“Sounds like she’s gonna get the justice she deserves,” Holland said. “Things have a way of working out like that.”

“If we were good people, we’d have her in protective custody until this Devereaux character was locked up,” Ross said.

“Seems we ain’t good people,” Gaines replied. “Far as I’m concerned, I have about as much concern for her welfare as she had for Clifton Regis.”

“So we need to find Devereaux,” Hagen said.

“And we need to tie Devereaux to Wade. We need something on Devereaux that’ll make him give up Wade, and then we can look at closing this thing once and for all. I want Wade for one of them, and if it can’t be Nancy, then it’ll have to be Webster.”

“Well, maybe Dolores Henderson will testify against Devereaux. She’s certainly showed her willingness to testify before, right?” Ross said.

Hagen shook his head. “She’s about as credible a witness as . . . well, as the worst kind of witness you could imagine. She’s a felon and a junkie. A greenhorn with no courtroom experience at all could pull her credibility to pieces in five minutes.”

“Which makes it all the more unbelievable that she was capable of putting Regis in Parchman,” Holland said.

“Exactly,” Gaines said. “She’s no use to us, believe me, beyond substantiating our suspicions about Devereaux, and she pretty much confirmed that he was the one who cut Regis’s fingers off.”

“Which leaves us Wallace,” Ross said.

“Which leaves us Wallace,” Gaines echoed.

“Damned shame, man like that, all those years behind him, and he winds up a yes man for the Wades.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Gaines said.

Ross shook his head. “I think we do, John.”

The four of them sat there in silence for a good thirty seconds.

“You want to take a visit with me?” Gaines asked Ross.

“We’re going as friends, I’ll come with you. We’re going official, you better take Hagen.”

“As friends,” Gaines said. “We don’t know what we have here as far as Wallace is concerned. We don’t even know that we have anything at all. Not really. We can go see him, tell him what we’re looking at, see if he gives us anything. We just have to let him know the direction we’re headed, and then if he wants to run interference or do something that absolves himself, so be it. We give him the benefit of the doubt and see what happens.”

“Good enough,” Ross said. “I’ll make some calls, see where he is.”

Gaines turned to Hagen. “You go on back to the office. Say nothing on this. Soon as I know where we’re at, I’ll get word to you.”

“And me?” Eddie Holland asked.

“Looks like you’re the fifth wheel, Ed,” Gaines said. “Don’t think it’ll suit to have all three of us arrive unannounced at Marvin Wallace’s house.”

“Suits me,” Holland said. “Got some things I need to do anyway. I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Appreciated.”

Ross came back to the kitchen from the hallway. “He’s in his office up in Purvis,” he said. “He’s not in court today, according to his secretary. We have an appointment with him at three.”

“We’re outta here, then,” Gaines said.

“Get him on a hook and make him wriggle,” was Holland’s parting comment.

Gaines didn’t reply. He didn’t think that the conversation with Judge Marvin Wallace would be anything like the conversation with Dolores Henderson. Wallace was a state-appointed legal authority, a man of considerable standing and reputation, and he had a great deal of friends. This was not going to be a turkey shoot, not at all. This was where any possibility of keeping their investigation under wraps was going to be blown into shreds.

Now there would be nowhere to hide from the influence and connections of Matthias Wade. Maybe Gaines would wake to find Leon Devereaux standing over his bed, asking if he please couldn’t have his knife back as there was urgent work needing to be done.

64

For a child of eleven, Kenny Sawyer was pretty damned smart.

Already he understood that when it came to life, what you deserved and what you got were never the same thing.

Kenny’s mother, Janette, was only thirty-seven, yet already exhausted with disappointments. She’d become the sort of person who figured that hope was merely there to remind you of all those things you’d yet failed to do.

At twenty-five, she’d married a man of forty, name of Ray Sawyer, and they’d rented a place in Lucedale. Ray had already been married, already had two sons—Dale and Stephen, fourteen and seventeen respectively. Ray had been widowed by a wife who committed suicide. Why she’d committed suicide, well, Kenny didn’t know, and it never seemed right to raise the subject.

A year into the marriage, Janette Sawyer was pregnant, and the result was Kenny, born in 1963.

Six years later, having contracted an aggressive cancer, Ray went from fit and well to dead in less than three months. There were pictures of him toward the end, a shadow of his former self, his clothes hanging off of him like there was room enough inside for two or three more folk of about the same stature. Kenny could barely remember his father, and his ma spoke of him rarely. Only thing that remained of Ray Sawyer’s memory was the house that he and Janette had taken. Janette had taken up with a string of men in the subsequent five years, some of them good, most of them not.

Both Dale and Stephen had shipped out pretty much as soon as their father was buried. How and why they felt no burden of responsibility for their stepmother was a mystery to Kenny. Kenny had felt that burden, and so he’d stuck around. That he’d been six years old at the time did play a part in his decision, for sure, but he liked to believe that if he’d wanted to, well, he could have up and left just like Dale and Stephen.

Kenny did not appreciate all the angles, but he was sure of one thing: What you deserved and what you got were not the same thing. Not ever.

The absence of a father was never that prevalent in Kenny’s mind. Folks asked him about it, and he said that what you never had you couldn’t miss. The kids didn’t really understand that sentiment; the adults were impressed with his philosophical attitude, and they favored him for his seeming honesty and sensitivity. He was an artistic boy, loved to draw and paint and make clay models, and there were those who believed he might be one of those who made it out.

“He could be an architect, a painter, a designer, or something,” the art teacher once told Janette Sawyer at a parent–teacher conference. “He certainly has a talent, Mrs. Sawyer, and I am sure he will do well.”

If Janette had possessed the energy to be proud, she might well have been. But she did not. She did not possess the energy for a great many things these days. She was not yet forty, and yet she felt as old as her own mother. Drained was the word she used. “I feel utterly drained, Kenny,” she would say. “Make yourself some soup and crackers. I’ll do some proper dinner later.” But mostly there was no later, and Kenny would take a couple of quarters from her purse and go get fried chicken.

It was on one of the fried chicken expeditions that he first met Leon Devereaux. Not a great deal more than a year earlier, he’d walked on up to the diner on Gorman Road, started back with the greasy paper bag, in it two wings, two legs, a tub of slaw, in his other hand a cup of root beer, and a black pickup had slowed alongside him and come to a stop.

Kenny Sawyer was not a suspicious child. He was young enough to take people at face value, to trust them until they gave him a reason not to, and yet old enough to consider he could take care of himself. Perhaps life had dealt him a mediocre hand, but it was with a mediocre hand that the best bluffs were undertaken.

“Got there?” a voice said.

Kenny stopped and turned left. “Chicken.”