Low Pressure

Bellamy was astonished to learn the extent of Rupert Collier’s treachery. “He arranged for a car wreck that almost killed two people? I thought he was nothing except an egotistical buffoon, a laughable caricature of the used-car salesman.”

“That’s what he wants everybody to think,” Moody said. “He’s so obnoxious he’s disarming.”

“It won’t work with me,” Dent said. “I can’t wait to talk to this asshole who wanted to plant a pair of panties in my house.”

“You won’t get anywhere,” Moody said. “He’s laid his groundwork. Underground work, more like it. For every one of his schemes, he’s got a steel safety net. He’s protected himself so well the CIA couldn’t get to him.”

Reluctantly Bellamy acknowledged that the man wielded some kind of power. “How does he get people to go along with him?”

“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 l

ast 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.