Jude Devine Mystery Series (68 page)

“It wouldn’t be, normally,” Schrott replied. “But Griffin Mahanes makes his living distorting facts and selling juries. Trust me, he’s going to work this angle.”

“Are you saying we don’t have a death-penalty case?”

“Our first offer to the defense will be life without parole. We can ask for the death penalty, but there isn’t a judge in Colorado who’ll buy it. There’s no indication that the murder was premeditated.” Schrott fingered his modest gray tie while he waited for the unrest to die down.

He wasn’t a good-looking man, and his wavy brown hair was cut in a style straight out of a fifties high school yearbook, but he came across well to juries in the Four Corners. Locals tended to be suspicious of slick defense attorneys from far-flung cities, and Jude hoped this would buy them something at the Miller trial. One look at Griffin Mahanes and you knew Satan wouldn’t want his soul if he offered to sell it.

“I know how you all feel,” Schrott continued. “We’d have more to work with if there was evidence of long-term abuse, but the autopsy makes it pretty clear that the attack was not part of a pattern.”

Jude glanced around the eight lawmen present, detecting a mixture of anger and resignation. The DA was making sense, but everyone had read the autopsy report. Emotion was inevitable.

“I’ll be interviewing Mr. Thompson again today,” she said, wondering if it was even worth the risk of adding another bizarre statement to the mounting proof of his insanity. “Can I see that video again. The part where he’s talking about the hat.”

They all watched in moribund silence as Suzette Kelly asked in her whispery, sorority-girl voice, “Did you ever see Corban Foley, Mr. Thompson?”

“Only when it happened.”

“When what happened?”

“When I took the hat.”

“Which hat?”

Thompson became agitated. “I forget.”

“When did you see the hat?” Suzette pressed him, but his attention was wandering, and she had to swat his hand away when he reached for her pearl necklace.

At that point, Matt Roache interrupted, announcing, “That engagement ring she’s wearing—that’s the one I gave her. What does
that
tell you?”

Thompson picked up on the rhetorical question with a display of righteous disgust. “She’s a whore, and God doesn’t forget those who transgress.”

Suzette immediately jumped in, like the prime-time heavy hitter she was. “Have you transgressed, Mr. Thompson?”

“Yes.” He seemed to shrink in his chair. “And I was punished.”

“What did you do?” Suzette asked softly.

“I can’t speak of my wickedness without the elixir.”

The interview continued along these lines for several more minutes before Suzette seemed to realize she was never going to get the hoped-for murder confession from a man who seemed to be missing his frontal lobe.

Schrott turned off the recording and remarked laconically, “It’s almost worth getting the guy to confess so that we can prove why he couldn’t have done it and clear the air before Miller faces trial.”

“That seems like a desperate strategy,” Sheriff Pratt said.

“I wasn’t serious, sir.”

“Okay,” Pratt conceded, “but assuming you were, for the sake of a hypothetical discussion, would it work?”

“Let’s not go there. The people have a good case against Miller. We don’t need to play games.”

“I don’t suppose we can keep Thompson off the stand,” Jude said morosely.

“Not when Mahanes wants him for a star witness.”

“Perfect. We get a statement that proves Wade Miller is a liar and staged the crime scene, and they get a witness who makes Miller seem credible.”

“Yep. It sucks.” Schrott got to his feet. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Pratt waited until the DA had closed the door then muttered, “That sonofabitch Mahanes thinks he can laugh at us. Get out there and find us a star witness we can put on the stand. Make that sucker wish he’d never been born.”

*

Jude’s interview with Gums Thompson started out like a waste of time. He reacted with bewilderment to the “hat” questions and marveled when Jude showed him the relevant parts of the Suzette Kelly interview.

He didn’t remember talking to the emaciated anchor and wondered out loud if she had special arrangements with Satan by which men were rendered impotent if they touched her pearl necklace. Lately he’d noticed a malfunction in his member that made self-gratification impossible.

Jude offered a suggestion. “When you appear in court, you don’t need to mention that to the jury.”

“Am I guilty?” he asked, eyes darting to the door.

“No.” Jude said calmly. “Wade Miller has been charged with murder. You are going to be asked some questions at his trial.”

Comprehension dawned, and he ran his big pink tongue over his spaghetti-thin lips. “Because of the baby.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t take him.”

“I know that, Hank.”

A flash of lucidity froze his wandering gaze. “He wasn’t there.”

Jude’s heart jolted. “What do you mean?”

“When I went back for the hat, he wasn’t there.”

Jude was almost afraid to ask another question in case she sent his train of thought careening away from its temporary stopover in sanity-ville. Cautiously, kindly, she echoed, “He wasn’t there?”

Thompson’s brow collapsed into tight furrows. “I took the hat then.”

Jude waved the deputy at the door over and instructed him to go get the two hats they had in evidence. She had shown Thompson the photographs previously and drawn blank looks.

While she was waiting, she said, “Stay with me, Hank. You’re doing fine. Just a few more questions.”

The deputy returned with the two bagged hats, and Jude placed them in front of Thompson. He snatched up the ball cap the goat had been wearing and cried, “You found it.”

“Yes.”

“He wanted to keep it to remember that goat by,” Thompson blurted. “But I had already cast it in. Now, Heather won’t talk to me.” He clutched the evidence bag to his chest. “Can I take it to her so she knows of my service?”

“I can give you a photograph of the cap, if you want. Heather likes photographs.”

Mollified, he set the cap back on the table and proceeded to poke around inside his mouth, extracting food from his false teeth.

Piecing his ramblings together, Jude asked, “Is that why you went back? You wanted to get the goat’s cap for Matt because he was angry at you?”

Thompson nodded weepily. “He threw my elixir out the window. He said I was undeserving.”

“What a wicked thing to do.” Jude humored him without mockery. “Is that when you went back?”

“No. He wanted to go home.”

“I see.”

“He wouldn’t let me in. He said, no hat, no Heather.”

“What did you do?”

“I tried to find the elixir, then I went back to the she-devil’s house to seek the minion’s hat.”

Jude ran the timeline. Miller and Thompson vandalized the house at around 11:30 p.m. then drove back to Heather Roache’s home, about twenty minutes away. Thompson then spent time looking for the discarded tequila. By her estimates he must have been back at Tonya’s place at around 12:30 a.m.

“What happened at the she-devil’s house?” she asked.

“I went inside.”

“Did you climb in a window?”

He shook his head and confided, “I found the magic rock that conceals the keys.”

“So you opened the door with a key?”

“I was fearful, but I asked the Big Guy to shine his light upon me and the house was filled with radiance.”

Jude recalled that the hall lights came on automatically when the front door was opened. “Where did you go then?”

“To the bathroom. I couldn’t hold it any longer.”

Jude pictured the befuddled Thompson relieving himself, then wandering directly across the hallway. To Corban’s bedroom. Did she really want to put him in there on the record, by his own admission? “And after that?”

“I looked in the first room. It wasn’t there.”

“Can you tell me about that room?”

“It had a small bed and,” he wiggled his fingers above his head, “music from the angels.”

The baby mobile that hung from Corban’s ceiling. “Did you see who was in the bed, Hank?”

With a quick nod, he said, “Nobody. I was going to lie down on it, but that’s when he came back.”

“Who did?”

“Wade Miller, the jerkoff. I heard his truck, so I ran.” He pointed at the elf hat on the table next to the cap. “This was on the ground, and I wanted to have it so I could show Heather. But he stole it from me and reviled me with his demon’s tongue.”

Jude thought she followed his twisted reasoning. He was trying to get the ball cap back for Matt because Matt was threatening him with limited access to Heather if he didn’t. Then, having failed, he thought the elf hat he stumbled on in the driveway would at least serve as a souvenir of his brave entry into the she-devil’s home. He imagined the adored Heather would be impressed by this.

“What did you do then?”

“I went far away and cleansed myself of his unclean touch.”

“Smart move.” Jude rested back in her chair and studied her star witness, the man who could testify that Corban was not in his bed when Miller claimed he’d left him there. The man who made it impossible to believe that Wade hadn’t seen the vandalism until much later that night.

He’d chased Thompson from the property. He must have seen the damage at the time. But he’d said nothing about encountering Thompson. Jude found that puzzling. He was bound to have told Griffin Mahanes, and now Gums Thompson had put himself in Corban’s room.

Her heart sank. This was going to come down to the word of a mental patient against the word of a violent loser. She knew who she believed. But by the time Mahanes was done making Thompson twist in the wind, she had no idea what a jury would think.

*

Tulley removed his gum and was about to stick it in the ashtray on his desk when Miss Benham waved her forefinger at him. Meekly, he wrapped it in a shred of paper and flipped it into the trash. Hugging the phone against his shoulder to free his hands, he set about cleaning his sticky fingers with a Wet Wipe.

At the other end of the phone, his ma said, “I was thinking, if I had one of them vacuum machines I could package up our bacon with a fancy label and sell it at the farmers’ market.”

“Ma Tulley’s home cured,” Tulley mused. “Your own brand. That’s smart thinking.”

“Since your brother had his accident last year, we gotta come up with something. That missing testicle’s ruining his marriage.”

Tulley wasn’t sure what the branded bacon had to do with his brother’s marriage, but he figured his ma would get to that. “What’s the problem?”

“Well, turns out it didn’t take when they sewed it back on, and now they’ve had one of them prosthetic ones made specially. But Marybeth says it’s too hard and she don’t care for it in the act of love.”

“Can’t he take it off when they’re going at it?” Tulley gave Miss Benham an apologetic look.

“It’s an implant. Damn fool I brought up for a son.”

“Tell him I’m real sorry.”

Miss Benham tapped her watch.

Tulley said, “Ma, I gotta go.”

But as usual, she was planning to hang up in her own good time. “Think they’re gonna hang that baby killer?”

“Not so far as I heard. For a killing to be a hanging offense there has to be premeditation.”

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and that’s all I’m gonna say about it.”

Tulley thought, praise the Lord.

She said, “You getting out here again some time before the Second Coming?”

It was the first time his ma had invited him home so warmly. Amazed, Tulley said, “I got some vacation owing to me. I can come if you want.”

“Don’t do me any favors.”

Something in her tone made Tulley forget himself and ask, “You okay, Ma?”

“What the heck are you implying?”

“Nothing. Just asking.”

“Never been better,” she sniffed.

“Alrighty then.” Tulley wanted to ask her if she’d been to the doctor recently for a checkup. At her age it seemed like a good idea. But he knew what she’d have to say about that.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said. “Get on back to work.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The dial tone hummed before he could say good-bye, and Miss Benham asked, “How is she doing?”

“Okay, I think.” Tulley put a harness on Smoke’m and fed him a couple of liver treats. “My brother and his wife are having marriage troubles, and that’s got her all worked up.”

Miss Benham handed him his hat and coat. “You’d best get going. You know the detective doesn’t care to be kept waiting.”

Tulley could immediately feel Jude’s sleepy greenish eyes boring holes in him. Even after two years of working with her, he could never tell exactly what she was thinking. She kept a straight face most of the time, and she didn’t smile much. These days he didn’t get nervous around her like he used to, but he saw the effect she had on others. He hoped she wouldn’t be in a pissy mood this afternoon. He was still feeling stoked after grabbing hold of Wade Miller’s ankles so he couldn’t go anywhere, during the arrest.