Patricia Cornwell - Unnatural Exposure

'No, ma'am. But she's almost seventy and has emphysema. From doing these things.' He sucked on the cigarette again. 'She doesn't drive anymore.'

'Who's looking after her now?'

He shook his head and wiped his eyes. His legs were crossed, one foot jumping like it was about to take off.

'She has no one to bring her food?' I said.

'Just me.' He choked on the words.

I looked around again, this time for something to write with, and found a purple crayon and a brown paper towel.

'Give me her address and phone number,' I said. 'And I promise someone will check in with her to make sure she's all right.'

He was vastly relieved as he gave me the information and I scribbled it down.

'I called you because I didn't know where else to go,' he started talking again. 'Can't somebody do something to get me out of here?'

'I understand your bond has been set at five thousand dollars.'

'That's just it! Like ten times what it usually is for this, according to the guy in my cell. I don't have any money or any way to get it. Means I got to stay here until court, and that could be weeks. Months.' Tears welled in his eyes again, and he was terrified.

'Keith, do you use the Internet?' I said.

'The what?'

'Computers.'

'At the landfill I do. Remember, I was telling you about our satellite system.'

'Then you do use the Internet.'

He did not seem to know what that was.

'E-mail,' I tried again.

'We use GPS.' He looked confused. 'And you know the truck that dumped the body? I'm pretty sure now it was definitely Cole's, and the Dumpster may have come from a construction site. They pick up at a bunch of construction sites on South Side in Richmond. That would be a good place to get rid of something, on a construction site. Just pull up your car after hours and who's to see?'

'Did you tell Investigator Ring this?' I asked.

Hate passed over his face. 'I don't tell him anything. Not anymore. Everything he's been doing is just to set me up.'

'Why do you think he would want to set you up?'

'He's got to arrest someone for this. He wants to be the hero.' He was suddenly evasive.

'Says everybody else doesn't know what they're doing.' He hesitated. 'Including you.'

'What else has he said?' I felt myself turning to cold, hard stone, the way I did when I

had moved from anger to determined rage.

'See, when I was showing him around the house and all, he would talk. He really likes to talk.'

He took his cigarette butt and clumsily set it end-up on the table, so it would go out without burning Styrofoam. I helped him light another one.

'He told me you have this niece,' Pleasants went on. 'And that she's a real fox but has no more business in the FBI than you have being a chief medical examiner. Because. Well.'

'Go on,' I said in a controlled voice.

'Because she's not into men. I guess he thinks you aren't, either.'

'That's interesting.'

'He was laughing about it, said he knew from personal experience that neither of you dated because he'd been around both of you. And that I should just sit back and watch what happens to perverts. Because the same thing was about to happen to me.'

'Wait one minute.' I stopped him. 'Did Ring actually threaten you because you're gay or he thinks you are?'

'My mama doesn't know.' He hung his head. 'But some people do. I've been in bars. In fact, I know Wingo.'

I hoped not intimately.

'I'm worried about Mama.' He teared up again. 'She's upset about what's happening to me, and that's not good for her condition.'

'I tell you what. I'm going to check on her myself, on my way home,' I said, coughing again.

A tear slid down his cheek and he roughly wiped it with the backs of cuffed hands.

'One other thing I'm going to do,' I said as footsteps sounded on the stairs again. 'I'm going to see what I can do about you. I don't believe you killed anyone, Keith. And I'm going to post your bond and make sure you have a lawyer.'

His lips parted in disbelief as the deputies loudly entered the room.

'You really are?' Pleasants asked as he almost staggered to his feet, his eyes wide on mine.

'If you swear you're telling the truth.'

'Oh yes, ma'am!'

'Yeah, yeah,' a deputy said. 'You and all the rest of 'em.'

'It will have to be tomorrow,' I said to Pleasants. 'I'm afraid the magistrate's gone home for the night.'

'Come on. Downstairs.' A deputy grabbed his arm.

Pleasants said one last thing to me. 'Mama likes chocolate milk with Hershey's syrup. Not much else she keeps down anymore.'

Then he was gone, and I was led back downstairs and through the women's section of the jail again. Inmates were sullen this time, as if I no longer were fun. It occurred to me someone had told them who I was, when they turned their backs on me and someone spat.

Sheriff Rob Roy was a legend in Sussex County and ran uncontested every election year. He had been to my morgue many times, and I thought he was one of the finest law enforcement officers I knew. At half-past six, I found him at the Virginia Diner, where he was sitting at the local table, which literally was where the locals gathered. This was in a long room of red-checked cloths and white chairs, and he was eating a fried ham sandwich and drinking coffee, black, his portable radio upright on the table and full of chatter.

'Can't do that, no sir. Then what? They just keep selling crack, that's what,' he was saying to a gaunt weathered man in a John Deere cap.

'Let 'em.'

'Let 'em?' Roy reached for his coffee, as wiry and bald as he ever was. 'You can't mean that.'

'I sure as hell can.'

'Might I interrupt?' I said, pulling out a chair.

Roy's mouth fell open, and for an instant he did not believe whom he was looking at.

'Well, I'll be damned.' He stood and shook my hand. 'What in tarnation are you doing out in these parts?'

'Looking for you.'

'If you'll excuse me.' The other man tipped his hat to me and got up to leave.

'Don't you tell me you're out here on business,' the sheriff said.

'What else would it be?'

He was sobered by my mood. 'Something I don't know about?'

'You know,' I said.

'Well, what then? What do you want to eat? I recommend the fried chicken sandwich,'

he said as a waitress appeared.

'Hot tea.' I wondered if I would ever eat again.

'You don't look like you're feeling too good.'

'I feel like shit.'

'There's this bug going around.'

'You don't even know the half of it,' I said.

'What can I do?' He leaned closer to me, his attention completely focused.

'I'm posting bond for Keith Pleasants,' I said. 'Now this obviously won't happen before tomorrow, I'm sorry to say. But I think you need to understand, Rob, that this is an innocent man who has been set up. He's being persecuted because Investigator Ring is on a witch hunt and wants to make a name for himself.'

Roy looked baffled. 'Since when are you defending inmates?'

'Since whenever they aren't guilty,' I said. 'And this guy is no more a serial killer than you or I. He didn't try to elude the police and probably wasn't even speeding. Ring's hassling him and lying. Look how high the bond was set for a traffic violation.'

He was silent, listening.

'Pleasants has an old, infirm mother who has no one to take care of her. He's about to lose his job. Now I know Ring's uncle is the secretary of public safety, and he's also a former sheriff,' I said. 'And I know how that goes, Rob. I need you to help me out here. Ring has got to be stopped.'

Roy pushed his plate away as his radio called him. 'You really believe that.'

'Yes, I do.'

'This is fifty-one,' he said into the radio, adjusting his belt and the revolver on it.