Charlie sat on the floor of the interview room with her back wedged into the corner. She had no idea how much time had passed since she’d been hauled off to the police station. An hour at least. Her wrists were still handcuffed. Toilet paper was still shoved up her broken nose. Stitches prickled the back of her scalp. Her head was pounding. Her vision was blurry. Her stomach was churning. She had been photographed. She had been fingerprinted. She was still wearing the same clothes. Her jeans were dotted with dark red splotches. The same pattern riddled her Duke Blue Devils T-shirt. Her hands were still caked with dried blood, because the cell where they had let her use the toilet only had a trickle of cold, brown water coming out of the filthy sink faucet.
Twenty-eight years ago, she had begged the nurses at the hospital to let her take a bath. Gamma’s blood was seared to her skin. Everything was sticky. Charlie had not completely submerged herself in water since the red-brick house had burned down. She’d wanted to feel the warmth envelop her, to watch the blood and bone float away like a bad dream fading from her memory.
Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.
Charlie let out a slow breath. She rested the side of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes. She saw the dead little girl in the school hallway, the way her color had drained like winter, the way her hand had fallen from Charlie’s hand the same way that Gamma’s hand had fallen away.
The little girl would still be in the cold hallway at school—her body, at least, along with Mr. Pinkman’s. Both still dead. Both still exposed to one more final injustice. They would be left out in the open, uncovered, unprotected, while people traipsed back and forth around them. That was how homicides worked. No one moved anything, not even a child, not even a beloved coach, until every inch of the crime scene was photographed, cataloged, measured, diagrammed, investigated.
Charlie opened her eyes.
This was all such sad, familiar territory: the images she couldn’t get out of her head, the dark places that her brain kept going to over and over again like car wheels wearing down a gravel road.
She breathed through her mouth. Her nose had a painful pulse. The paramedic had said it wasn’t broken, but Charlie didn’t trust any of them. Even while her head was being sutured, the cops were scrambling to cover for each other, articulating their reports, all of them agreeing that Charlie had been hostile, that she had knocked herself against Greg’s elbow, that the phone had been broken when she accidentally stepped on it.
Huck’s phone.
Mr. Huckleberry had repeatedly made that point that the phone and its contents belonged to him. He’d even shown them the screen so that they could watch the video being deleted.
While it was happening, it had hurt too much to shake her head, but Charlie did so now. They had shot Huck, unprovoked, and he was taking up for them. She had seen this kind of behavior in almost every police force she had ever dealt with.
No matter what, these guys always, always covered for each other.
The door opened. Jonah came in. He carried two folding chairs, one in each hand. He winked at Charlie, because he liked her better now that she was in his custody. He’d been the same kind of sadist in high school. The uniform had only codified it.
“I want my father,” she said, the same thing she said every time someone entered the room.
Jonah winked again as he unfolded the chairs on either side of the table.
“I have a legal right to counsel.”
“I just talked to him on the phone.” This came not from Jonah, but from Ben Bernard, an assistant district attorney for the county. He barely glanced at Charlie as he tossed a folder onto the table and sat down. “Take the cuffs off her.”
Jonah asked, “You want me to hook her leash to the table?”
Ben smoothed down his tie. He looked up at the man. “I said to take those fucking handcuffs off my wife right now.”
Ben had raised his voice to say this, but he hadn’t yelled. He never yelled, at least not in the eighteen years that Charlie had known him.
Jonah swung his keys around his fingers, making it clear that he was going to do this in his own time, of his own volition. He roughly unlocked the cuffs and stripped them from Charlie’s wrists, but the joke was on him because she was so numb that she didn’t feel any of it.
Jonah slammed the door when he left the room.
Charlie listened to the slam echo off the concrete walls. She stayed seated on the floor. She waited for Ben to say something jokey, like nobody puts baby in a corner, but Ben had two homicide victims at the middle school, a suicidal teenage murderer in custody and his wife was sitting in a corner covered in blood, so instead she took consolation in the way he lifted his chin to indicate that she should sit in the chair across from him.
She asked, “Is Kelly all right?”
“She’s on suicide watch. Two female officers, around the clock.”
“She’s sixteen,” Charlie said, though they both knew that Kelly Wilson would be direct filed as an adult. The teenager’s only saving grace—literally—was that minors were no longer eligible for the death penalty. “If she asked for a parent, that can be construed as the equivalent of asking for a lawyer.”
“Depends on the judge.”
“You know Dad will get a change of venue.” Charlie knew her father was the only lawyer in town who would take the case.
The overhead light flashed off Ben’s glasses as he nodded toward the chair again.
Charlie pushed herself up against the wall. A wave of dizziness made her close her eyes.
Ben asked, “Do you need medical treatment?”
“Somebody already asked me that.” Charlie didn’t want to go to a hospital. She probably had a concussion. But she could still walk as long as she kept some part of her body in contact with something solid. “I’m fine.”
He said nothing, but the silent, “of course you’re fine, you’re always fine,” reverberated around the room.
“See?” She touched the wall with the tips of her fingers, an acrobat on a wire.
Ben didn’t look up. He adjusted his glasses. He opened the file folder in front of him. There was a single form inside. Charlie’s eyes wouldn’t focus to read the words, even when he began writing in his big, blocky letters.
She asked, “With what offense have I been charged?”
“Obstruction of justice.”
“That’s a handy catch-all.”
He kept writing. He kept not looking at her.
She asked, “You already saw what they did to me, didn’t you?”
The only sound Ben made was his pen scratching across the paper.
“That’s why you won’t look at me now, because you already looked at me through that.” She nodded toward the two-way mirror. “Who else is there? Coin?” District Attorney Ken Coin was Ben’s boss, an insufferable dickslap of a man who saw everything in black and white and, more recently, brown, because of the housing boom that had brought an influx of Mexican immigrants up from Atlanta.
Charlie watched the reflection of her raised hand in the mirror, her middle finger extending in a salute to DA Coin.
Ben said, “I’ve taken nine witness statements that said you were inconsolable at the scene, and in the course of being comforted by Officer Brenner, your nose met with his elbow.”
If he was going to talk to her like a lawyer, then she was going to be a lawyer. “Is that what the video on the phone showed, or do I need to get a subpoena for a forensic examination of any deleted files?”
Ben’s shoulder went up in a shrug. “Do what you have to do.”
“All right.” Charlie braced her palms on the table so that she could sit. “Is this the part where you offer to drop the bogus obstruction charge if I don’t file an excessive force complaint?”
“I already dropped the bogus obstruction charge.” His pen moved down to the next line. “You can file as many complaints as you want.”
“All I want is an apology.”
She heard a sound behind the mirror, something close to a gasp. In the past twelve years, Charlie had filed two very successful lawsuits against the Pikeville Police force on behalf of her clients. Ken Coin had probably assumed she was sitting in here counting all of the money she was going to make off the city instead of grieving for the child who had died in her arms, or mourning the loss of the principal who had given her detention instead of kicking her out of school when they both knew that Charlie deserved it.
Ben kept his head bent down. He tapped his pen against the table. She tried not to think about Huck doing the same thing at his school desk.
He asked, “Are you sure?”
Charlie waved toward the mirror, hoping Coin was there. “If you guys could just admit when you did something wrong, then when you said that you did something right, people would believe you.”
Ben finally looked at her. His eyes tracked across her face, taking in the damage. She saw the fine lines around his mouth when he frowned, the deep furrow in his brow, and wondered if he had ever noticed the same signs of age in her face.
They had met in law school. He had moved to Pikeville in order to be with her. They had planned on spending the rest of their lives together.
She said, “Kelly Wilson has a right to—”
Ben held up his hand to stop her. “You know that I agree with everything you’re going to say.”
Charlie sat back in the chair. She had to remind herself that neither she nor Ben had ever bought into Rusty and Ken Coin’s “us against them” mentality.
She said, “I want a written apology from Greg Brenner. A real apology, not some bullshit, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ excuse like I’m a hysterical woman and he wasn’t acting like a God damn Brownshirt.”
Ben nodded. “Done.”
Charlie reached for the form. She grabbed the pen. The words were a blur, but she had read enough witness statements to know where you were supposed to sign your name. She scrawled her signature near the bottom, then slid the form back toward Ben. “I’ll trust you to keep your side of the bargain. Fill in the statement however you want.”
Ben stared down at the form. His fingers hovered at the edge. He wasn’t looking at her signature, but at the bloody brown fingerprints she’d left on the white paper.
Charlie blinked to clear her eyes. This was the closest they had come to touching each other in nine months.
“Okay.” He closed the folder. He made to stand.
“It was just the two of them?” Charlie asked. “Mr. Pink and the little—”
“Yes.” He hesitated before sitting back down in the chair. “One of the janitors locked down the cafeteria. The assistant principal stopped the buses at the street.”
Charlie did not want to think about the damage that Kelly Wilson could have done if she had started firing the gun a few seconds after the bell instead of before.
Ben said, “They all have to be interviewed. The kids. Teachers. Staff.”
Charlie knew the city wasn’t capable of coordinating so many interviews, let alone putting together such a large case on its own. The Pikeville Police Department had seventeen full-time officers. Ben was one of six lawyers in the district attorney’s office.
She asked, “Is Ken going to ask for help?”
“They’re already here,” Ben said. “Everybody just showed up. Troopers. State police. Sheriff’s office. We didn’t even have to call them.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.” He picked at the corner of the folder with his fingers. His lips twitched the way they always did when he chewed at the tip of his tongue. It was an old habit that wouldn’t die. Charlie had once seen his mother reach across the dinner table and slap his hand to make him stop.
She asked, “You saw the bodies?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Charlie knew that Ben had seen the crime scene. She could tell by the somber tone in his voice, the slump in his shoulders. Pikeville had grown over the last two decades, but it was still a small town, the kind of place where heroin was a much larger concern than homicide.
Ben said, “You know it takes time, but I told them to move the bodies as soon as possible.”
Charlie looked up at the ceiling to keep the tears in her eyes. He had awakened her dozens of times from her worst nightmare: a day in the life, Charlie and Rusty going about their mundane chores inside the old farmhouse, cooking meals and doing laundry and washing dishes while Gamma’s body rotted against the cabinets because the police had forgotten to take her away.
It was probably the piece of tooth Charlie had found in the back of the cabinet, because what else had they missed?
Ben said, “Your car is parked behind your office. They locked down the school. It’ll probably be closed for the rest of the week. There’s already a news van up from Atlanta.”
“Is that where Dad is, combing his hair?”
They both smiled a little, because they both knew that her father loved nothing more than to see himself on television.
Ben said, “He told you to hang tight. When I called him. That’s what Rusty said—‘Tell that girl to hang tight.’”
Which meant that Rusty wasn’t going to ride to her rescue. That he assumed his tough daughter could handle herself in a room full of Keystone Kops while he rushed to Kelly Wilson’s house and got her parents to sign his fee agreement.
When people talked about how much they hated lawyers, it was Rusty who came to mind.
Ben said, “I can have one of the squad cars take you to your office.”
“I’m not getting in a car with any of those assholes.”
Ben ran his fingers through his hair. He needed a trim. His shirt was wrinkled. His suit was missing a button. She wanted to think he was falling apart without her, but the truth was that he was always disheveled and Charlie was more likely to tease him about looking like a hipster hobo than to take out a needle and thread.
She said, “Kelly Wilson was in their custody. She wasn’t resisting. The moment they cuffed her, they were responsible for her safety.”
“Greg’s daughter goes to that school.”
“So does Kelly.” Charlie leaned closer. “We’re not living in Abu Ghraib, okay? Kelly Wilson has a constitutional right to due process under the law. It’s up to a judge and jury to decide, not a bunch of vigilante cops with hard-ons to beat down a teenage girl.”
“I get it. We all get it.” Ben thought she was grandstanding for the great Oz behind the mirror. “‘A just society is a lawful society. You can’t be a good guy if you act like a bad guy.’”
He was quoting Rusty.
She said, “They were going to beat the shit out of her. Or worse.”
“So you volunteered yourself instead?”
Charlie felt a burning sensation in her hands. Without thinking, she was scratching at the dried blood, rolling it into tiny balls. Her fingernails were ten black crescents.
She looked up at her husband. “You said you took nine witness statements?”
Ben gave a single, reluctant nod. He knew why she was asking the question.
Eight cops. Mrs. Pinkman wasn’t there when Charlie’s nose was broken, which meant that the ninth statement had come from Huck, which meant that Ben had already talked to him.
She asked, “Do you know?” That was the only thing that mattered between them right now, whether or not Ben knew why she had been at the school this morning. Because if Ben knew, then everyone else knew, which meant that Charlie had yet again found another uniquely cruel way to humiliate her husband.
“Ben?” she asked.
He ran his fingers through his hair. He smoothed down his tie. He had so many tells that they could never play cards together, not even Go Fish.
“Babe, I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
There was a quick knock before the door opened. Charlie held out hope that it was her father, but an older black woman wearing a navy pantsuit and white blouse walked into the room. Her short black hair was tuffeted with white. She had a large, banged-up-looking purse on her arm that was almost as big as the one that Charlie carried to work. A laminated ID hung on a lanyard around her neck, but Charlie couldn’t read it.
The woman said, “I’m special agent in charge Delia Wofford with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. You’re Charlotte Quinn?” She reached out to shake Charlie’s hand, but changed her mind when she saw the dried blood. “Have you been photographed?”
Charlie nodded.
“For godsakes.” She opened her purse and pulled out a packet of Wet Wipes. “Use as many as you need. I can get more.”
Jonah was back with another chair. Delia pointed to the head of the table, indicating that’s where she wanted to sit. She asked Jonah, “Are you the jerk who wouldn’t let this woman clean herself up?”
Jonah didn’t know what to do with the question. He had probably never had to answer to any woman besides his mother, and that had been a long time ago.
“Close the door behind you.” Delia waved Jonah off as she sat down. “Ms. Quinn, we’ll get through this as quickly as possible. Do you mind if I record this?”
Charlie shook her head. “Knock yourself out.”
She tapped some buttons on her phone to activate the recorder, then unpacked her bag, tossing notepads and books and papers onto the table.
The concussion made it impossible for Charlie to read anything in front of her, so she opened up the pack of Wet Wipes and got to work. She scrubbed between her fingers first, dislodging specks of black that floated like ashes from a roaring fire. The blood had seared itself into the pores. Her hands looked like an old woman’s. She was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She wanted to go home. She wanted a hot bath. She wanted to think about what had happened today, to examine all the pieces, then gather them up, put them in a box and place it high on a shelf so that she never had to deal with it again.
“Ms. Quinn?” Delia Wofford was offering her a bottle of water.
Charlie almost snatched it out of the woman’s hand. She hadn’t realized she was thirsty until that moment. Half of the water was gone before the logical part of her brain reminded her that it wasn’t a good idea to drink so quickly on a sour stomach.
“Sorry.” Charlie put her hand to her mouth to cover the noxious belch.
The agent had obviously endured worse. “Ready?”
“You’re recording this?”
“Yes.”
Charlie peeled another wipe out of the packet. “First, I want some information about Kelly Wilson.”
Delia Wofford had enough years under her belt to not look as annoyed as she must have felt. “She’s been examined by a doctor. She’s under constant surveillance.”
That’s not what Charlie had meant, and the agent knew it. “There are nine factors you have to consider before ascertaining whether or not a juvenile’s statement is—”
“Ms. Quinn,” Delia interrupted. “Let’s stop worrying about Kelly Wilson and start worrying about you. I’m sure you don’t want to spend a second longer here than you absolutely have to.”
Charlie would’ve rolled her eyes if not for the fear of making herself dizzy. “She’s sixteen. She’s not old enough to—”
“Eighteen.”
Charlie stopped cleaning her hands. She stared at Ben, not Delia Wofford, because they had both agreed very early on in their marriage that a lie by omission was still a lie.
Ben stared back. His expression told her nothing.
Delia said, “According to her birth certificate, Kelly Wilson turned eighteen two days ago.”
“You’ve—” Charlie had to look away from Ben because their broken marriage took a back seat to a death warrant. “You’ve seen her birth certificate?”
Delia shuffled through a stack of folders until she found what she was looking for. She put a sheet of paper in front of Charlie. All Charlie could make out was a round, official-looking seal.
Delia said, “The school records back it up, but we were faxed this official copy from the Georgia Department of Health an hour ago.” Her finger pointed to what must have been Kelly’s birth date. “She turned eighteen at six twenty-three on Saturday morning, but you know the law gives her until midnight before she’s officially an adult.”
Charlie felt sick. Two days. Forty-eight hours meant the difference between life with a possibility of parole and death by lethal injection.
“She was held back a grade. That’s probably where the confusion lies.”
“What was she doing at the middle school?”
“There are still a great many unanswered questions.” Delia dug around in her purse and found a pen. “Now, Ms. Quinn, for the record, are you willing to give a statement? It’s your right to refuse. You know that.”
Charlie could barely follow the agent’s words. She placed her palm flat against her stomach, forcing it to calm. Even if by some miracle Kelly Wilson managed to avoid the death penalty, Georgia’s Seven Deadly Sins law would make sure she never got out of prison.
Would that be so wrong?
There was no ambiguity here. Kelly had literally been caught holding the murder weapon in her hands.
Charlie looked at her own hands, still bloody from the little girl who had died in her arms. Died because Kelly Wilson had shot her. Murdered her. Just like she had murdered Mr. Pinkman.
“Ms. Quinn?” Delia glanced at her watch, but Charlie knew the woman was exactly where she needed to be.
Charlie also knew how the legal system worked. No one would tell the story of what happened this morning without an eye toward nailing Kelly Wilson to a cross. Not the eight cops who were there. Not Huck Huckabee. Maybe not even Mrs. Pinkman, whose husband had been murdered not ten yards from her classroom door.
Charlie said, “I agree to give a statement.”
Delia had a legal pad in front of her. She twisted open her pen. “Ms. Quinn, first I want to tell you how sorry I am that you’ve been pulled into this. I’m aware of your family history. I’m sure it was difficult witnessing …”
Charlie rolled her hand, indicating she should move on.
“All right,” Delia said. “This next bit I have to say. I want you to know that the door behind me is unlocked. You’re not under arrest. You are not being detained. As I told you before, you’re free to leave at any time, though as one of the few witnesses to today’s tragedy, your voluntary statement could be instrumental in helping us put together what happened.”
Charlie noted that the woman had not warned her that lying to a GBI agent could land her in prison. “You want me to help you build your case against Kelly Wilson.”
“I just want you to tell me the truth.”
“And I can only do that to the best of my knowledge.” Charlie didn’t realize that she was feeling hostile until she looked down and saw that her arms were crossed.
Delia rested her pen on the table, but the recorder was still going. “Ms. Quinn, let’s put this out there that this is a very awkward situation for all of us.”
Charlie waited.
Delia asked, “Would it help you speak more freely if your husband left the room?”
Charlie smoothed her lips together. “Ben knows why I was at the school this morning.”
If Delia was disappointed that her ace had been played, she didn’t let on. She picked up the pen. “Let’s start from that point, then. I know your car was parked in the faculty lot to the east of the main entrance. How did you enter the building?”
“The side door. It was propped open.”
“Did you notice the door was open when you parked your car?”
“It’s always open.” Charlie shook her head. “I mean, it was when I was a student there. It’s quicker from the parking lot to the cafeteria. I used to go to the …” Her voice trailed off, because it didn’t matter. “I parked in the side lot and went through the side door, which I assumed from my previous time as a student would be open.”
Delia’s pen moved across the pad. She didn’t look up when she asked, “You went directly to Mr. Huckabee’s classroom?”
“I got turned around. I walked by the front office. It was dark inside, except Mr. Pinkman’s light was on in the back.”
“Did you see anyone?”
“I didn’t see Mr. Pinkman, just that his light was on.”
“What about anybody else?”
“Mrs. Jenkins, the school secretary. I think I saw her go into the office, but I was way down the hall by then. The lights came on. I turned around. I was about thirty yards away.” Standing where Kelly Wilson had stood when she murdered Mr. Pinkman and the little girl. “I’m not sure it was Mrs. Jenkins who entered the office, but it was an older woman who looked like her.”
“And that’s the only person you saw, an older woman entering the office?”
“Yes. The doors were closed to the classrooms. Some teachers were inside, so I guess I saw them, too.” Charlie chewed her lip, trying to get her thoughts together. No wonder her clients talked themselves into trouble. Charlie was a witness, not even a suspect, and she was already leaving out details. “I didn’t recognize any of the teachers behind the doors. I don’t know if they saw me, but it’s possible they did.”
“Okay, so you went to Mr. Huckabee’s classroom next?”
“Yes. I was in his room when I heard the gunshot.”
“A gunshot?”
Charlie wadded the Wet Wipes into a ball on the table. “Four gunshots.”
“Rapid?”
“Yes. No.” She closed her eyes. She tried to remember. Only a handful of hours had passed. Why did everything feel like it had happened an eternity ago? “I heard two shots, then two more? Or three and then one?”
Delia held her pen aloft, waiting.
“I don’t remember the sequence,” Charlie admitted, and she again reminded herself that this was a sworn statement. “To the best of my recollection, there were four shots, total. I remember counting them. And then Huck pulled me down.” Charlie cleared her throat. She resisted the need to look at Ben, to gauge how he was taking this. “Mr. Huckabee pulled me down behind the filing cabinet, I assume for cover.”
“Any more gunshots?”
“I—” She shook her head because again she was unsure. “I don’t know.”
Delia said, “Let’s back up a little. It was only you and Mr. Huckabee in the room?”
“Yes. I didn’t see anyone else in the hall.”
“How long were you in Mr. Huckabee’s room before you heard the shots?”
Again, Charlie shook her head. “Maybe two to three minutes?”
“So, you go into his classroom, two to three minutes pass, you hear these four gunshots, Mr. Huckabee pulls you down behind the filing cabinet, and then?”
Charlie shrugged. “I ran.”
“Toward the exit?”
Charlie’s eyes flicked toward Ben. “Toward the gunshots.”
Ben silently scratched his jaw. This was one of their things, the way Charlie always ran toward danger when everyone else was running away.
“All right.” Delia spoke as she wrote. “Was Mr. Huckabee with you when you ran toward the gunshots?”
“He was behind me.” Charlie remembered sprinting past Kelly, leaping over her extended legs. This time, her memory showed Huck kneeling beside the girl. That made sense. He would’ve seen the gun in Kelly’s hand. He would’ve been trying to talk the teenager into giving him the revolver the entire time that Charlie was watching the little girl die.
She asked Delia, “Can you tell me her name? The little girl?”
“Lucy Alexander. Her mother teaches at the school.”
Charlie saw the girl’s features come into focus. Her pink coat. Her matching backpack. Was her name monogrammed on the inside of her jacket or was that a detail that Charlie was making up?
Delia said, “We haven’t released her name to the press, but her parents have been notified.”
“She didn’t suffer. At least, I don’t think so. She didn’t know she was …” Once again, Charlie shook her head, aware that she was filling in blanks with things that she wanted to be true.
Delia said, “So, you ran toward the gunshots, in the direction of the front office.” She turned to a fresh page in her pad. “Mr. Huckabee was behind you. Who else did you see?”
“I don’t remember seeing Kelly Wilson. I mean, I did remember later that I saw her, when I heard the cops shouting, but when I was running, well, before that, Huck caught up with me, he passed me at the corner, and then I passed him …” Charlie chewed her lip again. This meandering narrative was the kind of thing that drove her crazy when she talked to her clients. “I ran past Kelly. I thought she was a kid. A student.” Kelly Wilson had been both of those things. Even at eighteen, she was tiny, the kind of girl who would always look like a kid, even when she was a grown woman with children of her own.
“I’m getting fuzzy on the timeline,” Delia admitted.
“I’m sorry.” Charlie tried to explain, “It screws with your head when you’re in the middle of this kind of thing. Time turns from a straight line into a sphere, and it’s not until later that you can hold it in your hand and look at all the different sides, and you think, Oh, now I remember—this happened, then this happened, then … It’s only after the fact that you can pull it back into a straight line that makes sense.”
Ben was studying her. She knew what he was thinking because she knew the inside of his head better than she did her own. With those few sentences, Charlie had revealed more about her feelings when Gamma and Sam had been shot than she had alluded to in sixteen years of marriage.
Charlie kept her focus on Delia Wofford. “What I’m saying is that I didn’t remember seeing Kelly the first time until I saw her the second time. Like déjà vu, but real.”
“I get it.” Delia nodded as she resumed writing. “Go on.”
Charlie had to think to find her place. “Kelly hadn’t moved between the two times I saw her. Her back was to the wall. Her legs were straight out in front of her. The first time, when I was running up the hall, I remember glancing at her to make sure she was okay. To make sure she wasn’t a victim. I didn’t see the gun that time. She was dressed in black, like a Goth girl, but I didn’t look at her hands.” Charlie stopped to take a deep breath. “The violence seemed to be confined to the end of the hall, outside the front office. Mr. Pinkman was on the floor. He looked dead. I should’ve checked his pulse, but I went to the little girl, to Lucy. Miss Heller was there.”
Delia’s pen stopped. “Heller?”
“What?”
They stared at each other, both clearly confused.
Ben broke the silence. “Heller is Judith Pinkman’s maiden name.”
Charlie shook her aching head. Maybe she should’ve gone to the hospital after all.
“All right.” Delia turned to another fresh page. “What was Mrs. Pinkman doing when you saw her at the end of the hallway?”
Again, Charlie had to think back to find her place. “She screamed,” Charlie remembered. “Not then, but before. I’m sorry. I left that out. Before, when I was in Huck’s room, after he pulled me behind the filing cabinet, we heard a woman screaming. I don’t know if it was before or after the bell rang, but she screamed, ‘Help us.’”
“Help us,” Delia confirmed.
“Yes,” Charlie said. That was why she had started running, because she knew the excruciating desperation of waiting for someone, anyone, who could help make the world right again.
“And so?” Delia said. “Mrs. Pinkman was where in the hallway?”
“She was kneeling beside Lucy, holding her hand. She was praying. I held Lucy’s other hand. I looked into her eyes. She was still alive then. Her eyes were moving, her mouth opened.” Charlie tried to swallow down the grief. She had spent the last few hours reliving the girl’s death, but saying it out loud was too much. “Miss Heller said another prayer. Lucy’s hand let go of mine and …”
“She passed?” Delia provided.
Charlie squeezed her hand shut. All these years later, she could still recall what it felt like to hold Sam’s trembling fingers inside her own.
She wasn’t sure which was harder to witness: a sudden, shocking death or the slow, deliberate way that Lucy Alexander had faded into nothing.
Each existed in its own realm of the unbearable.
Delia asked, “Do you need a moment?”
Charlie let her silence answer the question. She stared past Ben’s shoulder into the mirror. For the first time since they’d locked her in the room, she studied her reflection. She’d dressed down on purpose to go to the school, not wanting to send the wrong message. Jeans, sneakers, a too-big, long-sleeved T-shirt. The faded Duke Devil logo was spattered with blood. Charlie’s face wasn’t any better. The red discoloration around her right eye was turning into a proper bruise. She pulled the wads of tissue out of her nose. The skin tore like a scab. Tears welled into her eyes.
Delia said, “Take your time.”
Charlie didn’t want to take her time. “I heard Huck telling the cop to put down his gun. He had a shotgun.” She remembered, “He tripped before. The cop with the shotgun. He stepped in some blood and …” She shook her head. She could still see the panic on the man’s face, the breathless sense of duty. He had been terrified, but like Charlie, he had run toward the danger instead of away.
“I want you to look at these photographs.” Delia rifled through her bag again. She spread three photos on the table. Headshots. Three white men. Three crew cuts. Three thick necks. If they hadn’t been cops, they would’ve been mobsters.
Charlie pointed to the one in the middle. “That’s who had the shotgun.”
Delia said, “Officer Carlson.”
Ed Carlson. He’d been a year ahead of Charlie at school. “Carlson was pointing the shotgun at Huck. Huck told him to take it easy, or something like that.” She pointed to another photo. The name below said RODGERS, but Charlie had never met him. She said, “Rodgers was there, too. He had a pistol.”
“A pistol?”
“A Glock 19,” Charlie said.
“You know your weapons?”
“Yes.” Charlie had spent the last twenty-eight years learning everything she could about every gun ever made.
Delia asked, “Officers Carlson and Rodgers were pointing their weapons at whom?”
“At Kelly Wilson, but Mr. Huckabee was on his knees in front of her, shielding her, so I guess that technically, they were pointing their weapons at him.”
“And what was Kelly Wilson doing at this time?”
Charlie realized she hadn’t mentioned the gun. “She had a revolver.”
“Five shot? Six?”
“I would only be guessing. It looked older. Not snub-nosed, but—” Charlie stopped. “Was there another gun? Another shooter?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because you asked how many shots were fired, and you asked how many bullets were in the revolver.”
“I wouldn’t extrapolate from my questions, Ms. Quinn. At this point in the investigation, we can say with a high degree of certainty that there was not another gun and there was not another shooter.”
Charlie pressed together her lips. Had she heard more than four gunshots in the beginning? Had she heard more than six?
Suddenly, she wasn’t certain of anything.
Delia said, “You said that Kelly Wilson had the revolver. What was she doing with it?”
Charlie closed her eyes to give her brain a moment to reset back to the hallway. “Kelly was sitting on the floor like I said. Her back was to the wall. She had the revolver pointed at her chest, like this.” Charlie clasped her hands together, miming the way the girl had held the gun with both hands, her thumb looped inside the trigger guard. “She looked like she was going to kill herself.”
“Her left thumb was inside the trigger guard?”
Charlie looked at her hands. “Sorry, I’m only guessing. I’m left-handed. I don’t know which thumb was inside the trigger guard, but one of them was.”
Delia continued writing. “And?”
Charlie said, “Carlson and Rodgers were screaming for Kelly to put down the gun. They were freaked out. We were all freaked out. Except for Huck. I guess he’s seen combat or …” She didn’t speculate. “Huck had his hand out. He told Kelly to give him the revolver.”
“Did Kelly Wilson make a statement at any time?”
Charlie wasn’t going to validate that Kelly Wilson had spoken, because she didn’t trust the two men who had heard her words to relay them truthfully.
She said, “Huck was negotiating Kelly’s surrender. She was complying.” Charlie’s gaze went back to the mirror, where she hoped Ken Coin was about to piss himself. “Kelly placed the revolver in Huck’s hand. She had completely relinquished it. That’s when Officer Rodgers shot Mr. Huckabee.”
Ben opened his mouth to speak, but Delia held up her hand to stop him.
“Where was he shot?” the agent asked.
“Here.” Charlie indicated her bicep.
“What was Kelly Wilson’s affect during this time?”
“She looked dazed.” Charlie silently berated herself for answering the question. “That’s just a guess. I don’t know her. I’m not an expert. I can’t speak to her state of mind.”
“Understood,” Delia said. “Was Mr. Huckabee unarmed when he was shot?”
“Well, he had the revolver in his hand, but sideways, the way Kelly had put it there.”
“Show me?” She took a Glock 45 out of her purse. She dropped the clip, pulled on the slide to eject the cartridge, and placed the gun on the table.
Charlie didn’t want to take the Glock. She hated guns, even though she practiced twice a month at the range. She was never, ever going to find herself in another situation where she didn’t know how to use a gun.
Delia said, “Ms. Quinn, you don’t have to, but it would be helpful if you could show me the position of the revolver when it was placed in Mr. Huckabee’s hand.”
“Oh.” Charlie felt like a giant light bulb turned on over her head. She had been so overwhelmed by the murders that she hadn’t processed the fact that there was a second investigation into the officer-involved shooting. If Rodgers had moved his gun an inch in the wrong direction, Huck could’ve been a third body lying in the front office hallway.
“It was like this.” Charlie picked up the Glock. The black metal felt cold against her skin. She hefted it into her left hand, but that was wrong. Huck had reached back with his right. She put the gun in her open right palm, turned sideways, muzzle facing backward, the same way Kelly had with the revolver.
Delia already had her cell phone in her hands. She took several pictures, saying, “You don’t mind?” when she knew full well it was too late if Charlie minded. “What happened to the revolver?”
Charlie placed the Glock on the table so that the muzzle pointed toward the back wall. “I don’t know. Huck didn’t really move. I mean, he flinched, I guess from the pain of a bullet shredding his arm, but he didn’t fall down or anything. He told Rodgers to take the revolver, but I don’t remember whether or not Rodgers took it, or if someone else did.”
Delia’s pen had stopped writing. “After Mr. Huckabee was shot, he told Rodgers to take the revolver?”
“Yes. He was very calm about it, but I mean, it was tense, because nobody knew whether or not Rodgers was going to shoot him again. He still had his Glock pointed at Huck. Carlson still had his shotgun.”
“But there wasn’t another shot fired?”
“No.”
“Could you see if anyone had their finger on a trigger?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t see Mr. Huckabee hand the revolver to anyone?”
“No.”
“Did you see him put it anywhere on his person? On the ground?”
“I don’t—” Charlie shook her head. “I was more concerned that he had been shot.”
“Okay.” She made a few more notes before looking up. “What do you remember next?”
Charlie didn’t know what she remembered next. Had she looked down at her hands the same way she was looking down at them now? She could remember the sound of heavy breathing from Carlson and Rodgers. Both men had looked as terrified as Charlie had felt, sweating profusely, their chests heaving up and down under the weight of their bulletproof vests.
My girl’s that age.
Pink coached me up.
Carlson hadn’t buckled his bulletproof vest. The sides had flapped open as he ran into the school with his shotgun. He’d had no idea what he would find when he turned that corner; bodies, carnage, a bullet to the head.
If you’ve never seen anything like that before, it could break you.
Delia asked, “Ms. Quinn, do you need a moment?”
Charlie thought about the terrified look on Carlson’s face when he slipped in the patch of blood. Had there been tears in his eyes? Was he wondering if the dead girl a few feet away from his face was his own child?
“I’d like to go now.” Charlie didn’t know that she was going to say the words until she heard them come out of her mouth. “I’m leaving.”
“You should finish your statement.” Delia smiled. “I’ll only need a few more minutes.”
“I’d like to finish it at a later date.” Charlie gripped the table so she could stand. “You said that I’m free to go.”
“Absolutely.” Delia Wofford again proved unflappable. She handed Charlie one of her business cards. “I look forward to speaking with you again soon.”
Charlie took the card. Her vision was still out of focus. Her stomach sloshed acid up into her throat.
Ben said, “I’ll take you out the back way. Are you okay to walk to your office?”
Charlie wasn’t sure about anything except that she had to get out of here. The walls were closing in. She couldn’t breathe through her nose. She was going to suffocate if she didn’t get out of this room.
Ben tucked her water bottle into his jacket pocket. He opened the door. Charlie practically fell into the hallway. She braced her hands against the wall opposite the door. Forty years of paint had turned the cinder blocks smooth. She pressed her cheek against the cold surface. She took a few deep breaths and waited for the nausea to pass.
“Charlie?” Ben said.
She turned back around. There was suddenly a river of people between them. The building was teeming with law enforcement. Muscle-bound men and women with big rifles strapped to their wide chests rushed back and forth. State troopers. Sheriff’s deputies. Highway patrol. Ben was right; they had all shown up. She saw letters on the backs of their shirts. GBI. FBI. ATF. SWAT. ICE. BOMB SQUAD.
When the hall finally cleared, Ben had his phone in his hands. He was silent as his thumbs moved across the screen.
She leaned against the wall and waited for him to finish texting whoever he was texting. Maybe the twenty-six-year-old from his office. Kaylee Collins. The girl was Ben’s type. Charlie knew this because, at that age, she had been her husband’s type, too.
“Shit.” Ben’s thumbs swiped across the screen. “Gimme another second.”
Charlie could’ve walked herself out of the police station. She could’ve walked the six blocks to her office.
But she didn’t.
She studied the top of Ben’s head, the way his hair grew from the crown like a spiral ham. She wanted to fold herself into his body. To lose herself in him.
Instead, Charlie silently repeated the phrases she had practiced in her car, in the kitchen, sometimes in front of the bathroom mirror:
I can’t live without you.
The last nine months have been the loneliest of my life.
Please come home because I can’t take it anymore.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
“Plea deal on another case went south.” Ben dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. It clinked against Charlie’s half-empty water bottle. “Ready?”
She had no choice but to walk. She kept her fingertips to the wall, turning sideways as more cops in black tactical gear passed by. Their expressions were cold, unreadable. They were either going somewhere or coming back from something, their collective jaws set against the world.
This was a school shooting.
Charlie had been so focused on the what that she had forgotten the where.
She wasn’t an expert, but she knew enough about these investigations to understand that every school shooting informed the next one. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook. Law enforcement agencies studied these tragedies in an effort to prevent, or at the very least understand, the next one.
The ATF would comb the middle school for bombs because others had used bombs before. The GBI would look for accomplices because sometimes, rarely, there were accomplices. Canine officers would hunt for suspicious backpacks in the halls. They would check every locker, every teacher’s desk, every closet for explosives. Investigators would look for Kelly’s diary or a hit list, diagrams of the school, stashes of weaponry, a plan of assault. Tech people would look at computers, phones, Facebook pages, Snapchat accounts. Everyone would search for a motive, but what motive could they find? What answer could an eighteen-year-old offer to explain why she had decided to commit cold-blooded murder?
That was Rusty’s problem now. Exactly the kind of thorny, moral and legal issue that got him out of bed in the morning.
Exactly the kind of law that Charlie had never wanted to practice.
“Come on.” Ben walked ahead of her. He had a long, loping stride because he always put too much weight on the balls of his feet.
Was Kelly Wilson being abused? That would be Rusty’s first line of inquiry. Was there some sort of mitigating circumstance that would keep her off death row? She had been held back at least one year in school. Did that indicate a low IQ? Diminished capacity? Was Kelly Wilson capable of telling right from wrong? Could she participate in her own defense, as required by law?
Ben pushed open the exit door.
Was Kelly Wilson a bad seed? Was the explanation here the only explanation that would never make sense? Would Delia Wofford tell Lucy Alexander’s parents and Mrs. Pinkman that the reason they lost their loved ones was because Kelly Wilson was bad?
“Charlie,” Ben said. He was holding open the door. His iPhone was back in his hand.
Charlie shielded her eyes as she walked outside. The sunlight was as sharp as a blade. Tears rolled down her cheeks.
“Here.” Ben handed her a pair of sunglasses. They belonged to her. He must have gotten them out of her car.
Charlie took the glasses but couldn’t put them on her tender nose. She opened her mouth for air. The sudden heat was too much. She leaned down, hand braced on her knee.
“Are you going to be sick?”
“No,” she said, then “maybe,” then she threw up just enough to make a splatter.
Ben didn’t step back. He managed to gather her hair away from her face without touching her skin. Charlie retched two more times before he asked, “All right?”
“Maybe.” Charlie opened her mouth. She waited for more. A line of spit came out, but nothing else. “Okay.”
He let her hair drop back around her shoulders. “The paramedic told me that you have a concussion.”
Charlie couldn’t lift her head, but she told him, “There’s nothing they can do about it.”
“They can monitor you for symptoms like nausea and blurred vision and headaches and forgetting names and not tracking when you’re asked a simple question.”
“They wouldn’t know the names I was forgetting,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the night in a hospital.”
“Stay at the HP.” The higgledy-piggledy. Sam’s name for the meandering farmhouse had stuck. Ben said, “Rusty can watch you.”
“So I die from second-hand smoke instead of a brain aneurysm?”
“That’s not funny.”
Head still down, Charlie reached back for the wall. The feel of the solid concrete block gave her enough steadiness to risk standing up straight. She cupped her hand to her eyes. She remembered cupping her hand to the window of the front office this morning.
Ben handed her the water bottle. He had already taken the top off for her. She took a few slow sips and tried not to read too much into his thoughtfulness. Her husband was thoughtful with everybody.
She asked, “Where was Mrs. Jenkins when the shooting started?”
“In the file room.”
“Did she see anything?”
“Rusty will find out everything during discovery.”
“Everything,” Charlie repeated. In the coming months, Ken Coin would be required by law to turn over any material in the investigation that could be reasonably interpreted as evidence. Coin’s idea of “reasonable” was as fixed as a spider’s web.
She asked Ben, “Is Mrs. Pinkman okay?”
He didn’t bring up her “Heller” slip because that wasn’t his way. “She’s at the hospital. They had to sedate her.”
Charlie should visit her, but she knew that she would find an excuse not to. “You let me think Kelly Wilson was sixteen years old.”
“I thought you could figure it out by holding a sphere in your hand and pulling apart time.”
Charlie laughed. “That was some next-level bullshit I laid down in there.”
“There’s some out here, too.”
Charlie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She smelled dried blood again. Like everything else, she remembered the smell from before. She remembered the dark flecks falling like ash from her hair. She remembered that even after she’d bathed, even after she’d scrubbed herself raw, the odor of death had lingered.
She said, “You called me this morning.”
Ben shrugged like it didn’t matter.
Charlie poured the rest of the water onto her hands to clean them. “Have you talked to your mom and your sisters? They’ll be worried.”
“We talked.” He did that shrug again. “I should go back in.”
Charlie waited, but he didn’t go back in. She grappled for a reason to make him stay. “How’s Barkzilla?”
“Barky.” Ben took the empty bottle. He screwed on the cap. He dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”
“Quiet.”
He tucked his chin into his chest, returning to silence. This was nothing new. Her normally articulate husband had not articulated much to her in the past nine months.
But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t nodding her along, urging her to go. He wasn’t telling her that the only reason he wasn’t asking her if she was okay was because she would say that she was okay even if she wasn’t. Especially if she wasn’t.
She asked, “Why did you call me this morning?”
Ben groaned. He leaned his head back against the wall.
Charlie leaned her head back against the wall, too.
She studied the sharp line of his jaw. This was her type—a lanky, laid-back nerd who could quote Monty Python as easily as the United States constitution. He read graphic novels. He drank a glass of milk every night before he went to bed. He loved potato salad, and Lord of the Rings, and model trains. He preferred fantasy football to the real kind. He could not put on weight if you force-fed him butter. He was six feet tall when he stood up straight, which didn’t happen often.
She loved him so much that her heart literally hurt at the thought of never holding him again.
Ben said, “Peggy had this friend when she was fourteen. Her name was Violet.”
Peggy was the bossiest of his three older sisters.
“She was killed in a car crash. She was on her bicycle. We went to the funeral. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, taking me. I was too young to see that kind of thing. It was open casket. Carla held me up so I could see her.” His throat worked. “I, like, lost my shit. Mom had to take me out into the parking lot. It gave me nightmares. I thought that was the worst thing that I would ever see. A dead kid. A dead little girl. But she was cleaned up. You couldn’t see what had happened, that the car had hit her in the back. That she had bled to death, but inside. Not like the girl today. Not like what I saw at the school.”
There were tears in his eyes. Each word out of his mouth broke another piece of Charlie’s heart. She had to clench her fists to keep from reaching out to him.
Ben said, “Murder is murder. I can deal with that. Dealers. Gangbangers. Even domestic violence. But a kid? A little girl?” He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t look like she was sleeping, did she?”
“No.”
“She looked like she had been murdered. Like someone had fired a gun at her throat and the bullet ripped it open and she died a horrible, violent death.”
Charlie looked up into the sun because she didn’t want to see Lucy Alexander dying all over again.
Ben said, “The guy’s a war hero. Did you know that?”
He was talking about Huck.
“He saved a platoon or something, but he won’t talk about it because he’s like fucking Batman or something.” Ben pushed himself away from the wall, away from Charlie. “And this morning, he took a bullet in his arm. To save a murderer, whom he kept from getting murdered. And then he stood up for the guy who almost killed him. He lied in a sworn statement to keep another guy out of trouble. He’s so fucking handsome, right?” Ben was angry now, but his voice was low, shrunken by the humiliation that came courtesy of his bitch wife. “A guy like that, you see him walking down the street, you don’t know whether you want to fuck him or have a beer with him.”
Charlie looked down at the ground. They knew she had done both.
“Lenore’s here.”
Rusty’s secretary had pulled up to the gate in her red Mazda.
Charlie said, “Ben, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. An awful, awful mistake.”
“Did you let him on top?”
“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Lenore tapped the horn. She rolled down her window and waved. Charlie waved back, her hand splayed, trying to let Lenore know that she needed a minute.
“Ben—”
It was too late. Ben was already pulling the door closed behind him.