“What went wrong?”
“Everything. We were nervous. Scared. We’d been drinking. Liquid courage, I guess. We were all pumped up on adrenaline. I was with Jules for a while back then. We’d … been fighting. I was … pissed off.…” His words trail. “God almighty. I can barely remember.”
“All of you were armed?”
“Except for Jules.”
“What happened? What went wrong?”
“We went in. Faces concealed. Got the parents out of bed. We were in the kitchen, getting the cash. We hadn’t counted on all of those little kids showing up. That was when the woman got … hysterical. We were all screaming at her to sit down. We started losing control of the situation.…” A single drop of sweat slides from his temple to a crease in his neck, but he doesn’t seem to notice. “McCullough panicked and … shot him.”
“Willis Hochstetler?”
He nods.
“What happened next?”
“We freaked out. I’d never been so scared, and I mean really scared. All of a sudden, everything was real. I couldn’t believe McCullough had done it. I went after him, and we got into it. But it was done. The guy was dead.”
“What about the woman?”
Blue looks at the wall behind me, as if there’s a window there and he can see through the darkness and rain to the promise of freedom beyond. But there is no window. There’s no escape for him, and he knows he won’t be walking out of here a free man.
“We took her with us.”
“Why?”
He shakes his head, doesn’t answer.
“Whose idea was it?”
He turns his gaze to mine, and in that instant I see the depth of his shame. The breadth of his disgust and self-loathing. “Mine.”
I’m so taken aback, I lose my train of thought. With the others dead, he could have blamed them. Only he didn’t.
Time to face the music …
He continues, his voice flat and low, like a robot. “We put her in the trunk and just drove. Like I said, we were scared. We didn’t know what to do. Somehow we ended up in Pennsylvania. Found a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere. We were going to leave her there. But she got her hands untied and pulled off Dale’s mask. She saw his face.”
Abruptly, he leans forward, puts his face in his hands, and rubs his eyes. “She got away. Ran into a cornfield. McCullough went after her. By the time I got there, he was on top of her. We raped her.”
I stare at him, sickened. “What else?”
He looks at the wall again, at the window that isn’t there, and I know he’s wishing he were out there, far away, in that imaginary place. “We argued. Figured we could intimidate her into keeping her mouth shut.”
“She saw your faces?”
He nods. “We couldn’t let her go.” He makes a sound, a sigh that ends with a moan. “Dale strangled her right there on the ground.”
“Did you try to stop him?”
A long pause. “No.”
“You thought she was dead?”
He nods.
“What did you do next?”
“Put her back in the trunk. Drove her to an abandoned farm and threw her into the well.”
He paints a scene so vivid, so horrific, I can feel the acid churn in my stomach, the bile climbing up my throat. I can hear Wanetta Hochstetler crying out for her children. Sense her terror and panic. I can hear her tumbling down that terrible shaft. Her body striking the stone walls on the way down. The splash of the final impact. The shocking cold of the water. Had she been conscious? In pain? How long had she lain there before someone found her? Hours? Days?
I look at Blue, and a wave of revulsion moves through me. I’m well aware that there are boundaries a cop can never cross. I know that once he does, there’s no going back. I feel myself venturing close to that line now. I’m keenly aware of my .38 pressing against my hip. Of how easy it would be to turn off the recorder, pull my firearm, and put a bullet between his eyes. I have a full confession. There’s no doubt in my mind I could come up with a believable story that he attacked me. I’m not the first cop to entertain such a dark fantasy.
I go to my next question. “Which one of you threw the lantern into the basement?”
He gives me a sharp look. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Hoch Yoder said one of you threw that lantern down the steps, which started the fire that killed those kids. The fire marshal’s investigation corroborates that.”
“We locked them in the basement, but no one threw a lantern.”
“Are you sure? Maybe one of the others did it and you didn’t notice?”
“No one threw a lantern into the basement. That’s all I got to say about that.”