“ What did you see?”
Otto broke in. “He says he saw the van, that the guy drove a van, and that she got in voluntarily. Got no plate numbers, but claims it might have been Illinois plates. Van was gray or beige-”
“ Hard to tell colors at night. I'm color-blind.”
“- and had some lettering on the side.”
“ Not bold lettering, just small, and I don't read good from a distance, so… but this guy… he's the one killed her.”
Jessica spoke to Otto. “How many suspects have Stowell and Chief Wright placed in custody?”
“ Six, working on more, all perverts.”
“ Hey, I'm no fuckin' pervert!” shouted Scarborough.
“ Shut up! And watch your mouth around Dr. Coran.”
“ Just tellin' the truth.”
“ Just tell her about your daddy's pig farm.”
“ Swine farm,” he corrected Otto. He looked again at Jessica, saying, “I grew up on a farm, ma'am… ahhhh, Doctor.”
Below the grunge, she saw the farm boy in him clearly now. Perhaps some of the scars came from working around farm machinery, or at the hand of a dictatorial, Bible-thumping father with a nasty technique for disciplining an unruly child.
“ Go on,” she coaxed.
“ Well, we slaughtered a lot of swine. My daddy'd be covered in blood by day's end… and so would I. My daddy would first cut the heel tendons when he'd get the pig ready-first thing-so's it couldn't get off. You know how a pig'11 run at the least thing. I swear, the pig knows when you're standing there with a butcher's knife behind your back. Anyway… second thing my daddy'd do would tie the thing up by its hind quarters… and… and-”
He stopped, looked at Boutine, who nodded for him to go on. “And drain out all the blood into a big caldron of boiling water. He'd drop the swine into the caldron to boil off the fine hair then. Anyhow… well, the way they told me I was supposed to have killed Candy… Christ, it sounded like something my daddy would do. Scared hell out of me.”
She caught something of the fear deep in the dark eyes. “Your father, Thomas, he would threaten to do to you what he did to the pigs, if you didn't do what he told you to do… wouldn't he?”
His mouth fell open slowly. “I… I never told anyone what… that he… what that man did to me.”
“ See why he's such a likable suspect for Vaughn Wright and Stowell, Jessica?”
“ Fits… all too very neatly…”
“ They don't have anything on me. I wasn't anywhere near her when it happened!” shouted Scarborough. “Christ, I ain't no murderer!”
“ His alibi is a boyfriend he sleeps with,” said Otto.
Scarborough never again looked into Jessica's face, and he became belligerent and nasty again. “Lady like you, I could do a lot with, if you ever wanted to sell it.”
Otto grabbed him up in a rage and forced him back to the car. She stared after them, her insides tugged at by the horror that a parent could create of a child's psyche, yet convinced along with Otto that this young man was not their killer. Still, she'd order specimen samples from him along with all the other suspects rounded up by Stowell and Wright, to check against what they'd found at the scene. It all might be one dead end after another, but by the same token, no rock could be left unturned, and poor Scar definitely had crawled from beneath a pretty large rock.
With Scarborough put away in the car, Otto returned to her and said, “He told us about a knot his father used on the swine, too.”
“ A sailor's knot?”
“ Farmers use it a lot in this area, a sling knot. No way to break it so long as it is countering a… a dead weight.”
She stared at the blindingly bright blue Wisconsin sky and fought back the fatigue and pain and memory of Candy Copeland trussed up like a swine for the slaughter. It had been an image that had come to her during the evidence gathering, and this fact was not lost on her now. In the rustle of the leaves overhead, she heard the sharp twitter of birds and she glanced a jay chase another off.
“ I know this creep's as unreliable as hell, but you said something yourself the other night about how it looked, and what he said was so close to what you said… Well, I just thought you ought to hear it straight from the guy. Sorry if it's upset you.”
She only half heard Otto's apology. She was listening to the voice in her head which had belonged to her father, saying, “You might wish to remember, child: it doesn't matter from whom you learn, only that you do learn.''
She repeated the favorite aphorism to Otto now and this calmed him a good deal. “You sure got mettle, Doc.” Otto's compliment was, as usual, understated.
She laughed lightly. “Then why do I feel like my spine is made of Jell-O?”
“ You get everything you want inside?” He indicated the hospital.
She nodded. “Yeah, all prepared to leave as soon as the results and the reports catch up to us at the airport. And you?”
“ Some loose ends downtown, like this creep.” He indicated Scarborough, who sat brooding in the back of the car. “He needs psychiatric help, you know,” she told him. “He was victimized and brutalized by his father.”
Otto frowned and nodded. ' 'The stuff of which murderers are made, I know.”
“ In his case, he seems to have stopped at degrading women and using them. I think he's too weak to kill.”
“ Agreed. All right, I'll meet you at the airport. You need a ride back to the inn?”
“ I'll get a cab.”
“ Great, fine. And on the plane you can tell me all about the autopsy.”
She halted him. “Not much else to add, really.”
“ That right?”
She didn't wish to lie outright, but without lab proof, and that would take time, she didn't want to discuss what she'd found, and she was through making half-assed guesses, even for Otto. “Yeah, 'fraid so.”
“ See you at the airport, then.”
She waved him off. From the backseat, Scarborough waved back and winked, his grin like that of the devil, and this made her wonder how much stock she could really put in what he had said.
Well, she told herself, his DNA couldn't lie to her. She forgot about Scarborough, but she could not forget about the image of his father, covered in blood, threatening his son with mutilation and boiling in his own blood and oil.
With these thoughts swimming about her mind, she went back inside to call a cab. She was beginning to miss her apartment in Virginia, and its safe walls.
From far above it, looking through the portal of the Learjet, Wekosha, Wisconsin, looked at peace, like a quaint village nestled in the wood where nothing evil could touch. But Jessica Coran could imagine Scar in his cell still trying to convince everyone that he was innocent of any wrongdoing in the Candy Copeland affair. She imagined Sheriff Stowell, Vaughn and the other police officials desperately seeking a confession from one of the perverts dragged in under their net. She could see the child's block in the far distance that represented police headquarters, where police faced off against press and community leaders clamoring for complete disclosure. Not far away, she made out the squares and shapes of the university medical complex where she imagined Dr. Stadtler, too, was inundated by reporters trying to get the full story.
She was glad to be above it all, but she was hardly divorced from the case, her mind wandering back to the girl who called herself Candy and the awful nature of her death. The public outcry over the girl who was ignored her entire life was a little late in coming, she thought.
Still, there were other girls in the community to worry about, others who might fall prey to a terrifying predator in their midst. So the predator must be found and incarcerated or eliminated quickly. It was the predictable result of a mutilation murder; it sent a shock wave of horror through the system to discover that one so physically close had died in so brutal a scenario, with one's own community as backdrop. Now that Candy Copeland was dead, it seemed that she had gained the attention she so yearned for in life, that her murder had outraged people in the community, but that outrage failed to include an outrage against Wekosha, the outrage that Jessica felt.