Key Witness (41 page)

The honesty was still there, but now there were doubts in that face, and lines on it. Lines around her eyes, from worrying about everything, him especially. Her cheeks sagged some and her neck wasn’t as firm.

She was a forty-year-old woman. Who had led a hard life, in great part because of him. Which was her problem, not his.

“You look pretty good,” he said. “Ol’ Man Time ain’t been so cruel to you.” He smiled tightly, without his lips parting.

“You look the same,” she replied. “You haven’t changed at all, it looks like.”

“Nope. I don’t figure I have.”

It’s true, she thought. He hasn’t changed. All the years in jail haven’t touched him. He still looks like the devil. When you have no conscience you never have anything to worry about.

“This is a surprise,” he said. “How did you know I was here?”

“Your name was mentioned in the newspapers.”

“So you decided to come down and visit me, for old-timey sake.”

She shook her head. “I hoped to never see you again,” she stated as matter-of-factly as her voice would allow. “I’ve always assumed that would be the case.” All the pain, anger, and sorrow had long since drained from her, leaving a feeling—when she had one, which was almost never—of emptiness and regret that they had even been connected, in any way. “No. I came down, first to make sure it was you—I couldn’t believe it when I heard it and I had to know for sure—and second, because I’ve got a stake in this.”

“What stake could you have?”

“The last woman this boy was arrested for killing was one of my closest friends.” She looked away for a moment before turning back to him. “I was the last person to see her alive.” She paused. “And I was the only person who saw him where she was killed, only a few minutes before … before he did it.”

Son of a bitch!
“What goes around comes around,” he said blandly.

She felt like breaking down and crying, so she took another deep breath to make sure she didn’t. Crying in front of him was unacceptable to her. She would rather walk away from the whole mess before she did that; and she couldn’t, she had to hang in with this. “Yes,” she said. “In a macabre way it must.”

“Well,” he crowed. “Well, well, well. Your girlfriend got killed and I’m the boy got the confession out of her killer. I’m the one’s going to pull the switch on him. That’s why you came down here. Isn’t it?”

“Yes. I had to know.”

“That I was the one?”

“That. And that it really happened. He really did tell you he killed her. And the other women.”

Dwayne pointed above his head. “They got his chocolate ass in maximum, maximum security upstairs, so I guess he did tell me. Otherwise, how would they have known? He doesn’t talk in his sleep—not that I’d have any firsthand knowledge of that.”

“What I want to know … what I need to know,” she said, “is that he did it.”

“He did it.”

She nodded. “You’ve done this before. Gotten men to confess to crimes.” She knew his history.

“That’s why I’m down here for now—I just finished testifying in a trial of a man who committed murder and confessed the crime to me. I’m the state’s key witness. They love my ass down here.”

Nobody loves your ass, Dwayne, she thought bitterly. Nobody loves any part of you. There’s nothing there to love.

He looked around, checking to make sure nobody was listening in. “Does anybody know about you and me?” he asked.

“No.” She cut him off. “No one knows.”

“That’s good. ’Cause that could complicate things.”

She knew that. She’d known that coming in. It was a bizarre twist, the connection between them, possibly a disastrous one. “I’ve thought about that.”

He leaned forward on his elbows, his face almost touching the scratched-up chicken-wire-supported double-thick glass. “It would be best if we keep this between us,” he said softly. “Our secret.”

“I agree,” she answered hastily. God! how she hated this man, and how utterly petrified she was of him.

“If it got out, it could screw things up.”

“I know.”

“Nobody has to know.”

“Yes. Nobody has to know.”

A buzzer went off. “Thirty seconds,” from a guard’s voice that came over a speaker.

“I have to go,” she said.

He stared at her. “I’m glad you came.”

She stared back. “I don’t think I am.” Thinking about that, she added, “I’m not.”

He smiled his cobra smile. “Yeah, I can feature that, given everything that’s gone down between us.” The smile widened. “But that’s in the past now. I can’t hurt you from in here—I can only help you.” Pointing his left index finger at the center of her forehead, he said, “You’re coming back again—aren’t you. Now that you know that I know you’re out there, you’re not going to be able to stay away.”

He leaned back in his chair, arms folded against his chest, staring at her as if to say, “You want me to make this good for you, you’re going to have to do something for me.” Aloud, the words were, “I want to see you again, Violet. I don’t have much else going for me in this world.”

She closed her eyes. Seeing him again was impossible, but avenging her friend’s murder was imperative.

She did the only thing she could. “Yes, Dwayne,” she lied. It was all right to lie—he always did. “I’ll be back again.”

T
HE TWELVE-PASSENGER TURBOPROP
touched down at the Springfield, Missouri, airport. Wyatt picked up the keys to his rental Chevy Cavalier at the Avis counter and drove east on U.S. 60, heading into the Missouri section of the Ozarks.

It was a picture-perfect spring day. Everything was in riotous bloom—the smells of dogwood, peach blossom, apple blossom hung heavy in the thick, humid air. The weather was normal for the time of year—humongously sticky—but he rolled the windows open and turned the air-conditioning off, to better savor the scenery with all of his senses.

The instructions were spread out on the passenger seat. According to the lawyer, with whom he’d had a long conversation over the phone two nights earlier, the drive time from the airport to the farm entrance was a leisurely hour. Past Winona he turned south, heading into the hills. The stands of trees grew thicker, the vegetation denser, the road narrowed, twisting and turning through the low pine-covered range. Then it was a right turn at a red, white, and blue mailbox with the name
Bollinger
stenciled on one side and a Zig Zag pirate’s face on the other. Prominent No Hunting, No Trespassing, Keep Off signs were posted on either side of the hard-packed gravel road that led up a twisting mile through the lawyer’s property, until his house was seen around a bend, sitting pretty in a sunny clearing. Wyatt noticed a satellite dish tucked around the corner of the house.

Three mangy, snarling dogs came tear-assing around the side of the house as Wyatt’s car announced his entrance. They jumped up on the driver’s-side door, barking loudly enough to wake the dead (should there be any dead within earshot). Two of them, Australian collie mixes, looked more bark than bite, but the third, who had some shepherd and some Doberman and probably some pit bull in him as well, was a serious-business kind of dog who would eagerly take a piece out of your ass or ankle. That dog didn’t bark as much as he snarled and growled, leaping up against the side of the car as if to knock it over and pluck out the morsel that was inside.

Wyatt stayed put. He should take this mutt home with him—Moira was so obsessed with protection these days. Except this one’s pedigree wouldn’t fit with their neighborhood.

A moment later their owner shambled out the front door. He was wearing Levi’s cutoffs, scuffed-up hiking boots that had years of wear and tear on them, and an orange tie-dyed sleeveless T-shirt with a picture of Jimi Hendrix on the front. His dark hair was long, hanging lank over his shoulders, and he had a Harley-Davidson skull-and-bones earring dangling from his left ear. A can of Pearl beer was grasped in one hand and a double corona cigar, dark maduro wrapper, in the other. Knowing some of his history, Wyatt figured he was around forty.

Transferring the cigar to the beer hand, the man put two fingers into his mouth and whistled. The dogs stopped barking and sat down on their haunches, their pink sweaty tongues lolling out the sides of their mouths.

“They aren’t going to bother you, long as I’m around,” Bollinger called out to Wyatt. “You can come on out, it’s safe.”

Gingerly, Wyatt opened the door, ready to slam it shut if any of the mutts made a move. They sat there, panting like they’d run a marathon, dog-grinning up at him as he cautiously made his way past them and approached their owner.

“Wyatt Matthews.” He offered his hand.

“Brent Bollinger.” The lawyer’s hand was hard, callused, dirty.

“I appreciate your inviting me down here.”

Bollinger smiled. “Happy to have you. The name Dwayne Thompson makes my ears perk up real fast. You want to know about Dwayne Thompson, I can tell you a thing or three.”

The house was vaguely Southern Colonial in style, on a smallish scale. “Nice house,” Wyatt commented, a break-the-ice compliment.

“I brought it to the site in pieces, assembling it over a period of several years. Now I live in it full-time,” Bollinger explained.

Wyatt nodded his appreciation of the task.

“My wife teaches elementary school, and both my kids go there,” he informed Wyatt. “Third and fifth grades.” They were sitting on the back porch, which ran the length of the rear of the house and was roofed against the sun. “It’s five miles the other direction from which you came.” He pointed south. “Ten miles after that you’re in Arkansas. It’s a long ten miles.” He smiled. “We think of them as poor white trash. We, on the other hand, are rural aristocrats.”

Wyatt had passed up the offer of a beer for a Coke. In a glass, with ice. He sucked on an ice cube. “How did you wind up here?” he asked. It was an obvious question, but he wanted to know. He was curious, and he was also on guard. Bollinger had information about Dwayne Thompson—Wyatt knew that for a fact—and why a former prosecuting attorney was now living like a country hippie twenty miles from the end of nowhere could color what he told Wyatt about Thompson.

“I was at loose ends when I stopped working for the state,” Bollinger began, “and I didn’t know if I wanted to practice law anymore. I knew I didn’t want to be a prosecutor. Mostly, what I wanted was some space. And time. I needed to think, figure my life out. We had this property—it’s been in my wife’s family five generations—so I figured this was as good a place as any to drop out and sort things out. And it was a good change for the kids, growing up in semiurban surroundings all their lives.”

This could be me, Wyatt thought, if the angst had hit me a decade earlier. Although Moira wouldn’t be part of this equation. Their house was as far from a center of population as she would ever want to live.

“It’s turned out okay,” Bollinger went on. “I’m practicing law again, for the other side, like you. Two or three cases a year, in and around Springfield. Enough to keep me busy, pay for the groceries, put a little aside for a rainy day. When I go into court I throw on my old Ivy League charcoal gray, trim up the locks, take this out”—he fingered his earring—“and I’m a respectable citizen. Respectable enough to pass muster round here. The rest of the time”—he spread his arms wide—“I’m a happy farmer. And father.”

“Criminal defense?” Wyatt asked.

Bollinger nodded. “Drug cases. Beaucoup marijuana grown in this part of the country, friend. One of your major cash crops.”

The word Wyatt had on Bollinger was that the man was a renegade, a former straitlaced, hard-nosed prosecuting attorney who had gone native. Passed over to the other side, now more antiestablishment than his clients in both lifestyle and behavior. From what Wyatt had seen so far, that assessment seemed accurate.

“What was it that made you leave the prosecutor’s office?” Wyatt asked.

“Hypocrisy. And other, more nefarious sins.” Bollinger stood up. “Let’s take a walk.”

From the edge of Bollinger’s cleared property a couple of footpaths had been broken over the years into the thick woods. Wyatt followed Bollinger through stands of oak, birch, ash, pine. Mostly pine. He was dressed in light clothes, khakis and a cotton polo shirt, but the humidity was fierce, and he was sweating like a bandit. Rivulets of water ran down his armpits and torso. The only saving grace was that the trees were so thick they formed a canopy overhead that protected them from direct sunlight.

“A little bit farther,” Bollinger called out over his shoulder. “Watch out for the poison ivy,” he cautioned, pointing at some shiny leaves at the side of the path.

Wyatt felt like he was in a tropical rain forest in some exotic locale like Belize or Ecuador. Birds of bright plumage flew overhead, screaming and chattering in a cacophonous din. Insects assaulted him—he swatted at mosquitoes, flying ants, gnats.

“Bear scat.” Bollinger pointed to a pile of dung at the side of the trail. “They’ve been out of hibernation about a month now, so it’s safe to walk through here. The first couple of weeks they come out, you don’t want to be around. They’ll eat anything that moves or grows from tree bark to ants to you or me.”

They had been walking about forty minutes, a steady low-grade uphill climb that led them farther and farther away from civilization. Rounding one more corner, they came to a semicleared area that was hidden from the sky by tall pines. Four-foot-high stalks, spaced closely and evenly, filled the space, about half an acre square.

“Holy shit!” Wyatt exclaimed.

“It’s holy, and it is great shit,” Bollinger agreed.

A man came from under a protective stand of birchs at the far end of the clearing. He was young, in his twenties, wearing a battered John Deere hat and Sears overalls. Long hair and a rock ’n’ roll goatee wreathed his face, so that the only thing showing was his black, wary eyes. A 12-gauge shotgun was draped over his forearm.

“Hey, Brent,” the shotgun wielder called out in a deep Southern accent, relaxing his vigilance.

“Hey your own self,” Bollinger sang out in return. “Say hello to a friend of mine, who shall be nameless to you as you shall be to him.” He plucked a bud from the top of one of the plants and ground it up between his palms. Inhaling deeply, he held his palms under Wyatt’s nose.