The Death Factory by Greg Iles Read Free Book Online

shields his eyes with the flat of his hand and looks north, then south, as if making some momentous decision. Apparently satisfied, he squats on his haunches and dips his hands into the brown water. Lifting them carefully, he studies the water running through his fingers.
    Inside the car, insulated from the wind and sun, I’m suddenly conscious that I’m sitting in the seat my father has occupied almost every day for the past five years. And someday soon—perhaps very soon—I will be taking his place as head of the family. My mother is strong in will, if not in body, but she has always observed the code of southern patriarchy, not out of submission, but out of a sense of tradition that probably predates the Bible. Traditional southern women never yielded all power to men—quite the opposite, in fact—but in formal social intercourse, an eldest son is expected to take up the mantle of his father.
    My father did it when his father passed, and Jack, as the youngest son, accepted that as the natural order of things. What does he see, squatting by the river with water running through his fingers? Forty yards beyond him, in the main current of the river, a half-submerged log floats past. That tree might have been lifted off the bank only a few miles upstream, or eight hundred miles north, in Minnesota, but Jack is oblivious.
    Fifteen hundred miles to the west, his wife is locked in a battle with her own immune system, which is relentlessly trying to kill her. Someday he will go through the agony I endured with Sarah; yet my greatest fear, losing my father, he endured years ago. How long, I wonder, until we exchange each other’s grief? How long before I drop the last spadeful of earth on my father’s grave in the cemetery up the hill?
    “NOW THAT I’VE marked my territory,” Jack says, nearly startling me out of my skin, “let’s ride up to the cemetery. We can watch the sun go down the way the birds do, while you finish your story.”
    As I turn the BMW in a 180, he says, “So you called Gaines, the ADA who’d pled down the rape case?”
    “Yeah. I didn’t want to do it—first because I’d been out of the office three years, and it was none of my business. Second, even if I’d still been in, it was considered bad form to interfere in another prosecutor’s case. And third, I’d never liked the son of a bitch.”
    “Why not?”
    I shift the BMW into low gear and start climbing the steep incline of Pierce’s Mill Road, wondering how log trucks ever made it up and down this slope in the winter. “Huge chip on his shoulder. Gaines went to the University of South Houston Law School, then served in the JAG Corps in the army. I’d gone to Rice, and then UT in Austin, like Joe Cantor. Gaines was four years older, and he resented my rapid rise in the office. To him I was still a Mississippi boy, while he was Texas right down to the Colt he carried in his briefcase. Gaines was a hard-ass, right-wing, Bible-thumping, law-and-order ex-soldier, and he’d never doubted he was right. Not once. The day I resigned from that office was a blue-ribbon day on his calendar.”
    “And he just loved you sticking your nose into a case he’d just closed.”
    I share Jack’s ironic laugh. “The first thing he said was ‘You researching a new book? You wanna make me the hero?’
    “I said, ‘You’re not going to like this, Mitch.’
    “I told him somebody had called me about the Avila case. I could feel his asshole pucker through the telephone. He got aggressive from the first second. The plea was signed and already ancient history, he said, not worth talking about. When I mentioned the crime lab, he shut me down right away. But I couldn’t figure out why. Gaines had always been a fairly straight shooter. ‘If the crime lab has problems,’ I said, ‘it’s going to bite you on the ass eventually. Why not deal with it now?’
    “That’s when I heard a cagey tone come into his voice. ‘Why do you care?’ he asked.