Low Pressure (32 page)

“He finds where a person is vulnerable and pushes that button.”

Dent nodded toward the bottle of whiskey. “Was that your button?”

“Ambition,” Moody mumbled into his glass as he raised it to his mouth.

Bellamy didn’t believe him, and she could tell Dent didn’t, either. An ambitious detective would have distinguished himself by exposing a crooked prosecutor, not covering for him.

Moody lowered his glass and divided a look between them, then expelled a gurgling sigh. “I was having a thing with a woman who worked in the department. I was married. She was young. She got pregnant. Rupe promised to make the mess go away. She resigned, and I never saw her again.”

“What did he do to her?” Dent asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t want to.”

Under his breath Dent muttered deprecations.

Bellamy refocused on the file and asked Moody, “If I read every single thing in here, would I know who killed Susan? Do
you
know?”

“No. And I
have
read every single word in there many times over. I’ve memorized most of it, and the person who killed her is as much a mystery as he was when I left the morgue and took my first drive to the crime scene.”

“So for all you really know,” Dent said, “it could’ve been Allen. Ray could have been lying to protect his brother when he told you about Susan’s laughter, all that.”

“Could have been, I suppose. Everybody lies,” he said, looking hard at Dent. Then his gaze moved back to Bellamy. “Except maybe you. You didn’t have much to say about anything.”

“I didn’t remember anything.”

Moody squinted at her. “What do you mean?”

Beneath his breath, Dent said, “Bellamy.”

But she ignored the subtle warning. “I lost time,” she said to Moody.

He didn’t take a drink or a draw on his cigarette the whole while she was explaining her memory loss. When she finished, he ground out the cigarette, which had burned down to the filter, and lit another.

“You testified at trial.”

“Answering truthfully all the questions put to me. I testified to seeing Susan and Allen leaving the pavilion together. Rupe Collier asked if that was the last time I saw my sister alive, and I told him yes, because it was. The defense attorney didn’t cross-examine. He must have thought I had nothing else to contribute, and I didn’t.”

Moody aimed another plume of smoke toward the ceiling, which was so thick with cobwebs they formed a ghostly canopy. “That’s an awfully convenient time period to be erased.”

“It’s not convenient to me. I want to remember.”

“Maybe you don’t,” he said.

“I do.” She left the bed and walked over to an aged map of the state that was tacked to the cheaply paneled wall. With her index finger, she touched the circled star representing Austin, then moved her finger over to the darker green patch denoting the state park. “For eighteen years, this has been the epicenter of my life. I want to move out of it.”

Coming back around, she said, “Maybe I would have moved past it if Daddy and Olivia had permitted me to go to the spot where Susan was found. I begged them to take me. They refused. They said it would only upset me. So I never saw the place where my sister died.

“It wasn’t like I wanted to consecrate the ground or anything. She wasn’t a very admirable person.” Homing in on Moody, she said, “I’m sure you deduced that from what people told you about her. I looked up to her because she was pretty and popular and self-confident. All the things I wasn’t. But I can’t honestly tell you that I loved her.”

She glanced at Dent, who was biting the inside of his cheek and looking as tightly wound as a spring. Obviously he wished she hadn’t told Moody about her memory loss. His fuming gaze telegraphed a warning that she should shut up.

But she wasn’t finished. “I want to know who killed her, Mr. Moody. Because, regardless of her personality or promiscuity, she didn’t deserve to die that way, with her skirt bunched up around her waist, her bottom bared, lying facedown on the ground, holding on to that dainty little purse she carried that day.” She lowered her head and took a deep, shuddering breath. “She was robbed of all dignity and grace.”

She stared at a spot on the grimy vinyl floor, her head coming up only when Moody said, “Well you’re wrong about one thing.” He sloshed the last of the whiskey into his glass and swirled it as he talked. “That dainty little purse was found the following day in the top of a tree, fifty yards from where her body was discovered. It had her name stitched inside, so it was brought to me. I took prints off it, but there were only hers. So I returned it to your parents, and they cried, happy to get it back.”

He paused and let that sink in. “If you saw her lying there facedown holding on to it, you were at the scene of where she died. And you were there ahead of the tornado.”

T
he silence inside the cabin was so prolonged and absolute that Dent imagined he could hear the dust motes spinning in the stifling air.

Bellamy stood frozen, her gaze fixed on Moody as he hauled himself up out of his chair, wove his way over to the screened door, pushed it open, and stepped out onto his sorry excuse for a porch.

Tilting his face skyward, he remarked, “Looks like we finally may get some rain.”

Dent glanced out the nearest window and noticed that clouds had gathered in the west, blocking out the setting sun. The atmosphere inside the cabin was gloomy, but due less to the weather than to Moody’s disturbing disclosure.

When he came back inside, the screened door shut behind him with a loud clap that caused Bellamy to jump. As though there had been no suspension of conversation, she asked gruffly, “You think I killed her?”

Moody halted and, swaying on his feet, eyed her up and down. “You? No.”

“But you said . . . you said . . .”

“I said that if you saw her with her purse in her hand, you had to have seen her before the tornado struck.”

“Maybe you got it wrong,” Dent said. “Maybe the purse was found at the scene, and you’re too drunk now to remember where you got it and when.”

Moody glowered at him. “My crime scene was compromised, but I know when I came by the fucking purse. It’s in my notes,” he said, gesturing to the file lying on the bed. “Dated.”

Bellamy returned to the bed and sat down beside Dent. In a haunted, breathy voice, she asked, “I had to have seen her purse there, in her hand. Why else would I have said that?”

“You only imagined it because you’d seen her carrying the purse,” Dent said. “Within days, everyone knew the position her body was in when she was found. It was all over the news.”

She looked deeply into his eyes as though desperate to believe his explanation. But he didn’t think she did.

Moody settled back into his chair. “The bruise on the front of her neck was a band.” He ran his finger across his throat in an even line. “The ME’s opinion—which I shared—was that she’d been strangled by a garrote of some kind. Typically that happens from behind. She was overpowered and didn’t put up a struggle.”

Dent felt a slight tremor go through Bellamy. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“We didn’t get any skin or blood from beneath her fingernails.” Addressing Dent, he said, “First thing I looked for when I questioned you was scratch marks on your hands and arms.”

“I didn’t have any. Did Strickland?”

“None that couldn’t be explained by him crawling under his Mustang to escape the tornado.”

“That should’ve eliminated us as suspects.”

“Not necessarily. She also had a knot on the back of her head, which she’d got before she died. What we figured is that she was struck from behind. By what, we were never able to determine. She fell facedown and was rendered unconscious, or at least too stunned to defend herself while the perp finished her off.”

“With her panties,” Bellamy said quietly.

“According to you, your stepmother, and the housekeeper who did the family laundry, she wore only one kind. Made of stretchy lace. Strong enough to choke someone to death. Rupe demonstrated in court how it could have been done. That was another of his shining moments.”

“Didn’t his courtroom shenanigans irk Strickland’s defense attorney?” Dent asked. “Did he ever file an appeal?”

“Right away, but before the appellate court had time to consider his case and make a ruling, Strickland was killed.”

“How did the lawyer react to his client’s murder?” Dent asked.

Moody snorted a mirthless laugh. “He moved over to the DA’s office. At Rupe’s urging. He’s still there, far as I know.”

Bellamy said, “Allen died for nothing.”

“Far as I know.”

Later, when he thought back on it, Dent figured it was Moody’s smirk that had set him off. He saw it, and the next thing he knew, he had closed the distance between the bed and Moody’s chair, and he was bearing down on the former detective.

“You and Rupe made quite a team. He was the brains and you were his bitch boy. It was working so well, why’d you quit?”

“Back off.”

“Not till I hear from you what I want to hear. You’ve admitted you knew Strickland was innocent from the get-go. How did you know?”

“I told you. He said that Susan had laughed at him. Guys don’t—”

“Give me a break, Moody. Guys don’t admit it and then whine about it. If she turned him down, he would have been steamed. He would have been cursing her, calling her names. Which would have been implicating, not exonerating. So sell that rationale somewhere else, because to me it smells like bullshit.”

“His brother—”

“Who you said could have been lying. You had to have had something else that cleared Allen. What was it, Moody?”

The former detective looked at Bellamy where she still sat on the end of the bed. When his bleary gaze came back to Dent he said, “When I’m ready.”

“When you’re ready? What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, I’ve said all I’m gonna say to you.”

“You lousy sot. She needs to know what you know,” Dent shouted. “Like fucking now.”

“Watch yourself, boy.” Moody struggled to stand up, but when he stood face-to-face with Dent, Dent didn’t back down, not even when Moody picked up his pistol from off the TV tray.

“What?” Dent scoffed. “You’re going to shoot me?”

“Just keep pushing me and see.”

“I don’t think so. You’re too chicken-livered.” Dent leaned closer until the barrel of the pistol was touching his shirt.

Bellamy gave a strangled cry.

“It’s all right,” Dent said. Holding Moody’s hostile stare, he said, “He’s not going to pull the trigger.”

“Don’t be so goddamn sure.”

“The only thing I’m sure about is what a coward you are. You didn’t have the guts to stand up to Rupe Collier, and you don’t have the guts to blow your own brains out now.”

“Dent!”

Bellamy sounded anguished and frightened, but neither he nor Moody heeded her.

Moody’s face was congested with anger. He was breathing hard. Dent felt the barrel of the pistol wavering as though the hand holding it was trembling.

“At least only one man died on account of me,” he snarled. “I gotta live with that. You gotta live with nearly killing a whole airplane full of people.”

Dent hit him. Hard. Moody took the blow on the chin and it sent him reeling backward, arms windmilling, until he broke his fall against the kitchen bar. He sank to the floor and landed in a heap.

Dent walked over to him, took a handful of his hair, and forced his head up. Moody looked at him through glazed and bloodshot eyes. “Don’t measure me by your yardstick, you miserable turd.” He bent down close. “You would’ve framed me for murder if you could’ve. You’ve had almost twenty years to set the record straight about your dirty dealings with Rupe Collier. You haven’t. Instead, you’ve been skulking in this hellhole, trying to drown your guilt in whiskey. Bellamy and I gave you a chance to atone, and you still can’t own up to what you did. You’re a god-damn coward.”

Making his disgust plain, he released Moody’s hair, went back to the bed, took Bellamy by the hand, and pulled her up. On their way to the door, he paused. “You know, Moody, Rupe Collier is so dazzled by his own image, so far up his own ass, he no longer knows right from wrong. What makes you worse than him, you do.”

“I can’t fly in this.”

Neither Dent or Bellamy had said a word since Dent had retrieved his pistol from the wobbly TV tray, shoved open the screened door, then stood aside and brusquely motioned her through it.

She had left the case file on the bed. As Dent dragged her past Moody, she’d paused, feeling she should say something. But the truth of it was, her revulsion matched Dent’s. Her eyes met the detective’s briefly before his head dropped forward. Without another word, she and Dent had left the dreary cabin.

For twenty minutes, he’d been speeding down the state highway in the direction of Marshall, pushing the rented sedan as though expecting it to respond with the velocity of his Corvette and cursing when it didn’t.

The sky had grown increasingly dark. Raindrops had begun to land hard on the windshield. Without music from the radio, or conversation between them, each splat sounded loud and ominous.