Redemption Road(15)

“Oh.” He looked more surprised than hurt, his mouth open as he found Adrian’s eyes, and his knees failed.

“Gideon!” Adrian crossed the room in three strides. He kicked the gun away and dropped to his knees beside the boy.

Blood pulsed from the wound. The kid looked blank-eyed and stunned. “It hurts.”

“Shhh. Lie still.” Adrian stripped off his jacket, balled it against the wound. “Call 911.”

“I saved your life, brother.”

“Please!”

Nathan lowered a small, silver pistol and picked up the phone. “You remember that when the cops come.” He cradled the receiver, and dialed 911. “I shot that boy to save your life.”





4

Elizabeth’s house had always been a sanctuary. Neat and trim, it filled a narrow lot on the historic side of town, a small Victorian under spreading trees that kept the lawn shaded and green. She lived alone, but the place was such a perfect reflection of what she loved about life that she never felt lonesome there. No matter the case or the politics or the collateral damage, stepping through the front door had always allowed her to turn off the job. She could study the oil paintings on the walls, trail her fingers along rowed books or the woodcarvings she’d collected since she was a girl. The house had always been an escape. That was the rule, and it had worked every month of her adult life until now.

Now, the house felt like wood and glass and stone.

Now, it was just a place.

Thoughts like that kept her up most of the night, thoughts of the house and her life, of dead men and the basement. By four o’clock, it was all about Channing, and those feelings spun mostly on the things Elizabeth had done wrong.

She’d made so many mistakes.

That was the difficult truth, and it pursued her until finally, at dawn, she slept. Yet, even then she dreamed and twitched and woke with a sound in her throat so animal it frightened her.

Five days …

She felt her way to the bathroom sink, splashed water on her face.

Damn.

When the nightmare let go, she sat at the kitchen table and stared at a manila file that was old and thumbed and dangerous enough to get her fired if it was ever found in her house. She’d spent three hours with it the day before, a dozen more the week before that. She’d had it since Adrian Wall’s conviction. Except for newspaper clippings and photographs she’d taken herself, it was an exact copy of the Julia Strange murder file that was stored, now, somewhere in the district attorney’s office.

Flipping to a sheaf of photographs, she took out a picture of Adrian. He was in dress blues, younger than she was now. Handsome, she thought, with the kind of clear-eyed determination most cops lose after a few years. The next shot was of Adrian in plainclothes, then another of him on the courthouse steps. She’d taken that one before his trial and liked the way light hung on his face. He looked more the way she felt now, a little worn and a little jaded. But still handsome and straight, she thought, still the cop she’d always admired.

Elizabeth flipped through newspaper coverage and got to the autopsy photos of Julia Strange, a young woman whose murder rocked the county the way few other murders ever had. Young and elegant in life, her beauty was stripped away by bloodlessness, a crushed throat, and the morgue’s bright lights. But she’d been lovely once, and strong enough to put up a fight. Signs of it were all over the kitchen: a broken chair and an upended table, a spray of shattered dishes. Elizabeth riffled through photographs of the kitchen, but saw the same things she always saw: cabinets and tile, a playpen in the corner, photographs on the fridge.

There were the usual reports, and she knew them thoroughly. Lab work, fingerprints, DNA. She skimmed the family history: the wife’s early days as a model, Gideon’s birth, the husband’s job. They’d been a perfect family in so many ways: young and attractive, not rich, but doing okay. Interviews with family friends said she was a wonderful mother, that the husband was devoted. Only one witness statement was in the file, and Elizabeth had read that a hundred times as well. An elderly neighbor heard an altercation around three in the afternoon, but she was bedridden, infirm, and not much help beyond establishing a basic timeline.

Elizabeth was a rookie when the murder happened—a uniformed officer four months into the job—but she had discovered Julia’s body on the altar of a church seven miles from the edge of town. That it was Elizabeth’s childhood church was an uncomfortable but otherwise irrelevant fact. It was a body in a building, a crime scene like any other. Elizabeth couldn’t know the effect its discovery would have on her own life. On her parents. Her church. Elizabeth had come that day to see her mother and discovered the body of Julia Strange, instead. She’d been choked to death in the most violent manner, the body undressed, then laid out on the altar and draped to the chin in white linen. No signs of sexual trauma were found, but skin discovered beneath her fingernails contained Adrian Wall’s DNA. Further investigation discovered Adrian’s prints on one of the shattered glasses in the kitchen and on a beer can found in a roadside ditch near the church. A court-ordered medical exam discovered scratches on the back of his neck. Once the prosecutor established that Adrian knew the victim, it was a hard, fast slide to conviction. He had no alibi and no explanation. Even his own partner testified against him.

Only Elizabeth doubted his guilt, but she was barely twenty-one, and no one took her seriously. She tried to investigate on her own, but was warned off. You’re biased, she was told. Confused. But Elizabeth’s faith in Adrian went beyond anything that simple. The second time she tried speaking to the witness, she was suspended. The next time she was threatened with prosecution for obstruction. So, Elizabeth let it go. She sat in the courtroom every day and kept her eyes straight ahead when the verdict came back against him. No one understood why she cared about Adrian Wall, only that she did. No one got it or possibly could.