Jody was shocked. She had never, never heard Phelps criticized in this house before now. If anything, he’d been put on a pedestal. Linders contributed to his reelection campaigns, as much as the law allowed. They sported his motto, “Reelect the Law,” on their truck bumpers, and her grandfather still had one of those stickers on his Cadillac.
“Evidence that should have gone to the defense?” Phelps repeated, with barely contained anger under his drawl. “Why would you want it to, Chase?” It seemed to be an admission that he’d done it, but that he wasn’t backing down from considering it the right thing to do.
For the first time, Jody’s grandfather spoke up, in a somewhat milder tone than his son, a tone that suggested he was speaking more in sorrow than in anger. “So we wouldn’t end up like this, Don, with a guilty man getting out of prison.”
The sheriff looked around the room at all of them before returning his attention to the patriarch. “Is that what you think, Hugh? You’re going to stand there and accuse me of being dishonest like your son just did?”
“What else would you call it?” Chase challenged him.
Hugh Senior said, in the same regretful tone, “There wasn’t any need to withhold that evidence, Don, and if I’d known you had it, I would have told you to show it. You had a strong enough case without hiding anything. You could have withstood the silly business about the hat. You could have easily dismissed any suspicions about those strangers that Hugh-Jay supposedly saw that day.”
“I don’t appreciate this,” Phelps said, looking cornered and as ready to attack as they were. “We did the best we could, and we did it as honest as we could. We were young and green. Call it incompetence if you want to, but don’t you call it dishonest. Don’t you do that. You think we had any experience investigating a major crime? We had zero. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, and we still managed to hand the county attorney a damned good case.”
“Doesn’t look so good now,” Belle said in a harsh voice.
“Seems to me I remember getting a lot of pressure from this family to arrest Billy Crosby!” the sheriff shot back at her. “It didn’t used to be ‘you’ when you talked about it, it used to be ‘we.’ My department and the prosecutor’s office and this family, we were in it together, remember? Helping each other put the son of a bitch away. I don’t recall you folks wanting to help the defense back then,” he said with deep sarcasm.
“What they ‘wanted,’” Meryl Tapper said as he strode into the room and took a stance in the middle of it, “was a clean case that couldn’t be commuted as this one just was. That’s what they ‘wanted,’ Don. Now, because we didn’t get that, they have to live with the killer of their son and daughter-in-law ten miles down the road. Now their granddaughter has to move out of her parents’ home so she isn’t living three blocks from Billy Crosby.”
Meryl still wore the reddish polyester trousers, the plaid jacket, and the bolo tie that made Jody roll her eyes whenever she saw them, but any pretense of country bumpkin lawyer was gone.
“You shouldn’t talk to me like this.” The sheriff put his cowboy hat back on, shoving it down on his head, and then looked straight at Hugh Senior. “This isn’t right. I never thought I’d hear this kind of thing from this family, and especially from you, Hugh. I thought as highly of your son as anybody else did in this county. I was just as upset as everybody else was. My wife cried about it. I worked my butt off to bring his killer to justice and make it stick.”
He started to walk out, brushing against Meryl, who didn’t budge.
Then he turned and said, “When I told Billy that if anything happened to any of you he’d be in trouble, you want to know what he said to me?” The sheriff paused and looked each of them in the face. “He said he didn’t give a damn. He said that if somebody killed another Linder, that was one crime he’d be happy to go to jail for this time, whether he did it or not.”
He let that sink in and then he shifted his weight and jutted his chin as if daring them to swing at it.
“But hey, if you’re all fired up to help the defense, I think I can be of some assistance, folks.”
Jody sensed a tightening of the tension among her family.
“You know that hair evidence that got thrown out?” the sheriff asked with a sly and aggressive look in his eyes. “Well, Billy’s boy came to me wanting some of those strands for DNA tests, ’cause we can do that stuff now where we couldn’t back then. I told him there wasn’t any left, that it was all destroyed in the earlier testing. But you know what? I think I might be able to come up with a few little hairs that got stuck back in an evidence box. You just never know what we might manage to find back there-since you’re all so eager to help him out.”
With that last volley, the sheriff slammed out the front door.
Within moments they heard his SUV spin gravel as he drove away.
“Why does he think a DNA test will help Billy?” Belle asked in a complaining tone. “It’s only going to prove once and for all that he did it. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“He’s just trying to shake us up,” Chase said, with a contemptuous downturn of his mouth, “because we pissed him off. We should have run somebody against him years ago.”
“Hell, I should have run against him years ago,” Bobby chimed in. “I couldn’t have been any worse at the job than he is.”
“Well, start thinking who we can put up for the job,” their father commanded, leaving Jody more astonished than ever. All her life she’d heard there was no finer lawman than Don Phelps, and now he was the enemy? Her grandfather was a self-pronounced lover of justice, and it was certainly true that she hadn’t been old enough to know what was going on at the time, but something about this whole situation with the sheriff didn’t sit right with her.
Maybe it would all come clear. It had to, she hoped.
“This outcome was unnecessary,” her grandfather was saying. “Billy would have been convicted without the shenanigans. There’s no excuse for it. Don can say what he wants to about how they didn’t know what they were doing, but inexperience or incompetence is no excuse for a lack of basic principles. It’s dishonest to circumvent the law like that, and look where it’s got us now.”
When he saw Jody, his intimidating formality melted and he smiled at her. “Hello, Granddaughter.”
After a moment’s hesitation, she ran over to get enveloped in a hug and then stayed close to him.
“Dad,” Belle said, sounding worried. “I think we just alienated our best protection.”
Meryl snorted. “The sheriff’s department is no protection for anybody, honey. Too few of them and they’re too far away to do us any good. We’re our own best protection. Always have been, always will be. That’s why we have guns.” He looked at his father-in-law. “I promise you this, sir. I’m an older, wiser lawyer now. Billy will screw up, we’ll get him again, and next time it will stick.”
His mother-in-law appeared in the doorway.
“Who’s setting the table for me?”
It made Jody feel anxious to think about what Billy’s “next time” might be, but none of the rest of them seemed to be worrying about that as she followed them in to supper.
30
AS JODY TRAILED her aunt around the table, laying dinner plates down between the silverware that Belle distributed, she said cautiously, “That was kind of rough in there.”
Belle retorted, “This whole situation is rough, don’t you think?”
“I know, but-”
“What in the world have you got on your head?”
Jody reached up a hand and touched the “found” scarf, which she had forgotten she was wearing, having tied it on after she left her own home. “Just a scarf.”
“You must have found it in a trash bin.”