As a lawman, Luther Tillman had an aversion to the kind of speculation that led to emotionalism and sensationalism, that took an ordinary case with a few oddities and ballooned it into a sordid melodrama involving conspiracies by wirepulling villains larger than life. Under the current circumstances, however, maybe a straw wasn’t necessary to break the camel’s back of that aversion. Perhaps a feather was enough to do the job, the feather being his inability to identify long-familiar constellations in the night sky, but whatever the cause, something tipped Luther Tillman over the edge after Sunday dinner.
Because he wouldn’t have time on Monday to purchase disposable cellphones, he committed an act of evidence tampering of which he wouldn’t have been capable a day earlier. He drove to headquarters, entered the evidence room alone, and took two disposable cells from a sack of twelve unactivated phones confiscated in the bust of a methamphetamine operation that had not yet gone to trial. As an item of evidence, ten phones served as well as twelve, didn’t they? There would be a discrepancy in the evidence records, but sometimes that happened quite innocently.
Home again, he made the necessary call to activate both phones, and he gave one to Rebecca. “While I’m in Kentucky, keep it charged and on. If I need to call you, I don’t want to use either your iPhone or mine, and I don’t want to call the house landline.”
Scowling, Rebecca said, “Are you maybe letting this thing with Cora push your spook-me button a little too hard?”
“No,” he said. “I’m not.”