Before I Sleep (6 page)

“So what's the point in killing him?”

Delia fell silent, and Carey cut her off, going to the next caller.

She had spent more time on Delia than she ordinarily would have on such a pallid, uncertain caller, but she had done so purposely to set up the question. What she wanted, what she needed, were passionate kooks and people with really well-thought-out opinions who could argue interestingly. Anybody who thought that talk radio was the public's forum didn't understand that it was entertainment before all else.

To her relief, she saw that one of her favorite lunatics was on hold, a man she could always count on for wild and inflammatory speeches on any subject. He was definitely out in the ozone.

“George from Bradenton, you're on the air.”

“What, are you crazy?” George demanded without preamble. “What the guy did was a horrible crime, and it doesn't matter whether we can keep him in prison forever. He deserves to die, just like those people he killed! We can't be letting murderers get away with this! And all this talk about how the electric chair is cruel and unusual punishment—I'll tell you what's cruel and unusual! What he did to those people is worse than anything Old Sparky will do to him!”

“You think so, George?”

“I know so! What's the matter with you? Did you lose your stomach for it?”

“This isn't about me, George. This is about a man who's going to die.”

“Yeah, right. I heard what you said about all of us killing him. He's killing himself because of what he did. And I'm not going to feel a damn bit guilty about it.”

“Good for you, George,” she said acidly. The guy was trying to bait her into a personal argument, and she wouldn't allow it. Within the limits of talk radio, she tried never to let discussions become personal pissing contests.

George was on a roll, though, and hardly heard her response. “And what's ah this crap about protecting society anyway? This isn't about protecting society! This is about retribution. This is about punishment. Nobody can give those people back their lives, but we can sure as hell take his to get even for it!”

She started leading him on. “We oughtta make that sumbitch pay, huh, George?”

“Damn right, counselor.”

“Make it painful, too.”

“Yep.”

“As bad as it was for them.”

“You got it.”

“And you'd be willing to pull the switch?”

She knew she'd taken a risk; he might back away, and she was due for a break in less than a minute. She wanted to do a “hot break,” cutting into the commercials directly from the conversation, with no warning. She couldn't afford for George to get reasonable now. But she'd judged her quarry well.

“Damn right I would,” he said, his voice rising. “And I wouldn't just throw the switch, either. I'd tease him with it. A little jolt here, another there. Let him know exactly what's coming. Let him sweat and hurt. Just the way he did to them.”

She punched off his line at the end of the sentence and stepped in as if he'd finished.

“That's what we call justice,” she said, and stabbed the white button that started the commercial break.

The rest of the hour went just as well, most of the callers disagreeing with George, whether or not they disagreed with the death penalty. And she had no doubt that George would call back, because he was now the topic of conversation, and he loved nothing better. Good old George, a host's dream.

At the top of the hour, she left the booth for a ten-minute break while news, weather, and commercials played. She headed straight for Bill Hayes's office and was relieved to find him still there.

“Show's going good, Carey,” he said, absolving her of her error in missing the meeting.

“Yeah, it's hot But it's not about Otis.”

“What do you care? It's good radio.”

“Right” She tried to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “Can I bum a cigarette?”

“You don't smoke.”

“Now I do.”

Most of the time she had the feeling that Bill didn't really see anyone except as cogs in the wheel of this station, but right now the look he gave her said he was seeing
her,
Carissa Stover. He pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of his desk drawer and passed them over. “ If you close the door, you can smoke in here. I won't report you to the air police. Otherwise, get the hell out back with the cat.“

“Thanks. I'll bring them right back.” She turned to leave.

“Carey?”

She looked back at him, waiting.

“If you want, you can pull the topic back to Otis. I know you can. But if it's too … difficult for you, just let the show go the way it's going. It's all right. Nobody said you
had
to bare your soul for ratings points. Okay?”

She felt the sudden burn of tears in her eyes, and blinked rapidly. “Thanks. I'll think about it.” Then she turned and headed for the back lot, where she could smoke her first cigarette in fourteen years and talk to a cat that couldn't talk back.

The cigarette made her feel light-headed and sick, and after three drags she dropped it to the dirt and ground it out under her heel. She stayed only to pet the station's cat.

Pegleg, as the three-legged ginger tomcat was called, had turned up a couple of years ago in bad condition with tattered ears and an infected leg. Someone had taken him to the vet, who had amputated the bad leg and nursed him back to health. Apparently Peg figured that meant the station was home, and he'd stuck around ever since. There were bowls for cat food and water that someone always kept full near the weathered picnic table, and Peg seemed to like lounging on the table near the microwave antennas. He let all the station personnel pet him, but ran from strangers.

Tonight he was feeling particularly friendly, and as soon as Carey put out her cigarette and sat at the table, he jumped into her lap, purring loudly.

Carey scratched him behind his ears, realizing that her show was avoiding the subject of Otis because she was letting it, and she was letting it because she didn't really want to go there. And what was more, she was going to let it keep going its own way because she wasn't ready to do anything else.

Her mind made up, she placed the cat gently back onto its perch, then went to take the cigarettes back to Bill. He was involved in a phone conversation, and merely wagged his fingers at her when she put the pack and lighter on his desk.

The next hour went pretty much the same as the first. She began to feel she was almost running on automatic, safe and secure in the knowledge that people were arguing among themselves about the death penalty, and she didn't have a whole lot to do except keep the ball rolling. The plight of John William Otis was secondary in the minds of her listeners, and for now she was content to leave it that way.

But then she saw a new caller pop up on her screen, and the subject tag that Marge had typed in made the hackles on the back of her neck stand up:
Otis didn't do it.

She interrupted a caller in the middle of a diatribe about lethal injection versus the electric chair, cut away to commercial, and stared at the glowing phosphor words.
Otis-didn't do it.

She punched the button that let her talk to Marge. “This guy who said Otis didn't do it. Did he say anything else?”

Marge was busy loading carts, but she took time to answer, sounding a little harried. “I hate it when we have a string of short commercials. I didn't give him a chance to say anything else. Do you know how many calls I've been answering?”

“Did he sound wild or weird or anything?”

“I don't remember.”

“Thanks.”

Marge gave her the one-minute signal, and she nodded, staring again at the words. It was just her imagination, but they seemed to glow brighter than all the others. Bob from Gulfport. He wasn't a regular caller, but if he turned out to be some doped-up freak who didn't really have anything to say, she could disconnect him in an instant. She decided to go for it, even though it meant returning the show's focus to Otis.

At Marge's signal, she punched the button. “Bob from Gulfport, you're on the air.” “Carey?”

“Yes, this is Carey.” She had to smother a sigh, but resisted the temptation to disconnect him. People who started this way rarely tended to be good callers. “What do you want to say?”

“John Otis didn't do it.”

She felt a stirring of impatience. You couldn't just drop something like that and let it go. It made for bad radio. “Didn't do what?”

- “He didn't kill his foster parents.”

“Were you there? Did you see what happened?”

The caller went silent. She reached for the disconnect button, but just before she hit it, he spoke. “I know he didn't do it. And I'm going to prove it.”

“How are you going to do that? Don't you think his defense attorney tried to do that? The problem here, Bob, is that there wasn't any real evidence one way or the other. Otis was registered in a hotel in Vero Beach the night the murders happened, but nobody could remember seeing him. There was no evidence at the scene to suggest that someone
else
had done it. Do
you
have evidence?”

“No, but I'm going to prove he didn't do it. I will. You'll see!”

He hung up before she could disconnect him, and she heard the dial tone. Instead of cutting it out of the broadcast, she left it, deciding to use it.

“Well,” she said to her listeners, “I can't imagine how he's going to prove it without evidence, and I guess he can't either, or he wouldn't have hung up.

“But you know, that was another thing that always bothered me about this case. John Otis registered at a hotel in Vero Beach on Friday night, the day before the murders. And he checked out on Sunday afternoon and came home.

“Now folks, why would a guy go to Vero Beach, drive all the way back here to commit murders like that, drive back to Vero Beach, then come home the following afternoon to be arrested?”

But no one tried to answer the question. No one really seemed interested in the man on death row.

Maybe that was the whole problem, she thought as she drove home that night. Nobody gave a damn about John William Otis.

And maybe it was time someone did.

C
HAPTER
4

18 Days

S
eamus Rourke looked across the breakfast table at his father, and figured there was little in the world he less wanted to see.

Danny had been with him three days now, and Seamus was beginning to feel as if his life was coming apart at the seams. The old man was a constant reminder of things he absolutely didn't want to think about.

Worse, after three days the old man still smelled like booze. Seamus, who'd always considered himself a reasonably tolerant man, was discovering there was something he couldn't tolerate at all.

“Did you go to AA yet?” he asked.

Danny looked up from his plate of bacon and eggs, his eyes still reddened and bleary. “Nope.”

“Look, Dad, I told you that was a condition of staying here.”

“And I said I'd do it.”

It was the voice of an annoyed father speaking to an importunate son. The thing was, it didn't work anymore on
this
son.

Seamus pushed his plate aside, his breakfast half-eaten. “I told you how it's gonna be. That's my final word on the subject. I'm sure as hell not going to live with a drunk.”

He stomped out of the kitchen, grabbing his jacket from the chair where he'd laid it. His gun was already holstered on his belt. He pulled his car keys off the peg beside the door without sparing a backward glance for the man he held partly responsible for turning his life into a living hell.

As he walked out the door, he heard his father say forlornly, “I wasn't drunk that night, boy. I wasn't drunk.”

But he'd been drunk every night ever since, Seamus thought bitterly. He slammed the door, then slammed the car door after he climbed in. Fuck him, he thought. Fuck him anyway.

He peeled out of the driveway with a squeal of tires, and left rubber when he had to brake for a stop sign. “Dammit!” He slapped his hand on the steering wheel and forced himself to calm down. Little in this world could make him as angry as Danny Rourke—or Carissa Stover.

But he didn't want to think about her either. Christ, what was she doing, turning her show into a John William Otis marathon? The last three nights she had opened with a monologue about the guy, and the ensuing discussion had revolved around the death penalty and whether society was responsible for making monsters like Otis. He was thinking about not even tuning in tonight.

Because she made him listen. This time he couldn't just soak up the liquid honey of her voice. No, he found himself listening to her arguments, and getting madder than an angry wasp. Four times last night alone he'd had to stop himself from picking up the telephone and giving her a piece of his mind. Just what did she think she was doing?

He sure as hell didn't like the way she was making him think about John Otis as a man. He didn't like the creeping sense of guilt she was giving him over what that murdering son of a bitch had been through as a child. Hell, he was a cop. When somebody brought something like that to his attention, he did his damnedest to put an end to it. But nobody had told anybody about what was happening to that boy. Why should he feel guilty about something he hadn't even known about?

Finding that thoughts of Carey were only making him angrier, he wrenched them away from her and thought about the old souse, otherwise known as his dad. He was just barking when he threatened to throw Danny out if he didn't go to AA, and he knew it.

That was the worst of it. He couldn't throw the old man out. He'd seen what happened to people like Danny when they had no one to turn to anymore. They wound up living under highway overpasses or in cardboard boxes in alleys, going hungry and spending whatever money they could find or beg on a bottle of cheap wine.

Well, he wasn't going to have that on his conscience, too. His conscience was already overloaded.

By the time he pulled into the police-station parking lot on First Avenue Norm, he had a grip on his temper.