(18)

Vibrating with excitement, we walked around to other cars, popping the trunks. Most of them were empty of bones, but some were not. We found four sets of human remains in as many cars, all of them with fragments of cloth, and all the cloth was similar, though much of it had worn away under the water or fell apart once we popped the trunks and the air got to them.

All those cloth fragments seemed strung to something in the back of my mind, but whatever it was on the other end of that string was stubborn, and I couldn’t drag it into the light.

After we finished with the car trunks, we walked through a heat so heavy you could almost hear it toasting the atmosphere. We walked so that we were under the bridge. There was some shade there due to the slats.

“I thought there would be nothing,” Ronnie said. “But I needed to look.”

“Good instincts.”

“I thought, What if your father didn’t do it? Someone else did it. Bodies were probably disposed of by being put in cars and pushed off into the lake. Maybe for years.”

“So it clears my father?”

“I’m saying it could be that way. But he could have killed the ones in the trunks, then killed someone and put her in the Buick, drove you and her off into the water. That someone could be your mother.”

“I’m saying it isn’t.”

“Still, there was a body in the trunk.”

“A lot of trunks have bodies.”

“They have been pushed off into the water, is the way I see it,” she said. “Your dad’s Buick, he drove it into the lake, so the body had to be in there when he did.”

“I would remember seeing him load a body in the trunk.”

“Did you have a freezer?”

“Yeah.”

“In the garage?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you ever look in there?”

“It was locked. Dad locked it so I wouldn’t do something stupid as a kid, like crawl inside. I see where you’re going with this.”

“All you would have to do is go back in the house to the bathroom, chase after something you forgot and wanted. Again, not saying it’s that way, but it’s a consideration.”

“To kill those others, he’d have to steal their cars, if those are their cars, and he’d have had to find his way back to his car after he dumped them. Means he would have had to walk his way out. He couldn’t drive two cars at once.”

“That’s true. Don’t be mad at me, Danny. Only saying how it looks, not necessarily how it is. I need to call this in.”

When we were back in the car, the air conditioner humming, I began to feel more human but no less confused.

Ronnie called it in on her cruiser mike. We sat and waited and didn’t talk much. I wasn’t mad at her. I just didn’t know what to say. Could Dad really have been a serial killer all the time I was growing up? He wasn’t someone who ventured out that much. When was he doing all this murder, and if the cars belonged to his victims, why were the cars so far apart in age? I organized my thoughts enough to tell this to Ronnie.

“Sometimes serial murderers start early. And he is from this town, Danny. Merely saying it’s possible.”

“Thinking like that could be an easy way out for the cops too.”

Ronnie turned in her seat and looked at me. “I wouldn’t do that, Danny.”

“Hell, I know. I’m just in the moment.”

She patted my hand. “Of course you are.”

Three cop cars arrived. Chief Dudley got out of one of them. With hesitation, we got out of the cruiser and stepped into the wall of heat.

Other cops were climbing out of cars now, and there were cars from the sheriff’s department as well. A massive orange wrecker came cruising up. The man who got out of that one was a black man. He was dressed in khakis that looked freshly starched and ironed. He appeared way too prim for my view of a wrecker driver.

Chief Dudley came over and started asking questions. I stood silent, let Ronnie answer them. I felt more capable of calculating a mathematical formula for time travel than figuring out why all those bodies were in those cars and what they had to do with my father.

“Goddamn,” Chief Dudley said. “This has turned into one steamy pile of lumpy dog shit.”

He gave me a glance like it might be all my fault. He sent a couple of the cops that had come over to stand with us down to the lake bed to look at what we had found, told them to break into the trunks of any cars they came across that we hadn’t touched. That meant they would have to walk the entire lake bed, which was sizable, to see all that was there.

“Well, Danny,” Chief Dudley said to me. “You may have gotten more than you expected. Jay called, said you say the bones aren’t your mother’s. Something about a tooth.”

I explained what I suspected he already knew. My guess was he wanted to hear it directly from me.

“People can get their teeth fixed,” he said.

“I know.”

Across the lake in the shadows I noticed a light. It moved. I touched Ronnie and pointed at it. Chief Dudley looked too.

“Flashlight Boy,” Chief Dudley said. “Always wandering the woods, flashlight on in the night or in the shadows, and then he’s gone. Some people try to catch him for whatever reason. That’s like trying to catch a will-o’-the-wisp in a fruit jar. Most of us just leave him alone. He’s not hurting anything. Lived in the woods around the lake for years. No one knows exactly where.”

“He was the boy on the bridge that night we went fishing with Dad,” Ronnie said.

I nodded. The light went away, and the thought of it was lost as the wrecker driver came over.

He was tall and black and walked like he had a free lunch ticket for a nice buffet. He had a brilliant smile and crow’s-feet around his eyes that made him look distinguished. I judged him to be older than me by several years, but he wore his age like a starlet wears a negligee. All in all, he made me feel slightly inadequate, especially when Ronnie looked at him the way she did.

He smiled at Ronnie, dimming the sun, and then he said to Chief Dudley, “What? Another?”

“Yeah,” Dudley said, removing his hat and slapping it on his thigh at a big fly, then placing it back on his head, having missed the insect. “More than another. Several others.”

“Now, that’s weird.”

“Tell us about it. Be careful with them cars when you pull them out. Handle them like you’re paying for their college. Officers down there, they’ll tell you which ones to pull out. Don’t know how firm that lake bed is. Firmer than last time, I suppose.”

“It’s pretty firm,” I said.

“On top, maybe,” the wrecker driver said, “but underneath it isn’t. Weight of a big wrecker like mine, I could sink up to the axle.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Buck Rogers, by the way. And yes, that’s really my name, and no, I don’t know Flash Gordon.”

We shook hands, and I gave him my name, which was considerably less dynamic.

Buck studied the lake bed. “It’ll take some finagling, long chain like last time and my expert driving and towing experience. But I always get my automobile.”

Buck didn’t smile when he said that. He meant it.

“Why you get the big bucks,” Chief Dudley said. “But I remember one time you didn’t pull one out.”

“You would remember that. Dumb kids drove an old army jeep off into a slough in the backwoods. They got out, but the jeep sunk in a goo of quicksand made of oozing oil from an old derrick and a deep swath of mud. I stuck a twenty-foot rod down there and didn’t hit that jeep. It could have slipped along, I guess, ended up farther out. But there was no way to pull that one out. Those kids were lucky they were close to shore and got out on firm land.”

The disappointment of that job lay heavy on Buck’s face for a moment, then he turned his attention to Ronnie, said, “You been good, Ronnie?”

“I’ve been good. You, Buck?”

“It’s really good to see you. Miss our trips to Shreveport.”

Ronnie smiled at him.

Buck’s smile got wider, then he lifted a hand in adios and went away like the Lone Ranger after the completion of a dangerous mission.

“You bring friends to the scene of the crime?” Chief Dudley said to Ronnie, nodding at me.

“Figured you might not think of, you know, looking for clues like policemen do, so we did it for you.”

“Thought that, did you?”

“Actually, we were having a picnic.”

“A picnic?”

“Am I not speaking loud enough, Chief? Yeah, a picnic.”

“Lady, I am your boss.”

“I was on my own time, and I’m only mean to you when I’m off work.”

“This is true.”

It was obvious this was common banter for them.

“After we ate, we walked on the lake bed, and I saw all the cars, and I got to thinking what if, you know?”

“Wish you hadn’t. Now we have our hands full. All manner of problems. And oh, shit, the paperwork you’re going to have to do, Officer.”

“You usually call me Ronnie.”

“When I think about paperwork, I call you Officer, even if you are off duty. Look here, drop Danny off wherever he needs dropping, and you and me, we got to figure on some things, like why all these bones are here. Never mind that. No way to figure. I’m going home for supper. Duncan is cooking. That means one of four dishes, because that’s all he can fix, but all four are good. Me, I can cook four different dishes, none of them particularly well, so I’m looking forward to supper. Figuring it’ll be chicken and dumplings tonight.

“You go back to the office, start writing down what you found and how you found it. I’m putting you back on the clock. Without overtime. And when you write it out, print so I can read it, and be thorough. For that matter, don’t write it down—type it up. You know, with a carbon, and make us a file for all that shit. Hell, they may even find more bodies in cars. Whatever all this means, I can tell you now, I don’t like it.”

“Would you like the reports on colored paper?” Ronnie asked.

“That would be nice.” Chief Dudley paused. “I’m partial to blue.”

We walked over to Ronnie’s cruiser and got in.

“He does seem all right,” I said.

“Buck?”

“Chief Dudley.”

“Oh. Most of the time he is. Likes me because I don’t underestimate him. I think he likes to be underestimated in a way. Gives him a leg up on the bad guys. Also gives me a kind of hope.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve been underestimated by white people all my life because I’m female and black. Underestimated by black people as well, being a woman, being uppity, doing a white job, a cop job. I get shit on by both sides. Don’t you think Chief looks like that cartoon dog?”

“Deputy Dawg?”

“That’s it. But again, don’t underestimate him.”

“I’m starting to believe you. So, you and Buck Rogers—can’t believe that’s his name—know each other pretty well?”

“Couple years back, my car broke down. I had to walk, find a phone, call Daddy to give me a ride home. Next morning, I called the wrecker service to come and pick the car up. Buck was the wrecker service. He came by my house and gave me a ride out to the car so I could show him where it was. He pulled my car in. I rode up front with him in the wrecker. We got friendly.”

“How friendly?”

She studied me carefully. “We had a few dates.”

“Yeah? Anyplace special?”

“Are you asking for all the details?”

“Not at all.”

“He took me to Mars in his rocket once…oh, shit. I was trying to be funny there, you know, the Buck Rogers name, but that could be taken the wrong way, I guess, to Mars on his rocket…”

“I get it.”

“Nothing special came from our dates. Certainly no trip to Mars. Problem is, a lot of women like Buck. They collect on him like fleas on a dog. There’s too much competition, and he encourages it. And sometimes I sense darkness there, or I think I do, and I don’t know if I find it mysterious and appealing or a bit nerve-racking.”

“Just curious,” I said.