Fatal Flaw Part 35

"Did you win in Vegas?" he said.

"Vegas?"

"Yeah, Vegas. Did you win or did you leave your money on the c.r.a.ps table?"

I waited a moment, tried to figure how to play it, and then decided to play it straight. Sooner or later the fact of our little trip was bound to come out, and sooner had just stepped through the door. "Some guy I was with thought he had a system."

"Did he?"

"Yes, but not a good system."

"Find anything of interest in the safe-deposit box?"

"Safe-deposit box?"

"Hailey Prouix's box at the Nevada One Bank, Paradise Road branch."

"Who exactly are you investigating, Detective?"

"And tell me, how did you find West Virginia?"

"Wild and wonderful, just as the ads say."

"Our office received a call that you were down there asking questions."

"Yes, well, that's what lawyers do. We ask questions."

"But why there?"

"I was getting a little history."

"And the man you were with down there, this Skink. It seems he also was in Las Vegas."

"Just an investigator I have working for me."

"We'd like to speak to him."

"That wouldn't be proper, considering he's covered by the attorney-client privilege, too."

"I am struggling here, Carl, struggling to figure out your side in all this. Stone doesn't like you. She thinks you want to ask her out but are afraid, and she's glad you're afraid. Saves her from breaking your heart. She says you're smarmy."

"Me?"

"Smarmy and weak and definitely hiding something. I don't like you much either, I've decided. I think you're whiny and manipulative and not half as clever as you think you are, but I don't really care about all that."

"Does that mean you'd you'd go out with me?" go out with me?"

"Somehow I have the strange sense that you're looking for the right kind of outcome here. I have a sense, maybe, that you're as interested as me in finding out what the h.e.l.l really happened to Hailey Prouix."

"You don't think Guy Forrest did it?"

"The evidence points right in his face. But I have to admit that some of what you said in your opening had been on my mind from the start. Like he really was in love with her. Like he never was in it for the money. Like he doesn't seem the type to end a fight with a bullet. But I've already told this to Jefferson, which is as far as my legal obligation goes. It is his decision whether or how to proceed. So it's not the doubts I'm struggling with. What I'm struggling with is you."

"You have unresolved feelings and you find them threatening. I understand. It's perfectly natural, really."

"You are in this deeper than you let on. You are in this up to your neck, though I can't quite figure out how. You are in this in ways that give me serious pause and leave me struggling to figure out what to do with something I found."

"Something exculpatory? If it's exculpatory, you have to turn it over. Brady Brady v. v. Maryland Maryland."

"Now who's the jerk throwing out cites? But what I have is nothing right now, though I have a sense you might be able to tell me enough to make it more interesting."

"Tell you what?"

"Let's start with why you turned over the gun."

I paused for a moment, wondering what he had found, where he was going, whether or not I could trust him, even with a little bit of the truth. "I thought your possessing the gun," I said slowly, "might further the ends of justice."

"That sounds like bulls.h.i.t."

"It does, doesn't it? That's the way it is with lawyers and politicians both, we can make even the truth sound like lies."

"What did you find in Vegas?"

"A story."

"Go ahead."

"A story about a boy who was killed a decade and a half ago in a little town in West Virginia."

"Hailey Prouix's hometown."

"That's right. He had fallen in love with Hailey, they had a stormy romance, and then he found out about something. He found out about something, and it made him mad as h.e.l.l and put him at a crossroads. He was going to either run away with his love, Hailey Prouix, or hurt someone. And there he was, at the quarry on the south side of town, waiting to hear which way it was going to be, when the next thing he somehow falls off a ledge, cracks his head open, and dies in the water that had collected at the quarry's bottom. The natural suspect was a guy named Grady Pritchett, rich man's son, big man in high school who had been fighting with our dead boy just a few days before. All eyes turned to him, but he had an alibi, and a pretty convincing one at that. Hailey Prouix. Funny how it worked. And funny how after Hailey stood up for Grady Pritchett she got her college and law school all paid for so she could get the h.e.l.l out of Pierce once and for all."

"How come I never heard any of this?"

"You haven't been asking the right questions."

"What kind of car does this Grady Pritchett drive?"

"Why?"

"Just asking."

"Doesn't drive a car, drives a truck. A big black pickup."

"Where does he live?"

"Just a few towns down the road from Pierce."

"And you think this Grady might have come up here and killed that girl?"

"Nope."

"You think he killed that boy fifteen years ago?"

"Nope."

"Then what the h.e.l.l do you think?"

"I don't know. I haven't yet figured it out, but there's something connecting the two deaths. I met up with Hailey's sister. She's certifiable, in an actual asylum, treats some pop physics book as her Bible, but I took from her babbling that she, too, thinks the two are related. And if they are, I want to find out how. Believe this, Detective, all I want is for whoever killed Hailey Prouix to go straight to h.e.l.l."

"Even if it's your client?"

"He didn't do it."

"What makes you so sure?"

"She seduced him for the Gonzalez money. She set him up for it, met him at a bar, let their knees bang accidentally, and seduced him completely and absolutely. He fell stupidly in love and lost his bearings and gave up everything for her. Like I said in my opening, for him it was never about the money, it was about a love that was transforming, or maybe more precisely the hope for a love that was transforming. She set him up for the money, yes, but his hope was real, and he never could have killed that hope. Even when it all turned bad, he closed his eyes and kept it alive, because it was the hope he was chasing more than even her."

"And obsession couldn't have turned to violence?"

"Not with him, not with her. See, no matter what happened, he'd always remember the way he felt when their knees banged accidentally at that bar."

Maybe there was something in my voice that betrayed me, because he turned to stare at me with that wandering gaze of his and he said, "And how did that feel exactly?"

"I'm telling you what I can."

"Maybe telling only what you can is not enough."

I didn't know what else to say. I couldn't explain the knocking of the knees and the way it had felt, the confusion and hope and l.u.s.t all mixed together, I just couldn't. I would be betraying more than myself, more than Guy, I would be betraying her, too. So instead I decided to say something else, something that would resonate. It is always in times of maximum stress, when all alternatives fail, that lawyers tend to turn to that most unlikely tactic, the truth.

"I saw the body, Detective. I saw her on that mattress with a bullet through her chest. I saw the way her arms were crazily akimbo, I saw the way the blood contrasted with the pale of her skin. I've seen a few corpses, not as many as you, but a few, and they never fail to stun me with their abject lifelessness. It's not like you can just breathe life back into them, it's not like they're sleeping, it's something else, something distorted in a way that haunts the dreams. I can't just let that go, I can't just play my minor role and let the rest of you decide how it all gets sorted out. I saw the body, Detective."

He breathed in quickly through his nose, or was it a snort? I couldn't tell. He stared straight ahead for a long moment before downing his beer and swiveling away from me. He reached into his jacket and tossed something onto the bar, a dollar or two for the beer, I supposed, and without saying a further word he climbed off his stool and headed out the door, right out the door.

Gone.

A despair flitted over my shoulders in that instant, a despair that filled me with a shocking sense of hopelessness. There was something about Breger I found comforting, something solid. He had shown faith in me, kindness, too, in his way. I admired how fairly he had handled the case, and I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to understand and say that I had done right, that everything would be okay. For some reason, from him, it would sound like the real thing. But he had instead just snorted at me and climbed down and walked away, a gesture that let me know with utter clarity that I had not done right, that everything would not be okay.

I was sitting at the bar, feeling the despair, when I noticed a piece of paper in front of me. It looked like a bar tab. When I scanned the bar for the money Breger had left, there was nothing else, and I figured Breger had stuck me with the check. But then I looked at the paper more closely and saw that it wasn't a bill. It was something else.

A speeding ticket issued by the Philadelphia Police.

Left on the bar, for me, by my good friend Detective Breger.

I stared at it for a long moment, the name of the driver, Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, which I didn't recognize, the make and style of the automobile, the state and number of the license plate, the location of the violation, the date. The date. I stared at it for a moment and then a moment more, and then I took out my phone.

First I called Beth and told her that she would have to handle the next day of the trial all by herself.

"What should I do?" she asked.

"Vamp," I said. "With all your heart."

Then I called the airline and made a reservation for two on the first flight out the next morning headed for Charleston, West Virginia.

"Will you be needing a rental car at the airport?" asked the reservation man.

"Oh, yes," I said. "Yes indeed."

41.

FALL HAD come to Pierce with a suddenness that stunned. How long had I been away, how long had the trial of Guy Forrest been going on? It seemed I had lost my temporal bearings. When I had driven into the little town before, it felt as though the promise of spring had just given way to the relentless summer. Now the dry colors of autumn had taken hold, the bright yellows and oranges heralding the death of a season. Right now it was a riotous bounty of color. In a few weeks all would be bare in Pierce. come to Pierce with a suddenness that stunned. How long had I been away, how long had the trial of Guy Forrest been going on? It seemed I had lost my temporal bearings. When I had driven into the little town before, it felt as though the promise of spring had just given way to the relentless summer. Now the dry colors of autumn had taken hold, the bright yellows and oranges heralding the death of a season. Right now it was a riotous bounty of color. In a few weeks all would be bare in Pierce.

We walked up the hill, through fallen leaves, their desiccated bodies crumbling beneath our feet as we made our way to the church.

Inside, our footfalls echoed about the plaster and wood of the main chapel. We knocked on the door of the rectory, and Reverend Henson bade us enter without asking first who we were. His face, when he recognized me, was distressed but not surprised, as if he had been expecting me to return all along. As if the only thing that surprised him was that I had waited so long and had brought with me someone new.

"Reverend Henson," I said, "I'd like to introduce Oliver Breger, a Montgomery County homicide detective. Hailey died in Montgomery County and he is investigating her death. I hope you don't mind, but I thought it important to bring him along."

The reverend smiled thinly at Breger. "A little out of your jurisdiction, isn't it, Detective?"

"Mr. Carl said it might be interesting."

Breger wasn't looking at Henson as he spoke, his gaze instead was slipping around the small room with its cherry paneling and shelves filled with prayer books and theological texts. Behind the door hung the reverend's vestment, flat and black and surprisingly frail, pinned as it was, limp and small, to the wood. It was a comfortable room, a place to read and prepare sermons, a place to have the pro forma talk with the bride and groom before the wedding or to hear stories from the family about the dear departed before the funeral, a comfortable room, but not lush. No, the Reverend Henson did not live a posh life in Pierce, it was clear. Whatever he had gained in the bargain he had brokered, it had not been his own material gain.

Henson shifted in his seat and asked us to sit. He wasn't happy having a homicide detective in his church, I was sure. I suppose he wasn't happy having me there either, but I hadn't come to make the good reverend happy. Something had happened in Pierce sixteen years ago, something rotten that the reverend was in the middle of, something that bore directly on the trial of Guy Forrest. The speeding ticket given me by the detective had shown with utter clarity that the deaths of Jesse Sterrett and Hailey Prouix were indeed related. To demonstrate that to a jury, I was going to need the reverend's testimony. And I would need something else, something maybe Breger could help me get if I convinced him I was right. That something else was what had prompted me to ask Breger along. His own innate curiosity, so vital to the makeup of a first-rate detective, was what prompted him to agree.

"I've come again," I said, "to talk about Jesse Sterrett."

"Of course you have. But I've told you all I can, Mr. Carl. I have certain...responsibilities."

"You're talking about privilege, aren't you? Priest-penitent. Oh, I know about privilege. Detective Breger could tell you all about my reliance on privilege."

"I've thought about this ever since you left, I considered all my options, read what I could on the subject. It is a balancing act, to be sure, but I have done that balancing in my head, over and over, and I believe there is nothing I can do. I am truly sorry."

"You need to know, Reverend Henson, that it didn't end with Jesse Sterrett. It isn't over."

"There is nothing I can do."

"He killed Hailey."

"No, no, he didn't," he said. "I checked as soon as I heard the terrible news. He never left the state."