Swinging around a curve on the narrow road, Tom encountered a coal truck coming from the opposite direction and realized with a jolt that he’d strayed over the center line. He pulled the cruiser back on course and sped past the truck.
His thoughts shifted back to the case. If Vance had killed Brian Hadley, what could he hope to gain from the innocence project’s investigation? If it was a charade, they wouldn’t find evidence to clear him because that evidence didn’t exist. And it could backfire on him—they might turn up additional evidence to reaffirm Vance’s guilt.
Where did all this leave Tom? Because the killer had brought Shelley’s body back to Mason County, he had trouble believing she’d been the victim of a random abduction and murder. But if she was killed by somebody who knew her, who had a strong enough motive to do it? The Hadleys were infuriated by Shelley’s work for Vance, but would they kill the girl to stop her? Did anyone besides the Hadleys care that much about what she was doing? Who was the woman Shelley was trying to persuade to come forward, and what kind of evidence could she offer? If it wasn’t Rita, what other woman was close enough to the events to know anything of value? Grace? Was she protecting the Hadleys, out of self-interest?
Tom chewed over these questions for more than an hour as he drove, until the prison came into view.
Vance had begun his life sentence in a maximum security institution on the other side of Virginia, but three years of model behavior won him a transfer to Harper Ridge, a medium security prison closer to home. Miles before he reached it, Tom could see the place from the road, a collection of buildings inside an octagonal wall, sitting on a leveled mountaintop surrounded by deep ravines. More than a thousand men lived inside that wall.
Tom braked at the turnoff and locked his service pistol in the glove compartment before he started up the steep, curving road to the prison. At the gate into the parking lot, he spent a few minutes proving his identity and waiting for the guard to get the warden’s okay for him to enter. He parked where he was told to and approached the gate into the prison compound on foot. From there, he moved through the layers of security and into the main building without incident.
The warden, a tall, chunky man with white hair and a rumpled brown suit, appeared at the final checkpoint to shake Tom’s hand, exchange a few words with him, and turn him over to a young guard.
The guard had big hands and a muscular body that probably earned him the respect of the inmates. He didn’t bother with chitchat as he led Tom down a hall. From behind them, Tom heard the automated steel mesh door slide shut with a grinding noise and lock with a clang. He didn’t see anyone else, but a hum of indistinct voices seemed to seep through the walls and ceiling and gave him the sensation that the building itself was alive around him. Prisons always made him think of the Borg, those cybernetically-enhanced beings in Star Trek who functioned as mindless drones in a vast collective that forcibly sucked in new victims. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Tom had known more than a few people who were destroyed or changed for the worse by prison. For that reason alone, he hoped to god Vance Lankford was guilty and deserved to be there.
The guard showed Tom into a small room that contained only a metal table, bolted to the floor, and two chairs. When the guard gestured at a chair, Tom sat down. He’d had enough of sitting in the car, though, and as soon as the guard left him alone, he rose, stretched, and walked to the window.
Thirty feet from the building, a couple dozen men wearing orange prison clothes were locked in a small yard surrounded by a six-foot chain link fence. They had divided predictably along racial lines, with whites, blacks, and Hispanics forming separate groups. One young white man, though, marched alone around the perimeter of the yard, his face set in a determined expression, as if he had to meet an exercise goal before his time outdoors ended.
Vance Lankford wasn’t among the men in the yard.
Tom had been waiting almost twenty minutes, long enough to watch the men shuffle back inside and another group take their place outdoors, when he heard the distant rumble of motorized doors. Footsteps sounded on the tiled hallway floor, drawing closer. A different guard, this one a balding middle-aged man, opened the door to the room where Tom waited, poked his head in and glanced around. Apparently satisfied that everything was as it should be, he ushered Vance Lankford inside.
“Go on and sit down,” the guard told Vance, “and don’t get up unless the deputy says you can.” To Tom he said, “I’ll be right outside, deputy. Yell if you need me.”
Vance, without cuffs or shackles, kept his eyes downcast as he approached the table. His gaunt frame acted as little more than a clothes hanger for his prison uniform, and he hitched up the loose waist of his pants before he took a seat. Tom didn’t know him well, but he’d seen him around often enough in the past to be shocked by the change in his appearance. His cheekbones and jaw looked like carved stone beneath taut, colorless skin. A buzz cut that had left his dark hair less than an inch long accentuated the stark angles of his face. Vance was barely thirty. He looked fifty.
Tom almost asked him how he was doing, but thought better of it. He could see the answer in Vance’s dull eyes and the way he slumped in his chair. This was a man who had given up on himself. Maybe he realized Shelley’s death meant the end of his hope for freedom.
“I’m Tom Bridger. We’ve met a few times. I don’t know if you remember me.”
Vance’s gaze flicked over Tom and the right edge of his mouth lifted a fraction of an inch. “I’m not likely to forget anybody connected to John Bridger. And you look just like him.”
“You know Shelley Beecher’s dead, don’t you?”
Vance turned his head to look out the window at the men in the yard. “Yeah,” he said, his voice as flat and empty as his expression. “The woman from the innocence project got in touch. But I heard it from the guards first. They got a real kick out of telling me.”
“She was murdered,” Tom said.
“Well, I’ve got a good alibi, so you can’t pin that one on me.”
Tom watched Vance for a moment, trying to detect some emotion on his face. Distress, anger, disappointment, fear—all of that would be understandable. Did he feel any grief for Shelley herself, any sympathy for her family? Did he recognize the indirect role he might have played in her death? Whatever Vance felt, he hid it behind an impassive mask.
“You didn’t kill Shelley,” Tom said, “but her work for you might have been responsible for her murder.”
Vance leaned forward, meeting Tom’s eyes and showing a spark of life for the first time. “What the hell is that supposed to mean? She was the only person who ever took the time to listen to my side of the story. Why would I want her to get hurt?”
“Were you pushing her to investigate some other person in particular? Dig around for dirt that might make somebody else look guilty? Was she threatening somebody who still lives in Mason County?”
Vance slumped back in his chair, and his face went blank again. “Look, whatever you’re here for, I can’t help you. I don’t know who she was investigating.”
“Are you saying she didn’t she tell you anything? That’s hard to believe. She was doing it for you, after all. You were her client.”
“Believe what you want to. But she didn’t want to talk about it until she could prove it.”
“And you didn’t give her any ideas about who else could have killed Brian? How did you persuade her to get involved in the first place?”
Vance folded his arms tightly over his waist and raised his chin. “All I know is that I didn’t kill him. And after Shelley heard me out, she believed me. She thought I was telling the truth, and she was willing to look into it.”
“The people at the innocence project don’t have any of the information she collected. It all disappeared when Shelley did. They don’t have anything to start over with.”
“I know that,” Vance mumbled. For a second his mask slipped and Tom glimpsed the despair behind it.
&n
bsp; Tom had heard protestations of innocence from a lot of guilty people, many so earnest that they might have been persuasive if hard evidence against them hadn’t existed. Some seemed to have convinced themselves that they’d done nothing wrong, and Tom was beginning to wonder if Vance was one of those. But he wasn’t here to debate Vance’s guilt or innocence. “There’s something else I wanted to ask you about.”
Vance regarded him with suspicion. “What?”
Tom reached into his uniform jacket to pull the photocopied newspaper picture from an inner pocket. He spread it open on the table. “Did Shelley ever show you this?”
Vance shot a cursory glance at the photo. “Yeah, a couple of times. What about it?”
“Why did she show it to you? What did she want to know about it?”
“She wanted me to identify some of the people. I don’t recognize most of them. The light’s bad, the picture’s not all that clear, and some of them were probably from outside the county anyway. But that’s Jordy Gale.” Vance shifted in his seat and tapped the picture.
“So Jordy was there that night?” If Vance had seen him, so had a lot of other people, Tom thought. “You told Shelley that?”
“Sure I did.”
“He claims he wasn’t at the concert,” Tom said. “Why would he lie about it?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe he just didn’t want to get dragged into a police investigation.”
“Rita says he wasn’t there.”
Vance laughed and shook his head. “She knows he was there. I saw her talking to him.”
“Why would she lie about something like that?”
“Don’t ask me to explain Rita. I’d have to be a psychiatrist to even try. But I’ve been over every second of that night a million times in my head. I can tell you what happened minute by minute. I saw Jordy before the concert, I talked to him, I told him to get the hell out of my face. And I think he was gone by the time we wound it up. I didn’t see him afterward, anyway. But why does this matter to—”
“Are you saying you had an argument with Jordy that night too?” Tom broke in. “Was that before or after your fight with Brian?”
“I wasn’t fighting with either one of them. An argument’s not a—Aw, hell, I don’t have to put up with this crap.” Vance pushed himself to his feet.
Tom rose too. “Sit down, Vance. We’re not finished.”
“Oh, yeah, we are. Just leave me alone and let me serve out my time in peace. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Me stuck in here for the rest of my life. You sure as hell don’t want anybody proving your daddy got the wrong man.” He turned away.
“I said sit down.”
The door swung open and the balding guard appeared. “What’s going on in here? Didn’t I tell you to stay put, Lankford? Do I have to cuff you to the table?”
“Take me back to my cell.”
The guard looked past Vance to Tom. “Deputy? You done with him?”
Before Tom could answer, Vance said, “Yeah, he’s done with me, whether he thinks so or not.”
Tom sighed and waved a hand. “All right. Take him.”
On his way out, Vance paused at the door and looked back at Tom. “I’ll tell you what I told Shelley. If you really care about finding the truth, go ask Rita your questions. Keep after her, break her down. I think she knows stuff about that night that she’s never told anybody.”
***
Tom followed another correctional officer, retracing his steps through the prison to the outside. Ninety minutes to get here, ninety minutes to get back home. What a goddamn waste of time. He’d confirmed that Jordy Gale was on the scene the night Brian was murdered, but so what? Maybe Vance was right and Jordy had lied for the simple and obvious reason that he didn’t want to get caught up in a police investigation. Maybe Rita had backed him up out of friendship. It could meant nothing.
In his cruiser in the parking lot, Tom grabbed his cell phone from the glove compartment and held it out the window to see if he could get a signal. Might as well check in and find out whether he’d missed anything important while he was on his wild goose chase.
He picked up a weak signal and found a couple of voice mail messages waiting. One was from Rachel, who sounded like she was clinging to self-control by her fingernails. What the hell? A rattlesnake at the animal hospital? Michelle in the ER?
Tom yanked on his seat belt, swung it around his body and fastened it with a click. He revved the engine, but before he shifted into drive he clicked on the other voice mail message. He had to play it twice before he was sure he’d heard right.
Dennis Murray wanted him to know right away about the crime lab report on the blood that was thrown onto Tom and Rachel’s porch. “It’s deer blood,” Dennis said. His voice faded in a burst of static, and when it became audible again it sounded faint and distant. “…heard Blake and Skeet Hadley shot a buck last weekend…out of season, so they’re not going to admit it…stalker probably didn’t do it…I’m betting on Skeet…boy’s out of control.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Rachel found Michelle, propped up and looking groggy, near the end of the row of beds in the emergency room. The only other patients were a teenage boy with a broken leg and worried parents, and an infant who screamed in his frazzled mother’s arms while a doctor struggled to examine his throat. Curtains drawn on both sides of Michelle’s bed gave her privacy.
“Hey,” Rachel said, laying a palm against her sister’s ashen cheek. Michelle’s skin felt cool to the touch even though it was moist with perspiration. An IV dripped fluid into her, delivering the antivenom to a vein on the back of her left hand as rapidly as possible. Not much more left in the bag. “How are you feeling?”
“Kind of loopy from the pain meds. I can’t stay awake.” Michelle sighed and her head lolled to the right. She wore a light green hospital gown, and a sheet covered her to the waist.
“Are you in much pain?”
Michelle ran her tongue over dry lips and murmured her reply, so that Rachel had to lean within inches to catch her words over the racket the baby made. “…gave me Percocet. You could flatten me with a bus right now and I wouldn’t feel it.”
Rachel forced a smile and tried to answer, but a lump of guilt sat in her throat like something hard and sharp-edged that refused to go down. She brushed a strand of damp hair off Michelle’s cheek. It should have been me. This was meant for me.
Whispery words drifted from Michelle’s mouth. “Doctor wants me to stay overnight…That necessary?”
“Yes, it is. You have to be watched for a while.” The baby’s cries ceased abruptly. In the startling silence, Rachel lowered her voice. “Do you mind if I look at your leg?”
Michelle gave a little gust of a laugh and waved a hand. “Oh, go ahead. Everybody else has. I drew a crowd when they brought me in. Doctors, nurses, residents…I was a teaching moment, I guess.”
Michelle must have had a heck of a dose of the painkiller if she could laugh about being displayed as a teaching aid for strangers.
Rachel pulled down the sheet. Several inches of skin around the two fang punctures were as tautly swollen and shiny as a red balloon. The antivenom would prevent further damage, but it couldn’t reverse the destruction of tissue that had already taken place. Necrosis would follow the inflammation, and Michelle would always have an ugly scar on her leg. Rachel drew the sheet up again, folding it at Michelle’s waist.
A dark-haired nurse dressed in blue scrubs bustled into the curtained-off space, asking, “How are we doing here?” She brushed past Rachel to reach the IV bag. Her boyish figure and ponytail made her look about twelve, but she was all business. In seconds, she assessed the level of fluid, checked Michelle’s pulse, stripped away the sheet to check the wound, yanked it back up. “We’ll be moving you to a room soon, Michelle. Let us know if you need anything in the meantime.” With a nod at Rachel, she marched out.
Rachel rearranged the sheet, making it as neat as it had been before the nurse breezed in.<
br />
“I hate it when they call me by my first name,” Michelle whispered. “There ought to be a rule against it.”
Ah, the real Michelle surfaces. “Kevin will be here in a few hours. I called him before I came over here.”
“Oh, no.” Michelle pushed away from the slanted bed, tried to sit up straight. “Why did you—I don’t want—”
“Stay still, please, Mish.” Rachel caught her by the shoulders and used gentle force to press her back against the pillows. “He’s very worried about you. He’d never forgive me if I hadn’t called him, and there’s no way he’s going to stay in Bethesda while you’re in the hospital. He wants to be here with you.”
“No, he doesn’t.”
A piercing scream from the baby a few feet away cut through the quiet.
Michelle winced at the noise, then all her defenses crumbled, her face puckered, and she seemed to become a child too, alone and frightened.
But she wasn’t alone. You have me. You’ll always have your sister. Trying to ignore the screeching infant, Rachel took Michelle’s hand and said, “Just rest now. That’s all you need to do.”
Michelle seemed not to hear her. “Mother thought Kevin was all wrong for me. You knew that, didn’t you?”
Rachel winced. “You’re stressing yourself when you should be trying to relax.”
“She was right.” Michelle’s fingers tightened on Rachel’s hand. “But she was blaming him, when it was me. I’m the one who’s all wrong. I shouldn’t have married him. He deserves a real wife, not somebody like me. I’m broken, Rachel. She ruined me.”
Would the woman they’d called Mother never let go of them? Would she always be reaching out from the grave to twist their minds and make them doubt their own worth? “You’ve had a shock and you’ve got a narcotic in your system. This isn’t the time to try self-analysis. You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Bleeding Through: A Rachel Goddard Mystery (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Page 24