Joel Goldman - The last witness

"You are too good for words and you are my hero. So how did you lose her?"

"I was following her from a distance, about half a block, with a few cars in between us. I was in an intersection when one of the cars in front of me stopped suddenly and we had a chain-reaction collision. My new truck got sandwiched, and then I got T-boned by a car coming through the intersection."

"Are you all right?"

"I'm all right but we're fucked. Amy's in the wind, man."

Mason had brought Rachel's newspaper clippings with him. He fanned out the articles on the passenger seat, looking for the one he'd scanned a few hours ago without paying any real attention to it.

"Maybe not. I'll call you later."

The Jeep's heater couldn't keep up with the cold, and Mason's breath crystallized and evaporated in quick gray puffs as he studied the article. It was a human-interest piece on Memorial Day observances that featured a picture of Amy and Cheryl visiting their parents' graves at Forest Park Cemetery. The accompanying story recounted that Cheryl had suffered brain damage in a fall at home, that their father had been killed in an accidental shooting, and that their mother had passed away a short time later.

Amy was quoted as saying that they always visited their parents' graves on Memorial Day. She had added that they also visited before going away for a long trip, in keeping with a tradition started by Cheryl's guardian, Jack Cullan.

Mason couldn't imagine Cullan as a guardian of anything except a junkyard where he dumped people after he had used them up like rusted-out, stripped-down cars sitting up on blocks, their guts scattered to the four corners. He also couldn't picture Cullan taking the time to honor the dead, with the obvious exception of Tom Pendergast. Mason hoped that Amy had kept alive Cullan's curious tradition of visiting the dead before hitting the road.

The black wrought-iron gate that barred access to Forest Park Cemetery after dark hung open, tapping against a stone wall with each gust of wind when Mason pulled up to the entrance. His headlights shot bright streamers into the cemetery, which spread out like buckshot before disappearing in the distance. Mason blocked the entrance with his jeep and got out.

The padlock for the gate hung from a chain, smashed and broken, the scratches fresh. There were also fresh scrapes on the rails of the gate, as if the assailant hadn't been able to stop after simply breaking the lock. A woman's white cotton glove lay in the snow at the foot of the gate, stained with fresh blood. He got the message. Whoever had opened the gate was out of control, and anyone that got in the way was going to take a beating.

The main road through the cemetery had been scraped, leaving a bottom layer of packed snow and ice harder than the underlying asphalt. Mason stayed on foot, following tire tracks illuminated by the moon. Snow had drifted against many of the tombstones, all but burying them. Some heirs and mourners had erected taller monuments to the deceased, capped by crosses that broke through the snow toward heaven.

Mason's footsteps slapped against the packed snow, a hollow sound in a silent theater, his shadow a poor accompaniment to a night owl passing overhead, its moonlit silhouette leading Mason deeper into the cemetery. A rasping, grating, fractious noise drew Mason off the main road along a winding path among the dead, until he crested a small rise and looked down on a pair of graves.

Amy White was bent over one of the headstones, her back to Mason, flailing at it with a hammer, cursing the rock, the ground, and the bones beneath. Her car was stuck nose down in the snow on an embankment opposite where Mason stood, its engine running, headlights glowing beneath the snow. A woman he assumed was Cheryl lay nearby on her back, making angel wings in the snow with her arms.

"Amy," Mason called to her.

She wheeled around, her face twisted with exhumed rage, her movement revealing Donald Ray White's name engraved on the stone. Her cold skin was paler than the moon, colored only by flecks of blood at the corners of her mouth.

Amy raised the hammer above her head as if to throw it at Mason, then spun back to her mad work, striking another blow against her dead father. The head of the hammer flew off, knifing into the snow as the handle shattered, spearing her hand with a jagged splinter. She clamped the splinter with her teeth, yanked it from her fleshy palm, and spat it out.

"I knew it would be you!" she screamed.

Mason walked down the hill toward Amy, keeping his hands in plain view in an effort to calm her down.

"How could you know it would be me?"

Amy gulped air and wiped her bloody hand against her jeans. "That day in the parking garage, when I asked for your help-I knew you wouldn't do it. I knew you thought I was just Billy Sunshine's toady. That I just wanted to protect his precious goddamn career."

"You're right. That is what I thought. But I was wrong, wasn't I? You wanted me to find your file, not the mayor's."

Amy heaved, gradually catching her breath, forcing her madness back into a genie's bottle.

"If you had told me where the mayor's file was, I would have found mine. Then everything would have been fine, except I knew you wouldn't do it. I knew you wouldn't let it rest until you found out."

"Until I found out that you killed your father, not Cheryl; that you used the same gun to kill Jack Cullan."

Amy threw her head back. "How did you know about the gun?"

"You told me that Cullan had wanted Blues's liquor license brought to him on the Friday night he and Blues argued at the bar but that you put him off until Monday. Howard Trimble told me that he gave you the file that same night. Yet you didn't give the file to Cullan, and I couldn't figure out why. Then Trimble told me what your father had done to Cheryl, how your mother had hired Cullan to defend your father and then to defend your sister."

"My father was a hell-born bastard that deserved to die!"

"That's probably what a jury would have said. Especially since the police reports showed that you shot him in self- defense. The cops found a gun in your father's hand. Your mother said that he'd fired a shot and threatened to kill all of you. Her mistake was calling Jack Cullan before she called the police."

Amy slumped to the ground, her back against her father's tombstone. "I don't remember very much after I shot him. My mother and I were screaming. We didn't know what to do."

"Cullan must have convinced your mother that the only way to save you was to blame Cheryl since she would never be prosecuted. Cullan had the juice to make everyone look the other way. Your mother even got to keep the guns. Instead of a fee, Cullan got you, just like a future draft choice."

"Jack Cullan was as rotten as my father. When he called me that night, I did what he told me, but I couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't stand that he was going to ruin someone else. I had found the gun in my mother's things when she died. I took it with me to Jack's house. I was going to make him stop."

"What did Cullan say?"

Amy pawed the snow at her sides as her face slackened into a dull, exhausted gaze. "He laughed at me and told me to give him the file. I took the gun out and he kept laughing, so I shot him. Then I turned off the heat, opened the windows, and went home."

Mason studied her, searched her suddenly detached face for a hint of meaning. She leaned against her father's headstone, reaching idly toward her mother's to dust the snow from the channels of her mother's engraved name.

"What did you do with the gun?"

Amy stood, brushed the snow from her jeans, and gave Mason a sly look. "I threw it into the Missouri River on New Year's Eve. By the way, you're quite the swimmer."