THE DAYLIGHT FILTERING THROUGH the dusty screens of the cabin was even dimmer than usual when I awoke the morning after Jess’s funeral. I rolled across the lumpy mattress and pressed my face to the window. Through the grime on the glass and the dust and cobwebs on the screen, I thought—though it was hard to be sure—that I saw dark clouds scudding above the treetops. That meant I would have to work on my textbook revisions indoors, by kerosene lamp. Although the image seemed romantic, in an Abe Lincoln sort of way, I knew that a day of hunching over to read fine print by flickering lamplight would leave me with knotted shoulders and a screaming headache. As I wrestled with my choices—the case of cabin fever I’d get if I didn’t work, versus the aching head and neck I’d get if I did—the cellphone Jeff had loaned me began to ring. The display read PRIVATE NUMBER, so I considered not answering—what if a reporter had somehow gotten hold of the number? By the third ring, though, I decided I was being excessively paranoid. Somebody was out to get me, and I did want to be cautious, but I didn’t want paranoia to run away with me.
“Hello?”
“Bill? It’s Art.”
I felt my shoulders relax, not simply because it wasn’t a reporter, but because it was someone who actually still had faith in me. I’d called and left my number on Art’s voice mail and Miranda’s voice mail; I’d also given it to Peggy, my secretary, and Burt DeVriess and his assistant Chloe. That small circle of people, plus Jeff, seemed to represent the sum total of human beings whose loyalty and faith I retained. It wasn’t many, but they were all good people to have in my corner. Well, Burt DeVriess was an unsavory person to have in my corner, but nonetheless a crucial one.
“Hi, Art. How goes the pursuit of the pedophiles?”
“I set up a date yesterday with one of my boyfriends. We were supposed to meet at the food court at the mall. He stood me up. I’m feeling rejected.”
“You think he got suspicious? Figured out that Tiffany was really a cop?”
“Maybe. But I think he’s just skittish in general. I sent him a hurt-feelings e-mail last night, and he wrote back to apologize. Made some lame excuse about work. Sometimes it takes two or three times before these guys follow through—I’m not sure if they’re just chickens, or if they have some tiny shreds of conscience. But I’ve told him we need to take a break from each other for a week or so.”
“You playing hard to get?”
“No. I’ve taken some time off, actually. I thought maybe there might be a higher and better use of my investigative talents.”
“Higher and better than catching child molesters? What would be better than that?”
“Figuring out who killed Jess. Figuring out who’s setting you up. I’m off all week. How about we rough out some sort of plan?” Art’s generosity astonished me and moved me. “Bill? You still there?”
I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. Thank you, Art. Thanks.”
“You’d do the same for me, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I would.”
“Okay, then, we’re even. You got any bright ideas for how we track down this diabolical killer?”
“Not so far.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t figure you would. Lucky for us, I do.”
“That is lucky. Whatcha got?”
“I keep thinking the Willis murder must be tied to Jess’s,” he said. “No pun intended. Jess had just released Willis’s name to the media, and it’s the one case you and Jess were working on together. Right?”
“Right. I keep thinking about Willis’s mother. The way she acted was really strange. It’s like she was less upset over the fact that he was dead than over the way Jess described him to the media. Almost as if his reputation were more important than his life.”
“Grief’s a funny thing, though,” he said. “People express it in wildly different ways. That could’ve been some weird version of denial.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but if so, then killing Jess might have been an extension of it—taking that assault on Jess to the extreme. That would fit with the threatening note that got thrown through my window, too.”
“But didn’t you say that came from one of those creationist protesters?”
“Looked that way,” I said, “but maybe she was trying to throw me off the scent. Then again, there’s another possibility.”
“Namely?”
“The cop that caught Craig Willis in the act. Given that he rushed in, didn’t follow procedures, and even roughed the guy up a bit, he sounds like a bit of a cowboy. Might he be capable of killing Willis, once the case got thrown out?”
“Maybe,” said Art. “The line between good cop and bad cop can be mighty easy to cross. You bend a rule here and there, pretty soon you’re breaking ’em right and left. Be a mighty big leap, though, to go from exterminating a pedophile to murdering a medical examiner—and then framing a forensic scientist for it.”
“Hmm. That does seem like a stretch.”
“Tell you what,” he said. “Let me try to track him down and have a talk with him. If nothing else, he might have some ideas about other folks who may have wanted Willis dead, and whether any of them were capable of the rest of this stuff.”
“You want me to go with you?”
“Naw,” he said. “Let me talk to him, cop-to-cop. You think you’d be taking a chance if you went and talked to Mrs. Willis?”
I felt more nervous than I cared to admit. “I’ll be okay,” I said, hoping Art would think better of it, try talking me out of it. He didn’t.
“Let’s touch base after lunch,” he said. “I’ll give you a call around one unless I hear something from you before then. By the way, do you know where Mrs. Willis lives?”
“Um, no.”
“That’s okay. I just happen to have her address handy.” He read it off—she lived on a street of small bungalows near West High School, and I knew the neighborhood well.
Relieved not to be facing a day of flickering eyestrain, I downed a bowl of Cheerios (Honey Nut, which I’d chosen over Jeff’s objections), took a quick shower in the bath house, and donned a pair of khakis and a polo shirt for the trip to Knoxville. I was still the best-dressed person in the park—a truly startling distinction for me—but at least I’d scaled back from church clothes (and arrest clothes) to business casual.
One lane of I-75 South was closed for repaving, so traffic was crawling today. The drive back to Knoxville, which normally took thirty minutes, required nearly an hour this time. I got off at the Papermill Drive exit—also a bottleneck, as it had been for a couple of years now, during a massive interchange reworking—and wound through small residential streets to Sutherland Avenue, the main artery that led to West High and Mrs. Willis’s neighborhood. I had just parked across the street from her house when she emerged from the front door. She was wearing work clothes—blue jeans and a dingy T-shirt and boots—and carry ing pruning shears. She headed for a hedge of boxwoods lining the front of the yard and began hacking at the new growth with a vengeance.
My camera was in a bin in the passenger-side floorboard; on impulse, I fished it out and zoomed in on her face. She looked nearly as angry as the day she had stormed into my office, and the look brought the altercation back vividly into my memory. You know, I thought, I bet there’s a lot of rage inside that woman. Any mother whose son turns out to be a child molester, and then gets murdered—be enough to turn anybody pretty hateful. I snapped a few photos, then stowed my camera and got out of the car.
“Mrs. Willis,” I called as I crossed the street, “could I talk to you for a minute?”
She turned slowly, and when she recognized me, her eyes flashed. “What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you about Dr. Carter,” I said.
“Dr. Carter’s dead,” she snapped, “and I’m glad. And you’re going to jail for killing her, and I’m glad of that, too.”
“I didn’t kill Dr. Carter,” I said. “I had no reason to.”
“I don’t give a damn,” she said. “I’m glad she’s dead, and I hope they give you the death penalty. The paper said they might try.”
The conversation was not going quite the way I had hoped it would. I tried to imagine what Detective John Evers would do if he were interrogating Mrs. Willis, but the only thing that came to mind was the feeling of his knee crowding the space between my legs, edging up toward my crotch and making me extremely uncomfortable. It was not a tactic I could use with a woman—especially a woman holding a pair of pruning shears.
“I think there might be a connection between your son’s death and Dr. Carter’s,” I said, hoping to appeal to her more maternal instincts. “Dr. Carter and the Chattanooga police were working to solve his murder when she was killed.” She didn’t say anything, but she lowered the shears to her side. I took that as an encouraging sign. “You got any idea who might have killed him?”
“I already talked to them detectives from Chattanooga,” she said. “Like I told them, I can’t imagine why anybody would have wanted to kill Craig.” I could think of some reasons, but it didn’t seem wise to mention them at this particular moment.
Something Miss Georgia Youngblood had said to me about pedophiles occurred to me—the phrase “Shit flow downstream,” which had gotten linked in my mind somehow with the phrase “Each one teach one”—and I wondered if Mrs. Willis could shed any light on her son’s pathology. “Mrs. Willis, can you think back to when Craig was about ten years old? Do you remember him at that age?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I remember him at every age. Why?”
“I’m wondering if maybe something happened around that time. Something that might have been very frightening or upsetting to him.” Her eyes darted back and forth as she thought, and it seemed to me that she fixed on something, because they stopped darting and she looked away, her jaw clenched. “An incident, maybe, that might explain things that have happened more recently.”
She looked at me now. “What kind of incident? What are you talking about?”
I didn’t see any alternative but to put it out there. “Maybe an incident in which…in which an older male might have…done something to Craig. Something sexual.” She stared at me. “The reason I ask,” I floundered, “is that sometimes, when that happens to a boy, after he grows up, he…might be inclined…”
Even if I could have put the rest of the sentence into words, I didn’t get the chance. With a low snarl, she flung herself at me, pruning shears and all. Luckily, she didn’t wield them point-first; instead, she swung them like a club or a baseball bat, and I was able to put up a hand in time to block the blow and grab the shears. We wrestled over them for a moment, but I was considerably stronger than she was, and it wasn’t hard to take them from her. When I did, she came at me with her fists, as she had done to Jess. I dropped the shears and grabbed her, spinning her around so her back was to me, and wrapped her in a bear hug, pinning her arms to her sides.
“Let me go!” she cried. “Let me go or I’ll scream. I’ll scream bloody murder, and they will haul you away in handcuffs.”
She had a point there. I could imagine the lead-in to the nightly newscast: “He’s already on trial for one murder. Did Dr. Bill Brockton try to commit another today?” I let her go, but as I did, I placed a foot on the pruning shears lest she grab them and use them more effectively this time. “Don’t you care who killed your son, Mrs. Willis?”
She glowered at me, her chest heaving, tears beginning to run down her face. “Of course I care,” she said, “but nobody else gives a good goddamn. You think I don’t know how the police feel about…people like Craig?”
It was an admission of sorts. “No matter what they think,” I said, “they’ll still try to solve his murder.”
“Bullshit,” she said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the cop that arrested him was the one that killed him.”
I was startled that she’d thought that through, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been. She’d undoubtedly spent far more time turning over the possibilities in her mind than Art and I had. “Who else could have?”
She gave me a look of undisguised contempt. “Gee, Mr. Fancy Ph.D., let’s think about that.” She shook her head. “It’s done. Nobody will ever be caught. Get the hell out of here and don’t come back. If I see you again, I’m calling 911. In fact, if you’re not gone in thirty seconds, I’m calling 911. Maybe even if you are.”
I bent down and picked up the pruning shears. Suddenly she looked frightened. With an underhanded toss, I lobbed them over the hedge and up near her front porch, just in case she was still inclined to take another run at me. Then I held up one hand and backed away, across the street, and got into the Taurus. I locked the doors first, then started the engine. As I eased away from the curb, I glanced back just in time to see Mrs. Willis hurling the pruning shears in my direction. They hit the trunk lid with a scraping clatter that I knew had left a nasty gouge. At least it’s a rental, I thought. Then I remembered that I had declined the supplemental insurance.
Once I was safely out of the neighborhood, I paged Art. He rang me right back. “Hey, how’d it go with Mrs. Willis?”
“Not so good,” I said.
“You mean she didn’t confess?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“What’s another way?”
“Let’s just say that if all you’ve got is a pair of pruning shears, everything looks like a hedge.”
“Oh, that good?”
“That good.”
“You lose any body parts?”
“No. Only the last of my dignity. You get a chance to talk to the guy that caught Craig Willis in the act?”
“Not yet. He’s kinda hard to reach.”
“Because?”
“Because he’s been in Iraq for the past four months. He’s in the Guard, and his unit got called up right after the Willis thing.”
“Damn. So I guess that clears him, huh?”
“See, I knew you had a knack for detective work,” Art said. “You got a Plan C?”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I don’t much like it. Tell me what you think.” I laid it out for him.
Art didn’t much like it either, but he agreed we needed to grit our teeth and give it a try at the end of the day.