She picked up her coffee. “Powder River, let’er buck.”
I played with the handle on my mug. “It all makes sense; people have been hiding in that Powder River country for over a hundred years.”
She stood when I did and walked out to the dispatch desk where Ruby was going over the reports from DCI. I leaned against the counter, and Ruby started to hand them to me. “Did you read them?”
She batted her neon-blue eyes over her lowered glasses with the pearl string, more than giving the impression of a second-grade schoolteacher. “Yes.”
I nodded and then crossed to the wooden bench beside the steps, I preferred audio most times. “Let’s have it, Sparky.”
Ruby frowned-she disliked nicknames. “She doesn’t stand much of a chance.”
Vic had taken the report and was silently reading. She looked up. “His body was incinerated.” She crossed her legs and leaned an elbow on the counter. “But they found all six melted slugs in his skull.” Having sensed my dissatisfaction, Dog ambled from behind Ruby’s desk and came around to rest his head on my knee. “The report said that the fire, possibly started by lightning, possibly not, actually began with the barn and then drifted over and burned the house.”
“That must’ve been a fun one for T.J. and the bag boys.” I petted Dog’s broad head. “Where was the confession taken?”
Ruby blinked and watched me. “At the scene.”
I nodded and stared at the pattern of the old wooden floor and at the sway in the marble step at the landing. I thought about how many times my boots had hit that step, having first noticed it when my daughter had picked it as the favorite place to sit her six-year-old butt.
Cady hadn’t called recently, and it was weighing heavily on me. She and Michael, Vic’s younger brother, were seeing a lot of each other, and I was thankful for the attention the Philadelphia patrolman was lavishing on her, but I wondered where it was all leading. She’d been in an extremely bad relationship before Michael, one that had ended in her being severely injured. “And the statement was?”
Vic read from the file. “ ‘I dreamed of shooting the son-of-a-bitch, I dreamed about it every night and I finally did it. I shot him, I shot him six times.’ ”
It was quiet in the office as I repeated the words to myself. “I dreamed-”
I’d come to terms with the fact that Cady had gone back to Philadelphia, but it didn’t make it any easier. I’d once again grown used to her company: the coffee in the mornings as I tried to get her to let me fix something for breakfast; the workouts at Durant physical therapy; the way she’d breeze into the office like Venus on the half-shell and pull everybody out of their bad moods; the way my deputies, Saizarbitoria, Double Tough, and Frymire, looked at her when they thought I wasn’t watching them; the afternoons in my office where she would sit with her legs curled under her to read another book in her read-a-mystery-a-day plan; the quiet dinners at home.
“Walt…” I continued to pet Dog and glanced up at my undersheriff’s unforgiving eyes. “The last part-she says she shot him. She says she shot him six fucking times.”
I nodded and looked at the two of them. Ruby weighed in, and it made me a little irritable to see how quick they were to gang up. “Walt, she repeated the statement en route to the Campbell County jail and once again to the investigators and then to DCI. All in all, she confessed four times.”
Vic shook her head at me. “Walt, this is a forcible felony with purposeful and premeditated malice.” She paused for a moment. “Back in Philly, we used to call it a whack-job.”
It was two hours later in Philadelphia but still early enough for me to make a phone call. I was being tough and not calling as much. I was doing really well and had held myself in check for a day at a time, only phoning her every other day. At least, I thought I had been doing really well, until the irritated Daaaa-dee on the other end told me otherwise.
I went back to studying the floor and quoted the passage of the legal description of homicide that Vic’d omitted. “You forgot of sound mind and discretion.”
She interrupted, tossing the report back onto Ruby’s desk. “Mary Barsad could be nuts, and I’m sure that’s the tack that the defense attorneys are going to take, but she shot him in the head six times; she shot him till she ran out of bullets, and she shot him just to watch his head bounce on the mattress.”
I studied the veins in the marble step and thought about the veins in Mary Barsad’s temples and then about the thoughts that resided there, the things that visited her while she slept. I could feel words creeping into my mouth, words that weren’t my own. “… But then begins a journey in my head, to work my mind when body’s work’s expired.” I thought I’d said it to myself, but when I looked up they were both looking at me like I was the crazy person in question.
Ruby was the first to say something. “Walter-”
“Twenty-seventh sonnet.”
“Christ.” Vic had redirected her look from Ruby back to me. “Look, Shakespeare, I know you’re looking for something to do since Cady left, but this isn’t it. I hate to be the one to break the news to you after twenty-four years in law enforcement, but some people are in jail because they did it.”
They had continued talking to me but their voices had diminished as if I were falling away from them even as their siren song continued.
October 27, 11:36 P.M.
Dog stood on the wooden walkway with me and stared into the empty motel room. I held the hollow-core door back with my right hand and looked around. There was a sagging single bed to the left and a dresser to the right, but what was of more interest was the bathroom door at the far end of the room, which was partially shut with the light on.
There were noises coming from the bathroom.
I stepped into the room and set my bag on the only chair beside a wobbly round table. Dog started toward the half-closed door, but I made a noise through my teeth that stopped him. There was the sound of metal on metal, a clanking of something into something, a shuffling noise, and then the door opened.
Juana, the young woman from the bar, stood there silhouetted in the backlight of the bare, sixty-watt bulb. I smiled as I flipped the light switch, illuminating dead flies in the childish cowboy-and-Indian sconce above the bed. Dog wagged. She blinked and didn’t smile back at me or Dog. She held a toolbox in one hand and a pipe wrench like a weapon in the other. “Does he bite?”
“Nope.”
She continued to look at the beast as he did his best to convey an even disposition by continuing to wag. She still held the wrench, which looked massive in her small but steady hand. “I don’t like dogs.”
I picked my bag up by the handles and tossed it onto the bed. It landed against the peeling painted headboard. “That’s too bad; he likes pretty girls.”
She didn’t move. “I fixed your toilet.”
I sat in the empty chair and listened to its recitative of creaks; I took off my hat and rested it on my knee. My head still hurt, and I massaged my eyes in an attempt to drive the headache down my neck. “Glad to be in compliance with the you-gotta-have-a-crapper-in-any-room-you-rent law.”
“I felt guilty about charging you full price-figured you should have a bathroom that works.”
I took a deep breath and looked up at her. She was placing the wrench into the toolbox. Dog sat on the worn, somewhat green carpet between her and the door. “I heard you didn’t work here anymore.”
She smiled and stiff-armed a lean on the dresser; it shifted. “Pat fires me about once a week, but nobody else’ll work for him, especially for the nothing he pays.”
I worked my jaw, lay the back of my head against the cool plaster surface of the wall, and rolled the dice of nationalism. “So, what’s a nice Guatemalan girl like you doing in a place like this?”
“I’m not legal, and this place is under the radar.”
I nodded and looked around. “It’s that.”
She continued to study me. “Are you okay?”