“Caroline.” Beasley cleared his throat. I registered his switch to using my first name. “I appreciate how difficult all this must be for you. How much you wanted that bullet to lead us to somebody. How good it would feel to achieve closure, feel like you’ve done right by your mama and daddy. The Smiths. Me, too, trust me. I told you when I met you, this case haunts me every day.” He harrumphed again. “Gerry and I have talked it over and—”
“You know what I think? I think you should go arrest Ethan Sinclare. I think he did it. I think he had an affair with Sadie Rawson, and she dumped him, and he went crazy. Shall we recap? Sinclare owned a .38 Special, and the bullet in my neck was a .38 Special. Sinclare doesn’t have an alibi, whatever nonsense Verlin Snow is currently spouting. And now he appears to be on the run, he isn’t returning your phone calls—”
“Hold on, hold on. Not returning my phone calls doesn’t qualify a person as being on the run. If it did, then my daughter was a fugitive for pretty much the entire decade she was a teenager. And let me play devil’s advocate on the other things you just said. One, we don’t know that Ethan and Sadie Rawson had an affair.”
“Cheral Rooney says they—”
“I know she does, and I also know that he denies it. There’s no proof either way.”
“Verlin Snow said Ethan’s always been a ladies’ man.”
“Oh, Verlin Snow!” crowed Beasley with mock enthusiasm. “Would you mean the same Verlin Snow who gave a statement today, who put it in writing and handed it to two uniformed police officers, swearing that Sinclare was with him at the time the murders were committed? You mean that Verlin Snow?”
“Beamer—”
“Sorry, what was that you were saying? About Sinclare not having an alibi?”
“He’s lying, Beamer! Snow lied to you today.”
“Prove it.”
I was silent.
“Caroline. My point is, there isn’t proof. None. Zero. There’s no proof there ever was an affair. There’s no proof that the bullet that hit you was fired from Sinclare’s gun. There’s no witness, except for you, and you don’t remember a damn thing. Oh, but we do have a leader in the business community, a senior Southern Bell exec, who swears that Sinclare couldn’t have been anywhere near the crime scene. You with me? We’re right back where we were thirty-four years ago. Except that maybe now I’m even more frustrated.”
“What about the fact that someone broke into my house two weeks ago and tried to hurt me? Don’t you think that might have been Sinclare, trying to get to the bullet before—”
“Sure, it might have been. Or it might have been Jack the Ripper. Or . . . Wile E. Coyote. Where’s the proof? Come on, you know the standard we have to meet for a felony conviction. Beyond a reasonable doubt. We’re not anywhere close to that. On the contrary: we’ve got both his wife and his secretary prepared to swear under oath that Sinclare was in Georgia the night of October twenty-third.”
I stamped my foot in frustration.
“You would want to be very, very careful before you brought charges against a man like Ethan Sinclare. I’m not saying that’s a reason not to try. But he would be a powerful witness for the defense. He would call in every favor he’s ever been owed in Atlanta. And given how generous he and Betsy are in the community, I’d wager that’s a few. Speaking of Betsy, he’d have his pretty, blond wife out there, the mother of his children, going on about what a good man he is, what a good husband and father. She’d light up the TV cameras. Betsy would have the whole Junior League lined up behind her, every blond lady in Buckhead insisting her husband must be innocent.”
That stopped me short. Not the image of sweet Betsy Sinclare in front of the cameras. But the image of Ethan as a good husband and father. It was, I had to admit, the same impression I’d gotten. It was difficult to square the kind, fatherly man who’d bought me breakfast with a violent criminal.
Beasley appeared to be struggling with the same disconnect. “I’m not saying rich, white folks get a pass. Even rich, white folks as well connected as the Sinclares. But you’re asking me to believe that Ethan Sinclare—an educated, respectable lawyer—went on a homicidal rampage in 1979. Shot everybody in sight, point-blank, left a baby girl for dead. Yet afterwards he went docile as a lamb. He transformed into the perfect gentleman, a loving family man, for more than three decades. Right up to last month, when—boom! He snaps again, drives to Washington, puts a brick through your basement window and tries to break down your bedroom door? It’s—”
“I know, I know. It sounds completely implausible.”
“People can change their ways, I grant you. But those are wild extremes.”
We were quiet for a minute.
Then Beasley said, “Mind you. Do you remember last year, that volcano that erupted in New Zealand?”
I waited. Talk about non sequiturs.
“It spewed rocks, sent up giant ash clouds, shut down a bunch of roads. And the volcano experts they interviewed—what do you call them, volcanologists?—they said there’d been no warning. No seismic activity.”
“Okay.” I was learning that Beasley would eventually get to his point; sometimes he just liked to circle around it for a while first.
“Mount Tongariro, I think it was called. It had been dormant for one hundred and fifteen years. More than a century. And then all of a sudden, no warning, it erupted.”
Ah. Now I saw. “Just like that?”
“Yes, ma’am. Just like that.”
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