Because she was a minor as well as female, Abby Land was held in the prison’s Administrative Segregation area for her own safety.
Rath nodded at the O.C. outside the assigned activity room in Segregation and entered. At a square metal table in the center of the room Abby Land sat on one of the four metal seats welded to the table and bolted to the floor. She looked like she’d lived thirty stony years in the short time since her arrest. The hot defiance in her eyes had paled to a watery dullness. Her flush pink skin had gone as sallow as that of an aged chain smoker. Her chin, once calcified in an obstinate, fuck-you thrust, sunk to her chest as she gnawed at a thumbnail.
On a seat to Land’s left sat public defender Joanne Blanc, whom Rath had phoned earlier to set up the meeting. Blanc was already going to be on-site for most of the day, but was resistant to letting Rath speak to Land, until Rath had told the attorney that what he had to say might get Land off the hook. That he believed she had not killed Mandy Wilks, or at least not alone. He didn’t believe this, but it had bought him a half hour.
Blanc sat silently in her black suit, its cuffs spattered with dried slush and road salt.
Rath sat across from Land. “Can you look at me?”
Land gnashed away at her thumbnail.
“Luke Montgomery,” Rath said.
“What about him?”
“What role did he play in Mandy Wilks’s murder?”
“Nothin’.”
“You killed Mandy because of him.”
“So?”
“So that’s not nothing. You and Montgomery, maybe you’re closer than you’re telling?”
“Fuck you.”
“Your friend. Jamie Drake. She’s dead. Did you know that?” Rath said.
Abby Land looked up, empty-eyed. A dribble of bloodied saliva trickled down her chin.
She spat a tag of skin from her thumb on the floor. “Are you stupid? Do you think we don’t get TV in here? I watch a TV the size of a movie screen, it’s ten times better than the piece of shit I had at home. I just saw the big breaking news update, the identity of the mystery dead girl.”
Blanc crossed one leg over a knee.
“She was murdered,” Rath said. “Hanged. That wasn’t on your TV.”
Blanc cut her eyes at Rath, disapproving his tone.
A quiver worked across Land’s lips.
“She was tortured. Deliberately and slowly.” Rath would never impart such traumatic information to a teen in a normal state of mind; but in the case of Land, trauma might be just what was needed to reach her.
Land stopped savaging her thumbnail.
“What does this have to do with my client?” Blanc said.
“Jamie Drake died a mean, cruel, slow death,” Rath said.
Land swallowed her flesh. She blew on her tattered thumb, wincing, waving it at her side as if it were on fire. “Yeah. What’s it got to do with me?”
“That is what I want to know,” Rath said.
“If you’re implying my client—” Blanc began.
“I’m not,” Rath said.
“And. Umm. Hello. I’m in here?” Land said. “How can it have anything to do with me? I didn’t kill her, obviously. Even you can figure that out, probably.” The old shining meanness leapt in her eyes. How did a person, a kid, end up like this? Rath was not looking at evil, not in the way he stared at evil when he met eyes with Preacher. No. What he was looking at he’d seen dozens of times from kids when he was a cop in the nineties; kids he’d give warnings to for partying in a park after dusk or drinking under age, only to be met with a recalcitrant, venomous disrespect for him and everything and everyone else in the world. It was not evil. It was pain. The pain of years of neglect and abuse, of invisibility and disrespect, fossilized into a contempt for and blindness to the very kindness the kids had most needed early on but to which now they were inured. The aftermath of lovelessness.
“Did you come here just to tell me the happy news that my friend was tortured?” Land said. “Is that how you spend your time?”
“I find it odd. That both you and a friend of yours are involved in violent deaths. You bludgeon a girl so hard with a tire iron that you struggled to dislodge it from her brain so you could hit her again. And now, your friend is killed in a ghoulish way.”
A look of confusion fluttered in Land’s eyes; she didn’t understand what ghoulish meant.
“Yeah. Well,” Land said. “Life sucks.”
“Death’s worse,” Rath said.
“Can’t be worse than this hole.”
“I doubt there’s TV.”
Land’s eyes gleamed, then dimmed. “That might suck worse. Not that I’ll be able stay here forever for the TV anyway. I’m a minor. When I turn eighteen, I’ll be released. Free.”
Rath wondered who had poisoned Abby’s naive head with lies. Abby Land was going to be tried as an adult and thus not see the free world until at least 2036, even if she were Mother Teresa inside of whatever maximum-security prison she got as a present for her eighteenth birthday.
“Did you tell her that?” Rath said to Blanc.
“Certainly not. I’ve tried to explain—”
“She don’t know shit,” Land said.
“How did you and Jamie become friends? You two don’t exactly strike me as compatible, if you know what I mean.” Rath decided to rile her.
“What do you mean?”
“You coming from the household you do: unemployed, coke-dealing stepdad; absentee mom, living in that hovel; playing dated cartridge video games; driving jalopies, if they start. Meanwhile Jamie’s bedroom is the size of your whole apartment, decorated just so; she wears brand-new, brand-name clothes, the latest fashions; she has the best laptop and the latest iPhone, lives in that big house on five secluded acres, drives a nicer car than you’ll ever own in your life and whines that it’s a piece of shit. Not exactly alike. You two.”
“What would you know about it?”
“Plenty.” Rath did know plenty about growing up in poverty. After his mother had sent his father packing, she’d worked three jobs just to string together enough for rent, thrift shop clothes, and the weekly groceries. He’d been so embarrassed about the state of their cramped, messy home he’d never asked what few fleeting friends he had over after school.
“We had things in common,” Land said. “Acting.”
“She get all the plum roles, did she? That piss you off?”
“Easy,” Blanc said. “You don’t have to answer any of these questions, Abby. I advise you not to, in fact.”
“I got good roles,” Land shot. “I got plenty of good fucking roles, if you think—”
“I don’t like this line of questioning, it’s upsetting my client,” Blanc said.
“I’m trying to help your client help herself,” Rath said. “If she knows something about her friend’s murder, if Montgomery was involved in either murder, and she can help us with it, we may be able to do quid pro quo.”
“Quid what?” Land said.
“Was your friend in trouble? Do you know anything that would suggest your friend’s death wasn’t random? Was your friend doing anything she shouldn’t be doing?” Rath used the word friend intentionally.
“Did she do stuff she shouldn’t?” Land scoffed. “You fuckin’ serious? We all do stuff we shouldn’t. Every day.”
“What did your friend do?”
“I wasn’t her mother. I just know we all do. I’m sure you got stuff you shouldn’t a done. Got all kinds a secrets you don’t tell no one. Don’t mean you got it coming or deserve to get killed for—” She stopped, as if she were struck for the first time by the fact that maybe Mandy Wilks hadn’t deserved to be beaten to death with a tire iron for looking the wrong way at a boy Abby had liked. If that was why she’d done it.
“This is enough. Enough,” Blanc said.
“It don’t matter,” Land said. “I did it. I said I did it. Killed Mandy. I confessed. It don’t matter if I say it again.”
“We’re done,” Blanc said.
Land dug at a loose piece of cuticle, peeled back a long strip of flesh, blood rising again.
She stared at Rath. A smile seeped across her face, grim and cold.
Rath thought perhaps his earlier musing was wrong, that perhaps this girl was evil. Not on the order of Preacher—whose evil was malignant and malicious. Hers was a banal and sad evil, but just as deadly.
Abby Land fixed her eyes on Rath. “Just because you don’t have something coming,” she said, “don’t mean it ain’t coming anyway.”