Free Rivers to Blood by Michael Lister Page A

said.
    “What?”
    “Hold on,” she said. “I’m thinking.”
    She narrowed her eyes in concentrated thought again, but looked down instead of up.
    “They did all happen in or around or very close to the medical building,” she said. “One was the greenhouse, one was near Confinement—both of those are right behind Medical—two were in Classification—and that’s the other side of the same building. I think the other was in the infirmary.”
    I nodded, thinking about what it meant.
    “So it’s Medical, right?”
    “It certainly sounds like the place to start,” I said. “What about the times it happened? Were they all at a similar time?”
    She shrugged. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I can probably find out. Is it important?”

Chapter Nineteen
    W ith very few exceptions, African-Americans in Pottersville lived in one small part of town—one still referred to by many as the Quarters.
    Poverty was part of life in a small town like Pottersville. There were very few good jobs, very few opportunities of any kind. But it was far worse for the small percentage of black men and women for whom inequality and disenfranchisement, living without in the land of plenty, was a way of life––and had been for generations.
    Over the past few years, as despair had increased so had the abuse of alcohol and drugs. More and more meth labs were being found, more and more young men were going to prison. The senselessness and hopelessness, the raw futility, was overwhelming.
    Dad was campaigning this afternoon, courting the black vote, and had asked me to meet him near Merrill’s mom’s house. By the time I arrived, I was depressed and disgusted.
    I was driving a tricked-out black 1985 Chevrolet Monte Carlo SS with T-tops, red pinstriping, a V-8 engine with a four-speed automatic transmission, a six-inch lift kit with twenty-six-inch chrome rims, a trunk full of speakers, illegally dark tinted windows, and a loud dual exhaust system.
    It had been seized in a large drug bust and would soon be auctioned off by the sheriff’s department, but until then it was on loan to me. Dad’s justification was that I was consulting on the case and that I had destroyed my vehicle while attempting to stop an inmate escape. It still seemed like a dangerous thing to do during an election year but he assured me it wouldn’t be an issue. And at the moment I didn’t have a lot of options.
    He had the screen door open and was stepping off her front porch when I pulled up behind his car, and met me by the time I got out.
    “You look like a drug dealer,” he said.
    “Already been pulled over three times,” I said. “You ought to see the looks on their faces when they see a white man in a clerical collar.”
    He smiled.
    We were quiet a moment, already beginning to sweat.
    “We got the prelim back today,” he said.
    I raised my eyebrows, inviting him to continue.
    “Our vic wasn’t lynched,” he said.
    “Well, yes he was,” I said.
    “I mean that’s not what killed him,” he said. “He was dead long before he was hanged.”
    I nodded, thinking about it.
    Unlike most of the dilapidated clapboard houses and faded single-wide trailers with multiple satellite dishes on them, Ma Monroe had a red brick home with freshly painted trim. In contrast to the trash, discarded appliances, and shiny pimped-out luxury cars in many of the other yards, hers was clean and neatly manicured with a modest mid-sized Ford—all of which Merrill was responsible for.
    “Cause of death?” I asked.
    “He was beaten to death,” he said. “He had massive blunt force trauma. His liver was lacerated, his spleen ruptured, and he had an acute subdural hematoma.”
    I thought about it some more.
    “I think whoever killed him wanted it to look like something other than what it was,” he said. “Hang a black man from a tree and everybody automatically assumes it’s racially motivated, that it’s a mob or the Klan. Be a smart thing to do no matter who the