One Summer (30 page)

“So you noticed nothing unusual about either his demeanor or his clothes?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay. After you picked him up, what happened?”

“Why, I drove him to his apartment.”

“What time did you arrive, do you think?”

“About midnight, probably.”

“And what happened then?”

“He went inside. And I went home.”

“He went inside his apartment at about midnight? Did you actually see him enter?”

“I saw him climb the stairs.”

“All right. Let me go over this to see if I understand it correctly. Stop me if I get anything wrong. Mrs. Watkins called you at eleven to pick Harris up because she thought he was too drunk to drive his motorcycle home. You drove out there, arriving about eleven thirty, and ran Harris off
the road in front of the trailer park. He left his motorcycle there, got in the car with you, and you drove him to his apartment, arriving about midnight. Is that essentially accurate?”

“Yes.”

“Then I have just one more question for you. When you were picking Harris up, did you actually set eyes on Glenda Watkins?”

“Why, yes. I did. Not to speak to, but I saw her from a distance, standing out in front of what I assumed was her trailer, as I first approached the trailer park. When I came around the bend in Manslick Road.”

“You saw her? Are you sure?” He sat abruptly upright, his eyes sharpening on her face, his hands moving to rest palms down on the desk.

“Why, yes.”

“You’re sure it was her?”

Rachel nodded, surprised at his sudden intensity, then said, “Yes. I’m sure.”

“What was she doing? Was she—did she seem—all right?”

“From what I could see, she seemed fine. She was standing in front of the trailer, staring off down the road in the direction I was coming from.”

“How soon after that did you almost hit Harris’s motorcycle?”

“Why, right away. Less than a minute, I’d say.”

“Rachel, think. This is important. Did Harris ever, at any time after his motorcycle ran off the road, get out of your sight?”

Rachel thought, then shook her head. “No. Why? What’s happened? Is it—has something happened to Johnny?” A straightforward charge like drunken driving wouldn’t merit the game of twenty questions the chief and she were playing, or his humorless demeanor, Rachel realized. It was something else, she very much feared. Something very bad.

Chief Wheatley sighed, and some of the stiffness went out of his spine. He reached over and clicked off the tape recorder.

“Mrs. Watkins was murdered last night.”

Rachel gasped. “What?”

The chief nodded grimly. “And that’s not the worst of it. The crime is almost an exact replica of the Edwards case, down to the flowers strewn over the body. Only in this case, they were roses, not summersweet blossoms. Taken from a garden nearby.”

“Glenda Watkins was
murdered
?” Disbelief and shock combined to make Rachel’s voice crack on the last word.

“Stabbed thirteen times. Sometime between eleven forty-five and ten after twelve, which is when her son went out to look for her. He said he saw something moving in the dark, so he got scared and ran back inside and locked the door and called a neighbor. The neighbor went to check and found the body.”

“Oh, my God!” Rachel felt sick with horror.

“Just like the last time. Johnny Harris was seeing both women, and he was the last person to see the victim alive.”

Rachel, still in shock, absorbed this, then shook her head. “No, he wasn’t—I was. I saw her standing there, and he had just left. On his motorcycle. I saw her after Johnny had already left, do you understand? He could not have killed her.”

Chief Wheatley slowly nodded. “That’s right. If you are absolutely sure it was Glenda Watkins you saw.”

“I’m sure.”

“Sure enough to testify to it under oath, in court?”

“Yes. I am absolutely sure. She was standing in a pool of lamplight, and I saw her clearly.”

Chief Wheatley pursed his lips, steepled his hands, and looked down at them, then up at her again, his eyes penetrating.

“Rachel—Harris didn’t somehow get in touch with you,
ask you to say this, did he? If he did, tell me now, and it’ll stay between the two of us.”

Rachel stared at him, her eyes widening. “No!” she said, outraged. “No!”

“If that sounded insulting, then I’m sorry,” he said heavily. “But we’ve got a real nasty incident here, an incident that looks identical to the one that Harris was convicted of eleven years ago. Only this time he has an airtight alibi: you. So where does that leave us?”

“Johnny didn’t murder Marybeth Edwards! I knew it! I knew it all along!” Rachel was suddenly, fiercely exultant as her eyes met the chief’s.

He held up a hand. “Now, that’s just one possibility we have to consider. Another is that this is a copycat killing, designed to place the blame on Harris. There are three possible rationales with that theory. One, someone—like maybe her husband—wanted to get rid of Mrs. Watkins real bad and, with Harris out of prison, decided the easy thing to do would be to kill her and make it look like Harris did it. The second possibility is that someone hates Harris so much that they killed the woman he was dating so he would get sent back to prison, or worse. That would seem to point to one of Marybeth Edwards’s family or friends as the perpetrator. The third possibility—well, it’s a tough one.”

“Which means?”

“Which means that there’s a wild card out there. Someone out-of-his-head crazy, or with a motive that we haven’t latched on to yet. But we will. We definitely will.” There was bleak determination in the chief’s voice.

He stood up abruptly, looked at Rachel, hesitated, then leaned toward her, putting both his hands flat on the desk in front of him to support his weight.

“Rachel, I don’t mean to accuse you of lying. I’ve known you since you were a baby toddlin’ after your mama, and I’ve never known you to be anything but one hundred percent honest and morally upright. But I’ve got
two girls of my own, as you know. And I’ve seen what happens to young women when they fall under the spell of a man.”

Rachel, guessing where this was leading, opened her mouth to refute it with some indignation. The chief held up his hand to silence her.

“I wouldn’t even say this, except to warn you. You do realize that, if—just if—you should happen to be lying, you’ve placed yourself in the gravest possible danger. You are all that stands between Harris spending the rest of his life in prison, or maybe this time, without youth for a mitigating factor, the electric chair. I wouldn’t want to be in that position. Not with a man who could commit crimes like these.”

“I am not lying, chief,” Rachel said firmly.

The chief straightened. “All right. I certainly take you at your word, and we’ll start looking further afield for the perp. We’ve had some tests run on Mrs. Watkins that we’ll be comparing to Marybeth Edwards’s results. They’ve already been sent off to the lab, and we should know within a week to ten days whether we’re dealing with the same killer in both cases, or a copycat. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thank you.”

The chief came around his desk, heading toward the door. Rachel stood up and realized that the interview was at an end.

“Where are the children—Glenda Watkins’s children?” she asked. A lump formed in her throat at the idea of four little ones motherless. Jeremy and his mother had seemed so close.

“We called their dad first thing. He came and got ’em while we were still there investigating the crime scene. Oldest boy was plenty shook up. He kept saying he saw something in the dark. But he couldn’t tell us who, or what.” The chief shook his head. “This is bad business, damned bad business. We’re going to find whoever did this. I gave that kid, and I give you, my word on it.”

He held the door open for Rachel.

“Will you be wanting to collect Harris while you’re here, or should I tell him to walk home?”

Rachel, passing through the door in front of him, heard that with disbelief. She turned to face him.

“Are you telling me that Johnny is here?”

The chief nodded. “Yes, ma’am, I am. We picked him up about two this morning. He told the same story you did, but I wasn’t letting him go until I checked it out.”

“Well, you can just let him go! He did not kill Glenda Watkins!”

“So it seems,” the chief said heavily. “Wait out front, Rachel. I’ll see that he’s brought out.”

32

J
ohnny walked through the door that led from the back of the police station into the waiting area some fifteen minutes later. Rachel, who’d been leafing sightlessly through an old copy of
Field and Stream
, stood up. Johnny needed a shave, his hair was rumpled, and his face was haggard. From the jerkiness of his movements and the glitter in his eyes, it was clear that he was furious. A bruise was purpling on his left cheekbone, and a trickle of dried blood curled like a comma at the corner of his mouth.

“He’s been hurt,” she said in some surprise to Kerry Yates, who had followed him out and was keeping a cautious eye on Johnny’s taut back.

“Yeah, well, he resisted arrest. He’s lucky we’re not charging him with assault. He hit Skaggs pretty good.”

“Let’s go, Rachel,” Johnny said. A muscle worked in his jaw as he cast Kerry Yates a single murderous glance.

“But they hit you! You should file a complaint,” she said indignantly as he pulled her toward the door.

Johnny snorted. “Yeah, right. Just keep on living in the land of Oz, teacher. Out here in the real world, I’m lucky they didn’t shoot me and ask questions later.”

He opened the door for her, waited impatiently for her to walk through it, then followed her outside.

“But you didn’t do anything! They know that now! At the very least they owe you an apology!”

Johnny stopped and looked down into Rachel’s face, which was flushed with righteous anger on his behalf. They were standing in the parking lot at the foot of the shallow flight of concrete steps that led up to the door. The September sun was bright and hot, the sky an endless blue, and a lazy breeze just stirred the air.

“You’re so damned naive sometimes, I can’t believe it,” he said harshly. Releasing her arm, he strode off without her. For a moment Rachel wondered if he meant to head out for his apartment on foot. But he stopped at the car and got in.

When she got in, too, he was lying back in the seat with his eyes closed.

“They tell you about Glenda?” he asked as she started the car.

“Yes. It’s terrible. That poor woman. Those poor children.”

“Yeah.” He was silent. Pulling out into the street, Rachel glanced at him but said nothing. He looked utterly drained.

“She was a good girl. A good friend. I hate to think of her dying like that.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“So am I. Damned sorry. But it doesn’t do Glenda a hell of a lot of good.” His fists clenched, and suddenly he sat up, his eyes alive with anger and pain. “God, it must have happened right after I left! If I’d gone back instead of going off with you, I could have prevented it! At the very least, I might have caught the bastard in the act.”

“And maybe been killed yourself,” Rachel said quietly.

He shook his head. “Whoever this is, he’s into women. I doubt he’s got the nerve to tackle somebody big enough and strong enough to fight back.”

“So you think it’s the same person who killed Marybeth?”

“Yeah. I don’t put much stock in copycats. In a town the size of Tylerville, what are the odds on there being two people that sick?”

“You have a point.”

They had reached the hardware store, and Rachel turned in and parked. Johnny reached for the door handle, looked over at Rachel, and hesitated. When he spoke, there was a gentleness to his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“You look real pretty. You going to church?”

“I was.”

“There’s still time. If you hurry.”

Rachel met the smoky blue eyes, saw the loneliness and hurting and need there, and gave a delicate little shrug. “I haven’t missed church in nearly ten years. I suppose one time can’t hurt.”

“Spend the day with me?”

“I’d like that.”

Johnny smiled, a slow, sweet smile that pierced Rachel clear through to the heart. She realized something then, something that had been hovering on the edges of her consciousness but which just at that moment took on concrete shape. Even though she had defended him, even though she had been positive in her own mind that Johnny had not killed Marybeth Edwards, she had always harbored just the tiniest sliver of doubt. Now that doubt had gone, vanished completely. He was innocent, as innocent as she.

Rachel felt as if her heart had suddenly been set free.

They spent the day together and by unspoken, mutual agreement refused to talk or even think of the hideous event that had occurred so near them the night before. Rachel went in with him and was reluctantly reintroduced to Wolf, who didn’t seem a bit more disposed to like her on this occasion than the last. With Wolf watching her with wary disapproval, Rachel waited while Johnny took a shower. When he emerged from the bathroom with a
towel wrapped around his waist, she went into his arms. It was the first time they’d ever made love with both of them naked, in a bed.