As I stare at the great white courthouse, my cell phone rings. I climb into my Saab and answer.
“Are you out of the meeting?” Drew asks in a tense voice. “Did you see the autopsy report?”
No questions about his future, only about what happened to Kate. Is that because he loved her so dearly? Or because he has something to fear?
“She was strangled, Drew.”
“That’s what I thought,” he says quietly. “From the petechiae around her eyes. Was she pregnant?”
“Yes. Four weeks along.”
A sharp intake of breath. “That’s why she was so desperate to see me. Jesus, what about—”
“Stop talking, Drew. We can go into details later. Right now we have a problem. The district attorney wants a sample of your DNA.”
Silence.
“The pathologist found semen inside Kate’s body.” There’s no point in telling Drew that the pathologist found the semen of two different men, and in two different locations. “Of course, I expected that, given what you told me about the previous night.”
“I’m listening.”
“Shad wants to prove you murdered Kate. He wants to prove it badly.”
“Does he really think I’m capable of that?”
“All men are capable of that, Drew. We can talk about Shad’s motives later. Right now, under these circumstances, giving him the sample is the best thing you can do. It’ll buy us three or four weeks while the lab does the test. And time is what we need more than anything right now.”
“Why?”
“Because the police may have caught the real murderer long before the test is completed, or even begun. And by that point, it won’t matter nearly so much that you were having sex with Kate Townsend. In fact, if Shad gets a confession from someone else, I might be able to persuade him to cancel the test altogether. You’d probably have to make a massive contribution to his next political campaign”—which will be sooner than anyone suspects—“but I think you could live with that.”
“Okay, fine. But what about the autopsy? What else did the report show?”
“
Later.
Shad wanted you to waltz into the St. Catherine’s Hospital lab and give the blood sample, but I worked out a compromise.”
“Which is?”
“Can you trust your lab technician?”
“Susan? Sure. She’s been with me nine years.”
“Good. Because in the next hour, a couple of cops are going to show up at your office and watch Susan draw some blood from your arm.”
“Okay.”
“And, Drew?”
“Yes?”
“From now on, don’t answer any questions from anybody without talking to me first. Nothing. You got that?”
“Okay.”
“You’d better get things straight with Susan.”
“I will. Are you going to be here when they draw the blood?”
“Is your office empty during lunch?”
“Like a cemetery.”
“All right. I’ll come by and make sure they don’t hassle you for pubic hairs or anything like that.”
“Thanks.”
As I hang up and start my car, a tall, big-bellied white man wearing a brown uniform and a gray cowboy hat swaggers by my car and turns into the doorway of the district attorney’s office. He is Billy Byrd, the sheriff of Adams County. As Sheriff Byrd pulls open the D.A.‘s door, he glances back at me and gives me a superior smile, as though he already knows exactly what transpired in the office upstairs a few minutes ago. And of course he does.
Welcome to Mississippi politics.
Chapter
8
Shad’s emissaries arrive at Drew’s medical lab before I do. But they’re not cops, as I expected; they’re sheriff’s deputies. I can tell by the big yellow star on the door of the white cruiser parked outside. This tells me that in the investigation of Drew Elliott, the district attorney has chosen to align himself with the fat man in the cowboy hat who walked by my car a few minutes ago, rather than with the chief of police, who by any standard of common sense should be handling this matter.
Drew practices in a suite of offices maintained by Natchez Doctors’ Hospital, which is located behind the cluster of primary care clinics that feed patients to the main facility. The front door of Drew’s office is unlocked. I enter to find his waiting room dark. There’s light in the corridor beyond it, but the door to the hall is locked. After I bang loudly, a young woman’s face appears behind the receptionist’s window. She waves, then buzzes me into the corridor.
Drew’s lab is right across the hall, a brightly lit rectangle containing centrifuges, microscopes, and expensive blood chemistry machines. Against the far wall, a blue phlebotomist’s chair stands beside a white refrigerator. Drew himself is reclining in the chair, one shirtsleeve rolled up past his elbow.
I step in and find two deputies standing with their backs to the wall opposite Drew. They look uncomfortable. I recognize one of them. Tom Jackson was the top detective at the police department until the sheriff hired him away, which wasn’t hard to do. The county pays cops about five thousand a year more than the city does. Jackson is as tall as Drew, and his handlebar mustache gives him the look of a cowboy in a Frederic Remington painting. He gives me a friendly nod, but his partner—a short, black-haired man with pasty skin—doesn’t even acknowledge me.
“Tom,” says Drew, “this is Penn Cage, a buddy of mine.”
“I know Penn,” Jackson says in a deep voice.
Both deputies must know why I’m here, but Drew seems to want to preserve the illusion of a friendly get-together. He nods past me, and I turn to see the white-uniformed woman who let me in. She’s in her midthirties, with short brown hair and a heart-shaped face distinguished by intelligent brown eyes.
“Penn, this is Susan Salter, my med tech.”
“Nice to meet you, Susan.”
She manages a slight nod; she looks the least comfortable of us all.
“Well,” says Drew, “let’s get this over with.”
Susan takes a long white box from a cabinet and looks at the deputies. “You said four tubes?”
“That’s what our evidence technician told us,” says Tom Jackson. “I guess they want to make sure they don’t have to ask for more blood later.”
Susan removes four vacuum tubes with purple stoppers from the box and lays them flat on one arm of the chair. Then she straps a Velcro tourniquet around Drew’s left biceps and slaps his antecubital vein three times. A vein like a rigid blue pipe stands up at the place where Drew’s arm muscles insert at the inner elbow. Susan pushes the stopper end of one of the tubes into a Vacutainer syringe, then with a single deft motion pricks the needle into Drew’s vein and presses the stopper of the tube down onto the rear of the needle with her thumb.
A fountain of dark blood begins filling the tube, sucked inward by the vacuum inside it. The short deputy looks away.
“I need to use the restroom,” he mumbles.
“Down the hall to your right,” says Drew.
The deputy disappears. As Susan replaces the full tube with an empty one, I realize her hands are shaking. She’s playing out a scene she couldn’t possibly have imagined an hour ago. How much has Drew told her? I wonder.
“Tom?” I say, taking advantage of the other deputy’s absence. “What do you figure the time of death was?”
Jackson looks warily at me. “You don’t know?”
“The D.A. wouldn’t tell me.”
He sighs and shakes his head. “People are acting mighty squirrelly about this case. I’d like to help you out, though.”
“Will you?”
“Well…we know the girl didn’t leave the school until three. The fishermen say they found her about six-twenty.”
“What did the body temperature tell you?”
Jackson glances uncomfortably at the door. “I don’t know about all that. I heard they’re not sure how long she was in the water.”
“Best guess?”
The short deputy walks through the door, looks at Jackson, and smiles. It seems a strange thing to do, but it shuts Jackson up.
When the four tubes lie full of blood on a table and the tourniquet has been removed from Drew’s arm, Tom steps forward with a plastic evidence bag and holds it open. Susan drops the tubes inside. Drew shakes his head, looking more than anything like an innocent man doing his best to humor overzealous cops.
“That it, guys?”
Jackson nods. “That’s it, Doc. Sorry to bother you with this.”
“How long do you think it will take to get the DNA results?” I ask.
“Usually takes a month, at least,” Tom replies. “They’ll probably rush this, considering the situation. But two and a half weeks is the fastest I’ve ever seen. Out of New Orleans, anyway.”
This is exactly what I expected.
Drew stands and offers Tom his hand, and Jackson gives it a strong shake. In all likelihood, Tom is a patient of Drew’s. But when Drew offers his hand to the shorter deputy, the man turns without a word and leaves the lab. Tom shrugs sheepishly, then follows his partner out.
Drew looks at Susan. “I guess I screwed up your lunch hour.”
She forces a smile. “That’s okay. I’m not hungry.”
Drew gives me a pointed glance, and I realize he needs to speak further with Susan in private.
“I’ll give you a call later,” I tell him, starting for the door.
“Wait,” he says. “Have you had lunch yet? I’m starving.”
“I was about to get something.”
“Why don’t we eat together? We ought to talk about a couple of things.”
I don’t want to risk talking about this situation in public. “Tell you what, I’ll grab some food and come back here. We can eat in your office.”
Drew looks dismayed, but then he seems to get it. “Okay. See you in a few minutes. No hamburgers.”
I leave the office and go out to my car, my mind on Susan and her ability to keep quiet. I feel like Thai food, but the only Thai restaurant is downtown, and it would take too long to get there and back to Drew’s office. The only options on this side of town are fast food and Ruby Tuesday’s. I pull into the drive-through lane at Taco Bell and order a couple of zesty chicken bowls, some tacos, and two Mountain Dews, which the restaurant delivers in record time. Then I pull back onto the bypass and get into the turning lane for Jefferson Davis Boulevard, the street that leads to Drew’s office.
While I wait for the light to change, the blare of a police siren pierces my ears. Several vehicles behind me pull onto the grassy median, and then a police car with blue lights flashing screeches to a stop behind me. With nowhere else to go, I shoot across two oncoming lanes of traffic and pull my right wheels onto the curb of Jeff Davis Boulevard. The squad car roars past me.
This kind of thing is pretty unusual in Natchez at midday. Maybe that’s what triggers my intuition, but in any case I hit the accelerator and take off in pursuit of the squad car.
The blue lights swerve into a parking lot on the right side of Jeff Davis Boulevard. Sure enough, it’s Drew’s office.
What the hell could have happened so fast?
I wonder, skidding into the lot behind the police car.
And then I see.
A muscular man in a blue cap is brandishing a wooden baseball bat at Drew, who stands in a half crouch with his hands held out from his body. Susan Salter is screaming at the man to put down the bat.
Two uniformed cops leap from the squad car. As one draws a can of pepper spray from his belt, I see two other men lying on the ground not far from the man with the bat. One rolls over onto his back, clutching his bloodied face in pain.
“Drop that bat!”
yells one of the cops, who’s holding a deadly steel baton called an asp.
The man with the bat jerks his head toward the cop, and at that moment I realize something alarming: the blue cap he’s wearing is a St. Stephen’s Bucks baseball cap, which almost certainly makes him not a man at all, but a boy. From the rear, his size and muscularity gave him the appearance of an adult. But when I read the letters on the back of his jersey—SAYERS—everything clicks. The boy with the bat is Steve Sayers, Kate Townsend’s ex-boyfriend.
“Why are you pointing that at me?”
Sayers screams at the cop, his eyes blazing with anger or fear and maybe both. “
He’s
the one! Look what he did!”
Steve points to the men on the ground, and I recognize one of them as a St. Stephen’s senior.
What the hell is going on?
As the cop yells again for Sayers to drop the bat, Steve swings the Louisville Slugger in a great roundhouse arc. Drew ducks beneath the whistling wood, and Steve keeps spinning. As the bat comes around a second time, Drew springs forward and snatches it from Steve’s hands.
“Get back, Steve!” he shouts. “I don’t want to fight you!”
But Sayers is beyond rational thought. He lunges for Drew’s throat, his eyes filled with rage. With a lightning motion, Drew thrusts the fat end of the bat into Steve’s midsection. There’s an explosive grunt, and Steve folds over the bat and drops to his knees, sucking for air. In the same moment, a cloud of pepper spray envelops Steve and Drew. Steve screams, and Drew begins clawing at his eyes with his free hand.
“That’s enough!”
I yell at the cop. “That’s Dr. Drew Elliott! I’m his attorney. There’s no more danger!”
“Drop the bat, Doctor!” the cop yells at Drew again.
“Drop it, Drew!” I shout.
But Steve Sayers isn’t done. Somehow he gets to his feet and charges Drew like a blind bull. Drew must be blind himself, because he takes the brunt of the charge in his belly. From reflex he pops Steve across the upper back with the bat, and this time the boy drops to the cement and stays there. Drew tosses the bat away and holds up his hands in surrender.
The cop with the pepper spray takes a pair of handcuffs from his belt, rushes up to Drew, and cuffs his hands behind his back.
“I was defending myself!” Drew protests, tears streaming down his face. “Penn, these kids attacked me. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t listen!”
“He’s telling the truth!” shouts Drew’s med tech, stepping forward.
The other cop has cuffed Steve Sayers and is now checking the other boys on the ground.
“What happened here, ma’am?” asks the first cop.
Susan Salter swallows and tries to collect herself. “Dr. Elliott and I were just standing here talking, and these kids drove up and started cursing. They picked the fight. I have no idea why. It was crazy! Dr. Elliott did everything he could to avoid it.”