But Rigo’s last words are swallowed by the sharp report, and the boom of the blast echoes idly over the main street, drifting like smoke over the watching crowd. Lyndon’s brain matter scatters in an antic plume before spattering to the gravel like summer rain. His body falls.
Rigo stoops and picks up the gun, gingerly, pinched between two fingers. He pulls a handkerchief from his inside breast pocket and wipes off the gun ceremonially. He toes Lancaster’s body. A puddle of blood widens on the gravel. Rigo puts the gun back in his waistband. Then he looks up at Cooper.
“That’s one,” he says. “Any time, Sheriff, you can call this off.”
Cooper says nothing.
“No?” Rigo turns and walks back to Santayana, who’s still seated in the lawn chair. He hands her Lancaster’s folder, which she sticks back into the legal file. Then she pulls out another one, a new one, and hands it to Rigo. He flips it open and reads, turning back to the assembled crowd.
He says loudly, “Is there a Doris Agnew here?”
They hear the shot, even inside the chapel, and everyone jolts, before the room abruptly stills. Hannibal, who’s been watching at the window, recoils. “Holy shit,” he says quietly, to no one.
Finally, Fran calls out: “What happened?”
“Some guy just shot himself in the fucking head,” Hannibal says. The room murmurs. A soundtrack of confusion, the prelude to a panic.
“Why?” Fran says, though what answer she’s expecting, she can’t imagine.
“I don’t know, from something that guy was reading maybe. It’s hard to hear,” says Hannibal.
“What could he be reading?” says Spiro, fearful, from the back of the room.
But Fran knows. And soon Spiro knows, too. The whole room knows. And no one says anything. The knowledge of it, dawning on all of them, spreads silently through the room like a dreaded contagion.
“He’s calling another name now,” says Hannibal.
“What name?” someone asks from the back.
“Don’t—” says Fran, but it’s too late.
“Doris Agnew,” says Hannibal.
At the back of the chapel, at the sound of her name, Doris Agnew stands.
“Doris Agnew,” Rigo repeats.
Nothing. No one answers.
“Last call for Doris Agnew,” Rigo yells.
Behind Cooper, the chapel door groans open. He turns quickly to block her but the door locks behind her and she steps forward and past him, with the blank momentum of a sleepwalker. Cooper grabs her shoulders and yanks her and says, “Doris, no,” but she shakes his hands loose and keeps walking toward Rigo, undeterred.
Toward the promise of knowledge.
Cooper watches her. He knows her well. She’s a sweet woman. Mid-sixties by now. She’s been in the Blinds maybe six, seven years. A bit of a notorious gossip. Her soft southern accent gives a hint as to her former life.
“Read it to me,” she says to Rigo, facing him, in her musical lilt.
“Your name,” Rigo says, “is Louise Evelyn Hucks. You were a nurse, apparently. Do you know what an ‘angel of death’ killer is?”
“No,” she says.
“It’s tough to know an exact number, but thirty-eight seems like a good guess,” Rigo says. “Infants, all of them. Maternity ward. Poison, and whatnot, a few suffocations. They think maybe you couldn’t have a baby of your own, is what drove you to do it, though that seems like some amateur armchair psychoanalysis to me.” He shakes his head dramatically, as though in mock wonder at the scale of the crime. “How the hell you swung a deal to end up here, though, is beyond me.” He scans through her folder, flipping pages. “Ah, here we go. The old insanity defense. I guess they bargained for a transfer here. Maybe they wanted to see how the memory-wiping process would affect such a damaged mind.” He slams the folder shut. “How about you, Louise? You feeling crazy?”
“No,” she whispers.
“You’re pretty lucky, actually,” Rigo says. “At least you didn’t flip on anyone, so there’s that. Of course, on the other hand, that means you offered them nothing in return for your life—”
“Just do it,” she says softly. Even Rigo is surprised.
“I’m sorry—?”
“Just do it,” she says. “I don’t have the guts. Not like Lyndon. You do it for me.”
Rigo glances over at Cooper, shrugs, then addresses the silent crowd. “What do you think, folks?”
Cooper starts to move toward Rigo, who draws the gun again and points it at Cooper, and Cooper halts.
“Don’t torture me. Just do it,” Doris whispers.
Rigo turns the gun crisply on her and shoots her dead in the street, the shot sounding like a whip crack as she falls.
Burly and Gains move swiftly to cart her body away, hoisting her and retreating to the doorway of a nearby building, where they’ve already deposited Lyndon’s corpse.
“You all saw that,” says Rigo to the crowd, shrugging, still holding the pistol. “She asked me. She begged me. And no court in the country would convict me. I mean, thirty-six infants? That they know of.” He turns to Cooper. “Come on, Sheriff. We’re not here to execute the whole town. For one, it’s going to start to get very messy. And, given how hot it is, pretty smelly, too.”
“You’re not getting that boy,” Cooper says quietly. “Just go home.”
“That’s your counteroffer?” says Rigo. “You are a fucking terrible negotiator, you know that?”
“Give him the kid!” someone yells from the street’s edge. Cooper flinches. This is exactly what he’s most afraid of. That the crowd will turn.
In her lawn chair, Santayana smiles. And she moves her ankles closer to clutch the large black legal box at her feet. You can always threaten to kill people, she thinks, but that’s an amateur’s bluff. There are too many stupid people who are willing to die these days, and too many stupid things they’re willing to die for. So the real trick is to figure what is worse for them than death.
Like what’s in these files.
She clutches them closer.
This is working so much better than she let herself imagine.
Cooper can’t place the source of the voice from the crowd and, for the moment, he’s glad he can’t, because he knows he would stride right into the mob and find that person and break him.
Rigo shrugs. “Listen to your constituency, Sheriff.” Then he strolls back over to Santayana. “Let’s read another one.” He addresses the assemblage in a raised voice as he waits for her to dig a file out. “Do y’all know that ‘file’ is an anagram for ‘life’? That just occurred to me.” He gives a self-satisfied nod. Santayana keeps shuffling, her lacquered nails riffling performatively, like a lottery girl spinning the basket full of numbered balls. “I mean, you can’t all be serial killers, right?” says Rigo, still waiting. “Just, like, statistically speaking? I assume some of you must be, like, penny-ante B&E guys, or Wall Street bullshit artists. But maybe not. I guess we’ll find out.”
Santayana finally finds the file she’s looking for, slides it free of the case, and hands it to Rigo with a flourish. He flips it open.
“Oh, this should be good,” Rigo murmurs.
Then he repeats it loudly, for the crowd, for effect, tapping the paper with his slender finger: “This should be good!”