“The thought never crossed my mind,” I said with a smile, and Fortner laughed out loud.
“I mean it,” Daniels said angrily.
“Me, too,” I said.
When no one else said anything, I looked over at Stone. “Are you doing this to protect DeAndré?”
He looked genuinely perplexed. “If it turns out that Bobby Earl is guilty-and I seriously doubt it will- DeAndré can find another job.”
When we had left Stone’s office, Pete stopped me out in front of the gate.
“Did you see Nicole with a coloring book and crayons when she was here?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “She colored a picture for me.”
“Coel said she had them that night,” he said. “Carried them in your office to color while she was waiting for Bobby Earl to preach his sermon.”
“Yeah?”
“They weren’t in the stuff we inventoried from the crime scene,” he said.
“What?” I asked in shock.
“They’re not still in your office, are they?” he asked.
“Well, I’m the last person who wants to be investigating when I’ve been ordered not to, but let’s go have a look.”
We walked through the sally port, down the sidewalk, and into the chapel.
Several inmates were seated in the chapel library listening to tapes, reading books, pestering my clerks, and by the anxious look on a few of their faces, waiting to talk to me.
After greeting the rest of the inmates and the officer who was babysitting them for me, Pete and I walked into my office. It was the first time since the night of Nicole’s murder I had been inside.
Before I turned on the light, the still, stale air of the room was as dark and dank as a tomb. The wet copper smell of blood was in the air and breathing it in left a bad taste in my mouth.
I felt a presence in the room. As it swept past, its touch felt like the shredded gown of a gothic ghost floating above us, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I wondered if Pete sensed it. No longer was this room my sanctuary from the insanity and brutality of prison, but a haunted and defiled death chamber, and turning on the light did nothing to vanquish the spiritual and psychological pain echoing through it.
“My God,” Pete said. “It’s worse now than when it happened.”
We spent the next few moments in silence looking around the room, trying to breath shallowly and only through our mouths.
It didn’t feel like my office anymore. It looked pretty much the same-especially if you avoided the blood- stained carpet, but it wasn’t, and I wondered if it ever could be again.
“We found her body there,” he said, indicating the bloody outline on the floor. “The envelope and cash next to it there,” he continued, “the card there, and the candy there.”
“That’s just where they were when I came in,” I said.
“Still no coloring book and crayons,” he said.
The statement was so obvious I couldn’t think of a response that wasn’t sarcastic, so I didn’t say anything.
“You think the killer took ’em?” he asked.
“If he did,” I said, “it tells us a lot about him.”
“Whatta you mean?”
“Many sexual murderers and serial killers take something belonging to the victim in order to relive the experience over and over again.”
He shuddered. “That would point away from Bobby Earl to Register or one of the other inmates.”
“Or it could point to someone close to her,” I added. “Were Bobby Earl and Bunny searched before they left the institution that night?”
“No,” he said. “They had just lost their daughter. They were victims at that point, not suspects.” He shook his head. “The stuff could’ve been inside Bobby Earl’s Bible cover.”
I moved past him, edging around my desk to take a better look under it, but froze when I reached its corner.
“What is it?” Pete asked.
“Look,” I said, pointing to the piece of paper on the floor. It was another page Nicole had colored and removed from her book.
“What the hell?” he said in shock. “That wasn’t here before, was it?”
I shook my head, still pondering what it meant.
“And there’s no way we’d’ve missed it,” he said.
I didn’t say anything, just continued to stare at the picture.
“It’s not the one she did for you, is it?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“You think it was in here somewhere-bookshelf, desk, chair, and fell down after we left?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” he said. “I’ll be damned.”
We were quiet a moment. I stepped around the picture and searched the desk and bookshelf thoroughly. No crayons. No coloring book. Nothing.
“This means someone’s been in here since we have,” he said.
I nodded.
“Her killer?”
“Possibly.”
“Well,” he said, “it was pretty damn dumb. Now we know it had to be a staff member with access to keys.”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “See how close it is to the door? It looks like someone could’ve slid it right beneath the door.”
“But there again, that points away from the Caldwells,” he said. “Bobby Earl hasn’t been here.”
“No,” I said, “but DeAndré has.”
CHAPTER 40
I found Theo Malcolm sitting at his desk grading papers, his inmate orderly, Luther Albright, standing behind him with his arms folded like a bodyguard. From a boom-box in the corner, the aggressive sounds of gangsta rap polluted the air in the room. When he had said, “Enter,” and I walked in, he briefly looked up, shook his head, and looked back down at his papers.
“You don’t seem happy to see me,” I said with a big smile.
“I’m very busy,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
The rapper was rapping about killing white policemen in the war of the streets-about takin’ his nine and smokin’ the pig’s cracker ass until they were all just traces on the pavement.
I shook my head.
“If you don’t like our music,” Albright started, but Malcolm held up his hand.
Our music? Was Albright an orderly or a buddy? Getting overly familiar with an inmate was a dangerous decision to make. I had seen more than a few careers destroyed because of it, and I wondered if Malcolm realized how foolish he was being.
“You probably think that African Americans believed OJ was innocent,” he said.
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t.”
“Well, we didn’t,” he said, as if contradicting me. “We’s not’s dumb as y’alls thinks we is,” he said in his best
