Page 28

There’s a rattling soft drink machine in the Manitou PD’s break room.

There’s a counter with a coffee maker and a few pastries on it.

The sign over the pastries says KICK A BUCK.

On one wall is a plaque reading WE SERVE AND PROTECT.

On another is a poster showing O.J.

Simpson and Johnnie Cochran.

The caption reads, IT DON’T MEAN SHIT IF THE GLOVE DOESN’T FIT.

In the middle of the room there’s a table with two chairs on either side and a microphone in the middle.

Between the drink machine and the pastry counter, a camera on a tripod blinks its red eye.

Jalbert spreads his hands at two of the chairs.

Danny and his new lawyer take them.

Ella Davis sits across from them and takes out a notebook.

Jalbert stands, for the time being at least.

He gives the date, the time, and the names of those present.

Then he gives Danny the Miranda warning again, asking if he understands his rights.

“I do,” Danny says.

“Spoiler alert, Inspectors, I’m mostly a real estate lawyer,” Ball says.

“I do land, I work with a number of local banks, I coordinate buyers and sellers, I write contracts, I write the occasional will.

I’m no Perry Mason or Saul Goodman.

Just here to make sure you are respectful and open-minded.”

“Who is Saul Goodman?” Jalbert asks.

He sounds suspicious.

Ball sighs.

“TV show.

Fictional character.

Forget it.

Ask your questions.”

Jalbert says, “Speaking of respect, I want to tell you who deserved some—Yvonne Wicker.

What she got instead was raped, stabbed repeatedly, and murdered.”

Ball frowns for the first time.

“You are not prosecuting this case, sir.

You are investigating it.

Save the speeches and ask your questions so we can get out of here.”

Jalbert shows his pegs again in what he may assume is a smile.

“Just so you understand, Mr.

Ball.

Understand and remember.

We’re talking about the cold-blooded murder of a defenseless young woman.”

“Understood.” Ball doesn’t look cowed—at least Danny doesn’t think so—but the pleasant smile is gone.

Jalbert nods to his partner.

Ella Davis says, “How are you this morning, Danny? Doing okay?”

Danny thinks, So it’s good cop and bad cop after all.

“Other than everyone in Oak Grove thinking I’m in police trouble, I’m doing all right. You?”

“I’m fine.”

“They’ll know what kind of trouble this is soon enough, won’t they?”

“Not from us,” she says.

“We don’t talk about our cases until they’re made.”

But Becky will, Danny thinks.

And once she tells Cynthia Babson, it’ll go viral.

“We’d like to have a peek at your phone,” Davis says.

“Just a matter of routine.

Would that be okay?” She’s giving him direct eye contact and a smile.

“Just a look at your locations could eliminate you from our enquiries.

Save time for us and trouble for you.”

“Bad idea,” Ball says to Danny.

“I think they need a special search warrant for your phone, or they would have taken it already.”

Ignoring him, still wearing her best trust me smile, Davis says, “And you’d have to unlock it for us, of course.

Apple is very touchy about the privacy issue.”

Jalbert has retreated to the pastry counter, content to let the good cop carry the ball, at least for now.

As he pours himself some coffee he says, “It would go a long way toward establishing trust, Danny.”

Danny almost says You trust me about as far as you could throw this table, but keeps it to himself.

He doesn’t need Ball—likeable, but clearly out of his depth—to tell him the less he says, the better.

Hostile comments won’t help, no matter how much he’d like to make them.

He can tell the truth; that won’t get him in trouble.

Trying to explain the truth might.

Danny takes his phone out of his pocket and looks at it.

10:23 already.

How the time flies when you’re having fun, he thinks, and puts it away again.

“I’m going to wait on that until we see how this goes.”

“We don’t actually need a warrant,” Jalbert says.

Now that he has his coffee, he’s retreated to the poster of O.J.

and his lawyer.

“Pretty sure that’s bogus,” Ball says, “but I could phone a colleague to make sure.

Want me to do that, Inspectors?”

“I’m sure Danny will make the right call,” Davis says.

The flint-eyed woman who came to Wilder High with Jalbert is gone.

This woman is younger and prettier, projecting an I’m-on-your-side vibe.

At least trying to, Danny thinks.

“There’s no event data recorder on your truck,” she says.

“Do you know what that is?”

Danny nods.

“Darn thing doesn’t even have a backup camera.

When you put it in reverse you actually have to turn around and look out the back window.”

She nods.

“So you’ll have to help us with your travels over the last few weeks, can you do that?”

“There’s not much.

I did go to see my brother in Boulder the weekend after school let out. I flew.”

“That would be the weekend of—?”

Jalbert is looking at his phone.

“June 3rd and 4th?”

“That sounds right.

He works at the Table Mesa King Soopers.” He feels like saying more, he’s very proud of Stevie, but he leaves it at that.

Earnest, wide-eyed, still smiling, Ella Davis says, “Let’s try to be exact, Danny.

This is important.”

Don’t you think I know that?he wants to say.

You’re playing with my life here.

“I went on Friday afternoon.

Flew United.

Came back on Sunday, my flight to Great Bend left late and I didn’t get home until after midnight.

So actually it was Monday morning by the time I was back in my own bed.”

“Thank you, we’ll check on that.

Other trips?”

Danny thinks it over.

“Drove up to Wichita to see my ex on a Sunday.

That was before the dream.”

Jalbert snorts.

Ball, looking at his own phone, says, “Could it have been the 11th of June?”

Danny thinks.

“Must have been.

Otherwise, I’ve just been here.

Back and forth to school, trips to the store, picked up DJ at school a couple of times—”

“DJ?” Davis asks.

“Darla Jean.

She’s my friend Becky’s daughter.

Good kid.” And he can’t resist adding: “Thanks to you guys, I don’t think I’ll be seeing much of her for awhile.”

Davis ignores this.

“Just to be clear, you went to Wichita to visit your ex-wife, Marjorie Coughlin, on the 11th of June?”

“Eleven,” Jalbert says, then says it again, as if to be sure of it.

“Margie, yeah.

But she’s gone back to her birth name.

Gervais.” Said she got tired of cough-cough-Coughlin, he doesn’t add.

Once you tell yourself not to spill your guts, it gets easier.

“Hey, you were arrested for stalking her, weren’t you?” Davis says, as if just passing the time.

Ball stirs, but Danny puts a hand on his arm before he can say anything.

“No.

I was arrested for violating the restraining order she took out.

And disturbing the peace.

The charges were dropped. By her.”

“Okay, good, and now you get along!” Davis says this warmly, as if it’s an accomplishment on the level of peace between Russia and Ukraine.

Danny shrugs.

“Better than the last year we were married.

We had lunch that day and I fixed her turn signals.

Fuse blew.

So yes, we get along.”

“Okay, this is good, this is good,” Davis says, still warm and wide-eyed.

“Now can you explain how Yvonne Wicker’s fingerprints happened to be on the dashboard of your truck?”

Danny ponders the question and considers the fact that he’s in an interrogation room instead of a jail cell.

He gives Davis a smile and says, “Your nose is growing.”

“You think you’re very smart, don’t you?” Jalbert says from in front of the poster.

Davis gives him a look.

Jalbert shrugs and flicks his two fingers at her, meaning she should carry on.

He says, apropos of nothing (at least that Danny can figure out), “One, three, six.”

“What?”

“Nothing.

Go on and tell your tale.” Slight emphasis on tale.

Davis says, “You have a little bit of a temper problem, don’t you, Danny?”

“I used to drink.

I stopped.”

“That isn’t a very responsive answer.” She says it reproachfully.

“If we ask your ex—and we will—what will she say about your temper?”

“She’ll say I had what you just called it, a temper problem.

Past tense.”

“Oh, all gone? Is that right?”

She waits.

Danny says nothing.

“Did you ever knock her around?”

“No.” Then forces himself to add, because it’s the truth: “I grabbed her by the arm once.

Left a bruise.

That was just before she kicked me out.”

“Never by the neck?” She smiles and leans forward, inviting confidence.

“Tell the truth and shame the devil.”

“No.”

“And you never raped her?”

“Hey, come on,” Ball says.

“Respect, remember?”

“I have to ask,” Davis says.

“The Wicker girl was raped.”

“I never raped my wife,” Danny says.

Not for the first time he’s struck by a feeling of unreality and thinks, I helped you guys.

If not for me, that girl would still be a stray dog’s snack bar.

“When’s the last time you went to Arkansas City?”

The change of direction feels like whiplash.

“What? I’ve never been to Arkansas in my life.”

“Arkansas City, Kansas.

Near the Oklahoma border.”

“Never been there.”

“No? Well, we can’t check the EDR in your truck, can we? Because they weren’t installed in Toyota Tundras for another year.

But we could check on your phone, isn’t that right?”

Danny repeats, “Let’s see how this goes.”

“How about Hunnewell? That’s also in Kan—”

Danny shakes his head.

“I’ve heard of it but never been there.”

“What about the Gas-n-Go where I-35 and SR 166 intersect? Ever been there?”

“I guess not to that particular one, but they’re all pretty much the same, aren’t they?”

“You guess? Come on, Danny.

This is serious.”

“If that Gas-n-Go is in Hunnewell, I’ve never been there.”

She makes a note, then gives him a reproachful look.

“If we could just check your phone—”

Danny’s had enough of this.

He takes it out of his pocket and slides it across the table.

Jalbert steps forward and pounces on it, as if afraid Danny will change his mind.

“The passcode is 7813.

And I’ll have my IT guy check it when I get it back, just to make sure you haven’t added anything.” This is pure bluff.

Danny doesn’t have an IT guy.

“We don’t roll that way,” Davis says.

“Uh-huh, and you don’t lie about fingerprints, either.” He pauses.

“Or DNA from semen.”

For a moment Davis looks off her game.

Then she leans forward again and gives him her you can tell me anything smile.

“Let’s talk about your dream, okay?”

Danny says nothing.

“Do you have these fantasies often?”

Ball says, “Come on, now.

It wasn’t a fantasy if the woman’s body actually turned out to be there.”

Another snort from Jalbert.

“Well, you have to admit it’s awfully convenient,” Davis says.

“Not for me,” Danny says.

“Look where I am, woman.”

“Do you mind telling us about this… dream again, Danny?”

He tells them the dream.

It’s easy because it hasn’t faded a bit, and although his trip out there was similar, there’s no cross-contamination between the dream and the reality.

The dream is its own thing, as real as the KICK A BUCK sign above the pastries.

As real as Jalbert’s peculiar wooly widow’s peak and avid yet lusterless eyes.

When he’s finished, Davis asks—for the official record, Danny assumes, since it’s been asked before—if he’s had previous psychic flashes.

Danny says he has not.

Jalbert sits down next to his partner.

He drops Danny’s phone in the pocket of his black coat.

“Would you be willing to take a polygraph?”

“I guess so.

I’d have to go to Great Bend for that, wouldn’t I? So it would have to be after I finish work.

And I’d have to get my truck back, of course.”

“Right now cleaning windows and sweeping floors is the least of your worries,” Jalbert says.

“Are we done here?” Ball says.

“I believe Mr.

Coughlin has answered all your questions, and more politely than I would have done in his position.

And he’ll need his phone back ASAP.”

“Just a few more,” Davis says.

“We can check on your trip to Colorado and your trip to Wichita, Danny, but that leaves a lot of time between the first and the twenty-third.

Doesn’t it?”

Danny says, “Look at the locations on my phone.

When I’m not home, it’s usually in the glove compartment of my truck.

The two boys I work with at the high school can tell you I was there every day from seven-thirty to four.

That’s a good amount of the time you want to know about.”

Edgar Ball isn’t a criminal lawyer, but he’s not stupid.

To Jalbert he says, “Oh my.

You don’t know when she was killed, do you? Or even when she was grabbed.”

Jalbert gives him a stony look.

Color creeps into Ella’s cheeks.

She says, “That’s not relevant to what we’re discussing.

We are trying to eliminate Danny as a suspect.”

“No, you’re not,” Ball says.

“You’re trying to nail him, but you don’t have a whole lot, do you? Not without a time of death.”

Jalbert wanders back to the poster of O.J.

and Johnnie Cochran.

Davis asks for the names of the boys Danny works with.

“Pat Grady and Jesse Jackson.

Like the political guy from the seventies.”

Davis scribbles in her notebook.

“Maybe your girlfriend can help us to nail down some of the times when—”

“She’s my friend, not my girlfriend.” At least she was.

“And stay away from DJ.

She’s just a kid.”

Jalbert chuckles.

“You’re in no position to give us orders.”

“Danny, listen to me,” Davis says.

He points at her.

“You know what, I’m starting to hate the sound of my first name coming out of your mouth.

We’re not friends, Ella.”

This time it’s Ball putting his hand on Danny’s arm.

Davis carries on as if Danny has said nothing.

She’s looking at him earnestly, the smile gone.

“You’re carrying a weight.

I can almost see it.

That’s why you’re telling this story about a dream.”

He says nothing.

“It’s awfully far-out, you have to admit that.

I mean, look at it from our point of view.

I don’t even think your lawyer believes it, not for a minute.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Ball says.

“More things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of in your philosophy.

Shakespeare.”

“Bullcrap,” Jalbert says from the poster. “Me.”

Danny just holds the woman’s gaze.

Jalbert is a lost cause.

Davis might not be, in spite of her hard shell.

“You feel remorse, I know you do.

Putting that barrel over Yvonne’s hand and arm so the dog couldn’t get at her anymore, that was remorse.”

He says nothing, but if she really believes that, she might be a lost cause, too.

It was compassion, not remorse.

Compassion for a dead woman with a charm bracelet on her mutilated wrist.

But Davis is on a roll, so let her roll.

“We can help you take that weight off.

It will be easy once you start.

And there’s a bonus.

If you make a clean breast of it, we may be able to help you.

Kansas has the death penalty, and—”

“Hasn’t been used in over forty years,” Ball says.

“Hickock and Smith, the ones Truman Capote wrote the book about, they were the last.”

“They might use it for the Wicker girl,” Davis persists.

Danny thinks it’s interesting that young woman has become girl.

But of course that’s what the prosecutor would call her: the girl.

The defenseless girl.

“But if you own up to what you did, the death penalty would almost certainly be off the table.

Make it easier for us and for yourself.

Tell us what really happened.”

“I did,” Danny says.

“I had a dream.

I went out to prove to myself a dream was all it was, but the girl was there.

I called it in.

You don’t believe me.

I understand that, but I’m telling the truth.

Now let’s cut the crap.

Are you going to arrest me?”

Silence.

Davis continues looking at him for a moment with that same warm earnestness.

Then her face changes, becomes not cold but blank.

Professional.

She sits back and looks at Jalbert.

“Not at this time,” Jalbert says.

His dusty eyes say But soon, Danny. Soon.

Danny stands up.

His legs are like the legs in his dream—as if he doesn’t own them and they might carry him anywhere.

Ball stands up with him.

They go to the door together.

Danny thinks he must be a little unsteady on his feet, or too pale, because Ball still has his hand on his arm.

All Danny wants is to get out of this room, but he turns back and looks at Davis.

“The man who killed that woman is still out there,” he says.

“I’m talking to you, Inspector Davis, because it’s no good talking to him.

He’s made his mind up.

You talk a good game, but I’m not sure you’ve made up yours.

Catch him, all right? Stop looking at me and look for the man who killed her.

Before he does it again.”

He might see something on her face.

He might not.

Ball tugs his arm.

“Come on, Danny.

Let’s go.”