Velocity (24 page)

chapter 55

SITTING ON THE EDGE OF THE TUB IN LANNY’S
bathroom, holding the photo of the redhead, Billy worked out the chronology of the murder.

The psychopath had called—when?—perhaps around twelve-thirty in the afternoon, earlier this same day, after the sergeants had left and after Cottle had been wrapped for disposal. For Billy, he had played the recording that offered two choices: the redhead tortured to death; the redhead murdered with a single shot or thrust.

Even at that time, the killer already held her captive. Almost surely he let her listen to the tape as he played it over the phone.

At one o’clock, Billy had left for Napa. Thereafter, the killer brought the woman into the house, took this snapshot, and killed her cleanly.

When the freak found Ralph Cottle wrapped in the tarp and stowed behind the sofa, his spirit of fun had been engaged. He swapped them, the young woman for the stewbum.

Billy had unknowingly dropped the redhead down the lava pipe, thereby denying her family the little solace that might come from having a body to bury.

This switch of cadavers felt like Zillis: this adolescent humor, the casualness with which he could sometimes deliver a mean joke.

Steve had not gone to work until six o’clock. He would have been free to play.

But now the creep
was
at the tavern. He could not have propped Cottle on the sofa and fired the nail gun.

Billy glanced at his wristwatch. Eleven-forty-one.

He made himself look at the redhead again because he thought he was going to bundle the photo with other evidence and drop it down the volcanic vent. He wanted to remember her, felt obliged to fix her face in memory forever.

When the freak had played the recorded message over the phone, if this woman had been there, bound and gagged and listening, perhaps she had also heard Billy’s reply:
Waste the bitch.

Those words had spared her torture, but now they tortured Billy.

He could not throw away her photo. Keeping the snapshot was not a prudent act; it was dangerous. Yet he folded it, being careful not to crease her face, and tucked it in his wallet.

Warily, he went out to the Explorer. He thought he would know if the freak was still nearby, watching. The night felt safe, and clean.

He put the punctured latex glove in the trash bag, and pulled on a fresh one. He unplugged his cell phone and took it with him.

In the house again, he went through all the rooms from top to bottom, gathering all evidence into a plastic garbage bag, including the photo of Giselle Winslow (which he would not keep), the cartoon hands, the nail….

Finished, he put the bag by the back door.

He got a clean glass. From the jug on the table, he poured a few ounces of warm Coke.

With exercise, the ache in his hand had grown worse. He took one tablet of Cipro, one of Vicodin.

He decided to eradicate all evidence of his friend’s drinking binge. The house should offer nothing unusual for the police to contemplate.

When Lanny went missing long enough, they would come here to knock, to look through the windows. They would come inside. If they saw that he’d been pouring down rum, they might infer depression and the possibility of suicide.

The sooner they leaped to dire conclusions, the sooner they would search the farther reaches of the property. The longer that the trampled brush had to recover, the less likely they would ever focus on the securely covered lava pipe.

When all was neat and when the garbage bag of evidence was tied shut, when only Ralph Cottle remained to be attended, Billy used his cell phone to call the backbar number at the tavern.

Jackie O’Hara answered. “Tavern.”

“How’re the pigs with human brains?” Billy asked.

“They drink at some other joint.”

“Because the tavern is a family bar.”

“That’s right. And always will be.”

“Listen, Jackie—”

“I hate ‘listen, Jackie.’ It always means I’m going to be screwed.”

“I’m going to have to take off tomorrow, too.”

“I’m screwed.”

“No, you’re just melodramatic.”

“You don’t sound that sick.”

“It’s not a head cold. It’s a stomach thing.”

“Hold the phone to your gut, let me listen.”

“Suddenly you’re a hardass.”

“It doesn’t look right, the owner working the taps too much.”

“The place is so busy, Steve can’t handle a midnight crowd by himself?”

“Steve isn’t here, just me.”

Billy’s hand tightened on the cell phone. “I drove past earlier. His car was parked out front.”

“It’s a day off for Steve, remember?”

Billy had forgotten.

“When I couldn’t get a temp to fill your shift, Steve came in from three to nine to save my ass. What’re you doing out driving around when you’re sick?”

“I was going to a doctor’s appointment. Steve could only give you six hours?”

“He had stuff to do before and after.”

Like kill a redhead before, nail Billy’s hand to a floor after.

“What did the doctor say?” Jackie asked.

“It’s a virus.”

“That’s what they always say when they don’t know what the hell it really is.”

“No, I think it’s really a forty-eight-hour virus.”

“As if a virus knows from forty-eight hours,” Jackie said. “You go in with a third eye growing out of your forehead, they’ll say it’s a virus.”

“Sorry about this, Jackie.”

“I’ll survive. It’s just the tavern business, after all. It’s not war.”

Pressing
END
to terminate the call, Billy Wiles felt very much at war.

On a kitchen counter lay Lanny Olsen’s wallet, car keys, pocket change, cell phone, and 9-mm service pistol, where they had been since the previous night.

Billy took the wallet. When he left, he would also take the cell phone, the pistol, and the Wilson Combat holster.

From the items in the bread drawer, he selected half a loaf of whole wheat in a tie-top plastic bag.

Outside, standing at the eastern end of the porch, he threw the slices of bread onto the lawn. The morning birds would feast.

In the house once more, he lined the empty plastic bag with a dishtowel.

A gun case with glass doors stood in the study. In drawers under the doors, Lanny kept boxes of ammunition, four-inch aerosol cans of chemical Mace, and a spare police utility belt.

On the belt were pouches for backup magazines, a Mace holder, a Taser sleeve, a handcuff case, a key holder, a pen holder, and a holster. It was all ready to go.

From the belt, Billy removed a loaded magazine. He also took the handcuffs, a can of Mace, and the Taser. He put those items in the bread bag.

chapter 56

QUICK WINGED PRESENCES, PERHAPS BATS
feeding on moths in the first hour of Thursday morning, swooped low through the yard, past Billy, and climbed. When he followed the sound of what he could not see, his gaze rose to the thinnest silver shaving of a new moon.

Although it must have been there earlier, making its way west, he had not noticed this fragile crescent until now. Not surprising. Since nightfall, he’d had little time for the sky, his attention grimly earthbound.

Ralph Cottle, limbs stiffened at inconvenient angles by rigor mortis, wrapped in a blanket because no plastic drop cloth could be found, held in a bundle by Lanny’s entire collection of neckties—three—did not drag easily across the sloped yard to the brush line.

Cottle had said that he was nobody’s hero. And certainly he had died a coward’s death.

He had wanted to live even his shabby existence because—
What else is there?
—he could not imagine that something better might be his to strive for, or to accept.

In the moment when the blade slipped between his ribs and stopped his heart, he would have realized that while life could be evaded, death could not.

Billy felt a certain solemn sympathy for even this man, whose despair had been deeper than Billy’s and whose resources had been shallower.

And so when the brush and brambles snared the soft blanket and made dragging the body too difficult, he picked it up and hauled it across his shoulder, without revulsion or complaint. Under the burden, he staggered but didn’t collapse.

He had returned minutes earlier to remove, once again, the lid from the redwood frame. The open vent waited.

Cottle had said there wasn’t one world but a billion, that his was different from Billy’s. Whether that had been true or not, here their worlds became one.

The bundled body dropped. And hit. And tumbled. And dropped. Into the dark, the vacant into the vacant.

When silence endured, suggesting that the skeptic had reached his deep rest with the good son and the unknown woman, Billy shoved the cover into place, used his flashlight to be sure the holes were aligned, and screwed it down once more.

He hoped never to see this place again. He suspected, however, that he would have no choice but to return.

Driving away from the Olsen house, he did not know where to go. Eventually he must confront Steve Zillis, but not at once, not yet. First he needed to prepare himself.

In another age, men on the eve of battle had gone to churches to prepare themselves spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. To incense, to candlelight, to the humility that the shadow of the redeemer pressed upon them.

In those days, every church had been open all day and night, offering unconditional sanctuary.

Times had changed. Now some churches might remain open around the clock, but many operated according to posted hours and locked their doors long before midnight.

Some withheld perpetual sanctuary because of the costs of heat and electricity. Budgets trump mission.

Others were plagued by vandals with cans of spray paint and by the faithless who, in a mocking spirit, came to copulate and leave their condoms.

In previous ages of rampant hatred, such intolerance had been met with resolve, with teaching, and with the cultivation of remorse. Now the clerical consensus was that locks and alarms worked better than the former, softer remedies.

Rather than travel from church to church, trying their doors and finding only sanctuary by prior appointment, Billy went where most modern men in need of a haven for contemplation were drawn in post-midnight hours: to a truck stop.

Because no interstate highways crossed the county, the available facility, along State Highway 29, was modest by the standards of the Little America chain that operated truck stops the size of small towns. But it featured banks of fuel pumps illuminated to rival daylight, a convenience store, free showers, Internet access, and a 24/7 diner that offered fried everything and coffee that would stand your hair on end.

Billy didn’t want the coffee or cholesterol. He sought only the bustle of rational commerce to balance the irrationality with which he’d been dealing, and a place so public that he would not be at risk of attack.

He parked in a space outside the diner, under a lamppost of such wattage he could read by the light that fell through the windshield.

From the glove box, he took foil packets of moist towelettes. He used them to scrub his hands.

They had been invented to mop up after a Big Mac and fries in the car, not to sterilize the hands after disposing of corpses. But Billy wasn’t in a position—or of a mind—to be fussy.

His left hand, nailed and unpaled, felt hot and slightly stiff. He flexed it slowly, gingerly.

Because of the Vicodin, he felt no pain. That might not be good. A growing problem with the hand, not sensed, might manifest in a sudden weakness of grip at the very moment in the evolving crisis when strength was needed.

With warm Pepsi, he washed down two more Anacin, which had some effect as an anti-inflammatory. Motrin would have been better, but what he had was Anacin.

The right dose of caffeine could compensate somewhat for too little sleep, but too much might fray the nerves and compel him to rash action. He took another No-Doz anyway.

Busy hours had passed since he had eaten the Hershey’s and the Planters bars. He ate another of each.

While he ate, he considered Steve Zillis, his prime suspect. His only suspect.

The evidence against Zillis seemed overwhelming. Yet it was all circumstantial.

That did not mean the case was unsound. Half or more of the convictions obtained in criminal courts were based on convincing webs of circumstantial evidence, and far less than one percent of them were miscarriages of justice.

Murderers did not obligingly leave direct evidence at the scenes of their crimes. Especially in this age of DNA comparison, any felon with a TV could catch the
CSI
shows and educate himself in the simple steps that he must take to avoid self-incrimination.

Everything from antibiotics to zydeco had its downside, however, and Billy knew too well the dangers of circumstantial evidence.

He reminded himself that the problem had not been the evidence. The problem had been John Palmer, now the sheriff, then an ambitious young lieutenant bucking for a promotion to captain.

The night that Billy had made an orphan of himself, the truth had been horrific but clear and easily determined.

chapter 57

FROM A DREAM EROTIC, FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD
Billy Wiles is awakened by raised voices, angry shouting.

At first he is confused. He seems to have rolled out of a fine dream into another that is less pleasing.

He pulls one pillow over his head and buries his face in a second, trying to press himself back into the silken fantasy.

Reality intrudes. Reality
insists.

The voices are those of his mother and father, rising from downstairs, so loud that the intervening floor hardly muffles them.

Our myths are rich with enchanters and enchantresses: sea nymphs that sing sailors onto rocks, Circe turning men into swine, pipers playing children to their doom. They are metaphors for the sinister secret urge to self-destruction that has been with us since the first bite of the first apple.

Billy is his own piper, allowing himself to be drawn out of bed by the dissonant voices of his parents.

Arguments are not common in this house, but neither are they rare. Usually disagreements remain quiet, intense, and brief. If bitterness lingers, it is expressed in sullen silences that in time heal, or seem to.

Billy does not think of his parents as unhappy in marriage. They love each other. He knows they do.

Barefoot, barechested, in pajama bottoms, waking as he walks, Billy Wiles follows the hallway, descends the stairs….

He does not doubt that his parents love him. In their way. His father expresses a stern affection. His mother oscillates between benign neglect and raptures of maternal love that are as genuine as they are overdone.

The nature of his mother’s and father’s frustrations with each other has always remained mysterious to Billy and seemed to be of no consequence. Until now.

By the time that he reaches the dining room, within sight of the kitchen door, Billy is immersed against his will—or is he?—in the cold truths and secret selves of those whom he thought he knew best in the world.

He has never imagined that his father could contain such fierce anger as this. Not just the savage volume of the voice but also the lacerating tone and the viciousness of the language reveal a long-simmering resentment boiled down to a black tar that provides the ideal fuel for anger.

His father accuses his mother of sexual betrayal, of serial adultery. He calls her a whore, calls her worse, graduating from anger to rage.

In the dining room, where Billy is immobilized by revelation, his mind reels at the accusations hurled at his mother. His parents have seemed to him to be asexual, attractive but indifferent to such desires.

If he had ever wondered about his conception, he would have attributed it to marital duty and to a desire for family rather than to passion.

More shocking than the accusations are his mother’s admission of their truth—and her counter-charges, which reveal his father to be both a man and also something less than a man. In language more withering than what is directed at her, she scorns her husband, and mocks him.

Her mockery puts the pedal to his rage and drives him into fury. The slap of flesh on flesh suggests hand to face with force.

She cries out in pain but at once says, “You don’t scare me, you can’t scare me!”

Things shatter, crack, clatter, ricochet—and then comes a more terrible sound, a brutal bludgeoning
ferociousness
of sound.

She screams in pain, in terror.

Without memory of leaving the dining room, Billy finds himself in the kitchen, shouting at his father to stop, but his father does not appear to hear him or even to recognize his presence.

His father is enthralled by, hypnotized by,
possessed
by the hideous power of the bludgeon that he wields. It is a long-handled lug wrench.

On the floor, Billy’s devastated mother hitches along like a broken bug, no longer able to scream, making tortured noises.

Billy sees other weapons lying on the kitchen island. A hammer. A butcher knife. A revolver.

His father appears to have arranged these murderous instruments to intimidate his mother.

She must not have been intimidated, must have thought that he was a coward, fatuous and ineffectual. A coward he surely is, taking a lug wrench to a defenseless woman, but she has badly misjudged his capacity for evil.

Seizing the revolver, gripping it with both hands, Billy shouts at his father to stop, for God’s sake stop, and when his warning goes unheeded, he fires a shot into the ceiling.

The unexpected recoil knocks back through his shoulders, and he staggers in surprise.

His father turns to Billy but not in a spirit of submission. The lug wrench is an avatar of darkness that controls the man at least as much as he controls it.

“Whose seed are you?” his father asks. “Whose son have I been feeding all these years, whose little bastard?”

Impossibly, the terror escalates, and when he understands that he must kill or be killed, Billy squeezes the trigger once, squeezes twice, a third time, his arms jumping with the recoil.

Two misses and a chest wound.

His father is jolted, stumbles, falls backward as the bullet pins a boutonniere of blood to his breast.

Dropped, the lug wrench rings against—and cracks—the tile floor, and after it there is no more shouting, no more angry words, just Billy’s breathing and his mother’s muted expressions of misery.

And then she says, “Daddy?” Her voice is slurred, and cracked with pain. “Daddy Tom?”

Her father, a career Marine, had been killed in action when she was ten. Daddy Tom was her stepfather.

“Help me.” Her voice grows thicker, distressingly changed. “Help me, Daddy Tom.”

Daddy Tom, a juiceless man with hair the color of dust, has eyes the yellow-brown of sandstone. His lips are perpetually parched, and his atrophied laugh rasps any listener’s nerves.

Only in the most extreme circumstances would anyone ask Daddy Tom for help, and no one would expect to receive it.

“Help me, Daddy Tom.”

Besides, the old man lives in Massachusetts, a continent away from Napa County.

The urgency of the situation penetrates Billy’s immobilizing shock, and terrified compassion now moves him toward his mother.

She seems to be paralyzed, the little finger on her right hand twitching, twitching, but nothing else moving from the neck down.

Like broken pottery poorly repaired, the shape of her skull and the planes of her face are wrong, all wrong.

Her one open eye, now her only eye, focuses on Billy, and she says, “Daddy Tom.”

She does not recognize her son, her only child, and thinks that he is the old man from Massachusetts.

“Please,” she says, her voice cracking with pain.

The broken face suggests irreparable brain damage of an extent that wrings from Billy a choking sob.

Her one-eyed gaze travels from his face to the gun in his hand. “Please, Daddy Tom.
Please.
”

He is only fourteen, a mere boy, so recently a child, and there are choices he should not be asked to make.

“Please.”

This is a choice to humble any grown man, and he cannot choose, will not choose. But, oh, her pain. Her fear. Her
anguish.

With a thickening tongue, she pleads, “Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus, where is me? Who’s you? Who’s in here crawling, who is that? Who is you in here, scares me?
Scares me!
”

Sometimes the heart makes decisions that the mind cannot, and although we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we also know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by suffering.

In the years to come, he will never know if trusting his heart at this moment is the right choice. But he does as it tells him.

“I love you,” he says, and shoots his mother dead.

Lieutenant John Palmer is the first officer on the scene.

What initially appears to be the bold entrance of dependable authority will later seem, to Billy, like the eager rush of a vulture to carrion.

Waiting for the police, Billy has been unable to move out of the kitchen. He cannot bear to leave his mother alone.

He feels that she hasn’t fully departed, that her spirit lingers and takes comfort from his presence. Or perhaps he feels nothing of the sort and only wishes this to be true.

Although he cannot look at her anymore, at what she has become, he stays nearby, eyes averted.

When Lieutenant Palmer enters, when Billy is no longer alone and no longer needs to be strong, his composure slips. Tremors nearly shake the boy to his knees.

Lieutenant Palmer asks, “What happened here, son?”

With these two deaths, Billy is no one’s child, and he feels his isolation in his bones, bleakness at the core, fear of the future.

When he hears the word
son,
therefore, it seems to be more than a mere word, seems to be a hand extended, hope offered.

Billy moves toward John Palmer.

Because the lieutenant is calculating or only because he is human, after all, he opens his arms.

Shaking, Billy leans into those arms, and John Palmer holds him close. “Son? What happened here?”

“He beat her. I shot him. He beat her with the wrench.”

“You shot him?”

“He beat her with the lug wrench. I shot him. I shot her.”

Another man might allow for the emotional turmoil of this young witness, but the lieutenant’s primary consideration is that he has not yet made captain. He is an ambitious man. And impatient.

Two years previous, a seventeen-year-old boy in Los Angeles County, far south of Napa, had shot his parents to death. He pleaded innocent by reason of long-term sexual abuse.

That trial, having concluded only two weeks before this pivotal night in Billy Wiles’s life, had resulted in conviction. The pundits predicted the boy would go free, but the detective in charge of the case had been diligent, accumulating a convincing mass of evidence, catching the perpetrator in lie after lie.

For the past two weeks, that indefatigable detective had been a media hero. He received lots of face time on TV. His name was better known than that of the mayor of Los Angeles.

With Billy’s admission, John Palmer does not see an opportunity to pursue the truth but instead sees an
opportunity.

“Who did you shoot, son? Him or her?”

“I s-shot him. I shot her. He beat her so bad with the wrench, I had to s-shoot them both.”

As other sirens swell in the distance, Lieutenant Palmer leads Billy out of the kitchen, into the living room. He directs the boy to sit on the sofa.

His question no longer is
What happened here, son?
His question now is, “What have you done, boy? What have you done?”

For too long, young Billy Wiles does not hear the difference.

Thus begins sixty hours of hell.

At fourteen, he cannot be made to stand trial as an adult. With the death penalty and life imprisonment off the table, the pressures of interrogation should be less than with an adult offender.

John Palmer, however, is determined to break Billy, to wring from him a confession that he himself beat his mother with the lug wrench, shot his father when his father tried to protect her, then finished her, too, with a bullet.

Because the punishment for juvenile offenders is so much less severe than for adults, the system sometimes guards their rights less assiduously than it should. For one thing, if the suspect does not know he should demand an attorney, he might not be informed of that right on as timely a basis as would be ideal.

If the suspect’s lack of resources requires a public defender, there is always the chance that the one assigned will be feckless. Or foolish. Or badly hungover.

Not every lawyer is as noble as those who champion the oppressed in TV dramas, just as the oppressed themselves are seldom as noble in real life.

An experienced officer like John Palmer, with the cooperation of selected superiors, guided by reckless ambition and willing to put his career at risk, has a sleeve full of tricks to keep a suspect away from legal counsel and available for unrestricted interrogation in the hours immediately after taking him into custody.

One of the most effective of these ploys is to make Billy into a “busboy.” A public defender arrives at the holding facility in Napa only to discover that because of limited cell space or for other bogus reasons, his client has been moved to the Calistoga substation. On arriving in Calistoga, he hears that a regrettable mistake has been made: The boy has actually been taken to St. Helena. In St. Helena, they send the attorney chasing back to Napa.

Furthermore, while transporting a suspect, a vehicle sometimes has mechanical problems. An hour’s drive becomes three hours or four depending on the required repairs.

During these two and a half days, Billy passes through a blur of drab offices, interrogation rooms, and cells. Always, his emotions are raw, and his fears are as constant as his meals are irregular, but the worst moments occur in the patrol car, on the road.

Billy rides in back, behind the security barrier. His hands are cuffed, and a chain shackles his cuffs to a ring bolt in the floor.