did!”
“How do you know?” asked Jonathan, fear now in his voice.
“Because your mother heard you talking about it on the 16th May. Edgar Olsen died on the 17th.”
Jonathan lowered his head. He appeared to be going through some inner turmoil. Finally he raised his head, dry eyed, but with a hardened expression on his face.
“Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s true, Dorothy came to me on the 16th when she finally realized she was pregnant. I’d known something was up before then because of the way she was acting. But that was when she finally told me — about the rape and about the pregnancy. She’d only just found out for sure that she was pregnant, although she’d suspected it for some time. I tried to comfort her, but she was inconsolable. There was nothing I could say. She was both afraid and angry — afraid because she wasn’t sure what she was going to do about the baby and angry with Burrow at what he had done. She must have brooded about it all night, because the following day she decided to kill him.”
“To kill him?”
“Yes.”
“To kill
“Yes.”
“How?”
“With my father’s gun.”
“And what? She went to Edgar’s place to get his gun and he caught her?”
“No, not exactly. You see, my father bought the gun way back in the eighties when there were all those crime scares. But by the late nineties crime was going down and he more or less forgot about the gun. So it just sat there at the back of the closet at our house.”
“Wait a minute. I thought he was no longer living at the house?”
“That’s right, he wasn’t. He’d moved out into a condo. But he didn’t take all his stuff with him. I mean, he took the important stuff, but he didn’t go through everything.”
“And one of the things he left behind was the gun?”
“Like I said, things had changed. I guess he wasn’t so paranoid by then. Or maybe he just forgot it ‘cause it was at the back of a closet. At any rate, for whatever reason, he didn’t take it.”
“And Dorothy found it?”
“Found it. Looked for it. Knew it was there. Whatever. The following day she came to my room with the gun and told me she was going to kill Burrow.”
“So what made her kill your father instead?”
“Did I say she did?”
“Well he died, didn’t he? And the cause of death was gunshot wounds from his own gun. Or are you going to tell me that it
“I wanted to stop her.”
“What?”
“I didn’t want her to do it.”
“Why not? You hated Burrow. He beat the crap out of you. And now he’d raped your sister.”
“I didn’t give a shit about Burrow! But I didn’t want Dorothy to get into trouble for it. I may have only been a kid but I knew that people who commit crimes like that usually get caught. Rape you can get away with because rapists can always say the girl consented. But amateur murderers usually get caught. And she was an amateur. I knew that if she killed him she’d get caught.”
“And what? You thought you could do it and get away with it?”
“Hell, no! I knew that with my luck I’d’ve botched it big time. I may have been a bit hot-headed but I knew my limitations.”
“So what did you do?
“I persuaded her to give me the gun. I told her that we should think about it and plan it properly. I was going to put it back.”
“But you didn’t put it back, did you?”
“Not back in
“And what? Just give it to him without an explanation?”
“I didn’t exactly have a clear plan. I just knew I had to get the gun out of the way — to stop Dorothy using it. When I got to his place, I told him I missed him and wanted to see him. He invited me in. He was usually happy to see me. He never treated me badly the way he did with Dorothy. Then, when he went to the bathroom, I crept into his bedroom and tried to hide the gun in a closet there. But he caught me and demanded to know what I was doing. He accused me of snooping. He could do that, you know, go from being friendly one minute to being angry the next. He didn’t usually do that with me, but he did with Dorothy and he knew that Dorothy and I were close. Then he saw the gun.”
“And what happened? Did he grab it?”
Jonathan hesitated for a second and his lips twitched upward. It was nearly a smile — but not quite.
“I wish I could latch on to that excuse. But he didn’t. Instead he just demanded to know what I was doing with it.”
“And what did you tell him?”
Jonathan took a deep breath.
“I told him the truth.”
“The truth?”
“Yes. Everything. I told him I was putting the gun there so it would be out of Dorothy’s reach. And I told him why.”
“You told him about the rape?”
“
Jonathan choked back his tears.
“Laughed?”
“And he said…” Jonathan swallowed the lump in his throat. Even after these years, the memory evidently still pained him. “He said: ‘With any luck it’ll cure that bull-dyke bitch.’”
He broke down in tears. Alex hated to press him, but he had to know the rest.
“And then what happened?”
“Then what happened? I… I just snapped at that point. I swung the gun round to his head and he turned away in fear. It all happened too quickly: I just didn’t think.” Alex said nothing. As a lawyer, he knew that this was not the time to put words into someone else’s mouth. “I … I pulled the trigger. The next thing I knew, his brains were splattered all over the wall.”
22:20 PDT (06:20 BST)
Alone in the office, Juanita was getting worried. Nat still hadn’t come back and she couldn’t reach Alex on the phone. If Nat was really trying to get the clinic to send the papers, then wouldn’t he have done it by now? What was taking him so long?
And where was Alex?
Time was running out and so were their options. One by one the doors had been slammed in their faces and it felt like they were boxed in on all sides. Unless they could come up with something fast, Clayton Burrow would be dead in less than two hours.
Juanita wanted to have another try with the medical center herself. They had evidently faxed over something, according to the journal, so someone at the center must have been cooperating with them. The problem was that
