Turning Angel

by Greg Iles

  I demand a meeting with the chief of police, and almost immediately I’m escorted to his office. Chief Don Logan sits waiting for me behind his desk. He’s a thin man in his forties who looks more like an engineer than a policeman. His spartan office reflects his reputation as a managerial type. Chief Logan has family photos on his desk, and more computer manuals than law enforcement texts on his bookshelves. He’s known for being careful about procedure, so it’s all the more surprising that he’s made the political move of arresting Drew.

  “Hello, Chief Logan,” I say equably.

  He regards me coolly over a steaming cup of coffee. “In my seven years as chief,” he says, “I’ve never seen anything like the furor over this situation. I understand the emotional side, of course. A pretty young girl, so much potential. A prominent physician suddenly associated with her murder. But people are losing their perspective over this thing. There’s a mob mentality developing out there. Nobody seems to want to let matters take their normal course. To let the system work.”

  “Including the district attorney?” I prompt.

  Chief Logan raises one eyebrow, but he doesn’t take the bait. “I’m sure you’re wondering why we’ve charged your client with aggravated assault.”

  “You read my mind, Chief.”

  “I’m going to lay my cards on the table, Penn. We have a troubled history with the sheriff’s department. You know all about it, I’m sure. The city of Natchez is under the jurisdiction of the police department, but technically, the sheriff has jurisdiction over the entire county, which includes the city. In general, we have a working agreement whereby we work crimes inside the city limits and the sheriff takes the county.”

  “But?”

  Logan takes a sip of coffee. “But Billy Byrd is a political animal. And when a high-profile case comes along, the sheriff believes it’s his God-given right to storm in and take over the investigation. Billy ran roughshod over the last police chief, and he’s tried to do the same to me on occasion. He’s actually had his deputies try to arrest one of my officers at a couple of crime scenes. They almost came to blows. I’ve requested several legal opinions from the attorney general’s office in Jackson, but nothing they send us is ever definitive enough.”

  “I understand your problem. I dealt with some of the same issues in Houston.”

  Chief Logan nods as though encouraged. “I’m glad you do. Because today I’m drawing the line. Kate Townsend’s body was discovered just within the boundary of the city, which alone makes it our case. But she almost certainly died farther upstream in that creek, which removes any doubt whatever about jurisdiction.”

  Sheriff Byrd won’t see it that way. “You’re preaching to the choir, Chief. Tell me about the assault charge.”

  “Since that’s a felony charge, Dr. Elliott and the Sayers boy will have to spend the night in this building. I’ll have a chance to talk to them without any interference from Sheriff Byrd. Now, as Dr. Elliott’s lawyer, you can stop me if you want to. But know this: my sole interest is in solving Kate Townsend’s murder. I’m not railroading anybody to judgment in order to grab some headlines, here or anywhere else.”

  This is good news indeed.

  “If Dr. Elliott’s guilty,” Logan goes on, “then he should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. But if he’s not, the man deserves some protection.” The chief shakes his head. “Drew’s reputation will be blown to hell by suppertime tonight, and as far as I can tell, there’s nothing against him but some anonymous phone calls and a fistfight.”

  “Which he didn’t start,” I point out.

  The chief waves his hand as though shooing away a fly. “The judge will throw out the assault charge tomorrow morning. The bottom line is, I think Dr. Elliot’s safer in my jail than anywhere else in this town tonight.”

  I sit back in my chair and study the chief. He’s the first rational man I’ve spoken to in some time. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  “I don’t have isolation cells here,” he says, “but I do have some eight-man units that are empty. I’ve put Drew in one and the Sayers boy in the other. They’ll be safe and relatively comfortable until tomorrow.”

  I try to suppress a smile at the thought of Shad Johnson learning about this development. “Have you spoken to the D.A. about this assault arrest?”

  Chief Logan looks out his solitary window and gives a long-suffering sigh. “I try very hard to get along with the district attorney. But I have a feeling Mr. Johnson isn’t going to like this one bit.” He looks back at me, his dark eyes hard with conviction. “You know what? Tough titty. This ain’t right, and I ain’t going along with it. There’s not a damn thing Mr. Johnson can do about this arrest before tomorrow, unless he wants to call a judge and have Dr. Elliott released on the strength of the D.A.’s word. And given Mr. Johnson’s main political support base, I don’t think he’ll want to do that.”

  I stand and shake hands with Logan. “I’m quite satisfied that procedure has been followed, Chief. Do you have any problem with me speaking to my client before I go?”

  “I’ll have him brought to the visitors’ room.”

  On my way out, I stop and turn back. “Do you know Kate’s time of death yet?”

  Logan watches me in silence for a few moments. Then he says, “From the body temperature—which they did take when the fishermen got her to the ER—the M.E. figures she died between three and five-thirty p.m.”

  “That’s pretty exact.”

  Logan nods. “They know she left the school alive at two fifty-five, and she hadn’t cooled much by seven-thirty, when they took the temp. The M.E. says he feels pretty confident about that window.”

  “Does he have any idea how long she was in the water?”

  “It’s hard to say, given how quickly everything happened. If he did know that, we might be able to figure out how far upstream she died. But that creek moves very fast in flood. She wouldn’t have to be in it long to be swept miles downstream. And remember, Kate was found at six-twenty. No matter what the M.E. says, a maximum of only three hours and twenty minutes could have passed after death, even if someone strangled her the minute she walked out of St. Stephen’s. I don’t think the body temperature is going to tell us what we want to know, Penn.”

  “Okay. So as of now, suspects need alibis from three p.m. to five-thirty.”

  “Yep.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  He smiles. “You didn’t hear it from me.”

  Five minutes later, Drew is escorted into the tiny visitors’ cubicle and seated behind a glass partition with a metal screen in it. He looks pale and drawn, and his eyes have the dull sheen I associate with lifers in the Walls unit at Huntsville, Texas, where I used to spend quite a bit of time. Has thirty minutes in a cell done this to one of the toughest friends I ever had?

  “When am I getting out, Penn?”

  “Not until tomorrow, I’m afraid.”

  I expect anger, but Drew hardly reacts. Maybe his listlessness is a symptom of grief. Maybe the attack by the St. Stephen’s teenagers has punctured his illusions about his relationship with Kate—or maybe his image of himself as a good man.

  “Chief Logan’s done you a big favor,” I explain. “He’s isolated you from Sheriff Byrd, who would love to use you to grab some headlines. He’s also put you at more of a remove from Shad Johnson, who wants to use you as a stepping-stone to higher office. Both men would like to interrogate you at their leisure, but I doubt either one will be bothering you in here.”

  “You never gave me the details of Kate’s autopsy,” Drew says, his eyes boring into mine.

  “I gave you the main points. The rest is medical jargon.”

  His eyes don’t waver. “Don’t bullshit me. Don’t try to spare me.”

  I focus on some dried pink bubblegum on the glass between us. “The pathologist thinks she was raped.”

  “Based on?”

  “Genital trauma.”

  Drew looks confused by this. “Go on.
”

  “They found semen from two different men inside her body.”

  He closes his eyes like a man fighting bone-deep pain. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

  “I wanted you sane when the deputies came to collect your blood.”

  He shakes his head as though I’ve betrayed him.

  “Drew, I have to ask you this. Is there any chance that Kate was having consensual sex with someone else besides you?”

  A slow blink. Then an odd smile. “You still don’t get it, do you? Kate loved me. She loved me absolutely. If you’d told me earlier that they found two different semen samples inside her, I could have told you right away that she’d been raped.”

  “Well…I wish there were some way to prove absolute love. Because I think the D.A. is going to paint you as a jealous older man who went crazy when he found out his teenage mistress was sharing her natural bounty with someone else.”

  Drew’s mouth wrinkles with disgust. “I don’t care what he does.”

  “You’d better start. You’d better give the whole situation some serious thought tonight. Try to conjure up some idea of who might have wanted to rape or kill Kate. Because the fact that she was pregnant means that you could be charged with double homicide.”

  Drew’s blue eyes are impenetrable to me. After a time, he says, “What happens tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow I’ll have the assault charge against you dismissed. You don’t want to charge Steve Sayers for attacking you.”

  “No.”

  “All right—”

  “Fuck!” Drew exclaims, his face suddenly flushed. “What about Tim? He’s going to see the newspaper. Kids are going to tell him his dad’s in jail!”

  I wish there was something I could do to ease Drew’s mind about his son, but there’s not. “Tim’s going to have a bad time throughout this thing,” I say evenly. “You have to accept that. I’ll get you out as early as I can tomorrow, and you can talk to him yourself.”

  Drew shakes his head, his eyes flicking back and forth in helpless rage.

  “Something else you’d better get used to,” I add. “Steve Sayers and his buddies are a pretty typical example of how the people in this community are going to feel about you for a while.”

  Drew’s eyes fix upon me. “All I care about is Tim. You get me out so I can help him understand this. After that, I’ll find out who killed Kate.”

  There’s an undertone in Drew’s voice that sends a tingle along my forearms. It’s the emotionless timbre of the man who put down three muscle-bound jocks without breaking a sweat. He said, “After that, I’ll find out who killed Kate,” the same way he might say, “After dinner, I’ll take out the garbage.”

  I nod and stand in the little cubicle. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Drew leaves the visiting room without a word.

  By the time I pick up Annie from school, I’ve taken several cell calls, and my phone is still ringing. Most of the calls have been from school parents, pumping me for information about Drew and Kate. But a few were more serious, and more disturbing.

  One was from Holden Smith, the president of the St. Stephen’s school board. Holden had heard a distorted version of the afternoon’s fight from Steve Sayers’s father, and he was livid at Drew. About the only fact he had right was that Steve and Drew were being held in jail on felony assault charges. I did my best to explain that Drew wasn’t at fault, but Holden didn’t buy my argument.

  “That’s not even the point,” he said. “We’ve got a member of the school board brawling with three of our students! That’s simply unacceptable. Drew should know better than to let something like that happen.”

  “I told you he tried to stop it, Holden. The fight couldn’t have been avoided.”

  “Okay, okay, but look what the fight was about. Everybody in town knows Drew was having sex with Kate Townsend, and that he might even have killed her. Do you—”

  “Nobody knows that!” I snapped. “That’s pure speculation!”

  “So what! Do you realize what that kind of rumor will do to St. Stephen’s? To our public image? Do you know what kind of lawsuits we’re going to get over this?”

  “What are you telling me, Holden?”

  A brief silence. “We want Drew off the board.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Everybody!”

  “You want him to resign?”

  “If he doesn’t, we’ll vote him off tonight in a special session. We have no choice.”

  “That’s bullshit. The board could give Drew its qualified support, based on his years of dedication to the school. Did that thought enter anyone’s head?”

  “Don’t even pretend that’s an option,” Holden said in a dismissive voice. “You know how this town works. And that brings up another issue. What about you, Penn? Are you Drew’s lawyer now?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, if you are, you’re not going to be able to remain on the board, either.”

  Holden was right about that. As a board member, I’ll be named in any civil suit arising out of the present situation. I can’t remain on the board and also defend Drew in a civil or criminal proceeding. Of course, resigning would cut off my flow of inside information, but I wasn’t about to align myself with gutless Holden Smith.

  “Drew and I will both resign,” I said with disgust. “You’ll have our letters in the morning.”

  “We’d prefer to have Drew’s tonight.”

  I hung up on him.

  While I drove along in a funk, Caitlin called me from Boston. Apparently, a reporter for the Natchez Examiner had called her and delivered a summation of the rumors spreading across town. Caitlin was stunned that I was being mentioned as Drew Elliot’s lawyer. She knows Drew, but only superficially, and she has no special reason to believe he’s innocent of the crimes being attributed to him.

  “Exactly when were you going to tell me you were representing Drew?” she asked. “Or were you going to tell me at all?”

  “I’m not sure I’m going to represent him.”

  “I thought you didn’t practice anymore.”

  “Drew is a lifelong friend, and he needs help. Right now, I’m acting primarily as a friend.” This wasn’t strictly true, but I’ve been deceiving myself as well as Caitlin about that. “When I see how this develops, I’ll make a decision about the legal side of things.”

  “Penn, why didn’t you tell me about all this last night?”

  Caitlin sounded hurt, but she hasn’t been very communicative to me about her recent situation either. “I couldn’t get you on the phone last night. You were at your party.”

  “You could have called me this morning.”

  “Yes, but you already had reporters working the story. You may even end up working it yourself.”

  “We’ve been in that situation before, and we handled it fine.”

  “But not without tension.”

  A little laugh. “Tension’s okay. We can live with tension. It’s deception we can’t live with.”

  “I agree.”

  More silence. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I just agreed with you.”

  “You had a tone.”

  “No tone. Look, things are breaking fast on this. I’ll call you tonight and give you a better idea of where I stand, okay?”

  Her sigh told me she was far from happy with this arrangement. “Did Drew kill her, Penn? I’m asking as your lover, not a journalist.”

  “You know I can’t answer that. Even if I knew the answer.”

  “But he was involved with her?”

  “You won’t report my answer?”

  “No.”

  “Yes. He was in love with her. But I don’t think he killed her.”

  “Classic midlife crisis?”

  “I don’t think it’s that simple. Drew says he and Ellen have been living a charade for ten years. He was starved for affection, and he finally found exactly what he was missing. And now here
we are.”

  “What about the two semen samples—”

  “No more,” I cut in. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”

  “I love you,” Caitlin said after an awkward silence.

  “You too.”

  When Annie gets into the car, I set my phone on silent. I also keep quiet about the fact that I’ve spoken to Caitlin. Annie would want to call her back immediately, and I don’t want to deal with that right now. Annie says she needs to go to Walgreen’s for some school supplies, so we make a run to the drugstore, one of my few sources in town for iced green tea. By the time we get home, my phone shows eight missed calls. While I scroll through the list, an incoming call pops up. It’s from Sonny Cross, a sheriff’s deputy assigned to the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics. Sonny has two young boys at St. Stephen’s, and through me, he’s spoken to the board a few times about Marko Bakic, our Croatian exchange student. Sonny suspects that Marko has gotten involved in the local drug trade, but so far he’s been unable to prove it.

  “Sonny,” I say. “What’s up?”

  “I’m calling to give you a heads-up,” Cross says in his laid-back, urban-cowboy voice.

  “Marko Bakic again?”

  “Among other things. Last night there was a big party out at Lake St. John. A rave. There was a lot of X there, and a lot of St. Stephen’s kids, too.”

  Lake St. John is a horseshoe lake about thirty miles up the Mississippi River, on the Louisiana side. It’s thronged with Natchez natives in the summer, but this time of year, most of the lake houses are deserted.

  “Was it only St. Stephen’s kids?”

  “No, thank God. The Catholic school and the Baptist boys were well represented.”

  “Did you bust the party?”

  “No. We didn’t find out about it until it was over. Whoever organized it did just what they do in the cities. The kids get word over their cell phones to go to such and such a place. When they get there, they find a sheet of paper taped to a pole with a coded message, a rhyme only the kids will understand. After they get led around to four or five different spots, they know where the rave is, and they know whether they’re being followed or not.”