Charlie sniffed her sunglasses as she walked toward Lenore’s car. She knew she was acting like a foolish girl in a teen romance, but she wanted to smell Ben. What she got instead was a whiff of her own sweat tinged with vomit.
Lenore leaned across the car to push open the door. “You put those on your nose, sweetheart, not in front of it.”
Charlie couldn’t put anything on her nose. She tossed the cheap glasses onto the dashboard as she got in. “Did Daddy send you?”
“Ben texted me, but, listen, your dad wants us to fetch the Wilsons and bring them back to the office. Coin’s trying to execute a search warrant. I brought your court clothes to change into.”
Charlie had started shaking her head as soon as she heard the words “your dad wants.” She asked, “Where’s Rusty?”
“At the hospital with the Wilson girl.”
Charlie huffed a laugh. Ben had really honed his deception skills. “How long before Dad figured out she wasn’t being held at the station?”
“Over an hour.”
Charlie put on her seat belt. “I was thinking how much Coin loves to play his games.” She had no doubt the district attorney had put Kelly Wilson in the back of an ambulance for the trip to the hospital. By maintaining the illusion that she wasn’t in police custody, he could argue that any statement she made absent counsel was voluntary. “She’s eighteen years old.”
“Rusty told me. The girl was practically catatonic at the hospital. He barely got her mama’s phone number out of her.”
“That’s how she was when I saw her. Almost in a fugue state.” Charlie hoped Kelly Wilson snapped out of it soon. At the moment, she was Rusty’s most vital source of information. Until he received the discovery materials from Ken Coin—witness lists, police statements, investigators’ notes, forensics—her father would be flying blind.
Lenore put her hand on the gear. “Where am I taking you?”
Charlie pictured herself at home, standing under a hot shower, surrounding herself with pillows in bed. And then she remembered that Ben wouldn’t be there and said, “I guess to the Wilsons.”
“They live on the backside of the Holler.” Lenore put the car in gear. She made a wide U-turn and drove up the street. “There’s no street address. Your dad sent me country directions—take a left at the old white dog, take a right at the crooked oak tree.”
“That’s good news for Kelly, I guess.” Rusty could break a search warrant that didn’t have the right address or at least a proper description of the house. The odds were against Ken Coin to come up with either. There were hundreds of rental houses and trailers up and down the Holler. No one knew exactly how many people lived there, what their names were or whether or not their children were attending school. The slumlords didn’t bother with leases or background checks so long as the right amount of cash showed up every week.
Charlie asked, “How long do you think we have before Ken locates the house?”
“No idea. They brought in a helicopter from Atlanta an hour ago, but from what I can tell, it’s on the other side of the mountain.”
Charlie knew that she could find the Wilson house. She was in the Holler at least twice a month chasing down past-due legal bills. Ben had been horrified when she’d casually mentioned her night-time excursions. Sixty percent of the crime in Pikeville was committed in or near Sadie’s Holler.
Lenore said, “I packed a sandwich for you.”
“I’m not hungry.” Charlie looked at the clock on the dash: 11:52 AM. Less than five hours ago, she’d been looking inside the darkened front office at the middle school. Less than ten minutes after that, two people were dead, another was shot, and Charlie was about to get her nose broken.
Lenore said, “You should eat.”
“I will.” Charlie stared out the window. Sunlight strobed through the tall trees behind the buildings. The flickering light flashed images into her mind like an old-timey slideshow. Charlie allowed herself the rare indulgence of lingering on the ones of Gamma and Sam—running down the long driveway to the farmhouse, giggling over a thrown plastic fork. She knew what came later, so she fast-forwarded until Sam and Gamma were firmly back in the past and all that remained was the aftermath of this morning.
Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman.
A little girl. A middle-school principal.
The victims didn’t seem to have much in common except that they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Charlie had to guess, she would assume that Kelly Wilson’s plan was to stand in the middle of the hall, revolver out in front of her, and wait for the bell to ring.
Then little Lucy Alexander rounded the corner.
Pop.
Then Mr. Pinkman rushed out of his office.
Pop-pop-pop.
Then the bell had rung and, but for some quick-thinking staff, a sea of fresh victims would have rushed down that same hallway.
Goth. Loner. Held back a grade.
Kelly Wilson was the exact type of girl who got bullied. Alone at the lunch table, last to get picked during gym, attending the school dance with a boy who only wanted one thing.
Why had Kelly picked up a gun when Charlie hadn’t?
Lenore said, “At least drink that Coke in the cooler. It’ll help with the shock.”
“I’m not in shock.”
“I bet you think your nose isn’t broken, either.”
“Actually, I do think it’s broken.” Lenore’s persistent mentions of Charlie’s health finally made Charlie aware that her health wasn’t that great. Her head was in a vise. Her nose had its own heartbeat. Her eyelids felt like they were weighed down with honey. She gave in for a few seconds, letting them close, welcoming the blankness.
Over the hum of the engine, she could hear Lenore’s feet working the pedals as she shifted gears. She always drove barefooted with her high heels on the floor beside her. She tended toward short skirts and colored stockings. The look was too young for a seventy-year-old woman, but considering that Charlie currently had more hair on her legs than Lenore, she couldn’t sit in judgment.
“You need to drink some of that Coke,” Lenore said.
Charlie opened her eyes. The world was still there.
“Now.”
Charlie was too exhausted to argue. She found the cooler wedged against the seat. She took out the Coke but left the sandwich. Instead of opening the bottle, she held it to the back of her neck. “Can I have some aspirin?”
“Nope. Raises the risk of bleeding.”
Charlie would’ve welcomed a coma over the pain. There was something about the bright sun that had turned her head into a giant, ringing bell. “What’s that thing you get in your ears?”
“Tinnitus,” Lenore said. “I’ll stop the car if you don’t start drinking that Coke right now.”
“And let the police get to the Wilson house before we do?”
“They’d have to leave out on this road, for one, and for two, even if they find the location of the house, and even if they have a judge standing by, it’ll take at least half an hour to put the warrant together and three, shut the hell up and do what I tell you before I pop you on the leg.”
Charlie used her T-shirt to twist off the cap. She sipped the Coke and watched downtown slip into the side mirror.
Lenore asked, “Did you throw up?”
“Pass.” Charlie felt her stomach clench again. The world outside was too disorienting. She had to close her eyes to regain her equilibrium.
The slideshow popped into her head again: Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Gamma. Sam. Charlie clicked through the images quickly like she was searching for a file on her computer.
What had she said to special agent Delia Wofford that might hurt Kelly Wilson’s defense? Rusty would want to know. He would also want to know about the number and sequence of gunshots, the capacity of the revolver, what Kelly had whispered when Huck was begging her to give him the gun.
That last part would be crucial to Kelly Wilson’s defense. If she had made an admission, if she had offered a glib comment or stated a grim motive for her crimes, then no amount of oratory flourish on Rusty’s part would save her from the needle. Ken Coin would never turn such a high-profile prosecution over to the state. He had argued two capital cases before. No jury in Pikeville would refuse his request for death by lethal injection. Coin spoke with a particular authority. Back when he was a police officer, he’d executed a man with his own hands.
Twenty-eight years ago, Daniel Culpepper, Zachariah Culpepper’s brother, had been sitting in his trailer watching television when Officer Ken Coin had rolled up in his squad car. It was eight thirty in the evening. Gamma’s body had already been found at the farmhouse. Sam was bleeding her life away in the shallow stream that ran under the weather tower. Thirteen-year-old Charlie was sitting in the back of an ambulance begging the paramedics to let her go home. Officer Coin had kicked down the front door to Daniel Culpepper’s trailer. The suspect had grabbed his gun. Coin had shot the nineteen-year-old seven times in the chest.
To this day, the majority of the Culpepper clan insisted on Daniel’s innocence, but the evidence against the kid was incontrovertible. The revolver found in Daniel’s hand was later identified as the same weapon that had been used to shoot Sam in the head. Daniel’s blood-covered jeans and distinctive blue hightops were found smoldering in a burn barrel behind the trailer. Even his own brother said they both went to the HP to kill Rusty. They were worried they would lose their home over some stupid legal bill they assumed would come due after the Quinns lost everything in the fire. Charlie was left to survive the ordeal with the knowledge that her family’s life had been reduced to the price of a used trailer.
Lenore said, “We’re going past the school.”
Charlie opened her eyes. Pikeville Middle School had been Pikeville Junior High when Charlie was a student. The building had sprawled over the years, hastily overbuilt to accommodate the twelve hundred students pulled in from the neighboring communities. The high school beside it was even larger, meant to house almost two thousand kids.
She saw the empty space where her car had been parked. Police tape cordoned off the lot. There were other cars that belonged to teachers scattered among the police cruisers, government sedans, ambulances, fire trucks, crime scene buses, the coroner’s van. A news helicopter was flying low over the gymnasium. The scene felt surreal, like a director would yell “cut” and everyone would take lunch.
Charlie said, “Mrs. Pinkman had to be sedated.”
“She’s a good woman. She doesn’t deserve this. Nobody does.”
Charlie nodded because she couldn’t talk past the glass in her throat. Judith Heller Pinkman had been a weird touchstone to Charlie over the years. They would see each other in the hall when Charlie finally went back to school. Miss Heller always smiled, but she didn’t push Charlie, didn’t force her to talk about the tragedy behind their connection. She kept her distance, which in retrospect, took a kind of discipline that most people didn’t possess.
Lenore asked, “I wonder how long the media attention will last?” She was looking up at the helicopter. “Two victims. That’s quaint compared to most mass shootings.”
“Girls don’t kill. At least, not like this.”
“‘I Don’t Like Mondays.’”
“In general, or do you mean the Boomtown Rats’ song?”
“The song.” Lenore said, “It’s based on a shooting. 1979. A sixteen-year-old girl took a sniper rifle to a playground. I forget how many she killed. When the cops asked her why she did it, she said, ‘I don’t like Mondays.’”
“Jesus,” Charlie whispered, hoping like hell that Kelly Wilson hadn’t been that callous when she had whispered whatever she’d said in the hallway.
And then Charlie wondered why she cared about Kelly Wilson, because the girl was a murderer.
Charlie was jarred by the sudden clarity of thought.
Take away all that had happened this morning—the fear, the deaths, the memories, the heartache—and Charlie was left with one simple truth: Kelly Wilson had murdered two people in cold blood.
Unbidden, Rusty’s voice intruded: So what?
Kelly still had a right to a trial. She still had a right to the best defense she could find. Charlie had said as much to the angry group of cops who had wanted to beat the girl to death, but now, sitting in the car with Lenore, Charlie wondered if she had come to the girl’s defense simply because no one else would.
Another personality flaw that had become a sore point in her marriage.
She reached into the back seat, this time for her court clothes. She found what Ben called her Amish shirt and what Charlie considered one step up from a burka. The Pikeville judges, all of them cranky old men, were an aggressively conservative lot. Female lawyers had to choose between wearing long skirts and chaste blouses or having every objection, every motion, every word out of their mouth overruled.
Lenore asked, “Are you okay?”
“No, not really.” Letting out the truth took some of the pressure off of her chest. Charlie had always told Lenore things that she would never admit to anyone else. Lenore had known Rusty for over fifty years. She was a black hole into which all of the Quinn family secrets disappeared. “My head is killing me. My nose is broken. I feel like I threw up a lung. I can’t even see to read, and none of that matters because I cheated on Ben last night.”
Lenore silently shifted gears as she pulled onto the two-lane highway.
Charlie said, “It was okay while it lasted. I mean, he got the job done.” She carefully peeled off her Duke T-shirt, trying not to bump her nose. “I woke up crying this morning. I couldn’t stop. I just lay in bed for half an hour staring up at the ceiling and wanting to kill myself. And then the phone rang.”
Lenore shifted again. They were leaving the Pikeville city limits. The wind off the mountains buffeted the compact sedan.
“I shouldn’t have picked up the stupid phone. I couldn’t even remember his name. He couldn’t remember mine. At least he pretended not to. It was embarrassing and sordid and now Ben knows. The GBI knows. Everyone in his office knows.”
Charlie said, “That’s why I was at the school this morning, to meet the guy because he took my phone by mistake and he called and …” She put on her court shirt, a starched button-up with ruffles down the front to assure the judges that she was taking this woman thing seriously. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Lenore shifted into sixth. “That you were lonely.”
Charlie laughed, though there was nothing funny about the truth. She watched her fingers as she buttoned the shirt. The buttons were suddenly too small. Or maybe it was that her hands were sweating. Or maybe it was that the tremble was back in her fingers, the vibration of bone that felt like a tuning fork had been struck against her chest.
“Baby,” Lenore said. “Let it out.”
Charlie shook her head. She didn’t want to let it out. She wanted to hold it back, to put all the horrible images in their box, shove it onto a shelf, and never open it ever again.
But then a teardrop fell.
Then another.
Then Charlie was crying, then she was sobbing so hard that she doubled over, her head in her hands, because the grief was too much to carry.
Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman. Miss Heller. Gamma. Sam. Ben.
The car slowed. The tires bumped against gravel as Lenore pulled to the side of the road. She rubbed Charlie’s back. “It’s okay, baby.”
It wasn’t okay. She wanted her husband. She wanted her useless asshole of a father. Where was Rusty? Why was he never there when she needed him?
“It’s okay.” Lenore kept rubbing Charlie’s back and Charlie kept crying because it was never going to be all right.
From the moment Charlie had heard those first gunshots in Huck’s room, the entirety of the most violent hour of her life had snapped back into her waking memory. She kept hearing the same words over and over again. Keep running. Don’t look back. Into the woods. To Miss Heller’s house. Up the school hallway. Toward the gunshots. But she was too late. Charlie was always too fucking late.
Lenore stroked back Charlie’s hair. “Deep breaths, sweetheart.”
Charlie realized she was starting to hyperventilate. Her vision blurred. Sweat broke out on her forehead. She made herself breathe until her lungs could take in more than a teaspoonful of air at a time.
“Take your time,” Lenore said.
Charlie took a few more deep breaths. Her vision cleared, at least as much as it was going to. She took another series of breaths, holding them for a second, maybe two, to prove to herself that she could.
“Better?”
Charlie whispered, “Was that a panic attack?”
“Might still be one.”
“Help me up.” Charlie reached for Lenore’s hand. The blood rushed from her head. Instinctively, she touched her aching nose, and the pain intensified.
Lenore said, “You really got whacked, sweetheart.”
“You should see the other guy. Not a scratch on him.”
Lenore didn’t laugh.
Charlie said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”
“Don’t be stupid. You know what came over you.”
“Yeah, well,” Charlie said, the two words she always said when she didn’t want to talk about something.
Instead of putting the car in gear, Lenore’s long fingers laced through Charlie’s smaller ones. For all her miniskirts, she still had man hands, wide with knobby knuckles and lately, age spots. In many ways, Charlie had gotten more of her mothering from Lenore than Gamma. It was Lenore who showed her how to wear make-up, who took Charlie to the store to buy her first box of tampons, who warned her to never ever trust a man to take care of birth control.
Charlie said, “Ben texted you to pick me up. That’s something, right?”
“It is.”
Charlie opened the glove box and found some tissue. She couldn’t blow her nose. She patted underneath. She squinted her eyes out the window, relieved that she could see things rather than shapes. Unfortunately, the view was the worst one possible. They were three hundred yards away from where Daniel Culpepper had been shot in his trailer.
Charlie said, “The really shitty thing is that I can’t even say that today was the worst day of my life.”
Lenore laughed this time, a husky, deep-throated acknowledgment that Charlie was right. She worked the gears and pulled back onto the highway. The going was smooth until she slowed for the turn onto Culpepper Road. Deep potholes gave way to gravel, which eventually turned into packed red clay. There was a subtle change in the temperature, maybe a few degrees, as they drove down the mountain. Charlie resisted the urge to shiver. Her trepidation felt like a thing she could hold in her hand. The hairs on the back of her neck rose up. She always felt this way when she came into the Holler. It wasn’t only the sense of not belonging, but the knowledge that the wrong turn, the wrong Culpepper, and physical danger would no longer be an abstract concept.
“Shit!” Lenore startled when a pack of dogs rushed a chain-link fence. Their frenzied barking sounded like a thousand hammers pounding against the car.
“Redneck alarm,” Charlie told her. You couldn’t step foot in the Holler without a hundred dogs howling your arrival. The deeper in you went, the more young white men you’d see standing on their front porches, one hand holding their cell phone and the other under their shirt rubbing their belly. These young men were capable of work, but they eschewed the labor-intensive jobs for which they were qualified. They smoked dope all day, played video games, stole when they needed money, beat their girlfriends when they wanted Oxy, sent their kids to pick up their disability checks at the post office, and let their glorious life choices form the backbone of Charlie’s legal practice.
She felt a flash of guilt for painting the entire Holler with the Culpepper brush. She knew that some good people lived here. They were hard-working, striving men and women whose only sin was to be poor, but Charlie could not help the knee-jerk reaction to the taint of proximity.
There had been six Culpepper girls of various ages who had made Charlie’s life a living hell when she went back to school. They were flea-bitten, nasty bitches with long painted fingernails and filthy mouths. They bullied Charlie. They stole her lunch money. They ripped up her textbooks. One of them had even left a pile of shit in her gym bag.
To this day, the family insisted that Charlie had lied about seeing Zachariah with the shotgun. They figured she was guided by some glorious scheme on Rusty’s part to lay claim to the meager life insurance policy and two-bedroom trailer that was up for grabs after Daniel had died and Zachariah was sent to prison. As if a man who had made it his life’s work to see justice done would trade his morality for a few pieces of silver.
The fact that Rusty had never sued the family for a penny did nothing to temper their wild conspiracy theories. They continued to firmly believe that Ken Coin planted the abundance of evidence found at the trailer and on Daniel’s person. That Coin murdered Daniel to kick-start his political career. That Coin’s brother, Keith, helped alter evidence at the state lab.
Still, it was Charlie who was on the receiving end of the majority of their rage. She had identified the brothers. The lies had not only started at her lips, but she continued to insist they were true. Thus the murder of one Culpepper brother and the death-row confinement of another rested squarely on her shoulders.
They weren’t entirely off the mark, at least not where Zachariah was concerned. Despite Rusty’s scathing disapproval, thirteen-year-old Charlie had stood in front of a packed courtroom and asked the judge to sentence Zachariah Culpepper to death. She would’ve done the same at Daniel’s trial if Ken Coin hadn’t robbed her of the pleasure.
“What is that racket?” Lenore asked.
Charlie heard the chopping sound of a helicopter overhead. She recognized the logo from one of the Atlanta news stations.
Lenore handed Charlie her phone. “Read me the directions.”
Charlie dialed in the passcode, which was her own birthday, and pulled up Rusty’s text. Her father had graduated from the University of Georgia law school and was one of the best known trial lawyers in the state, but he couldn’t spell for shit. “Left up here,” she told Lenore, pointing to a track marked by a white flagpole with a large Confederate flag. “Then right at this trailer.”
Charlie skimmed ahead, recognizing the route as one she had taken before. She had a client with a meth problem he financed by selling to other junkies with meth problems. He had tried to pay her in crystal once. Apparently, he lived two doors down from the Wilsons. She said, “Take a right up here, then another right at the bottom of the hill.”
“I stuck your fee agreement in your purse.”
Charlie felt her lips purse to ask why, but then she answered her own question. “Dad wants me to represent the Wilsons so it burns me as a witness against Kelly.”
Lenore looked at her, then looked at her again. “How did you miss that twenty minutes ago?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said, but she did know. Because she was traumatized. Because she ached for her husband. Because she was such an idiot that again and again she expected her father to be the kind of person who worried about his daughter the way he worried about pimps and gangbangers and murderers. “I can’t do it. Any judge worth his salt would slap me so hard with a bar complaint I’d be in China before my license to practice was revoked.”
“You won’t have to chase chicken bones up and down the Holler once you settle your lawsuit.” She nodded to her phone. “You need to take some pictures of your face while the bruises are fresh.”
“I told Ben I’m not filing a lawsuit.”
Lenore’s foot slipped off the gas.
“All I want is a sincere apology. In writing.”
“An apology isn’t going to change anything.” They had reached the bottom of the hill. Lenore took a sharp right. Charlie didn’t have to wait long for the lecture that was brewing. “Assholes like Ken Coin preach about small government, but they end up spending twice as much on lawsuits as they would on training cops the right way in the first place.”
“I know.”
“The only way to make them change is to hit them in the pocketbook.”
Charlie wanted to stick her fingers into her ears. “I’m going to get this from Dad. I don’t need it from you. It’s here.”
Lenore hit the brakes. The car lurched. She backed up a few feet, then turned onto another dirt track. Weeds sprung up between the wheel grooves. They passed a yellow school bus parked under a weeping willow. The Mazda bumped over a ridge, then a cluster of small houses came into view. There were four in all, scattered around a wide oval. Charlie checked Rusty’s text again, and matched the number to the house on the far right. There was no driveway, only the edge of the track. The house was made of painted chipboard. A large bay window blistered out in the front like a ripe pimple. Cinder blocks served as front steps.
Lenore said, “Ava Wilson drives a bus. She was at the school this morning when they locked down the building.”
“Did someone tell her that Kelly was the shooter?”
“She didn’t find out until Rusty called her cell.”
Charlie was glad Rusty hadn’t stuck her with making that phone call. “Is the father in the picture?”
“Ely Wilson. He works day labor down in Ellijay, one of those guys who waits outside the lumber yard every morning for somebody to put him to work.”
“Have the police located him?”
“Not that we know of. The family only has one cell phone, and the wife has it.”
Charlie stared at the sad-looking house. “So she’s in there alone.”
“Not for long.” Lenore looked up as another helicopter hovered into view. This one was painted in the distinctive blue and silver stripes of the Georgia State Patrol. “They’ll pop a Google map on the warrant and be here in half an hour.”
“I’ll be quick.” Charlie went to get out of the car, but Lenore stopped her.
“Here.” Lenore pulled Charlie’s purse from the back seat. “Ben gave me this when he brought back your car.”
Charlie wrapped her hand around the strap, wondering if she was holding the bag the same way Ben had. “That’s something, right?”
“It is.”
Charlie got out of the car and walked toward the house. She rummaged around in her purse for some breath mints. She had to settle for a handful of furry Tic Tacs stuck like lice into the seams of the front pocket.
She had learned the hard way that Holler people generally answered the door with some kind of weapon in their hands, so instead of traversing the cinder block front steps, she walked to the bay window. There were no curtains. Three pots of geraniums were underneath. There was a glass ashtray resting on the soil, but it was empty.
Inside, Charlie could see a petite, dark-haired woman sitting on the couch, transfixed by the image on the television. Everyone in the Holler had a giant, flat-screen TV that had apparently fallen off the same truck. Ava Wilson had the news on. The sound was up so high that the reporter’s voice was audible from outside.
“… new details coming in from our Atlanta affiliate …”
Charlie went to the front door and knocked, three sharp raps.
She waited. She listened. She knocked a second time. Then a third.
“Hello?” she called.
Finally, the television was muted. She heard the shuffling of feet. A lock clicking back. A chain sliding. Another lock opening. The extra security was a joke considering a thief could punch his hand through the flimsy wall.
Ava Wilson blinked at the stranger outside her door. She was as small as her daughter, with the same almost childlike quality. She was wearing light blue pajamas with cartoon elephants on the pants. Her eyes were bloodshot. She was younger than Charlie, but shoots of gray ran through her dark brown hair.
“I’m Charlie Quinn,” she told the woman. “My father, Rusty Quinn, is your daughter’s attorney. He asked me to pick you up and take you to his office.”
The woman did not move. She did not speak. This was what shock looked like.
Charlie asked, “Have the police spoken to you?”
“No, ma’am,” she said, her Holler accent blending together the words. “Your daddy told me not to answer the phone unless I recognized the number.”
“He’s right.” Charlie shifted on her feet. She could hear dogs barking in the distance. The sun was burning the top of her head. “Look, I know you’re devastated about your daughter, but I need to prepare you for what’s coming next. The police are on their way here right now.”
“Are they bringing Kelly home?”
Charlie was thrown off by the hopefulness in Ava Wilson’s voice. “No. They’re going to search your house. They’ll probably start in Kelly’s room, then—”
“Will they take her some clean clothes?”
Again, Charlie was thrown. “No, they’re going to search the house for weapons, any notes, computers—”
“We don’t got a computer.”
“Okay, that’s good. Did Kelly do her schoolwork at the library?”
“She didn’t do anything,” Ava said. “She didn’t kill …” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes glistened. “Ma’am, you gotta hear me. My baby didn’t do what they’re saying.”
Charlie had dealt with her share of mothers who were convinced that their children were being framed, but there was no time to give Ava Wilson the speech about how sometimes good people did bad things. “Listen to me, Ava. The police are going to come in whether you let them or not. They’ll remove you from the house. They’ll do a thorough search. They might break things or find things you don’t want them to find. I doubt they’ll hold you in custody, but they might if they think you’re going to alter evidence, so please don’t do that. You cannot, please, hear me on this: you cannot say anything to them about Kelly or why she might have done this or what might have happened. They are not trying to help her and they are not her friends. Understand?”
Ava did not acknowledge the information. She just stood there.
The helicopter swooped lower. Charlie could see the pilot’s face behind the bubbled glass. He was talking into the mic, probably giving the coordinates for the search warrant.
She asked Ava, “Can we go inside?”
The woman didn’t move, so Charlie took her by the arm and led her into the house. “Have you heard from your husband?”
“Ely don’t call until he’s done working, from the payphone outside the lumber yard.”
Which meant that Kelly’s father would probably learn about his daughter’s crimes from his car radio. “Do you have a suitcase or a small bag you can put some clothes in?”
Ava did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on the muted television.
The middle school was on the news. An aerial shot showed the top of the gymnasium, which was likely being used as a staging ground. The scroll at the bottom of the screen read: BOMB SQUAD SWEPT BUILDING FOR SUSPICIOUS DEVICES. TWO DEAD—8-YEAR-OLD STUDENT, HERO PRINCIPAL WHO TRIED TO SAVE HER.
Lucy Alexander was only eight years old.
“She didn’t do this,” Ava said. “She wouldn’t.”
Lucy’s cold hand.
Sam’s trembling fingers.
The sudden white waxiness of Gamma’s skin.
Charlie wiped her eyes. She glanced around the room, fighting against the slideshow of horror that had returned to her head. The Wilson house was shabby, but tidy. A Jesus hung on a cross by the front door. The galley kitchen was right off the cramped living room. Dishes were drying in the rack. Yellow gloves were folded limply over the edge of the sink. The counter was cluttered, but there was order to it.
Charlie told Ava, “You’re not going to be allowed back in the house for a while. You’ll need a change of clothes, some toiletries.”
“The toilet’s right behind you.”
Charlie tried again. “You need to pack some things.” She waited to see if Ava understood. “Clothes, toothbrushes. Nothing else.”
Ava nodded, but she either could not or would not look away from the television.
Outside, the helicopter lifted away. Charlie was burning through time. Coin had probably gotten his warrant signed by now. The search team would be en route from town, full lights and sirens.
She asked Ava, “Do you want me to pack some things for you?” Charlie waited for another nod. And waited. “Ava, I’m going to get some clothes for you, then we’re going to wait outside for the police.”
Ava clutched the remote in her hand as she sat on the edge of the couch.
Charlie opened kitchen cabinets until she found a plastic grocery bag. She slipped on one of the yellow dishwashing gloves from the sink, then walked past the bathroom down the short, paneled hallway. There were two bedrooms, both of them taking up one end of the house. Instead of a door, Kelly had a purple curtain for privacy. The sheet of notebook paper pinned to the material said NO ADULTS ALOWT.
Charlie knew better than to go into a murder suspect’s room, but she used Lenore’s phone to take a picture of the sign.
The Wilsons’ bedroom was on the right, facing a steep hill behind the house. They slept in a large waterbed that took up most of the space. A tall chest of drawers kept the door from opening all the way. Charlie was glad she’d thought to put on the yellow glove as she opened the drawers, though to be honest, the Wilsons were neater than she was. She found some women’s underwear, a few pairs of boxers, and a pair of jeans that looked like they came from the children’s department. She grabbed two more T-shirts and shoved all of the clothes into the plastic grocery bag. Ken Coin was notorious for needlessly drawing out his searches. The Wilsons would be lucky if they were allowed back into their home by the weekend.
Charlie turned around, planning to go to the bathroom next, but something stopped her.
ALOWT.
How could Kelly Wilson reach the age of eighteen without knowing how to spell such a simple word?
Charlie hesitated once, then pulled back the curtain. She wouldn’t enter the room. She would take pictures from the hall. Not as easy as it sounded. The bedroom was the size of a generous walk-in closet.
Or a prison cell.
Light slanted in from the narrow, horizontal window mounted high over the twin bed. The paneling on the walls had been painted a light lilac. The carpet was orange shag. The bedspread had Hello Kitty listening to a Walkman with large headphones over her ears.
This was not a Goth girl’s room. There were no black walls and heavy metal posters. The closet door was open. Stacks of shirts were neatly folded on the floor. A few longer pieces hung from a sagging rod. Kelly’s clothes were all lightly colored with ponies and rabbits and the sort of appliqués you would expect a ten-year-old girl to wear, not an eighteen-year-old almost woman.
Charlie photographed everything she could: the bedspread, the posters of kittens, the candy-pink lip gloss on top of the dresser. All the while, her focus was on the things that weren’t there. Eighteen-year-olds had all kinds of make-up. They had pictures with their friends and notes from possible future boyfriends and secrets that they kept all to themselves.
Her heart jumped when she heard wheels spinning down the dirt track. She stood on the bed and looked out the window. A black van with SWAT on the side slowed to a stop in front of the yellow school bus. Two guys with rifles drawn jumped out of the van and entered the bus.
“How …” Charlie started to say, but then she realized it didn’t matter how they’d managed to get here so quickly, because as soon as they cleared the bus, they would tear apart the house that she was standing in.
But Charlie wasn’t exactly standing in the house. She was standing on Kelly Wilson’s bed inside Kelly Wilson’s bedroom.
“Fuck me,” she whispered, because there was no other way to put it. She jumped off the bed. She used her rubber-gloved hand to swipe away the dirt from her tennis shoes. The deep purple fabric hid the grooves but a forensic tech with a sharp eye would know the size, brand and model number before the sun went down.
Charlie needed to leave. She needed to take Ava outside, hands raised in the air. She needed to make it clear to the heavily armed SWAT team that they were cooperating.
“Fuck,” Charlie repeated. How much time did she have? She stood on tiptoe and looked out the window. The two cops were searching the bus. The rest stayed inside the van. They either believed they had the element of surprise or they were looking for explosive devices.
Charlie saw movement closer by the house.
Lenore was standing by her car. Her eyes were wide as she stared at Charlie because any fool could tell that the slit of a window she was looking through was in one of the bedrooms.
Lenore jerked her head toward the front door. Her mouth mimed the words, “Get out.”
Charlie jammed the plastic bag of clothes into her purse and made to leave.
The purple walls. The Hello Kitty. The kitten posters.
Thirty, maybe forty seconds. That’s how long it would take them to clear the bus, get back in the van, and reach the front door.
She used her gloved hand to open the dresser drawers. Clothes. Underwear. Pens. No diary. No notebooks. She got on her knees and ran her hand between the mattress and boxspring, then looked underneath the bed. Nothing. She was checking between the stacked clothes on the closet floor when she heard the SWAT van doors thunk closed, the tires crunch against dirt as they drew closer to the house.
Teenagers’ rooms were never this neat. Charlie rifled the contents of the tiny closet with one hand, dumping out two shoe boxes of toys, pulling clothes off hangers and tossing them onto the bed. She patted pockets, turned hats inside out. She stood on tiptoe and reached blindly onto the shelf.
The rubber glove skipped across something flat and hard.
A picture frame?
“Officers.” Lenore’s deep voice reached her ears through the thin walls. “There are two women in the house, both unarmed.”
The cop wasn’t interested. “Go back to your car! Now!”
Charlie’s heart was going to blow up in her chest. She grabbed at the thing on the closet shelf. It was heavier than she thought. The sharp edge jabbed the top of her head.
A yearbook.
Pikeville Middle School class of 2012.
A deafening knock came at the front door. The walls rattled. “State police!” a man’s voice boomed. “I am executing a search warrant. Open the door!”
“I’m coming!” Charlie jammed the yearbook into her purse. She had made it as far as the kitchen when the front door splintered open.
Ava screamed like she was on fire.
“Get down! Get down!” Lasers swept around the room. The house shook on its foundation. Windows were broken. Doors were kicked in. Men yelled orders. Ava kept screaming. Charlie was on her knees, hands in the air, eyes wide open so that she could see which man ended up shooting her.
No one shot her.
No one moved.
Ava’s screaming stopped on a dime.
Six massive cops in full tactical gear took up every available inch of the room. Their arms were so tensed as they gripped their AR-15s that Charlie could make out the strands of muscle working to keep their fingers from moving to the triggers.
Slowly, Charlie looked down at her chest.
There was a red dot over her heart.
She looked at Ava.
Five more dots on her chest.
The woman was standing on the couch, knees bent. Her mouth was open, but fear had paralyzed her vocal cords. Inexplicably, she held a toothbrush in each of her raised hands.
The man closest to Ava lowered his rifle. “Toothbrushes.”
Another rifle was lowered. “Looked like a God damn trigger switch.”
“I know, right?”
More rifles were lowered. Someone chuckled.
The tension lightened incrementally.
From outside the house, a woman yelled, “Gentlemen?”
“Clear,” the first guy called back. He grabbed Ava by the arm and pushed her out the door. He turned around to do the same to Charlie, but she escorted herself out, hands in the air.
She didn’t lower her arms until she was out in the yard. She took a deep breath of fresh air and tried not to think about how she could’ve died if any one of those men hadn’t taken the time to differentiate between a toothbrush and a detonator for a suicide vest.
In Pikeville.
“Jesus Christ,” Charlie said, hoping it would pass for a prayer.
Lenore had stayed by the car. She looked furious to Charlie, which she had every right to be, but she only lifted her chin, asking the obvious question: You okay?
Charlie nodded back, but she didn’t feel okay. She felt angry—that Rusty had sent her here, that she had taken such a stupid risk, that she had violated the law for reasons that were completely unknown to her, that she had risked getting shot in the heart with what was likely a fast-expanding hollow-point bullet.
All for a fucking yearbook.
Ava whispered, “What’s happening?”
Charlie looked back at the house, which was still shaking from all the heavy men traipsing back and forth. “They’re searching for things they can use in court against Kelly.”
“Like what?”
Charlie listed off the things that she had been looking for. “A confession. An explanation. A diagram of the school. A list of people Kelly was mad at.”
“She’s never been mad at nobody.”
“Ava Wilson?” A tall woman in bulky tactical gear walked toward them. She had her rifle slung to her side. A rolled-up piece of paper was in her fist. That was how they’d gotten here so quickly. The warrant had been faxed to the van. “Are you Ava Wilson, mother to Kelly Rene Wilson?”
Ava stiffened at the sound of authority. “Yes, sir. Ma’am.”
“This is your house?”
“We rent it, yes, ma’am. Sir.”
“Mrs. Wilson.” The cop didn’t seem concerned with pronouns. “I’m Captain Isaac with the state police. I have a warrant to search your house.”
Charlie pointed out, “You’re already searching it.”
“We had reason to believe evidence might be tampered with.” Isaac studied Charlie’s bruised eye. “Were you accidentally injured during the breach, ma’am?”
“No. A different police officer hit me today.”
Isaac glanced at Lenore, who was still apparently livid, then looked back at Charlie. “Are you two ladies together?”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Mrs. Wilson would like to see a copy of the warrant.”
Isaac made a point of noticing the yellow glove on Charlie’s hand.
“Dish-washing glove,” Charlie said, which was technically true. “Mrs. Wilson would like to see a copy of the warrant.”
“Are you Mrs. Wilson’s lawyer?”
“I’m a lawyer,” Charlie clarified. “I’m only here as a friend of the family.”
Isaac told Ava, “Mrs. Wilson, per your friend’s request, I am giving you a copy of the warrant.”
Charlie had to lift Ava’s arm so that the warrant could be placed in the woman’s hand.
Isaac asked, “Mrs. Wilson, are there any weapons in the house?”
Ava shook her head. “No, sir.”
“Any needles we should be worried about? Anything that’s going to cut us?”
Again, Ava shook her head, though she seemed troubled by the question.
“Explosives?”
Ava’s hand flew to her mouth. “Is there a gas leak?”
Isaac looked to Charlie for an explanation. Charlie shrugged. The mother’s life was upside down. Logic was the last thing they should expect from her.
Isaac asked Ava, “Ma’am, do I have your consent to search your person?”
“Ye—”
“No,” Charlie interrupted. “You don’t have consent to search anything or anyone beyond the scope of the warrant.”
Isaac glanced down at Charlie’s purse, which had conformed roughly to the shape of a rectangular yearbook. “Do I need to search your bag?”
Charlie felt her heart flip. “Do you have cause?”
“If you’ve concealed evidence, or removed something from the house with the purposes of concealment, then—”
“That would be illegal,” Charlie said. “Like searching a school bus when it’s not specifically listed in your warrant and it’s not part of the curtilage.”
Isaac nodded once. “You would be correct, unless there was cause.”
Charlie snapped off the yellow glove. “I did remove this from the house, but not intentionally.”
“Thank you for being forthcoming.” Isaac turned to Ava. She had a script to follow. “Ma’am, you can stay outside, or you can leave, but you cannot go back into the house until we’ve released it. Do you understand?”
Ava shook her head.
Charlie said, “She understands.”
Isaac walked across the yard and joined the men inside the house. Plastic containers were stacked by the door. Evidence logs. Zip ties. Plastic bags. Ava stared through the bay window. The television was still on. The screen was so large that Charlie could read the scroll along the bottom: PIKEVILLE PD SOURCE: SCHOOL SECURITY FOOTAGE WILL NOT BE RELEASED.
Security cameras. Charlie had not noticed them this morning, but now she recalled a camera at the end of every hallway.
The murder spree had been captured on video.
Ava asked, “What are we going to do?”
Charlie suppressed her first answer: Watch your daughter get strapped to a gurney and executed.
She told Ava, “My father will explain everything back at his office.” She took the rolled-up warrant from the woman’s sweaty hand. “There has to be an arraignment within forty-eight hours. Kelly will likely be held at the county jail, but then they’ll transfer her somewhere else. There will be a lot of court appearances and plenty of opportunities to see her. None of this will happen quickly. Everything takes a long time.” Charlie scanned the search warrant, which was basically a love letter from the judge allowing the cops to do whatever the hell they wanted. She asked Ava, “Is this your address?”
Ava looked at the warrant. “Yes, ma’am, that’s the street number.”
Through the open front door, Charlie saw Isaac start yanking out drawers in the kitchen. Silverware clattered. Carpet was being stripped from the floor. None of them were being gentle. They lifted their feet high as they stomped around, checking for hollow sounds under the floorboards, poking at the stained tile in the ceiling.
Ava grabbed Charlie’s arm. “When will Kelly come home?”
“You’ll need to talk about that with my father.”
“I don’t see how we can afford any of this,” Ava said. “We ain’t got no money, if that’s why you’re here.”
Rusty had never been interested in money. “The state will pay for her defense. It won’t be much, but I can promise you, my father will work his heart out for your daughter.”
Ava blinked. She didn’t seem to follow. “She’s got chores to do.”
Charlie looked into the woman’s eyes. Her pupils were small, but that could be explained by the intense sunlight. “Are you on something?”
She looked down at her feet. “No, ma’am. There was a pebble but I kicked it away.”
Charlie waited for an inappropriate smile, but the woman was being serious. “Did you take some medication? Or maybe you smoked a joint to take the edge off?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. I’m a bus driver. I can’t take drugs. Children depend on me.”
Charlie looked into her eyes again, this time for any sign of reason. “Did my father explain what’s happening to Kelly?”
“He said he was working for her, but I don’t know.” She whispered, “My cousin says Rusty Quinn is a bad man, that he represents low-lifes and rapists and killers.”
Charlie’s mouth went dry. The woman did not seem to understand that Rusty Quinn was exactly the kind of man that her daughter needed.
“There’s Kelly.” Ava was looking at the television again.
Kelly Wilson’s face filled the screen. Someone had obviously leaked a school photo. Instead of the heavy Goth make-up and black clothes, Kelly was wearing one of her rainbow pony T-shirts from the closet.
The photo disappeared and was replaced with live footage of Rusty leaving the Derrick County Hospital. He scowled at the reporter who shoved a microphone in his face, but he had left by the front doors for a reason. Rusty made a visible show of reluctantly stopping for the interview. Charlie could tell by the way his mouth was moving that he was offering a cavalcade of southern-y sound bites that would be played on a virtual loop by the national stations. This was how these high-profile cases worked. Rusty had to get out in front of the talking heads, to paint Kelly Wilson as a troubled teenager facing the ultimate punishment rather than as a monster who had murdered a child and her school principal.
Ava whispered, “Is a revolver a weapon?”
Charlie felt her stomach drop. She led Ava away from the house and stood with her in the middle of the track. “Do you have a revolver?”
Ava nodded. “Ely keeps it in the glove box of the car.”
“The car he drove to work today?”
She nodded again.
“Does he own the gun legally?”
“We don’t steal things, ma’am. We work for them.”
“I’m sorry, what I mean is, is your husband a convicted felon?”
“No, ma’am. He’s an honest man.”
“Do you know how many bullets the gun holds?”
“Six.” Ava sounded certain enough, but she added, “I think six. I seen it a million times, but I never paid attention to it. I’m sorry I can’t remember.”
“It’s all right.” Charlie had felt the same way when Delia Wofford was questioning her. How many shots did you hear? What was the sequence? Was Mr. Huckabee with you? What happened to the revolver?
Charlie had been right in the middle of it, but fear had dampened her recall.
She asked Ava, “When was the last time you saw the revolver?”
“I don’t—oh.” Ava’s phone was ringing from the front pocket of her pajamas. She pulled out a cheap flip phone, the kind that let you pre-pay for minutes. “I don’t know that number.”
Charlie knew the number. It belonged to her iPhone, which Huck apparently still had. “Get in the car,” she told Ava, motioning for Lenore to help. “Let me answer this.”
Ava gave Lenore a wary look. “I don’t know if—”
“Get in the car.” Charlie practically pushed the woman away. She answered the phone on the fifth ring. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Wilson, this is Mr. Huckabee, Kelly’s teacher from middle school.”
“How did you unlock my phone?”
Huck hesitated a good, long while. “You need a better password than 1-2-3-4.”
Charlie had heard the same thing from Ben on numerous occasions. She walked up the track for more privacy. “Why are you calling Ava Wilson?”
He hesitated a second time. “I taught Kelly for two years. I tutored her a few months when she moved up to the high school.”
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
“I spent four hours answering questions from two assholes with the GBI and another hour answering questions at the hospital.”
“What assholes?”
“Atkins. Avery. Some ten-year-old with a cowlick and an older black chick kept tag-teaming me.”
“Shit,” Charlie mumbled. He probably meant Louis Avery, the FBI’s North Georgia field agent. “Did he give you his card?”
“I threw it away,” Huck said. “My arm’s fine, by the way. Bullet went straight through.”
“My nose is broken and I have a concussion,” Charlie told him. “Why were you calling Ava?”
His sigh said he was humoring her. “Because I care about my students. I wanted to help. To make sure she had a lawyer. That she was being looked after by someone who wasn’t going to exploit her or get her into more trouble.” Huck abruptly dropped the bravado. “Kelly’s not smart, Charlotte. She’s not a murderer.”
“You don’t have to be smart to kill somebody. Actually, the opposite is usually true.” She turned back to look at the Wilson house. Captain Isaac was carrying out a plastic box full of Kelly’s clothes.
Charlie told Huck, “If you really want to help Kelly, stay away from any and all reporters, don’t go on camera, don’t let them get a good photo of you, don’t even talk to your friends about what happened, because they’ll go on camera or they’ll talk to reporters and you won’t be able to control what comes out of their mouths.”
“That’s good advice.” He let out a short breath and said, “Hey, I need to tell you that I’m sorry.”
“For?”
“B2. Ben Bernard. Your husband called you this morning. I almost answered.”
Charlie felt her cheeks flush.
He said, “I didn’t know until one of the cops told me. This was after I had talked to him, told him what we’d been up to, why you were at the school.”
Charlie put her head in her hand. She knew how certain types of men talked about women, especially the ones they screwed in their trucks outside of bars.
Huck said, “You could’ve warned me. It put us all in an even worse situation.”
“You apologize, but really, it’s my fault?” She couldn’t believe this guy. “When would I have told you? Before Greg Brenner knocked me out? Or after you deleted the video? Or how about when you lied in your witness statement about how my nose got broken, which is a felony, by the way—the lying to cover a cop’s ass, not the standing around with your thumb up your ass while a woman gets punched in the face. That’s perfectly legal.”
Huck pushed out another sigh. “You don’t know what it’s like running into something like that. People make mistakes.”
“I don’t know what it’s like?” Charlie felt shaken by a sudden fury. “I think I was there, Huck. I think I got there before you did, so I know exactly what it’s like to run into something like that, and not for nothing, but if you really grew up in Pikeville, then you know I’ve done it twice now, so fuck you with your ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’”
“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”
Charlie wasn’t finished. “You lied about Kelly’s age.”
“Sixteen, seventeen.” She could picture Huck shaking his head. “She’s in the eleventh grade. What difference does it make?”
“She’s eighteen, and the difference is the death penalty.”
He gasped. There was no other word for it—the sudden, quick inhalation that came from absolute shock.
Charlie waited for him to speak. She checked the bars on the phone. “Hello?”
He cleared his throat. “I need a minute.”
Charlie needed a minute, too. She was missing something big. Why had Huck been interviewed for four hours? The average interrogation lasted somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Charlie’s had topped out at around forty-five minutes. The entirety of her and Huck’s involvement with the crime had been less than ten minutes. Why had Delia Wofford brought in the FBI to play good cop/bad cop with Huck? He was hardly a hostile witness. He had been shot in the arm. But he’d said he was interrogated before he went to the hospital. Delia Wofford wasn’t the kind of cop who didn’t follow procedure. The FBI sure as shit didn’t mess around.
So why had they kept their star witness at the police station for four hours? That wasn’t how you treated a witness. That was how you treated a suspect who wasn’t playing ball.
“Okay, I’m back,” Huck said. “Kelly’s—what are they calling it now? Remedial? Intellectually handicapped? She’s in basic classes. She can’t retain concepts.”
“The law would call it diminished capacity, as in she’s too incapable to form the mental state required for a crime, but that’s a very hard argument to make,” Charlie told him. “There are very different priorities between a government-run school system and a government-run murder prosecution. One is trying to help her and the other is trying to kill her.”
He was so quiet that all she could hear was his breathing.
Charlie asked, “Did the two agents, Wofford and Avery, talk to you for four hours straight, or was there time in between?”
“What?” He seemed thrown by the question. “Yeah, one of them was always in the room. And your husband sometimes. And that guy, what’s his name? He wears those shiny suits?”
“Ken Coin. He’s the district attorney.” Charlie shifted tactics. “Was Kelly bullied?”
“Not in my classroom.” He added, “Off-campus, social media, we can’t regulate that.”
“So you’re saying she was bullied?”
“I’m saying she was different, and that’s never a good thing when you’re a kid.”
“You were Kelly’s teacher. Why didn’t you know that she was held back a grade?”
“I’ve got over a hundred twenty kids a year every year. I don’t look back at their files unless they give me a reason.”
“Being slow isn’t a reason?”
“A lot of my kids are slow. She was a solid C student. She never got in trouble.” Charlie could hear a tapping noise, a pen hitting the edge of a table. Huck said, “Look, Kelly’s a good kid. Not smart, but sweet. She follows whatever is in front of her. She doesn’t do things like today. That’s not her.”
“Were you intimate with her?”
“What the hell does—”
“Screwing. Fucking. You know what I mean.”
“Of course not.” He sounded disgusted. “She was one of my kids. Christ.”
“Was anyone else having sex with her?”
“No. I would’ve reported it.”
“Mr. Pinkman?”
“Don’t even—”
“Another student at school?”
“How should I—”
“What happened to the revolver?”
If she hadn’t been listening for it, she would’ve missed the slight catch in his breath.
And then he said, “What revolver?”
Charlie shook her head, silently berating herself for missing the obvious.
During her own interview with Delia Wofford, she had been too disoriented to put it together, but now Charlie could see that the woman had practically drawn her a picture. You didn’t see Mr. Huckabee hand the revolver to anyone? Did you see him put it anywhere on his person? On the ground?
Charlie asked Huck, “What did you do with it?”
He paused again because that’s what he did when he was lying. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is that how you answered the two agents?”
“I told them what I told you. I don’t know. A lot was going on.”
Charlie could only shake her head at his stupidity. “Did Kelly say something to you in the hall?”
“Not that I heard.” He paused for the billionth time. “Like I said, a lot was happening.”
The guy had been shot and barely grimaced. Fear had not dampened his recall.
She asked, “Whose side are you on?”
“There’s no such thing as sides. There’s just doing the right thing.”
“I hate to blow apart your philosophy, Horatio, but if there’s a right thing then there’s a wrong thing, and as someone with a law degree, I can tell you that stealing the murder weapon from a double homicide, then lying about it to an FBI agent, can land you on the wrong side of a prison cell for a hell of a long time.”
He kept up the silent act for two seconds, then said, “I don’t know if we were in it, but there’s a blind spot in the security cameras.”
“Stop talking.”
“But, if—”
“Shut up,” Charlie warned him. “I’m a witness. I can’t be your lawyer. What you tell me isn’t privileged.”
“Charlotte, I—”
She ended the call before he could dig the hole he was standing in any deeper.