Part 6
Something low started in Dutch’s throat and he came off the bed with it. Owen got a hand on his head, put the door open the width of his own shoulder, and stood in the gap. He had shaved that morning for the first time since the courtroom.
“I didn’t want you getting it off a television,” Sutter said. “Her bracelet came out of a tool chest in Dowd’s bay this morning.”
“I had it by nine.” Owen left his hand where it was. He had turned thirty-one in a cell. The plan for thirty-one had been a bad roof and a truck payment; what he had instead was a tiredness that answered nothing people asked him about being out.
Past Owen’s shoulder was a bed nobody had made. Sutter looked at it, then at Owen. “It’s in my notes, that first morning — you said the dog wanted to take you north. I never put a man up there.”
“What you told twelve people was that I had you walking the wrong way on purpose.”
“I did.” He shifted his weight and did not come off the walkway. “A stolen gun was convenient, is what I put it down as, when you told me it had gone out of your truck. Running it out would have cost me the shape of the case. That was not a reason not to chase it.”
A housekeeper’s cart came along the far end of the building, one wheel catching on every third turn.
“I’m sorry,” Sutter said.
Owen looked at the concrete. Dutch had laid his good forefoot over Owen’s bare toes, and most of what held him up in that doorway was the weight of it. He had run this two hundred times in a cell, and every time he had known his line.
“She is still dead.”
“No.”
“And there’s not a word of what this county heard out of you about me that comes back.” Sutter took it without looking toward the stairwell. Owen waited until the voice was his own again. “Next time a man tells you his dog wanted to go somewhere, put somebody on the hill.”
“I will.”
A card went down on the table inside the door, once Owen moved enough to let an arm past. He left it there until the truck pulled out, then turned it on its face, sat on the end of the bed, and worked the bandaged foot out of the blanket.
Sutter’s card stayed face down until the phone rang about testimony.
He moved back into the house, though the motel key rode in his jacket two days after he turned it in. Getting ready took most of a year. Kern and Dowd received Renner’s account, the clerk’s envelope, and every recovery record. Judge Shaw remained on the case; she had taken no part in discovering the evidence, and neither defense sought her removal. The recovery would be proved through the deputy and the technician.
Lindahl’s question was about the last day Callie had been out at the house. What Owen got instead was a water glass. Hers, by the sink, rinsed and put away that spring by somebody who meant it kindly, while he was in county. He had to have the question again.
Two more families sat near the Boyds by the time he was called. For a week he knew them as faces; the names came later, because every introduction had a question folded in it he could not make himself open. Owen waited at the door with a palm on the brass plate and let one in ahead of him.
His own testimony took under an hour. The pistol had gone out of the truck in March and he had not reported it. He had looked for Callie two days before calling it in. On the first morning the dog had pulled north and he had followed half a mile.
Then a defense lawyer wanted to know why a man who had carried a badge for four years would not report a stolen firearm. He asked it twice, shaped two different ways, and waited both times.
Owen did not put anything around it. He had let it go because he kept thinking he had mislaid it himself; then because he had already let it go; and by the third week the not-reporting was its own thing he did not want to hand anybody. He heard how it sounded and did not add to it.
Kern watched the whole of it with a smile starting. Owen put both hands flat on the rail and kept his eyes on the lawyer. He was not going to send that man back to a cell with anything else of his.
The deputy who had lost him at the service gate sat with Dutch those days, in an office at the quiet end of the corridor. Recesses belonged to the two of them — Owen on the carpet with his tie hauled down, the dog’s head across one leg, neither required to say anything. A cup of water turned up within reach one afternoon, and whoever set it there went out without a word.
The recordings went in, then the confirmed comparisons, the bracelet, and what had come off the pistol. The fibers and tire impressions were presented with their limits attached, not as names. Under cross the technician read his dated entry and waited. Asked whether the bay was his alone, Dowd said half the county had a key. Owen sat listening to lawyers ask the things Sutter had quit asking him in a room with the door shut.
On the fourth day the specialist began on a file with Callie in it. Dale was up before the sentence finished, fast enough to bark both knees on the bench ahead of him. Janine reached for a sleeve already gone and stayed in her seat with her fingers laced together.
He was out at the vending machines in the corridor when Owen came through. He was looking through the glass at a rack of cracker packets.
There had been a windstorm six years back that put a cottonwood across Owen’s driveway, and the two of them had bucked and stacked it with a thermos going between them. Talking to the man had been nothing then. He stopped six feet short and said nothing now.
“I settled on you,” Dale said. He was watching Owen’s hands rather than his face. “And then I went around with my ears open for anything that would let me keep you there.” He stopped, and started again lower. “There was one thing left I could do for her and I made it that.”
Owen had seen the same embarrassed motion at Callie’s grade-school concerts, when he worked the door in uniform and Dale stood at the end of a row with his cap in his hands: the handkerchief out of the back pocket, held to the mouth. Over the top of it Dale said he was sorry — for what he had said about him, and for helping them do it.
“What you had about me was wrong.” He made himself stop there and let it sit. “Being afraid for her was not.”
Dale closed his eyes.
A thousand times in a cell he had deleted it. It was still there: his own phone, his own sentence on it, sent instead of asking her to call when she got down there. He stood in that corridor next to her father with the thing still in his pocket.
The bailiff pulled the doors open. Dale asked to go in alongside, and they walked up the aisle far enough apart that neither had to work out what to do with his hands. What was left on the card went in over the next two days, and Owen stayed for all of it. In his coat pocket was a letter from the Colters, opened once, carried since the first morning and not answered…
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