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“Just tell it the way you remember it, Darlene.”
She spoke slowly, the mist from her breath and cigarette smoke wreathing her head. “Bud told me to take off my clothes and get in bed and play with myself. ‘Put on a show for him,’ he said. And he had that boy sit in a chair and watch me.” She hesitated, then continued. “Bud told him to jerk off in this plastic bottle he gave him. That’s what we did. That’s all we did. And Bud let the boy go. I just thought it was weird shit, you know? I said, ‘Why you keeping his come in that bottle?’ He didn’t answer. Nobody was gonna get hurt.”
She had pulled him through a door he didn’t even know existed. He had a dozen questions, but didn’t dare ask them. She believed Cheryl Beth had seen this. Will couldn’t let her think otherwise.
Suddenly Darlene was talking rapidly, trying to purge it from her memory. “I never knew what Bud was going to do. I swear to God. That morning, he come by, all agitated. He said he found her body, Theresa. He swore to me that he didn’t kill her, but he said he had to put that boy’s come on her body because the other cops would frame him, say he done it because he was the husband and she had a restraining order against him and all. He told me what to say. God, I was scared! Fuck, it was hard keeping my head straight.”
“So,” Will said, “just to be clear, did you know who Bud brought home that night?”
“I never seen him before. Just said his name was Craig.”
“The one we arrested for murder, right?”
“Yes sir.”
“And when did Bud bring him home to you, when did you do this?”
“It was two nights before the killing.”
“How do you remember that, what with the meth and all?”
She smiled, sniffled loudly. “It was my birthday.”
Will stared into the opaque river and said nothing. The day was cold and dying. At last he spoke through the chill, “Darlene, you’re going to have to give a statement. Are you willing to do that?”
“Yes. Yes, I am…just let me keep my baby.”
He patted her arm and told her she could go. She stubbed out the last Camel, tossed it into the growing pile of cigarette filters on the sidewalk, and stood. She walked two steps and turned.
“I always liked you, Detective Will. Always thought you were fair. I never believed what Bud said about you.”
It was a moment of premonition, the nanosecond where the bullet leaves the rifle and strikes a target even before its sound is heard. But Will asked, “What did Bud say?”
“That you killed Theresa.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Cheryl Beth was relieved for the physical effort of folding the wheelchair and lifting it into the back of her car. When she almost lost control of it, nearly tossing it into the air, she knew the level of her emotions. Yet she could say nothing once she was in the car. Will was on his cell phone, obviously talking to Detective Dodds. She could only hear his end of the conversation.
“Darlene gave it all up…calm down…never mind why I’m not in the hospital…”
She could hear the angry percussions of Dodds’ voice coming through Will’s phone, interrupting nearly every sentence, but she couldn’t make out the words.
“Are you done now? She admits he wasn’t with her the night Theresa died, and she explained how he planted the DNA evidence…of course, I Mirandized her…She’s got a kid now, so you’ve got leverage…He turned her into a tweaker but she says she’s clean now…She’s in the same crappy little house, yes, she’s there…You’ve got to get over there now and take her statement, get her protected, and get a warrant out on him. Pull him in for anything, just get him and hold him…I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…Because somebody had to…You know where to find me.”
She listened to Will talk, such enthusiasm in his voice. Her emotions were lava under pressure.
“Will Borders, you’d better the hell tell me what’s going on because there’s nothing I hate more than being lied to.” She turned in the seat to face him, refusing to break eye contact, talking as adamantly with her hands as with her voice. “I’ve watched you these weeks as you’ve struggled and worked, and I’ve admired you. I never would have let you hurt as long as you did if I’d known and I stopped it. And then I got you out today, you go and get a damned gun, and this trailer girl talks about this man saying you killed that woman, and, God, you’d better stop lying to me right now! I’m sick of people lying to me! You’d better tell me what’s going on right now!”
She threw it out as the words boiled out of her mind. One of the docs used to make gentle fun of her when she was that intense, the exclamation points shooting out of her, calling it “running hot.” She was running hot. She stared at Will as he meekly put his phone away and reached down to rearrange his left leg. H
is eyes were wide.
“What do you want to know?”
“Did you kill her?”
“No.”
