The Next President (7 page)

J. D. told Pickpocket to add Birmingham to his search parameters. He then had the little thief set up a series of phony credit card accounts for him, and after studying Senator Rawley’s itinerary and picking up the M-100, he set off for Chicago.

After he’d missed that shot and reclaimed his car in Las Vegas, he found he had e-mail.

Now the stick figure had two legs, and the message read EV— —.

Evan and Belle Cade sat in the office of Richard Shuster, the criminal attorney to whom they’d been referred by Belle’s personal lawyer, Elgar Guererro.

Shuster was a stocky man with a wrinkled suit, a furrowed brow, and a blunt demeanor.

“Your father called me this morning, Mr. Cade,” Shuster said.

“He did?” Evan asked neutrally.

“I didn’t know he was even aware of you.”

“I spoke with J. D. before you woke up,” Belle told her grandson.

“He wanted to be sure you were in good hands. I gave him Mr. Shuster’s phone number.”

“I told your father my record in criminal trials was two hundred twelve

wins and three losses. He asked me about the losses. Would you like to hear about them, too, Mr. Cade?”

Evan started to reply but decided to hold his tongue. He shook his head.

“All right. I’ve spoken at length with Mr. Guererro,” Shuster told Evan and Belle.

“I’ve called people I know with the police and the state’s attorney.

The prevailing wisdom among the authorities, Mr. Cade, is that you killed Ivar McCray.”

“That’s just plain wrong,” Belle asserted.

“Is it, Mr. Cade? Many defense attorneys don’t like to know that little detail.

I do.”

“I didn’t kill him. And I don’t know where any of this stuff about my shoes and muddy footprints is coming from.”

Shuster scratched the side of his head with a stubby finger and stared at Evan.

“Okay,” he said after a lengthy examination.

“Let me lay it out for you the way the cops see it. They’ve got this dead guy, Ivar McCray. He dies while supposedly making a pipe bomb. Why was he doing that? To send a message to a businessman who refuses to pay protection money to a gang McCray was fronting. Who’s the businessman? A gas station owner named—”

“Barton Laney,” Evan interrupted.

Shuster looked at Evan closely again.

“I read the newspaper story the Southern Illinoisan ran,” Evan said.

“It’s public knowledge that Mr. Laney tipped the cops about what McCray was trying to do.”

“Yes, it is. But what the public doesn’t know is that Laney told them what was going on only after McCray had died.”

Belle looked puzzled and asked, “What’s the significance of that?”

“Why wouldn’t he have gone to the cops before McCray died?” the lawyer asked.

“Isn’t that what most people would have done? Somebody threatens you, you call the cops. So why didn’t Barton Laney?”

“Because the man obviously doesn’t have the sense God gave a goose,” Belle offered.

“But Evan can hardly be held responsible for someone else’s poor judgment.”

“Can you think of another reason, Mr. Cade?” Shuster asked.

Evan replied, “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Not me, Mr. Cade, the police.”

“The police, then. They think Mr. Lanev didn’t go to them first because he knew somebody was going to take care of his problem for him.”

The lawyer nodded.

“Do they think I killed this guy because he was bothering my girl’s father?”

“In a nutshell, yes. Things got hairy and you stepped in to save the day for the Laneys.”

“Then what? Mr. Laney comes forward to reveal the extortion attempt to make it look like McCray got what he deserved? Wouldn’t it have been safer just to keep quiet?”

“The cops are still chewing on that one. But besides the footprints, and some little birdie singing your name to the cops, my secretary told me some thing this morning that, having lived here only ten years, I hadn’t known.

She told me the saga of the Cades and the McCrays. Your family and the dead man’s have a history of bad blood between them that goes back a long way.”

Belle’s brow knitted.

“Evan has no part in that.”

“But think how it looks, Mrs. Cade,” Shuster told Belle.

“Who better to paint into a corner for the death of a McCray than a Cade? Another thing I learned today: Chief of police Billy Edwards’ wife, Maura, is a McCray.”

Neither Evan nor Belle was comforted to hear that piece of news.

The lawyer continued, “The way I see it is this: If the cops find your shoes and get a match on those footprints, they’ll arrest you. If they ” “Wait a minute,” Evan interrupted.

“About this whole footprint thing. Am I supposed to be the only guy in town who wears the size and type of shoe the cops are looking for?”

Shuster smiled at what he considered a good layman’s attempt at defense work.

“Probably not. But unless shoes are virtually brand-new, the wear and tear they exhibit is distinctive. And let me ask you, Mr. Cade, did you ever wear your sneakers without socks? If so, you might have left flakes of skin, bits of hair… maybe they can even find a way to coax old perspiration from the insole, for all I know. Anyway, if they find the shoes, find some source of DNA inside them, they’ll likely be able to establish whether they’re yours.”

Evan had no rebuttal.

“So if they get the shoes and make the arrest by the book, the state’s attorney will get a grand jury to indict you. If we can’t find a way to suppress the shoes as evidence, we’ll go to trial. At that point, to establish reasonable doubt, we’ll need to place you somewhere else at the time the victim was killed. Impartial and credible witnesses not family; sorry, Mrs. Cade are what you’ll need.”

Shuster scratched his head again.

“That, or we’ll have to find someone else to hang for Ivar McCray’s death.”

Evan Cade joined his grandmother in the living room of her house after dinner.

When his grandmother looked up from the book she’d been reading, she saw that something was bothering him. More than just his immediate difficulties.

“What is it, Evan?”

He said, “Grandma, if it’s all right with you, I’d like to know about the feud.” He’d seen how her face clouded when the subject came up that day at the lawyer’s office.

“Oh.” She closed the book and put it aside. For a moment she was quiet, seeming to seek her own counsel. Then with a small, decisive nod she began, “The feud started in 1865 with incest, rape, and a hanging.”

Belle recounted how Wilbert Cade, returning home from the Civil War, chanced to meet and fall in love with the beautiful eighteen-year-old Edina McCray. Determined to marry her, he finally won the permission of her father, Cullum. Family lore had it that in the end Wilbert had to pay old man McCray a hundred dollars for his consent, a princely sum at the time. Not long after the couple was married, Wilbert returned home from a trip to buy a plow horse and found Edina’s brother, Birk, raping his new wife in Wilbert and Edina’s bed.

Far from being intimidated by being caught at such a heinous act, Birk was defiant. He said his sister had been his first, their daddy had no right to sell her, and he was taking her home. It was said that the only reason Wilbert Cade hadn’t shot Birk McCray to death on the spot was that Edina had pleaded for his life; she wanted to see her brother hang. Birk was tried and convicted of crimes against God and nature.

Having their shame aired publicly did not sit well with the McCrays, several of whom attended the trial. Nor was it lost on them that half the members of the jury who convicted their kinsman were Cades. As was the hangman.

The McCrays came for vengeance a month after Birk’s execution. A dozen McCray men—“our jury,” as they called themselves—raided Wilbert Cade’s farm one night. They hanged Wilbert from an apple tree in his front yard, burned his house and barn, and slaughtered his animals. They let Edina live, but they carved WHORE into her belly.

A cycle of reprisals began that continued sporadically until the last two official deaths in the feud occurred more than seventy years later.

In July 1939 Lawler Cade was found hanging from an oak tree. He was rumored to have informed revenue agents as to the whereabouts of an illegal still the McCrays were running. In December 1941 Ransom McCray was found shot between the eyes in the doorway of his home. He was said to have been the McCray who’d slipped the noose around Lawler Cade’s neck.

Further bloodshed was prevented only by the outbreak of World War II the day after Ransom McCray was killed. All of the Cades and McCrays who might have directed their lethal energies against one another were sent off to other parts of the world to kill new enemies.

Evan was more than a little taken aback at the savagery in which his forebears had played a principal part, but he picked up on one important detail of his grandmother’s narrative.

“What did you mean. Grandma, when you said the last two official deaths in the feud occurred in 1939 and 1941? Were there any unofficial deaths after that?”

At first Belle Cade was plainly reluctant to answer.

“Come on, Grandma,” Evan chided.

“You can’t hold back on me now.”

Belle moved to the sofa where her grandson sat and took his hand.

“Evan, this feud has been a curse upon our family for far too long. It nearly ensnared your father… and now, I fear, it’s placed you in danger.”

Evan saw that his grandmother was speaking in deadly earnest, and that frightened him.

“If that’s the case,” he said, “don’t you think I should know everything I can?”

Belle looked into her grandson’s eyes and decided that she had to tell him as much as she could.

“Has your father ever spoken to you about Alvy McCray?”

Evan shook his head.

Belle told him the story.

Evan was agog.

“Dad pistol-whipped this guy with Grandpa’s .45?”

He considered his father to be the most easygoing man in the world. If he had any complaint at all about his dad, it was that he was overprotective. His father had tried too hard to make sure that nothing would ever hurt him. As Evan had grown older, this paternal hovering had chafed. He’d found it necessary to tell his dad to back off a little, to give him some room to lead his own life. Even if he made some mistakes.

Evan could see now that his father must have had similar protective feelings about the other members of the Cade family. So if this Alvy McCray ass hole had been pounding on a bunch of them, threatening to

get the feud started again all by himself… Evan guessed he could see his dad going off on the guy. Sure was an eye-opener, though.

“Your father did only what he had to do,” Belle assured him, seeming to read his mind.

“No more, no less.”

“And this Alvy McCray flipped his truck after Dad had already left for California?”

“Yes,” Belle answered emphatically.

“Everything worked out for the best.”

Then she added, “It was just a pity that deer had to die.”

Pickpocket, who had said he’d be back in a couple of hours, hadn’t returned to the Refuge by that evening. Which made J. D. very edgy. He had only one ally and couldn’t afford to lose him.

Almost as trying as the little thief’s unexplained absence were the hours of enforced idleness. J. D. felt certain it would be a mistake, but it was all he could do not to pick up the phone and force the issue—call Vandy Ellison and tell her he’d changed his mind and would like to attend the diva’s fundraiser.

Instead, he did something that almost always calmed him. He took target practice.

J. D. clipped the picture of Del Rawley from that day’s Los Angeles Times. He’d scanned the paper as soon as it had been delivered that morning to see if the FBI was making any progress in their manhunt for him. He’d wondered endlessly the past week if he’d made some mistake—other than missing his shot—while trying to kill Del Rawley in Chicago. He knew that if he’d overlooked the slightest detail, it could be his undoing, and the thought circled his mind like a bird of prey.

There had been no news indicating the FBI was on to him, but he’d been able to take little comfort from that. The feds could be following a lead that hadn’t leaked to the media yet.

The picture of Rawley J. D. cut out of the paper was a good four-color likeness, about two-thirds life size, he estimated. He found a clay planter in the gardening shed, filled it with potting soil, and took it into the garage. There he taped the picture over the mouth of the planter and wedged it on its side on a shelf approximating his target’s height. He found two ladders in the garage to stand in for Secret Service agents and set one just to either side of the picture, giving him only a narrow opening for his target.

He stepped off twenty feet from the target. He took out the pen gun he’d purchased from Walter Perry and examined it. It was a masterful

piece of craftsmanship. The black plastic shell gleamed in the overhead light, and the gold trim pocket clip, band around the middle, and ink-filling lever on the side gave it a look of elegance. The cap had to be removed for firing. The ink lever was the trigger; first it flipped the nib out of the way on a hidden hinge and then it fired the round. The weapon unscrewed at the gold band to reload a .22 caliber cartridge.

Last week, while waiting to make his approach to the Rawley campaign and futilely trying to draw out his unseen minders, J. D. had made use of his time by purchasing an actual Mont Blanc pen identical to the minigun. He thought a decoy might come in handy. While he was out shopping, he also bought a camera disguised as the remote for a car alarm. The idea that he might need to take pictures surreptitiously had also occurred to him.

Now, looking at his target, J. D. shot the pen gun from the hip, a firing position that would be very hard to detect in a crowd. The round went through the picture’s right eye. The sound was no louder than a matchstick snapping.

Firing the weapon in a large, crowded, noisy room, it would be effectively silent. Then dropping it in the pocket of an innocent bystander and letting him carry off the murder weapon as bedlam ensued would be child’s play.