Low Pressure

by Sandra Brown

  “But who do you blame for the crash? The captain made the last mistake. But you could also blame the clumsy first officer who spilled his coffee, or the mechanic who failed to notice that the fire warning had been damaged along with the panel he’d replaced. You could blame his wife for being a nag and driving him to drink the night before, making him feel like dog shit and not nearly as sharp as he normally would have been. You could take the blame all the way up to God for the crappy weather and that particular bolt of lightning.

  “The sequence of events proved disastrous, but if only one of the contributing factors had been taken out of the equation, it might never have happened.” He paused and gave a shrug. “That’s a simplistic, layman’s explanation, but you get the gist of it.”

  Bellamy hesitated, then asked, “What happened on Flight 343?”

  He turned his head and looked at her for several beats. “I just told you.”

  The gravel road wound through the thick grove of cypress trees and dead-ended in front of Dale’s cabin. He heard their car approaching long before it appeared.

  He couldn’t explain, even to himself, why he had listened to Haymaker’s earnest pitch that he agree to see them. He should have hung up on him, should never have answered his call in the first place. But he found himself listening, and there was some logic to what his friend had said.

  When Haymaker finished his spiel, which ended with his telling Dale that an interview might do his mind and body good, Dale surprised himself by asking Haymaker to hand the phone over to Bellamy.

  They wasted no time on an exchange of phony pleasantries. She asked him the name of the nearest regional airport, and when he told her, she asked if he’d be there to meet her.

  “No. Rent a car. Got a pencil?” After giving her directions from the airport to his place, he said, “Come alone.”

  “Dent Carter will be with me.”

  “I’ll only talk to you.”

  “Dent will be with me.”

  She was unbending, and he could have used that condition to scotch the whole thing. But he figured that if Dent meant to kill him, as he’d once threatened to, he wouldn’t do it with her as a witness.

  As of this moment, they were the only two people on the planet who knew his whereabouts, and that in itself filled him with misgiving. But it was too late now to change his mind. With a crunch of gravel, the car rolled to a stop.

  Moody watched from his sagging porch as they alighted, she with more alacrity and eagerness than Dent, who’d been driving. Dale figured that behind his Ray-Bans the boy’s—the man’s—eyes were cutting like razors. Hostility radiated off him like mist off a bog.

  Bellamy was less guarded. She came up the steps as though not noticing how dilapidated they were and extended her hand to him without a qualm. He shook hands.

  “Thank you for agreeing to see us.”

  He bobbed his chin once but kept an alert watch on Dent, who took the steps up onto the porch in a measured tread. They eyed each other like the adversaries they were.

  Bellamy brushed a mosquito off her arm. “Maybe we should go inside,” she said. Dale turned and opened the screened door, whose squeak seemed abnormally loud. In fact all Dale’s senses had grown more acute since their arrival. He realized how lazy he’d become now that he no longer had to depend on his wits and constant awareness of his surroundings, which, while a cop, had been second nature to him.

  Dale gauged the gashes and bruises on Dent’s face to be no older than a day, if that. It spoke to Dent’s character that he was unselfconscious of them. He’d been a tough bastard at eighteen. Maturity hadn’t softened him one iota. Which made Dale all the more cautious. Being that he was soft and inflated where Dent was hard and honed, he would lose in a fight. In a clean fight, anyway.

  Bellamy was prettier in person than on television. Her eyes had more depth, her skin a softness that studio cameras couldn’t capture. She also smelled good, like flowers. Dale felt a pang of yearning to touch a woman, which he hadn’t had the pleasure of doing for several months now. It had been years since he’d had the pleasure without having to pay for it.

  Loneliness, even if self-imposed, tasted metallic. Like the blue steel barrel of a pistol.

  Once inside, Dent peeled off his aviator sunglasses and slid them into his shirt pocket. Dale said, “You can relieve yourself of the handgun, too. Just set it there on the table.”

  Dent didn’t ask how he knew he was carrying. Dale supposed he realized the pointlessness of the question. A former cop would know. Dent reached behind his back and pulled the pistol from the holster attached to his belt.

  “After you, Moody.” He motioned down at Dale’s left hand in which he’d kept the .357 palmed and held against his thigh.

  When he hesitated, Bellamy said, “Please.”

  He looked down into her large, expressive eyes, which were perhaps the only feature reminiscent of the girl she’d been, then he met Dent’s level stare. Neither relented, exactly, but they moved simultaneously and set their weapons on the TV tray already crowded with Dale’s bottle of whiskey, his pack of cigarettes, lighter, and ashtray.

  Since he didn’t have an extra chair, he said, “You can sit on the bed, I guess.”

  He could have saved himself the trouble of making it up in advance of their arrival. The bedspread was something he’d found in a garage sale. It didn’t quite cover the stained top sheet. Beneath its ragged hem, the exposed springs screeched when his guests sat down on the foot of the bed.

  Dale held up the bottle of Jack by its neck. “Drink?” They shook their heads. “Mind if I do?” But he didn’t wait for their go-ahead before pouring himself three fingers’ worth. He took a swig, then set the glass down so he could light a cigarette, and after taking a long pull on it, he sat down in his armchair—another castoff—and gave them his undivided attention.

  Bellamy glanced at Dent, and when he said nothing, she nodded toward the copy of her book that Dale had left on the top of his television set. “Did you read it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “You want a review? You’re a good writer.”

  “Did I accurately capture the events as you remember them?”

  “More or less.”

  Dent shifted his position, making the bed rock. “That’s no answer. We didn’t come all this way for you to be cute.”

  Dale took a shot of whiskey. “What did you come here for?”

  Bellamy leaned toward him. “I want you to tell me that you believe with all your heart that Allen Strickland was guilty.”

  He held her pleading gaze for as long as he could stand it, then looked down and studied the burning tip of his cigarette.

  “Maybe he still thinks I killed her.”

  Dale, knowing Dent had said that just to goad him, fired back. “I thought, and still think, that you were capable of it.”

  “You could always apply a screwdriver to my eye again, see if I confess this time.”

  The girl admonished him just by softly speaking his name.

  But being reminded of the strong-arm, illegal tactics he’d used to interrogate Dent caused Dale’s gut to clench. “I didn’t believe for a single minute the alibi you and your sidekick came up with.”

  “We went flying that day.”

  “I’m sure you did. What I couldn’t prove was what time you came back.”

  “It was in Gall’s log.”

  “Log, my ass. He could’ve written any damn time in his log. Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “No, I think you’re clever. Clever enough to tell Rupe Collier that he couldn’t build a solid case against me. That’s when you two decided that Allen Strickland might be the surer bet on getting a conviction.”

  Dale shot to his feet so quickly he nearly upset the TV tray. He saved the bottle of whiskey first, grabbing it before it could topple over. Then he crushed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray. He could feel their eyes like red-hot pokers on his
back as he moved to the screened door and stared sightlessly at what had been his unchanging view for far too long.

  And suddenly he realized how very tired he was, and not only of the view. He was so damn weary, body and soul. Sick to death, literally, of it all. Just—as kids these days said—over it. He was almost a score of years too late to try to make things right. But he had one last shot at redemption and decided then and there to take it.

  “I was eating lunch at one of those good Mex’can places on the east side of town. Haymaker called to tell me that Allen Strickland had been killed in the prison yard that morning. Stabbed in the back three times before he hit the ground. Each stab had punctured an organ. He was dead in under a minute. Seems he’d gotten in with a bad group—”

  He paused and looked over his shoulder at them. “You gotta admit he was a slick, hustling type. In the pen, he affiliated with a gang of like minds.” He faced forward again. “The murder was blamed on gang warfare within the prison, although no one was ever brought up on charges.

  “Anyway, I left my plate of food on the table, went outside, and threw up. Hard. Till I was completely empty, and then I kept on retching. Because the last I saw of Allen Strickland, he was being escorted from the courtroom after his sentencing. He turned to where I was seated in the gallery, looked me straight in the eye, and said, ‘I didn’t kill her. God is my witness.’

  “Now, I’ve heard hundreds of guilty men and women swear on God and all the angels that they’re innocent. But I believed Allen Strickland. So, no, Ms. Price, I don’t believe with all my heart that he was guilty of killing your sister. I never did.”

  He remained as he was for as long as it took him to take a deep breath and release it slowly. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel as washed clean, as sanctified, as he thought he might after making that admission, and realized that he’d been naive to think it would be that easy.

  He turned back into the room and, resuming his seat, picked up the glass and drained it of the liquor. The two people sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bed were watchful.

  She was the first to speak. “If you didn’t believe in his guilt, how… why…”

  “How and why did I get the grand jury to indict, and a jury to convict? I could reel off a dozen good reasons, but the main one? We had to get the egg off our faces.”

  “We?” Dent said.

  “Rupe and me.”

  “So he’s tarnished, too?”

  Dale chuckled over Bellamy’s quaint term for corrupt. “You could say. Anyhow, we’d gone public with one prime suspect.” He looked at Dent. “But you had an alibi. We didn’t believe it, but we couldn’t crack it. That’s when Allen Strickland started looking like a winning prospect.

  “We were desperate to make good our promise to the Lystons, the PD, everybody, that we’d produce the culprit and bring him to justice. We couldn’t let this big, juicy case get away from us.

  “Here we had us a prominent family’s daughter slain at the company barbecue, during the worst storm in half a century. The girl was pretty, she was rich, she’d been found stripped of her panties. And you gotta hand it to Rupe, he’s a showman. He baited the sex hook every time he gave the media a sound bite.

  “You know,” he continued thoughtfully, “I think he was actually glad we never found her underwear, because that kept the public dwelling on it. Had her panties been the murder weapon? Where were they now? Would they be found? It was like a damn soap opera. Tune in tomorrow for the next episode.”

  He dragged his hands down his face. “At one point, Rupe even suggested we plant a pair of underwear to be ‘found’ by a rookie cop, someone unassuming, so it would look convincing. We’d have to show them to your parents for identification. They would deny they were Susan’s, of course, but it still wouldn’t look good for the guy who’d been found with them. It would make him look like a collector.”

  “You were actually going to plant false evidence on Allen Strickland’s property?” Bellamy asked.

  Dale’s gaze slid involuntarily toward Dent. “This was early in the investigation.”

  Dent stared at him for several beats, and when the implication sank in, he shook his head with disbelief. “Christ.”

  He stood up and began to prowl the room as though looking for something or someone to hit. Dale thought he might be the target, but Dent moved to a window, where he propped his shoulder on the frame and stared out over the desultory waters of the lake. Dale noted that there was a spot of dried blood on his shirt about waist level.

  Before he could ask about it, Bellamy said, “I didn’t like him.”

  “Who?”

  “Rupe Collier. I didn’t like him when he talked to my parents during the trial, assuring them that he was going to send Susan’s killer to jail for a long time. Then, when I was researching my book, I called him and asked for an interview. I made several appointments with him, all of which he canceled at the last minute. I suppose he ran out of excuses because I was finally allowed ten minutes of his time. He was—”

  “You don’t have to tell me how he was,” Dale said. “I know all too well.” He flexed the fingers of his right hand. The knuckles were bruised and sore from their contact with Rupe’s teeth, but he enjoyed the discomfort and only wished he’d struck the grinning son of a bitch even harder. “He told you squat, right?”

  “He was wishy-washy and vague,” she said. “Finally he told me that he’d forgotten the details of the case, and that instead of talking to him, I might try coaxing the police department into showing me the case file.”

  Dale tipped his chin, his question implicit.

  “I tried,” she said. “Unfortunately, the file had gone missing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You knew?”

  “Rupe’s too ambitious and too good at covering his ass to have let that file survive,” he said. Then he pulled himself up out of his chair. “And I’m too good at covering my own ass not to have made a copy of everything.”

  Chapter 18

  Startled, Bellamy and Dent glanced at each other, then watched as Moody went into the kitchen area of his cabin, which was demarcated by a short bar with a chipped Formica top. He opened the oven beneath the greasy range and took from it an accordion file folder that was expanded beyond capacity. The original elastic cord had been replaced by a thick rubber band.

  “I’ve been afraid I’d get really drunk one night, forget it was in there, and turn on the oven.” He carried the folder over to Bellamy and handed it to her, then returned to his chair, lit a fresh cigarette, and poured himself another drink.

  Dent rejoined her on the bed as she removed the rubber band and folded back the flap. The file contained a daunting amount of material. Thumbing through the well-worn edges of paper, she saw copies of various things: official forms and documents, lined notebook sheets filled with handwriting, transcriptions of recorded interviews, and countless scraps of paper with only one or two words scribbled on them. It would take weeks to sort through.

  “I took lots of notes,” Moody said, “and confiscated the notes of other detectives. Took me several days to get everything copied on the sly while Rupe was breathing down my neck to turn the file over to him. There’s stuff in there from Haymaker, notes he took until he asked to be taken off the case and reassigned.”

  Dent raised his head and looked over at him.

  “The screwdriver thing made him squeamish,” Moody said.

  “How did you feel about his abdication?”

  “It might have pissed me off, but I didn’t have time to think about it.” He indicated the file. “I was kinda busy.”

  “Busy trying to crack me,” Dent said.

  Moody shrugged his massive shoulders. “It’s usually the boyfriend. Or someone equally close to the victim.”

  “My father and stepbrother?” she asked.

  “Anybody who fell into the category of close male associate.”

  “But my father?”

  “Look, I’m no
t going to apologize to you for doing my job.”

  Because she didn’t want to antagonize him into silence, she backed off that. “I don’t understand why Allen Strickland didn’t come under suspicion immediately. Even according to your own notes… At least I assume this is your handwriting.” She held up the top sheet.

  He nodded.

  It was a copy of what appeared to be a page torn from a spiral notebook, covered with boldly scrawled annotations. Most had been written in a cryptic shorthand that only Moody would be able to decipher, but some of it was legible. A red pen had been used to underscore one of the notations: a name with a star beside it.

  She scanned the page. “You wrote down the names of witnesses who mentioned Allen Strickland when you interviewed them?”

  Moody nodded.

  “At least some of them must’ve remembered seeing the way he and Susan were dancing together,” she said. “Why wasn’t he the prime suspect from the beginning?”

  Obviously the question made Moody uneasy. Beneath his heavy, crinkled eyelids, his eyes shifted to several points in the room, including Dent, before returning to Bellamy. “He might’ve been, except that your folks were the first people I talked to. They gave me Dent’s name and told me about the argument he’d had with Susan that morning.”

  “So I shot straight to the top of your list.”

  “Yeah. I didn’t go back to Allen Strickland till you’d been eliminated.”

  “Allen was another likely choice. But even then you didn’t think he’d committed the crime, did you?” Bellamy said. “Why not?”

  He took a sip of his drink.

  “Why not?” she repeated.

  “First time I questioned him, he told me that Susan had turned him down flat and had made fun of him for trying.”

  “And you believed that?” she asked.

  “Usually a guy, especially a ladies’ man like him, doesn’t admit to being turned down, so I figured he was telling the truth. At least partially. Then there was his brother.”

  She and Dent exchanged a look.