Speaking in Tongues (29 page)

“Once more from the top, please, sir.”

Tate was still stunned from the news that Amy had been found naked and stabbed to death on Tate’s farm.

“There’s a man named Aaron Matthews. He drives a gray Mercedes. He lives on Sully Field, off Route twenty-nine near Manassas. He’s been following my daughter for the past couple weeks. Or months. I don’t know. And—”

“We’ve got our own agenda here, Collier,” the young homicide detective—a dead ringer for the security guard at Megan’s high school—said gruffly, his patience gone. “You don’t mind, we got a lotta ground to cover.”

“Is Ted Beauridge around?”

“No. One more time, sir. From the top.”

He was in an interrogation cubicle and he was perched on an uncomfortable metal chair. At least the cuffs were off.

“Matthews killed Amy. Megan had told her about being followed. He thought she might have some information—maybe he just killed her to get me out of the picture.”

And
I
gave him her name, Tate thought. He was sure the man who called from the FBI—Special Agent McComb—was Aaron Matthews, probing to get information to stop their search for the girl. He forced or tricked Megan into writing those notes and when they kept looking for her anyway, he turned on them.

“How’d you find out about the body?” Tate asked. “An anonymous call, right?”

The detectives looked at each other. They were slim and in perfect shape. Shoes polished, guns tucked neatly away. Law enforcement machines.

“It was
Matthews
who called. Don’t you get it?”

“Her mother said you’d been stalking Amy. That Child Protective Services has been investigating you.”

“What? That’s bullshit. Call them.”

“On Saturday night, sir? We’ll call on Monday.”

“We don’t have until Monday.”

The cop continued lethargically, “Mrs. Walker also said you tried to break into her house today.”

“Amy was going to give us Megan’s book bag. I knocked on the door and tried to open it when no one answered.”

“Uh-huh.”

“There
is
no Child Protective Services investigation. It’s him! It’s Matthews. He’s trying to stop me from finding Megan. Can’t you see?”

“Not exactly, sir. No.”

“Okay. When did this anonymous call come in? Within the last half hour? Believe me, Matthews killed Amy and dumped the body on my land. I saw somebody watching the house this morning.”

“Did you report it?”

“Well, no, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

Tate remembered thinking, as he stood in the rain-swept field that morning, Hey, looks like the Dead Reb. But it wasn’t. It was Aaron Matthews, waiting until I left the house then tossing the dog a bone, planting Megan’s letters, leaving fast.

“I just didn’t. Look, he knows I’m after him—Konnie was running a check on the Mercedes. It turned out to be his. That’s not a coincidence.”

“How do you account for the fact that this girl was murdered with a kitchen knife that had your fingerprints on it?”

“Because it was probably from
my
kitchen. Talk to Konnie about this morning. He—”

“Detective Konstantinatis is in custody and he’s also in no shape to talk to anybody. As I’m sure you know.”

“Beauridge, then. They were out to my house. Matthews broke in, planted some fake letters that Megan supposedly wrote and he must’ve stolen the knife at the same time. Or stolen it tonight. It’s an easy house to break into.”

“The cause of death was shock due to blood loss after her throat was slashed and her chest and abdomen punctured thirty-two times. There was some mutilation too.”

“Fuck of a way to kill someone,” the other detective added.

Tate’s face grew hot. Megan’s terrified eyes were the most prominent image in his thoughts.

“We’ve checked out your house and found you’d
packed most of your girl’s stuff away. Her bedroom looked about as personal as a storeroom.”

“She lives with her mother.”

“No pictures of her, no clothes, nothing personal. The impression we got was you’d been planning to say adios to Megan for some time. That’s making us wonder about this whole kidnapping story.”

“There were some witnesses. There’s a teacher . . . Robert Eckhard. He saw—” But he stopped talking when he saw the expression on their faces.

“You a friend of Eckhard?”

“I don’t know him,” Tate said cautiously. “I just heard that he’d seen the car that was following Megan.”

“Have you ever talked to him?”

“No. I just told you—why?”

“Robert Eckhard was arrested today on numerous counts of child pornography and endangering the welfare of minors.”

“What?”

“Could you describe your relationship with him?”

“With Eckhard? There
is
no relationship . . . Jesus Christ. I don’t know him! Please! Just send somebody out to check out this Matthews!”

A rhetorician never pleads. Tate’s talents were deserting him in droves. Think smarter, he raged at himself. He could talk his way out of this. He
knew
he could. There must be some way. What would his grandfather, the Judge, have done?

All cats see in the dark . . .

Midnight is a cat . . .

“Officer,” Tate said calmly, offering a casual smile, “you’ve got nothing to lose. Absolutely nothing. I’m not
going anywhere. If you check him out, if you send a couple officers out to his house then I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Anything. No hassle. We have a deal?”

One of the detectives sighed. He shrugged and stepped out the door.

Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.

Tate pictured Megan, bound and gagged, lying somewhere in a basement. Matthews standing over her. Undressing. It was a terrible image and, once thought, wouldn’t go away.

“Have you ever had sexual relations with Amy Walker?”

He tamped down his anger. “I’ve never met her,” he answered.

“Did you send your daughter off somewhere because she knew you were stalking Amy Walker? And did you fabricate a kidnapping charge?”

“No, I didn’t do that.” Struggling now to stay calm, to stay
helpful.
Really struggling. He looked at the doorway through which the other cop had disappeared. Were they sending a hostage rescue team to Matthews’s house? Or just patrol officers? Matthews could trick them. He could lull them into complacency—oh, yes,
he
had the gift too. Tate now understood.

You can’t negotiate with someone like Matthews. You need to act—immediately.

The silence of the deed.

“Did you kill Amy Walker?”

“No, I did not.”

“When was the last time you drove your daughter’s car?”

“A month or so ago, I think.”

“Is that how your fingerprints got on the door handle of her car?”

“It would have to be.”

“Could we run through the events just prior to her disappearance once more?”

“Prior?”

“Say, for the week before.”

Tate glanced out the door, squinted. Looked again. The second detective came back into the cubicle. Tate asked, “Did you send a team to his house? I should have told you to send hostage rescue. Not regular officers. And don’t listen to him. Whatever he says, Megan’s there, in the house. Tell whoever’s on their way not to listen to him.”

“He wasn’t home.”

“What?” Tate asked. He didn’t understand. The officers couldn’t have gotten there so quickly.

“I called him. He wasn’t home.”

“You
called
him?” Tate’s heart stuttered.

“Relax, sir, I didn’t tell him anything. Just asked him to give us a call about some parking tickets.” The slick young cop seemed proud of his cleverness.

“Jesus Christ, you don’t
have
to tell him anything. Are you crazy?”

“Sir, we don’t have to pay any attention to your story at all, you know. We’re doing you a favor.”

Tate sat back, glanced into the hall again.

After a moment he looked back at the officers again. Closed his eyes and sighed. “You win. Okay, you win.”

“How’s that, sir?”

“I’ll waive my rights and tell you everything I can think of. No confession but a full statement about my
daughter and Amy Walker. But I want some coffee and I’ve got to use the john.”

They looked at each other and nodded.

“I’m coming with you,” the first detective muttered.

Tate laughed. “I was a commonwealth’s attorney for ten years. I’m not going to escape.”

“I’m coming with you.”

Tate gave a disgusted sigh and walked into the scuffed halls, which resembled a suburban grade school. He ambled to the men’s room and pushed inside. The detective was directly behind him.

He stood at the urinal for an inordinately long time. When he’d finished and washed his hands he stepped to the door and pushed it open, bumping into the woman who was juggling three large law books and several pads of foolscap, which tumbled to the floor.

“Sorry,” Tate said, bending down to pick up the books.

Bett McCall glanced at him, said, “No problem.” And slipped the pistol out of her purse and into his hand.

Tate didn’t even pause to think—he simply spun around, shoved the Smith & Wesson into the belly of the shocked detective and pushed him back into the men’s room as Bett calmly retrieved the books.

In one minute Tate had gagged and cuffed the furious cop and relieved him of his gun. He tossed it in the wastebasket.

“The cuffs too tight?” he asked.

The detective stared angrily.

“Are they too tight?”

A nod.

Tate snapped, “Good.”

And stepped out into the corridor as a faint rumble arose in the john, like a low-Richter earthquake. The detective was trying to pull down the stall.

When he’d looked into the hallway from the interrogation room he couldn’t believe that he’d seen her standing there, motioning with her head down the hall. “How did you get in here?” he asked as they walked briskly toward the exit.

“Told them I was a lawyer.”

“You cite a case or two?”

“I could have.” She smiled. “I memorized the names of a couple on your desk. I was going to tell the desk sergeant I had to see my client because these new cases had just been put down.”

“It’s ‘handed down,’ ” Tate corrected.

“Oh. Glad he didn’t ask.”

“I don’t know if we can get out that way. I came in under my own steam but the desk officer might know I’ve been arrested.” He looked back down the corridor. “Five minutes, tops, till they come looking.”

She rearranged the books she was carrying so the cover showed. A school hornbook,
Williston on Contracts.

He laughed. “That’ll fool ’em.” Then asked, “You got my message?”

She nodded. “I called Konnie and his assistant told me you’d been arrested. I couldn’t decide whether to get a lawyer or the gun. I figured we didn’t have time to wait for public defenders. My car’s outside.”

The old Bett McCall might have meditated for days, hoping for guidance. The new one went right for the Smith & Wesson.

They paused just before they turned the corner beside the guard station. He took a breath. “Ready?”

“I guess.”

“Let’s go.”

Tate started forward, Bett at his side. The guard glanced at them but out they strolled without a hitch, signing the “time departed” line in the logbook scrupulously—one a phony prosecutor and one a phony defense lawyer and both of them now felons.

•   •   •

Aaron Matthews was driving, seventy, then eighty miles an hour.

Anger had given way to sorrow. To the same piercing hollowness he’d felt in the months after Peter had died in prison. Sorrow at plans gone wrong, terribly wrong.

Matthews had been at his rental house, off Route 29, waiting to see if he’d finally stopped Tate Collier. He believed he had. He’d given up on the subtlety, given up on the words, given up on the delicious art of persuasion. Stiff with anger, he’d dragged the Walker girl, screaming, from the trunk of his car. Said nothing, convinced her of nothing—he’d just slashed and slashed and slashed . . . All of his anger flowing from him as hot and sudden as the blood from her body. He’d called from a pay phone to report seeing a body then had sped home.

There the phone had rung. He hadn’t answered but listened to the message as the officer left it. Some bullshit about traffic tickets. “Give us a call when you get home. Thank you.”

It meant, of course, that they knew about him. Or suspected, at least.

How had it happened? Why hadn’t they just tossed Collier into the lockup and ignored him? Maybe he had actually convinced them that he was innocent and that Matthews had kidnapped the girl. The fucking silver-tongued devil! An angry, sorrowful mood exploded within Matthews like napalm.

It was only a matter of time now before they found Blue Ridge Facility. They knew his name, they’d find out his connection there, and they’d find Megan.

He stared out the window for a moment. Then closed his eyes.

In a perfect world, moods don’t burn you like torches, juries work pure justice and revenge befalls sinners in exact proportion to their crimes. In a perfect world Matthews would have kept Megan McCall as his child forever, a replacement for Peter. And Tate Collier would have lived in despair all his life, never knowing where she was—knowing only that she’d fled from him, propelled by undiluted hate.

But there was no chance for such symmetry now. All his hopes had unraveled. And there was only one answer left. To kill the girl and leave. Flee to the West Coast, New England, maybe overseas.

He’d lost his son, Tate Collier would lose his daughter.

A kind of cure, a kind of justice, a kind of revenge . . .

He spent a few minutes preparing some things in his house then hurried to his car. He sped out onto the highway, toward the distant humps of mountains, a sensuous dark line above which no stars became stars and the moon showed as a faint, white crescent of frown.

•   •   •

Cleaning the deep wounds was the hardest part.

She’d found a cheap sewing kit in the bedroom and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in the medicine cabinet.