All the Ugly and Wonderful Things(78)

“To see if who what?” I said. I’d been letting Cardoza take the lead, but something had just happened.

Donal brushed his hand against his shirt.

“There was dirt on me. I wanted to go swimming. To wash the dirt off,” he said. Blood, he meant, but I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to think about that. He went back to the farmhouse, but when he got there, my deputies were there.

“Daddy says, stay away from the pigs, so I hid.”

That was the end of the boy’s story.

After we returned Donal to his aunt, Cardoza and I went for coffee.

“Goddamn it,” Cardoza said. “He almost slipped and told us what he’s trying to keep a secret.”

“He won’t make that mistake again. Now he’s had a chance to practice it.”

“That poor kid. He walked ten miles. One way carrying the gun that killed his parents, and back the other way knowing that lowlife was banging his sister. You still think Barfoot is innocent?”

*

On the one side, I had the feds trying to ram murder charges down Junior’s throat and on the other side, I had Brenda Newling, who was just as eager to see him in jail. I’m not a squeamish man. I’d been sheriff for twenty-two years, and dealt with more than a few rapes, but I didn’t relish having a woman sit in my office and say the word “rape” twenty times in ten minutes.

I made the mistake of suggesting that the girl was willing.

“She is barely fourteen years old and he raped her,” Mrs. Newling said.

“The problem is we don’t have much in the way of evidence for a rape charge. Indecent exposure might stick, since we’ve got you as a witness.”

“The prosecutor says that the evidence from the office and Wavy’s clothes is enough.”

Make that the feds, Mrs. Newling, and the county prosecutor breathing down my neck, plus a mess of evidence from the two scenes.

At the farmhouse: Liam Quinn’s blood in the hallway and bathroom. Four bullets, two through his chest while he stood in the hallway, and two through his back while he crawled away. Valerie Quinn’s blood in the kitchen. One bullet above her right ear. Entry wound with contact powder burns around it. Exit wound the whole left side of her head. What looked like a suicide note on the kitchen table.



Liam, I’m done letting you make me miserable. I hope you’re happy with your whores, but you’re never going to f*ck me again. Val.



At the garage: blood on the floor and the workbench belonged to Roger Betsworth, from his accident. The smudge of blood on the windowsill of the office belonged to Valerie Quinn. Her son transferred it from his hand, left his fingerprints behind. Left them all over the gun, too, which was covered in Valerie Quinn’s blood.

Inside the office: Wavy Quinn’s blood on the desk blotter and some under Junior’s fingernails on his left hand. Also on the desk blotter: semen. Junior’s. More of the same in Wavy Quinn’s underpants, retrieved from a hamper at Junior’s house.

On Junior’s right hand: gunshot residue.

Valerie Quinn had GSR on her elbow and shoulder, but none on her hands. Her fingerprints were on the gun, but so were Liam Quinn’s. His were also on the five shell casings ejected from the gun and nine of the bullets left in the magazine.

On the other round in the magazine: Junior’s thumbprint.

Valerie Quinn didn’t shoot herself in the head holding the gun with her elbow, so some unknown party staged it to look like a murder/suicide.

Who was the unknown party? Junior? His print on that one bullet and GSR on his hand. He had an answer for both. He and Quinn went target shooting together and they both had nine millimeters. Assuming the gun at the garage was Quinn’s, Junior’s was in his kitchen drawer. Recently fired, he claimed, at a possum. Two of the bullets in that gun had Liam Quinn’s fingerprints on them. The gun also had Wavy and Donal Quinn’s fingerprints on it.

Toward the end of summer, when we hadn’t had rain in weeks, a farmer over in Belton County found Liam Quinn’s Harley Davidson submerged in an irrigation pond. It’d likely been there since the day of the murders, but it wasn’t until the water level dropped that the bike was visible. If that was the motorcycle the neighbor heard, who was riding it?

Not Junior, who was fooling around with the Quinn girl in his office when the motorcycle was ditched. I put it to him that he could have killed the Quinns and had time to get back to the garage.

“That don’t even make sense,” Junior said. “It’s not like Wavy’s aunt is gonna let us get married.”

“All I have is your word that Valerie Quinn was okay with you marrying the girl. And I got these two gals, Ricki and Dee, say Mrs. Quinn didn’t like you at all. The feds figure their testimony establishes motive for you killing her. And those gals are real eager to cut a deal.”

“First of all, Lyle Broadus says I only needed Liam’s signature. I didn’t need Val to sign nothin’. And second, Val didn’t like me, but she didn’t give a shit about Wavy, neither. She woulda let me do anything I wanted.”

“So, you were having sex with her while the Quinns were murdered?”

“No, sir. I wasn’t lying. We didn’t have sex.” That was what Junior said, but he covered his face with his hands when he did.

“I’m looking at the report, son. I got blood. I got semen. On the desk. In the girl’s underpants. Prosecutor says that’s enough to prove vaginal penetration and ejaculation. Sounds like you had sex to me. And the girl won’t talk to us.”