"You know what it's like to have no choices, to be used by everybody around you, to have nobody care when your little brother is killed? Have you ever lived like that, Mr. Holland? Tell me," she said.
Later, I sat with Temple Carrol at a picnic bench in a city park fringed with maple trees and read through the material she had amassed on Carl Hinkel.
"Where'd you get all this stuff?" I said.
"It's not hard. There're a half-dozen organizations that track people like Hinkel. Besides, he can't wait to get in front of a camera or a microphone," she said.
His record was one of failure on every human level: he had been a low-level operator in the Vietnamese black market; his three marriages had ended in divorce; he had been denied tenure as a communications professor in a South Carolina community college; the state of Georgia had put him out of business for operating a scam that involved selling fraudulent home warranty policies to working-class people.
But he was to discover the enormous potential of the Internet. Not only could he create an electronic recruiting magnet for racists and psychopaths, his self-published books and pamphlets inculcating the hatred of the government and Jews, homosexuals, blacks, Asians, and Hispanics found a huge mail-order audience. The more grim his perspective became, the more his constituency became convinced his voice was the one they had waited to hear all their lives.
He held televised news conferences in front of his ranch and claimed the CIA was making nocturnal flights over his home with black helicopters and that Belgian troops, working for the United Nations, were being trained in the Bitterroot Mountains for a takeover of the United States.
The fact that he obviously had symptoms of schizophrenia did nothing to dampen his newfound success. He actually addressed the Montana state legislature and went to Washington and was welcomed in the offices of at least two U.S. congressmen.
But Hinkel's history was a predictable one and was of little help to me in my preparation for Doc's defense. It was an entry at the bottom of a report and an attached news article sent to Temple by a Klan-watch group in Atlanta that caught my eye. A pedophile who was wanted on state charges had been arrested five years ago in Hinkel's yard. Hinkel had claimed he didn't know the man and in fact thanked the authorities for arresting him.
I circled the entry on the page and pushed it toward Temple.
"Does anything else about child molestation show up in this guy's past?" I asked.
"None that I know of. Why?"
"I'm not sure." In the center of the park was a cement wading pool and a fountain and children were playing in it, and out on the street a man was selling ice cream out of cart with a blue umbrella on top of it.
"There's something else on your mind you're not telling me about, isn't there?" Temple said.
"Quite a few things."
"Start with one."
"Early yesterday I tried to bushwhack Wyatt Dixon."
"Say again?"
"I got downwind from him while he was running a chain saw and put four rounds past his head. He didn't see me but Terry Witherspoon did. Those ATF guys know about it, too."
She propped her head on her fingers and looked at me with her mouth open. Then she took her hand away from her brow and her eyes searched mine.
"Why?" she said.
"A guy like that deserves it."
"Don't lie," she said.
"Come on, I'll buy you a Popsicle."
"You thought I was going to do it. That's why, isn't it?"
"You think too much, Temple," I said, and began putting away her papers and file folders into her nylon backpack.
She was standing next to me now and I could smell the sun's heat on her skin and the perfume on her neck. There was a flush in her cheeks, a different light in her eyes.
"Look at me," she said.
"What?"
She pushed several strands of hair out of her face, a smile tugging at the edge of her mouth. But she didn't speak.