Shattered (26 page)

“You think that matters? Did you get the name of that lawyer from the sheriff? It's probably his brother-in-law. He gets paid whether you live or die.”

“Get the fuck out of here, man.” But Guy thought there was less cockiness in Saddler's eyes now, maybe even a touch of worry. “There are laws against intimidating a prisoner.”

“I'm not intimidating you, Saddler,” Guy said softly. “I haven't even started to intimidate you.”

Saddler said, “What the hell do you want, man?”

“I want to know what happened to my daughter. I want you to tell me now and I want you to tell me the truth and if you do, I might even testify before the grand jury that your sorry carcass was alive when I left you.”

Saddler's scowl was disdainful and dismissing. “You're not scaring me, asshole. And I don't know what you're talking about.”

“You'd better be scared. Three girls are dead, raped and tortured, and their fingers are pointing straight at you. You're going to fry this time, Saddler. And I'm going to be there to watch.”

“Man, you're out of your fucking mind! Where's my goddamn lawyer?”

“Where is Kelly? Who did you get to make those phone calls to my wife? What did you do to my little girl?”

“Chill the fuck out, man! How the hell am I supposed to know where she is? You can't keep up with your own kid, it ain't my fault.”

Guy's hand shot through the bars and grabbed Saddler's shirt and if he could have gotten his fingers around his throat, he would have crushed his windpipe. He jerked him against the bars, hard, and had the satisfaction of seeing Saddler's smirk dissolve into slack-jawed shock as he crashed against the metal.

“You answer me, you piece you shit, you tell me the goddamn truth! What have you done with her, goddamn it!” He pushed him back and jerked him forward again, slamming him against the bars again and again. “Answer me!” He pushed back for one more blow, but the material of the shirt tore and Saddler wrenched away.

“You're crazy, man!” Saddler was screaming at him. “You're fucking crazy!”

And then someone was pulling at Guy's shoulders, demanding, “What's going on here? Are you manhandling my client?”

“He threatened me, man! He tried to fucking kill me!”

Guy jerked away from the middle-aged lawyer, shrugging off his touch, straightening his shoulders. “Sue me,” he told Saddler, and walked out.

At the door that separated the cells from the interrogation room, he met Case coming down the hall with strong measured strides, a dark cold light in his eyes and a grim set to his mouth. “Now,” he said, “it's my turn.”

~

Chapter Thirty-nine

“
I
would have killed him,” Guy said. “If I could have gotten my hands on his throat, I would have killed him and I wouldn't have been sorry. I never knew that about myself before.”

They were on the deck in the late morning sunshine, a pot of coffee on the table between them, the Gulf pristine and sparkling below. It was a morning like so many others in the life they had shared, and unlike any other they would ever know.

Carol said, “Do you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking about that poor man's wife, and how it could be me who's picking out a coffin now and reserving the chapel and God, I hate myself, but I'm so glad, so glad it's not me.”

Stress and sleeplessness were evident on her face in the clear morning light; her hair was tousled and her eyes were haunted. Guy reached across the table for her hand. She squeezed his fingers lightly, then pulled gently away.

She lowered her eyes and cleared her throat slightly. She said, “Everything—happened so quickly, didn't it?”

It was not the kind of question that required an answer, so Guy said nothing.

Then she looked at him, her eyes troubled and uncertain. “Guy,” she said, “I want you to know that being with you again the other night was wonderful. It was exactly what I needed—”

“What we both needed,” he corrected quietly, watching her.

Her smile was faint and transitory. “But everything has been so sudden, so intense, and now, this.” She swallowed, and shifted her gaze. “It would be unfair of us to expect promises from each other right now, and I'm not asking them. Just—help me get through this, okay? Whatever we're going to do, let's not do it now.”

Guy said, “Keeping promises was never one of my problems, Carol.”

She still wouldn't look at him. “I know that.”

“The ones I make, I keep.”

Her eyes were pained when she looked at him. He almost preferred no eye contact at all. “When you can.”

“Do you want a promise from me?”

Her eyes darkened, and her voice broke on the next words. “I don't know.”

Guy got up and knelt behind her, encircling her shoulders with his arms, pressing his cheek briefly against her hair. She was fresh from the shower, smelling of warmth and soap, and he could feel her gentle nakedness beneath the terrycloth robe. He said, “We're going to get each other through this, sweetie. We can talk about promises afterward if you want to. But right now I'm not going anywhere unless you ask me to.”

Carol reached up and took his hand. Her voice sounded husky, though he saw the curve of her smile. “I'm not going to ask you to. Not anytime soon, anyway.”

“Good.” He kissed her fingers, and stood up.

Carol took her coffee over to the rail and looked down in silence for a time. She said, “I keep telling myself the worst is over. But it's not, is it? Because by the time the investigation is over, we'll know what happened to Kelly. And all of a sudden I realize it was easier not to know.”

Guy said, “I think she's alive, Carol. If Saddler wanted to hurt me, the quickest way to do that would have been to let me know he'd killed my daughter. If he was going to taunt me with anything, that would have been it—not those phone calls from a living girl. I think he might have had her, but she got away somehow—and I think he's holding that as his trump card.”

Carol rubbed her forehead wearily. “I don't understand why none of this came out at his first trial. Why the phone calls, who the girl was ... why he won't tell us anything.”

“It hasn't even been forty-eight hours of interrogation,” Guy said. “It could take weeks.”

Carol drew a slow, careful breath. “I'm not sure I can take it that long.”

He came forward and put a hand on her shoulder. “Yes,” he said, “you can.”

Then he said, “I have to go into the office this morning. Ed called and said the TV stations had gotten wind of developments down here and we can expect a zoo. I don't think they'll track you down, but if they do, try to stay out of the line of fire, okay?”

“They won't find me. I'm supposed to go with Ken Carlton to see some property today—by boat, no less. God, it all seems so bizarre. Life goes on.”

He kissed her hair. “It always has.”

Then she turned around. “When is the memorial service for Deputy Long?”

“I'll call his wife today. I should—anyway.”

Carol nodded, and started to go back inside to finish dressing. Then she looked back. “There haven't been any more phone calls since he was arrested.”

“It's only been a day,” Guy reminded her.

She nodded and tried to look reassured. But she wasn't, and neither was he.

***

“Why are you coming at me with them murdered kids again? I'm telling you, I didn't have anything to do with any disappearing girls and I don't know nothing about it, so just leave me the fuck alone will you?”

Saddler was putting up an angry show, but he looked haggard and worried. Sleeping conditions had not been the best in the county jail since Saddler had been in residence, and the only times Saddler had been allowed out of the interrogation room during daylight hours were for meals and bathroom breaks. It was unlikely that a big-city, civil-rights lawyer would have allowed John Case to get away with as much as he was doing, but William Soffit, whose name had rotated up on the court-appointed attorney list, was more comfortable defending DUI and teenage breaking and entering than he was murder cases, and he had not yet figured out that he just might be handling the case of the decade as far as the state of Florida was concerned.

It had been thirty-two hours since Saddler's arrest. The state police were already sending a team of investigators to try to make a case in the deaths of Mickie Anderson and Tanya Little, and the D.A. had assigned two prosecutors to the case. The sheriff figured he had until noon, tops, before his authority in this case all but disappeared.

He could hear the clock ticking like a time bomb in the back of his head.

Soffit said, “Sheriff, I've asked you repeatedly to confine your questions to the charges against my client.” He didn't bother to keep the boredom out of his tone. “Mr. Saddler, do you wish to take a break?”

“What for?” Saddler shot back irritably. “All they do is leave me sit in this goddamn room. It takes two goddamn hours to get a deputy in here to take me back to my cell so I can take a goddamn leak. Can't you do something about that, for christsakes?”

Case replied equitably, “As I've explained to you, Mr. Saddler, we're a little shorthanded, right now. All my deputies are tied up investigating the disappearances of several young girls, two of whom have turned up dead. We don't have a lot of time left over for escorting prisoners back and forth from their cells. Now, if you'd like to tell us anything that might make our investigation easier, I'm sure it would free up enough personnel to make sure you get your meals and your potty breaks on time.”

Saddler said, “Jesus, man, I keep telling you, you got the wrong goddamn guy! I don't know nothing—”

“We've got the right guy, all right,” Case said, smiling genially. “We've got your fingerprints on the fireplace poker that you used to assault Guy Dennison. We've got ignition wire and explosive powder in that rat's nest of a trailer you've been squatting in that matches the wire and explosive used in the bomb that killed my deputy. We've got an eyewitness who saw you place the bomb. What we've got, Mr. Richard Saddler, is a cop killer who's going back into the Florida prison system and as an ex-con I'm sure you probably know how
much fun that’s going to be.”

Saddler gave an angry hiss and started to turn away, but Case went on mildly, “And let me tell you what else we've got. We've got a convicted rapist, a pathetic little dickhead who likes to play with little girls, prowling our shores and making threatening phone calls just about the time one of those young girls washes in with the tide, dead, raped, and a victim of some pretty weird games. Then we got a whole collection of newspaper articles and fliers and photographs of Kelly Dennison in your trailer. That disturbs me, Mr. Saddler. That disturbs me a whole lot.”

There had also been clippings on Carol Dennison, pictures of that big house of hers torn from some magazine, some miscellaneous scraps of newspaper with Guy Dennison's byline on them. Case had not told the Dennisons about this yet, and he hoped he didn't have to—not until he had answers to the questions he knew Dennison would ask.

Saddler was stony faced. Soffit glanced at his watch. Tick, tick...

“Now as you can see, you don't have a whole lot of bargaining room here. I'm counting three solid counts of murder one, two of kidnapping and sexual assault, one of assault with a deadly weapon, two of stalking, one breaking and entering, one illegal possession of an incendiary device, and we haven't even gotten to parole violations yet. In short, Mr. Saddler, you are in deep, deep shit. But I'll tell you what I'm going to do for you.”

Case paused for a moment, letting Saddler mull over his situation and anticipate what was to come. Then he said, “You help me find Kelly Dennison and I'll make sure the judge knows you cooperated. It might mean the difference between life in prison and eight to fifteen years waiting for Old Sparky.”

That was bullshit, of course, but it was amazing what a man would believe when he was desperate. And if Saddler wasn't desperate by now, he soon would be.

Saddler said, “How the hell am I supposed to do that man? I'm telling you I don't—”

“Who'd you get to make those phone calls to Carol Dennison, Saddler? Was it Kelly? Is she still alive? Who've you got working with you?”

“What phone calls? Man, I don't have to listen to this bullshit!” He turned to his lawyer. “Are you going to let him harass me like this? I done told him—”

“Because that's your trump card, Saddler, that's your chance to come out of this with a nice cozy prison cell instead of a one-way ticket to Death Row, if that girl is still alive. But you'd better tell me quick because this is a limited time offer and it expires”—Case looked at his watch—”in just about an hour.”

Saddler pushed up angrily from the table. “This is bullshit.”

And Soffit said, glancing at his own watch, “Are we about done here?”

At a tap on the door, Case turned with a frown of irritation. A deputy came in with a folded slip of paper, which he handed to Case, and a murmured, two-part message. The first part was good news: They had tracked down the shop in town that sold the bound-girl necklaces, and the name of the shop owner and the address were on the paper Case had been handed. The second part was not so good: The D.A. himself was waiting in Case's office for a full briefing. His time was almost up.