had to go back and read the old stories on the Trail Murders. I could just about run them again for this new case with no rewrite.”
“There are some similarities,” LeDonne conceded.
“Well, we know it isn’t Fate Harkryder this time,” said McCullough. “Do you have any suspects?”
“Nothing to speak of.”
Jeff McCullough smiled. “You wouldn’t speak of it, anyhow, would you? But that’s okay. I don’t want to hinder the investigation. I think my angle for this week is the irony of these murders happening so close to Fate Harkryder’s execution date, and bearing such a resemblance to his own crime. What does the sheriff think about it?”
“He’s still recovering from his wounds. He’s not part of this investigation.”
“But I just read those old Harkryder articles. Spencer Arrowood was the arresting officer in that case. What does he think about this one?”
“We haven’t told him about this one. He’s still weak from surgery, and he’s not up to any more strain right now. Martha thinks he’s better off not being told.”
“So I can’t interview him about the new case, and whether he thinks they’re related?”
“No. He knows nothing about it. Martha and I will keep you posted on what’s happening in this case. And the old one is closed-or it will be in a few weeks, when Fate Harkryder goes to the chair.”
Jeff McCullough frowned. “When is the sheriff due back on the job?”
“Couple of weeks. We’ll have an arrest by then.”
Fate Harkryder was thirty-seven years old and looked fifty. His hair was shot with iron gray. A lifetime of smoking and hard times had etched deep creases between his nose and chin, and had stitched a chain of fine lines around the hollows of his eyes. He had not run to fat, though, as so many of the prisoners did, partly because Harkryder men were built short and wiry, and partly because Fate Harkryder stopped eating when he felt his body thicken. Fat was weakness, and in prison it did not do to give the appearance of weakness. Fate Harkryder liked to be left alone. He was soft-spoken and courteous to those he encountered, but people who mistook his remoteness for weakness did so only once. He had learned long ago that if you are polite and distant, people will leave you alone. He could fight if he had to, but he avoided it if he could do so without backing down. Shouting and striking people is a form of intimacy, and for that reason alone Fate Harkryder avoided confrontations.
His lawyer had just left. This one was an earnest kid out of Nashville who was working pro bono because he claimed to hate the death penalty. He had offered his services when the state announced its intention of executing Fate Harkryder in six weeks’ time. Maybe he was a do-gooder, or maybe he wanted to get his name in the paper by representing an infamous man. It was all the same, though. Fate didn’t think there was much the kid could do, but for zero legal fees, he was welcome to try. What the hell.
Fate had lost count of the lawyers he’d gone through in twenty years. Some of them had only been voices on the phone, staying on the case just long enough to find some other sucker to take it off their hands. None of them stayed long. Fate wasn’t notorious enough to make a name for an ambitious litigator, and his family was too poor to make it worth anybody’s while to defend him. That had been the trouble to begin with. The court-appointed lawyer at his original trial went through the motions of defending him, but his efforts had been all but useless.
He sat on a concrete bench outside Pod Five and looked up at the hill beyond the river. The sun was warm against his skin, and he yawned and stretched, savoring the smell and feel of early summer. If he kept his eyes closed, he could picture the homestead back in east Tennessee. He wondered if it had changed much in the decades that he’d been gone. Probably not. The land had been farmed out two generations before he was born. Who’d want it now? He hadn’t even seen any pictures of the home place since he left, and what little news he had from the relatives at home never touched on the farm or the changing seasons, which they all took for granted, while he, deprived of it forever, would have traded them all for a hill and a meadow.
His father’s sister was the family correspondent. Her spelling was as haphazard as her narrative skills, but at least she made the effort two or three times a year, which is more than the rest of them did. Scrawled pencil notes on lined paper informed him of the birth of a child to cousins he dimly remembered as infants themselves, or the smudged pages wished him a merry Christmas, with a spidery postscript enumerating the Harkryders’ car troubles, job losses, and the illnesses of aging relatives. As if he cared. They were all like characters in a movie he had seen once and only vaguely recalled, without any real certainty about the names or their function in the story. In his memory, time in east Tennessee stood still. Hamelin was a sleepy little seventies community still peopled by folks who were old when he was seventeen and his brothers were still young men in their twenties, with unlined faces and thick dark hair. He knew that they had grown older, as he had in the years since he had seen them. They were as old now as his father had been back then, but somehow his mind would not adjust his memories to accommodate the aging process. He could not picture Tom’s cold steel eyes looking out of their daddy’s furrowed face, or Ewell with Mama’s aging dumpling chins and graying hair. His brothers still grinned out at him from Technicolor daydreams as swaggering youths on the brink of manhood.
Tom and Ewell.
Tom was the oldest, a dark-haired banty rooster with a look of sleepy indifference that masked his intensity. That vacant stare had stood him well in poker games and bar fights. His opponents thought that he would be easy pickings, and by the time they cottoned on to their mistake, it was usually too late.
Ewell… Mama’s side of the family. Bigger, soft-bodied, with heavy-lidded eyes and fleshy lips, and always that look of
Tom and Ewell. How long had it been since he’d heard from them? There had been a few letters at first. Just after Fate had been sent away to prison, Ewell sent him a couple of postcards that said things like
After the trial Tom did a stint in the army, and ended up with an infantry company in Korea.
At first he had thought a lot about his brothers. During the first months of his imprisonment, rage had been his warmth, his comforter, and his friend. He would look at the wall, trying to shut out the ceaseless noise of the cell block, and he would imagine his brothers eating hamburgers at the Dixie Grill, or walking the October woods with rifles in search of deer, or burying their faces in the breasts of sweet-smelling doe-eyed girls. In his imaginings they were always laughing, always free. Fate wanted to destroy them. He would escape from prison, he thought, and he would put a gun barrel into Tom’s grinning mouth, and he would make the laughter stop. Or he would recant. Break the silence. Tell what happened that night, but tell it a different way, so that they, not he, would be shut away here until they faded away into nothingness. Except that no one would believe him this time. Nobody cared about the truth anymore-if, in fact, they had ever cared at all. The trial was finished, the sentence was passed, and now it was all over but the waiting.
His brothers were beyond his reach now. Gradually he had come to accept that. Eventually the rage flickered out, to be replaced for a while by sweeter memories of home and family. Fate lived for a while on scenes from his boyhood. There hadn’t been many happy memories of home, but the few that could be lit
