The deputy who shows up with the video camera has pimples on his cheeks, that’s how young he is. Or at least that’s how I see him now, as I read the transcript. For the next few hours, this man will frame everything recorded through the camera’s viewfinder. He is the only person present who doesn’t say anything on tape, doesn’t react, just records. He is a mystery in this transcript, but—think what he sees. What he’s required to take in. I’d rather imagine him new to this; I’d rather think his eyes go wide. I see his skin scraped raw with razor burn and his neck as skinny as a chicken’s.
Dixon sizes him up, shakes his head. Already he and the police photographers have been up to the bedroom to photograph the scene. It’s fine that the department’s started to add video, but they treat it like a shit job for the new cops.
“You ready?” Dixon says. I see him snap on latex gloves and unfold a clear bag marked EVIDENCE. The kid had better have seen a dead body before. The last thing they need is the cameraman getting sick.
“Ready,” the boy says. He doesn’t sound it.
“I’ll get the suspect,” Lucky says—his words suddenly formal, now that there’s going to be a tape.
When Lucky comes back he’s got Ricky beside him, cuffed. Ricky’s shuffling along, won’t look up. He flat-out stops at the front door. Then he crosses the threshold.
“Roll the tape,” Lucky says.
It’s on.
“What I want you to do now,” Lucky starts, then stops. “What I want you to do now, Jeremy—”
(This little slip, calling Ricky by his victim’s name, is the only sign Lucky is nervous. The only sign of how big this moment is for him. Later the transcription clerk will mark it with “[sic].”)
“We’ll let the cameraman follow you inside and I want you to take me up to the room where this happened and I want you to show him the room and I don’t want you to touch anything, OK? I know there’s some guns in here and, like I say, I don’t want you to touch anything.”
Lucky looks expectantly at Ricky.
“Uh-huh,” says Ricky.
They go.
It’s a tight fit, the three of them walking up the staircase, the cameraman right behind Ricky. The film will be dim on the television screen later, their bodies almost shadows, Ricky’s black shirt a spot of dark night in the dusky light. The camera angle makes the ceiling seem lower. The walls tighter. The men climb wordlessly, one crisp step after another. They reach the bedroom.
“In here?” says Lucky.
Ricky nods, then remembers he’s supposed to answer out loud. “Yeah.”
“You got anything to add before we go in?” Lucky says to Dixon.
“Yeah, gimme a minute,” Dixon says. Maybe now that the moment’s about to go down, he’s got doubts about handing it over to Lucky. This was his find. He’s the one who told Lucky to get moving, wasn’t he? He’s the one who got Ricky to confess. Or maybe he just wants to make sure, again, that the arrest stays airtight. Whatever the reason, he goes through it all again. Says, “Ricky, when you were arrested back up at the gas station and you got in the car with me, did I ever threaten you, or anything like that?”
Ricky shakes his head. Then: “Nuh-uh.”
“Was I polite to you?”
“Yeah.”
“And I just said, ‘Ricky look me in the eyes man to man,’ and I advised you of your rights. And everything you said to me was voluntary.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then.” Dixon nods to Lucky. They’re ready.
The men step into the room. “Cut the tape,” Lucky says, and the boy fumblingly obliges. Then to Ricky: “Show me the closet.” Ricky starts to move. “No, don’t walk over there. Point at it.”
Ricky does.
“The child’s in there?” Dixon again. He knows the answer. He was up here before, when Lucky went to get Ricky. But he’s watching Ricky now. Watching the small lines of distress that have started to crack through his body.
“Yeah,” Ricky says.
“He’s just in there, or—”
“I got him in some blankets.”
Lucky steps forward and motions for Dixon and Ricky to leave the room. Then he walks to the closet. Its door is white, chipped paint with a dirt crust. It’s wide-open. Inside there’s a bundle of blankets. Not really in the shape of a body. Just a bundle. He waits until he can feel the cameraman behind him. He nods. The camera starts recording again. Lucky speaks each word carefully and slowly. “It’s 3:35 p.m. We are back in the room. The date is February 10, 1992. We are back in the southeast bedroom of Ricky Langley and our photo division has finished taking their still photographs and we are about to remove the blanket or quilt or whatever it is that Ricky Langley advises that he covered the body up with.”
He shines a flashlight into the closet. The beam cuts through, touching the bundle with yellow. Then it moves to the side so the camera can see the shape. Lucky steps back into the frame, reaches in. “We are going to put this—it is a Tweety Bird curtains or bedspread I place in this bag.”
The tape is awkward from this point on. Lucky narrates every step. He must want so badly to get it right. He lifts layer after layer and each time shows the blanket to the camera before putting it in the bag.
But see that first bag, waiting in the corner to be taped up, the plastic bag with EVIDENCE written right across it, no doubt what’s in the bag? It will be mislabeled, and switched with a bag of clothes cut carefully from Jeremy later. See the bag Lucky fills next? It will be mislabeled, too, and combined with a bag that contains nothing of significance.
I’ve seen a clip of this tape. I’ve watched Ricky and Lucky and Dixon climb the porch steps of the Lawson house—seen Ricky, with his hands bound, walk to the front door Jeremy had walked through a few days before. The confession that was shown to me at the law firm, the tape that launched me into this story, was filmed right after this, when Dixon and Lucky brought Ricky back to the police station. He looked like a rabbit, his eyes darting, the handcuffs just restraining him locked at the waist. The rest of his words come through the staccato flash-time of memory, as though my body could absorb only in jolts, in gulps with swallowed black in between.
Only the transcript—only looking at it now—settles the memory.
The blue blanket is the last sheet Lucky lifts on the tape. “Covering the lower portion of the victim is a blue bedspread with some figure on it—maybe Dick Tracy with a gun in his hand, multicolored. At this time we are removing it and we see the remainder of our victim.”
The camera doesn’t linger. It catches the blond hair and then falters in the face of the boy. But on Jeremy’s lip right now—too small for the camera to catch, and no one’s looking at him that closely, no one wants to look at a body that closely—there is a single dark pubic hair.
When they cut the samples from Jeremy’s white T-shirt, the samples Calton Pitre will remember for decades, they’ll find semen stains on his shirt. That semen will match Ricky’s. But this hair on his lip? It isn’t Ricky’s. They’ll test it twice. Twice the answer will come back: not Ricky’s.