Beneath Devil's Bridge(60)

He makes a blubbering sound. More tears flow down his cheeks. His nose begins to run.

“Did you take Leena Rai beneath Devil’s Bridge?”

He swipes his wrist across his nose, smearing snot.

“Did you assault Leena under the bridge? Did you—”

“Stop!” he screams. Luke, the lawyer, and I jerk back, taken off guard. He surges to his feet.

“I did it. Okay? I fucking did it. All of it.” He glares at us.

“Clay, please, sit down,” Luke says. I’m wired, ready to move to block the door, restrain him.

Clay stands, unmoving.

“Sit, Clay.”

He clears his throat. Slowly, as if in a trance, he sits.

“Tell us, what did you do? How did you do it?”

In a slow, quiet monotone, he says, “I sexually assaulted and then killed Leena Rai. After I raped her, I couldn’t stand her, what she represented. Because she represented everything I hate about myself, everything horrible I’ve done, all my addictions—my addiction to pornography, my arousal around children, young girls. I beat her out of existence. I bashed her away. Killing it, hating it, murdering it. I wanted her gone. Out of my life.”

I swallow. The lawyer is as pale as a ghost. I can feel the tension of the others watching from behind the mirror. I’m aware of the camera and audio recording this. I feel surreal.

“How?” Luke says softly. “Tell us exactly how it happened, step by step. How did you kill Leena?”

He closes his eyes for several long beats. The smell of him in the room is thick. Again, in that soft monotone, Clay speaks. “I had sex with Leena in the grove, off an overgrown trail near the outhouses. I know Maddy saw us. She had a headlamp on. Her beam lit on our faces. I tried to call out to Maddy, but she ran away, along the trail, back toward the bonfire. Leena . . .” He looks confused for a moment, closes his eyes again, and he begins to rock back and forth. “She was upset, crying. I reached down to help her up. That’s when I heard people in the bushes. Possibly watching us. Leena was wobbling, drunk. I put my arm around her to assist her back to my car. I . . . I was going to take her home.”

He glances up at the camera near the ceiling, then turns his gaze back to us. “On the way home, she got more and more agitated. She started to say she was going to report me, because Maddy had seen us already, and Maddy would tell anyway. Leena said she’d written about me in her journal, which she had in her backpack. Instead of taking her home, I drove her to a lookout, to try and talk her down, and to try and sober her up a bit. She fell asleep for a while. We were parked at the lookout for a few hours. She woke up and seemed more reasonable. I then started to drive her home, but when we reached the intersection near Devil’s Bridge, she got riled up again and asked to be let out. I handed her her backpack, watched her go, then panicked. I parked my car off the road, behind some trees, and I followed her over the bridge. I guess this was sometime around two a.m. On the south side, I grabbed her and forced her down the path that led under Devil’s Bridge.”

He falls silent.

“And then?” Luke asks.

“I ripped the pack from her back and tried to take her journal. She fought me. The pages ripped. I struck her across the side of the face. She fell onto the gravel path. I stomped my boot onto the back of her head. I . . . raped her there. She got up, got away, staggered across the bridge, heading north. I followed, but I held back because some vehicles went by, and I didn’t want any witnesses to link me to her. Then on the other side of the bridge, where it was dark, I grabbed her again and dragged her back down along the trail under the north end of the bridge this time. I hit her head with a rock. I stomped on her back. I grabbed her by the collar, dragged her over the stones and boulders. The jacket came off while I was dragging her, and her shirt, too, because I was pulling the sleeves, tugging, and she was fighting me. And a shoe came off. Leena staggered to her feet, and I got hold of her, and I ran her face-first into the trunk of a tree. And again. And again. And again. And she still wasn’t gone, still wouldn’t die. She was still breathing. So I dragged her body over the small rocks into the water. Her pants came off while I was pulling her. She was limp, and very heavy, and kept getting snagged up in the stones. I dragged her thigh deep into the water. It was cold. And then I straddled her, and sat on her, using my body weight to press her down into the small stones on the bottom of the river. I used my knees, forcing them into her shoulders. I held the back of her head underwater with both hands. Until she was gone. I killed—I drowned—Leena Rai.”

Clay absently examines the bruises and healing lacerations on his hands, as if seeing them for the first time. “From hitting Leena, I guess,” he says quietly. “Punching her.”

Silence fills the room. Time elongates and shimmers. Then in his quiet, strange monotone, Clay says, “I left her there. Floating facedown in the reeds. Under Devil’s Bridge. And no one even noticed for a week. The bus that her father drove—his route went right over that bridge every day. Several times a day. And the school bus that she wasn’t on, it went over the bridge twice a day, too. And no one saw her down there. Floating in the eelgrass, until she sank. The forgotten girl.”





RACHEL


THEN


Wednesday, November 26, 1997.

I walk into the Raven’s Roost pub with Luke and the rest of the team. It’s almost midnight. We have charged Clay Pelley. He’s been transported to a remand facility in the Lower Mainland to await further processing.