Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

by C. J. Box

  “Yes.”

  “He brought in lots of film to be developed, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not supposed to look at the prints that you develop, are you? And the way the equipment worked, there was no reason even to see them. The processor was automatic, right? The only time you even touched the prints was when you put them in the envelope for the customer, right?”

  “That was the policy.”

  “But in this case you looked, didn’t you, Wyatt?”

  His voice was a croak. “I looked.” As he said it his eyes darted to Cody and back to me.

  “What was on the prints, Wyatt?”

  “Nature stuff, mostly. But there were a lot of pictures of children with their families. The families were camping or hiking.”

  “Were photos of children pretty much all the customer took?”

  “Yes.”

  Cody shot me a look. I still didn’t know what the point was.

  “And why did you run a second set of prints to keep for yourself?”

  Henkel briefly closed his eyes.

  “Wyatt?”

  “There were four pictures I wanted to keep,” he said.

  Cody leaned back and reached into his coat with his free hand and brought out a manila envelope. “Are these the four photos you kept, Wyatt?”

  “You know they are.”

  Cody handed the envelope to me.

  Cody said, “Who has the originals and the negatives?”

  “The customer.”

  Cody smiled sarcastically. “And who is the customer, Wyatt?”

  “Aubrey Coates. He was the park caretaker at the time.”

  I felt an electric bolt shoot through my chest, and I almost pulled the trigger accidentally. Suddenly, it was as if all around me, for three weeks, there were dozens of sheets of clear plastic, each with a brush of color and several errant squiggles. Individually, none of the sheets made sense. But when they were placed one upon the other, a whole image emerged. It was as if everything we had learned and done over the last three weeks made horrifying sense.

  I lowered the pistol and opened the envelope, knowing what I would find.

  Brian was right. There were photos.

  The first was of a young family of three hiking along a narrow trail. There was a rock wall behind them so it was obviously in a canyon—Royal Gorge Canyon. The photo was grainy, and there was a pine twig in the bottom corner of it, indicating to me that the shot was taken at a great distance, and the photographer was hiding in a stand of trees. The woman—plain, heavy, obviously pregnant—was in the lead. A boy of twelve or thirteen was last. It took me a moment to recognize him as a young Garrett. The man in the middle was John Moreland.

  The second photo was slightly blurred, but it was obvious that Moreland was tugging on his wife’s arm, and she was reaching out wildly to steady herself. Garrett stood in sharp focus, looking on with what looked like intense interest.

  In the third photo, Dorrie Pence Moreland, the ultradevout Catholic homely homebody who was a drag on her husband’s social and political climb and who was bringing another child into the world to compete with her monomaniacal and psychopathic firstborn son, could be seen cartwheeling through the sky, her long black hair flying behind her like flames.

  In the fourth, Garrett prepared to deliver the coup de grâce with the large rock he held over his head to the broken body of his mother while his father looked on approvingly.

  I went through the photos a second time, then a third.

  “My God,” I said. “So Coates owns the judge.”

  “That would be correct,” Cody said.

  “Which is why he was bulletproof.”

  “Bingo.”

  “So he’s been blackmailing him all these years?”

  Cody nodded his head and raised his Glock, pointing it at Wyatt Henkel’s head. “Sort of. Tell him, Wyatt.”

  If possible, Henkel suddenly looked even smaller and more pathetic.

  “It was me who blackmailed the judge,” Henkel said. “I told him I had the pictures. I put them on a copy machine and sent a copy to him to prove it. So for years he’s been paying up.”

  Cody said, “Hence the vehicles, the large spread, the Rolex. But you lied to the judge, didn’t you, Wyatt? You told him you had the negatives.”

  Henkel nodded.

  Cody said, “So when Brian Eastman started putting word out among all of his acquaintances that he was searching the country for someone who had some kind of photos on Judge Moreland, you contacted the judge again, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “To tell him the price would be going up or you’d sell the photos to Brian, right?”

  “Right.”

  Strangely, Henkel was warming to the revelations. It was obvious he was proud of himself. I really did want to shoot him, but not before I’d heard everything.

  Cody said to me, “I’m speculating now, but it’s speculation based on Henkel’s role in this. When I was investigating Coates, I always wondered why Coates quit working at state parks five years ago and switched exclusively to campgrounds on federal land. It was just one of those little things that stuck out and didn’t make sense to me. Now it makes sense. Coates’s job switch corresponds with when Moreland was named to the federal bench. Henkel here had the photos and wanted money from the judge—and got it. Coates didn’t want money—he needed security. Coates knew someday he’d get caught so he contacted Moreland and told him about his hole card. He wanted to make sure he was tried in a federal courtroom because he knew who the judge would be. Another thing: There are nine district court judges. Coates must have somehow made it known to Moreland that someday he might show up in his courtroom and that he’d need a favor. So how did Moreland make sure he’d be the presiding judge if this unknown blackmailer got hauled before him? He worked the system from the inside, and made sure he’d be the judge for serious crimes committed on federal land. Moreland wanted to be in control of the situation for his own sake in case the second blackmailer ever needed that favor. That’s why Coates was bulletproof.”

  “Son of a bitch,” I said. Then: “Hold it. Why would Coates risk taking his film to Henkel? Wouldn’t Coates be worried that Henkel or somebody would see the shots of the murder?”

  “I can answer that,” Henkel said. “I don’t think at the time he realized what he had. Those photos are blown up, that’s why they’re so grainy. In the originals, the people look like ants against that wall. I think he may have gotten a shot of her falling, but I don’t think he knew that the judge pushed her. I don’t think he knew what he had until he got home and looked closely at the prints.”

  “And he never came after you?” I asked, skeptical.

  He smiled for the first time. Rotten yellow stubs for teeth. “I was long gone if he ever did. I took those blowups and kept them with me when I moved from place to place, job to job. I think he tried to find me a couple of times. Once a man showed up at my store in Salida asking about me. I heard it from the other room and walked out the side door and never looked back. Another time I came home after work in Durango and saw some kids who looked like Mexican gangsters parked in front of my apartment building. I just drove right by and all the way to New Mexico.”

  Cody nodded, as if another piece of the puzzle had just fit into place. “So when you left the message about Brian Eastman, did the judge call you back?”

  “No. It was the judge’s son, Garrett. He’s the boy in the pictures—the one with the rock.”

  “Right. And what did Garrett say?”

  “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?” Henkel asked us.

  Cody screwed up his face. “I’m at ninety percent yes. But there’s ten percent to play with, Wyatt. You need to convince me you’re worth that ten percent by telling me the truth.”

  I could see Henkel thinking, running through the arguments. Finally, he said, “Garrett said they’d pay more but only if I called Eastman and told him I had the photos
. I talked to him, and he agreed to meet me here in Denver. Garrett gave me the directions to give to Eastman, but he told me not to go. I guess Garrett met him instead.”

  I shot him.

  The explosion was deafening. I don’t know how Melissa slept through it, but she did. And Henkel was writhing on my couch, clutching his shoulder where the bullet hit, smearing bright red blood all over the fabric.

  Cody wrenched the .45 out of my hand before I could cock it and finish Henkel off.

  “For Christ’s sake, Jack!” Cody yelled. “We’re not done with him yet!”

  “I am,” I said, but what I’d just done shocked me.

  Henkel grunted and moaned.

  Cody grabbed him by the hair and sat him back up.

  “Talk fast,” Cody said, “and maybe you’ll get to live.”

  “It hurts,” Henkel said through bared teeth.

  “It’s gonna hurt a lot more!”

  “I’m going to bleed to death.”

  “Maybe.”

  Cody leaned over him, his face inches away.

  “As far as you knew, Coates never contacted the judge again until recently, correct?”

  “As far as I know,” Henkel said.

  Cody looked to me, nodding. “When Coates found out I was closing in on him, he must have contacted the judge and reminded him what he had all these years. Imagine Moreland’s surprise when he found out that one of the two people who knew about Dorrie’s murder was the very pedophile we were closing in on. Moreland had the search and arrest warrants on his desk, of course, so he tipped Coates we were coming. That’s how Coates knew to destroy everything ahead of time. And he made sure Coates walked.”

  A million thoughts were going through my mind. I tried to put them into some kind of order.

  “But Cody,” I said, “Coates walked because of what you did.”

  I instantly regretted saying it, and Cody’s eyes flashed with pure rage.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But…”

  Cody said, “Up until to night there has always been one thing about that trial I couldn’t figure out, and that was how Ludik knew everything there was to know about my movements after we arrested Coates. I mean, Ludik’s smart, but he’s not that smart. Somebody tipped him, and I think it was Moreland. He didn’t do it with a phone call or anything that obvious, I’m sure. He probably told some court gossip something like, ‘I just hope this is a solid case because there seem to be some real chain-of-evidence problems with it’— something like that. He probably heard about me through the DA or some blabbermouth cop. So Moreland put it out there so Ludik would hear it thirdhand and investigate. I’m not saying I didn’t fuck up, Jack—I did. But Moreland set the whole clusterfuck in motion—from tipping Coates to the search warrant to suggesting to the defense they take a second look at the chain-of-evidence list.”

  It made sense.

  Cody turned from me and shoved his Glock into Henkel’s nose. His voice was flat. “When I came to your house in New Mexico, you were packing up your car. Where were you planning to go?”

  Henkel said, “We were going to do the exchange.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “There was going to be an exchange. A big meeting, where everybody got what they wanted.”

  Cody slapped him again, and Henkel winced. The cushions were getting dark with lost blood. I could smell it, and it was sharp and metallic and it made me want to gag.

  Henkel was fading. His eyelids were starting to drop.

  “WHAT EXCHANGE?” Cody screamed.

  “The judge was going to get all the photos and the negatives from Coates and me once and for all,” Henkel said. “I was going to get my big payoff from the judge. We were going to meet at Coates’s place up in the mountains tomorrow morning.”

  Cody said, “What was Coates going to get?”

  Henkel coughed and nearly passed out. He said, “What he said he always wanted—his own little girl.”

  And at that moment I realized who had sent the photo of Angelina to his associate Malcolm Harris in London— Aubrey Coates. I recalled Moreland taking that photo the morning they came to visit when he went upstairs with Melissa. It was the reason he was so insistent that he see her, and the reason he asked Melissa to turn her over for a better look.

  Monday, November 26

  The Day After

  TWENTY-FIVE

  THERE WAS SNOW FALLING on I-70 that night as we drove to Desolation Canyon. It had started snowing around midnight and gotten progressively worse. The only vehicles our four-car caravan encountered on the two-hour drive from Denver were snowplows with yellow wigwag lights flashing and the occasional four-wheel-drive pickup. My nerves were shot, and I had trouble keeping coffee down. Cody had made three calls after dropping Henkel in a heap outside the emergency-room doors of Denver General: Sanders, Morales, and Torkleson. Torkleson had responded with a crime scene tech and a team of four SWAT officers in heavy black clothing. Morales and Sanders showed up in Morales’s jacked-up four-wheel-drive pickup. Morales brought his wife along to watch over Melissa. Torkleson drove the lead vehicle, with Cody in the passenger seat and me in the backseat.

  A panicked thought hit me. “What if they won’t do the exchange without Henkel?” Jesus, I thought again, I never should have shot him.

  “Good thinking,” Torkleson said, and plucked his mike from the cradle on the dashboard. “I’m switching over to a nonpublic channel,” he said as he called the state highway patrol. Locating a trooper he knew, Torkleson persuaded the man to put out a false report about a fiery head-on collision near the New Mexico border, and to identify one of the fatalities as a man named Wyatt Henkel. When the trooper agreed, Torkleson said to Cody and me, “We know Coates listens to police scanners, and if he hears that report, I’m sure he’ll relay the info to the judge. That’ll explain why he isn’t there.”

  “You’re the man,” Cody said to Torkleson. “Both Coates and the judge will be happy to hear that Henkel—and his photos—are cooked.”

  I TRIED to sort out what we’d learned as we drove. Cody seemed to be doing the same thing.

  I asked, “How did Coates learn about Angelina in order to pressure the judge for her?”

  “I’d wondered that myself,” Cody said. “Until I checked on the federal jail roster before the trial and found out that Coates shared a cell for two weeks with a slimeball named José Medina, who was in for trafficking. Medina is a bigshot Sur-13 gangster and a known associate of Garrett’s. Garrett probably mentioned to Medina he had this adoption agency hounding him—bragged about it, most likely—and Coates overheard Medina talking about it. That’s the kind of thing Coates would pick up on, especially since he had his deal going with the judge already. So he doubled down on his demands of the judge because Moreland had nothing to bargain with: the negatives and photos and a little girl of his own in exchange for an acquittal.”

  “It makes me sick,” I said.

  “No shit,” Cody said. “What makes me even sicker is that the judge would go along. Or appear to go along.”

  “So why did Moreland and Garrett kill Dorrie?” I asked, guessing the answer.

  “We’ll probably never get a confession out of either of them,” Cody said. “But I’m thinking Dorrie couldn’t live with her guilt any longer for providing an alibi for John on the night John’s parents were run off the road. The more she got to know him, the more she was convinced he’d done it— well, it was eating her up inside. She was going to church more, right? Pouring her heart out to God that she was married to a man who’d killed his own parents, and she’d provided the alibi. Maybe she asked John outright if he did it, or maybe he just guessed she wanted to tell somebody. Either way, John knew he had to get rid of her. Plus, he was probably already putting the hardwood to Kellie. So, if you’re John Moreland, you have a heavy guilt-ridden wallflower who can bring you down on the one hand and a blond knockout with money on the other. Easy choice for John.”

  “But
why did Garrett finish her off?”

  “Because Garrett is a sick, twisted, evil little fuck,” Cody said. “Your instincts were right about him. Plus, by helping his dad with the crime, Garrett knew he’d always have a bargaining chip and something to hold over his dad’s head. In a way, killing Dorrie set Garrett free.”

  “And John knew what Garrett was from an early age,” I said. “Imagine knowing your son is like that? And just living with it and covering up for him whenever possible. And the judge had to cover up for his son, or Garrett might confess what the both of them had done.”

  I said, “Jim Doogan told me something at Brian’s funeral about men like Moreland. He said once a man like that gets his eyes on a prize—in this case the U.S. Supreme Court— every move he makes is in preparation for it. I didn’t realize what Doogan was saying at the time, and I don’t think he did, either. But if you’re John Moreland, and you want to be a Supreme, how can you even consider the possibility if your only son is a gangster?”

  “Good question,” Cody said. “How?”

  “You mitigate the situation,” I said. “You take in your bad son’s illegitimate child and raise her as your own. You show the world that even though your bad-seed son has no responsibility, you do. You clean up the best you can for your son’s indiscretion. You turn a negative into a positive. You also know that it’s only a matter of time before your crazy-ass son goes down, and you don’t have to worry about him anymore. It could have easily happened at the Appaloosa Club the other night. And when it does, you breathe a sigh of relief and go on.”

  Cody turned and smiled. I could see his teeth in the dark. “You might make a good detective after all, Jack. But there’s something wrong with your theory.”

  “What?”

  “Why would John hand over the child to a known pedophile? Aren’t people going to find out?”

  I thought about that for a while. Then it hit me hard. “Moreland is clever,” I said. “Clever enough to figure out a way for Angelina to disappear after a short while, maybe even to stage a disappearance or a kidnapping. I could see him making a tearful plea on television to the kidnappers, turning Angelina into a new Lindbergh baby who is never found. He’d be a hell of a sympathetic figure. And someday, if a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has the gall to question him about taking the child from our home all those years ago, he says he felt horrible about it and did all he could to help the young couple adopt another child, but not nearly as horrible as he feels about her fate at the hand of kidnappers and what an outrageous thing to ask! He comes off looking like a tragic saint.”