At the lip of the grave, Louis stopped. He pushed Scott’s face into the dirt, then picked him up by the back of his coat. He held his face over the gaping black hole.

“You ready, motherfucker?” Louis said.

Scott spat out a mouthful of dirt. “Stop! Stop!” he screamed. He twisted frantically, wrestling himself out of his coat and Louis’s grasp. Louis let him go. Scott scrambled away on his knees, backing up against the backhoe. He sat there, heaving, wiping his dirty face.

Louis still had the coat in his hand. He threw it to the ground. A flash of red caught his eye. He bent down and picked up the paper that had fallen out of the coat. It was an Air France ticket envelope.

Louis looked over at Scott. “You sorry sonofabitch,” he said quietly. “You were going to fucking run.”

Scott was crumpled against the backhoe, his white shirt streaked with red. He lowered his hand from his mouth and squinted up at Louis.

“You were going to run out on your own brother,” Louis said tightly.

“Fuck you,” Scott said, coughing on his blood. “Fuck you and him and that girl.”

Louis saw Brian out of the corner of his eye, staring at his brother. He threw the ticket at Scott. Scott flinched but did not get up.

“Her name was Kitty,” Louis said. He turned and walked away.

Chapter Forty-Four

Louis examined the knuckles of his right hand. The skin was broken and something hurt, like he had cracked a bone. He glanced up at the wall clock. It was after one; he had been here since seven this morning.

After leaving the cemetery, he had gone right to Mobley. He told him what Brian and Scott had said, but not what happened afterward. Mobely had looked long and hard at Louis’s swollen hand but had not asked the obvious questions. Then Mobley had called Scott, asking him to come in for questioning. Scott had come willingly, bringing Brian. They had been in the interrogation room for more than an hour now.

A door opened and Louis looked up as Mobley came out. He saw Louis sitting there and came over.

“You look like hell,” Mobley said.

Louis realized Mobley had the same beaten look he had the last time Louis had seen him at O’Sullivan’s. Something hadn’t gone right in that room.

Mobley sank down onto the bench next to him. “They’ve denied everything,” he said. “Scott says they were at the cemetery mourning their poor dead father and you just appeared and started harassing them.”

“Did he tell you the rest?”

“No. Why don’t you give it a shot?”

Louis drew in a deep breath. “I tried to walk away, but Scott kept talking. He laughed about her. He said it was ironic that he was hired as Cade’s lawyer. Ironic, for chrissake.”

“So you beat the shit out of him.”

Louis nodded, flexing his hand. “I lost it. And he just stood there while I beat the crap out of him. Just stood there with that fucking smile on his face like he wanted me to keep hitting him.”

“He did.”

Louis started to ask Mobley what he meant, but suddenly it hit him. Scott knew exactly what he was doing; it had been part of his game strategy. He knew that if Louis attacked him, Louis would lose all credibility and any testimony that might get admitted wouldn’t be believed. That why he was so willing to show up at the station; he wanted everyone to see his face.

Louis leaned his head back against the wall.

“If you push this so-called confession,” Mobley said, “I get the feeling he’ll counter with assault charges. And we’re not talking thirty days here, Louis.”

“I don’t care. I’ll tell it to anyone who will listen.”

“I don’t think it’s going to do you any good.”

Louis stared at the closed door to the interrogation room. “So Scott was right? It’s all privileged?”

Mobley shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but between the privilege, hearsay and coercion issues, I do know we got one big fucking legal cesspool that will take years to clean up.”

Louis sighed, dropping his gaze to the floor.

“It gets worse,” Mobley said. “They’ve hired a big time lawyer from Miami who’s already on his way here to file a motion to try Brian as a juvenile. Sandusky says we’ve got to go by the 1966 laws, and it was general practice back then to try kids as kids. If they do that, Brian will walk away completely because he’s already over the maximum age you can punish juveniles for.”

Mobley hesitated, watching Louis. “And without Brian facing charges, we got no leverage to ever turn him against Scott.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“And even if the juvenile thing doesn’t work, Scott’s claiming everything we found in the search is inadmissable because the warrants were based on information you gave us-”

“And that makes it privileged,” Louis said.

Mobley nodded. “And without the warrants, we can’t even use Brian’s statement.”

“That’s fucking crazy. There’s no way a lawyer can claim privilege when one of his employees discovers he’s committed a crime.”

Mobley sighed heavily. “I don’t know about that, but I do know this case is going down the toilet real quick. Even if we could use the evidence, what else do we got?”

Louis didn’t answer. He knew what was coming.

“Hell, we got a shaky statement by Brian that some lawyer will get thrown out because we didn’t Mirandize him when he showed up or some shit like that,” Mobley went on. “And we have no way to put Scott at the house when either girl disappeared.”

“We can look deeper,” Louis said. “We can find witnesses, housekeepers-”

“All the housekeepers were illegals. Long gone, Louis.”

“What about the cabana itself. Prints, blood-”

“We got some preliminaries on the cabana and we’re still looking, but the drywall was clean. Not a single print. Nothing on the wood behind it or on Lou Ann.”

Louis felt suddenly very tired.

“What about college friends?” Louis asked.

“Can you remember which holidays your college friends went home and when they didn’t?” Mobley said.

“Okay, then, what about Brian’s red Corvette? People keep cars like that. It still might be around, there would have to be blood in the trunk somewhere.”

“We checked. He wrecked it in sixty-eight. It was scrapped.”

Louis rubbed his face, and spoke softly. “Maybe Scott told someone else over the years.”

“He didn’t and you know it,” Mobley said. He let a few seconds go by. “He’s probably going to walk, Louis. I’m sorry.”

The hallway fell quiet. Louis stared at the floor, the pit of anger in his stomach now an ache that he was dangerously close to getting used to. He knew he needed to let her go. But not yet. “Lance, Scott is a killer.”

“I know that, Louis,” Mobley said, exhaustion in his voice. “But what do you want me to do? There’s nothing to even hold him on until we finish processing the cabana.”

“He’s got a plane ticket to France in his pocket,” Louis said.

“Fuck,” Mobley muttered.

A deputy came up. “Sheriff, Detective Jensen said to give this to you asap.”

Louis watched as Mobley thanked the deputy, then he leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He could hear voices behind the interrogation room door, voices that sounded almost like laughter, but he knew his head was playing tricks now, that it was probably only his own anger he was hearing, something he knew he was going to hear for a long time.

“I’ll be a motherfucker.”

Louis looked over at Mobley.

Mobley was reading something in the file the deputy had given him.

“What?” Louis asked.

“Remember all those prints I told you we took out of Duvall’s office?” Mobley said. “Guess whose name showed up? Our boy Scotty.”

“He’s a lawyer, Lance. He must have been in that office at some time.”

“Yeah, but no one can ever remember seeing him there. Not even that old bag Ellie. Jensen double checked.”