Thinking of it in that moment, Gaines could feel the emotion swelling in his chest, but whatever depth of loss he might have experienced as a result of Linda’s miscarriage was merely a thousandth of what the families of Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick must have felt and must still feel. A thousandth of what Judith Denton was going through right this very moment.

Perhaps there was some small mitigation of pain to be derived from justice in such a case. To see the guilty brought to account for their crimes would at least have resolved some aspect of uncertainty and wonder. But here? Perhaps to have known that Matthias Wade had been suspected, questioned, and then to have seen him walk away without any further resolution would have been worse than no one being suspected at all. To carry the burden of knowledge and yet to be impotent, to see that knowledge denied and refuted by the continued presence of the man . . .

Can’t bear to think how it must haunt their families.

And Judith Denton. She had lost her only child, and not through illness or accident, not through misfortune or misadventure, but by the hands of some unknown assailant, someone who simply put their hands around the girl’s throat and choked her until she was dead. What must that do to a parent? What must that do to a human being?

The weight of grief and guilt and conscience would be unbearable.

How could I have protected her? What could I have done differently? Why didn’t I drive her to the friend’s house? Why did I let her walk out alone?

How could I bear a child, raise them, feed them, guide them through all the pitfalls and obstacles of life, and then lose them in a moment?

“We are not gods,” Lieutenant Wilson used to tell Gaines. “We are just men. We are grown-up enough now to see that happy-ever-afters occur only in fairy tales. The young believe that bad will be balanced out by the good, and they imagine there are enough years ahead of them to see this happen. The old, having lived all those years, now see it’s the other way around. If there is a God, then he is cruel and bitter and fickle, and men—made in his image—are equally cruel and bitter and fickle. Shit happens, and it happens all the time, and it keeps on happening, and most of the time there is no explanation for it. Life is random and unpredictable, and it doesn’t stop coming at you. If you try to stop it, it will just crush you. If you slow down enough to try to understand it all, it will swallow you whole. Best you can do is understand as much of it as possible while you keep running.”

Maybe Lieutenant Wilson, sideshow philosopher that he was, slowed down to try and see things better and the bullet that killed him caught up.

Gaines did not know, did not profess to know. Not just about Webster, not just about Wade, not about Nancy Denton and the two girls from St. Mary Parish, but most everything. He did not pretend to know anything. He did not know why his mother was sick and yet did not die. He did not know why Michael Webster had cut open Nancy Denton’s chest and replaced her heart with a snake. He did not know what he could say or do that would lessen the sense of guilt and stupidity he felt for removing evidence from Webster’s motel room without a damned warrant.

All he knew—all he knew—was that he needed to pick Webster up again in the morning, get him into an interview room once more, and have him say enough to justify Judge Wallace signing a warrant to search that motel room again. There had to be something else there, some aspect of incriminating evidence that could be brought to bear upon Webster, something that would tie him up with a charge, an arraignment, a trial date. Or perhaps Webster could be made to say something again, but this time on tape, in the presence of Ken Howard, in the presence of any damned person.

And Wade? Matthias Wade was an entirely different game altogether. If there was some way to tie Wade in with the Denton killing, then perhaps the Mayhew-McCormick double murder could be revisited.

There had to be some connection. There had to be. If not, then why the hell would someone like Matthias Wade be willing to pay five thousand dollars to get Michael Webster out of jail? It went beyond one old friend helping another. Gaines was sure of that.

Had Webster been telling the truth? Had he merely found the girl at the side of the road, and—in some warped and delusory reality—imagined that opening up her chest, removing her heart, and replacing it with a snake would somehow serve a purpose? Webster had said that he had known what to do. Those had been Webster’s words. How had he known what to do? From Al Warren, the man who had been there for him in Guadalcanal?

Had Webster merely been the means by which Nancy Denton’s body could be disposed of? Had Matthias Wade told Michael Webster where to find the body, what to do with it, where to bury it? And had this ritualistic performance been undertaken merely to confuse and confound the issue, to create the appearance that there was something more sinister and arcane going on beyond the abduction and murder of a teenage girl?

Was this all a game of smoke and mirrors, the entire thing played out by Matthias Wade and his unwitting confederate, Michael Webster?

These were the questions that plagued Gaines. His mind grew tired, his eyes gritty, and every time he closed them, he saw those same images—the discarded bodies of the two Morgan City girls, now not only on the kitchen table before him, but also there behind his eyelids.

Gaines went for the bottle of bourbon on top of the refrigerator. He drank two inches neat, felt the raw burning in his chest, and knew it would help him close down, if only for a few hours.

He did not know what would transpire next, but in his wildest imagination, he could not have anticipated that which woke him merely four and a half hours later. And that, in truth, was not the worst of it. There was a great deal more to come, and John Gaines, sheriff of Breed County, he who had seen the nine circles of hell, started to believe that the war had followed him home.

30

The filth and mud beneath the waterlogged wood, the smell of smoke and charred earth and all that this brought to mind was nothing in the face of what was revealed as the blackened timbers of Lieutenant Michael Webster’s motel room were hauled away by the fire chief, his deputy, and the other attending officers of the Breed County Fire Service

They hauled away those timbers with ropes affixed to the rear of the fire truck, and those timbers snapped and released clouds of hot ash and sparks skyward.

It was close to dawn, and the sky was flat and bleak with a low ceiling and almost without color at all. The trees were like scrimshaw etchings, indistinct and fragile, like pictures incompletely developed in a tray of solution.

It was a monochrome world, and John Gaines stood aside from the fray near the adjacent cabin, and when he touched the wooden wall of that cabin, he could still feel the heat of the fire that had been extinguished.

Webster’s cabin was little more than a shadowed footprint of its former self, and Gaines knew what they would find within.

The fire chief’s name was Frank Morgan, and it was Morgan who came to Gaines with the news. “He’s in there,” he said. “Well, who it is might be difficult to establish, but that’s Vic Powell’s job, not mine.”

“Burned beyond recognition?” Gaines asked.

“Decapitated beyond recognition, more like, and he ain’t got his left hand neither,” Morgan replied.

“Seriously?” Gaines asked. “They cut off his head and one of his hands?”

“Sure did.”

“Jesus Christ, what the fuck is this?” Gaines said, dismayed and confused, almost disbelieving his own ears. In a matter of no time at all, Whytesburg had become the kind of place one read about in inflammatory and melodramatic novels.