Last Light (8 page)

The place seemed empty of customers. Made sense since it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. A woman stacking glasses behind the bar glanced up. “Can I help you?”

“We’re looking for David Ruiz,” Lucy told her.

She nodded her chin to the corridor leading behind the bar. “He’s set up in our back room.”

They followed her directions, past doors labeled
BULLS
and
HEIFERS
, to a windowless room with tables arranged in an open circle to accommodate larger parties. The sole occupant was a dark-haired man in his late twenties who sat at the far end of the tables surrounded by boxes of documents and files.

“David Ruiz?” Lucy said as they entered. He glanced up, blinked as if not sure where he was, and ran a hand through his hair.

TK strode forward. “We’re from the Beacon Group. TK O’Connor, and this is Lucy Guardino. We’re here to help.”

He nodded and took TK’s hand. “Glad to have you.”

His voice grated through the air, lifeless and monotone. It sounded mechanical, devoid of any inflection or emotion. TK dropped his hand and stepped back. “Uh, pleased to be here.”

“Whoops. Should have used this.” He held a small black cylinder to his throat. It resembled the artificial larynx that Lucy’s dad had after his tracheotomy. “Is that easier? I’m still figuring out the best way to put people at ease.”

TK winced at the strange voice, but nodded. “I guess. Gives me something to focus on besides—”

“Exactly,” he said, nodding. Without his body language it would have been impossible to discern any emotion. “Sometimes a prop saves time, right?”

Lucy stepped forward. “Are these the case files?” It was obvious they were, but she wanted to get started, figured the social chitchat could wait.

“What the defense had. The judge signed off on our court order compelling access to everything the police and prosecution have. We can start tomorrow.”

TK sat down and opened her laptop. “This place got Wi-Fi?”

“Yep, that’s why I chose it.”

TK quickly had them online with Tommy and Wash back at Beacon Falls. “David Ruiz of the Justice Project, meet Wash, our resident white-hat hacker.”

Wash did a flourish with his hand in acknowledgment.

“And Dr. Tommy Worth, pediatrician, our medical and forensics expert.”

“Nice to meet you,” Tommy said.

Lucy glanced through the files David had organized. “So, David, you have no law enforcement background?”

“Investigative reporter.”

Wash chimed in. “Right. I knew you looked familiar. I remember seeing you on the news. Before...” He gestured to his face, sliding a palm over half of it.

“Funny thing is, I actually get better stories now than I ever did before...” He mimicked Wash’s gesture. “After, I decided the truth shall set me free, so that’s all I care about. Not ratings or Q scores or any corporate BS. All I want is the truth.”

“Can I ask what happened?” Lucy said. “I’m afraid I don’t watch the news, so I’m not familiar with your work.”

“He was embedded in Afghanistan,” Wash answered. “Covering the troop drawdown and the dangers it posed. His Humvee blew up.”

“Not mine. The squad I was working with. IED. Shrapnel.”

“Like from the Humvee?” Wash sounded both excited and horrified.

“Bones,” Tommy muttered as if by reflex.

“Bones?”

“Baby Doc’s right—best shrapnel any suicide bomber ever devised. Bits and pieces of the guys around me—the ones who didn’t make it. Which was everyone except me. Human bone splinters are sharp, jagged, and cause secondary infection, prolonging the healing process, and tying up more of the enemy’s resources.”

It was an eerie disconnect, his voice so flat, reciting facts, while his face filled with anguish and his shoulders hunched with the memory.

“I don’t like it,” TK said. “A reporter? What’s to keep him from posting or Tweeting or Snapchatting everything we do?” She seemed to realize her faux pas and turned to him. “No offense.”

“None taken. I told you, I’m not here for a story. I want the truth. All of it. Nice thing about my screwed-up brain is just like you can’t hear any emotion in my voice, I can’t hear yours. Which frees me to focus on your body language. Words lie, but body language doesn’t. I can tell when someone’s hiding something.”

“Tonal agnosia,” Tommy diagnosed. “The language center that processes verbal emotion was damaged.”

The term was vaguely familiar. Lucy remembered watching a documentary with Nick—his turn to choose the entertainment, but she’d been just as fascinated by the strange permutations of certain brain injuries.

“Right.” David beamed at TK. “See? Tell her, doc. I’m an open book—can’t help it.” He raised his right hand as if swearing on a stack of bibles. “Funny thing is...now that I can’t lie anymore, people actually open up to me more. I get far more truth than I ever did before. Just not the kind of truth that grabs ratings.”

“Let me get this straight.” TK didn’t sound convinced. “Upside is you’re kind of a walking lie detector? But downside is you can’t actually lie?”

“Not verbally. I can say the words but I can’t sell the lie, if you get my drift. Can’t communicate emotion with my voice anymore either. This,” he gestured to his lips and mouth, “stripped-down Tin Man robot voice is as good as I get. Shame too,” he grinned at TK, “because used to be I could sweet talk a pretty girl like you out of your panties before—”

“I think we get the picture,” Tommy said through the computer.

“Guess you weren’t lying about telling only the truth,” TK said, smiling at David.

“Pretty much talked the same before, only it would cost you a few shots of tequila first. Just now, people don’t hear me the same—without emotional context coloring the words I use, unless I add dramatic body language to emphasize phrases, it all sounds flat. Spent months with a vocal coach to make it this far—should have seen me in rehab, sounded worse than a robot.”

“Okay, let’s get back to the case,” Lucy said, trying to regain control of the conversation.

“Wait,” Tommy said from the screen. “I just have one more question for Mr. Ruiz—not medical-related, if that’s okay.”

TK had warned her that the pediatrician would stray from his area of expertise. “Go ahead, Tommy.”

“When were you going to tell us that the killer we’re working to get out of prison is your father?”

DAVID LOOKED UP
at the two women in the room staring at him and then at the computer screen with the image of the two men back in Pennsylvania. “Sorry. I thought you knew. My mother was the girl with Michael Manning on the night of the killings. She’s his alibi witness.”

“Whose testimony was discounted,” Worth, the pediatrician, added. Hostility radiated from the man although he’d never met David before. But Worth’s gaze through the computer monitor was directed past David to TK. Did the two of them have a relationship?

“Yes,” he answered Worth’s accusation. “My mother’s family has lived in the area for generations. Longer than the Mannings—or the Blackwells, for that matter. But an under-aged, brown-skinned girl with relatives who speak with an accent and a funny last name? No one will listen to a word you say.”

Lucy pursed her lips and then relaxed, turned to face him, her body posture open. “We’re listening now. What does your mother have to say?”

He blew out his breath, exasperated. If only it were that easy, proving Michael’s alibi. “Not a hell of a lot. Except she’s sure he didn’t do it—even though he could have left her while she slept. That much she will admit. And the other witness puts my father and uncle at the scene of the crime after my father took her home.”

“Which the brothers both admitted, being in the area that morning. So she’s really not much of an alibi, then, is she?” TK said in her blunt fashion. She was by far the easiest of them to read.

“She wants me to go talk to him. In person. Make peace or some such thing. Says it’s important.” David felt as if he were making a confession, admitting his own emotional involvement. As a journalist, he’d always prided himself on being able to maintain a professional detachment from his subjects. One more thing lost in that Humvee explosion.

“Tell me you didn’t drag us all the way across the country just because you’re too chickenshit to face your daddy.” This time Lucy sliced a glare at TK that made the other woman flush. But David didn’t mind. He was quite enjoying TK’s refreshing honesty.

He sighed. How to explain? All this, everything he was doing wasn’t for Michael Manning. It was all for Maria. Keeping his promise to her, leaving no stone unturned.

“My mother raised me by herself, dragging me all over the state as my father was transferred from prison to prison. Somehow, along the way, she managed to save enough money for me to go to journalism school. She’s the one who got the Justice Project involved in Michael’s case last year after my uncle died in prison. I haven’t spoken to the man since I graduated college and began my career as a reporter eight years ago. But the Justice Project has arranged for me to visit with him tomorrow.”

“Whatever. We’re here now.” TK shrugged as if conceding a point.

“I asked for the Beacon Group’s help because the appeals process is going slowly and my mother is dying. The doctors say she’s already hung on weeks longer than they expected. All she wants is to see my father set free.”

“You’re not giving us much to go on,” Lucy said. “I thought you told Valencia you found a hole in the prosecutor’s case? A maybe-sorta alibi witness who can’t account for the entire night doesn’t really count.”

“That’s the problem. I’ve always believed my father was guilty and my mother was chasing a pipe dream with her delusions of his innocence. But when I began re-investigating his case, I found more than just one hole in the prosecution, I found a whole slew of them. Too many for me to handle on my own. Which is why, given my mother’s condition, I need—we need—your help.”

He hauled a box across the table and began throwing folders down, each smack of paper against wood releasing the pungent odor of decay. “Coroner’s notes that didn’t make it into the final, official report, scant as it was. And yes, it was a coroner, a funeral director, but he did a half-decent job and was the first to examine the bodies. It was a week before the state pathologist did his examination. No rush, they had their men, signed confessions.”

“Except?”

“Except the coroner said the man my father supposedly killed, the husband, was actually the first victim, not the last. And he died late afternoon to early evening,
not
the next morning.”

Lucy glanced up at that. “So, Friday night? When your father was in front of thousands of high school football fans.”

“Exactly.”

“But your uncle had no alibi for that time, right?” TK put in.

“No, afraid not.”

“And the other victims?” Wash, the man in the wheelchair, asked via the computer linkup.

“The baby and mother both died several hours later. According to the coroner, the outside estimate of their time of death was midnight or thereabouts.”

“When your father was with your mother.” TK moved to join him.

Tommy chimed in from the computer screen, finally fully engaged. “Can you send me a copy of the coroner’s notes? Even with modern methods, time of death is never cut-and-dried, but maybe I can give you some idea of what our widest window of opportunity is.”

“What else do you have?” TK asked David, craning to look into his box.

“The knife was never recovered despite searching the house, the truck, and my father’s trailer.”

“So they ditched it.” TK shrugged, leafing through a file and setting it down. David retrieved it and returned it to its proper place.

“Why ditch the knife and not the gun?” Lucy asked.

“Was the gun’s ownership ever traced?” Wash put in.

“No. I was hoping maybe you could help there.”

“And what about your uncle’s alibi witness? This Ronald Powell he was doing drugs with. Did they ever locate him?”

“No. Apparently he hid out in Mexico until things calmed down—he was growing marijuana on federal lands.”

“Wash,” Lucy said to the screen.

“On it, boss.”

David liked the way she smiled and sat back, letting her team run with ideas and suggestions rather than micromanaging.

“What about the lone survivor, Alan Martin?” Worth asked. “Was he ever able to give a statement? He could maybe narrow the gaps in the timeline, provide basic descriptions of the perpetrators.”

“He never recovered fully from his injuries. Had permanent brain damage, the doctors said. Never spoke again.”

Worth frowned at that, his skepticism about the competence of the doctor’s prognosis evident. “He’s still alive?”

“Last I heard, he lives in a group home outside of Dallas.”

“Let me make a few calls, see if we can get permission from his guardian to speak with him. Or at least to talk to his attending physician.”

“Thanks, Tommy,” Lucy said. “But I’m most interested in the man who did the initial interviews. Any chance of meeting him? Andrew Saylor, he was sheriff.”

“Don’t see why not,” David answered. “He retired five-six years back, lives out near the river, not far from the Martin place, actually.”

“Good.”

“But there’s one more witness I need your help with,” he told them. “The boy who placed my father and uncle at the scene of the crime the morning they were arrested.”

“Right,” TK said. “Caleb Blackwell. Any idea where he is now?”

“Yeah. Right down the road. He’s the new sheriff of Blackwell County.”

LUCY WANTED A
chance to absorb the mountain of information from the case files and she did her best thinking alone, so, after their initial session exploring the case, she ordered a steak and potato to go, and left TK and David at the Sweetbriar.

It would still be light for a few hours and she couldn’t face being trapped inside her hotel room, so she found a cool corner beneath the shade of an umbrella at the pool behind the motel to eat her dinner while reading twenty-nine-year-old police reports on her laptop. The pool was empty except for two boys, both preschool-aged, splashing in the shallow section and a mother who watched them from a deck chair.