“Mr. Walker, a man was murdered in her house. She fled the scene. She left you handcuffed so you wouldn’t be able to stop her from getting away. That’s what we in the police business call suspicious. Maybe even incriminating. Tell your friend to get herself a good lawyer.” He gave a tip of his hat. “And thanks again, for leading the way.”
“You called the car manufacturer,” I said. “You knew where I was all the time. I was being tracked by satellite.”
Flint smiled, but not as devilishly as he might have been entitled to. “So sorry to have disrupted your evening.”
Upstairs, Trixie was saying goodbye to her sister, to Don. And especially Katie. As Trixie came down the stairs, one officer walking in front of her and one behind, Katie stood, bleary-eyed, on the landing, clutching a yellow blanket and watching, baffled and sad. “When are you coming back?” she asked.
Trixie glanced at her and said, “I might be gone a while, sweetheart, but your other mom will take good care of you.” At the bottom of the stairs, they cuffed her.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Trixie. “It was your car. They used the GPS thing to find it. I led them right to you.”
She smiled tiredly. “It’s okay, Zack. I’m going to make it clear to them that you came up here to get me to turn myself in. Don’t worry.”
“You need a lawyer.”
“I told you about Niles. He handles all my difficulties.” She shook her head. “This one’s right up there.”
“We have to go, ma’am,” said one of the cops.
“See ya, Zack,” said Trixie, and Candace, and Miranda. “Maybe now you’ll catch a break. How much trouble can you get into with me locked up, right?”
I was on the road by six in the morning.
Trixie was right, there was something wrong with the Virtue. I tried to start it, but the engine, or the batteries, or whatever it was that made the damn thing go, failed to make a sound. So I hung on to Trixie’s car. If Detective Flint wanted to put the space shuttle and all the other resources of NASA into keeping track of my movements, he was welcome to. I no longer gave a rat’s ass.
I plugged my cell phone into the cigarette lighter. Long before I was home, it would be recharged, plus I’d be able to make or receive calls during my journey.
I called no one, and no one called me.
There was a lot of time to think on that drive home. And as I reached the city of Canborough and took the bypass, I felt a twinge of guilt. I probably should have driven into the downtown, parked outside police headquarters, and gone in to see Michael Cherry. I had some vague recollection of a promise I’d made to him two days earlier, that if I happened upon any information that would help him with the Kickstart massacre investigation, I’d pass it along.
It was fair to say I had a few new details he might want to have. I’d have a source for life in the Canborough Police Department, helping him crack a triple murder.
Moral dilemma time.
Maybe, for most people, this would be a no-brainer. Trixie had admitted to me that she’d shot and killed three men. Three men who’d raped her before, and were about to do it again. If her claim of self-defense was legit, she could tell it to a judge and jury. He might well agree. So might the jury.
But I could see the prosecutor—and in my mind’s eye he looked a lot like Sam Waterston—approaching the witness box. He was saying, “So tell us, Ms…. whatever your name is at the moment. Is it Chicoine? Is it Snelling? So these men, they allegedly attacked you, allegedly sexually assaulted you, on this earlier occasion, you claim, and, let me just check my notes here, and then you went back to work with them? Just a couple of days later? And then, when they allegedly did this again, that’s when you decided to kill them? I’m just having a little trouble with this. Isn’t it more likely that the reason you killed them was because you were ripping them off for half a million dollars? And that this first incident, that this never even happened? That it’s just a very good story to justify what you did? I mean, do we have anything but your word?”
I composed Sam’s entire summation in my head as I drove.
It seemed unlikely that Gary Merker, the only one left alive who’d participated in the rape, would be called to support her testimony.
There was a good chance, I thought, that the evidence would exonerate Trixie in the death of Martin Benson. But if the cops ever knew what she’d told me about that night at the Kickstart, well, I didn’t like her chances of beating that one. Trixie was classic “blame the victim” material, by virtue of the choices she’d made, her line of work, her use of multiple aliases.
They’d tear her apart.
But was it up to me to keep Trixie from having to answer for the things she’d done? Or to at least explain them? Was I responsible for Trixie’s future? And what of my obligations to the Metropolitan? To my profession? If I had any intention of actually writing about this—assuming Magnuson put an end to my suspension, and that was quite an assumption—how could I tell only part of the story? If I couldn’t do the job properly, I had no business doing it at all.
I needed to talk to someone about this.