Fatal Flaw

37

“IT WAS a quiet, rain-swept night on Raven Hill Road,” said prosecutor Troy Jefferson in his smooth prosecutor’s voice. “The kids were asleep, the cars were parked in the driveways and by the curb, the houses were dark. Everything was locked up tight, safe and sound. An unlikely night for-”

“Objection, Your Honor.”

I was standing at the defense table, Guy Forrest sitting to my left and Beth, with a white plaster cast on her wrist, sitting to his. Judge Tifaro peered over her half glasses at me. The eyeglass chains hanging from her temples gave her pique a schoolmarmish edge. “We’re only on the fourth sentence of Mr. Jefferson’s opening, Counselor. Don’t you think your objection is a bit premature?”

“Mr. Jefferson is implying that all the houses were locked up tight on Raven Hill Road the night of the murder, when he knows full well that there is no evidence that Miss Prouix’s house was locked at all. When he knows full well there is no evidence to disprove the possibility that anyone could have strolled inside that house at any time for any purpose, whether-”

“Mr. Carl, that’s enough. You’ll have your turn to discuss any failures of proof in your closing. Objection overruled.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said as I sat back down in my seat.

“Let me start again,” said Jefferson, smirking at me before turning back to the jury. “It was a quiet, rain-swept night on Raven Hill Road. The kids were asleep, the cars were parked in the driveways and by the curb, the houses were dark. Everything was locked up tight, safe and sound. An unlikely night-”

“Objection, Your Honor. He did it again.”

“Mr. Carl, I overruled the objection. Mr. Jefferson can say what he pleases. Sit down.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.” I sat.

“An unlikely night,” said Jefferson hurriedly, “for murder.”

“Objection, Your Honor.”

“Oh, please,” moaned Troy Jefferson, spinning around to give me the eye.

“Mr. Carl?” said the judge, unable to conceal her exasperation.

“Whether or not there was a murder is a legal conclusion for the jury to decide after receiving your instructions. Mr. Jefferson can argue facts here, but an opening is not the time to throw all kinds of technical legal terms at the jury in the hopes of pushing them at this early stage to some legal conclusion that might not be warranted by-”

“Overruled,” said the judge. “Murder is the charge, and so he can use the word. Sit down, Mr. Carl. I’ve had enough out of you already and we’re only” – she glanced at her watch – “three minutes into the proceeding. I fear this is going to one be of those trials, so let make myself clear, Mr. Carl. I don’t want you interrupting Mr. Jefferson’s opening again. I don’t want to hear your voice even if the building is on fire and you are the first to see the flames. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you, Your Honor.”

“Don’t thank me when I slap you down, Mr. Carl. It puts me in a foul mood. And, Mr. Jefferson, when Mr. Carl is giving his opening, I certainly hope you show him more respect than he has shown to you.”

“I certainly hope so, too, Your Honor,” I said.

The jury laughed at that one, which I appreciated. I smiled as I nodded their way. Some smiled back.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said, to a few more chuckles.

Troy Jefferson glared at me before turning around and beginning again, but with his back now slightly hunched, as if anticipating the next interruption, and without the same lovely assurance in his voice.

God, I loved the courtroom.

I was in a strange, unsettled place just then, confused as to what had really happened or why to Hailey Prouix, confused by what I had learned in West Virginia, uncertain about who had done what to whom, certain only that the man I was defending was in a harder place than he should have been because I had screwed up in every which way. I was holding tight to a series of secrets that could destroy me and my client. I was keeping facts from Beth, my partner and best friend. I was playing a dangerous game. And yet, with all that, I still felt comfortable in that court of law, and the reason wasn’t too hard to fathom.

My life to that point had been pretty much an unmitigated failure. I had little money, less love, a few good friends that I could count on, but only a few, and a career that, despite its evident lack of financial rewards, had somehow veered out of my control. My last romantic relationship fitted the pattern of all those that preceded it, a twisted affair that ended badly, although this ending seemed to rise to a new and unprecedented level, seeing how it ended in death. No, the whole my-life situation was pretty dim. Somehow, after all this time, I still had not figured out the rules. Where was the rule book? I needed a rule book. I thought that graduating from college would do it, turn my life into something lovely and joyful and successful, but, no, it did not. Then I thought that getting into law school would do it, and then I thought that passing the bar would do it, and then I thought that surviving in my own practice for more than five years would do it. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again. I didn’t have the least notion of what was really going on. Others knew, others with fancy cars and big houses and lovely spouses and bushels of children, they knew how to play the game and come out winners. How did they get hold of the rule book while my hands still were empty?

But in court there was no such problem. Here there actually was a rule book, the Pennsylvania Code, and it contained between the many covers of its many volumes the rules of evidence and the rules of trial practice and the rules of criminal procedure and that great guidebook of human behavior, the penal code. In the course of my career I had spent enough time elbow deep in the law to learn these rules cold. And the other rules, too, the rules of dealing with your adversary, relating to the jury, bolstering your witnesses during direct examination, destroying their witnesses on cross. Outside the courtroom I was lost, inside I was slick. I’m not bragging, there were thousands just like me, it seemed to be an epidemic, lawyers helpless outside the courtroom while eagles within, and I don’t claim to have been the best, or even close. Sometimes I would see a master go through the paces and grow sick with jealousy. So, no, I was not the best, but what I did best I did in the courtroom. It was the only place where I understood the rules.

So, in order to keep within the new rules laid out by Judge Tifaro, I spent the rest of Jefferson’s opening restraining myself from objecting at every other word. It was seemingly a difficult task, I was halfway to standing many times until I openly noticed the judge’s displeasure and meekly returned to my seat. I must have been a sight, squirming in the chair as I restrained myself, I must have been something to behold, and I know this because of the expressions on the faces of the jury members as they were beholding me, even as Troy Jefferson tried to continue.

It was a good opening, I must admit, laying out the facts that he would prove against Guy Forrest with a devastating simplicity. Motive. Guy and the victim had been involved with a fraud in the Juan Gonzalez case. Hailey had turned on him by stealing most of the money from their joint account and then sleeping with another man. Guy had every reason to be furious at her, murderously angry. And it showed. The night of her death Hailey Prouix had been hit in the eye before being shot to death. Opportunity. Guy was the only one we knew to have been in the house with the victim on the night of the murder. Means. Guy’s fingerprints were on his gun, his gun, which the forensic evidence would prove had fired the bullet into Hailey Prouix’s heart. And then there were those little factual touches that, like accent pillows on a couch, add so much. Instead of calling 911 for an ambulance after the shooting, Guy had called his lawyer. And after the cops came, Guy tried to run away with a boatload of cash and a bottle of Viagra in his suitcase. Oh, the facts were clearly on Jefferson’s side, and his opening would have been strong enough to clasp the iron shackles upon Guy Forrest’s legs on its own if the jury hadn’t been concentrating so much on my valiant efforts to restrain myself. In fact, it got to the point where I didn’t even have to squirm like a snake to get their attention. Jefferson would make a point, the jury would glance my way, I would raise an eyebrow, and they would understand to take what had just been said with a jaundiced eye.

“MR. CARL,” said Judge Tifaro, gesturing me to a space in front of the jury after Troy Jefferson had retaken his seat. “Don’t make us wait.”

Still in my chair behind the defense table, I patted Guy on the shoulder of his gray suit and then squeezed his arm in solidarity. “My name is Victor Carl,” I said. “This is my client, Guy Forrest. Mr. Jefferson over there is trying to kill him, which is a serious thing. What, then, is Guy’s serious crime? Mr. Jefferson says it is murder, but he is wrong. Guy didn’t kill Hailey Prouix. Someone else did. Someone came into the house and walked up the stairs and shot Hailey Prouix dead while Guy was in the Jacuzzi with its whirlpools noisily whirling, wearing a set of headphones, listening to Louis Armstrong blow his cornet. That is what happened, no matter how strange it might sound. The police when they came found the Jacuzzi full, the Walkman by the side of the tub, the CD loaded and primed with Satchmo’s lovely horn. When they checked Guy’s hands the night of the murder, there was no evidence that he had fired a gun, because he hadn’t. He was listening to Louis Armstrong, and when he came out of the bath, he found Hailey Prouix dead. He didn’t do it. So why is Guy on trial? What is his crime, really?” I stood, stepped behind Guy, put a hand on each shoulder. “His crime here, the serious transgression for which they are putting him on trial for his life, is that he fell in love.”

I walked slowly now as I spoke, moved toward the jury until I was standing right beside their box, close enough so I could reach out and anoint the foreheads of each of those in the front row.

“Guy had a life we all could wish for. A lovely wife, two children, a house, a big house, a job with a law firm that paid well and would pay far better when he made partner, which was a lock, believe me. It was a lock because the person making the partnership decision was his father-in-law, Jonah Peale, as you will learn when Mr. Peale testifies in this courtroom for the prosecution. Guy had a life we all could wish for, but he gave it up. Why? Mr. Jefferson will claim he gave it up for money, but don’t you believe it. Prosecutors are paid less than they are worth and so they always think that money is at the root of everything, but not in this case, ladies and gentlemen. Whatever Guy Forrest did or didn’t do, it had nothing to do with money. The evidence will show that Guy was in line to make millions and he gave it up, and when you see that, you will know better than to think it was money that motivated him. Instead he sacrificed his wonderful life, tossed aside everything he had, for love.

“Hailey Prouix was beautiful, smart, sad, alluring. Hailey Prouix was a siren calling Guy away from his comfortable life into the unpredictable waters of love, and he couldn’t help himself. He abandoned his wife, his children, his job, his future, his very integrity – abandoned it all for her. Abandoned it all for love. I’m not saying he was right to desert his family and sully his profession – you have every right to condemn what he did, and he’ll have to suffer the consequences for the rest of his life – but he did it for love, and love, at least in this state, is not a hanging offense.

“Now, you’ve already heard tell of the Juan Gonzalez case, as if that will prove that Guy killed Hailey Prouix. Let me tell you now that it will prove nothing. Juan Gonzalez, a poor man with a family to support, had entered the hospital for a simple operation and ended up in an irreversible coma. Hailey Prouix represented the Gonzalez family, seeking compensation. Guy Forrest represented the doctor and the insurance company, seeking to avoid paying the family for the disastrous result. There was a file that showed that Mr. Gonzalez had a preexisting condition and which might have won the case for Guy’s clients, but Guy buried the file so that the family of Juan Gonzalez could get some money and so that Hailey Prouix, his love, could get some money, too.

“It was wrong what he did, I’m not defending it, but don’t think he did it for the money. If he was thinking only of the money, he would have stayed married to Jonah Peale’s daughter and become a partner in Jonah Peale’s firm and stood in line to inherit Jonah Peale’s fortune and ended up with more money than he could ever have spent. No, we can only imagine why Hailey Prouix got involved with Guy Forrest, we can only imagine as to her motivations, but when you hear the evidence, you will have no doubt as to what motivated Guy Forrest. He buried that file, failed his responsibilities to his clients and the law, stepped over the line for love. What he did was wrong, and maybe it was a crime, a crime for love, and maybe for that he should be tried. But he didn’t bury that file for the money, and when Mr. Jefferson says he later killed his love for that same money, you will know he is wrong.

“And you heard Mr. Jefferson tell you that Hailey Prouix had another lover and that might be why Guy killed her. You would think Mr. Jefferson could figure out whether it was the one or the other, but that is what he has come up with. And the evidence will show how Mr. Jefferson discovered that fact of Hailey Prouix’s lover, by reaching deep within Hailey Prouix’s body and pulling out evidence, by testing that evidence with the most advanced scientific techniques, by comparing that DNA with Guy’s own and showing that the complex DNA strands do not match. We will have no dispute with the accuracy of that test, but only with the idea that Guy Forrest could have conducted the same intricate scientific tests to learn that truth. It seems ridiculous, doesn’t it? But Mr. Jefferson will rely on such an idea to show motive when there will be not a shred of evidence that Guy knew of this other lover.

“Mr. Jefferson assumes that Hailey was leaving Guy for this other man and that was why he hit her first and then killed her. But all we know for sure is that Guy and Hailey were living together, were engaged to be married, were planning for a future as man and wife. They were going to Costa Rica for a lovers’ vacation. You will see the plane tickets in their names. Tell me, ladies and gentlemen, who was Hailey Prouix leaving for whom? You could equally assume the opposite of what Mr. Jefferson claims, that she was leaving this other lover for Guy and that was why the other man hit her when she told him it was over and then later killed her. The coroner will not be able to place exactly the time of the blow that caused the bruise. It happened before the killing, but we don’t know for sure how far before, we don’t know if it happened, maybe, at the time of the tryst with her lover earlier in the day when, maybe, she said good-bye and he lost control. And when you see Guy’s name on the ticket to Costa Rica, maybe you will consider this possibility more likely.

“So maybe, possibly, probably it was this other lover that killed her. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you should be asking yourselves, what will you learn during the trial about this other lover other than his existence, which is beyond dispute? Will you learn who he was? No. Will you learn whether or not Hailey had given him the key to her house? No. Whether or not Hailey had shown him the location of the gun during one of their trysts? No. Whether or not he was murderously angry at Hailey Prouix for leaving him? No. Whether he has an alibi for the night of the killing? No. Whether he was, instead, lurking alone outside the house, waiting until his anger forced him through the door to the hidden location of the gun and then up the stairs, into that bedroom where he shot the woman he loved with a dangerous obsession, the woman who was abandoning him to his cold, cruel loneliness, shot her through the heart? Watch as this trial unfolds, and see if any of those answers are provided, and wonder why not.

“And ask yourselves about the mysterious patch of wet carpet found by the police beside the front door, and wonder who it was that came from outside and left something there, an umbrella, his boots, something, when we know for sure it wouldn’t have been Guy. And ask yourselves about the strange man in black rushing out of Hailey Prouix’s house the night after the murder, when Guy Forrest was already in police custody.

“This is what I believe the evidence will show. The evidence will show that Guy had no motive, but that another might have. The evidence will show the possibility that another had opportunity and access to the means to commit this crime. The evidence will show that the prosecution brought this case before they found the evidence needed to answer the crucial questions I have just raised, because they thought they had discovered the ultimate answer. They have accused Guy Forrest of killing Hailey Prouix because his is the only name they could come up with and the link between Guy and Hailey was powerful and undeniable. Love. He loved her. He had given up everything for her. That is why he is on trial today, because of that love.

“And so this is, finally, what I want you to ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen: Whenever did love become a crime?”

38

WE STOOD as the jury was let out for the day, remained standing as Judge Tifaro followed. I put my arm around Guy’s back, squeezed his shoulder, said a few encouraging words before the bailiff led him away for transport back to the county jail. So it was just Beth and me at the defense table as I packed up my notebooks, my folders, my omnipresent yellow pads, when something banged hard onto the wooden tabletop beside me.

Startled, I turned to find a large brown briefcase and holding on to it a grinning Troy Jefferson.

“That was pretty good,” he said, “that song and dance of yours.”

“Thank you.”

“You should have lowered your voice and done a Barry White. I can hear him singing it: ‘Whenever did love become a crime?’ But it’s not going to fly. Doesn’t matter where you try to point the finger, the fingerprints on the gun are Guy’s.”

“We’ll get to that in the course of the trial.”

“I had thought blaming the lover might be your strategy, as good as any, but I didn’t think you’d be so foolish as to spout it in the opening when any day, any minute he could walk right into the courtroom.”

“Well, there you go, that’s what we are, Beth and I, a couple of fools.”

“You blaming him in the opening, getting it into all the papers, might just force his hand. And it certainly forced mine. We’re twenty-four/sevening the search for the missing man.”

“Maybe you should have twenty-four/sevened it before you swore in the jury.”

“Oh, we’ll find him and his alibi. The detectives pissed and moaned about the overtime, but they’ve already got leads.”

“Speaking of the detectives, I saw Stone at the table, but not our good friend Breger.”

“He took a jaunt.”

“Anyplace interesting?”

“Vegas.”

“Gambling?”

“No. But before he left, he told me he still had some questions about that night of the murder. Once again he asked if you would consent to allow us to examine your phone logs for that night.”

“And once again I refuse,” I said. “Attorney-client privilege. And I don’t think the judge will set the precedent of allowing you to rummage around the phone records of the defense attorney after a trial starts.”

“Maybe not, but not every defense lawyer is called just moments after a murder. I suppose we’ll just have to see.” He opened his briefcase, took out a blue-backed motion, tossed it onto the table before me. “I’ve been holding this for a while, but I think it’s too hot to hold on to any longer. I’ll be filing it before we leave the courthouse. I expect she’ll rule tomorrow.”

“Let me guess, Troy. You weren’t the quiet type on the basketball court.”

“I did my share of verbalizing,” he said with his grin before he turned for the exit, followed by the two ADAs who were assisting him. Beth and I watched as the coterie departed.

I scanned the document he had given me: MOTION TO COMPEL THE DISCLOSURE OF CERTAIN TELEPHONE LOGS. “You’ll have to answer this tonight,” I said as I handed it off to Beth.

Beth snatched the motion with her good hand and quickly reviewed it. Her wrist had healed badly. The bones had needed to berebroken, manipulated into proper alignment, and fastened together with metal pins inserted by a huge pneumatic device to keep them in place. For her it had been a summer of pain, but it looked as though the doctors had finally gotten it right and this would be the last of her casts. She continued reading the motion as she said, “He’s right, you know.”

“Who, Troy? Nah, he’s just talking trash.”

“No he’s not. He seemed almost gleeful.”

“Really? I thought he seemed a bit rattled.”

“Not rattled, relieved. If you had been less specific, you would have kept your options open to the end. Any big surprises could have been accounted for. Now, if the other lover walks in, we’re sunk. What if he shows up and matches the DNA and then gives himself a perfect alibi? What then?”

“He won’t.”

“Why not?”

“He has a reason to hide. Maybe he’s married, maybe he’s engaged to someone else, maybe his gay lover is a jealous fiend. Whatever, he hasn’t come forward yet and won’t in the future.”

“But he might if he thinks the real killer is getting off because of his silence. He might suffer the embarrassment to stop a travesty of justice.”

“He’s not that noble.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Trust me.”

“I don’t know, Victor,” said Beth, staring now at the door out of which Troy Jefferson had just departed. “It’s almost as if Jefferson already knew who the other lover was and was preparing to whisk him in as soon as you blundered into his trap.”

“Wouldn’t he have had to disclose that to us already?” I said, my voice betraying my sudden nervousness.

“Not if it was merely a suspicion that he can now send his detectives out to turn into a fact.”

I wondered on that for a moment and then shook my head. “I had to do it. To win this thing I need the jury to see the missing lover behind every question, every possibility. If I just tried to offer him at the end, it would have looked like flummery. Now he’s sitting right here at the defense table, ready to shoulder the blame when the evidence is equivocal. He’s what the jury will see when that police technician testifies that she couldn’t detect gunpowder residue on Guy’s hands at the crime scene. She’ll try to dismiss the result by claiming that the gunpowder washed off in the rain, but the jury will be wondering if maybe the police tested the wrong man. And when the DNA pattern of the semen gets put up on the chart, without my saying a word, they’ll be wondering if they’re looking at the DNA of a killer. By the time I get to closing, they’ll have argued the case for themselves and found reasonable doubt.”

Beth just stared at me, a faint amusement at my assurance in her eyes. “It sounds so easy.”

“Genius always does. But in the end all our supposes don’t matter.” I rapped her cast gently with my knuckle, the sound sharp and hollow. “Hello. Anybody there? This is what our client wants us to argue, he has told us so repeatedly, so this is the way we go.”

“I’m not used to seeing you so deferential to the client.”

“He’s a lawyer, and it’s his life on the line.”

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t blow up in his face,” she said. “Have you decided if Guy is going to testify?”

“He wants to, but I won’t let him. He’d have to say he knew about the other man and that he hit her on the night of her murder. Those two facts would kill us.”

“But what about the open door, the sudden sound? How are you going to prove up the possibility that someone else could have slipped into that house the night of the murder?”

“That’s why, dear Beth, they invented cross-examination.”

39

CROSS-EXAMINATION IS a witch’s brew. It most famously can be a truth serum for the untruthful, though that wasn’t a problem yet in our trial. There were no liars here, no falsified testimonies being used to frame up our defendant. The case against Guy Forrest was powerfully circumstantial, and the circumstances, as presented by Troy Jefferson, were basically true. It was only the natural inferences flowing from those circumstances that we had quarrel with. But that just required a different recipe of cross, an al-chemist’s potion to turn the inconceivable conceivable, the unthinkable thinkable, the improbable into a stone-cold absolute possibility, to raise phantoms and conjure them into flesh and blood.

“NOW, MRS. Morgan,” I said, “you stated in your direct testimony that you saw Mr. Forrest sitting outside his house about eleven o’clock on the night of the killing, is that right?”

“That’s right,” said Evelyn Morgan, a well-dressed matron with hair shellacked in place. She was a neighbor of Hailey’s, across the street and a few numbers down.

“And Mr. Forrest wasn’t wearing much, isn’t that right?”

“Not from what I could see, though there were shadows, so I couldn’t tell to the last inch.”

“Good thing for the shadows, right, Mrs. Morgan? Were the upstairs lights on then, do you remember?”

“Yes, they were on. Or at least I think they were on. I noticed that because earlier I seemed to remember that the upstairs window was dark.”

“And that window is to the master bedroom?”

“I was never invited inside, but I think so.”

“Good enough. And then later, after you first spied Mr. Forrest, you saw a man in a raincoat go up the steps, talk with Mr. Forrest, take something off the cement step, and then go inside. And you said that man was me?”

“As best I could tell,” she said.

“You’ve got good eyes, Mrs. Morgan,” I said. “I notice you wear glasses. Were you wearing them that night?”

“Yes I was. I wear them until I go to sleep every night. And I don’t sleep as much as I used to.”

“Fine. Now, when you saw me go up those steps, was I holding an umbrella?”

“Not that I remember.”

“A bag of some sort, any object I could have laid down beside the doorway when I went inside?”

“No, sir.”

“And I wasn’t inside long, was I, before I came out again?”

“Not that I remember.”

“And the police came soon after.”

“Yes, they did.”

“It must have been quite a sight.”

“Well, it is normally a very quiet neighborhood.”

“You’re married, aren’t you, Mrs. Morgan?”

“Yes I am, for thirty-three years now.”

“Thirty-three years. My, oh, my. And you have how many children?”

“Four, and two grandchildren, with two more on the way.”

“That is something, yes. And with all that, and of course the volunteer work you testified about, you don’t have much free time, do you?”

“I’m kept busy.”

“I bet you are, Mrs. Morgan. I can see that you’re not one of those sad, pathetic ladies who spend all their days sticking their noses out the window spying on their neighbors.”

“I should say not.”

“You’ve got too much going on in your own life to be like that.”

“Yes I do, Mr. Carl.”

“Which is why you say you saw Mr. Forrest sitting on the steps but you didn’t see him actually leave the house, because you were busy living your life, not twitching curtains to see what the neighbors were up to.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“So if somebody had walked right up those steps and into the house, somebody, let’s say, with an umbrella or a bag, you wouldn’t have noticed, would you?”

“Maybe not, I don’t know.”

“In fact, a whole army could have gone in and out and you wouldn’t have seen it, because you were living your life, not sitting by the window like a spy.”

“I suppose.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Morgan. That is all.”

NOW, IT wasn’t a sham defense I was presenting with my witch’s brew, no, not at all. I’m never above presenting a sham defense, of course, poking holes in an airtight case just to create some doubt where none should exist is a defense attorney’s job, but this wasn’t that. Hailey had been murdered and if Guy was innocent, as I now believed, then some other person had come into that house, climbed those stairs, shot her dead. The man I was blaming hadn’t done it, I knew that with perfect knowledge, since I was broadening the boundaries for the defense bar and, in effect, blaming myself, leaving my name out for propriety’s sake. But someone had indeed killed her, someone, surely, and my job, as I perceived it, was to take the simple testimony that Jefferson presented and create a hole big enough for that murderer to walk through and do his dark deed.

“NOW, OFFICER Pepper, in your report you say when you made a quick examination of the house after finding the corpse, you noticed a small patch of carpet by the side of the door that was wet.”

“That is correct.”

“And it was about a foot square, isn’t that right?”

“Approximately. I didn’t take out the tape measure.”

“Was the roof at that part of the house leaking?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“The wall?”

“No.”

“So this spot of carpet, it had been wetted by an umbrella, maybe, or a coat thrown to the ground, or a pair of boots.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“Did you check it for fibers or debris?”

“It was checked, but I didn’t do it. From what I understand, nothing unusual was found, other than some small stones which could have been there previously.”

“Now, in that corner there was no umbrella stand or coatrack, was there?”

“No, sir.”

“So this wasn’t the place where Miss Prouix or Mr. Forrest usually dropped their wet things.”

“Objection,” said Troy Jefferson.

“Sustained,” said Judge Tifaro.

“You’re sustaining the objection just like that, Judge? No argument, no explanation given?”

“That’s right”

“I’m just trying to show it was highly unlikely that either Miss Prouix or Mr. Forrest would have left anything there, that’s all.”

“Not with this witness. Objection sustained, move on.”

“Wow, okay. I’ll try. Now, Officer Pepper, isn’t it possible, based on the size and location of that spot, that someone, anyone, came into that house that night and dropped something wet there, like a bag, or an umbrella, or their boots, on their way up the stairs?”

“Anything’s possible.”

“And if that possibility occurred, and that person left after whatever it was he did, then he would have taken the wet object, whether bag or umbrella or boots, with him, unlike Guy, who was still there and would have left it right in place.”

“Anything’s possible, like I said.”

“Yes it is, Officer. No further questions.”

I COULDN’T help thinking through the course of the trial about Roylynn Prouix and her little black book.

Troy Jefferson was laying out the smooth surface of his case, a simple explanation of time and space that made it impossible for anyone other than Guy Forrest to have killed Hailey Prouix. I, on the other hand, was trying to create a disruption in his continuum, attempting to distort time and space so that a gap appeared, a yawning hole big enough to allow someone other than Guy to step through and take the shot. It seemed a trick, what I was doing, a distortion, but as I worked, I realized it wasn’t a trick at all. It was there, the gap, absolutely, and I was simply making its presence felt.

I thought of that primordial black hole of which Roylynn had spoken, the thing that had distorted her life and her sister’s. She had said that Jesse Sterrett had been devoured by that same black hole. It had seemed at the time like the spinnings of a mind deranged by some great tragedy, but during the course of the trial I began to reassess. Each time in my cross-examinations that I bent the smooth surface of Troy Jefferson’s case and allowed the hole to grow ever larger, it was as if the force of some massive body was becoming more evident. It was still shadowy, this body, still unidentifiable, but it was there, twisting time and space, opening its murderous gap.

The mass of a mountain, had said Roylynn Prouix, in a million millionth of an inch. With each cross, with each question, it seemed ever more present, ever more frightening, ever more true.

“OFFICER JENKINS, you testified that you found People’s Exhibit Seven, which is a portable CD player with headphones, by the Jacuzzi in the master bathroom.”

“That’s right.”

“Did this Jacuzzi have water jets built in?”

“Yes, there was a timer switch on the wall.”

“Did you try the switch to see if the jets worked?”

“I did.”

“Pretty loud, weren’t they?”

“I suppose. In that small room, sure.”

“Now, the headphones you found, are they the normal lightweight things that usually come with such players?”

“I don’t know what usually comes with players, but these were pretty good headphones. If I can look at the exhibit, I could tell you more.”

I brought People’s Exhibit Seven to the witness stand. “Those are your initials on the bag, isn’t that right?”

“My initials are first. The other initials are from the technicians who examined it in the lab.”

“Fine. Now, if you could open the bag, take out the exhibit, and look at the headphones. Those are the same headphones you found by the tub, aren’t they?”

“Yes. They are made by a company called Koss. They’re the kind with padding that covers the ear.”

“Pretty high quality?”

“I don’t know for sure, but better than usual, I would suppose.”

“And the disc inside was Louis Armstrong’s Greatest Hits?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And it’s still inside?”

The officer opened the case.”Yes.”

“Now, Officer, did you happen to check the settings on the disc player before you put it into that evidence bag?”

“What do you mean?”

“The player has a little digital readout, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does.”

“And that readout gives all kinds of information. It tells the track number of the song being played. It tells the state of the battery. It tells the volume it is being played at.”

“I suppose so.”

“And did you determine those numbers when you found the disc player and put it into that nice plastic bag you wrote your initials on?”

“I didn’t want smear any fingerprints, so, no, I didn’t play around with it. Can I check my notes and see if I took down anything else?”

“Please,” I said, having already reviewed the notes and knowing that he did not.

“No, I suppose not,” he said finally. “I did make sure it played, though. I listened a bit to the disc.”

“And it played pretty loudly, didn’t it?”

“I suppose, with the headphones on.”

“Now, I wonder if you might help us get a little more specific. May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

Judge Tifaro gave me a skeptical look, which grew more strained when I smiled and waved two AA batteries at her. She glanced at Troy Jefferson, who stood and thought about it before sitting down again without raising an objection. “Go ahead, Mr. Carl,” she said.

“I’m going to put in some fresh batteries and play the same CD that was in the player when you found it, and I’d like you to tell me whether or not it was this loud when you listened to it on the night of the murder.”

When the new batteries were in and the player was set to a track called “Basin Street Blues,” I asked Officer Jenkins to put on the headphones.

“Do you think it might have been louder than this?”

“Excuse me?” he said loudly.

I gestured for him to take off the headphones.

“How are those headphones, Officer? Comfortable?”

“Oh, yeah, sure.”

“Do you think that the volume it was set at the night of the murder when you checked the sound might have been louder than this?”

“Yes, I think so. Yes, it was pretty loud.”

“Okay, now, what I’d like to do is for you to put the headphones back on, and slowly I’ll raise the volume. I’d like you to look at the little digital readout and when you’re absolutely sure that it is at least as loud as or louder than it was that night, I’d like you to raise your hand to let us know. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We’re looking for the outer boundary of volume.”

“I understand.”

“All right, let’s try it.”

He put the headphones back on and stared down at the digital monitor, as did I. Slowly I pressed the volume button at the bottom of the player. I had started it very low, at two, and was raising it now to three, to three and a half, to four, to four and a half. I was watching not just the volume readout but also the time of the track. When it was at a volume of six and a half and the time into the track was 4:35, when Armstrong’s brilliant horn is added to the mix in a roaring finale, I scratched my back.

A shot rang out, or something very much like a shot.

The whole courtroom jumped, the jury, the judge, the bailiff reached for his gun, all looked around crazily for the source of the shot, all but myself and Officer Jenkins, whose eyes were focused still on the little digital readout.

Beth, standing now, picked up the large legal volume she had dropped flat onto the defense table and apologized for the disturbance.

Troy Jefferson leaped to his feet and objected.

Judge Tifaro was starting to launch into a brutal admonishment aimed at Beth when Officer Jenkins raised his hand.

The judge stopped midsentence and, her mouth still open to speak, turned to stare at the witness.

Officer Jenkins took off his earphones. “It’s hard to tell for certain, but my best guess,” he said, still looking at the player, “is that the volume at the time was somewhere here between seven and eight, if that’s helpful.”

Officer Jenkins looked around at the quiet laughter, wondering what he had said that was so funny.

“Thank you, Officer,” I said. “That’s very helpful.”

AND SO it continued, the trial of Guy Forrest, and so I continued with my witch’s brew of cross-examination to bring to light a gap in time and space big enough for a murderer to walk through. And as I worked, as carefully and methodically as Troy Jefferson, and as that primordial black hole became a presence ever more real, something strange happened that made me wonder if indeed the entire space-time continuum had shifted.

A friend of Hailey’s was testifying, which was strange, because I didn’t know Hailey had any friends, and she was talking about the woman she knew. It wasn’t such a flattering portrait, of a woman materialistic, casually cruel – I use the term “friend’‘ broadly here – but as she spoke, I could detect something slight in the air about me, so slight I almost missed it, something shimmering in the courtroom. I had maybe noticed something before, some small distortion as, bit by bit, the testimony of the neighbors, of the crime-scene officers, of the witnesses who one by one linked together suspect and murderer, began to paint a portrait through their words. But in the testimony of this witness, this friend, it became clearer and clearer, word by word. I looked around to see if anyone else had spotted it, but, no, it had come only for me, with its sharp cheekbones and pursed lips and the sadness in its eyes.

The friend testified at one time to being in Hailey’s office and hearing her speak, over the speakerphone, to a man she didn’t recognize. She had met Guy before, this friend, and so she knew it wasn’t he, but no names were used, and Hailey didn’t tell her who it was. Something about the Stallone matter was all she could get, but she could tell, this friend, that there was something going on between Hailey and the man, something intimate and strong. And, no, they hadn’t been fighting. And, no, there were no intimations of problems. And, no, she couldn’t imagine that the man on the other side of that phone conversation, the way he spoke so sweetly to her, could have been her murderer.

Before she had finished her testimony, I leaned over to Beth and whispered, “Why don’t you take this one.”

Beth was lovely on cross, strong, clear, making it obvious that from the conversation the woman could have no real idea whether the relationship had any future or whether or not the man on the other side of that line might have turned murderous when rejected. In fact, the only thing we could really glean from the conversation was the strong link between the two, a link that could easily have turned wrong. Jefferson had thought the testimony would defuse my theory, when all it did was make the missing lover more mysterious, more threatening, a disembodied voice able to wreak any havoc.

I concentrated as much as I could on the testimony, but as the vision of the specter grew stronger, my mind wandered. It was Hailey, of course, conjured by my alchemy from some strange place to remind me. I had been struggling so hard to save Guy and protect my secret that I had forgotten what had driven me from the start, but here she was, Hailey Prouix, come to keep me to the decision that had been made.

Over the dead body of my lover I had pledged that I would discover the truth behind her murder and that the truth I discovered would be served, whatever the price to be later paid. And what was I doing to learn what had really happened, to learn who had really pulled the trigger and bring that killer to justice? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That realization made me sick to my stomach as the testimony continued and the specter shimmered.

But just then a note was dropped in front of me as if out of the air. Without looking up, I opened it.

WE NEED TO TALK.

We need to talk. Are there four more frightening words in the English language? For a moment I suspected the message had come from my personal specter, but when I looked up from the note, the spell had been broken and she was gone.

So who was it, who needed to talk with me? I searched around until I found him, looking at me with that strange, bent gaze of his, and I knew without doubt that I was in serious trouble.

Detective Breger, back from Vegas and now in search of the missing lover, wanted to have a chat.

40

IF THIS had been a first date, there wouldn’t have been a second.

Breger sat next to me at the bar, but he wouldn’t look at me. He seemed uncomfortable, almost embarrassed to be meeting me without his partner, as if he were cheating. We talked a bit about the Eagles, we passed platitudes about politics. It was the kind of conversation bored strangers with real interest in nothing other than their booze suffer through. We were at the bar of a pizza chain out near the big suburban mall, a place that felt as empty of context as the huge shopping park in whose shadow it sat, a place that could have been anywhere in this great land, on the side of any highway, sandwiched between any two fast-food joints, a fine enough place to go only when there’s no place else to be. Breger had suggested this place with its yawning emptiness, a place where no one knew us or cared about what we had to say to one another. Both of us were drinking out of politeness, but neither of us was really paying attention to the beers in our frosted franchise mugs. I was waiting for him to get down to business, he was waiting for something else, though I couldn’t quite tell what.

“What’s up, Detective?” I said finally, when we had talked of the weather about as much as I could stand.

“I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

“Not too much.”

“So it seems, but still I’m wondering,” he said. “Why do you keep fighting our attempts to examine your phone logs?”

“Attorney-client privilege.”

“I know how you keep us from looking, and the judge has backed you each time we’ve made the request, but I’m asking why.”

“Privilege is like a muscle, Detective. If you don’t exercise it, next time you turn around, it has become withered and weak.”

He gave a quick and dismissive glance at my biceps. “We’re still trying to figure out how Guy called you after he found his fiancée dead.”

“Let’s hope you get to the bottom of that mystery once and for all, save everybody a bit of worry.”

He shook his head, took a sip of his beer. He didn’t like my answer. I didn’t like that he was still asking the question.

“Did you win in Vegas?” he said.

“Vegas?”

“Yeah, Vegas. Did you win or did you leave your money on the craps table?”

I waited a moment, tried to figure how to play it, and then decided to play it straight. Sooner or later the fact of our little trip was bound to come out, and sooner had just stepped through the door. “Some guy I was with thought he had a system.”

“Did he?”

“Yes, but not a good system.”

“Find anything of interest in the safe-deposit box?”

“Safe-deposit box?”

“Hailey Prouix’s box at the Nevada One Bank, Paradise Road branch.”

“Who exactly are you investigating, Detective?”

“And tell me, how did you find West Virginia?”

“Wild and wonderful, just as the ads say.”

“Our office received a call that you were down there asking questions.”

“Yes, well, that’s what lawyers do. We ask questions.”

“But why there?”

“I was getting a little history.”

“And the man you were with down there, this Skink. It seems he also was in Las Vegas.”

“Just an investigator I have working for me.”

“We’d like to speak to him.”

“That wouldn’t be proper, considering he’s covered by the attorney-client privilege, too.”

“I am struggling here, Carl, struggling to figure out your side in all this. Stone doesn’t like you. She thinks you want to ask her out but are afraid, and she’s glad you’re afraid. Saves her from breaking your heart. She says you’re smarmy.”

“Me?”

“Smarmy and weak and definitely hiding something. I don’t like you much either, I’ve decided. I think you’re whiny and manipulative and not half as clever as you think you are, but I don’t really care about all that.”

“Does that mean you’d go out with me?”

“Somehow I have the strange sense that you’re looking for the right kind of outcome here. I have a sense, maybe, that you’re as interested as me in finding out what the hell really happened to Hailey Prouix.”

“You don’t think Guy Forrest did it?”

“The evidence points right in his face. But I have to admit that some of what you said in your opening had been on my mind from the start. Like he really was in love with her. Like he never was in it for the money. Like he doesn’t seem the type to end a fight with a bullet. But I’ve already told this to Jefferson, which is as far as my legal obligation goes. It is his decision whether or how to proceed. So it’s not the doubts I’m struggling with. What I’m struggling with is you.”

“You have unresolved feelings and you find them threatening. I understand. It’s perfectly natural, really.”

“You are in this deeper than you let on. You are in this up to your neck, though I can’t quite figure out how. You are in this in ways that give me serious pause and leave me struggling to figure out what to do with something I found.”

“Something exculpatory? If it’s exculpatory, you have to turn it over. Brady v. Maryland.”

“Now who’s the jerk throwing out cites? But what I have is nothing right now, though I have a sense you might be able to tell me enough to make it more interesting.”

“Tell you what?”

“Let’s start with why you turned over the gun.”

I paused for a moment, wondering what he had found, where he was going, whether or not I could trust him, even with a little bit of the truth. “I thought your possessing the gun,” I said slowly, “might further the ends of justice.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s the way it is with lawyers and politicians both, we can make even the truth sound like lies.”

“What did you find in Vegas?”

“A story.”

“Go ahead.”

“A story about a boy who was killed a decade and a half ago in a little town in West Virginia.”

“Hailey Prouix’s hometown.”

“That’s right. He had fallen in love with Hailey, they had a stormy romance, and then he found out about something. He found out about something, and it made him mad as hell and put him at a crossroads. He was going to either run away with his love, Hailey Prouix, or hurt someone. And there he was, at the quarry on the south side of town, waiting to hear which way it was going to be, when the next thing he somehow falls off a ledge, cracks his head open, and dies in the water that had collected at the quarry’s bottom. The natural suspect was a guy named Grady Pritchett, rich man’s son, big man in high school who had been fighting with our dead boy just a few days before. All eyes turned to him, but he had an alibi, and a pretty convincing one at that. Hailey Prouix. Funny how it worked. And funny how after Hailey stood up for Grady Pritchett she got her college and law school all paid for so she could get the hell out of Pierce once and for all.”

“How come I never heard any of this?”

“You haven’t been asking the right questions.”

“What kind of car does this Grady Pritchett drive?”

“Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Doesn’t drive a car, drives a truck. A big black pickup.”

“Where does he live?”

“Just a few towns down the road from Pierce.”

“And you think this Grady might have come up here and killed that girl?”

“Nope.”

“You think he killed that boy fifteen years ago?”

“Nope.”

“Then what the hell do you think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t yet figured it out, but there’s something connecting the two deaths. I met up with Hailey’s sister. She’s certifiable, in an actual asylum, treats some pop physics book as her Bible, but I took from her babbling that she, too, thinks the two are related. And if they are, I want to find out how. Believe this, Detective, all I want is for whoever killed Hailey Prouix to go straight to hell.”

“Even if it’s your client?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“She seduced him for the Gonzalez money. She set him up for it, met him at a bar, let their knees bang accidentally, and seduced him completely and absolutely. He fell stupidly in love and lost his bearings and gave up everything for her. Like I said in my opening, for him it was never about the money, it was about a love that was transforming, or maybe more precisely the hope for a love that was transforming. She set him up for the money, yes, but his hope was real, and he never could have killed that hope. Even when it all turned bad, he closed his eyes and kept it alive, because it was the hope he was chasing more than even her.”

“And obsession couldn’t have turned to violence?”

“Not with him, not with her. See, no matter what happened, he’d always remember the way he felt when their knees banged accidentally at that bar.”

Maybe there was something in my voice that betrayed me, because he turned to stare at me with that wandering gaze of his and he said, “And how did that feel exactly?”

“I’m telling you what I can.”

“Maybe telling only what you can is not enough.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t explain the knocking of the knees and the way it had felt, the confusion and hope and lust all mixed together, I just couldn’t. I would be betraying more than myself, more than Guy, I would be betraying her, too. So instead I decided to say something else, something that would resonate. It is always in times of maximum stress, when all alternatives fail, that lawyers tend to turn to that most unlikely tactic, the truth.

“I saw the body, Detective. I saw her on that mattress with a bullet through her chest. I saw the way her arms were crazily akimbo, I saw the way the blood contrasted with the pale of her skin. I’ve seen a few corpses, not as many as you, but a few, and they never fail to stun me with their abject lifelessness. It’s not like you can just breathe life back into them, it’s not like they’re sleeping, it’s something else, something distorted in a way that haunts the dreams. I can’t just let that go, I can’t just play my minor role and let the rest of you decide how it all gets sorted out. I saw the body, Detective.”

He breathed in quickly through his nose, or was it a snort? I couldn’t tell. He stared straight ahead for a long moment before downing his beer and swiveling away from me. He reached into his jacket and tossed something onto the bar, a dollar or two for the beer, I supposed, and without saying a further word he climbed off his stool and headed out the door, right out the door.

Gone.

A despair flitted over my shoulders in that instant, a despair that filled me with a shocking sense of hopelessness. There was something about Breger I found comforting, something solid. He had shown faith in me, kindness, too, in his way. I admired how fairly he had handled the case, and I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to understand and say that I had done right, that everything would be okay. For some reason, from him, it would sound like the real thing. But he had instead just snorted at me and climbed down and walked away, a gesture that let me know with utter clarity that I had not done right, that everything would not be okay.

I was sitting at the bar, feeling the despair, when I noticed a piece of paper in front of me. It looked like a bar tab. When I scanned the bar for the money Breger had left, there was nothing else, and I figured Breger had stuck me with the check. But then I looked at the paper more closely and saw that it wasn’t a bill. It was something else.

A speeding ticket issued by the Philadelphia Police.

Left on the bar, for me, by my good friend Detective Breger.

I stared at it for a long moment, the name of the driver, Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, which I didn’t recognize, the make and style of the automobile, the state and number of the license plate, the location of the violation, the date. The date. I stared at it for a moment and then a moment more, and then I took out my phone.

First I called Beth and told her that she would have to handle the next day of the trial all by herself.

“What should I do?” she asked.

“Vamp,” I said. “With all your heart.”

Then I called the airline and made a reservation for two on the first flight out the next morning headed for Charleston, West Virginia.

“Will you be needing a rental car at the airport?” asked the reservation man.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes indeed.”

41

FALL HAD come to Pierce with a suddenness that stunned. How long had I been away, how long had the trial of Guy Forrest been going on? It seemed I had lost my temporal bearings. When I had driven into the little town before, it felt as though the promise of spring had just given way to the relentless summer. Now the dry colors of autumn had taken hold, the bright yellows and oranges heralding the death of a season. Right now it was a riotous bounty of color. In a few weeks all would be bare in Pierce.

We walked up the hill, through fallen leaves, their desiccated bodies crumbling beneath our feet as we made our way to the church.

Inside, our footfalls echoed about the plaster and wood of the main chapel. We knocked on the door of the rectory, and Reverend Henson bade us enter without asking first who we were. His face, when he recognized me, was distressed but not surprised, as if he had been expecting me to return all along. As if the only thing that surprised him was that I had waited so long and had brought with me someone new.

“Reverend Henson,” I said, “I’d like to introduce Oliver Breger, a Montgomery County homicide detective. Hailey died in Montgomery County and he is investigating her death. I hope you don’t mind, but I thought it important to bring him along.”

The reverend smiled thinly at Breger. “A little out of your jurisdiction, isn’t it, Detective?”

“Mr. Carl said it might be interesting.”

Breger wasn’t looking at Henson as he spoke, his gaze instead was slipping around the small room with its cherry paneling and shelves filled with prayer books and theological texts. Behind the door hung the reverend’s vestment, flat and black and surprisingly frail, pinned as it was, limp and small, to the wood. It was a comfortable room, a place to read and prepare sermons, a place to have the pro forma talk with the bride and groom before the wedding or to hear stories from the family about the dear departed before the funeral, a comfortable room, but not lush. No, the Reverend Henson did not live a posh life in Pierce, it was clear. Whatever he had gained in the bargain he had brokered, it had not been his own material gain.

Henson shifted in his seat and asked us to sit. He wasn’t happy having a homicide detective in his church, I was sure. I suppose he wasn’t happy having me there either, but I hadn’t come to make the good reverend happy. Something had happened in Pierce sixteen years ago, something rotten that the reverend was in the middle of, something that bore directly on the trial of Guy Forrest. The speeding ticket given me by the detective had shown with utter clarity that the deaths of Jesse Sterrett and Hailey Prouix were indeed related. To demonstrate that to a jury, I was going to need the reverend’s testimony. And I would need something else, something maybe Breger could help me get if I convinced him I was right. That something else was what had prompted me to ask Breger along. His own innate curiosity, so vital to the makeup of a first-rate detective, was what prompted him to agree.

“I’ve come again,” I said, “to talk about Jesse Sterrett.”

“Of course you have. But I’ve told you all I can, Mr. Carl. I have certain… responsibilities.”

“You’re talking about privilege, aren’t you? Priest-penitent. Oh, I know about privilege. Detective Breger could tell you all about my reliance on privilege.”

“I’ve thought about this ever since you left, I considered all my options, read what I could on the subject. It is a balancing act, to be sure, but I have done that balancing in my head, over and over, and I believe there is nothing I can do. I am truly sorry.”

“You need to know, Reverend Henson, that it didn’t end with Jesse Sterrett. It isn’t over.”

“There is nothing I can do.”

“He killed Hailey.”

“No, no, he didn’t,” he said. “I checked as soon as I heard the terrible news. He never left the state.”

“He sent someone else to do it. And that’s not all. He tried to kill me, too. An attempt on my life is something I take pretty personally, especially when it is my partner who ends up in the hospital, dazed with a concussion, her wrist snapped like a twig. The doctors are still trying to put it back together.”

Henson startled behind the desk and then looked away. “I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t over, Reverend. No one paid the ultimate price sixteen years ago, no one was convicted of murder in his stead, Hailey saw to that, but if you ask Grady Pritchett, a price was paid nonetheless, a price almost more than he could bear. And now my client is on trial for his life. If he loses, they will kill him. I know you can’t allow that. I know you can’t allow a man to die for something he did not do.”

“I’m sure it won’t come to that. I’m sure you can pull it out with some dashing legal maneuver. I’ve heard about you Philadelphia lawyers.”

“Oh, I have some tricks up my sleeve, yes I do. But so does the prosecutor, also a Philadelphia lawyer, with flashier moves than mine. And really, all I can tell you with certainty after a decade of practicing law is that no one knows what a jury will do. And here’s the thing, Reverend. You coming in after the fact might not be enough. The appellate court might not believe you, or might decide you are speaking up too late. The court might let the verdict stand. You might end up in the prison parking lot, fists balled in frustration, as an innocent man dies for someone else’s sins and for your silence.”

“Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re mistaken. What proof do you have?”

I stared at him for a moment. I could see the wavering in his eyes. Yes, he had been thinking about it for the weeks since I left, and they had not been easy weeks.

“I could sit here and try to prove it to you, Reverend. In my briefcase I have all manner of evidence, but, to be honest, none of it is conclusive. It is all wildly circumstantial. But you don’t really need proof, do you? Your mind is asking for the evidence, but in your heart you know. In your heart you’ve known from the instant you learned of Hailey’s death. You knew this moment was coming, and though you’ve been reading the texts and debating what to do, your heart’s known what you needed to do all along.”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m responsible for accusing Guy Forrest of murder,” said Breger, his words soft and comforting but his unsettling gaze now straight on the reverend. “In all my years I believe I’ve never been involved in the conviction of an innocent man. It would haunt me to the day I died if ever I was. If you have information that might convince me I am wrong about that man, I need to hear it.”

“What happened to Jesse Sterrett sixteen years ago?” I said.

There was a long silence. The trees outside the window lost more of their leaves, a darkness came and passed as a cloud drifted overhead. There was a long silence, and then Reverend Henson said, “I don’t know for sure. That’s the thing, Mr. Carl, I’ve never known for sure.”

“Then tell us what you do know.”

“All I know is suspicion and surmise, and the anguished cries of a poet who died before either of the Prouix twins was born. That is all I know. But even so, Mr. Carl, even so, it remains a story to tear at your heart.”

42

REVEREND HENSON

SHE CAME around shortly after I arrived to take over for the Reverend Johannson.

He had been a formidable figure in the community, the Reverend Johannson, with his great leonine head and deep voice. They said around town that listening to his uncompromising sermons was like listening to a prophet of God. As you can see, I was quite a change. I’m more squirrelish than leonine, and no one ever confused my squeak of a voice with the voice of God. Following the Reverend Johannson, I thought I’d be a great disappointment to the congregation, but that turned out not to be exactly so. I suppose some thought I wasn’t up for the job, that I didn’t project the image of stern righteousness they had come to expect in Pierce, but then again others greeted me with much warmth, as though I were a welcome antidote. ’Tis a hard thing, I suppose, to bring what seem to be our petty little problems to a prophet of God, even when sometimes they’re not so petty.

When first I arrived, there was an initial period of greeting in the community and I was taken up in a gratifying whirl of activity. But then, of course, the invitations slowed appreciably, and I settled into the more peaceful rhythms of a small-town rectory, with much time on my hands. That was when Hailey came around to see me.

She was a lovely-looking girl, that was clear, with a sadness that was unmistakable and made her, somehow, intriguing to me. And she was provocative, too. She would dress a certain way and act a certain way and hold herself a certain way, all designed, I could tell, to get my heart to beating. And it did a bit, I admit, I’m only human, and I wasn’t yet married. And she did keep wearing shirts the bottoms of which never seemed to reach the top of her pants. And her smile was truly a dazzling thing. She was fishing, almost desperately, daring me, it seemed, some of her comments were on the wrong side of salacious, but I steadfastly refused to take the lure, or even to much react beyond a disapproving rise of the eyebrow. I might not be as good a man as I could wish, but I saw before me a girl in some sort of trouble, and I knew exactly what she didn’t need from the likes of me. So I didn’t take the lure, and it was as if by not doing so I had passed her little test. Slowly I saw her manner ease and her provocative ways cease.

Her house was not far from here, on the same side of Main Street, and she seemed to be around more and more. We talked about things, nothing much at the first, the high school teams, some small-town gossip. It is amazing, I’ve found, how a little harmless gossip loosens the tongue. We spoke, and I felt echoes of problems deep beneath her veneer, but she didn’t open up and I didn’t push. Sometimes when you push you push away, and I sensed she was looking for something from me, though I couldn’t yet figure out what. I tried to get her interested in some of the youth activities I had begun, a way to keep the young people out of the quarry and involved in a more wholesome setting. Her sister, Roylynn, serious and reserved, was one of the mainstays of our youth group, but Hailey would have none of it, and, to be honest, I could see she wasn’t the type. But I maintained my warm welcome whenever I saw her, and we continued to talk, and slowly the talks turned from the coyly frivolous to the more serious.

“I don’t believe in God,” she told me one day in this very office. Her legs were slung over the armrests of a chair and she said it as if she meant to shock me, which I thought sweet, in its way. I mean, in our modern world, could anything be less shocking than that?

“What do you believe in, then?” I asked.

“Not much,” she said.

“That’s a problem, isn’t it? If you don’t believe the ground is solid beneath your feet, how do you dare to take a step? And if you don’t believe the air itself won’t poison you, how do you dare to take another breath?”

“That’s stuff I can see,” she said. “I believe in stuff like that.”

“But can you, really? Scientists say the surface of the earth is continuing to shift every moment, not to mention the great uncertainties postulated in the quantum theories of physics.” She gave me a blank look, but I continued on. “And how many in this very town have lungs black as tar from breathing air they thought was safe? No, Hailey, it seems the things in which you believe are not so worthy of belief. What does that tell you of that in which you do not believe? Maybe the only things worth belief are those we can’t see with our eyes, but with our hearts. Maybe that’s what makes belief at all special in the first place.”

She stayed silent for a moment, thinking. You could see her trying to make some sense of the insensible.

“I suppose one thing I believe in,” she said finally, “is love.”

“There you are, Hailey,” I said. “And what is love, after all, but the purest manifestation of God’s presence on the surface of the earth.”

I was pleased with myself at coming up with that. It seemed I had given some semblance of an answer in an area where there are truly only questions, and Hailey, well, she walked out with something like a smile. I felt pleased with myself. But I’ve learned since that self-satisfaction often blinds us to the fact that we are traversing the most treacherous of territories.

“REMEMBER BEFORE, when you said love is like a piece of God right here on earth?” she said to me a few afternoons later. I was working then in the cemetery, trying to keep it as best I could with what little horticultural talent I had, and she was helping me to yank out the more aggressive weeds.

“I don’t think you can divide God into pieces like that, Hailey, but I might have said something to that effect, yes.”

“Does that include any kind of love?”

A good question, that one, and she asked it with a kind of urgency, as if it had been troubling her over the past few days. I could see the problem right away, the dilemma I had blithely stepped into like a pile of horse dung, but I assumed I could wipe it off my shoes with little fancy blather.

“I suppose it does. All love is a great gift,” I said carefully. “But how that love is expressed can turn it from something godly to something else.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, Hailey, you might love your dog, the emotion might be stronger than you could ever expect and that would be a lovely, godlike thing. Jesus felt great love for all the animals in his kingdom. But you wouldn’t marry your dog, you wouldn’t take vows in a church with a dog, trying to be man and wife in the eyes of the Lord with a canine. That just wouldn’t do. That would be worse than silly, don’t you see?”

She looked at me for a moment and then said, “You’re talking about sex.”

“Am I?” I said disingenuously, because I was, absolutely, and Hailey was always too sharp to slip even the most clever bit by. “Well, maybe that’s part of it. But whatever it is we’re talking about, it’s not the love that’s the problem, it is the way it is expressed. Propriety is not just a matter of how to sip tea at some dowager’s house. It is more, far more. It is how to live a life. And there are guides if you need them.”

“Anne Landers?”

“Yes, or the Bible.”

“Please.”

“Hailey, you know full well where we are and what I am. I even suspect that is exactly why you are here.”

She didn’t respond, but the posture of her body showed she knew I was right about that.

“And sometimes,” I continued, “there are things we know from experience, our own experience or that of others we trust enough to listen to. For example, I can tell you true that what might be a sun-dappled love to one might be something else to another.”

“Excuse me?”

“It is sometimes hard to be sure what we are feeling, really, or what the other is feeling. What might feel like love might be something else, some urgent physical need that seemingly can’t wait, although, of course, science and experience has proven that it can.”

“You think it’s just lust.”

“It’s always possible. And when you dress like you dress, it becomes all the more probable, don’t you think?”

“No, it’s not just that.”

“Oh, don’t be so sure, sweet Hailey. I’m not totally unaware of the world. I was once a boy myself, you know.”

She tilted her head at me. “Boys?” she said. “Boys? Oh, no, Reverend, boys don’t worry me.” Then she smiled. “I eat boys like air.”

I WAS troubled by that last comment, troubled by the whole conversation, to be sure, but that last comment most of all. I realized I had no idea what it was we had been speaking about, and I knew that to be a dangerous thing. Sometimes if you ask too many questions, you scare a child off, but then sometimes if you don’t ask enough questions, you end up talking nonsense. I didn’t know which it was with Hailey, but I felt an unease. “I eat boys like air,” she had said. There was something about that line that tolled familiar. It was like a line from a horror movie, but I couldn’t recall which. So I called a friend of mine, who taught English at a small college in Ohio and who, it seemed, knew every fact about every movie ever made.

“It’s not from a movie,” my friend told me. “It’s the final line of a poem by Sylvia Plath, although in the original it is men she eats like air.”

“Plath?” I said. “I don’t think I ever read her.”

“It’s a girl thing,” she said. “Like Nietzsche is a boy thing.”

“I never cared much for Nietzsche.”

“No, I suppose he’s not big among the clergy. So who’s quoting Plath?”

“Just a young girl who seems to be a bit troubled.”

“Be careful there, Teddy. Plath is the patron saint of bewitched adolescent girls who find themselves overwhelmed by pain and disillusionment. We just hope they don’t follow her career too closely.”

“Really. Tell me about her, this Sylvia Plath.”

“Oh, books have been written. The most important male critics think she’s minor at best, but whole wings of women critics have clutched her to their breasts as an authentic feminine voice struggling free in a male-dominated society. And there’s no doubt about the power in her work. Her father died when she was eight, and that seems to be the major impetus behind all her writing. She cracked up at eighteen, took pills to kill herself, and later wrote a famous book about it called The Bell Jar. Went to Smith, then to Cambridge. At a party she famously met a now famous British poet named Ted Hughes. They took one look at each other and they kissed hard – ’bang smash on the mouth,’ she wrote in her journal – and she bit his cheek until blood flowed, and that was it.”

“Oh, my.”

“Happiness for a time, they married, had children, wrote poetry, made names for themselves. But ultimately he cheated and left her poor with two kids, and she lashed out against him in her work. Many of the women critics blame what happened next on the husband.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, there’s a disturbing strain of Holocaust imagery in her poems. She seemed to strongly identify with the Jews marched by the Nazis into the gas chambers. It might be because her father was a German, though certainly no Nazi, having emigrated to America at the century’s turn. Anyway, one night, after her husband had left her, she put out bread and milk for her two children and then stuck her head in a gas oven and killed herself.”

“My God,” I said.

“She was thirty.”

I felt a chill, just then. It wasn’t only that Hailey had quoted a Plath poem, or even the shocking coincidence of both she and Sylvia Plath losing their fathers at age eight, it was something deeper. I sensed a desperation in Hailey, and a sadness, and an urgency, and I suddenly feared where that sad, desperate urgency might lead her. What was it that was eating at her, and would it drive her to some horrible mistake? I hoped she would come in again to talk, so I could maybe calm her or help her. Things would be different if she came in again. I would be more forthright. I would talk to her about Sylvia Plath. I would step in forcefully. I waited for her to come and see me. But she didn’t, as if she was avoiding me, and, for whatever reason, I didn’t go to her. And then I learned, through the normal channels of gossip, that something terrible had happened in the Prouix household.

IT IS a peculiar thing, sitting by the bedside, chatting amiably about this and that, nothing of any import, chatting oh, so amiably, all the while unsuccessfully trying not to stare at the white bandages that cover a young girl’s wrists. You try to be cheery and funny, you tell stories and both of you laugh, you talk about the exciting events coming up in the near future, and still, all the time, there are those bandages. That’s what it was like for me, sitting beside Roylynn Prouix’s bedside after she was found in the bathtub up to her neck with red-stained water, horizontal gashes on her forearms.

The house the Prouixs lived in is now owned by the Liptons, and I have since been there many times, and it is pleasant and sunny, but I felt no sun in the house that day. There was a darkness, darker than the familiar black mood of a house visited by tragedy. Mrs. Prouix thanked me for coming and offered me a cup of tea, and I sat with her in mostly silence in the kitchen as she made it and I drank it. She smiled tightly and hugged herself as if she wanted to disappear, and I saw not a spark of life in her eyes. When she talked about her daughter, she spoke softly, in phrases so common they were devoid of meaning. “She’s feeling better now.” “Everything will be all right, I am sure.” “It is so nice when friends come to visit.” “More tea, Reverend, or a cookie?” Mrs. Prouix was unable to confront the fact that her daughter had stood on the precipice between her life and her death and had chosen to step through. Hailey came into the kitchen and joined us, subdued, as if her normal energy had been drawn out of her. I tried to start a conversation with her, but she let all my openings fall to the floor and flop there, like fish in the throes of death. It was awkward, more than that, it was unpleasant and frightening, the way she changed inside that house. And then we heard footsteps, coming up the stoop, heavy footsteps, and something strange occurred when we heard them. Mrs. Prouix seemed to shrink, if that was possible, and Hailey brightened as if a candle inside had been lit.

He came into the house with his overalls spattered with blood. And however dark the house had felt before he entered, it felt darker still with his presence. I stood, instinctively, pushed to my feet by a strange fear. He yelled something crude before he saw me, and when he did finally spy me, he quieted, as if daunted by my collar. Tall, gaunt, his broad shoulders leaning aggressively forward, his hands curled into near fists, his huge knuckles covered with thick black hairs. Lawrence Cutlip. When he saw me, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and stared for a moment before he smiled and called me by my honorific and thanked me for visiting his dear ill niece. There was a chilling warmth, chilling because it came too quickly and without effort and was only almost convincing. I felt the urge to leave, to run, to get away from that house, but I stilled my heart and fought my urges and sat down with him. When he offered a beer, I took it and drank, as did he, straight from the bottle. When, in the course of our conversation, he asked me if I played poker, I lied and said only a little, and he brightened even more and invited me into his game at the local Chrysler dealership, and I accepted with an expression of gratitude. When we talked, we agreed on important civic matters, even when I thought him dead wrong. I even laughed at his jokes, no matter how cruel. And all the time I sensed that the darkness I had felt in that house emanated straight from some black abscess in his heart.

Why did I stay in that house and let the likes of Larry Cutlip ply his charm on me? Guilt, pure and simple, a guilt that I felt as soon as I had heard the disastrous news about Roylynn and that I still believe was utterly deserved. I had missed what it was that was happening with her, missed it completely. I had been worried about Hailey, pretty, provocative Hailey, with her dazzling smile and suggestive questions, and the whole time I had assumed all was right with her quiet, dutiful sister. But that was blind of me, wasn’t it? They were twins, after all, weren’t they? And what it was that afflicted the one was sure to afflict the other. They expressed it differently, obviously, for reasons of their own, but they were both equally at risk, and I, feeling so proud of my forbearance, still had been seduced by the one to the point that I ignored the other. And so, I suppose you could say it was the guilt that sent me searching for an answer.

Roylynn was referred by the state to a county home for troubled girls, where she could be watched more closely, and I was glad to have convinced the welfare worker of such a move being necessary. She was well out of danger for the moment, I figured, though Hailey was still in that house, with that man, still in need of saving. And so I set my plan. I would identify the affliction and do all in my power to heal those children, that household, that family. The death of the father was part of it, I was sure, and there was precious little I could do about that. But this other, this Lawrence Cutlip, he was part of it, too, I sensed. Part of the darkness came straight from him, I sensed. And so I would do my scouting on his turf, drink with him, laugh at his jokes, play in his game, and all the time hope to gain a glimpse of what was afflicting those girls.

I lost in the card game. Larry Cutlip was a gambler, hard-core, who was in it, I could instantly tell, not for the conviviality or the conversation but for the money. He wanted me in the game only as long as I swam like a fish, and so as a fish I swam. But I didn’t lose more than I could afford to lose, I hadn’t put myself through college playing poker against private-school boys without learning my way around a deck of cards. So I played, and I lost, and I kept my eyes narrowed as I watched. And what I saw across the green felt table from me was a glimpse of something evil.

You look at me aghast, as if I am saying it was Satan sitting across from me, but I tell you a man can be evil without cleft feet and a tail. What is it to be evil in this world? It is to have an unsubmitted will, to swear allegiance to nothing but the inner demons of one’s self, and to use every possible means to bend others to those same demons. Most of the people I see have given themselves over to some other good, to their children, their spouses, their friends or families, their business maybe, or their community or country, their people, their God. You, Mr. Carl, as a lawyer, have submitted your will to the workings of our country’s legal system. You, Detective Breger, have submitted your will to the pursuit of justice. Both of you, I assume, have submitted your wills if not to God then to the simple ideal of trying to do the right thing. The submission of will is the start of goodness. Matthew five, verse three: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

I spent three years ministering in prisons, I’ve seen bad people up close, psychopaths with no conscience whatsoever, but still, in all my life I think I’ve only met three people with a completely unsubmitted will, three people whom I consider evil. One was the mother of a childhood friend, whose evil I recognized only upon reflection long after the friend had killed himself. One was in the clergy, believe it or not. And one was Lawrence Cutlip. It took me a while to see it, they all cleverly hide it behind a veneer of good intentions, but see it I did, and it sent shivers. Nothing existed to temper his desire. Whatever he wanted was right, whoever opposed him was wrong, everything he did was justified and proper, everything in this universe existed for the purpose of serving him. You could see it in the way he dealt with people, the way he dealt with problems, the way, finally, he dealt the cards. It was subtle, but not too subtle for someone trained to see the flip of the finger and the distinct sound of cards slipped from the bottom of the deck at crucial points in the game.

Before the father of the twins died, Cutlip had been a worthless drunk, surviving out of garbage cans and by petty thefts. Suddenly, in one tragic accident, he gained a house, a family, a certain amount of money, and still he talked about how he sacrificed his life to raise his sister’s family, how he suffered to raise them right. What he did on the surface seemed righteous, but there is always, in evil people, a desperate attempt to portray themselves as the souls of righteousness. And just as inevitably, whenever a portion of the evil slips from that false cover of propriety, they are quick to angrily blame someone else for the evil deed.

So I spent part of my time examining the inner demons of Lawrence Cutlip and being frightened by what I found. And I spent another part of my time reading a volume of the complete poems of a certain female author with whom at least one of the twins had identified. “The world is blood-hot and personal,” she wrote, and in every line there were expressions of anger, madness, despair. I am no scholar, and much of the poetry, I must admit, was indecipherable to me, but other of it was crystal clear. “Dying is an art, like everything else,” she wrote. “I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell.” And still other of it caused in me a deep alarm. “The child’s cry melts in the wall.” I couldn’t stop myself from imagining the stifled cries of another young girl. There was one poem in particular that struck me. It was called “Daddy,” and knowing of the similar timing of the father’s death in the lives of Sylvia Plath and the Prouix twins, I seized on it immediately. The poem told of the author’s attempt to come to grips with the choices she made in the wake of her father’s absence, and when I read it as a clue into the mind of a fifteen-year-old girl, one line in particular seized me with terror. “Every woman adores a fascist,” wrote the poet, “the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you.”

HAILEY WOULDN’T much talk to me after my visit to her house. Oh, she still stopped by now and then, and we chatted, and she gave me updates on Roylynn’s condition at the home and of the fine things Roylynn had written about it, but there seemed to be something diminished about her. Everything about Hailey seemed smaller, her energy, her smile, even her size, everything but her sadness. Whenever I tried to steer the conversation to God or love or any difficulties in her own life, she turned our discussion in some innocuous direction. And whenever I tried to bring up her uncle, she said something bland and then quickly left. She had shut me out, whether because of what had happened to Roylynn or because of my new seeming friendship with her uncle, I couldn’t tell, but I could see that she still was troubled, and I understood that now more than ever she needed my help.

Then, suddenly, almost overnight, she changed completely. There was joy where there had been only sadness, and the dazzling smile was back. I commented on the transformation, and she smiled as young lovers smile, and I can’t tell you how happy I was to see it. Yes, me, a man of God, happy to see a lover’s smile on a young girl’s face.

“Tell me about him,” I said one afternoon.

“Who?” she said, though she knew whom I meant.

“The boy.”

“Oh, Reverend, I eat boys like…”

“Just cut out the act and tell me about him,” I said.

Her smile grew. “He plays baseball,” she said, “and he’s gorgeous, and I feel like, I don’t know, like I can actually talk to him.”

I had heard the rumors, and I assumed she was talking about Grady Pritchett. I didn’t like Grady, thought there was nothing to him except arrogance and entitlement, but I welcomed anything that got her out of that house, away from that evil. I was still worried about Roylynn, of course, but suddenly I felt hope for Hailey, as if she had finally escaped from a nightmare.

And then they found the body of the Sterrett boy in the lake at the belly of the quarry.

I WASN’T a part of the official probe. I know you’ve already talked to the chief, and so I’ll let stand whatever it was he says about what they found and how they investigated. That wing of the Sterrett family were buried in our cemetery, but they were not members of our congregation, and so, beyond the normal sadness I have upon learning of the death of any promising youth, I didn’t think this much affected the Prouixs or me. But then I heard that maybe it was Grady Pritchett they were looking at as the killer. And then I heard that this Jesse Sterrett, whom I knew to be a good-looking boy, had been the best baseball prospect to come out of the county in fifty years. I knew then that Hailey was somehow at the heart of this tragedy, and I sought her out.

I looked for her at the house, the school, I asked her friends. No one knew where she was, no one had seen her. Up and down the valley I drove, searching to no avail while the bitter lines of the poetry I had been reading tied themselves into knots in my mind. “And I am the arrow,” wrote the poet, “the dew that flies suicidal.” On the spur of the moment I thought to check the quarry.

There was yellow tape around the fence, but I ducked under it and through the rip in the fencing and clambered down the steep slope to the narrow ledge above the water. There, behind a large outcropping, curled like a lizard in hiding, I found her.

I stooped beside her on the ledge and said nothing for a long moment and waited for her to acknowledge my presence, which she failed to do.

“He was the one,” I said finally.

She gave no answer.

“He was the one, Hailey, the one who brought a smile to your lips and a flush to your cheeks.”

“Stop,” she said quietly.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t, don’t know.”

“No? They say it was Grady Pritchett that did it. The police are centering their investigation on him.”

“It wasn’t Grady.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because Grady is a coward.”

“Maybe he is, but he’s the one they’re looking at. He’s the one who will shoulder the blame even if it was someone else that did the deed.”

“Maybe it was an accident.”

“Yes, maybe. Wonderful athletes often are the clumsiest in their footing. But tell me, Hailey, who knew about you and the Sterrett boy?”

“No one, kids at school maybe.”

“Did your uncle?”

She looked at me, her red-rimmed eyes.

“’To do justice and judgment is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.’ Don’t hide it, Hailey, tell me. Who did this to young Jesse? Who did this to you?”

“Stop. Please.”

“I think I know.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I think I know. Let me read you something you might recognize.” I took a paper out of my pocket. “It’s from a poem I’ve been reading.”

She turned her face to me, puzzled, but as I started to read from the Plath poem “Daddy,” she curled her body defensively as if to ward off blows.

“‘I was ten when they buried you,’” I recited. “‘At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, and they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, a man in black with a Meinkampf look and a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do.’”

“Shut up.”

“I want to help,” I said. “Let me help. But for me to help, you must step out of your hole and tell me what is happening. I can’t do anything if you won’t tell me. Save Grady, Hailey, and save yourself, too.”

She didn’t respond. She lay there, curled like a lizard, thinking, and I stayed beside her in silence. Waiting for her to speak, waiting for her to tell me something, everything.

“You want to help me and help Grady?” she said finally.

“Yes,” I said. “I can and I will.”

“Then, this is what you do. You play cards with Grady’s father, he trusts you, I’m sure. You tell him I’ll get Grady cleared of all charges in exchange for something.”

“Yes,” I said, hoping she was ready to tell me all.

“Tell him I want a college education for me and Roylynn, college and graduate school if that’s what we want. Tell him in exchange for him financing our route out of this stinking little town, I’ll make sure Grady is cleared. Do you got that, Reverend?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” she said. “Let me know when it is all agreed, and I’ll talk to the police.”

“Where will you be?”

“Here, I’ll be right here. I’ve got no place else to go.”

I MADE the deal. When I proposed it to Mr. Pritchett, he snarled at me, a Scotch in his hand, and nodded, and that was that. I ran back to the quarry and took Hailey with me to the police. I expected then that she would tell them what had happened, tell the truth, that the evil would be taken care of, I was certain of it. But, as always with Hailey, she betrayed my expectations. She insisted on seeing Grady first, and only then did she tell her story to the police, and a clever story it was. She saved Grady, financed her college and law degree, gave her sister a chance, everything she said she would do, but she did it all with a lie.

It wasn’t enough, I couldn’t just leave it at that. I had no evidence of what I thought had really happened, nothing more than the rantings of a suicidal poet, no witnesses who would back up my suspicions, but still I could not do nothing. I was compelled to do something. And so it was that I summoned Lawrence Cutlip to meet me in the chapel on a sunny Thursday afternoon.

He stood before me with his dangerous forward lean, a fresh wound on his cheek, his overalls spattered with the blood of slaughtered cattle. He held in his huge, hairy hands a rusted spade with a long wooden handle. We were in the center aisle of the chapel, the door to the outside world behind him, the cross behind me. He stared and smiled, and I felt a fear I had never known before and have never known since.

“I don’t have much time,” he said. “I’ve got some digging to do. So let’s have it, then.”

I didn’t even want to know what he was digging or why, the possibilities that flitted through my mind were terrifying enough. I braced myself against the side of a pew to stop my shaking, and then, without pleasantries, I brought up the purpose of our conversation.

“You need to leave this town. This town, this county, this state, those girls. You need to leave, now, and never come back.”

He tilted his head at me like a dog. “What are you saying there, Reverend?”

“I know what you are and what you’ve done. I know everything.”

“You’re kidding with me, right?”

“I am serious as my faith.”

“Aw, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about you and those girls. You and that boy. Leave now, or I’ll tell all.”

He stared at me, a realization dawning in his eyes. “Who you been listening to? Hailey? Has she been blabbing? She’s a lying bitch, always has been. You can’t go around listening to a mongrel bitch like her.”

“You need to leave.”

“Leave, hell, that would be the best thing for me. Don’t you think I want to leave? Don’t you think I wanted to leave ever day of the past eight years? I done everything for those girls. They’d have nothing without me, nothing. They’d be on the street, starving or whoring, I wasn’t taking care of them. I gave the best part of my life to them, sacrificed it straight up, spent my days butchering cows and my nights tending to their wants. But does anyone ever care about my wants? I’ve given up everything for them, and this is what I get in return, lies and accusations. They’re both a couple of halfbreed ingrates. Their father wasn’t a hundred percent, I told my sister that before she ever married that boy. Any wonder then at what is going on with his demon offspring? One slices her wrists because she wants to be the center of attention, the other’s now telling lies about me. They’s bad kids, that’s just the way they is. Everything that’s happened is their fault. There’s something wrong with them, I’ve always knowed that, something sinister. But you, Reverend, believing them lies. You should be ashamed.”

“You leave now, right now, take your truck and go and never come back, or I’ll make the calls.”

“Aw hell, go ahead and make your calls. No one’ll believe your ass anyways.”

“Yes, they will. I’m a man of God. And Hailey will back me up. And Roylynn from the hospital will back me up. And your sister will back me up, you know she will, when you’re in jail and she’s no longer afraid of the back of your hand. And as for the boy? Where was it you received that slice on the cheek? Did it bleed much? It’s a wonder what they can do now in matching up blood.”

He stared at me hard, and his eyes grew cold, he hefted the shovel in his hands. “I could kill you right now,” he said. “Stick this shovel in your chicken neck and pop your head right off.”

“I know you could, without a second’s thought, kill me now in this house of God. But you know that someone’s seen you come in, that someone knows you’re here. If you kill me, they’d lock you up for sure, lock you up till they pull the switch. And you want to know something?” I took a step forward. “I hope you do. It would solve the problem for good. So don’t just talk about it, do it. Do it or leave.”

I stood face to face with evil for that moment, watched the shovel twitch as if it wanted to launch itself into my neck, watched as the anger played like a screeching chord across his face. He was ready to hit me, crush me, do anything to bend me to his will, but I stood as steady as my feverish fear would let me and held my ground.

And then a smile, a lean, cold smile. “I’ve been thinking of leaving anyway,” he said. “Them girls is growed up enough. It’s time to be on my way. I guess I will go, head out west, just as soon as I pick up my stake. Edmonds and Doc Robinson owe me enough to get a good start out there in Vegas.”

“They don’t owe you a thing. You’ve been cheating them for years, dealing from the bottom.”

“Lies, lies, and more lies. You you’re just a damn thief of lies.”

“I’ve seen it, watched it happen over and over.”

“They won’t believe you. They know me. They’re my friends.”

“You have no friends, and I’m a man of the cloth. They’ll believe every word of it. Who would they believe more? If you’re not gone by tonight, I’m going to tell them about you dealing from the bottom of the deck. I’m going to tell them about you killing that boy. I’m going to tell them about you and the girls. I’m going to tell them everything.”

There was a moment more of silence, where I could see a fire raging inside him. I fought the urge to back up, to back away, to run from his ungodly presence. I fought and won and held my ground, even as his body tensed, even as he brought the shovel back as if to land a great blow, even as that shovel rushed at me and past me and rang with a brutal clang on the steps of the altar behind me.

I turned around to glance at it lying there, at an oblique angle on the stairs, and when I turned back to Lawrence Cutlip, he was walking out the door.

And, all praises to God, I never saw him again.

43

“SO THAT is the story, gentlemen,” said the Reverend Henson, sitting behind his desk, his forefinger sliding back and forth across the bevel on the desktop’s edge. “That is all I know. No facts underlay my accusations, no secret confessions, just a series of my own surmises. I knew nothing for certain. Had I known anything for certain, I would have done all in my power to put him in jail where he truly belonged, but I guessed well enough and knew enough about bluffing to banish this evil from our lives.”

“That was pretty damn brave,” I said. “He might just as easily have killed you.”

“What else was I to do? And in the end, I supposed it all worked out well. Hailey did go to college, as you know, and to law school, too. She never confided in me in any way after that, treated me like a business acquaintance, which I suppose I had become. She simply took her money and went off into her new life, God bless her. Roylynn took a few courses at the community college, but that was all. There were three more attempts at suicide which halted her formal education, but she seems to be fighting the urge successfully, for now. The money from Pritchett has been used to finance a continuing series of rest homes, like the one she’s in now. I visit her when I can, I myself gave her the physics book she clutches so fiercely. I thought it would be a diversion, but it has become something to her like a Bible, and I don’t suppose that is so bad a thing. We all need something to believe in.”

“I met with Roylynn after I spoke to you,” I said.

“Yes, I heard. I had hoped you would honor my request, but she said nice things about you.”

“She told me that something called a primordial black hole killed Jesse Sterrett and her sister, something from the beginning of time with the power to obliterate anything that comes close.”

“Yes, I’ve heard her say that. It’s hard to understand, but I think I have an explanation. I believe that what she calls a black hole is simply her expression for the evil I saw in her uncle. He left that night and never returned, and I only knew of his whereabouts through the occasional references from Roylynn, who learned what she knew from her sister. It was she who told me of the nursing home in Henderson, a place I called as soon as I heard about Hailey. No, he had never left the property, I made sure of that before ever you came upon the scene, Mr. Carl.”

“If I need you to testify, Reverend, would you come up to Philadelphia?”

“I would, yes, but what could I say? What do I have for you, really, except my suspicions, and from what I can glean from the lawyer shows on TV, my suspicions are not much use in a legal case.”

“What exactly are your suspicions, Reverend Henson?” asked Breger. “Do you really think he killed the Sterrett boy?”

“Yes, I do. I saw it in his eyes as he held that shovel, but I own not an ounce of proof.”

“Why did he do it?”

“Jealousy.”

“Of Hailey?”

“Of course.”

“But why? What exactly do you suspect was going on between Cutlip and his nieces?”

“You ask for a surmise when I gave you all the facts at my disposal. I don’t think you have a right to anything more than that, and I won’t put my darkest fears about those girls into words. But she was a young girl in bad circumstances and terribly confused. Whatever it was that had infected her and that she was trying, in her way, to tell me about, it had nothing to do with love. It was something else, something monstrous and ungodly. And if it survived his leaving this town, it did so in the dark recesses of a dark heart that never allowed itself to catch a glimpse of light.”

OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, Breger I and took a slow walk in the graveyard. I weaved among the tombstones reading the now familiar names. Breger examined this stone, stared at this flower, this path, searched the cemetery as if it were a crime scene. While I stood among the graves, the harrowing lines of a dead poet rang in my ears.

“A white Camaro ran me down on a rocky road outside Henderson, Nevada,” I said finally to Breger.

“I read the police report when I was out there.”

“And it was a white Camaro with Las Vegas plates that was ticketed for speeding on the night before Hailey Prouix’s murder.”

“I thought you’d find the coincidence interesting.”

“Who is he, this Dwayne Joseph Bohannon?”

“Just a guy from Henderson.”

“Who works at the Desert Winds nursing home?”

“That’s right.”

“Let me guess. Long, scraggly blond hair, bad skin, worse teeth, scratching his arms like he’s got the mange. A lovely young man in every respect. Bright, too. Goes by the name of Bobo.”

“Cutlip’s toady.”

“That son of a bitch,” I said. “That vampire.”

“I met with Cutlip in Vegas. Bobo, too, standing behind the wheelchair. Followed some bank payments to the Desert Winds and found Cutlip. I asked the basic questions, showed him the picture of the corpse, had him identify his niece. He broke down when he saw it, and then his anger flared. A hard case for sure, but I didn’t find him evil.”

“Neither did I, actually, but my partner sensed something. What are you going to do?”

“I’ll make a call to my contact in Nevada. Have him ask Cutlip some tougher questions.”

“And what will that get you? You might shake him up a bit, but if he suspects he’s a suspect, you won’t get very far. He’s a tough old bird. He’ll clam up, shed crocodile tears over his niece, claim ill health, deny everything. I know, I’ve seen him do it. Better to leave him alone.”

“Then maybe I’ll ask my contact to give Bobo a roust.”

“Bobo killed her. It seems clear now, doesn’t it?”

Breger merely looked away.

“He killed her. And I’ll tell you something else: He’s the mystery man in black rushing out of the house. He was inside looking for something, and when the Forensic Unit technician showed up, he rushed out and beat her all to hell. With his hands scratched up like they were, you couldn’t see the bruises from the beating. But he’s the one.”

“It’s possible.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I told you.”

“What about you convincing Jefferson to drop the case?”

He shook his head.

“You’ll at least tell him what you heard.”

“Jefferson wants evidence or nothing. What I heard is not evidence.”

“What more do you need?”

“Facts, maybe. Proof. If my guy grabs a confession out of Bobo, I’ll talk to Jefferson, but I can’t without that. You’ve raised a lot of questions, but there still aren’t many answers, including the big one. Cutlip may be a murderer, he may have killed Jesse Sterrett fifteen years ago out of jealousy or hate, but why would he send Bobo off to kill Hailey? Why would he want her dead?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Maybe when you find an answer we can do some business. But I’ll tell you flat-out, Carl, without a confession Jefferson is going to stay on after your boy to the end, that’s just the way he is. And the way the trial is going now, it looks like he’s going to get him.”

“I’ve been making some headway.”

“Some,” he said. “But not enough to overcome the fingerprints. Not enough to overcome the motive. Not enough to overcome the fact that only your client was in that house. And it doesn’t help you blaming some mystery lover for the crime if you think Cutlip did it.”

“A lawyer’s got to lawyer.”

“That’s the problem with you guys. A surgeon’s going to cut, a hunter’s going to shoot, a lawyer’s going to lie. I’ll make the call to my contact. If Bobo says something interesting, I’ll give it to Jefferson, who has to give it to you under Brady. That’s all I can do.”

“And if Bobo gives you nothing?”

“Then start gathering character witnesses for the sentencing phase, because you’ll need them.”

“You’ll tell me what happens in Vegas?”

“I’ll tell you.”

I stood in the cemetery, thinking things through. I thought of the trial, what had happened already, what still needed to be proved. I was at a loss. What could I do? How I could raise the level of doubt?

“Detective,” I said finally, “I might need a favor.”

He didn’t say anything, he just stood there with his shoulders hunched as if waiting for the weight of the world to drop down upon him.

“There might come a moment when Troy Jefferson gets sputteringly angry at something I do, and he’s going to come to you for some additional proof.”

“Same old same old.”

“When he does, this time I want you to whisper something in his ear.”

“Go ahead.”

“Just one word.”

“Go ahead.”

“Will you do it?”

“I’ll consider it, maybe, depending on the word. And in exchange.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Your phone logs.”

“Don’t do that. Don’t go there.”

“That’s the deal.”

“I’m asking for one little thing, one word in his ear, just one word.”

“I understand what you’re asking. And it is not any little thing.”

“The logs aren’t even mine to give up. It’s up to the client.”

“Talk to him. Tell him that’s the deal.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Let’s go, we’ve got ourselves a plane to catch.”

“You have no idea what you are asking.”

“Oh, I have an idea,” he said. “I have plenty of an idea. Yes I do.”

And I believed then that he did.

44

“AND YOU think this bastard, Hailey’s Uncle Larry, actually killed her?” asked Guy as the two of us sat alone in the gray lawyer-client conference room in the county jail. I had just told him everything I’d learned in Pierce, the whole ugly story.

“I think he sent his lackey, Bobo, to kill her, yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Any idea?”

“Maybe she threatened to take away the money he needed for his luxury nursing home. Or maybe he was sick of his luxury nursing home and wanted the insurance money for a new stake. Who knows? It could be anything. But he did it.”

“What can we do about it?”

“I don’t know. There’s a chance maybe this Bobo will turn against him. There’s a cop in Nevada that’s going to get him alone in a room and ask some tough questions.”

“And if that gets us nothing?”

I didn’t say anything. I kept perfectly still and waited.

“What do we do, Victor? What do I do?”

I waited some more, and then I said, “I have an idea, but it’s risky.”

“What is it? Tell me.”

“If it doesn’t work, it will blow up in our faces.”

“Go ahead, Victor. What is it?”

I leaned forward and clasped my hands on the table and told him what I would have to do and then what Breger would have to do and then what Jefferson would have to do and then what I would have to do.

“Jesus. That’s all you could think of, that risky Rube Goldberg contraption of a defense?”

“It is, yes. And the thing is, the trial’s gone pretty well for us so far. Our gambit with the headphones worked out great. I think the possibility that someone else might have entered that house and killed Hailey has come alive for the jury. I think we have a pretty decent chance of winning this thing outright, without the risk. We’ve created a suspect, the other lover, and I think we’ve created enough of a hole in the prosecution’s case for the jury to find both opportunity and motive. Our argument at the end of this case will be as strong as I could have hoped.”

“Are you guaranteeing an acquittal?”

“No, I can’t guarantee a thing, you know that, but we have a decent chance.”

“I don’t want to hear about chances. I need to get out of here.”

“But there’s something else. You know how they keep asking for my phone records and I keep refusing and the judge keeps upholding my refusal based on attorney-client privilege?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the whole plan only works if Breger does his part, and Breger will only do his part if we offer up, in exchange, my phone records.”

“So?”

I stood, walked to the narrow window to look upon another wall. This is why I had come alone, why I had left Beth at the office to work up some motions. “Guy, they want to know about the phone call you made to me on the night of the murder.”

Guy stared at me for a moment, thinking of that night, that horrible night, thinking of what he had done when he stepped out of the tub. “Oh,” he said.

“They have questions about that call that haven’t been resolved by your own phone logs.”

“Oh, I see.”

“I haven’t asked you this yet, but it’s time. Why hasn’t the phone call you made to me shown up on your phone records?”

“I was flustered. I was scared. I… I couldn’t remember your number.”

“So what did you do?”

“I used Hailey’s phone. The red phone. It was right on the table by the bed.”

“Why her phone?”

“Because… because I… because…”

“Guy?”

“Because your number was on the speed dial.”

I didn’t say anything, I didn’t need to. Outside, it was a sunny fall day, one of those days that remind you of the summer that passed and foreshadow the end of the coming winter. It was a lovely day outside, but a brisk chill had descended into that hard gray room.

“You didn’t think I would check it out?” he said. “You didn’t think I would find out who it was, Victor? I gave myself over to her completely, sacrificed my family, my integrity, my very soul on her altar and yet she was sleeping with someone else. You didn’t think I would do whatever I needed to learn who the bastard was? I spied on her, I followed her, I listened in to her conversations. She was wily, I got nowhere. But then the phone appeared and one night, when she was in the Jacuzzi, I checked out the speed dial, and there were the numbers, some totally foreign, but the first two, the first two strangely familiar. One was your office, Victor, one was your home. I think by then she wanted me to know, that was why she left out the phone. I think she was using you to tell me that it was over. You were her get-out boy, the excuse to break up with me, like she would have found a get-out boy for you when your time came. And you want to know something? By the time I found out, I wasn’t even angry at you. I felt sorry for you instead, sorry that you had fallen into her web.”

“Guy…”

“So who would I call when I found her dead? Who could understand even some of what I was feeling? Who could I trust? Only you. And in my panic I knew where to find your number with just the touch of a button.”

“Guy…”

“So that’s why I used her phone.”

“I’m sorry…”

“No you’re not.”

He was right, I wasn’t.

“And neither am I,” he said.

“Then why did you keep me on as your lawyer?”

“First you were just there and I was desperate. Then I thought it through. There’s nothing to do in here except think. I analyzed the case, the evidence, I put on my most dispassionate lawyer mind-set and came up with a strategy. The strategy I came up with, the one that made the most sense, was to blame the other lover. That’s why I kept suggesting it. But I couldn’t have that other lover just walk into the courtroom and take himself out of the case by providing an alibi, like being at home when I called. I needed to make sure that never happened, and as far as I could see, there was only one way.”

“Keeping me on as your lawyer.”

“That’s right.”

“You’re a son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“I’d say we both are, Victor.”

And what could I say to that? He was right, absolutely, we were both sons of bitches, and we had both been played for fools. We had each been made part of whatever strange journey was mapped out by Hailey Prouix and, truth be told, each of us was thrilled to our bones to be taken along on her ride.

“So what should I do?” I asked.

“About the uncle?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe this Booboo guy will turn on him.”

“Bobo. Maybe.”

“But it won’t be that easy, will it?”

“No.”

“What’s he like, the uncle? Have you met him?”

“Yes, I have. He’s a hard man.”

“And he killed Hailey.”

“I think he did.”

“But we don’t want them looking at your records, do we?”

“No, we don’t.”

“It could ruin us both.”

“That’s right.”

“It makes a lot of sense to play it out just like it is and let him get away with it.”

“Yes, it does.”

“He’s old, dying, only a few pathetic years left in some nursing home. We should just let him be.”

“All right.”

“But we won’t, will we?”

“It’s your choice.”

“We need to do something about him, if he killed her.”

“It’s your choice.”

“She used us, she used us both. When I first saw her on the mattress, bloodied and gone, when I first saw her, I was devastated at my loss. My loss. But I’ve been thinking about her, what she lost. We just can’t leave it like that. Whatever she did, she didn’t deserve to die. Whoever was responsible for killing her should pay. That’s what I think.”

“All right.”

“Do you think you can pull this off?”

“I’ll try.”

“You better do more than try, Victor. If all you do is try, I’ll be here longer than I could bear. Don’t just try it, Victor. Do it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Do it. And when that murderous bastard gets close, rip out his heart.”