The ringing phone wakened Mars.
He’d slept so hard his right arm was numb. He knocked the receiver off the hook before retrieving it with his functioning left hand.
“Mars Bahr?” the voice said. Quiet, confident.
“Yeah,” Mars said, trying to sound awake, not sure of the time.
“I have something to say.”
“Who’s calling?” Mars looked at the caller ID screen. It was a long-distance call, area code 302. He stretched for his jacket, hung over a chair near the bed, fumbling in the inside pocket for a pen. He didn’t take time to find paper and he didn’t want to risk losing the number on the ID system, so he wrote the number on the wall.
“If you pay attention to what I have to say, you’ll know who I am …”
Then the voice began a carefully cadenced recital of the familiar words:
“‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;’”
There was a long, purposeful pause before the voice said,
“‘He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;’”
Again, the long purposeful pause, then,
“‘He has loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible, swift sword;
His truth is marching on.’”
Then, intensifying, becoming almost intimate, the voice said, “Now, here’s the part that will be of the greatest interest to you … .”
“‘I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;’”
The voice said, “We’ll talk again.” And the line went dead.
Mars was back in the squad room by 6:00 A.M. He called Nettie and Evelyn and asked them both to get down to city hall as soon as they could. He was hoping that Evelyn’s experience in analyzing poetry could be put to use in interpreting the hymn’s lyrics. Then he called Boyle Keegan at his hotel.
“Don’t leave. Macintosh called me at five-fifteen this morning.”
Evelyn stared at the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” that Nettie had printed out from a Web site.
“Tell me everything you know about the song,” Mars said.
Still staring at the pages, Evelyn said. “Not a lot. Written by Julia Ward Howe, the lyrics, that is. Isn’t the tune from ‘John Brown’s Body’? I can’t remember for sure. It was more or less the Union’s anthem.”
Nettie said, “Why would Hec Macintosh use a Union song? Why not ‘Dixie’?”
“That’s the question,” Keegan said.
Mars said, “Union anthem or not, I think the words fit what Macintosh has been doing. The words have this godlike authority and sense of purpose …”
“Omniscient point of view, is what us pointy-headed academics would call it,” Evelyn said.
“Exactly,” Mars said.
“There’s one thing,” Evelyn said. “Not a big thing, but given what you said about how he paused after each line …”
“What?” Mars said.
Evelyn held the page up, pointing. “You’ve drawn a line under each line as he recited it, and after each line there was a long pause, right?”
Mars nodded.
“Okay. The lines he recited are from the first stanza of the Hymn. I think it’s generally considered that there are four lines in each stanza—but he’s combined the last line of the stanza—‘His truth is marching on’—with the third line. Given that he was so precise about pausing after each of the first two lines, it’s curious. And then, he skips the chorus—you know—the ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah’ bit—and moves to the first line of the second stanza, telling you that line is going to be of particular interest. It just seems to me that how he’s putting the lines together is curious. That may be more significant that the words themselves. But I agree with Mars: Macintosh sees himself as being the first person singular ‘I’ and ‘mine’ of the lyrics. And by doing that, he’s aligning himself with Christ. The thing that was really notable about the Hymn—the thing that did and does drive southerners crazy about the song—is that it puts Christ squarely in the Union’s camp. In using the Hymn for this message, Macintosh is coopting the Union’s claim of righteousness. The guy’s a megalomaniac.”
Keegan gave a wry smile to Evelyn. “Anytime you want to kick over your traces and leave the pointy-headed academics in the dust, say the word. I could put you to work in the profiling section at Quantico.”
Mars turned to Nettie. “We got anything on the phone number yet?”
Nettie glanced at her watch. “Waiting on the phone company.”
“That’s the other thing,” Evelyn said. “Why did he call Mars? Why take the risk, calling from a phone where the number isn’t blocked?”
Keegan said, “It all ties back to your description of Macintosh as a megalomaniac. He has a point to prove. It’s a catch-me-if-you-can taunt. Adds to his sense of superiority, to the thrill of what he’s doing. Putting down us feds is where it’s at for him.”
Mars got up and walked over to the white board. He drew a box on the small section of the board that wasn’t covered with notations on the dead survivors and their descendents.
Writing, he said, “Here’s what I think is most important to finding Macintosh.”
Mars made a little star with the marker, then wrote, “Everything he does has significance. Nothing is random or without meaning. No detail of those ninety seconds at Gettysburg when the flag was captured has gone unnoticed.”
Mars looked at each of them. “So,” he said, “What are we missing?”
Immediately, Nettie said, “Sherman and Lee.”
They all looked at her. Keegan said, “Two generals?”
Nettie shook her head. “No. Marshall Sherman of the First Minnesota who captured the flag, and John Lee, the guy from the twenty-eighth Virginia—Macintosh’s ancestor—who lost the flag to Sherman. There’s nothing about them in what we’re doing. Nothing on Sherman because he never married, never had children. And nothing on Lee because he died after Gettysburg. He’s not one of the nineteen members of the Twenty-eighth Virginia who died at Gettysburg, so we didn’t include his birth date in target dates for hangings.”
Mars said, “I think Nettie’s nailed it. John Lee might have survived Gettysburg physically—but he lost the flag, he lost his soul, and he was Hec Macintosh’s ancestor. His birth date is gonna be one of the nineteen. And Hec would have wanted to have found a way to tie this thing to Sherman. The question is, how?”
Keegan said, “With the three missing descendents, Macintosh created a wild card for his target victims. With Lee, he’s created a wild card for the target dates. This guy’s a genius.”
Mars said to Nettie, “Where’s the photo of Sherman?”
Nettie wheeled on her chair to a file cabinet. She wheeled back with the book Mars had read in the hospital. Flipping through it, she found the picture of Sherman posed in front of the captured flag, and passed the opened book to Mars.
Mars looked at the picture of the handsome, virile man. If you’d described him as a ladies’ man, no one would have disagreed. He held the book open to each of them, and said, “Even in the 1860s, you didn’t need to be married to father a child. Nettie, we need to find Sherman’s bastards and Lee’s birth date.”
By early afternoon the phone company had confirmed that Macintosh had called from a hotel in Wilmington, Delaware. Mars spoke with the hotel manager who could tell them nothing of any use, other than the guest to whose room the call had been charged had checked out at 6:30 A.M., Eastern Time, that morning.
“Right after he talked to me,” Mars said.
Nettie called out to him. “Mars!”
He looked over at her. Her face was ashen.
“John Lee was born on January fifth, 1840.”
Mars covered his eyes with one hand. “No wonder he didn’t move yesterday. Today’s date trumped the fourth.”
The hanging body of Willes E. Corrigan—the thirteen numbers inscribed on Corrigan’s right arm—was recovered from a boat shed on the Chesapeake Bay. His name was one of the sixteen targeted descendents, so they could assume he was not one of the three missing targets. What Mars couldn’t understand was how the Wilmington Police Department had failed to protect him.
“He left to go down to his boat around seven-thirty this morning, same as always,” the sergeant assigned to cover Corrigan said. “He told us yesterday nobody had contacted him yet, and nobody can reach him when he’s down at his
boat. We told him to check back with us when he got back to town. And this not being a target date …”
Mars sat in silence after the call. Wilmington was blameless. Macintosh must have known enough about Corrigan’s habits to be sure Corrigan would be alone in the boat shed, so he’d skipped making a preliminary contact. Was Macintosh starting to be more reckless? For sure Macintosh’s wild card date had served him well.
Just when Mars thought things couldn’t get much worse, Gordon Ball called.
“Something extraordinary has happened,” Gordon Ball said, sounding shell-shocked. “I think the simplest way to tell you about this is to start at the beginning. And let me warn you. All I can do as of this moment is tell you what happened. I’m not anywhere near knowing what any of this means.”
“Just tell me,” Mars said.
Ball drew a deep breath. “I got a call from Bunny Palmer midmorning. Asked if I’d send someone out to her house. She’d started upstairs to check on something her houseboy had asked her about—he’s in London—and she thought she heard a toilet flush in the bathroom in his room. Scared the hell out of her. She was gonna dial nine-one-one, but she was afraid if she did that, a goon squad would arrive and come barreling into the house, breaking china and all. Mars, you’ve been in the house, you know how she’s got artwork and what-not all over … .”
Mars nodded, too absorbed in what Ball was saying to remember to speak out loud.
“Anyway,” Ball said, “I would have gone out myself, but I was gonna go over to Hollywood, check out the Confederate graves and monuments. So I asked one of the burglary investigators to run on out. Tell you the truth, thought it was probably nothing. Squirrels on the roof, or whatever. Damndest thing, the guy who went out didn’t even think to pack
his gun. Just pulled on a jacket and got in an unmarked squad, drove out to Bunny’s. He gets there, and Bunny’s standing out by the driveway. Didn’t want to be in the house. They both go back in, and he starts up the stairs, calls out, ‘Hello? Anyone upstairs?’ Nothing. So he calls out his name, identifies himself as a police investigator. At that point, he hears footsteps, then a big crash. He goes up to the room, opens the door, and sees that someone’s gone right through the French doors, knocking down a shelf of—if you can believe this—Barbie dolls—on his way to a little terrace off the room, over the pool. Anyway, he walks out onto the terrace, looks down, and sees a body lying facedown, head and shoulders hanging in the pool. Blood all over everything. Blood and Barbie dolls. The jumper took the curtains with him when he went through the doors, and the dolls must have gotten caught up in the curtains. A couple of dozen dolls are lying all around the body, floating in the pool. Most surreal crime scene you are ever going to see. We have digital crime-scene photos. They’re being E-mailed to you as we speak.”
Mars interrupted. “The body, Gordon. Who was it?”
“Thought you would know without being told. It was Junior Boosey.”
Mars, Nettie, and Keegan huddled together in front of her computer as the file with the digital crime-scene photos opened. It was slow, dropping inch by inch from the top of each photo to the bottom. When the first photo was at midpoint, there was a pristine image of Bunny Palmer’s garden on the far side of the pool. Its variegated green depths, with stone paths leading into darkness, seemed impossibly romantic.
“It’s lovely,” Nettie said, turning toward Mars. “You saw the garden when you were there?”
Mars nodded, but didn’t take his eyes from the screen. The image continued to drop. The first hint of tragedy was a
discoloration that muted the glittering black water of the pool. Nettie squinted. “The pool is filled with black water?”
“No. The interior of the pool is painted black.”
The reflection on the pool’s water changed as the image moved from shadow to sunlight. The sun made clear that the discoloration in the water was red. Blood red.
They continued to stare as fragments of Barbie dolls began to take shape. Some floating faceup, an arm raised as if in a salute, others facedown, their elaborate costumes splayed about them on the water. A miniature chorus-girl leg appeared, its foot clad in a sequined, spike-heeled sandal. Bridal Barbie’s smile was indefatigable, but her white dress had absorbed the red of the water.
Then Junior Boosey’s face, distorted by the prism of the water, began to appear in the bottom third of the picture. His body from the shoulders down lay flat on the pool’s edge, arms and legs at sickening angles, possible only when bones under the flesh are broken. A river of pink streamed into the water from his mouth.
Mars, Nettie, and Keegan sat silent in front of the computer screen for minutes.
“You’re sure it’s Junior?” Nettie said.
“It’s Junior all right. It wasn’t a dumb move. He was trying to jump to the pool. Another couple feet and he would have made it. By the time the Richmond cop got back downstairs and out to the back, Junior would have been long gone.”
Nettie shook her head. “Do you have the faintest idea why Junior would have been in Bunny Palmer’s house?”
Mars didn’t answer right away. The odd thing was, something about it did make sense. Mars just wasn’t sure yet what it was. “Not now,” Mars said. “Need time to rethink everything I know about Bunny, Phillipe, Ruth, and Junior.”
“You think Bunny and Phillipe may be involved?”
Mars shook his head slowly. “Only by association. Neither has any motive to be involved in the hangings. Phillipe doesn’t have a malevolent bone in his body, and his only passion is Barbie Dolls. Bunny’s got no sympathy for the
flag nuts. And she’s the one who called the police when she heard the noise in Phillipe’s bedroom. But it’s clear they’ve been used. I just need to figure out how.”
The answers started to come as he thought it through. He needed to talk to Ball again.
Ball wasn’t available, and Mars couldn’t wait to talk to him. He called Bunny Palmer, being certain she’d be able to answer his questions.
Bunny sounded shaken. Which reminded Mars that she probably still had the bloody body of a dead stranger lying in her back garden.
“Sorry to hear about your problem this morning, Bunny.”
“My God,” she said, “you have any idea what that young man was doin’ in my house?”
“An idea is all I have at this point. And I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s something I’d like to know, and you’re the quickest way I have of finding an answer. You feeling up to talking a bit?”
“Talking is better than sittin’ around thinking about what’s out back.”
“Did Ruth know Phillipe was going to be in London this week?”
“Sure, she did. Whenever we talked she asked about Phillipe. She always had some little thing she wanted him to do.”
“And she still has a key to your house?”
He could hear Bunny considering his question, and he could tell from her voice when she answered that she understood why he asked.
“Ruth and I have always had keys to each other’s houses. Think I told you that when you were here.”
“And, Bunny—does Ruth know what happened to Junior Boosey?”
“Yes,” Bunny said. “She called not an hour ago. Of course I told her what was going on.”
Which meant that if Hec Macintosh didn’t already know that Junior was dead, he would know soon.
Nettie sat up straight and pulled back over to the computer. “You want to look at the other photos?”
Keegan shook his head. Mars had surprised himself by feeling a kind of sadness at Junior’s death. He recognized the emotion from back when he’d investigated drug homicides. You’d come across these young black guys, intelligence glittering from their eyes. Young men who—given half a chance—could have done just about anything they’d put their minds to. Junior was the first white-trash character he’d run into who’d had the same kind of misdirected intelligence. The image on the computer screen was painful. He didn’t need—or want—to see any more.
“Not now,” he said.
Instead Mars talked through with Keegan and Nettie what he was thinking about.
“Hec’s wife, Ruth, always had live-in help—until after Hec ‘died.’ Which means she had a lot of privacy. By choice. And she knew when Phillipe was at Bunny Palmer’s and when he wasn’t. Ruth Macintosh had a key to Bunny’s house. Which means Hec could have a key to Bunny’s house. And I don’t have any doubt that Hec and Junior would have thought through where they could hide out if they needed to. With the layout of Bunny Palmer’s house, I think Hec Macintosh would see it as a perfect safe house. Bunny’s living area—the area of the house she frequents—is in an opposite wing from the room where Junior Boosey was discovered. And apart from formal gatherings, Bunny doesn’t often have casual visitors.”
There was no response to what Mars said, so he continued. “I’m also willing to bet that Bunny’s house was the drop point for Ruth to leave money for Junior. Then Junior would get the money to Hec. Don’t know that we’ll ever be able to prove that’s how it worked, but I can’t believe Ruth would have driven up to West Virginia with cash or that
they’d risk mailing large amounts of cash. And having Hec or Junior go to Ruth’s house would be too risky.
“My guess is Hec has a place somewhere in the mountains—within hiking distance for Junior. Junior got there after he came out of the tunnel. I think it’s an open question if Hec was there, but I’d guess that’s where Junior picked up a vehicle.”
They were quiet until Mars rose, patting himself down. “Damnation,” he said. “I’m out of cigarettes.” He dropped his hands to his side and sucked air. “Not the only thing I’m out of.”