Custody of the State (21 page)

“On that last point about hydraulic brake fluid…” Parker said with some hesitation in his voice.

“We've got that covered,” Harriet Bender said. She handed a stapled packet of papers to him.

“These are some technical papers from manufacturers of hydraulic brake fluid. They give its chemical breakdown, which includes the ingredients of ethylene glycol.”

The doctor thumbed quickly through the packet of papers.

“Can I expect to be interviewed by anyone else before trial, other than you two?” Parker asked.

“I'm not sure. Possibly defense counsel for Ms. Fellows,” Putnam said.

Then Bender tittered and added, “Although we're not sure about that—Mr. Chambers is cooling his heels in the county jail on a contempt-of-court order right now.”

“Yeah, I think I heard something about that,” Parker remarked.

Harry Putnam's gut instinct as a trial lawyer was to probe into Parker's last comment a little, but he resisted the temptation and decided to approach it from a broader perspective.

“Before we get into the particulars, Dr. Parker, is there anything you think you should share with us at this point that might be problematic concerning your evaluation of Joshua Fellows' blood sample?”

“Problematic in what way?” Parker asked.

Harry Putnam was jiggling his ballpoint pen in his fingers rapidly.

“Problematic in the sense that you believe it might undermine the validity of your conclusion that Joshua Fellows' blood contained ethylene glycol,” Putnam explained, studying Parker carefully. “Or that might impact your credibility as a witness.”

Dr. Parker removed his glasses and wiped the sweat from his nose, then calmly cleaned the lenses with the fabric of his lab coat.

Putting his glasses back on, he answered.

“I see nothing problematic, Mr. Putnam. Nothing at all.”

29

A
T
S
T
. S
TEPHEN THE
M
ARTYR
C
ATHOLIC
C
HURCH
in downtown Delphi, Father Godfrey, now seventy-four, slowly plodded through his daily rituals and routines.

Early-morning prayer and homily. The leading of morning mass. Three days a week, one of the young assistants would drive him to the hospital for visitation.

On that day, though, there was no hospital visitation scheduled. But his mind was still preoccupied by the thought of one particular confession at the hospital.

The priest had taken confessions from dying men and women during the war in Vietnam. Desperate soldiers, their backs arched in indescribable agony, faces contorted, uttering their last words in hopes of absolution. And he had taken hundreds of deathbed confessions in peacetime as well. At the scene of car accidents. From the elderly, thin and languishing, in their beds.

Almost all of those confessions were attempts to tie up the loose ends of lives that had been unloosened by the impending reality of death.

But the confession of Henry Pencup had been different. Pencup had been a staid, reserved banker. Calm, respectful, and businesslike. He had quietly attended mass with his wife and had given generously to the church and its various charities. Occasionally he'd volunteered to help with the food drive and the soup kitchen.

But when the bank president had called for Father Godfrey from his bed in the Delphi hospital, it had not turned out to be an attempt to tie up the loose ends of his life.

To the contrary, what Pencup had told Father Godfrey held the threat of unraveling the social and political fabric of Delphi—and a good deal of the Atlanta establishment as well.

After the confession and sacraments, Father Godfrey had closed the curtain. Then there had been the awful sound from the heart monitor, the screaming tone that indicated total cardiac arrest. The nurse in the room had rushed to the bed and called for assistance.

That was the last that Father Godfrey had seen of Henry Pencup until his funeral.

But Pencup's last words to the priest had also unraveled something else. As a result, he had been left with a legal, ethical, and spiritual mess.

Pondering all this, Father Godfrey thought back to his young fishing days on the chain of lakes that fed into Eden Lake. Once in a while, the fishing line would become tangled in the reel. Any effort to pull it apart would only result in a more complicated, more impossible tangle. He used to call it a “bird's nest.”

That was it. Henry Pencup had left a bird's nest of tangled threads in the old priest's wrinkled hands.

Whatever the resolution, Father Godfrey was not prepared to figure it out today. Instead, he would go out to his vegetable garden, a small patch of land behind the church. He would tend his tomatoes and check on his carrots. He would spend the afternoon seeing whether his small wire fence had kept out the rabbits that had worked mischief against his beloved vegetables.

30

S
PIKE WAS SITTING BEHIND
the steering wheel of the rental car parked on the shoulder of the highway. Stretched out before him across the dashboard was a highway map for South Dakota. He peered at the spider web of minor county highways and then glanced up at the sign some fifty feet down the highway.

“I think I've found it,” he said out loud. And then he motioned to Crystal Banes, who was outside of the car, pacing on the shoulder of the road, and trying to get a better signal on her cell phone.

Banes ignored his gestures and turned away as she began connecting with her producer back in Atlanta.

After a few minutes, Banes got back in the rental car, folding up her cell phone. She threw a fatigued look at Spike.

“Excuse me,” she snapped. “I've got a TV show that has to keep surviving. I've got other stories besides tracking down Mary Sue Fellows. So please don't interrupt me when I'm on the phone again, okay?”

“It's only that I found it. I thought you wanted to know.”

“Found what?”

“The Sioux Indian reservation that we were looking for. I found our location. The reservation is only about twenty miles from here.”

“Well, good for you, Spike,” Banes said in a deliberate monotone. “So let's get there. Let's find out where this Fellows woman is. Let's get her on tape, and then let's call the cops.”

“The cops?” Spike asked incredulously.

“Sure—what's the problem?”

“I thought you were after the story.”

“Sure I'm after the story. I'm after two stories. First we get Mary Sue Fellows with a shock-of-a-lifetime look on her face as we click on the lights and get her on tape. Then we get the second story—we're right there when they arrest her, slap the cuffs on her, and grab her little boy away. That might be an even better visual than the first part.”

“You never said anything about turning her over to the cops.”

“Well, that's show business.” Banes motioned for Spike to hurry up and start the car and head toward the reservation.

There was silence for ten or fifteen minutes. Then Banes broke the quiet.

“Don't get all soppy on me, Spike. I thought you were a tough, no-nonsense cameraman.”

“So what happens after the cops grab her?” Spike asked.

“Well, she goes to jail. And the little kid goes to a foster home.”

“And then what?”

“Spike, I don't know. She battles it out in court along with her lawyer—if he ever gets out of jail. And then there's an appeal, and then maybe we've got some more stories out of it.”

“I've been reading the file,” Spike remarked. “This mother has no history of child abuse. No criminal arrests. Her friends and family say she's a practically perfect mother. And then one day, an anonymous tip is called in. Nothing said about who the anonymous person is. But somebody says she's been poisoning this little kid. With brake fluid. So why that?”

“Why what?” Banes asked with a raised eyebrow, surprised by her cameraman's stringing so many thoughts together.

“Why brake fluid? Of all the things you're going to poison your kid with—why that? Doesn't that strike you as kind of strange?”

“Yeah. Poisoning your own kid strikes me as very strange, very bizarre, very sick.”

“No, I mean the use of brake fluid,” Spike continued. “If you're going to poison your own child—how about bleach, how about drain cleaner, how about even antifreeze? Besides, she's a nurse. She's got to know some chemicals that would do the job on her kid. If that's what she really wanted to do. Just seems strange to me—
brake fluid
. It's just really weird. Hard to believe.”

“Spike, remember the news stories of the last decade—well, you're pretty young, so let's say the last five or six years? How many headlines with ‘perfect little mothers' who say their children were kidnapped or murdered by some neighbor. And then you find out that these perfect little mothers were monsters and they killed their own children. C'mon, it happens all the time. Why not Mary Sue Fellows?”

“Because this is different.”

“How?”

“Because as far as we know the little kid is alive and well. The mom has been taking good care of him. Remember how it all started. The boy is sick. That could be from a bunch of different things. And the police sweep down on the farm, she runs away out of fear. And her real story never comes out.”

“Well, considering that Will Chambers is in jail,” Banes said, “maybe you ought to be Mary Sue's attorney.”

“What's going to happen to Mary Sue Fellows and that little kid—I mean, long-term?” Spike asked.

“Alright, I'll give you the straight scoop,” Banes answered. “I've consulted with an attorney friend of mine in Atlanta. He handles a lot of these really bloody custody battles. You know what he told me?”

Spike just shook his head as he continued driving down the highway.

“He told me that once the kid is pulled out of the house and put in foster care, and they've fed him into the system, it's pretty difficult to pull him back out again. It's a little bit like reversing gravity sometimes. That's the bottom line.”

The TV host and her cameraman fell silent for a while as they surveyed the long stretch of South Dakota highway ahead. The landscape was full of brown hills, with a handful of farmhouses and ranches scattered here and there.

“Keep your eye out for the next store. We'll stop and start asking if they know where this Tommy White Arrow's ranch is. We have to be getting pretty close. The first sign of civilization, the first little gas station or store, you pull in,” Banes said. “Besides, I need to pick up some deodorant and some more toothpaste.”

Sixteen miles down the highway there was a small grocery store with a sign on top that said “THE TRADING POST.” A gas station was located on the other side of the store—with the pay phone that was often used by Mary Sue Fellows.

In the parking lot of the Trading Post there was only one vehicle right now—a Suburban. The Suburban belonged to Tommy White Arrow.

The vehicle was parked next to the Trading Post that day because Tommy had driven Katherine, Mary Sue, and Joshua to the store to pick up a few odds and ends. Tommy was busy trading jokes with the store clerk, an older man who wore sunglasses because of eye problems. Katherine was working down her grocery list, picking up canned goods in her small shopping basket. Down the aisle where the women's deodorant was kept, Mary Sue and Joshua were kneeling down. That was also where the coloring books and crayons were located.

For mother and son, the day had a calmness that came only with the routine and the mundane. Mary Sue had reluctantly adapted to her life at Tommy's ranch. Although she had longed to return home to her husband, she was tolerating her new, temporary life in South Dakota.

The Trading Post had become part of her new routine. She and Katherine had visited once a week.

Right then, she was not thinking about the case against her in Georgia, or even about Joe sitting in jail. She was looking at a
coloring book and some cheap crayons—and wondering when she would find out the results of the blood test taken by Dr. Kendoll.

She was still squatting in the aisle with her little boy when the rental car occupied by Spike and Crystal Banes pulled into the parking lot, directly under the sign that read “THE TRADING POST.”

31

B
EFORE GUARD
T
HOMPSON
placed Will Chambers in the back seat of his squad car, behind the metal screen that separated him from the front seat, he locked his wrists in handcuffs and his ankles in manacles.

As the two drove to the overflow pen, Thompson glanced occasionally in his rearview mirror, studying Will.

On each occasion, Will locked eyes with him in the mirror.

There was a small part of Will that entertained a curiosity about Thompson's culpability. Was he only following orders in transferring Will to the auxiliary jail? And if so, who gave the order and why?