DEPUTY SPENCER ARROWOOD was spending another late night working at his desk when the call came in. The hamburger, seeping grease through its waxed-paper covering and onto the paperwork beneath it, was supposed to be his dinner, but it had long since congealed into a sodden lump, and he could not bring himself to touch it, even to throw it away.
When the phone rang, he was so groggy from lack of sleep that he picked it up to reinstate the silence rather than to talk to anyone.
“Uh-Wake County Sheriff’s Department.”
“Mr. Miller?”
“No. This is his deputy.”
“Oh. Spencer. It’s Harmon here, out to the truck stop and all. How you been?”
“Fine, Harmon. What can I do for you?” They had been in high school together, nodding acquaintances now, not much more than that then.
“Well, Spencer, the radio station was talking about those murders out on the trail. Terrible thing. I hated to hear that-a pretty young girl and all. And, you know, they said that you wanted people to report anything suspicious.”
“Yes?”
“There’s been a kid down here at the truck stop. Probably nothing, but I thought I’d better call you.”
“A child? How old?”
“Not a child. Akid. Well, seventeen or so. Not somebody you’d sell a beer to without having a mighty long look at his driver’s license.”
Spencer tried to keep the impatience out of his voice. He didn’t have time for liquor-law violations. “So what about him?”
“He’s been going around trying to sell jewelry to one or two of the truck drivers in here.”
“What kind of jewelry?”
“A gold chain, a woman’s watch with a band of gold and silver intertwined, and a ring.”
“Wedding ring?”
“Looked like a high school class ring to me. Big silver-colored one with a blue stone, and some carving on the side. I didn’t get much of a look at it. He shoved it in his pocket when he saw me coming down to that end of the counter.”
It was probably nothing, Spencer thought. At best, it would turn out to be evidence of an unreported burglary. Some vacationing couple would call soon to report their hotel room robbed, or their home burgled. Still, he had to check it out. There weren’t any other leads to follow.
“Is he still there?”
“Yeah, he’s playing pool with a couple of the truckers. I think he’s betting on the game. He’s putting up the jewelry, and the truckers are betting cash. You’d better get here before he loses it all, and your evidence rolls out of here six ways from Sunday.”
“Keep an eye on him. I’m on my way.”
Sometimes you get lucky, Nelse Miller had said. In the small hours of the morning, Nelse had been apt to find philosophy at the bottom of a shot glass, or in the glow of his last cigarette. He maintained that for every case that stays unsolved by chance-no one happened to see anything, no one happened to find the weapon-there is another case that is solved by the same random luck. “This time the coin came up your way,” he’d said when he got back to find the suspect already in custody and the evidence tagged for trial.
Now Spencer wondered whose luck it had been-his windfall or Fate Harkryder’s misfortune? He found the kid at the truck stop, still shooting pool with a couple of truckers. Harmon pointed him out. Spencer recognized the scraggly youth with the peach-fuzz mustache as one of the Harkryders, and he’d asked to see the jewelry the kid had been trying to sell. The kid had made a move, as if to put his hand into the pocket of his jacket, but instead he had shoved the player with the cue stick against Spencer Arrowood and made a run for the door. He’d been about three truckers short of a getaway, and instead of making it to his car, he found himself facedown on the sticky floor of the truck stop, while the deputy cuffed his hands behind his back.
“It’s your move,” Alton Banner told his patient, tapping the chessboard with a black pawn.
Spencer blinked and the carved wooden pieces came back into focus, but he had forgotten now what maneuver he had been setting up. “Did we miss anything?” he asked his opponent.
The old doctor shrugged. “Are you referring to my designs on your king’s bishop, or are you over there wool-gathering again?”
“I was thinking about the night of the Trail Murders,” said Spencer. “When you and I were at the crime scene. Is there anything we overlooked? Anything you’d do differently now-with more experience, I mean.”
“Speak for yourself, boy. I was fifty-one back in those days, and I can’t say that experience has improved me much since then. As for technology, maybe there’s something we could have gained if we’d had Luminol and DNA testing, and all the rest of the new tools, but there’s no use worrying about that now. The evidence has long since degraded. It went into the trash the decade before last. What good will it do to dwell on that now?”
“I want to be sure. I’ve never had anybody executed before-and it’s on my say-so. The evidence was circumstantial.”
“Circumstantial. Would you listen to yourself? Most of the people in prison are there on circumstantial evidence, aren’t they? Even felons are smart enough not to commit the crime in front of a bunch of eyewitnesses. Excepting John Wilkes Booth, that is.”
Spencer smiled. “I know that. And most killers are not inclined to think that confession is good for the soul, either. We had a solid case. He had Emily Stanton’s jewelry in his possession and was attempting to sell it, which gave us a motive of robbery. His blood-type A-negative-was found at the crime scene. He had no alibi.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself? Because if you’re saying all this for my benefit, let me say now that I never had one moment’s doubt from that day until this that you had the killer. He had A-negative blood, Spencer. That’s rare enough so that if you walk into a blood bank and offer to give them some, they start dancing for joy and offering you refills on the orange juice.”
“I just wondered if there’s anything I’ve forgotten about that case.”
“My memory is long. I can still see those two young people crumpled on the ground in that clearing, looking as if they’d been caught in a threshing machine. No, I never will forget that. So don’t ask me to spare too much time helping you agonize over Fate Harkryder’s execution, because the night we found the bodies of his victims, I could have shot him myself without a flicker of hesitation. I swear I could’ve.”
Spencer pushed a rook forward. “My summons to the execution said that as sheriff of the prisoner’s home county, I could appoint another witness besides myself to attend as well. Would you like to go?”
Alton Banner sighed. “I would not,” he said. “I have spent a lifetime trying to keep people from dying, and I have no intention this late in the game of watching it happen on purpose. You go, if you feel it’s your duty, but my responsibilities in this case were all discharged twenty years ago. I’m done with it.”
The sheriff nodded. “I’ll tell them I relinquish my second witness, then. The forest ranger, Willis Blaine, is dead. I asked Martha to check on that a couple of days ago. Aside from him, I can’t think of anyone else who ought to be there.”
A few moments passed in silence while Spencer stared at the chessboard, but Alton Banner knew that chess wasn’t on his mind. “What about your other pet case?” he said loudly, hoping to distract him. “Was the evidence against Frankie Silver circumstantial?”
Spencer had finished reading all the material Martha had brought him about the 1830s murder case. So far he saw no reason to question the decision of his nineteenth-century counterpart. Given the circumstances, he could see no choice but to arrest Frankie Silver for murder. “She lied,” he said. “When Charlie Silver disappeared, Frankie went to her in-laws and said that he hadn’t come back to the cabin.”