Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(78)
TWENTY-FIVE
JOE HAD A VAST CHOICE OF PARKING SPACES ON MAIN Street in front of the hardware store. The only other vehicles on the block were by the Stockman’s Bar a few hundred feet away. They would likely be there until the bar closed at 2:00 a.m., which was fifteen minutes from now. He got out and shut off the engine and looked up. Duane Patterson’s apartment lights were still on, which didn’t surprise him. The man never slept.
It was a cool, still night. Although no inclement weather had been predicted, Joe felt the bite of snow on the way in the air.
He’d changed into a fresh uniform shirt and he clamped on his Stetson and took the unusual step of undoing the safety strap on his .40 Glock sidearm before mounting the stairs to the second level of the building.
Joe paused for a beat outside Patterson’s door. He could hear Duane talking inside. And not just talking but shouting: “How much did she hear?”
Was someone with Patterson inside? It was awfully late for visitors, Joe thought.
He rapped sharply on the door and it got suddenly quiet inside. The peephole darkened for a moment while Patterson looked to see who was on the landing. Joe heard Patterson say something urgent and then the knob twisted.
When Patterson opened the door and stepped aside, he looked both sheepish and terrified.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” Joe said. “Do you have company?”
Patterson inadvertently answered the question by glancing to the side and behind him. The phone on which he’d been talking was tossed onto the back of a couch. It was a cheap convenience store burner.
“I guess you know why I’m here,” Joe said.
Patterson’s eyes betrayed that he did.
*
THEY SAT ACROSS from each other in threadbare chairs that Joe guessed Patterson had bought at a garage sale when he was in law school. The coffee table between them was littered with fast-food containers and empty cups. The apartment looked the same as when Joe had seen it last—like a bachelor hovel.
Patterson sat forward with his elbows on his knees. As he waited for Joe to speak, he ran his fingers through his hair. His breath came in short bursts, and Patterson looked everywhere in the room except at Joe’s eyes. It was the same behavior a guilty hunter displayed when he knew he’d killed an elk in the wrong area.
Joe said, “Stovepipe said something to me right after Sue got shot. He was pretty upset. He said he’d really come to like Sue when she visited the courthouse—that she’d bring him cookies and brownies.”
Patterson didn’t respond.
“It got me to thinking,” Joe said. “How often did Sue Hewitt visit the courthouse, anyway?”
It wasn’t a question demanding an answer, and Patterson knew it.
“Marybeth did an analysis of the courtroom logs from the last six months,” Joe said while slipping his notebook out of his breast pocket and flipping it open to the most recent entries. “She cross-referenced the log Stovepipe kept against the county calendar. You’re familiar with the calendar, of course. We were both surprised to find out that Sue visited the courthouse twenty-six times in the last half year. This didn’t jibe at all with what Judge Hewitt told me in his chambers after Sue got shot. He admitted he’d taken his wife for granted, and when she recovered—if she recovered—he wanted to try to spend more time with her. He said he felt guilty about neglecting her, leaving her out there at that house for seven months a year by herself.
“So it didn’t make sense,” Joe said. “Either they barely saw each other, like the judge claimed, or Sue made a habit of visiting him often in his chambers. But it makes sense now. Do you know what Marybeth found?”
Patterson shrugged and stared at the tops of his shoes.
“Of the twenty-six times she came to the courthouse, Judge Hewitt was away twenty-five of them. He was gone on one of his hunting or fishing trips or attending a conference somewhere. Which means she came to the building to see someone else.”
Patterson once again ran his fingers through his hair and looked away.
“My wife also accessed the records of the Eagle Mountain Club with Judy’s permission,” Joe said. “They keep track of how often members come and go, even in the off-season. They’ve got a piece of equipment that reads the bar code on the sticker on every member’s windshield. I don’t know why they do that, but they do.
“Anyway,” Joe said, glancing down at the figures he’d written in his notebook, “Sue passed through the gated entry two hundred and thirty-one times in the last six months. That’s not a crazy number, since she’d go get her mail and groceries in town at least a couple of times a day. But the weird thing is that Sue used her membership code at the front gate another thirty-one times during that same period, meaning that instead of just driving through the gate she stopped at the key-code box and punched in her number so the gate would open. Now, why do you suppose she’d do that when all she had to do is drive up and let the gate open automatically?”
“Don’t know,” Patterson grumbled.
“There are two explanations,” Joe said. “Either she drove a vehicle without a club bar code sticker, but I doubt that. I saw those stickers on both Judge Hewitt’s SUV and Sue’s BMW. There were no other cars in their garage.”
“Okay.”
“Or, more likely,” Joe said, “she gave the code to someone else so they could come and go whenever they chose. And I’m sure it doesn’t surprise you to know that those key-code accesses also corresponded to times the judge was out of town.”