NED PREACHER HAD aged well, and this fact sent a wave of hatred through Rath that made his muscles go rigid. He’d expected a fat, grizzled, ruined man.
At the time of the murders Preacher had been rough and seedy, but fit, too, the hard, sinewy body of a laborer, a smile that could be both menacing and charming. He had disarming, persuasive, roguish good looks. Rath supposed this was what kept people off guard—and kept them from believing he was capable of what he’d done. He’d come off as the knowing bad boy. But he’d also had a haggard look around his eyes, and in a certain light, back then, he’d looked fifteen years older than his actual age.
Now, Preacher was 53 but looked 40. Younger and more virile than Rath, he was fit and trim, the bags under his eyes miraculously gone. His skin was weathered but tan. A man who’d spent time soaking up the rays in the prison yard. A man who’d made use of the prison gym. On the public dime. He stood up straight. His easy, don’t-give-a-fuck swagger had vanished, and as he was led by the guards into the old judge’s quarters used for the hearing, shackled and cuffed, he walked with a slow, easy confidence, shoulders squared, chin up, eyes forward. His demeanor was one of humility and pride.
Rath felt his utter repulsion for Preacher expand inside himself, suffocate all other emotion, leaving it hard to breathe.
As Preacher was aided into his seat by the guards, he locked eyes with Rath, and a smirk oozed across his face, as if he might break into a fit of his soulless laughter, his eyes brilliant with evil. Then it was gone. His face full again with false reverence. An act. This room his theater. The five people on the board, the only audience he had to impress. In his hands, he held a book. The Bible.
Rath fought a mounting urge to spring from his folding chair and drive his fist through Preacher’s teeth, through the back of his throat, grab hold of his spine, and rip it out. He closed his eyes, trying to master his rage.
Laura had never been a vengeful person. She’d been forgiving, a study in patience and understanding. But that had been toward transgressions of the everyday variety. How patient would she be after what she’d suffered? After what her husband had suffered? Would she be so forgiving? She’d forgiven Rath’s selfish youthful ways partly because she herself had struggled with promiscuity in high school and college, until she’d met Daniel.
If I’d been on time. The thought knifed through Rath’s heart. If not for Preacher, Laura and Daniel would be the ones worrying about Rachel these days. And where would Rath be? Still a bachelor? Unmoored and indifferent, sating his base desires? Unable to commit because he could feel the old man’s blood like a toxin in his veins. A man alone because he was unable or unwilling to suppress his own ugly appetite? He could imagine it, and it chilled him. Laura’s death had been his rebirth into a better life. Her death had saved him. And this thought sickened him most of all. The simple truth: Rath loathed himself even more than he loathed Preacher.
Preacher looked at Rath, a malicious glint in his eye, the look of one accomplice to the other: Without you, I could not have done it. As the parole board readied at its table with the shuffling of papers, Preacher clutched his Bible to his chest, eyes on Rath, and winked. Rath, trembling, willed himself to keep calm.
That Preacher was even here today, given a pulpit from which to spin his web in a civil procedure, was a mockery of the system, or perhaps it revealed the system for what it was: inept and inadequate. Justice was blind all right—blind to its own failings.
This was a waking nightmare.
A female parole-board member, a former public defender, for God’s sake, was nattering about procedure. How the victims and family of victims would have a say. Rath was the only family. He and Rachel. And Rachel had no idea Ned Preacher had murdered her parents. He’d not spared her pain she didn’t deserve but robbed her of a truth she did deserve. However hard it would have been to tell it. He’d been weak.
The parole-board members cleared their throats, adjusted microphones, and poured springwater from plastic bottles into glasses etched with the scale of justice.
Rath’s hatred radiated from his every pore.
“Mr. Rath. Would you care to speak?” a parole-board member, Jonas Kron, said, staring at Rath as if he knew what Rath had been thinking. Kron was a liberal who used human-rights issues to benefit and free criminals rather than think of the victim’s rights to keep the criminal locked up.
Rath stood, and the Earth’s rotation had slowed, gravity had lessened, and he felt he’d float away. He held fast to the back of the chair in front of him to keep from doing just that.
“This,” he nodded toward Preacher. He wanted to say pervert, sociopath, monster. But hot emotion did not play as well as cold fact in this theater. Unless you were the criminal sobbing false tears of regret, not for what you’d done but for being caught. Then, emotion worked.
Rath continued. “This man killed my sister. He stabbed her and he cut her throat and he broke her neck. He raped her. While her baby slept. And when her husband came home, he killed him, too. The mother and father of a sleeping baby. My niece. My daughter.” Rath tried to swallow, but couldn’t, his throat tight, as if a pair of hands were squeezing it. “What he did was not the result of a momentary fit of passion. It was planned. Calculated. Sport. His entire life, this man has committed violent crimes, ruined lives, then plea-bargained, knowing the law would go easier on him for saving the state money. He has it figured out, what the state’s priority is. Money.”
Rath’s heartbeat was accelerating too fast. “He works the system. In prison, he takes every ‘self-improvement’ class available. He’s a Good Boy. Not because he’s changed. But to help himself get out. I don’t think his appetite has lessened. It’s grown, the same way your own appetite grows for something you crave when you are deprived of it, and whatever he tells you, how he’s a better man, repentant, changed, found Jesus, don’t believe it. He can’t wait to do it again.” The words were gushing forth now, his adrenaline screaming, his blood lit gasoline. “Ask yourselves why men like him find Jesus only after being locked up? Why can’t Jesus find the man before the man commits such acts? When ‘God’ becomes proactive and spares women and children, maybe I’ll start to believe in him.”
Rath’s thoughts were fleeing, his emotions boiling over. To continue was a mistake. But he could not stop himself. “He can’t be allowed to do these things again. Ruin more lives. He doesn’t have the right. The only way to guarantee that he won’t is to keep him locked up. If you let him out, when he does it again, and he will, those crimes are on your hands.”
Rath sat.
The parole board responded with cold stares and the scratching of pencils in notebooks.