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I went over to Agent Wolfe, said, “What do you think my dad’s chances are?”
Wolfe said, “Well, he’s not going back to his job with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office. They’ve been pretty clear on that, but I don’t think he’ll end up being prosecuted for taking Bell hostage and marching him into court.”
“You don’t think?” I asked. “Pretty extreme move.”
“It was,” she said. “But we arrested the police chief and the presiding judge in Stark County, and the sheriff’s been murdered. And Guy Pedelini regained consciousness and spilled everything on all of them. The DA’s office is even under investigation. Basically, there’s no one left in Starksville to go after your dad, and I don’t know what federal statute would apply.”
“So he walks free into a new life,” I said.
“He walks free into an old life,” Bree said, coming up beside me.
“And Marvin Bell and Harold Caine go down for so many things,” Wolfe said. “If they’re not given the death penalty, which I think is the appropriate punishment, they’ll at least never see the outside of a prison.”
I thought about Harold Caine, his callous, cruel indifference. We’d gotten more of the story from Cece.
After Rashawn’s birth, her parents had all but disowned her. Then Cece got pregnant by a white boyfriend she picked up while Rashawn’s father was doing time. Her parents found out, and they also found out that Cece was on drugs while she was with child.
The Caines used the rigged courts of Starksville against Cece and had the baby girl, Lizzie, taken from her mother’s arms within minutes of birth. The courts awarded Lizzie’s grandparents full custody, and they had greatly limited Cece’s involvement in her daughter’s life.
Harold Caine had evidently spent years bitter and humiliated about his mixed-race grandson while at the same time doting on his lily-white granddaughter and running a meth business from secret underground labs beneath his fertilizer factory.
The most terrible thing about it all was that the frenzied nature of the wounds Rashawn had suffered before death clearly indicated that Caine had enjoyed killing his grandson. He’d enjoyed murdering his own flesh and blood. When it came right down to it, that poor, innocent boy had been tortured and slain for the color of his skin.
I’d heard too many variations of that story over the years—young black boy killed for his race—but this one was the worst. The cruelest. The most heinous. The most sadistic. The least understandable.
Like Cece Turnbull, I would never get over Rashawn’s death.
Caine had lawyered up and wasn’t talking. Marvin Bell was talking to prosecutors who were going after Caine for murder, kidnapping, and depraved indifference within the course of a race-based incident. I hoped that whatever the jury decided about Caine, they’d make him suffer.
I spotted a middle-aged woman wearing a Domino’s hat coming around the corner carrying two pizzas. Wolfe, Bree, and I immediately went on alert. Varney, Bell, and Sherman had continued to turn over evidence against Caine, and they’d all stated that he had hired a female assassin known as the lace maker to kill members of my family and make it look like accidents.
She’d missed getting Bree and me with the broken brake line. Now that Caine was behind bars, there was no reason to think the lace maker was still around. But you never knew.
“Can I take those off your hands?” I asked the woman.
“Please,” she said as she smiled and handed them to me. “I’m a little late, so it’ll be five dollars off.”
“Who ordered them?” Bree asked.
“Connie Lou.”
“Oh, Edith, there you are,” my aunt said, hustling over with the cash.
They hugged, and Bree and I relaxed.
Then I saw something that warmed my heart. Cece Turnbull came into the backyard with a beautiful little girl who was the spitting image of her mother, and Cece looked clean and sober and thrilled to be with her daughter.
Bree went into the house for something to drink. I got in line for food. With my plate loaded with fried rabbit, coleslaw, broccoli salad, and little roasted red potatoes, I spotted Pinkie talking to Bree and started over.
“You didn’t eat all the rabbit, did you, Dad?” Jannie asked from a lawn chair between Damon and Ali.
“God, it’s really good,” Damon said. “There better be seconds.”
“I want some more too,” Ali said. “But Pinkie said he’d cook the bass I caught yesterday up at the lake.”
“I’m sure he hasn’t forgotten,” I said. “But I’ll remind him.”
Jannie said, “Coach Greene and Coach Fall said they were going to try to come by later.”
