Cold Springs(33)

“I don't know.”

“For what—Katherine?”

Chadwick was silent.

Hunter sighed. “Look, amigo. Samuel Montrose was what—her drug dealer? So maybe you brought a little heat on him for supplying the drugs that killed her. Maybe he had to leave town for a while. So what? Guys like that—they have an attention span of three seconds. They use people, throw them away, forget about them. You're telling me he's spent nine years planning some kind of revenge scheme? That he'd kill his own mother to get at you? Doesn't make sense.”

“Mallory is following the same path Katherine did, with this guy's little brother. That's a coincidence?”

Hunter's jaw flexed, as if he were chewing on something small and hard. Chadwick knew the warning sign. He'd seen Hunter do that in Korat, when an ARVN made a racial crack at Hunter's expense. Hunter had walked up behind him, real calm, yanked him out of his seat by the hair, and drove the Vietnamese's head through the hootch wall.

Years later, Hunter had taken Chadwick out to show off his new six-thousand-acre spread that would become Cold Springs—land he had bought with minority business loans and mortgages on three different houses and decades of blood and sweat, working on grants that had landed him an initial capital outlay of $5 million. When they'd gotten almost to the gates, county deputies pulled them over, said Hunter fit their description of a wanted ra**st. Hunter's jaw had been going as he explained to them he didn't care if he was the only black man they'd seen all month. He was now the biggest landowner in the county, and they had best get used to it. He'd kept his cool, but he spent the rest of the afternoon down by the river, throwing his knife at a tree, impaling the blade three inches into the bark.

“This Samuel guy,” Hunter said. “He got some kind of blackmail leverage over John Zedman?”

“I don't know. It's been a long time.”

“You ever meet Samuel?”

“Once. Sort of.”

“Sort of.”

“I was picking up Katherine from a police station. She'd been busted at a party at the Montrose house. Samuel was in the next holding cell, staring at me. His eyes—you remember Galen, the arsonist kid we got a few years back, lit homeless people on fire in their sleeping bags?”

“That scary?”

Chadwick nodded. “After Katherine died, Mallory identified the Montrose house as the place they'd gone to get the heroin. The police looked for Samuel. As far as I know, they never found him.”

Hunter's fingers made a claw against his camouflage pants, as if he'd caged something there. His jaw was still tight with anger. “Look, amigo, I've known you since before Norma, before Katherine, before God entered puberty. Am I right? I understand about guilt. I understand you help kids because you feel like you failed Katherine. But Mallory Zedman isn't your daughter. You start trying to salvage the past through her, then I made a mistake, taking her.”

The bitterness in his voice stung like sleet.

Hunter was right, of course, about knowing him. Only Ann had known him longer. That was one of the reasons Chadwick had accepted this job, when his life was at its darkest point—just after Katherine's death, when it took him conscious effort just to get out of bed and take a shower.

With Hunter, Chadwick could almost believe that his adulthood was a shell—a layer of years that could be slipped off, set aside for a while, examined impartially.

“You can help the girl,” Chadwick said. “That's why you took her.”

“I've been telling you a long time, you're too hard on yourself: Katherine wasn't your damn fault.”

“But?”

“But it wasn't her dealer's fault, either. Maybe I don't like that you're so ready to believe your daughter was corrupted by the poor black kid she was hanging out with. Maybe that's been bothering me a long time. Now you're telling me his younger brother is ruining Mallory Zedman.”

“It's not about them being black.”

“Isn't it? What do we teach here? Honesty. Responsibility. Katherine was responsible for her actions. Mallory is responsible for hers. Period.”

“I can't just step back, Asa.”

“This necklace—Katherine gave it to Mallory before she died, right?”

“Right.”

“All that suggests to me—Mallory left it at the scene of the murder. Anybody's sending you a hate message, it's the girl.”

“If you think she was involved, maybe you should turn her over to the police.”

Hunter swirled his coffee.

Chadwick wondered if he saw something in the liquid—the faces of the thousand-plus kids he'd graduated, most of them rich, most of them white. He wondered if Hunter ever regretted the clientele he served.

With his charisma, his doctorate in education administration, his business experience after the Air Force, raising money for nonprofits, Hunter could've gone anywhere, been superintendent of any major metropolitan school district. He could've been a model for kids who grew up like he did—poor, scraping with gangs on the East Side of San Antonio, perpetually angry.

I don't want to go to work and see myself every day, Hunter had told him once. You want to help somebody, you got to have a little distance from them. White kids, I understand. I can save their sorry-ass lives.