by Brian Hodge
On a hunch, Andy had pulled up a photo for Jordan Rabin, MacGregor’s cousin and partner in the string of salon robberies that had culminated in Phoenix last fall with three deaths. They’d turned on each other, MacGregor shooting his cousin and leaving him on the floor to go straight to jail, trial, and three life sentences. Rabin was clearly no public threat any more, but Andy wondered if he wasn’t the one who resembled Sheppard, and Boyle had confused the two cousins. The instant he’d seen the photo, the theory died. Rabin was spiky-haired and raw-boned, with the contemptuous look of a born convict.
After all the interior footage, Andy watched the exteriors next, running the crucial segment back and forth a couple of times before treading out into the bullpen.
“Meredith,” he said. “Got a minute to watch what may or may not be a snuff film? I could use an unbiased second opinion.”
Meredith Jaffe looked up from her desk, her paperwork. Endless forms, the bane of existence. Like anyone needed an excuse to leave them sitting.
“La Paz, yesterday?”
He said yes, and she pushed away from her desk. On her way past his, she tapped an engraved walnut sign sitting along the front, with the size and shape and tilt of a nameplate. In block letters it read THOU SHALT COMMIT MURDER; underneath, in smaller script: …PREFERABLY DURING STANDARD OFFICE HOURS.
“Cute,” Meredith said. “I’ve been meaning to ask where it came from.”
“Maria had it made for me. You think it’s a hint?”
“Tell her that regular schedules are soul-sucking. That it’s the chaotic life that keeps you young.”
“And you really expect that to fly with the mother of a five-year-old?”
The exterior footage showed the confrontation from opposing angles, one view from the left, the other from the right. Both cameras had been positioned to catch the license plates of deadbeats who drove away from the pumps without paying. Between the two tapes, you could see the front end of Sheppard’s car, and you could see the back end, but nothing down low and directly between the car and the pumps—exactly where Sheppard had disappeared for those pivotal seconds.
Andy started the tape showing the front-end perspective. It had the better view of Boyle as he walked away, turned abruptly, appeared to say something, and then charged. Andy would’ve given anything for the soundtrack to this exchange, what exactly had set Boyle off. The license and registration ritual had gone smoothly enough. The license would’ve checked out, and while even now it was unclear why Sheppard was driving Samantha Emerson’s car, whatever explanation he’d offered didn’t appear to have stuck in Boyle’s craw, since everything had been handed back.
“Wait a minute,” Meredith said after Boyle was down. “Run that back.”
Andy thumbed the pause button after they’d watched Boyle slide down the trashcan for a second time. “Does this look the same to you as it does to me?”
“What it looks like to me is that—what’s his name? The deputy?”
“Boyle.”
“It looks to me like Boyle fucked up hugely. He fumbled his gun.”
“No question on that. But did the guy on the ground use it on him? That’s the whole issue.”
Meredith froze for a moment, teeth gritted in her reluctance to commit. It was a rare look for her—hesitant. Not the way he saw most six-foot women, especially her. Meredith logged probably four times the gym hours he did, and enjoyed them every bit as much as he didn’t.
“Gut instinct?” she said. “No.”
“All right. Now. Keep in mind I wanted to get your opinion before you see what happens next.”
He released the pause, let the scene roll through Boyle’s last extraordinary surge of energy, then Sheppard’s tantrum—four kicks, by Andy’s count, after the deputy was down.
“Well, that was stupid of him,” she said. “But it doesn’t change my mind on the other.”
He let it play through to the finish for her: Sheppard stooping for the gun and firing two, maybe three, times at the store—return fire, Andy explained—then jumping into his car and burning rubber out of frame. Andy wanted to drive back down to the Gulp ’n’ Go and choke that idiot clerk. Would’ve bet his pension that the only reason Sheppard had run was because he was being shot at. That a few hours of sit-down and a routine inquest would’ve cleared this up.
Meredith swiped the remote from him and backed up the tape, starting it again but thumbing through on a frame-by-frame advance.
“If he did it,” she said, “then what you’ve got here is a magic bullet on the same level as the Kennedy assassination.”
“Contrary to the only witness—and the less said about him, the better—the kid dropped by accident, I think that’s fairly obvious. Looks like it happened when Boyle kicked his feet apart for a frisk.”
“Boyle doesn’t look any too steady himself right there, does he?”
“No,” Andy said, “and that worries me. When I was kneeling by the body yesterday, for a second I thought I caught a whiff of alcohol. But there was so much other stink at the time I didn’t think a lot about it. Figured it was his bladder, maybe. Some people, you know, they’ve got ammonia for urine.”
“Did you check his car?”
“Yeah. No bottles, nothing.”
“The autopsy’ll settle it one way or another.” Meredith pointed at the blur of the revolver, now loose, then obscured by the fender. “Look how it’s falling. Kind of back and to the side. It’s not falling right into your guy’s hands, that’s for sure.”
“But did he squirm around down there and get his hands on it?”
“I don’t see how,” she said. On-screen, Boyle was hoisting Sheppard back into view. “Look—there he’s coming up again. How long has he been on the ground—five or six seconds? He dropped facedown and he’s coming up the same way. This guy’s from the circus, he’s going to get off a shot from behind his own back?”
“Five seconds gives you plenty time to roll back and forth.”
“The gun’s not in his hand when he comes up, though.”
“The angle,” Andy mused. Something else coming to him on watching this for the sixth time. “Trajectory. Boyle was shot crossways through the upper body. Not front-to-back. To catch Boyle from the side like that, Sheppard would’ve had to twist about ninety degrees. Which maybe he did, to go for the gun. Although to come up in that same spot, he’d have to spin back where he was when he fell. But…there was time. You could do that in five or six seconds. It’s possible.”
“But how likely? You’ve got him moving with the instincts and reaction time of a Navy SEAL when it’s obvious he’s scared to death. See that dark patch on the front of his pants when he’s on his feet again? I don’t think that’s a shadow. Looks like he pissed himself.”
Andy nodded. “And hangs to the left, by the look of it.”
“If he hadn’t done what he did after Boyle was down, would you find it easier to believe what you’re seeing here?”
“Well, he sure as hell didn’t help his case, did he?”
“Maybe by that point he’d just snapped. Did it look to you like, when he had him against the car, like Boyle was playing roulette or something with him?”
Andy groaned and rubbed his eyes. “So what’s this leave? Boyle, possibly impaired, dropped his own gun and killed himself with it?” Thinking, regardless of how he’d assessed the man, of the shame. Maybe Boyle had taken too much satisfaction in twisting arms and cracking heads, but you had to figure that over close to forty years a lot of people had been glad to see him drive up. That he’d prevented a lot of bad days from turning into worse days. He had helped raise a dead friend’s son. Maybe he didn’t deserve brass bands and his own holiday, but he’d earned better than to be thought a joke, incompetent enough to die by his own bungling hand. How could you help prove that against a man and not feel as though you were putting a knife in his back?
“There’s another outside tape, didn’t you say?” Meredith asked.
“It
ends the same way.”
“In for a penny…”
He made the switch. Aware now of how few misgivings Meredith seemed to have about helping to write such an unflattering final page on Boyle’s life. Didn’t know him, and while they were on the same side, it wasn’t the same team. Maybe it went deeper with her, Meredith wanting this to have been Boyle’s fault because even though she didn’t know him, she knew his type. Good old boy dinosaur who, on the best day of her career, still would’ve sneered down his nose at her, thinking there were better places for her to be than in a uniform or carrying a detective’s shield.
Onscreen, the confrontation played out again, the point of view now that of a crow perched on the opposite end of the store. A repeat of Sheppard’s disappearing act down the side of the car. One second, the gun fumbled, three seconds, four —
“Look at that.” Meredith ran her finger across the screen, beneath and alongside the car. “His shadow.”
She was right. On this tape, although you still couldn’t see Sheppard, the low angle of the sun was throwing his shadow in the direction of the camera.
“It didn’t move,” Andy said. “Not until Boyle hoisted him. I missed that.”
“Enhancement would help, but if his shadow’s not doing anything, neither is he.” Meredith slapped her hand onto the tabletop. “Say that’s him, he’s lying there flat. And the sun’s coming across him at whatever angle it is. But low. Now if he rolls”—slowly tilting her hand up onto its edge—”look how much extra surface area raises up. It’d change the shadow. But that’s not happening.”
Andy ran it through one last time, then ejected the tape and shut off the TV and VCR.
“That’s that,” he said. “Gave the guy every chance to be guilty.”
Still, to clear this up, they would have to find him, and right now it was looking as though Sheppard had vanished off the face of the earth.
Coincidentally enough, just like the fugitive for whom he’d been mistaken.
****
Jamey swore that once he made it out of this, he was never going to sit in a rocking chair again. Medieval devil-worshippers caught harvesting the fat of unbaptized babies had not been made to suffer this level of discomfort. No cushion, no pillow, just solid wood beneath and behind him.
Yesterday’s bumps and bruises had ached enough, but now it had gotten so bad that he’d begun to despise his own muscle tone. The same taut rump that Samantha liked to pat, whenever he was fresh from the shower or wearing snug jeans…he hated it now. Regretted every squat thrust, every mile he’d run, every pound of Nautilus machine iron each gluteus maximus had budged. He wanted a huge ass now, an ass like a bus driver’s, just for the luxury of padding.
Morning. He knew he must have slept, because there were things he couldn’t account for. Like how long the others, three of them by now, had been convened in the kitchen for breakfast. Through a doorway at the opposite end of the living room he could see half of Rupert’s back as he sat at the kitchen table, none of Jasper, and the whole of their mother, standing in profile.
Jamey kept his head lowered and watched through slitted eyes. The longer they thought he was asleep, the better.
“No,” their mother was saying, “they just come into the bar, couple a deputies, looking at faces and asking questions. But nobody said nothing about a reward.”
“Doesn’t mean there’s not one,” came Jasper’s voice.
“Doesn’t mean there is,” their mother said.
“But it don’t mean there’s not,” Rupert insisted.
“I stand corrected,” she sighed.
Jamey had met her already. Late in the night, her sons already slumbering, Jamey had awakened from another catnap, groggily aware of someone standing before him. He blinked toward the floor, saw a gnarled pair of feet in clear plastic slippers, one of them tapping in impatience. His gaze traveled upward, past bony calves crawling with blue veins, past scrawny thighs in pedal pushers. Past a knit top left shapeless by a thousand washings and two arms crossed stern as a librarian’s. Her long face recalled photos he’d seen of Oklahoma women during the Great Depression, haggard and haunted, skin turned to leather by sun and dust. She had attempted to brighten it with dabs of rouge, on each cheekbone a blotch the size of a nickel and as red as a baboon’s rump. And her hair, like bleached straw. It was the blondest hair he had ever seen, and coming from L.A., that was saying something.
She’d scowled down at him. “That’s my chair you’re parked in, mister.”
“Oh,” he’d said. “I didn’t really have much to say about it.”
“You best not scratch my chair with them chains.” Her foot went tap tap tap. “Who the hell are you?” He told her his name and she nodded. “Okay, that’s a name I’ve heard already tonight.” Tap tap tap. “The boys brung you home?”
As though he could’ve landed here by accident. “They did.”
“I’m Sadie.”
“Charmed.”
“For a wanted killer, you don’t look like all that much. I was expecting more.”
He’d started to tell her it was all a mistake, then thought why bother? “You should’ve seen me in my prime.”
“I have the diabetes,” she’d declared ominously. “You can’t stay long.” Tap tap tap. “Get this sorted out come daybreak. Yes sir, we will.”
And now, as the morning sun pushed the temperature in the trailer higher, he listened as she objected to Jasper’s suggestion that they phone the sheriff’s office right away—any sheriff’s office—and flat-out ask about a reward.
“It’s not like calling up for the lottery numbers,” Sadie was saying. Her back turned to her sons as she poured coffee and juice for three. “It arouses suspicions. They trace your number, they know who you are, they get to wondering how come you got to be so interested in that reward money. Next thing you know they’re out here sniffing around and find him on their own, and figure they don’t have to pay a dime.”
“But —” said Rupert.
“But nothing,” she turned and snapped. “Butt-head.” She whapped the side of his skull with her bony hand and he hunkered down, pawing at the sore spot while Jasper chortled. “And you hush your mouth too. You’re not so damn smart yourself.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Jasper.
“You don’t think the law doesn’t have its eye on you both already? You don’t think they’re just counting the days ’til you follow that father of yours into prison? They know you ’bout as well as I do.”
“And maybe they’re right,” Jasper said. “We didn’t have Sheppard caught an hour yesterday before Rupert was trying to kill him with this gun here we took off him.” Jamey could hear its heavy thud against the kitchen table.
“You what?” Sadie cried.
“It’s not my fault!” Rupert bawled. “Jasper was gonna tell him about my mouth.”
“Jasper.” Sadie stopped dishing out sweet rolls and crossed her arms in that stern way of hers. “You know your brother’s sensitive about that.”
“I just thought it’d give us a little chuckle, is all.”
“Chuckle,” said Rupert, very glum. “I’ve heard all the chuckles I want to hear from you about that.”
“Well, serves you right.” Sadie turning on Rupert now. “It’s your own damn fault. You boys and that junk you drag home. I bet you haven’t sold but one piece for every ten that collects around here, and I swear, I don’t know how anyone could get so pathetic drunk he can’t tell the difference between an electric toothbrush and an electric carving knife.”
Rupert began to squeal in protest.
“Now, Mom, give him some credit,” Jasper said. “He figured it out by the time he got to his back teeth.” Jamey saw Rupert’s thick shoulders flex as he hauled off with a backhand, and the impact sounded brutal, but Jasper never stopped laughing. “Had to figure out sometime why the toothpaste was green and he was spittin’ red.”
“All right, that’s enough out of the both of you.” Sadie han
ded out paper plates piled with sweet rolls. Three each for the boys, one for herself. She pulled up a chair and settled. “Let’s have us a peaceful breakfast for a change and think on this.”
“Mom?” said Rupert. “These are jelly rolls.”
“What of it?”
“I don’t like jelly rolls. You said you were gonna bring home donuts.”
“It’s the same thing. It’s pastry. It’s good for you.”
“It’s not the same. These have that goop in the middle, it makes my teeth hurt.”
“Now what I could do,” Sadie said, “is drive back on into town this afternoon and drop by the bar, make up some reason to be there, and just happen to see if anyone’s heard about any reward. And if they haven’t, well, then maybe use the payphone in the back, find out from the source.”
“Sounds like a plan, Mom,” said Jasper.
Rupert wasn’t giving up: “You said you were bringing home donuts.”
“Well I didn’t, did I!” Sadie yelled. “Either live with it, or bake your own!”
“I don’t know how to bake donuts,” Rupert whined. “All I know is you said —”
Sadie slammed both fists on the table and bolted to her feet. Jamey watched as she snatched Rupert’s plate away and restacked the rolls, slapping each one atop the other in perfect alignment. She leaned across the table, and when her arm came into view again Jamey saw that she’d grabbed the big silver revolver. She cocked it, then held the muzzle over the center of the top roll and fired, blasting through pastry and table and linoleum-covered floor alike. Then shoved the plate back at Rupert.
“There,” she spat. “They’re donuts now, y’ungrateful little shit.”
****
Priority one after watching the videos was putting a file stop on Jamey Sheppard’s case, downgrading his status with state and county agencies, and clearing him from the grand jury docket in La Paz. No homicide, no homicide suspect. Wanted for questioning as a material witness only. Updating Sheriff Beech was one of the more painful calls he’d had to make lately. The man taking the news with a reserve so terse you could almost hear the creaking of his jaw muscles, tensing up in anticipation of telling the six dozen people working under him how their man had tripped over his own feet.
