She slid to the floor and leaned against the window wall. “But it was stupid. He was dead.”
“You didn’t kill him.” I forced an inflection that made the words not sound like the question that they were.
“No, I didn’t kill him. Trent did.”
“You’ve been protecting your stepfather?”
She looked at me hard. “No, no. I’m still protecting my stepfather. Don’t forget your promise.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Good.”
She gestured out the window. “They’re done out there. I want to go back and be with Chaney while she’s still awake.”
In a firm voice, I said, “I have some questions first. About what happened.”
She smiled at me coolly. “They can wait. There’s no hurry anymore. The man’s dead, he can’t help Chaney anymore.”
I tried to counter. “But what about Brad? He’s in serious jeopardy. Half the police in Colorado are after him.”
“Brad? Screw Brad. He doesn’t care about Chaney at all. Never did. Take me back out there.”
I thought about it for a long time. I was in a power struggle with a teenager who had an array of weapons I couldn’t match. In addition, she had two trump cards. One, of course, was her vow to return to silence. The other was a willingness to die for her cause.
I agreed to return Merritt to her sister’s bedside while I was trying to figure out some way to explain to the psychiatric unit staff what I was doing so that it resembled something like a treatment plan.
Thirty-one
I made my way out of the ICU to the elevator lobby to head upstairs to make a note in Merritt’s chart. As the elevator door opened, Sam Purdy stepped out, accompanied by his wife, Sherry.
It should have been an inconsequential visit, an aunt and uncle visiting a critically ill niece. Sadly, in tertiary care hospitals like this one, such visits happen all the time. But it wasn’t an inconsequential hospital visit and Sam, Sherry, and I all knew it.
I said hello to the Purdys and they replied in hushed hospital tones.
Sherry Purdy is a pleasant woman, cautious interpersonally, but not shy. Every time I had ever seen her, she had always been quick with a smile. And every time I had spoken with her on the phone looking for Sam, I’d always been grateful for the effervescence in her greeting. Not this time, though. Sherry appeared tired and worn and her eyes were heavy and dark. Her clothes seemed to hang on her.
Sam said, “Where is Chaney, Alan?”
“Intensive care unit. It’s halfway down this corridor on the right. Everyone is down there. Merritt, both of her parents.”
Sherry snapped, “He is not her father.”
What was that about? “Excuse me, Sherry, I misspoke. Both Merritt’s mother and her stepfather are there.”
Sam jumped in to douse whatever embers were threatening to flare. “Honey, you go ahead down to see her. You still want to do this alone, right?”
She managed a throaty “Yes,” but didn’t sound like she meant it.
“I’ll be down soon,” Sam said, planting a gentle kiss on her cheek.
She tried to force a smile onto her face before she turned and headed down the hall. I didn’t know her well enough to know whether her dread over her long march was generated more by her niece’s illness or was residue of her ancient feud with her sister.
I said, “Sherry’s lost weight, Sam.”
“She’s ripped up by this. Chaney. Merritt. Having Brenda in town. It’s been hard.” He looked down the hall at Sherry. “You said Lucy told you about the extortion attempt? The phone call?”
“Yes, she told me. Anything new on it?”
“No more calls. Let’s face it, if it was the two kids, they’ve had a little falling out since then. Brad’s a proven asshole, by the way. His last two girlfriends both say he hit them.”
I wasn’t surprised. “Brad may follow through on the extortion on his own.”
“If he’s stupid enough to do that, everybody’s ready for him this time.”
“Do they know what the videotape was? The one he beat Madison with?”
“They’re still piecing it together. So far, it looks like it was a badly recorded copy of Pretty Woman, taped straight off the network, commercials and everything. All the other videos in the RV were the commercial versions. You know, store bought. And no, I don’t know what that means.”
“Anything else?”
“No. You leaving the hospital?”
“Not yet. I have some paperwork to take care of upstairs in the psychiatric unit.”
“I’ll go with you. See if I can read something over your shoulder.”
I said, “Fine. You learn anything new about the threats that were being made?”
He puffed out one cheek and arched his eyebrows. I didn’t know what it meant. But he didn’t answer my question. I figured that he’d tell me when he had something and when he was ready. No sooner.
We had an elevator to ourselves on the way upstairs. I said, “This has to be hard for Sherry. The visit, I mean, coming here.”
“Yeah, sure is. It needed to happen, though-seeing her sister and the kids. Sherry’s been on the outside of this too long.” He paused a moment, enough to scratch under his nose. “Listen, your empathy’s real sweet and everything, but, uh, things you don’t know about are getting goofy. Nothing’s making much sense to me anymore about Merritt and…”
His voice faded as the electronic chime announced we had reached the third floor. No one entered.
Sam faced me again when the doors closed. “See, it turns out that Merritt was not only in Dead Ed’s house, she was also in Dead Ed’s RV.”
“What?”
The doors opened at the fourth floor and I followed him out. I yanked him into an unoccupied room that had two empty cribs in it and repeated, “What? She was in the damn RV? What the hell was she doing in the RV?”
“I don’t know. When we did the search of her bedroom in her house-you know, after you found the bloody clothes?-we found an earring in the trash can under her desk. Just one, a little silver cross. Didn’t make much of it. Till now. Because it turns out the other one was in Dead Ed’s RV.”
“What?”
He examined me critically. “Great questions you’re asking. You suffer some brain damage since I saw you last? I could use some thoughtfulness here.”
I realized that by my stupefied reaction to his news, I had just demonstrated clearly to him that my work with Merritt hadn’t covered the topic of any visits she might have made to Dead Ed’s Holiday Rambler. Sam hadn’t impinged on his niece’s confidentiality at all and he knew exactly what he had come to find out from me.
“Fingerprints?” I asked.
“Yep. Plenty. Not matched yet, but they’ll be hers. You know where they found it? The earring?”
“No, where?”
“It had fallen down between the mattress and the headboard in the bedroom. Damn Winnebago has an actual bedroom, can you believe it?”
“In the bedroom?”
Sam shook his head at me disdainfully. I sat down. I wanted to protest his news. I desperately wanted to tell him that Merritt had just told me she hadn’t done it. That she had just gone over to Dead Ed’s house to beg for her sister’s welfare. That Dead Ed was already Dead Ed when she got there. That it was John Trent who had been there first.
That it was John Trent who had killed Dr. Edward Robilio.
But when I calculated in all the facts that Merritt wasn’t telling me I also realized that my faith in what she was telling me was rapidly diminishing.
Sam recognized that I was in the midst of some kind of internal struggle. He said, “What? What aren’t you telling me, Alan? Has she started talking to you?”