Feast Day of Fools - James Lee Burke [34]
“This is my county and my jurisdiction. You guys are our guests,” Hackberry said.
“That’s outrageous.”
“So is federal arrogance.”
“I have to get back to work.”
“No, you don’t,” Hackberry said. “What’s your interest in a burned-down shack?”
“That’s not your concern.”
“You think Jack Collins might have given refuge to Barnum?”
“If you’ve figured everything out, why bother asking the FBI?”
“I’m not asking the FBI. I’m asking you, man to man.”
“We never found Collins’s body. His case is still open.”
“You think he burned his shack to get rid of his prints?”
“We haven’t come to any conclusions about any of this, at least not that we can pass on.”
“We? I asked you for an opinion about the torching of the shack. It’s not a difficult question.”
“I think you should take your mind off world events. Do that for us, and we’ll do our best to stay out of your hair.”
Hackberry gazed at the gray and black humps of ash and charcoal and scorched boards and cans of food that had exploded in the heat and the strips of rusted corrugated tin protruding from the pile. A charred Bible had been raked out on the grass. The pages, all of them burned as black as carbon paper along the outer margins, were flipping in the wind. Hackberry turned his attention back to Riser.
“You didn’t bag the Bible,” Hackberry said.
“Why should I?”
“To see if Collins’s prints are on it.”
Riser removed a ballpoint from his shirt pocket. He seemed to study it a moment; then he started clicking it. “I can never get these things to work right.”
“You already know whose Bible that is. It belongs to Collins, doesn’t it?” Hackberry said.
Riser stuck the ballpoint back in his pocket and glanced at his watch and at his colleagues by the SUVs. “I hope all this works out for everybody. Be seeing you, Sheriff,” he said.
“Something else happened here. Collins didn’t burn the shack, did he?”
“How do you know that?”
“He’s a religious fanatic. He wouldn’t burn his Bible.”
“You’re too smart for your own good. I mean that in a kindly way.”
“You guys did it.”
“No, we did not do it.”
“Or somebody from ICE or the Border Patrol or the DEA. But one of y’all did it. Tell me I’m wrong. I want you to.”
“So maybe you’re not wrong,” Riser said. “Maybe a hothead got pissed off and wanted to send Collins a message. Maybe unlike you, not everybody is always in control of his emotions.”
“You’re telling me one of your people soaked private property with an accelerant and put a match to it, and you’re telling me lawmen do this with regularity?”
“The U.S. Forest Service used to burn out squatters all the time.”
“Nobody can be this dumb. Do you realize what y’all have done?”
“The Department of Justice isn’t exactly Pee-wee Herman. We don’t quake in our shoes because we have to hunt down a self-anointed messiah who probably hasn’t changed his underwear since World War Two.”
Hackberry walked over to the group of federal agents, still gathered between the two SUVs. “Which one of you guys torched the shack?” he asked.
They stared at him blankly from behind their shades. “What shack?” one of them said.
“I dug up nine of Jack Collins’s victims, all of them Asian, all female, some of them hardly more than children. He used a Thompson submachine gun, a full drum, fifty rounds, at almost point-blank range. Then they were bulldozed over behind the ruins of a church. One of them may have been still alive when she went into the ground. A Phoenix mobster sent three California bikers to pop him. Jack bribed their chippies to set them up and then turned the three of them into wallpaper.”
“Sounds like the right guy might have got his house burned down,” one of the agents said.
Hackberry walked back toward his cruiser, his face tight, his temples knotted with veins. Behind him, he heard one of the agents make a remark the others laughed at. But Hackberry didn’t look back. Instead, he kept his eyes focused on Ethan Riser. “That bunch of Ivy League pissants back yonder?” he