Dean Koontz - Velocity

That trial, having concluded only two weeks before this pivotal night in Billy Wiles’s life, had resulted in conviction. The pundits predicted the boy would go free, but the detective in charge of the case had been diligent, accumulating a convincing mass of evidence, catching the perpetrator in lie after lie.

For the past two weeks, that indefatigable detective had been a media hero. He received lots of face time on TV. His name was better known than that of the mayor of Los Angeles.

With Billy’s admission, John Palmer does not see an opportunity to pursue the truth but instead sees an opportunity.

“Who did you shoot, son? Him or her?”

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“I s-shot him. I shot her. He beat her so bad with the wrench, I had to sshoot them both.”

As other sirens swell in the distance, Lieutenant Palmer leads Billy out of the kitchen, into the living room. He directs the boy to sit on the sofa. His question no longer is What happened here, son? His question now is,

“What have you done, boy? What have you done?”

For too long, young Billy Wiles does not hear the difference. Thus begins sixty hours of hell.

At fourteen, he cannot be made to stand trial as an adult. With the death penalty and life imprisonment off the table, the pressures of interrogation should be less than with an adult offender.

John Palmer, however, is determined to break Billy, to wring from him a confession that he himself beat his mother with the lug wrench, shot his father when his father tried to protect her, then finished her, too, with a bullet. Because the punishment for juvenile offenders is so much less severe than for adults, the system sometimes guards their rights less assiduously than it should. For one thing, if the suspect does not know he should demand an attorney, he might not be informed of that right on as timely a basis as would be ideal.

If the suspect’s lack of resources requires a public defender, there is always the chance that the one assigned will be feckless. Or foolish. Or badly hung over.

Not every lawyer is as noble as those who champion the oppressed in TV

dramas, just as the oppressed themselves are seldom as noble in real life. An experienced officer like John Palmer, with the cooperation of selected superiors, guided by reckless ambition and willing to put his career at risk, has a sleeve full of tricks to keep a suspect away from legal counsel and available for unrestricted interrogation in the hours immediately after taking him into custody.

One of the most effective of these ploys is to make Billy into a “busboy.”

A public defender arrives at the holding facility in Napa only to discover that because of limited cell space or for other bogus reasons, his client has been moved to the Calistoga substation. On arriving in Calistoga, he hears that a regrettable mistake has been made: The boy has actually been taken to St. Helena. In St. Helena, they send the attorney chasing back to Napa.

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Furthermore, while transporting a suspect, a vehicle sometimes has mechanical problems. An hour’s drive becomes three hours or four depending on the required repairs.

During these two and a half days, Billy passes through a blur of drab offices, interrogation rooms, and cells. Always, his emotions are raw, and his fears are as constant as his meals are irregular, but the worst moments occur in the patrol car, on the road.

Billy rides in back, behind the security barrier. His hands are cuffed, and a chain shackles his cuffs to a ring bolt in the floor.

There is a driver who never has a thing to say. In spite of regulations forbidding this arrangement, John Palmer shares the backseat with his suspect. The lieutenant is a big man, and his suspect is a fourteen-year-old boy. In these close quarters, the disparity in their sizes is of itself disturbing to Billy. In addition, Palmer is an expert at intimidation. Ceaseless talk and questions are punctuated only by accusing silences. By calculated looks, by carefully chosen words, by ominous mood shifts, he wears on the spirit as effectively as a power sander wears on wood.

The touching is the worst.

Palmer sits closer some times than others. Occasionally he sits as close as a boy might want to sit to a girl, his left side pressed to Billy’s right. He ruffles Billy’s hair with patently false affection. He rests one big hand on Billy’s shoulder, now on his knee, now on his thigh.

“Killing them isn’t a crime if you had a good reason, Billy. If your father molested you for years and your mother knew, no one could blame you.”

“My father never touched me like that. Why do you keep saying he did?”

“I’m not saying, Billy. I’m asking. You’ve nothing to be ashamed about if he’s been poking you since you were little. That makes you a victim, don’t you see? And even if you liked it—”

“I wouldn’t like it.”

“Even if you did like it, you’ve no reason to be ashamed.” The hand on the shoulder. “You’re still a victim.”

“I’m not. I wasn’t. Don’t say that.”

“Some men, they do awful things to defenseless boys, and some of the boys get to like it.” The hand on the thigh. “But that makes the boy no less innocent, Billy. The sweet boy is still innocent.”

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Billy almost wishes that Palmer would hit him. The touching, the gentle touching and the insinuation are worse than a blow because it seems that the fist might come anyway when the touching fails.

On more than one occasion, Billy nearly confesses just to escape the maddening rhythms of Lieutenant John Palmer’s voice, to be free from the touching.

He begins to wonder why… After he put an end to his mother’s suffering, why had he called the police instead of jamming the muzzle of the revolver in his mouth?

Billy is saved at last by the good work of the medical examiner and the CSI technicians, and by the second thoughts of other officers who have let Palmer whip the case as he wishes. The evidence indicts the father; none points to the son.

The only print on the revolver is one of Billy’s, but one clear fingerprint and a partial palm on the long handle of the polished-steel wrench belong to Billy’s father.

The killer swung the lug wrench with his left hand. Unlike his father, Billy is right-handed.

Billy’s clothes were marked by a small amount of blood but not a liberal spattering. A back-spray of blood stippled the sleeves of his father’s shirt. Clawing, she had tried to fend off her husband. His blood and skin, not Billy’s, were under her fingernails.

In time, two members of the department are forced to resign, and another is fired. When the smoke dissipates, Lieutenant John Palmer somehow remains standing without sear or singe.

Billy considers accusing the lieutenant, but fears testifying and, most of all, fears the consequences of not prevailing in court. Prudence suggests withdrawal.

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don’t expect much, enjoy what you have. Move on.

Amazingly, moving on eventually means moving in with Pearl Olsen, the widow of one deputy and the mother of another.

She makes the offer to rescue Billy from the limbo of child-service custody, and in their first meeting, he knows instinctively that she will always be no more and no less than she appears to be. Although he is only fourteen, he

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has learned that harmony between reality and appearance may be more rare than any child imagines, and is a quality he may hope to foster in himself.

Chapter 58

Parked in the bright lights of the truck stop, outside the diner, Billy Wiles ate Hershey’s, ate Planters, and brooded about Steve Zillis. The evidence against Zillis, while circumstantial, seemed to support suspicion far more than anything that John Palmer had used to justify targeting Billy.