She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Dr. Rouse called me,” she said.
“Were you surprised? Since you two had a run-in just a week before?”
She looked at Burns, who nodded. “Yeah. I was. Surprised.”
“What was the subject of his phone call?”
“Pardon?”
“What did Dr. Rouse want to talk about?”
She looked at Burns. Christ, this was going to take forever if she had to get his okay for every word out of her mouth. “Mr. Burns, you’re pretty quick on the up-take,” Russ said. “Maybe you could tell your client that you’ll interrupt if there’s anything you don’t think she should answer. Otherwise, I’m afraid we’ll be here for a very long time.”
Burns nodded to Debba. “It’s okay. Rest assured, I’ll jump in if he goes over the line.”
Sentence by sentence, Russ led her through the events of that evening. Her language was stilted, the way some people got when they knew they were being recorded, but her account was substantially the same as the one she had given him that Friday in Clare’s living room. She had agreed to meet him because he had kept insisting he was going to show her the truth about vaccines, and she thought anything he said to justify himself might be ammunition in her custody fight. No, she didn’t think her lawyer for the custody dispute would approve. No, she didn’t know where the directions he gave her would lead to. No, she didn’t see him until she arrived at the spot along the county road. Yes, they were each alone. Dr. Rouse had led the way through the trail to the tiny cemetery. He had a flash-light. She didn’t. No, she hadn’t been afraid of him. “I’m at least as big as he is,” she said. “I figured if he got weird on me, I could take care of myself.”
“Were you contemplating having to use force to defend yourself?” Burns asked before Russ could get his next question in.
“No,” Debba said. “I believe in nonviolent resolutions. Discussion, not disruption.”
Russ thought he remembered seeing the same sentiment on a bumper sticker on her car. It hadn’t impressed him then, either. “How does that jibe with your breaking into Dr. Rouse’s clinic and trashing one of his examining rooms two weeks ago?”
Burns’s arm shot in front of Debba like a parent holding a kid back at a stop-light. “That’s irrelevant to Dr. Rouse’s whereabouts,” he said. “You don’t need to address that, Debba.”
Russ waited a beat, and when it became apparent she was going to follow counsel’s advice, he went on. “What did Dr. Rouse say to you when you reached the graves?”
She looked at Burns. He nodded. “It’s hard to remember,” she said. “It was cold and dark, and I was thinking that I had made a major mistake, because obviously, he wasn’t going to tell me anything about the vaccines he had been using on the children of Millers Kill.” She caught a strand of her long, curly hair and wrapped it around one finger. “He told me to look at the dates on the headstones. He wanted me to understand how deadly and contagious some of the epidemic diseases were. Please. Like I hadn’t already spent two years reading up on them.”
Burns laid his hand on her arm. “Just stick to the question.”
“Oh. Okay. He had this idea that the epidemic wasn’t just the disease, but the effects of the disease. He said the parents of those four children died when their kids did.”
“What?” Those kids died in 1924, and he knew that whatever had happened to Jonathon Ketchem, he had been alive and kicking until 1930.
“I think he was speaking metaphorically. You know, they died inside. For a supposed scientist, he used a lot of metaphors. He was going on about links in the chain, about how each death sent ripples across the water, until more and more lives were swamped.” Russ must have been giving something away in his expression, because she nodded to him, her long corkscrew hair bouncing up and down. “Yeah, I didn’t know what to make of it, either. You can see what I meant when I said it was hard to tell what he was talking about.” She pushed some of her hair away from her face. “Then he said that if anything happened to my children, I would never forgive myself. Now, up to that point, I was feeling a little sorry for him, because I could tell he meant well, and he seemed to be in total denial about the role his vaccinations have played in screwing up kids’ health. But when he said that, I got mad.”
Geoff Burns was on her statement before she had time to draw breath. “When you say you got mad, Debba, do you mean you attacked the doctor?”
“Of course not.”
“You shouted at him? Threatened him in some way?”
“No. I got mad. I told him I thought between the two of us, he was the one who needed help, not me. Then I told him he should either give me the flashlight or escort me back to the road, because I was going home.”
“What did he do then, Deborah?” Russ leaned forward slightly. This would be the meat of it.
“I turned to go, and I took a few steps, and he must have tried to follow me, because I heard him kind of yell-you know, that noise people make when they’re falling on ice?”
He nodded. Oh yeah, he knew that noise.
“When I turned back toward him, he was laid out in front of one of the stones. I grabbed his flashlight and I could see that he had whacked himself pretty hard, he was bleeding and all.” She glanced over at Burns, as if to check if she could use the word blood.
“What did you do?”
“I helped him up the trail, back to where we had parked the cars. I took a better look at his gash, and I offered to drive him into town, but he turned me down.” She spread her hands in appeal. “How was I to know? He was the doctor, not me. Besides, if you’re a parent, you see plenty of head cuts over the years. They always bleed like crazy, but they don’t amount to anything.”
“So what happened next?”
“I watched him get into his car and turn it on. It was running, I saw the exhaust. Then I took off. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“Where did you drive to, once you left?”
“I needed gas, so I drove over to the Quik-Fill that’s by the Kmart. I was seriously shaken up by the weird stuff that had happened. I didn’t want to go straight home. So I went to Clare’s house.”
“Why Reverend Fergusson?”
Debba tilted her head, twisting another strand of hair around her finger. “She had told me, when we… during that thing at the clinic”-she glanced over at Burns, checking to see if she was on dangerous ground-“that I should come talk to her anytime. I thought… I had a lot of stuff in my head, and I thought she could help me sort it out and make sense of things.”
Russ nodded. “When you say that’s the last you saw of Dr. Rouse, do you mean alive? Have you seen his body at any time after you left him Friday?”
“Ugh. No.”
“Have you seen him alive any time after you left him Friday?”
“I told you, no.”
Burns tapped the table. “Don’t badger my client, Chief Van Alstyne.”
Russ ignored him. “You say after you reached the trailhead, you took a closer look at Dr. Rouse’s injury. How did you do that? With his flashlight?”
“Yeah. He sat in my car and I turned on the lights and took a look. He had a handkerchief, a real cloth one, and he kept it pressed against his cut.”
Crap. “How long was he in your car?”
“A few minutes, maybe. He seemed really exhausted. That’s when I tried to get him to let me take him home, or to the hospital or something.”
This was not what he wanted to hear. Rouse taking a breather in the car was totally plausible. There wasn’t any other sign of him in the car-no indication that she had stuffed him in the trunk or laid him out in the backseat. If Lyle and Kevin didn’t find anything in her house, there was no way they were going to connect Clow with Rouse’s disappearance. The DA wouldn’t even bother with their paperwork-it would go straight into the circular file. “What time was it when you left Dr. Rouse?” he asked.