Fear No Truth

by LynDee Walker

  I spun to find headlights dead-leveled at Graham.

  His name ripping from my throat, I charged. Leapt. My shoulder exploded when it hit his chest, all my wind rushing out in a whoosh as I rolled, rolled, rolled us both, opening my eyes to a tire speeding past our noses. Tears leaked from my eyes as the stitches in my head ripped, blood running over my ear and down my neck.

  More footfalls. A higher voice.

  “Look out!” Skye? Who was she talking to?

  I pushed off Graham’s chest, raising my head as brake lights washed everything in blood.

  Erica Andre’s white Jag skidded to a stop a foot from the edge of the dam.

  “Dad!” Nicky bolted upright, his hand shooting out.

  The sky opened up.

  Darren Richardson pitched backward.

  He fell so fast the rain couldn’t even catch him.

  48

  A pair of butterflies, one orange and one yellow, played tag over the hyacinths at the gates of Texas State Cemetery Saturday morning.

  Storms gone, the sun bathed Tenley’s memorial service in warmth, purple flowers popping against the flat steel of the casket, the end-to-end blanket of petals enough to make the whole city smell like spring.

  Graham stood beside me, his hand finding mine during the opening prayer. I laced my fingers through his and smiled at the sparks racing up my arm. Maybe now we’d have time to figure out what that electricity might mean.

  The Marshall High choir sang “Amazing Grace” and “Jesus Loves Me,” and then broke into Katy Perry’s “Roar.” I glanced around, people filling the graveyard as far as I could see, news vans lining the road for day two of the scandal of the century.

  Skye broke the story Friday morning on two hours’ sleep, and the web just kept spreading, ensnaring another Austin power player every hour, it seemed. New this morning: the university president was paying for the illegal prescription opiates four of the five starters on the basketball team and more than half of the football players were abusing. Archie’s cyber team found a nice trail of bank transactions and recorded conversations in Darren Richardson’s laptop. A narcissist always covers his own ass first.

  And I still knew my politicians: Bobby Wayne Otis sold Ray Wooley the video of Jessa DuGray’s assault for twenty-five hundred dollars. Since there were no faces visible on camera, Bobby Wayne thought if he killed Ray and swiped his laptop, he could stop himself from being thrown under the bus in a plea bargain if Ray went to trial. He found the laptop, but not the memory stick he’d given Ray with the original video, which he took from my pocket after he coldcocked me in Ray’s apartment Wednesday night. He said he confessed to the murder because the scene was gruesome enough to pull the news cycle off of Ray’s website, and he “liked his chances of drawing a hung jury on account of Ray being such a disgusting human being.”

  “Takes one to know one” was never so true: in the enhanced original video of Jessa’s final hours, the cattle prod Otis had hit Nicky and the other boys with as he screamed at them to “take her” was visible, and his voice was a dead identical match. By dawn Thursday, he’d admitted that she’d stopped breathing at some point, though he couldn’t be sure when, and he’d burned her body to hide evidence and buried it on his back forty.

  I would enjoy watching that man go to prison for a long, long time.

  Nicky, his memory vomiting horror in fits and starts, told a story about sneaking out to Otis’s place and moving Jessa’s remains on a bitter winter night after he saw her parents pleading for answers on the news.

  Even Skye Morrow did a good thing every now and again.

  The choir fell silent, Jake Simpson taking the podium.

  “Tenley Andre was a superstar. Many admired her light, but few got close enough to see past it to the wonderful soul within.”

  Wow. Deep, and lovely for someone who came across as so self-involved. Simpson went on about Tenley’s accomplishments, his eyes never leaving a tall, lanky boy in the back row of folding chairs.

  I scanned the crowd: blotchy-faced, sobbing teenagers packed tight among the trees. The entire Marshall High student body was at the cemetery. With one painful exception.

  Erica Andre called Friday and invited me and Graham over to ask if an exception could be made for Nicky to attend Tenley’s service. “You might think I’ve lost my mind, but I know how much that boy loved my daughter. Nicky wouldn’t have hurt Tenley. Or anyone else.” She did an admirable job of talking around her tears, a shaky breath bringing her husband’s hand to her shoulder. “Not before they went messing around in his brain. I hate with everything in me that we all have to live with this, but it’s cruel to make him miss her funeral. He should be there. She would want him there.”

  I called everyone I could think of up to and including my parents. Erica asked Governor Holdswaithe’s wife, but nobody had enough pull to drag that mountain: Nicky was in a court-ordered locked psych program. Hopefully good doctors and good therapy could repair the damage Otis had done. But they couldn’t make him forget, and I feared the memories, once he had them all, would end him.

  Erica and Brent sat next to each other in the front row, heads bowed and hands folded in their laps, as person after person stood to talk about their daughter and what they remembered best about her, what they’d miss the most. It was hard for me to listen to without tearing up, and I’d never spoken to Tenley, though I felt like I knew her all the same.

  People sometimes told me I was brave, chasing murderers, jumping in front of bullets. Maybe. But these people, sitting in this massive crowd missing and remembering their daughter—they were braver.

  Nicky, looking up at me Thursday night, tears streaming, wrists crossed in front of him, confessing patchy recollections of doing horrible things to Jessa and Tenley before he asked me to put him somewhere he couldn’t hurt anyone else—that was valor.

  Police work can force a person to see the world around them as black and white.

  Every once in a while, a case comes along that brings out all the gray in the middle.

  I started Tuesday with a promise to help Tenley’s family find peace. I’d raced through the week determined to avenge two bright young women who had life stolen from them far too soon. Like Charity. Except I could do for Jessa and Tenley what nobody had done for my sister: I could deliver justice for them. Could leave their killer to rot in a cell forever.

  But it wasn’t that simple this time. My heart ached for what the victims lost, but it hurt just as gravely for Nicky—for what people he trusted had done to him in the name of “normal.” The presumption that such a thing exists is the biggest lie people tell themselves every day.

  “The hard ones stay with you, kid,” Archie had told me over margaritas at the Work Horse Friday evening. “It’s the ones where the bad guy is a human, not a demon, that haunt you when you do this job long enough.”

  Right again.

  Sitting with Nicky in the emergency room, I’d patted his back as he sobbed. “Aren’t you supposed to take me to jail?” he asked. “I did god-awful things. Things I didn’t even know I was doing. How can your own mind just betray you that way?”

  I couldn’t answer, unsure what to make of that myself, even with my psych degree. So many years in police work will make a person think they’ve seen everything, but talking to the doctors about Nicky was a crash course in what not to do with mental illness. Electroconvulsive therapy had come a long way since the early days of practically lobotomizing people via current, they said, and had shown to be effective in treating serious depression.

  But administered by an unqualified person to a bipolar teenager in the early days of his first manic phase, it had created the perfect storm in Nicky’s head, sending his brain into a rapid-cycling form of depressive mania that had him cutting himself, blacking out, and struggling to survive a life he’d been pretty happy with just a year ago, by all accounts.

  Brent stood and made his way to the podium. I smiled when Graham squeezed my hand. Foren
sics deemed the front bumper of the Jag unblemished, and Brent swore he wasn’t aiming for Richardson, but trying to stop Nicky from doing something else he’d regret. Truth? Maybe. Maybe not.

  Given the press around the case, Captain Jameson let it go.

  Brent gripped the sides of the podium, his chest puffing out with a deep breath. “Erica and I would like to thank you all for coming here today to honor our beautiful Tenley. She was brilliant, she was special, and she was loved just as fiercely as she loved in return. We may not have been given as many days with her as we would’ve liked, but we will cherish every memory that much more for knowing how fleeting they were.

  “We will miss her every day, but we will move forward, we will love bravely, and we will find our smiles again. Tenley had such a beautiful smile, and she’d have been the first to tell anyone here that yours is just as radiant, just as valuable, and just as necessary. If I could ask y’all a favor: do one thing every day that makes you genuinely smile. That is the best way I can think of to remember my little girl.”

  He made it to the last word before he choked up, nodding as the minister patted his shoulder and asked everyone to stand for the closing prayer.

  The Andres shook a thousand or more hands as people filed past the casket. Erica stopped the line to pull me into a hug.

  “Thank you for believing us,” she whispered. I squeezed her shoulders tight. If there were words to answer that with, I couldn’t put them together.

  I followed Graham back to his cruiser, where I leaned against the side and watched as the crowd dissipated. Erica stayed until they lowered the casket, but turned away when time came for the shoveling to start.

  She and Brent walked to the waiting limo in lockstep, his arm draped around her, her head tipping to rest on his shoulder. I smiled, the ease between them not what I expected after the dynamite at Lola Savannah just two days ago. Good for them. Finding love in tragedy is a much tougher dig than finding blame.

  Turning to open the car door, I spotted my mother fifteen or so yards away, pulling open the back door of a town car. Catching her eye, I nodded.

  Ruth McClellan tilted her head forward and disappeared.

  Jim’s wife was in Houston getting prepped to join the drug trial. I had a mandatory lunch date with my father in an hour. Small price to pay, looking around.

  As Graham drove out of the cemetery, my phone buzzed. Boone: Nice work, McClellan. I have something that might interest you waiting on your desk when your “vacation” is over.

  Graham laid an easy hand on my knee. “Everything okay?”

  Tenley’s family had an answer. I had Graham back in my life, even if I wasn’t sure exactly how yet. And Boone had used my actual name in that text. All things considered, it seemed I’d done some good and had the karma to show for it: “New Girl” had officially moved up in the world.

  A rippling sea of bluebonnets blurred past the window as I put my hand over Graham’s.

  “Today, everything is way better than okay,” I said. “And tomorrow will take care of itself.”

  <<<<>>>>

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  About the Author

  LynDee Walker is the author of six national bestselling novels of suspense, beginning with the Agatha Award-nominated FRONT PAGE FATALITY.

  Before she started writing fiction, LynDee was an award-winning journalist who covered everything from ribbon cuttings to high level police corruption. Her work has appeared in newspapers and magazines across the U.S.

  Aside from books, LynDee loves her family, her readers, travel, and coffee. She lives in Richmond, Virginia, where—when she’s not juggling laundry and children’s sports schedules—she is working on her next novel.

  From LynDee: Thank you so much for reading my books! Come join my exclusive reader group HERE.

  Also by LynDee Walker

  The Nichelle Clarke series:

  Front Page Fatality

  Buried Leads

  Small Town Spin

  Devil in the Deadline

  Cover Shot

  Lethal Lifestyles

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  Acknowledgments

  “Write the book that scares you.” Every author has heard those words, but I never really knew what they meant until I started this novel. I stay involved in my littles’ lives, and I like to think I have the kind of bonds with them that mean I really know how they are, what they’re thinking, and if anything is bothering them. But what about the twist of fate you don’t see coming? That’s the fear that keeps me awake some nights, and it was the question that grew into this novel, which has been through too many evolutions for me to remember over the past two years. This book challenged me, surprised me, pushed me to venture inside some of the darkest capabilities of humanity, and stretched my ability as a writer.

  I owe thanks to several folks for their help getting it into your hands: my agent, John Talbot, who saw something in Faith McClellan I missed, and never gave up on this project; my friend Rick Campbell, who has played the role of publishing guardian angel for me for the past couple of years; Andrew Watts, Mo Metlen, Keris Sirek, and the rest of the team at Severn River Publishing, who work incredibly hard to help my books reach readers, and make being part of this team such fun; Julie Hallberg, Donna Andrews, and Tara Laskowski, who read drafts for me, said nice things, and offered insightful comments that made this a better book; Art Taylor, who gives the very best writer pep talks in the world and also listens better than most anyone I know; Hank Phillipi Ryan, who continues to set high bars both professionally and personally, a gifted author who is also one of the best people I’ve ever met; Jessica Gardner, who has the sharpest eye of any editor I’ve ever worked with; the men and women of the various Texas law enforcement agencies I covered during my journalism career, who taught me firsthand about police procedures and what motivates good cops to go to work every day; Jody Klann, who is ever-patient with my lab and forensic questions; and Justin and my littles, who never complain about having pizza again or laundry that still hasn’t been folded—I love y’all with the fire of ten thousand suns.

  And you, wonderful readers: thank you for reading, reviewing, telling your friends, and sending lovely notes that mean more to me than you could possibly know. I hope y’all love Faith as much as I do. As always, any mistakes are mine alone.