No one moved.
No one spoke.
Charlie cupped her hands to her face. Blood poured from her nose like a faucet. She felt stunned. Greg looked stunned. He held up his hands as if to say he didn’t mean it. But the damage had already been done. Charlie staggered sideways. She tripped over her own feet. Greg reached out to catch her. He was too late.
The last thing she saw was the ceiling spinning over her head as she hit the ground.
3
Charlie sat on the floor of the interview room with her back wedged into the corner. She had no idea how much time had passed since she’d been hauled off to the police station. An hour at least. Her wrists were still handcuffed. Toilet paper was still shoved up her broken nose. Stitches prickled the back of her scalp. Her head was pounding. Her vision was blurry. Her stomach was churning. She had been photographed. She had been fingerprinted. She was still wearing the same clothes. Her jeans were dotted with dark red splotches. The same pattern riddled her Duke Blue Devils T-shirt. Her hands were still caked with dried blood, because the cell where they had let her use the toilet only had a trickle of cold, brown water coming out of the filthy sink faucet.
Twenty-eight years ago, she had begged the nurses at the hospital to let her take a bath. Gamma’s blood was seared to her skin. Everything was sticky. Charlie had not completely submerged herself in water since the red-brick house had burned down. She’d wanted to feel the warmth envelop her, to watch the blood and bone float away like a bad dream fading from her memory.
Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.
Charlie let out a slow breath. She rested the side of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes. She saw the dead little girl in the school hallway, the way her color had drained like winter, the way her hand had fallen from Charlie’s hand the same way that Gamma’s hand had fallen away.
The little girl would still be in the cold hallway at school—her body, at least, along with Mr. Pinkman’s. Both still dead. Both still exposed to one more final injustice. They would be left out in the open, uncovered, unprotected, while people traipsed back and forth around them. That was how homicides worked. No one moved anything, not even a child, not even a beloved coach, until every inch of the crime scene was photographed, cataloged, measured, diagrammed, investigated.
Charlie opened her eyes.
This was all such sad, familiar territory: the images she couldn’t get out of her head, the dark places that her brain kept going to over and over again like car wheels wearing down a gravel road.
She breathed through her mouth. Her nose had a painful pulse. The paramedic had said it wasn’t broken, but Charlie didn’t trust any of them. Even while her head was being sutured, the cops were scrambling to cover for each other, articulating their reports, all of them agreeing that Charlie had been hostile, that she had knocked herself against Greg’s elbow, that the phone had been broken when she accidentally stepped on it.
Huck’s phone.
Mr. Huckleberry had repeatedly made that point that the phone and its contents belonged to him. He’d even shown them the screen so that they could watch the video being deleted.
While it was happening, it had hurt too much to shake her head, but Charlie did so now. They had shot Huck, unprovoked, and he was taking up for them. She had seen this kind of behavior in almost every police force she had ever dealt with.
No matter what, these guys always, always covered for each other.
The door opened. Jonah came in. He carried two folding chairs, one in each hand. He winked at Charlie, because he liked her better now that she was in his custody. He’d been the same kind of sadist in high school. The uniform had only codified it.
“I want my father,” she said, the same thing she said every time someone entered the room.
Jonah winked again as he unfolded the chairs on either side of the table.
“I have a legal right to counsel.”
“I just talked to him on the phone.” This came not from Jonah, but from Ben Bernard, an assistant district attorney for the county. He barely glanced at Charlie as he tossed a folder onto the table and sat down. “Take the cuffs off her.”
Jonah asked, “You want me to hook her leash to the table?”
Ben smoothed down his tie. He looked up at the man. “I said to take those fucking handcuffs off my wife right now.”
Ben had raised his voice to say this, but he hadn’t yelled. He never yelled, at least not in the eighteen years that Charlie had known him.
Jonah swung his keys around his fingers, making it clear that he was going to do this in his own time, of his own volition. He roughly unlocked the cuffs and stripped them from Charlie’s wrists, but the joke was on him because she was so numb that she didn’t feel any of it.
Jonah slammed the door when he left the room.
Charlie listened to the slam echo off the concrete walls. She stayed seated on the floor. She waited for Ben to say something jokey, like nobody puts baby in a corner, but Ben had two homicide victims at the middle school, a suicidal teenage murderer in custody and his wife was sitting in a corner covered in blood, so instead she took consolation in the way he lifted his chin to indicate that she should sit in the chair across from him.
She asked, “Is Kelly all right?”
“She’s on suicide watch. Two female officers, around the clock.”
“She’s sixteen,” Charlie said, though they both knew that Kelly Wilson would be direct filed as an adult. The teenager’s only saving grace—literally—was that minors were no longer eligible for the death penalty. “If she asked for a parent, that can be construed as the equivalent of asking for a lawyer.”
“Depends on the judge.”
“You know Dad will get a change of venue.” Charlie knew her father was the only lawyer in town who would take the case.
The overhead light flashed off Ben’s glasses as he nodded toward the chair again.
Charlie pushed herself up against the wall. A wave of dizziness made her close her eyes.
Ben asked, “Do you need medical treatment?”
“Somebody already asked me that.” Charlie didn’t want to go to a hospital. She probably had a concussion. But she could still walk as long as she kept some part of her body in contact with something solid. “I’m fine.”
He said nothing, but the silent, “of course you’re fine, you’re always fine,” reverberated around the room.
“See?” She touched the wall with the tips of her fingers, an acrobat on a wire.
Ben didn’t look up. He adjusted his glasses. He opened the file folder in front of him. There was a single form inside. Charlie’s eyes wouldn’t focus to read the words, even when he began writing in his big, blocky letters.
She asked, “With what offense have I been charged?”
“Obstruction of justice.”
“That’s a handy catch-all.”
He kept writing. He kept not looking at her.
She asked, “You already saw what they did to me, didn’t you?”
The only sound Ben made was his pen scratching across the paper.
“That’s why you won’t look at me now, because you already looked at me through that.” She nodded toward the two-way mirror. “Who else is there? Coin?” District Attorney Ken Coin was Ben’s boss, an insufferable dickslap of a man who saw everything in black and white and, more recently, brown, because of the housing boom that had brought an influx of Mexican immigrants up from Atlanta.
Charlie watched the reflection of her raised hand in the mirror, her middle finger extending in a salute to DA Coin.
Ben said, “I’ve taken nine witness statements that said you were inconsolable at the scene, and in the course of being comforted by Officer Brenner, your nose met with his elbow.”
If he was going to talk to her like a lawyer, then she was going to be a lawyer. “Is that what the video on the phone showed, or do I need to get a subpoena for a forensic examination of any deleted files?”
/>
Ben’s shoulder went up in a shrug. “Do what you have to do.”
“All right.” Charlie braced her palms on the table so that she could sit. “Is this the part where you offer to drop the bogus obstruction charge if I don’t file an excessive force complaint?”
“I already dropped the bogus obstruction charge.” His pen moved down to the next line. “You can file as many complaints as you want.”
“All I want is an apology.”
She heard a sound behind the mirror, something close to a gasp. In the past twelve years, Charlie had filed two very successful lawsuits against the Pikeville Police force on behalf of her clients. Ken Coin had probably assumed she was sitting in here counting all of the money she was going to make off the city instead of grieving for the child who had died in her arms, or mourning the loss of the principal who had given her detention instead of kicking her out of school when they both knew that Charlie deserved it.
Ben kept his head bent down. He tapped his pen against the table. She tried not to think about Huck doing the same thing at his school desk.
He asked, “Are you sure?”
Charlie waved toward the mirror, hoping Coin was there. “If you guys could just admit when you did something wrong, then when you said that you did something right, people would believe you.”
Ben finally looked at her. His eyes tracked across her face, taking in the damage. She saw the fine lines around his mouth when he frowned, the deep furrow in his brow, and wondered if he had ever noticed the same signs of age in her face.