Instead, I shifted a little so that I could talk without twisting my neck. I leaned a shoulder against the gentle vibration of the door and window. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions?” Sprague glanced quickly at me and shrugged. I smiled faintly. “No interruptions up here.”
“Feel free,” Sprague said.
“When your daughter died last year…” I saw the flicker of pain on the doctor’s face, just a brief tightening of the muscles and an extra blink or two. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.” He didn’t look at me, but continued his regular scanning of the sky ahead of us.
“It was after a party with some of her friends, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you know her friends very well?”
Sprague turned and looked at me steadily. “Obviously not. Had that been the case, she wouldn’t have been…” He hesitated, then said, “The incident wouldn’t have happened.”
“Was Jenny Barrie one of her close friends?”
Sprague was once more scanning the sky, this time looking out to the east, and for a moment it appeared that he hadn’t heard the question. I was sure he had, though, and let the silence hang.
“She and the Barrie girl became friends during their freshman year.” He said it to the window, then reached forward and wiped a speck of dust from the rim of one of the gauges. He seemed to settle a little. “That was a hard year.”
“In what way?”
“I didn’t like the direction I saw Darlene going.”
“And how was that?”
He waved a hand at the familiarity of it. “The usual. Minimal effort at things I thought important. The sort of daily dress that…I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole process. You watched four of your own grow up. First thing you know, there seems to be a gulf growing, and be damned if there’s anything to do about it. Pretty soon the gulf’s too big to cross.” He glanced at his watch. “Too damn big.”
“And the Barrie girl?”
“I tried to ignore her. That was a mistake, in retrospect.”
“There was never any decision about where the cocaine came from that killed Darlene.”
“No, there wasn’t. But you would know that better than I.”
“What do you think?”
Sprague eyed me skeptically. “You’re serious?”
“Of course.”
“For months, I agonized over that question, Sheriff. Agonized. Over that question, over my daughter’s death. You’re a parent. I’m sure you can empathize. In fact, if I read you right, you’re finding it hard to write off Art Hewitt as just another cop killed in line of duty. He’s not so far removed in age from your youngest, right? And he was even living under your roof.”
“Go on.”
Sprague shrugged. “My first thought was to blame Barrie and her circle of creepy friends. Hell, not my first thought. My only thought.” His lips compressed grimly. “It would seem that your department has found evidence supporting that notion.”
“The accident that killed Barrie and her friends, you mean.”
“Certainly.”
“So you think the cocaine found in that vehicle was hers?”
“Maybe, maybe not. But it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s how it turns out. The common denominator is Barrie. Or her friends.”
“Do you have any notions about which one? Or ones?”
“Detective Reyes asked me the same thing a day or two ago. Whenever it was. No, I don’t. In fact, of the five youngsters who died in that car crash, I knew only two fairly well. Jenny Barrie, obviously. Tommy Hardy was a patient of mine when he was very young.” Sprague blinked rapidly a couple times. “He was in leg braces for almost a year. A two-year-old in leg braces. He walked like a goddamned duck. It worked out all right, though. And now this. What a goddamned waste.” He looked over at me and shrugged. “I knew the Fernandez boy only tangentially. I knew Hank Montano only as a name and a kid in a long line of fall sport physicals. I did that for a few years, as you no doubt remember.”
“I remember. My youngest son came home one day after his and told me that you dipped your hands in buckets of ice water between each kid.”
Sprague laughed loudly. “They always think that, don’t they. God, that was years ago when he went through it.”
“Something like nine.”
“You know”-and he squirmed down a little in his seat, a touch more at ease-“I know I’m from a generation light-years removed, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how a run-of-the-mill high school kid gets ahold of a kilo of hard drugs. That puzzles me. No kid has that much money. Do they?”
“Evidently one of them did. Either that or they were set up.”
Sprague grimaced. “Set up? A teenager?”
“Or being used. It’s possible none of the five knew the coke was there. It’s conceivable that someone else was just using the car as a stash. That’s possible.”
“There aren’t many other choices. Either they were dealing, or someone was using their car innocent of their knowledge, or someone was framing them. I don’t see any other choice.”
“I don’t either.”
“And so what do you plan to do?”
I shrugged. “Detective Reyes has been digging during my absence. I’ll see what she’s come up with. We’ve got a couple leads, and we’ll thrash those out.” Sprague didn’t ask what those leads were, and that was a good thing. I didn’t know, myself.
“Will you be returning for the funeral? Officer Hewitt’s?”
“Yes.”
“His parents are from Tucson, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Is that where the funeral is? Tucson?”
“The family affair is. I won’t make that one. Just the one in Gallup.”
“And when is that?”
“Thursday at two.”
“Another flight upstate, eh?”
“No. Holman and I will drive. The car will be in the procession. For some reason, cops seem to believe that it’s a comfort for the grieving family to see the brotherhood assembled.”
“Is it?”
I held up my hands. “Who knows. I can’t imagine that anything is a comfort, except passage of time. Maybe the fanfare makes for a less painful memory, I suppose. Beats standing in the rain by yourself. We all need things like that sometimes.”
Dr. Sprague toyed with a couple of things on the dash. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it.”
“About?”
“At what point folks will stop accepting that it’s a part of life to see their young buried.”
“I’m not sure any of us accept that as a necessity, Doctor. We’d all pay a fancy price to avoid it.”
Sprague looked at me for a long minute. Even without his attention, the Cessna drove a straight rail through the sky. “I don’t think so, Sheriff. I don’t see much evidence of willingness to do that.”
“Wouldn’t you do about anything if it were possible to have your daughter back?”
“That’s what I mean,” Sprague said so softly I almost couldn’t hear him over the engine beat. “In retrospect, it’s so simple. But before it happens? Did I do enough? Did any of us? We all know fast cars can kill, and we know they especially kill the young. And yet we allowed five youngsters to pack themselves in that vehicle…with alcohol included. We don’t require much training for a driver’s license. We allow parties. And all the time, what do we do? We gamble, Sheriff. We gamble that the ones who are killed-and we know they will be, every year-we gamble that they aren’t our own.” When I didn’t respond immediately, Sprague added, “You see? It costs, doesn’t it? Let me give you one simple example. You’re a law officer, and should appreciate the simplicity of this. Suppose that if you were caught driving while intoxicated, no matter what your age, you lost your driving privileges for life.” I raised a skeptical eyebrow. Sprague smiled. “You see? We are not willing to pay the price yet, are we? The convenience of driving is more important to us…more important…than a stiff penalty to clear the roads of drunks.”