“A good-looking girl,” Walt said.
“Asked me to take care of the dogs for her one time her mother got real sick and she couldn’t stick around. I said sure. And she gave me a key.”
Again he paused. Again, it seemed as if he wasn’t going to continue.
“A key to Coats’s place.”
“Correct,” Crabtree said.
“And you helped her out by feeding the dogs. Does this connect with Kira, Taylor? I’m a little short on time.”
“I put a pair of webcams in there.” His head was hung in shame.
Walt’s heart raced in his chest. He looked around for a glass of water. There wasn’t one.
“Inside the house.”
“His cabin, yeah.”
Walt’s jaw dropped. He sucked up his surprise, cleared his throat, and tried to sound as normal as possible. But, inside, he was both churning over the invasion of privacy and jumping at the thought that Taylor Crabtree might have witnessed the assault. Depending on if he ever found Mark Aker, depending on his condition, proving the abduction could be difficult. But a witness to a sexual assault, a rape, tried and convicted in Blaine County, could put Coats away for most of his adult life. It would be a poor trade-off but one that Walt would be happy to have in his back pocket.
“ Taylor, I understand that your concern here is prosecution over the existence of the webcams. It’s a legitimate concern, given your being expelled from the Alternative School for the same offense. If we charged you, a judge wouldn’t like that at all. But I can guarantee you-guarantee, Taylor -that that will not be the case here. If you witnessed what I think you witnessed, those charges will never be filed. Not only that but others will be lessened or eliminated. But most of all, I need you to be honest. Do you get that? Absolutely honest. The slightest embellishment will hurt everything.”
The boy nodded. “I have hours of DVDs,” he said.
“Of?”
“The girl. In the shower. Dressing. Undressing. In bed. She had a boyfriend who… you know. He came over a lot when she was there. And they… you know.”
“You recorded it,” Walt said, his voice shaking slightly. He couldn’t hold himself back. “The assault, Taylor? Crab? Did you record the assault?”
“I didn’t burn it, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m not exactly what you’d call a techie.”
“It’s on my hard drive. I’ve got like fifteen hours on my hard drive.”
Fifteen hours. “Including the assault.” Walt made it a statement.
Crabtree nodded, clearly ashamed. “How do you think I got in there to get her? You think I was going to take on those guys?” Walt noted the plural. “But they took a break. Jesus… the things they did to her. Poor Kira. But I got her out of there and into my car. And I was in such a fucking hurry, I planted my face into the car door as I opened it. I was carrying her. Bashed my face into the door.” He reached up and touched it. “It fucked me up bad. Was me who needed the emergency room. Drove like mad. Got her to the hospital. They never figured it out. That it was me helped her. Yesterday, when you came by, I wasn’t afraid of your cop car-”
“The pickup trucks.” Walt remembered them.
The kid nodded again. “I keep expecting a knock on the door and someone crushing my head in. Coats is fucking out of his mind. He’ll kill me, he figures out it was me. All I want is those cameras out of there. They’re still in there. Get it? He’s gonna find them at some point and then I’m, like, totally fucked.”
“I can probably help you there,” Walt said, his head spinning from the information. “The night of the assault, Coats had company?”
“Yeah.”
“A black Escalade? The guy’s in his late thirties. Pretty buffed out. Dresses well.”
The boy looked stunned. “How could you know that?”
“It’s my job, Taylor,” Walt said, and then mumbled to himself: “It’s my job.”
53
“WHY AM I BEING MADE TO WATCH THIS?” FIONA ASKED, standing alongside Walt in the sheriff’s office command center. The door was shut and locked, the television’s sound turned down low, so that Kira Tulivich’s agony remained contained within those walls.
“I’m sorry,” Walt said, “but you’re my photography expert.”
“They should be hung. No, castrated with a kitchen knife, then pulled, limb from limb, drawn and quartered. And even that would be too good for them.”
On the screen, Coats and an unidentified male took turns violating Kira Tulivich. The horror played out in the grainy black-and-white of Taylor Crabtree’s webcam, his computer having been confiscated from the RV he used as shelter.
“You may be able to spot a frame we could enlarge or something, to give us a better look at the second man.”
“It’s not that at all, is it?” she said accusingly. “What is it with you, Walt? Always having hidden agendas. Never admitting them. Why don’t you just come out and say you think it’s Sean Lunn?”
“Is that what you think?”
“Oh… give me a break.”
“Is it?”
“That’s what I think, yes. Does anything I see here confirm it, make me absolutely certain? No. But you won’t even speak his name.”
“I can’t,” Walt said, winning a surprised look from her.
“You need me as a witness?” she speculated.
“I need to identify the second man. Yes. That could prove extremely helpful.”
“So you don’t mention his name because, if you did, it could be construed later that you led the witness.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m sorry.” She ran her fingers through her hair and tilted her head back. She had an elegant neck, long and regal. “I confuse the professional with the personal, don’t I?”
“It’s easy to do.”
“So why don’t you?” she asked.
Tulivich was held in place by Coats. She let out a horrible scream. Fiona looked away. “Well, if anything will put you off sex, this will.”
“I want them both to pay for this, Fiona. Not just Coats. Coats…I’m going to take care of Coats.”
“Do you have him?”
“No.”
“Know where he is?”
“No. We do know the Bureau had a confrontation with a man believed to be a member of the Samakinn-an extremist group, part Ted Kaczynski, part Aryan Nation. A second suspect, a woman, is in custody. She’s a meth addict and is proving difficult to deal with. We have a description of a man that’s close enough to Coats to do the trick. It’s all very fluid.”
She dared to look at the screen again. “Jesus… I can’t take any more of this. That poor girl.”
Walt had not taken his eyes off the screen. “Yeah. How ’bout there?” he asked. He used the keyboard’s space bar to stop the video. Used the mouse to back up the footage. “Is that a mirror on the wall? Is that his face in the mirror?”
“It’s too grainy,” she said. “You’ll never get anything. This is incredibly low resolution, Walt. Really poor. Even with enhancement, you’re going to need a shot that’s very strong.”
They watched another thirty seconds, Fiona needing to look away repeatedly.
“Wait!” she said.
Walt paused the video.
Fiona leaned forward and pointed not at the man’s face, but the pants crumpled at his knees. “Look. The back belt loop. It’s ripped. Attached at the top but not the bottom.”
Walt craned forward. “How did you ever see that?”
“I was trying not to look at what was going on.”
He played a short segment repeatedly. Sure enough, the belt loop flapped loose. It was seen only briefly, but there it was on video.
Walt said, “It’s not enough to win a warrant. I can’t say because of that it’s Sean Lunn. I need to see Sean Lunn in those pants. That would give me probable cause for a wider search. It’s not much, even at that.”
“But you’re going to search the cabin, aren’t you?”