by Nevada Barr
Anna weighed the pros and cons of telling Paul about the Clinton pullout scenario. In the end, she told him. Unless she’d read him wrong, he would not indulge in idle gossip and it might be of some comfort to him to know the reason why this gifted and depressive man had come to believe his life was intolerable, a risk to the bridge between the races he had worked so long and hard to build.
They took a moment, the telephonic equivalent of snatching their hats off out of respect for the dead, then went on. Anna was reminded of her grandmother’s telling her that if she thought she was important she should just stick her finger in a bucket of water and pull it out to see how big a hole it left. No person, no matter how important when living, left much of a hole in the great scheme of things when he died.
Brandon DeForest remained to be talked to. Again. Heather had folded. Lock had appeared on the scene playing a part in the tragedy. Given the new information, it was time to squeeze the recalcitrant Mr. DeForest. Needing to pretend she was in control of some small aspect of life, Anna took her car; Sheriff Davidson rode in the passenger seat. Once again they would be pulling Brandon out of class, questioning him on school property. This time there would be two of them. Juvenile cases were tricky, each twist and turn in the investigative process fraught with rules, written and unwritten. But DeForest had turned eighteen on January twelfth. Anna’d gotten that bit of information from his driving record. In his junior year, he’d gotten a speeding ticket, fifty-five in a forty-mile-an-hour zone on Northside Drive in Jackson. The moment he’d run afoul of the law, even in this mundane and fleeting fashion, his information had gone into the computers. There was no such thing as a private citizen anymore. Anybody with a PC and a modem was welcome to drive down the information highway. Unless an individual kept a profile so low earthworms had to bend over to see it, he was bound to show up.
The high school shimmered in the heat, looking new and awkward with its complement of saplings not yet rooted deep enough to grow tall.
Adele Mack, the vice principal, was again the person the secretary steered them to. The door to the principal’s office remained firmly shut, and Anna wondered if there really was such a person or if Ms. Mack had done away with him or her at some point and continued to efficiently run the school, the real force behind the paper tiger.
The growing heat was taking its toll on Ms. Mack’s face. Her eye makeup had melted slightly when she’d been out-of-doors, then resolidified in a blurrier configuration when exposed to the air-conditioning. Other than that, she was impeccable: hair, hose, high heels in perfect order.
“Come in,” she said, neither pleased nor displeased at Anna’s return but clearly concerned. Anna had intended to sit quietly and let Sheriff Davidson do the talking for two reasons. One, she thought both he and VP Mack would be more comfortable with the traditional lines of male authority in place. Two, she was feeling lazy. But once they were all in Ms. Mack’s office with the door closed, both the sheriff and the vice principal stared expectantly at her, and she was forced to give up yet another preconceived notion about Southerners.
Unable to think of any reason to withhold information, Anna told Ms. Mack what they knew of DeForest. That Danni had taken his car. That he and his cronies had pursued Heather and Danni to Rocky Springs after the prom. Keeping Lockley Wentworth out of the equation, she said that apparently there was another boy involved, that DeForest had known about him and that DeForest and his buddies, Lyle and Thad, had lied to Anna and the police about their memory of what had occurred that night. The boys all claimed they’d been too drunk to remember, but with new information, Anna thought they might be more forthcoming. Ms. Mack asked a few questions. Anna and Paul answered them the best they could. DeForest, Mack confirmed, was eighteen, an adult by legal standards. As was Lyle Sanders. Thad Meyerhoff was still seventeen and, as a minor, had a right to her protection.
Meyerhoff, they assured her, was not a suspect.
“But if he committed perjury—” Ms. Mack began.
“It’s not perjury unless you’re under oath,” the sheriff said and by the look of annoyance that flickered across the VP’s well-manicured face, Anna guessed she knew that and was embarrassed at having forgotten momentarily.
“Lying to the police then,” she said.
Though law enforcement officers hated admitting it, there was no law against lying to the police. They might try and frighten Thad Meyerhoff with obstruction of justice but would be hard-pressed to make it stick.
Ms. Mack left to fetch the boys.
“We weren’t entirely honest,” Anna said after she’d gone. “If those boys were with Brandon when he killed Danni, they are both potentially accessories to murder. The way Danni was draped and roped and carried and dragged, it looks to me like it could have been the work of more than one person.”
Davidson nodded. “There’s no law against lying to vice principals either,” he said, and Anna glimpsed a colder part of the man than she’d seen before.
By prior agreement, Anna and the sheriff kept the three boys separated, questioning them one at a time, Thad and Lyle first. They told neither boy of Heather’s revelations but questioned them closely on details: the time they’d left the prom, where they’d gone drinking and a dozen other things. From the quick pat answers, it was clear they’d spent time rehearsing. Sanders was cocky, but Meyerhoff was nervous enough. Anna guessed they could crack him if they kept him away from the support of his peers and turned up the pressure.
Questioning concluded for the present, they tucked Sanders away in the absent principal’s office and incarcerated Thad Meyerhoff in a small conference room to steep in their lies.
At a quarter of three, Ms. Mack showed Brandon DeForest into the little office she’d relinquished for the cause. He still grinned and strutted but Anna could see the wait while his friends had been questioned had worn him down a bit. His blue-denim eyes moved from object to object on Adele Mack’s desk, and when he sat, his left leg continued to bounce.
Anna leaned back and looked intentionally smug. Paul leaned forward, elbows on knees, and ran his fingers through his hair, the picture of a tired, disappointed, but determined man.
“So,” he said and scrubbed his face with both hands as if to rub away the knowledge of evil. “You argued about Danni’s new boyfriend. Danni stole your car. You and Thad and Lyle chased her down the Trace and cornered her at Rocky Springs. You better talk to me, boy, and tell me why I shouldn’t book you for the murder of Danielle Posey. You’ll be playing football at Parchment Penitentiary for the rest of your life.”
DeForest stopped jiggling his leg, stunned as if Davidson had hit him with a bucket of ice water. “Those shits,” he said, and the red blood of righteous anger boiled into his face. Anna and the sheriff just watched, he with tired compassion, she with a look she hoped came across as gloating.
The boy’s anger couldn’t hold through the silent watching. Blood drained away as quickly as it had risen, leaving him pale and looking younger than his eighteen years.
“I just wanted my car back,” he said sullenly. “We took Thad’s car, followed Danni and Heather to Rocky. When they got out, I got in my car and drove home. I don’t care what Thad and Lyle told you. That’s the truth.”
Anna allowed herself a small audible sniff that as much as said: “Hah!” Paul merely looked terribly sad. Neither one of them said anything. The second hand on the big round wall clock behind Brandon’s head jerked its way around twice.
Silence having failed, Paul said: “Son, you’re lying to me.” Brandon started to protest, but the sheriff forestalled him with a raised hand. “We’ve got enough to arrest you on suspicion of murder. When you go to trial and we got two witnesses saying one thing and you saying another, it’ll go bad with you. You get caught in one lie, and the jury will figure you’re lying every time you open your mouth. I’ve had a long day, and I’m not fixin’ to sit in this office and screw around with you for much longer.”
The second hand con
tinued on its appointed rounds. Anna watched a kaleidoscope of emotions flicker over DeForest’s face. Nothing telling, just fragments, ill-fitting and out of context.
“Danni’d been going on about having this other boyfriend, and it was pissing me off. Then she steals my car and goes off to see this guy. Me and Thad and Lyle chased them to Rocky Springs like I said. We were just screwing with Danni, giving her some of her own back. We dogged ‘em—you know, yelling and stuff—around that loop there at the campground. Then Danni tears out and we follow ’em around the back way to the old church up at the graveyard.”
Brandon stopped. Anna guessed he was mentally editing the next chapter in his story, deciding what would be damning and what would not, what he could get away with and what was already known.
“Danni and Heather got out and ran up through the graveyard. We followed for a while. Just giving them a bad time. Then we left. That’s all that happened, no big deal.”
“Then why did you lie to us?” Paul asked.
“Because it might’ve looked bad. You know, with that happening to Danni and all.”
Anna never broke her laid-back pose of smug self-assurance. “Makes sense to me,” she said reasonably. “Lying because the truth might look bad.”
“That’s all it was, ma’am,” DeForest said earnestly.
“What I want to know is why you’re lying now,” Anna said.
Brandon turned up the sincerity and, wide-eyed, hurt, he said: “Lying? How? I don’t know what you mean.”
“You said you chased Danni and Heather, right? The two girls were together.”
“That’s right.”
“You and Thad and Lyle, all together all the time.”
“That’s right.”
Anna sat up straight and dropped the easy attitude. “Lyle and Thad returned to the graveyard without you. Heather and Danni were already separated when the boys came. Where the hell were you? Murdering your girlfriend because she dumped you for another boy? A black boy who’s a better football player and a better lover than you could ever hope to be?”
“That fucking bitch ...” He had lost it and knew he had. He pulled himself together, put his good-boy face back on. “No, ma’ am,” he said. “I never hurt Danni. Maybe I got separated from Thad and Lyle for a minute or two, but that’s all.”
“Two against one, Brandon,” Anna said. “Lyle and Thad against you. Ugly isn’t it? No honor among thieves.”
“It could’ve been longer,” Brandon admitted. “But I didn’t kill anybody, and no way you can prove I did.”
They’d gotten all they were going to get out of him on that subject for the moment. Anna switched gears. “Your cohorts tell me you’ve got a picture of Heather Barnes baring her chest, that you used it to get her to lie. That’s blackmail and suborning perjury. Both felonies. You’re young, and you’re scared. You give me that picture and the negative, and I’ll see to it those charges are not brought against you.”
“Shit,” Brandon said and, “Yes, ma’am.”
Paul picked up his hat from where he’d placed it beneath his chair. “If you remember anything else, you call me or Ranger Pigeon,” he said.
“I’m free to go?” Brandon looked both surprised and relieved.
“For the moment, son,” the sheriff said gently. His kindness frightened the boy more than anything either he or Anna had done to date.
Anna let Brandon get to the door, his hand on the knob, the scent of freedom in his nostrils, before she stopped him. “By the way, why did you put that alligator in my carport?”
Convinced Anna knew way too much about him to risk another lie—at least on a lesser crime—DeForest said: “A man called and told us where the gator was. Said if we wanted you to quit poking in our business, asking stupid questions, we could go get it. Scare you off.”
“What man?”
“Some man doesn’t want you around these parts. Could be anybody.”
Though Anna would have shot herself before she let it show, the last barb hurt. “That alligator bit the leg off my dog,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. We were real sorry to hear about that,” he said with what sounded like genuine regret in his voice. If it had been her leg that had been bitten off, she doubted Brandon DeForest would have been half as sorry.
The door closed. Slumped elbow to elbow in padded industrial-strength armchairs, Anna and Paul said nothing. The quiet deepened until Anna could hear the faint tick of the spastic second hand on the wall clock. Sunlight came through the blinds of the west-facing window, painting yellow stripes across the top of Adele Mack’s desk. Dust motes moved through the light in a lazy dance, then vanished the moment they were touched by the shadows.
“Lord, but I hate bullying children,” Paul said. Another moment passed. The tension they’d maintained while questioning DeForest melted away like the dust in the shadow.
“I don’t know,” Anna said thoughtfully. “I think I’m beginning to develop a taste for it.”
The sheriff shot her a sidelong look to see if she was joking. Anna chose not to let him know one way or another.
Ms. Mack reclaimed her office. It seemed to Anna as if they’d been camped out there several days, but just over three-quarters of an hour in real time had elapsed. They were given the small conference room, and it was made clear they were on borrowed time. Ms. Mack was tiring of having her institution of learning sullied by the less exalted realities of life. Anna didn’t blame her. She’d been blessed to attend high school before police and teachers were forced to work together so closely. Wearing skirts too short, getting pregnant and smoking dope had been the crimes that plagued Anna’s alma mater. Not murder and blackmail.
Armed with information, Anna and Paul mixed bluff and bluster and were quickly finished with Thad Meyerhoff and Lyle Sanders.
From Thad they learned that events had transpired pretty much as DeForest said until the five kids left their cars and took to the graveyard. There Heather, too drunk to run, had hidden from them, probably where Anna later found her in the walled plot near the edge of the forest. Thad and Lyle had stopped to look for her. DeForest had pursued Danni Posey out of the graveyard and into the woods, toward the Old Trace Trail that ended near the campground half a mile east.
The booze wore off a little. Sanders and Meyerhoff got scared. Without flashlights or much in the way of cognitive thought processes, they’d tried to find Brandon and Danni. The search had quickly been abandoned, and they headed back to the car. That’s when Anna had talked with them. Neither one of them had seen or heard from Brandon till the following day. Thad had lied about remembering, because Brandon said he’d lost sight of Danni and gotten lost in the woods but thought nobody would believe him because they’d been fighting and he’d chased her.
Sanders, they got nothing from. He’d been abused and bullied by adults most of his life. Now he sat through the worst they could do locked in a private world he’d undoubtedly begun constructing the first time his dad got drunk and started beating on him.
With Thad’s information, they didn’t need much from Lyle Sanders and cut him loose after a quarter of an hour.
“Well,” Anna said apropos of nothing.
“Right. Well,” the sheriff replied.
For their afternoon’s combined efforts, they’d learned a great deal and nothing at all. Brandon DeForest was the prime suspect with the big three: means, motive and opportunity. The means of the murder could be anything—Anna took an educated guess that it would be some item from the same trunk that harbored the sheet and rope that mocked Danielle’s corpse, common things anyone could come by. Motive was the age-old, tried and true lover’s triangle. But Danielle Posey had accrued a surprising number of reasons to be done to death for a girl of her tender years: the lure of forty thousand dollars in insurance money, the racist rage of her brother Mike, the insanity of her mother, the threat she could have posed to Lockley Wentworth’s chances at the pros. Even, at a stretch, George Wentworth’s wrath because
, in endangering Lock’s chances, she threatened George’s dreams.
Opportunity was the factor that tightened the noose around DeForest’s neck. Though it was possible, it was not probable that anyone, with the possible exception of Lock Wentworth, could have known of Danni and Heather’s impromptu decision to steal a car and run with it down the Trace.
“We’re going to have to arrest the boy,” Anna said as she turned the key of the ignition and, like a true Southerner, reached immediately for the air-conditioning vent as if some minute adjustment would speed the cooling process.
“Looks like,” Paul said absently. He slouched in his seat, the natty crease on his shirtfront crumpling under the shoulder belt. “Brandon’s not going anywhere. I doubt he’s a danger to himself or society. Let’s hold off a bit.”
“Why?” Anna asked, curious. She didn’t care one way or another. If DeForest had killed his girlfriend because his pride had been outraged, she sincerely hoped he was punished to the full extent of the law. But she was in no hurry to do it.
“I don’t know,” Davidson said. “It just doesn’t seem the time is ripe yet. Chances are if we nail him and all we’ve got is circumstantial evidence, he’s going to get away with it.”
“Do we have enough for a search warrant? Search his car, match fibers from the sheet. Hope to get lucky and lay hands on whatever was used as a bludgeon?” Anna was afraid her ignorance was readily apparent. It wasn’t that she was totally in the dark regarding probable cause and the legalities surrounding the application for a search warrant, it was just not a job that often fell into a ranger’s daily tasks. In all her years with the park service, she’d only done it half a dozen times and not for many years.
“We might could,” the sheriff said wearily. “I’ll look into it.”
It was in Anna’s mind to ask him to dinner, but something stopped her. They rode the forty minutes to Port Gibson lost in a world of their own thoughts.