by Julia Keller
“Mrs. Elkins,” Judge Tripp said, his voice a thin croak. He gestured with a scaly scrap of brown-speckled flesh that looked more like a claw than a hand. “You ready to get us going again?”
“I am, Your Honor.” Bell signaled to Hick, who handed her the legal pad on the top of the pile. She knew what was written there, but glanced at it anyway. No mistakes. “The prosecution would like to call—”
“Hold up, hold up.” Pyle was rising, buttoning his suit coat as he did so. He smiled, but the smile, Bell noticed, stopped well short of his eyes. “Judge,” he said, “we’d like to request a recess.”
“A recess? Lord in heaven,” Tripp declared. “We ain’t rightly started yet.”
“Well, sir,” Pyle replied, “there’s some extenuating circumstances.”
Judge Tripp tilted his head and peered down at Pyle through his thick-lensed black spectacles.
“That right? You got some new information?”
Pyle nodded.
“Son,” the judge said, “the court recorder can’t do nothing with a nod.”
“We have new information,” Pyle repeated, booming it this time.
“Well, then.” Judge Tripp raised a furry interrogative eyebrow in Bell’s direction. “You know anything about this?”
“No, Judge.” She was angry—Pyle was obviously trying to pull something—but she knew better than to show it. Tripp had an eccentric and unreliable temper; he’d overlook large things, but small ones—such as a sarcastic comment from a fed-up prosecutor about a defense attorney’s shenanigans—sometimes elicited a testy lecture or a contempt citation. She had to remain serene, unruffled. Take it all in stride. At least until Pyle revealed his strategy.
“Well,” Tripp went on, “what we got ourselves here is a dilemma. What’s the nature of this new information, Gomer?” The judge corrected himself. “I mean—Mr. Pyle? And why wasn’t the county prosecutor notified about it, before we resumed our proceedings this afternoon?”
“Your Honor,” Pyle said, “this information only came to our attention about an hour ago, during the recess. It has a crucial bearing on these proceedings.”
“That right?”
Judge Tripp seemed intrigued rather than outraged. Bell struggled to maintain her composure. It was all she could do not to explode in anger, turning to the wily bastard across the aisle and letting loose with a fire-hose blast of expletives about his childish trickery and scathingly unprofessional conduct.
“That’s right, Your Honor,” Pyle said. He looked, Bell thought, as earnest and endearing as a Boy Scout, with his simpering little half-moon smile and his glossy block of black hair—its color obviously enhanced by repeated applications of shoe polish—and his habit of raising his clasped doughy hands to his chest when he talked. The fact that it was all phony—she knew a thing or two about the particulars of Pyle’s messy personal life, and she knew that his legal ethics, too, were a dirty jumble—did not appear to matter unduly to Judge Tripp.
“Well,” the judge said, “just what is this new information you got yourself, Mr. Pyle, and why in heaven’s name can’t it wait until the prosecutor’s finished presenting her case? You’ll get your turn, son.”
“Because, Your Honor, the county’s case rests wholly upon the testimony of Missy Skylar Wills, fourteen years old, one of the alleged victims.”
Bell felt a sick feeling starting up in her gut. It was true: Waller’s girlfriend, Regina, the mother of the abused girls, had refused to testify against him. And Missy’s sisters were too young to take the stand; when Rhonda Lovejoy had tried to prep the middle sister for the trial, she wouldn’t stop crying. Missy alone had agreed to speak against Waller. To describe what he’d done to them, and done to them over and over again. It was her story—a grotesque one, filled with descriptions of the nightly horror enacted by an unrepentant monster who’d been provided with laughably easy access to defenseless children—that was their only hope of convicting Lanny Waller. Missy wasn’t in the courtroom yet; Bell had wanted to shorten the amount of time the young woman was forced to spend in Waller’s company. At the moment Pyle interrupted her, Bell was ready to request that the bailiff fetch Missy Wills from the hall where—Bell had been assured—she waited.
“—And, Your Honor,” Pyle went on, “we have new and conclusive evidence that the accusation against my client lodged by Missy Skylar Wills was coerced by a member of the prosecutor’s staff. Furthermore, we’ve been told that Missy herself now wishes to thoroughly recant her earlier statement, which leaves the county with no credible evidence whatsoever against Mr. Waller. Frankly, we’re appalled at the actions of Mrs. Elkins and her subordinates, who would seek to ruin the life of an innocent man by charging him with such heinous crimes—crimes allegedly perpetrated against the very family he has loved and supported for many years.”
Judge Tripp poked the tip of his tongue around the inside of his mouth. Bell watched its progress: Left side, right side, now digging at the trenches along the top and bottom gum lines. This was his thinking look. At least we’re keeping him awake, Bell thought bleakly, fighting the anger that rose in her throat like bile. He can’t sit back and snooze on this one.
The charge was absurd, of course. Pyle knew that as well as Bell did. No one had attempted to coerce Missy Wills—no one, that is, except Missy’s mother, who obviously had persuaded the girl to back down. To claim it was all a big misunderstanding. And thereby keep the family intact.
Bell recoiled from her own thought. Applying the word “family” to the dancing circus of damaged souls over which Waller presided made the acid rise in her throat all over again.
But George Pyle was right about one thing: Without Missy’s testimony, the county had no case. And the hell of it was, Bell had always known this might happen. She knew Missy was shaky, vulnerable. Bell had seen it before: a mother, afraid of losing the man in her life, offers up her children as bait. As the sweetener to keep Mr. Wonderful around. And then Mom puts heavy pressure on whichever child is temporarily brave enough to rat out the abuser. Keep this up, the mother says, and they’ll tear us apart. Bust up the family. You’ll never see me or your sisters again. That what you want?
Another moment passed. All four of them were standing now: Bell, Hickey, Pyle and Waller. Waller, wiggling his narrow shoulders inside the oversized orange jumpsuit, started to rub his nose. He’d forgotten that his hands were shackled, however, which restricted the height to which he could raise his wrists. So after jerking his hands in frustration, he settled for twitching his nose, apparently in hopes that it might calm the itch.
“Your response, Mrs. Elkins?” the judge said.
“My office did not coerce Miss Wills, Your Honor.” Bell forced herself to keep her words simple, cordial, on point. She wanted to throw back her head and howl at the outrage of it all, but she couldn’t give way to umbrage; she had to be patient. Even-tempered. Professional. “We believe her recitation of the offenses committed over the past four years in the trailer occupied by the defendant and by Regina Wills and her three children was true, relevant, and unimpeachable. We have no idea why—or even if—Miss Wills has changed her account of Mr. Waller’s ongoing criminal acts.”
“Mr. Pyle?” the judge said. He turned back to the defense attorney. Tripp, like a spectator at a tennis match, was swiveling his head from one side of the courtroom to the other, taking in the serve and return.
“All I can say, Your Honor,” Pyle replied, “is that I spoke with Missy a few minutes ago myself, and she’s plenty upset. She realizes how she’s hurt Mr. Waller by her lies, and she feels just terrible about it. Wants to get back to her family and forget the whole thing. And she hopes that Mr. Waller—the only real father she’s ever known—will one day forgive her for all the trouble she’s caused him.”
Judge Tripp pushed out his fleshy lower lip, another favored facial gyration when he was engaged in a bout of contemplation. The courtroom had grown exquisitely still. Only a few people occupied the woode
n pews of the public section, and they had stopped fidgeting, stopped trying to find a cooler position in which to sit. Someone coughed. Someone else rattled a piece of paper. Bell looked over at the defense table and saw that the paper-rattler was Pyle; he had picked up a sheet from his notes and relocated it an inch away from its original spot. Busywork.
“Well,” Tripp said, “if the young lady is, in fact, withdrawing her accusation, that changes things. No doubt. No doubt.” He slid out and drew back his lower lip over and over, until it resembled a faulty drawer in a chiffonier that won’t stay properly closed. “Okay, then.” Despite the tension, Tripp yawned. He tried to disguise it, pretending that he’d just been revolving his jaw to keep it limber, but the yawn was unmistakable. “We’re finished here today, that’s for sure. First off, we’ll make sure that Missy Wills indeed is officially withdrawing her accusation against the defendant. If that’s the case, I’ll instruct the sheriff’s department to initiate an immediate investigation into how the prosecutor’s office dealt with Miss Wills from the get-go. Soon as I know what on God’s green earth is going on here, I’ll send the information to both of your offices. In the meantime, we’re adjourned here, folks.”
* * *
Bell and Hick walked through the courthouse corridor side by side but silent. The yellow legal pads were crammed under Hick’s arm. He hadn’t taken the time to shove them back in his briefcase, so eager were they to get away from the courtroom before one of them—it would be Bell, of course, but Hick pretended that he, too, might be liable to react inappropriately—exploded in wrath and gave Judge Tripp, Gomer, Waller, and maybe even the court recorder a telling-off vicious enough to strip the finish from the crown molding that ran around the dusty uppermost edge of the plaster walls.
They were on their way back to Bell’s office, without any clear idea of what they’d do when they got there. The realization that Lanny Waller would probably go free—and thereby return to his regular pillaging of three defenseless girls—had stunned them past the possibility of future planning. For the moment, at least.
Bell didn’t greet Lee Ann Frickie. She went straight to her desk. Pulled out the chair and threw herself into it. She ignored a stack of square pink slips, the kind headed by the preprinted line WHILE YOU WERE OUT and featuring scribbled entreaties to return calls. Most of the messages, she knew, were from townsfolk who wanted to inquire precisely when she and the sheriff planned to get off their butts and solve the murders of Freddie Arnett and Charlie Frank. Lee Ann generally tried to clean up the callers’ language when she wrote down the messages. “Never even heard of some of the names they’re calling you,” she had told Bell the day before. “I guess I should be grateful for the education.”
Hick stood, waiting to hear Bell’s instructions. They both knew what had happened back in that trailer this morning, just as surely as if they’d been present at the scene, appalled but—like now—essentially helpless, because families were what they were, did what they did. Regina Wills, fearful of being alone if Waller went to prison, had, in all likelihood, confronted her oldest daughter. Grabbing the girl by the arm, she’d surely pulled her down in a chair, leaned over, and shoved her face right up into Missy’s face, so close that when she raged, her spittle flew into Missy’s eyes, making the girl blink and cringe: Take it back, you little bitch. You take it back, hear? You ain’t dragging us all down. Got that? You tell ’em you was lying. You don’t know why you said what you said to Rhonda Lovejoy—but it was a lie. Lanny never touched you—nor your sisters, neither. You hear me? Listen, girlie. You don’t know nothing about the world. We need a man around to protect us—are you listening to me? We need him. If he goes, who’s gonna take care of us? Who? You ever think of that, girlie, when they was telling you what to say? Telling you to lie about Lanny?
Bell was certain that she knew what Regina had said, down to the last ragged syllable; as a prosecutor who’d dealt with a distressing number of child abuse cases, Bell had met a lot of Reginas. Her kind almost always picked the man over their own kids. Not because they loved him—that, Bell at least could’ve understood, because people did terribly misguided things out of love, or what they chose to call love—but because they thought they needed him. Needed him. Bell would let the phrase echo internally, disgusted and slightly in awe, too, of the breadth of the ludicrous illogic behind it. Needed him. Jesus. Him and the bums just like him, the assholes who don’t work, don’t lift a finger, freeloading jerks who’d be lost without obliging females to take care of them. To cook their meals. Fetch their beer. Wipe their butts. So the women use their own kids as flypaper. To catch and to hold. Jesus Christ.
She had warned Rhonda the day before: “Make sure Missy Wills understands the pressure that’ll come down on her, okay? Make sure she’s ready.”
And Rhonda had done her best. Bell was sure of it. But after Missy had been prepared for her testimony, duly forewarned, bolstered with Cokes and with platitudes about the liberating power of truth, there was nowhere else for Missy to go—nowhere else except home to the trailer, where Regina waited. And as she waited, Bell knew, Regina had probably opened and closed her fist, opened and closed it, keeping loose, keeping limber, ready to grab Missy’s arm the second she saw the girl, slinging her into a chair and telling her what’s what. Lanny had taught her well.
Not a damned thing the prosecutor’s office could do about it. There was no legal justification to relocate Missy or her sisters during the trial—and the vastly inadequate and chronically underfunded state apparatus charged with protecting them naturally required proof of imminent peril. During the proceedings, Waller would be in jail; Bell couldn’t claim he posed a hazard at the moment to Missy and her sisters. The law assumed that a mother would protect her children.
The law was naïve.
Bell experienced a familiar surge of anger, an immense black wave that swept in front of her eyes and almost—almost—overwhelmed her better judgment. She felt a powerful urge to jump out of her chair and find Lanny Waller and break his fingers one by one with a twist and a jerk—reveling in each of the ten separate shrieks of pain—and smash his kneecaps with a hammer, assuming she could find one. If not, she’d settle for any heavy object likely to inflict maximum agony and lasting damage.
Then it all receded, just as suddenly as it had appeared: the anger, the outrage, the fantasy of seriously hurting the man. And Bell realized, once again, that this was why she’d chosen the law for her life’s work: Because it offered something other than the closed loop of vengeance. It broke the black circle. It gave her a place to put those renegade emotions, the ones that spilled over the sides of her life, the ones that wouldn’t fit anywhere else and that, if she hadn’t found a way to control them, would certainly have destroyed her. The law wasn’t always rational or fair, it didn’t always work the way it ought to, it sometimes seemed to be only a half-step up from the chaos it was intended to bring to heel—but up was the right direction. Beat the hell out of down.
It saved her, again and again.
The law, she believed, wasn’t there just to keep the bad guys in line. It was there to keep the good guys in line, too. The good guys who were tempted by adversity to think that ends ever justified means.
“Bell?” Hick said. Not out of impatience, just curiosity. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to get hold of Rhonda right away.”
Rhonda was terrific in dealing with victims; she had a real knack for it. She wasn’t mean, the way Sheriff Fogelsong could be when perturbed at their hesitations or their evasions, but she also wasn’t too gooey-soft or instantly forgiving.
“She’s taking a deposition,” Bell went on, “over at the Monk County Courthouse. Tell her to get back here as soon as she can and make another run at Regina Wills. Regina’s the key. Not much chance she’ll back off and let the girl speak—but whatever small chance there is, we have to try.”
“Okay. Anything else?”
Before she could answer, the
phone on her desk rang. Bell nodded to Hickey, releasing him to return to his own work. He waved back at her over his head as he departed.
“Elkins.”
“Howdy, Miss Belfa,” Buster said. “Thought I’d take a chance and call you back early. Got finished sooner’n I expected with my afternoon business.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Bell tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice.
“What’d you need, sunshine?”
She moved aside two piles of folders on her desk to find what she was looking for. “Okay,” Bell said. “I’ve got your notes from the Arnett and Frank autopsies right here.”
“Dreadful, dreadful. Tragic loss. Town’s as shook up as I’ve ever seen it, and I’ll tell you this—I’ve been around here a long time.”
“Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you about Charlie Frank’s injuries. The stab wounds. From the sketch you made, I can see that the wounds vary substantially in depth. The ones across the upper part of his torso—near his shoulders—are almost superficial. But in the middle and lower part of the torso, they’re very deep. Deep enough to pierce vital organs.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”
“Is that unusual? I mean, to have such a variety of force levels used in a knife attack like this?”
She could imagine Buster Crutchfield in full cogitation mode: the wrinkled sack of his face collapsing inward, rheumy eyes getting squinty. “Well,” he said, “not especially, darlin’ heart. Lotsa things could account for that—the position of the assailant, which might’ve shifted during the attack. And Charlie himself surely moved around a lot, trying to defend himself. Man fighting for his life—he ain’t likely to hold still.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Tell you this much, sweetie.”
Bell snapped back to attention, assuming he had suddenly remembered a crucial detail common to both victims. “Like I said,” Buster went on, his drawl as soft as corn silk, “I been around these parts a long, long time. But we’ve never had a summer quite as dark and sad as this one.”