Music of Ghosts (19 page)

“Get out of my face!” Fred Moon brushed Jonathan's hand away. “At least you got a little girl left. I got nothing but a box of pictures!”

“Stop it!” Laura Bagwell banged her cell phone on the table. “This is a mediation. You're not supposed to do this!” Frightened, she turned to Alex. “Counselor, can you please control your client?”

Alex got up and walked over to the two men. “Come on, Jonathan,” she said calmly, stepping between them. “Let's get out of here. I don't think we have anything more to say.”

The unfocused rage in Jonathan's eyes vanished, replaced by a look of cold hatred. He gave a brief, dismissive glare at Dulcy Moon, who stood shivering in the corner, then he walked toward the door. As Sam held it open, he turned to aim one final salvo at Fred Moon.

“I don't know how you've got this rigged up, but the sun will not come up on the day Lily Walkingstick comes to live with you.”

He stormed out the door, Sam following. The room was silent as Alex began putting her papers back in her briefcase.

“Gosh.” Laura Bagwell gave a nervous laugh. “Mr. Walkingstick certainly has an interesting way of expressing himself.”

“That he does,” said Alex, continuing to pack her papers away.

“Are you leaving?” Laura Bagwell's rabbit nose twitched again.

“I don't think there's any real reason to continue.”

“But we've got a lot on the table. Custody, visitation.”

“I think my client summed up his position pretty clearly, Ms. Bagwell.”

Laura Bagwell blinked. “You mean his refusal is final?”

“Yes.” Alex picked up her briefcase. “From here on, I think we'd better work this out before a judge.”

Twenty-Six

Ghosts were not on
Mary Crow's mind as she grasped the telephone. She'd been pondering the Stratton case since noon, all the while waiting to hear about the mediation. Now, just as the sun was casting long shadows on her office wall, Alex finally called, spewing profanity that would do all Texans proud. Mary would have laughed at all the “bone-sucking shitheads” and the “four-eyed fucking assholes,” had she not been so scared.

“Calm down, Al!” she cried, fearing that Jonathan had, as he'd threatened, knocked Fred Moon's ass into next Tuesday. “Quit swearing and tell me what happened.”

“That little bitch is as smug as they come,” Alex fumed. “Said she didn't want to re-open any old wounds, then proceeded to re-open every old wound she could think of.”

Mary's heart sank. Some incredibly vicious litigator must be lurking in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

“I go in there and think oh, boy, no sweat here. She's young, looks like a rabbit, almost swooned when Jonathan walked in. But no. Her shitty little rabbit nose started twitching and off she went.”

“What did Jonathan do?”

“Oh, Jonathan perked things up quite a bit. Fred Moon made some stupid ass remark and before I know it, Jonathan's at the other end of the table shaking the guy like a rag doll.”

“Oh, God.” Mary closed her eyes, afraid something like this might happen. “Do I need to arrange bail?”

“No, Sam Hodges got him out of the room before he could throw any punches.” Alex chuckled. “I think Moon's wife may have wet her pants, though. I gotta tell you Mary, your boy can be a pretty rank horse.”

“Yes, he can.” Mary rubbed the hard knot of tension that clamped down on the back of her neck. “I take it mediation is over for today?”

“Mediation is over forever. I don't think Dulcy Moon has that many pair of underpants. We're going to trial in ten days.”

“So are Jonathan and Lily coming home?”

“No, I'm taking them to Texas with me. They can play cowboy with Charlie and the boys. I've got a therapist I'd like Lily to talk to.”

“Good idea,” said Mary. “Is Jonathan agreeable to that?”

“He balked at first, but he's come around. Lily's a mighty mixed-up little girl.”

Mary's heart ached for the child. “Do you think I should come out? Make it a family thing?”

“No—I want to see what Dr. Pace says. She usually likes to talk to kids by themselves for a while. Anyway, if you came out here, you'd just drive everybody crazy.”

“No, I wouldn't. I would—”

“Mary, we've gone over this before. The best place for you right now is in North Carolina, tending your own little legal practice.”

“But I can help. I can—”

“Mary. I'll call you if I need you. Right now we're all fine.”

“Are you sure?” Mary said, despising this feeling of utter help-
lessness.

“Positive. Now go sue somebody. It'll do you good.”

“Okay, Alex.” She sighed. “You win. I'll call you tomorrow.

She hung up the phone. A wave of sadness came over her—it seemed that everything was going wrong in Oklahoma and all she could do was wish them good luck.

For the next ten days, Mary worked hard on Stratton's defense. Every morning she visited him in jail, and though he tried to contain his frustration, she could tell that the Pisgah County Justice Center was wearing on him. He'd quit shaving and his complexion had gone from golden to sallow. He paced throughout their interviews like a scruffy animal trapped in a cage. All his interns had fled the raptor center after their release from jail. Doris Mager and a dozen other raptor rescuers had immediately volunteered to adopt Stratton's birds, but Artie Slade and Willy Jenkins agreed to stay and take care of the animals—Jenkins doing most of the bird cage cleaning, while Slade became the point man for the whole operation. Mary made a point to become friends with Artie, pumping him ever so slightly about the goings-on up there when Lisa Wilson had been alive.

“That gal was nice to me, but crazier than a bedbug when it came to Nick. Stuck to him like fly paper. 'Bout split her britches when he even talked to anybody else.”

“How did Nick feel about her?”

Artie pulled his battered Braves cap lower on his head. “He told me once he'd be glad when she went back to school. I think she gave him the heebie-jeebies.”

She made a note of that as she worked on the case. Evidence-wise, Omer Peacock had not exactly struck gold among the interns. His most damning find had been that Chris Givens had leaked Lisa Wilson's picture to the
Snitch
. “He's a slimy little bastard,” Omer had told Mary. “It wouldn't surprise me if he'd carved the girl up just to sell the picture.”

“But where did he get a picture of her?” asked Mary.

“Snapped it with his iPhone before the police got there. Somehow he got a signal out in the woods and sent it to his brother before deleting it so the police wouldn't know. The brother sat on it till Givens got out of jail then they sold it for twenty-five grand.”

Though Omer confirmed Mary's low opinion of the boy, selling a picture of a dead body did not make someone a killer. Nothing Peacock dug up about the interns made her think they were anything other than self-indulgent college kids, so she decided to move on to Jenkins and Slade. She was sitting in her office, about to put Peacock on to them when someone rapped on her door.

“Come in,” she said,

The door opened to reveal Buck Whaley standing there, a sly grin on his face, a small paper bag in his hand. Of all Cochran's detectives, Mary liked Whaley the least. He was an old-style holdover from Stump Logan's administration, full of swagger and stubbornness.

“What can I help you with, Detective?”

“The DA sent me over. I'm afraid we neglected to include some evidence in the Stratton case.”

“Oh?”

“It's not much, but Mr. Turpin said you should have it.” He stepped forward and handed her the paper bag, along with a folded copy of the
Snitch
. “Nice picture of you in the tabloids, by the way. Thought you might like an extra copy for your files.”

“What's your evidence, Whaley?” she said, impatient with his snideness.

“Oh, just Lisa Wilson's diary. And a couple of hundred pictures off her cell phone.”

She looked inside the bag and found a bound copy of the girl's diary in a manila envelope and half a dozen contact sheets of photographs. “You've held on to this for nearly two weeks?”

He gave a helpless shrug. “Sorry. Sometimes we get busy.”

“You know I could go back to Judge Barbee and ask for a new trial date.”

“Do what you gotta do, Ms. Crow,” he said as he headed toward the door.

As his footsteps echoed down the stairwell, she considered filing a motion, but then decided to have a look at the stuff first. She pulled out the contact sheets and flipped through them quickly. Most were photos of Stratton, skimpily clad, either coming out of a swimming hole, or playing his fiddle.

“Taken by a girl in love” she whispered, tossing the photos on the desk and turning to the diary. “Let's see what Lisa wrote to Dear Diary.”

She opened the envelope and pulled out certified Xeroxed copies of the pages of a small book. Neat blue writing spread across the pages, varying from print to script. The entries began May 24, the day Lisa arrived at the Raptor Center.
Met Nick Stratton today—he is so nice!
and went on to record Lisa's impressions of her fellow interns. Ryan Quarles she found sweet, Rachel Sykes nice. Abby Turner is a pain in the ass tattletale. Chris Givens she detested, calling him an arrogant dickhead. Laughing at some of Lisa's descriptions, Mary read on. The girl wrote about Jenkins pestering her about a job with her dad, how the mountains creeped her out at night, how Artie Slade had nailed up a shelf for her, even with most of his fingers missing. Then, on June 16, lightning struck both literally and figuratively. According to the diary, she and Nick were observing two young eagles on a hacking stand when a storm broke.
Lightning struck close by, just as Nick kissed me, she wrote. He really knows how to use his tongue!
After that, she barely mentions anything except intimate descriptions of liaisons behind waterfalls, quickies at the bird barn:
I never dreamed anyone could make me come so fast!
The last week of her life she recounts a breakup:
I can't believe he doesn't want me anymore
. And the day before she died she wrote,
I'll never leave Nick. I'm good for him, even if he doesn't know it yet!

Mary put the diary down and took a deep breath, feeling as if she'd just read a volume of erotica. Though Lisa had included details only a lover would note (the scar on his thigh looks just like a crescent moon; his breath smells good, even when he drinks beer) Stratton had consistently denied any kind of sexual relationship with the girl. Mary shook her head. This was not good—before it was just Stratton's word that nothing had happened. Lisa had told quite a different tale to her diary. Turpin could do some major damage with this in court.

She put the pages in her briefcase and grabbed her purse. Stratton needed to come clean about his relationship with Lisa Wilson. It was strategic not to admit to murder. To lie to your attorney over an affair was just plain dumb.

Half an hour later she sat across from him in an interview room. He asked her the questions that had become a standing joke between them.

“Any chance of getting my fiddle?”

“No,” she replied as usual. “Look Nick, we need to talk.”

“About?”

She opened her briefcase and pulled out the pages from Lisa Wilson's diary. “This diary. Lisa writes that you two had quite an affair. There are passages in here that even made me blush … ”

He started shaking his head. “She lied. I never laid a hand on her.”

“Nick, it's okay if you did. She was over twenty-one. Having sex isn't illegal.”

He slapped the diary pages down on the table. “But I didn't! At the very most, I put my arm around her shoulder.”

“What about the night she came to your bed?”

“I told you! She kissed me, I responded. I'd been drinking earlier, or I wouldn't have even done that.”

Suddenly, Mary saw a crack in the wall he'd put up. “So you two did have intercourse?”

“No.”

“Nick, you can't expect a jury to believe that a pretty, young girl comes up to your room, takes off her clothes, kisses you, whereupon you tell her to get lost.”

He closed his eyes, fighting some kind of battle within himself. “Okay. This is what happened. I was in bed—passed out. Lisa came in, woke me up, started taking off her clothes. She climbed on top of me and started kissing me. I got hard—I mean, sometimes your body just takes over. But I told her to get out before anything happened.” He stopped and swallowed. “I was pretty drunk—I honestly don't remember much more after that.”

“And that's the only time she came on to you?”

He looked at her, his gaze serious. “She kept flirting with me, but I avoided her. I don't get off on college girls.”

“Are you gay?”

“No,” he said sharply, giving her breasts an appreciative glance. “I just prefer women to girls.”

She took back the diary pages and started thumbing through them. “Have you got a scar on your thigh?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me see it.”

He stood up and dropped his pants, revealing a crescent-shaped scar just above the hem of his boxer shorts. “A kid nailed me with his skate in a hockey game, back in junior high. Why?”

She ignored his question and asked another of her own. “Did Lisa Wilson get along with Rachel Sykes?”

He pulled up his trousers and sat back down. “Yeah, they were pals.”

“How about Ryan Quarles?”

“I guess they were friends, I don't know.”

“What did she think of Abby Turner?”

He laughed. “The same thing everybody thinks of Abby. That she's a bean-counting tattletale.”

“Chris Givens?”

“Lisa hated Chris, and the feeling was mutual.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Chris wanted to fly the eagles, but he didn't have the chops. Lisa did. He hated her for that. She hated him right back. Givens can be an asshole.”

Mary looked up from Lisa's writing. “Do you realize that you've just corroborated everything Lisa wrote about your interns?”

He frowned, not understanding. “So?”

“Nick, you can't have it both ways. Why would Lisa write a totally accurate account of her fellow interns and then fabricate her relationship with you?”

He sat back, folding his arms across his chest. “The girl followed me around all summer—just because she wrote a lot of nonsense about me in her diary doesn't mean we were lovers.”

“I guarantee you the DA will see this very differently.”

“I can't help it,” he replied. “I'm telling the truth.”

With a deep sigh, she put the pages and the pictures back in her briefcase. This was a conundrum as old as humanity itself, she decided. He said, she said. The tragic thing about this was that the
she
was dead, and the
he
could well be hanged for her murder.