“Why? For the good of his soul? I don’t think so. If these people went to the trouble of killing his guardians and then hunting him down, then it doesn’t seem to me like they were in any doubt about why they were doing it.”
There was, though, the possibility that Adams was at least partly right in his suggestion that a final confession was the motive. Suppose the men who hunted him down were almost certain that he had killed Marianne Larousse, but almost certain wasn’t good enough. They wanted it from his own lips because if he wasn’t responsible then the consequences were even more serious, and not simply because the real culprit might evade detection. No, the actions that had been taken in the last twenty-four hours indicated that some people were very concerned indeed about the possibility that someone might have targeted Marianne Larousse for very particular reasons. It seemed to me that it was about time to ask some hard questions of Earl Larousse Jr. but I wasn’t about to do that alone. The Larousses were hosting their party the following day, and I was expecting some company to join me in Charleston. The Larousses would have two unwelcome guests crashing their big occasion.
That afternoon, I did some research in the Charleston Public Library. I pulled up the newspaper reports of Grady Truett’s death, but there was little more than Adele Foster had already told me. Persons unknown had entered his house, tied him to a chair, and cut his throat. No prints had been lifted, but the crime scene squad had to have found something. No crime scene is entirely clean. I was tempted to call Adams but, once again, to do so would be to risk blowing everything that I had. I also found out a little more about the plateye. According to a book called Blue Roots, the plateye was a permanent resident of the spirit world, the underworld, although it was capable of entering the mortal world to seek retribution. It also had the ability to alter its form. As Adams had said, the plateye was a changeling.
I left the library and headed onto Meeting. Tereus had still not returned to his apartment, and he now hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Nobody would tell me anything about him, and the stripper who had taken the twenty and then sold me out to Handy Andy was nowhere to be seen.
Finally, I called the public defender’s office and was told that Laird Rhine was defending a client over at the State Courthouse that afternoon. I parked at my hotel and walked down to the Four Corners, where I found Rhine in courtroom number three at the arraignment of a woman named Johanna Bell who had been accused of stabbing her husband in the course of a domestic argument. Apparently, she and her husband had been separated for about three months when he had returned to the family home and a quarrel had broken out over the ownership of the couple’s VCR. The quarrel had ended abruptly when she stabbed him with a carving knife. Her husband sat two rows behind her, looking sorry for himself.
Rhine handled himself pretty well as he asked the arraignment judge to convert her bail to OR release. He was probably in his early thirties but he put up a good argument, pointing out that Bell had never been in trouble before; that she had been forced to call the cops on a number of occasions during the dying months of her marriage following threats and actual physical assualt by her husband; that she could not meet the bail set; and that no purpose could be served by keeping her in jail and away from her infant son. He made her husband sound like a creep who was lucky to get away with a punctured lung, and the judge agreed to her release on her own recognizance. Afterward, she hugged Rhine and took her son in her arms from an older woman who stood waiting for her at the back of the court.
I intercepted Rhine on the courtroom steps.
“Mr. Rhine?”
He paused, and something like worry flashed across his face. As a public defender, he encountered some of the lowest forms of life and was sometimes forced to try to defend the indefensible. I didn’t doubt that, on occasion, his clients’ victims took things personally.
“Yes?” Up close he looked even younger. He hadn’t started to gray yet and his blue eyes were shielded by long, soft lashes. I flashed him my license. He glanced at it and gave a nod.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Parker? You mind if we talk while we walk? I promised my wife I’d take her out to dinner tonight.”
I fell into step alongside him.
“I’m working with Elliot Norton on the Atys Jones case, Mr. Rhine.”
His steps faltered for a moment, as though he had briefly lost his bearings, then resumed at a slightly faster speed. I accelerated to keep up.
“I’m no longer involved in that case, Mr. Parker.”
“Since Atys is dead, there isn’t much of a case, period.”
“I heard. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sure. I have some questions for you.”
“I’m not sure that I can answer any questions. Maybe you should ask Mr. Norton.”
“You know, I would, except Elliot isn’t around, and my questions are kind of delicate.”
He stopped at the corner of Broad as the light changed to red. He gave the offending signal a look that suggested he was taking its interference in the course of his life kind of personally.
“Like I said, I don’t know that I can help you.”
“I’d like to know why you gave up the case.”
“I have a lot of cases.”
“Not like this one.”
“My caseload doesn’t allow me to pick and choose, Mr. Parker. I was handed the Jones case. It was going to take up a lot of my time. I could have cleared ten cases in the time it took me just to go through the files. I wasn’t sorry to see it go.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a young public defender. You’re probably ambitious and from what I saw of your work today you have good reason to be. A high-profile case like the murder of Marianne Larousse doesn’t come along every day. If you had acquitted yourself well, even if you had ultimately lost, it would have opened doors for you. I don’t think you wanted to give it up so easily.”
The lights had changed again, and we were jostled slightly as people crossed ahead of us. Still, Rhine didn’t move.
“Whose side are you on in this, Mr. Parker?”
“I haven’t decided yet. In the end, though, I guess I’m on the side of a dead woman and a dead man, for what it’s worth.”
“And Elliot Norton?”
“A friend. He asked me to come down here. I came.”
Rhine turned to face me.
“I was asked to pass the case on to him,” he said.
“By Elliot?”
“No. He never approached me. It was another man.”
“You know who he was?”
“He said his name was Kittim. He had something wrong with his face. He came to my office and told me that I should let Elliot Norton defend Atys Jones.”
“What did you say?”
“I told him that I couldn’t do that. There was no reason to. He made me an offer.”
I waited.
“We all have skeletons in our closet, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that he gave me a glimpse of mine. I have a wife and a young daughter. I made mistakes early in my marriage, but I haven’t repeated them. I wasn’t planning on having my family taken away from me for sins that I’ve tried to make up for. I told Jones that Elliot Norton would be better qualified to handle his case. He didn’t object. I walked away. I haven’t seen Kittim since then, and I hope I never see him again.”
“When were you approached?”
“About three weeks ago.”
Three weeks ago: about the time that Grady Truett had been killed. By then, James Foster and Marianne Larousse were also dead. As Adele Foster had said, something was happening, and whatever it was, it had reached a new level with the death of Marianne Larousse.
“Is that all, Mr. Parker?” asked Rhine. “I’m not happy about what I did. I don’t really want to go over it again.”
“That’s pretty much it,” I said.
“I really am sorry about Atys,” he said.