Shadrach rubs his temples with both hands, like a man in real pain. “As far as your father having a motive to kill Viola Turner, I’ve got more than you want to hear. But you won’t hear it in here. Not today. There are some lines I can’t cross, no matter what you threaten me with.”
He pushes back his chair, rises, and looks down at me with the closest facsimile of compassion he can manufacture. “This case is going to trial, Penn. Even if it was you sitting in this chair, if you knew what I know, you’d go forward and indict for murder. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do to change that.”
“Motive, Shad. I’m not leaving this office without a motive. Where did it come from? The sister? Cora Revels?”
“I’m not saying another word.”
“The son, then. Lincoln.”
Shad looks down at his desk. Then he raises his eyes and says very softly, “Have you asked yourself why a mother would want to be euthanized a half hour before her son arrived to tell her good-bye?”
As soon as the words leave his lips, I realize I have no answer.
“A mother wouldn’t want that, would she?” Shad asks gently. “Viola’s killer wanted her silenced before her son got there. He didn’t want Viola to be able to talk to her son face-to-face.”
My cheeks are burning. “You’re saying my father killed Viola Turner to silence her?”
Shad stares at me with the calm certainty of a man who believes he has the full weight of the facts behind him. But surely not even Shad Johnson could actually believe such a thing about my father? Maybe he doesn’t really believe it, I think. Maybe he’s content to know that others might believe it, or be made to. But no … that’s wishful thinking. The look in the DA’s eyes is clear: he believes my father committed murder last night.
“What kind of lawyer is the son?” I ask, an unsettled feeling growing in my belly. “Criminal? Corporate? Bankruptcy? Ambulance chaser?”
Shad shrugs as though this is irrelevant, then walks to his window and looks down to the street where Henry was parked only a few minutes ago. He taps the window glass lightly, his brown fingers moving like those of a violinist.
“He’s smart,” he says. “You sense that right away.”
“You didn’t know him in Chicago?”
Shad laughs. “God, no. The man went to a night law school.”
Our DA has always been quick with contempt. “You said he was about forty?”
“Somewhere around there.”
“Did you know he’s about to be disbarred for embezzling client escrow funds?”
Shad seems to freeze for a moment, but then he looks back from the window like a man whose mind has moved on to other issues. “You need to get your father a good criminal defense lawyer, Penn. Don’t even think about representing him yourself.”
“Are you seriously thinking about arresting him?”
“No, but Billy Byrd is.”
A current of fear shoots through me. “When?”
“I can probably hold him off until tomorrow morning. If you plan to pull a miracle out of your hat, do it tonight. Life’s going to get embarrassing after that.”
Shad meets my eye and offers his hand. The guy has balls, I’ll grant him that. For him to utter the word embarrassing in connection with my father takes unimaginable gall. If Caitlin were to publish the dogfighting photo, Shad would be hounded out of the city by nightfall, no pun intended. Disbarment would follow, and possibly even prison. Yet in spite of all this, I take Shad’s hand. My old nemesis has told me more than he should have during this meeting, and even if he only did it out of fear, I owe him something.
“Don’t try to see Lincoln Turner,” he says in a warning tone. “And don’t let your father try, either. You’ll only make things worse.”
“Where’s Turner now?”
“Leave it alone, Penn. Your father is the man you need to find.”
CHAPTER 10
AS HIS WRISTWATCH ticked over to eleven, Henry Sexton sat down beside the only admitted member of the Double Eagle group ever to agree to speak for the record. Glenn Morehouse had once been a giant of a man; pictures on the walls of the little den testified to that. One framed snapshot showed him in hunting camouflage beside a dead ten-point buck that looked more like a fawn next to the man who’d killed it. In another he sat behind the wheel of a glittering bass boat that looked like a toy that might not bear his weight. In a third he held two hefty toddlers, one in each huge hand, extended before him like dolls on display. But today, thirteen months after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Morehouse had been reduced to a skeletal figure in a La-Z-Boy recliner, a crocheted comforter on his lap and a bifurcated oxygen hose running from his nose back over his ears and down to a steadily humming machine on the floor. Beside the oxygen machine, a white bucket half covered with a lid read CHEMOTHERAPY WASTE, and a plastic urinal stood beside that. The urine in the wide-mouthed vessel looked like strong tea. Henry could hardly imagine this man beating someone to death with a leather strap with roofing nails stuck through it. But that was the kind of thing Morehouse and his buddies had done in their heyday.
Henry was doing his best to hide his nervousness. He wasn’t physically afraid. Morehouse wasn’t an immediate threat (unless he had a pistol under his comforter), and nobody knew this meeting was taking place. The house belonged to Morehouse’s sister, Wilma Deen, the secretary at a local Baptist church, and Morehouse had sent her out on an errand that should take at least ninety minutes. The house itself sat well back from the nearest pavement, at the end of a washboard gravel road potted with holes, so there were no near neighbors to spy on them. Yet still Henry felt edgy and ill at ease.