When my eyes met with hers again, she barely nodded, and her voice was a fragile whisper. “Okay.”
“I’ve got some questions about the timing of that night.” I carefully avoided actually mentioning her husband’s murder. “Do you remember leaving the house?”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
“Do you have any idea when that was?” She shrugged and then lay there looking at me. “Before midnight, after?”
“Before.” She didn’t wheeze quite so much with this answer.
“You don’t have any idea when?”
She shook her head and swallowed carefully. “Why?”
“The volunteer fire department in Clearmont didn’t get a ten-seventy fire alarm until almost one o’clock in the morning.” I lowered the report and looked at her. “That seems like an awful lot of time between the fire in the barn and the anonymous call.”
“I could have been confused about the times.”
“I don’t think you were.” I allowed the pages of the report to fall against my chest. “Mary, you stated in the report that the hired man, Hershel Vanskike, was the one who found you.” I let the image sit there with her for a moment. “Was there anybody else there that night?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?” I leaned forward, closed the file, and dropped it flat on the floor between my boots as a symbolic gesture. “Mary, for me to really know what happened to you that night, I need you to think about it clearly-and tell me. See, I’m beginning to think that there were a lot more people there than you’re willing to say and possibly more than you know about.” I rolled my lip under my teeth. “Let’s start with the ones you do.”
“Why is this so important to you?” Her voice was stronger with this question, even if it was without emotion.
I stared at her and then nodded toward the manila folder on the floor. “This is your life we’re talking about.”
I stood up and walked over to the window. I could see the back of Kyle Straub’s sign, where another meadowlark was singing. There was something about the sign that was bothering me, and not just because it was a reminder that the thought of Kyle Straub or his grammar made my ass hurt. I let it submerge in my mind and shifted my weight from one size 14-E to the other.
“It’s going to happen like this: the statements that you’ve made to the Campbell County investigators are enough to-” I stopped speaking and turned to look at her. “They don’t get many high-profile cases like this one. Generally, it’s Bubba shot Skeeter while they were drinking beer in the cab of Skeeter’s truck and trying to figure out if Bubba’s Charter Arms revolver was loaded.” I leaned back and sat on the windowsill. “You see, the mechanism that I’m a part of-it feeds on high octane, and that’s what this case is. Everybody is going to want a piece of it-of you.” The sun cast shadows on the crown of my hat. “They’ll call for a change of venue, and they’ll get it; possibly Casper, maybe Cheyenne, and you’ll get a jury trial-and that won’t go well for you. I’ve stood through a lot of trials, and I can tell you that those prosecutors are going to tap into something-a virulent little strain of human nature that’s going to sway that jury into getting somebody, somebody rich, beautiful, and powerful-somebody they’ve never had a chance of getting before. It’s going to be you, Mary, and not just because you confessed.”
She watched me intently. “Why then?”
“Because you are incapable of showing the one thing that they are going to demand, whether you’re guilty or not-repentance. They want you to feel sorry; it makes them feel better about themselves.” I couldn’t look her in the eye, so I turned my face and gazed at the pillow beside her head. “Most people…” Her head dropped a little, but with my peripheral vision I could see she kept her eyes on me, on my polyester shirt and my dull and unpolished badge still with traces of her blood in the engraving. “They go through their lives believing in things that they never have much contact with-the police, lawyers, judges, and courts. They have an unstated belief in the system; that it’ll be impartial, fair, and just.”
I could hear normal conversations through the door. It was good to know that normal conversations could still happen while I was engaged in this one. “But then there’s the moment when it comes to them that the police, the courtroom, and the laws themselves are just human, vulnerable to the same shortcomings as all of us, that they’re a mirror of who we are, and that’s the heartbreaking dichotomy of it all-that the more contact you have with the law, the less belief you have.” I took a breath. “Like some strange little religion all its own, the one thing that makes the whole system work is the one thing it robs you of-faith.”
I turned my face and looked at her directly. “But you have to believe that justice is truly blind, and that those scales aren’t tipped.”
She had taken a breath of her own. “Or what?”
“Or else you’re in a dark place.”
She looked at the sheets covering her legs. “But you haven’t answered my question: why is this important to you?”
I smiled sadly. “This is important to me because I believe you’re innocent. And I’ve spent most of my life defending and protecting the innocent.” I crossed to the door and opened it. “I’ll let you in on another little secret-the sheriff of Campbell County believes you’re innocent, too. Otherwise he never would’ve sent you over here to me.”
I allowed Dog to enter the room. The beast was waiting outside the door. He looked at her, then at me. I nodded, and he crossed to the bed and placed his broad head next to her hand. “Mary, tell me about that night.”
She had laughed a sad exhale and scratched the fur on his muzzle as his big tail fanned in a counterclockwise circle the way it always did when he was happy.
October 30, 2:20 P.M.
We drove across the railroad tracks and headed south on Echeta Road, which went past the local cemetery. It was an odd place with an iron archway and two bands that went across the drive to which the words ABSALOM CEMETERY were attached. There were lights on either side, a ranch gate below that was closed to keep any stray cattle from grazing between the markers, and a cross affixed above, which was black against a sky so blue it hurt my eyes. Most everything hurt my eyes this morning, so I closed them and nodded off.
It was a good thing that Hershel was driving. I woke up when we hit a rough stretch on the only road leading to and from the Battlement’s flat mesa, and I hoped we wouldn’t meet another truck as there was only room for one and a half. It was the kind of road where, if you met anybody coming up or going down, somebody was going to have to put it in reverse.
My headache was subsiding but only commensurate with the increasing pain of my eye socket. I’d tried to cradle my face in my hand with an elbow resting on the truck’s windowsill, but the constant jolting of the uneven road only resulted in my periodically punching my damaged face with the palm of my hand. It was an ongoing battle, which had not gone unnoticed by Benjamin, who was seated on the bench seat between Hershel and me.
I stretched my jaw and felt the unsettling pop in my temple.
“I bet that hurts.”
I glanced down at the little bandito as he leaned forward to get a better look at my face. I pulled my Ray-Bans from my shirt pocket and slipped them on in an attempt to hide the evidence. “You’d be right.”
He nodded. “Have you decided what your name is today?”
I shrugged. “I thought we’d all go by aliases.”
“You mean nicknames?” He seemed excited by the thought and turned his attention to Hershel for approval.
“Sure.” The older cowboy’s face remained immobile as he negotiated the grade, the oversized pickup, and the two tons of trailered horseflesh behind us.
The boy struggled against his seat belt, which was my dictate, and peered over the dash at the road ahead. “I’m going to be El Bandito Negro de los Badlands.”
I waited a moment before replying. “You don’t think that’s a little long?”