I winced at the photos, but that wasn’t the worst part.
I had to call Terri.
“It’s not good,” I told her. I was in the kitchen, looking for chips or chocolate or something to distract me. “Let’s put it this way: I knew we were going to lose at the preliminary hearing. They have probable cause. But I didn’t know we were going to lose this bad.”
“What’s it say?”
I cracked open a Coke and went to the table. “Well, if I were prosecuting this, here’s what I’d say: ‘Shortly after the night Karl died, a police detective gave a statement about what he’d seen on the night of the murder. He said he saw Jackson walking toward the marina with a crowbar in his hand.’ And I’d let that sink in.” I looked out the window at the twilight sky, at nothing.
“Okay…”
“And then I’d say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, when that officer spoke, he hadn’t seen the coroner’s report. It wasn’t done yet. But fully six weeks later, when it finally was done, it said the victim’s injuries were consistent with being beaten with a crowbar.’”
“Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. And that’s not all of it. It was pretty violent. The coroner said there were so many blows he couldn’t count them.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh no. There goes manslaughter.”
“Most likely, yeah. Hang on.” I went through the basement door and pulled it shut behind me to make sure Noah wouldn’t hear even if he stopped blowing away cartoon soldiers on his screen. “It’s hard to tell a jury my poor abused child of a client didn’t mean to kill his dad when he whacked him in the head three dozen times with a crowbar. Or however many.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And for another complication,” I said, “they couldn’t narrow down a time of death.”
“Had he eaten?”
“Yeah, but they don’t know when, so knowing that the food in his stomach had been digesting for however many hours didn’t help pin down what time he died.”
She sighed. “Any drugs? Alcohol?”
“Just alcohol. But that can keep fermenting after death, and the samples weren’t great because of the decomposition, so they can’t say for sure how drunk he was.”
I heard her moving around. I could tell she was thinking something through.
On a hunch, I asked, “You find out anything on Blount?”
“Not yet.” She paused. “But, okay. I’m wondering about this crowbar sighting. I mean, I spent eight years out on patrol. I’ve seen about every damn thing a person can have in their pocket or their hand. I’ve thought cell phones were guns. I once thought a bulge in some guy’s pocket might be drugs and it turned out to be, I swear as the Lord is my witness, a chipmunk.”
I almost spat out my Coke. “A what? Was it alive?”
“No!” She was laughing. So was I. “What kind of fool d’you think I am? Those critters never stop moving. If it’d been moving, I wouldn’t have thought it was drugs, would I.”
“It’s good working with you, Terri,” I said. I was leaning against the stairway wall with my eyes closed. When a case was doomed, or when the facts were more horrifying than usual, a colleague who could crack a joke made it easier.
“So keep working,” she said. “You see where I’m going with this? I want to know how Blount was so sure he saw a crowbar. I mean, that’s real specific.” I heard her clicking away at her keyboard.
“Oh,” I said, getting it. “It’s nighttime, he’s driving, presumably at a normal speed. He passes some kid…”
“And what’s a crowbar look like? I mean, from that distance, it could be a stick, a shadow...” The keyboard clicking stopped. “Okay, Leland, I just looked at the sunset times and weather that day. Depending exactly what time Blount says he saw him, it was either nautical twilight or astronomical twilight. Which is basically straight-up nighttime. Can you get away right now?”
“Uh, sure.”
“It’s nautical twilight for another half hour,” she said. “Then astronomical. And there’s no moon, same as on that night.”
“I’ve got a crowbar in the basement,” I said. “I’ll see you there.”
The last bit of road down to the marina still looked rural. When I’d left for college it was barely even paved, but when Henry Carrell’s charter company took off, they’d spiffed it up and added palmettos down either side. When I turned onto it and spotted Terri’s Jeep parked a hundred yards down, I saw it still didn’t have sidewalks. Part of it was lined with oaks that cast dark shadows from the few streetlights nearby. I’d have to ask Blount where exactly he’d seen whoever he saw.
I parked, and we got out. While Terri’s dog trotted off to do his business, she leaned over her hood and messed with something. When she stood up, I saw she’d attached a little camera to her windshield wiper. “Well,” she said, looking down toward the marina with her hands on her hips, “we got about a quarter mile to cover. This could take a while.”
It took almost an hour. I walked, holding the crowbar, while she drove past, filming. Sometimes I turned my head to see her Jeep pass; sometimes I didn’t. I walked out in the open and under oaks. After every shot, we’d confer through the passenger window about what she’d seen and what to try next.
Afterward we swung by the McDonald’s drive-through off the highway before heading back to my house to look at her footage on my laptop. Her camera’s three-inch screen was too small to get a sense of what Blount could’ve seen.
We sat at my kitchen table, divided a burger between our two dogs, and ate dinner while watching my shadowy figure walk past some palmettos. Terri had a pocket notebook in front of her, and she checked it after we watched each clip.
“That camera’s good in low light,” she explained, “but I took notes in case my eyes were better.”
We were deep at it, hashing our theories
