High in Trial

THIRTEEN

Four hours, fourteen minutes before the shooting





Buck found Smokey sitting in front of his trailer in a folding metal chair, drinking a beer. It was only ten in the morning, and Buck was surprised to find him awake. He left the squad car parked behind a rusted-out Pontiac and a Jesus van on blocks and picked his way around a smattering of old tires, metal fire barrels, the remnants of a sofa, and an electric stove without an oven door. He kept a wary eye out for Smokey’s pit bull, who had a tendency to charge first and bark later, and rested his hand on his gun holster, just so Smokey could see it.

When he was ten or fifteen feet away, he stopped and called, “Morning, Smokey. Where’s your dog?”

Smokey had let himself go to seed since getting out of prison, not that he’d been much of a fashion model before that. He had a gut on him that wasn’t flattered by the stained wife beater tee shirt and motor-oil splattered jeans he wore, and the scrub of beard that sagged on his face was bristled with gray. He narrowed his bloodshot eyes, drank from the can, and replied when he was ready. “Dead.” He had a long, low bayou accent—his people were from the swamp country of Louisiana—that made the word sound like “dayid.” He spat on the ground and added, “Got hisself rattlesnake bit last August.”

“Sorry to hear that.” Buck proceeded toward the trailer.

“You got issue with me, officer?”

“Just a friendly visit.” Buck looked around until he found a plastic lawn chair that looked as though it would hold him and tilted it forward to drain a puddle of water leftover from the rain shower two days ago. He found a level place in the ground a few feet away from Smokey and set the chair there. He sat down, noticing as he did a flutter of the ragged dishtowel that served as a window curtain behind him. “Who’s in the house?”

“Nobody.”

“Ask Nobody to come out.”

Smokey glared at him for a minute, then bellowed over his shoulder, “Jolene! Bring me another beer!”

In a moment the front door opened and a horse-faced woman in an ill-fitting house dress and animal print slippers came out. She kept a suspicious eye on Buck as she moved past him, giving his chair a wide berth, to hand Smokey the can of beer she brought. Nonetheless, Buck half rose in his chair and gave her a polite nod. “Morning, ma’am.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” she muttered and scuttled back into the trailer. Buck heard the lock click on the door when she closed it.

Smokey drained the first beer, crumpled it in his fist, and dropped it on the ground. He popped the tab on the second. “That all you come out here for, Deputy? To see who was in my house and what happened to my dog?”

Buck let the mistake in his title slide. Smokey had been away for a while and didn’t know, or care, about his promotion. In a way, that was a good thing. “Just being cautious,” he replied. “Considering the last time I was out here you pulled a gun on me, I figured that’d be smart.”

Smokey grunted. “I had a right.”

“I reckon.”

Smokey took a long draw of his beer. “You got something to say to me, you’d best get on with sayin’ it. I got things to do.”

Buck said, “I’ve always been fair with you, haven’t I, Smokey?”

The other man drank his beer, not looking at him, not talking.

“I never hunted you when I could have. I never hassled you over small stuff, and I let one or two things slide when you know well and good I could’ve put you in County for a month or two if I’d ever had a mind to.”

Still, Smokey said nothing.

“So all that considered, I thought there might not be any harm in a couple of old friends like us having a conversation.”

“I got friends. You ain’t one of them.”

“All right. Acquaintances, then. How’d you like it upstate at Marion?”

Smokey slithered a beady glance at him, held it steady for a minute, and then looked away. “Wadn’t so bad. No picnic, but I’m here, ain’t I?”

“Make any new friends? Maybe get reacquainted with some old ones?”

Smokey said nothing.

“Do you remember a fellow by the name of Jeremiah Allen Berman?”

Smokey sucked on his beer, and Buck waited patiently. At last he said, “So what if I do?”

“Just thought you might’ve run into him upstate. I was wondering if he ever said anything to you about coming back here. About maybe having some unfinished business.”

Smokey gazed fixedly at the right fender of the rusted out Pontiac, swiping his tongue around the rim of the can, gathering dew. “Don’t know why a man’d ever want to come back to this godforsaken butt crack at the end of the earth if’n he didn’t have to.”

“I’m just asking.”

Once again, Smokey slid him a bloody-eyed look. “You gunnin’ for him?”

Buck shrugged. “He hasn’t done anything to me.”

The look turned speculative. “But if you was, and if I was to help you out somehows, you reckon you’d be grateful to ol’ Smokey?”

Buck’s gaze was steady. “As grateful as I’m allowed to be.”

Smokey held his stare for another moment and then gave a short, surprising burst of cackling laughter. “Ain’t nothin’ to me nohow,” he said. “That was one pe-culiar bird. Beat this one girl half to death down in Georgia, raped her, stuffed her in the trunk of his car, then drove her out to the lake and tossed her in, still alive. Least that’s the story he told. Everybody knew it. Did you know it?”

“I wasn’t around back then.”

“He liked to tell stories about what he’d got away with. He got away with a lot.” He drank. “But upstate, now, he got smart. Smart like a fox, you know what I mean? Knew how to play the system. Signed up for these computer classes in vo-hab. Said he was gonna make something of hisself. Even went to chapel sometimes. That’s what the smart ones do. They play the system. But he was still one pe-culiar-ass bird.”

“How’s that?”

“Carried around a picture of a dead guy, for one. Tore it out of a newspaper and had it so long it was all sweaty and crumpled and about to fall apart. But he’d take it out now and then and just look at it with this real scary grin on his face, mutterin’ to hisself. Always said the same thing.”

“What did he say?”

“Something church-like. Lemme think.” Smokey licked the rim of the can again. “Sins of the father, that’s it. ‘Sins of the father, you son of a bitch’ was what he was sayin’, over and over again. ‘Sins of the father.’”

Buck frowned. “That picture. Do you know who it was?”

Smokey shrugged. “Some judge is all I know.” He drained the beer, crumpled the can, and dropped it on the ground beside the other. “Said it was the judge that sent him up.”



* * *



Miles was leaning against the driver’s door of my SUV as I came around the corner of the parking lot, his expression unreadable. I watched him carefully as I approached.

“So,” he said, “where are we going?”

I unlocked the doors with a click of the remote control. “I thought you were checking out.”

“And I thought you were packing.”

“I told you, I have to find someone to take care of these dogs.”

“Let me guess. The guy with the temper and the fancy footwork who, less than twenty-four hours ago, threatened both you and the woman they just took to the morgue.”

Sometimes I really hate it when he outthinks me. Sometimes it saves me a lot of explaining. So I replied defiantly, “That’s right.”

“Do you have his address?”

I had done a search on my smartphone, and only one Neil Kellog came up in Pembroke. I said, “Yes.”

“You couldn’t just have called him, I suppose.”

I could have, but I wanted to see him. I wanted to look into his eyes when I told him about Marcie, and if I didn’t like what I saw there, nothing could make me leave those dogs with him.

Miles pushed away from the door. “I’ll drive. You navigate.”

He held out his hand for the keys, and after a moment, I gave them to him.

I secured Cisco in his seat belt in the back seat, and the two border collies in the cargo area poked their black-tipped noses over the barrier curiously. When all the dogs had greeted each other and I was certain everyone was comfortable, I got into the passenger seat beside Miles and brought up the driving directions on my phone. “Right turn out of the parking lot,” I said. “Then left on Burke Boulevard for six miles.”

He made the left, easily navigating the Saturday morning traffic with one hand on the steering wheel. Cisco curled up in the bench seat behind me and closed his eyes. The border collies were quiet.

Miles said, “My first wife was gorgeous.”

I glared at him in disbelief, then slumped down in my seat with my arms crossed over my chest. “Thanks a lot.”

“Not as gorgeous as you, of course,” he continued smoothly, “but a head-turner nonetheless. That would have been okay, but she also had this tendency to flirt. I knew it was harmless, but other men would misread her. We use to go out dancing—”

I looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you liked to dance.”

“Oh yeah. I’m a hell of a salsa dancer. Do a mean boot-scoot, too. The point is, she would dance with anyone who asked her, and I would spend most of the night feeling like a bouncer, waiting for somebody to get out of line. I didn’t mind if she danced with other guys. I wanted her to have a good time. But she never understood that, while she was out there bringing down the house, I was the one who was in danger of getting my teeth knocked out every time some drunk put his hand in the wrong place. Women just don’t get it. They go off half-cocked with some reckless scheme or another and never think about how it affects the man who’s trying to protect her.”

Miles rarely talked about his ex-wives, and we’d been on the verge of having a nice moment. Now I bristled. “I don’t want or need protecting, thank you very much!”

“Doesn’t matter. That’s the thing you don’t get. Men can’t help it. We’re hardwired to protect the women we care about, and whether you like it or not, somebody’s been doing it for you all your life. Your dad, your uncle, every boyfriend you’ve ever had, your husband. Whether you mean to or not, whether you want to or not, every time you put yourself at risk you’re putting some man who cares about you in danger. And since men are essentially selfish beasts who value our creature comforts, that pisses us off. Which way?”

We’d come to a stop sign, but I was so disconcerted by what he’d said that for a moment I’d forgotten what we were doing here. I glanced at the map on my phone and said, “Left on Randolph Street, then right on High Manor Way.”

I let the street signs roll by silently while I absorbed his words. I’d never thought about it that way before, but deep inside I knew he was right. And I felt bad for it. I said quietly, “I can’t change who I am, Miles.”

“I know that. I’m still around, aren’t I? But if I raise my voice now and then, that’s why.” He reached across the seat and squeezed my knee. “Hey, I like cave diving and parasailing, neither one of which endears me to my insurance carrier. So maybe that’s something we have in common.”

I stared at him. “Stupidity?”

He laughed and then made the turn into a wide, neatly maintained street lined with white brick apartment buildings. “Looks like this is it. What’s the number?”

“Two forty-six, apartment A.” I hesitated. “Probably best if you let me do the talking. I mean, don’t mention the dogs.”

“Because you’re not really going to leave them with him.”

I slid a glance his way. Like I said, sometimes he saves me a lot of time explaining. “I just want to talk to him. He probably knows by now he’s under investigation. If he really values the dogs—and I know he does—he’ll have a plan for someone to take care of them.”

We pulled into a parking space next to a dusty red SUV with a border collie sticker in the rear window and a bumper sticker that read “Faster Than a Speeding Border Collie.” I could see dog crates in the back. Miles left the windows cracked for the dogs, even though the morning was still cool, and we got out of the car in front of Neil’s apartment building. Cisco pressed his nose through the opening in the back window, looking offended to be left behind, and I smiled at him. Then I said to Miles, “Hey.”

He glanced at me.

“Thanks for coming with me.”

He smiled then and dropped his hand to my shoulder. “You’re buying breakfast,” he said.

We went up the walk and I pressed the buzzer to apartment A. While we waited for an answer, I looked at Miles and said, “So what happened to wife number one?”

He shrugged. “She got tired of flirting. I got tired of fighting. We both moved on to bigger and better things.”

I pushed the bell again. We waited.

Miles said, “Maybe he’s not here.”

I nodded toward the parking lot. “That has to be his car.”

He looked at me meaningfully. “Maybe the police got here before us.”

I frowned and punched the bell again. We waited.

Miles said, “You don’t think he did it, do you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“The dog, right?’

“Right. He knows how valuable she is. He trained her from a pup. He wouldn’t just let her run loose like that.” I could see skepticism in his eyes, so I added, “You have to know dog people.”

Miles knocked loudly on the door. “There aren’t too many lawyers who could win with the you-have-to-know-dog-people defense, so I hope this guy has an alibi. And I hope you have a backup plan, because it doesn’t look like he’s home.”

He started to turn away, but I held up a hand. “Wait. I think I hear someone inside.” I knocked again. “Neil?” I called. “Neil, are you there? I want to talk to you about Bryte and Flame.”

A chain rattled on the inside, there was some fumbling with the doorknob, and the door swung open. Neil leaned against the doorframe, blinking at us slowly in the gentle morning light, his pupils the size of dimes. His hair was crumpled and his complexion pasty, and his right hand was wrapped in a heavy gauze bandage. I barely noticed any of this, though. I was too busy staring at the blood spatters on his tee shirt.



~*~