A million thoughts were going through my mind. I tried to put them into some kind of order.
“But Cody,” I said, “Coates walked because of what you did.”
I instantly regretted saying it, and Cody’s eyes flashed with pure rage.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But…”
Cody said, “Up until to night there has always been one thing about that trial I couldn’t figure out, and that was how Ludik knew everything there was to know about my movements after we arrested Coates. I mean, Ludik’s smart, but he’s not that smart. Somebody tipped him, and I think it was Moreland. He didn’t do it with a phone call or anything that obvious, I’m sure. He probably told some court gossip something like, ‘I just hope this is a solid case because there seem to be some real chain-of-evidence problems with it’- something like that. He probably heard about me through the DA or some blabbermouth cop. So Moreland put it out there so Ludik would hear it thirdhand and investigate. I’m not saying I didn’t fuck up, Jack-I did. But Moreland set the whole clusterfuck in motion-from tipping Coates to the search warrant to suggesting to the defense they take a second look at the chain-of-evidence list.”
It made sense.
Cody turned from me and shoved his Glock into Henkel’s nose. His voice was flat. “When I came to your house in New Mexico, you were packing up your car. Where were you planning to go?”
Henkel said, “We were going to do the exchange.”
“What are you talking about?”
“There was going to be an exchange. A big meeting, where everybody got what they wanted.”
Cody slapped him again, and Henkel winced. The cushions were getting dark with lost blood. I could smell it, and it was sharp and metallic and it made me want to gag.
Henkel was fading. His eyelids were starting to drop.
“WHAT EXCHANGE?” Cody screamed.
“The judge was going to get all the photos and the negatives from Coates and me once and for all,” Henkel said. “I was going to get my big payoff from the judge. We were going to meet at Coates’s place up in the mountains tomorrow morning.”
Cody said, “What was Coates going to get?”
Henkel coughed and nearly passed out. He said, “What he said he always wanted-his own little girl.”
And at that moment I realized who had sent the photo of Angelina to his associate Malcolm Harris in London- Aubrey Coates. I recalled Moreland taking that photo the morning they came to visit when he went upstairs with Melissa. It was the reason he was so insistent that he see her, and the reason he asked Melissa to turn her over for a better look.
Monday, November 26
TWENTY-FIVE
THERE WAS SNOW FALLING on I-70 that night as we drove to Desolation Canyon. It had started snowing around midnight and gotten progressively worse. The only vehicles our four-car caravan encountered on the two-hour drive from Denver were snowplows with yellow wigwag lights flashing and the occasional four-wheel-drive pickup. My nerves were shot, and I had trouble keeping coffee down. Cody had made three calls after dropping Henkel in a heap outside the emergency-room doors of Denver Generaclass="underline" Sanders, Morales, and Torkleson. Torkleson had responded with a crime scene tech and a team of four SWAT officers in heavy black clothing. Morales and Sanders showed up in Morales’s jacked-up four-wheel-drive pickup. Morales brought his wife along to watch over Melissa. Torkleson drove the lead vehicle, with Cody in the passenger seat and me in the backseat.
A panicked thought hit me. “What if they won’t do the exchange without Henkel?” Jesus, I thought again, I never should have shot him.
“Good thinking,” Torkleson said, and plucked his mike from the cradle on the dashboard. “I’m switching over to a nonpublic channel,” he said as he called the state highway patrol. Locating a trooper he knew, Torkleson persuaded the man to put out a false report about a fiery head-on collision near the New Mexico border, and to identify one of the fatalities as a man named Wyatt Henkel. When the trooper agreed, Torkleson said to Cody and me, “We know Coates listens to police scanners, and if he hears that report, I’m sure he’ll relay the info to the judge. That’ll explain why he isn’t there.”
“You’re the man,” Cody said to Torkleson. “Both Coates and the judge will be happy to hear that Henkel-and his photos-are cooked.”
I TRIED to sort out what we’d learned as we drove. Cody seemed to be doing the same thing.
I asked, “How did Coates learn about Angelina in order to pressure the judge for her?”
“I’d wondered that myself,” Cody said. “Until I checked on the federal jail roster before the trial and found out that Coates shared a cell for two weeks with a slimeball named José Medina, who was in for trafficking. Medina is a bigshot Sur-13 gangster and a known associate of Garrett’s. Garrett probably mentioned to Medina he had this adoption agency hounding him-bragged about it, most likely-and Coates overheard Medina talking about it. That’s the kind of thing Coates would pick up on, especially since he had his deal going with the judge already. So he doubled down on his demands of the judge because Moreland had nothing to bargain with: the negatives and photos and a little girl of his own in exchange for an acquittal.”
“It makes me sick,” I said.
“No shit,” Cody said. “What makes me even sicker is that the judge would go along. Or appear to go along.”
“So why did Moreland and Garrett kill Dorrie?” I asked, guessing the answer.
“We’ll probably never get a confession out of either of them,” Cody said. “But I’m thinking Dorrie couldn’t live with her guilt any longer for providing an alibi for John on the night John’s parents were run off the road. The more she got to know him, the more she was convinced he’d done it- well, it was eating her up inside. She was going to church more, right? Pouring her heart out to God that she was married to a man who’d killed his own parents, and she’d provided the alibi. Maybe she asked John outright if he did it, or maybe he just guessed she wanted to tell somebody. Either way, John knew he had to get rid of her. Plus, he was probably already putting the hardwood to Kellie. So, if you’re John Moreland, you have a heavy guilt-ridden wallflower who can bring you down on the one hand and a blond knockout with money on the other. Easy choice for John.”
“But why did Garrett finish her off?”
“Because Garrett is a sick, twisted, evil little fuck,” Cody said. “Your instincts were right about him. Plus, by helping his dad with the crime, Garrett knew he’d always have a bargaining chip and something to hold over his dad’s head. In a way, killing Dorrie set Garrett free.”
“And John knew what Garrett was from an early age,” I said. “Imagine knowing your son is like that? And just living with it and covering up for him whenever possible. And the judge had to cover up for his son, or Garrett might confess what the both of them had done.”
I said, “Jim Doogan told me something at Brian’s funeral about men like Moreland. He said once a man like that gets his eyes on a prize-in this case the U.S. Supreme Court- every move he makes is in preparation for it. I didn’t realize what Doogan was saying at the time, and I don’t think he did, either. But if you’re John Moreland, and you want to be a Supreme, how can you even consider the possibility if your only son is a gangster?”
“Good question,” Cody said. “How?”