I SPENT THE NEXT four hours driving some of Georgia’s finest old neighborhoods with my two buddies from the state police.
We drove over to Berkeley Lake in Gwinnett County and were buzzed onto the grounds of an enormous waterfront property. Then to Johns Creek southeast of Alpharetta where we entered a massive home with twelve-foot custom copper doors.
The old were given up to protect the young. And the closer it got to morning, the more signed statements and lawyers were already on hand by the time I arrived.
But no attorney asked for a deal.
They simply handed over five white men between sixty-two and eighty, along with written documentation about how they’d paid to have four black kids killed. I didn’t supply them the names, and they matched perfectly with the kids from ’93 that I had from the ledger. And with Kendrick and Delilah nowadays.
The looks on the men’s faces were blank, and their cheeks were sallow with the expectation of what was to come.
In an estate in Milton I saw a lawyer’s name I recognized. Lauten Hartley was the man who had come and visited Bernard Kane in prison. Right before Kane had hung himself.
“I know you,” I said to him. “You talked to Bernard Kane in my jail.”
The lawyer stood up. “You don’t know a thing about me,” he said and walked out.
The last of the men was Talmadge Hester in Shonus, where I first got a whiff of the Order. The old guy was slumped over in a chair at his two-hundred-year-old desk when I arrived at seven a.m. There was no grand party this time. No uniforms or stories about debutantes from days past.
“I haven’t seen Wade,” he said to me. “Will you talk to him about this? Can you try to explain that I did this for him?”
“No,” I said, cuffing the old man and putting him in the back of the squad car.
Lawrence Neary from the state police was on hand for this one, and he shook his head at me. “Jesus, Marsh. Did you close four murders in one night?”
I didn’t answer. I just turned toward my car. I was worn slap out, and I needed to be done with this case.
These were real crimes, but no one explained how their doing them resulted in something magical on the other end of the spectrum. How violence became luck. And how luck built fortunes.
There was ritual here. I’d seen candles and writings in the cave. The farmer had found a headless lamb burned out in Harmony. But I guess that was part of the trade I’d made with the governor. That I didn’t get to know all those details. Instead, I got arrests.
I finished the last of the bookings by eight a.m. and headed to the parking lot outside the precinct.
Deb Newberry from Fox was parked two cars down from me. She had on a red blouse and a short black skirt. There was no cameraman with her this time, but I was sure he was on his way.
“Early bird gets the worm, huh, Deb?” I said, opening the door to the Charger.
The reporter applied pink lipstick by crouching near her SUV’s side-view mirror.
“I know that sound in your voice, Marsh,” she said without glancing over. “You’re wondering how I got here so fast. Who I know.”
I made a noise with my nose as if I didn’t care. But she’d read me right.
She stood up and straightened her skirt. “I was starting to pile up some juicy stuff on you, Detective. But looks like someone climbed out of the basement. Went from zero to hero. That’s my story, at least.”
She headed off to the precinct, and I got in my car. By eight-thirty, I pulled into my driveway, and there was a black BMW 7 Series waiting outside. A driver rolled down a tinted window and asked if I had something for him.
I grabbed the ledger from my car and handed it over. I couldn’t turn it in as evidence anyway, or everyone would see the name of the governor, who I’d made the deal with. But I was hoping that somewhere deep in the bowels of the university library, Candy’s old coworker had made copies of some part of it.
I lay my back down onto the wood of my porch, and Purvis came out and licked my face.
Ten days ago when I got to Virgil Rowe’s place, I’d had one idea of justice. One in which I considered removing Rowe from the world. I was at the bottom of the canyon and ready to take a man’s life, just because I could.
It had been a year since my wife and son were gone, and it had finally sunk in. They weren’t coming back, and there was no one left to take it out on.