Chapter 20
The Whiteboard
By the middle of March, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had given the case a name, and the name was a joke that nobody found funny.
It was Special Agent Dana Prescott who suggested it, at six in the morning, in a conference room in Decatur that smelled of microwaved oatmeal. She stood at a whiteboard with a green marker and wrote, in large square letters, across the top: THE DEFENDANTS.
"It's what the Ledger is calling it," she said.
"The Ledger doesn't know anything," said Terrence Ames.
"The Ledger knows five names. And three of them are dead."
It was true. On the board, in four neat columns, in the blue and black of three colours of marker, she had drawn the history of State v. Pruitt et al. in the form of a grid. At the head of each column was a name, and a date of birth, and a photograph copied from a driver's licence. Under the first name, in red, was written DECEASED 9/23/23. Drowning. Accident? Under the second, DECEASED 1/12/24. Shooting. Contact wound, 9mm. Under the third, DECEASED 3/2/24. Shooting. 9mm. Two rounds.
Under the fourth was a photograph of a man in a tan uniform, with a flat pleasant face. Under it, in blue, she had written Sutter, Dale. Lt., PCSO. Alive.
Under the fifth there was a question mark.
"The ballistics came back last night," said Prescott. "The slug from Pruitt and the two from Boyle. Same weapon."
"I assumed."
"A Taurus nine. Unregistered. The rifling's a match."
"Casings?"
"Two at Boyle. None at Pruitt. Whoever it was is learning." She capped the marker. "She picked up the first shell and not the second. I'd say the first time she was being careful. The second time, she wasn't thinking."
"You're sure it's a she."
"I'm sure that you've been calling her she since the day of the note."
He did not answer. He stood at the end of the conference table with his hands in his pockets, in a shirt that had been worn two days, and looked at the board. It was a long white sheet, and it looked, he thought, like a chart. Like one of those diagrams in a hospital, of the progress of a disease.
Five, he thought. Three down.
He had been a policeman for twenty-eight years. He had been in rooms with a good many dead. He had never before had to look at a list of the deceased and feel, as he did now, a distinct, unprofessional, rising nausea of anticipation.
"Say the other thing," he said.
"What other thing?"
"What you said in the car."
Prescott looked at him. She was thirty-three, and she had a degree in forensic accounting from Georgia State and a very exact way of thinking. She had been raised in a small town outside of Albany, by a mother who cleaned houses, and she had come to the Bureau with the conviction that if you simply followed the money, the numbers, the timeline, the truth would hold still.
She was, he thought, just now discovering that it did not.
"I said that I don't think we're going to catch her," she said.
"Why?"
"Because I don't think we want to."
There was a silence. Down the corridor, a vacuum cleaner whined and stopped.
"Dana."
"I'm only saying it. I'm not saying I'd do anything. I'd arrest her. I'd put her in the car myself. But I read the file. All four years of it." She sat down, slowly, at the table. "I read the order from the judge. I read the thing about the brighter tape. I read the memorandum from the Attorney General's office that said to avoid interference with the pending proceedings. And I thought, if that were me. If I were twenty-three, and I'd done everything right, and a man in a nice suit said, the interests of justice are not served." She stopped. "I don't know what I'd do."
"You'd do what the law says."
"Would I?"
"Yes."
"Is that what you did?"
He looked at her. He did not smile.
"I'm a state employee," he said, very quietly. "I'm only allowed to say that it's imperfect."
They got the warrant for the Hickory Run Club on the nineteenth of March, and they got it from Judge Eleanor Whitcomb-Rhodes.
She received them in her chambers, on a Tuesday morning, in her robe, with a glass of buttermilk at her elbow. She was sixty-seven. She had retired once, and been asked to return. She read the affidavit twice, slowly, with her glasses pushed up on her forehead, and did not say a word until she had finished.
"I presided over the first case," she said.
"I know, Your Honor."
"I thought it was handled very badly." She laid down the paper. "I'm told that I mustn't say that."
"You're under no obligation to say anything."
"I'm an old woman, Agent Ames. I have the right to say what I like." She picked up her pen. "You're asking me to authorize a search of a private lodge, belonging to a club of which, I regret to say, my own cousin is a member, on the strength of a note on a mock-trial form, a story about yellow roses, and a statement from a nineteen-year-old who thinks he saw a book."
"It was Boyle's mother, Your Honor. She gave us the unsent message. And a notebook. He'd written down what he intended to tell the district attorney."
"It's hearsay."
"It's a dying declaration, in a manner of speaking."
"It's nothing of the kind." She sighed. She looked at him, over the rims of her glasses, with eyes that were unexpectedly shrewd. "Do you know what I have found, in nineteen years on the bench? That the law is a very fine instrument. It has a very narrow edge. It cuts one way, in one place, at one time. And if you push it a little to the side, you'll find that it doesn't cut at all."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"I'm going to push it a little to the side."
She signed.
She did it slowly, with a certain relish, in a large looping hand, and then she blew on the ink, which was a thing she had done since she was a girl, and handed the paper across the desk.
"There's one condition," she said.
"Name it."
"The sheriff is not to be informed."
"He'll be informed by his own men within an hour."
"Then you'd better be quick." She took a sip of her buttermilk. "And Agent Ames. When you open that safe, if there is a safe, I should like to be told what's in it. Whether it's anything. I should like, for once, to be proved wrong."
He thanked her. He went down the long marble corridor with his hat in his hand. At the foot of the stairs, he stopped, and put on his glasses, and looked at the signature again.
It was a big, round, fearless hand. E. Whitcomb-Rhodes.
She knows, he thought. She's known the whole time.
He did not know whether it comforted him.
The Hickory Run Club occupied six hundred acres of pine and hardwood eleven miles west of Calloway, on a ridge above a private lake. It was reached by a gravel drive, a mile long, with a pair of stone gateposts at the end and a gate of black iron.
They went in at five-fifteen on the morning of the twentieth, in four cars, with a locksmith and a uniformed contingent from the Bureau's own tactical team. It was raining. The ridge was wrapped in a thick wet fog, and the cars crawled up the drive with their lights on, past the silent trees, in the thin grey light.
The lodge was a long log building with a green metal roof and a porch the length of the front. It was beautiful. It might have been in a magazine. A bearskin rug lay before a stone fireplace in a great low-ceilinged room. On the walls hung the heads of deer, and the stuffed bodies of fish, and a pair of crossed oars. There was a long table, set with eighteen leather chairs. There was a bar. On a shelf, in a glass case, stood a trophy cup, inscribed Hickory Run Invitational, 1974.
They found the safe in the office.
It was a very old one, a black Mosler, five feet high, as big as a refrigerator, with a brass dial and a spoked handle, bolted into the floor behind the desk. The locksmith, a short quiet man named Dewey, stood before it for some time with his head on one side, like a doctor, and then sat down on an upturned bucket and began to work.
It took forty minutes.
At six-oh-two there was a deep, soft, solid clunk. The handle turned.
Terrence Ames, who had stood behind him throughout, with his hands clasped and his hat tucked under his arm, did not breathe. Beside him, Dana Prescott had gone quite still. Behind them, in the doorway, six agents in raincoats waited in a tense, motionless row.
The door swung open.
The safe was empty.
It was clean. It was perfectly clean. It had been wiped, thoroughly, within the last several days. The shelves had been lined with a layer of white shelf paper, and the paper was undisturbed, and bore on its surface the faint rectangular imprint of a square object that had lain there for a great many years and had been taken away.
Prescott crouched. She put a gloved finger against the paper. She looked up at Ames, with eyes that were stricken, and furious, and curiously young.
"It's warm," she said.
"What?"
"The shelf. It's, it hasn't, they've only, someone's been here. Today. Last night. Within hours."
"Hoyt," said Ames, softly.
"He was told."
"By who?"
"By someone. Someone in the office, at the courthouse. Somebody in the, there were four people who knew about this warrant." Her voice was shaking. "Judge Whitcomb-Rhodes, her clerk, you, me."
"And the sheriff's cousin."
"What?"
"She said her cousin was a member." He closed his eyes. "She told us. She told us in her own office. And I thought, how honest."
"She wouldn't."
"No." He opened his eyes. "But her clerk might."
They stood in the dim office, in the smell of wax and old tobacco, with the rain tapping on the roof, and looked at the open safe. There was nothing in it. There was not so much as a rubber band. It had been emptied by a man who knew exactly what was there, and what it would mean, and who had done it so thoroughly that he had left, as the only trace of what the thing had been, a dust-free outline, in the shape of a book.
"Sir," said one of the agents, from the doorway. "We've got something."
It was in the kitchen.
It was a big stainless-steel kitchen, cold and spotless, at the back of the lodge, with a commercial range and a walk-in refrigerator. In the far corner, in a utility room that held a washing machine and a rack of coats, stood a large old-fashioned iron stove, a wood-burning one, for the staff. It was still warm.
A young agent had opened the door of the firebox.
Inside, on a bed of grey ash, lay the blackened remains of something that had once been bound in leather. It had not burned well. It had been too thick, and the fire too small. The cover had curled and split. The spine had come away. But a great quantity of the pages, a few hundred, perhaps, had survived in a fused charred block at the bottom of the stove, each leaf stuck to its neighbour like the layers of a pastry.
Ames knelt. He took a pencil from his pocket. He lifted a single edge, very carefully, and a flake of ash fell away, and in the grey light from the window, in a spidery faded hand, in ink that had gone brown with age, he could read a fragment of a line.
...June, 1987. Miss D.R., age 19. Out of county. Paid, $2,000. Dep. Brannock.
He stopped.
He had been prepared. He had told himself for four years what he would find. But he had not expected the date. He had not expected the age. He had not expected to read, in the hand of some long-dead gentleman of the county, the careful, blameless, clerical entry of a man recording a transaction.
Paid.
"Don't touch it," he said. His voice was very low. "Bag the whole stove. Take it to the lab, in one piece, in a box. Don't, don't pry."
"Sir—"
"Do it gently."
"Yes, sir."
"It's the only record." He rose. His knees cracked. He stood looking down at the ruined block in the firebox, with its curling, singed, fragile leaves, and for a moment his face was perfectly naked. "It's sixty years."
"Can they read it?"
"Some." He drew a breath. "There's a technique. Infrared. They can lift a hundred pages, maybe. If we're lucky."
"And if we're not?"
"Then he won," said Ames. "Hoyt did. He burned the evidence, and I am standing in a room, and I can't prove he did it."
Prescott said nothing. She was looking at the page.
Miss D.R., age 19.
"Sir," she said. "Look at this."
She pointed. She had found a name, at the margin, in a different hand, a fresher one, in blue ink. It was scrawled in a hurry across the charred edge of a leaf, as if added in a moment of panic, at the last, before the match.
111 — C. BELLAMY. June 2019. Out of county (Atl.). Complete.
Ames put out his hand. He did not touch it.
Complete.
"It means the arrangement was completed," said Prescott. "It's an accounting term. That the matter had been, they'd closed the file. It's what you'd write when everything had been taken care of."
"Yes."
"And somebody wrote it in blue."
"Yes."
"Last week."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because he wanted to leave a note," said Terrence Ames. "For us. Or for her." He took off his glasses. "Whoever did this, whoever burned this, wanted somebody to know. That's the thing about men like that. They can't stop recording. It's the one habit they can't break. They're so used to being in charge of the record that when they destroy it, they leave a receipt."
She heard on the radio.
She was driving. It was a quarter to eight, and she was on Highway 41 in the Camry, on her way to work, and the announcer on the Macon station had said, in a bright, hurried, informational voice: In other news, officers from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation executed a search warrant this morning at the Hickory Run Club in Pruitt County. No arrests have been made. A spokesman said only that the operation was related to the ongoing investigation into the deaths of three men connected to a 2019 sexual assault case. In sports...
She pulled over.
She turned off the engine, and sat with her hands in her lap, in the grey rain, on the shoulder of the highway, with the trucks going by in sheets of spray.
They went to the lodge.
She had told no one. She had told no one at all. She had told Grant, who was dead, and Tee, who was dead, and Terrence Ames had said, in her kitchen, I'd start there. But he had said it a month ago. And it was a thing that a man might think, from the notebooks and the files. It did not mean that he had followed her.
It means he followed the roses.
It means I'm not the only one looking.
It should have been a comfort. She sat with the thought for a long time, and tried to make it one. They're going to find the book. They're going to open the safe. They're going to read my name. It was what she had wanted. It was, God help her, the whole of what she had ever wanted: someone to stand in a room with a book, and see that it was there.
But she did not feel relieved. She felt, as she sat in the car in the rain, a thing she had not felt since a boathouse, a cold slow tightening, a closing, like a noose being drawn by a very patient hand.
They're going to find it, she thought.
And then they're going to find me.
Wes arrived at nine that night, unannounced, in a rattling pickup with Hall County plates.
He stood on the porch in the rain, in a green poultry-plant jacket, with a duffel bag, and when she opened the door he said nothing. He looked at her. He had a thick dark beard now, and had put on forty pounds, and his eyes in the porch light were bloodshot and wary.
"You look like hell," she said.
"I drove four hours."
"Come in."
He came in. He stood in the narrow hall, dripping, enormous, awkward, with his boots on the mat, and looked round at the house with an air she could not interpret. He had not been in it since the funeral.
"I saw the news," he said.
"I know."
"I saw the, Tee's, the paper said he was, they said it was a, a shooting. In his own carport. That's, Corrie, he was twenty-nine."
"I know how old he was."
"Was it—" He stopped.
She said nothing. She went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. He followed her, and stood in the doorway, with his hands hanging, and she heard him breathing behind her, the slow, laboured, uneven breath of a man who has been rehearsing a sentence for several hours.
"I'm not going to ask," he said.
"Good."
"I'm not going to, I don't want to know. I want you to hear me say that. I don't want to know anything. I came to say one thing."
"What?"
"If they ask, I was with you. On the second. All night. We watched a movie." He drew a breath. "I've got a, I'll swear to it. I'll say I drove down Friday and stayed over. I'll say I fell asleep on the couch."
"You weren't here."
"I know that."
"It's perjury."
"I know that."
"Wes." She turned. She leaned against the counter with her arms folded, and looked at him. "I don't want you to do that."
"I don't care."
"I do."
"Corrie, they're going to, they're going to come. It's a matter of weeks. I'm not stupid. I've been reading about it. I know what an Agent Ames is. If they, I'm not going to let them, I won't just stand by while—"
"While what?"
"While they take you."
She almost laughed. She did not. She looked at her brother, at the broad, bearded, anxious face, at the hands that opened and closed at his sides, and she thought, with a sudden painful clarity, of a boy of seven, holding a school bag against his chest on the side of a football road, saying, Corrie, I'm still here.
"You said you'd have killed them," she said.
"I know."
"You said it in the car. At the jail."
"I didn't mean it."
"Yes, you did."
"I meant, I'd have wanted to."
"That's all anyone means." She smiled, tiredly. "It's all I meant."
He looked at her.
The kettle began to whistle. She turned, and took it from the stove, and poured two cups of tea into two mismatched mugs, and put one in front of him on the kitchen table, and sat down.
"I'm going to ask you for something," she said. "And I want you to say yes. Not because it makes sense. Because I'm your sister."
"Anything."
"Go home."
"No."
"Wes."
"No. I'm not going." His jaw was set. "I'll sleep on the couch. I'll sleep in the truck. I'm not going to leave you here, with, with a cop in a car outside, and nobody, and Mom, and, no."
"It's not safe."
"I don't care if it's safe."
"I do."
"Why?"
"Because I'm not going to have it end with both of us on the list," said Corinne.
She said it very simply. She did not raise her voice. She sat with her hands round the mug, in the steam, in the thin yellow light of the kitchen, and looked at her brother, and he looked back, and the clock in the front room, which had stopped, did not mark the silence.
"You said that," he said, at last. "At the jail. You said you didn't want me on the list."
"Yes."
"And there is a list."
"Yes."
"And you're on it."
"I've always been on it," said Corinne.
He put down his tea. He put his face in his hands, a large man in a wet jacket, and sat that way for a long time. She did not touch him. She did not speak. She watched the rain on the window, and the steady white light of the streetlamp beyond, and the dark shape of the grey Chevrolet, parked under the water oak, in which, for the nineteenth night in a row, a man sat smoking a cigarette and watching her door.
"Is it Dale?" said Wes.
She looked at him.
"In the car. Is it him?"
"I don't know."
"It's him." He lifted his head. His eyes were red. "I know the Chevy. It's a, he's got a friend who drives it. A guy named Pickett. They worked together on the, you know. The, the jail."
"Pickett."
"Yeah. Younger guy. Blond. He's the one who, the night, in the cell." He frowned. "Why?"
She did not answer. She was looking at the window, at the grey car beneath the oak, at the faint red point of the cigarette. She thought of a night officer, in a ledger, in a cell, in the dark, at two in the morning, saying to a man in a cot, I'm sorry.
He was afraid.
But not of me.
She stood up. She went to the window, and drew the curtain a half-inch aside, and looked.
"Corrie?"
"I need to talk to somebody," she said.
"Who?"
"The man in the car."
"What?"
"He's been out there nineteen nights. He's got a thermos. He's been tired. He's been, Wes, he's been watching me, and every night he looks at the house for about an hour, and then he looks at his watch, and then he looks at the sky." She let the curtain fall. "He's not a spy. He's a man who doesn't want to be there."
"That doesn't mean—"
"I know."
"It could be a trap."
"It could." She took her coat from the hook. She slipped it on, and felt in the pocket, and found the cool plain weight of the thing she had come to carry as other women carry lipstick. She did not take it out. "It's the only thing I've got. I've been trying to find a witness for five years. And I think I've been looking in the wrong direction."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Corinne Bellamy, "that I've been looking at the five. And I should've been looking at the people who watched."
She opened the door.
It was raining hard. The street was black and shining, the lamp a white blur. She stepped out onto the porch, in her coat, with her hair in her face, and crossed the lawn, and went down the walk, and out onto the pavement, in front of her brother's astonished, terrified, rain-streaked stare.
And she walked, calmly, steadily, without hurrying, toward the grey Chevrolet.