CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

All the lights had been switched on inside the Emory household, and it glowed like a navigational beacon standing alone against the black expanse of moonless rangeland. The jangle of the bellwether and the bleating of the flock echoed from the pasture as I switched off the ignition and climbed out of the Bronco.

Bryan Emory was seated on the porch stairs, his eyes rimmed in red as he watched me unfasten the garden gate latch and pass through. Sam Griffin stood beside the front door just a few feet away, his thumbs tucked in the belt loops of his jeans.

“How’d you smash up your truck?” Bryan asked me.

He seemed completely disconnected, his voice a hoarse and faded monotone, the question itself a non sequitur.

“Busting through your neighbor’s gate,” I said. “What’s happening here?”

“You need to step inside with me, Sheriff,” Griffin said.

Bryan made no attempt to accompany Griffin and me, but stood and moved into the garden instead. He hesitated for a moment, stooped, and picked up a handful of gravel and began pitching the stones one at a time into the shadows.

Once inside, I saw Harlan Emory’s wife sitting in a chair beside a gooseneck lamp in the corner of the parlor. She was stitching a floral pattern onto a needlepoint canvas, her features as impassive and opaque as a department store mannequin. Her brow was furrowed in concentration and it sounded as though she was humming some sort of tune under her breath. She glanced up momentarily, seemed to register my presence without alarm, and returned her attention to her work.

“Follow me,” Sam said, and moved down a long hallway whose walls were decorated with early century samplers and old family portraits framed in bubble glass. A door stood wide open at the far end of the hall, and Sam halted just short of the threshold, gesturing for me to enter first.

Harper Emory’s eyes were thrown open wide, his face locked in a mask of shock and fury as he sagged sideways in his desk chair, his blood stippling the draperies that had been drawn across his office window. He clutched a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver in his right hand, the top drawer of his desk yanked off its sliders, as though he had withdrawn the weapon in a rush. I leaned in close and examined the cylinder, saw that there were no bullets chambered there.

“His gun’s not loaded,” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” Sam said. “But this guy’s was.”

He inclined his chin toward the body of Carl Spinell sprawled on the floor beside the desk, his clothing soaked through from the discharge of buckshot that had completely pulverized his center mass. A pump-action ten-gauge shotgun was propped neatly beside the office door. Spinell’s pistol lay some distance away.

“I already notified the staties,” Sam said.

I nodded.

“This’ll be their third scene today in Meriwether County,” I said.

“Say that again,” Sam said, but I ignored it.

“What the hell happened here?” I asked.

“Better if you hear it from the kid.”

Outside, Bryan Emory had moved to one of the chairs beside a small table at the far end of the porch, the same spot where I had first been introduced to Carl Spinell. Bryan’s face was in silhouette in the light from the house, and I could see the resemblance to his mother.

“I heard them shouting in Dad’s office,” Bryan said.

His chin rested inside the palm of his hand, his elbow propped on the table.

“What were they shouting about?”

His eyes locked on mine for a long moment before he spoke.

“Your name came up,” he said.

“They were shouting about me?”

“From what I could tell, Mr. Spinell was warning my father not to speak to you. Threatening him.”

Sam pulled out a chair opposite Bryan and folded himself into it. He drew a breath and reached across the table and patted the boy on the forearm.

“Tell the sheriff what you told me,” Sam prompted.

Bryan ran the back of his hand across his lips.

“It’s my fault,” he said finally. “I knew she was going to do it.”

His voice had dropped into a whisper.

“Your mother? Going to do what?”

“She was afraid that Dad was going to hurt her again. That he might hurt both of us again.”

Upstairs, in the frame of an open casement window, a curtain twisted on the wind. Bryan turned and studied it for a long moment then leaned back in his chair.

“She took all the ammunition out of my father’s guns,” he said. “I knew what had happened in his office as soon as I heard the shot. He never had a chance against that man. He couldn’t defend himself.”

“So you shot Carl Spinell?”

Bryan Emory nodded.

“With my bird gun.”

“Spinell would have come after you and your mother next,” I said.

“It was my fault,” he said again.

“It was an act of self-defense, Bryan.”

He looked at me and I could tell that he wished he could believe me but could not.

“I was talking about unloading my dad’s guns,” he said.

“I know you were,” I said. “So was I.”

“Why did he make her do that? Why did he have to be such a bastard sometimes?”

“Betrayal never comes from your enemies, son.”

I stopped at the office before going home that night. Jordan Powell had been dozing upstairs, his boots propped on the desk, while William Emory paced inside his ten-by-ten jail cell. Powell pushed the brim of his hat off the bridge of his nose when he recognized the sound of my footfalls on the landing.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Rowan Boyle brought some chow over from the diner a bit ago.”

I stood outside the flatiron bars of the holding cell, wondering how a man like Harper Emory and his family had ended up this way.

“Don’t leave him by himself,” I said to Powell. “Make sure somebody’s with him at all times.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Give me your belt,” I said to the man inside the cage. “And your shoes.”

He shook his head and blinked at me, his face uninhabited by emotion.

It is said that the human soul possesses weight, and that its loss can be measured scientifically at the moment of a person’s death. I don’t know whether that is true or not, but if it is, I could see in his expression that the man who had once referred to himself as Deva Ravi had already surrendered his, and I wondered whether redemption could exist for such a man as this.

“I’m not going to kill myself,” he said.

I did not reply, only waited for him to do as I had asked of him. He stepped toward the door where I was standing, handed me his belt, and kicked his shoes across the floor to me between the bars.

“No,” I said finally. “You’re probably right. People like you don’t kill themselves. It’s the ones who place their trust in you who wind up dead.”