by Archer Mayor
“Yes.”
“I’m Joe Gunther, with the Vermont Bureau of Investigation,” he said, displaying his credentials. “I think you know Agent Kunkle.”
She ignored Willy. “Are you here to arrest me?”
He hesitated, glancing at Sharon, who stood with her hands slack and her head bowed. He’d homed in on this house by instinct, seeking enlightenment as much as confirmation. In his mind, the answer to BB’s death had to have come from here—not logically from Sharon, necessarily, but somehow from the emotional tsunami that had engulfed her entire family.
Julie’s stark question hit him like the revelation of a much-anticipated, long-secreted solution to a puzzle.
“I am,” he answered. “For the murder of Robert Barrett.”
She nodded, and then seemed a little confused, glancing around. “What happens now?”
A small moan escaped Sharon’s lips as he said, “I read you your rights and place you under arrest.”
Her eyes darted for a split second to her mother, perhaps checking that she wouldn’t collapse, before she responded, “Okay.”
He proceeded without hesitation with the Miranda warning, and followed with the unofficial but forever hopeful inquiry: “Will you talk with me now, or would you like a lawyer?”
To his relief, she replied, “What’s the point? I did it.”
“Those’re your rights, Julie.”
She pressed her lips together briefly. “No,” she then said. “I’ll talk to you. Here?”
The inquiry somehow cut free the stillness in the room, releasing Sharon to move to her daughter’s side and embace her, and prompting Willy to close the front door behind them.
Normally, his answer was routinely, “the office,” and certainly without her mother sitting beside her. But Julie was where he wanted her, and he didn’t want to lose that advantage. He therefore gave her a supportive half smile, and indicated the living room with a wave of his hand. “Here’ll be fine, unless there’s someplace else you’d like.”
Sharon looked from Julie to them. “You need me to leave?”
Joe sat on an armchair opposite the couch, while Willy chose a ladderback chair near the wall.
Joe addressed Julie, “With the understanding that, if she stays, your mother is to remain absolutely silent during this conversation, what would you prefer, Julie?”
Simultaneously, Julie answered, “I’d like her to stay,” as her mother pledged, “I won’t say a word. I promise.”
Joe reached into his pocket and produced a digital recorder, which he turned on and placed on his knee. In short order, he intoned his name and rank, the date and time, Julie’s name and date of birth, and repeated her Miranda rights. “Julie,” he concluded, “did you understand your rights as I’ve explained them to you?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“And do you still agree to speak with me without a lawyer present?”
“I do.”
There was a standard interviewing template that guided the course of such conversations, designed by experts so that cops could steer clear of trouble once their cases entered the legal system.
But Joe had already muddied that perfection, and wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to keep things short and direct.
“Did you kill Robert Barrett, Julie, as you’re accused of doing?” he therefore asked.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“With my husband’s .22 pistol,” she said in the same monotone.
“Do you still have this weapon?”
“I put it back in the gun cabinet.” She gestured vaguely. “At home.”
“We’ll collect it later,” he said. “Can you tell me how you did this?”
Her voice remained strong, her expression unchanged, her gaze fixed on some middle distance between them. “I drove up near to his house, hid the car behind a row of trees, and walked the rest of the way, cross-country, till I reached his swimming pool. I didn’t have a plan; I just figured I’d look around until I found him. But he was already there, reading the newspaper. So I waited. When he got up and started cleaning the pool, I shot him.”
“How many times?”
“Three—once in the side and twice in the chest. He fell in the water. I picked up my brass and left.”
Despite her best efforts, Sharon let escape a thin, high-pitched note, as feeble as a distant keening almost lost to a breeze.
Joe frowned at her. “You were alone?”
Julie paid no attention to any of them, speaking as if to herself. “Yes.”
“Did anyone know what you were going to do?”
“No.”
“Did you tell anyone what you did afterwards?”
“No.”
“How ’bout your mother or brother?”
She focused briefly on him. “I told you: No.”
Her face was tense, her eyes dry. He doubted he’d get her to change her story, or even if he’d ever determine its truth or not. Julie Washburn was taking all the blame for BB’s death—whether she was the sole guilty party or not.
The thought shifted his scrutiny to Sharon, to gauge her reaction. But her attention remained fastened to Julie, and nothing in her body language radiated anything beyond support and concern. If Julie was covering anyone else’s involvement, Joe guessed it might’ve been her brother, Greg, as Willy had suspected long ago.
But the girl was giving them nothing to work with.
“Why did you do it, Julie?” Joe asked.
“He killed our father.”
He waited for more, got nothing, and followed with, “How do you know that?”
“He was in love with our mother.”
The authority of her tone gave it conviction and caused Sharon to squeeze Julie’s hand.
“Tell me about that,” Joe coaxed her, noting her use of the word “our.”
Julie had resumed staring into space, but looked at him again. “You people told me, indirectly, when you found Dad’s body at the nuke plant.”
“Because you’d thought the same as everyone else? That he’d just left you?”
She kept his gaze a moment longer, before breaking off. “I never thought he left us,” she almost whispered.
Joe let the pathos of that float between them—of the ignored little girl, assumed to be too young to notice what was going on around her. He imagined her suffering Hank’s absence in silence, only to watch the ebullient BB Barrett trying to move in without a pause. The irony was that Julie hadn’t been alone. Both Sharon and Greg had longed for Hank Mitchell’s return, with Sharon never wavering in her rejection of BB’s advances.
But to a brokenhearted girl, such a broader understanding had been as absent as her father, whose death by murder—confirmed so many years later—must have come as a celestial directive. As soon as Hank’s body had surfaced and his cause of death made public, BB’s remaining time on earth was short, probably regardless of any input from anyone else.
“You loved your father very much,” Joe suggested quietly.
“My life ended when he went away,” she said calmly.
“How did it feel when you killed Barrett?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Peaceful. I’ve never felt so good.”
“And when the news broke that you’d killed an innocent man? That we got your dad’s killer?”
She stared at him again. “Innocent? He wasn’t innocent of sniffing around my mom as soon as Dad was gone. If he didn’t kill my father, it was only because somebody beat him to it.”
Joe studied her face, her smoldering anger, and rethought his appraisal. Underneath the pitiful grieving of a longing daughter, there was the primitive rage of pure revenge. He noticed that even Sharon straightened slightly upon hearing these words, as if stung by an insight she’d never before imagined.
“My wild child,” she’d once said, describing her daughter. Joe imagined that right now, the true meaning of the phrase had never been sharper-edged. Greg’s possible involvement dimme
d in his mind.
Joe pursed his lips, suddenly tired. He reached for the recorder, his finger hovering over the Off button. “Do you swear, Julie Washburn, under penalty of law, that everything you’ve told me today is the truth to the best of your knowledge?”
“I do.”
Perhaps, he thought.
Truths were said to be self-evident. This one, he’d just take at face value.
ALSO BY ARCHER MAYOR
The Company She Kept
Proof Positive
Three Can Keep a Secret
Paradise City
Tag Man
Red Herring
The Price of Malice
The Catch
Chat
The Second Mouse
St. Albans Fire
The Surrogate Thief
Gatekeeper
The Sniper’s Wife
Tucker Peak
The Marble Mask
Occam’s Razor
The Disposable Man
Bellows Falls
The Ragman’s Memory
The Dark Root
Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
The Skeleton’s Knee
Scent of Evil
Borderlines
Open Season
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ARCHER MAYOR has, over the past twenty-five years, worked or still works as a firefighter/EMT, a death investigator for the Vermont state medical examiner, and a detective for the Windham County Sheriff’s Office. He lives outside of Brattleboro, Vermont. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Acknowledgments
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part Two
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Also by Archer Mayor
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
PRESUMPTION OF GUILT. Copyright © 2016 by Archer Mayor. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by Ervin Serrano
Cover photograph © Mark Owen/Arcangel
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-06468-4 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7091-8 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466870918
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: September 2016
