Between Black and White (McMurtrie and Drake Legal Thrillers #2)(92)
Tom walked over to Rick and kneeled down. “Deputy Springfield needs you to write a statement about what you saw on the square. Can you do that?”
Rick blinked and then he nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”
Tom turned back to Hank and gave the thumbs-up sign. “We’re right behind you.”
“Ten-four,” Hank said, walking toward the exit with the other deputy that came in with him right on his heels. At the doors he turned around and looked back at Tom, making the phone symbol with the thumb and pinky finger of his right hand. “Keep trying Bo.”
84
As the sun began to set over Walton Farm, Bo pulled into the gravel driveway leading up to the main entrance of the Big House. He pushed the buzzer out in front of the gate and waited.
Bo had spent the last two hours driving the back roads of Pulaski, thinking about what Ray Ray had said. About what it all meant.
Bo pushed the buzzer twice more and put his car in reverse. Just as he started to ease the car backward to leave the driveway, a clipped voice blared out of the speaker adjacent to the buzzer. “Who is it?”
“Bo Haynes, ma’am.”
Silence for a good five seconds. Then a faint chuckle. “You have a lot of nerve coming over here. What do you want?”
“To talk, ma’am. Just . . . talk.”
More silence. Then Bo was startled by another buzzing sound as the gate slowly began to creak open. Feeling a catch in his throat, Bo hesitated, knowing this was probably a bad idea. Regardless, almost without conscious thought he pressed the accelerator down and eased the vehicle forward. The compulsion to follow Ray Ray out the courthouse doors was moving him forward, and he found himself powerless to stop it. I have to know . . .
As the Sequoia wound up the hill, Bo’s mind filled with images of the day his father was killed. The day that had haunted every hour of his life since. The cross in the yard. The Klansmen surrounding the house. The smell of burning wood mixed with the fear coming from his father as he kneeled next to Bo and made the boy promise to take care of his momma, to make something of himself and to not believe the reasons given for the murder. Forty-five years . . . Bo had gone to law school ultimately so that he could bring the men who killed his father to justice. He’d practiced in Pulaski these past twenty-five years for the same reason. He’d spoken with every living Klansman in the Tennessee chapter. His obsession in life had been to bring Andy Walton to justice. Andy Walton. The monster who had killed his father and made his mother disappear. “The monster . . .”
At the top of the hill the house came into view. As with most things you remember being so huge as a child, the Big House really wasn’t so big after all. Sure, it was a two-story rancher—a beautiful old relic of a day gone by—but Bo’s house in town probably carried more square footage.
Bo had not been invited to be on Walton soil since he was five years old. Two weeks after the murder and a day after his mother had disappeared, he’d moved in with Aunt Mable and Uncle Booker, who lived in the parish next to Bickland Creek Baptist Church. He had never been invited back.
He opened the car door and walked toward the house, his body fueled by adrenaline. Given what he’d been through that day—the trial and then the shooting—Bo should be exhausted. But he felt nothing, his feet propelled forward by a four-decade-long obsession. I have to know . . .
As he trotted up the steps of the porch, Bo saw the note. It was a yellow sticky pressed to the front door. He tore it off and brought it close to his eyes.
“At the clearing. Walk, don’t drive.”
Bo crumpled the note and swept his eyes over the farm, seeing the orange hue of the sun beginning to descend over the western horizon. It was beautiful, he had to admit, and the memory of other sunsets flooded back to him. His mother and father’s house had been on the north side of the farm. “House” was really an overstatement. It had been a two-bedroom shack. Less than a thousand square feet. But for Bo it was home. He remembered his father liked to smoke a pipe and sit in a plastic chair under a tree near the front of the house, watching the sun make its slow descent. Sometimes Bo would stand next to him, asking questions that little boys ask. “Daddy, why does the sun rise and fall? Does it go to sleep at night too?”
Bo wiped a tear from his eye and headed north on foot toward the clearing. It had been forty-five years since he’d walked this farm, but he knew the way. He could find it blindfolded.
I have to know, he told himself. I have to know . . .
85
The sheriff’s office was a madhouse.
Between the shooting of Ray Ray Pickalew, the arrest of JimBone Wheeler, and the suicide of Dr. George Curtis, the parking lot had become ground zero for a plethora of television and print news reporters, all hoping for more information on any of these events.
Tom and Rick had piled into the back of Deputy Springfield’s cruiser at the hospital so as to avoid the hassle of trying to park and wade through the cameras. Hank pulled to the front of the building and whisked them all inside. A few minutes later Rick was in an interrogation room being questioned by one of the younger deputies about what he had seen on the square.
Tom waited in the lobby and continued to try to reach Bo, with no luck. Each call went straight to voice mail. He called Jazz and Booker T., and neither had heard a word from him since just after the shooting. Where the hell could he be? It didn’t make sense for Bo to disappear. Unless . . .