Redemption Road(18)

Sitting on the sofa, she opened the murder file and pulled a photograph taken by a crime-scene tech less than an hour after Julia Strange was discovered missing. In the shot, Elizabeth stood in uniform with a red-faced infant in her arms. The Stranges’ kitchen was in disarray behind her. Gideon had the fabric on her shirt balled in his tiny fist. As a rookie and the only woman in the house, she’d been given the child to take care of until social services arrived. She didn’t know then how she’d react to such need and helplessness. She was a kid herself. She couldn’t have.

Elizabeth leaned back, remembering all the days and months she’d spent with the boy in the years that followed his mother’s death. She knew his teachers, his father, the friends he kept at school. He called her when he was hungry or scared. At times, he walked to her house, just to do homework or talk or sit on the porch. For him, too, the old house had been a sanctuary.

“Gideon.”

A single finger touched his face, and when tears rose in her eyes, she let them run unheeded down her cheeks.

“Why didn’t you talk to me?”

But he had tried, she remembered, calling three times in one day, then again, and then not at all. She’d known that Adrian was getting out, and that Gideon knew it, too. She should have anticipated his distress, known he might do something stupid. He was such a feeling, thoughtful boy.

“I should have seen it.”

But she’d been at the hospital with Channing, then talking to state police and roaming the halls of her own private hell. She hadn’t seen a thing. She’d not even thought of him.

“You poor, sweet boy…”

She gave herself that minute to be soft, to feel the guilty fullness of a mother’s love when she was not, in fact, a mother; then she put the file away, pushed a pistol into her belt, and drove for the cinder-block bar that sat in the shadow of the prison.





5

Elizabeth took Main Street at twice the legal limit. She saw a blur of sidewalks and narrow streets, of wrought-iron fencing and redbrick buildings so weathered they looked like orange clay. She passed the library, the clock tower, the old jail that dated back to 1712 and still had stocks in the courtyard. Six minutes later, she left rubber at the on-ramp for the state highway that turned north past the last remnants of the city, a few outlying buildings rising on her left, then falling away as if sucked into the earth. Beyond that were trees and hills and twisted roads.

If Gideon died…, she thought.

If somehow Adrian shot him …

The math was horrible because both of them mattered. The man. The boy.

“No,” she told herself. “Just Gideon. Just the boy.”

But simple truth was not always so simple. She’d tried for thirteen years to forget what Adrian had once meant to her. They’d never been together, she told herself. There was no relationship. And all of that was true.

So, why did she see his face as she drove?

Why wasn’t she at the hospital?

The questions came without easy answers, so she focused on the drive as the road dropped into a narrow valley, then crossed the river, the prison like a fist in the distance. Elizabeth kept her eyes on a knot of low buildings that floated in a heat shimmer two miles down the road. Cars were parked in front of the sand-colored buildings. She saw blue lights that spun and flashed, a slash of red where an ambulance lingered. Beckett met the car when she stopped. He was not happy.

“You’re supposed to be at the hospital.”

“Why? Because you said so?” Elizabeth patted a thick arm, walked past him. “You know better than that.” He fell in beside her, the bar thirty yards ahead, cops clustered around the door. Elizabeth glanced at the cop cars. “I don’t see Dyer. Is he too scared to show his face?”

“What do you think?”

Elizabeth didn’t have to think at all. She’d sat front and center at Adrian’s trial and remembered every aspect of Francis Dyer’s testimony.

Yes, my partner knew the victim. Her husband was a confidential informant.

Yes, they’d been alone together in the past.

Yes, Adrian had once commented on how attractive he found her to be.

It took the prosecutor ten minutes to establish those simple truths, then he drove the point home in seconds.

Tell me what Mr. Wall said when making reference to the victim’s physical appearance.

He thought she was too good for the man she was with.

You’re referring to Robert Strange, the victim’s husband?

Yes.

Did the defendant make a more specific reference to the victim’s appearance?

I’m not sure what you mean.

Did the defendant, your partner, make a more specific reference to the victim’s appearance? Specifically, did he mention whether or not he found her attractive?

He said she had the kind of face that could drive a good man to do bad things.

I’m sorry, Detective. Could you repeat that, please?

He said she had the kind of face that could drive a good man to do bad things. But I don’t think— Thank you, Detective. That will be all.

And it was. The prosecutor used Dyer’s testimony to paint a picture of obsession, rejection, and payback. Adrian Wall knew the victim. He knew her house, her habits, her husband’s schedule. In his professional duties, he’d grown infatuated with the beautiful wife of a confidential informant. When she refused his advances, he abducted and killed her. His fingerprints were at her house and the murder scene. His skin was under her fingernails. He had scratches on his neck.