Prologue

Monday, September 14, 1987

Biloxi, Mississippi

The city’s worst day began quietly enough, when a used car salesman discovered one of his cars missing, an anonymous-looking yellow Ford. The theft was strange, because the boxy Fairmont was about the least valuable car on the lot, so ordinary, it seemed invisible—like an undercover police car. Or a getaway car.

The day ended quietly, too, with a muted popping noise, much like the sound of a newspaper rolled loosely into a fly swatter and slapped on a tabletop. Few people heard those nine innocuous pops, and those who did would never speak of them. Yet those sounds would destroy a family, alter countless lives, transform a city. Little would remain the same in Biloxi in their wake.

Between those two events, Vincent and Margaret Sherry lived as they always had, taking no special precautions, exhibiting few outward fears. He went to the county courthouse that morning as always, where he had served as judge of the Circuit Court for the past eleven months. She, as always, worked much of the day on her one great obsession—exposing Biloxi’s legendary corruption, in preparation for a mayoral campaign many Biloxians believed would earn her reign of city hall.

During that last day, Vince Sherry also found time to jog, to kibitz with his law partner, to get his thick shock of brown hair cut at the local Air Force base barbershop (where he enjoyed the privileges of a retired colonel), and to gas up his battered station wagon in preparation for a trip Tuesday to Baton Rouge. The Sherrys planned to take the day off to visit their youngest daughter at her college campus and to have cataracts removed from one of their beloved dachshunds, Meaux.

Margaret Sherry spent part of Monday shopping for clothes for her increasingly round five-foot frame, buying two electronic calculators, planning a United Daughters of the Confederacy convention she was chairing the next month, and speaking to three friends on the telephone about her plans to allege scandals in city government. At one time or another during the day, she told people she had been working with the FBI, that she now had enough evidence to expose a major corruption case in the city, and that she would try to put the man she hated most—the mayor of Biloxi—in jail.

“You can’t talk like that without evidence,” one of her friends warned upon hearing this final pronouncement.

“Don’t you understand? I have the goods,” Margaret said in her quiet, commanding way. “I have the documentation.”

She told another friend that she planned to make her claims public the next day, at Tuesday’s city council meeting, when the city’s budget was to be adopted.

Oddly, her last conversation of the evening was cut short, in midsentence, just as Margaret was about to say good night to her friend, Dianne Harenski, an occasional ally on the city council. This was after 7 P.M., and Vince had been clamoring in the background. He was hungry, he was saying, it was time for dinner. Margaret’s friend could hear him clearly. A minute or two later, when the phone clicked dead in her hand, Harenski simply assumed Margaret had rushed off the line to appease her hungry husband.

Later—minutes or hours, no one can say for sure—that anonymous yellow Ford cruised by the Sherrys’ ranch-style four-bedroom home on Hickory Hill Circle, then stopped down the block. The lonely street was empty, its houses locked tight against the thick, wet air of the Gulf. The only sounds piercing the humidity were the whir of crickets hidden in dense lawns, the dry flap of bats overhead.

Vince was still wearing his blue seersucker pants and white shirt from court that day, his trim frame stretched out on the couch in the den as he watched the Atlanta Braves on television. The knock on the door brought him to his feet. He shunted the barking dachshunds, Meaux and Fritz, into the master bedroom, where Margaret was midway between dressed and undressed, then he pulled the door shut. He muted the television and tossed the remote control onto the coffee table, which, like many areas of the house, sat obscured beneath a burial mound of papers, magazines, newspaper clippings, and legal files, some of it his, some of it Margaret’s. They were voracious readers, and they threw out nothing. Then he opened the front door and waved in whoever had knocked.

They walked back to the den, where Vince and his company that night may have chatted awhile. Vince could have even offered a visitor a cup of tea—police would later find a lone, used bag of Lipton’s sitting on the kitchen counter, a cup rinsed and on the drainboard. Then again, business may have overtaken politeness immediately, and Vincent Sherry may have turned around, still smiling in greeting, to face a .22-caliber Ruger automatic, the black tube of a silencer sitting fat and obscene on the lip of its barrel.

Inside the bedroom, Margaret had stripped to her bra and panties, her glasses on the bureau, her gray-streaked brown hair tousled. As she reached up to take off an earring, she heard, faintly, that popping noise, followed by a vague sound of movement in the living room. Perhaps, her family would later speculate, she shook her head and smiled, thinking: There goes Vince, swatting flies again. She loved him dearly, but Vince had been a cleanliness bug throughout all his fifty-eight years, the type who washed his hands before using the bathroom, who flushed with his foot, who would never have something as unsanitary as a flyswatter around the house. Vince would use a newspaper, flailing about the room, knocking over books and papers. Then he’d throw the offending page with its flattened insect into the trash, as if disposing of toxic waste. It always made Margaret laugh.

After a moment, the bedroom door glided open, a slight creaking. The dogs rushed out, yapping. Margaret did not grab for her housecoat draped over the television—what would be the point? After nearly forty years of marriage, why bother trying to cover up the ravages of time when your husband walked in the room? Margaret would hardly have looked up at the blurry form in the doorway. She was so nearsighted without her glasses.

Then there was that swatting sound again, two pops, louder now, followed by the sound of something hitting the wall behind her. This wasn’t fly swatting, after all. The sound was coming from the doorway, from a man who was approaching her now, flying at her, coat flapping, a man she must have finally realized wasn’t Vince, even as the sharp odor of cordite filled the room. This smell she knew well because she was a crack shot herself, could shatter a bottle at one hundred yards with a .22 rifle by the time she was twelve, that pungent aroma stinging her nostrils with every shot. She slid to the floor, a gold-ball earring clutched in her right hand, the other still dangling in place, as the man who wasn’t Vince loomed over her.

She never heard those last four quiet pops. Consciousness, identity, dreams, fear—all were obliterated before the sound of that first silenced shot stopped echoing. And the day ended as quietly as it had begun, with a nondescript Ford disappearing down a deserted street, the sound of dogs barking muffled behind a closed front door.