“You don’t want to arrest me,” she said.
“I don’t want to sit here all morning and listen to you talk in circles, either.” I was becoming impatient. “Now, what’s your name?”
She looked back out over the river. “Alisha. Alisha Elizabeth Davis.”
“Are you some kind of psychic?”
“I see things that others can’t see. I hear and feel things that others can’t.”
“I don’t have a lot of time this morning, Alisha. If you know something about the murders, I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell me.”
“They thirst for revenge, and they won’t stop.”
“Who are they?”
“One is Samuel, another Levi.”
“Do they have last names?”
“Boyer. Barnett.”
I reached into my back pocket for a notepad. I didn’t have one, so I pulled a pen from my shirt pocket and started writing on the palm of my left hand.
“Samuel Boyer?”
She nodded.
“Levi Barnett? You’re saying Samuel Boyer and Levi Barnett did these killings? Do you know where they’re from? Where can we find them?”
“They won’t be hard to find.”
“How do you know? And don’t say you know things. Don’t tell me it came to you in a vision.”
“There’s a third. One who commands. She believes she is the daughter of Satan.”
“How do you know?”
My cell phone rang. I looked down at the caller ID. It was Jack.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I need to take this. I’ll be right back.” I got up and walked twenty or thirty feet away from her, out of earshot.
“Tell me something good,” I said when I answered.
“Surgeon just left,” Jack said. His voice was hushed. “The tumor was stage three, whatever that means. He said it was almost four centimeters long. There was cancer in the skin above the tumor and in the lymph node. He said the type of cancer she has is very aggressive. He already closed her back up. He said he left the tumor so they could see how it responds to chemotherapy.”
“What did he say about the chemo?” It was the one part of the treatment Caroline had talked about the most. She was terrified of chemotherapy.
“Some other doctor is going to handle it, but he said most of the cases similar to Mom’s go through three months of chemo, then surgery to remove the breast and the rest of her lymph nodes, then three more months of chemo. After that she’ll have to go through radiation for a couple of months. He says she’s looking at about a year before she’s clear of it, and that’s if everything goes well.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m standing in the lobby.”
“Where’s your mom?”
“In recovery. The nurse told me we can go back in about a half hour.”
“But she’s okay?”
“Outside of the fact that she has cancer.”
“How’s Lilly?”
“Not good.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Wait for me. I want to be in the recovery room when she wakes up.”
I hung up the phone and walked back over to the girl.
She looked up at me, and I noticed a tear running down her left cheek.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
I’d developed a keen intuition over more than a decade of practicing criminal defense law and listening to my own clients lie to me over and over again. Caroline jokingly referred to it as my “bullshit detector.” It wasn’t innate; it was something that I had developed through experience, but I’d learned to trust my ability to detect and sort through lies and to get to the heart of a matter very quickly. This girl gave me no indication that she was lying. Her voice was clear and steady, her manner calm and straightforward. The circumstances were certainly unusual, but I found myself believing her.
“Okay, Alisha,” I said, “if you really want to help me, this is what has to happen. I’m going to go up and talk to that officer for a few minutes. Then he’s going to come back down here and take a statement from you. He’s going to write down everything you say. In the statement, you’re going to tell him exactly what you know about the murders and the people you’ve mentioned. And more important, you’re going to tell him how you know these things. We need details. We need something concrete if we’re going to be able to get warrants and arrest these people. If what you say checks out, I’ll probably need you to testify in front of a grand jury. You may even end up testifying at trial. Do you understand?”
A feeling came over me that reminded me of the way I felt the night I went to the Beck murder scene, but it was different somehow. I felt as though I were experiencing something unnatural, perhaps even supernatural, but the sickening sense of being in the presence of evil was absent. I wanted to talk to this girl, to question her, and I could sense that she wanted to tell me what she knew, but I couldn’t stop envisioning Caroline lying in the recovery room, about to come out of the anesthesia-induced coma. Someone would have to break the news to her, and I wanted it to be me.
“I have to leave,” I said, “but I’m going to go talk to the agent, and he’ll be back down here in just a minute. Just sit tight. Won’t take but a second.”
I jogged back up the hill to where Fraley was standing.
“Well?” he said.
“Write these names down.” I opened my hand so he could see them.
“Who are they?”
“She says they’re the killers.”
“You’re shitting me. You wrote them on your hand?”
“I didn’t bring a notepad. Didn’t know I’d need one.”
“And I took you for a Boy Scout. At least you had a pen.” Fraley began copying the names down. “One of those names is familiar,” he said.
“How so?”
“I put a list together of kids Norman Brockwell had serious problems with before he retired. One of them, Boyer, is on your hand. What’s her name?” He nodded towards the river.
“Alisha Elizabeth Davis. Take a statement from her. Get everything you can. Names, addresses, ages, shit, you know the drill. All we can do is check out everything she says. And let’s make sure we check her out at the same time. I have to get back to the hospital.”
“Bad news?”
“You could say that. Go ahead, before she changes her mind. I’ll call you in a couple of hours.”
I jogged back to my truck and pulled out of the lot. My cell phone rang less than a minute later. It was Fraley.
“She’s gone,” he said.
“What do you mean, gone?”
“I walked back down to the bench and she was gone. I don’t think she could have walked off without me seeing her, but she’s not here. She disappeared.”
As soon as I got back to the hospital, I ran down Caroline’s surgeon and talked to him for about ten minutes. One thing he said stuck in my mind: “The only way to deal with cancer is to kill it.” From there, I headed straight back to the recovery room.
