Chapter 3
Wayne Thorne was the kind of boy who carried tools in the back of his four-wheel-drive pickup. A heavy pipe wrench. A tire iron. Maybe a peavey hook stolen from the old mill to pry open jammed tailgates. Thorne gets drunk on a rainy Tuesday, sees an out-of-state car broken down near the mill, thinks he’s catching a trespasser or an easy shakedown. Things go south. The boy fights back. Thorne loses his temper, grabs whatever is within arm's reach in the bed of his truck or on the mill floor, and doesn't stop swinging until the boy stops screaming.
Then Thorne calls the only man in Black River who can make a murder disappear: Calloway Miller.
And Calloway, looking at the dead boy from Columbus and the idiot son of the county's biggest tax contributor, does what sheriffs like him had been doing for a hundred years. He tells the boy to go home, wash the red mud off his fenders, and pack his bags for the Gulf Coast.
Then Calloway goes into the mill with a notepad.
Wesley frowned, looking back at the desk.
There was only one problem with the Wayne Thorne theory, and it was the same problem that had kept him staring at the fluorescent tube for an hour:
*The two-minute window.*
The county medical examiner in 1998 had been Dr. Raymond Hargrove. Hargrove had been an alcoholic, yes, and his reports were notoriously thin, but he had spent four years in a surgical tent outside Da Nang in 1968. Hargrove knew what traumatic shock looked like in live muscle tissue.
In the margins of the redacted page, beneath the chisel-tip Sharpie, Hargrove had noted:
*Extravasation of blood into the perivascular spaces across all eleven strike zones demonstrates uniform antemortem response. Heart was still pumping during impact 1 through impact 11. Absence of secondary clot formation indicates interval between first blunt impact and terminal cerebral laceration did not exceed 120 to 180 seconds.*
Wesley tapped his fingers against the table.
If Wayne Thorne had beaten Julian Vance to death with a succession of different weapons, why would he drop a crowbar, pick up a cast-iron skillet, drop the skillet, pick up a drift-pin, drop the drift-pin, and pick up a peavey hook—all while the victim was thrashing on the floor, within two minutes?
It was absurd. In a blind rage, a man picks up a crowbar and he hits the target eleven times. He doesn't conduct an inventory of the tool shed while the victim’s heart is still beating.
Unless Thorne hadn't been in a rage.
Unless Thorne had been staging the scene to look like a pack of vagrants had done it. Or—and this made Wesley’s stomach tighten with that familiar, ugly cynicism—Calloway Miller had rewritten the physical evidence to make the injuries look so wildly inconsistent, so bizarrely chaotic, that no prosecutor could ever tie them to a single standard-issue police baton.
*He clouded the waters,* Wesley thought. *He took Thorne’s beating, broke the implements up in the narrative, and turned a brutal police homicide into an impossible, mythological slaughter committed by a drifter who didn't exist.*
Wesley stood up, took his leather jacket from the back of the chair, and zipped it to his throat. The basement air felt colder now, thin and stale.
He walked over to the cardboard box, took the original crime scene photos—the curled Polaroids that smelled of vinegar—and slid them into his leather briefcase along with the graphite rub of the autopsy sheet. He left the official incident jacket on the table, exactly where Martha Cleary had seen it, so she’d think he was still chasing the paper trail.
He climbed the stairs quietly. The door at the top was locked, as expected, but the latch was an old brass Yale mortise with a loose strike plate. He pulled a thin piece of celluloid from his wallet, slid it between the stop and the jamb, angled the bevel, and eased the latch back.
The courthouse rotunda was dark. The bronze statue of the county's Civil War volunteers stood in the center under the dome, surrounded by dusty glass display cases containing Confederate scrip, rusted minie balls, and the taxidermied head of a twelve-point buck shot by Calloway Miller in the winter of 1984.
Wesley stepped out through the side exit onto the granite steps.
The rain had started again. A slow, heavy Appalachian mist was settling over the valley, blurring the neon sign of the hardware store across the square and the mercury-vapor lamps along the river wall. The Black River ran four blocks south, swollen and red with mud from the strip mines up in the hollows, rushing past the concrete piers of the old highway bridge with a sound like tearing canvas.
Wesley stood under the portico, pulled a silver Zippo from his pocket, and lit a cigarette.
Across the street, parked in the gravel lot beside the feed mill, a white Ford F-150 sat with its parking lights on.
It was an old truck, late nineties, with a dual rear axle and a commercial rack behind the cab. The engine was idling, a low, wet diesel rumble that barely cut through the sound of the rain. The driver’s side window was cracked two inches, the tip of a cigarette glowing orange against the interior darkness.
Wesley didn't look directly at it. He exhaled a thin stream of gray smoke into the wet air, turned up his collar, and started down the stone steps toward his rented Impala.
He didn't need to check the truck's license plate. He had seen the silhouette of the driver when he drove into town this morning: an old man with broad, stooped shoulders, wearing a khaki twill work jacket with the round patch of the Black River Fish & Game Club sewn onto the left sleeve.
Calloway Miller wasn't eighty-one years old in his mind. He was still the high sheriff of this county, still running the perimeter, still checking the fence lines to make sure nobody kicked over the stones he had laid down twenty-six years ago.
Wesley unlocked the Impala, tossed his briefcase onto the passenger seat, and slid behind the wheel. The car started with a soft, clean whine that sounded utterly out of place against the diesel clatter across the street.
He shifted into drive, pulled out of the courthouse alley, and turned north, onto Route 9.
In his rearview mirror, through the rain-streaked rear glass, the two amber parking lights of the F-150 flared as the truck eased out of the feed mill lot, keeping three car lengths between them in the dark.
Wesley looked at the briefcase on the seat next to him.
"You're an old man, Calloway," Wesley whispered to the windshield wipers as they swept the river mist from the glass. "You can't follow me everywhere."
Tomorrow morning, he wouldn't go to the quarry, and he wouldn't call Mobile, Alabama.
Tomorrow morning, he was going to take the county road out to the St. Jude timber bottoms, find what was left of the dry-kiln shed, and look at the sawdust hopper where Julian Vance died. Because no matter how many pages a sheriff painted black with a chisel-tip marker, iron always leaves a mark on wood.
