Assassin's Blood (The Alan Graham Mysteries) Read online

  Assassins’s Blood

  An Alan Graham Mystery

  Malcolm Shuman

  MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

  This is for Darwin Shrell, scholar and friend

  PROLOGUE

  It was just after noon, and the crowd was already gathering below in Dealey Plaza. The thin, sharp-faced young man, however, was uninterested in the excitement. Instead, he lounged nonchalantly against the wall of the cluttered sixth-floor area, a smirk on his face, his eyes on the corner of the building and its big window.

  They’d all gone to lunch, leaving him here alone. Soon he would do what had to be done.

  The elevator door opened, and he wheeled around as one of his co-workers got off.

  “You seen my cigarettes?” the man asked. “I could swear I left ’em.”

  The younger man shrugged. Then his visitor saw the pack of smokes on a packing crate, picked them up, and stuck them in his pocket.

  “Boy, are you going downstairs?” the visitor asked.

  “No, sir,” the younger man answered.

  “Suit yourself,” the other said with a shrug and got back onto the elevator.

  Only when the elevator began to move again did the young man spring into action.

  He dragged cardboard boxes of books across the plywood floor, making a three-sided enclosure on the southeast corner so that no one leaving the elevator would be able to see him. Then he retrieved the brown paper bag he’d secreted here earlier.

  Curtain rods, he’d told his neighbor about the oblong package. And his neighbor, who had driven him to work, had accepted the explanation.

  Curtain rods.

  The young man laughed and ran a sweaty palm through his short, dark hair.

  It would be over soon. And there wouldn’t be another miss, like when he’d shot at the general in April. This time he would use sheer willpower to quiet the butterflies in his belly.

  He stripped away the newspaper, hands trembling as the outline of the bolt-action rifle revealed itself.

  He fitted the stock and action together, pulled back the bolt, and screwed the four power scope to the top. Then he loaded the clip with four cartridges, each a man killer.

  In the distance he heard sirens echoing into the plaza and off the buildings.

  He opened the window and, twisting the sling around his arm, rested the rifle on the sill and sighted through the scope.

  A young woman in a red dress was standing on the far curb, and with a quick turn of the adjustment knob he brought her round face into focus.

  It was a pleasant face, slightly anxious, as if she wasn’t sure she had time to spend here and wished the procession would hurry and arrive. How easy it would be to kill her right now. Just a squeeze of the trigger, and her head would explode in a halo of red.

  But she wasn’t his target. His target was someone infinitely more important. Someone stupid women like that one pretended to admire, as if he were God Almighty. It was disgusting, because the man who would be driving by in a moment was no different than anybody else, just born rich, as if wealth conferred some kind of sainthood.

  The sirens were loud now, blasting into the plaza, and he swung the rifle barrel toward the far edge just in time to see the first motorcycle policeman.

  The gunman’s heart was pounding now so loud he was sure that if anyone else had been up here with him they would have heard it.

  Thirty seconds, and all the past failures of his life would be erased. Thirty seconds …

  He swung the barrel back to the street below and swore to himself at the tree branches that blocked his view.

  He’d have to fire quickly, before the limo reached the tree. And his shot would have to count. Because if he missed, he’d have to fire through a break in the foliage, which was trickier.

  The sirens were right under him now, and he pressed his eye against the scope.

  Suddenly he saw it, the black open limo, with the governor in the front and his target, wearing a dark suit, in the seat directly behind.

  His target was waving.

  He took a deep breath, brought the crosshairs steady on the president’s head, and pressed the trigger.

  That was how I imagined the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy thirty-six years ago. A third of a century before I went to Jackson. A third of a century before the other deaths …

  ONE

  Pepper was gone. She had gotten up early one morning in April, and I had driven her to the airport in New Orleans. Two hours later she was on a plane to Mexico.

  Working at the Maya site of Lubaanah was too great an opportunity to pass up. Working with Eric Blackburn was just an added plus.

  Blackburn was married with children, and despite his calculatedly rakish appearance, it was ridiculous to think of anything developing between them.

  She and I had worked together for two years, had almost been killed a few times, and had finally become lovers, despite a ten-year difference in our ages. Nothing would change the way she felt, not even an archaeologist her own age with a half-million dollars from National Geographic to study Maya trade relations in the early historic period.

  “It’s just that we both need some time,” she’d explained. “It’s only four months, and you can fly down and visit.”

  I promised I would. And lied.

  I’d had a bad experience in Mexico years before, when I’d met a beautiful Mexican archaeologist on a dig in Yucatán. We’d ended up married, but our careers had brought us into conflict. I’d gone round the bend, lost my university position, and come back to Baton Rouge to do contract archaeology. I was just getting my emotions together when I met Pepper. She’d given me something I’d never expected to have again. But I didn’t know if I was ready for Mexico and its memories.

  And she may have known. There were still things about her I didn’t understand, and when she’d announced her intention to go, I sensed that it was our closeness that frightened her as much as her professed desire to jump into a field in which she had no previous experience.

  “You don’t even read Maya,” I said.

  She told me she’d learn.

  That was a month ago, and I’d gotten one lousy letter before they’d disappeared into the jungle.

  Now I felt an emptiness, even a betrayal. I plunged into work. One day our Corps of Engineers contracting officer, Bertha Bomberg, A.K.A. La Bombast, called and told us she was sending us to inventory the archaeological sites along a stretch of Thompson Creek, thirty miles to the north.

  The Corps was thinking of building a dam and flooding a few thousand acres of pine forest. The plan was touted as a way to draw tourists for fishing and recreation, but everyone knew it would really benefit the politicians who had bought up most of the land.

  I pulled into the tiny community of Jackson at just after nine. It was a warm May morning, with summer hiding in the shadows of the old buildings. In a few weeks the blackberries would be ripe. Idyllic, if you didn’t have to beat your way through the berry patches in hundred-degree heat.

  The man I’d come to meet was waiting in a pickup next to the bank. He got out as I approached, a round little fellow of fifty in a short-sleeved shirt and cowboy boots, who looked happy with the world.

  “Dr. Alan Graham?” He came forward with his hand outthrust. “Gene McNair. I own the eastern half of the tract. I’m also on the board of the Development District.”

  We shook and he nodded over his shoulder.

  “You been to Jackson before, right?”

  “Just for pleasure,” I said, and he cracked a grin. The state mental hospital is in Jackson.

  “Well, it’s a nice little town. Been around since
the middle of the last century. Used to be a center for cotton shipping. Railroad took the cotton west to the Mississippi for loading onto boats. This was a hopping place back then: Centenary College was the first institution of higher learning in the state. Asphodel Plantation, down the road, was built in the early 1800s. It’s on the National Register, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re trying to get things started up again. Get known for something besides a mental hospital and a correctional institution.”

  “You have a lot of local backing?” I asked.

  “Everybody except one or two. But that’s always the way it is.” He folded his arms. “Look, if you found an Indian grave, would that hold things up?”

  “Probably. The state has a strong burial law. Any human remains have to be reported to the authorities within twenty-four hours, and then if they’re Native American, interested tribes have to be given a chance to comment. So I imagine it would slow things down. But most of what we find isn’t burials. Mostly it’s Indian artifacts—projectile points and pottery—and old house remains from the last century. If we find something that seems important, then we have to recommend what to do with it.”

  “Like excavate?’

  “That or avoid it completely.”

  “Sounds interesting,” McNair said dubiously.

  I nodded. Most people said what I did was interesting, whether they believed it or not.

  I left my red Blazer in the lot and climbed into McNair’s pickup, and a few seconds later we were heading north on a winding two-lane. To the left was a terrace, with the creek at the bottom. The creek had etched its way into the landscape during the last Ice Age, which ended ten thousand years ago. The hills were made out of loess, a fine clay that the glaciers had ground into a dust a thousand miles to the north and deposited here on the winds. It was a good place to find fossils, with a better than average chance of turning up leavings of the first Americans, who had come here just before the Ice Age ended.

  Three miles from town we turned left onto a dirt road, dipping down toward the valley across a pasture. Five minutes later we came to an iron-bar gate, and McNair hopped out with a key and unlocked it.

  “I’ll give you a key when we finish today,” he said. “From here on down to the creek is my land.”

  We shot through the gate and started winding downward.

  “The other half of the tract you need to look at is on the other side of the creek, in West Feliciana. That belongs to the Devlins. To get to my land, you come up Highway 952 on this side of the creek. To get to the Devlin tract, you go up Highway 421, that runs parallel to it on the other side. The creek’s the dividing line between the two tracts, and it’s the parish line, as well.”

  A deer leaped out in front of us and then bounded away, its flag high.

  “Damn, I wisht it was hunting season,” my guide swore.

  “Are the Devlins a problem?” I asked.

  “Just the one that lives there. Real pain in the ass.”

  “He’s against the project,” I said.

  “She. Cynthia Jane, but everybody calls her Cyn. She was okay before her husband died. But ever since, well, I think it knocked a screw loose. I don’t think she’ll shoot at you, though.”

  “She lives by herself?” I asked.

  “Yeah, in a big-ass old house on Highway 421. But her land only goes about halfway back to the north.” Gesturing with his head he said, “Across the creek there belongs to her brother-in-law, Buck, but she’s against his selling. You’d think it was her own family’s land instead of his.”

  We came to the edge of the terrace. The road ended here, and somebody had thought it was a good vantage point for hunting, because a wooden deer stand had been built onto an oak tree on the right. I looked over the edge of the bluff and down at the creek. It was a shallow, sandy expanse a hundred feet wide, with the water in pools and very little current. A wooden stake with a red ribbon guarded the end of the road, and I pointed.

  “Are the perimeters staked?”

  “Supposed to be.”

  “And this Devlin woman let the surveyors onto her land?”

  “Raised hell, but what can she do? The state’ll expropriate if it has to.”

  I nodded. I hated these kinds of situations.

  “Can we get across here?” I asked.

  “If you don’t mind getting your feet wet.”

  I got out of the truck and followed him to the clay bank, then slid down to the sandy beach. We sloshed through the water, came up onto a sandbar, sloshed some more, and emerged on the other side. At least there were no POSTED signs. The pine hills rose up in front of us, but to the left was a narrow jeep track. I made for it, McNair breathing hard behind me.

  The aerial photos hadn’t shown many clear-cuts, which were hell in the summer because of the thick briars, but I needed to get a feel for the topography and especially the amount of undergrowth so I could put together a cost estimate.

  “You’re the first archaeologist I heard of who didn’t work at a college,” McNair said, puffing behind me.

  “Actually,” I said, reaching the top of the hill, “most archaeologists don’t work at universities. Most do just what I do, contract archaeology. It’s a new field that developed from the environmental movement of the sixties. When they made laws to protect the wildlife, they decided it would be a good idea to protect historical sites, as well.”

  The track entered the trees a few yards ahead of me, and I started forward, the pine needles soft under my boots. In the ruts I saw some raccoon prints and then some deer droppings, but there was no sign that humans had been this way in the last few weeks.

  “Where does this track go?” I asked.

  “To a clearing up ahead with an old camp house. Then it goes south, into the back pasture of the Devlin place.”

  “Is this camp house very old?” I asked.

  McNair gave a little laugh. “Nah. Built in the fifties. But you don’t want to go there.”

  “No?” I was already in the forest, and I saw a patch of sunlight ahead through the trunks. “Why’s that?”

  “Might stir up the tenant.”

  “Somebody lives there?” I could see the building now, a wood-frame structure with a tin roof. The windows were broken and the front porch sagged. “They don’t keep it up very well, if they do.”

  “Well, they don’t really live there—they just haunt it.”

  “What?”

  He gave a high-pitched laugh. “That’s just the teenagers around here. They call it Lee’s Place.”

  “Lee?”

  “Lee Harvey Oswald. They say he stayed here just before he killed Kennedy. Some say his ghost is still here and that’s why bad things happen to people who come on this land.”

  TWO

  “Oswald?” I asked.

  “It’s just the kids making things up. But it’s a fact he came here just about three months before JFK got killed. Said he was looking for work at the hospital. Came to Jackson and then went over to Clinton, the parish seat, to talk to a state senator. Must not’ve found anything, because he left and went back to New Orleans. But lots of people saw him, and he gave his name, because he was trying to register to vote so he could get a job in the parish.”

  “How’s he connected to this cabin?”

  McNair shrugged. “Damned if I know. Maybe ’cause the cabin’s lonesome and kinda spooky. The kids come across the creek the way we did—they wouldn’t dare come through Cyn’s property.”

  I walked up to the cabin and gingerly tried the porch. There was a wasp nest over the door, but it was old and dried up. I pushed the door open slowly and looked inside.

  The interior was dim and smelled of dust. I remembered when I was a kid in Baton Rouge and how other kids told stories about a mysterious ball of fire that seemed to appear in the swamps near the town of Gonzales, twenty miles down the road. Nobody had ever seen it, but everybody knew somebody else who had.

  I turned around and
stepped back onto the ground.

  “Okay, Mr. McNair. I guess we can go back.”

  I returned to Baton Rouge and the big wooden frame house across from the campus in Tigertown, where we had our offices and lab. We called ourselves Moundmasters, because we’d dug into so many of the damned things, and it had more character than the names some of our competitors chose, like Pyramid Research. There were just myself; an ex-rabbinical student named David Goldman, who had dropped Talmudic studies for playing in the dirt; Marilyn Fisk, our tiny bookkeeper and factotum; Frank Hill, who was working on his master’s; and some temporaries, who ground out reports on a couple of PCs and sorted artifacts in the big living room we called the lab. My office was a room at the back, with a plywood partition, notices and deadlines dangling from all the walls, and a bookcase at one side. The desk, which I’d picked up at a yard sale, was piled with reports to review and bits and pieces of proposals in progress.

  The next couple of weeks I spent on other projects and in writing the cost proposal for the Jackson work. I also had to recruit a crew, which was easy since it was summer and there were university students eager for work. Then I faxed Bombast the cost estimate and waited.

  When she called to negotiate the cost, I knew it was going to be one of those days. It took two hours, but finally we agreed on all items.

  When he heard me hang up and sigh, David crept into my office.

  “We okay?”

  I nodded. “But she cut us back on time in the field and report prep.”

  “At least we have the job.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, but I hate it when the argument ends with her saying, ‘I’m the government.’ ”

  “Maybe she was talking about size. When do we hit the field?”

  “She said a week. So make it two.”

  “Good. I could stand getting out from under these reports. And you”—he folded his arms—“could stand to get your mind off Pepper Courtney.”

  “I know.” I got up and turned around to face him. “David, what do you know about Lee Harvey Oswald?”