I’m not saying that this is a good thing for me to want or even that I want it. It is just what I seem to need.
Beside me, the phone keeps flashing.
I’m shoving open the door, my caller ID lighting up the dark entryway.
The word A-hole, glaring at me. My partner.
I lift the phone to my ear. “Hey, Rusty.”
“Where’ve you been? We’ve arrested Wyatt Branson.”
I stop short in the doorway. “When?”
“Five … six hours? He’s asking for you.”
“Why didn’t you call me five hours ago?”
“Are you his keeper? I thought you were on vacation. And he wasn’t asking for you five hours ago. He was drunk.”
“You arrested him on drunk and disorderly? DWI?”
“Yes, but incidental. He was hounding Lizzie Raymond while she walked home from cheerleading practice. You know the girl I’m talking about—the one who looks like Trumanell Branson if you get her in the right light. The girl who was on that documentary. She had a little cheerleader friend with her this time, so there’s a witness to what he said. When you get here, I suggest coming in the back. You’ll see why.”
17
Outside, the crowd is belting out a war cry. Rusty is marching me down to Wyatt’s cell, tossing the keys in his hand, our steps clicking in tandem on the shiny white tile. But we’re not in tandem. Rusty and I both know that sticking my foot in that cell is going to be the point of no return, the official demarcation, and that I might not be able to step back.
Rusty has always been perfectly clear. He believes Wyatt is every evil rolled into one: Ted Bundy slithering around with a handsome face; Perry Smith slaughtering a bucolic farmhouse; Jack the Ripper grinning in his grave and getting away with it.
“Wyatt Branson’s got the fuckin’ long view,” he’d told me five years ago on our first day on the job together. “He’s taken on the role of a lifetime in an off-off-off-off-Broadway play—however fucking off New York is from Texas—and he hopes it runs forever. I can bide my time. But you need to know I’m going to clear the Branson case and close his show.” Rusty loves to speak in extended metaphors.
My father’s support of Wyatt, or mine, wasn’t a secret and it was absolute. So you’d think that Rusty and I would be a bad match. Eventually, we’d part ways. It turned out, Rusty was the only one who volunteered to be my partner. No other cop on the force wanted to be paired with a one-legged rookie girl.
A few years later, over shots of tequila, I asked Rusty if he chose me because he thought I was his ticket to fame. I’d tapped my temple drunkenly, almost missing it. “You think all the answers to Trumanell are in here. That’s why you took on the amputee. That’s why you chose me.”
“I chose you because you go from zero to animal in five seconds when it counts,” he drawled. “And you’re pretty. Useful tools in the cop kit.”
It’s not like he didn’t test me first. He invited me out to his piece of land and watched me shoot holes in a target with a series of six guns he laid out.
He said he heard I had “one of those Oscar Pistorius Olympic blades” and asked if I’d join him on a ten-mile run around the property. When he was finished, doubled over, sucking at the air, he admonished me for trying not to show him up. “I know what you can do. Don’t ever slow down for nobody. If you’re going to try to manipulate somebody like me, do a good job of it. Didn’t your daddy teach you that?”
Wyatt’s slouched on a bench in the squatty cell, head bowed. The chants of the protest in the parking lot are more jarring in here, louder, primed by echo. People in this town know exactly how this jail is laid out. The Wyatt haters are huddled at the corner of the building as close to him as they can get.
When Rusty clangs open the door, Wyatt’s head stays down, lips still moving. Rusty probably thinks Wyatt is faking. I know better. Wyatt’s praying used to draw every girl to him. There was nothing sexier than a boy who could slam any asshole to the ground except a boy who could slam any asshole to the ground and still believe there was something greater in this universe than he was. Believing in God—in an invisible and all-powerful watchman—was one thing Wyatt never lied about.
“Like I said, he hasn’t said a word except to ask for you,” Rusty says. “You don’t have long.” He leans in to my ear. “Remember what you are. A cop. Remember, girls are dying.”
Plural “girls” because Rusty’s imagination has Wyatt scattering bones like birdseed.
The air pouring out of the vent in the ceiling is a bitter, cold soup. I rub my arms to try to stop the shivering. Mother-May-I, who controls the thermostat, is blasting it on purpose, anything to twitch Wyatt’s nerves. There’s nothing Mother-May-I hates more than a man bothering a girl. I’m sure my colleagues haven’t offered Wyatt food, water, a bathroom break. The rusty urinal in the corner has a sign that says it’s out of order, a lie.
Wyatt raises his head and nods up at the camera in the corner, blinking green.
“People are on the other side of that,” I confirm.
I glance quickly down the hall outside the cell. Empty, both ways. So are the other three cells. The doors at either end, shut.
I turn so the back of my head is all the camera sees. “The audio has been busted for two months. So I’ll talk. You listen. Nancy Raymond is the one who made the call to police after her daughter Lizzie got home from school. I know Lizzie. She does a little babysitting for some of my neighbors. I just read her statement. She was a little reluctant, just like she was on the documentary. Her mother says that’s because she’s worried about disappearing like Trumanell if she gets you mad.”
No reaction from Wyatt. I swallow a deep breath. “Lizzie says in her statement that she thinks you followed her several other times but isn’t positive—she might have confused you with some reporters. But this time, there was a witness. You pulled over as she and her friend were walking out of cheerleading practice. You asked whether Trumanell’s picture is still hanging in the locker room. You told her she looked so much like Trumanell, you thought she was Trumanell at first. You snapped her picture with your cellphone, without her permission. They’ve got the proof of that because now they have your phone. As we speak, someone is going through every search you ever made.”
I let that sink in. There’s nobody on earth who hasn’t made a search they prefer no one ever sees. A cellphone is platinum to a cop, a tool to scrape every bit of blackmail material to the surface. A person of interest in a case should never, ever carry a phone.
Wyatt’s tan is bleached under the harsh fluorescent. His face, impassive. I’ve been trying to be as matter-of-fact as possible. Inside, I’m seething. I want both him and the people watching this silent movie to wonder whose side I’m on.
“What the fuck is wrong with you, Wyatt? Getting drunk. Scaring the crap out of those girls. And what you did to Lizzie? Cruel. She’s a sweet, shy girl, who has been teased about looking like Trumanell since she was in middle school. Everybody knows that’s why she dyed her hair and changed the color of her contacts. She’s considered a nose job even though her nose is perfect. In fact, it’s hard for me to believe, along with every other cop in this place, that you didn’t seek her out specifically to provoke—”