mind if I play a disc that Charlie Barefoot made of Mallory’s last voice mail? She was leaving him a message when she crashed. It’s pretty hard to take, but we’ve all listened to it several times and we can’t quite agree.”
“Agree about what?”
“Listen to it first. I don’t want to influence your interpretation.”
I took the disc and slipped it into the player. A moment later, I heard Christmas music and Mallory’s voice scolding her brother for not picking up and for wrecking the holidays for her and their parents. There was an annoyed injunction to an oncoming car to dim its lights, then the sound of the crash. Her moans and her call for her mother broke my heart and I wondered if Sarah and Malcolm had heard it. When all was silent, I reached out to replay it, but Dwight turned up the volume and said, “No. Listen.”
Very faintly as if from a distance, I heard a motor catch and then fade away.
He gave a nod that I could turn it off and said, “So what’s your take?”
“I need to hear it again,” I said and pressed the play button.
Once again the Christmas music, Mallory’s voice, the crash, and another car engine.
“You hear it?”
“I did,” I told him. “Did you ask Charlie about it?”
He looked puzzled. “Ask him about that other car?”
Now it was my turn to look puzzled. “No, about what he cut out of the message.”
“Huh?”
“Isn’t that what you meant?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’ll play it again. This time, try not to listen to Mallory’s voice. Listen to the music.”
I pressed PLAY again and a syrupy sweet version of “Silent Night” performed on bells could be heard beneath the dead girl’s voice. This time, because he was listening for it, Dwight could clearly hear that the music skipped a few bars. Had there been singing, it would have been the equivalent of several words missing between “holy infant” and “sleep in heavenly peace.”
“Well, damn!” said Dwight.
CHAPTER 25
—
Have Sarah and Malcolm heard this?” I asked, when Dwight had listened to the disc twice more.
Each playing took away some of the horror and heartbreak for me, but I imagined it would be progressively worse for Mallory’s parents.
“Yeah. Charlie said he let Sarah hear it at the hospital and then he made copies so she could listen to it with Malcolm the next day. I don’t get it, though. Why the hell would he cut it?”
Dwight likes to think that he can compartmentalize and keep his official life strictly separate from the personal, but he’s really not much better at it than I am. Given his druthers, I was pretty sure he’d ditch our dinner dance, drop me back at the house, and go make Charlie Barefoot shake loose an unedited version of the message Mallory had left on his voice mail.
“Look at it logically,” I said as we neared the country club. “If the deletion had anything at all to do with the wreck itself, other people on the road, a big dog or a deer, wouldn’t he leave that in?”
“I guess.”
“So I’ll bet she was probably yelling at him for something he’s either ashamed of or doesn’t want you or Malcolm to know about.”
He dimmed his lights against a steady stream of oncoming vehicles. “How do you make that assumption?”
“What you just said. He let Sarah listen to it at the hospital, so that means she heard an unedited version on his cell phone. He wouldn’t have had time to make a copy yet. I’m willing to bet that what Malcolm heard the next day was the same as this copy here. Maybe he was doing drugs or something that he knew Malcolm would hit the roof over, but that Sarah might let slide. Or maybe he said something ugly to Mallory that he didn’t want Malcolm to know about now that she’s dead. For all we know, he could’ve accused her of sleeping around or breaking up relationships like Joy said and the deletion was about that. Maybe he’d heard a rumor that she was partly to blame for Stacy Loring’s wreck and killing two kids. He’d feel pretty awful if she died upset about something like that, wouldn’t he?”
“I guess,” Dwight conceded.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “If you’ll put this out of your head for tonight and just enjoy the evening, I’ll break our separation of powers agreement this one time so you don’t have to drive all the way into Dobbs tomorrow to find another judge.”
“You’ll sign me a search warrant?”
“Well, it does sound as if he’s concealing evidence in an official investigation. If any other officer gave me this much cause, I wouldn’t think twice about it. Deal?”
He grinned. “And all it’s going to cost me is wining and dining and dancing with you for a few hours?”
“That’s all.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Your Honor.”
