Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

The boy looked at him silently with an undiluted hate that made Corde want to weep. He motioned to Ebbans and the two of them stepped outside. "What happened, T.T.? Did you and Mahoney spook Jamie and follow him here?"

To his credit in Corde's mind Ebbans held the detective's eyes and answered honestly. "I'm sorry, Bill. That's what happened. He just asked to see him for a few minutes by himself and Steve told me to let him. I didn't know what he had in mind. I swear that."

Corde said, "You don't think Philip did it, do you?"

"Take a look at what we found." Ebbans led him to the squad car. Inside was a foot-high stack of porn magazines and violent comic books, also sketchbooks and notebooks. Corde flipped through the crudely drawn pictures of spaceships and monsters, montages of photos cut out of the school yearbook: girls imprisoned in towers and dungeons, chained to walls while snake creatures circled around them. Much of the material had the Naryan insignia hand-printed on it.

Corde thought of the picture of Sarah, her skirt high over her thighs.

"He had this incendiary thing hooked up. We opened the drawer where he'd hid all this stuff and it started to set fire to the file cabinet. It blew a fuse before it did any damage. Lance went through the backyard. In the barbecue he found some scraps of Jockey shorts the kid'd tried to burn." Ebbans touched a small plastic bag. "They were stained and it could be semen. Oh, and we also found some pictures of a naked girl. Polaroids."

Polaroids.

"Jennie?"

"Can't tell. It's a girl's breasts."

"It's not…" Corde dodged Ebbans's eyes. "Not a younger girl, is it?"

Ebbans said, "Not a little girl, no." He continued. "And I found a pair of muddy boots. I'm doing casts."

From the porch Slocum offered, "It all fits the profile. The smut collection, the home situation, everything."

Corde ignored this and said to Ebbans, "You didn't question him by himself, did you? He's got to have his parents present."

"No. I didn't question him at all. But I'll tell you, his father's not going to be much help to the kid. He's the one sent us out to the barbecue. Told us he saw Philip burning something there the night after the first killing."

Corde stared at the pile in the back seat of the car. In the center of Corde's bulletin board was a sign that he'd sent off for from National Law Enforcement Monthly a couple of years ago. The brittle yellow slip of glossy paper read: Physical evidence is the cornerstone of a case. He was looking at physical evidence now. Physical evidence that could put two boys in prison for forty years. And one of them was his son.

Ribbon and Ellison arrived in one of the county's fancy Furies. The slogan on the side said, If you drink, do us all a favor. Don't drive. Ebbans told them what they'd found.

Inside Halpern was leaning over his son, who stared straight ahead. "What the hell was going through your mind?" The boy's eyes were glazed. He didn't speak. His face wasn't particularly sad or frightened. He seemed to be possessed.

Philip played at the Corde house once or twice a week. But was this the boy who'd taken the pictures of Sarah? Who had put the threatening newspaper article on the rosebush? And in Diane's diaphragm case?

Was this the boy who murdered Jennie Gebben and Emily Rossiter?

He looked at Philip's round, soft face, smudged with dirt or chocolate, a face that did not appear so much guilty as bewildered.

Corde said, "Jamie, come here."

Slocum's head turned. "Say, Bill… maybe it's not such a good idea. Uh, talking to him in private, I mean."

Corde squashed his temper and ignored the deputy. He motioned to his son. The boy stood and followed him onto the porch. Ribbon stepped forward.

Corde stopped him with a look. "Leave me alone with my boy." The sheriff hesitated only a moment before stepping away.

Jamie leaned against the porch bannister and turned to his father, "I don't have anything to say to you."

"Jamie, why are you being this way? I want to help you."

"Yeah, right."

"Just tell me what happened."

"I don't know what happened."

"Son, it's murder we're talking about. They're looking for somebody to send to jail for this."

"I know you are."

"Me?"

"You want me to make up something about Phil?"

"I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell it to me right here and now."

"Bill?" Ribbon came to the doorway. "You can be present at questioning but -"

"Oh, goddamnit," Corde exploded. "Goddamnit! You don't have probable cause to charge him. Call the DA. Ask him!"

Ribbon said delicately, "We do for conspiracy and obstruction. You'll just make things worse for everybody."

"Jamie, why?" Corde's eyes begged, his hand reached for his son's arm but stopped short of contact. "What did I do? Why won't you tell me?"

Eyes downcast, the boy let Ribbon lead him into the filthy house, while his father's desperate questions fell like shot quail, silent and flimsy.

The tall grass waved in the wind and the sunlight flickered off the leaves of thin saplings. Sarah stepped into her circle of stones and sat down. She crossed her legs carefully. From her backpack she took the bear she was going to give to the Sunshine Man and set him next to her.

She looked at her Madonna watch. It said 2:40. She closed her eyes and remembered that this meant twenty minutes to three. She hated numbers. Sometimes you counted to a hundred before they started over, other times you counted to sixty.

Twenty minutes until the Sunshine Man arrived.

She remembered a drill at school – her second-grade teacher would move the hands on a clock and then point to different students and have them tell the time. This exercise socked her with icy terror. She remembered the teacher's bony finger pointing at her. And, Sarah, what time is it now? She screamed that she didn't know she couldn't tell don't ask don't ask don't ask… She cried all the way home from school. That night her daddy bought her the digital watch she now wore.

A sudden breeze whipped her hair around her face and she lay down, using her backpack as a pillow. Sometimes she took afternoon naps here. Looking around her, wondering where the Sunshine Man would come from, Sarah noticed just above the horizon a sliver of new moon. She imagined that the sky was a huge ocean and that the moon was the fingernail on a giant's hand as he swam just below the surface of the smooth water. Then she wondered how come you can see the moon in the daytime.

She closed her eyes and she thought of the giant as he swam, lifting arms as big as mountains from the water, kicking his mile-long legs and speeding across the sky. Sarah was afraid of the water. When the family went to the park downtown she would still play in the baby pool, which made her ashamed but wasn't as bad as the terror of bouncing on the adult pool floor with the water inches from her nose and thinking she might get swept into the deep part.

She wished she could swim. Strong strokes, like Jamie. Maybe this was something else she could ask the Sunshine Man to do for her. She looked at her watch. 2:48. She counted on her fingers. Two minutes… No! Twelve minutes. She closed her eyes and kneaded the grass bunched up at her hips and pretended she was swimming, skimming across the pool like a speedboat, back and forth, saving the lives of children struggling in the deep end and racing past her brother once then again and again…

Five minutes later she heard the approaching footsteps.

Sarah Corde's heart began pounding in joyous anticipation, and as she climbed out of her imaginary pool she opened her eyes.

Look at this place. Lord.

Bill Corde couldn't get over the size of Wynton Kresge's office.