by Donna Ball
Case screamed, “Long, no!” and it sounded slowed down, attenuated, dragged across the blue-back sky: “Loonnnggg .... Nooooooo. . . . ”
Long turned his head at the sound of the sheriff's voice, very, very slowly, even as his hand turned the handle of the door on the cabin. The door swung open.
And the world exploded in light and flame.
~
Chapter Thirty-eight
Sheriff John Case said quietly, “Thirty years in law enforcement. And for the first time I'm thinking it might be too long.”
He stood at the window, hands in the pockets of his rumpled khakis, staring out at the first gray rays of dawn. The door to his office was closed but the clatter came through—phones ringing, doors slamming, voices, both hushed and excited, outraged and anguished: sounds of mourning, sounds of shock, sounds of vengeance.
“His wife is sick, not many people knew that. M.S. She's in remission now. A nurse down at the E.R. You probably know her. Pretty little thing.”
Guy felt something twist deep in his throat; he didn't even try to speak.
“I've only had to take that walk one other time in my life. The door I knocked on that time was my captain's wife's. Right after that I left the New Orleans Police Department. Thought, for some damn stupid reason, people don't die as much in small towns. Hell, I guess I was right—most of the time.”
Two things would stand out forever and uppermost about that night in Guy's mind: The look in Carol's eyes as she saw the smoldering remains of his boat, and the sight of the coroner wheeling away the body bag that contained the remains of the deputy who had given his life in the line of duty. Guy remembered wondering about that man's wife, and why he wasn't home with her, and feeling angry, so angry he couldn't even think.
It was a long time before he realized what it all meant. Saddler was in custody. Carol was safe. He was safe. Their ordeal was over, and the price they paid was a body bag containing the remains of a man they barely knew. A man who had only been trying to save their lives.
In the confusion and horror, they hadn't talked much. The sheriff, grim mouthed and taciturn, had given them only the barest details. Walt, as visibly shaken as Guy had ever seen him, kept saying, “Man, he had a bomb. I should've known it was a bomb he was carrying, I should've known it.” Walt was forgetting that he was, in fact, the hero of the occasion, if such a tragic business could be said to have any heroes.
It was just before dawn when Guy drove Carol back home, and that was when she said in a small, flat voice, “It was supposed to be you. You would have been there. It would have been you.” She didn't have to look at him when she said it. He knew what she was thinking, what she was feeling. The night between them was heavy with loss and fearful, guilty triumph and the weight of wrongs, terrible wrongs that could never be righted.
“Let me talk to him,” Guy said hoarsely now.
“Take a number.” Without turning, Case jerked a thumb over his shoulder to the squad room outside. “You and every one of those uniforms out there, two minutes alone with him ... shit, not that I'm not tempted.”
“It's my daughter, damn it!”
Case turned. His shoulders were slumped, his face gray and lined. He said, “He's not talking, Guy. We've got a lawyer on the way.”
Guy swore softly and pushed his hands through his hair. He knew that once the lawyer got there, any hope he had of interviewing the prisoner would be over. If he were any kind of lawyer at all, in fact, he would do his best to have his client moved out of this jail, even if it meant putting him in a state facility.
With a distant irony, Guy remembered one of his last encounters with Long had been over just such an issue. That time Guy had been an advocate of the accused.
He was just trying to catch a killer, Guy thought sickly. He was trying to find my daughter and protect my family, and he ended up dying for it.
“You can't question him without his lawyer present,” Guy said suddenly, turning on Case, “but that law doesn't apply to reporters.”
“Jesus Christ, Guy, you're not a reporter, you're the victim!”
“Let me talk to him, John,” Guy said urgently. “It may be our last chance and you know it.”
There was no alteration in the sheriff's tired, dull features for a time and Guy thought he would be turned down. Then a slow faint hardness crept into the other man's eyes and he said, “You're a reporter getting a story, that’s all.”
“I do it all the time,” Guy assured him.
Saddler had been put in the last cell in the row, out of sight of the unemployed highway worker who was overdue on his child support, and out of hearing of the DUI who was snoring in the first cell. Saddler was reclining on the bunk when the metal door closed behind them. He got to his feet, a nasty look of recognition sliding onto his face when he saw Guy.
“You've got a visitor,” Case said. “I think you know Mr. Dennison. He works for the local paper here. He just wants to ask you a few questions.”
Grinning, Saddler walked up to the bars. “I just bet he does.” And he looked at the sheriff. “Hey, is this legal, man? I've got my rights, you know.”
But he didn't seem very concerned, and the grin returned when Case turned and walked away without a word. “Kind of a cranky old coot, ain't he?” he remarked.
Guy said, “I'm going to do you a favor, Saddler, and tell you something. You're in a backwoods jail in west Florida an hour's drive from nowhere. You're in a cell all by yourself at the end of the row where nobody can see or hear anything, and by the time that fancy lawyer of yours gets here, it could very well be too late, you following me?”
“Hey, are you threatening me?”
“You killed a cop,” Guy said sharply, “and they've lynched men in this county for less than that. Believe it or not, Saddler, I might be the best friend you've got right now.”
Saddler looked startled. “What the fuck are you talking about? I didn't kill nobody!”
“They didn't tell you? That bomb you planted on my boat. It went off and killed a deputy sheriff.”
Saddler looked momentarily confused, then he asserted, “They don't have a thing on me. This is bullshit man. They can't prove nothing.”
“You think that matters? Did you get the name of that lawyer from the sheriff? It's probably his brother-in-law. He gets paid whether you live or die.”
“Get the fuck out of here, man.” But Guy thought there was less cockiness in Saddler's eyes now, maybe even a touch of worry. “There are laws against intimidating a prisoner.”
“I'm not intimidating you, Saddler,” Guy said softly. “I haven't even started to intimidate you.”
Saddler said, “What the hell do you want, man?”
“I want to know what happened to my daughter. I want you to tell me now and I want you to tell me the truth and if you do, I might even testify before the grand jury that your sorry carcass was alive when I left you.”
Saddler's scowl was disdainful and dismissing. “You're not scaring me, asshole. And I don't know what you're talking about.”
“You'd better be scared. Three girls are dead, raped and tortured, and their fingers are pointing straight at you. You're going to fry this time, Saddler. And I'm going to be there to watch.”
“Man, you're out of your fucking mind! Where's my goddamn lawyer?”
“Where is Kelly? Who did you get to make those phone calls to my wife? What did you do to my little girl?”
“Chill the fuck out, man! How the hell am I supposed to know where she is? You can't keep up with your own kid, it ain't my fault.”
Guy's hand shot through the bars and grabbed Saddler's shirt and if he could have gotten his fingers around his throat, he would have crushed his windpipe. He jerked him against the bars, hard, and had the satisfaction of seeing Saddler's smirk dissolve into slack-jawed shock as he crashed against the metal.
“You answer me, you piece you shit, you tell me the goddamn truth! What have you done with her, goddamn it!” He pushed
him back and jerked him forward again, slamming him against the bars again and again. “Answer me!” He pushed back for one more blow, but the material of the shirt tore and Saddler wrenched away.
“You're crazy, man!” Saddler was screaming at him. “You're fucking crazy!”
And then someone was pulling at Guy's shoulders, demanding, “What's going on here? Are you manhandling my client?”
“He threatened me, man! He tried to fucking kill me!”
Guy jerked away from the middle-aged lawyer, shrugging off his touch, straightening his shoulders. “Sue me,” he told Saddler, and walked out.
At the door that separated the cells from the interrogation room, he met Case coming down the hall with strong measured strides, a dark cold light in his eyes and a grim set to his mouth. “Now,” he said, “it's my turn.”
~
Chapter Thirty-nine
“I would have killed him,” Guy said. “If I could have gotten my hands on his throat, I would have killed him and I wouldn't have been sorry. I never knew that about myself before.”
They were on the deck in the late morning sunshine, a pot of coffee on the table between them, the Gulf pristine and sparkling below. It was a morning like so many others in the life they had shared, and unlike any other they would ever know.
Carol said, “Do you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking about that poor man's wife, and how it could be me who's picking out a coffin now and reserving the chapel and God, I hate myself, but I'm so glad, so glad it's not me.”
Stress and sleeplessness were evident on her face in the clear morning light; her hair was tousled and her eyes were haunted. Guy reached across the table for her hand. She squeezed his fingers lightly, then pulled gently away.
She lowered her eyes and cleared her throat slightly. She said, “Everything—happened so quickly, didn't it?”
It was not the kind of question that required an answer, so Guy said nothing.
Then she looked at him, her eyes troubled and uncertain. “Guy,” she said, “I want you to know that being with you again the other night was wonderful. It was exactly what I needed—”
“What we both needed,” he corrected quietly, watching her.
Her smile was faint and transitory. “But everything has been so sudden, so intense, and now, this.” She swallowed, and shifted her gaze. “It would be unfair of us to expect promises from each other right now, and I'm not asking them. Just—help me get through this, okay? Whatever we're going to do, let's not do it now.”
Guy said, “Keeping promises was never one of my problems, Carol.”
She still wouldn't look at him. “I know that.”
“The ones I make, I keep.”
Her eyes were pained when she looked at him. He almost preferred no eye contact at all. “When you can.”
“Do you want a promise from me?”
Her eyes darkened, and her voice broke on the next words. “I don't know.”
Guy got up and knelt behind her, encircling her shoulders with his arms, pressing his cheek briefly against her hair. She was fresh from the shower, smelling of warmth and soap, and he could feel her gentle nakedness beneath the terrycloth robe. He said, “We're going to get each other through this, sweetie. We can talk about promises afterward if you want to. But right now I'm not going anywhere unless you ask me to.”
Carol reached up and took his hand. Her voice sounded husky, though he saw the curve of her smile. “I'm not going to ask you to. Not anytime soon, anyway.”
“Good.” He kissed her fingers, and stood up.
Carol took her coffee over to the rail and looked down in silence for a time. She said, “I keep telling myself the worst is over. But it's not, is it? Because by the time the investigation is over, we'll know what happened to Kelly. And all of a sudden I realize it was easier not to know.”
Guy said, “I think she's alive, Carol. If Saddler wanted to hurt me, the quickest way to do that would have been to let me know he'd killed my daughter. If he was going to taunt me with anything, that would have been it—not those phone calls from a living girl. I think he might have had her, but she got away somehow—and I think he's holding that as his trump card.”
Carol rubbed her forehead wearily. “I don't understand why none of this came out at his first trial. Why the phone calls, who the girl was ... why he won't tell us anything.”
“It hasn't even been forty-eight hours of interrogation,” Guy said. “It could take weeks.”
Carol drew a slow, careful breath. “I'm not sure I can take it that long.”
He came forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Yes,” he said, “you can.”
Then he said, “I have to go into the office this morning. Ed called and said the TV stations had gotten wind of developments down here and we can expect a zoo. I don't think they'll track you down, but if they do, try to stay out of the line of fire, okay?”
“They won't find me. I'm supposed to go with Ken Carlton to see some property today—by boat, no less. God, it all seems so bizarre. Life goes on.”
He kissed her hair. “It always has.”
Then she turned around. “When is the memorial service for Deputy Long?”
“I'll call his wife today. I should—anyway.”
Carol nodded, and started to go back inside to finish dressing. Then she looked back. “There haven't been any more phone calls since he was arrested.”
“It's only been a day,” Guy reminded her.
She nodded and tried to look reassured. But she wasn't, and neither was he.
***
“Why are you coming at me with them murdered kids again? I'm telling you, I didn't have anything to do with any disappearing girls and I don't know nothing about it, so just leave me the fuck alone will you?”
Saddler was putting up an angry show, but he looked haggard and worried. Sleeping conditions had not been the best in the county jail since Saddler had been in residence, and the only times Saddler had been allowed out of the interrogation room during daylight hours were for meals and bathroom breaks. It was unlikely that a big-city, civil-rights lawyer would have allowed John Case to get away with as much as he was doing, but William Soffit, whose name had rotated up on the court-appointed attorney list, was more comfortable defending DUI and teenage breaking and entering than he was murder cases, and he had not yet figured out that he just might be handling the case of the decade as far as the state of Florida was concerned.
It had been thirty-two hours since Saddler's arrest. The state police were already sending a team of investigators to try to make a case in the deaths of Mickie Anderson and Tanya Little, and the D.A. had assigned two prosecutors to the case. The sheriff figured he had until noon, tops, before his authority in this case all but disappeared.
He could hear the clock ticking like a time bomb in the back of his head.
Soffit said, “Sheriff, I've asked you repeatedly to confine your questions to the charges against my client.” He didn't bother to keep the boredom out of his tone. “Mr. Saddler, do you wish to take a break?”
“What for?” Saddler shot back irritably. “All they do is leave me sit in this goddamn room. It takes two goddamn hours to get a deputy in here to take me back to my cell so I can take a goddamn leak. Can't you do something about that, for christsakes?”
Case replied equitably, “As I've explained to you, Mr. Saddler, we're a little shorthanded, right now. All my deputies are tied up investigating the disappearances of several young girls, two of whom have turned up dead. We don't have a lot of time left over for escorting prisoners back and forth from their cells. Now, if you'd like to tell us anything that might make our investigation easier, I'm sure it would free up enough personnel to make sure you get your meals and your potty breaks on time.”
Saddler said, “Jesus, man, I keep telling you, you got the wrong goddamn guy! I don't know nothing—”
“We've got the right guy, all right,” Case said, smiling genially. “We've got your fing
erprints on the fireplace poker that you used to assault Guy Dennison. We've got ignition wire and explosive powder in that rat's nest of a trailer you've been squatting in that matches the wire and explosive used in the bomb that killed my deputy. We've got an eyewitness who saw you place the bomb. What we've got, Mr. Richard Saddler, is a cop killer who's going back into the Florida prison system and as an ex-con I'm sure you probably know howmuch fun that’s going to be.”
Saddler gave an angry hiss and started to turn away, but Case went on mildly, “And let me tell you what else we've got. We've got a convicted rapist, a pathetic little dickhead who likes to play with little girls, prowling our shores and making threatening phone calls just about the time one of those young girls washes in with the tide, dead, raped, and a victim of some pretty weird games. Then we got a whole collection of newspaper articles and fliers and photographs of Kelly Dennison in your trailer. That disturbs me, Mr. Saddler. That disturbs me a whole lot.”
There had also been clippings on Carol Dennison, pictures of that big house of hers torn from some magazine, some miscellaneous scraps of newspaper with Guy Dennison's byline on them. Case had not told the Dennisons about this yet, and he hoped he didn't have to—not until he had answers to the questions he knew Dennison would ask.
Saddler was stony faced. Soffit glanced at his watch. Tick, tick...
“Now as you can see, you don't have a whole lot of bargaining room here. I'm counting three solid counts of murder one, two of kidnapping and sexual assault, one of assault with a deadly weapon, two of stalking, one breaking and entering, one illegal possession of an incendiary device, and we haven't even gotten to parole violations yet. In short, Mr. Saddler, you are in deep, deep shit. But I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you.”
Case paused for a moment, letting Saddler mull over his situation and anticipate what was to come. Then he said, “You help me find Kelly Dennison and I'll make sure the judge knows you cooperated. It might mean the difference between life in prison and eight to fifteen years waiting for Old Sparky.”
That was bullshit, of course, but it was amazing what a man would believe when he was desperate. And if Saddler wasn't desperate by now, he soon would be.
