Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(93)
DeMarco said nothing. After a few seconds, he turned in his chair and gazed out the window again. The bareness of the trees made his chest ache. The sky was heartbreakingly blue.
Finally he faced Bowen again. “Are you asking me if it’s possible that a good, decent, and compassionate man could resort to torture?”
“That’s what I’m asking.”
“You tell me,” DeMarco said. “You have a wife and a little girl who mean the world to you. Let’s say you come home one night and find them butchered. What would you do to the man responsible? What would you consider a suitable punishment?”
Bowen stared down at DeMarco’s report. He sat very still for half a minute. Then he pulled open a drawer, removed a manila folder, slipped the report inside the folder, and closed the cover. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Take your frozen balls and get out of here.”
DeMarco stood. “Oh, they’re both nicely thawed by now. You wanna check?”
Sixty-Four
Before returning home in the afternoon, DeMarco drove to the village of Oniontown. From the O’Patchens’ driveway, he could see Rosemary in her backyard. On her hands and knees, she was moving down the rows of withered tomato plants in her garden, pulling them up by the roots and stuffing them into a plastic bucket. As DeMarco approached, she looked up at him. Her eyes were red and swollen, cheeks slick with tears and streaked with the dirt from her hands.
“Where’s Ed?” DeMarco asked.
“Sitting by the TV,” she said. “I think he’s hoping the news will change somehow. But it’s not going to. ‘Last member of Huston family brutally slain before killer is brought down by state police.’”
She yanked a tomato plant from the ground and shook the dirt from its roots. “At least you got the son of a bitch,” she said. “At least you got him.”
DeMarco knelt beside her. He picked up the bucket and held it while she stuffed the dead plant inside. “How are you at keeping secrets?” he said.
Sixty-Five
The day of Huston’s funeral was appropriately gray and chilled. Now that his innocence had been proclaimed over the Internet and beamed from one broadcasting tower to the next across several continents, his colleagues and neighbors were quick to claim him again as a close friend whose innocence they had never doubted. The jealousy they had felt for Huston alive became a personal sense of loss for Huston dead. On the day of the announcement of his death, every bookstore in the country sold out every copy of his work in stock, and tens of thousands of copies were back-ordered.
At the crowded gravesite, coeds hugged copies of Huston’s novels to their Halston stadium jackets, sobbed, and shivered while thin, sensitive boys looked on longingly and plotted ways to turn grief into sexual conquest. The poet Denton, in a charcoal cashmere overcoat, a lavender wool scarf wrapped twice around his throat, spoke for fifteen minutes about the special relationship he and Thomas Huston had shared. “Colleagues, friends, and even collaborators,” he said, “laborers toiling side by side in the vineyards of truth,” “brother soldiers…warrior poets.” Afterward, he threw back his head and recited Poe’s “Lenore” and “Annabel Lee.” His shaggy chestnut hair lifted in the gusty breeze, his eyes glimmered with tears, and his voice quavered just enough to be heard.
DeMarco stood well behind the deep half-moon of mourners. Only occasional snatches of Denton’s recitation reached his ears. DeMarco had meant to remain at the ceremony only briefly, then to return to the silence of home and the thoughts that nagged at him, but he lingered on until shortly after the coffin was lowered into the ground and the feature-length histrionics of sobbing and keening began. Rosemary and Ed O’Patchen were the first to lean over the grave for a final good-bye. They stood side by side, motionless for half a minute, Ed’s ungloved hand resting in the middle of his wife’s back. When the couple turned away to make room for the others queuing up behind them, Rosemary’s eyes found DeMarco at the rear of the crowd, and with a whispered word, she directed her husband’s gaze to him. Though their cheeks were red with cold and shiny with tears, both O’Patchens greeted DeMarco with a subtle smile only he understood. He nodded once, then turned and walked the long, winding asphalt pathway back to his car alone.
What had been troubling DeMarco was the nagging question of why Inman had shown up at DeMarco’s house three nights earlier. Why would he risk capture by confronting DeMarco? The two men shared no history. DeMarco had never busted him, had had no role in any of Inman’s previous arrests. All DeMarco could figure was that, at some point, Bonnie had mentioned the sergeant to her boyfriend, and something in her tone of voice had tripped Inman’s jealousy trigger again, so he made a slight detour in his escape route, slit Bonnie’s throat, and came after DeMarco. Given the convolutions of the criminal psyche, DeMarco considered this a plausible explanation, yet it failed to quiet the mumblings in his brain. For that reason he had ordered that Bonnie’s vehicle be impounded and scrutinized, but it produced no further rationale for Inman’s behavior. The small trunk was crammed with their clothing in two suitcases and three duffels, the glove box held road maps for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas, and in Bonnie’s purse was their traveling money, two packets of three thousand dollars each in Citizen Bank wrappers. None of it spoke to DeMarco, not a word of insinuation. It left him only with a vague uneasiness that refused to gel.