Seeing Red(105)

“But why?”

“He feared that if you began swapping experiences about that day, one or the other of you would realize something was out of joint.”

She looked over at Trapper. He said, “That’s why I tried to warn you off doing it, remember?”

Glenn said, “Wilcox really got nervous when I told him it was Trapper who’d alerted me.”

“That explains why you were so upset the night of the Bible study, Dad.” Hank looked at Trapper. “You sent Tracy in to tell me that he was hitting the bottle pretty hard.”

“I asked her to be discreet.”

“She was. She whispered it to me while someone else was talking. The study concluded about ten minutes later.” Going back to Glenn, he said, “I asked Emma to head off Mom so she wouldn’t catch you drinking. When I came here to the kitchen, you nearly bit my head off. I figured Trapper …” He looked over at Trapper, his implication clear.

“It had to be my fault that Glenn was getting drunk,” he said. “This should be enlightening to you, Hank. Now do you understand what’s been ‘eating me’ and burdening your dad?” He turned back to Glenn. “What was it like for you, plotting with Wilcox to kill The Major and Kerra?”

Glenn made a choked sound that was half belch, half sob. “I swear to God, I didn’t. I told Wilcox to keep his cool, told him I would check into the situation and get back to him. I went out to The Major’s house the following day. You were there,” he said to Kerra. “The Major didn’t introduce you to me as the girl in the picture, just as Kerra Bailey, ‘I’m sure you’ve seen her on TV.’ That kind of thing.

“I reported back to Wilcox that we didn’t have a problem. Y’all didn’t know. Kerra wanted to score an exclusive interview with The Major and had somehow sweet-talked him into it. That’s basically what Trapper had told me, too. But Wilcox was still antsy.”

“That’s why you came to my room at the motel,” she said.

“I wanted to see how you would react when I mentioned the big surprise you had planned for Sunday night’s audience. You didn’t ask me what big surprise, you only acted miffed that I knew about it.”

“I had expressly asked Trapper and The Major not to tell anyone else.”

“In any case, I had my answer, and I had to tell that snake-eyed son of a bitch,” Glenn said. “The Major might not know who you were, maybe the surprise would be on him, too, but we could expect the big reveal come Sunday night.”

Glenn covered a dry cough with his fist. He shifted in his seat. He reached for his whiskey but let his hand drop before picking up the glass. “Wilcox told me to take preventative measures to be sure that didn’t happen.”

His admission dumbfounded Kerra.

Hank’s head dropped forward, and he clasped his fingers together on the back of his neck.

Trapper got out of his chair, rounded it, and gripped the top rung, tempted to pick it up and bash it over Glenn’s head.

“One thing I don’t get,” Trapper said tightly. “Why didn’t you attack before the interview instead of after? How did you even know that Kerra would still be in the house?”

“I didn’t attack anybody.”

“You just said—”

“You didn’t let me finish.”

Trapper spoke over him. “Oh, wait. You wouldn’t have done it yourself. You sent those three flunkies out there to do it.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Jenks and who else?”

“I didn’t send anybody.”

“Ever at the ready, Deputy Jenks—”

“Be quiet, John!” Glenn banged his fist on the table hard enough to rattle the glassware, then took a deep breath. “For once, will you shut up and listen? I talked Wilcox out of doing anything. Or I thought I had.” When Trapper would have interrupted again, Glenn held up a hand. “Let me talk.”

Trapper was seething, but he made a grand, sweeping go-ahead gesture.

Glenn turned to Kerra. “I told Wilcox that you’d shown me the questions you intended to ask. I gave him a run-down of what they entailed, told him they were chatty, innocent, nothing mysterious. They wouldn’t raise eyebrows or red flags or pose a threat to anybody. I urged him to let the interview proceed as scheduled.

“By contrast, if tragedy were to strike you and The Major within days of you going on TV together, it would be like ringing a fire bell, and the FBI would come running. A data analyst couldn’t ignore a coincidence like that, and the feds wouldn’t depend on a department as small as mine to investigate the double murder of two celebrities. They would take over, and that would create a media frenzy like none other.”

“Which is exactly what’s happened,” Trapper said. “Obviously Wilcox didn’t heed your caution.”

“Obviously. But he led me to believe that he agreed with my reasoning. He threatened me with dire consequences if I was wrong, but said he would trust my judgment. We hung up, and I took a huge breath of relief. Crisis averted and no one was the wiser.”

Still addressing her, he raised his right hand. “On my solemn oath, I had nothing to do with what happened to you. I knew nothing about it until after the fact.”

She looked up at Trapper, and he knew that she was remembering, as he was, that Wilcox had denied ordering the attempted assassination. Were both Glenn and Wilcox telling the truth about that? Or were both lying?