Eventually, he rose, gathered up the small case, and walked back to where Eugene Wade hung from the rafter.

Gaines looked at the man’s face, almost unrecognizable though it was, and he knew he was looking at the face of the devil.

72

Gaines left Hagen behind to deal with the local authorities. He did not speak of the leather case. He did not speak of the newspaper clippings he had found. Hagen was instructed to explain to the attending officers that the dead man was responsible for a twenty-year-old murder. Details were of no great concern now. There were no living relatives to inform of the ultimate justice that had befallen the perpetrator of Nancy Denton’s murder. There would be no charges to file, no arraignment to schedule, no jury to select. Gaines would go back and bring closure to the families who had lost their children, of course, but right now that was not his foremost concern.

Maryanne accompanied Gaines to the car.

“We’re going back to Whytesburg,” he said, “and I’ll have one of my deputies drive you home.”

She was there on the passenger seat beside him for some minutes before she spoke.

She had seen him set the small case on the rear seat. She had watched as he closed his eyes for a moment before starting the car, the way he had clenched and unclenched his fists, the way his hand shook ever so slightly as he tried to get the key into the ignition.

And then she reached out, and she placed her hand over his, and he looked at her.

“Tell me,” she said.

Gaines shook his head. He looked away through the window, and she could see his knuckles whitening as he gripped the steering wheel.

“John?”

And then he nodded, as if reconciling something within himself. He reached behind himself, retrieved the case, and handed it to her.

She held it in her hands and then placed it on her lap.

She placed her fingers on the latches, but she did not open it.

“Look,” Gaines said. “You want to know . . . then look.”

Maryanne hesitated, and then she flipped the latches. The sound was sharp and loud in the confines of the car.

The smell of musty paper filed her nostrils, and she started to look through the newspaper clippings within.

On the morning of March 19, 1957, a bright and cool Tuesday morning, Jeanette Ferguson, a fourteen year-old girl from Lyman went missing on the way home from school. She was reported missing that same evening. She was found four days later in a derelict house.

On Saturday, November 10, 1960, just a day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man ever to win the presidency, Mary Elizabeth Duggan was found strangled in the back of a Greyhound bus. Mary Elizabeth had boarded the bus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, bound for Monroe, Louisiana. She was eighteen years old. The bus had made stops in Collins, Magee, Mendenhall, Jackson, Vicksburg, Tallulah, and Rayville. Mary Elizabeth’s cousins—Stan and Willa Blakely—had waited in the depot for Mary Elizabeth to disembark. She did not. Puzzled, they asked if they could perhaps search the bus to see if she had somehow remained asleep. The driver said there was no one back there, but he gave them permission to look anyway. At the very back of the vehicle, there beneath the seat, they found Mary Elizabeth on the floor, wrapped from head to toe in a blanket. She was not sleeping. She was dead.

A lengthy and extensive investigation was undertaken. Police departments from both Mississippi and Louisiana were involved. An attempt was made to locate every single passenger who had used that service between Hattiesburg and Monroe, but anyone could buy tickets and no identification was required; nor was any record maintained beyond the number of tickets sold and their respective costs. The investigation, it appeared, had come to nothing.

On Saturday, October 7, 1961, Frances Zimmerman, a nineteen-year-old from Monticello, ironically the girl chosen to present Vice President Richard Nixon with flowers upon his arrival at the Mississippi State Fair in 1958, was found strangled in the men’s restroom at Brookhaven train station. She had been left in an open doorway.

August 19, 1962, just two weeks after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Kathleen Snow, a fifteen-year-old, was reported missing from her afternoon classes at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School for Girls in Jackson. Her friends said she had left the school at lunchtime to meet someone. The identity of the person was unknown to her friends, and Kathleen had assured them she would be gone for no more than half an hour. They had promised they would cover for her. Kathleen did not return. Her body was found the following day by a volunteer crossing guard. Kathleen had been strangled, but strangled with such force that the hand prints of her killer were visible on her throat as dark welts.

And so it went on—through ’63, ’64, a year or two skipped here and there, but those reports seemed endless. And then Maryanne found them. Morgan City, January of 1968, the faces of Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew.

She held up the clipping. Gaines looked at those faces, and they looked back at him, just as they had from the files he had read in Dennis Young’s office.

Fourteen victims spanning seventeen years.

“I can’t believe—”

She shook her head, and there were tears in her eyes, and they welled over the lids and rolled down her cheeks.

Gaines started the car.

“You’re going to see him . . . Matthias?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to see him, John.”

“You won’t, Maryanne. Go home, or even stay in my office, but don’t see him.”

There was silence between them for the rest of the journey, and once they arrived, Gaines had Forrest Dalton fetch a squad car to take Maryanne home.

It was then, as she left Gaines’s office, that she hesitated. She touched his arm, looked at him directly, unerringly, and said, “Enough people have come to grief. Enough people have died. And this man—”

“This man is not going to kill anyone,” Gaines replied. “I do not think he has ever killed anyone. I think he got Devereaux to kill Webster, and he hid his brother from the law. I don’t even know that he was aware of what Eugene had really done. His crime was his silence, the same as Della, the same as Earl.”

“And Devereaux? Didn’t he kill Devereaux?”

Gaines shook his head. “I don’t believe he did, no. I think Devereaux was killed in revenge for something else entirely.”

Her expression was questioning, but it was obvious Gaines was not going to explain further.

“Be careful,” she said, and there was something in that entreaty that touched Gaines, as if she really meant it, as if she really wanted to ensure that he came back safely.

“I will,” Gaines replied, and then she left.

Half an hour later, Gaines was again at the Wade house. He pounded on the door with the side of his fist, and the door was hurriedly opened. He did not wait to be invited across the threshold. He walked in, the leather suitcase in his hand, said that he needed to see both Matthias and Della, and then he crossed the hallway and entered the same library where he had spoken with Earl Wade only that morning.

Della appeared within a minute.

“What is it?” she said. “What is going on?”

“Where is Matthias?” Gaines asked.

“He’s upstairs with Father. Why? Why have you come back here?”

“Eugene is dead,” Gaines said matter-of-factly.

Once again, real or perfectly portrayed, Della Wade expressed utter disbelief and shock in her expression, in her absence of words, in the way in which the color drained from her face and her eyes widened.

“Dead?”

“He hung himself, Della. He committed suicide. He has been dead for a few days, and I think it would interest you to know that Leon Devereaux might very well have been the last person to see him. That is an assumption on my part, but I think it will prove to be fact.”