The Best Revenge Page 34

  “Oh my God,” I said as I finally comprehended what Kelda and Jones’s brother had been doing.

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “Oh my God.”

  “That’s what the thing was with the fence and the fear lessons and the snakes and the bees and—”

  “Yes, yes, yes. But that was all Ira. He cut me out of all the planning a while ago. He didn’t trust me anymore. Maybe he never really trusted me. Maybe he just needed me to get Tom out of prison. Right now, I don’t know what to think.”

  “That’s why you’ve been frantically looking for Tom? Because you knew that Ira had him? And you guessed what he was going to do to him? No, you didn’t guess, you knew?”

  She nodded and wiped away a tear that had migrated to her chin.

  “That’s why you referred Tom to me, isn’t it?”

  She cocked her head and looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “You wanted me to stop you. To interfere with this . . . this plot you were cooking up with Ira.”

  “No. No. Giving him your name that day . . . it was just a . . . brain cramp. That’s all.”

  “I don’t think so. Think about it, Kelda. You wanted me in the middle of this. You must have wanted me to stop you.”

  “No,” she said.

  “You were dating Tom, Kelda.”

  I watched her try to chase the thought away. “That was . . . I don’t know . . . tactical.”

  “How?”

  “At first, I wanted to know how he was most vulnerable. How to get to him . . . most effectively. That’s what I told myself, anyway. But then . . . I don’t know. I started to want to know what made him tick, to understand how he could have done what he did to Ivy Campbell and to Jones. I wanted to find his weak spot, the way he found theirs.” She shifted on the sofa, crossing her legs beneath her. “But after a while . . . the last couple of times . . . I wasn’t so sure at all why I was spending time with him. Something had changed.”

  I said, “This time, you wanted to know him before you pushed him out of the tree house?”

  “Maybe that’s it. I don’t know. I’ve thought about it that way. I just don’t know.”

  “Prisons take different forms, don’t they, Kelda?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The kid you pushed out of the tree house? He’s in one, isn’t he?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Are you in a prison, too, Kelda?” I asked.

  “Are you?” she shot back, after half a heartbeat’s delay.

  I considered pressing her further, upping the ante. Instead, I asked, “Tom was being tortured, wasn’t he?” The t-word was Sam’s, but it seemed to fit. “Jones’s brother took him up to Ward to imprison him and to torture him?”

  “I never used that word. But, yes,” she said, “that was his plan. Our plan. We wanted ten minutes alone in a room with Clone. That’s what we called it. ‘Alone in a room.’”

  “Ten minutes?”

  “Metaphorically.”

  “You got Tom Clone out of prison to torture him, Kelda?”

  “We wanted him to know what she felt. What she wrote about in her journal. Her agony. Her terror. We wanted him to know what anguish he caused her. We wanted him to know it, tofeel it.”

  “Revenge?” My incredulousness had hardly abated.

  “Retaliation. Revenge. Retribution. Vengeance. I’ve found lots of words for it since it all started. But they were all just different ways of saying that we were teaching him a lesson, we were getting even. It’s all been about getting some satisfaction, Alan. I never felt any satisfaction after saving Rosa, because the way it ended was too easy for the guy who molested her. I didn’t want that to happen again. So that’s what it’s been about for me. I wanted some satisfaction.”

  “Did you feel satisfaction after you pushed the boy from the tree house?”

  She glared at me. “At least he knew my sister’s helplessness, didn’t he? After that, he knew exactly what vulnerability was. Didn’t he? Didn’t he?”

  I didn’t know what to say.Of course he did.

  Kelda wasn’t burdened by any doubts. “He got what was coming to him. And I got satisfaction.”

  I repeated the last word silently before I opened my mouth to speak. But words to describe my feeling were as elusive as the summer monsoons.

  Kelda leaned forward. “Oh, don’t be so naÏve—think about it, Alan. Think about September 11. If you offered the families of the people who died that day ten minutes alone in a room with bin Laden, you don’t think they’d take it? What about the Oklahoma City victims and McVeigh? Of course they’d go for it. All of them. In a New York second. Well, Ira and I decided to take our ten minutes. We saw a way to do it and we were going to get our time alone with Clone.”

  “Fear? The ‘fear lessons’? This is what the fear lessons were about? You were making him as frightened as she was?”

  “I wanted him to stand on the edge of that cliff with Jones and feel the thrust of a hand on his back. I wanted him to feel what that boy felt after he fell from the tree house. I wanted that second or two he spent in the air before his neck snapped to last for infinity.”

  “The boy didn’t fall from that tree house, Kelda. You pushed him. Not to punish him, but to save your sister.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Tom Clone didn’t kill anybody, Kelda,” I said. My outrage was barely in check. “He didn’t kill Ivy Campbell and he didn’t have anything to do with Jones’s death. Nothing.”

  I could see the muscles in her jaws tighten into ropes.

  “We didn’t know that. Yes, we manufactured the evidence that got him out, Ira and I, but we were working under the assumption that he really had killed Ivy Campbell. The system said he did it. A jury said he did it. The evidence said he did it.

  “And we were absolutely sure that he killed Jones. Her journal made that as clear as day.”

  I wanted to scream at her. I settled for packing my words in ice. “Tom Clone has never been to Hawaii, Kelda. Never.”

  She swallowed. “He hasn’t? You’re sure about that?” I could tell that she wasn’t truly surprised by my revelation. The tenor of her questions told me she had already come to the conclusion that Tom had never followed Jones to Hawaii.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I asked him on the phone earlier tonight. After you told me about what you read in Jones’s journal, I had Boca ask him if he’d ever been there. I didn’t tell him why I was asking. I just asked him if he’d ever been. Well, he said he hadn’t. I don’t think he even knows that Jones moved to Maui.

  “He didn’t have anything to do with what happened in Paia. Nothing at all. Jones fell off that cliff. Or she jumped. Or someone else pushed her. But Tom Clone didn’t do it.”

  She looked away from me. “You have to believe that I didn’t know that before tonight. I didn’t know . . . that he didn’t kill Jones.”

  “He didn’t kill anyone.” I made sure that I ladened my voice with as much irony as it could bear when I added, “Until tonight, anyway.”

  “Ira and I thought what we were doing was right. That our crusade was just. We were sure . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  I half expected a knock on the door. A loud knock, pounding fists. A sheriff with a warrant for her arrest.

  I asked, “Are you going to get away with this, Kelda?”

  “I’m not sure. It depends on what Ira said before he was killed. There’s no evidence down here. If Ira was careful up there . . . maybe. Nobody can even tie Tom to Jones’s death. Without doing that, why would they look for Ira or me? Nobody knows what we were planning but you.”

  The weight of the knowledge that I was the keeper of the secrets plastered me to my chair. I could barely fill my lungs, the burden on my heart felt so great.

  “Now it turns out that we got Tom out of prison for all the wrong reasons, but I’m beginning to think that maybe it was the right thing to do after all. Is that possible? That the right thing happened? If Ira and I hadn’t gotten To
m out of prison, he’d still be on death row, right? He’d be scheduled to die in Cañon City. No matter what Ira did to him up there, it’s better than that, isn’t it? It’s better than Tom dying from a lethal injection, right?”

  I chewed her words reluctantly and tried to swallow the rationalization even though I knew that every bit of it was rotten. My capacity for empathy deserted me and I thought,How am I supposed to feel right now?

  Before I could get too far lost in that egocentric miasma, Kelda said, “I can’t believe what I did to Tom. And . . . I can’t believe that Ira is dead. He was my lover. I never told you that. Maybe you guessed. It doesn’t matter. Now he’s dead and there’s a hole right here”—she thumped a fist between her breasts—“where he used to be. I don’t know what to think anymore.” Her voice sharpened. “What am I supposed to feel, Alan? Tell me, please. I’m . . . lost. Now that this is over, what am I supposed to feel?”

  A single word emerged in my head.

  Satisfaction?

  CHAPTER 61

  Only a few lights were on in the Denver Field Office. A solitary special agent was on night shift handling the after-hours FBI phone duty. When Kelda stepped off the elevator and said hello to the agent at the phones, a new guy she barely recognized, he told her that the shift, thus far, had been slow.

  “Hope it stays that way,” Kelda said.

  One of the lines rang just then and the agent brought his hands together like an altar boy in prayer before he reached for the receiver. Although she thought she’d seen a flicker of recognition in his eyes, he didn’t say a thing to her about the events in Ward the night before.

  Were she planning on staying with the FBI, she would have remembered him for his discretion.

  Kelda made her way to her desk and began packing her things into a couple of cardboard file boxes. She expected to collect the few personal items she kept at work and to be back in the elevator in ten minutes.

  She almost made it.

  As she was completing a final search of the drawers of the desk, someone approached her from behind so silently she didn’t hear his footfalls until the last few steps.

  Without turning to face him, she said, “You need to change whatever it is you use on your hair, Bill. It precedes you like a toxic wave.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Kelda. I’ve been wondering why I’ve been striking out with so many women. I had been worried that it’s a character flaw. It’s nice to know it’s merely a question of bad hair gel. My favorite problems in life are the ones that can be solved for less than five bucks.”

  “Hint: Spend more than five bucks. It will probably smell better. How did you know I’d be here?”

  “After what happened last night up in the mountains with Clone and those Park County cops, I bugged the SAC all day today. He handed me a bunch of bullshit before he finally admitted that you were going on leave, but he wouldn’t tell me why.

  “Knowing you, I figured that you’d try to sneak out of here without saying good-bye to anyone. I told Carter at the desk that I’d owe him one if he’d give me a heads-up if you showed your face while he was covering the phones. I was killing time down at Panzano when he called. Greatfritto misto . The bartender is keeping a couple of seats warm at the bar for me. Why don’t you come on down? I’ll buy us a bottle of Barolo.”

  Kelda glanced at the empty section in the hinged frame on Bill’s desk.

  “I don’t think so, Bill.”

  “Come on, finish packing up. I’ll help you carry that stuff to your car. Then we’ll go have some wine.”

  She said, “Your calamari will already be cold by the time we get back to the restaurant.” She didn’t really want to put him off; she merely wanted to gauge his persistence.

  “I suspect they’ll fry some up fresh if we ask them to. I just got my tax refund check. Come on, I’m celebrating.”

  She lowered herself to her desk chair, thinking that it would be the last time she would sit in the Denver Field Office, and she allowed her eyes to close. Her legs didn’t hurt, and for an extended moment, she wondered why. Finally, she opened her eyes and looked up at Bill Graves.

  “What?” he asked. “What’s that face?”

  “Is your cousin really the governor of Kansas? Tell me the truth. No bullshit this time.”

  He didn’t smile. He said, “We’ve known each other for a long time, Kelda. We’re colleagues. We’re friends. We wouldn’t lie to each other, would we?”

  She tasted his words for irony, but couldn’t quite decide.

  Thefritto misto was terrific, as advertised, and the wine that Bill picked was so supple and rich that Kelda thought that if red grapes could actually bleed, they would bleed this Barolo.

  Bill held his wineglass in front of his face and looked at Kelda through the tannic legs that rippled down from the rim on the inside of the glass. “You know somebody set us up,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That knife we found up in the mountains? Somebody set us up. If it wasn’t the real murder weapon—and the Park County cop who now says he killed that girl is telling everybody that it wasn’t—then somebody set us up to find what we found.”

  “Yes?” She focused on spearing a ring of calamari.

  “Doesn’t that piss you off?”

  She didn’t trust that she could make her face a good enough mask, so she poked the squid into her mouth before she gazed at the surface of the wine in her glass. She could see a distorted reflection of Bill Graves in the mahogany surface of the wine. Finally, she said, “I guess.”

  “Why would somebody do that?”

  “Somebody wanted him off death row, I suppose. You know as well as I do how many fanatics there are out there about . . . capital punishment.”

  “Why us, though? Why the Bureau? Why didn’t they just use the local cops as their patsies?”

  “Does it matter? They didn’t do it to us personally, Bill. We were just somebody’s tools.”

  “I know that. I’m wondering why someone would conspire to get him out of jail. That’s what I don’t get.”

  “Maybe it was somebody who knew that he was innocent. That’s why they did it. Whatever the reason, it appears that . . . justice was done. If we hadn’t retrieved that knife, Clone would have been executed for a crime he didn’t commit. So we did a good thing, right?”

  “I know, I know. But who would’ve known that for sure? The real murderer. Nobody else. And I can’t see that Park County cop they arrested arranging this whole charade. It doesn’t add up. What would be in it for him?”

  She leaned in close to him, hoping to dissuade his interest in the topic. “Why do people do half the shit they do, Bill?”

  “You know, I really thought Clone did it,” Bill said, ignoring her subtle flirtation. “I thought he killed Ivy Campbell. Eighty percent of the people on death row were convicted on less evidence than there is against Clone.”

  “I did, too,” Kelda replied, sitting back again. “I thought he did it.”

  “Right from the start, I had reservations about what we did to help Clone get out of the penitentiary. I know we were just doing our jobs—you and me—but given the evidence against the guy, I wasn’t sure he should be free. No, that’s not true. The truth is that Iwas sure heshouldn’t be set free.”

  She speared a tiny scallop, dipped it in some fiery red sauce, lifted it to her mouth, and took a long sip of wine before she said, “I had doubts, too. About getting him out.” She thought that the words were one hundred percent honest, and because they were she liked the feel of them as they slid across the contour of her lips.

  “So why were you up there last night?”

  “In Ward?”

  “Yes, in Ward.”

  “Clone called me and asked for help. He sounded desperate. That’s why I went. He didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “Why didn’t you get some backup?”

  She thought that Bill was trying to sound nonchalant, nonjudgmental. She liked him for that. Sh
e knew some of her colleagues would have blasted her with, “What the hell were you thinking going up there alone?”

  “He thought that there were some cops involved in whatever it was that was going on. He asked me not to call anybody, said it would only make things worse. I went along with him.”

  After a moment spent digesting her rationale, Bill asked, “Why didn’t you get Bureau help?”

  “Maybe I should have,” she replied. But she knew that Bill’s question was ripe with subtext. What he really wanted to know is why she didn’t callhim . “He didn’t call me until after you and I talked in Boulder, Bill. I didn’t shut you out. If I’d known what was going to go down, I would have called you.”

  The last lie wasn’t necessary. She immediately regretted it.

  To her, he seemed to be processing her words as though he were checking the addition on a column of figures. After a few minutes, he said, “Clone was being tortured up there. That’s what I hear.”

  “I didn’t see that part. It was dark when I got to Ward, and everybody was already running around the forest. I didn’t actually see Tom up close until he was being loaded into the chopper. But I can tell you that he looked awful. I believe that something terrible happened to him up there. Maybe torture.”

  She thought of Ira’s vipers and his bees and the laboratory in his basement.

  Bill said, “Well, I hear he was being tortured. That’s what the local cops are telling the SAC.”

  “Bill, I really don’t want to talk about this. Is that okay? Do you mind? The wine’s nice. Let’s enjoy it.”

  “No,” he said, his voice suddenly stern. “House wine is nice. This bottle of Barolo is as lovely as you are.”

  She forced a smile in reply.

  “What are you going to do, Kelda? Now that you’re gone from the Bureau.”

  “It’s only a leave of absence. I’ve had some health problems. I need to get some things with my health . . . under control. I don’t think I’ll make any decisions until I make some progress on that.”

  “You want to tell me about the health problems?”