Turning Angel (20 page)

“How do you figure that?”

“You’re singing your song about positions of trust and underage sex. You want to go out to the public school with me tomorrow and start questioning seventeen-year-old black girls? You want to ask them if any of their coaches have rubbed their shoulders after practice? Or maybe rubbed some more intimate parts, as defined in the statute on sexual battery?”

Shad has gone still as a bust in a museum.

“You want to go over to the junior high and start asking fifteen-year-old black girls how many of them are sleeping with adult men? That’s statutory rape, open and shut. Hell, you could fill up both jails in an hour. But you won’t do that, will you? You’d lose votes faster than if you put on a KKK sheet and hood. Don’t pretend that public morals or public safety have anything to do with this case, okay? You want to convict a rich white man to further your political ambitions. End of story.”

I turn to Sheriff Byrd. “I don’t know why you’re part of this, but I’m going to find out. And don’t think I’ll hesitate to go to the media with the whole stinking mess. You’ve already ruined my client’s reputation. I’ve got nothing to lose.”

Both men are staring at me with more anxiety than anger. Sheriff Byrd walks over to a chair and takes a seat beside Shad. The district attorney rises from his chair, comes around the desk, settles his butt on it, and smiles as though this whole confrontation is just a misunderstanding between friends.

“Penn, you were a prosecutor for fifteen years. The evidence I’ve laid out tonight is just what we’ve uncovered in the first forty-eight hours. Can you imagine what else there is to find? You know Dr. Elliot’s DNA is going to match what we took from that girl’s rectum. And at that point—forget any future evidence that comes in—at that point, just about any jury in this state will be ready to fry his ass and not lose a minute’s sleep over it.”

I let his last sentence hang in the air. This is the kind of logic that condemned many an innocent black man not so many years ago.

“There’s just one problem with your scenario, Shad. A tiny little hole that a second-year law student could drive a cement truck through.”

“What’s that?”

“The second semen sample. You’re completely ignoring it. Who else had sex with Kate Townsend? Who raped her? That’s what you should be trying to find out.”

“On the contrary,” he says, “that’s the cornerstone of my case. Dr. Elliott murdered Kate Townsend in a jealous rage over what he perceived as infidelity on the girl’s part.”

“Then who’s the mystery man? If the semen in her vagina wasn’t deposited during a rape, why hasn’t the guy come forward?”

Shad glances at Sheriff Byrd as if deciding how much to reveal. “I think it’s a kid,” he says finally, “just like the deceased. A kid who’s scared shitless, and with good reason. He doesn’t want to jump into the middle of a capital murder case. Also, he’s probably scared of Dr. Elliott. Maybe he saw Elliott kill the girl. If so, he’s got to figure, ’If he killed
her,
he’ll damn sure kill
me
to keep me quiet.‘ Or the kid may have told his parents what he saw.
They
may be keeping him from coming forward. These days, a lot of parents would do that.”

“Everything you just told me is pure speculation.”

Shad shrugs. “Maybe so. But it’s the kind of speculation juries like.”

He’s right. And although he might have some difficulty getting this speculation into the record in a normal courtroom, he’ll have no trouble with Judge Minor. Good old Arthel will give Shad all the rope he needs to hang Drew with innuendo.

“Come on, Cage,” says Sheriff Byrd. “You know as well as I do that most murder victims are killed by people they know, and know well. Same with rape.”

“You’re absolutely right. Are you satisfied that you’re aware of everybody Kate Townsend knew well?”

“We’re getting there.”

“So you know all about Cyrus White.”

Byrd’s eyes narrow, but Shad looks blank.

“What are you talking about?” asks the sheriff.

“I’m talking about regular contact—regular and
documented
contact—between Kate Townsend and Cyrus White. And I’m not talking about casual encounters in the mall. I’m talking about her visiting his crib in the Brightside Manor Apartments.”

“Stop right there,” Shad says irritably. “Who the hell is Cyrus White?”

“Only the biggest drug dealer in the city of Natchez.”

Shad glances at Byrd. “Is that right?”

The sheriff nods reluctantly.

“Why haven’t I heard of him before?”

I can’t resist answering. “The voters of this city would probably like to ask you the same question, Shad.”

The sheriff gives me a dark look, then cuts his eyes at Shad. “You don’t know who Cyrus is because he’s never been arrested. Where did you get your information, Cage?”

Since I can’t betray Sonny Cross, I barb my evasion with a point. “From the same person who told me Cyrus was sexually obsessed with Kate Townsend.”

“Bullshit.”

“Cyrus has a serious jones for white girls, Billy. That seems like the kind of thing you ought to know about, given the circumstances of this case.”

“Cyrus is black?” Shad asks. “I mean, if he lives in Brightside Manor, I guess he must be.”

“He’s black,” the sheriff confirms. “But he doesn’t always stay at Brightside. He has safe houses and apartments all around town. The crib at Brightside is just one of them. Cyrus moves around a lot.”

“Where was this guy when the murder happened?” Shad asks.

Sheriff Byrd looks at me again but says nothing.

“He doesn’t know,” I tell Shad. “Billy figured he could nail Dr. Elliott on circumstantial evidence alone, and since that’s what you want him to do, why look any further? Right, Sheriff?”

“Screw you, Cage. Don’t tell me how to run my business.”

“Somebody needs to. Has it seeped into your brain yet that St. Catherine’s Creek runs
right behind
Brightside Manor?”

Sheriff Byrd’s mouth falls open. He looks like a largemouth bass that’s been hooked deep in the gut.

“That’s what I figured.” I turn to Shad. “Ain’t it a bitch? You were all ready to rush a pillar of this community to execution to make yourself look good for an election, and now Cyrus White drops out of the woodwork. Nailing a black drug dealer for killing a white girl won’t buy you much capital with black voters, will it? In fact, it might hurt you some.”

Shads eyes are no longer focused on me. They’ve moved off to the middle distance as he makes lightning calculations about the political ramifications of all this.

“Ask yourself this, Shad,” I say softly. “On one hand, you’ve got a distinguished physician who’s never been in trouble in his life. He was having sex with an underage girl, but he was in love with her and ready to marry her.
That’s
the guy you’ve got sitting in jail. On the other hand, you’ve got a notorious drug dealer who violently wiped out all his competition, who is known to have been sexually obsessed with the murder victim, and who lives on the creek into which the body was dumped. Now—which suspect would a reasonable man conclude is the most likely killer?”

Shad swallows audibly. The sound gives me great satisfaction.

Sheriff Byrd stands up straight and tries to stare a hole through me. Except for the paunch, he looks a lot like the black-hatted gunfighters in the old Westerns my dad and I watched when I was a kid. “Tell me where you got your information about Cyrus and the Townsend girl,” he says, taking two steps toward me.

“Sorry, Sheriff. If I told you
everything,
that wouldn’t be right, would it?”

Shad speaks in a cold voice. “Tell him, or I’ll charge you with obstruction of justice.”

“You call what I saw when I walked into this office justice?” I laugh outright, then turn and walk to the door. “I’ll see you boys tomorrow, after you’ve taken a DNA sample from Cyrus White. And be sure to inform the newspaper, the grand jury, and Judge Minor that you have a second suspect. Or I’ll have to do it for you.”

“Hold it, Cage,” Sheriff Byrd warns. “We’re a long way from done here.”

I keep walking.

“You can’t get out,” Shad calls after me. “The downstairs door is locked.”

He’s right. “Then get your ass down there and open it. Or I’ll smash it open.”

“Do that, and I’ll arrest you,” threatens the sheriff, his voice edged with hatred.

It’s times like this that I think the judicial system should be entrusted solely to women. “Arrest me, and I’ll make you look like the biggest asshole in the county on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. And that’s saying something.”

Billy Byrd looks like he’s about to stroke out.

“Open it for him,” Shad says softly. “Here are the keys.”

I walk downstairs without waiting for Billy. He’ll be ready to kill me by the time he reaches the ground floor, but right now I don’t give a damn.

I stand at the glass door, listening to his boot heels hammer the steps and the keys jangling in his hand. He stops behind me but makes no move to open the door.

“You’re writing mighty big checks with that mouth of yours,” he says in a low voice.

I turn and face him, my jaw set. “What did Shad buy you with, Billy? Whatever it was, it must have been big. I know you don’t sell cheap, especially to a black man. They’ve never been your kind of folks.”

Byrd’s trigeminal nerve twitches his cheek. “Be careful, boy.”

“Of what, exactly?”

The smile that cracks his face is like another man’s grimace.

“Don’t you wish it was forty years ago?” I say softly. “So you could just put two in the back of my head and say I assaulted you? Or maybe that I tried to escape?”

The smile leaves Byrd’s lips. “Sometimes I think they had it right back then, yeah.”

“Open the door.”

The sheriff tosses Shad’s keys onto the floor and walks back up the stairs.

I unlock the door, toss Shad’s keys into a trash can in the corner, and walk out into the night.

As I stand in the street looking at the hulking white courthouse, everything I didn’t know about Drew rushes through my mind with dizzying speed. His fingerprints in Kate’s bedroom. Kate’s cell phone records. A witness seeing Drew and Kate changing cars in a parking lot. Each of these facts is another stone in the pile that could eventually bury Drew at trial. Not evidence of murder, of course, but evidence of depravity to a conservative jury. And Shad was right about one thing: if the semen found in Kate’s rectum turns out to match Drew’s DNA, Shad’s theory of rape and murder as revenge is going to sound a lot more plausible. No member of a Mississippi jury will want to believe that a high school senior was practicing anal sex for recreation. I’m not sure I believe it myself. If it weren’t for Cyrus White’s relationship with Kate—and the location of the Brightside Manor Apartments—I’d be damned frightened right now.

My cell phone rings. The caller ID saysMIA , but when I answer, all I hear is sobs.

“Mia? Is that you?”

She’s crying, I’m sure of it. My heart bounds into high gear. “Is Annie all right?”

“Yes, but something terrible has happened!”

“Tell me.”

“Chris Vogel is dead.”

Chris Vogel is a junior at St. Stephen’s and the star of the basketball team. I saw him two days ago, shooting three-point shots in a neighbor’s driveway downtown. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. Everybody’s talking about it.”

“How did he die?”

“He drowned at Lake St. John.”

Lake St. John. The same lake where the X-rave was held last night.
I climb into my Saab, crank the engine, and pull into the empty street. “When did this happen, Mia?”

“Tonight.”

“Do you have any details?”

“More than I want. Apparently, Chris never came back to town after the party last night. He and Jimmy Wingate ditched school today. Everybody figured they had hangovers, because they wouldn’t answer their cell phones. But apparently they stayed up at the Wingates’ lake house. They just didn’t want word to get back to the teachers where they were. They stayed drunk and probably worse, given the shit that was up there the other night.”

“You mean drugs.”

“Mm-hm.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Christy Blake called and told me about Chris, but as soon as I hung up with her, I called Jimmy Wingate. We were good friends when we were little. He’s in bad shape. Seeing Chris drown really messed him up.”

I want to know more, but I’d rather hear it face-to-face. “I’ll be home in three minutes. Tell me when I get there, okay?”

Mia sobs into the phone. “Please hurry.”

I hang up and press down on the accelerator. I’ve never seen or heard Mia lose her composure before. But tonight it’s no wonder. Death is difficult enough for adults to deal with, but for adolescents it can be a paralyzing shock. Flushed with hormones and in the best physical shape of their lives, they view death as a shadowy event that waits incomprehensibly far in the future. The sudden loss of one of their own—particularly a school hero like Chris Vogel—punctures their illusions of immortality.
You are not immune,
says Fate, speaking with utter permanence.

Two high school kids dead in two days?
muses a voice in my head.
In a school with only five hundred students? How could they not be connected?

Chapter
14

I’m parked outside my house on Washington Street, trying to reach Sonny Cross, the narcotics agent who told me about Cyrus White. Mia stands in the open door, her worried face illuminated by the porch light. Someone answers in a voice so soft as to be almost inaudible.

“Sonny?” I ask. “Are you asleep?”

“On surveillance,” he whispers. “Hang on.”

I hear the sound of heels on pavement—probably Sonny’s snakeskin cowboy boots—and then he speaks in a normal voice. “You must have heard about the Vogel boy.”

“Yeah.”

“Things go to shit in a hurry, don’t they?”

“Do you think his death was drug-related?”

“Definitely. The kid with him admitted they’d done three tabs of acid in the past twelve hours. I was there when they questioned him.”