All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

  “That puts us at nearly three hours between when her aunt says she dropped the girl off and when she made the call to dispatch from your office. You didn’t leave the garage any time in those three hours?”

  “No, Sheriff. I didn’t even leave the office.”

  “Three hours is an awful lot of fooling around, even for a young man like you.”

  My face got hotter and hotter, and even though it was air-conditioned in there, I started sweating. The sheriff waited, looking at me.

  “Well, we talked quite a bit, too,” I said.

  “So, that’s your story? You and the girl talked. And you fooled around some, but you didn’t have sex with her. And you didn’t leave the office any time in there. And that’s what the Quinn girl will say?”

  I nodded, but it made my guts tight, thinking about the police questioning Wavy.

  “Anything else you want to tell me?” the sheriff said.

  “That swab they took?”

  “For the gunshot residue?”

  “That might come back positive.”

  “Damn it, Junior. What’s the story?” The sheriff put out his cigarette and leaned a little closer, frowning.

  “There was a possum messing in my trash this morning and I took a shot at him.”

  “Don’t suppose you killed him?”

  “I missed.”

  “That figures,” the sheriff said. “Is that it? I’m not gonna find your prints on that gun? That Quinn girl’s exam ain’t gonna show there was more than a little fooling around?”

  “No, sir, but what kind of exam?”

  “I believe they’ll do a swab for semen and look at, you know, whether she’s got any injury. Like that.”

  “Are they going to touch her?”

  “Yes, I suppose they will.”

  “I wish they wouldn’t. She can’t stand for people to touch her.”

  It made me sick. That I hadn’t had the self-control to say, “No, Wavy.” Or the goddamn good sense to close up the shop and take her to my house. I’d had this great plan and I screwed it up with plain old carelessness.

  “She’ll be okay,” the sheriff said. “And so will you, if you’re telling me the truth.”

  7

  SHERIFF GRANT

  The federal agents crawling all over the Quinn place were part of some drug task force, and apparently that meant they couldn’t help look for two missing kids. We lost daylight before we found Wavy and Donal. I’ve had some sleepless nights as sheriff, but that was one of the worst.

  By four o’clock I gave up on sleep and went back to the station. The feds had made about a dozen arrests, left me to figure out where to keep them overnight. I sent the women over to Belton County, and put Junior Barfoot in the old drunk tank in the basement. It hadn’t been used in twenty years and still smelled like piss. Down there in the dark, he was this big mountain on the narrow bunk.

  “You asleep, Junior?”

  “Not likely.” He sat up and gave a long sigh.

  “I thought you might have some idea where those Quinn kids are.”

  “Isn’t Wavy with her aunt?”

  “No, your girl ran off from the hospital yesterday afternoon.”

  “You just now decided to tell me that?”

  He was a soft-spoken man, but when he took hold of the bars in front of me, I stepped back. I’d never been afraid of him, but right then, I was glad for those bars between us. I’d seen a few men who needed a doctor when he was done with them.

  “Did you look up in the meadow? Those cottonwoods? By the windmill? What about my house?” he said.

  “We can check again. And your house is locked up.”

  “She’s got a key.”

  “Alright, we’ll start there.”

  “Let me know, will you, Sheriff? When you find them.”

  I promised I would, and went up to the desk, where Haskins was on duty.

  “Have Delbert check Junior’s house for the girl. I’m going up to the Quinn place,” I said.

  “The Rotary’s coming out to volunteer come dawn,” Haskins said.

  “Did Barfoot tell you something?” Agent Cardoza said. I hadn’t noticed him sitting at one of the desks in the squad room, and I wished he hadn’t noticed me. A fireplug of a man with a bristly black mustache, he looked as rough as I felt. But he was a federal agent, so even at four in the morning, he wore a suit and tie.

  “He’s got an idea about where the Quinn kids might be,” I said.

  “You mind if I tag along?”

  I did mind, but I shrugged. Cardoza seemed decent enough, but he wasn’t losing any sleep over those missing kids. What was keeping him awake was the fact that his big career-making drug bust had farted and failed. With Liam Quinn dead, Cardoza and the rest of the feds were looking around to see what they could salvage.

  Driving out to the ranch, he said, “I like Barfoot for the murders. Looks to me like he tried to make it look like a murder-suicide.”

  “If you’re looking for somebody who’d plan a thing like that, he’s not your man.”

  “In a big drug operation like this, murder is sometimes the best way to move up the ladder.”

  Cardoza could like Junior for the murders all he wanted, but I’d believe it when I saw the evidence.

  I’d known Junior Barfoot his whole life, although I don’t suppose I knew him by name until the night I drove him to the emergency room in Garringer. He was maybe ten years old and his old man broke the boy’s jaw. Junior didn’t even cry when they wired his mouth shut and took out a tooth to put a straw through. Coming from that, I figured he’d end up on the same path as the rest of his family. Both his folks drunk all the time, an older brother in prison for armed robbery, older sister in and out of jail, and the oldest brother shot dead in a bar fight before he was even old enough to drink.

  Wasn’t but four years after that trip to the emergency room, when Junior was about fourteen, we got our usual domestic disturbance call out to their house. Mrs. Barfoot was standing on the front lawn, her housedress torn and her nose bloodied. Inside, I expected to find the old man going at Junior, but for the first time it was the other way around. Junior was pounding on him and screaming, “I’ll fucking kill you!” It took me, two deputies, and a volunteer fireman to pry Junior off his father. He was a big boy.

  After Barfoot Senior was in the hospital, their youngest girl, who was retarded, was put in a state home, and Junior went to stay with Mrs. Barfoot’s family down in Oklahoma. That’s when he started going by Kellen, her maiden name. He came back two years later, and almost immediately got into trouble. I never saw anybody could tear up a bar the way he could. Furniture broken and grown men bleeding and crying, looking like they’d been hit by a train.

  So I could imagine Junior killing somebody if he got angry enough, but he wouldn’t waste any energy trying to plan it or cover it up.

  “The rape charge is a problem for us, since the girl isn’t cooperating,” Cardoza said. “We’d rather get Barfoot on the murders or the meth production. Your county prosecutor isn’t going to give us any trouble, is he?”

  “My county prosecutor is likely to do whatever he wants. He usually does.”

  At the farmhouse, I headed for the windmill, with Cardoza trailing.

  I panned my flashlight around the stock tank, and there sat a little boy. He was awake, huddled up in his undershorts with a pile of bloody clothes next to him, probably been there all night.

  “Hey,” I said. “Are you Donal?”

  He looked scared, but he nodded and said, “Is Wavy okay?”

  “Why are you worried about her?” Cardoza said, trying to make that one question mean something.

  “She’s fine, son.” I hoped it wasn’t a lie. “You want me to take you to her?”

  “Will you piggyback me like Kellen does?”

  The kid was worn out, so I wrapped him in my windbreaker and carried him up the hill to the car. Left Cardoza to gather up the bloody clothes for evidence.

/>   Driving back to Powell, I radioed the station.

  “I was just set to call you,” Haskins said. “Delbert picked up the Quinn girl at Junior Barfoot’s house. Looks like she spent the night there.”

  “Well, take her up to the motel to her aunt. I’m bringing her brother.”

  “I’d rather we didn’t put them together just yet,” Cardoza said. “He’s our only eyewitness.”

  “Your eyewitness is seven years old. He’s been up all night, and I bet he’d like to make sure his sister’s okay.”

  “Look, I have a little boy about Donal’s age. I just—”

  “Bet you wouldn’t think much of me interrogating your son at a time like this.”

  The sun was coming up when we got to the motel. Mrs. Newling was already dressed, didn’t look like she’d slept either. I carried Donal into the room and put him to bed. As I was leaving, Delbert pulled up with Wavy Quinn. She stepped out of the patrol car, wearing a man’s T-shirt like a dress, and a pair of motorcycle boots. She brushed past me and went straight to her brother.

  Driving back to the station, Cardoza said, “I wonder what he saw yesterday that he was so worried about her. Do you think he saw Barfoot kill his parents?”

  “You’re barking up the wrong tree there.”

  “But you have to wonder if Donal brought the gun to the garage to point a finger at Barfoot,” Cardoza said.

  “Or maybe the garage was someplace familiar. And he knew his sister was there.”

  “Why bring the gun, though? And why’d he leave if he went there for his sister?”

  “Your little boy, does everything he do make sense?”

  I’d had enough of Cardoza, but I wasn’t anywhere near getting shut of him. The feds were like a plague of cockroaches, except they didn’t scatter when you turned on the lights. They were convinced somebody would roll over on Junior, but everybody they interviewed said the same thing: Junior wasn’t Quinn’s second-in-command. This Butch character was, and he’d lit out in Brenda Newling’s car. Junior was just Quinn’s mechanic, and that held some water, seeing as he had half-ownership in Cutcheon’s garage. The feds took that place apart, pored over the books, and got nothing. Not a trace of meth, not a misplaced decimal point, which I could’ve predicted. Dan Cutcheon wouldn’t put up with any nonsense.

  As for the murders, the gun being on his property was the only thing to connect Junior to them. That made Cutcheon a suspect, too.

  In the end it all came down to the kids’ statements. The girl wouldn’t talk and they had to hold her down to get fingerprints and a blood sample. That left us with her brother.

  Against my better judgment, I went along with Cardoza’s idea to take the boy on a walk-through of that day. Kids are tough, but Donal sure didn’t want to go back to that house. I held his hand going up the drive, with half-a-dozen agents behind us, including Cardoza. Never mind that he had a boy that same age, he was looking out for his career.

  “What were you doing before you went inside the house?” Cardoza said.

  “I was outside,” Donal said.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Outside. On the porch.”

  I knew what Cardoza was trying for, but the kid’s story started with him standing on the porch.

  “I was going to see Mama. Because Sandy and me heard the car coming back.”

  I opened the door and, brave as can be, Donal went in. The place was mostly cleaned up, but there was a brown spot on the kitchen floor, where blood had stained the linoleum. Same in the hallway.

  Donal walked us around the crime scene. Here was Daddy. Here was Mama. He pointed to where the gun had been in Mrs. Quinn’s hand, before he took it.

  “Kellen says you can’t leave a gun lying around.”

  “Kellen told you that on the day you found Mommy and Daddy?” Cardoza said.

  “No. Before, when he let me and Wavy try his gun. He said, ‘You have to be careful. You can’t leave a gun lying around.’”

  “He let you shoot his gun?”

  “If we were careful and only pointed at the beer cans.”

  “Was Kellen here to tell you to take the gun?” I don’t know how Cardoza figured to get the truth if he was going to keep feeding Donal lines.

  “No, I was all by myself,” Donal said, the same way he said, “I was outside.” Like he’d practiced it.

  “But you took the gun?”

  “Because it wasn’t safe to leave it lying around.”

  You couldn’t fault the kid on his logic. Or his gun habits. When my deputy found the pistol, the safety was on.

  After the house, Donal showed us the route he took that day, more than five miles of hayfields and woods, to Cutcheon’s garage.

  On the walk, Cardoza said to me, “He’s lying about what happened up at the house.” Like he was the only one could see that. “You think Barfoot threatened him?”

  “Don’t seem to me he’s scared of Junior.”

  “It just kills me. I keep seeing my son, walking all this way.” Cardoza seemed sincere, but he kept looking at his watch. The feds were set on proving Junior had time to go from the garage to the farmhouse and back. They didn’t have any eyewitnesses for that, aside from a neighbor who might have heard a motorcycle, but wasn’t sure what time.

  It was hot and humid, like the day the Quinns were killed, and by the time we got to the garage, Cardoza and I were dripping with sweat. Junior would have been in worse shape, as much weight as he was carrying.

  Donal showed us how he walked in through the open garage door and laid the gun on Junior’s workbench. Instead of knocking at the office door, he looked through a gap at the bottom of the blinds. Up on his toes, resting a hand on the windowsill.

  “Wavy says it’s okay to watch. That’s how you learn things.”

  “Who was in the office?” Cardoza said.

  “Wavy and Kellen.”

  “What were they doing when you looked in?”

  “Fucking. Like Daddy does to Sandy on the kitchen table. When is Sandy coming back? I miss her.”

  “I don’t know, son.” I doubted she was coming back. The feds had charged her with possession and intent to distribute.

  “I’m thirsty. Can we get a pop out of Kellen’s fridge?”

  “Did you do that on that day?” Cardoza said.

  “No. I didn’t want Wavy to catch me spying.”

  We were all thirsty from hiking, so we went into the office and got some drinks. Cardoza sat Donal down in the chair, perched himself on the corner of the desk, and said, “What do you mean by fucking? What was Kellen doing to Wavy?”

  “You know. On the table. Like cooking. Wavy says that’s how babies are made.”

  “Maybe you could just tell me what you think it means.”

  Donal took a drink of his pop and gave Cardoza a suspicious look. Apparently the rape charge wasn’t a problem for the feds anymore.

  “Putting his thing in her. Making a baby. Except Daddy fucks Sandy all the time and they never make a baby. But maybe Wavy and Kellen could make one.”

  It would’ve been funny, if it wasn’t so messed up. Made me think a little harder about him asking, “Is Wavy okay?” Because of what he’d seen at the garage? I planned to ask Junior about that.

  “So what did you do then?” Cardoza said.

  “I left the gun here. Kellen would know what to do with it. I needed to tell somebody about Mama, so I went back to the house to see if he—” The boy went pale as ashes and snapped his mouth shut. He started to shivering so hard I reached out to take the pop bottle before he dropped it.

  “To see if who what?” I said. I’d been letting Cardoza take the lead, but something had just happened.

  Donal brushed his hand against his shirt.

  “There was dirt on me. I wanted to go swimming. To wash the dirt off,” he said. Blood, he meant, but I couldn’t blame him for not wanting to think about that. He went back to the farmhouse, but when he got there, my deputies were there.


  “Daddy says, stay away from the pigs, so I hid.”

  That was the end of the boy’s story.

  After we returned Donal to his aunt, Cardoza and I went for coffee.

  “Goddamn it,” Cardoza said. “He almost slipped and told us what he’s trying to keep a secret.”

  “He won’t make that mistake again. Now he’s had a chance to practice it.”

  “That poor kid. He walked ten miles. One way carrying the gun that killed his parents, and back the other way knowing that lowlife was banging his sister. You still think Barfoot is innocent?”

  * * *

  On the one side, I had the feds trying to ram murder charges down Junior’s throat and on the other side, I had Brenda Newling, who was just as eager to see him in jail. I’m not a squeamish man. I’d been sheriff for twenty-two years, and dealt with more than a few rapes, but I didn’t relish having a woman sit in my office and say the word “rape” twenty times in ten minutes.

  I made the mistake of suggesting that the girl was willing.

  “She is barely fourteen years old and he raped her,” Mrs. Newling said.

  “The problem is we don’t have much in the way of evidence for a rape charge. Indecent exposure might stick, since we’ve got you as a witness.”

  “The prosecutor says that the evidence from the office and Wavy’s clothes is enough.”

  Make that the feds, Mrs. Newling, and the county prosecutor breathing down my neck, plus a mess of evidence from the two scenes.

  At the farmhouse: Liam Quinn’s blood in the hallway and bathroom. Four bullets, two through his chest while he stood in the hallway, and two through his back while he crawled away. Valerie Quinn’s blood in the kitchen. One bullet above her right ear. Entry wound with contact powder burns around it. Exit wound the whole left side of her head. What looked like a suicide note on the kitchen table.

  Liam, I’m done letting you make me miserable. I hope you’re happy with your whores, but you’re never going to fuck me again. Val.

  At the garage: blood on the floor and the workbench belonged to Roger Betsworth, from his accident. The smudge of blood on the windowsill of the office belonged to Valerie Quinn. Her son transferred it from his hand, left his fingerprints behind. Left them all over the gun, too, which was covered in Valerie Quinn’s blood.