Absolute rage

16

"What did the judge say?" asked Karp.

"Judge is not inclined to issue our warrant," said Hawes. "Judge says we haven't demonstrated the involvement of the union to the degree necessary to open the union books and the personal accounts of all the union's officers to the extent we asked for."

"Christ! Why in hell does he think the Heeneys were killed? We have Floyd involved. What else does he want?"

"Something besides the Cades," said Hawes, and added gloomily, "You have to admit he's got a point."

They were walking down a pale green corridor smelling of disinfectant that could have been any hospital in the world, but was in fact the Robbens County Medical Center. They were going to visit Wayne Cade.

"I don't admit any such thing," said Karp. "I should have been there. I assume the Sewer was present?"

"Yeah, he was in good form, too," said Hawes, letting pass the small dig. He had grown a thicker skin in the weeks of working with Karp. "Very eloquent about the importance of the Fourth Amendment to our vital freedoms."

"And Bledsoe bought it."

"Well, yeah. He made the point, which was hard to argue with, that he'd been on the state court of appeals and the state supreme court for twenty years, and if an appeal had come up based on the exclusion of evidence produced by the present subpoena, he'd have been inclined to reverse. Seward pointed out that the only connection we have with the union is through Floyd, and the only inculpation of Floyd is the testimony of a pair of half-wit felons. Hell, they could've said the mayor was there, too."

"He probably was, in this town," said Karp darkly. "Well, fuck it anyway, we knew it was a stretch. We'll just have to find the money some other way."

They had arrived at a door guarded by a Robbens County deputy. Officer Petrie looked up from his ragged Guns amp; Ammo, glared briefly, and with a motion of his head informed them that the occupant was available for interview.

They found Wayne Cade propped up in his hospital bed watching a NASCAR race on a television hung from the ceiling. He was still huge, but not as ruddy as he had been. Tubes entered his mound of bedclothes at several points.

"You want to shut that thing off, Wayne?" said Hawes. "We need to talk to you."

"I got nothin' to say," said Cade, nor did he still the roar of the track.

Karp reached high and flipped the power switch off. He said, "Your cousins say you shot Lizzie Heeney in the head while she was sleeping. You want to comment on that?"

"Yeah. My comment is fuck them, and fuck you, too." Cade stared at Karp. His eyes, like those of all the Cades, were small, close-set, tincolored. "That's your girl, ain't it? The one with that dog tore me up?"

Karp said nothing.

"Yeah, you're that one. You're that Jew lawyer from New York. Okay, here's a comment, lawyer man. When I get out of here, I'm gonna find that dog and gut-shoot it, and throw it on a slow fire, and skin it while it's still wigglin'. And then I'm gonna do the same thing to her, after every man I can drag in has fucked her up the corn hole."

"Not a helpful attitude, Mr. Cade," said Karp. "It speaks to a lack of remorse. When had you planned on accomplishing these deeds? You know you're going to spend the rest of your life in prison, don't you?"

"That's what you think, shitheel."

"Well, Mr. Cade, given your current legal position, ordinarily I'd have to say you have a lot of balls, but in your case… exactly how many do you have now?"

Cade roared, clenched his fists, made a move to leave the bed, grimaced in pain, and fell back on his pillows, yelling, "Petrie! Goddamnit, Omar, get these goddamn people out of my face!"

"We'll try him first," said Karp after they left the room. "A conviction will give us a nice base for going after George Floyd and Lester."

"You're pretty confident," said Hawes.

"Yeah, aren't you? We have good forensics, prints at the scene, his prints on the cans and bottles along with those of the other two we know for sure were at the murders. We even have an I.W.Harper pint with all three of their prints on it, overlapping. Also, since all the DNA stuff from the shoes came back positive, there's a lock on Bo and Earl, and the bottle prints mean Wayne was at the party. We have the two cousin confessions. He killed the child with a gun. We have the gun, too."

"But no prints on it, and no knowledge of how it came to be buried at Floyd's. We do know it was in the Guyandotte. They compared the mud on the gun and got a match."

"Yeah, my darling wife was right on the money there, if a little late. And for sure I'd dearly love to have whoever saw them toss the piece and fished it out. And planted it on George. But you can't have everything."

"I don't like it, though. It's just the kind of thing that screws up a case."

Karp waved a dismissive hand. "But we don't need that for Wayne. We got Wayne without his gun."

Emmett Heeney was driving the old red Farmall tractor, with Zak on his lap, steering and crowing with joy. The tractor towed a little stakebed trailer on which bounced Emmett's brother, his brother's girlfriend, her dog, and her other brother. Also in the trailer were tools of various kinds, fishing equipment, weapons, and a large picnic hamper. The Heeneys had acquired nearly forty acres along with their farmhouse; today Emmett and Dan were providing a tour of the land.

It had not been a farm for a long time. As Dan explained, Red had not been interested in land and had been a little wary of accepting the title of landlord-so bourgeois! Rose had raised a garden, but the rest of the land had been allowed to follow the natural succession and had grown up in thickets of dogwood, white oak, bay laurel, above which young yellow pine were beginning to tower. There was still a good-sized apple orchard, which they now passed, descending a little hill toward a shallow stream that ran through a sparse, pale forest of beech and willow. Emmett stopped the tractor. They all unloaded and walked along a narrow trail through the trees and over an earth berm. There was a little pond there, made by damming the stream, with lilies in the water and a tiny beach.

They ate barbecued-chicken sandwiches and potato salad and drank beer and lemonade. After lunch, Emmett took Zak to the pond's edge and taught him the first lessons in fly casting, and to call dragonflies snake doctors. Then Emmett went with tools to repair the dam and clear culverts. Giancarlo sat on a rock with his pad and markers and drew the pond and the surrounding woods, adding to it many creatures not normally denizens of West Virginia. Dan and Lucy put in an hour's work helping Emmett. Afterward, they sat against a log cooling off, talking or not as the mood struck them. They were for whole minutes at a time extremely silly, which delighted both of them, since neither had logged much time in that country. Lucy had almost forgotten the extreme unlikelihood of her situation, and that the delight was likely to stop before too long. Dan, for his part, was still wondering why the colors were so extraordinarily bright, why time had become variable in its pace, why he was never bored anymore, why music seemed more lovely and compelling than it once had. In common with many alienated bright kids, he had taken LSD a time or two. This was like that, but not like as well-the intensity and peace without the speediness or paranoia. Somewhere in the lower reaches of his overintellectualized mind, the L-word began its slow rise to the surface.

Zak caught a bass, which was admired, as was Giancarlo's drawing. Later that afternoon, Lucy went a distance away from the campsite to pee, and after emerging from the bushes, she heard Zak's voice coming from above.

"You can't find me."

She looked. "I can't. Where are you? In the tree?"

"In the deer blind. Emmett showed me." There was a rustling forty feet above, and the boy's delighted face showed in the leaves of a tulip poplar. "Come on up. It's great!"

Lucy found climbing rungs on the tree's other side and climbed up.

"Wow, you're pretty invisible. What're you going to shoot?" The rat rifle was couched in his arm.

"Squirrels. They're considered varmints. You could eat them, you know. Emmett's going to show me how to make squirrel stew. I almost got a crow, too. Emmett's going to let me nail it to his barn if I do. And he's got a hunting bow, too, he showed me. This is what they use this blind for, bow hunting. It doesn't have a season. The deer come down to the stream there, through the laurel. They have paths."

She riffled his hair. "You're having a great time, aren't you?"

"Yeah, I never want to leave."

"Oh, yes, I know just what you mean."

When Karp returned to the Burroughs Building, he was not amazed to find his wife there, in the room with the state detectives, kibitzing and making herself useful, which was useful indeed. Karp did not believe there were three people in the country he would rather have involved in a criminal investigation than his own dear one, as long as she stayed continually under adult supervision. For the past several days Marlene had realized that she was not, in fact, made to lie around pools. Working on her tan was not enough work, it appeared. So she had started to show up and was accepted immediately by the staties as a colleague. Word had spread about her speckled background.

Virtually all the person-power Karp had at his call had been directed at a single goal: tracing the $7,500 blood money to a source of funds controlled by George Floyd, Lester Weames, or both. He found her working on just this with Mel Harkness.

"Any luck?" Karp asked, kissing the top of her head.

"Zilch. I am prepared to state that at no time in the past six months did either of the two scumbags in question withdraw that sum in cash from either private or union bank accounts. Those that we know of, anyway."

"Mel?"

"I don't get my head kissed?"

"Maybe later. Is she right as usual?"

"She's right," said Harkness, a rotund, balding, bespectacled state police detective who looked like an accountant and was an accountant. "We got pretty excited there for a bit. We found a ten-grand check to cash written out, but then there was a ten-grand cash deposit a day later."

"Why would they do that?"

"Can't say. But if there's no net withdrawal, we can't attribute it to any illegal payoff. Of course, there's a million ways they could have done it that we can't trace. They could have used a kickback from a purveyor. They could have private accounts. The company could have slipped them the cash. They could have cashed in their piggie pennies…"

"Unlikely," said Marlene. "I would be inclined to doubt that either of them spent their own money on this. Weames has a rep for cheapness. Neither of them spend their own money for anything, as far as I can tell. Car, travel, meals-it's all out of the union account. And perfectly legal, too. It has to be union cash, and since your judge won't let us look at the union books…"

"He's not my judge," said Karp. "But let's think about this. They didn't expect an investigation by us, but they had to know that the feds would be interested in the union, since Red had said he was going to bring them in. The feds would want to look at the union finances, therefore they have to be a little careful. So no big cash withdrawals. What do they spend their money on, anyway, the union?"

"Mainly pensions and health," said Harkness. "Salaries. Mortgage on the hall. Bonuses. Research. Very straightforward as far as the bank is concerned. It could be cooked as hell, but we can't tell from this."

"Well, we'll just have to follow up every check they cut and make sure it's legit."

"Better call in the marines, then," said Harkness.

"He doesn't have marines," said Marlene, "just us." To Karp she said, "I bet you wish you were back chasing Beemer and the congressman now."

"What congressman was that?" Harkness asked.

Neither Karp answered. They were staring into each other's eyes, combining brainpower in a way that they hadn't in a while.

"Smurfs," said Karp. "Why didn't we think of that?"

"The old guys' spending money," said Marlene. "The bonuses." He grabbed her, they kissed.

Harkness stared first at one, then at the other, a confused look on his face. "What're you two talking about?"

"We just figured out how they did it," said Karp, moving, looking for a phone to call Wade Hendricks.

Royal Eberly lived in the coal company house he had been born in, a four-room wooden affair with a sagging porch. It was painted baby blue with white trim. Red geraniums bloomed in number-ten cans on the windowsills and in the center of a white-painted truck tire in the tiny front yard. A faded American flag flapped gently above the heads of Karp and Hendricks and Eberly, the latter rocking in a straw-back rocker, the others in straight chairs. Mr. Eberly was sixty-nine; Karp thought he looked eighty: hollow-chested, sunken-eyed, hands so knotted with arthritis that he needed both of them to hold the jelly glass of iced tea. They were all drinking very sweet iced tea as Mr. Eberly talked about the old days in the deep mines. He had worked with Hendricks's daddy right here in this coal patch, Racke Creek, forty-eight years, man and boy.

Mr. Eberly was a loyal union man. He thought the world of Lester. Lester had come up to the holler himself when Mrs. Eberly passed a few years back. Last time the whole family was together. A shame. His daughters had moved away, something he had not expected. People used to stay with their kin. Mr. Eberly blamed it on the television. He didn't have a dish himself. Radio was good enough, music all the way from Nashville. He used to play a fiddle himself away back in them days, but now the arthritis had stopped that pretty good. He didn't have that old-timer's disease though, thank Jesus, he could recollect good as he ever done.

Hendricks said, "Now, Royal, I hear you all got a bonus to your pension a couple of months back. Do you recollect that?"

"Sure I do, and it come in right handy. New tires on the truck. New muffler, too. I still got some left. It warn't no bonus though. It was research."

"Research?"

"Yessir. What they said. How we'ns was all getting along and such. Give us a paper, you had to make little crosses in the boxes, with a pencil, if'n you had a 'frigerator and a TV. How you spent your time, an' all. I didn't mind on account it was the union askin'."

"And they paid you for this?"

"Yessir. A thousand dollars." He shook his head. "Lord Jesus, that's how much I made my first two months in the mines. Age of sixteen and one week old. Course, they wanted half of it back. One of the union boys, Jordy Whelan, drove me into the bank and I cashed it."

"Did they say why you had to give half of it back?"

"Oh, some gummint foolery he said. I didn't really follow it, tell the truth." A worried look appeared on the worn face. "There ain't nothing wrong, is there? I mean, I won't have to give none of it back, will I?"

"No, you won't," said Hendricks. "That enough for you, Butch?"

"Yes." Karp spoke a few formal words into the tape recorder and switched it off.

They interviewed six other pensioners that afternoon, all with the same story. The bank records showed that fifteen checks for $1,000 each had been cut and issued. Each recipient had given half his check back in cash to Jordy Whelan. The Cades said $7,500 had been paid out for the murders. The math was simple.

They drove by the union hall the next morning, with a Bronco-load of staties for backup. These were not necessary, as Jordy Whelan came along with no difficulty. Karp recognized him as one of the bruisers present at the catfish dinner at Rosie's, sitting with Floyd and Weames.

"This ain't about not showin' up for my speed ticket, is it?" Whelan asked from the back of the unmarked.

"No, it's not," said Karp. "It's about some union stuff. Have you worked for the union long, Mr. Whelan?"

Whelan placed a forefinger the size of a spark-plug socket on his upper lip and thought. "Six years, about that. What kind of union business?"

"We'll talk about it later," said Karp.

They took him to the back of the Burroughs Building and into a disused office full of furniture from a bankrupt firm. They all sat on swivel chairs around a dusty fake-wood conference table.

Jordy looked like an offensive tackle, an appearance supported by his having retained his high-school-team crew cut, a hairdo that left the sides of his head nearly bald. He looked to have added twenty pounds or so since the glory days, mainly beer-gut.

"What exactly is it you do for the union, Mr. Whelan?" Karp asked when they were settled, provided with coffee or RC, and the tape machine was running.

"Administrative assistant, Local Four. That's the Majestic Two mine."

"And your duties?"

"Oh, you know, keep everything runnin' smooth. Sometimes I drive Mr. Weames places, and interviewin'. Sometimes."

"Interviewing?"

"Yeah, you know, talk to the members, see if everything's okay. Check on the pensioners. How come you're asking this?"

Karp in reply read off a list of fifteen names from a typed list. "Are these names familiar to you?"

"Sure. They're pensioners. Alwin, Murphy, Eberly, all those guys. What about them?"

"They say that over a period of five days sometime in June of this year, you drove them to several banks in this county to cash checks the union had given them, and that you then took half of the proceeds of these checks, in cash."

"Uh-huh. What about it?"

"You've done this before?"

"Sure. It's the givebacks. Some of the old guys don't have cars, so I drive them."

"Givebacks?"

"Uh-huh. See, it's like when you go to the grocery store. The food, say, comes to twenty-four dollars and you give the girl a check for fifty, and she gives you it in cash, so you have, you know, for gas and cigarettes."

"Right. And who told you to collect the givebacks?"

"Oh, that was Mr. Floyd. He's the business manager."

"And you handed the money to him? It came to what?"

"Seventy-five hundred, all told. Uh-huh, and I gave it to him it must've been a Friday, because the checks always go out on Friday and I recall it took a whole week to collect from all those old boys."

"Did he say what he wanted it for?"

"Uh-huh. The basement in the union hall needed sealing and the guy was going to give us a break on the job for cash. Oh, and the rats, too."

"Rats."

"Uh-huh. Rats in the basement. He said it was for an exterminator."

"Thank you, Mr. Whelan," said Karp.

Whistles, cheers, hoots of laughter, filled the Burroughs Building when Karp played the tape for the assembled team.

"No further questions, Your Honor," said Marlene.

"Yes," said Karp, "I have had many golden moments in court, but this is going to have a special place in the scrapbook."

"I want to be a fly on the wall," said Stan Hawes, "when Seward gets this stuff. He'll want to deal."

"Oh, he may want to," said Karp obliquely. Hawes met his eye, then looked away. They had an unvoiced understanding. Hawes would do most of the trial work and get the credit and front to the press, but Karp would decide the major strategic moves. Karp could see that Hawes still bore a trace of resentment about this, but Karp was careful not to rub his face in it, and Hawes had enough sense not to bring the subtle hierarchy into the public gaze. There was a little eye action with Cheryl Oggert, too, Karp noted. Maybe Stan manipulating around the edges? Who knew? thought Karp; who cared?

"Well, it looks like the police part of the operation's just about over," said Hendricks. "I guess the governor's going to be happy about that."

"Yes, he will," Oggert agreed. "I get a call from his budget people every other day. It's like we're going to have to close the schools if Robbens County keeps draining resources. I told them you'd be able to release everyone back to normal duty as of the end of this week."

"This is wise?" asked Karp. "We don't want to depend on the sheriff too much."

"We won't," said Hendricks. "We'll keep the detectives, and we'll still keep priority at the lab. But we don't need thirty-six troopers anymore. What I mean is, we already arrested all the bad guys."

"Your show, Wade," said Karp. "I just work here."

Three days later, after the defense had perused the Whelan testimony, and after some remarkable findings had come in from the state laboratory, and after Wayne Cade had been transferred to the jail, still refusing to talk to anyone, including his state-appointed lawyer, a call came in from Floyd's attorney, Milton Seward, asking Hawes for a meeting. Karp insisted it be held in the makeshift conference room in the Burroughs Building, rather than in Hawes's office in the courthouse. When the state's attorney expressed annoyance at this, Karp explained, "I'm the bad guy, Stan. Let me be the bad guy, with the meet in the bad guy's castle. They still think you're a patsy. I don't want them to discover you're not until George is sitting at his trial. It'll be a Clark Kent moment for you."

"This is how they do things in New York?" said Hawes grumpily.

"Yeah, it is, and, you know, people around here ask me that a lot, I notice. It seems to be polite code for 'Is that some kind of Jew trick?' Answer: yes, it is. So, when we go in on this, I'm going to ask you not to contribute anything. I want you just to sit there and look uncomfortable."

"Well, hell, that won't be hard," said Hawes sourly.

Milton Seward was known as the Sewer among the members of the West Virginia bar, both because of his frequent use of salty language and because one of his first major cases had been the successful defense of a group of speculating contractors and councilmen accused of rigging bids for the construction of the Wheeling waste-water treatment system. He was arguably the state's premier defense lawyer at the time, a status to which he frequently adverted.

When he arrived, with his client in tow, Karp again noted that of the two canonical premier defense-lawyer personae-(1) slick, pinstriped $2,500 suits, French cuffs, handmade shoes, $200 haircuts; (2) custommade, monogrammed cowboy boots, cattleman suits, funny Stetsons, sideburns, lots of heavy jewelry-the Sewer had chosen the latter. Waal, Ah'm jest a shit-kickin' good ole country boy who made good: that was the message. Karp thought that the people who chose (2) did so because they were generally short little fucks and the cowboy boots gave them as much as three inches.

"What the hell you tryin' to pull with this goddamn horseshit, Karp?" was the Sewer's opening gambit.

"What goddamn horseshit would you be referring to, Mr. Seward?" Karp inquired.

The Sewer flung a sheaf of bound paper on the table. "This. This Whelan so-called testimony. You can't use this."

"And why not?"

"Because the whole fucking thing is a tissue of lies coerced under pressure, plus declarant is a mental incompetent. Jordan Whelan has an eighty-six IQ."

"Making him smart enough to be a bagman for your client, but not so smart that he'd ask a lot of questions. His testimony, which was in no way coerced, a fact we can demonstrate without a peradventure of a doubt, is amply confirmed by the testimony of a number, fifteen to be precise, of union pensioners, each of whom received a thousand-dollar fee for so-called research, half of which fee was given back to Mr. Whelan, who then gave it to your client, who gave it to the three Cade boys, for which remuneration they murdered the Heeney family."

Seward chuckled, as if Karp had told an amusing joke. George tried to paste a smile on his face, but it came out like the grimace of a man who had just bitten down on a bad oyster. "Well, Lord fuck a duck, you New York boys sure can come up with the stories. You know as well as I do that there is no way on God's earth you can connect that union money with whatever money, if any, got passed to the alleged murderers. It's all fuckin' smoke, Karp."

"Not quite smoke, Mr. Seward. I wouldn't call DNA evidence smoke."

"What the fuck are you talking about, DNA?"

"Gosh, Stan, didn't we turn that over yet? Well, it just came in from Charleston last night." Karp handed a thin manila envelope across the desk. Seward made no move to pick it up.

"It turns out that little Bo Cade had five twenties left from that payoff when he was arrested. Did you know that your client has a habit of licking his thumb when he peels money off a roll? Well, he does. I observed him doing it myself. And when we took a close look at those twenties, we found some saliva traces on the bills. And there was enough cellular material in the saliva traces to give us DNA lines. It's amazing what they can do with tiny little bits of organic material today. I guess your client, being an honest fellow, hasn't kept up with the very latest in criminalistics. Now, we haven't matched that DNA with anyone yet, but since you look like a betting man, Mr. Seward, with that fancy outfit, I'd like to bet you, say, a thousand dollars that we get a match off your client there. What do you say?"

"Ah, that don't mean shit," Seward exclaimed. "Fifty different people could've touched one of those bills."

"All the bills," said Karp. "Same traces on all five bills." There was a brief, delicious silence.

Then Floyd leaned over and whispered something in his lawyer's ear. The lawyer whispered something back. Karp loved to see whispered consultations like this. It was so hard for even experienced rogues to get their lies straight on short notice.

"Not admitting anything at all at this time," said Seward, "but my client directs me to discuss the possibility that other individuals were involved in plotting these murders."

"For example?"

"Other individuals, an individual associated with the union. At the highest level. Suppose we were to say that this individual was the prime originator of the murder plot, who made the money available, who directed the murders, who used my client's good offices as an unwitting intermediary."

"You're talking about a plea in exchange for testimony, are you?"

"Well, what the fuck do you think I'm talking about? I'd like to know what your position would be on that?"

"My position on that would be that if your client pleads guilty to the top count of the indictment, murder in the first degree, and if he testifies to the material involvement of Lester Weames, we will place that fact into the cognizance of the sentencing judge."

"You're fucking joking." Seward had a face made up of semispherical units, not unlike that of W. C. Fields-little round nose, little round chin, full cheeks-and now all these turned rosy.

"I am deadly serious."

Seward looked at Hawes. "Stan, what the fuck… are you gonna sit there and let him get away with this? I mean, are you the goddamn state's attorney here, or what?"

Hawes said nothing. Seward turned on Karp again. "Okay, then listen to me, Mr. New York! You got a lot of horseshit, is what you got. I don't give a fuck what kind of DNA trickology, what kind of lying testimony from a bunch of no-account hillbillies, you bring into court, I will personally guarantee you that no Robbens County jury is gonna convict George C. Floyd for these murders." He stood up. "Let's go, George. We're done here."

"He might have a point," said Hawes. "Those citizens who don't think George Floyd is man of the year are scared silly of him."

"You're thinking change of venue?"

"It's worth a look."

"No, it's not. The whole point of this exercise is to bring justice to this county. Justice has to be done in this place, and seen to be done. If we have to run somewhere else, it's not the win we need."

"We could lose."

"Bite your tongue, and cheer the fuck up, Hawes. We are going to pull George C. Floyd's shorts down in open court and whip his heinie for him."

They walked out into the main suite. Harkness seemed to be the only one at a desk. The chair Marlene usually occupied was empty.

"Where's Marlene?" Karp asked.

"Oh, she's gone. She got a phone call and just dropped everything and ran off like her hair was on fire. She said to tell you she was going to the city, but she didn't say which one."

Karp knew which one. He learned the rest of the story early that afternoon, when Lucy showed up at the office.

"Mom called me," said Lucy. "Billy called her here and said that Jeb had got off the property and bit Mrs. Winchell next door. She got the truck out of the shop, drove herself to Charleston, and got a plane back to the City through Pittsburgh."

"Oh, Christ! There goes the college fund. Was the old lady badly hurt?"

"Oh, no. She wasn't like attacked. According to Billy, Jeb just likes to roam, and he roamed into Mrs. Winchell's backyard, and her Scottie dog went for him, which of course Jeb ignored, and then Mrs. Winchell came out and tried to shoo him off with her cane, and I guess that constituted assault with a weapon in his dog mind, and he gave her a nip on the hand. Really it wasn't his fault."

"Uh-huh, and I bet your mom will be making just that argument in front of a judge and a contingency-fee lawyer who's already picking out the color of the Rolls. Why did she call you and not me?"

"Sheer mortification, since you were always going on about something like this happening and ruining us. Also, she wanted me to collect Gog. I'll be watching both of them at Dan's place with the boys. The boys are in paradise. We're going huntin' 'n' fishin' this afternoon. I figured you didn't need to worry about them while you're involved here."

Karp raised an eyebrow. "You're, um, planning on staying there, huh? Setting up light housekeeping?"

"Yes, and what you mean by that is, are you sleeping with him? What do you think?"

He studied the ceiling tiles. "Your mom thinks it's unbridled teen lust out there."

"Yes, I know. It's sort of gross when your mom leers at you, nudgenudge, wink-wink, and I wish she'd cut it out. The problem is she's been preparing practically her whole life to be the understanding and helpful mom of a gorgeous lust bucket like she was when she was my age, and what she gets is virginal me, floating slightly above the ground. It must be quite vexing." Lucy paused and gave him one of her deep looks. "You really don't want the details of my-ha ha!-sex life, do you?"

"No. As long as you're okay."

"I'm okay." She smiled. He recalled that she was smiling a lot more nowadays, not the dry and sardonic smile she had formerly affected, but a real grin, from which light flared. "I'm actually real good."

Karp watched her walk out. Floating, yes. She had a bounce in her step that he had not noticed before. He hoped it was love, although personally he thought that Dan Heeney was not fit to tie the laces of her shoe. After he thought this, he had the good sense to laugh at himself.

He stuffed a number of documents and scrawled-upon legal pads into a cardboard folder and walked over to the courthouse. There for the next several hours he consulted with Stan Hawes about their strategy for the Wayne Cade trial, which amounted to teaching the younger man how to prevail in a high-profile homicide prosecution without seeming to teach him anything. It was subtle and tiring work. Hawes was bright enough to understand he needed help, but he was also a competitive and politically ambitious young lawyer, and his mind was at least partially on the greasy pole rather than totally devoted to the case at hand. Karp had observed this in such lawyers before this. It pissed him off, and he could not afford to be pissed off just then.

At three, they both went down to the courtroom to answer motions before Judge Bledsoe. Wayne Cade had a public defender, a man named Rob Sawyer. Sawyer had a new blue suit, a law degree nearly as old, and a light trace of acne on his cheeks. The motions were the usual pro formas: exclusion of evidence, deficiencies in the warrant, quash the indictment. Hawes answered them well enough, and Karp thought that Bledsoe would have no problem in deciding all of them in the state's favor. While Hawes was up arguing, Karp noted that young Sawyer was having difficulty attracting his client's attention. His client was more interested, seemingly, in Karp. Karp met his stare, which was predictably malevolent. Then Cade made a choking gesture and bared his teeth in a nasty grin. This was actually quite unusual. Karp had tried people who could eat Wayne Cade for lunch, and typically the really hard boys had no personal animus at all against the people whose job it was to put them in jail. Things were apparently different among the Cades. Karp rolled his eyes and looked somewhere else. He felt embarrassed for young Sawyer.

After court, Hawes and Karp went back to Hawes's office. Bledsoe had promised to rule the next day and had announced that, without objection, he wanted jury selection to begin the day after. He expected a speedy trial, with no obstructionism.

At 5:32, they were just about to knock off and go get a bite to eat when they heard a series of popping noises coming from below.

"Someone's got firecrackers left over from the Fourth," Hawes observed, and was startled when Karp leaped up and ran headlong from the room.

Dan Heeney had Emmylou Harris playing out of his computer speakers, "Sweet Dreams" the song. He was lying on his bed watching Lucy Karp lip-synch the song and play air-guitar accompaniment. That Lucy liked Emmylou Harris seemed to him the final benediction on the relationship. For her part, Lucy was not conscious of ever having heard Ms. Harris before arriving in West Virginia, being in the main a world-music sort of girl. She had decided, however, that country was actually world music from the United States. And she actually spent a good deal of time gyrating and lip-synching, in a dozen tongues, in the privacy of her room. That she was now doing it in front of a boy was to her mind a greater intimacy, almost, than getting naked.

The song ended; he applauded; she took a modest bow.

"Can you actually play anything?"

"No, not a thing. My mom tried to teach me guitar-she's good at it-but I could barely get through the first two bars of 'Go Tell Aunt Rhody.' I have perfect pitch, of course, but I could never figure out how to read music. A tragedy, huh?"

"I can play the banjo."

"You can? Oh, play something!"

"I might later, if you're good. You know, you look a little like Emmylou Harris used to."

She sputtered out a startled laugh. "Oh, yeah, I get that all the time. People stop me in the street. Except for…" She grabbed up the CD and consulted the face thereon. "She has shining, perfectly straight raven locks and I have curly brown fuzz not unlike pubic hair. She has razorsharp cheekbones; mine are barely visible. She has a cute little absolutely straight nose; I have a hideous contorted bassoon; she has lush red lips; I have thin pale objects that resemble stretched rubber bands reaching nearly to my ears. She has a broad, noble brow; mine slopes backward like that of early man. She has huge, lustrous dark eyes; mine are tiny and resemble dog poo in color. Aside from that, we could be twin sisters." She grinned at him, put a hand on her hip, cocked it, and said, "You must be in love, me bucko."

He slid away from that one, saying, "I hate it when you dis yourself like that. You have unbelievably beautiful eyes."

She nodded and batted the mentioned units ostentatiously. "Yes, I do. It's my pathetic one good feature, and I'm proud as Lucifer of them, God forgive me." She flopped next to him on the bed.

"Do you always tell the truth like that?" he asked.

"Uh-huh. I never lie, but the truth is not for everyone. My mom says that a lot, when lying. But I think I'm beginning to see what she means."

"I like your mouth, too."

"Unfashionably slitlike though it is?"

He was demonstrating how much he liked it when a sound came from just outside the door, from where the two mastiffs had been lying, facing away from each other like a pair of bookends. It came from both dogs, a kind of growling whine. Lucy jumped up, cold sweat breaking out on her face. Another sound now, tires on gravel, the roar of an engine.

"Get the boys, Dan!"

He got off the bed. "Why, what's wrong?"

She ran out of the room, out the front door, confirming what she had feared.

She ran back to Dan's doorway. "Get the boys! Go, now! Get them and hide in the woods!"

"What are you talking about?"

"It's the Cades, a bunch of them. Go out the back!"

"But what about-"

"I have the dogs. Oh, please, just don't stand there, for the love of Christ, go!"

He found himself running out the back. Lucy said something to Magog, who dashed out after him. Lucy and Gog went out onto the porch. She sat in the rocker and placed the dog next to her, talking to him gently. He was whining continuously and his back hairs bristled.

There were three of them in a dirty green Ford pickup truck. Someone she didn't recognize was driving it. The two passengers were Wayne and Earl Cade.

They parked at the foot of the driveway, where it joined the access road. It was twenty yards away, but the wind was right and she could hear what they were saying.

The driver said, "Goddamnit, Wayne, we ain't got time for this."

"Henry, you listen here. I'm gonna shoot that dog there, grab up the girl, and blow up that house. It won't take but a minute. Just set here and I'll be right back."

Wayne walked toward the house. He was walking slowly and carefully, she observed, with a somewhat bowlegged gait. He had a large revolver in his hand.

He stopped in front of the porch steps. "Well, honey, here's what's gonna happen now. I'm gonna gut-shoot that dog of yourn, then I'm gonna take you and your dog back to my home place, and I'm gonna cook it on a slow fire and skin it while it's still alive. Then I'm gonna-"

"It's not my dog," she said.

"What?"

"No, this is my mother's dog. That's my dog." She pointed.

Wayne heard the sound of running claws behind him and a shout from Earl. He whipped the upper part of his body around to his right, his gun hand extended.

Magog was already airborne, but easily made a slight midcourse correction. She knew Wayne from before, knew he was a bad actor who would not, for some reason, learn his lesson, and so when she clamped her jaws down on his forearm just behind the wrist, she gave him the full twenty-six hundred foot-pounds. The pistol went flying; so did Wayne. As the other two Cade boys scrabbled in the cab of the truck to grab their weapons, Lucy called the dogs to her and disappeared into the house.

Giancarlo had just caught a largemouth bass that must have weighed a pound and a half. He detached it from the hook and ran to call his brother, who he knew was sitting in the deer blind waiting for a target for the rat rifle. He approached the tulip tree where the blind was and was all set to shout when he heard heavy, running footsteps and the voices of men in loud conversation. He stopped and remained still, the fish held in his hand.

Two men came around the curve of the trail. One held a shotgun, the other a pistol. Giancarlo heard Dan Heeney call his name from the direction of the pond. The men heard it, too. They looked up and saw Giancarlo. The man with the shotgun raised it and pointed it at him. Still clutching his fish, Giancarlo dived into the laurel. Earl fired both barrels.

Up in the blind, Zak had seen this happen, and without thinking he laid the crosshairs of his scope on Earl Cade's head and pulled the trigger.

"Oww! Goddamnit! Oww!"

"What in hell is wrong with you?" Henry Cade cried. His cousin Earl had dropped his shotgun and was doubled over holding his hand to the left side of his head.

"Something bit me or stuck me. Goddamnit, that hurts!"

"Lemme see it," said Henry, and pushed Earl's hand away. A small, round wound an inch above his left ear was bleeding slightly. Henry laughed. "Looks like a pellet hit from your own gun. Must've ricocheted off've somethin' and hit you in the head."

"Ah, shit, Henry, that never happened to me before. How in hell could a thing like that happen?"

"Well, you prob'ly never shot no little boy before neither," said Henry sagely. "C'mon, let's get ol' Wayne put together and get shut of this place. I swear, between the two of you…"

"We all're still gonna blow up that house," said Earl, kneeling down carefully to retrieve his shotgun.

"Yeah, and you better be quick about it, 'cause I think I hear sirens."

Magog sniffed him out in the laurel hell. When Lucy went in, following the dog, she found him lying on his back with his eyes closed. For a glad instant she thought that he was kidding, pretending to be asleep, but he did not stir at her voice or touch, and when she shrieked and clutched him to her, she found that he was all soaked with blood from the crown of his head to the backs of his knees.