Bad To The Bone (20 page)

I booked a seat on a Tampa-bound plane
leaving RDU on Monday afternoon. I would need the weekend to set my
plan in motion. The fare cost me most of my savings. But no one
ever said revenge was cheap. I could only hope they'd give me two
bags of peanuts for my four hundred dollars.

Anger, frustration and fear fueled my energy
all the way to the front door of the Wake County jail later that
afternoon. I left my hangover behind in the cold, but I still
looked crummy. Robert Price looked worse.

Prison had changed him. The uniform—a bright
orange jumpsuit—reduced him to nothing more than an
all-too-familiar stereotype: another black man in jail. Gone was
any dignity. Gone was any sense of who he had once been. He could
have been a rapist, a drug dealer, a murderer or a thief. That
jumpsuit didn't care and, I suspected, neither did the guards who
brought him in to me.

He sat down across the table and didn't
bother to say hello. He stared at me so long I began to wonder if
he remembered who I was. He seemed like a stranger. Even his face
looked different, darker and angrier. His hair was disheveled and
bulged out on the right side.

I don't know what it was, maybe the contrast
between who he had been and who he was right then, or maybe it was
just the unfairness of it all, but I felt as sick to my stomach as
I had earlier that day.

"I believe you," was all I could think of to
say.

His expression flickered. "That makes two of
us." His voice was hoarse from worry. "All my lawyer wants to talk
about is cutting a deal."

"I looked into Tawny's background. You're
right. She's evil."

"Where's my daughter?" he interrupted. Tears
welled up in his eyes and he looked at the floor. "Have you found
out where she's taken Tiff?"

"No, but I have a lead. I think they may be
in Florida."

He looked at me, frightened. "Why
Florida?"

"There's a group of people there who
maintain a sort of underground railroad for abused women and their
kids. I think they've gone underground."

He didn't like that much. "She's not
abused," he said flatly.

"I know. But the people who run this
organization don't know that. It's a fundamentalist group. They're
violently anti-abortion, and they also protect women and children
who claim sexual or physical abuse but aren't believed by the
courts. The group takes them in and sends them to stay at homes in
Florida, Georgia, Alabama and I'm not sure where else. They also
help the women take on new identities."

"How do you know all this?" he asked,
looking even more alarmed.

“Tawny met my ex-husband outside my offices
one day," I explained. "In the very beginning, before all this
happened. When she was still planning it, down to her getaway. I
think she worked on my ex as a backup plan, then asked him to help
hide her when the frame-up of you began. This morning, I found my
former mother-in-law's phone number on Tawny's long-distance bill.
I think my mother-in-law hooked Tawny up with the underground.
She's been active in it for a long time. Makes her feel morally
superior to the rest of us. It's not like she gives a shit about
the people she's supposedly protecting."

His eyes grew wide with panic. "I'll never
find Tiff now," he said. "Not without your help. I don't care about
anything but my daughter. You have to bring Tiff back so she can be
raised by decent people if they keep me inside here."

Or if they put him to death. "I'll bring her
back," I promised. "I know what I need to do." I was silent for a
moment, remembering what it felt like to be inside. "I guess
they're giving you a pretty hard time."

"You guessed right." His voice was gruff.
"Half the Aryan Nation lives in my cell block and my own people
don't want anything to do with me. They think I'm an Oreo. I got a
crick in my neck from watching my back."

"Then you ought to be in isolation."

'Tell that to the guards." He glanced at the
man standing in the small interview room doorway. The guard looked
away, embarrassed.

"I'm going to help you get out of here," I
promised. "I'll find Tiffany, too, and bring her home to your
family. Who should I call?"

"My sister," he said, not sounding very
hopeful. "Bring her to my sister in Rocky Mount."

"I'll bring Tawny down, too," I promised.
"I'll prove she did it."

Price stared at his shackled hands. "Nobody
can do that. She's too smart."

"No, she's not. She's making mistakes. She's
snorting too much coke. It's making her sloppy."

Price looked up, alarmed. "She's doing drugs
around my baby?"

I nodded. "I'll find her in time. I
promise."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because I know how Tawny thinks," I
explained.

"Then I wouldn't want to be inside your
head."

"I'm one step ahead of her. I'll find a way
to stop her."

Price shook his head. He didn't believe
anything anymore. "She'll get away with it. She always does. She
did a good job of making me look bad."

"Look," I said more loudly, hoping to
convince him that I meant what I said. "I'm going to do more than
clear you. I'm going to prove she's guilty. You'll get your
daughter back and you'll get out of here. I promise you."

Something in his eyes flickered. Hope,
maybe, or just more fear. "All I care about is my daughter," he
repeated.

"Then you have to help me nail Tawny. I want
a favor from you. Or, rather, your lawyer." I told him what I
needed.

He didn't like it one bit. "What if she
takes it out on Tiffany?"

"She won't. Right now, public opinion is the
only thing keeping her from being questioned by the cops. Tawny
won't do anything to jeopardize that."

He didn't look convinced. "You don't know
her when she gets angry."

I thought back to my earlier phone call with
her. "Yes, I do. And I need her angry. It's the only way she'll
make mistakes."

"Okay," he agreed reluctantly. "I'll talk to
him and ask him to set it up."

"It will be good for you, too," I promised.
"Some people will believe us. You've helped a lot of people so far
in your lifetime. They'll stand by you."

His mouth curled. "You got a better view of
human nature than I do. Right now, it feels like everyone is
assuming I'm a killer."

"Not everyone," I said. "Look, I also need
to ask you some questions. They may be painful. But every little
thing you can tell me helps."

He nodded, waiting.

"When was the last time you talked to Tawny?
Was it that day at the beach when she took Tiffany from you?"

His mouth tightened at the memory. "No. She
stopped by my apartment the afternoon after that guy was killed. I
didn't even know about the murder yet. I thought she had Tiffany
with her, so I opened the door."

"But she was by herself?" I asked, wondering
if anyone else had been taking care of Tiffany at the time, or if
Tawny simply left her alone.

He nodded. "It was just her. She had some
stuff for me, sweaters, clothes and my old dop kit. Stuff I'd left
at our house when we separated, because I didn't get a chance to
take much at the time. She said I might want my stuff and she'd
trade it for the Barbie dolls and clothes that Tiffany left at the
beach house."

Bingo. The bitch wasn't half as smart as she
thought. Now I knew how Tawny had planted Price's hair and fibers
from his clothing in Boomer Cockshutt's car. She'd worn one of his
sweaters when she did the killing—or whoever she'd hired had—and
she'd gotten his hair from the toiletry kit she'd refused to let
him take when they first separated. Then she'd returned everything
to Price, just in time for the police to find them.

I shook my head, half in admiration at her
cunning. Simply to offer the items would have been too out of
character for Tawny and she knew it, so she'd thought up the Barbie
doll trade as a cover story.

"Didn't you think it was a little suspicious
that she was suddenly offering you these things back?" I asked.

"I was too angry to think. All I noticed was
that she didn't have Tiffany with her. I told her I was going to
the police if she didn't bring her back by the end of the weekend.
I had my court order and I said I would use it."

"What did she do?"

"She laughed and said that I ought to know
by now I'd never get the best of her." His fists clenched so hard
that his nails gouged into his palms.

"Did you give her the Barbie stuff?" I
asked.

He nodded. "Why should I punish my little
girl just because her mother's what she is?" His voice started to
crack. "At least I know Tiff has her favorite dolls with her right
now. A little bit of home, wherever she is."

"I'm sorry, but I have to ask this," I said.
"Why did you marry Tawny in the first place?"

"Isn't it obvious?" he answered
bitterly.

"Not to me. You seem smarter than that."

"I married her because she was having my
baby. And she was having my baby because I was stupid enough to
leave the birth control to her. I wasn't thinking at the time. My
wife and I were having trouble. When Tawny came along, I was dumb
enough to think I could have a fling to get me over my troubles and
then forget about it."

"But Tawny got pregnant?"

He nodded. "And wouldn't
have an abortion." His face softened. "I'd never have asked her to
get one, if I'd known I was talking about Tiffany. When Tawny
insisted on having the baby, I knew my wife would find out. She's
too smart not to know when something that big is going on. So I
came clean, and told her. She threw me out that same day, then
filed for divorce the next week. Linda doesn't screw around.
There's right and there's wrong in her book. You do wrong and
you're out of her life.
I didn't have any
place to go after she threw me out, I didn't know what to do. I'd
ruined a fifteen-year marriage by listening to my—" He stopped for
a second. "By not listening to my brain. Marrying Tawny seemed like
a way to make up for it. To make my stupid mistake seem better than
it really was."

"So, why—" I stopped, not quite knowing how
to put it.

"So why did Tawny marry me, right?" Price
guessed correctly. "I've had a lot of time to think about it in
here. And I think I know at least one reason why. Before me, Tawny
had been involved with some rich guy who had a lot of snobby
friends who didn't buy Tawny's blond hair and pearls. They thought
she was trash and they let her know it."

He shook his head. “He wouldn't marry her
and she blamed it on his friends. It was all she could talk about
for a long time. When she gets insulted, she does not let it go.
 So finally she just married me to send them a signal. You
know what I'm saying? I was nothing more than a big ‘fuck you’ to
all those people at the country club."

"How nice for you to have been used in that
way."

He shrugged. "I was using her, too. You
don't think that me marrying a blond woman wasn't sending a signal
to my first wife?" He looked up, eyes clear. "It's hard to hide in
this place. From other people. And it's even harder to hide from
yourself. But you wouldn't know that."

"I know more than you think. What made your
marriage to Tawny go bad?"

His expression hardened. "We'd been married
a couple years when she started in on me to use my position as a
county commissioner to rezone parcels of land," he explained. "She
was going to quit her job at the police department and make a
fortune in commercial real estate. At least that's what she
thought. If she could promise her clients that a prime piece of
land was going to be rezoned for commercial purposes in the near
future, she'd have closed dozens of sales a month. When I wouldn't
do that, she went bat shit and never forgave me. And when I told
her I wanted a divorce, hoo boy, she went ballistic. It didn't make
sense. Clearly she hated me. But she wanted to be the first one to
leave. I thought she'd come after me with a kitchen knife that
afternoon when I told her."

"Was Tawny having affairs when you were
still living together?" I asked.

"You're kidding me, right? What do you
think?"

"She was doing everyone from the mailman to
the mayor?"

He nodded. "That woman was hardly out of the
hospital from having Tiffany before she was catting around.
Probably did the doctor who delivered Tiff."

"I gather you were the one who first filed
for an official divorce?"

He nodded. "I'm man enough to admit it when
I make a mistake. I knew I had to get my daughter away from her
before she turned Tiff into what she is."

I thought back to what the court reporter
had told me about the custody proceedings. "I hear you brought her
ex-husband Joe Scurlock into court," I said. "That he was the
reason she agreed to joint custody without a fight."

"That's right."

"How did you know about him?" I asked.

"He called me. He said he'd read about me
filing for divorce in the public records section of the N&O and
that he wanted to warn me that she could get real ugly. When I
found out she had a son and a daughter with a fellow that I didn't
even know about, I couldn't believe it."

"Was that what Joe Scurlock was going to
tell the court?" I asked. "That Tawny had abandoned her first two
kids and not seen them in years?"

Price nodded. "My lawyer said it was all the
judge would need to hear. That I'd get full custody for sure."

"Yet you agreed to joint custody."

He looked up, angry. "Don't you get it,
yet?" he asked. "This is about my daughter and what I have to do to
give her a decent start in life. The shrink said she needed to be
around her mother, so I agreed to joint custody. And look where
that got me." He glanced around the desolate room.