“That sounds like bullshit.”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s the way it is with lawyers and politicians both, we can make even the truth sound like lies.”

“What did you find in Vegas?”

“A story.”

“Go ahead.”

“A story about a boy who was killed a decade and a half ago in a little town in West Virginia.”

“Hailey Prouix’s hometown.”

“That’s right. He had fallen in love with Hailey, they had a stormy romance, and then he found out about something. He found out about something, and it made him mad as hell and put him at a crossroads. He was going to either run away with his love, Hailey Prouix, or hurt someone. And there he was, at the quarry on the south side of town, waiting to hear which way it was going to be, when the next thing he somehow falls off a ledge, cracks his head open, and dies in the water that had collected at the quarry’s bottom. The natural suspect was a guy named Grady Pritchett, rich man’s son, big man in high school who had been fighting with our dead boy just a few days before. All eyes turned to him, but he had an alibi, and a pretty convincing one at that. Hailey Prouix. Funny how it worked. And funny how after Hailey stood up for Grady Pritchett she got her college and law school all paid for so she could get the hell out of Pierce once and for all.”

“How come I never heard any of this?”

“You haven’t been asking the right questions.”

“What kind of car does this Grady Pritchett drive?”

“Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Doesn’t drive a car, drives a truck. A big black pickup.”

“Where does he live?”

“Just a few towns down the road from Pierce.”

“And you think this Grady might have come up here and killed that girl?”

“Nope.”

“You think he killed that boy fifteen years ago?”

“Nope.”

“Then what the hell do you think?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t yet figured it out, but there’s something connecting the two deaths. I met up with Hailey’s sister. She’s certifiable, in an actual asylum, treats some pop physics book as her Bible, but I took from her babbling that she, too, thinks the two are related. And if they are, I want to find out how. Believe this, Detective, all I want is for whoever killed Hailey Prouix to go straight to hell.”

“Even if it’s your client?”

“He didn’t do it.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“She seduced him for the Gonzalez money. She set him up for it, met him at a bar, let their knees bang accidentally, and seduced him completely and absolutely. He fell stupidly in love and lost his bearings and gave up everything for her. Like I said in my opening, for him it was never about the money, it was about a love that was transforming, or maybe more precisely the hope for a love that was transforming. She set him up for the money, yes, but his hope was real, and he never could have killed that hope. Even when it all turned bad, he closed his eyes and kept it alive, because it was the hope he was chasing more than even her.”

“And obsession couldn’t have turned to violence?”

“Not with him, not with her. See, no matter what happened, he’d always remember the way he felt when their knees banged accidentally at that bar.”

Maybe there was something in my voice that betrayed me, because he turned to stare at me with that wandering gaze of his and he said, “And how did that feel exactly?”

“I’m telling you what I can.”

“Maybe telling only what you can is not enough.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t explain the knocking of the knees and the way it had felt, the confusion and hope and lust all mixed together, I just couldn’t. I would be betraying more than myself, more than Guy, I would be betraying her, too. So instead I decided to say something else, something that would resonate. It is always in times of maximum stress, when all alternatives fail, that lawyers tend to turn to that most unlikely tactic, the truth.

“I saw the body, Detective. I saw her on that mattress with a bullet through her chest. I saw the way her arms were crazily akimbo, I saw the way the blood contrasted with the pale of her skin. I’ve seen a few corpses, not as many as you, but a few, and they never fail to stun me with their abject lifelessness. It’s not like you can just breathe life back into them, it’s not like they’re sleeping, it’s something else, something distorted in a way that haunts the dreams. I can’t just let that go, I can’t just play my minor role and let the rest of you decide how it all gets sorted out. I saw the body, Detective.”

He breathed in quickly through his nose, or was it a snort? I couldn’t tell. He stared straight ahead for a long moment before downing his beer and swiveling away from me. He reached into his jacket and tossed something onto the bar, a dollar or two for the beer, I supposed, and without saying a further word he climbed off his stool and headed out the door, right out the door.

Gone.

A despair flitted over my shoulders in that instant, a despair that filled me with a shocking sense of hopelessness. There was something about Breger I found comforting, something solid. He had shown faith in me, kindness, too, in his way. I admired how fairly he had handled the case, and I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted him to understand and say that I had done right, that everything would be okay. For some reason, from him, it would sound like the real thing. But he had instead just snorted at me and climbed down and walked away, a gesture that let me know with utter clarity that I had not done right, that everything would not be okay.

I was sitting at the bar, feeling the despair, when I noticed a piece of paper in front of me. It looked like a bar tab. When I scanned the bar for the money Breger had left, there was nothing else, and I figured Breger had stuck me with the check. But then I looked at the paper more closely and saw that it wasn’t a bill. It was something else.

A speeding ticket issued by the Philadelphia Police.

Left on the bar, for me, by my good friend Detective Breger.

I stared at it for a long moment, the name of the driver, Dwayne Joseph Bohannon, which I didn’t recognize, the make and style of the automobile, the state and number of the license plate, the location of the violation, the date. The date. I stared at it for a moment and then a moment more, and then I took out my phone.

First I called Beth and told her that she would have to handle the next day of the trial all by herself.

“What should I do?” she asked.

“Vamp,” I said. “With all your heart.”

Then I called the airline and made a reservation for two on the first flight out the next morning headed for Charleston, West Virginia.

“Will you be needing a rental car at the airport?” asked the reservation man.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes indeed.”

41

FALL HAD come to Pierce with a suddenness that stunned. How long had I been away, how long had the trial of Guy Forrest been going on? It seemed I had lost my temporal bearings. When I had driven into the little town before, it felt as though the promise of spring had just given way to the relentless summer. Now the dry colors of autumn had taken hold, the bright yellows and oranges heralding the death of a season. Right now it was a riotous bounty of color. In a few weeks all would be bare in Pierce.

We walked up the hill, through fallen leaves, their desiccated bodies crumbling beneath our feet as we made our way to the church.

Inside, our footfalls echoed about the plaster and wood of the main chapel. We knocked on the door of the rectory, and Reverend Henson bade us enter without asking first who we were. His face, when he recognized me, was distressed but not surprised, as if he had been expecting me to return all along. As if the only thing that surprised him was that I had waited so long and had brought with me someone new.