Gibbons swivelled and pointed a finger at Harrow, obviously wishing it could be a gun. “Now this talk is going to stop — right now. It’s inappropriate, and you are embarrassing yourself, Harrow. You need to pull it together and—”
“You don’t understand, Sheriff. I’m a TV personality. I just want to interview the lead investigator into the deaths of Cathy and Mark Shelton — and that’s you, right? And my first question is — why didn’t you mention that pertinent fact to us, Herm? Why did I have to find out for myself?”
Gibbons came up very close to Harrow. “You need to go, Harrow. Now. Or I will take you into custody for disturbing the peace.”
“Like you did Gabe Shelton?” Harrow whispered; this was for Gibbons, not the microphones or cameras. “That unmarked car he saw was real. The men in the masks were real. I wonder if you were one of them?”
The sheriff’s eyes popped; his mouth twitched, and he backed away. Then he said to his deputies, “Let’s cordon off this crime scene and get these media types out of here! We have work to do!”
The deputies flew into their jobs, and the sheriff came back over to Harrow.
“J.C., you are wrong about this. You are embarrassing yourself. This ended tonight. You killed the man responsible for taking your family away from you. You need to be grateful.”
Harrow, calmly, coldly, said, “I wonder if I’m looking at the man responsible for taking my family away? Certainly one of them.”
Gibbons swallowed, and turned his back to Harrow and went about loudly supervising his deputies as they worked the yellow crime scene tape and batted the media back.
Suddenly Harrow sensed someone at his side: Jenny Blake. She handed him a slip of paper. He read it.
Then Harrow made an announcement in a voice loud enough to freeze the deputies in their motion, and to bring the various cameras and microphones his way again.
“Excuse me! I have important information related to the aftermath of this case!”
Pin-drop silence.
“Former Lebanon sheriff Daniel Brown has left the country. His passport was okayed by Homeland Security tonight. He’s flying to South America.”
Across the yard, the sheriff turned toward Harrow with the look of a wet hound. “That son of a bitch...”
“Looks like he left you holding the bag, Herm,” Harrow said genially. “Who knows? Maybe you can get immunity.”
Harrow was having a smoke outside the semi when Deputy Colby Wilson, with the hangdog expression of all time, came tentatively over. The heel of a hand was on his holstered revolver.
“Can I talk to you a second, Mr. Harrow?”
“What do you want, Colby? I’ve said my piece.”
“I, uh... haven’t said mine. What you said about immunity... you think that’s a possibility?”
“I do, for the first conspirator who comes forward and comes clean.”
He laughed, but it was humorless, more a cough. “Is that what I come to after all these years? Being a conspirator? Who do I go to, Mr. Harrow? Who do I talk to?”
“I’ll get someone from the state police,” he said, and did.
Because of his knowledge about the case, Harrow was asked by the state police not only to sit in on the interview, but to conduct it. It was irregular, but there was a moment that needed to be seized: right now, Colby Wilson wanted to talk, and he didn’t ask for a lawyer to be present.
The interview was held in the Crime Seen! lab, since the state police did not under the circumstances wish to borrow facilities from the local authorities.
Colby Wilson said, “I was one of the guys in the car that night — Gibbons knew about it, but he wasn’t there.”
Harrow asked, “Who else was there?”
Wilson gave him three more names, all current Smith County deputies.
“Why kill Cathy Shelton and her boy? Doesn’t make sense, Colby.”
“We didn’t mean to.” He wasn’t able to look at Harrow. “It was an accident. We went there to scare them. Put the fear of God in ’em, or anyway the fear of Sheriff Brown. We shook her and slapped her around, broke some knickknacks, even some furniture... but she had this gun she got to, that we didn’t know about. When she aimed that thing at us, we didn’t have any choice. It was sort of like... self-defense.”
Sort of like, Harrow thought.
“And the kid had seen us...” The beefy deputy shrugged. “Things got out of hand.”
Harrow said nothing.
“At night, I close my eyes, and I see that kid,” Wilson said. “I didn’t shoot him myself! I didn’t do that! But I’ll never get past that.”
“Some things,” Harrow said, “you never do get past.”
Chapter Thirty-nine
The north-south highway turned out to be no rumor — the I-80–I-70 connector was due to start construction next year, and would be completed in less than three years, making the land Brown and his cronies owned worth tens of millions. Brown and his partners had also bought land in and between every small town along the route of the new highway. A major indoor mall and the United States museum in Lebanon were part of the master plan.
The show on the eighteenth had gone well, particularly a crowd-pleasing segment of Harrow and Laurene Chase on hand when a certain South American government, led by a president who “never missed” Crime Seen!, turned over a morose Daniel Brown to Interpol.
Jenny Blake had been surprised by how normal Brown looked — seventyish with a white beard and long hair, like somebody’s grandfather, not a monster at all. In profile, a little pudgy, he’d have made a good Santa Claus.
Now, on Monday afternoon, driving back to LA on the Crime Seen! bus, gliding across I-70 westbound, Jenny was with Pall, Anderson, Choi, and Carmen, watching satellite TV as Harrow did yet another in an endless parade of interviews.
If he’d gained national attention saving the President (and losing his family) and had become a reluctant star by getting his own crime-busting show, J.C. Harrow was in a galaxy of his own now. Many bad guys had been shot on national TV, but rarely a real one, by a real hero.
A backlash from gun control advocates was already well under way, and fringe types proclaimed (mostly online) that Shelton was either a hero or a victim. Not a hero certainly, Jenny thought, but a victim. Also a monster — as her friend Carmen could attest.
Valerie Jenkins, the missing bartender with the stray license plate, turned up in Omaha, Nebraska, with a new life that included another bartender gig and a trucker boyfriend she’d followed there.
But other loose ends would be much harder to tie up — twenty-some family killings that would challenge and bedevil law enforcement agencies all over the killer’s target-defaced map for months and even years to come.
On the screen, Carlos Moreno held the UBC microphone toward Harrow’s rugged movie-star features. Jenny wondered if Carmen wouldn’t rather be doing the interview herself; on the other hand, the reporter had declined a plane and requested that she ride back with the team.
Maybe we make her feel safe, Jenny thought.
Anyway, after her ordeal, Carmen could use a little downtime.