The silence in the room was broken by the deep rumble of thunder. Heavy rain began to pelt the trees outside the windows.
Randy watched Ethan back out of the doorway and disappear. He had to go talk to him, but he couldn’t just bolt out of the room.
“What do we do?” asked Jane.
“We call the police,” said her father.
“I’m not sure that’s the wisest approach,” said Del.
“He’s my son,” shouted Ray, looking hard at Del, then turning to Randy. “I make those decisions.”
“I could talk to Nolan,” said Jane. “See what he thinks.”
“Who’s Nolan?” Del had moved over to the windows, turned his back to them.
“He’s a retired homicide cop,” said Jane. “A friend of mine. Before we do anything, I’d like to get his opinion.”
“Okay,” said her dad. “I’ll agree to that.”
Jane stood up. “I’ve got to go talk to Sigrid.”
“Oh, God, I forgot about her,” said her father, rubbing the back of his neck. “Thanks, honey. But call Nolan on the way. And call me as soon as you’ve talked to him.”
Jane kissed him and left.
“Okay, boys,” said Ray, locking eyes with Randy. “I want the full story. Everything you know.”
Del turned around.
“Look, my son’s the innocent bystander here. I can’t fight your buddy, Larry, if I’m in the dark.”
“Come on, Ray,” said Del, pressing a hand to his back. “Let’s you and me go find ourselves a couple beers.”
“Only if they come with some answers.”
Randy thanked Del with his eyes as Del guided Ray out of the study. When Randy heard the front door close, he got up. He rushed up the stairs to Ethan’s bedroom. The door was closed.
Randy knocked. “It’s me. We have to talk.”
“Go away,” came Ethan’s voice.
Randy knocked louder. “Come on, Ethan. Please!”
“Leave me alone.”
Katie’s door opened and she came out. “What’s all the commotion?”
“Oh, hi, honey.” Randy shoved his hands into the pockets of his dress slacks. “I just needed to talk to Ethan for a sec.”
“Well, keep it down, okay? I gotta study for my geometry test.”
“Sure, honey,” said Randy, forcing a smile. “Sorry.”
After she closed her door, he waited a few more seconds, then, cursing Larry under his breath, walked back down the stairs. Ray followed Del back to Stillwater, where they stopped at a bar on South Main Street. Because the lift bridge to Wisconsin was temporarily shut down for repairs, Stillwater had briefly returned to a quiet small town with decent parking. Ray found a spot not far from the entrance to the bar and dashed across the street, holding a newspaper over his head to prevent himself from getting soaked.
Del was already waiting for him at a table by the windows. “I ordered us a couple of Leines.”
Ray didn’t care about the beer, he wanted to talk. He pulled out a chair and sat down. “First order of business. You’re fired.”
Del leaned back in his chair. He seemed startled.
“Now tell me about this psychopathic friend of yours.”
“I never wanted any of this to happen, Ray. You must know that.”
“Fine. But it did. And now we have to deal with it.”
Del nodded, played with the salt shaker. “I never thought Larry was a psychopath. At least, not before tonight.”
“He tried to kill a woman, Del, a friend of my daughter’s. Did you know about that?”
Del leaned into the table. “Yeah. I knew.”
“And you didn’t turn him over to the police?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Good God, man. What were you thinking?”
The beers arrived.
Del took a long sip, then set the bottle down. “He lied to Randy and me about what he was up to. By the time we found out, it was already done.”
“So what? He belongs in prison.”
“I know.”
“Then why didn’t you report it?”
“Look, you’re a defense attorney. You know life isn’t always a matter of action and appropriate reaction.”
Ray stared at him. He drummed his fingers on the table. “This reporter he knifed, was it premeditated?”
“Yeah, I think so. Randy and me, we just thought he was trying to scare her.”
“And you were okay with that?”
He nodded.
“Why? I mean, this is so . . . out of character. Nothing like the Del Green I know.”
“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do. Maybe nobody knows anybody. Look, Ray, she was digging into that old murder case in Iowa. We wanted her to stop.”
“Why would you care? Unless one of you killed her.” Del’s eyes drifted around the room.
“Christ! That’s it? That was why he tried to murder her? He thought she might dig up some information that would convict one of you?”
“Yeah,” said Del, taking another sip of beer.
“Ethan was arrested for the murder, but he was acquitted. Are you all trying to protect him?”
“I can’t answer that, Ray.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
Del shook his head.
Now Ray was getting mad. “And my daughter—”
“She and Cordelia drove down to Iowa and talked to the people their reporter friend had planned to interview.”
Ray groaned. “Sounds like Jane.”
“Larry got them to back off, according to what Randy told me.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, but obviously he felt they didn’t really get the message. And then when Gunderson regained consciousness, I think he just went tilt and grabbed your son.”
Ray had no idea why Jane hadn’t come to him with what she knew. Maybe she’d been trying to protect him, to see if the reporter’s information had any validity before she came to him with her suspicions. Jane was the exact opposite of Peter—too goddamn independent, too capable and self-sufficient for her own good.
“Look, Ray, here’s what you gotta understand. Randy and me, we met Larry in Vietnam. He saved both our lives more than once.” Del went on to explain how, after they came home, Randy had invited them to stay with him at his parents’ house in Waldo, Iowa. Del didn’t have anything else to do, so he took him up on it. Same with Larry. “You ever been in combat, Ray?”
“No. What’s that got to do with any of this?”
“Everything.” He tipped his bottle back and finished the beer.
Ray pushed his across the table. “Take it. I don’t want it. But keep talking.”
Del sucked in a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It was the early seventies, man. I can only tell you what it was like back then from my viewpoint. When Randy got back to Waldo, they gave him a parade. A fucking parade! When I got back to Detroit, people spit at me. Randy was a local hero, I was a baby killer. When I heard about the parade thing, I made sure I was in uniform when I got off the bus in Waldo that spring. Otherwise, I woulda been just another nigger. At least with the stripes on my arm, most people had to make a pretense of respect. See,” he said, pulling his chair closer to the table, “a lot of people thought I murdered Sue.”
“Did you?”
He shook his head. “No, I loved her.”
“Love—as in romantically?”
“Nah, more like a sister. But people got the wrong idea because they saw us together. The night she was murdered, we walked out of a bar together. Arm in arm. Down the center of the street. I was drunk and didn’t care. In fact, I wanted people to see us. I was as black as night and she was as white as a summer cloud, and we were friends. The goddamn world was changing and I wanted that town to look it in the eye.”
“But if you’d just met her,” said Ray, “how could you love her?”
He smiled, pulled Ray’s beer closer to him. “Randy, he used to get letters from her every week. Sometimes he’d read them to us, sometimes he wouldn’t. Nobody ever wrote me and I got to thinking, hell, maybe if I got Sue’s address, sent her a letter, that she’d write me back. Course, I knew Randy wouldn’t like it, being the jealous kind. So, when I finally got up the nerve to write her, I told her that she seemed like a nice person and that I was superlonely, that I’d like to hear from her—but that if she did write me, I suggested that she type the letters and use a different name. That’s how it started. We got to be great friends that year. By the time I made it to Waldo, I felt like she was part of my family.” He laughed. “Better than family. Nobody back in Detroit ever wrote me a goddamn thing.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Ray. “Because you were friends, people saw you together, they assumed you murdered her? Even for racists, that’s a stretch.”
“Actually, it’s not, but I won’t argue the point right now. No, it was more than that. If Jane did her work down in Waldo, you’re going to hear about this sooner or later, so I might as well explain it now, tell you the whole truth.” He took a sip of Ray’s beer. “It was my dog tags. The cops found them in the field where Sue was strangled, close to the tree where they found her body. They’d already arrested Ethan, but they called me in for questioning. Larry came up with this plausible explanation, and since I was scared out of my mind, I used it. He told me to tell the cops that we’d been horsing around in that field earlier that night. Wrestling. And that my tags had come off then. We all met at a bar that night in town.”
“Who exactly?”
“Me and Larry, Ethan, and Randy and Sue. Larry backed up my statement, told the cops that I was so pissed that I’d lost my tags that I wanted to go back to the field and try to find them, but Larry talked me out of it, said we’d go back in the morning when we could see better.”
“But that wasn’t true.”
“No. Like I said, Sue and I left the bar together that night. I walked her to the front door of her house and said I’d see her in the morning. She seemed really down, but wouldn’t tell me why. She was like that sometimes, kept things to herself. I thought maybe it was the war. She was totally against it. She’d gotten into an argument with Larry that night. Larry was a huge supporter of what we were doing in Vietnam and made fun of the candlelight peace vigils and sit-ins she was always attending. At one point, I thought she was going to throw her beer at him. Anyway, as I was walking across the front lawn back to Randy’s parents’ place, her brother came up to me. He’d been in the garage working on his car. He didn’t like me, didn’t like it that I was a friend of his sister’s. He’d been drinking, too. Seemed like everybody in town was drunk that night. Grant—that was his name—had just graduated from high school and registered with the draft. I knew he had a low draft number, and I also knew he was scared shitless about being sent to Nam.
“He came out of the garage, demanded to know what I was doing with his sister. I told him to go fuck himself. I kept walking across the field where we used to sit. I finally stopped because he wouldn’t shut up, must have stood there for almost a minute listening to him yell a blue streak. He told me I was a sick killer. Asked if I was proud of that. Said that people like me deserved to rot in hell for playing along with our evil government and agreeing to go fight innocent people. You get the drift. I got sick of it after a while and told him to go home and play with his toy car, leave me the hell alone. Well, that did it. He rushed at me, shoved me to the ground. He was stronger than I thought he’d be, and scrappy as hell, but I pinned him. I was about to beat the crap out of him when Sue showed up. I guess she heard him yelling at me from her upstairs window. She ordered me off him, so I got up. But as soon as I did, he came at me again. I think that’s when he yanked my tags off, although I can’t be sure.
“Sue got between him and me, finally got him to back off. He ran off. She was so embarrassed. She apologized over and over again for his behavior. As I was walking her back to her house, her brother sped past us in his piece-of-shit car, honking and cursing. He was a real piece of work. Anyway, I said good night again and then headed for Randy’s place. It was a warm night, so I lay down in the grass by the barn, stayed there until sunup.”
Ray listened to the story. Del sounded like a man telling the truth, but there was no way he could be sure. As a defense attorney, he’d met a lot of persuasive liars in his day. “You didn’t go anywhere else that night?”
“Nope. I saw Randy come in a while later.”
“What about Ethan?”
“I don’t know. He said he stayed until the bar closed.”
“No idea. I was dead to the world by the time he said he got back.”
“Are you telling me Larry could have done it?”
“He swears he didn’t.”
“And you believe him?”
“I did, at the time. Now I’m not so sure. But you can believe that Larry, Randy, and me were the prime suspects after Ethan. None of us wanted to spend the rest of our lives in prison for something we didn’t do. The case went cold. Sure, we all wanted to know what happened to Sue, but not at the risk of our freedom. That’s why we’ve always kept an eye out for someone digging into that old murder case. There are people in that town would would still love to put my ass in jail for her murder.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“I do.”
“And now Larry has abducted my son.”
“Randy told me that there’s a warrant out for his arrest on a Colorado murder charge, and of course, if Melanie Gunderson remembers what happened to her, she can ID him, so that’s attempted murder on top of the murder charge. Larry’s in deep, Ray. Maybe Randy’s right. Maybe he has flipped out.”
“That’s really what I want to hear about the guy who’s just kidnapped my son.”
Del turned the beer bottle around in his hand. “That’s why we have to play this carefully. You don’t want your campaign manager—or your ex-campaign manager—making the papers because of an old murder case, which then led to your son being abducted.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about the governor’s race, I care about Peter!”
“And I get that,” said Del, pushing the bottle aside. “But here’s the deal. Randy and I know Larry better than anybody else. If there’s any way to talk him down from this, we’re the ones who can do it. I understand your concerns. I’m a father, too, but give us some time to see if we can defuse the situation without anybody getting hurt.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“Yeah, I do. Absolutely.”
Ray had dealt with criminals all his adult life. If a man had nothing to lose—and that defined Larry Wilton—he was at his most dangerous. If Ray contacted the police and they even made one small mistake, he might never see his son again. But then, there was no guarantee that Del and Randy would handle things perfectly, either.
The waitress came over to the table, asked if they’d like another beer.
“No thanks,” said Del, handing her a ten and telling her to keep the change.
As she walked off, Ray fastened his eyes on Del. “Before you clean out your desk, cancel all my events until further notice. I don’t care what excuse you give. Then tell Mar Rios that she’s been bumped up to your job.”
“Think about that a minute, Ray. Are you sure canceling your speaking engagements is a wise idea? The press is going to smell blood, no matter what cover story I give them, especially if they also know I’ve been canned.”
“Just do it. All I can think about now is my son. Now, here’s the bottom line. I’ve been around a long time, Del. Longer than you. I know how to play hardball with the best of them, so listen up because I’m only going to say this once. You’ve got two days. Call me tomorrow with an update. You better have one. If you
lied to me about any of this and I find out, if something happens to my boy because of you and Randy and your psycho friend, I’ll come down on you so fast and hard there won’t be anything left of you but a grease stain on a rug.”