“Screwing. Fucking. You know what I mean.”
“Of course not.” He sounded disgusted. “She was one of my kids. Christ.”
“Was anyone else having sex with her?”
“No. I would’ve reported it.”
“Mr. Pinkman?”
“Don’t even—”
“Another student at school?”
“How should I—”
“What happened to the revolver?”
If she hadn’t been listening for it, she would’ve missed the slight catch in his breath.
And then he said, “What revolver?”
Charlie shook her head, silently berating herself for missing the obvious.
During her own interview with Delia Wofford, she had been too disoriented to put it together, but now Charlie could see that the woman had practically drawn her a picture. You didn’t see Mr. Huckabee hand the revolver to anyone? Did you see him put it anywhere on his person? On the ground?
Charlie asked Huck, “What did you do with it?”
He paused again because that’s what he did when he was lying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is that how you answered the two agents?”
“I told them what I told you. I don’t know. A lot was going on.”
Charlie could only shake her head at his stupidity. “Did Kelly say something to you in the hall?”
“Not that I heard.” He paused for the billionth time. “Like I said, a lot was happening.”
The guy had been shot and barely grimaced. Fear had not dampened his recall.
She asked, “Whose side are you on?”
“There’s no such thing as sides. There’s just doing the right thing.”
“I hate to blow apart your philosophy, Horatio, but if there’s a right thing then there’s a wrong thing, and as someone with a law degree, I can tell you that stealing the murder weapon from a double homicide, then lying about it to an FBI agent, can land you on the wrong side of a prison cell for a hell of a long time.”
He kept up the silent act for two seconds, then said, “I don’t know if we were in it, but there’s a blind spot in the security cameras.”
“Stop talking.”
“But, if—”
“Shut up,” Charlie warned him. “I’m a witness. I can’t be your lawyer. What you tell me isn’t privileged.”
“Charlotte, I—”
She ended the call before he could dig the hole he was standing in any deeper.
5
Predictably, Rusty’s old Mercedes was not parked in the lot when Lenore pulled into her space behind the building. Charlie had watched her father leave the hospital live on television. He had been half an hour from the office, roughly the same distance away as the Wilson house, so he must have taken a detour.
Lenore told Ava, “Rusty’s on his way,” a lie she told multiple clients multiple times a day.
Ava didn’t seem interested in Rusty’s whereabouts. Her mouth gaped open as the security gate rolled closed behind them. The enclosed space, with its array of security lights and cameras, metal bars on the windows and twelve-foot-high razor-wired perimeter fence, looked like the staging area inside a SuperMax prison.
Over the years, Rusty had continued to receive death threats because he continued to represent outlaw bikers, drug gangs, and child killers. Add to the list the union organizations, undocumented workers and abortion clinics, and he had managed to piss off almost everyone in the state. Charlie’s private theory was that most of the death threats came courtesy of the Culpeppers. Only a fraction came from the fine, upstanding citizens who believed Rusty Quinn served at the right hand of Satan.
There was no telling what they would do when word spread that Rusty was representing a school shooter.
Lenore parked her Mazda beside Charlie’s Subaru. She turned around and looked at Ava Wilson. “I’ll show you a place where you can freshen yourself.”
“Do you got a TV?” Ava asked.
Charlie said, “Maybe it’s best not to—”
“I wanna watch.”
Charlie couldn’t deny a grown woman TV privileges. She got out of the car and opened the door for Ava. The mother didn’t move at first. She stared at the back of the seat in front of her, hands resting on her knees.
Ava said, “This is real, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry,” Charlie said. “It is.”
The woman turned slowly. Her legs looked like two twigs underneath the pajama pants. Her skin was so pale as to be almost transparent in the harsh daylight.
Lenore shut the driver’s side door quietly, but the look on her face said she wanted to slam it off the car. She had been pissed off at Charlie from the moment she’d spotted her in the front bedroom of the Wilson house. But for Ava Wilson, she would’ve taken off Charlie’s head and thrown it out the window on the drive back.
Lenore mumbled, “This isn’t finished.”
“Super!” Charlie smiled brightly, because why not pour more fuel onto the fire? There was nothing Lenore could say about Charlie’s foolish actions that Charlie had not already said to herself. If there was one thing she excelled at, it was being her own inner mean girl.
She handed Ava Wilson the plastic bag of clothes so she could look for her keys.
“I’ve got it.” Lenore unlocked the steel security screen and accordioned it back. The heavy metal door required a code and another key to engage the bar lock that went straight across the inside of the door and bolted into either side of the steel jamb. Lenore had to put some muscle into turning the latch. There was a deep cha-chunk before she could open the door.
Ava asked, “Y’all keep money in here or something?”
Charlie shivered at the question. She let Lenore and Ava enter first.
The familiar odor of cigarettes managed to make its way into Charlie’s broken nose. She had banned Rusty from smoking in the building, but the order had come thirty years too late. He brought the stink in with him like Pig-Pen from the Peanuts comics. No matter how many times she cleaned or painted the walls or even replaced the carpet, the odor lingered.
“This way.” Lenore gave Charlie another sharp look before escorting Ava to the reception area, a depressingly dark room with a metal roller shade that blocked the view to the street.
Charlie headed toward her office. Her first priority was to call her father and tell him to get his ass down here. Ava Wilson shouldn’t be relegated to sitting on their lumpy couch, getting all of her information about her daughter from cable news.
Just in case, Charlie took the long way by Rusty’s office to make sure he hadn’t parked in the front. The white paint on his door had bled yellow from nicotine. Stains radiated into the Sheetrock and clouded the ceiling. Even the knob had a film around it. She pulled down the sleeve of her shirt to cover her hand and made sure the door was locked.