“Okay. But not when it comes to Jackson Warton?”
“That’s not what I said.” He was getting irritated. I’d found one of his triggers.
“My apologies,” I said. “Why don’t you explain in your own words, then, why you left this particular abused child at the mercy of his violent daddy?”
“I did not—”
“Objection,” Ruiz said. “Badgering the witness.”
“Sustained.”
“I’ll rephrase. You knew Karl. You saw him around, in town and at the marina. You knew what he was doing. Why didn’t you ever tell him not to beat his son?”
He paused, like he needed a second to calm down, and then said, “I can’t answer that.” He glanced at Ruiz and amended it to, “I just don’t know.”
“Okay.” I looked at my notes and scribbled “Annoyed, says doesn’t know” in the margin next to the questions on this topic. “Uh, moving on, Detective Blount, you’ve said on the night Karl disappeared, you were driving down the marina road?”
“I was, yes.”
“Were you on duty?”
“No.”
“What type of vehicle were you driving?”
“My personal vehicle. A 2011 Ford F-150.”
“Okay. Were you heading to the marina yourself?”
He knew there was nowhere else to go on that road, and he was ready. “That was my intent, but I ended up turning around.”
“Why was that?”
We were looking each other in the eye. I got the sense he was trying to intimidate me.
“I realized I forgot my cell phone,” he said. “I’m supposed to have it at all times, even off duty. So I had to go back home.”
That seemed awfully convenient. In about fifteen seconds of testimony, he’d explained why nobody had seen him at the marina. And he’d let me know that, even if I got my hands on accurate cell phone data for him, I couldn’t use it to show he was lying, because at that critical moment in the case he just happened to leave his phone at home.
“Okay,” I said. “About what time was that?”
He shifted and glanced sideways, at the judge perhaps. “I didn’t look at my watch,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t know the importance of what I was seeing.”
“About when did you get home?”
“Well, again,” he said, “I didn’t check. I didn’t realize that night’s timeline was going to be important.”
“Was it dark?”
“Depends what you mean by dark. To me, yes.”
“Okay,” I said. On my notes, I drew a star next to that line of questions. I’d typed up plenty more along those lines, but I didn’t want to play those cards yet. I knew we weren’t going to get the charges dismissed here. I just wanted to kick the tires to confirm their timeline was weak.
“So, Detective, you’ve said you were driving east on the marina road that night when you saw somebody walking?”
“I saw Jackson Warton.”
“Okay. And about how far away was he?”
“Off to the side, where you’d walk. Maybe thirty feet when I first saw him, ten feet when I passed him.”
I wrote those distances on my notes. “And at what point did you actually recognize him?”
“Well, he turned his head when I passed, so I saw his face. But I already thought it might be him from behind, when my headlights hit him. Tall, skinny kid, dark hair, always wearing those band T-shirts with the flames or skulls and whatnot.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. In my poker voice, I asked, “And how close were you when you noticed that?”
“Oh, maybe twenty feet.”
I wrote that on my notes. I didn’t really care about the distance. The detail that mattered, which I didn’t want him to know mattered, was in the other note I made: “Wrong shirt?”
In the photo Noah had shown me, Jackson wasn’t wearing any of the heavy metal band T-shirts he always wore. I didn’t know why—maybe to make himself harder to identify when he burned the ice cream stand, or to avoid getting a shirt he liked dirty—but he’d been wearing a plain white one with nothing on it but soot marks. Nothing on the front, anyway.
I was going to need to get my hands on that T-shirt. Maybe Jackson was right to call Blount a liar. What I needed to figure out was how to prove it.
17
Monday, July 29, Afternoon
Mazie, Terri, and I all met up at my house after the hearing. I’d texted Noah we were coming, and as I opened the door, I saw him on the couch.
“Can you grab hold of Squatter?” I said. “Don’t want any of us to step on him.”
He scooped him off the floor and asked, “How’d it go? Can he get bail?”
I tossed my keys on a table and my briefcase on the floor, took the pizza and drinks Mazie’d been holding while I unlocked, and waved the two of them in.
“We brought a late lunch,” I said. “Or an early dinner. But no, we didn’t get him bail. That was not in the cards.”
I was pretty sure I’d been clear with Noah that we weren’t going to get the charges reduced, but he still had the ultraresilient hope that kids his age usually did. It didn’t feel great to shove that hope back down in the mud.
The light went out of his face for a second, but then he seemed to realize who else was here.
“Oh, Ms. Grant,” he said to Mazie. “I’m so sorry we couldn’t get him out for you.” His hangdog look of self-pity had vanished; he was focused on her. My kid was acting, for the first time I’d ever seen, like a grown man.
“Oh, thank you,” Mazie said. “Well, it’s just going to take a while.”
When I turned to bring our paper cups of Coke into the kitchen, I saw Terri smiling. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a little nod that seemed to say, “Not bad!”
I felt proud but also a little unnerved. I kept getting whiplash from watching my kid grow up before my eyes.
While I got plates out and poured our Cokes into proper glasses, the women told Noah how
