“They’re nice enough folks,” Rutherford says to Win as they walk out to the parking lot, takes a good, long, disparaging look at Sykes’s old VW Rabbit, same thing he did when she and Win first drove up. “Well, call me when you’re ready,” he says to Win. “A real shame locking them up.” Chewing gum. “They’ve never caused any trouble around here.”
“Doesn’t look like they’re going to get a chance to, either,” Sykes says.
A few miles away is Little River Road, where many of Flat Rock’s wealthy residents have big homes and estates, many of them summer homes, many of their owners from the far reaches of New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago.
Sykes pulls her car off the long, unpaved driveway, parks to one side, in the weeds so she and Win can show up with no advance warning. They get out and start walking toward the house that Vivian Finlay’s nephew, George, and his 93 percent East Asian wife, Kim, inherited from Mrs. Finlay after her murder. The well-off couple have been married twenty-two years, their wedding six months after Kim’s first husband, Detective Mark Holland, committed suicide on lonely train tracks in a lonely part of North Carolina.
“Well, I know I would have,” Sykes remarks, carrying on a conversation they’ve been having for the past ten minutes.
“It’s easy to say twenty years after the fact,” Win reminds her. “We weren’t there.”
“You mean you wouldn’t have bothered checking out the tennis reservations?” Sykes says as they walk along the unpaved drive, getting closer to the house where George and Kim enjoy their privileged lives in their lovely home. “You know, just done the same damn thing I did?”
She has to remind Win yet again of how hard she’s worked, of what an amazingly thorough and smart investigation she’s conducted.
“If Barber had done that, he would have realized it wasn’t Mrs. Finlay who used the ball machine that day,” Sykes goes on, has made this point maybe four times now, “not unless she signed in as a guest. All he had to do was ask questions.”
“Maybe he felt about it a little bit the same way I do,” Win suggests. “He didn’t like dealing with a club that would never have him as a member.”
She walks close to him. He puts his arm around her.
“So, she’s going to jail?” Sykes asks, and she isn’t talking about Kim Finlay.
She’s thinking of Monique Lamont.
“Personally, I think she’s been punished plenty,” Win says. “But I’m not finished yet.”
For a moment they are quiet as they walk in the sun, the driveway long and winding, trees everywhere. He can feel the heaviness in Sykes’s heart, sense her pain and disappointment.
“Yeah, you’ve got a lot of unfinished business up there, all right,” she says. “Guess you’ll be leaving after you take care of these two.” She stares in the direction of the house.
“We could use a few good CSIs in Massachusetts,” he says.
She walks with her arm around him, holding him tight.
“You think the box of silver coins ever existed?” she asks, maybe just to change the subject, maybe to get her mind off where Win lives and works, off where he has his life, off how entwined his life is with Lamont’s, no matter how much he denies it.
“Probably,” he says. “I’m guessing Kim grabbed it on her way out the first time, after she killed her, trying to figure out how to stage it to look like a burglary/sex crime, disguise what in truth was probably an impulse crime. Blame it on a suspicious-looking black man. Worked like a charm, especially back then. People used to call the police on my dad. Happened a lot. He’s in his own yard and gets reported as a prowler.”
The sun is hot on their heads, the air cool, the roof of the house visible now, peeking above trees. They remove their arms from each other, walking apart, like colleagues again, talking about the case, Sykes wondering why Jimmy Barber never questioned what happened to Vivian Finlay’s shoes and socks, wondering what Kim found to wear when she made her getaway after stripping off her bloody tennis clothes, wondering a lot of things.
Then the house is right there in front of them, George and Kim Finlay, now in their sixties, sitting in white chairs on the wide white porch, eating lunch.
Win and Sykes stare at the couple on the porch staring at them.
“They’re all yours,” he quietly says.
Sykes looks at him. “You sure?”
“It’s your case, partner.”
They follow the slate walkway, head to the wooden steps that lead up to the porch, where George and Kim have stopped eating. Then Kim gets up from her chair, a stooped woman with graying hair pinned back, dark-tinted glasses, wrinkles that indicate she scowls a lot.
“Are you lost?” she loudly asks.
“No, ma’am, we’re definitely not lost,” Sykes says, she and Win stepping onto the porch. “I’m Special Agent Delma Sykes with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. This is Investigator Winston Garano, Massachusetts State Police. I talked to you on the phone the other day?” she says to George.
“Why, yes.” George clears his throat, a small man, white hair, looks uncertain, pulls his napkin out of the front of his Izod shirt, doesn’t seem sure whether he should stand or sit.
“The murder of Vivian Finlay has been reopened due to new evidence,” Sykes says.
“What evidence could there possibly be after all these years?” Kim says, acts clueless, even tries to look distressed by the memory.
“Your DNA, ma’am,” Sykes says.
15
He and Nana, and a secret mission, mid-October, the night starting out crisp and cool with not much of a moon.
Watertown, driving fast to an address where a client of hers said that dogfights were secretly being held in the basement on the weekends, horrible, violent fights, pugs, terriers, bulldogs, pit bulls, starved, baited, torn to pieces. Twenty dollars, the price of admission.
Win can still see the look on Nana’s face as she pounded on the door, see the look on the man’s face when she walked right into his dark, squalid house.
I have you between my fingers, she said, holding up two fingers, pinching them together. And I’m squeezing. Where are the dogs? Because we’re taking every one of them right now. And she squeezed her fingers together as tightly as she could, right in his mean, soulless face.
Crazy witch! He yelled at her.
Go take a look in your yard, look at all those shiny new pennies everywhere, she said, and maybe time has embellished history, but as Win recalls it, the moment she mentioned the pennies and the man went to the window to look, a fierce wind kicked up from nowhere and a tree branch slammed against that very window and shattered it.
Nana and Win drove off with a carload of dogs — pitiful, mangled creatures — while he cried uncontrollably, tried to pet them, do something to make them not hurt and shake so much, and after they left them at the animal hospital, they drove home and it had gotten very cold, and the heat had been turned on inside the house, and Win’s mother and father and Pencil were dead.
“Pencil?” Monique Lamont asks from her glass desk.
“A goofy mixed breed yellow Lab, Pencil. Because as a puppy he was always chewing up my pencils,” Win replies.
“CO poisoning.”
“Yes.”
“That’s awful.” It sounds so empty when Lamont says it.
“I felt it was my fault,” he tells her. “Maybe the same way you feel about what happened to you, that it’s somehow your fault. Victims of rape often feel that. And you know that. You’ve seen it enough in your office, in court.”