“His twelve-gauge shotgun’s locked up out in the garage.”
“I mean a handgun.”
“Yeah. In the closet. An old Colt semiautomatic. I know how to use it.”
“Keep it by the bed tonight.”
“I’ll do that. I promise.”
Westerley did drive back to Hogart after breakfast, but not before making sure Beth was safely installed at home.
The first thing Westerley did when he got into town was to call his deputy, Billy Noth, into the office and give him the rest of the day off. Then he told Billy the situation with Beth and instructed him to drive to her place this evening and spend the night keeping an eye on the house without telling her.
“I can hardly recall what Roy Brannigan looks like,” Billy said.
“Let’s hope you aren’t reminded tonight. By the way, Billy, Beth’s got a handgun she keeps by the bed.”
“Great,” Billy said. Then he laughed. “You warning me away, Sheriff?”
“Get out of here, Billy,” Westerley said.
When Billy was gone, Westerley called his contact at the state lab and asked if there was any progress on the DNA samples he’d sent in. There’d been a family killing in St. Louis that was put on top priority, he was told. It might be several days before he heard about his samples.
Westerley’s next phone call was to his part-time clerk and dispatcher Bobi Gregory. He asked her to handle the phone and to call him if anything important came up. He wouldn’t be far away, over in Jefferson City, where the Vincent Salas trial had been held.
Something about the time of the rape, and the Salas trial, was nibbling at the edges of Westerley’s memory, but he couldn’t identify it.
He spent most of the morning in the City Hall records room, reading the trial transcript. Salas seemed guilty again.
Only he wasn’t. Not according to DNA.
Westerley went to another department and gained access to the section where evidence was stored from trials dating back years. He easily found the box containing the Salas trial evidence.
It angered him when he touched Beth’s torn panties, the three empty Wild Colt beer cans. Salas had never reclaimed the contents of his pockets, which were in a separate brown envelope. When he examined the envelope’s contents, Westerley understood why. The envelope contained a pocket comb, a cheap penknife, and sixty-two cents in loose change. A worn leather wallet held two one-dollar bills, a punch card that would earn free coffee at a restaurant in Flagstaff, Arizona, and an expired Missouri driver’s license. One of the loose nickels attracted Westerley’s attention. It was dated 1919, or maybe 1918. It was hard to tell, as worn as the nickel was. Westerley fingered the coin for a while, then dropped it back in the envelope with the rest of the contents, put the envelope back in the evidence box, and returned everything to its dusty space in the rows of metal shelves.
When he left it struck him as always how so much chaos and violence could be reduced to items in neat rows of boxes, and ignored to be rendered harmless by time.
76
When Westerley got back to Hogart and entered his office, Bobi Gregory was seated at the desk by the window. Across from her, Mathew Wellman was sitting in one of the padded black vinyl chairs with wooden arms. Mathew was pretending to read a supermarket tabloid. It featured the President of the United States smiling and waving as he boarded a flying saucer.
“My Aunt Edna sent me,” Mathew said.
Westerley was thrown for a moment. Then he remembered Mathew’s surreptitious viewing of pornography on the computer. He motioned with his head for Mathew to follow him into his office.
After settling in behind his desk, Westerley told Mathew to have a seat in a nearby chair that was exactly like the one he’d been seated in out in the anteroom.
Mathew looked down at the floor. “All I can say is I’m sorry about what happened, sir. I never meant for Aunt Edna to see that stuff.”
“I bet you didn’t,” Westerley said. “Some of those women looked seriously underaged.”
“Aw, they can make them look like that. You probably mean the one with the-”
“The sites are against the law,” Westerley said, but he supposed they’d have to be looked at one by one to really determine that.
“Actually, they’re-”
“I’ll talk to your Aunt Edna and make sure she knows you were just satisfying your curiosity, and you’re not a sex maniac.”
Mathew seemed surprised by this sudden apparent termination of what he’d assumed would be a major and historic ass-chewing from an expert. He wasn’t sure quite how to react. “I know pornography can become an addiction, sir.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Westerley said, noticing that Mathew was regarding him with a new attentiveness.
Mathew said nothing, sensing when to hold his cards close.
“You believe that stuff?” Westerley asked.
“About the addiction?”
“No. About the president and that flying saucer.”
No fool, Mathew, knew that wasn’t really the question. He said, “I don’t dismiss it out of hand.”
“You notice that computer on the table out in the other room?” Westerley asked.
“Sure, I did. Nice setup with plenty of power and storage. It’s got that new chip that makes it unbelievably fast. If you wanted to play games-”
“I do,” Westerley said.
Mathew grinned. “What kind of games?”
“Depends on what you and that computer can do. The state just bought it and I’m still lost on it. Probably always will be, to some extent. It’s a generational thing. Seems that the younger people are, assuming they been weaned, the better they are with all this tech stuff.”
“Weaned?”
“It’s an old expression. Like carbon copy. ”
“You’re funning me,” Mathew said.
“Not really. People over a certain age have a difficult time getting the hang of computers. Bobi, out there, she mostly downloads recipes and sends e-mail and photographs, so she’s not much help so far. Billy Noth might as well be flying the starship Enterprise for the first time. What I want calls for somebody who can make the most use of that expensive advanced technology. Really make it hum.”
“That would be me,” Mathew said.
“I’d find somebody younger if I could,” Westerley said, wondering where the sir went.
“I’m in the right spot at the right time.”
“That you are, Mathew. On the spot, you might say.”
“I want to do something,” Mathew said, “to repay you for keeping me out of trouble with Aunt Edna, and with the law. And for saving me a lot of embarrassment.”
So young to be playing the game, Westerley thought. “I haven’t done anything yet,” he said.
Mathew nodded but said nothing. His bland, reassuring face was unreadable. The lad would go far.
“What’s the expression used when you go where you aren’t supposed to be on the Internet?” Westerley asked. “I mean, other than if you’re looking at porn sites.”
“Hacking,” Mathew said.
“Do you possess that skill, Mathew?”
“It’s more an art than a skill.”
“So are you an artist?”
Mathew smiled. “Think Picasso.”
