“You’re serious? Is it really that easy?”
He smirks. “It’s not easy, but based on what I’ve done so far, I think it might be possible.”
“Might?”
“I’ve never tried it,” he says. “And nobody I’ve talked to has, either. In theory it should be doable, assuming I can figure out the rendering engine issue. The point is, it’s worth a try.”
When it comes to information technology, I’m out of my depth. Having the killer open an email and send us a photo of himself seems like television, not reality. But in the brave new world of bits and bytes anything is possible. At least Hanford seems to think so.
“It’s ironic,” I say.
“What is?”
“I doubt he took her laptop just so he could send taunting emails. He must have had some contact with her, and he was afraid emails, pictures, something would lead us to him. He’s been smart enough not to use the phone, knowing we can trace him when it pings the nearest tower, but he couldn’t resist sending the email. It must give him a thrill, a sense of power. Without realizing it, he’s left a trail of bread crumbs that lead right back to him.”
“Assuming my plan actually works.”
“How soon can we try it?”
Hanford cocks his head. “If I can get the help I need, there might be something to test by this time tomorrow. At the latest, we’ll have something Monday. Obviously, we’ll have to send the reply through your computer. Then it’s a waiting game until he checks for mail. I can’t guarantee we’ll have a lot of information to work with, but I’ll get as much as I can.”
“Get me a picture, Quincy, and you’ll become a crime-fighting legend. Then you can buy yourself a couch.”
I delete Tammy’s message within a second or two of hearing her voice. Force of habit. The one from Curtis Blunt leads me to the emergency room at Ben Taub, where I find the reverend in another all-black ensemble wedged into a row of molded plastic seats with his face resting in his hands. I pause over him, not wanting to interrupt any in-progress prayers. Sensing me, he gives a startled jump.
“Where is he?” I ask.
“Surgery. They beat him up pretty good. You know what an open skull fracture is? The doctor says they’ve gotta pick all the bones out of the brain before they can suture it up.”
“Was he conscious when they brought him in?”
He shrugs.
I sit next to him, exhaling. “What happened?”
“All I know is somebody cracked his head open. I thought you’d want to be informed on account of that message you left yesterday. I take it you expected something like this might happen to him? You don’t seem surprised.”
“Jason seems to have a self-destructive streak. He goes out looking for a fight, and if he can’t find one, he starts it. So yeah, I’m not surprised. It was a week ago today Simone was killed. He’s just marking the anniversary.”
“The way they made it sound, he’ll be lucky to survive. And if there’s no permanent brain damage, it will be a miracle.”
“You believe in miracles.”
“Yeah,” he says, “but I’m not so sure the Lord will bless a thing like this with healing.”
“Jason’s not a bad kid.”
He turns in his chair. “Last time the two of us spoke, you were telling me Jason filleted his wife, and now you think he’s not a bad kid?”
“It’s my job to think people are guilty,” I say, “until I know otherwise. The presumption of innocence is for the jury.”
Blunt gives my words more weight than I intend, chewing them over as he rubs his tired eyes. The fact that he’s here at all surprises me. His concern for Jason Young must be genuine.
“You know something, Detective,” he says. “The devil’s name-Satan-it comes from an old Hebrew word that means ‘the accuser.’ Ha-Satan. The way you talk about your job has me wondering if there’s a whole lot of difference between you and him. On the one hand, you act like you care about what happens to this boy, and on the other you drive him to it.”
“Jason was on this path long before I showed up,” I say, shaking my head. “Last weekend, while I was with his dead wife, he picked a fight in a strip club.”
He winces. “At a what?”
“Never mind,” I say. “Forget I said that.”
“You just don’t stop, do you? Jason’s laying in there on the stretcher with his head in pieces, and here you are, kicking him when he’s down.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything, but you-”
“So it’s my fault now? Listen, Detective, I made a mistake calling you. I can see that now. You’ve done your duty, so why don’t you get on out of here? Whether that boy lives or dies, it’s got nothing to do with you.”
“I’d like to see it through-”
“I absolve you of guilt,” he says. “I’ll handle this from here on out.”
Since my daughter died, I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol, but at times like this, standing outside the automatic doors as a fresh ambulance pulls up, feeling the glare of the jumped-up preacher right between my shoulder blades, I could drink myself into oblivion without regret.
But he’s right, I tell myself. It’s got nothing to do with me. I didn’t push Jason Young into anything. He made those choices all on his own.
All I did was stand by and let him.
The lights are on in my kitchen, and when I push through the back door, a solemn conversation is in progress between Charlotte and Carter Robb. She leans in a crook in the counter, the right angle connecting the sink and the stove, with an oversized coffee mug in both hands. Carter perches on a stool by the island. Both of them stare, surprised by my sudden appearance.
I’ve had enough people staring at me for one day.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming back,” Charlotte says. “You left so early this morning, I didn’t hear you go.”
“I left last night about one. Something came up with the case.”
“Have you made a breakthrough?” Carter asks.
I ignore this. “Tomorrow morning I’m driving up to Huntsville. I’d better get my head down for a few hours.”
“We were just talking about Carter’s job,” she says. “If you have a few minutes to spare, maybe you could give us your opinion.”
“My opinion on what?” I lay my damp jacket over the back of a breakfast table chair, then help myself to some of the newly brewed decaf. “If it’s a life coach you’re after, I’m not exactly your best option. Not tonight.”
“Things with Murray are getting a little awkward,” Carter says.
His boss, Murray Abernathy, is a wealthy benefactor in the mold of Curtis Blunt, only instead of minting DVDs of himself preaching to a studio audience, Murray bought an old brick building off of Westheimer and opened an outreach center for the community, a place where people can walk in off the street for a little social interaction, shoot the breeze about the great philosophical conundrums, and leave feeling better about themselves. When Carter was a suburban youth pastor, he’d taken a group of his teenage charges to the center to do volunteer work, and a couple of them met their future murderer, a man named Frank Rios. Personally, I would have razed the place to the ground before taking a job there, but I’m not Carter.
“Awkward in what way?” I ask. “Murray seems all right.”
“It’s not him exactly. It’s just. .” He glances toward Charlotte. “I assumed Murray was dipping into his own pocket to support the center, that it was a labor of love. And I found out today it’s not exactly like that.”
“What did you discover?”
“Usually Murray keeps me out of the support side of things, but I saw some paperwork I wasn’t supposed to. Turns out the center wasn’t Murray’s idea. Some of the larger churches around here got together and they came up with this as a kind of experiment. They brought him in to run the center. I asked him point-blank and he admitted it. The center’s a laboratory for new ideas. What we’re doing today, he says, will be best practices for the church of tomorrow.”