In The Forest Of Harm Read online

“You don’t understand. We’re the Whitmans, for God’s sake . . .”

  “Wouldn’t matter if you were the Jesus H. Christs. You whack somebody, they’ll come after you.”

  Mitchell clenched his teeth. “Then let’s just say it’s personal. Something between Mary Crow and me needs to be resolved.”

  Delgado frowned, feeling as if he were about to set something very bad into motion. “And how are you gonna resolve this personal thing?”

  Whitman spread the fingers of his right hand and studied his palm. “Haven’t decided yet.”

  “You wouldn’t be thinking of going up in those woods, would you?”

  “What if I am?”

  “Because my guy says it’s pretty rough where they went.”

  Whitman’s fingers curled into a fist. “I led tactical ROTC squads every semester in undergraduate school. And my Dad and I have hunted all over the country. Alaska. Maine. The Canadian Rockies. I don’t think the Smoky Mountains would present too much of a challenge.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  Whitman frowned. “Why?”

  Delgado leaned forward. “Because even if you were the General Patton of your ROTC unit and bagged every moose in Maine, you still got no business hunting lawyers in the jungle. Trust me, kid. You do that, and you’re in way over your head. This Mary Crow’s like a bad dog with a big bone. You don’t want to piss her off.”

  For the first time Whitman threw back his head and laughed, revealing a mouthful of square white teeth. “You actually think I should be afraid of her?”

  “She roughed you up pretty good on the witness stand, didn’t she? Everybody in town was laughing about it.”

  Whitman’s smile faded as his eyes abruptly took on a sheen like black ice.

  Delgado shook his head. “Kid, you got an old man who can throw enough money at the system to get your brother off on appeal. So this chick DA made you look like a yo-yo on TV. People will have a little chuckle about it, then the next chump will come along. Go get laid. Go build your dam in South America. It’ll work out better for everybody in the long run.”

  Whitman grinned at Lou as if he had him in the crosshairs of a gun sight, then he slid the contact sheet back in the envelope and closed the clasp.

  “Thanks, Mr. Delgado.” He clapped Lou hard on the back as he rose from the table. “You’ve no idea how helpful you’ve been.”

  Mitch Whitman pulled his car out of the Copper Pot parking lot and turned south on I-75, heading toward Georgia Tech. Mary Crow roughed you up on the witness stand, Delgado’s voice rang in his ears. Everybody in town was laughing about it. He put the thought out of his mind as he sped around a wobbling truck carrying chickens to market.

  Camping, he thought, glancing over at the pictures on the seat beside him. The fucking bitch hangs us all out to dry and then goes on a nature walk. He’d assumed she would do what most career girls did on Atlanta weekends—shop at Phipps, dinner in Virginia Highlands, then drinks in Buckhead. He figured Delgado would bring him a list of restaurants and nightclubs along with the name of some lover, and he could have had her taken care of at some place where she felt at home.

  But camping. This was far better than he’d ever expected. He laughed out loud as he exited off the highway and pointed his Porsche toward Mincy’s Sporting Goods. For the first time since his little brother had graduated from diapers, things were looking up. With just a little careful planning, he would be able to enjoy a woodsy autumn weekend and make sure Mary Crow would never squeeze anybody’s balls again.

  Three hours later Mitch Whitman stood in his old bedroom in his father’s house. Though he’d kept his apartment near Tech, he’d moved most of his stuff back home after Cal had been arrested. His mother had been too much of a basket case then, and his father had asked him to come home and “keep her company.”

  “Her damn friends won’t call her anymore,” he’d told Mitch. “You can take her mind off things.”

  Mitch thought that the Jack Daniels his mother sipped from noon through Oprah Winfrey kept her mind off most things, but he did what his father had asked. Few people, he’d noticed, ever denied a direct request from Calhoun Whitman, Sr.

  Now he stood, dressed in jeans and a yellow Georgia Tech T-shirt, surveying the array of equipment spread out on his bed. Beside his sleeping bag and camp stove was an unusual selection of high-tech gear. Night-vision goggles, a handheld VHF radio, and a GPS positioner lay next to a Colt Light 30.06 with a long-range scope. A 9mm Beretta pistol gleamed dully next to the rifle, amid three different kinds of survival knives and a dozen boxes of ammunition. Mitch smiled. He had enough firepower on this bed to bring down any animal in the southeast United States.

  Prepare for everything. Mitch remembered his father’s admonition before every hunting trip they’d taken together. And expect the worst. Mitch wished he’d remembered that at Sandra Manning’s house that night, but there was nothing to be done about that now.

  “Did you know Sandra Manning before she was killed, Mr. Whitman?” Thanks to his brother’s asshole attorney calling him as a character witness, that question had kicked off the worst hour of his life. Mary Crow had leaned right up against the stand when she’d cross-examined him—stood so close that he could see the tiny vein throbbing on one side of her long throat. Her heart beat calmly, delicately, while his hammered in his chest like a drum.

  “No.”That lie was his first mistake.

  “Really?” Mary Crow prissed over to her table, the kick pleat in her slim black skirt revealing shapely legs.“Then why on earth would Sandra’s phone records indicate that she called your apartment every day for the past six months?” Mary Crow held up a thick stack of papers.

  His mouth froze; became unable to form words. How could he have forgotten about the fucking phone records? Mary Crow walked back to the stand.

  “Who do you think Sandra Manning called there, Mr. Whitman? Your roommates?” Mary Crow checked her records. “And why would Sandra talk to them for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes at a time?”

  “Well, maybe I did know her,” he admitted, his face heating up. The reporters in the back of the courtroom perked up. They were looking at him, whispering and scribbling on their notepads as he squirmed.

  “Bitch,” he repeated now, aiming the rifle at his reflection in the bedroom mirror. “Before I’m done, you’ll wish you’d finished me off in court.”

  With a hot anger rising in his gut, he put the rifle back on the bed and sat down at the desk that had served as his worktable since he was fourteen, when he got his first computer. On top of the plans for the dam in Veracruz de Calbuco were three pictures of Mary Crow. One showed her tonguing a blonde woman; in another she straddled a black man. The third was a nude shot of Mary alone, her legs spread wide, sprawled in a leather chair. Mitch looked at the pictures and smiled. Of course none of them were really Mary Crow—all were just her head pasted on porn shots he’d downloaded from the Net. Earlier that morning, though, with just a few clicks of his mouse, he had hacked into some French guy’s screen name and E-mailed the shot of Mary with the Negro to everybody in the Georgia legal system. He chuckled. His little electronic masterpiece would cause Mary some embarrassment. Too bad she wasn’t going to survive the weekend long enough to suffer through it.

  He thumbed through the papers on his desk until he found a pink sheet with all of Mary Crow’s numbers on it—Social Security, driver’s license, address, telephone, credit cards. Yesterday afternoon he had maxed out her Visa and tanked her credit. This morning he had humiliated her with a dirty picture. Tomorrow he would take care of Mary Crow forever, and the cover was perfect. When she didn’t show up for work on Monday, people would figure that having her affair with the black buck exposed had frightened her off. After her credit card scandal broke they would assume the heartbroken and disgraced Mary Crow had just flapped her wings and flown off into oblivion. Nothing else had ever worked out so well in his whole life.

  He slipped the photos and
credit card numbers in a folder and filed it in the bottom drawer of his desk. From the same drawer he pulled out another folder labeled “Alternates” and flipped it open. Paper-clipped together in four small stacks were four separate identities—driver’s licenses, credit cards, draft cards, one even with a card from Blockbuster for a video store membership.

  “Okay.” Mitch riffled through the cards. “Who do I want to be today?” He looked at them all, then chose Mitchell Keane, a registered Republican and card-carrying Rotarian from Athens, Georgia. Digging his wallet from his back pocket, he slipped Mitchell Keane’s IDs behind his own, then he locked the other papers back in the drawer.

  With expert ease he stowed his gear in a large backpack and grabbed his rifle. Along with a camouflage suit, he had food and supplies for a week. If he couldn’t get this job done in that amount of time, then he might just fly down to Chile early and not bother coming back home.

  Downstairs his father’s voice thundered from the library, demanding an answer to some legal question. Mitch stashed his pack in the dark closet at the end of the hall and walked to the double library doors. He cracked one open. Some idiot lawyer was catching hell. He hoped it was the same incompetent fucker who’d put him on the stand. His father stood at his massive desk, a phone glued to his ear, his finger stabbing at some paragraph in a thick legal tome. Whoever it was, Mitch was glad he wasn’t on the other end of that call.

  “I tell you she shouldn’t even be in the Georgia legal system,” Cal Whitman roared. “She’s a goddamn Cherokee. According to the treaty my own damn ancestor wrote, she’s an illegal alien. She ought to be out in Oklahoma, frying bread for tourists.”

  Mitch stepped forward as his father listened on the phone. “Hey, Dad. I just wanted to tell you that I’m flying up to D.C. for the weekend—”

  His father put the receiver to his chest, ignoring the voice still buzzing from the phone. “Your brother just got convicted of murder and you’re going to Washington?”

  Mitch felt his stomach shrivel, as it always did when he talked to his father, but he ignored it and planted his legs wide apart.

  “I’m meeting some guys from the dam project there,” he replied. “I’ll be back next week.”

  Big Cal regarded his strapping firstborn a moment, then he lifted his hand in farewell. “Be back here Wednesday. And tell your mother where you’re going.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mitch said as he backed out the door.

  “Maybe I’ll bring you a present, Dad. Something that will help you sleep better at night.”

  Cal, Sr., didn’t reply.

  Mitch turned and walked back through the hall to the den. His mother and Lucille, their maid, sat together shelling pecans and watching some man weeping on the Jenny Jones show. Daytime television had become their diversion-of-choice. Since Cal’s arrest they had probably watched enough talk shows and shelled enough pecans to send a pie to every drug-abusing, wife-beating bisexual transvestite in America.

  “Mom, I’m going to D.C. for a couple of days.”

  “Fine, dear.”

  “I’ve got a meeting about the dam.”

  “Fine, dear.”

  “I’ll be back soon.”

  He did not wait to hear the third “Fine, dear.” Instead, he turned and walked toward the closet in the hall, wondering what her response would have been if he’d announced his true intentions.

  “Mom,” he would have said. “I’m going to kill Mary Crow.”

  “Fine, dear. Have fun.”

  TWELVE

  Come look out the window,” the voice commands. “You can’t do anything for your mother now. Come look out the window!”

  Mary looks up from her mother’s body. She cannot move. Her feet feel nailed to the floor.

  “The window,” the voice insists again, then Mary hears something else. A dull thudding that grows louder. Footsteps. Slow. Methodical. Moving closer. This time coming for her.

  “Mary! Wake up!”

  Mary opened her eyes. Brilliant light surrounded her. Someone was kneeling in front of her, talking.

  “Mary?” Alex’s voice hummed above her as her face and blonde hair came into focus. She was frowning, her blue eyes squinting as if she were peering into a microscope. “Are you okay?”

  Mary sat up, breathing hard. “Someone was stalking me.”

  Alex threw one arm around her shoulders. “You were dreaming, honey. Nobody’s here but Joan and me.”

  Mary closed her eyes, the earthy-sage smell of Alex’s flannel shirt stilling her panic. “Alex, I heard the footsteps again,” she said, her mouth dry as a cracker. “I haven’t heard them since college . . .”

  Alex squeezed her shoulders, then started to rub her back in slow circles. Outside the tent, birds chirped and buttery morning sunlight streamed through the open flap.

  “You know, Mary, maybe the mountains aren’t where we need to be right now. Why don’t we pack up and hike out? We can throw our stuff in the car and drive back to Atlanta. We’ll have a nice dinner there tonight and just table the rest of this trip.”

  “No.” Mary couldn’t stop trembling. “This is what we planned. We’re almost there, and I want you guys to see Atagahi.”

  Sighing, Alex sat back on her heels. “Honey, you can’t come up here and visit your mother’s murder scene and pretend it’s some picnic in the country. Stuff like that takes a toll. Let’s go home and come back another time. I’ll come with you again.”

  “No, Alex. We’re already here and Atagahi really is special. One cup of coffee and I’ll be fine. I promise.” Mary peered through the tent flaps. “Where’s Joan?”

  Alex snorted. “In the middle of her morning toilette. Sunscreen. Moisturizer. The whole nine yards.” Alex rolled her eyes. “She’s as bad as my mother.” She scooted backwards out of the tent, summoned by a thread of steam that whistled from a small kettle of water heating on top of her stove. With a wide grin she waggled a packet of instant coffee. “Since you’re determined to stay up here, would you like some nice fresh coffee from the stove you made such fun of yesterday?”

  “Please.” Mary rubbed her eyes, trying to erase all vestiges of her nightmare. Maybe this was mountain payback. You nose around some, the Old Men lob over a tiny little psychotic flashback in return. Just like a psychic tennis match.

  She crawled out of the tent as Alex poured the coffee. Overnight a blanket of mist had arisen from the forest floor, and Alex looked as if she were about to tumble into a cloud bank. Mary sat cross-legged by the fire and took the cup she offered. It was not her usual freshly brewed French Roast, but it was a marginal jolt of caffeine that would bump her into the day. She had just taken her first sip when Joan materialized through the fog, makeup kit and canteen in hand.

  She sang some vaguely familiar aria as she walked, her light soprano trilling through the damp air.

  “Morning, Joan.” Mary smiled, suddenly grateful for Joan’s taupe eyelids and the scent of perfume that preceded her. The fact that one of them had risen and was singing opera helped to rivet her to the here and now, away from the manic tangle of her dreams. “Your first night in the forest must have been okay.”

  Joan stopped singing and rotated her shoulders. “Are you kidding? My feet feel like petrified wood. My thighs are on fire. I have an awful pain in my right shoulder and I just popped three Excedrin for a sinus headache. And if that isn’t enough, Alex snored all night.”

  “I did not!” Alex snapped. “I never snore.”

  “Well, then it must have been some bear that slept outside our tent,” Joan retorted. “Or maybe it was that ghost you were dying to tell us about.”

  Relishing Joan and Alex’s wrangling, Mary stretched her legs out in front of her. In the crisp morning air, her nightmare seemed far away and silly, nothing that a grown woman should be afraid of.

  “Hey, Mary,” Alex asked, “when can we hike on to the spring?”

  “Soon as the mist burns off.” Mary looked out across the huge cauldron of
thick white mist that roiled just beyond the lip of the fissure. Only the tops of the mountains pierced through the swirling clouds. The view reminded her again of San Francisco, only here the mountains were the whales, dark forms breeching in a wispy white sea.

  Joan flopped down between them. “Is all this fog why they call these the Smoky Mountains?”

  “Shaconage,” Mary said without thinking.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s Cherokee. It means ‘land of blue smoke.’ Although actually,” Mary continued as she warmed her fingers around her coffee cup, “we’re in the Unicoi mountains, which comes from the Cherokee word Unaka.”

  “Which means?”

  “White mountains.”

  Joan laughed. “You’re a regular thesaurus, Mary.” “Don’t get excited. Ten more words and we’ll be at the end of my Cherokee vocabulary.”

  Alex fixed them oatmeal with raisins for breakfast, then they waited for the fog to lift. By the time they struck their tent and repacked their gear, rust-colored mountains began to reappear as the thick white mist drained away. Overhead the sky turned from white to dazzling blue, and the breeze carried the aroma of apples and damp earth. It promised to be one of the singularly gorgeous fall days for which the Appalachian Mountains were famed. Mary grinned at her friends, suddenly exhilarated. “Are we ready for the final assault on Atagahi?”

  “I’m ready for any kind of hot tub,” replied Joan. “Electric, solar, or thermonuclear. These old bones need to soak in some nice warm water.”

  Alex laughed. “Joan, you’re only thirty.”

  “That’s in Atlanta years. Up here I feel three hundred.”

  They doused the fire, buckled on their backpacks and followed Mary as she began to pick her way down from the cave.

  Each step down the steep path sent currents of pain up their shins. The packs they’d worn so lightly the day before rubbed against sore muscles and stretched tendons, and the air itself seemed against them—buzzing with small, nearly invisible gnats that hovered around their eyes and stung their faces.

  “How much farther?” huffed Joan when they stopped to rest at Blacksnake Creek.