Butch Karp: Absolute Rage Part 18

"As far as I know, that's a formality, unless you call the governor a son of a b.i.t.c.h and p.i.s.s on the carpets."

"I'll try to remember that. How did you get picked for this?"

"Just lucky, I guess," Hendricks said with a soft grin. "I was in charge of the security detail during the campaign, and we found we got along, and when he won it, well, he told me to stay on. Besides security, he's asked me to do a couple of ch.o.r.es for him the past year or so in the criminal justice line, and when this came up, he said I was it." Hendricks paused. "I'm from there originally. He thought it could help."

"You're from Robbens County?"

"Yes, sir. Coal-patch kid. When I was ten, my daddy sat me on his knee and made me swear on the Bible I'd never go down in the mines."

"And you kept your word."

"I did, too. When I was seventeen, I joined the Marine Corps. I did a hitch in the emba.s.sy guards and then my next hitch I got into the military police. Daddy was sick by then with the black lung, so I got out of the service and joined the staties, so's I could watch over him. After he pa.s.sed, I stayed on. I liked the work, although, between you and me, I don't much care for the political end of it, which you have to if you're rising up. I'd rather just cop."

"A man after my own heart," said Karp. "But there's politics involved in this thing, isn't there? Or your governor wouldn't have reached out to a complete stranger."

Hendricks dropped his eyes, a shadow of unease crossing his face. "Well, I guess you'll have to discuss that with Governor Orne." With that, he reached under his seat and pulled out a fat, blue plastic portfolio with the state seal printed on it in gold. Handing it across to Karp, he said, "Here's all the information we have on the Heeney murder to date, plus we got some background material in there about Robbens you might be interested in. Why don't you read through it, and after you're done we'll talk." He stood up and dropped a large folding table down in front of Karp, then nodded and went to the rear of the plane, where he talked quietly to Trooper Blake while Karp examined the contents of the portfolio.

This comprised two three-inch loose-leaf binders, one containing all the doc.u.ments relevant to the state's case against Moses Welch, and the other labeled "Robbens County: Historical a.n.a.lysis and Situation Report." This latter had a governor's office seal on the cover, but no attribution or author. The Heeney case binder, neatly tabbed, began with a letter from the state's attorney, Hawes, to the attorney general, summarizing his case. Karp was particularly interested in the b.l.o.o.d.y sneaker, the finding of which he already knew about from Marlene. The lab had made a good DNA match on it and found that the stain on its sole was Rose Heeney's blood. Hawes had tried to put the best face on this discovery by postulating that the sneakers had actually been worn by the defendant while committing the crime. The boots must have been in the Heeneys' bedroom during the time of the murders, been splattered there, and stolen by the defendant. Karp snorted and paged through the data, trying to find any indication that Hawes had determined, whether through a search for receipts or checking records, whether anyone in the family had purchased such boots, or even some indication of what all the Heeneys' shoe sizes were. Nothing; nor had Hawes seemingly made any effort to determine the provenance of those boots, the only piece of evidence he had linking his suspect to the crime. Karp couldn't wait to meet Mr. Hawes.

After making some notes on the blank sheets thoughtfully provided at the back of the binder, he turned to the Robbens County report. He had expected the usual dry bureaucratic prose. Instead he found a fluidly written and absorbing history of what seemed to be a remarkable, if grim, piece of the nation. The county had been settled in the late eighteenth century, by Scotch-Irish farmers on the run from poverty or worse. They were feisty, independent, clannish people, the original pioneer stock that produced people like Daniel Boone and Andrew Jackson.

Those of them who might have been a little too feisty and clannish to invent great nations settled in the hills and hollows of the Appalachians and stuck. There they cut down the ancient forests of hickory, oak, and chestnut and built little farms and sawmills and fought the Cherokees and, on occasion, the agents of the United States, who tried to collect taxes on the corn liquor that was their princ.i.p.al source of income. The fields were small, rocky, and steep-not a prosperous sort of farmland, but at least they did not have to chop wood to keep warm. Great boulders of coal stood out from the hillsides, and many people started to mine it in a small way, for local use. In 1787, a vein of hemat.i.te was found near Ponowon in the western part of the county, and they started a furnace at Furnace Cove, nearby. They began making nails and ploughs, knives and fowling pieces. Around this nascent industry, small towns sprang up. Donald McCullen deeded land to the settlement that bore his name in 1793, and a few years afterward it became the county seat of Robbens County, that named for an otherwise forgotten legislator. For the next fifty years, the nation flowed around them westward, leaving the people to their strictly local concerns. Though poor, the people were nearly self-sufficient. Bartering was the rule in that economy. What little cash arrived in the place came from the stills. Corn liquor was the only product worth carrying over the rough trails that connected Robbens to the country of which it was nominally a part.

Among the people who arrived in the county during this period were Josiah Cade (b. 1810) and Ephraim Jonson (b. 1815). Cade settled on Burnt Peak, Jonson on Belo k.n.o.b to the east. Both married locally and raised families and attracted kin from other states and the old country. Cade had five sons and two daughters, and Jonson had four sons and one daughter. Somewhere around 1856, the two men fell into a dispute about a boundary between two adjoining fields. They went to law, and Jonson won his case. Cade was ordered to move his boundary markers. This he refused to do and ordered his sons Lemuel and Ransome to drive a herd of cattle to pasture on the disputed land. When this action was challenged by James and Peter Jonson, Ephraim's eldest sons, shooting broke out. In the affray, Peter Jonson was badly wounded, and Lem Cade was killed.

This was the origin of the Cade-Jonson feud, or war, as the report called it. In the next four years, two Cades and four Jonsons were shot from ambush. Barns were burned. Cattle were poisoned. Dogs were hung from trees. Shortly thereafter, actual war came to the region, when Virginia seceded from the Union and West Virginia seceded from its mother state. Although there were no formal contests of uniformed troops in Robbens during the Civil War, nearly the entire able-bodied male population of the town engaged in hostilities at some level. The report made it clear that the War Between the States was considered an excuse to escalate the War Between the Cades and the Jonsons. The surviving Jonson boys went to Harpers Ferry to enlist with the Union. Immediately thereafter, the surviving Cade boys trooped to Knoxville to sign up with the rebels. In the county, guerrilla warfare was continual for the duration of the conflict. Both sides easily obtained arms from the belligerents. By war's end only one son survived in each family-Moses Jonson and Ransome Cade.

Appomattox did not bring an end to the sniping and ambushes. Of the ten children, male and female, of Moses and Ransome, only two escaped murder long enough to survive into the twentieth century. Of the two, the report took particular notice of Ransome Cade (18641937), who brought a new level of ferocity and cunning to the feud. Devil Rance, as he was known, moved his clan away from its agricultural roots, replacing this as a source of income with a variety of criminal enterprises. He ran moonshine; he stole horses and rustled cattle; he could break a limb or a head for cash up front. He also ran a primitive protection racket among the local illicit distilleries. Most significantly, he consolidated the tribal property into a single hollow around Canker Run on Burnt Peak. This settlement was approachable only by a narrow, winding road and was surrounded on three sides by nearly impenetrable growth. From this fortress, Devil Rance fell like a robber baron upon his enemies and retreated with impunity. He held to the theory that the secession of West Virginia had been an illegal act, and that the state had no authority over him or his. Moreover, neither had the United States, since Virginia had seceded from the Union and the part of it that comprised West Virginia had never been legally reincorporated. It was not a theory that Karp would have liked arguing before a court, but Devil Rance was not all that interested in courts anyway. Courts had failed his tribe once; he was not inclined to give them another chance.

Into this parochial violence now barged the Gilded Age in the person of Thomas G. (Big Tom) Killebrew. Killebrew was a McCullensburg man whose family had been involved in small-scale coal mining for decades, all for the local market. But Killebrew was a traveling man and visionary. He had been to Knoxville on horseback and even to Pittsburgh. He had ridden on a railroad train and seen streets lit with gas. Quietly at first, and then brazenly, Killebrew began to buy up all the coal rights in Robbens County. Some people refused to sell, but Big Tom was not daunted. He soon concluded that the muscle that kept the moonshiners in line might be put to other uses. An agreement was reached with Devil Rance. Soon, after a brief terror, Killebrew had all the coal leases, save one. In grat.i.tude, he gave his partner his very own coal patch, right up there near the Cade home place on Burnt Peak.

With the leases in hand, Big Tom ventured out to Pittsburgh again and talked with Mellons, and to New York to converse with Goulds. The result was the construction of the Huntington & Knoxville Railroad, which reached McCullensburg in the fall of 1889. Killebrew was, of course, a partner in the railroad, for the construction of which large numbers of Italian and Slovak immigrants were recruited. As soon as the railroad was finished, he began his mining operation, fittingly called the Majestic Coal Company.

Karp was distracted at the next chapter, an account of the worst labor violence in U.S. history, by a change in the motion of the plane. It was banking counterclockwise and seemed to be descending.

Hendricks was in the aisle, leaning over him. "How's that report?"

"It's fascinating. It reads like fiction. Is it on the level?"

"Like what?"

"Oh, here where it says fourteen revenue agents have gone missing in the county since 1900. Fourteen?"

"That's only the federals. We lost some state boys, too, over the years. They don't much like lawmen poking into them hollers up there. Plus, you got to consider that the county is stuck full of mines like a Swiss cheese, and you got boys up there with unlimited access to blasting compound. Stick a couple of bodies down a shaft and dump sixty tons of rock on top of 'em. What're you gonna do? Start digging with a pick and shovel? We know they run meth, they run pot, some corn liquor, too, but not as much as they used to. It's a bad situation. If you want to know the truth, the law wrote off Robbens County a while back."

"What changed your minds?"

"Oh, you know, new governor, new broom. You need to put your seat belt on now." Hendricks sat in the seat opposite and affixed his own. Karp looked out the window. They were flying at what he estimated to be fifteen hundred feet, over ground that resembled green corrugated cardboard.

"Are we landing?"

"No, but we'll be heading over Robbens any minute now. At this alt.i.tude we sometimes have to use evasive maneuvers."

"Evasive from what?"

"Ground fire," replied Hendricks blandly. "We have state markings. A lot of folks down there don't like official kinds of airplanes flying over them." He looked at Karp innocently. "Unless it makes you nervous. I could tell the pilot to get upstairs again."

"Not at all. I think everyone should be subjected to antiaircraft fire at least once."

Hendricks nodded, his face neutral. He pointed out the window. "Okay, you can see mining from here. We're still over Mingo. That's Mateawan down there. You heard of that, haven't you?"

"Yes. That's a coal mine?" It was a smudge of black and ocher the size of a town, intermittently veiled by greasy smoke, threaded by railways.

"Yeah, a Peabody operation, I think. In a bit, we should be coming up on . . . yeah, look there, see that big flat area?"

Karp did. It was a huge, perfectly flat oval, looking unlikely amid the rippled hills, as if G.o.d had dropped a soccer field for giants on top of the mountains.

"What is it?"

"It used to be a mountain called Thatcher. They chopped it flat and dumped the spoil in the hollers all around it, and smoothed it out and planted it with gra.s.s."

"They can do that?"

"Oh, that's a prize exhibit of reclamation. They fixed that one. Just wait, we're coming up on something real interesting."

Karp thought the interesting thing might be a controlled flight into terrain. A mountain was looming in front of them, whose top looked to be higher than the alt.i.tude of the plane. He stared at the approaching green wall; out of the corner of his eye he saw that Hendricks was watching him. A little mountain-state aviation initiation, then, he thought, and made himself yawn. When he could count individual trees on the mountainside and distinguish the very one upon which the King Air was about to impale itself, the aircraft twitched its wing up and zoomed through a break in the mountain wall. Karp thought he could see squirrels running for cover as the towering forest flew past.

"This is Conway Gap, and that's Majestic Number One," said Hendricks.

It looked like something had taken a huge bite out of the rear half of the mountain, leaving an orange and black earth pit that looked large enough to swallow New York City. Orange creeks ran off the sore and disappeared into the surrounding timberland.

"That's what they look like when you don't clean 'em up, and Majestic don't."

"Don't they have to?"

"Oh, it's the law all right, but try and make them. There's court cases been going on for ten years on this pit alone. See, what they do is dump the spoil from the hole down into the hollers. They bury everything, homes, farms, graveyards, whole little towns. Of course, the people've moved out before then. The mining ruins the water first, tears up the water tables and kills the creeks. And that's what you got left. You all have your coal, though. This here's downtown McCullensburg."

The plane dropped even lower and sped over a group of low buildings and a green square with a golden-domed courthouse in it.

"Not much to it at this speed," said Hendricks. "On the other hand, there ain't much to it on the ground neither." The plane circled the town twice, while the trooper pointed out the hills and highways, scars of coal patches, and the coffee stream of the Guyandotte River.

"We're pa.s.sing over the murder house there."

Karp pressed his face against the gla.s.s and looked down with interest. A yard, a roof, a red truck in the driveway. Marlene's maybe. Then it was gone.

"One more beauty spot and then we'll put the pedal down and get us home," said Hendricks. The plane rose, rising with the curve of the mountain he had identified as Hampden. The top of the mountain was gone, leaving a great mustard-and-black scab upon which yellow trucks and bulldozers rolled. It looked like a sandbox occupied by a child unusually well supplied with Tonka toys. In the center was what appeared to be a white, rectangular, five-story office building.

"Majestic Number Two. There's the dragline," said Hendricks, answering Karp's unspoken question about what a five-story office building was doing in the middle of a mine. "They use a Bucyrus 2570, maybe the largest shovel in the world, although I hear they got one even bigger out in Wyoming."

"That thing moves?"

"Oh, yeah. It never stops, day and night. Every scoop is near four hundred tons. Those trucks down there? Cat 797s. Over six hundred tons fully loaded."

"I'm impressed," said Karp. "Every little boy's dream."

"Uh-huh. The reason I'm showing you this is to give you some idea. You want to bury a body around here, you don't have to go out at night with a spade and a lantern."

A few minutes later the plane heaved and rolled onto its side, climbing. Karp's belly lurched and he grabbed the seat arms.

"What was that?"

"Oh, Rudy probably saw a flash. He's real nervous when he flies over weed."

"Marijuana?"

"Yeah. It's getting as big as coal around here. We go down and chop it back some from time to time, but there're lots of hollers and not enough of us."

The plane climbed rapidly. Hendricks loosened his seat belt. He grinned. "Wild and wonderful. We'll be down in twenty, twenty-five minutes."

As they were. The trip to the capitol was swift, in a convoy of two state police vehicles. Karp and Hendricks rode in the back of one of them, with the captain pointing out the features of what looked to Karp like a nice little city on the banks of a not-too-clean river. The capitol itself was the usual ma.s.sive gray-stone, gilded-domed structure. The governor was meeting them in his office there, instead of the one at the governor's mansion, in the interests of privacy, Hendricks explained.

"In case I p.i.s.s on the rug."

"We're careful folks hereabouts."

"I might, though. I never met a governor before. The excitement . . ."

Hendricks laughed and opened a walnut-paneled door.

They were ushered in immediately. The office was modern and not impressively large, much like its occupant. Roy Orne was a small man with excellent barbering and a peppy manner. A young woman, trim in a fawn suit, her blond hair in a neat bun, was introduced as "my aide" Cheryl Oggert. Shakes all around, seats, offer of coffee, soft drinks, declined, the usual banter. Governor Orne asked how was the flight; Karp commented on the abundance of mountains. Laughs.

Time to turn serious: Orne asked if Karp had read the binders. What did he think?

"I think you got the wrong man. I think the people down there botched the investigation."

"Incompetence, do you think, or malevolence?" asked the governor.

"Hard to tell. Could be either. Based on the other binder, I would tend to bet on the latter. Otherwise it was a really dumb investigation. In any case their suspect is a joke."

"What does your wife think?"

Karp was taken aback. The governor had certainly done his homework. "Well, clearly, she believes her client is innocent," Karp said carefully. "As to malevolence, there seems to be plenty to spare. An attempt was made on her life the other day."

The governor looked grave, and a glance flicked between him and Hendricks. "Well. That's awful. Was she hurt?"

"No. Marlene is hard to hurt. Experts have tried. Of course, she'll be out of there once I get there, provided you want me. Speaking of which, why do you?"

"How's that?"

"Why do you want a prosecutor from out of state? It seems a bit extreme. I'm sure you've got plenty of fine lawyers in West Virginia."

"Well, yes, we do," said Orne. "But I'm kind of busy just now." The others chuckled, Karp allowed a smile. Orne continued, "Here's the thing, Mr. Karp. I've heard a lot about you from Saul. I don't think there's a prosecutor in the state that has your experience, h.e.l.l, half your experience. State's attorney tends to be a young fellow's profession. We've got a man up in Wheeling's been there twelve years, and I doubt he sees three murder trials a year, and those're bar fights and domestics. We don't have any people skilled in unraveling a conspiracy."

"You think it's a conspiracy?"

"Well, let's see: a union reformer gets killed along with half his family in the most corrupt, antiunion county in the state. What're the chances it was a wandering drifter, like in that book, In Cold Blood? I'd say slim to none. Okay, that's one reason. Another is, if I a.s.sign a local, people are going to look at his political connections, either to me, or to my many fine enemies, or to Big Coal, or whatever. You on the other hand don't know one end of West Virginia from the other. That's an advantage. Also, Saul a.s.sures me that you don't play political games."

"Yes. People have said I have the political skills of a three-year-old."

The governor laughed. "That's good. We want the truth here, and let the bricks fly."

"Sounds good," said Karp. "Another reason might be that, if I crash and burn, I'm a stranger, and it doesn't cost you anything to dump me."

A tiny silence here. Then the governor chuckled. "Well, yeah, I guess that pa.s.sed through my mind. And as long as we're being brutally frank, I'm also doing it to keep control of this mess, a.s.suming that it might very well lead to some pretty powerful political factors in the state. I don't want the feds to have an excuse to come in here and p.i.s.s all over another Democratic governor. This is a decent state, with solid liberal instincts, and it's tied to a nasty, regressive bunch of industries-coal, chemicals, power plants. It makes for a funny kind of politics, but just about everyone's now agreed that the old kind of Robbens County behavior just don't cut it anymore, and I mean to clean it up, and I need a pro to do it. Well, Mr. Karp, will you?"

"Sure," said Karp, surprising himself with the ease with which he committed himself. "Resources . . . ?"

"Whatever you need. If you want to hire people, there's money for that. Captain Hendricks will be part of your team, in charge of any detective and forensic work. You'll have priority at the state lab, of course, and a budget that should be adequate. Cheryl here will be your contact with my office and will go down there with you to handle the on-scene public relations. I a.s.sume you'll appreciate the help in that area."

"Saul must have ratted about my winning ways with the press."

"Well, no offense, but I think we're going to get a lot of publicity on this case, and I think the viewers would rather see her face on the screen than yours. When can you start?"

"How about the beginning of next week?"

"That's fine," said Orne. "Wade and Cheryl will form up an advance team and have everything ready for you when you get down there."

Orne rose, extended his hand. "Welcome aboard, Mr. Karp. We expect great things from you."

Karp looked into the governor's dark eyes; sincerity flooded from them, which made him feel good for a moment, until he reflected that Orne was a politician and that sincerity was easy to fake.

Lucy drove the refurbished Land Cruiser off the car ferry and onto the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut, feeling quite uncharacteristically pleased with herself. She had fixed the car, obtained the plates, finished her various ch.o.r.es, whipped her brothers into finishing theirs, and escaped without either mechanical breakdown or dog-based emergency intervening. She had made one final executive-level decision just before leaving, and she was somewhat concerned that she had not called her mother to clear it, but Billy had agreed and she felt confident that she had done the right thing.

Zak the navigator, a street map unfolded across his lap, said, "Right in three blocks."

From the backseat came the tweedle of a Game Boy. Giancarlo was spread out with pillows like a pasha on a divan, his preferred mode of automobile travel. One of the nice things about traveling with the boys was that there was never any quarrel about who would get the shotgun seat. Giancarlo did not covet it, nor would Zak ride anywhere else.

The executive decision was about the dog Jeb. Jeb was a bonehead and varminty as all h.e.l.l, which meant that he was suspicious of everything that moved, besides which, he was an escape artist of some talent. Billy had tried to break him of the habit of lunging at every stranger, with some success, but clearly Jeb would never make a personal guard dog good enough to sell as such under the Wingfield Farm label. The decision was to turn him into a yard dog. He would spend his professional career pacing behind a high fence hoping that some really stupid person would try to climb over it at night. Not a trivial decision either, because it meant that he would lose over half his value.

Lucy steered onto Route 25 and took it a few miles north to the Reservoir Road exit. A few more turns found them in a leafy neighborhood of middle-cla.s.s homes set back from the street behind treeshaded lawns. She spotted the right number and pulled into a long driveway.

"Don't get out," she said.

"Why not?" asked Zak, his hand on the door handle.

"It's good manners to wait," she said, a fib. In fact, she knew, weapons were probably pointing at them right now. She waited. Within three minutes, she heard a door open, steps on the brick walk; a handsome Vietnamese man of saturnine mien appeared at the driver's side window.

"Good morning, Freddy," she said in Vietnamese.