IT WAS a private investigation firm run by two ex-cops who had over the years been hired numerous times by a local offshoot of the Innocence Project, run by a former University of Chicago law professor. A few phone calls and a thorough Google search by Darren explained why Michael Wright thought to suggest their help. While looking into the cases of men and women, mostly black and Latino, who had been wrongfully accused and often incarcerated for decades, the two investigators discovered a pattern: for every story about a black mother, sister, or wife crying over a man who was locked up for something he didn’t do, there was a black mother, sister, wife, husband, father, or brother crying over the murder of a loved one for which no one was locked up. For black folks, injustice came from both sides of the law, a double-edged sword of heartache and pain. Lennon and Pelkin had carved out a whole division of their agency to work on unsolved murders in which race played a part—as in the race of the victim had put lead in the shoes of local law enforcement, slowing their pace and ultimately dulling their curiosity to the point of inertia. The New York Times had written a profile of the agency and its founders and the few unsolved murders they’d resurrected and solved. Michael had been offering Geneva a way to find Joe Sweet’s killer.
Standing outside the cafe, Darren wondered if Wally knew that Michael had been asking questions about the death of Joe Sweet in the hours right before he died, wondered in fact where Wally had spent the hours leading up to Michael’s death. The question felt urgent, and he was already reaching for his car keys when he looked up from his phone and saw Randie coming around the side of the cafe. She reached out and touched his forearm as she told him she’d been waiting to say good-bye.
“They’ve released the body,” she said. “I’m taking Michael home.”
“Don’t go.” He said it before he thought it through. He felt himself reaching for her permission or approval when his duty was ultimately to Michael, not her; justice didn’t require the consent of those left behind.
“It’s done, Darren,” she said. “Look, I wanted to—”
“Randie.”
“Thank you, Darren. I appreciate everything you tried to do for me, for Michael. I don’t understand this place, this state, but Michael did. He would have respected what you’re trying to do down here. He would have liked you.”
“Randie, wait.”
“I can’t,” she said. “There’s nothing else for me to do here.” She started for the driver’s side of her blue hatchback. He grabbed her left arm to stop her.
“I think Keith is telling the truth about Michael,” he said.
Randie’s face hardened as she yanked her arm free. “Stop this.”
“I don’t think he killed him.”
“I can’t do this, Darren,” she said, opening the door to her rental car.
“What if Michael’s death didn’t have anything to do with Missy Dale?”
“Then why?” she said, her voice rising to the edge of a scream, her brown eyes flashing red with rage. “Then why is my husband dead, Darren?”
“Joe Sweet.”
She looked at him blankly. For a second, it seemed she’d forgotten the name, the guitar, and the love story, the whole reason Michael had driven Highway 59 into East Texas. And when the name finally landed, it exhausted her, the realization of what Darren was asking her to endure, more questions with no promise of an answer, when she could just get in the car now and drive.
“Michael was asking questions about the night Joe Sweet was killed.”
“So?” She opened the car door wider, so that it put a wall between them.
“So somebody in this town might have had reason to put a stop to it.”
Darren glanced back behind him, across the highway toward Wally’s Monticello, musing on an approach, how he wanted to come at his hunch.
“Go or stay,” he told her. “But I’m seeing this through.”
He wanted to know one thing: had Wally and Michael crossed paths the night he died? Wally’s icehouse was the last place Michael had been seen before he took a beating on the farm road. Darren wanted to track all Wally’s movements that night. He crossed 59 and drove through the gate to Wally’s mansion. No one answered the front door, though Darren saw Wally’s enormous truck in the circular drive. Darren had in fact parked behind it. He was pressing the doorbell a third time when he heard sounds from around the back side of the house, footsteps through fallen leaves, then a door opening and closing. The sound echoed through the oak trees that were rising like specters and surrounding the house, their thick limbs casting black shadows over the roof. “Wally,” Darren called. Hearing no response, he started around to the back of the house, coming within inches of the black Lab on its chain. It lurched toward Darren, barking and snarling. The dog came so close that Darren could feel its hot, moist breath through his pants leg. He slid by the dog, pressing his body against the side of the house, the rough edges of the red brick wall stabbing him down the center of his back.
“Wally,” he called again, thinking he must be in the backyard.
But only silence answered Darren. There wasn’t a sound out here but the rustle of leaves blowing across the expanse of Wally’s backyard and the flutter of birds fleeing nearby trees, as if they knew something he didn’t, could sense trouble coming. Darren felt it, too, a stillness around him he didn’t trust.
The land behind the house was more raw woodland than landscaped garden. It was choked with the gnarled roots of a family of live oaks. Traditional East Texas pines stood sentry to the north and south, along the property line. There were a few buildings back here, small structures that were covered in fallen leaves and skeletal pinecones: a narrow greenhouse, as much a hut for storing tools as a hothouse, and a larger shed, the wood feathered with time, the color faded to a dull gray. Its doors were cracked open an inch or two, and the padlock meant to secure the shed was open, hanging like an ornament from its latch, a useless decoration. Darren saw something on the ground in front of the shed, and it stopped him cold. There were twin tire tracks that disappeared into the blackness on the other side of the wooden doors.
Where is the car?
He’d been asking the question for days. It was the missing piece that convinced him that Keith Dale might be telling the truth. Darren couldn’t read tire treads any better than tea leaves, but he had a sinking feeling about what he would find on the other side of those doors. He pulled one of them open, cringing at the awful screech of the rusty hinge. This, he realized, was the sound he’d heard when he was standing at the front door on the other side of the house.
Before his eyes could adjust to the dark, he heard the sound of a gun cock, and he knew he wasn’t alone. Through the thin shafts of light shooting through holes in the roof and the swirl of dust that hung in the air, he saw Isaac pressed against the back wall, pointing a tiny pistol at Darren’s head. Darren went for his Colt, but before he could get it out of the holster, Isaac got off a shot. It went over Darren’s shoulder, missing him by inches. Darren held a hand in front of his body and reached for his .45 with the other. “Isaac, put the gun down.”
Isaac shot again, splintering a slat in the shed’s door.
From inside the house, Darren heard a woman scream.
“Wally, somebody’s shooting out there!”
So they were home, Darren thought.
He pictured the toddler in there and felt his stomach drop.
“Wally ain’t gon’ like this,” Isaac mumbled.
Darren put his hands up. “Just tell me what you saw, Isaac.”
He could see now that Isaac was terrified, eyes wide and red-veined. He may have been crying. He was inching closer to the door while Darren kept a safe distance, so that the two were in a strange, slow dance, arcing around each other, a pirouette that ended with Darren deep inside the shed, which was empty except for cans of old paint, and Isaac right at the shed’s door. The BMW, if it had been here once, was gone now. Isaac backed into the daylight outside the shed, then slipped through the doors and ran.
Darren reached for his gun as he took off after him.
“Isaac, I don’t want to hurt you, man.”
But Isaac was swift and had the benefit of knowing the landscape better than Darren did. Within moments Darren lost sight of him in the surrounding woods. He was starting for the back door of the house when he came upon Wally. The older man wore a crooked smile as he held his hands up, eyeing Darren’s gun.
“Where’s the car, Wally?”
“I didn’t kill that Chicago fella.”
“Where is the fucking car?”
Darren heard a car peeling into the driveway on the other side of the house. A door opened, then slammed shut, and Darren heard clunky footsteps as a sheriff’s deputy came huffing and puffing around the side of the house. Wally’s smile spread, and Darren realized he’d walked into a scene Wally had staged. “Put the gun down, sir,” the deputy said, his own pistol shaking.
“He was trying to kill me,” Wally said.
“I said put the gun down!”
“You’re talking to a Texas Ranger,” Darren said. He was afraid to angle his body in a way that would show off his badge. He was afraid to make any sudden movement. “Call Van Horn and tell him I got the killer right here.”
“He’s on his way,” the deputy said. “Laura called about a shooting, an intruder or somebody. Sheriff’s got deputies looking up and down 59 for him now.”
“Can you tell this man to get this gun off me?” Wally said.
“This man is under arrest,” Darren shot back.
The deputy looked between Darren and Wally. He still had the gun pointed in Darren’s direction, not sure whom to trust. The walkie-talkie on his belt squawked at him. He lifted it, and they all heard a voice on the other end say, “Sheriff, this is Redding. We still got an APB on that late-model BMW, black?”
Van Horn’s voice came over the open channel. “Copy.”
Darren felt a chill as he heard Redding say, “We caught it heading for the county line just a piece from Lark. Daniels and Armstrong picked up the driver. The wife is still over to that cafe out there. They bringing the car there now.”
In a county full of police scanners, word had already spread. And when Darren pulled into the parking lot at Geneva’s, there was an audience standing watch out front. Geneva and Dennis, Huxley and Faith, and a few of Geneva’s other customers. Wendy, too. And Randie. In the end, she had waited for him. She had her arms folded against a late afternoon breeze that was lifting stray leaves and red dust from neighboring fields. She shuddered and looked across the cafe’s parking lot. Her eyes met Darren’s, and he thought to walk to her, to reach for her hand. But he stayed near his truck and Wally and the deputy who’d been in back of his house. Mr. Jefferson, as the young deputy called him, had consented to ride shotgun in the deputy’s squad car. There were questions the cop had about what he’d seen, and the plan was to meet Van Horn here. It was a deputy’s vehicle that rolled up first, driven by the one called Daniels. Darren saw the outline of Isaac behind the cage in back. He was holding his head down low, looking at no one. Then, less than a minute later, the black BMW pulled up in front of the cafe. At the sight of it, Randie went weak in the knees. It was Geneva who reached out to hold her up, to keep her from hitting the pavement. The one called Armstrong had driven it here. The young man, thick-necked, with a lineman’s shoulders, got out of the vehicle and walked to Van Horn, who’d arrived only shortly before Darren and Wally. “This that man’s car, ain’t it?” Armstrong said. “The one we pulled out the bayou?”
Randie tore from Geneva’s clutch and ran to the squad car that held Isaac, beating her fists against the windows of the backseat and screaming, “What did you do?” Wally watched stone-faced as she ran from one side of the car to the other, and Isaac tried to sink from sight. Her voice was like piano wire stretched to its breaking point, so that it hardly made a sound, just a ragged whisper. “What did you do?” Darren went to her side, and only then did she take her eyes off Isaac, pressing her face into Darren’s chest and weeping in a way that felt like grief being born, newly alive and raw. Van Horn looked from Randie to the small, freckled black man in the back of the squad car. “Get him out of here.”