more. Remember what they did to his ass in juvenile hall?' His voice softened. 'Next place I'm goin', don't want that sucker taggin' after me. Maybe you can see to him now.'
Terri sat down again. 'Thank you,' she said succinctly. 'Too bad for 'all our sakes' it's probably too damned late. You've out-waited your credibility.'
She watched the comprehension in his eyes turn to apprehension. ' 'Cause now I've got nothing to lose?'
'Worse,' she answered. 'Now you've got something to gain—time. That's the other problem with waiting until they're ready to kill Rennell. They're planning to kill you first.'
SEVENTEEN
AT ELEVEN THAT NIGHT, AS ELENA AND KIT SLEPT UPSTAIRS, the adult Pagets—Terri, Carlo, and Chris—met with Anthony Lane and Tammy Mattox around the Pagets' kitchen table. The conversation was tense and muted. Only Johnny Moore was absent; he was already searching for Eddie Fleet's ex-girlfriend, Betty Sims. Only Terri knew, behind her facade of detachment, how much she needed Rennell to be innocent for her own sake, and for Elena's. And only Terri knew how much she wanted to tell Elena what she had learned, before her own complex set of boundaries—that it was wrong to further immerse Elena in the case, false to intimate that Terri's continuing involvement rested on Rennell's innocence—made her withhold Payton Price's confession from the member of her family who, for her own reasons, might have cared the most.
' 'I didn't do that little girl,' ' Tammy murmured aloud.
'Could just be the truth,' Lane told her. 'Rennell's got a low capacity for lying, I think. And Monk couldn't draw him into a confession.'
'Course not, the A.G.'s gonna say. Even a dummy's too smart to hang himself.'
'Maybe so. But I think Rennell's asexual, or pretty close to it. Being retarded may have held him back.'
'There's at least one problem with that,' Terri cautioned. 'Payton's story about their father forcing Mom to go down on Rennell. It's a paradigm for what happened with Thuy Sen: the A.G.'s shrink could argue that the family normalized pedophilia—it seems to have done that for Payton, after all. A shrink could also say that a retarded man is more likely to feel comfortable with children than to feel shame about having sex with them.'
Tammy nodded. 'Grandma's important here. Doesn't Rennell claim she taught him to be 'a respectful man'?'
'True,' Terri answered. 'But how persuasive that is depends on who else Rennell identified with most. Maybe it's Eula. But there's Payton, who abused Thuy Sen, then lied to the cops about it. Then there's Mom. Does Rennell identify with her, the victim—or Dad, the abuser? And given what he saw as a child, where would Rennell learn the difference between sex and sexual violence?' Pausing, Terri looked at Lane. 'Unless,' she inquired softly, 'the sex act his father forced on him would cause him to identify with someone as helpless as Thuy Sen?'
'That's possible,' Lane agreed. 'In Rennell's own childhood, sex probably meant dominance and aggression. But there's no evidence that experience made him into a child predator.'
Carlo touched the bridge of his nose. 'What about being gang-raped at juvenile hall?' he asked Lane. 'What might that do to him?'
'Nothing good.' Lane's voice was tinged with melancholy. 'I'd guess that was what caused Rennell to slash his wrist. I think he tried to end his own misery—the sleeplessness, his constant fear of darkness and violation. Which no doubt goes back to his father sitting him naked on a space heater.'
Carlo puffed his cheeks. 'Unbelievable.'
Though she cast an ironic glance around the gleaming modern kitchen, Tammy's voice was kind. 'Welcome to the 'other America.' '
'There's another thing,' Chris said evenly. 'Maybe there's no evidence that Rennell's a pedophile. But child victims tend not to report abuse, and a chaotic environment like the Bayview makes underreporting more likely. Plus sexual predators tend to act alone.'
'Except with Thuy Sen,' Terri countered. 'So everything you just said about Rennell applies to Eddie Fleet.'
Tammy nodded. 'We know Fleet beat up Betty Sims. And we're pretty sure Rennell's not violent. Ask me to 'pick the pervert,' and I'm going with Eddie.'
'The problem's Payton,' Chris rejoined. 'He's admitted to abusing Thuy Sen; the only question left is who helped him. It's pretty easy to imagine Rennell falling in with whatever Payton wanted from her.'
'That cuts both ways,' Lane observed. 'It's an argument that Rennell might have helped Payton molest a child. But it also cuts against sentencing Rennell to death: Yancey James never developed the degree to which Payton directed Rennell's whole life.'
Nodding, Chris turned to Terri. 'When are you seeing James?' he asked.
'Tomorrow afternoon. We can only hope he chooses to help.'
Chris faced Tony Lane again. 'What might have been the impact on Rennell of watching his mother knife his father? Not to mention the father's dying act of sadism—'Want my blood,' and all of that?'
'It's Gothic.' Lane shook his head in bemusement. 'But the answer is I don't know. Still, Rennell was only nine when he went to Eula Price. That gave her a little time to mold him before Payton took over.'
'What about our claim that he's retarded? Can the A.G. find some psychiatrist to testify that retardation limits Rennell's empathy for someone like Thuy Sen?'
'Probably. But I don't believe that. There's a difference between intellectual and emotional capacity—even a retarded person like Rennell could have learned love from his grandmother and, in an odd way, from Payton. So it's possible for Rennell to feel much the same sensitivities as you or I. Just like it's possible for a decent man to emerge from a nightmare childhood—'
'But that's also the A.G.'s argument,' Chris objected. 'That Rennell had choices, so his environment shouldn't make a difference when it comes to meting out the death penalty.'
