Jeffery Deaver - Twisted - The Collected Stories of Jeffery Deaver

All right, let’s figure it out, she thought. Let’s say Lawrence and the mugger are in this together. Maybe the mugger’s a friend of his. They steal Stan’s gun. I stop in Dunning for coffee and gas. They could’ve followed me and found out I stop there every night. They make it look like it’s a mugging, I sleep with Lawrence...

But why?

What’s he up to? Who is he?

Just then the car that had been speeding toward the hotel skidded to a stop nearby. It was a golden-brown Lincoln.

Lawrence leapt out, leaving the door open, and ran in panic toward the doorway of room 103.

“No, no! My wife...”

A cop restrained him and pulled him back from the door. He was sobbing. “I came as soon as you called! I can’t believe it! No, no, no...”

The cop’s arm slipped around the shoulders of the fancy, navy blue trench coat and he led the sobbing man back to the detectives, who gazed at him with sympathy. The bald one asked softly, “Your name’s Samples?”

“That’s right,” he said, struggling to control his sorrow. “Lawrence Samples.” Breathlessly, he asked, “You mean... she was cheating on me? My wife was cheating on me? And somebody’s killed her?”

You’ve got to make it look like it’s more likely somebody else committed the crime than you, even if you have a motive...

And for an instant, unseen by the officers, Lawrence cast a glance toward Carolyn, a look that could only be described as amused. Then, as she began screaming at him in fury, slamming her shackled wrists against the window, his eyes went dull again and he covered them with shaking hands. “Oh, Lorrie... Lorrie... I just don’t believe it! No, no, no...”

“I’d help you if I could,” the boy said. “But I can’t.”

“Can’t, hmm?” Boz asked, standing over him. Peering down at the top of the brown cowlick. “ Can’t? Or don’t wanta?”

His partner, Ed, said, “Yup, he knows something.”

“Don’t doubt it,” Boz added, hooking his thumb around his $79.99 police baton, genuine imported and gleaming black.

“No, Boz. I don’t. Really. Come on.”

An engine-block-hot dusk. It was August in the Shenandoah Valley and the broad river rolling by outside the window of the sheriff’s department interview room didn’t do anything to take the edge off the temperature. Other towns, the heat had the locals cutting up and cutting loose. But Caldon, Virginia, about ten miles from Luray — yeah, that’s the one, home of the cave — was a small place, population 8,400. Heat this bad usually sent most of the bikers, trash and teens home to their bungalows and trailers, where they stared, groggy from joints or Bud, at HBO or ESPN (satellite dishes being significant anticrime measures out here).

But tonight was different. The deputies had been yanked from their own stupors by the town’s first armed robbery/shooting in four years — an honest-to-God armored-car stickup, no less. Sheriff Elm Tappin was grudgingly en route back from a fishing trip in North Carolina and FBI agents from D.C. were due later tonight as well.

Which wasn’t going to stop these two from wrapping up the case themselves. They had a suspect in the lockup and, here in front of them, an eyewitness. Reluctant though he was.

Ed sat down across from Nate Spoda. They called him boy behind his back, but he wasn’t a boy at all. He was in his mid-twenties and only three years younger than the deputies themselves. They’d all been at Nathaniel Hawthorne High together for a year, Nate a freshman, the other two seniors. Nate was still skinny as a post, had eyes darty and sunken as any serial killer’s and was known throughout town for being as ooky now as he was in high school.

“Now, Nate,” Ed said kindly, “we know you saw something. ”

“Come on,” the boy said in a whiny voice, fingers drumming uneasily on his bony knee. “I didn’t. Really.”

Boz, the fat cop, the breathless cop, the sweaty cop, took over when his partner glanced at him. “Nate, that just don’t jibe with what we know. You sit on your front porch and you spend hours and hours and hours not doing diddly. Just sitting there, watching the river.” He paused, wiped his forehead. “Why d’you do that?” he asked curiously.

“I don’t know.”

Though everybody in town knew the answer. Which was that when Nate was in junior high, his parents had drowned in a boating accident on the very river the boy would gaze out at all day long while he read books and magazines (Frances at the post office said he subscribed to some “excruciatingly” odd mags, about which she couldn’t say more, being a federal employee and all) and listened to some sick music, which he played too loud. After his parents’ deaths an uncle had come to stay with the boy — a slimy old guy from West Virginia no less (well, the whole town had an opinion on that living arrangement). He’d seen the boy through high school and when Nate hit eighteen, off the kid went to college. Four years later Ed and Boz had served their stint in the service, becoming all they could be, and were back home. And who showed up that June, surprising them and the rest of the town? Yep, Nate. He booted his uncle back west and took to living by himself in that dark, spooky house overlooking the river, surviving, they guessed, on his folks’ savings account (nobody in Caldon ever amassed anything that lived up to the word inheritance ).

The deputies hadn’t liked Nate in high school. Not the way he dressed or the way he walked or the way he didn’t comb his hair (which was too damn long, scary long). They didn’t like the way he talked to the other kids, in a sick whisper. Didn’t like the way he talked to girls, not healthy ways, not joking or gossiping, but just talking soft, in that weird way that kind of hypnotized them. He’d been in French Club. He’d been in Computer Club. Chess Club, for Christ’s sake. Of course he didn’t go out for a single sport, and just think about all those times in class when nobody could answer Mrs. Hard-On’s question and Nate — the school’d advanced the nerd bone-whacker a couple years — would sashay up to the board to write the right answer in his fag handwriting, getting chalk dust all over himself. Then just turn back to the class and everybody’d stop snickering, ’cause of his scary eyes. Got picked on some, sure. Got his Keds boloed over the high-tension wires. But who didn’t? Besides, he asked for it. Sitting on his porch, reading books (probably porn) and listening to this eerie music (probably satanic, another deputy had suggested)... Well, sir, he was simply unnatural.

And speaking of natural: Every time a report of a sex crime came in, Boz and Ed thought of Nate. They’d never been able to pin anything on him but he’d disappear for long periods of time and the deputies were pretty sure he’d vanish into the woods and fields around Luray to peer through girls’ bedroom windows (or more likely boys’). They knew Nate was a voyeur; he had a telescope on his porch, next to the rocker he always sat in — his mother’s chair (and, yep, the whole town had an opinion about that too). Unnatural. Yep, that was the word.

So the Caldon Sheriff’s Department deputies — Ed and Boz at least — never missed a chance to do their part to, well, set Nate straight. Just like they’d done in high school. They’d see him buying groceries and they’d smile and say, “Need a hand?” Meaning: Why don’tcha get married, homo?

Or he’d be bicycling up Rayburn Hill and they’d come up behind him in their cruiser and hit the siren and shout over the loudspeaker, “On your left!” Which’d once scared him clean into some blackberry bushes.