Allie’s compassionate eyes rested on her. “Do you feel vulnerable to another attack?”
“A little,” she said. “But I’ve got to get over it. I have a lot to do tomorrow, and I don’t have time to slink around in hiding.”
“I thought you were taking the rest of the week off.”
“I’m going to the jail to talk to Jerry Ingalls. I may decide to represent him.”
Allie just stared at her for a moment. “Did you tell Dan?”
“No. He won’t like it. But I have to do it anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because it might be the right thing. The man who held me hostage the other night…he doesn’t seem like the type to do these things…”
“He sure had a gun to your head, Jill. They were real bullets.”
“But he didn’t pull the trigger. Not on me. He showed me pictures of his children. When his wife came in, he let her talk him out of it. I could tell he loved her.”
“And because he loves his wife, you don’t think he was even an accessory to the bombing?”
Jill considered that and realized it didn’t make sense. “I’m just considering that he may not have been.”
Allie came to the bed to hug her. “You’ve always had good instincts,” she said. “All I know to do is pray for you.”
“That’s the best thing. And as for Dan…well, I’ll just have to deal with that as it comes. Our relationship is kind of fragile right now. I don’t know. He may decide it’s not worth it.”
“Can you live with that?” Allie asked.
“I don’t want to,” Jill said. “But either we’re compatible or we’re not. We might as well find out now.”
Chapter Forty-Six
The police station was abuzz with activity after the last strike by the killer, and Jill walked in and looked around. She didn’t see Stan or Sid anywhere, so she headed for the front desk and asked to see Jerry Ingalls in an interrogation room where she could question him privately.
“Are you questionin’ him as his attorney, Jill?” R.J. Albright asked her.
“I think so,” she said.
“Didn’t you do that the other night? Sid says you chewed Ingalls up one side and down the other, and still didn’t commit to representing him.”
“Well, maybe I’ll commit today.”
“Why?”
“Because he needs an attorney, and they’re about to appoint one.”
“Don’t have to be you.”
“Maybe it does,” she said. “Which room can I have, R.J.?”
He pointed to the first room at the back of the station, and she headed back to wait for him. She went in and dropped her briefcase on the mahogany table, and went to the barred window to peer out. There wasn’t much to see, even though they kept the back lawn lit up. There was an eight-foot wall that went around the jail’s recreation area, obstructing the view from the police station to the bayou behind them. But she supposed the prisoners needed sunshine now and then, so she didn’t blame them for the wall.
The door to the room opened, and Jill turned around. She crossed her arms as Jerry came in. He was unshaven and looked as if he hadn’t slept in days. Wearily, he sat down and slumped at the table. “Did you come to ream me again?” he asked.
“No, not really.” She waited for the door to close, then fought the chill running down her back. This was the man who had threatened to kill her just a few days ago.
“For somebody who refuses to represent me, you sure are showing up here a lot,” he said.
She sat down and leaned forward on the table, meeting his eyes. “I’m still not sure I’ll represent you, but I wanted to talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About what happened to your wife and children last night.”
He looked confused, and she studied his face earnestly for some sign of guile. There was none. “What do you mean, what happened to my wife and children?”
“No one’s told you?” she asked.
He stiffened, and his eyes grew wide as his face reddened. “Is my family all right?”
“Yes, they’re fine,” she said. “But last night, while Debbie was rocking Christy in the front bedroom, someone threw something through the window and started the house on fire—”
He sprang up out of his chair, knocking it over, and backed against the wall with both hands to his head. “He didn’t! Tell me he didn’t!”
“Who didn’t?” Jill demanded through stiff lips.
His hands fell limp to his sides, and he came back to the table and bent over it, breathing hard. “Just…did they catch him?”
“No,” she said. “He got away. We don’t know how he keeps escaping, but somehow he does. Jerry, if Debbie hadn’t been in there with Christy at the time, if she’d been sitting a little closer to the window…they could be dead now. You’ve got to tell us who this is.”
He began to pace across the room. A fine layer of perspiration glistened on his skin. “Where are they now?”
“They’re staying with some friends of mine. Ray’s the fire chief in town, and his wife Susan…she’s the one who took care of the kids when Debbie came to the motel…”
His eyes shifted from side to side across the room, as if considering all his options. “I don’t know what to do! My family—”
“Tell the truth,” she said. “If you’re not involved, Jerry, your only hope is to tell us who did this.”
He slammed his hands on the table. “But he can’t help it. It’s not his fault.”
“Why isn’t it his fault, Jerry?”
He turned his face to the wall, banged a fist on it. Someone opened the door to see if Jill was in danger. She waved them away.
“I can’t believe he would do that. We had a covenant. We’re supposed to protect each other’s families.”
“A covenant? What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that we—” He stopped cold and turned back around, as if he’d said too much already. “Nothing. I didn’t mean anything.”
She couldn’t believe he was going to clam up now. She got to her feet and came around the table. “Jerry, your children could be in danger. Your wife could be a target for him. He’s still out there. He isn’t giving up. He’s tried to kill me, your wife, your kids, and he did kill three people and orphan and injure a little boy!”
“How is that boy?” he asked.
She hesitated a moment, surprised by his concern. “He woke up yesterday. He’s grieving because they’re burying his mother today.”
Jerry looked away and rubbed his eyes roughly. “I don’t believe this. This wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Jerry, are you protecting this man out of some sense of honor?”
He shook his head, unable to answer.
“Because there’s no honor in protecting a crazed killer. No honor at all.”
“A covenant is a covenant,” he bit out.
She frowned. “Jerry, look at me.”
For a moment, he kept his back to her, then finally, he turned around and met her eyes.
“If you want me to represent you, you’re going to have to be straight with me. You’re going to have to tell me a whole lot more than this.”
He rubbed his temples, then stepped toward the table and sank back into his chair. He looked as if the last drop of energy had just drained right out of him. “What do you know about covenants?” he asked.
She thought this was another challenge about her not keeping her word. “I know it’s an agreement. I know about honor and all that—”
“No,” he cut in. “I mean, what do you really know about the Jewish custom of cutting covenant?”
She twisted her face at the question. “Well, nothing, I guess.”
“I didn’t think so.” He got up again and began pacing across the room, thinking hard as he spoke. “They used to take animals and cut them in half, longwise, and lay them opposite each other, and walk between the two pieces. It was how they sealed a covenant.”
>
Jill remembered she had heard that before. “Yeah. Just like in Genesis when God told Abraham to cut the animals in half.”
“Yes!” Jerry said, pointing to her, as if she—a simpleton—had just understood a complicated concept. “And God was the one who walked between the pieces of flesh, in the form of a smoking oven and a flaming torch. And that was the Abrahamic covenant.”
Jill wondered how in the world this could possibly have anything to do with Jerry’s case. She hoped he was going to tell her.
“At Jewish wedding ceremonies, the fathers would do the same things.”
“What things?”
“They would cut the animals in half and lay them opposite each other, and the father of the bride and the father of the groom would walk between the pieces. In doing that, they were saying, ‘I will give my life for this covenant. If my child fails to keep it, may the Lord do the same to me that I did to these animals.’”
“I still don’t understand what this has to do with the post office—”
“Just listen,” he said, sitting back down opposite her at the table, his eyes boring into hers. “When people made a covenant, they kept it, because it’s witnessed by God. It’s very serious.”
“I understand that,” she said. “Now, you tell me. Are you in a covenant with this person?”
He got up and turned his back to her again. Frustrated, Jill leaned on the table. “Jerry, if you are obstructing justice and enabling him to commit more crimes, maybe against your own family, God will not honor that.”
“Just listen,” he said. “Jonathan, Saul’s son, entered into covenant with David. They swore to protect each other with their lives. Everything that was Jonathan’s became David’s, and everything that was David’s became Jonathan’s. They were identified with each other.”
She shook her head. Maybe he was unstable, she thought. Maybe he needed to be hospitalized. She rubbed her forehead. “Jerry, you don’t have to keep telling me these things.”
“When Saul, Jonathan’s father, set out to kill David, you didn’t see Jonathan siding with Saul. He had a covenant with David, and that superceded his relationship with his father. He was sworn to protect David. That’s what it means when you enter covenant with someone. You keep it. You take it seriously. You defend and protect them. You give them what’s yours…”
“And is this what you did with this person?”
He closed his eyes and sat down again, and she could see the struggle on his face, as if he was fighting a memory. A terrible, painful memory.
“Jerry, if this is what binds you to this person, he didn’t keep his end of the bargain. He betrayed you when he went after your family.”
“The covenant stands, even if it’s one-sided,” he said. “God kept his covenant, even though the Israelites broke it over and over.”
“You’re not God!” She slid her hands down her face and looked at him over the fingertips. “Jerry, do you or do you not know who blew up the post office?”
He banged his fists on the table again. “I’m telling you, when you walk between the pieces, you’re in covenant.”
Now it was her turn to slam her hands on the table. “So you take the fall for some maniac and go to prison for the rest of your life for something you didn’t do? What about your covenant with your wife?”
He closed his eyes as he struggled with that thought. “Yes. I do have to put that first. My wife and children…But what if this was a message to me? A warning not to talk? What if I give you his name and he goes after Debbie and the kids for revenge?”
“Jerry, he’s a crazy, unpredictable, reckless killer. Your family will be much better off if we know who he is so we can find him and stop him.”
“But he’ll feel justified in his revenge if he thinks I broke covenant. He has a rationale for everything.” His voice broke and emotion twisted his face. “We went between the pieces. I didn’t walk. I was carried.” He stopped and swallowed, trying to rein those emotions in.
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘carried’?”
“I was bleeding to death,” he bit out. “I wasn’t the only one. But he came back for me. I do owe him.”
It was the first thing he’d said that made any sense to her. Had it happened in war? Had the killer saved Jerry’s life? “Jerry, are you talking about Vietnam?”
He didn’t answer, which was answer enough. He leaned on the table and stared into her face. “Some people can’t be held accountable,” he said. “Some people don’t have the mental faculties, and sometimes…that’s our fault. We have to protect them because we swore we would.”
“Jerry, you’re the one who sounds like you have mental problems. This sounds crazy. They’re just gonna think you’re insane, that you blew up the post office because you don’t know right from wrong. I’ll only represent you if you’re innocent, Jerry. I’m not going to do the ‘guilty by reason of insanity’ defense. If you would just give me the name, tell me what really happened, the last time you saw him, why it was your pickup at the post office, why you were at the motel…”
He covered his face and shook his head harder with each question she posed to him.
“Jerry, your arraignment is the end of the week. They’re going to appoint an attorney for you if I won’t represent you.”
“You could do it,” he cried. “You said you would. That’s why I let you go.”
“And what would you have done if I hadn’t? Killed me? What did you expect me to do?”
“Some people, when they give their word, they stand by it.”
“When it’s done under duress, I don’t think it counts.”
“Read about the Gibeonites,” he said. “Read about the deceitful way they got Israel to enter into covenant with them. Joshua kept it, anyway, even when they knew they’d been deceived, because Joshua knew how serious covenant was.”
Jill didn’t remember any of these stories. She vowed to herself that tonight she would start reading the Old Testament again. “I don’t know anything about Gibeonites, Jerry. I don’t know anything about Joshua’s covenant with them. All I know is that I am not obligated to represent you, and if I don’t feel that you’re being straight with me, I’m not going to. So you have a choice. You can either tell me who did this, or you can get yourself another attorney.”
When he didn’t answer, she took her legal pad and pen and her laptop, which were spread out on the desk, and began to pack them back into her briefcase. She got up and started to the door, then turned back around midstride. “I only came here because your wife convinced me to. She’s very persuasive. When I saw that there had been an attempt against your family, I hoped you weren’t involved. I started to believe you, Jerry.”
“You can believe me now, too.”
“Still, I don’t know the whole story. I can’t represent you with only half of it. Meanwhile, whether I represent you or not, I can’t go home. I have to look over my shoulder every minute, scared to death he’s going to come out of nowhere. Even where your family is, Jerry, he could find them. This guy seems to be everywhere…and then nowhere…While you’re in your cell waxing poetic about this glorious covenant of yours, he could be out there blowing up another post office. Or a football stadium with kids in it, or an airport!”
“It’s not that hard to figure out!” Jerry shouted. “You can do it without my betraying him!”
She dropped her hand from the doorknob and stared at him, dumbfounded. “So you’re telling me that if I figure out who he is, that’s one thing, but you’re not going to help me?”
“You can figure it out,” he said.
“All right. Fine. I’ll go tell your wife you said that. While she’s sitting up, unable to sleep tonight for fear of some flaming, flying thing crashing through her window, killing her baby…” She brought her trembling hand to her forehead and tried to calm her voice. “Jerry, you should care more about your own family and the innocent bystanders who have been drawn in and may be killed because of this. Ta
lk about honor…Jerry, you pulled me into this. I didn’t ask for it. You owe it to me to tell me who wants me dead before they finish the job.”
He stared down at the floor, struggling with the tears in his eyes. “He was in my unit. He saved my life. He won a Purple Heart and a Congressional Medal of Honor.”
“I don’t care if he won a Nobel Prize!” she yelled.
“He had brain damage because he came back for me! It doesn’t take a genius to figure this out!”
Suddenly, she realized he was feeding her information. It wasn’t a name, but it was close.
He got up and went to the door, opened it. “I’m ready to go back,” he told the guard.
Jill stood frozen, watching him leave.
“Tell Debbie I love her,” he choked out. And then he was gone.
It took a few moments for Jill to get her thoughts back in line. She grabbed her briefcase, stepped out into the noise of the police department, and scanned the room for Stan.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Jill spotted Stan at the doorway of Chief Shoemaker’s office, with several men she didn’t recognize.
She cut through the desks, stepping around people, and made her way back to where Stan stood. He caught her eye, and she mouthed, “I need to talk to you.” He nodded, then excused himself and headed to his desk. She met him there and plopped down in the chair across from him.
“I’m sorry if I interrupted something,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s just the feds trying to make our lives miserable. If they’d get out of our way we might solve these crimes.”
She looked back over her shoulder at the group of men still talking to the chief of police and Sid Ford. “Is this about Jerry Ingalls?”
“You got it. If he had to blow up something, I sure wish it hadn’t been a federal building. It got the FBI involved, and there’s a certain amount of head-bashing involved in working on a case with them.”
Jill leaned forward, propping her elbows on his desk. Lowering her voice, she said, “That’s why I’m here, Stan. I just talked to Jerry, and I think he gave me some vital information.”