Free The Midnight Road by Tom Piccirilli Page A

few rounds at a school playground one afternoon. The kids were in class and no one was hurt, but he started yelling about throwing babies in a well and it made the local authorities come down on him. He was arrested but the Army doctors stepped in, got him released. They were going to have him committed, I suppose, but instead he jumped in the Chatalaha River, which branches into the deep cypress swamps. As you might guess, the body was never found. Which is why Crissy Shepard may have spoken about him in the present tense.”
    “Or maybe his corpse showed up at her house one day with Nuddin in tow.”
    “There is that,” she said. “And he might blame you for her death. And he might want revenge. And he is going insane.”
    Flynn said, “There is that.”
    He tried to work out the angles but kept hitting walls. He thought he just wasn’t crazy enough to see his way clear, or at least not crazy enough in the way he needed to be. It was a pretty rude awakening, knowing that his brain damage just wasn’t the right kind. “But if he wanted me dead for killing his daughter, why wouldn’t he just zap me? Why have a pro deliver a note and then whack her instead?”
    “Listen, I dug a little further into their family history. Even though they’re proud of their heritage, the Bragg dynasty is not known for its mental and physical well-being. A lot of it’s just hearsay and rumors, but it’s the kind of thing that winds up in reports and on file. People write down their suspicions, and they’re believed down through the years. Bragg’s forefather slave owners would do naughty things with the field hands out in the tobacco patches, then throw the mixed-race newborns down a well.”
    “Ah-ha.”
    “Ah-ha is right. Who knows what he had in his head at the end.”
    “If it was the end. What’d you dig up on Nuddin?”
    “Nothing. No record of him at all.”
    “How can that be?”
    “You’ve seen it here in New York, for Christ’s sake. People ashamed of their kids, locking them up in cellars, crack babies born in apartments in the Bronx.”
    “But most of them still had birth records and documentation.”
    “Most isn’t all. They were down in swamp country, they do things differently there. Midwives.”
    “Maybe.”
    It was a reach. An Army bigwig wasn’t a burnt-out prostitute living in squalor off the social radar. But who knew what kind of thoughts Bragg had in is head even before the tumors. Flynn hoped Shepard didn’t die in his sleep. He had to talk to him.
    Flynn leaned against the phone and watched the foot traffic through Greenwich Village. There was a Ray’s Pizza stand nearby and he caught a whiff of mozzarella and his stomach rumbled.
    He could hear Sierra shrug in her chair. “I suppose a colonel could have certain documentation destroyed if he wanted. Out of shame. Fear of stigma, maybe. But why go to the trouble of caging him up? Why not just put him away? If Bragg had so much pull and could cover his tracks, then he could’ve put Nuddin away in a facility with no publicity. Nuddin could’ve been helped.”
    “Or Bragg could’ve just killed him,” Flynn said.
    “Yeah, there’s that too. Shepard’s not awake yet?”
    “No, and there’ve been complications. His blood pressure took an almost fatal dip. They’re calling him ‘unresponsive.’”
    “Nicer than saying he’s in a coma.”
    “They say he’s going to wake up, they just don’t know when.”
    “Speaking of unresponsive, you haven’t been in to the office.”
    “Very sweet segue,” Flynn said.
    “Don’t try to divert me. You’ve got cases.”
    “Turn them over to someone else. I’ve got to stay off the map for a while until I figure this thing out. See if Angela Soto was targeted because of me. If it really has to do with Shepard or not. Find out how involved I am. If it really is my fault.”
    “You doing this for us? To make sure nobody hands us little notes to give to you?”
    “Well, let me ask you, do you