C Box - Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

“Son of a bitch,” I said. Then: “Hold it. Why would Coates risk taking his film to Henkel? Wouldn’t Coates be worried that Henkel or somebody would see the shots of the murder?”

“I can answer that,” Henkel said. “I don’t think at the time he realized what he had. Those photos are blown up, that’s why they’re so grainy. In the originals, the people look like ants against that wall. I think he may have gotten a shot of her falling, but I don’t think he knew that the judge pushed her. I don’t think he knew what he had until he got home and looked closely at the prints.”

“And he never came after you?” I asked, skeptical.

He smiled for the first time. Rotten yellow stubs for teeth. “I was long gone if he ever did. I took those blowups and kept them with me when I moved from place to place, job to job. I think he tried to find me a couple of times. Once a man showed up at my store in Salida asking about me. I heard it from the other room and walked out the side door and never looked back. Another time I came home after work in Durango and saw some kids who looked like Mexican gangsters parked in front of my apartment building. I just drove right by and all the way to New Mexico.”

Cody nodded, as if another piece of the puzzle had just fit into place. “So when you left the message about Brian Eastman, did the judge call you back?”

“No. It was the judge’s son, Garrett. He’s the boy in the pictures-the one with the rock.”

“Right. And what did Garrett say?”

“You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” Henkel asked us.

Cody screwed up his face. “I’m at ninety percent yes. But there’s ten percent to play with, Wyatt. You need to convince me you’re worth that ten percent by telling me the truth.”

I could see Henkel thinking, running through the arguments. Finally, he said, “Garrett said they’d pay more but only if I called Eastman and told him I had the photos. I talked to him, and he agreed to meet me here in Denver. Garrett gave me the directions to give to Eastman, but he told me not to go. I guess Garrett met him instead.”

I shot him.

The explosion was deafening. I don’t know how Melissa slept through it, but she did. And Henkel was writhing on my couch, clutching his shoulder where the bullet hit, smearing bright red blood all over the fabric.

Cody wrenched the.45 out of my hand before I could cock it and finish Henkel off.

“For Christ’s sake, Jack!” Cody yelled. “We’re not done with him yet!”

“I am,” I said, but what I’d just done shocked me.

Henkel grunted and moaned.

Cody grabbed him by the hair and sat him back up.

“Talk fast,” Cody said, “and maybe you’ll get to live.”

“It hurts,” Henkel said through bared teeth.

“It’s gonna hurt a lot more!”

“I’m going to bleed to death.”

“Maybe.”

Cody leaned over him, his face inches away.

“As far as you knew, Coates never contacted the judge again until recently, correct?”

“As far as I know,” Henkel said.

Cody looked to me, nodding. “When Coates found out I was closing in on him, he must have contacted the judge and reminded him what he had all these years. Imagine Moreland’s surprise when he found out that one of the two people who knew about Dorrie’s murder was the very pedophile we were closing in on. Moreland had the search and arrest warrants on his desk, of course, so he tipped Coates we were coming. That’s how Coates knew to destroy everything ahead of time. And he made sure Coates walked.”

A million thoughts were going through my mind. I tried to put them into some kind of order.

“But Cody,” I said, “Coates walked because of what you did.”

I instantly regretted saying it, and Cody’s eyes flashed with pure rage.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But…”

Cody said, “Up until to night there has always been one thing about that trial I couldn’t figure out, and that was how Ludik knew everything there was to know about my movements after we arrested Coates. I mean, Ludik’s smart, but he’s not that smart. Somebody tipped him, and I think it was Moreland. He didn’t do it with a phone call or anything that obvious, I’m sure. He probably told some court gossip something like, ‘I just hope this is a solid case because there seem to be some real chain-of-evidence problems with it’- something like that. He probably heard about me through the DA or some blabbermouth cop. So Moreland put it out there so Ludik would hear it thirdhand and investigate. I’m not saying I didn’t fuck up, Jack-I did. But Moreland set the whole clusterfuck in motion-from tipping Coates to the search warrant to suggesting to the defense they take a second look at the chain-of-evidence list.”

It made sense.

Cody turned from me and shoved his Glock into Henkel’s nose. His voice was flat. “When I came to your house in New Mexico, you were packing up your car. Where were you planning to go?”

Henkel said, “We were going to do the exchange.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There was going to be an exchange. A big meeting, where everybody got what they wanted.”

Cody slapped him again, and Henkel winced. The cushions were getting dark with lost blood. I could smell it, and it was sharp and metallic and it made me want to gag.

Henkel was fading. His eyelids were starting to drop.

“WHAT EXCHANGE?” Cody screamed.

“The judge was going to get all the photos and the negatives from Coates and me once and for all,” Henkel said. “I was going to get my big payoff from the judge. We were going to meet at Coates’s place up in the mountains tomorrow morning.”

Cody said, “What was Coates going to get?”

Henkel coughed and nearly passed out. He said, “What he said he always wanted-his own little girl.”

And at that moment I realized who had sent the photo of Angelina to his associate Malcolm Harris in London- Aubrey Coates. I recalled Moreland taking that photo the morning they came to visit when he went upstairs with Melissa. It was the reason he was so insistent that he see her, and the reason he asked Melissa to turn her over for a better look.

THERE WAS SNOW FALLING on I-70 that night as we drove to Desolation Canyon. It had started snowing around midnight and gotten progressively worse. The only vehicles our four-car caravan encountered on the two-hour drive from Denver were snowplows with yellow wigwag lights flashing and the occasional four-wheel-drive pickup. My nerves were shot, and I had trouble keeping coffee down. Cody had made three calls after dropping Henkel in a heap outside the emergency-room doors of Denver General: Sanders, Morales, and Torkleson. Torkleson had responded with a crime scene tech and a team of four SWAT officers in heavy black clothing. Morales and Sanders showed up in Morales’s jacked-up four-wheel-drive pickup. Morales brought his wife along to watch over Melissa. Torkleson drove the lead vehicle, with Cody in the passenger seat and me in the backseat.

A panicked thought hit me. “What if they won’t do the exchange without Henkel?” Jesus, I thought again, I never should have shot him.

“Good thinking,” Torkleson said, and plucked his mike from the cradle on the dashboard. “I’m switching over to a nonpublic channel,” he said as he called the state highway patrol. Locating a trooper he knew, Torkleson persuaded the man to put out a false report about a fiery head-on collision near the New Mexico border, and to identify one of the fatalities as a man named Wyatt Henkel. When the trooper agreed, Torkleson said to Cody and me, “We know Coates listens to police scanners, and if he hears that report, I’m sure he’ll relay the info to the judge. That’ll explain why he isn’t there.”