Defensive Wounds (38 page)

They both knew he couldn't guarantee anything of the kind, but that didn't matter. Theresa was exhausted, bewildered, and terrified, and it was what she needed to hear at the moment. She allowed herself to slump into his arms and wrap herself against his sturdy frame.
Let him be able to deliver on that pledge,
she prayed, clutching him so tight that the keys on her lanyard pressed into her sternum.

“It will be all right,” he breathed into her ear, grasping her hair with one hand. “We'll stop him.”

“Not him,” Theresa corrected. “Her.”

They reached the fifty-second floor.

He insisted on leading the way, right hand on his gun, his left splayed outward to keep her behind him. But he moved quickly enough to keep her from going insane, advancing into the smaller, south-facing observation room, through the narrow hallway, into the larger, north-facing room with its wide windows and bare floors. They were empty and silent.

Neil continued into the very dim stairwell, moving up the two flights. Theresa followed him closely enough to feel the heat from his body as they climbed the creaking metal steps. Coral was someone to be empathized with, not arrested, right? They could hope. But Coral had not sought out William to have a cathartic chat, and Rachael would never have left the lobby at a simple verbal request. Coral, Theresa felt sure, would be armed. A gun or a knife. By this point Theresa wouldn't be surprised if the slender woman had dynamite strapped to her chest.

The top of the tower hadn't been designed for either efficiency or convenience, and certainly not for ease of apprehending a murderously grieving mom. There were no lights and no windows. Dark corners abounded. The door to the outside could be located only by the rim of fading light around its edge. Neil Kelly pulled it open, gently, and it moved inward as quietly as eighty-three-year-old, well-painted-over metal could—with a deafening metallic squeak.

Now Theresa heard voices.

They stepped over the high threshold into the curving bowl of the outer observation deck. The sun had begun to set, streaking the air over the lake with pink and purple, and the wind whipped up the water as the temperature faded. It would have been beautiful had she time to look at it.

Neil Kelly moved toward the north, Theresa immediately behind him, grateful that he did not waste even a split second trying to convince her to hang back, perhaps figuring they had little to fear from a single distraught mother. But she noticed he kept his hand on the butt of his gun and had unsnapped his holster. They moved quickly around to the point where Sonia's body had lain, the paint still streaked with her blood.

Coral stood on the workers' scaffold, a gun in her right hand and Rachael's elbow in the other, herself against the wall, Rachael at the edge of the platform. Theresa stopped. It was bad enough to see the barrel of a Glock pointed at her only child. Even worse was that nothing but a railing of thin cables that barely reached Rachael's thigh separated her from seven hundred feet of empty air.

William Rosedale stood in the niche between the steps and the outer wall, his back to Theresa, as Coral was saying to him, “… what you did in five minutes of drunken stupor destroyed every iota of the beautiful family I had, blasted it into dust.”

Rachael's voice pierced the breeze. “What are you going to do, kill him? Everyone will know you did it, even if—”

Even if you kill me, too.

“I don't want to kill him! I want him to confess. To me, to you, to the entire city!
I just want to hear him admit it!
”

Calm. It was really important to stay calm here.

“Coral!” Neil raised his voice to be heard above the growing wind, but not shouting. “Drop the gun.”

William's head swiveled toward them, and Rachael jerked as if she wanted to run to her mother—turned into a little girl all over again—but Coral pulled her back. William looked about as terrified as a buff nineteen-year-old could look.

Coral did not seem the least dissuaded by the presence of two witnesses. She barely spared them a glance.

Theresa forced herself to breathe. “I told you I had some new information you'd want to hear.”

“You let her stay here,” Coral said, the depth of her voice belying her slight frame. “You know what he is, and you let her see him. Are you
nuts
?”

Theresa refrained from saying,
I'm not the one on top of the Terminal Tower waving a gun at two kids,
and instead said, “That's what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“I didn't kill Jenna,” William said to Theresa. The stoicism she'd seen this week had been decimated, wiped out by this relentless pursuit. His voice hovered on the edge of tears. “I would never have hurt Jenna. And I would never—”

“Shut up!” Coral screamed. “Stop saying that!”

Theresa said, “He's right. He didn't kill Jenna.”

They both stared at her.

“His friend Ray did.”

“What?”

“What?”

Theresa squeezed past Neil Kelly, gently, slowly, never taking her eyes off the woman on the platform. He didn't stop her, probably waiting to see if she could talk Coral Simone into putting down the gun.

Theresa tried to take her eyes off her daughter, with nothing to hang on to except the woman who was threatening to kill her in order to force a confession from her boyfriend. If Coral pushed, she might grab the cables—Would they even hold …? Theresa made herself stop. Concentrate. Then she started to talk.

“The bloody streaks on Jenna's shirt—three and a half lines. They're finger marks. Ray is missing half of his index finger.” She asked William, “When did he lose that?”

The boy choked, coughed, then pulled himself together with visible effort. “Grade school. He was helping his dad mow the lawn—”

“Ray was with you that night, wasn't he? He was at the dance with you, because you did everything together. Ray has been riding your coattails since grade school. He told me so himself.”

“Ray wouldn't—”

“He also told me, ‘
I
should never have gone to that dance.' Not ‘
William
shouldn't have gone,' but ‘
I
shouldn't.' What do you remember about that dance, William?”

“I … I remember going. But Ray couldn't kill somebody—”

“Speak!” Coral Simone demanded, surprising Theresa. But this didn't mean she subscribed to Theresa's theory. She merely wanted to wring every detail out of her daughter's last day on this earth. “What happened at the dance?”

“Ray was there, right?” Theresa pressed.

“Yeah … I picked him up. Jenna was there, other kids. I think we talked to her … then, I don't know.” His body gave a jerk from time to time, first in one direction and then another as if both wanting to run and wanting to protect Rachael, neither possible under the threat of Coral Simone's .40-caliber.

“You were drugged, William. Traces of Rohypnol were found in your blood—
your
blood, not Jenna's.”

“His lawyer made that up,” Coral interrupted.

“The prosecutor would have tested the samples again if he thought that. William, do you remember taking any drugs that evening?”

“No, I wouldn't—I never took stuff like that. Why would I?”

“Exactly. Why would a randy teenage boy drug
himself
? But Ray could have slipped it to you. You appeared drunk, Ray asks her to help him get you home. She'd have done something like that, wouldn't she?” Theresa asked Coral Simone. “You said she never wanted to see another kid get in trouble.”

The mother nodded. Slowly. But she didn't put the gun down, nor did she relax her hold on Rachael's arm.

Neil Kelly hovered behind Theresa, a warm mass at her elbow, waiting to see if she could talk Coral's finger off that trigger.

Scheherazade, only spinning tales to save a daughter's life this time. But they weren't just tales … The more she talked, the more she convinced herself. “So there's Ray and Jenna, feeling like Good Samaritans. You're passed out. Your parents aren't home. This is Ray's plan, his big chance. He makes his pass. Now, Jenna is a sweet girl, but let's face it—she can have her pick of any boy in the class. She isn't about to suck face with a loser like Ray, is she?”

“This isn't true!” William said. “You don't know what you're talking about!”

“Ray has Klinefelter's syndrome, doesn't he?” she asked him, receiving a blank look in reply. “It's when a male has an extra X chromosome. Instead of XY, he's XXY. It's characterized by abnormal body proportions, which makes him look sort of droopy though he's of normal height, and enlarged breasts though he's not really overweight. Most commonly it causes infertility, which is why no sperm was found on Jenna. DNA can also be found in seminal fluid, but sexual problems are common with Klinefelter's, too, so likely he couldn't even produce that. This would have caused him a great deal of frustration, especially liking Jenna as much as he did. And he did, didn't he?”

She was guessing, but the look on William's face told her that she was guessing right on every point.

“He always talked to her,” Coral admitted. “Jenna mentioned him now and then. He'd ask her out, ask for her help with his homework, linger at her locker. She laughed about it—not to be mean, she just didn't think anything of it. All the boys acted like that with her.”

Theresa went on. “You said he came to her funeral, cried harder than anybody. He cried again this morning—the sight of Sonia's body completely unnerved him, because it brought back bad memories of Jenna's death—because he was there.”

William tried one last protest. “But then how did he get home? I drove us to the school.”

“He walked. He said you and he had been friends since you walked to school together in grade school. He doesn't live far from you,” she guessed, and William didn't disagree. “It's a perfect solution for him. Your car is at the school, Jenna's car is in your driveway, he can drop the murder weapon in the woods or maybe bury it on the way home. No one at the school will remember that you arrived at the dance together, because no one ever pays any attention to Ray, right?”

“He would never have done that to me!” Anger had finally erupted. The boy turned red, and his fists balled. He seemed to have completely forgotten about Coral's gun, about Coral. “He's the only one who stuck by me, the only one who didn't drop me like last year's BlackBerry model. He would never have let me go to jail for something he did. Never!”

“I'm sure it tore him up,” Theresa agreed gently. “He said he went to your trial every day until his mother made him stop. He spoke of Marie Corrigan as if she were a saint, because she saved your life. When you were acquitted, no one was happier than Ray was, right? Not your parents, not even you.”

She was proving William innocent, relieving him from a lifetime of infamy
and
Coral Simone's justice, and the kid only appeared younger and more vulnerable than she'd ever seen him. Knowledge of Ray's betrayal had decimated him, shredded the one last piece of comfort he'd been able to salvage from the previous three years.

“So you see, Coral—you would have executed the wrong boy.”

At last the too-thin woman lowered the gun a few inches. “That's a lot of theorizing.”

“Yes, it is. But I don't think it will be hard to prove. All we have to do is ask Ray. He's been carrying the weight of his guilt for three years, and he'll be only too relieved to shed it.”

Coral appeared to ponder this, the pallor in her face brightened only slightly by the rosy cast of the setting sun. Theresa didn't dare look at her own daughter, or she might not be able to keep herself from rushing the platform and the crazed woman on it.

“You really think so?” Coral asked, barely audible over the evening breeze and still not ready to accept this new view of life. She had spent three years planning William Rosedale's destruction, and now it had all been for nothing.

“Yes.” Theresa breathed out. This would work. Coral was coming down, both literally and figuratively.

Then, reversal. Coral took a new grip on the gun, pulled Rachael an inch closer to her, and said, “Let's find out. Call him.”

William stared at her, uncomprehending. “
What?
”

“Your little friend Ray. Get out your phone and call him. Tell him to come here.”

“No.”

“He murdered my child.”

William's mouth worked without sound for a moment, and then he said, “He's not here anyway.”

“He'll come back. He'd crawl across broken glass just to hover in your orbit. Call him.”

“He went home,” the teen insisted. “His mother picked him up. She won't let him drive, and the bus makes him nervous.”

Another reason for Rachael to date this boy: He couldn't lie worth—

“He left her naked and bloody for strangers to poke and prod so that all the other kids could talk about it on their MySpace pages. And then,” Coral added with a quick and fatal slice, “he let you take the blame for it. Bring him here, and you and this girl can walk away.”