Blind Fall (20 page)

A silence fell. “I’m sorry,” John said. “I didn’t hear the question.”

“Where did you dump the body?”

He met the detective’s stare, saw the cash box he had dug from the sand, saw the red ruby ring and the limp fingers of Bowers’s right hand. John was confident Duncan knew that at some point the body would surface, and one missing hand would be a strange detail that wouldn’t fit with a frame job.

“I thought you’d be more interested in hearing why I cut off his hands and feet.”

No response from the detective other than a small shift in the set of his mouth. It was enough. But the detective wasn’t willing to give any more away, wasn’t willing to take the bait John had offered him.

“My original question still stands, Mr. Houck.”

“I want a lawyer.”

A thin smile this time. “That’s real good timing, mister. If I were in the midst of screwing up a major homicide investigation with a false confession, I would want a lawyer, too.”

Another few minutes of his unnerving stare, and the detective left the room.

His cell was a good ways down the hall from the drunk tank, with an empty cell on either side. He figured they wanted to keep him isolated so he wouldn’t say anything to another prisoner that might leak to the media, who had been camped outside the sheriff’s station in full force when they had brought him in early that morning.

John lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling with the vacant gaze he assumed a remorseless killer might use. Two sets of footsteps approached the cell. He listened to their arrival, then listened to one of them depart. He didn’t make any move to acknowledge the person standing outside the bars.

Ray Duncan said, “They know you’re covering for him. I told them Bowers saved your life in Iraq, so they think Alex got something over on you. Maybe introduced some kind of
sexual confusion
that changed your definition of loyalty. They thought it last night when they got word you turned yourself in, and they’re thinking it now. So you would have had to do some real good work in there to convince them otherwise.”

John said, “Well, they haven’t told you what I’ve said, so I’d say that’s a bad sign for you, Duncan.”

“How’s that, John?”

“See, I told them I hid Mike’s body in the woodshed while I wiped down the scene, which means they probably asked you if you did a search of the area after your deputies arrested me and you would have had to tell them you didn’t, which was a fuckup on your part, which doesn’t give them anything to disprove my story with.” He fought the urge to sit up and look at the man because he knew all he would see was Bowers’s hand resting in that cash box. “I think you’ve been cut out of the investigation, Duncan. Is that right?”

A brittle silence. Then, “You haven’t thought this through, John. Don’t pretend otherwise.”

“And you have?”

“Yes, sir. I have. That’s my job.” Not quite a confession, just an inch to the right of one. “There’s still time to set this thing straight, son. Hell, I’ll even back you up. Tell them what you told me about how Mike saved your life.”

“I bet you would, Duncan.”

“Call me Ray, John. It’ll let me know you’re really hearing me.”

John rose to a seated position, swung his legs to the floor, and looked up at Duncan. Everything about the man seemed calm and settled if you didn’t notice the details. The way he held on to the bar in his right hand in a tense grip, the tension in his upper lip, and the fact that he had rolled the sleeves of his uniform shirt three-quarters of the way up his arms.

After a long silence John said, “Are you waiting for me to blink?”

Duncan said, “You know I used to be an actor?”

“I didn’t.”

He nodded and smiled, as if they had just met at a cocktail party. “I never made much of anything at it, but the first time I ever wore a cop’s uniform was on the set of a TV show. I was just some guy in the background, but people told me I was good. They told me I never broke character. Not for one minute.” John nodded at this threat but said nothing. “I went to one acting coach when I first started who told me that acting is
reacting
to the stimuli we are presented with. Does that make sense?” John nodded. “But really, that’s life now, isn’t it? Because we are not a product of where we came from or what was done to us. We are what we choose to be in every situation that God delivers. And that’s why when a thing of beauty enters my life, I rise to the occasion with everything I have. Some people are humbled by beautiful things, John. I’m not. I’m
inspired
. I go after them with everything I have.
Everything.
”

John took a few minutes to pretend that he was digesting this speech. Then he nodded respectfully. “Here’s what I think happened, Ray. I think she let you start boning her because her husband dragged her up to that cabin every other weekend and she didn’t want to go because it was too far from her nice clothing stores and her charity lunches and her hair salon. And I think maybe you showed her some things she’d never seen before, so she let you hang in there.

“But I think after a while you started to want more, and she always had an excuse. She started with the obvious one: her husband. Her marriage. Then he was out of the picture and you thought maybe that was your shot. But then she had another excuse, just as good, if not better: her mother-in-law’s will. She couldn’t jeopardize her inheritance. But then—and this was the kicker, Ray—this is what I think really got to you: when her mother-in-law started to get sick, she sprang a big surprise on you. She wasn’t first in line for the life insurance. Alex was and, well, you couldn’t support her in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed. I guess it counts for something that you couldn’t bring yourself just to kill him. He is her only son, after all.

“But this is where I get confused. Maybe you did it because you thought she would actually be with you once she got that money. Or maybe—and this is the part that really fucking scares me—maybe you just did it to find out whether she was feeding you a load of shit. Maybe you just did it to find out, once and for all, if you’re really just some dumb pony she likes to ride when she’s done buying new shoes.”

Duncan’s laugh didn’t get past his throat, and his strained breaths flared his nostrils. “Is that what you told them in there?” he asked. His voice was thin and reedy.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” John said. “But just for the record, Duncan, I think it’s ’cause she thinks you’re a dumb pony she likes to ride when she’s done buying shoes.”

Duncan turned on one heel and started walking away from the cell. John rose and moved to the bars, “Hey, Duncan. Has she called?” Duncan kept walking. “’Cause I talked to her last night and I thought she might have called you.”

Duncan turned, started back toward the cell. His mouth opened, but he licked his lips instead of giving voice to his fear. John said, “I told her Alex was going to try to kill you. Are you sure she didn’t call to warn you?” The answer was on Duncan’s face. “That’s a shame,” John added.

“I’ll fucking roll over you. Do you understand me? I will
roll over
you, son.”

“Do it right now. You want me to go down for this, then tell me what I need to tell them when they ask me what condition I left the body in. Tell me everything I need to know to convince them I did this.”

“Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“Because the longer I’m in here, the more time Alex has to reconsider blowing your fucking head off. And in my book that is a good thing. It is the
only
good thing. Because I care about you about as much as you cared about Mike Bowers.” Even as the words poured from him effortlessly, he wasn’t sure he believed them. What he wanted was a confession. “Tell me what I need to know to take the fall for this.”

For a long time they stared at each other through the bars. Then Duncan glanced around him, looked down at the cracked cement floor, and cleared his throat. “The body was found in a dry streambed that feeds into Nesbit Creek. The area is accessed down about twenty yards of a rocky slope, near the intersection of Nesbit Road and Old Holloway Drive.” John held on to the bars in front of him for support, worked to steady his breath as he tried to memorize all the details he would need to know to issue a complete false confession. “Facedown, arms spread on either side. Hands and feet severed by a circular saw, not left at the scene.” As Duncan delivered these details, his quiet voice took on a breathy, high-pitched quality. “Various contusions indicate he was kept inside an industrial-size freezer for several days following his murder. Contusions to the face and chest indicate that he was dragged down the slope for several yards.”

His vision of Duncan blurred and shifted. He blinked back tears, spoke to chase away the uncontrollable wave of emotion that had just swept through him. “You haven’t even read the fucking coroner’s report, have you? You just know all this is going be in there.”

“Pretty good for some dumb pony,” Duncan whispered.

“You’re never going to have her. She believed me, Duncan. That’s why she didn’t call you. She believed me.”

Duncan brought his face right to John’s and whispered, “Let me tell you what wasn’t in the coroner’s report. When Marines get cut, they don’t sound like Marines at all.”

Duncan had already withdrawn by the time John lunged at the bars and spit at his face. John thought he had missed; then he saw Duncan wipe his cheek with the back of his right hand as he walked off in the direction of the central holding cell. Nevertheless, this small burst of inadequate violence left John feeling pathetic and childlike, as if he had spit into a fan.

When he saw that the metal door he was being led toward was marked “Visiting Room,” his heart leaped at the thought that Patsy might be waiting for him on the other side. Maybe once he had left the picture the police hadn’t been all that interested in her. But when the guard opened the door, he revealed a long, empty well of a room divided by a giant metal wall that cut the room into two sections and held large viewing windows. The wall stopped about six feet short of the ceiling so that guards stationed at the top of each metal staircase could look down into the entire area below.

No visitor was waiting for him. Indeed, it seemed the room had been cleared out. But a guard deposited him on the stool in the middle of the row, seating him in front of a Plexiglas panel that offered nothing more than a view of the empty stool on the other side and the metal-clad wall behind it. Instead of the telephones you saw on television, the panel had a vent of thumbnail-size holes at mouth level.

He looked up and was surprised to see that only one guard was still with him. Maybe the other had gone to fetch John’s secret admirer. The guard reached down and uncuffed him, then gave John a hard warning look. He could interpret it in only one way: the guy thought John was getting away with something, and he didn’t approve of this strange, silent proceeding. Then the guard moved back up the metal staircase they had just descended and stepped out the door. John saw part of his hulking back blocking the door’s viewing window.

For what felt like several minutes, John was completely alone. Then, on the other side of the wall, at the top of a metal staircase opposite the one John had been brought down, the door opened and a different guard stepped through. Charlotte Martin was behind him. The guard allowed her to descend the stairs unaccompanied, holding his ground just inside the door at the top. She wore a black pantsuit with a white silk shirt that had an almost metallic sheen to it. He wondered whom she had already gone into mourning for; then he reminded himself that she was the type of woman who mourned damaged reputations and lost opportunities, not human beings.

Carefully, she took a seat on the other side of the Plexiglas, reaching back to make sure the hem of her coat didn’t catch under her butt, even as she maintained unblinking eye contact with him. Then her eyes cut past him and he realized she was looking on his side of the wall at the top of the staircase, which was empty, but she could still see the guard’s back through the wire-reinforced glass window.

“I didn’t realize you had this much influence around here,” John said.

“They brought me in for questioning. Of course, they didn’t tell me what you told them. But I could tell from the nature of their questions it was quite a yarn.”

“What are you doing here?”

She smiled thinly, then looked down the length of her shirt, as if she were checking it for a stain. “There are two things you need to know before we go any further.”

“Open your eyes, Mrs. Martin. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Indeed. First thing. My husband changed his will without my knowledge. I had no idea he was leaving Alex the place in Owensville, and I never would have allowed it if I had known. Not because I am driven by a desire to punish my son, mind you, but because I never would have allowed my son to get that close to Ray.”

“Right. ’Cause you kept it away from the house.”

“Second.”

“I’m listening.”

“There’s a tape recorder taped to my waist and a microphone hidden in the lapel of this jacket. It’s not a wire, mind you. No one’s listening in right now. Apparently it would have taken a day or two to get that kind of technology. So it’s just a plain old tape, and when we’re done here, Detectives Barkin and Lewis are expecting to listen to it and discover that I have somehow led you to admit that your confession is bogus.”

He just stared at her, wondering if his exhaustion was causing auditory hallucinations. When she said nothing to refute what she had just told him, he leaned forward to get a better look at her. “Are you kidding me?”

“No.”

“And you’re telling me this?”

“I just told you. Yes.”

“So there’s no chance of that happening now, is there, Charlotte?”

“No. There isn’t.”

He was about to suggest that she leave, when she broke the silence with “I’m a very competitive woman, John. And as much as I am loath to admit it, you impressed me last night. But you’re out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you take the fall for this.”

“You don’t want me to show you up?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Good. Then tell the detectives about your relationship with Ray Duncan.”

“I won’t need to,” she said with a smile. “Ray will be here soon enough.”

John waited for her to elaborate. When she did no such thing, he opened his mouth, but she cut him off with, “And soon, I assume the affair will be public knowledge, given the enormous number of reporters your false confession has drawn to this building. If she lives long enough, my mother-in-law will gladly cut me out of her will altogether, and I—”

“What do you mean Ray will be here
soon enough
?”

She smiled broadly at the sound of fearful anticipation in his voice. “John, you could say I have been
inspired
by your hatred of me. After you left in handcuffs last night, I took a good, hard look at myself. At my accomplishments.” Her eyes glazed over at this word, as if she knew it wasn’t quite adequate but couldn’t find a suitable replacement. “I wasn’t proud.”

“You knew,” John said quietly. “You knew what he was going to do.”

“I most certainly did not!” Her anger was clear and unguarded. She took a minute to catch her breath. Then in a cooler tone she said, “I thought he kept asking me to marry him because he felt some kind of duty. I thought he believed that because I was a woman, I couldn’t just keep going to bed with him the way I had for years. I thought by putting him off again and again, that I was doing him a favor. Freeing him from what he saw as an obligation—an obligation to my sanctity as a woman. That’s a favorite word of yours, isn’t it, John?
Obligation
?”

“Charlotte, what did you mean when you said Ray would be here soon enough?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she whispered, rocking back in her seat, smoothing invisible pieces of lint from her thighs. “He was practically throwing himself against the door to the interrogation room the entire time they were questioning me. I thought he was going to try to come in through a vent. It’s just a matter of time before he figures out they’ve brought me in here. With you.”

“All right. And just what the hell are you doing in here? Now that you’ve blown your own cover.”

“Explaining myself, John. What does it sound like I’m doing?”

“Explain yourself to Barkin and Lewis.”

“How is that even possible, John, now that you’ve poisoned the waters with all of your lies? Those poor men can’t tell heads from tails in there. Don’t you see you haven’t left me with many choices when it comes to redeeming myself? Believe me, you’ve made it very clear that I am in desperate need of redemption. So what other choice do I have?”

Slowly she slid her right hand backward across the table, revealing the sharp point of a wooden stick the diameter of a human finger. She had taken the handle of a wooden spoon and sharpened it into a slender stake. He figured she had taped it to the inside of her leg to get it through security. “I’m told that a man like you knows a thousand different ways to kill. Teach me one of them, John. Teach me quick.”

“This is insane,” he whispered.

“You’re sitting in jail right now because you confessed to a crime you didn’t commit, to protect a man you don’t love. I’m not sure of many things right now, but I am sure that you have not been asked to determine the true definition of the word
sanity.
”

“If you tell them the truth, I’ll change my story. I’ll tell them what happened last night.”

“So I’ll be in league with a liar as my life is
destroyed
in the public eye. No, thank you, Mr. Houck. I have decided how this should be taken care of. You’re either going to help me or you won’t.”

At the top of the staircase on his side of the metal wall, John saw the guard move away from the glass window in the door. He listened, trying to recognize the voices shouting at each other on the other side. He couldn’t make out the words or who was delivering them.

“He’s coming in, John,” Charlotte whispered. “One way or another, he’s coming into this room. You can help me make sure he never leaves.”

Against his will, his eyes went to the barely concealed weapon resting under her fingers. With so pathetic a weapon, her best option would be a downward strike to the area just above Duncan’s collarbone, aiming for the subclavian artery. Immediate internal bleeding would result if the tip went deep enough, and death would follow quickly. But there were too many variables. The tip would probably break on impact, screwing her aim. Three inches off and the stake would snap against his collarbone. It infuriated him that he would even entertain these thoughts, but they were reflexive.

“I’m disappointed, John. You had such
passion
. Such
convictions.
But you’re too young for them. You get frightened when the concepts you toss about with such abandon actually take root and become reality. And that’s exactly what’s about to happen, John. I’m about to show you what you believe in. You’ll have to decide how it looks once I’m done.”

“I asked you to do something to take care of your son. To honor the fact that you’re his mother. You do this, and it’s about your ego. It’s not about a damn thing I said last night.”

“
Honor
is a word that teenage boys use to make their vanity and their ego sound like things they shouldn’t live in fear of.”

“They’ll gun you down before you can even make a flesh wound.”

On her side of the metal wall, the door atop the staircase flew open and the guard whirled around just as Ray Duncan stepped onto the landing, one hand raised to hold the guard back. At first John thought Duncan was holding a weapon, but then he saw it was a key ring. There was also someone behind him. The older man had silver hair and patrician features and wore a Sheriff’s Department uniform that matched the one Duncan was currently sweating bullets in. John recognized him from the photo that was hanging on the wall at the entrance to the station. He was the sheriff of Hanrock County.

Duncan turned and looked down at them. “This is exactly what I told you!” he shouted. “I told you they were up to something. You want to tell me what the hell these two are doing in here together, and why the room had to be shut down for them to do it?”

Dumbfounded, the sheriff stared down at them as Duncan descended the steps two at a time. “John,” Charlotte whispered.

He met her eyes but kept his mouth shut.

“Will you ever believe that I did this for my son?” she asked him.

“No. I won’t.”

“Fair enough. Then you should probably warn him now.”

Duncan’s voice boomed, amplified by the metal-clad walls, which were clearly intended to make conversations between prisoners and visitors more audible to the guards above. “Mrs. Martin, if you could come with me. The sheriff and I are going to try to straighten this whole thing out. Clearly something highly unorthodox has been—”

As soon as his hand touched her right shoulder, Charlotte was on her feet. It happened so fast that the stake she held in her right hand was in the air and covered in blood before John realized she had struck the first blow. Duncan let out a series of yelps, both hands pressed to his eyes, blood pouring from between his fingers. Shouts rang out from overhead. The sheriff had drawn his revolver, was shouting warnings for Charlotte to stop where she was. Instead, Charlotte took another step forward, her lips pursed in concentration, and went for the second most obvious target: she drove the stake into the side of Duncan’s neck just before he collapsed against the far wall.

Then Charlotte’s right shoulder exploded, shooting tufts of fine fabric, and the Plexiglas panel in front of John splintered and he went to the floor. He hit the floor as the metal walls amplified the second and third gunshots, turning them into a single unearthly roar. But he wasn’t there anymore. Acrid black smoke had swallowed him, and his skin was aflame from tiny pieces of shrapnel, and for the first time he could hear the words Mike Bowers had whispered into his ear in that moment.
Easy, brotha. Easy easy easy.

When the hands of the living finally pulled him from the cement floor of the visitation room, he tried to take solace in the fact that the horrors of war could sometimes protect him from the agony of the present.