Evidence of Blood (26 page)

“What did you remember?”

“Well, Overton described the Dinker girl just like the Sheriff said in court, the way she came over to him, and the questions she asked, but he also said that she looked
strange, and I remember the word he used to describe the way she looked to him.”

Kinley felt the tip of his pen press down onto the open notebook. “What word?”

“He said she looked ‘nervous-like,’” Hendricks said. “You know, jumpy.”

Kinley quickly jotted the word down in his notebook, then looked back up at Hendricks. “Just her manner? Just the way she acted when she talked to him?”

“That’s right,” Hendricks said. “The way she looked to him, nervous-like.”

“That’s all?”

“I guess,” Hendricks said softly as his eyes lowered somewhat, as if to avoid discovery. It was a movement Kinley had noticed many times on other occasions, and which had always signaled the presence of something more. In Colin Bright, it had been nothing more than the way his hand had suddenly inched forward toward Kinley’s own hand, lingered a moment, then retreated. In Willie Connors, it had been something almost melodramatic, a trembling of his lower lip. Mildred Haskell had made no sign at all.

He looked at Hendricks steadily while his mind went through its bag of tricks, frantically searching for the one question that would set Riley Hendricks free as it had the others, whether guilty or innocent, cowardly or fearless, the one question that would penetrate the wall. After a moment, he found it.

“Ben Wade told me that you quit the Sheriff’s Department not long after the trial,” he said. “Is that true?”

Hendricks’s eyes remained discreetly lowered. “Yes, it is.”

“Did it have something to do with Charlie Overton?”

Hendricks’s eyes lifted slowly and stared directly into Kinley’s. “No,” he said. “With Ellie Dinker.”

“What about her?”

“Her body,” Riley said. “The one her mother wanted to find so bad.”

“What about it?”

“Well, the way they sort of lost interest in it,” Hendricks said. “I mean, I was no great cop, but one place seemed obvious to me.”

“Where?”

“Well, we arrested Overton in his backyard,” Hendricks answered. “And I remember that when I put the cuffs on him, I happened to glance over his shoulder, and I could see it plain as day, just like Sheriff Maddox could.”

Kinley waited anxiously, but careful to keep himself in check.

“Well, there was a well back there,” Hendricks said. “I could see it standing right in the middle of the yard.”

Kinley nodded, his hand motionless on the notebook page as he listened.

“And nobody ever looked for Ellie Dinker there,” Hendricks added. “Why not? It was the most obvious place.”

It seemed so to Kinley, and the new information surprised him as much as it had always baffled Hendricks. “They never looked at all?” he asked.

Hendricks shook his head. “No. Never.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it would have been me they’d have sent to do it,” Hendricks explained, “you know, the rookie.” He laughed, but with a curious edginess. “I mean, there’s no way Sheriff Maddox would have climbed down some old muddy hole in the ground to look for a body. No way. He liked his uniform too much. He would have sent the new boy for sure.”

“How about Ben Wade?” Kinley asked. “He wouldn’t have sent him?”

Hendricks stared at him thoughtfully. “I don’t know about Ben Wade,” he said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning he was always sort of a mystery to me,” Hendricks said. “But then, just about everybody is, don’t you think?”

Kinley’s mind raced through the catalogue of his acquaintances, editors, writers, all of them more or less transparent in the grand simplicity of their needs. It did not stop until it got to Ray, his face a black-and-white photograph. Except for the eyes, which Kinley’s mind had eerily insisted on painting the same dark green as it had already imagined Ellie Dinker’s dress.

Once again at Ray’s desk, Kinley typed in the appropriate code:
OVER:MYS
.

The file flashed onto the screen, and Kinley scrolled down until he reached the questions he wanted:

To the first four questions, he wrote a fifth, sixth and seventh:

Once the questions had been written, Kinley let his eyes linger on them silently, doing what Ray had evidently done from time to time as well, imagining the scene, recording it like an invisible camera bearing down upon it from the overhanging cliffs.

In his mind, he could see Overton’s truck as it slogged wearily up the mountain, laden with tools, dusty with the red clay of the courthouse construction site. Overton was behind the wheel, as Kinley now imagined him. He was sweating, his stomach churning uncontrollably as he fought to keep the old truck crawling up the mountain road.

But he had failed, and suddenly she was there in the distance, standing by Mile Marker 27 in her dark green dress, her head turning toward him as the truck ground to a halt on the weedy shoulder of the road.

Now the camera was outside, and Kinley could see the two of them on the mountain road. Overton was holding his stomach as he bent over the truck’s steamy engine. Dinker was poised a few yards away, watching, waiting, until she began to move toward him, slowly at first, then faster until she was at Overton’s side, her mouth twitching left and right as she fired her questions in a crisp, staccato voice:
What’s the matter? Can you fix it? How long will it take?

Overton, still clutching at his stomach to keep it from exploding, groaned his answers as he continued to lean under the raised hood of the truck, his eyes now peering blearily into the oil-splattered engine:
The motor’s leaking. I have to find out how bad it is
.

In his mind, Kinley could see Ellie Dinker in her green dress as she stepped away from the truck to watch nervously as Overton eased himself onto the pebbly earth, then pulled himself under the truck.

How bad is it?

Bad
.

Can you fix it?

Now Overton was staring up into the worn metal innards
of the engine. Oil was everywhere, everywhere, dripping from the engine block, oozing from the wide crack in the oil tank’s ancient seal. All around him, like a thousand edgy, fluttering birds, Ellie Dinker’s questions kept diving at him.
Can you fix it? Can you fix it?

Overton’s stomach heaved and bellowed, as his face grew taut under the relentless volley of her questions.

Can you fix it? Can you fix it?

To shut her up, he answered her at last: I
don’t know
.

But his answer had not silenced her, and the questions continued to assail him:
How long will it take? Will it take an hour? Will it take half an hour? Will it take …

Flat beneath the truck, his eyes staring achingly at the devastated engine, he had put it to her bluntly:
A long time
.

And after that, a silence must have descended upon them, Kinley thought, as he continued to envision the scene, a frozen instant before Ellie Dinker skirted away from him, her white legs moving rapidly through the weedy growth along the shoulder of the road, taking her away from Overton, away from the truck, past the white, pointed obelisk of Mile Marker 27, and “on up a little ways,” as Overton had told Sheriff Maddox, “on up a little ways” …
where she stopped
.

Kinley’s mind halted a moment, his eyes concentrating on all the small details of what he’d gathered so far about Ellie Dinker’s last day on earth. He thought of her early departure, of the route she’d taken, one which would not have led her to Helen Slater’s house, but straight up the slope of the mountain, where she would have reached the mountain road at—precisely at—Mile Marker 27.

He glanced at the list of questions he’d compiled under Ellie Dinker’s name, then answered question three:

Quickly, Kinley typed his answer under the question:
Because she was not going to Helen Slater’s house. She was going to Mile Marker 27, which is directly in line with her path, and where she was seen standing when she met Charles Overton
.

Kinley’s eyes moved up the screen’s illuminated page and settled on questions one and two:

He thought a moment, then typed the most reasonable answer to both questions:
Because she wanted to go up the mountain, rather than in any other direction, and because she needed time to go wherever it was she wanted to go, and to do whatever it was she wanted to do
.

Next Kinley moved quickly to the four remaining questions:

4)Why did she stop on the mountain road?

5)Why did she approach Overton after his truck broke down?

6)Why did she ask him what was wrong with the truck and how long it would take to fix it?

7)Why did she appear “nervous-like”?

For a moment he considered the possibilities. It was conceivable that one answer might fit all four questions. In his mind, he tried once again to reconstruct the events, this time from Ellie Dinker’s perspective, rather than from Overton’s.

He saw her standing by Mile Marker 27, standing idly, just as Overton had described her, in her dark green dress, her eyes turning suddenly to where Overton’s battered old
truck wheezed and rattled as it hauled itself up the mountain, the overheated engine gasping loudly, just before the truck drifted to the side of the road and came to rest on the littered shoulder.

As Kinley imagined it, she must have looked at the dusty truck, pausing for just a moment before she moved toward it, walking determinedly until she reached Overton’s racked body as it slumped beneath the open hood.

After that, it was talking heads, Overton’s slumped over the devastated engine, Ellie’s beside him, her mouth at his ears, firing her questions one after the other, and then later, Overton under the truck, his eyes catching only brief glimpses of the small feet in the black shoes as they pranced about, pacing up and down, the young, girlish voice coming to him in short, nervous bursts:
What’s the matter? can you fix it? how long? how long? how long?

It was easy for Kinley to hear Ellie Dinker’s voice now, as it had always become easy when he had released his mind like a dog in the woods, let it take him wherever the dreadful scent led, and in those weird and tragic moments, he felt the wildest region of his mind bloom with a sudden, relentless ardor, and he entered imagined landscapes, dark and smoldering and haunting, heard imagined voices, dim, shrill, full of rage, emptiness, longing, everything fully visualized in that powerful way his grandmother had taught him to imagine:
with your mind’s fingertips, Kinley, with nothing between you and what you’re after
.

For a time, he let his mind hold, trancelike, over the little scene on the mountain road, absorbing every nuance of sound and sight, before returning it to the brutal questions which still shone from the screen of his computer.

He read them over again, slowly, one by one, concentrating on each word, as the possible answers emerged, tossed about in his head, then settled to the ground with the fierce gravity of logic, and to all four questions, he typed in a single, unifying answer: