Keith slowly reached into his coat pocket and removed a folded sheet of paper. He unfolded it and slid it across the table. “Recognize this girl?” he asked. It was a copy of a black-and-white photo printed from the Web site, a photo of Nicole Yarber, posing in her cheerleader outfit, holding a pom-pom, smiling with all the innocence of a sweet seventeen-year-old.
At first, Boyette did not react. He looked at Nikki as if he’d never seen her before. He stared at her for a long time, then the tears came without warning. No gasps, no sobs, no apologies, just a flood of moisture that ran down his cheeks and dripped off his chin. He made no effort to wipe his face. He looked at Keith, and the two men stared at each other as the tears continued. The photo was getting wet.
Boyette grunted, cleared his throat, and said, “I really want to die.”
———
Keith came back from the kitchen with two cups of black coffee in paper cups, along with some paper towels. Boyette took one, wiped his face and chin, and said, “Thanks.”
Keith resumed his seat and said, “What happened to Nikki?”
Boyette seemed to count to ten before saying, “I’ve still got her.”
Keith thought he was prepared for every possible answer, but in fact he was not. Could she be alive? No. He’d spent the past six years in prison. How could he keep her locked up somewhere? He’s crazy.
“Where is she?” Keith asked firmly.
“Buried.”
“Where?”
“Missouri.”
“Look, Travis, these one-word answers will keep us here forever. You came to my office this morning for one reason, and that was to finally confess. But you couldn’t muster the courage, so here I am. Let’s hear it.”
“Why do you care?”
“That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? An innocent man is about to be executed for something you did. Maybe there’s time to save him.”
“I doubt it.”
“Did you kill Nicole Yarber?”
“Is this confidential, Pastor?”
“Do you want it to be?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Why not confess, then make a full admission, then try to help Donté Drumm? That’s what you should do, Travis. Your days are numbered, according to what you said this morning.”
“Confidential or not?”
Keith took a breath, then made the mistake of taking a sip of coffee. Travis was right.
“If you want it to be confidential, Travis, then it is.”
A smile, a tic. He glanced around, though they had yet to be noticed by anyone else. He began to nod. “I did it, Pastor. I don’t know why. I never know why.”
“You grabbed her in the parking lot?”
The tumor expanded, the headaches hit like lightning. He grabbed his head again and weathered the storm. His jaws clenched in a determined effort to keep going. “I grabbed her, took her away. I had a gun, she didn’t fight much. We left town. I kept her a few days. We had sex. We—”
“You didn’t have sex. You raped her.”
“Yes, over and over. Then I did it, and buried her.”
“You killed her?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“Strangled her with her belt. It’s still there, around her neck.”
“And you buried her?”
“Yes.” Boyette looked at the photo, and Keith could almost see a smile.
“Where?”
“South of Joplin, where I grew up. Lots of hills, valleys, hollows, logging trails, dead-end roads. She’ll never be found. They never got close.”
A long pause as the sickening reality settled in. Of course, there was a chance he was lying, but Keith could not force himself to believe that. What could he possibly gain by lying, especially at this stage in his miserable life?
The kitchen lights went out and the radio was turned off. Three burly black men made their exit and walked through the mess hall. They nodded and spoke politely to Keith, but only glanced at Travis. They closed the door behind themselves.
Keith took the copy of the photo and turned it over. He uncapped his pen and wrote something on it. “How about a little background, Travis?” he said.
“Sure. I have nothing else to do.”
“What were you doing in Slone, Texas?”
“Working for a company called R. S. McGuire and Sons, out of Fort Smith. Construction. They had a contract to build a warehouse for Monsanto, just west of Slone. I hired on as a laborer, just a grunt, crappy work, but it’s all I could find. They paid me less than minimum wage, in cash, off the books, same as the Mexicans. Sixty hours a week, flat rate, no insurance, no skill, no nothing. It won’t be worth your time to check with the company, because I was never officially employed. I was renting a room in an old motel west of town, called the Rebel Motor Inn. It’s probably still there. Check it out. Forty bucks a week. The job lasted five or six months. One Friday night I saw the lights, found the field behind the high school, bought a ticket, and sat with the crowd. Didn’t know a soul. They were watching football. Me, I was watching the cheerleaders. Always loved the cheerleaders. Cute little butts, short skirts, dark tights on underneath. They bounce and flip and throw each other around and you see so much of them. They want you to see. That’s when I fell in love with Nicole. She was there for me, showing it all. I knew from the first moment that she was the one.”
“The next one.”
“Right, the next one. Every other Friday, I’d go to the games. I never sat in the same place twice, never wore the same clothes. Used different caps. You learn these things when you’re tracking someone. She became my whole world, and I could feel the urges getting stronger and stronger. I knew what was about to happen, but I couldn’t stop it. I can never stop it. Never.” He took a sip of coffee and grimaced.
“Did you see Donté Drumm play?” Keith asked.
“Maybe, I don’t remember. I never watched the games, didn’t notice anything but Nicole. Then, suddenly, no more Nicole. The season was over. I got desperate. She drove this hot little red BMW, the only one in town, so she was not too hard to find, if you knew where to look. She liked the usual hangouts. I saw her car parked at the mall that night, figured she was at the movies. I waited and waited. I’m very patient when I have to be. When the parking space next to her car became vacant, I backed into it.”
“What were you driving?”
“An old Chevrolet pickup, stole it in Arkansas. Stole the tags in Texas. I backed into the parking space so my door was next to hers. When she walked into the trap, I jumped her. I had a gun and a roll of duct tape, and that’s all I ever needed. Not a sound.”
He rattled off the details with an unaffected detachment, as if describing a scene from a movie. This is what happened. This is how I did it. Don’t expect me to make sense of it.
The tears were long gone. “It was a bad weekend for Nikki. I almost felt sorry for her.”
“I don’t really want those details,” Keith said, interrupting. “How long did you stay in Slone after you killed her?”
“A few weeks, I guess. Through Christmas, into January. I was reading the local paper, watching the late-night news. The town was in a frenzy over the girl. Saw her mom cry on television. Real sad. Every day there was another search party, with a television news crew chasing after it. Fools. Nikki was two hundred miles away, sleeping with the angels.” He actually chuckled at the memory.
“Surely, you don’t think this is funny.”
“Sorry, Pastor.”
“How did you hear about the arrest of Donté Drumm?”
“There was a little greasy spoon near the motel, and I liked to go there for coffee early in the morning. I heard ’em talking, said a football player had confessed, a black boy. I bought a newspaper, sat in my truck, read the story, and thought, What a bunch of idiots! I was stunned. Couldn’t believe it. There was a mug shot of Drumm, nice-looking kid, and I remember staring at his face and thinking that he must’ve had a screw loose. Why else would he confess to my crime? Kinda pissed me off. The boy had to be crazy. Then the next day his lawyer came out strong in the paper, yelling about how the confession was bogus, how the cops tricked the kid, overwhelmed him, broke him down, wouldn’t let him out of the room for fifteen hours. That made sense to me. I’ve never met a cop I could trust. The town almost blew up. The whites wanted to string him up on Main Street. The blacks felt pretty strongly the boy was getting railroaded. Things were tense. Lots of fights at the high school. Then I got fired and moved on.”