The Long and Faraway Gone (26 page)

Crowley held her down, his knee on her chest. The weight crushed. Julianna fought to draw in a breath. Crowley used the torn plastic bag from Target to hold the gun while he wiped it clean with the tail of his plaid shirt. When he finished, he flung the gun into the lake. The splash sounded like a kiss.

He moved his knee off her chest. Julianna gulped air, but before she could move, Crowley straddled her and pinned her wrists above her head—­both of her wrists locked in one of his big hands. She kicked and twisted. With his free hand, he slapped her. When she screamed for help, he clamped his hand over her mouth. She tried to bite his palm, and he slapped her again.

“Stop it,” he said. “Look at me.”

She wouldn't. She focused on his tattoo. The blurred blue snake that wound around his thick forearm. She focused on Genevieve, standing off to the side, bemused and bored.

Genevieve shook her head.
Is this what you wanted all along, you idiot?

I don't know.

“Look at me,” Crowley said.

Julianna wouldn't. He sighed.

“Everything I told you's the truth,” he said. “I never touched your sister. I don't know what happened to her. I wish I did. She showed up, we had those few words, she turned around and left. That's all. She never even came inside. She didn't say where she was going, and she never came back. That's it. You understand?”

He's telling the truth, Juli. You idiot.

I know.

She knew. He had no reason to lie.

Crowley let go of her wrists and straightened up. He looked back out at the water.

“I wish she had come inside,” he said. His voice was quieter now, with a touch of something—­sadness, maybe, regret—­that Julianna hadn't heard before. “You never know, do you? She comes inside and listens to me play my guitar, maybe it all ends up all right for everybody.”

Life,
Julianna thought he meant. She didn't know if he was still playing with her or not.

He climbed to his feet. Slowly, in stages, wincing at each stage.

“I'm keeping your damn money,” he said. “We had a deal.”

Julianna lay on her back, staring up into the darkness. She listened to Crowley start his car. She listened to the engine fade as he drove away.

How could it be so quiet in the middle of a city? Oklahoma City without the wind was not Oklahoma City at all. She lay on her back, eyes open, and now, finally, she could hear it—­the cars on the highway a mile away. Just an occasional whisper, a soft hushing,
shhhhh, shhhhh.

 

S
unday morning, Wyatt's tour of Oklahoma City's authentic old-­school breakfast joints continued. La Oaxaqueña Bakery was just off Olie, on a stretch of SW Twenty-­ninth where the signs in Spanish far outnumbered those in English. The place was homey and unpretentious, with plastic tablecloths, ripped vinyl seats, and a tile mosaic on the wall of what appeared to be a Mayan god devouring a small human being. All that and a pastry case that boggled the mind.

Wyatt, running a few minutes late, looked around. Most of the tables were occupied by multigenerational Latino families and a few older ­couples. Only one person sat alone, a non-­Latina woman in a wheelchair, early fifties or so. Wyatt checked his watch and then noticed that the woman in the wheelchair was eyeing him. He realized that Brett Williams was a woman, a fact Haskell had failed to mention. Wyatt supposed he'd failed to ask.

He walked over. “Detective Williams?”

The woman nodded and motioned for Wyatt to sit. “Pardon me if I don't get up,” she said.

Wyatt smiled and sat. “Who says cops don't have a sense of humor?”

“I've been retired almost ten years. Call me Brett.”

She studied Wyatt, so he felt free to study her back. She had strong, square features and dark, shoulder-­length hair shot with gray. She was neither attractive nor unattractive. Wyatt wondered if she'd had to work at that balance the years she'd been on the force or if it was just her natural state. Her eyes were so pale they seemed empty.

“Thanks for meeting me,” he said.

“How can I help?”

She put a hand over her coffee mug before Wyatt even saw the waitress approaching.

“Try the concha,” Brett Williams told him. “Or the churro with caramel.”

Wyatt shook his head. “I'm fine with coffee,” he said. “So you remember the details of the movie-­theater case?

She laughed. “I'd made detective exactly four days earlier.”

“Welcome to the big leagues.”

“Something like that. So yes. I remember.”

“The afternoon of the murders,” Wyatt said, “an elderly woman accidentally rammed her car into the Dumpster behind the theater.”

“Yes. The young man who survived the shooting told us about that.”

“The collision left the Dumpster at a slightly different angle to the building,” he said. “He didn't tell you that. So on that one night, Grubb wouldn't have had his back to the exit doors, not completely. Grubb, the doorman who took the trash out that night. He would have been turned a little to his right when he lifted the lid of the Dumpster. I think he would have had a clean view of the exit doors.”

Brett Williams listened, neither frowning nor not frowning. A placid expression. That was the best way to describe it, Wyatt supposed—­a surface unruffled by breeze above or by current below.

“The killers couldn't have snuck past him,” Wyatt continued. “They had to come through the front doors of the theater. They had to have keys. There were no signs of forced entry. Correct?”

“Correct,” Brett Williams said. Placidly.

Wyatt realized he was leaning forward across the table. He was coming off as the kind of crackpot who fluttered around the edges of every high-­profile crime, a species dreaded by cops.

He sat back in his chair. He took a sip of his coffee.

“Was that avenue ever investigated?” he said. “The possibility that someone who worked at the theater gave the killers the keys?”

“Of course.”

“How seriously, if you were certain the killers came in through the exit doors?”

She regarded Wyatt with what might have been amusement. Or contempt. Or boredom.

“Seriously,” she said.

“I'm not talking about the kid who survived, I'm talking about the theater employees who weren't working that night.” Wyatt realized he was leaning across the table again. “How did the killers know that the deposit didn't go to the bank until Monday morning? The entire weekend take, all cash, was in the safe that night. The timing was clockwork. It was perfect.”

“We looked at everyone who wasn't working that night. We looked at them twice. Every possible connection. The theater employees, the mall security guards. The brass kept it out of the papers, for obvious reasons.”

“But—­”

“Janella Crawford, one of the girls who worked behind the candy counter. Seventeen years old. Her sister's boyfriend had been picked up a ­couple of times for possession with intent, so we brought him in. The poor guy. We scared the shit out of him. We kept at him in the box for eight, nine hours. I talked to Janella myself probably half a dozen times. I knew that girl's life inside and out. I knew what brand of shampoo she used. We knew everyone, all of us did, inside and out.”

“Okay,” Wyatt said.

“Toby Haygood, the daytime projectionist. He was a diabetic. Do you want me to tell you what his hobbies were? Who he played poker with every Saturday night?”

“I get it.”

“We looked hard at everyone.”

Not everyone. Not hard enough.
Someone
had to have given the killers the keys to the theater. Wyatt could feel the anger building, a hot blue bubble at the base of his throat. Why was he so pissed? He couldn't say for sure. Who was he pissed at? That one was easier. He took a breath.

“There was a kid,” Wyatt said, “a doorman who only worked a ­couple of months that summer. He quit in July. He wasn't on the payroll at the time of the murders.”

Brett Williams shifted in her wheelchair. Leather creaked. Her expression remained placid.

“Steven Hurley,” she said. “His family owned one of the big furniture stores on Reno.”

Steve Herpes.
“You knew about him?” Wyatt said.

“We knew about everyone. We ran down every person who'd worked at the theater in the previous five years.”

Wyatt, the way he was seated, could see one of her legs under the table. When Brett Williams shifted again in her wheelchair, the leg didn't move at all, the foot resting dead on the chrome footplate.

So that was that. Of course the police had investigated the possibility of an inside man. Wyatt should have known that. He
had
known it. The movie-­theater massacre had been the most notorious crime in the history of Oklahoma City up till then. Every question had long ago been asked. If there was an answer, it had been found.

Grubb had been stoned the night of the murders. He was stoned every night. The Dumpster had been angled toward the building, and still he hadn't noticed the killers slip through the auditorium exit door. He probably wouldn't have noticed them riding horses across the parking lot.

“You don't remember me, do you?” Brett Williams said.

Wyatt looked up at her. “What?”

“That morning. The morning after.”

For an instant Wyatt didn't understand what she was talking about. The morning after what? And then suddenly he could see her face again, those pale eyes searching his. Her hair back then was shorter, no gray in it. She'd patted his knee. His ears were still ringing.

Is there anything else you remember? Try hard, hon.

Brett Williams had been the female detective, the one who sat with Wyatt on the grassy median between the back lot of the movie theater and the street. Who'd assured him, just before the EMTs loaded him into an ambulance, that this was his lucky day.

“They sent you over because you were a girl,” Wyatt said.

“I guess I was supposed to be comforting. Nurturing? I didn't have a clue what I was doing.”

“What happened to you?”

She didn't have to ask. “A bullet. A ricochet. Quarter of an inch higher and the vest catches it. That's what the doctor told me anyway.”

“That was an asshole thing for him to tell you.”

“Maybe.” She sipped her coffee. “I don't know how you did it. Sitting there, fifteen years old. I would have lost it. I did lose it. That night when I got home.”

“They gave me a Valium.”

“I'm serious.”

“So am I,” Wyatt said. “How did you recognize me after all these years?”

She shrugged. “How could I not?”

That sat in silence.

“I never remembered your face until just now,” Wyatt said. “I remembered your shoes. You had ugly shoes.”

“I did?” She seemed genuinely surprised.

Wyatt stood up. “Thanks for your time, Brett.”

“I'd help you if I could,” she said. “Do you understand that?”

“Sure,” he said.

Driving back to his hotel, Wyatt saw a sign for the Oklahoma City National Memorial. On impulse he made the turn. He'd read about the memorial but had never been there. He parked and crossed Robinson to the massive bronze gate at one end of the reflecting pool. Cut into the panels above the entrance was the time that morning in April of 1995—­9:01—­when Oklahoma City had last been whole. At the opposite end of the reflecting pool, on the other side of the grounds, was an identical gate. The time cut into that gate was 9:03, one minute after the bomb in Timothy McVeigh's Ryder truck had detonated.

Wyatt walked through the 9:01 gate and took a seat on one of the sandstone benches. On the spot where the Murrah Federal Building once stood, there was now an open lawn, filled with row after row of empty chairs. One hundred and sixty-­eight chairs, one for each person killed in the blast. Nineteen of the chairs were sized for children.

The empty chairs were powerful in a way Wyatt had not expected. They captured something essential about the dead—­how they could be so far away and yet at the same time right here, right now, right next to you, close enough that you could still hear them breathing.

One evening, a week or so before the murders, Wyatt and Theresa had parked by the lake. They sat on the long hood of her old yellow Buick Skylark and watched the setting sun hit the water and shatter—­a thousand fragments of unbelievable color.

Wyatt couldn't believe he was here with her. He still couldn't believe that she'd picked him.

“Why me?” he asked her.

Theresa had her slender arm looped around his neck. “Because why,” she'd said.

Two benches down from Wyatt, an older woman sat gazing at the empty chairs of the memorial. One strand of white hair lifted in the wind and then settled. Who, Wyatt wondered, had she lost? What had she lost?

One hundred and sixty-­eight chairs. Wyatt knew that the toll was much higher than that. Oklahoma City was a small town at heart, and everyone knew someone who had been killed or maimed in the blast or someone who'd descended into hell to help with the rescue.

And yet a minute after the explosion, at 9:03, the city had begun to pull itself back together, to become something new. The gate at the opposite end of the reflecting pool didn't mark the end of something. It marked a beginning.

There was a lesson here for Wyatt. Wasn't there? He could walk out the far gate and out of the past. All he had to do was leave behind the dead and stop asking questions.

Why am I still here and all the others gone?

He knew he couldn't do it. He knew he'd never be able to do it.

It was eleven o'clock in Vegas. On most Sunday mornings, Laurie went into the office for a ­couple of hours to catch up on e-­mail. Wyatt took out his phone and called her.

“You're right,” he said.

There was a long silence. “What does that mean, Wyatt?”

“It means you're right.”

“Wyatt. Talk to me.”

“I can't do this right now.”

“Call me later, then.”

“No,” he said. “I can't do this. Us. You were right.”

“Wyatt.”

He could picture Laurie at her desk, her back turned to the doorway of her office in case someone walked past and saw the tears rolling down her cheeks. Wyatt wanted, so badly, to reach out and take her hand and never let go.

But he was cut off, shut out, partitioned behind glass. She was there, and he was here. She was real, and Wyatt was just a memory of a person, a ghost, a dead planet anchored to its orbit while the rest of the universe drifted farther and farther away.

He didn't understand why he was so fucked up. He was the one who had survived.

“I'm sorry,” he told Laurie. “You were right.”

W
YA
TT'S PHONE RANG.
Chip, yet again. Wyatt answered.

“Hello, Chip.”

“Hi, Mr. Rivers. I'm really . . . I'm sorry to bother you. I know you're really busy with your other case, aren't you?”

“Yes, I am, Chip,” Wyatt said.

He was driving north on Western, past Fairlawn Cemetery.
The man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.
Wyatt wondered if O'Malley had known about Edward O'Kelley when he picked Fairlawn for their game of graveyard Frisbee. It was the kind of shit O'Malley would have loved. If there was any justice in the universe, O'Malley was the boy buried next to the man who killed the man who killed Jesse James.

“I know, I'm really sorry. But I'm just wondering if . . . you know, if maybe you had a chance to look into it yet? My situation with my wife? How I think she might be having an affair?”

“I remember, Chip. Yes, I looked into it.”

“And did you—­ What did you find out?”

This was truly the last thing in the world Wyatt wanted to deal with right now. Or ever again.

“Where are you, Chip?” he said.

“Where am I?”

“Are you at work?”

“No, Mr. Rivers. It's Sunday. I'm off on Sunday.”

“Meet me in twenty minutes. The hotel lobby.”

“Oh,” Chip said.

Wyatt remembered. Employees weren't supposed to approach guests for personal reasons. An excellent rule. Wyatt wished it were better enforced.