Serial

75

Hogart, the present

“You want me to drive over there?” Westerley asked, after Beth had described Roy Brannigan’s unexpected visit.

“No,” Beth said on the phone. “He didn’t actually threaten me, and he must have had to keep moving to stay on his route.”

“If the whole thing wasn’t a load of bullshit,” Westerley said.

“I believed him about the driving job. I saw the actual truck. One of those big diesel things the drivers leave running even when they go in someplace for lunch.”

“When’s Link due home?”

“Not for two more days.”

“I don’t like it, you alone in that house, especially tonight when we know Roy’s in the area. I could talk to the state patrol. Maybe they’d send a car around.”

“They’d tell you there wasn’t enough reason. Even I know they don’t have enough people to protect every woman who suspects she might be in danger.”

“True enough,” Westerley said. “How’d Roy seem to you after all these years?” He was trying to get a feel for just how real a threat Roy Brannigan might pose. After all, the business about the rape and trial was a long time ago. If time didn’t heal completely, it did tend to cool passions.

“Physically he looked about the same,” Beth said, “only bigger and stronger than I remembered. And he seemed to be calmed down some when it came to his religious beliefs.”

“Did his apology seem sincere?”

Beth hesitated. “I can’t say, Wayne.”

Westerley thought about it. “I could have Billy Noth drive out to your place and keep an eye on things till morning.”

“Your deputy’d just love to spend the night sitting in a parked car,” Beth said. “Or hiding in the woods.”

“He could sack out on the couch, Beth. Billy’s a light sleeper.”

Beth didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Wayne?”

“Yeah?”

“How ’bout you, after all? I’d like you to come over.”

“Sleep on the couch?” Westerley asked.

“Don’t try to be funny, Wayne.”

Nothing out of the ordinary seemed to happen at Beth’s that night. And Westerley didn’t sleep on the couch.

When they got up the next morning, he took Beth to the Bob Evans near the Interstate cloverleaf and they had breakfast. Westerley had eggs and biscuits, Beth a waffle and sausages.

“I appreciate you coming here,” Beth said, over their second cups of coffee.

“It’s not like I got nothing in return,” Westerley said with a smile.

There was a rumble outside the window by their booth, and they looked out to see a big eighteen-wheeler with a dusty black cab roll in. It parked some distance from the building with a hiss of air brakes. They stared and saw a short blond man climb down from the cab, stretch, and swagger toward the restaurant. He looked nothing like Roy Brannigan.

“I’m still jumpy,” Beth said.

“I should come back tonight.” Westerley said.

Beth smiled at him and stroked his bare forearm. It made the hairs on his arm rise up. “You’d do this all over again?”

He nodded. “I like the biscuits.”

“I don’t think I need anyone tonight,” Beth said. “Roy’s probably two states away by now. Besides, Wayne, you’ve got a job to look after.”

“The Hogart Bank hasn’t been robbed in forty years.”

“Overdue, I’d say.”

“Has Link got a gun?”

“His twelve-gauge shotgun’s locked up out in the garage.”

“I mean a handgun.”

“Yeah. In the closet. An old Colt semiautomatic. I know how to use it.”

“Keep it by the bed tonight.”

“I’ll do that. I promise.”

Westerley did drive back to Hogart after breakfast, but not before making sure Beth was safely installed at home.

The first thing Westerley did when he got into town was to call his deputy, Billy Noth, into the office and give him the rest of the day off. Then he told Billy the situation with Beth and instructed him to drive to her place this evening and spend the night keeping an eye on the house without telling her.

“I can hardly recall what Roy Brannigan looks like,” Billy said.

“Let’s hope you aren’t reminded tonight. By the way, Billy, Beth’s got a handgun she keeps by the bed.”

“Great,” Billy said. Then he laughed. “You warning me away, Sheriff?”

“Get out of here, Billy,” Westerley said.

When Billy was gone, Westerley called his contact at the state lab and asked if there was any progress on the DNA samples he’d sent in. There’d been a family killing in St. Louis that was put on top priority, he was told. It might be several days before he heard about his samples.

Westerley’s next phone call was to his part-time clerk and dispatcher Bobi Gregory. He asked her to handle the phone and to call him if anything important came up. He wouldn’t be far away, over in Jefferson City, where the Vincent Salas trial had been held.

Something about the time of the rape, and the Salas trial, was nibbling at the edges of Westerley’s memory, but he couldn’t identify it.

He spent most of the morning in the City Hall records room, reading the trial transcript. Salas seemed guilty again.

Only he wasn’t. Not according to DNA.

Westerley went to another department and gained access to the section where evidence was stored from trials dating back years. He easily found the box containing the Salas trial evidence.

It angered him when he touched Beth’s torn panties, the three empty Wild Colt beer cans. Salas had never reclaimed the contents of his pockets, which were in a separate brown envelope. When he examined the envelope’s contents, Westerley understood why. The envelope contained a pocket comb, a cheap penknife, and sixty-two cents in loose change. A worn leather wallet held two one-dollar bills, a punch card that would earn free coffee at a restaurant in Flagstaff, Arizona, and an expired Missouri driver’s license. One of the loose nickels attracted Westerley’s attention. It was dated 1919, or maybe 1918. It was hard to tell, as worn as the nickel was. Westerley fingered the coin for a while, then dropped it back in the envelope with the rest of the contents, put the envelope back in the evidence box, and returned everything to its dusty space in the rows of metal shelves.

When he left it struck him as always how so much chaos and violence could be reduced to items in neat rows of boxes, and ignored to be rendered harmless by time.