Beneath Devil's Bridge(67)

He’s been listening to the podcast again. It’s eating at him.

As he scans another strip of negatives from the many rolls of film he shot that night, Detective Luke O’Leary’s voice shimmers to life in his mind.

Did you shoot photos at the bonfire, Liam? Of the crowd?

I . . . I lost the camera, and the film inside. I . . . I got wasted, and I woke up in a tent, and the camera was gone. It was a school camera. I’d signed it out, and it had been stolen.

He stops his loupe over an image of Leena and Mr. Pelley sitting on a log. He thinks about the voice he’s been listening to on the podcast.

CLAYTON: I did not sexually assault Leena Rai . . . And I did not kill her.

TRINITY: If . . . if you didn’t, who did?

GUARD: Time’s up, Pelley. Come on, let’s go.

CLAYTON: Whoever did, her killer is still out there.

Liam looks even more closely at another image of a group of girls. In it are Maddy Walczak, Natalia Petrov, Seema Patel, Cheyenne Tillerson, Dusty Peters, and Beth Galloway. He frowns as his magnifier suddenly brings into focus a pendant. It has a purple stone nested into silver filigree. The stone catches the light from the bonfire. Liam sits back.

Just hours after he shot this photo, Leena Rai was sexually assaulted, bludgeoned, and then drowned. And he knows from the podcast that there was a silver locket with a purple stone tangled in the dead girl’s hair. But it’s not Leena who is wearing it in this photograph.

Liam’s heart thuds in his chest. Is that why Maddy asked him to pretend his camera had been stolen? She offered up one of her girlfriends as his date to the prom if he did as she asked. So he lied. How else was a kid like him going to get a girl? Back then, he was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth. He also wanted to please one of the most popular and cool girls in the school. Maddy.

What should he do now?





RACHEL


NOW


Saturday, November 20. Present day.

It’s midmorning, and Granger still has not returned home. He called late last night to tell me he’d had too much to drink and would be bunking in the apartment that Rex keeps above the club.

I’m oddly numb about this as I stick a photo of Leena at the top of my new crime whiteboard. I think of Luke and the board he created back in 1997 when the Twin Falls PD station was still located near the water and the railway yard. My heart hurts. I’m glad I saw him, but it’s made everything feel raw and alive in my chest.

Under the photo of Leena, I stick the picture of the locket found in her hair. Beside the locket photo, I put up the image of the girls at the bonfire that I took from Maddy’s drawer. I reach for a Sharpie and draw a line between the locket and the girls. And beneath the image of the girls, I write: Liam shot this? Lied? Why? What other photos did he shoot?

Next I stick up photos of the jacket, the journal pages, the book of poems, the bloodied backpack, Leena’s Nike shoe, and images of the other items found either in the pack or among the rocks. I follow these with some of the autopsy images, including the boot print on the back of Leena’s skull, and the thermal burns on her face.

I step back to examine my work, but Luke is still filling all the space in my brain. And heart. My whole body.

Maddy blamed the breakup of our family on my brief fling with Luke. What made it so easy for Maddy was the fact that it had been Cheyenne and her mother in that car that had turned in front of the alley. The car whose headlights had illuminated Luke and me like actors on a dark stage. And we’d stared into those lights like guilty lovers. Which we were. Briefly. And Cheyenne, of course, told Maddy at school the next day. And Maddy told Jake. It was just the excuse he needed to blow up at me and return to his own fling.

And now Jake and his squeeze are gone anyway. All the way to New Zealand, where they eventually got married and now live, near his new wife’s parents. And Jake has new babies around the same age as Maddy’s kids. It all fed into Maddy’s bitterness.

Perhaps it really all began with my need to prove myself to my own dad and my spending too much time on the job at the expense of nurturing my family. Would I feel this same way if I were a guy?

Maybe some marriages just go wrong, and there is no one particular thing that can be blamed.

I stare at the image of Maddy and her girlfriends with the light of the bonfire glowing golden on their skin. Pretty young dragonflies locked in the amber of time. Full with so much promise. So many dreams. Like I once was.

Follow the truth, Rache. Even if it hurts. Even if it takes you where you don’t want it to go. It’s not too late . . . The truth . . . sets you free. It’s . . . the secrets that fester. You . . . think you’ve buried them, gotten rid of them somehow, but they’re like this damned cancer. The minute you’re down, the second you grow tired, it starts to grow again, and it catches up with you.

Luke was right. This case has seeded some sickness in all of us. And even though we might have thought we’d moved on, the cancer is back.

Suddenly I’m struck by something. The photo of the packet of Export “A” cigarettes. And the lighter. Clay Pelley didn’t smoke. Not that I knew of. So how did Leena get those thermal burns?

Did she light up under the bridge? Did Clay grab the cigarette from her and then stub it out in her nostril, or on her brow? Which came first? Whichever it was, surely the action of pressing the lit end of the cigarette into her skin to cause those deep burns would have extinguished the cigarette? Leena would surely not have lit another for Clay to burn her again. Or maybe she did. We didn’t retrieve any cigarette stubs or butts at the scene. Even if we had, DNA was not used in 1997 in the way it is today. But one thing I do know is that Clay never explained the burns satisfactorily. And that Clay was not a smoker.