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Chapter 70: Revelations
"Sometimes, it's safer not to know than to find the answers to all your questions."
~the author
The Charger slipped through the night, purring its gentle, high gear hum over the smooth alphalt of Highway 23. The pulsing lights of the police cruiser it followed washed across its passengers in red and blue as Rosco escorted them through Atlanta's nighttime commuters. No one spoke, each harboring his own hopes and fears for what lay ahead.
Tension hung heavy and thick in the car, reminding Jesse of the long nights beside his still when the first tongues of flame licked the kindling beneath the combustible, raw whiskey. The ghosts of those he had loved and lost seemed to be riding with him through the darkness, and the sweet scent of wildflowers lingered like the memories of happier times. Tears blured his eyes as he rested his head against his window and the General Lee sped on through the night.
The conference room was silent now, the television a dirty gray screen reflecting the harsh flourescents of the conference room. Agent Wilburn dragged a chair over and sat down at the table across from Enos while another agent slid a syrofoam cup of coffee in front of him.
"I'd drink that while it's hot," said Wilburn, nodding at it. "It's even worse when it's cold."
Enos cupped his hands around ithe liquid, feeling its warmth seep into his travel-worn calluses. The scent reminded him of early mornings at the station, making coffee for Rosco and Mr. Hogg in what felt like someone else's lifetime. The simple act of kindness seemed surreal, and the whole situation more like a dream than reality. He tested the thought of Darcy being alive, prodded it like a hiker might a sleeping snake, and then let it alone - still coiled in the corner of his mind. That was for later, and all the implications that might come with it. His hands shook as he raised the coffee to his lips, sloshing it.
"I know this is a lot to take in," apologized Wilburn,"and I'd like to sit here and jaw with you about what'll happen next, and answer all the questions you must be thinking up, but unfortunately the GBI's time is limited. I've got a couple of questions that I need to ask you first."
Enos could only nod, not trusting himself to speak.
Wilburn reached into his suit pocket and pulled out a stack of polaroids. Unwrapping the rubber band holding them together, he shuffled through them until he found the one he was looking for and slid it across the table to Enos. "We know the woman is Daisy," he said, "What we don't know is where it was taken."
It showed a woman sitting alone on the bank of a pond with a fishing pole. The distance was strange for a photograph, and even Enos had a hard time making out that it was Daisy. It wasn't a picture he had taken, but he knew the place well. "This is Miller's Pond." He looked back up at the detective, confused. "But I didn't take it."
Wilburn shook his head. "Oh, we know you didn't take it."
"Not many people know how to get there anymore since the trail's grown up. She took a picture of that pond, though, to give to me while I was in Fulton." Pictures of places he thought he'd never seen again. He had studied them so many times, the corners had become dog-eared. They'd been left in his cell and, afterwards, it had been a long time before he was concious enough to miss them. "Maybe Bo or Luke went with her and took this one?"
Wilburn looked down at the stack of pictures and frowned, his fingers worrying them in indecision, and Enos realized the man wouldn't have asked if Bo or Luke or Jesse had taken the picture. Something wasn't adding up for the GBI.
A picture of Daisy unawares, alone at a secluded place, taken by an unknown person. The idea made his heart beat faster. He felt his mind blurring the edges of the thought; softening it, protecting him. "Are the other pictures of Hazzard?" he asked, before he could change his mind.
Wilburn lay the stack of polaroids carefully down on the table. "These are the photos Las Vegas police took at the address you gave us." He tapped the top. "And come next week, Mr. Kincaid's lawyers will be trying to have them locked away where the sun never shines." He stood up and grabbed the empty coffee cup. "It's not my place to show them to you," he said, "but I'm gonna leave them right here while I go and check to see if Miss Duke is out of surgery."
"Sir? I don't understand."
The detective glanced at the door, but there was nothing but hallway beyond the narrow window, even though Enos knew the other agents were close by. Finally, he looked back, a mixture of weariness and sadness etched in the lines of his face, and leaned forward. "There's things you need to see to understand why this happened to you," he said, grimly. "Look at the pictures, son."
The door clicked shut behind Wilburn, and Enos stared down at the polaroids, raking his hands through his hair. The lights buzzed quietly in the new silence, making his skin crawl, prodding that dark, scorched part of his mind which gleefully suggested that he'd finally gone crazy, after all, and that it was time to wake up and peel some paint.
He felt disconnected; like a fly on the wall, looking down at himself; at a man with no home and no future, whose past seemed a distant memory and whose nights were filled with terrible dreams. He felt small and lost and if he closed his eyes, like so, he could imagine he was ten again and sitting at the table in the Dukes' sunlit kitchen...
The intercom snapped to life, startling him out of his reverie, as it paged someone to somewhere else. When he opened his eyes, the pictures were still there, lying face down on the table. With a sigh, he picked them up and turned them over.
There was nothing remarkable about the small, one story with cheap, white, vinyl siding. Mildew crept up from the foundation in shades of green and black and a cracked basement window held together with several overlapping strips of masking tape. It was no different than many houses in Hazzard, most of them built in the 1940's when the baby boom from World War II had swelled the population. His father told him the moonshine had tasted like lumber dust for so long, it nearly bankrupted the bootleggers. No one wanted to buy hooch that passed for Pine-sol.
The pictures moved inside then, down a dimly lit hallway with wood paneling and faded, pink carpet. One by one, he followed them through the house; uncovering cluttered bedrooms and a grimy kitchen in faded avocado where a pile of unwashed dishes sat by the sink. At last, he stood atop a steep flight of wooden stairs decending into the dark basement. The coffee he'd gulped down settled uneasily in the pit of his stomach.
Monsters live in places like these, offered his imagination, but the next four pictures showed only a cinder block room, now lit, ringed with shelves of canned fruit, camping equipment, and dog-eared cardboard boxes labeled "Christmas". He chuckled at his paranoia and released the breath he had been holding as he lay them on the table with the others.
The next picture looked back at the stairway leading up to the kitchen. A rusty, hot water heater stood on cement blocks to one side with a mist of cobwebs clinging to the wooden floor joists above it. He scratched his neck, thinking of spiders. To the left side of the water heater, the door of an old dumbwaiter with flaking white paint was set into the brick, a newer, brass deadbolt lock holding it shut.
The next picture seemed to be of a different place; a windowless room with industrial gray walls covered with squares that might be pictures and a floor of cracked linoleum. A bare bulb, hanging down from the ceiling cast a harsh, yellow light across a counterop covered with crude drawings and dirty magazines.
He shuffled quickly through the rest, confused. All of them were of this singular, gray walled room. His palms prickled with sweat as he lay a row of photos out on the table, gritting his teeth at their graphic subject matter - and suddenly, he was standing in Los Angeles again, he and Turk, in a room that stank of old sweat and sex, of soured wine and fear; wrapping a fourteen year old girl in a ratty quilt. He shook off the memory, but his heart still felt the pull of that old, familiar ache that came with working Vice on the days when Lt Broggi had nothing better for them to do. He flipped the pictures over, but there were no distinguishing marks; no dates and no locations.
They've mixed in a different crime scene, is all. How many times had it happened in Hazzard, especially with Cletus' careless filing? Mixing photos taken with the same camera was easy to do if you didn't label them. Los Vegas investigated hundreds of crimes every week, maybe even more than Los Angeles. He chided himself for being jumpy, and waited until he couldn't feel the slamming of his heart against his ribs or the rush of blood in his ears before he flipped over the last of the pictures.
Closeups of the gray walls now revealed the squares to be a sea of pictures. Pictures of rail-yards and clippings of articles about himself and his case, but most of the pictures were of Hazzard and Daisy; leaving the courthouse, shopping, entering Fulton's prison, outside the Boar's Nest, doing chores outside the farmhouse. Dozen upon dozens. All the pictures had been taken from a distance, as though the photographer was hiding somewhere out of sight. Stalking her. Other pictures were of Dixie, taken from inside a car behind her, on some unidentifiable highway. The most chilling were outside Daisy's bedroom window, looking in.
He didn't hear the door open, and his head jerked up in shock as Wilburn cleared his throat. For a long moment, Enos could only stare at him, his mind frozen like the static on the television.
"Officially, you never saw those."
Enos shook his head. "Everyone in Hazzard knew Darcy," he said, trying to keep the anger and bitterness out of his voice, and failing miserably. "How in tarnation did no one see him if he was following Daisy?"
Wilburn scooped the pictures on the table back into a stack. "We're not sure," he admitted. "We've just started the process of piecing his whereabouts together after he disappeared in March of '83." He blew out a frustrated breath as he wrapped the rubber band back around the pictures and placed them in his jacket pocket. "He didn't stick to Hazzard, either. They found a reciept for gas in Gallup, New Mexico, from the third of May this year, two days after you and Miss Duke passed through McKinley County."
That had been the closest they had come to being caught after the raid at Jack's house. They had walked across the desert from Goffs to Cima to catch out on a Union Pacific and throw the FBI off their trail. Enos couldn't begin to imagine what would have happened if they had met up with Darcy out in the middle of nowhere. With his nerves already wrecked, he'd probably have lost any remaining marbles right then and there. He didn't allow himself to think of what might have happened to Daisy. He focused back on Wilburn, and realized the man was still talking.
"-the phone records about a hour ago." Wilburn stopped. "You still with me?" he asked, gently, his tone like an old, caring grandfather who might be informing his family that he was dying.
"Sorry, sir, I was...was just thinking...what would have happened if we had met up with Darcy out there somewhere." He gestured towards the door.
The look the agent gave him in response made Enos wonder if he had missed something. He reminded himself that, whatever had happened or hadn't happened, no matter how unsettling it was to find out that Darcy was alive (he would think on that later, he reminded himself), the important thing was that Darcy was in custody now.
"We think you nearly did, son," he said, softly. "I'm gonna lay it out for you, and you're not gonna like it." Wilburn pulled the seat back and sat down. "Like I was saying, before, we got the phone records back from the house in Las Vegas about an hour ago. This morning, there was a collect call to there placed from Atlanta, Georgia." Wilburn paused, letting the connection to the two cities sink into Enos' mind, but there was nothing surprising to Enos about Darcy having friends in Atlanta. "The call was traced back to the Gold Club. We think someone tipped him off that Daisy had been there." He pulled a single picture from his coat pocket which had not been in the stack with the others and placed it gently on the table in front of Enos. "Los Vegas police caught him just as he was leaving. That was in the back seat of his car. You've walked the beat in LA, I probably don't need to tell you what it is."
Enos stared at the box in the picture, sitting on the blue vinyl bench seat. Hot, angry tears sprang to his eyes, and he swallowed against the lump in his throat. The box didn't matter; he'd seen the same contents in bags, boxes, and trunks in Los Angeles enough to know its purpose. He slammed his hand over the picture, turned it upside down, and pushed it back towards Wilburn. This..THIS... wasn't anything he had been expecting. He had come face to face with evil at Fulton, that went without saying, but it had never been personal (It's nothin personal, Enos...Just gotta look out for me and mine, you understand). But the roots of this evil sank deep into his own past and that of the girl he had loved since before he knew its meaning.
Darcy had followed them from one end of the country to the other; hunting them, stalking them, framing him for murder...
"Was it all for her?" he heard himself asking. "For Daisy?"
"It's a bitch to take in, son, I know." He tried to catch Enos' eyes but couldn't. "And, I'm not talking to you from any official standpoint here - just man to man, when I say I think you were collaterial damage. Some of the pictures we found of Daisy went back ten years, at least."
Ten years... Suddenly, more than anything, he needed to reassure himself that she was okay.
"I need to see her, sir," he pleaded. "Please. Just to...," he floundered. It was a hospital, perfectly safe, and Darcy was somewhere in handcuffs (or sitting at a table with fake wood grain laminate, waiting...). Nothing would happen to her here, surely.
Wilburn rubbed his face where a shadow of gray stubble was breaking though. "I can't let you go free, son," he said. "No matter that everyone knows you're innocent, there's still laws. Procedure. In the end, it ain't my call."
Enos nodded, feeling that soft blanket of hopelessness creep over him. "I understand," he whispered.
"But, I do have the power to make it a little easier for you, at least while we're here. We've secured the wing where Daisy is, so no one is going to come or leave without us knowing. She's doing just fine, sleeping right now. If you can manage Agent Stewart shadowing you, we'll take you up there."
He looked gratefully back up at Wilburn. "I'd sure appreciate that, sir."
"Come on then, Enos. I'll lead the way."