In the Clearing

by Robert Dugoni

  “Lionel, this is crazy,” Eric said.

  Devoe glanced briefly at Reynolds, looking more confident now that Tracy was unarmed. “Is it? Is it really, Eric?”

  “Put the gun down, Lionel. I’ve already told her everything. She knows everything. So does the sheriff.”

  “You shouldn’t have done that, Eric. You shouldn’t have said anything. We had a deal. Everyone remains silent.” Devoe stepped back and set the Glock on the poker table. “Can you shut the damn dogs up?”

  “It’s what dogs do,” Eric said. “It’s instinct.”

  “You shouldn’t have broken the deal, not without talking to me and to Hastey.”

  “She knew, Lionel. She already knew.”

  “Maybe, but she had no way of proving any of it. You should have kept quiet. You should have kept your mouth shut. Goddamn it, shut those dogs up.”

  “It’s been forty years, Lionel. What good has keeping quiet done any of us?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You should have checked with us. You should have checked with Hastey. That was the deal. But I guess we both knew it was going to come down to a situation like this, didn’t we?”

  “A situation like what?”

  “Either you or Hastey deciding to do something stupid like this. And me having to stop you.”

  “She’s a homicide detective, Lionel. Are you going to kill a homicide detective? How long do you think it would be before they hunted you down?”

  Devoe smiled. “I’m not going to kill anyone, Eric.”

  “He has your gun,” Tracy said to Eric, continuing to watch Devoe, waiting for any opportunity, assessing the distance between her and the poker table and how quickly she could get to the gun. Not quick enough. “He shoots me with your gun, and shoots you with mine. Makes it look like we had it out.”

  Devoe smiled. “See, Eric, that’s why she’s a detective. But that isn’t quite accurate. I don’t see you both getting a shot off. I see Eric surprising you. The way I see it, the detective here brought you back to your house after exposing you and your father. She was giving you the chance to take care of things before she brought you in. But you had other plans. You had your gun out. You always had your gun out at night. I can testify to that. So will Hastey. You lured her back here, and you surprised her. You weren’t going to prison, not a guy like you. So you shot her. Then you shot yourself.” Devoe shrugged. “Since we are technically within the Stoneridge city limits, I’ll have jurisdiction over the investigation. And when I close the case, you can be damn sure I’ll destroy that file.”

  “You don’t need to do this, Lionel,” Reynolds said. “I’ve already taken the blame. I’ve told her Hastey didn’t have anything to do with it and neither did you.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Eric, and I wish we could turn the clock back forty years and make it true, but that wasn’t the case then, and it isn’t the case now. I fixed the car for your dad. If she has Buzz Almond’s file, she knows that. She also knows I removed the report with the photographs Buzz took of your car. I’m not going to prison for you or for your father, and I’m not letting Hastey go to prison for you either.” Devoe looked to Tracy. “I told you, Detective, you should have left this one alone. What was done was done. Nobody meant for it to happen. It was an accident. You should have just let it be.”

  “Tell that to Earl Kanasket,” Tracy said.

  “It isn’t going to bring his daughter back, is it? So what was this all for? What’s it going to get him?”

  “Closure, Lionel,” Eric said. “It’s going bring closure for him and for all of us. It’s the right thing to do. We should have done it forty years ago. We should have done it then.”

  “Yeah, well.” Devoe took aim at Tracy. “I guess we all find closure in our own ways.”

  The dogs’ barking became more violent.

  “Don’t,” Eric said.

  “Shut up, Eric. For once in your life, just shut up.”

  “Lionel!” Reynolds charged.

  Devoe diverted his attention and his aim for a split second. That was all Tracy needed. She dove to her right, hitting the edge of the poker table and upending it. Poker chips went scattering and clattering on the hardwood. The .45 roared, the sound reverberating up to the vaulted ceiling and echoing off it like a cannon blast. Tracy half expected the table to explode, but it didn’t. She grabbed her Glock from amid the colorful chips and rose up from behind the table.

  Devoe remained in the center of the room, already swinging the barrel of the .45 in her direction, his eyes searching.

  Too slow.

  She squeezed off two rounds, center-mass shots that drove Devoe backward, like a drunk falling off balance. When he landed, his head hit the ground with a dull crack.

  For a moment, time froze. The smell of gunpowder permeated the air, and Tracy’s ears rang from the percussion of the shots. The dogs were still barking, but now their barking sounded hollow. Across the room Eric Reynolds sat slumped against the side of the couch, a bloody hand pressed just below his right shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers.

  Tracy stood and moved first to Devoe. She kicked away the .45, then bent to a knee and put two fingers to his neck. No pulse. Devoe had not been wearing his vest. She moved to Eric Reynolds. His two dogs, anxious and unnerved, pranced and whined.

  “It’s okay,” Eric said, voice weak, free hand reaching out, trying to soothe his dogs. He was pale, pupils dilated, quickly slipping into shock, if not already there.

  “Stay with me,” Tracy said, already on her cell phone. “Stay with me, Eric.”

  An hour later, Tracy stood on the covered front porch of Eric Reynolds’s house, protected from the falling snow, watching as the ambulance carrying him drove off, lights swirling. A half-dozen Klickitat County sheriff’s deputies milled about the front yard, awaiting the Crime Scene Response Team Jenny had requested from the Washington State Patrol’s Vancouver office. As the ambulance departed, Jenny approached.

  “How is he?” Tracy asked.

  “He’s stable,” Jenny said. “They’re transporting him to the county hospital in Goldendale. They’ll assess him there and see if he needs to be airlifted to Harborview. They don’t think so.”

  Reynolds had been fortunate to take the bullet in his right shoulder, and lucky that Devoe hadn’t shot him in the head when he’d lowered himself to charge.

  “You picked up Ron Reynolds?”

  Jenny nodded. “He’s not saying anything. Asked for an attorney. Didn’t even ask about his son. Only seemed concerned with himself.”

  Jenny looked about at the beautiful grounds, flocked in snow. “This really is a tragedy, isn’t it?”

  “On so many levels,” Tracy said.

  “Can you imagine a parent doing that to his own child, letting him believe he killed someone all those years? Letting him take the blame? That’s horrific.”

  It made Tracy think of Angela Collins, and the A Team’s inability to fully reconcile her or her son’s confession with the crime scene evidence, and Tracy realized they’d been looking at that case all wrong.

  “Tracy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Just thinking of another case.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Late Friday afternoon, Kins hung up the phone and turned his chair to face Faz. “Hold on to your ass, Faz. This case just got a whole lot stranger.”

  “Let me guess,” Faz said. “Tim Collins rose from the dead and confessed that he shot himself.”

  “Close. That was Cerrabone. Atticus Berkshire just withdrew as counsel of record for Angela Collins.”

  That got Faz out of his chair and crossing the bull pen. “No shit? He quit on his daughter?”

  “Cerrabone said the notice just came across his e-mail. No reason given, just withdrawing.”

  “Did it provide notice of new counsel?”

  “Nope. Just a withdrawal. No substitution.”

  Faz considered the i
nformation for a moment. “Maybe she doesn’t think she needs one. She hasn’t been charged.”

  “That’s not a reason for Berkshire to withdraw,” Kins said.

  “He thinks he’s too close to it, too emotionally invested?” Faz said. “You know that old saying about an attorney representing himself having a fool for a client.”

  “If that were the case, wouldn’t you have expected him to have secured new counsel for his daughter before withdrawing?”

  “Maybe that will come Monday,” Faz said.

  “Maybe,” Kins said. “I guess we’ll find out.” Faz had his jacket on. “You on your way home?”

  “Not for a while. Husky game tonight. Traffic in the U District will be a killer until seven. I was going to take a walk up to Palomino and watch the first half there.”

  “You mind making it a working night?” Kins asked. “I’d like to talk some things through.” A flat-screen TV hung over the adjacent B Team’s bull pen.

  “You’re staying?”

  “Might as well,” Kins said. “Shannah’s got book club, and the boys are with friends. I agreed to pick them up on my way home.”

  “I’ll call the Palomino and have it delivered,” Faz said.

  An hour and a half later, Faz and Kins sat in the A Team’s bull pen talking through the potential various scenarios. Empty boxes of takeout littered the center table—not a spare piece of pasta, bread, or even a shred of lettuce to be found. In the background, they could hear announcers giving the play-by-play of the Husky football game, and from the bits and pieces Kins had caught, it didn’t sound pretty. Stanford was up 21–0 nearing the end of the first half.

  “Okay, so the father comes storming in, ranting and raving,” Faz said. “He picks up the crystal sculpture and starts beating on her. The kid intervenes, and he smacks the kid.”

  “So then why does he go to the back bedroom?”

  “That’s where the wife has gone.”

  “When?”

  “When he beats on the kid.”

  “Why does he drop the sculpture? Why doesn’t he take it with him?”

  “He’s done with it,” Faz said. “He’s already dropped it before he kicks her a few times in the ribs.”

  “Tell me how she gets to the bedroom if he’s whaling on her.”

  “Connor said he stepped in to stop him, and his father hit him,” Faz said. “That gives Angela enough time to get down the hall. The husband goes after her, Connor grabs his leg, trying to stop him, and that’s how the fingerprint ends up on the father’s shoe. He kicks Connor off of him and goes down the hall. Connor gets up and goes for the gun.”

  Kins thought it through a minute. “Okay, and if Angela shot him?”

  “Then it’s like she said; the husband is whaling on her, and Connor is cowering in the back bedroom. When the husband gets finished, he drops the sculpture and goes to the back room to get Connor, except Connor is upset and doesn’t want to go with him, so the father smacks him. Meanwhile, Angela has gotten the gun, comes down the hall and shoots him.”

  Kins mulled over that scenario. “So then what is she doing for twenty-one minutes?”

  “That’s where I think the evidence points to Connor as the shooter,” Faz said, sitting up and leaning forward. “She’s trying to clean up his mess. She trying to protect the kid, so she’s taking the time to get their stories straight. She tells him that she’ll confess, that she’ll tell the police she shot him. She’s grown up the daughter of a criminal defense attorney, right? It’s like Tracy said, they probably had sit-down dinners where Berkshire regaled them with all his war stories. She probably grew up thinking about things like Miranda rights and self-defense. She uses the time to calm the kid and get him on board, and makes him rehearse his story until she’s satisfied he’s got it straight.”

  “So why does she wipe down the sculpture? If she’s thinking about fingerprints, Tim Collins’s prints on it would help prove he used it to hit her.”

  “That, my friend, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Faz said.

  “That and why would Connor come in and confess if his mother agreed to take the fall?”

  “Two thoughts. Either he feels guilty and doesn’t want anything to happen to his mom for something he did, or it was all part of her plan to get them both off.”

  “And Berkshire withdraws why?” Kins asked.

  “Don’t know,” Faz said, sounding and looking tired.

  Kins tossed an empty can into the wastebasket. Faz stretched his neck and checked his watch. They’d reached the same dead end again.

  “Getting late,” Faz said. “I think we both could use a good night’s sleep. We can get a fresh start Monday morning. Come on. Let’s head out.”

  “You go,” Kins said. “Kids asked to stay an hour later at their friends’.”

  Faz got up from his chair and grabbed his sport coat from the hanger dangling over the corner of his cubicle. “Don’t stay too late.”

  “I won’t.” Kins sat back, frustrated. They were doing something wrong. He knew it. He knew he was missing something, something that would help make sense of the evidence. In his mind, Angela had shot Tim. Not only did she have the financial incentive, but the evidence indicated that she was cashing out, trying to milk as much money out of her husband to dump into a home she knew she was going to sell. If Tim wasn’t in the picture, she stood to take 100 percent of the proceeds and control over the entire estate—all because Tim hadn’t finalized his new will yet. And Kins just didn’t see Connor having the guts to pull the trigger—at least not without something more.

  Kins opened the case binder and thought of Tracy’s trick of laying out the evidence in one place. He grabbed the file and the Bekins box and carried it into the conference room. There he dismantled the file and began laying out the witness statements, the photographs, the reports, the sculpture, and the other evidence in plastic evidence bags.

  He started through it again, scanning his and Tracy’s typewritten reports, the witness statements, and forensic reports from the crime lab. Nothing new jumped out at him. He considered the crime-scene photographs. In his mind, he saw Connor sitting beside his mother on the couch in the living room, neither of them talking, both of them barefoot. A thought came to him.

  “Why are you barefoot?” he said out loud. Connor was supposed to be going with his father. His father had sent a text message he was picking him up, and Connor had responded, K. It was winter. Why didn’t the kid have on shoes, or at least socks?

  Another thought. Kins went through the photographs and found the ones of the room where Tim Collins had been shot.

  No suitcase or duffel bag or backpack. There hadn’t been one in the front room either.

  “Why aren’t you packed? If you’re leaving for the weekend, why didn’t you pack?”

  Maybe he kept clothes at his father’s apartment. “Or maybe he wasn’t going with his father,” Kins said, talking it out. “Maybe he had no intention of going with his father.”

  Another thought came to him, something he’d read in the ME’s report and dismissed but that now seemed relevant. He went back through the report, finding the paragraph on the condition of the body when first found. Tim Collins wore black lace-up shoes, but the shoelaces of one of those shoes were untied.

  Kins went back to the coroner’s photographs taken at the scene and focused on Tim Collins’s shoes. One was indeed untied.

  He knew how Connor’s print got on his father’s shoe.

  CHAPTER 37

  The celebration to rename the renovated athletic complex Ron Reynolds Stadium was postponed indefinitely, although the game was played that Saturday night.

  Stoneridge lost.

  Monday morning, Tracy and Kins walked to the King County Courthouse to meet Cerrabone to discuss what they wanted to do about the Angela Collins case. Cerrabone was trying another case but said he could speak to them during the morning recess.

  They stepped into a marble conference room f
ull of yellowed oak furniture that looked as old as the building. Kins explained why he thought Berkshire’s withdrawal confirmed his theory that they were going about the case wrong, and Tracy proposed her idea on how they might move the case from its current state of limbo. Cerrabone expressed skepticism, but he agreed that there wasn’t anything unethical about her proposal and that they had nothing to lose by giving it a try.

  “Angela’s no longer represented by counsel,” Kins said. “If she agrees to talk to us, Berkshire can’t prevent it. All he’ll have to do is watch and listen, and I think he will. I think he wanted her to go on record about what happened. I think he wanted her to lock herself in.”

  “It definitely was out of character; I’ll give you that,” Cerrabone said. “Maybe you’re right.” He checked his watch. His break was coming to an end. “I’ll make some calls this afternoon and let you know.”

  Angela Collins voluntarily agreed to come to the Justice Center when Kins called and told her he had a few more questions about her son’s statement that he wanted to go over with her.

  She had expressed reluctance, but it seemed halfhearted.

  She came in alone, without counsel, as Tracy had also predicted.

  Kins placed her in the hard interrogation room with the one-way mirror. In the adjacent viewing room, Tracy and Cerrabone stood watching. Moments later, Faz brought in Connor Collins and Atticus Berkshire.

  “What’s my mother doing here?” Connor asked.

  “She’s being asked a few questions also,” Tracy said.

  She flipped a switch, and Kins’s voice came through the speaker. “We’ve had an interesting development, Angela.”

  “Have you?” Angela Collins looked and sounded calm. Her bruising was only slightly visible beneath her makeup. She looked to have recently had her hair styled and her nails done. Far from the grieving widow, she looked like she was dressed for a date, wearing straight-leg jeans, ankle boots, and a soft red sweater.

  “Am I correct that you are no longer represented by counsel?”