by Craig Smith
WILL BOOKER WAS GOING to make his play as maniacs always do, and we would come in behind him, when it was over, as we always did: sheriff, coroner, and county prosecutor. We would all shake our heads at the terrible thing done to the innocents. We would all trumpet plenty of nonsense about justice once it no longer mattered. Will Booker would get a lawyer; his victims would get a prayer.
And neither Pat Garrat nor I would ever mention that we had had a desperate chance at the beginning of this thing – an old bloodhound turned loose on the devil’s trail – and we had let it slip away from us.
For political reasons.
Chapter 46
Darkness.
A KNOCK AT THE DOOR. THE furtive whisper of Will Booker. ‘It’s time to come out and play, Penny!’
Mr Lyons swore at the sound of Will’s voice. When the door opened, he shouted, ‘Don’t go, Penny!’ Tabit rolled to her side and curled up. She was certain Will would start shooting again. There was candlelight in the hall, darkness beyond it.
The door closed behind Penny. Mr Lyons swore quietly as he had the last time Will had called her out. And the time before that. Then he got quiet, as they all had done each time she left. Penny had told them nothing happened. Will had just talked to her. She couldn’t say what he talked about. She refused to answer when Mr Lyons pressed her. She was lying so the rest of them wouldn’t know the truth, but they all knew the truth.
‘I don’t understand why Will wants her,’ Tammy moaned.
Tabit didn’t answer. No one did. Benny sighed, his voice cutting through the darkness angrily, ‘We have to do something, Dad.’
‘What? We can’t even walk! We have nothing in here that we can use as a weapon…’
‘Do we just let him do what he wants to Penny?’
Mr Lyons said nothing for nearly a minute. Like he wasn’t there. And then quietly he told them, ‘He’ll make a mistake, Benny, and when he does…’
Chapter 47
Thursday 2:00 p.m., March 25.
JUST BEFORE LUNCH I got with the sheriff’s office and collected the reports on the
Merriweather girls that Garrat had asked for. We ordered pizza and did a lunch-conference in Garrat’s office, going through the thing in tedious detail. We had witnesses seeing Will Booker leave the hospital before three. We had the kids in the school bus seeing Tabitha Merriweather go into her house a few minutes after three-thirty. We had the bathrobe Booker was wearing out of the hospital left inside the Merriweather house. We had the blood on the broken mirror matching Tabitha Merriweather, a good print belonging to Tabitha on one of the envelopes from the mailbox. We had Booker’s prints on the tape that had bound Tammy Merriweather in her room. We had a bit of blood and clothing from Tabit on the carpet of the TV room but no evidence of rape.
When the meeting broke up, I took an underground passage to the city police department for a meeting about another case with the assistant chief of detectives, Bobby DeWitt. My arrest was still a good joke on that side of the plaza; so it was bound to come up after we had knocked around the gossip on the Merriweather abductions.
The rookies, he said, were still asking how an old man had taken them out so easily. I played dumb with DeWitt. Too drunk to remember what really happened, I said. ‘All I know is I sure hurt the next day.’ He bought it, but levelled his gaze on me with an intensity that I was not prepared for. ‘If you ever got off the sauce, Rick, Max would love to make you his chief of detectives.’
‘That’s Rolly Tincher’s job.’
‘For a real detective Max could find Rolly a boki