Scott Pratt - In good faith

“In recovery. The nurse told me we can go back in about a half hour.”

“But she’s okay?”

“Outside of the fact that she has cancer.”

“How’s Lilly?”

“Not good.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me. I want to be in the recovery room when she wakes up.”

I hung up the phone and walked back over to the girl.

She looked up at me, and I noticed a tear running down her left cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I’d developed a keen intuition over more than a decade of practicing criminal defense law and listening to my own clients lie to me over and over again. Caroline jokingly referred to it as my “bullshit detector.” It wasn’t innate; it was something that I had developed through experience, but I’d learned to trust my ability to detect and sort through lies and to get to the heart of a matter very quickly. This girl gave me no indication that she was lying. Her voice was clear and steady, her manner calm and straightforward. The circumstances were certainly unusual, but I found myself believing her.

“Okay, Alisha,” I said, “if you really want to help me, this is what has to happen. I’m going to go up and talk to that officer for a few minutes. Then he’s going to come back down here and take a statement from you. He’s going to write down everything you say. In the statement, you’re going to tell him exactly what you know about the murders and the people you’ve mentioned. And more important, you’re going to tell him how you know these things. We need details. We need something concrete if we’re going to be able to get warrants and arrest these people. If what you say checks out, I’ll probably need you to testify in front of a grand jury. You may even end up testifying at trial. Do you understand?”

A feeling came over me that reminded me of the way I felt the night I went to the Beck murder scene, but it was different somehow. I felt as though I were experiencing something unnatural, perhaps even supernatural, but the sickening sense of being in the presence of evil was absent. I wanted to talk to this girl, to question her, and I could sense that she wanted to tell me what she knew, but I couldn’t stop envisioning Caroline lying in the recovery room, about to come out of the anesthesia-induced coma. Someone would have to break the news to her, and I wanted it to be me.

“I have to leave,” I said, “but I’m going to go talk to the agent, and he’ll be back down here in just a minute. Just sit tight. Won’t take but a second.”

I jogged back up the hill to where Fraley was standing.

“Well?” he said.

“Write these names down.” I opened my hand so he could see them.

“Who are they?”

“She says they’re the killers.”

“You’re shitting me. You wrote them on your hand?”

“I didn’t bring a notepad. Didn’t know I’d need one.”

“And I took you for a Boy Scout. At least you had a pen.” Fraley began copying the names down. “One of those names is familiar,” he said.

“How so?”

“I put a list together of kids Norman Brockwell had serious problems with before he retired. One of them, Boyer, is on your hand. What’s her name?” He nodded towards the river.

“Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Take a statement from her. Get everything you can. Names, addresses, ages, shit, you know the drill. All we can do is check out everything she says. And let’s make sure we check her out at the same time. I have to get back to the hospital.”

“Bad news?”

“You could say that. Go ahead, before she changes her mind. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”

I jogged back to my truck and pulled out of the lot. My cell phone rang less than a minute later. It was Fraley.

“She’s gone,” he said.

“What do you mean, gone?”

“I walked back down to the bench and she was gone. I don’t think she could have walked off without me seeing her, but she’s not here. She disappeared.”

As soon as I got back to the hospital, I ran down Caroline’s surgeon and talked to him for about ten minutes. One thing he said stuck in my mind: “The only way to deal with cancer is to kill it.” From there, I headed straight back to the recovery room.

Her eyes fluttered open when I rubbed my fingers across her forehead. Caroline was lying on a gurney behind a flimsy curtain in a gray room that smelled of anesthetic and floor cleaner. A monitor loomed above her, its digital display reflecting her blood pressure, heart rate, and body temperature. A plastic tube carried antinausea medicine from a bag on a hook into a vein in her forearm. The skin on her face was dry and splotched with red, and when I leaned down to kiss her on the cheek, I noticed a bitter smell coming from her mouth.

“Hey, sugar,” I said. “How do you feel?”

She looked up at me, and her eyes lit with a glint of recognition.

“My mouth tastes like a thousand elephants took a dump in it,” she said.

“Smells like it, too.”

She covered her mouth with the back of her hand self-consciously.

“Just kidding, baby,” I said. “Your breath smells fine.”

“Liar. Would you get me some water?”

I poured some water from a pitcher that was sitting on a table near the bed into a plastic cup and helped her drink. Her lips were dry and scaly.

“I’m freezing,” she whispered.

“Be right back,” I said. I went and found a nurse, who directed me to a large cabinet just down the hall. I grabbed a couple of thin blankets and went back to Caroline’s cubicle. I laid the blankets over her and tucked the sides snugly beneath her.

“Is it that bad?” she said after I moved back to the head of the bed.

“What do you mean?”

“I can tell by the look on your face. And the kids aren’t in here. If the news was good, they’d be here, too.”

“I just wanted to be alone with you for a minute,” I said.

“So you could break the bad news to me?”

“It could be worse. I think you’re going to make it.”

She grimaced and adjusted herself on the gurney. “Was there cancer in the node?”

“Yeah, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Did it spread to the skin above the tumor?”

“Yeah.”

“Shit.”

I squeezed her hand gently.

“So I’m going to lose my breast?”

“I don’t think you have much choice.”

“What do I need a breast for, right? We’re not going to have any more kids.”

“They’ll make you another one if you want them to. They do it all the time now.”

“When do I have to start the chemotherapy?”

“A couple of weeks. They want you to heal up from this for a little while first.”

“Will you love me when I’m bald?”

Caroline wasn’t particularly vain, but she loved her hair, and so did I. It was a reflection of her personality, beautiful but occasionally a bit on the unruly side. It was auburn and thick and curly and fell to the middle of her back. It turned a few shades lighter in the summer when she spent more time in the sun. Losing it was the side effect of chemotherapy that she dreaded the most.

“I’ll shave my head if you want,” I said. “We can be bald together.”

Two hours later, after I’d rolled my wife out of the surgery center in a wheelchair, helped her into the car and taken her home, gotten her settled into bed, and made sure Lilly and Jack knew what to do in case something went wrong, I drove back up to the TBI headquarters in Johnson City. Fraley’s office was buzzing. People were running in and out while Fraley alternately barked commands like a general and talked into the telephone. As I sat down across from him, he hung up the phone. He got up from behind the desk and walked over and closed the door.