THE FIRST SIGN OF HABITATION IS A SMALL, OUT-OF-TOWN MALL with a bar, an auto repair shop, a furniture store, a take-out pizza joint, a jewelry exchange and a payday loan facility, arranged around two sides of a parking lot.
We cross a bridge, hang a left and keep the railroad on our right till we find ourselves outside what was once a train depot: a long, low brick building with dust-caked windows, three-quarters of them smashed in.
Hetta pulls up in front of a corrugated-iron maintenance shed with West Virginia Railroad stenciled above the concertina doors. There’s a steam locomotive out front, graffiti covering every inch of it. Between the shed and a warehouse is a single-story building with a flat roof and flashing signage. The Coalhole is open till midnight, serves beer, burgers and pizza, and is available for social functions.
There is no one around, so we make a U-turn.
Back in town, we turn into a street with a Pentecostal church at one end and a Baptist church at the other. Cody Wyatt’s one-story house stands in the middle. It has a swing in the yard and a GMC pick-up with black windows on the drive. The drapes are drawn and there is no sign of life. We park up a discreet distance away.
The database holds a mugshot of Wyatt: a smalltime drug-dealer in a no-hope shit-hole with convictions for domestic battery and larceny.
When the coal company threatened to close down both Blacksoil’s mines in the mid-1990s, Duke Henry Gapes Sr, known as Hank, mounted a spirited campaign to save them, rallying local people to march in defense of their vanishing pension and retiree healthcare rights.
The subsidiary of the company that owned the mines was declared bankrupt and most of its pension funds died with it. Years later, this was exposed as a scam. For Gapes Sr the betrayal was too much. Two days after the deal brokered by the mineworkers’ union became a fait accompli, he died of a heart attack.
When Hetta told me this, I was filled with admiration for Duke, and compassion. He could have ended up doing a Cody Wyatt, but after three years kicking around the fringes of Blacksoil’s petty crime scene, he took himself off to a recruiting office – the Armed Forces Career Center in Heatherfield – and signed up with the Marines.
Was there anger there?
Perhaps.
Enough to harbor rage against the system?
Unknown.
A twenty-year-old Ford pick-up with smashed wing mirrors and a West Virginia Black Bears sun-strip sits out front of the Gapes trailer. Its white paint is chipped and peeling, and the shutters have faded on the side that gets the sun. Shingles are missing from the roof. The lights are on behind the lace drapes, but there are no other signs of life.
Heavy metal rocks the trailer on the left. The one on the right looks like a junkyard. A pit-bull on a leash shivers and whines in the sub-zero sunshine. A pine forest sweeps down a wide, rock-strewn slope behind them. A pair of eagles soar above the ridgeline.
I close the window as the Gapes porch door opens. An overweight woman appears. She uses a stick and moves with difficulty. Tight gray curls protrude beneath her blue woolen hat. She is wearing blue slacks and a white windcheater. She looks around seventy.
Hetta and I exchange glances. This has to be Misty Buckhannon, Gapes’s aunt, his mother’s sister.
Hetta has pulled up the mother’s medical records. The Alzheimer’s is advanced. Louisa Gapes – Lou – needs Misty’s full-time care. She is all but confined to the trailer.
Misty approaches the pick-up and puts her key in the driver’s side lock. She wiggles it, removes it, looks at it, sticks it back in the lock and tries again.
Hetta shuffles in her seat. ‘Lock’s frozen.’
I open my door.
‘What are you doing?’
‘You got any hand gel?’
Course she has.
Misty turns around when she hears my steps on the gravel. She raises a hand and squints against the sun.
I step forward and squeeze some of the gel into the lock. This time, it opens.
She studies me more carefully. ‘You from around here, mister?’
‘No, ma’am. I’m from Washington.’
‘Worshington?’
She turns back to the porch, then stops and says over her shoulder: ‘Then I guess you’re here about Duke.’
I’m sitting in a bay window at the rear of the trailer. Duke’s mother, Lou, is beside me, her gaze apparently fixed beyond the chain-link that separates her yard from the trees.
Two framed photographs lie on the table in front of me. The first is of Duke in dress blues: the white cap, blue tunic, red piping, white belt of a Marine. The peak of his cap is low over his eyes. Mo was right; he had been a good-looking boy.
In the second photo, Duke is aged around twelve or thirteen; Hank in his late forties. They’re both clutching fishing rods, and Duke, beaming, holds up two decent-sized trout to the camera.
Misty has already told us how much Duke loved his dad. And I don’t doubt it. She knows that we know more than we’re letting on. I can see it in her eyes. She also knows that we are not the people who showed up without warning to ask questions about her nephew. Those people carried no identification, wouldn’t say where they were from, and appeared after Katya had agreed the compensation package.
‘Do you recall the date?’ Hetta asks. They are in the kitchen, Misty washing pans and dishes, Hetta drying them.
‘It was the night before Lou’s birthday.’
‘When?’ I ask.
‘A little over a year ago. November 20th.’
‘What did they do?’ Hetta asks.
‘Turned the place over good.’
‘Sounds like they were looking for something, not someone,’ Hetta says.
I don’t have the first idea what to make of this. I just listen and observe.
When Hetta and Misty are finished, Misty comes over with a fresh pot of coffee and fills my cup.
Under Hetta’s Opsec rules, we have implemented a few precautions.
The local field office, contrary to protocol, is completely in the dark about our visit. The only person that knows we are in West Virginia is Lefortz. I have told Misty no more than I told Katya: that the White House is interested in looking again at Duke’s case. There is no TV here and no Internet. She seems unaware of the events in D.C.
Lou picks up the picture of Duke in his uniform and stares at it intently. She turns to me and says something. It sounds as if she’s asking whether I know her son.
The clinical advice is easy to dispense. My training has given me the tools, supposedly, to deal with the victims of Alzheimer’s. But now that Lou is focusing on me, her eyes searching mine for something – anything – I can tell her about Duke, I haven’t the first clue what to say. And I don’t have the heart to tell her the truth.
She takes my hand in her thin, bony fingers and asks me again. This time I hear her clearly.
‘Do you see him?’
‘Now come on, darlin’,’ Misty says. ‘You don’ wanna be talkin’ that way …’
‘Why does she say that?’ Hetta asks.
Misty dabs at a bead of white spittle that is beginning to trickle from the corner of her sister’s mouth. ‘Because this is how life is, that’s why.’
I hear her anger, bitterness and frustration.
‘Katya told me your sister received some calls from Duke,’ I say to Misty. ‘After he ran.’
‘Uh huh. Did she also tell you they only ever happened when I was out?’
‘No. Did you check with the phone company?’
Misty nods. ‘There were no calls.’
She glances at her sister and taps the side of her head. ‘She weren’t ever the same after Duke got blew up in A-rak. She said Duke was callin’ her ’cos he was in a place that made him sceert.’
If he was foreign-deployed, if he had been sent back to the desert, as Katya had maintained, it wasn’t surprising that a return to the Middle East, with its memories of the war and the incident that gave him the brain injury, would re-traumatize him …
Misty shakes a finger. ‘She said Duke was sceert ’cos he kept seein’ his dad. She said he’d spoke to Duke – number of times.’
‘But his father’s dead.’
‘Uh huh. Dead years.’
Lou has gone back to staring out the window. ‘Duke …’ she says suddenly, with heartrending sadness.
‘I told you, Lou honey. You gotta stop talkin’ that way. Duke’s with our Lord now. He’s at peace.’
Misty sets the milk down on the table and prizes Lou’s hand from mine.
‘Where does she say she sees Duke?’
And then, because I realize I’m not addressing the question to the person I ought to be, I take back Lou’s hand. ‘Where do you see him, Lou?’
She points again toward the trees.
I re-examine the pictures on the table. ‘Where did Duke and his father like to go fishing?’
Misty doesn’t know. But it was somewhere up in the North Laurel Fork. They had a cabin up there. Sometimes they’d be gone for days.
‘A cabin?’
‘Old place, beat up.’
‘Where?’
Lou gives my knuckles another squeeze. Her grip tightens. ‘Creek Finger. That’s where my boys go. That’s where they are.’
We park in the out-of-town mall, next to the payday loan shop with the splintered window that radiates to the four corners like a spider’s web. Hetta has managed to find a signal for her call to Lefortz and we’re waiting for the encrypted feed he’s promised her – a satellite image, downloaded from a database held within the Service’s Intelligence Division – of an area of the North Laurel Fork, eighteen miles east of the North Laurel River.
The commercial satellite maps we’ve examined over the past thirty minutes show a lake fed by a tributary of the Laurel, shaped like a finger. It’s unnamed on all the maps we’ve managed to access thus far.
The minutes tick by. Hetta produces her notebook. ‘Can you function with post-traumatic depression?’
For a fraction of a second, I think she’s talking about me. Long enough to wonder how much, with her access to every kind of Secret Service database, she really knows about me.
‘It depends what you mean by “function”.’
‘I couldn’t help hearing some of that stuff Misty was telling you about Duke’s father. While we were in the kitchen, and you were with Lou, I asked about his mental state at the Veterans Center. You’re the expert, but I can’t get my head around the spooks wanting to employ someone with his kind of symptoms and history.
‘His anxiety became depression. Then his depression seemed to morph into something more serious. Kind of bears out what Misty was telling you and what his medical notes said – if we can trust them at all.’
She knows what I think: that they’ve been altered, though quite why is anybody’s guess. ‘How serious is serious?’
‘He heard voices. Saw things. Had hallucinations.’
‘While he was in therapy?’
She nods. ‘Before they placed him in work.’
‘Did anybody voice their concerns?’
‘Yes. According to Misty, Lou did. Before she got sick. To his recovery support therapist.’
‘When we get back, we’re going to need to speak to him or her.’ Then we’ll know whether his notes are real or not.
‘Best of luck with that. He was killed in a road traffic accident shortly before your friend Katya took on the DoD for compensation. She didn’t tell you?’
No, she didn’t.
‘Where are you going with this?’ she asks.
‘A year, maybe eighteen months after he went AWOL, Duke allegedly called his mom. A number of times. Told her he was scared. It only ever happened, though, when Misty was out.’
‘So?’
‘Maybe he had eyes on the trailer. Did you see the way his mom pointed at the trees? The forest backs onto the yard. My guess is he had a prepaid cell and she really did see him there.’
‘Where?’
‘In the trees. Beyond the chain-link.’
She looks at me long and hard. ‘The phone company said there were no calls.’
‘If they can alter his medical notes, then they wouldn’t have any difficulty manipulating the phone records.’
‘And that shit about his dad?’
‘In the kid’s mind, he might not have been dead.’
She gives a slight shake of the head. ‘Say that again.’
‘Duke clearly did not want to be foreign-deployed. With his history, being sent back to the desert would have been a big stressor – severe enough quite possibly to have brought on a psychosis in which he believed that he saw his dead father.’
‘Like a hallucination?’
‘If he was that sick, yes.’
There’s a ping from her inbox. She detaches the sat-phone lead, and we open up the file to see what we’ve got.
I’m amazed by how much better the resolution is.
The lake is twenty miles from the nearest road. Rocks and trees pepper the desolate landscape.
We zoom in from space to a point where we’re hovering just a hundred meters above its surface.
‘There,’ she says, pointing with her pen. ‘There’s something right there.’
I peer at the screen. It isn’t easy to see. It isn’t where I would have expected it, down by the water’s edge, but higher, partially obscured by the trees, around two hundred meters above the shoreline: a cabin.