“I don’t—oh.” Ava’s phone was ringing from the front pocket of her pajamas. She pulled out a cheap flip phone, the kind that let you pre-pay for minutes. “I don’t know that number.”
Charlie knew the number. It belonged to her iPhone, which Huck apparently still had. “Get in the car,” she told Ava, motioning for Lenore to help. “Let me answer this.”
Ava gave Lenore a wary look. “I don’t know if—”
“Get in the car.” Charlie practically pushed the woman away. She answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Wilson, this is Mr. Huckabee, Kelly’s teacher from middle school.”
“How did you unlock my phone?”
Huck hesitated a good, long while. “You need a better password than 1-2-3-4.”
Charlie had heard the same thing from Ben on numerous occasions. She walked up the track for more privacy. “Why are you calling Ava Wilson?”
He hesitated a second time. “I taught Kelly for two years. I tutored her a few months when she moved up to the high school.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I spent four hours answering questions from two assholes with the GBI and another hour answering questions at the hospital.”
“What assholes?”
“Atkins. Avery. Some ten-year-old with a cowlick and an older black chick kept tag-teaming me.”
“Shit,” Charlie mumbled. He probably meant Louis Avery, the FBI’s North Georgia field agent. “Did he give you his card?”
“I threw it away,” Huck said. “My arm’s fine, by the way. Bullet went straight through.”
“My nose is broken and I have a concussion,” Charlie told him. “Why were you calling Ava?”
His sigh said he was humoring her. “Because I care about my students. I wanted to help. To make sure she had a lawyer. That she was being looked after by someone who wasn’t going to exploit her or get her into more trouble.” Huck abruptly dropped the bravado. “Kelly’s not smart, Charlotte. She’s not a murderer.”
“You don’t have to be smart to kill somebody. Actually, the opposite is usually true.” She turned back to look at the Wilson house. Captain Isaac was carrying out a plastic box full of Kelly’s clothes.
Charlie told Huck, “If you really want to help Kelly, stay away from any and all reporters, don’t go on camera, don’t let them get a good photo of you, don’t even talk to your friends about what happened, because they’ll go on camera or they’ll talk to reporters and you won’t be able to control what comes out of their mouths.”
“That’s good advice.” He let out a short breath and said, “Hey, I need to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“B2. Ben Bernard. Your husband called you this morning. I almost answered.”
Charlie felt her cheeks flush.
He said, “I didn’t know until one of the cops told me. This was after I had talked to him, told him what we’d been up to, why you were at the school.”
Charlie put her head in her hand. She knew how certain types of men talked about women, especially the ones they screwed in their trucks outside of bars.
Huck said, “You could’ve warned me. It put us all in an even worse situation.”
“You apologize, but really, it’s my fault?” She couldn’t believe this guy. “When would I have told you? Before Greg Brenner knocked me out? Or after you deleted the video? Or how about when you lied in your witness statement about how my nose got broken, which is a felony, by the way—the lying to cover a cop’s ass, not the standing around with your thumb up your ass while a woman gets punched in the face. That’s perfectly legal.”
Huck pushed out another sigh. “You don’t know what it’s like running into something like that. People make mistakes.”
“I don’t know what it’s like?” Charlie felt shaken by a sudden fury. “I think I was there, Huck. I think I got there before you did, so I know exactly what it’s like to run into something like that, and not for nothing, but if you really grew up in Pikeville, then you know I’ve done it twice now, so fuck you with your ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’”
“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
Charlie wasn’t finished. “You lied about Kelly’s age.”
“Sixteen, seventeen.” She could picture Huck shaking his head. “She’s in the eleventh grade. What difference does it make?”
“She’s eighteen, and the difference is the death penalty.”
He gasped. There was no other word for it—the sudden, quick inhalation that came from absolute shock.
Charlie waited for him to speak. She checked the bars on the phone. “Hello?”
He cleared his throat. “I need a minute.”
Charlie needed a minute, too. She was missing something big. Why had Huck been interviewed for four hours? The average interrogation lasted somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Charlie’s had topped out at around forty-five minutes. The entirety of her and Huck’s involvement with the crime had been less than ten minutes. Why had Delia Wofford brought in the FBI to play good cop/bad cop with Huck? He was hardly a hostile witness. He had been shot in the arm. But he’d said he was interrogated before he went to the hospital. Delia Wofford wasn’t the kind of cop who didn’t follow procedure. The FBI sure as shit didn’t mess around.
So why had they kept their star witness at the police station for four hours? That wasn’t how you treated a witness. That was how you treated a suspect who wasn’t playing ball.
“Okay, I’m back,” Huck said. “Kelly’s—what are they calling it now? Remedial? Intellectually handicapped? She’s in basic classes. She can’t retain concepts.”
“The law would call it diminished capacity, as in she’s too incapable to form the mental state required for a crime, but that’s a very hard argument to make,” Charlie told him. “There are very different priorities between a government-run school system and a government-run murder prosecution. One is trying to help her and the other is trying to kill her.”
He was so quiet that all she could hear was his breathing.
Charlie asked, “Did the two agents, Wofford and Avery, talk to you for four hours straight, or was there time in between?”
“What?” He seemed thrown by the question. “Yeah, one of them was always in the room. And your husband sometimes. And that guy, what’s his name? He wears those shiny suits?”
“Ken Coin. He’s the district attorney.” Charlie shifted tactics. “Was Kelly bullied?”
“Not in my classroom.” He added, “Off-campus, social media, we can’t regulate that.”
“So you’re saying she was bullied?”
“I’m saying she was different, and that’s never a good thing when you’re a kid.”
“You were Kelly’s teacher. Why didn’t you know that she was held back a grade?”
“I’ve got over a hundred twenty kids a year every year. I don’t look back at their files unless they give me a reason.”
“Being slow isn’t a reason?”
“A lot of my kids are slow. She was a solid C student. She never got in trouble.” Charlie could hear a tapping noise, a pen hitting the edge of a table. Huck said, “Look, Kelly’s a good kid. Not smart, but sweet. She follows whatever is in front of her. She doesn’t do things like today. That’s not her.”
“Were you intimate with her?”
“What the hell does—”