My-wott had a nasty-looking bruise right in the middle of a small bald spot on the back of his head. Cody saw me looking at it, and said, “That’s how I broke my damn phone.”
Cody dragged two chairs from the kitchen and placed them in front of him. He spun his around and straddled it, placing his arms on the top of the backrest. His eyes were gleaming, and his mouth was set in a sarcastic snarl. “I said, introduce yourself to Mr. McGuane.” To me: “Jack, have a seat.”
The little man looked down at his Crocs. His legs shook violently.
“Speak the fuck up,” Cody said, and slapped him sharply on his face. I glared at Cody, who ignored me.
“Wyatt,” the man said.
“Wyatt what?” Cody barked.
“Wyatt Henkel.”
“And where are you from, Wyatt Henkel?”
“You mean now, or where I was born?”
Cody slapped him again.
“Jesus, Cody,” I said.
Cody looked at me. “When you hear what he’s going to say, you’re going to want to do more than slap him.”
“Still,” I said.
“I was born in Greeley, Colorado,” Henkel said, forcing the words out through his chattering teeth. “I live now in Las Cruces, New Mexico.”
“Good,” Cody said. “Now tell Mr. McGuane why you’re here. Why your telephone number was on Brian Eastman’s call log from his cell phone.”
Henkel looked away from Cody and stared at our gas fireplace, which I’d turned off a few minutes before as I left the house.
“I’m freezing to death,” Henkel said, turning to me. “I’ve been in that trunk for eight hours.”
“Seven hours, tops,” Cody said. “Quit whining.”
I got up and walked over to the fireplace to turn it on.
Cody said, “No-keep it off.”
“Look at him,” I said.
“Fuck him,” Cody said. “We’ll turn on the fireplace once he starts talking.” To Henkel, Cody said, “Fuck you. Got that?”
Henkel avoided meeting his eyes.
To me, Cody said, “I noticed some weight in your coat pockets. Are you carrying?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get that gun out of your pocket. This is your grandpa’s Colt.45 Peacemaker, right?”
I drew it out. It was heavy and cold, and it looked like a blunt instrument in my hand.
Cody said, “Cock it and put the muzzle against Wyatt Henkel’s forehead. If he tells a lie, I’ll ask you to pull the trigger. Don’t worry about his brains splashing all over the wall because I don’t think he has any. And don’t worry about the body afterward, either. I’ll just take it up to where I buried Uncle Jeter. It’s a perfect place nobody will ever look. Maybe the coyotes will dig up their bones in 2025, but by then who gives a shit?”
Cody defused my look of horror with a barely perceptible wink that Henkel couldn’t see because his head was still down. Okay, I nodded. Now I get it.
Henkel’s head came up slowly. He was terrified.
I cocked the hammer and the cylinder rotated and I put the muzzle above his eyebrow.
Cody shifted in his chair and pulled his departmental.40 Glock semiauto. He held it loosely in his hand. “In case he misses,” Cody said to Henkel.
“Let’s start again,” Cody said to Henkel. “State your occupation.”
Henkel’s voice was high and reedy. “I’m a janitor at Las Cruces High School.”
“A janitor, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yes, I like that. Call me ‘sir.’ And call Mr. McGuane here ‘sir’ as well. Now tell me how long you’ve had your job.”
“Seven years.”
“What is your salary?”
“I make $26,000. It’s considered part-time.”
“Interesting,” Cody said. “You pull down 26K, but you live on five acres and you have two new vehicles. Is that correct?”
Henkel tried to swallow, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “Yes,” he said.
“And you have that big piece of gold on your wrist. Is it a fake? One of those Taiwanese knockoffs?”
“It’s real,” he said.
“And that Escalade you drive-was it stolen?”
“No, sir.”
“You live well for a part-time janitor, don’t you, Wyatt?”
“Not as well as some, but I do all right.” His voice had gained some confidence. He was warming up both literally and figuratively. Which angered Cody.
“Shoot him,” he said.
I pushed the gun harder into Henkel’s brow.
“No!” he cried, his eyes round.
“Then answer me straight,” Cody said. Cody even scared me.
“Okay,” said Henkel.
“You weren’t always a janitor, were you?”
“No.”
“What other jobs have you held?”
“A lot of ’em. I’m not very smart, I guess.” Although Cody was asking the questions, Henkel was answering them to me. Probably because despite my gun, Cody scared him more. “I do my best, but people just don’t like me. No one’s ever really liked me.”
Said Cody, “I can see why. Again, what jobs have you had in your life?”
Henkel’s eyes rolled up as if trying to remember. “Retail, mostly. Wal-Mart, Target, Pier One. I moved around a lot between New Mexico and Colorado.”
“You didn’t mention that one-hour photo place you used to work at,” Cody said. “You know, that one in Canon City, Colorado.”
“Oh, that one,” Henkel said, his face getting even whiter. Cody’d struck a nerve.
“Tell Mr. McGuane when you worked there.”
He thought for a second. “It was 2001.”
“Before everybody went digital,” Cody said. “Back at the end of the film-and-print days.”
“Yes. I don’t think that shop is even there anymore.”
“Royal Gorge is outside of Canon City, right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s quite a spectacular place, isn’t it?” Cody asked. “Lots of tourists go there to see it and walk across the footbridge and look down at the Arkansas River. There’s even a state park there, right?”
I tried not to look at Cody to ask him where the hell this was going.
Henkel paused, then said, “Yes.”
“In 2001, the caretaker of the state park brought in some film to have developed at your shop. Do you remember that?”
Henkel tried to swallow again but couldn’t.
“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked me.
“You can have a bullet in your head,” Cody said. “Again, do you remember when the caretaker of the state park brought some film in to you?”
“Yes.”
“He brought in lots of film to be developed, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not supposed to look at the prints that you develop, are you? And the way the equipment worked, there was no reason even to see them. The processor was automatic, right? The only time you even touched the prints was when you put them in the envelope for the customer, right?”
“That was the policy.”
“But in this case you looked, didn’t you, Wyatt?”
His voice was a croak. “I looked.” As he said it his eyes darted to Cody and back to me.
“What was on the prints, Wyatt?”
“Nature stuff, mostly. But there were a lot of pictures of children with their families. The families were camping or hiking.”
“Were photos of children pretty much all the customer took?”
“Yes.”
Cody shot me a look. I still didn’t know what the point was.
“And why did you run a second set of prints to keep for yourself?”
Henkel briefly closed his eyes.
“Wyatt?”
“There were four pictures I wanted to keep,” he said.
Cody leaned back and reached into his coat with his free hand and brought out a manila envelope. “Are these the four photos you kept, Wyatt?”
“You know they are.”
Cody handed the envelope to me.
Cody said, “Who has the originals and the negatives?”