The sheriff tosses Shad’s keys onto the floor and walks back up the stairs.
I unlock the door, toss Shad’s keys into a trash can in the corner, and walk out into the night.
As I stand in the street looking at the hulking white courthouse, everything I didn’t know about Drew rushes through my mind with dizzying speed. His fingerprints in Kate’s bedroom. Kate’s cell phone records. A witness seeing Drew and Kate changing cars in a parking lot. Each of these facts is another stone in the pile that could eventually bury Drew at trial. Not evidence of murder, of course, but evidence of depravity to a conservative jury. And Shad was right about one thing: if the semen found in Kate’s rectum turns out to match Drew’s DNA, Shad’s theory of rape and murder as revenge is going to sound a lot more plausible. No member of a Mississippi jury will want to believe that a high school senior was practicing anal sex for recreation. I’m not sure I believe it myself. If it weren’t for Cyrus White’s relationship with Kate-and the location of the Brightside Manor Apartments-I’d be damned frightened right now.
My cell phone rings. The caller ID saysMIA, but when I answer, all I hear is sobs.
“Mia? Is that you?”
She’s crying, I’m sure of it. My heart bounds into high gear. “Is Annie all right?”
“Yes, but something terrible has happened!”
“Tell me.”
“Chris Vogel is dead.”
Chris Vogel is a junior at St. Stephen’s and the star of the basketball team. I saw him two days ago, shooting three-point shots in a neighbor’s driveway downtown. “Are you sure?”
“Positive. Everybody’s talking about it.”
“How did he die?”
“He drowned at Lake St. John.”
“Tonight.”
“Do you have any details?”
“More than I want. Apparently, Chris never came back to town after the party last night. He and Jimmy Wingate ditched school today. Everybody figured they had hangovers, because they wouldn’t answer their cell phones. But apparently they stayed up at the Wingates’ lake house. They just didn’t want word to get back to the teachers where they were. They stayed drunk and probably worse, given the shit that was up there the other night.”
“You mean drugs.”
“Mm-hm.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Christy Blake called and told me about Chris, but as soon as I hung up with her, I called Jimmy Wingate. We were good friends when we were little. He’s in bad shape. Seeing Chris drown really messed him up.”
I want to know more, but I’d rather hear it face-to-face. “I’ll be home in three minutes. Tell me when I get there, okay?”
Mia sobs into the phone. “Please hurry.”
I hang up and press down on the accelerator. I’ve never seen or heard Mia lose her composure before. But tonight it’s no wonder. Death is difficult enough for adults to deal with, but for adolescents it can be a paralyzing shock. Flushed with hormones and in the best physical shape of their lives, they view death as a shadowy event that waits incomprehensibly far in the future. The sudden loss of one of their own-particularly a school hero like Chris Vogel-punctures their illusions of immortality.
Chapter 14
I’m parked outside my house on Washington Street, trying to reach Sonny Cross, the narcotics agent who told me about Cyrus White. Mia stands in the open door, her worried face illuminated by the porch light. Someone answers in a voice so soft as to be almost inaudible.
“Sonny?” I ask. “Are you asleep?”
“On surveillance,” he whispers. “Hang on.”
I hear the sound of heels on pavement-probably Sonny’s snakeskin cowboy boots-and then he speaks in a normal voice. “You must have heard about the Vogel boy.”
“Yeah.”
“Things go to shit in a hurry, don’t they?”
“Do you think his death was drug-related?”
“Definitely. The kid with him admitted they’d done three tabs of acid in the past twelve hours. I was there when they questioned him.”
“Did he say where they got it?”
“Claims they found it in a bag by the lake road.”
“This is Jimmy Wingate?”
“Yeah.”
“Were his parents there?”
Sonny chuckles dryly. “Oh, yeah. Jimmy’s old man threatened to beat the crap out of him if he didn’t tell us the truth, and the kid
“You think they got the acid from Marko Bakic?”
“Who else? But nobody’s admitting that. These kids either love Marko or they’re scared shitless of him.”
“Maybe both,” I suggest. “Marko knows nothing about American football, but he won the South State football playoff for St. Stephen’s by kicking the winning field goal. I wouldn’t think that would be enough to keep kids quiet when a childhood friend dies, though.”
“Yeah, well, time’s on our side, bubba. Let Chris’s death really sink in, and somebody’ll get mad enough or upset enough to talk.”
“I hope so. St. Stephen’s can’t take much more of this.”
“Natchez can’t take much more,” Sonny mutters.
“Could the LSD have come from Cyrus White rather than Marko?”
“You can bet it went through Cyrus’s hands before it got to Marko. Just like it went through the Asians’ hands before it got to Cyrus. I suppose some other white kid could be buying from Cyrus, but it wasn’t until Marko got to St. Stephen’s that this shit started showing up there.”
“Look, Sonny, I had to mention the Cyrus-Kate connection in front of Sheriff Byrd. I kept your name out of it, but I did tell him the contact was documented. He may be able to figure out where it came from based on that.”
“Ah, shit, don’t worry about it. Byrd can’t afford to fire me. I make him look too good. I gotta go, Penn. Later.”
I hang up and get out of the car. As I walk up the steps, Mia runs forward and hugs me, then sobs against my chest. “What’s happening? Everything’s gone crazy!”
“Calm down,” I tell her, trying to separate us, then giving up and stroking her hair the way I do Annie’s when she’s upset. “It’s going to be all right.”
She pulls away and stares at me, her eyes sparkling with tears. “No, it’s not. You know it’s not. Don’t tell me things are okay when they’re not. My dad does that.”
“How? You can’t bring Chris back to life.”
“No. All I can do is try to keep what happened to Chris from happening to anybody else.”
She lays her head on my chest again. I let her alone for a bit, trying not to feel too awkward with her body
