C Box: Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

“Shoot him,” he said.

I pushed the gun harder into Henkel’s brow.

“No!” he cried, his eyes round.

“Then answer me straight,” Cody said. Cody even scared me.

“Okay,” said Henkel.

“You weren’t always a janitor, were you?”

“No.”

“What other jobs have you held?”

“A lot of ’em. I’m not very smart, I guess.” Although Cody was asking the questions, Henkel was answering them to me. Probably because despite my gun, Cody scared him more. “I do my best, but people just don’t like me. No one’s ever really liked me.”

Said Cody, “I can see why. Again, what jobs have you had in your life?”

Henkel’s eyes rolled up as if trying to remember. “Retail, mostly. Wal-Mart, Target, Pier One. I moved around a lot between New Mexico and Colorado.”

“You didn’t mention that one-hour photo place you used to work at,” Cody said. “You know, that one in Canon City, Colorado.”

“Oh, that one,” Henkel said, his face getting even whiter. Cody’d struck a nerve.

“Tell Mr. McGuane when you worked there.”

He thought for a second. “It was 2001.”

“Before everybody went digital,” Cody said. “Back at the end of the film-and-print days.”

“Yes. I don’t think that shop is even there anymore.”

“Royal Gorge is outside of Canon City, right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s quite a spectacular place, isn’t it?” Cody asked. “Lots of tourists go there to see it and walk across the footbridge and look down at the Arkansas River. There’s even a state park there, right?”

I tried not to look at Cody to ask him where the hell this was going.

Henkel paused, then said, “Yes.”

“In 2001, the caretaker of the state park brought in some film to have developed at your shop. Do you remember that?”

Henkel tried to swallow again but couldn’t.

“Could I have a glass of water?” he asked me.

“You can have a bullet in your head,” Cody said. “Again, do you remember when the caretaker of the state park brought some film in to you?”

“Yes.”

“He brought in lots of film to be developed, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not supposed to look at the prints that you develop, are you? And the way the equipment worked, there was no reason even to see them. The processor was automatic, right? The only time you even touched the prints was when you put them in the envelope for the customer, right?”

“That was the policy.”

“But in this case you looked, didn’t you, Wyatt?”

His voice was a croak. “I looked.” As he said it his eyes darted to Cody and back to me.

“What was on the prints, Wyatt?”

“Nature stuff, mostly. But there were a lot of pictures of children with their families. The families were camping or hiking.”

“Were photos of children pretty much all the customer took?”

“Yes.”

Cody shot me a look. I still didn’t know what the point was.

“And why did you run a second set of prints to keep for yourself?”

Henkel briefly closed his eyes.

“Wyatt?”

“There were four pictures I wanted to keep,” he said.

Cody leaned back and reached into his coat with his free hand and brought out a manila envelope. “Are these the four photos you kept, Wyatt?”

“You know they are.”

Cody handed the envelope to me.

Cody said, “Who has the originals and the negatives?”

“The customer.”

Cody smiled sarcastically. “And who is the customer, Wyatt?”

“Aubrey Coates. He was the park caretaker at the time.”

I felt an electric bolt shoot through my chest, and I almost pulled the trigger accidentally. Suddenly, it was as if all around me, for three weeks, there were dozens of sheets of clear plastic, each with a brush of color and several errant squiggles. Individually, none of the sheets made sense. But when they were placed one upon the other, a whole image emerged. It was as if everything we had learned and done over the last three weeks made horrifying sense.

I lowered the pistol and opened the envelope, knowing what I would find.

Brian was right. There were photos.

The first was of a young family of three hiking along a narrow trail. There was a rock wall behind them so it was obviously in a canyon-Royal Gorge Canyon. The photo was grainy, and there was a pine twig in the bottom corner of it, indicating to me that the shot was taken at a great distance, and the photographer was hiding in a stand of trees. The woman-plain, heavy, obviously pregnant-was in the lead. A boy of twelve or thirteen was last. It took me a moment to recognize him as a young Garrett. The man in the middle was John Moreland.

The second photo was slightly blurred, but it was obvious that Moreland was tugging on his wife’s arm, and she was reaching out wildly to steady herself. Garrett stood in sharp focus, looking on with what looked like intense interest.

In the third photo, Dorrie Pence Moreland, the ultradevout Catholic homely homebody who was a drag on her husband’s social and political climb and who was bringing another child into the world to compete with her monomaniacal and psychopathic firstborn son, could be seen cartwheeling through the sky, her long black hair flying behind her like flames.

In the fourth, Garrett prepared to deliver the coup de grâce with the large rock he held over his head to the broken body of his mother while his father looked on approvingly.

I went through the photos a second time, then a third.

“My God,” I said. “So Coates owns the judge.”

“That would be correct,” Cody said.

“Which is why he was bulletproof.”

“Bingo.”

“So he’s been blackmailing him all these years?”

Cody nodded his head and raised his Glock, pointing it at Wyatt Henkel’s head. “Sort of. Tell him, Wyatt.”

If possible, Henkel suddenly looked even smaller and more pathetic.

“It was me who blackmailed the judge,” Henkel said. “I told him I had the pictures. I put them on a copy machine and sent a copy to him to prove it. So for years he’s been paying up.”

Cody said, “Hence the vehicles, the large spread, the Rolex. But you lied to the judge, didn’t you, Wyatt? You told him you had the negatives.”

Henkel nodded.

Cody said, “So when Brian Eastman started putting word out among all of his acquaintances that he was searching the country for someone who had some kind of photos on Judge Moreland, you contacted the judge again, right?”

“Yes.”

“To tell him the price would be going up or you’d sell the photos to Brian, right?”

“Right.”

Strangely, Henkel was warming to the revelations. It was obvious he was proud of himself. I really did want to shoot him, but not before I’d heard everything.

Cody said to me, “I’m speculating now, but it’s speculation based on Henkel’s role in this. When I was investigating Coates, I always wondered why Coates quit working at state parks five years ago and switched exclusively to campgrounds on federal land. It was just one of those little things that stuck out and didn’t make sense to me. Now it makes sense. Coates’s job switch corresponds with when Moreland was named to the federal bench. Henkel here had the photos and wanted money from the judge-and got it. Coates didn’t want money-he needed security. Coates knew someday he’d get caught so he contacted Moreland and told him about his hole card. He wanted to make sure he was tried in a federal courtroom because he knew who the judge would be. Another thing: There are nine district court judges. Coates must have somehow made it known to Moreland that someday he might show up in his courtroom and that he’d need a favor. So how did Moreland make sure he’d be the presiding judge if this unknown blackmailer got hauled before him? He worked the system from the inside, and made sure he’d be the judge for serious crimes committed on federal land. Moreland wanted to be in control of the situation for his own sake in case the second blackmailer ever needed that favor. That’s why Coates was bulletproof.”