Before they left town, Bo insisted they drive by his house so he could prove his tire was flat. He’d gotten a ride to work, he said, and hadn’t driven since yesterday. Just as he’d said, the tire was flat, and the engine was cold.
Kent should have noticed that, he thought, but his emotions had been leading. Just one more reason Kent had been right to remove himself from the case.
As they drove to Birmingham, Bo talked about what he’d been through since getting out of rehab.
“I wasn’t serious then,” he admitted. “I didn’t go to rehab because I wanted to. I was forced to. And the whole time I was in there I was determined not to give my mother and my wife and the government what they wanted. They could force sobriety on me while I was there, but I was just biding my time until I could get out and go right back to it.”
“Not a good recipe for long-term sobriety.”
“Yeah, well. After Carter got out, when I had nobody my age to shoot the breeze with, I started seeing what a fool all them dopers were. They were getting pretty wild, most of them. No intentions of getting better. Just trying to work the system. I’d been using since I was fifteen. And there I was at forty. I didn’t want to act like those stupid kids who saw themselves as party animals. They were really ruining their lives.”
Kent was quiet. He thought of Emily and what a tremendous journey she’d made from addiction to sobriety. Staying there had been an even greater achievement.
“There was this dude there named Jack. Constantly smuggling in dope. Judge sent him to rehab, but it didn’t do no good. Finally got thrown out. I couldn’t stand that guy. He had serious mental problems, always accusing us of dissin’ him, stirring up trouble where there wasn’t any. Paranoid. Had fried his brain, and was almost as bad sober as he was when he was high. But he stayed high most of the time, even there. I didn’t want to be like that. By the time I got out, I had an AA sponsor lined up. I’ve worked the program since I got home.”
“Did you tell Devon you wanted to stay clean?”
Sorrow changed his face. “Yeah, I told her, but she didn’t believe me. I figured when she saw changes in me, she’d get excited. I started to see that she was tryin’ to save our family and our kids from a loser father. She wasn’t the bad guy. I was.”
Kent glanced at Bo as he drove. Headlights briefly illuminated his face, and there were tears glistening in the man’s eyes. He couldn’t know for sure, but Bo looked sincere.
“So you’ve been sober ever since rehab?”
“Yeah, I have. Not that it’s been easy. After what happened . . .” His voice broke off. “I started to think it wasn’t worth it . . . that I couldn’t be expected to stay sober with all this going on. But my little girl said, ‘Daddy, who’s gonna take care of us?’ I told her I would, and she said, ‘Daddy!’ Like that was ridiculous. Like I was so irresponsible that nobody could expect me to step in and take over.”
“So you didn’t relapse?”
“No. My AA sponsor talked sense into me.”
Calling a sponsor was a decision in itself. Most addicts didn’t want to make that call when they were craving. They’d made their minds up to use before there was even a struggle.
On the other hand, maybe nothing Bo said was true.
They were quiet for the next several minutes, then Bo said, “Detective, tell me you believe me, man. Tell me you don’t think I killed my wife. That you know I didn’t try to burn your house down.”
Kent clenched his molars, felt the tightening in his temples. He hesitated. “It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said finally.
Bo accepted that. “What could Carter be thinking? He knew I was joking about swapping murders. The next day we laughed about it. He said, ‘If we stay in this place much longer we’ll scheme to kill our wives, our parents, our cousins . . .’ And I said, ‘Yeah, we’ll even be plotting to kill the president. As if slackers like us could ever pull that off.’ And we cracked up because it was totally ridiculous.”
“Maybe that started Carter thinking.”
“I never woulda thought so.” Bo sighed. “So what do we do when we get there?”
Kent didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure yet.
He’d love to kick down the door and drag him out of his house, smash his face in, tie him up and make an arrest.
When they reached Birmingham, Kent programmed the address into his GPS. As he waited for it to give him the directions, he wondered if he was doing the right thing. Here he was, in the middle of the night, doing police work on a case that wasn’t his, with one of the persons of interest in the car with him.
He must be losing it.
But someone had tried to kill Emily for the second time, and Barbara and Lance along with her. They had torched his own house. He couldn’t just sit around waiting for the guy to succeed.
“I want to talk to him,” Bo said. “I want to go to the door and look into his eyes.”
Kent thought about that. If he knocked on the door, showed Carter his badge, and asked to interview him, would that fly? No. He wasn’t on the case. He could get suspended for pulling a stunt like that. And when an arrest was made, his attorney would use that breach in policy to get him off. “No, we can’t do that.”
The calm, female GPS voice directed him to “follow the highlighted route.” When they reached Carter’s neighborhood, Kent’s heart rate sped up.
There were no lights on at Carter’s house, but two vehicles sat in the driveway. A pickup truck and Cassandra’s car. Yes, the car could have been the one he’d seen tonight, but he couldn’t see the back right fender.
He turned off his lights and pulled to the curb. Killing his engine, he sat for a moment, staring toward the house.
Carter had had plenty of time to get home after his attack. He could be sleeping it off by now.
Kent reached under the seat for his flashlight. “Stay here,” he said. “I want to look at that car.”
Bo did as he was told. Kent closed the door gently. It clicked, but not loudly enough to wake anyone. He headed up the driveway toward the sedan closest to the side door of the house.
A motion light flashed on in the carport as Kent reached the car.
And then he saw something.
Feet . . . blood . . .
He drew his weapon and stepped closer.
A man lay slumped in a pile, a bullet’s gaping exit wound in his back.
Bending over, Kent took the man’s pulse. Dead.
The man looked like Carter Price.
His heart sprinted as he looked around for anyone waiting in the shadows. No one was there. Kent backed away and headed to his car, pulling out his phone.
Bo’s door came open. “Was the car warm?”
Kent didn’t answer. His hand was shaking as the Birmingham 911 Dispatcher answered. “I need police at 9340 Sharon Drive,” he said. “There’s a dead man in the carport.”