All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

He looked scared, but he nodded and said, “Is Wavy okay?”

“Why are you worried about her?” Cardoza said, trying to make that one question mean something.

“She’s fine, son.” I hoped it wasn’t a lie. “You want me to take you to her?”

“Will you piggyback me like Kellen does?”

The kid was worn out, so I wrapped him in my windbreaker and carried him up the hill to the car. Left Cardoza to gather up the bloody clothes for evidence.

Driving back to Powell, I radioed the station.

“I was just set to call you,” Haskins said. “Delbert picked up the Quinn girl at Junior Barfoot’s house. Looks like she spent the night there.”

“Well, take her up to the motel to her aunt. I’m bringing her brother.”

“I’d rather we didn’t put them together just yet,” Cardoza said. “He’s our only eyewitness.”

“Your eyewitness is seven years old. He’s been up all night, and I bet he’d like to make sure his sister’s okay.”

“Look, I have a little boy about Donal’s age. I just—”

“Bet you wouldn’t think much of me interrogating your son at a time like this.”

The sun was coming up when we got to the motel. Mrs. Newling was already dressed, didn’t look like she’d slept either. I carried Donal into the room and put him to bed. As I was leaving, Delbert pulled up with Wavy Quinn. She stepped out of the patrol car, wearing a man’s T-shirt like a dress, and a pair of motorcycle boots. She brushed past me and went straight to her brother.

Driving back to the station, Cardoza said, “I wonder what he saw yesterday that he was so worried about her. Do you think he saw Barfoot kill his parents?”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree there.”

“But you have to wonder if Donal brought the gun to the garage to point a finger at Barfoot,” Cardoza said.

“Or maybe the garage was someplace familiar. And he knew his sister was there.”

“Why bring the gun, though? And why’d he leave if he went there for his sister?”

“Your little boy, does everything he do make sense?”

I’d had enough of Cardoza, but I wasn’t anywhere near getting shut of him. The feds were like a plague of cockroaches, except they didn’t scatter when you turned on the lights. They were convinced somebody would roll over on Junior, but everybody they interviewed said the same thing: Junior wasn’t Quinn’s second-in-command. This Butch character was, and he’d lit out in Brenda Newling’s car. Junior was just Quinn’s mechanic, and that held some water, seeing as he had half-ownership in Cutcheon’s garage. The feds took that place apart, pored over the books, and got nothing. Not a trace of meth, not a misplaced decimal point, which I could’ve predicted. Dan Cutcheon wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.

As for the murders, the gun being on his property was the only thing to connect Junior to them. That made Cutcheon a suspect, too.

In the end it all came down to the kids’ statements. The girl wouldn’t talk and they had to hold her down to get fingerprints and a blood sample. That left us with her brother.

Against my better judgment, I went along with Cardoza’s idea to take the boy on a walk-through of that day. Kids are tough, but Donal sure didn’t want to go back to that house. I held his hand going up the drive, with half-a-dozen agents behind us, including Cardoza. Never mind that he had a boy that same age, he was looking out for his career.

“What were you doing before you went inside the house?” Cardoza said.

“I was outside,” Donal said.

“Where did you come from?”

“Outside. On the porch.”

I knew what Cardoza was trying for, but the kid’s story started with him standing on the porch.

“I was going to see Mama. Because Sandy and me heard the car coming back.”

I opened the door and, brave as can be, Donal went in. The place was mostly cleaned up, but there was a brown spot on the kitchen floor, where blood had stained the linoleum. Same in the hallway.

Donal walked us around the crime scene. Here was Daddy. Here was Mama. He pointed to where the gun had been in Mrs. Quinn’s hand, before he took it.

“Kellen says you can’t leave a gun lying around.”

“Kellen told you that on the day you found Mommy and Daddy?” Cardoza said.

“No. Before, when he let me and Wavy try his gun. He said, ‘You have to be careful. You can’t leave a gun lying around.’”

“He let you shoot his gun?”

“If we were careful and only pointed at the beer cans.”

“Was Kellen here to tell you to take the gun?” I don’t know how Cardoza figured to get the truth if he was going to keep feeding Donal lines.

“No, I was all by myself,” Donal said, the same way he said, “I was outside.” Like he’d practiced it.

“But you took the gun?”

“Because it wasn’t safe to leave it lying around.”

You couldn’t fault the kid on his logic. Or his gun habits. When my deputy found the pistol, the safety was on.

After the house, Donal showed us the route he took that day, more than five miles of hayfields and woods, to Cutcheon’s garage.

On the walk, Cardoza said to me, “He’s lying about what happened up at the house.” Like he was the only one could see that. “You think Barfoot threatened him?”