Authors: Walter Satterthwait

Wall of Glass (30 page)

I pulled the trigger.

The slug couldn't have come closer to her than three feet. But she'd never been shot at before. Her hands jerked from her pockets, empty, and her mouth fell open. When I reached her, she was shaking. I took the pistol from her jacket pocket and slipped it into the pocket of my windbreaker. I put my hand on her shoulder. “Come on, Miranda. Everything will be all right.”

It was the second time I'd said that today, and both times it had been a lie.

B
UT FOR A WHILE THERE,
it seemed as though perhaps I hadn't lied, that everything might, in fact, turn out all right. At least for Miranda.

Because the girl was sixteen years old, the state had the option of charging her either as an adult or as a juvenile. If charged as an adult, and convicted, she faced a mandatory life sentence in the penitentiary, with no parole for thirty years. If charged as a juvenile, she faced a year in the New Mexico Girls School, in Albuquerque.

Derek Leighton got her the best lawyer in the state, a former governor with a lot of flash and dazzle. From what I understand, Miranda's testimony to the police and to the courts was impressive. She seemed open, honest, and sincerely repentant. She admitted shooting Biddle, but claimed it was an accident. She admitted stealing the necklace and the gun, and keeping them, but claimed she was sorry. She admitted shooting through my living-room window, but claimed that she hadn't meant to hurt anyone, only to scare her mother and me, and to stop me from looking for the necklace. That last part, at least, I believe.

She claimed she knew nothing about Killebrew or his disappearance, and that part the police believed. The official theory was that after shooting at John Lucero and me, he had left the town, left the state, left the country.

Rita didn't agree. She was convinced that the girl had gotten in touch with him somehow, had lured him off somewhere and killed him. I was inclined to agree with her; I'd seen Miranda reach into that windbreaker for the gun, and I'm certain that she intended to use it.

The court chose to try her as a juvenile. She was indicted for second-degree homicide, and she was convicted and sentenced to a year in the Girls School. She was due to be released in about three months.

Two weeks ago, a pair of hikers found a man's decomposed body in a shallow grave in the forest up by the ski basin. The police investigation established that the man had been killed there, on or near the spot where he was buried, that he'd been buried almost immediately after having been shot, and that this had all occurred approximately a year ago, last spring. The run-off of winter's meltwater, and the foraging animals, had exposed the body. Dental records from the penitentiary helped identify it as Killebrew's, and the forensic lab of the state police had no trouble, even after all this time, matching the slug found in the body with the others fired from Miranda's gun.

Her trial is set for next month. And the betting is that everything, this time, will not turn out all right.

I found the necklace, that day last year at the Cerillos turn-off, in the glove compartment of her Jeep Renegade, which she'd parked on the other side of the mound of boulders. Atco paid the finder's fee to the MondragÃ³n agency, but Allan Romero told Rita that Derek Leighton never reimbursed them for it. He didn't want the necklace back.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This edition published in 2012 by
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