Just as in war, if your time was up, then it was up. Sometimes you got postponed by an hour or two, but that was all.

Gaines walked to the front of the house and opened the door. He crossed the path, reached his car, radioed Barbara Jacobs at the desk, told her to find Bob Thurston and get him over to the Denton house.

“When you’re done, call Victor Powell and tell him we got another body to collect.”

Barbara—an unquestioning sense of discretion and professionalism in all she did—simply said, “Judith?”. To which Gaines replied, “Yes, Judith.”

“Oh Lord almighty,” Barbara said, her voice almost a whisper.

“Think He’s been absent around here for a few days, wouldn’t you say?” Gaines said.

Barbara did not rise to the comment, but merely said, “I’ll get Bob over there right away.”

Gaines smoked a cigarette while he waited. He returned to the yard, once again surveyed the charred earth, the few remaining fragments of child’s clothes and playthings. This was it now. This was all that was left of the Denton family line. It had ended here.

Still, Nancy’s body and the box that had held her heart were at the morgue. Now Judith would join them alongside the headless corpse of Lieutenant Michael Webster.

There would be no great desire to see this investigation go any further. Gaines could imagine—even now—the conversations that would take place. Webster had killed the girl. He got his just deserts. No one could cry for a man like that. Gaines should just let it go. The truth had died with Webster, and it was best left that way.

But Gaines could not leave it that way. Not at all. Not simply because of his official duty, but more a sense of personal obligation to Nancy and her mother to find out what had really happened. And if this investigation indicated beyond all reasonable doubt that Michael Webster had acted alone, that he had strangled Nancy, that he had desecrated her body as part of some bizarre ritual, then so be it. But if there was some indication that another person had been involved—someone such as Matthias Wade—then Gaines would not let it go until the truth was out. He could not. It was against his nature, against his own dictate and integrity, and right now—faced with this madness—it seemed that these commodities were all he possessed. Someone had perpetrated a dark and terrible wrong here, and that someone needed to be identified.

Then, and only then, could it all be laid to rest.

If it was Wade—if he had been complicit in the murder of Nancy Denton, in the killing of Michael Webster, perhaps also in the murders of Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick—then it would be his life for theirs, and there was no other way to see it.

As had been said so many times in Vietnam, sometimes you just had to kill people to show them the error of their ways.

Gaines went back into the house. He sat with Judith Denton until he heard Bob Thurston’s car pull up outside. He knew she’d spent the last twenty years alone, and—crazy though it was—it now seemed right to stay with her as long as he could.

32

Thurston made a preliminary examination and signed the certificate of death.

“Every indication of a self-administered drug overdose,” he told Gaines.

“What did she take?”

“No question there. It’s Seconal. I prescribed it for her to help her sleep.”

“When?”

“She came to see me on Thursday evening.”

“You think she planned this and just said she was not sleeping?”

Thurston shrugged his shoulders. “I have no way of knowing, John. She’d just lost her daughter; she looked exhausted, utterly devastated. I know that in such situations, people lose their appetites and cannot sleep, and those two factors contribute greatly to the depth of depression they fall into. More often than not, a couple nights of good sleep give them sufficient strength to carry on and get through it.”

“I understand,” Gaines said.

“So Vic is en route?”

Gaines nodded. “He has a headless Michael Webster to get to the morgue, and then he will come get Judith.”

“You think Webster killed Nancy?”

“I don’t know, Bob,” Gaines said. “I thought I was sure, but now I’m not.”

“So who?”

“I have ideas,” Gaines said, “but nothing substantial or evidenced.”

“Heard Matthias Wade bailed Webster out.”

“You heard right.”

“You think—”

Gaines shook his head. “It’s best not to think. It’s best just to look, to see what’s there, what’s not there, and try and figure out the bit that’s missing.”

“You know there was a case back in—”

“I already went out there last night,” Gaines interjected. “I spoke to Dennis Young. He showed me the pictures and the case files.”

“They never got anyone for that, far as I recall, but I heard rumor that Matthias Wade had been in their sights.”

“So Young told me.”

Thurston shook his head. “They say an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but if ever you wanted proof of that, you’d only have only to look as far as Matthias and Wade Senior.”

“You know the father?”

“Sure, as much as it’s possible to know someone like that. They live in a different world, John. The money they have, the political influence, the businesses they own. Matthias is just one of four, far as I know, two sons, two daughters, but the father is ever-present, lives in some huge place between here and Morgan City. Don’t know where the other kids are, but Matthias has always lived with the father. He’s the oldest, will inherit the lion’s share of everything, I should imagine.”

“Wade Senior’s name?”

“Earl.”

“And the mother?”

“Lillian. Long since dead. She was an alcoholic. It’s all predictable stuff, John. Heard Earl Wade had mellowed in recent years, but I find that hard to believe. As a younger man, he was a great deal more active in managing his businesses. Got himself involved in politics for a while. There was even talk of him running for governor, but that never came to anything. Anyway, that’s all history, but whatever is said, and whatever can be said about the Wades, they are a real honest-to-God Southern dynasty.”

“Well, Matthias is the only one I’ve met, and he looks like five and a half feet of stiff shit in a handmade suit.”

Thurston laughed, and then he stopped as suddenly as he’d started. Perhaps he’d forgotten where he was for a moment, seated right there in Judith Denton’s kitchen while her dead body sat no more than ten feet away.

“I better be going,” he said. “You okay here until Vic arrives?”

“Sure am,” Gaines replied.

“Well, let’s hope that this is the end of it,” Thurston said when he reached the door.

“Somehow I don’t think it is,” Gaines replied, but Thurston did not acknowledge the comment.

Gaines heard the front door open and close. He heard Thurston’s car start and then pull away.

Gaines was left in silence in the Denton kitchen. He thought about Earl and Matthias Wade, about the alcoholic wife, the two girls found in January of 1968, and considered the fact that he had been in Vietnam for only three months when those little girls lost their lives.

Whichever side of the world you were on, there was always some kind of crazy bullshit going down. Wars of race, of religion, of territory, of political agenda, even wars within the minds of madmen, compelled to do truly terrible things to other human beings with no logical reason at all.

There was no acceptance, no reconciliation, no explanation. Until man understood his own mind, there would never be freedom from such things.

Plato had been right. Only the dead had seen the end of war.

The small war that now occupied Gaines’s thoughts raged on, and the Dentons and Michael Webster were the only ones out of it for good.

33