“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
Charlie wasn’t finished. “You lied about Kelly’s age.”
“Sixteen, seventeen.” She could picture Huck shaking his head. “She’s in the eleventh grade. What difference does it make?”
“She’s eighteen, and the difference is the death penalty.”
He gasped. There was no other word for it—the sudden, quick inhalation that came from absolute shock.
Charlie waited for him to speak. She checked the bars on the phone. “Hello?”
He cleared his throat. “I need a minute.”
Charlie needed a minute, too. She was missing something big. Why had Huck been interviewed for four hours? The average interrogation lasted somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Charlie’s had topped out at around forty-five minutes. The entirety of her and Huck’s involvement with the crime had been less than ten minutes. Why had Delia Wofford brought in the FBI to play good cop/bad cop with Huck? He was hardly a hostile witness. He had been shot in the arm. But he’d said he was interrogated before he went to the hospital. Delia Wofford wasn’t the kind of cop who didn’t follow procedure. The FBI sure as shit didn’t mess around.
So why had they kept their star witness at the police station for four hours? That wasn’t how you treated a witness. That was how you treated a suspect who wasn’t playing ball.
“Okay, I’m back,” Huck said. “Kelly’s—what are they calling it now? Remedial? Intellectually handicapped? She’s in basic classes. She can’t retain concepts.”
“The law would call it diminished capacity, as in she’s too incapable to form the mental state required for a crime, but that’s a very hard argument to make,” Charlie told him. “There are very different priorities between a government-run school system and a government-run murder prosecution. One is trying to help her and the other is trying to kill her.”
He was so quiet that all she could hear was his breathing.
Charlie asked, “Did the two agents, Wofford and Avery, talk to you for four hours straight, or was there time in between?”
“What?” He seemed thrown by the question. “Yeah, one of them was always in the room. And your husband sometimes. And that guy, what’s his name? He wears those shiny suits?”
“Ken Coin. He’s the district attorney.” Charlie shifted tactics. “Was Kelly bullied?”
“Not in my classroom.” He added, “Off-campus, social media, we can’t regulate that.”
“So you’re saying she was bullied?”
“I’m saying she was different, and that’s never a good thing when you’re a kid.”
“You were Kelly’s teacher. Why didn’t you know that she was held back a grade?”
“I’ve got over a hundred twenty kids a year every year. I don’t look back at their files unless they give me a reason.”
“Being slow isn’t a reason?”
“A lot of my kids are slow. She was a solid C student. She never got in trouble.” Charlie could hear a tapping noise, a pen hitting the edge of a table. Huck said, “Look, Kelly’s a good kid. Not smart, but sweet. She follows whatever is in front of her. She doesn’t do things like today. That’s not her.”
“Were you intimate with her?”
“What the hell does—”
“Screwing. Fucking. You know what I mean.”
“Of course not.” He sounded disgusted. “She was one of my kids. Christ.”
“Was anyone else having sex with her?”
“No. I would’ve reported it.”
“Mr. Pinkman?”
“Don’t even—”
“Another student at school?”
“How should I—”
“What happened to the revolver?”
If she hadn’t been listening for it, she would’ve missed the slight catch in his breath.
And then he said, “What revolver?”
Charlie shook her head, silently berating herself for missing the obvious.
During her own interview with Delia Wofford, she had been too disoriented to put it together, but now Charlie could see that the woman had practically drawn her a picture. You didn’t see Mr. Huckabee hand the revolver to anyone? Did you see him put it anywhere on his person? On the ground?
Charlie asked Huck, “What did you do with it?”
He paused again because that’s what he did when he was lying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is that how you answered the two agents?”
“I told them what I told you. I don’t know. A lot was going on.”
Charlie could only shake her head at his stupidity. “Did Kelly say something to you in the hall?”
“Not that I heard.” He paused for the billionth time. “Like I said, a lot was happening.”
The guy had been shot and barely grimaced. Fear had not dampened his recall.
She asked, “Whose side are you on?”
“There’s no such thing as sides. There’s just doing the right thing.”
“I hate to blow apart your philosophy, Horatio, but if there’s a right thing then there’s a wrong thing, and as someone with a law degree, I can tell you that stealing the murder weapon from a double homicide, then lying about it to an FBI agent, can land you on the wrong side of a prison cell for a hell of a long time.”
He kept up the silent act for two seconds, then said, “I don’t know if we were in it, but there’s a blind spot in the security cameras.”
“Stop talking.”
“But, if—”
“Shut up,” Charlie warned him. “I’m a witness. I can’t be your lawyer. What you tell me isn’t privileged.”
“Charlotte, I—”
She ended the call before he could dig the hole he was standing in any deeper.
5
Predictably, Rusty’s old Mercedes was not parked in the lot when Lenore pulled into her space behind the building. Charlie had watched her father leave the hospital live on television. He had been half an hour from the office, roughly the same distance away as the Wilson house, so he must have taken a detour.
Lenore told Ava, “Rusty’s on his way,” a lie she told multiple clients multiple times a day.
Ava didn’t seem interested in Rusty’s whereabouts. Her mouth gaped open as the security gate rolled closed behind them. The enclosed space, with its array of security lights and cameras, metal bars on the windows and twelve-foot-high razor-wired perimeter fence, looked like the staging area inside a SuperMax prison.
Over the years, Rusty had continued to receive death threats because he continued to represent outlaw bikers, drug gangs, and child killers. Add to the list the union organizations, undocumented workers and abortion clinics, and he had managed to piss off almost everyone in the state. Charlie’s private theory was that most of the death threats came courtesy of the Culpeppers. Only a fraction came from the fine, upstanding citizens who believed Rusty Quinn served at the right hand of Satan.
There was no telling what they would do when word spread that Rusty was representing a school shooter.
Lenore parked her Mazda beside Charlie’s Subaru. She turned around and looked at Ava Wilson. “I’ll show you a place where you can freshen yourself.”
“Do you got a TV?” Ava asked.
Charlie said, “Maybe it’s best not to—”
“I wanna watch.”
Charlie couldn’t deny a grown woman TV privileges. She got out of the car and opened the door for Ava. The mother didn’t move at first. She stared at the back of the seat in front of her, hands resting on her knees.
Ava said, “This is real, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It is.”
The woman turned slowly. Her legs looked like two twigs underneath the pajama pants. Her skin was so pale as to be almost transparent in the harsh daylight.
Lenore shut the driver’s side door quietly, but the look on her face said she wanted to slam it off the car. She had been pissed off at Charlie from t
he moment she’d spotted her in the front bedroom of the Wilson house. But for Ava Wilson, she would’ve taken off Charlie’s head and thrown it out the window on the drive back.
Lenore mumbled, “This isn’t finished.”
“Super!” Charlie smiled brightly, because why not pour more fuel onto the fire? There was nothing Lenore could say about Charlie’s foolish actions that Charlie had not already said to herself. If there was one thing she excelled at, it was being her own inner mean girl.
She handed Ava Wilson the plastic bag of clothes so she could look for her keys.
“I’ve got it.” Lenore unlocked the steel security screen and accordioned it back. The heavy metal door required a code and another key to engage the bar lock that went straight across the inside of the door and bolted into either side of the steel jamb. Lenore had to put some muscle into turning the latch. There was a deep cha-chunk before she could open the door.
Ava asked, “Y’all keep money in here or something?”
Charlie shivered at the question. She let Lenore and Ava enter first.
The familiar odor of cigarettes managed to make its way into Charlie’s broken nose. She had banned Rusty from smoking in the building, but the order had come thirty years too late. He brought the stink in with him like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comics. No matter how many times she cleaned or painted the walls or even replaced the carpet, the odor lingered.
“This way.” Lenore gave Charlie another sharp look before escorting Ava to the reception area, a depressingly dark room with a metal roller shade that blocked the view to the street.
Charlie headed toward her office. Her first priority was to call her father and tell him to get his ass down here. Ava Wilson shouldn’t be relegated to sitting on their lumpy couch, getting all of her information about her daughter from cable news.
Just in case, Charlie took the long way by Rusty’s office to make sure he hadn’t parked in the front. The white paint on his door had bled yellow from nicotine. Stains radiated into the Sheetrock and clouded the ceiling. Even the knob had a film around it. She pulled down the sleeve of her shirt to cover her hand and made sure the door was locked.
He wasn’t there.
Charlie let out a long breath as she walked toward her office. She had purposefully staked her claim on the opposite side of the building, which in its previous life had housed the back offices of a chain of stationery supply stores. The architecture of the one-story structure was similar in higgledy-pigglediness to the farmhouse. She shared the reception area with her father, but her practice was completely separate from his. Other lawyers came and went, renting space by the month. UGA, Georgia State, Morehouse and Emory sporadically sent interns who needed desks and phones. Rusty’s investigator, Jimmy Jack Little, had set up shop in a former supply closet. As far as Charlie could tell, Jimmy Jack used it to store his files, possibly hoping that the police would think twice before raiding an office inside a building filled with lawyers.
The carpet was thicker, the décor nicer, on Charlie’s side. Rusty had hung a sign over her door that read “Dewey, Pleadem & Howe,” a joke on the fact that she kept most of her clients out of the courtroom. Charlie didn’t mind arguing a case, but the majority of her clients were too poor to afford a trial, and too familiar with the Pikeville judges to waste their time fighting the system.
Rusty, on the other hand, would argue a parking ticket in front of the United States Supreme Court if they’d let him get that far.
Charlie searched her purse for her office keys. The bag slipped off her shoulder. The mouth gaped open. Kelly Wilson’s yearbook had a cartoon General Lee on the front because the school mascot was the Rebel.
Defense counsel who possesses a physical item under circumstances implicating a client in criminal conduct should disclose the location of or should deliver that item to law enforcement authorities.
It wasn’t lost on Charlie that she had lectured Huck about concealing evidence while she had Kelly Wilson’s yearbook tucked under her arm.
Though, arguably, Charlie was caught in the legal equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat. She wouldn’t know if there was evidence inside the yearbook until she opened the yearbook. She looked for her keys again. The easiest thing to do was to dump the book onto Rusty’s desk and let him deal with it.
“Let’s go.” Lenore was back, and clearly ready to say her piece.
Charlie indicated the bathroom across the hall. She couldn’t do this on a full bladder.
Lenore followed her inside and shut the door. “Half of me wonders if it’s even worth laying into you, because you’re too dumb to know how stupid you are.”
“Please listen to that half.”
Lenore jabbed her finger at Charlie. “Don’t give me your smart mouth.”
A cornucopia of smartass responses filled her head, but Charlie held back. She unbuttoned her jeans and sat on the toilet. Lenore had bathed Charlie when she was too grief-stricken to take care of herself. She could watch her pee.
“You never think, Charlotte. You just do.” Lenore paced the tight room.
“You’re right,” Charlie said. “And I know you’re right, just like I know you can’t make me feel any worse than I already do.”
“You’re not getting out of it that easy.”
“Does this look easy?” Charlie held her arms out wide to show off the damage. “I got caught up in a war zone this morning. I antagonized a cop into making this happen.” She indicated her face. “I humiliated my husband. Again. I fucked a guy who is either a martyr, a pedophile or a psychopath. I broke down in front of you. And you don’t even want to know what I was doing when the SWAT team came in. I mean, seriously, you do not want to know because you need plausible deniability.”
Lenore’s nostrils flared. “I saw their guns pointed at your chest, Charlotte. Six men, all with their rifles up, all a trigger’s width from murdering you while I stood outside wringing my hands like a helpless old woman.”
Charlie realized that Lenore wasn’t angry. She was frightened.
“What on earth were you thinking?” Lenore demanded. “Why would you risk your life like that? What was so important?”
“Nothing was that important.” Charlie’s shame was amplified by the sight of the tears rolling down Lenore’s face. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have done that. Any of it. I’m an idiot and a fool.”
“You sure as hell are.” Lenore grabbed the toilet paper and rolled out enough to blow her nose.
“Please yell at me,” Charlie begged. “I can’t take it when you’re upset.”
Lenore looked away, and Charlie wanted to disappear into a pool of self-hate. How many times had she had this same discussion with Ben? The time at the grocery store that Charlie had shoved a man who’d slapped his wife. The time she’d almost got clipped by a car trying to help a stranded motorist. Antagonizing the Culpeppers when she saw them downtown. Going to the Holler during the middle of the night. Spending her days defending sleazy meth heads and violent felons. Ben claimed that Charlie would sprint head-first into a buzz saw if given the right set of circumstances.
Lenore said, “We can’t both cry.”
“I’m not crying,” Charlie lied.
Lenore handed her the toilet-paper roll. “Why do you think the guy’s a psychopath?”
“I can’t tell you.” Charlie buttoned her jeans, then went to the sink to wash her hands.
“Do I need to worry about you going back to before?”
Charlie didn’t want to think about before. “There’s a blind spot in the security cameras.”
“Did Ben tell you that?”
“You know Ben and I don’t talk about cases.” Charlie cleaned under her arms with a wet paper towel. “The psychopath has my phone. I need to get it turned off and replaced with a new one. I missed two hearings today.”
“The courthouse locked down the minute news broke about the shooting.”
Charlie remembered this was procedure. There had been a f
alse alarm once before. Like Ava Wilson, she was having a hard time believing that any of this was real.
Lenore said, “There’s two sandwiches in a Tupperware bowl on your desk. I’ll go to the phone store for you if you eat them.”
“Deal,” Charlie agreed. “Listen, I’m sorry about today. I’ll try to be better.”
Lenore rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”
Charlie waited until the door was closed to finish her whore’s bath. She studied her face in the mirror as she cleaned herself. She was looking worse by the hour. There were two bruises, one under each eye, that made her look like a domestic violence victim. The bridge of her nose was dark red and had a bump on top of the other bump from the last time her nose had been broken.
She told her reflection, “You’re going to stop being an idiot.”
Her reflection looked as dubious as Lenore.
Charlie went back to her office. She dumped her purse on the floor to find her keys. Then she had to figure out how to shove everything back in. Then she realized that Lenore had already unlocked the door because Lenore was always two steps ahead of her. Charlie dropped her purse on the couch beside the door. She turned on the lights. Her desk. Her computer. Her chair. It felt good to be among familiar things. The office wasn’t her home, but she spent more time here, especially since Ben had moved out, so it was the next best thing.
She crammed down one of the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Lenore had left on the desk. She skimmed her inbox on the computer and answered the emails asking if she was okay. Charlie should’ve listened to her voicemail, called her clients, and checked with the court to see when her hearings would be rescheduled, but she was too jittery to concentrate.
Huck had all but admitted to taking the murder weapon from the scene.
Why?
Actually, the better question was how?
A revolver was not a small thing, and considering it was the murder weapon, the police would have been searching for it almost immediately. How did Huck sneak it out of the building? In his pants? Did he slip it into an unwitting paramedic’s bag? Charlie supposed the Pikeville police had given Huck a wide berth. You didn’t frisk an innocent civilian you’d accidentally shot. Huck had also erased the video that Charlie had taken, proving he was firmly on their side—inasmuch as Mr. Huckleberry believed in sides.