“Right,” said Thomas. “This will blow the jurors away. Jurors love this shit. This is nearly as good as CSI.”
I no longer begrudged Thomas his $3,000 a day. He had earned it just now, I figured, and then some. In fact, he’d earned every damn cent I had forked over to Burt DeVriess so far. “Will you tell all this to Evers and the DA, or wait and spring it at the trial?” I asked Burt.
“Actually, I’ll file a motion to dismiss as soon as I get Owen’s report,” he said. “We’ll get some good press. But the judge won’t dismiss the case. Too much other evidence. No judge in his right mind would dismiss a case against a guy whose bed is drenched in his dead lover’s blood.” He shook his head. “A shame those sheets didn’t just disappear.”
“I play by the rules,” I said. And then I thought of something else. “This guy knows that, too. He was counting on that. Counting on the fact that I’d call the cops when I found the sheets. Giving me the rope he knew I’d use to hang myself.”
“Then that tells us even more about him,” Burt said. “Maybe a name will pop into your head in the wee small hours. Maybe Evers will have another, friendlier chat with us. Maybe he’ll start asking and thinking about who else might have done this. Start casting his net a little wider.”
Burt clapped Thomas on the shoulder; Thomas flinched, either from the force of it or from the violation of his boundaries. “Okay, I think we’re done for now,” Burt said. “How soon can you send me that report?”
“I’ll write it on the plane and e-mail it to you to night. That soon enough?”
“Yeah, that’ll do; thanks. Chloe will be in touch once we have a trial date. I’m gonna go start drafting that motion.” As he left the conference room, Burt yanked up the blinds, flooding the room with light. It was that scrubbed version of sunlight that follows a hard spring storm. I took it as a good omen.
CHAPTER 39
AFTER I LEFT DEVRIESS’S office, I sat for several minutes in the cool darkness of the building’s parking garage, considering where to go next. I still had several hours to kill before my rendezvous with Art and our evening’s errand. Normally I would simply go to my office on campus, which was only a couple of miles away, or home, which was no more than five or six. But I’d been asked to stay away from the one, and I was anxious to avoid the reporters that I feared were at the other.
I’d brought my briefcase, stuffed with the journal articles that would help me update my textbook’s discussion of long bones. But where to work? The downtown library felt too public, too exposed; so did the restaurant across the valley from Burt’s office, Riverside Tavern. The last thing I wanted was to be gawked at, pointed at, intruded on, even in the unlikely event someone simply wanted to wish me well. In the end, I drove back to Tyson Park, where I spread my papers on a slightly sticky picnic table under a shelter, in case another storm blew through.
Not long after I settled in, a car drove through the park and stopped when it drew alongside the shelter. I glanced up just long enough to recognize the markings and light bar of a police car, then redoubled my focus on my papers. After idling beside the Taurus for an interminable ten minutes, the cruiser left. But it circled back at regular intervals over the next three hours. The vigil made me feel both vaguely guilty and unfairly persecuted. I wondered if this was what homeless people felt like-people whose days stretched out before them, with no comfortable, welcoming place to spend them. I had money in my pocket and a roof over my head, of course-two roofs, if I counted my house and the rented cabin at Norris-yet neither place felt like home.
I willed myself to concentrate on the bones of the human arm and leg. In the two de cades since I had written the first edition of my textbook, Americans’ average stature had increased by a fraction of an inch. Consequently, the femur and other long bones had also grown ever so slightly; as a result, a femur whose dimensions would have identified it as unequivocally male twenty or thirty years ago might now be that of a tall woman instead. The changes were slight, but not insignificant. I thought of the creationists, and what they might make of the trend. If we were created in God’s image, would Jennings Bryan and his followers take this to mean God was growing, too?
The reading and revisions took me until dark. When I could no longer see to read or write, I gathered up my papers and drove out of the park and along the Strip, the stretch of Cumberland Avenue whose restaurants and bars bordered one edge of the UT campus. I went back to the same deli I had visited at lunchtime; the turkey sandwich had been good, and the drive-through window afforded me some privacy. This time, feeling daring and in need of variety, I ordered a corned beef. Then-undercutting the boldness of the impetuous sandwich choice-I pulled into the farthest, darkest corner of the lot to eat. The sandwich was fine, but I was preoccupied. I wasn’t looking forward to what I was about to do. My only consolation was that Art was doing it with me. Halfway through the sandwich, I lost interest and put it back in the bag. Then, with more than a little trepidation, I drove to KPD headquarters, where Art stood waiting for me under the floodlit flagpole. He got in without speaking-clearly he wasn’t looking forward to this any more than I was-and I headed toward Broadway and Old North Knoxville.
I’d called Susan Scott earlier in the day to find out what time her son went to bed. “Joey’s bedtime is nine-thirty,” she had said. “We usually watch America’s Funniest Home Videos at eight-thirty, and I read a chapter out of Harry Potter to him. He’s nearly always asleep by nine forty-five.”
“I know it would be late,” I’d responded, “but could my friend Art and I come by at ten? I’m sorry to ask, but I think it’s important. And I’d like to come when you and your husband can both be home.”
She had hesitated, and I could almost hear her trying to decide whether to ask why. She didn’t ask, and I was grateful, as I hadn’t been able to come up with an explanation that sounded anything short of crazy or terrifying. “All right,” she had said. “Bobby’s working a lot of overtime, like I told you, but he’s usually home by eight or nine. I’ll turn on the porch light for you when Joey’s asleep.”
It was nine-thirty when Art and I pulled up to the curb across the street from the Scotts’ house. The honey-colored lamplight shone from every window on the front of the house. It made the old Victorian look like something out of a Currier amp; Ives print-Home Sweet Home or Cozy Sanctuary or something equally sentimental; not the sort of place you’d ever imagine hearts had been shattered and young psyches scarred. We sat in silence. I was grappling with myself, wondering whether this was really necessary; I was pretty sure Art was, too. After a few minutes, the light in one of the second-floor windows winked out, and soon after, the front-porch bulb snapped on. Just enough of its light carried into the dimness of the car to illuminate Art’s face a bit. It looked sad and drawn. “We could just drive away,” I said. “Leave it alone.”
He was silent for a long time. “We could,” he said. “Don’t think I wouldn’t love to. But if we look the other way this time, what happens next time? And the next? Once you cross a line, it gets easier the next time, and the next and the next. And pretty soon you don’t even remember where the line was. You and I have spent a lot of years playing by the rules. We believe in ’em, even though they don’t always seem fair. You know that. That’s why you called Evers instead of burning those sheets, or tying them around a cinder block and chucking ’em in the river.”