Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

"Steve bought her."

Corde laughed in genuine surprise. "Steve Ribbon?"

"Surely did. Walked right into the dealership and drove out this morning."

"Hell you say. He was gonna drive that Dodge till it dropped." Corde looked at the shimmering chrome and metallic-flecked burgundy paint and he said to Lance Miller, "He's gone and set a bad precedent. Now everybody's gonna want their trucks with all cylinders running."

They entered the Sheriffs Department wing. Half the complement was out inspecting the sheriffs new wheels. Jim Slocum was looking at a handful of letters. Corde assumed they were more of the worthless confessions and tip letters that accompany any publicized investigation.

"Dodd, you can't keep doing this," Corde said to his prisoner.

"Doing what?" the man asked drowsily.

The man's Toyota pickup had sheared a leg off the Purina feed billboard on 116 and dropped a painted sixty-foot Hereford on her black-and-white rump. Miller took him into the lockup in the back of the office. When he returned Corde looked up from the arrest report. "Two point four. He's more than legally drunk. I do believe he's legally dead."

Miller said, "Well, he's legally barfing and he's got bits of windshield falling out of his skivvies. It's all over the floor."

Corde said, "Give him some paper towels and make him clean it up. Nobody should be drinking like that on a weekday morning."

"He'll lose his license this time," Miller said.

"Hardly matters," Corde answered. "That was his last truck."

Steve Ribbon appeared in the doorway and looked at Corde. "Talk to you for a minute, Bill."

Corde followed him into his office and the sheriff shut the door. Ribbon sat down and expanded his cheeks like a blowfish's body and started to bounce a Ticonderoga number two off the drum of his skin. Corde decided it might be a long conversation and sat down in the chair opposite the sheriffs desk.

"Bill…" The pencil stopped being a drumstick and became a Flash Gordon rocket crash-landing on the desk. "Damn this bureaucracy, Bill."

Corde waited.

"County and state and everybody."

"Okay, what's up, Steve?"

"I got a call from Ellison."

"Uh-huh."

"Bill, this is a damn difficult thing to say to you."

Corde laughed without humor. "Then spit it out fast."

Ribbon said, "The county's taking over the Gebben and Rossiter cases."

It took several seconds for the fire to burn across Corde's cheek. "The county."

"T.T.'s going to be heading her up."

"Well, Steve, legally, I suppose, the county can take over any murder investigation it wants to. But the point is it's never -"

"Bill."

"The point is it's never happened before. All right. I'm a little angry. That's what you're hearing. I don't think we've done anything to make Ellison feel this way."

"It was the situation at the dorm."

" What situation?"

Ribbon surveyed the rocket pencil's crash site. "They think you burned her letters and her diary, Bill."

Corde said nothing.

"They're thinking it was curious you flew to St Louis so fast after the killing. When you didn't find anything there you went to her dorm room and took them and burned it all up. Don't look that way, Bill. They think you were trying to cover up something between you and her. There'll be an inquest next month and you're off the case till it's over."

Wynton Kresge's great-great-great-grandfather, whose name was Charles Monroe, had been a slave, one of two, on a small farm near Fort Henry, Tennessee. The story goes that when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on New Year's Day in 1863 Monroe went to his master and said, "I am sorry to tell you this, Mr. Walker, but there is a new law that says you can't own slaves anymore, including us."

Walker said, They did that in Nashville?

Monroe answered, "No, sir, they did that in the capital, that is to say, Washington, B.C."

"Blazes," Walker said, and added that he'd have to look into it. Because both he and his wife were illiterate they had to ask someone to tell them more about this law. Their charming innocence was demonstrated by their choice of Abigail, the Walkers' second slave, to confirm the news. She did so by reading from an outspoken abolitionist penny sheet, which printed the text of the Proclamation while avoiding an inconvenient discussion of Lincoln's jurisdiction to free slaves located in the Confederacy.

"Damnation, he's right," Walker said. Then he wished Monroe luck and said by any chance you be interested in staying on for pay and Monroe said he'd be happy to and they negotiated a wage and room and board and Monroe kept on working on the Walker farm until he married Abigail. The Walkers gave them their wedding and Monroe named his first son Walker.

Family history.

And probably as embellished and half-true as any. But what Wynton Kresge thought was most interesting was how his children responded to the story. His eldest son, Darryl, eighteen, was horrified that he had been descended from slaves and never wanted the fact mentioned. Kresge felt bad the boy was so ashamed and grumbled that since he was black and had grown up in the United States and not on the Ivory Coast, how come that was such a shock?

Kresge's eldest daughter, Sephana, sixteen, on the other hand often talked about Monroe's plight. Which was how she referred to it. Plight. She hated Monroe for going back to work for Walker. She hated him for not putting a Minié ball in his master's head and torching the farm. Sephana had posters of Spike Lee and Wesley Snipes on her wall. She was beautiful. Kresge had put all serious talks with his daughter on hold for a few years.

Kresge's fifth child, named after the ancestor in question, was eight and he loved the story. Charles often wanted to act it out, insisting that Kresge take the role of Mr. Walker, while Charles did an impersonation of someone probably not unlike his namesake. Kresge wondered what his youngest son, Nelson, aged two, would say about their ancestor when he learned the story.

These were the thoughts that kept intruding into Kresge's mind as he sat trying to read in the massive bun-buster swivel chair. He felt all stifled and bouncy with nervous energy so he stood up and walked to the window in the far corner of his office. He reached out and rested his hands on the windowsill and did half a dozen lazy-boy push-ups then twelve more and twelve more after that until he smelled sweat through his shirt.

The window overlooked not the quad but a strip of commercial New Lebanon, storefronts and flashing trailer signs and a chunk of the satellite dish on the Tavern. He was anxious and his muscles quivered from using them the wrong way, in a soft office, in a soft university, a soft white university, where you had to keep your temper and give reasons and all the suspects were good students and were trying hard and were just out for some fooling 'round.

He sat on the windowsill, his huge shoulders slumped.

Thinking of his ancestor (perhaps because Walker had ultimately gotten his freedom) had put Wynton Kresge in mind of his essential problem – he was not what he wanted to be.

Which was a cop.

He would be a cop in Des Moines. He would be a cop in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. In Sandwich, Illinois. He'd be a cop taking tolls on the interstate if they let him spend a good portion of the time cruising around in a souped-up four-barrel Dodge, tagging speeders and hunting down child molesters and stopping DUIs.

What was ironic – no, what was bitterly mean – was that every day Kresge got résumés from cops all over the country. From real COPS! They wanted to work for him. Dear Sir: As a law enforcement officer of ten years standing, I am seeking a position in private security services and would like to be considered for any position you might have open …