“Did you see her?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure. She’s pretty. I would have noticed.”
“I bet you would have. I bet you did. She was also murdered last weekend.”
John’s face lost all its color.
“Now wait a minute…”
“John, we know you went to bars at Oxford. She was a nursing student at Miami. What if I have a witness who said you were on the trail with her and then started stalking her?”
“That’s crazy! I never…”
Henderson said, “Let’s go through this again.”
Dodds turned down the speaker and said, “What do you think?”
“We don’t have enough to hold him once his mother gets here with a lawyer,” the prosecutor said.
Will shook his head, looked back at Cheryl Beth for some reassurance. She telegraphed it. He said, “I don’t know what the hell to think, J.C. He’s lied and lied. But he’s not bald.”
“You can buy a bald cap from the Internet. It’d be a good disguise, because that’s the first thing any witness would remember.”
Will said, “You don’t really think…”
“No,” Dodds said. “He’s tall but looks out of shape. I don’t see him overpowering Noah Smith. He doesn’t have a knife.”
Now the hole in Will’s stomach was big enough to drop a baseball through.
“But,” Dodds continued, “It’s all what a jury believes.”
He turned the speaker back up.
“So she liked it rough,” Henderson was saying. “Liked to be tied up.”
“Not by me,” John said. “I didn’t like that. It scared me.”
“You never tied her up?”
“I wouldn’t. She wanted me to. She wanted me to call her names and slap her, force myself on her. She said it helped her get off.”
Henderson shook her head and pushed back the chair. “Now you’re lying to me again, John. Why would any woman enjoy that?”
He tried to answer but couldn’t form the words through his sobs.
When he was able to speak, they could barely hear him. “I tried to understand why she was that way. Finally, she told me she’d been raped when she was twenty-five. She’d been on duty when it happened. I don’t know if that had anything to do with how she was, but that was all she’d tell me.”
A tap came at their door and a uniformed officer stuck his head inside.
“His mother and lawyer are here, raising hell.”
Chapter Thirty-three
They made it out to the parking lot and into the car before Will’s phone rang. Cheryl Beth could only hear his side of the conversation.
“Yes, chief…I told Detective Dodds this morning and Covington brought him down for interrogation…No, sir, he lives with his mother, my ex-wife…No, sir…” She watched his face lose its color. “I haven’t read it yet…I don’t know how they could have put together the information about Noah Smith…”
She felt her body tense at the mention of Noah’s name.
Will kept talking, “So the Oxford cops said nothing?” The voice on the other end talked a long time. Will silently gripped his leg. “Sir, with all due respect to Lieutenant Fassbinder, he’s misremembering. I urged him to go public with the connection between Oxford and Gruber. I think it might help bring forward some new witnesses, throw the suspect off balance. Lieutenant Fassbinder declined my advice…Yes, sir…I’d really like to be there. If for no other reason because I think the suspect still might try to make contact with me…”
The police jargon both amused and horrified her. “Contact me.” Sure as hell.
“I don’t believe John is the suspect, sir,” Will said. “He’s stupid and was in the wrong time and wrong place. Based on that, he might end up like Noah Smith, who was a suspect once himself…”
Cheryl Beth hadn’t even considered that. She watched Covington cops coming and going.
Will gave a final “yes, sir” and put the phone down, a defeated look on his face.
“The Dayton Daily News had a story this morning saying the suspect in the Miami killings had committed suicide in Cincinnati last week. The chief wants to know how they put that together. How the hell do I know? We never released Noah’s name. The newspaper didn’t even call me for a comment. Hank Brooks was helpful, giving a ‘no comment,’ which makes a good reporter think something’s being hidden. Goddamn it to hell…”
She put a hand on his arm. He slumped into the seat.
“Now I have to explain this disaster with John. And Fassbinder told the chief that I was the one who said we shouldn’t go public with the connection between Gruber and your students. Damn him. If you don’t mind, would you pull the knife out of my back?”
She smiled. He didn’t.
“They’re going to give a media briefing this afternoon and bring in the Oxford murders and their connection to Gruber. I’m not to be there. The chief wants me to take a leave.”
He suddenly slammed his fist on the steering wheel.
“I’m useless! I’m done! All they see is this fucking cane and they judge me. They keep it to themselves in their nice Cincinnati way, but they judge me and stab me in the back. I’ve cleared more homicide cases than anyone in the unit except for Dodds, but does that mean anything? No. I didn’t even want this case, but the chief assigned me. Now I’m a liability. I’m a cripple who can’t cut it anymore…”
“Stop that!” The words were out of her mouth before she realized it, and all the tension and anger that she had held inside blew out like a high-pressure oil well. “You are not useless, or done, or a liability! The only one who sees that cane is you. The only one who doesn’t see a tall, handsome, impressive man is you. Do you know how lucky you are, Will Borders? Do you remember all those people in neuro-rehab, the quads who couldn’t move the arms and legs? I see people every day who are sick and dying. You’re alive and strong! You got a second chance that so many people never get!”
She was fighting tears now. She tended to cry when she got mad. But her anger quickly dissipated.
In the silence, he took her hand and held it to his face. She could feel his tears, too. His kissed her palm, whispered, “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
The car’s layout, with radios and a computer between the seats, made it difficult, but she scrunched over and gave him a long hug. She didn’t care who was watching.
“No displays of affection in an official police vehicle!”
It was Dodds, standing by Will’s door.
“Check this out.” He handed an official-looking piece of paper to Will. The upper part showed a mug shot of a hard face staring at the camera and above it no hair.
“Charles Wayne Whitaker,” Will said. “Registered sex offender. Convicted of raping a woman in Columbus ten years ago.”
“Yep,” Dodds said. “It gets better. Remember Kristen’s fan mail? We took it back from Covington. They didn’t have the manpower. So I had police recruits go through two-hundred letters yesterday. Mister Whitaker wrote to Kristen, telling her all the things he’s like to do to her.”
“No shit? Does Henderson know?”
“I’m going to tell her. Why do all your white psychos have Wayne as a middle name?”
“Yours have De-Wayne,” Will shot back, but she could see his body relax.
Dodds put a hand on Will’s shoulder. “We’re going to get him. All this is going to work out.”
“Chief wants me to take a leave.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
“Yes, sir, Chief Dodds.”
They rode back through Covington’s old streets in silence. From the bridge, she could see the river filled with pleasure craft, as if Kristen Gruber’s murder had never happened.
“Turn here,” she said quietly once they reached the other side.
She gave a couple more directions and he knew where she wanted to go. In five minutes, they slipped out of downtown, around Mount Adams, and into Eden Park. It was the grandest of Cincinnati’s hilltop parks, with its abundance of trees, grass, gardens, and a view into the distant blue-green hills that instantly relaxed her. The flowers were in full bloom, in more colors than she could count or name. He illegally parked where they could look across the shallow reflecting pond of Mirror Lake at the gazebo. Its jet-stream fountain shot six stories in the air. For a long time, they sat and took in the views, the sweet spring air, and the people walking and sitting in a happy normality, where babies didn’t die, men weren’t struck down in their prime, and killers didn’t roam the darkness.