“Oh really?”
“Yes. And the picture of Esther when she was younger.”
“And what conclusions have you drawn?”
“I … I’m not sure. I know that you’ve had an obsession with this case for some time. And maybe even an obsession with the Olsen family. The passport shows that she went to England but never came back here or entered another country. ”
“But you still don’t know what to make of it,” Nat taunted.
“No.”
“And presumably it was your burglar friend Lee who found the passport and picture?”
“Yes. Lee.”
“I should’ve guessed. I should have searched him.”
“I also know about Dusenbury and Jimmy … and Jonathan.”
Nat smiled.
“You really
“But I still don’t understand the rest, what you did … the why and the wherefore.”
“Does it really matter now? Isn’t it more important that the man who tormented Dorothy has finally got what he deserved?”
“Do you mean Clayton Burrow or Edgar Olsen?”
Nat shrugged.
“Both, I guess.”
“To be perfectly honest, Nat, that’s
“My … interest?”
“Oh come on, let’s not play games, Nat. You badgered your way into my office, battering down my defenses with flattery. You set your sights on working for me and you made it happen. You went about it like a military campaign. You also made sure that I got the Clayton Burrow case. You were working with the Public Defender’s office and you got some con to recommend me to Burrow. Hell, I wouldn’t even be surprised if you persuaded the other law firm to drop the case.”
“Oh no, that I didn’t do. That was just luck. They wanted out and I saw my opportunity. If they hadn’t dropped out, I’d’ve probably gone to work for them. Although I must confess I liked it a whole lot more this way — for reasons that should have figured out by now.”
“Then perhaps you’d like to tell me.”
“Well firstly, I liked the irony of defending the man who was found guilty of killing her.”
“Except that he didn’t kill her, did he?”
“No,” replied Nat, swallowing nervously. “I did.”
00:09 PDT
Juanita was waiting for the second page of the fax to come through. But there seemed to be a problem. The machine was making frantic noises like it was making valiant efforts to print the page, but it wasn’t happening. After a few more seconds, the machine fell silent and it flashed a message on the LCD display: “Black toner empty.”
“Damn!” she cursed.
She raced to the office supply cupboard and found another, angrily ripping the box open and tearing the wrapping off the cartridge. There was a frantic haste in her movements as she opened the fax machine and removed the old cartridge, tossed it aside, pulled off the tape that covered the flow-hole of the cartridge and slotted it into the machine.
Then came the long wait for the machine to restart. The motor cranked to life and started huffing and puffing like an aging locomotive struggling up a high-grade track to the top of a hill. Even then it wasn’t over: the LCD display invited her to choose “Y” or “N” for whether she had changed each of the four cartridges. And even then, after more cranking and wheezing, the LCD announced: “Cleaning.”
Every time! She thought to herself. Every fucking time!
00:10 PDT
“I had a feeling that you were going to say that,” said Alex, meeting Nat’s eyes unflinchingly. “I assume you were one of her classmates. I don’t remember your picture in the year book. Which one were you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Nat.
“Is he dead?” asked one of the crowd of people, a reporter.
“The doctor’s still checking.”
“Why was it called off?” asked the reporter.
“They got a call from the governor,” said another reporter.
For a moment, Alex and Nat had got distracted by the exchange. But now they looked at each other again.
“Okay,” said Alex. “I don’t need to know the minutiae now. But I want to understand why. Why did you kill her? What had she done to you?”
“You really don’t get it, do you?” asked Nat with a sneer in his voice. “I was doing her a favor.”
“A favor?”
“Yeah, you know … like in that movie —
Alex was beginning to understand. “You wanted to put her out of her misery?”
Nat nodded.
“Think about it. An abusive father. An indifferent mother who turned a blind eye to what her father was doing to her. Bullying in school, not just at the hands of Clayton Burrow but most of her class. Burrow was just the ring leader, but how do you think the rest of them reacted to a cross-dressing bull-dyke?”
“So what was it? A mercy killing?”
“You could call it that. I know that’s not a defense in law, but it’s the truth.”
“But when did you do it?”
“What do you mean, when?”
“Well it wasn’t round about the time she vanished. We know that she went to London and had an abortion. We know that she never came back. You had her passport at your place and it didn’t have any exit stamp from England. What happened, Nat? Did you go over to England and kill her there?”
“I had to. It was hard. To do something like that is never easy. But I had to. I finally killed her when she was over there.”
“What do you mean ‘finally’? Had you been trying before?”
“Oh, I’d been trying to kill her for a long time.”
00:11 PDT
Looking at the clock on the wall, Juanita was frantic. The fax machine was taking ages to go through its self- cleaning routine. She shifted uncomfortably, waiting for it to finish and start printing again.
But what was the point? Looking at the clock on the wall, she realized that it was too late. Unless they had taken a long time reading out the warrant or Clayton had made a particularly long final statement, he had to be dead by now.
