Injustice (24 page)

I got out of the car, walked to the cabin, and went in. Everything was orderly. The woodstove was warm, coffee cups on the table, dishes in the sink. Nobody home. I went back out and updated the agents, then walked to the bunkhouse. Ditto: It was lived in but currently vacant. I went to the shore and counted canoes. I was pretty sure one was missing. I went to the car and consulted. One of the agents radioed the status to his reinforcements. More agents arrived and took up positions in hiding.

“Now we wait,” Chip said.

“You wait,” I said. “I'm going out looking.”

They tried to talk me out of it, but sitting around waiting felt like the worst idea. If another gargantuan cyclone was swirling into existence, I'd be damned if I was going to sit around waiting for it to make landfall. Henry might have caught wind of something. He might have fled out the road with my family as hostages, or maybe he'd decided on some warped survivalist tactic, taking to the woods, perhaps even heading for the Canadian border in a bizarre attempt to flee from justice at two miles per hour in the stern of a canoe. Or maybe he was taking Tina and Barnaby off into the woods to indulge his unspeakable proclivities. Who knew what his festering wounds would cause him to do when he was playing family with Tina and Barn a zillion miles from anyone else's eyes? I pushed a canoe into the water, jumped in, and went.

I had been on the water about an hour, well out of sight from
the house, when I saw the tendril of smoke rising from the trees on a tiny island. I tried Chip on the two-way radio he'd given me, but his response was unintelligible. I told him I'd found them, though I doubted he understood me; I switched the radio off so it wouldn't give me away.

When I got close to the beach, Barnaby ran to the water and started jumping up and down, screaming, “Daddy, Daddy!” ZZ barked. Tina and Henry stood on the beach shoulder to shoulder, waving.

“Cooking hot dogs,” Barn yelled, and the second I was out of the boat, he had me by the hand and pulled me to the fire, where they had everything for their cookout ready to go.

“I hoped we'd have some fish,” Henry said. “I guess I'm not such a great provider.” He laughed. Tina laughed. She grabbed Henry's arm and said to me, “He's been so great.”

They wanted to know if there was news: anything new about Smeltzer; anything about Lydia; anything about Kyle Runion.

“Nothing,” I told them. “Nothing about anything.” But Tina saw how agitated I was. She went from happy and affectionate to wary and standoffish. They'd been in their own world, the three of them, far from the horrors of Lydia's death and of Tina being stalked by a killer. From Tina's perspective, she and Henry had a bond in their grief over Lydia that I didn't share. It made me the outsider, the intruder. They'd put on a good show for a few moments, but with my conspicuous agitation, I'd brought all the unhappiness of the outside world to this wilderness paradise of theirs. I was unwelcome.

I had allowed myself to forget that Tina and I were on the outs. Now I remembered loud and clear. Her body language and tone of voice said it all. In subtle ways, she oriented toward Henry, not toward me. The connection between them was palpable. I was sure, as fellow refugees and partners in grief, they'd found solace in each other's company that felt better to her than her fraught relationship with me.

But Henry would be on his way to life in prison (or worse) within the hour.

“We should go,” I said.

“Why?” Tina said, her voice heavy with resentment.

I had no answer for her. I should have thought something up ahead of time:
We have to go because . . .

Because there's a storm coming?

Because Lizzy was in an accident?

Because I ate a bad burrito, which is about to be ejected from both ends at once?

Because if I'm gone too long, the FBI is apt to send one of the helicopters out to look for me, perhaps causing your new best friend, Henry, to go off like a Roman candle, forcing me to shoot him right here by the shore as our four-year-old son looks on?

“Henry, can I have a word?” I said. I walked away from the fire, beckoning him to come with me.

“What is it, Nick?”

I walked until we were out of sight from the campfire. “Everything okay, Nick?” he asked, brimming with innocence. In his tone of voice, in the pronunciation of every syllable, every inflection, and in the way he walked, the swing of his arms, the solicitous bend of his back, the way he now stopped and turned toward me, the way he blinked at me questioningly, the lifting of his arms in a “what gives” gesture, I felt his calculating, remorseless psychopathic deception. I thought about the excitement he must have felt at first snatching up young Kyle Runion, and of his self-congratulatory efficiency at dealing with Lydia when she became a threat, and I thought about the smug satisfaction he must have gotten these past two weeks while lavishing fatherly attention on Barnaby and husbandly compassion on Tina.

I had my hands in my jacket pockets. My Glock was in the right-hand pocket. I held it. I wanted to use it. It would have been so much easier than keeping up the charade, pretending all was well.

I could do it. I could save everyone a lot of trouble.
He knew something was up,
I'd say.
He jumped me. We wrestled for the gun. I won.

Nobody would doubt me. Nobody would care.

“Nick,” Henry said. He touched my shoulder. I jumped backward—now would be the moment . . .

The moment passed.

“It's Lizzy,” I said. “I just got word. There's been an accident.”

“Oh my God. How . . .”

“I don't know anything yet. I don't want Barnaby to know. You tell Tina,” I said. It was easier lying to Henry like this than to Tina. If I'd tried lying to Tina, everything would have gotten too confused. The emotions in that lie would have overcome me. But it was easy with Henry. My hatred for him masked everything else.

We loaded the canoes and left. Tina and Henry went in one boat. I took Barn and ZZ with me.

W
e hit the beach in record time, propelled by the urgency of my lie about Lizzy. I hurried Tina and Barn into the cabin, asking Henry to secure the boats.

Within minutes Henry had been handcuffed, loaded into a helicopter, and was gone.

The detention hearing was two days later. Henry shuffled into the courtroom, chained up like Marley's ghost. I sat in the gallery behind Gregory Nations, hoping my presence would add federal gravitas to the proceedings. The judge was Wendell Ballard, a former private lawyer, new to the bench, and not expected to last long because he was already talking about how much he missed being a combatant in the tooth-and-claw grappling of trial law.

He called court to order: “. . . detention hearing of Henry Tatlock on one count of murder in the first degree . . .”

Just murder? I wondered why they weren't charging him with kidnapping or any of the possible sex crimes. So I almost missed it when the judge said: “. . . for the killing of Lydia Trevor.”

Lydia? I looked around in the courtroom, and yes, a couple of rows back, Detectives Sabin and Philbin were there to watch.

Henry's lawyer stood. “We believe there is insufficient probable cause for an arrest in Lydia Trevor's murder, and so—”

Judge Ballard interrupted: “Ms. Brill, are you moving to quash the arrest warrant?”

“I am, Your Honor.”

“Fine. Submit your motion. We'll schedule arguments. But today's
hearing is on the question of whether Mr. Tatlock, being charged with Lydia Trevor's murder, should be detained or freed on bail.”

It took me a few moments to realize what a shrewd move it had been for Gregory Nations to charge Henry in only Lydia's murder right now, not Kyle Runion's. Prosecutors
never
want to admit they've convicted an innocent man. It causes the public to lose confidence in the system. Some of the old-school prosecutors claim that no innocent man or woman has ever been convicted in their jurisdiction—though I doubt they believe this. What they
really
believe is that a few wrongful convictions are a small price to pay for a society that trusts the police, prosecutors, and courts. So Nations would resist caving on Daryl Devaney's eight-year-old conviction as long as possible. If the DNA evidence against Henry held up, Daryl would go free, and the state would write him a big check for his trouble. But Gregory Nations wasn't giving up this bone without a fight, especially seeing as he could, for now at least, keep the new suspect—Henry—in jail for something else.

Monica Brill, Henry's lawyer, argued that considering his good reputation and ties to the community, he should be free on bail. She said there was no good evidence linking him to Lydia's murder, and it was an atrocious misuse of the system that he'd been charged for the crime. She said he posed no danger to the community.

But we all knew about the DNA results. So even though Henry was being arraigned for a crime having nothing to do with the Kyle Runion killing, there was no way a judge was going to put him back out into society. “The suspect is to be detained pending trial,” Judge Ballard said. His gavel hit the bench.

The officers got Henry to his feet and started walking him toward the exit, but he swung around violently, jerking his arms from the guards' hands. He looked toward all of us in the gallery. I saw savage terror in his eyes. He barely looked human. It was
a split second before the officers had him facedown on the floor. He screamed in pain at having his arms wrenched up tight behind his back. But there were words in the shrieks; “I didn't do anything.”

I doubted Henry would ever again spend a day as a free man.

M
y cabin feels different this morning. I didn't stoke the fire last night. It burned out hours ago. I stick my head out from under the quilts and can see my breath. But it's not only the temperature. The light is steely white and cold, and I know before even looking out the window that it snowed last night. Probably not much, just an inch or two, but enough to blend the landscape into a startling blur of sameness. It will melt by noon, as early snows always do, its flash of clean renewal turning immediately to gray and brown. But for now, everything feels erased.

I wish Tina were here with me.

I wish Barn and Lizzy were here.

I'd even settle for Flora and Chip showing up at the other cabin to irritate me with their abundance of good cheer.

I have spent the past month writing down everything that has happened. I'm done now. Finis. I have caught up to the present. This process has helped me keep it all straight in my mind, and the discipline I had to exercise, sitting here methodically going back through the murder, the investigations, the revelations about Henry, and the realization of how I'd so naïvely invited him into all corners of my life, has helped me traverse the emotional quicksand.

Henry Tatlock is the very incarnation of evil and misery. He inserted himself into my life. He killed and debased the innocent Kyle Runion, he murdered my sister-in-law, he corrupted the integrity of the U.S. Attorney's Office, and with who knows what malevolent intentions, he positioned himself as ad hoc husband and father into my relationships with Tina and Barnaby during their time in hiding.

I hate him. But “hate” is too weak a word.

I get up and make a fire in the woodstove. Then coffee. I walk out to the end of the dock. The snow is nice. I take a deep breath of cold air and spend a minute reflecting on the feeling of renewal that arrived with the new snow.

I go back into the cabin and sit at the pine-slab table. I have some of the Subsurface files with me. It's time to climb into the saddle; time to do some work. I open one of the files, but the startling whiteness of the light distracts me. I get up and close the curtains partway.