A Grant County Collection: Indelible, Faithless and Skin Privilege

  'Watch it,' Frank said. He had always thought that the almost thirty years he had on her should afford him some kind of deference.

  Lena changed the subject. 'You get that credit report back on the family?'

  'Yeah,' he said. 'From what I could tell, the farm's running in the black.'

  'By a lot?'

  'Not much,' he said. 'I'm trying to get a copy of their tax returns. It's not gonna be easy. The farm's privately held.'

  Lena stifled a yawn. She had slept about ten seconds last night. 'What'd the shelters say about them?'

  'That we should all thank God every day there are people like that on the planet,' Frank said, but he didn't look ready to bow his head.

  Jeffrey's door banged open, and Marty Lam walked out like an inmate doing the death row shuffle. He had his hat in his hands and his eyes on the floor.

  'Frank,' Jeffrey said, walking over. She could tell he was still angry, and could only imagine the reaming he had given Marty. The fact that he had a bruise under his eye the color of a ripe pomegranate probably hadn't done much to improve his disposition.

  He asked Frank, 'Did you get in touch with that jewelry supply company?'

  'Got the list of customers who bought cyanide right here,' Frank said, taking a sheet of paper out of his pocket. 'They sold the salts to two stores up in Macon, one down along Seventy-Five. There's a metal plater over in Augusta, too. Took three bottles so far this year.'

  'I know it's a pain in the ass, but I want you to check them out personally. See if there's any Jesus stuff around that might connect them to the church or to Abby. I'm going to talk to the family later on today and try to find out if she ever left town on her own.' He told Lena, 'We didn't get prints on the bottle of cyanide from Dale Stanley's.'

  'None?' she asked.

  'Dale always used gloves when he handled it,' Jeffrey said. 'Could be that's the reason.'

  'Could be someone wiped it down.'

  He told her, 'I want you to go talk to O'Ryan. Buddy Conford called a few minutes ago. He's representing her.'

  She felt her nose wrinkle at the lawyer's name. 'Who hired him?'

  'Fuck if I know.'

  Lena asked, 'He doesn't mind if we talk to her?'

  Jeffrey was obviously not interested in being questioned. 'Did I get it backward just then? You're my boss now?' He didn't let her answer. 'Just get her in the fucking room before he shows up.'

  'Yes, sir,' Lena said, knowing better than to push him. Frank raised his eyebrows as Lena left and she shrugged, not knowing what to say. There was no deciphering Jeffrey's mood over the last few days.

  She pushed open the fire door to the back part of the station. Marty Lam was at the water fountain, not drinking, and she nodded at him as she passed by. He looked like a deer caught in the headlights. She knew the feeling.

  Lena punched the code into the lockbox outside the holding cells and took out the keys. Patty O'Ryan was curled up on her bunk, her knees almost touching her chin. Even though she was still dressed, or rather half-dressed, in her stripper's outfit from last night, she looked about twelve when she slept, an innocent tossed around by a cruel world.

  'O'Ryan!' Lena yelled, shaking the locked cell door. Metal banged against metal, and the girl was so startled she fell onto the floor.

  'Rise and shine,' Lena sang.

  'Shut up, you stupid bitch,' O'Ryan barked back, no longer looking twelve or innocent. She put her hands to her ears as Lena shook the door again for good measure. The girl was obviously hungover, the question was from what.

  'Get up,' Lena told her. 'Turn around, put your hands behind your back.'

  She knew the drill, and barely flinched when Lena put the cuffs around her wrists. They were so thin and bony that Lena had to ratchet the locking teeth to the last notch. Girls like O'Ryan rarely ended up murdered. They were survivors. People like Abigail Bennett were the ones who needed to be looking over their shoulders.

  Lena opened the cell door, taking the girl by the arm as she led her down the hall. This close to her, Lena could smell the sweat and chemicals pouring out of her body. Her mousy brown hair hadn't been washed in a while, and it hung in chunks down to her waist. As she moved, the hair shifted, and Lena saw a puncture mark on the inside of the girl's left elbow.

  'You like meth?' Lena guessed. Like most small towns all over America, Grant had seen a thousandfold increase in meth trafficking over the last five years.

  'I know my rights,' she hissed. 'You don't have any call to keep me here.'

  'Obstructing justice, attacking an officer, resisting arrest,' Lena listed. 'You want to pee in a cup for me? I'm sure we can come up with something else.'

  'Piss on you,' she said, spitting on the floor.

  'You're a real lady, O'Ryan.'

  'And you're a real cunt, you cocksucking bitch.'

  'Woops,' Lena said, jerking the girl back by the arm so that she stumbled. O'Ryan gave a rewarding screech of pain. 'In here,' Lena ordered, pushing the girl into an interrogation room.

  'Bitch,' O'Ryan hissed as Lena forced her down into the most uncomfortable chair in the police station.

  'Don't try anything,' Lena warned, unlocking one of the cuffs and looping it through the ring Jeffrey had welded to the table. The table was bolted to the floor, which had proven to be a good idea on more than one occasion.

  'You got no right to keep me here,' O'Ryan said. 'Chip didn't do nothing.'

  'Then why'd he run?'

  'Because he knows you fuckers were gonna bang him up no matter what.'

  'How old are you?' Lena asked, sitting down across from her.

  She tilted her chin up in defiance, saying, 'Twenty-one,' pretty much assuring Lena she was underage.

  Lena told her, 'You're not helping yourself here.'

  'I want a lawyer.'

  'You've got one on the way.'

  This took her by surprise. 'Who?'

  'Don't you know?'

  'Fuck,' she spat, her expression turning into a little girl's again.

  'What's wrong?'

  'I don't want a lawyer.'

  Lena sighed. There was nothing wrong with this girl that a good slapping wouldn't fix. 'Why is that?'

  'I just don't,' she said. 'Take me to jail. Charge me. Do whatever you want to do.' She licked her lips coyly, giving Lena a once-over. 'There something else you want to do?'

  'Don't flatter yourself.'

  When the sexual offer didn't work, she turned back into the frightened little girl. Crocodile tears dribbled down her cheeks. 'Just process me. I don't have anything to say.'

  'We've got some questions.'

  'Go fuck yourself with your questions,' she said. 'I know my rights. I don't have to say jack shit to you and you can't make me.' Minus the expletives, she sounded very much like Albert, the owner of the Pink Kitty, when Jeffrey had asked him to come down to the station last night. Lena hated when people knew their rights. It made her job a hell of a lot harder.

  Lena leaned across the table, saying, 'Patty, you're not helping yourself.'

  'Fuck you with your helping myself. I can help myself fine just shutting the fuck up.'

  Spittle dotted the table, and Lena sat back, wondering what events had brought Patty O'Ryan to this kind of life. At some point, she had been someone's daughter, someone's friend. Now, she was like a leech, looking out for no one but herself.

  Lena said, 'Patty, you're not going anywhere. I can sit here all day.'

  'You can sit on a big fat cock up your ass, you cocksucking bitch.'

  There was a knock on the door and Jeffrey walked in, Buddy Conford behind him.

  O'Ryan did an instant one eighty, bursting into tears like a lost child, wailing at Buddy, 'Daddy, please get me out of here! I swear I didn't do anything!'

  Sitting in Jeffrey's office, Lena braced her foot against the bottom panel of his desk, leaning back in her chair. Buddy looked at her leg, and she didn't know if it was with interest or envy. As a teenager, a car accident had
taken his right leg from the knee down. Buddy's left eye had been lost to cancer a few years later and more recently, an angry client had shot him point-blank range over the matter of a bill. Buddy had lost a kidney from that fiasco, but he still managed to get the charge of attempted murder against his client reduced to simple assault. When he said he was a defendant's advocate, he wasn't lying.

  Buddy asked, 'That boyfriend of yours staying out of trouble?'

  'Let's not talk about it,' Lena said, regretting yet again that she had involved Buddy Conford in Ethan's troubles. The problem was, when you were on the other side of the table and you needed a lawyer, you wanted the wiliest, most crooked one out there. It was the old proverb of lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. Lena was still itching from it.

  'You taking care of yourself?' Buddy pressed.

  Lena turned around, trying to see what was keeping Jeffrey. He was talking to Frank, a sheet of paper in his hand. He patted Frank on the shoulder, then walked toward the office.

  'Sorry,' Jeffrey said. He shook his head once at Lena, indicating nothing had broken. He sat behind his desk, turning the paper facedown on the blotter.

  'Nice shiner,' Buddy said, indicating Jeffrey's eye.

  Jeffrey obviously wasn't up for small talk. 'Didn't know you had a daughter, Buddy.'

  'Stepdaughter,' he corrected, looking as if he regretted having to admit it. 'I married her mama last year. We've been dating off and on for pretty much the last ten years. She's just a handful of trouble.'

  'The mama or the daughter?' Jeffrey asked, and they shared one of their white-man chuckles.

  Buddy sighed, gripping either side of the chair with his hands. He was wearing his prosthetic leg today, but he still had a cane. For some reason, the cane reminded Lena of Greg Mitchell. Despite her best intentions, she had found herself looking out for her old boyfriend this morning as she drove into work, hoping he was out for a walk. Not that she knew what she'd say to him.

  'Patty's got a drug problem,' Buddy told them. 'We've had her in and out of treatment.'

  'Where's her father?'

  Buddy held his hands out in a wide shrug. 'Got me.'

  Lena asked, 'Meth?'

  'What else?' he said, dropping his hands. Buddy made a fine living from methamphetamine – not directly, but through representing clients who had been charged with trafficking in it.

  He said, 'She's seventeen years old. Her mama thinks she's been doing it for a while now. This shooting up is recent. I can't do anything to stop her.'

  'It's a hard drug to quit,' Jeffrey allowed.

  'Almost impossible,' Buddy agreed. He should know. More than half of his clients were repeat offenders. 'We finally had to kick her out of the house,' he continued. 'This was about six months back. She wasn't doing anything but staying out late, stumbling in high and sleeping till three in the afternoon. When she managed to wake up, it was mostly to curse her mama, curse me, curse the world – you know how it is, everybody's an asshole but you. She's got a mouth on her, too, some kind of voluntary Tourette's. What a mess.' He tapped his leg with his fingers, a hollow, popping sound filling the room. 'You do what you can to help people, but there's only so far you can go.'

  'Where'd she go when she moved out?'

  'Mostly she crashed with friends – girlfriends, though I imagine she was entertaining some boys for pocket change. When she wore out her welcome, she started working at the Kitty.' He stopped tapping. 'Believe it or not, I thought that'd finally be the thing to straighten her out.'

  'How's that?' Lena asked.

  'Only time you help yourself is when you hit rock bottom.' He gave her a meaningful look that made her want to slap him. 'I can't think of anything more rock bottom than taking off your clothes for a bunch of seedy-ass rednecks at the Pink Kitty.'

  Jeffrey asked, 'She didn't happen to get mixed up with the farm over in Catoogah, did she?'

  'Those Jesus freaks?' Buddy laughed. 'I don't think they'd have her.'

  'But do you know?'

  'You can ask her, but I doubt it. She's not exactly the religious type. If she goes anywhere, it's looking to score, seeing how she can work the system. They may be a bunch of Bible-thumping lunatics, but they're not stupid. They'd see right through her in a New York minute. She knows her audience. She wouldn't waste her time.'

  'You know this guy Chip Donner?'

  'Yeah, I represented him a couple of times as a favor to Patty.'

  'He's not on my files,' Jeffrey said, meaning Chip had never been busted by Grant County police.

  'No, this was over in Catoogah.' Buddy shifted in his seat. 'He's not a bad guy, I have to say. Local boy, never been more than fifty miles from home. He's just stupid. Most of 'em are just stupid. Mix that with boredom and –'

  'What about Abigail Bennett?' Jeffrey interrupted.

  'Never heard of her. She work at the club?'

  'She's the girl we found buried in the woods.'

  Buddy shuddered, like someone had walked over his grave. 'Jesus, that's a horrible way to die. My daddy used to scare us when we'd go visit his mama at the cemetery. There was this preacher buried two plots over with a wire coming out of the dirt and going up to a telephone pole. Daddy told us they had a phone inside the coffin so he could call them in case he wasn't really dead.' He chuckled. 'One time, my mama brought a bell, one'a them bicycle bells, and we were all just standing around Granny's plot, trying to look solemn. She rang that bell and I liked to shit in my pants.'

  Jeffrey allowed a smile.

  Buddy sighed, 'You don't have me in here to tell old stories. What do you want from Patty?'

  'We want to know what her connection is to Chip.'

  'I can tell you that,' he said. 'She had a crush on him. He wouldn't give her the time of day, but she was into him something horrible.'

  'Chip knows Abigail Bennett.'

  'How?'

  'That's what we'd like to know,' Jeffrey said. 'We were hoping Patty could tell us.'

  Buddy licked his lips. Lena could see where this was going. 'I hate to say this, Chief, but I don't hold any sway with her.'

  'We could work a deal,' Jeffrey offered.

  'No,' he said, holding up his hand. 'I'm not playing you. She hates my guts. Blames me for taking her mama from her, blames me for kicking her out of the house. I'm the bad guy here.'

  Lena suggested, 'Maybe she doesn't hate you as much as she hates being in jail.'

  'Maybe,' Buddy shrugged.

  'So,' Jeffrey said, obviously not pleased, 'we let her sweat it out another day?'

  'I think that'd be best,' Buddy agreed. 'I hate to sound hard about this, but she needs something more than common sense to persuade her.' His lawyer side must have kicked in, because he quickly added, 'And of course, we'll expect the assault and obstruction charges to disappear in exchange for her statement.'

  Lena couldn't help but grunt in disgust. 'This is why people hate lawyers.'

  'Didn't seem to bother you when my services were needed,' Buddy pointed out, cheerfully. Then, to Jeffrey, 'Chief?'

  Jeffrey sat back in his chair, his fingers steepled together. 'She talks tomorrow morning or all bets are off.'

  'Deal,' Buddy said, shooting out his hand so they could shake on it. 'Give me a few minutes alone with her now. I'll try to paint the picture for her nice and pretty.'

  Jeffrey picked up the phone. 'Brad? I need you to take Buddy back to talk to Patty O'Ryan.' He slipped the receiver back in the cradle. 'He's waiting in lockup.'

  'Thank you, sir,' Buddy said, using his cane to stand. He gave Lena a wink before making his exit.

  'Asshole,' she said.

  'He's just doing his job,' Jeffrey told her, but she could see he felt the same. Jeffrey dealt with Buddy Conford on pretty much a weekly basis, and it usually worked to his benefit to cut deals, but Lena thought that O'Ryan would eventually talk on her own without any backdoor negotiations to save her ass from two years in prison. Not to mention Lena would've liked to have been c
onsulted on whether or not to give the bitch a free pass considering she was the officer who had been assaulted.

  Jeffrey was looking out into the parking lot. He said, 'I told Dale Stanley to send his wife here first thing.'

  'You think she'll come?'

  'Who the fuck knows.' He sat back, breathing a sigh. 'I want to talk to the family again.'

  'They're supposed to come tomorrow.'

  'I'll believe it when I see it.'

  'You think Lev will let you hook him up to a lie detector?'

  'It'd tell us a hell of a lot either way,' he said, looking out the window again. 'There she is.'

  Lena followed his gaze as he stood, catching a small woman getting out of a classic Dodge. She had one kid in tow and another on her hip. A tall man walked beside her as they headed toward the station.

  'She looks familiar.'

  'Police picnic,' Jeffrey said, slipping on his jacket. 'You mind keeping Dale busy?'

  'Uh,' Lena began, caught off guard by his suggestion. They usually did interviews together. 'No,' she said. 'No problem.'

  'She might open up more without him around,' Jeffrey explained. 'He likes to talk.'

  'No problem,' Lena repeated.

  At the front desk, Maria squealed at the sight of the children, and she leapt up as she buzzed open the door, going straight to the baby on the mother's hip.

  'Look at those adorable cheeks!' Maria screeched, her voice shrill enough to shatter glass. She pinched the baby's cheeks, and instead of crying, the kid laughed. Marla took him in her arms like she was his long-lost grandmother, stepping back out of the way. Lena felt her stomach drop about six inches as she finally saw Terri Stanley.

  'Oh,' Terri said, as if the breath had been knocked out of her.

  'Thanks for coming in,' Jeffrey told them, shaking Dale's hand. 'This is Lena Adams . . .' His voice trailed off, and Lena forced herself to close her mouth, which had opened a couple of inches at the sight of Terri. Jeffrey looked at Lena, then Terri, saying, 'Y'all remember each other from the picnic last year?'

  Terri spoke, at least her mouth moved, but Lena could not hear what she said over the rush of blood pounding in her ears. Jeffrey need not have bothered with an introduction. Lena knew exactly who Terri Stanley was. The other woman was shorter than Lena and at least twenty pounds lighter. Her hair was pinned up into an old lady's bun though she was barely out of her twenties. Her lips were pale, almost blue and her eyes showed a flash of fear that seemed to mimic Lena's own. Lena had seen that fear before, a little over a week ago as she had waited for her name to be called so that she could leave the waiting room of the clinic.