by Brian Hodge
“What’d Duncan do with the sword?”
“Got rid of it. I don’t know exactly where, but it may have been in Lake Mead. I’m not sure because I was out of it for most of the next two or three days.” He raised his hand, flexed his fingers. “That glove Pellegrino was wearing? With the lead in the palm? It can do a real number on your head.”
“So after that Saturday, you guys went up to Lake Mead. Were you there that whole time, until you headed back here to L.A.?”
Jamey shook his head. “We scooted around some. A motel here, a motel there. We spent a couple of days in Utah. Interstate town called St. George.”
“At any time, was Duncan MacGregor holding you against your will?”
“No.” Jamey sounding adament about it. “He actually took pretty good care of me those days I was out of it.”
“Why? Why would he want to? You playing him on American Fugitives, that can’t have made his life any easier.”
Jamey studied the question awhile. “If he held a grudge, he didn’t show it. Laugh if you want, but the main reason he tracked me down, once that convenience store thing hit the news? I think it was because he was lonely.”
“How touching,” Andy said, and got a dirty look. “Why’d you hang with him? Couldn’t be loneliness on your part, not when you’ve got a girl waiting to marry you.”
“If anyone’s ever saved your life, you can understand the debt. And if a guy risks his own life to do it, you can overlook a lot about him. And if it’s somebody like Duncan, maybe you start looking at him different from the way everybody else does.
“Duncan didn’t just save my life,” Jamey went on. “The fact that I got mistaken for him took a career that was going nowhere and gave it some velocity. Having so many new opportunities…weird as it is, I owe that to Duncan. So I wanted to return the favor. He was tired of running, I could tell…he just needed a little more time to admit it to himself. Once he did, what I wanted to do for him was bring him back to L.A. and get him a lawyer, with my agent’s help, because she’d already lined one up for me. After we were ready to make the trip, I called my sister. I’d already been in touch with her a couple times to let her know I was okay. Besides, her boss, Mickey Coffman, all along he’s wanted my story rights. I already knew that. So how Melissa wanted to work it was stash us at Mickey’s house up in The Oaks the moment we got into town, while we started setting things up with the lawyers.”
“Why do that?” Andy cut in. “You’ve got a home, your sister’s got a home. Why bring Mickey Coffman’s place into it?”
“The privacy. You drive right in and nobody can see you. I live in an apartment in North Hollywood. Melissa’s got a condo in Sherman Oaks. Samantha shares a little house in Burbank. We didn’t want some neighbor spotting us and phoning in a media tip. But what I didn’t realize was that after we set this up on the phone, Jordy found my sister and was ready to kill her if she didn’t cooperate. Duncan and I, we’d seen in the news that Jordy was loose, so that wasn’t any surprise. But we had no idea he’d be tracking Duncan down through me, through my life.”
“He give you any indication how he managed this?”
“How long was I around him—five minutes? It didn’t come up, he had his own agenda.” Jamey shrugged. “If he didn’t tell my sister how he pulled it off, I guess you’ll have to hold a séance.”
“What about the guy with him?”
“I was around him five minutes too. We walked right into their hands, and soon as we did Jordy started working Duncan over. While that was going on I had my mind on Samantha, because they’d grabbed her up the night before too. Melissa, she’s the one who kept the cool head. She’d picked up a stun gun one of them had set down and zapped Jordy’s partner in the shoulder. Not very solid, I guess, but he dropped the gun he was carrying. My sister grabbed it and that’s when the shooting started. She and Duncan both took Jordy out. She’s probably still alive because Jordy couldn’t kill both of them, and he hated Duncan more than he hated her. The other guy, that’s when he took off. It wasn’t our job to chase him. Duncan, he’d fallen into the pool and I went in after him, to see if we couldn’t help him, but…”
Jamey looked down at the tabletop and shook his head.
Again, nothing deviated from the testimony the women had given the L.A.P.D. Both had provided verbal sketches for an Identi-Kit composite, but it was still fairly nondescript, little better than the eyewitnesses to Jordy’s escape at the cemetery in Casa Grande—five-eight or five-nine, sturdy build, curly brown hair, no distinguishing marks. They’d differed on the name they’d heard Jordy use when referring to him. One thought it was B.J., the other claimed it was D.J. Back home, attempts to match either with Jordy’s K.A.’s had been coming up with zero.
“Let’s go back last week, before all that,” Andy said. “You and Duncan ever get down around Sedona?”
“I wouldn’t swear to it, because I don’t know the state that well, but I don’t think we ever got that far south again.”
“Do you know a guy named Christopher Plunkett?”
“Sure. He’s my sister’s boyfriend.”
“How about a guy named Blayne Thompkins?”
Jamey waited a beat, thinking. “Only the name. Kristophe might’ve mentioned him before, some friend of his. Kristophe, that’s what he goes by instead of Christopher. He thinks he’s German.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t know—back in the summer, maybe?”
“How did you two get along, overall?”
“I barely know him. Just because we have Melissa in common doesn’t mean we have much to do with each other.”
Andy nodded. Had posed that last question in past tense, but Jamey hadn’t taken the opening. Sometimes they got too comfortable and walked through that newly opened door, started talking past tense along with you before realizing they’d even done it—a pretty good indication they knew more than they’d first let on.
“Do you know of any reason why Christopher—Kristophe—would be in Arizona the same time you were?”
“He was?” Jamey said. Low-key surprise, barely registering the coincidence. “What, did he and Melissa have another fight, and he take off again?”
Andy didn’t answer. According to Jamey’s sister, during yesterday’s phone interview, the guy had left more than a week ago in a state of depression. So Andy kept probing, trying to get Jamey to own up to knowing more than he seemed to about Kristophe, his habits, his musclebound friend. Finally telling him that both these guys were dead, to see how he handled the news. If his surprise looked the same as when he’d learned about Rupert Hardesty’s murder.
Andy swore that it looked more mechanical. Might even have appeared genuine if he hadn’t seen the real thing already, for comparison. As long as Jamey refused to budge, though, there wasn’t much telling what he really knew about why this pair had been in central Arizona with a Heckler & Koch machine gun.
At first there hadn’t seemed any connection: a Sedona motel manager thinks he’s been beaten out of a day’s rent, uses his pass key Sunday morning and finds a dead body-builder, scalp split open and swarming with ants. An unloaded assault weapon lying across the room with the rest of his luggage.
The guy who’d signed for the room hadn’t turned up until yesterday, when a road crew found him near his totaled car north of town. Four days or so of open-air decomposition, insects, and animal scavenging had left him looking even worse than his friend who’d died of a slow cerebral hemorrhage. Nearby, a full magazine’s worth of nine-millimeter shell casings lay scattered on the ground where pine limbs had been shot down to conceal the car.
Andy hadn’t known about any of it until yesterday. Not until it turned out that Christopher Plunkett had the same address as Jamey Sheppard’s sister. Andy having to postpone his flight here another day, getting up to speed on these new oddities. One of which had come from the Coconino County medical examiner.
“You know,” he told Jam
ey, “every dead body, just about, is an educational experience. Until yesterday, I didn’t know that when animals scavenge a dead body, it goes through four distinct stages. Did you know that?”
Jamey said no. Looking awfully curious as to what this was leading to.
“One of the first things to go is a guy’s face. Especially if there’s an injury already, to get him started coming apart—say, if he’s been banged up in a car wreck. Or…something. The front of his chest, they eat that too, and they go for the arms. All this is still stage one. In stage two, they go for the legs. Kristophe hadn’t really gotten to stage two yet, so his legs were pretty much intact. The strange thing about him being out there is that even though it looks like he didn’t survive long after wrecking his car, the back of his right leg had a deep stab wound that hadn’t come close to starting to heal when he died. He hadn’t even bandaged it. And it’s not the kind of thing you see happening in a car wreck. Especially one where the air bag worked. You know anyone who might’ve had a reason to stab him in the leg?”
Slowly, Jamey shook his head. “Not unless it was somebody who was riding with him and got pissed about his bad driving.”
“Could be. The thing is, though, when I first heard about the stab wound, I was thinking knife. But going by what you told me earlier, now you’ve got me wondering if maybe it couldn’t have been a sword. Because it wasn’t any skinny little switchblade that put that hole in his leg. It was wider than that.”
He watched Jamey appear to mull this over, giving nothing away. Bet the guy would make a wicked poker player, as long as he knew to play the other players instead of his cards. Which he probably did.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he said, “if Kristophe and Blayne were into military guns, they might be into big military knives too? And you just haven’t found one yet?”
Out with it: “Did you and Kristophe run into each other last weekend? And Kristophe come out the worse for wear?”
Jamey dodged, but didn’t flinch: “Are you going to make me change my mind about having a lawyer here?”
“Do you need one?”
“That depends on how hard you’re trying to put something on me, so your state doesn’t come off looking so bad.” He stared across the table and spread his hands wide. The pose of a reasonable guy at the end of his patience. “I thought I was here to answer questions about Duncan and Jordy, and what happened with those deputies. If you’re going to start grasping at straws, that’s something else.”
Impasse, and they both knew it. As surely as they both realized something else was swimming underneath the surface here, but only one of them knew what that was. With Jamey telling him, in more diplomatic terms, to put up or shut up.
“One more thing about Duncan,” Andy moving on, no mistaking who’d come out ahead just now. “This whole time you’ve been talking about you and him, him and you. You’re leaving somebody out.”
“Who?”
“The woman who was with you at that gas station where the two of you were spotted after Deputy Pellegrino was killed.”
“She was…a friend of Duncan’s.”
Andy held a stare, waiting for more.
“So she helped him. So she’d been with him the past year. She never hurt anybody. I was hoping to leave her out of this.”
“You think that’s for you to decide?”
Jamey leaned back, deep breath, pulling himself together again after what was appearing more and more like a performance rehearsed in his mind. When he leaned forward again, the vibe was earnest, more plea than defiance.
“Early on, you tried to do me a good turn and give me the benefit of the doubt. I’m grateful for that. And if it’s not going to look good for you to go back without much to show for coming here, I’ll trade you.”
Had a certain beguiling style, you had to give him that. “Trade me what?”
“You have to know the scope of the lawsuits for civil rights violations I could file. And win. The damages could be in the millions. I don’t know if it would go all the way to the state level—probably not, but a couple of counties, for sure. There are lawyers in Phoenix ready to make it happen.” For a moment, Jamey’s demeanor slipped, and he looked as weary as a human being could and still sit upright. “I don’t particularly want to penalize thousands of people because of what two dead men did. I don’t see the fairness in that, but then, I’m not a lawyer. So how would you like to be the one who makes that go away? Her anonymity…for my letting sleeping dogs lie.”
Andy pulled back from the table, aware of the sudden silence in the room. Just the soft whir of the video camera. It was the most lopsided bargain he’d ever heard of.
Sometimes he had to stop and think how this had begun. A guy on his way to get married crossed paths with some old thug too eager to turn it into the worst day of his life. Then it just kept deteriorating from there. On both sides of the law. To say that Jamey Sheppard had public sympathy was like saying Elvis had had listeners. Probably half of the people on Jamey’s side now disliked cops just a little bit more because of what two bad ones had done.
Twenty years and more ago, the world had seemed so black and white. He’d never thought he would ever have to distinguish between so many shades of gray.
“See you in the movies,” Andy said.
****
The sun hung noonday high when they released him. Jamey had thought that Samantha might be the one to drive him home. Once he saw that Sherry Van Horn had come here to meet him, instead, this seemed apropos, since it was her machinations that had drawn out this ordeal for so long.
“Brace yourself,” she said, once she’d hugged him.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
Thin as a rail in her skirt and tailored jacket, her hair drawn into a smart little bun at the nape of her neck, she fussed at his rumpled clothes, and with great melodrama pinched her nose at his stale aroma. From her purse she plucked a fresh tissue and began swabbing at his face. Childhood throwback—had she been his mother, Sherry would have licked it first, to give him a spit bath.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“When was the last time you saw a mirror and a washcloth? Your face is as oily as a wrestler. If we don’t take care of this, the glare is going to render you invisible.” She beamed, aware that she’d elevated her job performance to heretofore-unreachable heights of achievement. “And now, finally, is the time not to be invisible.”
When she hit him with a few pats of a powder puff, he understood.
“Let’s leave the shades off, for the sake of P.R. Your eyes really should be visible right now. And smile,” she told him. “You just drew the world’s biggest get-out-of-jail-free card. Look like it.”
Sherry took him by the elbow and as she steered him through the lobby, he put on his game face. They stepped into the hot glare of the midday sun, a roar erupting the instant they exited the glass doors: a hundred questions shouted from a hundred throats, the throng spread across the walkway and parking lot now surging forward, all heads and shoulders and outstretched arms.
When he first took in the sobering spectacle of all the microphones and lenses thrust at him, he couldn’t help but flinch, as though he’d instead stepped before an angry mob and their arsenal of guns.
Not much difference, he supposed.
Except for the ways they went about destroying you when they decided that your time had come.
“I admit I was skeptical, because of the way he came to prominence. But he really is extremely good in this role. You know, Martin Scorcese once said that Nicolas Cage looks like a man who’s haunted. He could just as easily have been saying that about Jamey Sheppard.”
—Roger Ebert
Film critic,
on Ride the Lightning,
Ebert & Roeper and the Movies
45
IN the interviews he’d given—and there had been a lot of them these past months—not once had he ever mentioned this starkly quiet corner
of Utah or its impact on him as a boy. Duncan and Dawn were the last ones he’d told about this place of petroglyphs and destiny. To release that day for public digestion would have cheapened its magic, he feared, so he kept it close inside.
After eighteen years the place looked the same as he had always remembered it, except that the cliffs of tan rock were no longer the mile-high crags they had seemed to a boy with a crooked foot. He could climb them now, as long as he hiked around their bases to hunt for a way up that wasn’t so imposingly sheer as the walls, most sheltered by overhangs, where ancient hands had put pigment to stone.
It was early April now, between seasons, warm in the sunlight and chilly in the shade. He broke sweat before he’d climbed far at all, shivering whenever a trickle ran down his ribs or spine from beneath the backpack he wore.
Higher, until he could look back over his shoulder at the miles of dirt road he’d driven in on; then higher still, until he had crested the layered ridges of weather-worn rock and could walk the plateau of its summit. He sat at the edge, legs dangling over the side, and opened his backpack to rid himself of one more remnant of a life that already seemed so far gone.
He held the urn that contained Melissa’s ashes, turning it in his hands while hawks wheeled against the pale blue sky. And could still remember the image he’d conjured up on the only other day he’d been here: a cruel fantasy, his spiteful little sister climbing these rocks only to slip and plummet to the boulders that would break her along with her fall.
Eighteen years later, with more sorrow and guilt than he ever thought he could feel for her after last September, he supposed he was getting his wish.