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Cooper licked a spoon covered with strawberry smoothie. “Got it?”
“I do.” Melton clicked on the link. Seconds later, as Cooper poured the smoothie into two glasses, she was looking at the BCA file on the Sand murder. The file contained photographs, which they never looked at anymore. It also contained a number at the bottom of the last page that indicated how many words were in the file.
“It’s up four hundred words, more or less,” Melton said. “Can’t be much. Do you want to scan?”
“Might as well.”
Scanning took fifteen minutes, because the file was fat. They found the additional four hundred words in an interview with a man named Ben Louis Pritchard, whose car had pulled off the road below the wooded bluff where the Sand house stood, a few days before the murders. A speed camera had picked up the license plate coming and going. Pritchard was not seen getting out of the car, and nobody was seen getting in. In the interview, Pritchard, a salesman for a barn-building contractor, claimed to have been talking to a worried horse owner about construction of a four-stall addition to her barn. He’d pulled over, he said, because he didn’t have a hands-free telephone link in his car.
The horse owner backed him up. When the BCA agent asked why she’d called him so late in the day, between six and seven, she said, “I needed to get it done, the new stalls. Those people moved so slow it was like watching mold grow. I had three more horses coming from Europe.”
Pritchard said, “She called me every fifteen minutes. I’m not saying she’s nuts, but I’d say she was... worried. We got the job done on time. Almost.”
He’d seen nobody on foot, as far as he could remember.
“Nothing,” Cooper said, and Melton closed the file.
—
Cooper took aturn around the kitchen island, shook her head a couple of times, then said, “Davenport and Flowers aren’t reporting. Flowers is in the system, but only on old cases.”
Melton: “If they keep up with their paperwork, like they should, we’ll be able to keep up with them. On the other hand, maybe they won’t do that. They seem to work on their own.”
“We could be blind to the competition,” Cooper said.
“We have an advantage. Once they’ve identified a suspect, they won’t go right at him, not unless they somehow find DNA and there isn’t any question,” Melton said. “Otherwise, they’ll do a lot of running around, nailing down the suspect. If we can find out who that is... and we should be able to do that... we can move, as long as we’re morally certain that they’ve got the right guy.”
“But if it’s Davenport and Flowers, and if they’re really loners and keep it to themselves...”
“At that point, when they believe they’ve identified the guy, they’ll have to talk to their superiors at the BCA and it’ll go in the file,” Melton argued.
“I hope,” Cooper said. “We’ve still got to get a gun.”
“That’s the scary part. I say we move now. Tomorrow,” Melton said. “We’ve put it off long enough. We know where he is, and what kind of shape he’s in. He’ll go for it.”
“I’ll talk to him alone,” Cooper said. “I don’t want him to see your face.”
“I’m good with that,” Melton said. “When the cops kick down your door, I’ll be your defense attorney.”
“If we get caught at it, Davenport and Flowers will know what we’re up to,” Cooper said.
“We’re either going to do it, or not,” Melton said.
Cooper took a deep breath: “We’re doing it.”
“If Carter doesn’t go for it, we might have to call the whole thing off.”
“Nope. I won’t do that,” Cooper said. “We’re gonna do it.”
—
In bed thatnight, Cooper began to kick. She couldn’t help it. The movement started with her legs, twitching, kicking, then her whole body would begin to shake. Not a random spasm, but a fight response. She was fighting, killing.
As long as she was talking, as long as she had a specific focus of some importance, she could function. Alone in bed, her mind began to churn, and her body followed suit.
She went from despair, to depression, and then to anger. The anger was always there, like a ball of fire in her belly. She’d been told she was suffering a variety of PTSD, created by her discovery of her murdered family.
But it was worse than that. Under any circumstances, stumbling on the murder scene would have been traumatizing enough. Her mind unreeled it, like a video, from stepping through the door from the garage, to the sound of the olive jar shattering as it hit the floor, and the sight of the bodies.
