Dance of the Bones

“What happened then?”


“I’d been let down by my family time and again, but when Amos pulled the same stunt, it was far worse. I thought he was my friend. I trusted him, and when he turned on me, too, I didn’t take it very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“For one thing, Ava dropped me, too. After that, I proceeded to get myself drunk and stayed that way. I’d earn some money, cash a paycheck, and go on a bender. When I ran out of money, I’d sober up and work long enough to pay for the next round of drinking. That’s pretty much how things stood—-right up until just before you and that other detective showed up to arrest me.”

“What changed?”

“A -couple of months before you came after me, I met another woman—-a good one, this time—-Bernadette Benson.”

“Amanda’s mother?”

He nodded. “She was a peach.”

“And she stuck by you?”

“Yes, she did—-all through the trial and even after I got sent up. She came to see me every week until she died in a car wreck.”

“Getting back to Ava. I understand she testified against you at the trial.”

“That’s true. Amos always said she was bad news. Much as I hate to admit it, I’m pretty sure he was right.”

“What about that other friend, someone named Ken?”

“That would be Ken Mangum,” Lassiter said at once. “He testified at the first trial. When it came time for the second one, my attorney couldn’t find him. He had disappeared into thin air. I heard later that he had died—-that he’d been murdered somewhere up north—-Portland or Seattle, one of those—-but I didn’t find out any of that until years after the fact.”

“I understand from Warden Huffman that you’ve had zero bad--conduct problems while you’ve been here, so it sounds as though you’ve made some changes.”

Lassiter nodded. “That’s the thing; once you’re inside, you’ve only got two choices. You either get better or you get worse. I decided to do what Amos did and get better.”

“Right,” Brandon agreed.

“He did five years of hard time right here in Florence. Read his way through the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica while he was at it, initialing the bottom of each page with a pencil when he finished reading it. By the way,” Lassiter added, “they still have the same set. Encyclopedias don’t wear out because not enough -people use them.

“So I did the same thing Amos did—-reading it and marking the pages as I went. Doing that made me feel closer to him as I read, like I could understand him better. I read the Bible, too. One is for my mind and the other for my soul. I like the encyclopedia better,” Lassiter added with a grin. “The librarian ended up getting so tired of having me underfoot all the time that she lets me take the volume I’m reading back to my cell.”

“So you’ve walked the line as long as you’ve been here?”

Lassiter nodded. “Pretty much,” he agreed. “I did it for Amos—-in his memory. That’s what he would have wanted me to do, because staying out of trouble in prison is the best way to stay alive. At first, because I was big and tough, competing gangs tried to drag me into one faction or another. I refused to go, and eventually they gave up. Later on, after I got sick, they left me alone completely. That’s the one good thing about MS. Most of these guys are too dumb to realize that it’s not contagious.”

Aubrey Bayless stirred in his corner and pointed at his watch. Glancing at his own, Brandon was surprised to see how much time had passed.

“What’s in the box?” Lassiter asked as curiosity got the better of him. “You went to the trouble of bringing it, but we haven’t touched it.”