Turning Angel

Drew goes still. “Yes.”

“Okay. So you knew she was dead. What happened then?”

“I went insane. I literally came apart. Suddenly everything I’d been holding inside for months just burst out of me. I was crying, talking to myself, screaming at the sky like Captain Ahab.”

“Is this when you saw someone else there?”

“I didn’t see anybody else. But there was someone there.”

“How do you know?”

Drew clenches and unclenches his right fist. “I felt him.”

“How?”

“The way you do in horror movies. Your scalp is itching and you start to sweat. You can feel someone looking at you.”

This is a popular notion, but entirely untrue. Extensive experiments have proved this type of “intuition” false. “That was probably just paranoia.”

Drew shakes his head with absolute conviction. “I’ve hunted all my life. There was a human being close to me in those woods. But he stayed concealed. He knew how to use cover, or I’d have seen him watching me.”

I finally ask the obvious question. “If this is really how it went down, why wasn’t it you who reported Kate’s death?”

Drew looks at me as though puzzled about this himself. “It almost was. My first instinct was to cradle her like a baby and carry her up to my car. I was going to take her home to her mother and confess everything.”

As reckless as this sounds, I sense that he’s telling the truth. As a prosecutor, I heard many confessions in which murderers expressed this urge, and some even followed through with it.

“Did you actually pick her up?”

“No. It was at this point that I sensed the other person. I felt an urge to run, but I didn’t. Only a coward would run, I told myself. I had to face the situation. But as I sat there staring at her blank eyes—eyes I’d looked into the night before as we made love, eyes so alive you can’t imagine them—I started to see the situation from outside myself. What would I accomplish by confessing the affair? Kate was beyond help. If I confessed, I’d lose my medical license and probably go to jail. I might even be suspected of killing her. At that moment I honestly didn’t give a shit about myself. But what would it do to my family? My parents? What would happen to Tim? I wouldn’t be there to raise him. But worse, what would he think about me? He’d grow up believing I was a total shit, and maybe even a killer.”

“So you left the scene?”

Drew nods. “I pulled Kate clear of the water, but I left her in the open so that she’d be easily found. I was going to make an anonymous call.”

“Did you?”

A silent shake of the head.

“Why not?”

He bends down and examines the Honda’s carburetor. “I’d been there for a while. I’m no detective, but I’ve read enough to know that you leave trace evidence everywhere you go. It was raining pretty hard. I figured the rain would wipe away any evidence that I was there by morning.”

“That and more,” I say softly, wondering more and more about Drew’s actions. “It also washed away any evidence of the real killer. And it damn near washed Kate down to the Mississippi River.”

He says nothing.

“You don’t come out looking too heroic in this, buddy. A cop would be reading you your rights about now.”

Drew looks at me with a direct gaze. “Probably so. But Kate wouldn’t have wanted me to destroy Tim’s image of me for the sake of her postmortem dignity.”

“Her mother might have. You said the blackmailer sounded like a black kid. What would a black kid be doing down at St. Catherine’s Creek? I don’t remember ever seeing any down there.”

“When was the last time you were down there?”

“When we were kids, I guess.”

“That was thirty years ago, Penn. A couple of apartment complexes you think of as white have gone black in the past ten years. A lot of the kids play down there. Smoke dope, have sex, whatever.”

“Do you think some random black kid would have recognized you?”

“Why not? I have a lot of black patients.”

“But earlier you said that whoever was watching you was probably the killer.”

“I think so, yeah.”

“You think Kate was murdered by some random black kid?”

“Why not? Some crazy teenager?”

“We’re talking about capital murder, Drew. Murder during the commission of a rape.”

“Happens all the time, doesn’t it?”

“It does in Houston or New Orleans. But Natchez is a universe away from there. Houston had two hundred and thirty-four homicides last year. I think Natchez had two. The year before that, nobody got murdered here.”

“Yeah, but in the last twenty years, we’ve had some seriously twisted crimes.”

He’s right. Not even Natchez has gone untouched by the scourges of the modern era—stranger-murder and sexual homicide.

“Only now I’m thinking it wasn’t one kid,” he says. “We just got shot at while we chased the guy on the motorcycle. That means two people, at least. Maybe there were more. Maybe Kate was waiting for me at the creek, and it was just the wrong time to be down there. Maybe a crew of horny teenagers was down there messing around and they saw her. Maybe they decided they wanted her, whether she wanted them or not. Like that ‘wilding’ thing in Central Park, remember?”

I don’t answer. As a prosecutor, I found that whenever a crime victim’s relative suggested minority-assailant murder cases as parallels, I needed to look more closely at that person. What I’ve learned in the past five minutes has fundamentally altered my perception of Kate’s death and Drew’s relationship to it. When the school secretary interrupted the board meeting tonight, Drew already had a good idea of what she was about to say. When Theresa Cook choked out that our beloved homecoming queen was dead, Drew felt no surprise. Only hours before, he had been pounding on her chest and kissing her dead lips, trying to breathe life back into her body. I’ve never thought of Drew as duplicitous, but I guess we’re all capable of anything in the interest of self-preservation.

“What happens now?” he asks.

“You tell the police about your involvement with Kate. If you don’t, you’re at the mercy of whoever was on that motorcycle. And his buddy with the rifle.”

“What happens if I do tell the cops?”

“At the very least, you can count on a statutory rape charge from Jenny Townsend.”

Drew shakes his head. “Jenny wouldn’t do that.”

“Are you crazy? Of course she would.”

He steps closer to me, close enough for me to see his eyes clearly. “Jenny knew about us, Penn. About Kate and me.”