SIX
Outside the university hospital, she saw the campus filled with young people, most well dressed and energetic and rushing to someplace of importance. She wondered what had gone wrong in Candy Copeland's life, why she wasn't here, or in a similar school, working and alive and looking toward a bright future. She wondered how many of the young men rushing between classes had known Candy, and how many had used her.
A car pulled up that she recognized and Otto got out and went to the rear to help out a man in handcuffs. He cursed Otto's rough handling of him. She guessed it to be Scarborough from both his dress and his foul mouth.
“ Someone I want you to meet, Thomas,” he told Scarborough, towing him toward Jessica.
Boutine found a pair of stone benches, where he parked Thomas Scarborough below the warm sun and the crisp leaves of a white oak. Where he sat, the shadows creased his rough features. He was called Scar for good reason. He had three scars on his face from what looked like knife wounds suffered at an early age. She guessed him to be little older than Candy had been.
“ How many times I got to tell you people, I loved Candy! I'd never harm her. She… she was my best girl. I loved her. We even talked about… about getting married someday.”
“ Cut the crap, Thomas, and shut up, and just tell Dr. Coran what you told me about your goddamned pig farm.” Otto stood over him like an angry father. Scarborough's head was forward, his eyes on the earth in the learned position of those beaten and intimidated all their lives. He hadn't so much as glanced at Jessica until she spoke to Otto, his eyes sneaking to one side, rolling like a snake's to take her in, all without lifting the head.
“ What's this all about, Otto?” she asked.
Otto poked the kid in response.
Tommy “Scar” Scarborough spit on the ground in response. The young man was unclean, unshaven, and he smelled both of bad breath and booze, not to mention body odor. Jessica chose the bench across from him to sit, rather than get too close. Even handcuffed, he made her flesh crawl. His eyes were deep, black cinders, smoldering with rage, his complexion pockmarked from terrible years of bouts with acne and perhaps chicken pox and other diseases. His long-sleeved, unkempt shirt did little to hide the needle marks, both old and recent. It looked as if the cops had nabbed him while he was sleeping in his clothes and his own filth, and he hadn't had a bath in days.
He now lifted his square-jawed face to her and said, “You're a doctor? You saw what they… they did to Candy?”
“ Yes,” replied Jessica to both questions.
“ You're the one that the cops say has found my semen in her, aren't you?”
She looked at Otto, who shrugged and said, “Tell him what you will, Dr. Coran.”
“ Until tests prove it, Mr. Scarborough, no one knows whose semen it is. Is it yours? You may's well tell us if it is, because with the sophisticated tests we run, we'll know in a matter of-”
“ I ain't slept with her for over a month. We… we weren't gettin' along, you know. Started to get at each other like an old married couple. She kept pushing me for things, for this, that… to get married… that kind of shit. I cut loose on her. Left her. Otto frowned. “Wekosha police say otherwise, Thomas. Now, if you help us, maybe we can help you. Tell the nice FBI lady what you came here to tell her.”
“ All right… all right.”
Jessica was curious now. “Do you know who was last with her?”
“ No, not really. He wasn't from around here.”
“ Then you saw him?”
“ No, I didn't see him.”
“ What did you see?”
Otto broke in. “He says he saw the van, that the guy drove a van, and that she got in voluntarily. Got no plate numbers, but claims it might have been Illinois plates. Van was gray or beige-”
“ Hard to tell colors at night. I'm color-blind.”
“- and had some lettering on the side.”
“ Not bold lettering, just small, and I don't read good from a distance, so… but this guy… he's the one killed her.”
Jessica spoke to Otto. “How many suspects have Stowell and Chief Wright placed in custody?”
“ Six, working on more, all perverts.”
“ Hey, I'm no fuckin' pervert!” shouted Scarborough.
“ Shut up! And watch your mouth around Dr. Coran.”
“ Just tellin' the truth.”
“ Just tell her about your daddy's pig farm.”
“ Swine farm,” he corrected Otto. He looked again at Jessica, saying, “I grew up on a farm, ma'am… ahhhh, Doctor.”
Below the grunge, she saw the farm boy in him clearly now. Perhaps some of the scars came from working around farm machinery, or at the hand of a dictatorial, Bible-thumping father with a nasty technique for disciplining an unruly child.
“ Go on,” she coaxed.
“ Well, we slaughtered a lot of swine. My daddy'd be covered in blood by day's end… and so would I. My daddy would first cut the heel tendons when he'd get the pig ready-first thing-so's it couldn't get off. You know how a pig'11 run at the least thing. I swear, the pig knows when you're standing there with a butcher's knife behind your back. Anyway… second thing my daddy'd do would tie the thing up by its hind quarters… and… and-”
He stopped, looked at Boutine, who nodded for him to go on. “And drain out all the blood into a big caldron of boiling water. He'd drop the swine into the caldron to boil off the fine hair then. Anyhow… well, the way they told me I was supposed to have killed Candy… Christ, it sounded like something my daddy would do. Scared hell out of me.”
She caught something of the fear deep in the dark eyes. “Your father, Thomas, he would threaten to do to you what he did to the pigs, if you didn't do what he told you to do… wouldn't he?”
His mouth fell open slowly. “I… I never told anyone what… that he… what that man did to me.”
“ See why he's such a likable suspect for Vaughn Wright and Stowell, Jessica?”
“ Fits… all too very neatly…”
“ They don't have anything on me. I wasn't anywhere near her when it happened!” shouted Scarborough. “Christ, I ain't no murderer!”
“ His alibi is a boyfriend he sleeps with,” said Otto.
Scarborough never again looked into Jessica's face, and he became belligerent and nasty again. “Lady like you, I could do a lot with, if you ever wanted to sell it.”
Otto grabbed him up in a rage and forced him back to the car. She stared after them, her insides tugged at by the horror that a parent could create of a child's psyche, yet convinced along with Otto that this young man was not their killer. Still, she'd order specimen samples from him along with all the other suspects rounded up by Stowell and Wright, to check against what they'd found at the scene. It all might be one dead end after another, but by the same token, no rock could be left unturned, and poor Scar definitely had crawled from beneath a pretty large rock.
With Scarborough put away in the car, Otto returned to her and said, “He told us about a knot his father used on the swine, too.”
“ A sailor's knot?”
“ Farmers use it a lot in this area, a sling knot. No way to break it so long as it is countering a… a dead weight.”
She stared at the blindingly bright blue Wisconsin sky and fought back the fatigue and pain and memory of Candy Copeland trussed up like a swine for the slaughter. It had been an image that had come to her during the evidence gathering, and this fact was not lost on her now. In the rustle of the leaves overhead, she heard the sharp twitter of birds and she glanced a jay chase another off.
“ I know this creep's as unreliable as hell, but you said something yourself the other night about how it looked, and what he said was so close to what you said… Well, I just thought you ought to hear it straight from the guy. Sorry if it's upset you.”
She only half heard Otto's apology. She was listening to the voice in her head which had belonged to her
