Speaking in Tongues (28 page)

“Sure.” She sniffed and waddled to her chair, sat heavily. Then she typed furiously.

A moment later she motioned him over.

The first three names matched those on the receipts.

The fourth didn’t.

“Oh my God,” Tate muttered.

“What is it, Mr. Collier?”

He didn’t answer. He stood, numb, staring at the name Aaron Matthews, Sully Fields Drive, Manassas, the letters glowing in jaundice yellow type on the black screen.

The Court:
The prosecution may now present its summation. Mr.
Collier?

Mr. Collier:
My friends . . . The task of the jury is a difficult and thankless one. You’re called on to sift through a haystack of evidence, looking for that single needle of truth. In many cases, that needle is elusive. Practically impossible to find. But in the case before you,
the Commonwealth versus Peter Matthews,
the needle is lying out in the open, evident for everyone to see.

There is no question that the defendant killed Joan Keller. He was seen walking with the victim, a sixteen-year-old girl, by Bull Run Marina. He was seen leading her into the woods. He was later seen running from the park five minutes before Joan’s body was found, strangled to death. The mud in which her cold corpse lay matched the mud found on the knees of the defendant’s jeans. When he was arrested, as you heard from the testimony, he blurted out to the officers, “She had to die.”

And in the trailer where he lived, the police found hundreds of comic books and horror novels, depicting big, hulking men doing unspeakable things to helpless women victims—victims just like Joan Keller.

The defense can see that shiny needle of truth as clearly as you and I can. There’s no doubt in their minds, either, that the defendant killed that poor girl. And so what do they do? They try to distract us. They raise doubts about Joan’s character. They suggest that she had loose morals. That she’d had sex with local boys . . . sometimes for money. Or for liquor or cigarettes. A sixteen-year-old girl! These are nothing more than vile attempts to distract you from finding the needle.

Oh, they talk about accidental death. “Just playing around,” they say. The killer was a troubled young man, they say, but harmless.

Well, I’d say the facts of the case prove that he wasn’t harmless at all, don’t you think?

Harmless men don’t strangle innocent young women seventy pounds lighter than they are.

Harmless men don’t act out their sick and twisted fantasies on helpless youngsters like Joanie Sue Keller.

Ladies and gentlemen, don’t let the defense hide that needle of truth from you. Don’t let them cover it up. This case is simple, extremely simple. The defendant, through his premeditation, his calculation, his knowing, purposeful intent, has taken a life. The life of a young girl. Someone’s friend . . . someone’s sister . . . someone’s daughter. There is no worse crime than that. And he must be held fully responsible for it.

The great poet Dante said that the most righteous requests are answered in the silence of the deed. I’m not asking for hollow words, ladies and gentlemen. No, I’m asking for your courageous deed—finding this dangerous killer sane, finding him guilty and
recommending to the court that he pay for young Joan Keller’s life with his own. Thank you.

Orator Tate Collier had done everything right in the closing statement. It was short, colloquial, filled with concrete imagery. He’d referred to Peter Matthews as “the defendant” and to the girl as “Joan”—depersonalizing the criminal, humanizing the victim. The reference to the “needle”—getting the jury used to the thought of the needle used in lethal injections—was a particularly good touch, he’d thought.

He’d even added the request for the death penalty because that was something they could bargain with in their minds—trading the boy’s life for a finding of sanity and a long prison sentence.

And that was exactly what happened.

He won, the boy was found sane and guilty. And was sentenced to life without parole. Which had been Tate’s goal all along.

And a week later the young man who’d beaten capital punishment was executed by a far more informal means than lethal injection—a dozen prison inmates, identities unknown, had used broomsticks and sharpened spoons to carry out the sentence. And it took them three hours to do so.

Justice?

After he’d heard of Peter’s death, Tate had sat at his desk for a long moment, wondering why he felt so troubled at the news. Then he walked into the commonwealth’s attorney’s file room and read through evidence in the case once again.

They were the same files and documents he’d read before the trial, of course. But he examined them
now untainted by the passionate drive to convict the young man. He looked more carefully at the picture they painted of the boy—not “the defendant.” But Peter Thomas Matthews, a seventeen-year-old boy, a resident of Fairfax, Virginia.

Yes, Peter had a collection of eerie comics and Japanimation tapes. But many of them, Tate had learned in preparing for trial, were best-sellers in Japan—where they’d taken on an artsy cult status and were reviewed seriously and collected by young people and adults alike. What was more, the boy also had a collection of serious science fiction and fantasy writers like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs. Peter had spent hours copying long, poetic passages from these books and had tried his hand at illustrating scenes from them. He’d also written sci-fi and fantasy short stories of his own, which weren’t bad for someone his age.

Yes, some psychiatric evaluations called the boy dangerous. But others said he merely had a paranoid personality and was given to panic in stressful situations. He had no history of violence.

In getting ready for the case, Tate had also learned about Joan Keller—the victim. The girl had been sexually active since age twelve. She’d experimented with “weird things,” possibly erotic asphyxia. She’d seduced older men on several other occasions and would have been the complaining witness in at least one statutory rape case, except that she’d refused to cooperate. She’d been treated for being a borderline personality and had been suspended twice for
assaults—against both girls and boys at her school, including one involving a knife.

Peter had abrasions on his face and neck when he was brought to the lockup. He claimed that Joan had struck him with a rock when she got tired of his awkward groping—after
she’d
taken
his
hand and slipped it into her panties.

And the statement the boy had made—about how Joan “had to die”—was disputed by a local fisherman near the scene of the arrest. He claimed the boy might have said, “She never had to die . . . She shouldn’t have hit me.”

But silver-tongued Tate Collier had managed to keep all of this damning evidence out of the trial or had shattered the credibility of the witnesses presenting it.

Your Honor we will not try the victim in this case Your Honor a well-written short story has no probative value in this case whatsoever Your Honor that fact is immaterial and has to be stricken please instruct the witness . . .

The defense lawyers had come to him with a plea bargain request: criminally negligent homicide, suspended sentence, three years’ probation and two years’ mandatory counseling.

But, no. Peter Matthews had laid his hands upon the neck of a sixteen-year-old girl and had pressed, pressed, pressed until she was lifeless. And so a plea bargain wouldn’t do.

The Court:
The defendant will rise. You have heard the verdict of the jury and have been adjudged guilty of murder in the first degree. The jury has not recommended the death penalty and accordingly I hereby sentence you to life in prison . . .

He went to prison and the last thing anyone remembered about Peter was his telling a guard he was going to play with his new friends. “Won’t that be way cool?” Peter asked. “We’re going to play ball, a bunch of us. They want me to play ball. Awesome.” Then he disappeared into the laundry room and was found, in several pieces, five hours later.

Why, Tate had wondered back then as he sat alone in the musty file room, had he been so vehement about prosecuting the boy?
Why?

The question he’d asked himself often in the past few years.

The question he asked himself now. What would have been so bad if the defendant . . . if
Peter
had been put on probation and gone into a hospital for treatment?

Wasn’t that reasonable? Of course it was. But it hadn’t been then, not to the Tate Collier of five years ago. Not to Tate Collier the whiz-kid commonwealth’s attorney, the man who spoke in tongues, the Judge’s grandson.

Why?

Because the thought of a killer depriving parents of their child was unbearable to him.
That
was the answer.
That
was all he thought. Someone stole away a girl just like Megan. And he had to die. To hell with justice.

Tate had never seen Peter’s father, Aaron Matthews, at the trial or hadn’t paid any attention to him if he’d been there. The man was a therapist, Tate remembered from reading the boy’s history and evaluations. Lived alone. His wife—a therapist as well,
and reportedly more successful than her husband—had committed suicide some years before.

Aaron Matthews . . .

Well, he could give the police a name and address now. They’d find him. He only prayed Megan was still alive.

Now, in Konnie’s office, he dialed Bett’s home phone. Her voice mail gave her cell phone number and he dialed that. She didn’t answer. He left a message about what he’d learned and told her that he was at the county police station.

He started down the hall, striding the way he’d walked when he’d been a commonwealth’s attorney and cut up these offices as if he owned them, playing inquisitor to the young officers as he grilled them about their cases and the evidence they’d collected.

He pushed through the door to the Homicide Division and was surprised to see three startled detectives stop in the tracks of their conversations. He smiled ruefully, remembering only then that he was a trespasser.

One detective looked at another, an astonished gaze on his face.

“I’m sorry to barge in,” Tate began. “I’m Tate Collier. It’s about my daughter. I don’t know if you heard but she’s disappeared and—”

In less than twenty seconds he was facedown on a convenient desk, the handcuffs ratcheting onto his wrists with metallic efficiency, his Miranda rights floating down upon him from a gruff voice several feet above his head.

“What the hell’s going on?” he barked.

“You’re under arrest, Mr. Collier. Do you understand these rights as I’ve read them to you?”

“For what? What’re you arresting me for?”

“Do you understand your rights?”

“Yes, I understand my fucking rights. What for?”

“For murder, Mr. Collier. The murder of Amy Walker. If you’ll come this way, please.”

She cradled him, sobbing.

Megan had eased Joshua LeFevre into the pale light from the outside lamp. He was even more badly injured than she’d thought at first—terribly battered—riddled with slashes and bite marks, the wounds crusted with dirt and dried blood. One eye was swollen completely closed. Most of his dreads had been torn off his scalp, which was covered with mud and scabs.

He could speak only in a ghostly, snapping wail. No, it hadn’t been Peter Matthews’s leering voice she’d heard; it was Josh’s. His throat was split open and his vocal cords had apparently been cut. When he breathed, air hissed in through both his mouth and the slash. The bleeding seemed to have stopped but she bound the denim rope around his throat anyway. She could think of nothing else to do.

“Thought
it was you,” he gasped. “I couldn’t see. My eyes, my eyes. I thought it was you. But you didn’t answer.”

Megan lowered her head to his chest. “I thought you were his son. I thought you were going to kill me. Oh, Josh, what happened? Was it the dogs? Outside?”
He nodded, shivered—from the pain, she guessed, as much as the cold.

“That . . . man?” he struggled to ask. “He kidn—”

She nodded. “Did you call the police?”

“No,” he gasped. “I didn’t know what was going on. I stopped him but he tricked me . . .” He coughed for a moment. “Thought you . . . thought you were going with him.”

“What happened?” she asked tearfully.

The stuttering explanation: he’d followed her and Matthews here then the doctor had attacked him and left him for the dogs. But before they could finish him off a young deer had trotted past and they left Josh to pull her down.

His beautiful voice, Megan thought, crying. It’s gone. She had to look away from his face.

He’d found a metal rod to use as a cane, he continued, and made his way into the hospital to find a phone. But there weren’t any. Then he learned that the doors didn’t open outward, that the place was a prison.

She gently touched a terrible wound on his face. Even if they managed to get him to a doctor soon would he survive? He’d lost so much blood.

“Were you . . . you weren’t his lover, were you?”

“What?” she blurted.

“He said you were. He said . . . He said you wanted to get rid of me.”

“Oh, Josh, no. It was . . . whatever he said, it was a lie.”

“Who is he?” LeFevre rasped.

“We don’t have time now. Can you walk?”

“No.” He breathed heavily and winced. “Can’t do anything. I’ve about had it.”

She pulled him farther into the alcove, hid him from view. “Wait here.”

“Where . . . you going?”

“Lie still, Josh. Be quiet. I’ll get something to use for bandages,” she said, rising.

“But he might be there.”

She showed him the glass knife. “I hope he is.”

•   •   •

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. But for God’s sake send somebody after my daughter.”