Turning Angel (54 page)

”Annie’s had a tough time these past few days,“ he said. ”We all have, but she had it the worst. She thought you were dead. And nothing we said to her would change her mind. I guess losing her mother so young proved to her that the worst nightmares
do
come true. You need to spend a lot of time with her, Penn.“

”You can count on it. How’s Mom?“

Dad shook his head. ”She’s a tough old girl, but this just about did her in. She sat by the telephone day and night, waiting for word. I don’t believe she slept more than three consecutive hours the whole time you were gone. She was afraid they were going to find you in a ditch somewhere.“

”I’m sorry. I’m sorry I got myself into this mess.“

A small smile touched my father’s lips. ”That’s your nature, son. I understand it. But you’ve got a family to think about.“

I nodded.

Dad looked through a crack in the curtains at the nurse’s station. ”When they brought you into the ER, they put you on the same treatment table they put Kate Townsend on two weeks ago. I saw Jenny Townsend that night. And I felt just like her when I saw you.“ Dad’s jaw muscles flexed with the effort of holding in his emotion. ”I’m not burying my son,“ he said in a shaky voice. ”I won’t do it.“

I reached up and gripped his wrist, squeezing as hard as I could.

”I couldn’t just sit and wait,“ he said. ”I knew if there was a way to stay alive, you’d manage it. After meeting with Sheriff Byrd and Chief Logan, I called your old assistant and got the names of every FBI agent you’d ever worked with. I called them all, and they lit a fire under the task force here. I still wasn’t convinced that was enough, so I called Dan Kelly’s security company in Houston.“

Daniel Kelly is the former Delta operator I considered bringing in to protect Annie. My father got to know him well during the Del Payton case.

”Kelly was still in Afghanistan, but twelve hours later, he returned my call. When he heard you were missing, he promised to get back to the U.S. by hook or by crook. It took three days for a replacement to arrive in Kabul, but forty-eight hours ago Kelly arrived in Natchez and started searching for you. He even brought a buddy with him to protect Annie. You may not believe it, but Kelly was planning to search the Triton Battery plant the day after you escaped. I saw it in his daybook.“

”He has good instincts. But I probably would have been dead when he found me.“

Dad shook his head slowly. ”No doubt about it.“

”Is he still in town?“

”Yes. He said to tell you he’s waiting for instructions.“

For some reason, Kelly’s continued presence brings me a blessed feeling of relief.

”Now,“ Dad said, ”there are some people waiting to see you.“

He turned to go, but I said, ”Wait.“

”What is it?“

”What about Cyrus White? Did they bring him into the ER?“

Dad nodded but said nothing.

”Did he make it?“

”No. He died. Bad.“

Dad left me in silence with my memories of Cyrus and Blue. I felt no satisfaction at having killed them. New predators would soon take their places in the local drug hierarchy, and probably already had. Cyrus and Blue had never meant to kill me, but they
had
been content to watch me die by a process they didn’t understand. Now they are dead, and I am alive, and that is all that matters.

Two minutes after Dad left the ICU, Caitlin led Annie into my room. When Annie stared at me as if unsure I was real, I told her to climb up into my bed. I hugged her tight, and Caitlin hugged us both from behind Annie. We watched an episode of
Leave It to Beaver
on TV Land, hardly speaking as we did, but words didn’t matter at that point. My mother came into the room during the show. She sat on the edge of my bed for a while with her hand on my knee. She had aged visibly since I last saw her, but I sensed that she was still far from broken. When
Leave It to Beaver
ended, she kissed me on the forehead, then lifted a sleeping Annie into her arms and left for home.

Finally alone, Caitlin and I simply held each other, both shivering from an emotion we could not name. After a while, she asked to see the damage done to my body by the vasculitis. She cried then, but she knew the outcome could have been much worse. Though I was still suffering from the reaction, at least no more skin had died.

As for Drew’s trial, the news was almost all bad. A few hours before Caitlin’s visit, Shad had stunned the court by providing proof that Kate had been visiting Cyrus to procure drugs for Drew, who had then given them to his addicted wife. To prove this, Shad produced four different witnesses, each of whom knew only part of the story. The most powerful of those witnesses, Caitlin said, was Ellen Elliott herself. Because Ellen was testifying about her drug habit, and not giving direct testimony against her husband, her testimony was allowed. I figured Ellen would be glad to give testimony that might convict Drew, but Caitlin said Ellen had been very hostile to Shad during direct examination, and as she left the witness box, she appeared to have been shattered by the ordeal. This testimony had fulfilled Quentin Avery’s worst fear, and it left me deeply troubled. Cyrus himself had not known whom Kate was buying the Lorcet for, so how had Shad Johnson divined that the hydrocodone was for Ellen? I resolved to discover this as soon as possible.

According to Caitlin, Quentin had been playing catch-up throughout the trial. He had little inside information to work with, and he was saddled with a client who seemed bent on self-destruction. Drew remained firm in his belief that he should tell the whole truth about everything, and he was still demanding to take the stand in his own defense. That might happen as soon as tomorrow.

After Caitlin returned to the newspaper office, I settled back in my bed and tried to rest, but my withdrawal symptoms made it impossible. I was shaking like an epileptic when Daniel Kelly walked into my room.

I hadn’t seen him for five years, but he looked the same: curly blond hair, sea blue eyes, an Irish smile, and a reserved manner. Kelly also sported a desert tan, which somehow added to the aura of centeredness he always projected. Kelly knows how to go unnoticed in a crowd, but when he reveals himself, you know you’re in the presence of a man of supreme competence.

I asked him what he’d been doing in Afghanistan, and he gave me a typical one-word answer: ”Babysitting.“ I thanked him for dumping his contract and playing seventh cavalry on my behalf, but then I told him I was fine and that he could go back to Asia. Kelly gave a small shake of his head and said, ”I’ve been checking things out for a couple of days. Been to the trial, been out in the street. This thing isn’t over, Penn.“

”It is for me.“

Kelly raised his eyebrows. ”That may not be your choice. I went out to Triton Battery and looked at the lab where they held you—what was left of it. And I found two pounds of ninety-eight percent pure heroin.“

”
You
found it? Not the cops?“

”They took drug dogs out there, but Cyrus had figured a way to beat the dogs. Probably learned it in the air force. I’ve seen most of those tricks in my time, so I knew where to look.“

I’ve learned to expect Kelly to amaze me. ”Two pounds of pure heroin. What’s the street value of that?“

”You could buy a small island. And the people who lost that dope are going to be mighty angry.“

He gave me his cell number and told me he would stay within reach for the next couple of days, at least. Then he squeezed my right hand in both of his and walked to the glass door. ”By the way,“ he said, turning back to me, ”that was a neat trick you pulled. Couldn’t have done better myself.“

I blew out a stream of air, fighting a memory of Blue’s massive body crushing mine. ”Necessity’s the mother of invention, right?“

Kelly smiled. Then his eyes twinkled and he was gone.

Not long afterward, Quentin Avery called me. He apologized for not coming to the hospital, but I understood. A lawyer defending a client on a capital murder charge is one of the busiest people on earth. Quentin let me know he was glad that I’d survived, but then he quickly asked if I had any rabbits I could pull out of my hat for him. Had I learned anything during my captivity that might help Drew in the courtroom? I had to tell him no. When I asked for a summary of Shad Johnson’s strategy, Quentin told a depressing tale.

Though Shad’s case remained circumstantial, he had painted a compelling picture of Marko Bakic as the ”mystery man“ who’d had consensual sex with Kate within seventy-two hours of her death, and then of Drew as the older man who’d discovered this infidelity and killed his underage paramour in a jealous rage. DNA analysis of the fetus in Kate’s womb had proved it to be Drew’s child. But Drew, Shad told the jury, had no way of knowing that. He might have believed the child belonged to Marko (or any other man). Shad’s hypothesis was helped greatly by the fact that no one had seen Marko since the night of the X-rave at Oakfield. Shad had even suggested that Drew had paid to have Marko killed, which would explain the Croatian’s disappearance.

While Don Logan’s police department had been searching frantically for Marko, Sheriff Byrd had taken a more leisurely approach. I wanted to laugh at the irony when Quentin griped about this; he himself had ordered me not to hunt down Cyrus for the same reason. It suited both lawyers’ purposes to work with a myth in court, rather than a flesh-and-blood person who could contradict their theories. I offered to put Daniel Kelly at Quentin’s disposal, but Quentin demurred. He didn’t seem to grasp the value of Kelly’s help—probably because Kelly has no inside knowledge of Natchez.

Late on my second night in the hospital, Mia called. She told me she had wanted to visit earlier, but that Caitlin had told her it was best that I have as few visitors as possible. This surprised and even angered me, but on reflection I understood. It took me a while to realize that Mia was crying softly. To raise her spirits, I asked her to update me on the progress of her investigation. I knew better than to believe my absence would end her Nancy Drew efforts.

Mia had deduced that I’d been kidnapped or killed by either Cyrus White or the Asians, since I had provoked both parties. Because she had no way to work the Asian angle, she had focused on Cyrus. The only possible line Mia had into Cyrus’s organization was Marko, so for the past week, she had talked to every high school student in town, trying to find some clue to Marko’s whereabouts. She’d badgered Alicia Reynolds, Marko’s girlfriend, but Alicia had blown her off. When Mia tried to follow Alicia in her car, she quickly discovered that the police were doing the same thing. After being warned off, she went home and fell into a mild depression. I thanked her profusely for everything she’d done, but this didn’t bring her out of her mood. She’d cut school twice to attend Drew’s trial, she said, and she had a bad feeling about the way it was going.

I wanted to see for myself, but my withdrawal symptoms grew worse, not better. The methadone helped, but it didn’t stop the pain that bored like rusty nails into my bones. I still had an irregular heartbeat, as well, but Dad told me that was caused by the vasculitis, not the withdrawal.

This morning I learned that Shad and Quentin were scheduled to give their closing statements, but as badly as I wanted to hear them, I simply couldn’t function well enough to go to the courthouse. It was all I could do to stand beside my bed for five minutes, or sit in the visitors’ chair watching television. I got so agitated at my failure that Dad finally sedated me. I lay in the bed half conscious, waiting for an update from Caitlin, who was in the courtroom.

I waited in vain. Caitlin wasn’t about to give up her seat in the packed courtroom to call someone who couldn’t do anything about what was happening anyway. I switched on the TV and tried to think about something else, but it was no use. I’d never felt so impotent in my life. I lay shaking under the blanket, troubled by thoughts of Blue, almost wishing the big man would appear at my bedside with his blessed syringe. But he couldn’t do that, of course. He was dead. I’d cut the top of his head off with a battery plate. When the sedative finally overwhelmed me, I almost wept with relief.

”Penn? Penn, wake up.“

I blink my eyes in confusion. My mother is standing beside my bed.

”What’s the matter?“

”Caitlin’s on the phone. The jury’s back.“

A bolus of adrenaline shoots through my body. ”Give it to me!“

Mom passes me the phone. ”Caitlin?“

”The jury’s coming back in,“ she whispers. ”They deliberated ninety-four minutes.“

My face goes cold.

”What do you think?“

”Guilty.“

”If they see me on this phone, they’ll kick me out,“ Caitlin says. ”I’m going to leave the connection open. If you can’t hear the verdict, I’ll tell you as soon as I can.“

My phone begins hissing like a link to outer space. I’ve never listened to a jury verdict this way before. A friend of mine once called me and held up his cell phone at a Paul McCartney concert: ”Eleanor Rigby,“ I think.

”Who is the foreperson?“ asks Judge Arthel Minor, his voice replacing the hiss with amazing clarity.

For some reason, I don’t hear the reply. Probably because the judge has a microphone while the jury box doesn’t.

”Have you reached a verdict?“ Judge Minor asks.

Again nothing.

”Please pass the verdict to the clerk.“

Silence now, but I know what’s happening. The clerk is giving the verdict to Judge Minor, who will check to see if the jury has worded it correctly. Minor will then pass it to the clerk, who will read the verdict aloud. At least three deputies will surround Drew to keep him from bolting in panic in the event of a guilty verdict, or to protect him from angry relatives of the victim in the opposite event.

”Ladies and gentlemen,“ says Judge Minor, ”I’m warning you. There will be no outbursts when the verdict is read, or afterward. There will be quiet and order. Do not test me, or you will find yourself in the custody of the sheriff.“

After a brief silence, Minor says, ”Read the verdict.“

A female voice says, ”In the matter of the
State of Mississippi versus Drew Elliott,
we find the accused guilty on two counts of the charge of first-degree murder during commission of a felony.“