No one moved.
No one spoke.
Charlie cupped her hands to her face. Blood poured from her nose like a faucet. She felt stunned. Greg looked stunned. He held up his hands as if to say he didn’t mean it. But the damage had already been done. Charlie staggered sideways. She tripped over her own feet. Greg reached out to catch her. He was too late.
The last thing she saw was the ceiling spinning over her head as she hit the ground.
3
Charlie sat on the floor of the interview room with her back wedged into the corner. She had no idea how much time had passed since she’d been hauled off to the police station. An hour at least. Her wrists were still handcuffed. Toilet paper was still shoved up her broken nose. Stitches prickled the back of her scalp. Her head was pounding. Her vision was blurry. Her stomach was churning. She had been photographed. She had been fingerprinted. She was still wearing the same clothes. Her jeans were dotted with dark red splotches. The same pattern riddled her Duke Blue Devils T-shirt. Her hands were still caked with dried blood, because the cell where they had let her use the toilet only had a trickle of cold, brown water coming out of the filthy sink faucet.
Twenty-eight years ago, she had begged the nurses at the hospital to let her take a bath. Gamma’s blood was seared to her skin. Everything was sticky. Charlie had not completely submerged herself in water since the red-brick house had burned down. She’d wanted to feel the warmth envelop her, to watch the blood and bone float away like a bad dream fading from her memory.
Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.
Charlie let out a slow breath. She rested the side of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes. She saw the dead little girl in the school hallway, the way her color had drained like winter, the way her hand had fallen from Charlie’s hand the same way that Gamma’s hand had fallen away.
The little girl would still be in the cold hallway at school—her body, at least, along with Mr. Pinkman’s. Both still dead. Both still exposed to one more final injustice. They would be left out in the open, uncovered, unprotected, while people traipsed back and forth around them. That was how homicides worked. No one moved anything, not even a child, not even a beloved coach, until every inch of the crime scene was photographed, cataloged, measured, diagrammed, investigated.
Charlie opened her eyes.
This was all such sad, familiar territory: the images she couldn’t get out of her head, the dark places that her brain kept going to over and over again like car wheels wearing down a gravel road.
She breathed through her mouth. Her nose had a painful pulse. The paramedic had said it wasn’t broken, but Charlie didn’t trust any of them. Even while her head was being sutured, the cops were scrambling to cover for each other, articulating their reports, all of them agreeing that Charlie had been hostile, that she had knocked herself against Greg’s elbow, that the phone had been broken when she accidentally stepped on it.
Huck’s phone.
Mr. Huckleberry had repeatedly made that point that the phone and its contents belonged to him. He’d even shown them the screen so that they could watch the video being deleted.
While it was happening, it had hurt too much to shake her head, but Charlie did so now. They had shot Huck, unprovoked, and he was taking up for them. She had seen this kind of behavior in almost every police force she had ever dealt with.
No matter what, these guys always, always covered for each other.
The door opened. Jonah came in. He carried two folding chairs, one in each hand. He winked at Charlie, because he liked her better now that she was in his custody. He’d been the same kind of sadist in high school. The uniform had only codified it.
“I want my father,” she said, the same thing she said every time someone entered the room.
Jonah winked again as he unfolded the chairs on either side of the table.
“I have a legal right to counsel.”
“I just talked to him on the phone.” This came not from Jonah, but from Ben Bernard, an assistant district attorney for the county. He barely glanced at Charlie as he tossed a folder onto the table and sat down. “Take the cuffs off her.”
Jonah asked, “You want me to hook her leash to the table?”
Ben smoothed down his tie. He looked up at the man. “I said to take those fucking handcuffs off my wife right now.”
Ben had raised his voice to say this, but he hadn’t yelled. He never yelled, at least not in the eighteen years that Charlie had known him.
Jonah swung his keys around his fingers, making it clear that he was going to do this in his own time, of his own volition. He roughly unlocked the cuffs and stripped them from Charlie’s wrists, but the joke was on him because she was so numb that she didn’t feel any of it.
Jonah slammed the door when he left the room.
Charlie listened to the slam echo off the concrete walls. She stayed seated on the floor. She waited for Ben to say something jokey, like nobody puts baby in a corner, but Ben had two homicide victims at the middle school, a suicidal teenage murderer in custody and his wife was sitting in a corner covered in blood, so instead she took consolation in the way he lifted his chin to indicate that she should sit in the chair across from him.
She asked, “Is Kelly all right?”
“She’s on suicide watch. Two female officers, around the clock.”
“She’s sixteen,” Charlie said, though they both knew that Kelly Wilson would be direct filed as an adult. The teenager’s only saving grace—literally—was that minors were no longer eligible for the death penalty. “If she asked for a parent, that can be construed as the equivalent of asking for a lawyer.”
“Depends on the judge.”
“You know Dad will get a change of venue.” Charlie knew her father was the only lawyer in town who would take the case.
The overhead light flashed off Ben’s glasses as he nodded toward the chair again.
Charlie pushed herself up against the wall. A wave of dizziness made her close her eyes.
Ben asked, “Do you need medical treatment?”
“Somebody already asked me that.” Charlie didn’t want to go to a hospital. She probably had a concussion. But she could still walk as long as she kept some part of her body in contact with something solid. “I’m fine.”
He said nothing, but the silent, “of course you’re fine, you’re always fine,” reverberated around the room.
“See?” She touched the wall with the tips of her fingers, an acrobat on a wire.
Ben didn’t look up. He adjusted his glasses. He opened the file folder in front of him. There was a single form inside. Charlie’s eyes wouldn’t focus to read the words, even when he began writing in his big, blocky letters.
She asked, “With what offense have I been charged?”
“Obstruction of justice.”
“That’s a handy catch-all.”
He kept writing. He kept not looking at her.
She asked, “You already saw what they did to me, didn’t you?”
The only sound Ben made was his pen scratching across the paper.
“That’s why you won’t look at me now, because you already looked at me through that.” She nodded toward the two-way mirror. “Who else is there? Coin?” District Attorney Ken Coin was Ben’s boss, an insufferable dickslap of a man who saw everything in black and white and, more recently, brown, because of the housing boom that had brought an influx of Mexican immigrants up from Atlanta.
Charlie watched the reflection of her raised hand in the mirror, her middle finger extending in a salute to DA Coin.
Ben said, “I’ve taken nine witness statements that said you were inconsolable at the scene, and in the course of being comforted by Officer Brenner, your nose met with his elbow.”
If he was going to talk to her like a lawyer, then she was going to be a lawyer. “Is that what the video on the phone showed, or do I need to get a subpoena for a forensic examination of any deleted files?”
/>
Ben’s shoulder went up in a shrug. “Do what you have to do.”
“All right.” Charlie braced her palms on the table so that she could sit. “Is this the part where you offer to drop the bogus obstruction charge if I don’t file an excessive force complaint?”
“I already dropped the bogus obstruction charge.” His pen moved down to the next line. “You can file as many complaints as you want.”
“All I want is an apology.”
She heard a sound behind the mirror, something close to a gasp. In the past twelve years, Charlie had filed two very successful lawsuits against the Pikeville Police force on behalf of her clients. Ken Coin had probably assumed she was sitting in here counting all of the money she was going to make off the city instead of grieving for the child who had died in her arms, or mourning the loss of the principal who had given her detention instead of kicking her out of school when they both knew that Charlie deserved it.
Ben kept his head bent down. He tapped his pen against the table. She tried not to think about Huck doing the same thing at his school desk.
He asked, “Are you sure?”
Charlie waved toward the mirror, hoping Coin was there. “If you guys could just admit when you did something wrong, then when you said that you did something right, people would believe you.”
Ben finally looked at her. His eyes tracked across her face, taking in the damage. She saw the fine lines around his mouth when he frowned, the deep furrow in his brow, and wondered if he had ever noticed the same signs of age in her face.
They had met in law school. He had moved to Pikeville in order to be with her. They had planned on spending the rest of their lives together.
She said, “Kelly Wilson has a right to—”
Ben held up his hand to stop her. “You know that I agree with everything you’re going to say.”
Charlie sat back in the chair. She had to remind herself that neither she nor Ben had ever bought into Rusty and Ken Coin’s “us against them” mentality.
She said, “I want a written apology from Greg Brenner. A real apology, not some bullshit, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ excuse like I’m a hysterical woman and he wasn’t acting like a God damn Brownshirt.”
Ben nodded. “Done.”
Charlie reached for the form. She grabbed the pen. The words were a blur, but she had read enough witness statements to know where you were supposed to sign your name. She scrawled her signature near the bottom, then slid the form back toward Ben. “I’ll trust you to keep your side of the bargain. Fill in the statement however you want.”
Ben stared down at the form. His fingers hovered at the edge. He wasn’t looking at her signature, but at the bloody brown fingerprints she’d left on the white paper.
Charlie blinked to clear her eyes. This was the closest they had come to touching each other in nine months.
“Okay.” He closed the folder. He made to stand.
“It was just the two of them?” Charlie asked. “Mr. Pink and the little—”
“Yes.” He hesitated before sitting back down in the chair. “One of the janitors locked down the cafeteria. The assistant principal stopped the buses at the street.”
Charlie did not want to think about the damage that Kelly Wilson could have done if she had started firing the gun a few seconds after the bell instead of before.
Ben said, “They all have to be interviewed. The kids. Teachers. Staff.”
Charlie knew the city wasn’t capable of coordinating so many interviews, let alone putting together such a large case on its own. The Pikeville Police Department had seventeen full-time officers. Ben was one of six lawyers in the district attorney’s office.
She asked, “Is Ken going to ask for help?”
“They’re already here,” Ben said. “Everybody just showed up. Troopers. State police. Sheriff’s office. We didn’t even have to call them.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.” He picked at the corner of the folder with his fingers. His lips twitched the way they always did when he chewed at the tip of his tongue. It was an old habit that wouldn’t die. Charlie had once seen his mother reach across the dinner table and slap his hand to make him stop.
She asked, “You saw the bodies?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Charlie knew that Ben had seen the crime scene. She could tell by the somber tone in his voice, the slump in his shoulders. Pikeville had grown over the last two decades, but it was still a small town, the kind of place where heroin was a much larger concern than homicide.
Ben said, “You know it takes time, but I told them to move the bodies as soon as possible.”
Charlie looked up at the ceiling to keep the tears in her eyes. He had awakened her dozens of times from her worst nightmare: a day in the life, Charlie and Rusty going about their mundane chores inside the old farmhouse, cooking meals and doing laundry and washing dishes while Gamma’s body rotted against the cabinets because the police had forgotten to take her away.
It was probably the piece of tooth Charlie had found in the back of the cabinet, because what else had they missed?
Ben said, “Your car is parked behind your office. They locked down the school. It’ll probably be closed for the rest of the week. There’s already a news van up from Atlanta.”
“Is that where Dad is, combing his hair?”
They both smiled a little, because they both knew that her father loved nothing more than to see himself on television.
Ben said, “He told you to hang tight. When I called him. That’s what Rusty said—‘Tell that girl to hang tight.’”
Which meant that Rusty wasn’t going to ride to her rescue. That he assumed his tough daughter could handle herself in a room full of Keystone Kops while he rushed to Kelly Wilson’s house and got her parents to sign his fee agreement.
When people talked about how much they hated lawyers, it was Rusty who came to mind.
Ben said, “I can have one of the squad cars take you to your office.”
“I’m not getting in a car with any of those assholes.”
Ben ran his fingers through his hair. He needed a trim. His shirt was wrinkled. His suit was missing a button. She wanted to think he was falling apart without her, but the truth was that he was always disheveled and Charlie was more likely to tease him about looking like a hipster hobo than to take out a needle and thread.
She said, “Kelly Wilson was in their custody. She wasn’t resisting. The moment they cuffed her, they were responsible for her safety.”
“Greg’s daughter goes to that school.”
“So does Kelly.” Charlie leaned closer. “We’re not living in Abu Ghraib, okay? Kelly Wilson has a constitutional right to due process under the law. It’s up to a judge and jury to decide, not a bunch of vigilante cops with hard-ons to beat down a teenage girl.”
“I get it. We all get it.” Ben thought she was grandstanding for the great Oz behind the mirror. “‘A just society is a lawful society. You can’t be a good guy if you act like a bad guy.’”
He was quoting Rusty.
She said, “They were going to beat the shit out of her. Or worse.”
“So you volunteered yourself instead?”
Charlie felt a burning sensation in her hands. Without thinking, she was scratching at the dried blood, rolling it into tiny balls. Her fingernails were ten black crescents.
She looked up at her husband. “You said you took nine witness statements?”
Ben gave a single, reluctant nod. He knew why she was asking the question.
Eight cops. Mrs. Pinkman wasn’t there when Charlie’s nose was broken, which meant that the ninth statement had come from Huck, which meant that Ben had already talked to him.
She asked, “Do you know?” That was the only thing that mattered between them right now, whether or not Ben knew why she had been at the school this morning. Because if Ben knew, then everyone else knew, which meant that Charlie had yet again found another uniq
uely cruel way to humiliate her husband.
“Ben?” she asked.
He ran his fingers through his hair. He smoothed down his tie. He had so many tells that they could never play cards together, not even Go Fish.
“Babe, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
There was a quick knock before the door opened. Charlie held out hope that it was her father, but an older black woman wearing a navy pantsuit and white blouse walked into the room. Her short black hair was tuffeted with white. She had a large, banged-up-looking purse on her arm that was almost as big as the one that Charlie carried to work. A laminated ID hung on a lanyard around her neck, but Charlie couldn’t read it.
The woman said, “I’m special agent in charge Delia Wofford with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. You’re Charlotte Quinn?” She reached out to shake Charlie’s hand, but changed her mind when she saw the dried blood. “Have you been photographed?”
Charlie nodded.
“For godsakes.” She opened her purse and pulled out a packet of Wet Wipes. “Use as many as you need. I can get more.”
Jonah was back with another chair. Delia pointed to the head of the table, indicating that’s where she wanted to sit. She asked Jonah, “Are you the jerk who wouldn’t let this woman clean herself up?”
Jonah didn’t know what to do with the question. He had probably never had to answer to any woman besides his mother, and that had been a long time ago.
“Close the door behind you.” Delia waved Jonah off as she sat down. “Ms. Quinn, we’ll get through this as quickly as possible. Do you mind if I record this?”
Charlie shook her head. “Knock yourself out.”
She tapped some buttons on her phone to activate the recorder, then unpacked her bag, tossing notepads and books and papers onto the table.
The concussion made it impossible for Charlie to read anything in front of her, so she opened up the pack of Wet Wipes and got to work. She scrubbed between her fingers first, dislodging specks of black that floated like ashes from a roaring fire. The blood had seared itself into the pores. Her hands looked like an old woman’s. She was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She wanted to go home. She wanted a hot bath. She wanted to think about what had happened today, to examine all the pieces, then gather them up, put them in a box and place it high on a shelf so that she never had to deal with it again.