THE HOUSE JULIA had shared with Beverly had been full of her mother-in-law’s possessions, including walls full of paintings and family photos.
But those in her new place were bare, and that night, after Julia had tucked Calvin into bed, she slipped into the spare bedroom she’d claimed for her work space and eyeballed the wonderfully blank acreage surrounding her. Two large whiteboards and a bulletin board, purchased earlier in the day at a downtown office-supply store, leaned against the walls.
Twenty minutes later, they filled most of a wall to the left of her desk, where she could see them whenever she turned her head or swiveled in her chair. She pinned a photo of Calvin to one corner of the bulletin board, then took up a blue dry-erase pen and stood before the whiteboards.
She drew a circle in the middle of one and wrote Billy/Miss Mae/Craig in the middle.
She drew another circle on the second board, with only a single name: Leslie Harper.
Then she went back to the first and drew lines radiating from the circle: Ray. Angie. Ichabod—she still had problems recalling his real name. All the people in the victims’ inner orbit, including the necessary Unknown Assailant.
She drew longer lines for people with more distant ties. Cheryl Hayes. Wayne Peterson. That creepy Mack Coates, whispering to her in the courtroom. Even Claudette, for the simple reason that she, as well as the others, had mentioned Ray’s name to her or had some involvement in investigating the case.
Her illustration resembled an ungainly spider, which in fact was the name for this particular exercise, one Michael had taught her when he worked for the local newspaper and was planning out longer-term projects. There was nothing new in it, only the questions and issues that tapped a daily drumbeat in her brain no matter what else she was doing. But sometimes a visual display would trigger an idea. Over the years, she’d used a similar system, writing bits of evidence on index cards and shuffling them until she came up with a coherent narrative. But that worked best for trial prep, an opportunity denied her in this case.
Hence the exercise Michael called Running the Spider: put your main subject in the middle and the people and things that relate to it all around.
“It looks more like a solar system,” she’d observed the first time she’d watched him do it. Hers looked even more like one, especially when she drew a circle far to one side enclosing a remote planet labeled Motive?
Lacking even a guess, she took up her red pen to eliminate suspects.
She X’d out the obvious right away—Wayne and Claudette—and, after a moment, Cheryl Hayes. For all of Wayne’s gripes about his colleague, he’d never once hinted that she was capable of murder.
She considered the two remaining creekside inhabitants—Angie and Ichabod—with an eye to whether either might be a killer. Fights were commonplace in the transient camps—alcohol- and drug-fueled turf wars, mostly—but she hadn’t detected any tension among the group when she’d seen them all together before Miss Mae and Craig were killed. The idea that Angie could have killed someone Billy’s size beggared belief. And she and Miss Mae had seemed good friends.
Johnny Harrow aka Ichabod had the sort of height that made him a potential suspect, but his arms were so spindly and stringy Julia couldn’t imagine him swinging something like a tire iron with the force necessary to inflict the kind of wound she’d seen in his sidekick’s skull.
Julia set the pen aside and hefted an imaginary bat. Could she put enough force into such a move to kill someone? Maybe—if she were scared or angry enough. If someone threatened Calvin. Her muscles tensed at the very thought. Jake, who had crept in from Calvin’s room, sprang to his feet.
“It’s all right, boy.” She petted him, then drew a red X across Angie’s name and a dashed X through Ichabod’s, indicating doubt. While he hadn’t said anything that implicated him, he hadn’t offered an alibi either, probably because she hadn’t asked him directly. She put an asterisk beside his name to remind herself to do that.
Mack Coates. She didn’t know whether he’d known Billy or Miss Mae well, but she’d bet her new and too-reasonable rent that they were at least tangentially acquainted, given Mack’s immersion in Duck Creek’s demimonde.
But what would his motive be? Why kill a couple of transients who in no way threatened his tidy drug and trafficking operations? Word around the courthouse was that Mack ran his enterprises like the most ruthless Wall Street CEO. Get caught dipping into the product—or worse yet, the profits—and you’d be lucky to escape with a few missing teeth. He’d never faced a homicide charge, but Julia had represented defendants who were genuinely terrified of Mack; who’d asked if she could get them transferred into jails in other counties to escape his wrath or that of his minions.
Still, her breath caught as she stared at the board, with Ray’s and Mack’s names the only two—if she discounted Unknown Assailant—not crossed out. Was it possible? Had everyone in law enforcement focused on Ray because of his well-earned reputation as a fuckup and overlooked Mack despite his own notoriety as the most disciplined of thugs?
Except.
While Ray and Mack both had reputations as fighters, Ray had been seen arguing with Billy the weekend he was killed, and no one had mentioned a word about Mack so much as being in the neighborhood, let alone tangling with anyone there. She’d hated the circumstantial nature of the evidence against Ray, but the evidence against Mack was nonexistent.
Her red marker hovered over his name, but just before it touched the board, she flung it away. Then lunged to retrieve it before Jake could pounce upon it as some new and exceptionally flavorful chew toy.
Next, to Leslie Harper, despite the doubts that badgered her even as she started populating the second whiteboard with most of the same names. Claudette, Wayne, Cheryl Hayes, Mack Coates—the only people beyond Marie and Pinkham with whom she’d talked about Harper—and the shadowy Unknown Assailant, whom she favored more by the moment.
At least in this case, she could supply a possible motive for her far-flung planet. She settled on Corruption, even if she didn’t know precisely what had piqued Harper’s interest in the inner workings of Peak County’s sheriff’s department.
She stood back and looked at the two boards.
Nothing indicated the killings of the two transients and Harper were related.
But she couldn’t ignore the timing, nor the fact that her questions about Harper, and her move into Harper’s house, seemed to have triggered whoever was stalking her. People wanted her to back away from a vigorous defense of Ray. And someone wanted her not to look at Harper’s death.
Every time she told herself to turn away from Harper, her gut urged her back.
“Always, always trust your gut,” Claudette had commanded when they first started working together.
Once again, she X’d out Wayne and Claudette right away. Her pen hovered over Cheryl Hayes’s name.
She should have been able to X out the deputy. Hayes had been visibly upset during Harper’s funeral. But Julia couldn’t avoid Wayne’s comments about her and the fact that she’d objected to Harper’s oversight proposal. Still, it was a long way from being upset about a proposed oversight board to murder—and of course there remained a significant school of thought that said Harper’s death was accidental, despite Pinkham’s caution. She drew a reluctant X through Hayes’s name.
Which left her with a commonality between the two boards she couldn’t ignore: in both cases, Mack Coates’s name stood unmarred.