Chapter 21
What Pickett Wrote Down
The man in the grey Chevrolet saw her coming from forty feet, and he did not start the engine.
That was the first thing she noticed. She noticed it with some part of her mind that stood a little way off, and went on counting. Her boots on the wet pavement. The tick of the rain on her hood. The dark bulk of the car under the water oak, and the faint red point of a cigarette in the window, which went out as she came near, ground into a tray by a hand that did not seem to know what it was doing.
She stopped beside the driver's door.
The window came down.
"Ma'am," said Pickett.
He was twenty-six. He was blond and thin and sunburned across the nose, with a long neck and a prominent Adam's apple, and he wore a tan uniform shirt that had been ironed by somebody who loved him. He looked at her with wide pale eyes. He looked, she thought, exactly like what he was, which was a boy who had signed up to be a deputy because his father was one, and had been, for some time now, very quietly drowning.
"You're Rick Pickett," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You were the night officer. In June of 2019. The ledger. You wrote the entry about Dale and the kit."
"I did."
"And you were at the jail. When my brother was there."
His mouth worked. "Yes, ma'am."
"Why are you outside my house?"
"I was told to be."
"By Dale."
"Yes."
"For nineteen nights."
"Twenty," said Pickett. He lifted a hand and rubbed his face. "It's, I'm sorry. It's twenty tonight. I count." He swallowed. "I'm not supposed to talk to you."
"Then why haven't you started the car?"
He looked at her. He did not seem to have an answer. The rain ran down the glass behind his head, and the dashboard clock gave a small green blink: 9:41. From inside the car came a smell of coffee and old cigarettes and, unexpectedly, a sweet, powdery baby smell, like talc.
"I have a daughter," he said. "She's eight months."
"Congratulations."
"I'm not, I'm not saying that so you'll, I just." He stopped. "Ma'am. Can I tell you something? And you won't, you won't hurt me?"
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"Everybody says that."
"I'm saying it."
He studied her face. It was a long look, serious and slow, the look of a person trying to decide which of two roads to take in the dark. Then, with a small, shaky, defeated motion, he reached across the seat to the passenger side, and picked up a spiral notebook.
It was green. It had a bent wire. She had seen one like it, on the arm of a rocker, in the last of the daylight, on Willow Lane.
"I write things down," he said.
They sat in the Chevrolet, in the rain, with the engine off and the windows steaming, and he read to her.
He did not read well. He had a high flat mumbling voice, and he stumbled over the long words, and his finger moved under each line like a child's. But he had been keeping the notebook for five years, and it was all there, in a round, careful, schoolboy hand, with dates and times and the initials of the people he had seen.
6/16/19. 2:14 a.m. Lt. S. signed out Item 19-0614-A. Said it was for another case. Looked tired. Had a smell like lake water.
6/16/19. 6:09 a.m. Returned. New tape.
6/17/19. Ms. Tolliver asked if I'd noticed anything. I said no.
6/17/19. I should have said yes.
"I didn't know what it was," he said. "I was twenty-one. I'd been on the job four months. He said, write it down just like I tell you. He said, you'll make sergeant. So I did. I wrote, signed out at 2:15, returned at 6:05. That's all I wrote. I didn't, I didn't write the other part."
"What other part?"
"That he was soaked."
She did not move.
"His boots," said Pickett. "His uniform. He came in the door, and there was water on the floor behind him, a trail, all the way from the car. And his hair was wet. It hadn't rained. It was a clear night. I thought, he's been in the lake." His voice cracked. "He had the box under his arm. He put it on the counter. And I looked at his hands, and there was a, there was a scratch. Down the back. Like a fingernail."
"A scratch."
"A long one. It was bleeding. And he saw me looking, and he said, Brush. In the dark." He drew a shaky breath. "I didn't say anything. I'm not, I'm a coward. I know that. I wrote it down, in this, the next morning. I put scratch, hand, left. But I never told. Not to Ms. Lenoir. Not to Detective Beck. Not to anyone."
A scratch, thought Corinne.
She looked at her own hands, folded in her lap. There was a thin pale seam across the left forearm, just under the edge of the sleeve, an old scar, an inch and a half long, healed white. She had never known where it came from. She had never been able to remember.
She had assumed it was the lake house.
It was Dale.
Dale's hand, or mine.
Which of us was scratched?
"Mr. Pickett," she said. "Why are you telling me this?"
"Because he's coming."
"Who?"
"Dale." The boy's eyes were enormous. "Saturday. Midnight. He told me yesterday. He said, I want you in the car at eleven-thirty, outside her house, with the lights off, and I want you to keep watch. He said he'd go in alone. He said it'd be quick."
"What would be quick?"
"He didn't say." He licked his lips. "He said, by morning it'll be over. He said, she's going to do something stupid. A woman in her state. We'll find her in the kitchen."
"He said that?"
"He said, a sad thing." Pickett began to cry. He did it quietly, with his chin on his chest, in the tan shirt, like a boy in church. "I don't want to. I swear, I don't, I can't. I've got Maddie. I've got Kayla. I'm not going to sit in a car and keep watch while he, I won't. I'd rather he fired me. I'd rather he shot me."
"He might."
"I know."
She sat very still. She was thinking, with a cold, steady, rapidly turning clarity, of what a man like Dale Sutter would do. He was careful. He did not leave things to chance. He would not come in a cruiser. He would come on foot, from the next street, in dark clothes, with a pair of gloves. He would let himself in by the back, through the kitchen window, which had not latched properly since the spring. He would be quiet. He had been quiet all his life. He would find her at the table, in the lamplight, and he would say something kind.
And in the morning, they would find a young woman in her kitchen, in her pyjamas, with a gun in her hand, beside a note.
I'm sorry. I couldn't carry it any longer.
She knew the words. She could have written them herself. She had once been asked to.
"Saturday," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
"That's the day after tomorrow."
"Yes."
"What time did he say?"
"Midnight." Pickett wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "Ma'am. I know it's a lot to ask. But if I, if I helped you. If I told Agent Ames. If I testified. Do you think they'd, would I be, I mean, would I go to prison?"
She looked at him.
She thought, this is a witness.
She thought, this is the second one I have been handed.
She thought of a church lot, and a Saint Christopher, and a blue Ford under a carport, and a phone lit in a dead man's lap. She felt, as she looked at the thin pale child in the tan shirt, a great cold wave of something that she could not name. It was not forgiveness. It was not pity. It was something much harder to carry, and it went through her like a wire.
Don't do it again.
Don't, don't, don't.
"Rick," she said. "I'm going to ask you to do something."
"Anything."
"Go home. Kiss your daughter. Don't come here on Saturday. Tell Dale you're sick."
"He'll know."
"Then tell him you saw me go out. That I left, at ten, in the Camry. That you followed me to a motel in Macon." She said it slowly. "Tell him I'm gone. Tell him he'll have to find me."
"Why?"
"Because I want him to come alone," said Corinne.
On Saturday night, at ten past eleven, she turned out all the lights in the house.
It was a clear, cold, still night, the first in a week without rain. A hard bright moon stood over the roofs of Dellwood Street, and the maple in the front yard threw a lattice of shadow across the lawn. The streetlight on the corner burned its steady white. A dog barked twice, and was silent.
She sat at the kitchen table.
She had thought about it for forty hours. She had done what she had been trained, for three years, to do: she had gone through it, step by step, in order, as one goes through a case file, looking for the place where the argument might fail. She had made a list. It was written on the back of an envelope, in her small flat capitals, and she had read it eleven times and burned it.
1. He will come through the back. 2. He will not shoot at once. He will want to talk. (He always wants to talk. It's his vanity. It is the thing he has in common with all of them.) 3. He will say something about Mason. 4. He will make it look like suicide.
5. I will not let him.
On the table in front of her, under the lamp that she had not lit, lay three objects. The first was the Taurus, loaded, with the safety off. The second was her phone, set to record, face down, with a thin wire running from it to a tiny microphone taped under the edge of the table. She had bought it in Macon, at a shop that sold things to private detectives, and she had not wanted to ask herself why.
The third was a legal pad.
She did not know why she had brought it out. She had taken it from her bag, that evening, a yellow one with EXHIBIT LOG printed across the top, and set it in front of her, in the dark, with a pen laid across it. She laid her hands on it. She did not write anything. She only sat with her fingertips resting on the cool paper, and felt, in the silence, the old calm come up through her palms.
I'm going to remember this, she thought. Whatever he says. Every word.
I'm going to be the witness.
The clock in the front room, which had stopped on the night of the second of March, stood at four minutes to twelve.
She waited.
He came at twelve-nine.
She heard nothing. That was the astonishing thing. She sat in the dark, in a hush so complete that she could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator and the tick of her own pulse in her ears, and she heard no footstep, no creak, no scrape of a window. There was only a very faint change in the air, a sort of softening, as if the house had breathed in.
And then, from the doorway, in a mild, quiet, pleasant voice:
"Ms. Bellamy."
She did not turn.
"I hope I didn't startle you."
"You didn't."
"I'm glad." A small, soft footfall on the linoleum. "I wanted to be sure I did this right. I know it's late. I wouldn't ordinarily, but I thought we ought to talk."
"Sit down, Lieutenant."
"I'll stand. If you don't mind."
"As you like."
"It's an old habit." He moved a little further into the room. She could see him now, from the corner of her eye, a tall slim shape in a dark jacket, with his gloved hands loose at his sides, and a pale oval of face above the collar. He was not wearing his uniform. He looked, in the dim light from the window, like a very polite burglar. "You've got something on the table."
"A legal pad."
"Is it on?"
"It's paper. It doesn't have a switch."
"I meant the other thing."
She did not answer.
"The phone," said Dale Sutter, kindly. "Under the edge. I noticed it when I came in. It's a nice little device. A lot of the private-eye shops carry them. I've got one myself." He smiled. She could hear it in his voice. "I'm not going to take it. I want you to know that. I'd like you to keep it running. I think it would be good for both of us to have a record."
"Why?"
"Because I'm tired of being the only man in this county who doesn't."
She turned her head.
He had come to stand at the end of the table, with his back to the window. The moon was behind him. She could not see his face, only the shape of his head, and the glint of something on his nose. He was wearing glasses.
Glasses.
He wasn't wearing glasses.
In the courtroom, in 2020. He touched his nose.
"You wear glasses," she said.
"For driving. I'm very nearsighted." He took them off, and folded them, and put them in his breast pocket. "I don't wear them in public. A man in uniform is supposed to see clearly. It's a vanity."
"In the courtroom. In August of 2020. You touched your nose."
He laughed softly.
"You noticed that."
"I wrote it down."
"Of course you did." He sounded delighted. "I wondered if you would. It was for Moss. Caleb. He used to, he had a tell, when he was frightened. He'd touch the bridge of his nose. I'd taught him that, in a way. I told him, years ago, when you want to say you're sorry, do that. He did it to me, in the kitchen, that night, before I hit him. And I did it back. In court. It was a message. It said, I remember what you are, and I'm watching."
"A threat."
"A reminder." He tilted his head. "Do you know why Caleb Moss didn't testify?"
"He ran."
"He ran. Because I made sure he understood that if he opened his mouth, a number of other things would come out. About him." He shrugged. "It's a funny thing. Boys like Caleb. They're so good. They want so badly to be good. And it makes them so easy."
"What other things?"
"I'll tell you, if you like."
"Tell me."
"I will." He drew a chair from under the table. He did not sit. He rested his hands on its back, and leaned a little over it, in the pale light, a long, courteous, elegant figure. "But first, Ms. Bellamy, I'd like to explain what's going to happen. I think it's only fair. I think you've been very brave, and a good deal cleverer than I gave you credit for, and I'd like to be honest."
"You're going to kill me."
"I'm going to take care of you."
"That's what you call it."
"It's what I've always called it." He said it simply. "It's what I did for Owen's father, when he had the trouble with the building inspector. It's what I did for the girl, in nineteen-ninety-eight, who was going to talk to a reporter. It's what I did for you, in June of 2019, when I came back to the house at four in the morning with the sheriff, and found you gone."
"You took care of it."
"I took care of everything. That's the job." He lifted a hand, in a mild, deprecating gesture. "You don't understand what it is, to be the one who holds it together. It's not glamorous. It's not even evil. It's just, someone's got to. The Pruitts are good people. They give to the hospital. Grant Senior has built half this county. And a man like that can't be allowed to be destroyed by a, by a mistake. A silly boy's mistake. A party."
"A hundred and eleven parties."
"A tradition."
"You drugged me."
"I relaxed you."
"You were going to put me in the lake."
"I was going to handle it." His voice sharpened, for the first time. "I was going to do what had to be done. And then somebody took you. And I've spent five years wondering who."
She said nothing.
"I'll tell you what I think," said Dale. "I think it was Moss."
Her pulse jumped.
"He was the only one who had the, he was soft. He'd have done it. He went upstairs, after I took him out. I thought he'd gone home. I thought he'd driven off. But somebody moved a car, I heard it, later, at about four. A truck, on the gravel. And when I came back, you were gone, and so was a blanket, and so was he." He tapped his fingers on the back of the chair. "He never said. I never asked. I knew he'd, I knew what he'd do, if I did. And I thought, let him think he's saved her. Let him think he's clean. A boy like that will pay for it all his life."
Caleb.
The name went into her like a nail.
It was Caleb.
He picked me up.
He carried me out.
He drove me to Old Mill Road.
She thought of a hand, a warm one, under her knees, and a green blanket, and a smell of woodsmoke and beer and soap. She had remembered it, a dozen times, in a dozen dreams, and had never been able to say whose it was. She had told herself it was the milk truck driver. She had told herself it was nothing.
She was sitting at her own kitchen table, in the dark, with the thing that had been missing from her story laid out on it, plain and entire, like a bone on a plate.
He called nine-one-one.
He moved me.
He is the fifth.
He is also the one who came back.
She could not hold the two together. She tried. They would not meet. They lay in her mind side by side, a man with his hands round Owen's throat, screaming get off her, and a man in the doorway, twenty minutes later, looking at the room, and coming in.
Which?
Both.
"Where is he?" she said.
"Savannah."
"Where?"
"I'm afraid I can't tell you that." He smiled. "Not yet. I'm driving down on Monday. I've known where he was for two years. I thought it was best to let him alone. A man like that is more useful frightened. But I think the time has come to, I think he's become a risk. He's been in touch with a lawyer. A woman at the Georgia Innocence Project." He sighed. "It's very sad. I'd hoped he'd be wiser."
"You'll kill him too."
"I'll see what's best."
She said nothing. Her hand, on the legal pad, had gone very cold.
"I'm sorry," said Dale Sutter. "I'd have preferred a different ending. I'd have preferred that you'd married a nice man and moved to Atlanta. But it's the way it's gone." He reached into his jacket. "There's something I need you to do for me. Just one small thing. I need you to put your hand on the table, flat, and keep it there."
"No."
"Please."
"I said no."
"Ms. Bellamy." He sighed. A black shape came out of the jacket, small, flat, and neat, and rested lightly against the back of the chair. "I do have a young son. I'd like to get home to him. I do hope you'll be reasonable."
Mason, she thought.
She saw him. She could not help it. A round-cheeked boy in a sailor suit, with a cowlick, looking up at the world with a face full of wonder, and she thought, this man's child.
He did not ask for any of it.
"You wouldn't make a boy an orphan," said Dale.
He said it softly. He said it gently, with an air of real regret, as a man says something he does not wish to have to say. And she understood that it was a gift. It was a final, courteous, calculated gift, laid on the table between them, as a cat lays a bird at the door. He knew exactly what he was doing. He had known she would see the child. He had wanted her to.
He is counting on it.
He's counting on my mercy.
"Somebody made one of me," she said.
She did not know that she had said it until it was out. It was quiet and quite flat. She heard it in the room, like a stone dropped in a well.
"I'm sorry?"
"Somebody made one of me." She looked at him. She could see his eyes now. They were pale and clear and unalarmed. "When I was seventeen. A man died, in my house, and I found him. And everybody was very kind. Everybody said, she's only a child. And I thought, somebody did that to me. Somebody made it so that I'd have to be the one."
"That's not the same."
"It's exactly the same."
"I didn't—"
"No. You didn't. That's why I'm telling you." She drew a slow breath. "I'm not going to put my hand on the table."
"Then I'll have to—"
"Say please."
He stopped.
"Say it," said Corinne.
He stared at her. In the dim light, she saw his face change. It did not become angry. It did not become afraid. It became, for a moment, quite blank, quite empty, as though a very old and very reliable piece of machinery had encountered an instruction it did not recognize.
"I don't understand," he said.
"I know."
She moved.
She did not plan it. She had not rehearsed. It was the oldest thing in her, older than the counting, older than the law, a thing her body had learned in a gap in the record, in a room with no light: she dropped, off the chair, to the floor, and rolled, and her hand found the cold plain butt of the Taurus under the lip of the table where she had taped it, and the room went white.
There were two sounds. One was very loud and flat. The other was louder.
Something struck her left arm like a hammer.
She was on her back on the linoleum, with the table above her and the chair rocking where she had left it, and a long thin pain running from her shoulder to her fingers, and she was pointing the gun at the ceiling. She did not remember firing. She was breathing in short hard gasps.
"Oh," said Dale Sutter, from somewhere above her. "Oh, that's, you've."
She rolled onto her side.
He was standing quite still, at the end of the table, with the little black pistol hanging in his right hand. He was looking down at himself with an expression of mild, puzzled, scientific interest. There was a dark, spreading stain on the front of his jacket, low, just beneath the ribs.
"I think you've hit me," he said.
"Don't move."
"I'm not." He swayed. He took a step back, and the chair fell, and he caught himself against the counter. The gun slid from his fingers and rattled across the floor. "That's, it's a lot more, I always thought it'd be, quicker."
"Put your hands up."
"I can't." He sounded surprised. "I'm, my arm's, it's very heavy."
She got to her knees. She was holding the Taurus in her right hand, and the left hung useless, hot and wet. She could see him quite clearly now in the thin light of the moon, a pale, neat, flat-faced man in a dark jacket, sliding slowly down the front of the cabinet, with his glasses sticking out of his pocket and his hair a little mussed.
"Dale."
"I'm all right."
"I'll call an ambulance."
"You won't." He smiled. It was an astonishingly sweet smile. It was the smile of a man who has been told a joke he finds, on reflection, rather good. "You'd have to explain."
"I'll say it was self-defense."
"It was." He closed his eyes. "I'll say so. If anybody asks."
"You're, I'll call, Dale, I'll—"
"Ms. Bellamy."
"What?"
"Tell my wife," said Dale Sutter, very faintly, "that the, that Mason's, in the, the blue pajamas. I put him to bed in the, he likes the, it's the one with the, with the rocket."
She stood there.
She did not move. She did not breathe. Her arm was running with blood, and her ears were ringing, and the whole kitchen swam in a thin grey haze of smoke. She stood with the gun in her hand and looked at the man on the floor, and she thought, very clearly: I could still call.
I could do it right now.
I could say, a man broke into my house.
She did not dial.
It was a thing she would think about for a long time. In the cell, in the court, in the years of waiting. She would turn it over and over, like a stone in her pocket, and ask herself why. She could have saved him. She had known, as soon as she saw the stain, that it was not a mortal wound, that a man in a hospital within twenty minutes would very probably live. She could have knelt on the floor and pressed a cloth to it.
She did not.
She stood in her kitchen for the length of time it takes a man to bleed, and she watched Dale Sutter stop, and she did not call.
At twelve-nineteen by the stopped clock in the front room, which did not tell the time, she walked to the table, and took the phone from under its edge, and turned off the recording. She wrapped her arm in a dish towel. She took her coat from the chair.
She was on the porch when she saw the headlights.
They were small, and dim, and swung into the street from the far end, slowly, like the lights of a car whose driver is not sure of the address. They stopped under the water oak. The engine cut. A door opened.
Rick Pickett stood in the road in the moonlight, in his uniform, with one hand on the roof of the Chevrolet, and looked at her across thirty yards of empty lawn.
She stood very still.
He did not have his gun out. She saw that. He had both hands in plain view, open, empty, one on the car, one at his side, and he stood in the middle of Dellwood Street with his thin neck and his Adam's apple and his ironed shirt, as a man stands who has driven forty miles to say something and has forgotten the speech.
"I heard," he said, "I heard a, I was parked at the end. I heard two. Ma'am. Is he."
She nodded.
He closed his eyes. His lips moved. She could not tell if he was praying.
"I couldn't stay home," he said, in a whisper. "I tried. I got as far as the, I got to my daughter's room, and I stood there. And I thought, if it's, if he comes and, if he does, and nobody's there." His voice broke. "I thought somebody ought to see."
"Rick."
"I saw it." He opened his eyes. They were wet, and wide, and quite steady. "I want you to know that. I saw him go in. Through the window. At twelve-oh-nine. I saw him take the gun out. I was across the street. I've got a, I wrote it down. Time and, and everything." He lifted the green notebook. His hand shook. "I'll say. If anybody asks. I'll say he came in with a weapon, and, and, and he fired first."
"Did he?"
"I don't know," said Pickett. "I didn't see that part. I only heard." He swallowed. "But I'll say it. If it's true. If it is, I'll say it was."
She stood on the porch, with her blood dripping off her fingertips onto the boards, and looked at him.
A witness, she thought.
The third.
And this time I'm not going to kill him.
It was not a promise. It was a fact. It stood in her mind with the plain dumb heaviness of a thing that has always been true.
"Go home," she said.
"What?"
"Go home, Rick. Put the notebook in a safe place. Give it to Agent Ames. Tell him what you saw." She heard her own voice, flat and steady and cold. "Don't tell him where I went."
"Where are you going?"
"To find somebody."
"Who?"
She went down the steps. She crossed the lawn, in her bloody coat, with her ruined arm held against her chest, and passed within ten feet of him, close enough to smell the baby powder on his sleeve, and the cold, and the fear.
"The only one," said Corinne Bellamy, "who ever tried."
She got into the Camry. She put the key in the ignition. In the rearview mirror, she saw the boy in the road lift one hand, slowly, in a gesture that was not quite a wave, as if to say wait.
She did not wait.
She drove away, down Dellwood Street, past the corner, past the streetlamp, which shone, as it always did, its steady white, as though nothing had happened at all.
Behind her, in the empty kitchen, on a table in the dark, a small black phone lay on its side beside a dead man's glasses, and a yellow legal pad, and a phone that had gone on recording for six minutes and nine seconds, in the dark, in the empty room, while a woman who had once meant to be a lawyer built her own exhibit, word by word.
I don't understand, it said.
And beneath it, in a different type, a different pressure:
Say please.