Fatal Flaw Part 48

"We're looking for him, Judge," said Detective Breger. "He has apparently disappeared from his home in Henderson. The Nevada police have put an APB out on his car."

"The white Camaro."

"Yes, Judge. The white Camaro."

"If you want a warrant to bring him in, I'll sign it."

Just then there was a knock on the door, and the judge's secretary poked her head into the office. "There's a phone call for Miss Derringer."

"Excuse me," said Beth as she stood. We all watched as she left the office.

"Telemarketers," I said. A soft spurt of nervous laughter died at the judge's impatience.

"Mr. Jefferson, my expectation is that you will immediately put this witness into police custody and inform the proper officials from the state of West Virginia of what happened in court today. At the same time I will have an attorney appointed for his benefit. I will not, however, put this witness back on the stand simply to plead his Fifth Amendment privilege. That That would be unfairly prejudicial. I suppose we'll have to wait to see exactly what his new lawyer advises before continuing. Now, Mr. Jefferson, one more question." would be unfairly prejudicial. I suppose we'll have to wait to see exactly what his new lawyer advises before continuing. Now, Mr. Jefferson, one more question."

"Yes, Your Honor."

"Do you really think, after hearing what they heard, the jury will convict Mr. Forrest of murder?"

"The evidence against Mr. Forrest remains very strong."

"You think so, do you?"

"He was the only one in the house, it was his gun, his fingerprints are on the gun, there is a strong monetary motive-"

"Yes, yes, yes, but what about Mr. Cutlip's admissions?"

"I believe that Mr. Carl is a skilled attorney, practiced in the arts of deception and trickery, who was able to badger and twist an old man to say pretty much anything he wanted the man to say."

"Thank you," I said, "I think."

"Maybe your opinion of Mr. Carl's skills is higher than mine," said the judge, "but I don't think that old man said anything he didn't want to say. You haven't yet closed, your case is still not complete, and Mr. Carl here can always screw things up, I have no doubt, but you understand that a certain threshold has to be met before I can even allow a case to go to the jury."

"I understand the law, Your Honor. We believe we have already met that threshold."

"I suppose you'll find out for certain when the defense makes its motion at the close of your case."

The door opened, and Beth came back into the chambers, but instead of returning to her chair, she stood at the door. "Can I see you for a moment, Victor?" she said.

Judge Tifaro nodded. I stood and walked to her and leaned over, letting her whisper in my ear as all watched.

"Judge," I said, "could you excuse us? Something has turned up to which we need to immediately attend. Mr. Jefferson and the detectives will want to come along, too. It might be better if we just recess everything until tomorrow morning."

"What is it, Counselor? What have you found?"

"Bobo."

52.

THE SEABRIGHT Motel squatted on a desolate commercial section of Route 1 leading to the Delaware sh.o.r.e, surrounded by outlet centers and strip malls. The exhaust and sound from six lanes of traffic covered the two-story cement block like a fulsome blanket. The only sign of the bright sea still twenty miles away was the aqua painting above the lit neon Motel squatted on a desolate commercial section of Route 1 leading to the Delaware sh.o.r.e, surrounded by outlet centers and strip malls. The exhaust and sound from six lanes of traffic covered the two-story cement block like a fulsome blanket. The only sign of the bright sea still twenty miles away was the aqua painting above the lit neon VACANCY VACANCY. It was a weekday and summer was over and most of the s.p.a.ces in front of the building were empty. Those cars still parked were battered and old, their shocks sagging from the weight of sad, rambling stories. Except for the white Camaro in the corner, the white Camaro with the silver Nevada plates and the right side dented in all to h.e.l.l.

Bobo had fallen back into motel land, and he had fallen back hard.

We came down in a caravan: a black unmarked van, carrying Beth and me, Jefferson, one of his a.s.sistants, Breger and Stone, followed by two Delaware State Police cars we had teamed up with in Dover, their lights off and their sirens silent.

Slowly we pa.s.sed the motel and then parked in the lot of a huge discount store next door to the SeaBright. The six of us, along with four uniformed state troopers, congregated at the edge of the high chain-link fence separating the two properties. Two of the troopers held shotguns at the ready.

"So what do we do now?" said Troy Jefferson. "Has the Delaware judge signed that warrant?"

"Not yet," said one of the troopers. "They'll radio us when he does."

"You want us to go in anyway?" said another of the troopers. "We can knock and ask if he wants to talk."

"He's probably jumpy as it is," said Breger. "I don't think the sight of four uniforms is going to calm him any."

"Let me wander over and see if he's still there," I said. "He spots me, I'm just a guy in a suit. My man's waiting for me on the other side of the fence. Once we know the situation, we'll be better able to figure something out."

"Just find out where he is," said Jefferson, "and where we can all stand un.o.bserved, and then come right back."

"Fine."

"Don't be a cowboy," said Stone.

"No threat of that," I said. "I'm too smarmy to try anything brave." I winked at her before I skulked around the fence to the corner of the motel's lot.

In the shadow of a large sign advertising a mini-golf just a bit farther down the strip, I found Skink waiting for me. He was wearing his brown suit and fedora, leaning against the sign pole, tossing something up and down in his hand, looking every inch the insouciant private d.i.c.k out of a different era.

"I finally figured out where you find your wardrobe tips," I said as I eyed his getup. "From the colorized versions of old detective movies on TNT."

"You took your time showing up."

"Just a little distraction called a murder trial. He still here?"

"Yes he is."

"We're lucky he didn't leave."

"Yes we are," he said. And then I noticed that the thing he was tossing up and down in his hand was a spark plug.

"How'd you find him?"

"Outgoing call from the DoubleTree this morning."

"Did he make you?"

"Nah. He wasn't here when I first showed up, gave me a fright, it did. But then he came roaring back into the lot with a bag of McDonald's and a bag of booze. He's up on the second floor, two-oh-nine, emptying them both. I don't know which bag will kill him first."

"Why is he here of all places?"

"Had to go somewheres, didn't he? But he grew up only a few miles down the road. Might still have pals around to help him out while he waits for it all to blow over."

"Two-oh-nine?"

"The room above the car."

The door was closed, the window was curtained, the room looked dead. And inside was the man who had murdered Hailey Prouix.

"Cutlip almost confessed to everything on the stand today," I told Skink while I stared up at the room. "Killing Jesse Sterrett, his abuse of Hailey, even her murder. Almost."

"Who'd he blame?" said Skink.

"He said the Sterrett boy asked for it and Hailey seduced him."

"b.u.g.g.e.r all. We ought to tell Mr. Sterrett when we gets a chance."

"I'll drive you back down if you want, let you meet up with your old pals Fire and Brimstone."

"Maybe we'll call."

"You know what his last words were before he finally took the Fifth and refused to answer anything more? He said, 'Whatever Bobo done, I had nothing to do with.'"

"Loyal b.a.s.t.a.r.d, isn't he?"

"How'd you ever get hooked up with him in the first place?"

"He found me," said Skink. "Hailey left him my name in case of trouble."

"There are four cops with shotguns behind that fence. I want you to hold on here while I head up to Bobo's room. As soon as I get to the door, go over and tell everyone waiting on the other side where I am."

"Are you sure you want to go alone? You don't want me along, or one of the cops?"

"I don't know how he'll react to a crowd, and I don't need anybody reading him his rights either. I see trouble, I see a gun, I'll disappear and let our cops shoot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d to bits. But right now it's better all around if it's just me that goes up. Tell those clowns in the uniforms that they can bring their cars into this lot and put on the lights and c.o.c.k their shotguns if they want. It won't hurt if Bobo sees them out there once I'm inside. But under no circ.u.mstances are they to rush the stairs and start firing. If they spook him, there's no figuring what he'll do. Can you manage all that?"

"I'll try."

I patted Skink on the shoulder. "You did great."

"I always does great."

I returned his gap-toothed smile. We had a moment, one of those touching no-touch male moments, a glance, a nod, an urge to hug stifled. Who would ever have expected that I'd have to stifle an urge to hug Skink? To strangle his ropy neck maybe, but not to hug him. We had our moment, and then I headed off for Bobo.

The stairs were outside the building, at the end opposite Bobo's room. I strode quickly through the lot and around the tiny fenced-in swimming pool to reach them. I must have looked a sight, a man in a blue suit hurrying across the asphalt, his gaze steady on a second-floor window as he moved, but I reached the steps without so much as a twitch of that curtain. Slowly I climbed, stepping softly so that my footfalls barely registered on the metal stairway, and then, carefully, my back to the brick, I made my way along the portico to the corner room.

I stooped down below the level of the peephole as I pa.s.sed the door to Room 209. His door. Something tickled my neck as I pa.s.sed it. I reached out a hand and brushed the door with my fingertips. It was hot, sizzling, as if there was a strange, evil fire raging inside.

Past the door, I squatted at the window. Between the curtain and the sill closest to the door was a slight opening. Carefully I placed an eye at the opening and gazed inside.

It was a small, filthy room. My view was tightly constricted, but still I could see the bed unmade, the floor littered with fast-food wrappers, emptied beer cans, the crumpled cellophane of cookie packs and potato chip bags. A flickering blue light filled the room with an uneven glow, a television light, but I heard no sound over the incessant roar of the highway. And strangely, even as I could see the action of the screen play on the scuffed block walls, there was something else, some other change in the light, as if something was moving, circling, spinning between the light source and the wall.

And then that thing moved, circled, spun into view, and my breath caught in my throat like flesh on barbed wire.

Bobo, ghostly thin, pale, in jeans but shirtless, one hand gripping the neck of a bottle, the other the b.u.t.t of a gun, his lank blond hair spinning around his face as he slowly danced in loose circles to a music I couldn't hear. Bobo. Circling 'round and 'round. Like a moth 'round a flame. Circling. But it wasn't the mere sight of him circling like a moth that caught my breath, or the sight of his gun either.

When I had seen him in Nevada, his hands and arms had been scratched and scabbed as if infested with colonies of vile insects, but now it was as if the infestation had moved in marauding armies beneath his skin to cover the whole of his body. The entirety of his arms, his shoulders, his neck, his back as far as could be reached with his nails, on all of it the skin was ripped and flayed, raw, the wounds open and wet, oozing, the blood and pus running in narrow streaks from wound to wound.

It was as if Bobo, for some reason, for some reason that I could very well imagine, Bobo was trying to tear himself apart.

There is always a moment of shock when we catch a raw glimpse of another's utter humanity. We don't want to see it, we don't want to gaze beyond the surface of this clerk, of that cop, of that acquaintance, of that murderer, we don't want to be confronted with the deeper truth. But when we are, when against all our best efforts it is pressed into our consciousness, it never fails to shock us or to change us. And the shock is even greater when in our arrogance we believed that our understanding had reached beyond the mysteries of the other's soul. Here, now, peering through that crack between the curtain and the sill, seeing the wet wounds of Dwayne Joseph Bohannon's self-flayed skin, his suppurating hair shirt of septic gouges, I received such a shock. He was a cruel tool, stupid and violent, someone who had found his level with Lawrence Cutlip, that was what I knew for sure before I climbed those motel stairs, and there was an undeniable truth in all of it. But having made that climb, I saw a side I had never before considered. All the failures of his life, the disappointments, the desertions, everything he ever wanted and had been refused, everything he had never wanted but had gotten stuffed down his throat, the boy he had been and the man he had become, the entire breadth of his sorrow was written there on his flesh as if in a script of blood. I read it all, and like some great biblical pa.s.sage it reached into my soul, and something changed, something changed, something dark went out of me.

I turned from the window. It was too much to bear, but the change had happened just that quickly.

The police cars were already in the parking lot, the officers crouched behind them, shotguns at the ready. Breger and Stone and Troy Jefferson were standing in a clot of law enforcement behind the crouching uniforms. And standing together, still farther behind, was my brain trust, Beth and Skink. And each of them, every one of them, was staring at me, wondering what the h.e.l.l I was doing up there. I had planned on retreating if I saw a gun, I had planned on running and letting it play out as I knew it would. There would be a knock, an order, a demand. There would a shot fired and then another and then a fusillade that would rip Dwayne Joseph Bohannon apart. He would be ripped apart and would disappear from the earth as surely as if he had fallen into one of Roylynn's black holes, another of Cutlip's victims. It would play out just like that, except I couldn't let it play out just like that anymore, not after the glimpse I had caught of that boy's inner torment. The inevitable gunplay at the end was not inevitable.

I glanced back at the force arrayed in the parking lot and then knocked on the door.

"Dwayne," I said through the metal door, hot, I now knew, not from his evil but from the sun. I was standing in the gap between the window and the door, protected, I hoped, from anything fired from the room. "It's Victor Carl. We met in Henderson. You ran me off the road, tried to kill me. We need to talk."

No answer.

I knocked again. "Dwayne. It's no use. The police are already here. But I can help. I forgive you for what you tried to do to me. I'm here to help you."

I pressed myself against the wall and waited for the curtain to be pulled aside. It was.

A voice came m.u.f.fled from behind the door. "I have a gun. Tell them I have a gun."

"They have bazookas, Dwayne."

"Really?"

"Let me in. I'm a lawyer. I can help you. I want to help you."

There was a long moment when I heard nothing, nothing, before, slowly, the door opened a sliver and then a sliver more, until the chain was taut. Dwayne Joseph Bohannon stood in the doorway, the gun in his hand, his face in shadow, a dirty tee shirt, stained with his blood, hiding the most hideous of his wounds.

"Thank you," I said.

He leaned forward. The light hit his face. I had to look away.

"Will you let me in?" I said.

"I don't know what to do."

"Let me in and we'll figure it out together."