Johnson turned the recorder on, gave their names, the date, checked the clock on the wall for the time, sat back, and said, “So, please. Tell me what this is about.”
“I went to see my dad at the jail this morning,” Harlan said. “He’d been calling me, telling me he had to talk to me. I guess you don’t actually only get one call.”
Johnson said, “What did he say?”
Harlan had spent the drive over trying to organize his thoughts. They still weren’t all that organized, so he just started at the beginning. “He wanted me to pay for a defense attorney. A hundred thousand, he said.”
“At the very least,” Johnson said. “If it goes to trial. How did you respond?”
“Told him hell, no.” He took a breath and said, “You probably know I play for the Portland Devils. NFL.”
“Yes,” Johnson said. “I do.”
“Which means he thought I should do it,” Harlan said, “because the money doesn’t mean that much to me.” He felt the stiffening in Jennifer, tightened his hold on her hand, and said, “I’m used to that. But not like this. I told him that he owns property, plus whatever he has saved up. Told him to use that. He said there was the bail, too. Is he going to get bail? For murder?”
“Probably,” the detective said. “The judge could deny it, but it’s a first offense, and it happened a long time ago. He’d have an ankle bracelet. The judge could call him a flight risk, though, because of your financial resources.”
What was he supposed to do about that? What could he do about that? He didn’t want his dad out, back in the house, back around town. It would feel like leaving a black-widow spider in the corner of your shed, just waiting for a kid to stick his hand in there. It would feel like failing his mom again. If he told the judge he wasn’t helping with bail or anything else, though, they’d probably be more likely to grant it.
He needed to talk to his lawyer.
A problem for later. “I’m taking my sister out of here,” he said. “To Portland. If you need us, you know my number.”
“Seems like a good idea,” Johnson agreed. Harlan could hear him thinking, You got me all the way over here on Sunday for this?
Harlan put his elbow on the table and drew his hair back from his face. “I’m going to tell you some stuff he said.”
“I’m listening,” Johnson said.
Harlan closed his eyes a second to get it straight in his brain. Like memorizing a playbook, and he was good at that. Recall under stress, and he was good at that, too. “He told me that it must be somebody else. He suggested Austin Grant, the bookstore guy, but I wouldn’t say he was focused on that. He gave me a scenario of what the guy would have done, though.”
Johnson was too good an interviewer to react to that. “Go on.”
“He said it wouldn’t have been hard to break into the office and get the keys for a Bobcat. He said that specifically. Bobcat. That the guy would drive it up onto a trailer and haul it. That the land wasn’t fenced, so all the guy had to do was haul the Bobcat behind the trees, out of sight, and dig the hole. That he’d have all night to do it, because there would be nobody to see him, not in October.”
“That’s interesting,” Johnson said.
“Yeah.” He had to breathe a couple times for the next part. “I asked him why somebody would’ve done that. Why the guy would’ve killed her. He said, maybe she wanted to leave with him, and he didn’t want to take her.”
Some definite non-interest on Johnson’s face. “Yeah,” Harlan agreed. “That one was stupid. Why would a man kill a woman for that? He’s leaving anyway. And then he said, maybe he didn’t mean to do it. Maybe she told him it was over, and they were fighting about it. Maybe he was shaking her, had his hands around her neck to shut her up, and it happened by accident. Or maybe …” He gripped Jennifer’s hand tighter. “Maybe she told him she was pregnant.”
A little noise from Jennifer, like she couldn’t help it escaping. He loosened his hold on her hand and said, “Sorry. Am I hurting you?”
“No,” she said. “It’s OK.” She wanted to say something else, he could tell, but she didn’t.
Johnson said, “Anything else?”
“That was it.” Harlan was lightheaded. He took another sip of cooling coffee, and then a second one, only a major effort of will keeping his hand from shaking. “And I kept thinking … how did he know? It was like he saw it all. The Bobcat. Driving back behind the trees. October, not whenever it would have been after the postcards stopped. The postcards that aren’t there anymore, so nobody can compare the handwriting. That would have been April, maybe, when the ground was thawed enough to dig. But he said it was October, and that you’d be digging all night.” He put the cup down and looked into the detective’s pale blue eyes. “And I swear he saw those hands around her neck.”
No answer, and he needed one. He said, “Detective. How did my mother die?”
The tension was holding Harlan’s body up like he was strung through with stiff cords. Like if you cut them, he’d collapse in a heap. He was all but vibrating with it.
With that, and dread.
A long, long pause, and the detective said, “Manual strangulation.”
Jennifer saw Harlan’s eyes close, saw the motion of his throat he swallowed. He opened his eyes again, not moving a muscle, and asked, “Was she pregnant?”
She could see the detective deciding whether to tell him. Finally, he said, “Not to my knowledge. If a fetus isn’t very far along, though, you’ve got cartilage, not bone. Cartilage dissolves.”
Unlike the bones of a skeleton. Over twelve years.
She couldn’t bear to think about those last moments. About her frantic hands around his wrists, her mouth open, trying to speak. Trying to beg. She couldn’t bear to, but she was going to have to, because it was right there in Harlan’s mind.
Johnson said, “Thank you for providing that information. It could be useful.” His tone matter-of-fact, dry as unbuttered toast, as only a Norwegian could make it.
Harlan said, “He hasn’t confessed, obviously.”
“No.”
“Are you going to try to get him to?”
“Yes. It’s easier. You never know what a jury will do.”
“Can I …” Harlan’s hand was tight around hers again, almost painful. “Is there a way I can … wear a wire, or something? If I told him I’d bail him out, that I’d pay his lawyer, too, but I needed to know the truth, I’m pretty sure he’d tell me. He wants to say that it wasn’t his fault. He’s dying to say that it was an accident, to justify it. It’s what he does. I could feel it in him. All I’d have to do is give him a nudge, and I’d have it.”
“No,” the detective said. “Not at this point. Once we’ve made an arrest, we can’t go back in to try to compel a statement. It would be entrapment. He’d be incriminating himself.” A wintry smile. “Blame the Fifth Amendment.”
“You wouldn’t be doing it,” Harlan said. “It would be me.”