I could hear the shellshock in my voice, but I didn’t care if he heard it, too. I stared down at the enlarged photo on my screen, at the women’s smiling faces. I thought about the strength of their bonds and how hard they’d probably worked to earn those smiles back.
I could understand how that might warp over time, as two of them had to continue to live in fear of their abusers. They could have developed a pact to see “justice” done and to do it in a way that’d be hard to trace. Penny hadn’t killed her husband. Julia hadn’t killed her rapist. But both men were dead nonetheless.
And, for a split second, I wanted to hide the phone and convince Mark and Elise to look the other way. If Mandy hadn’t been currently accused of killing Vilsack, I couldn’t be sure that I might not have done it.
I also wasn’t sure what that said about me, but I was pretty sure it said that, no matter how scared I was of becoming the target of another murderer or other criminal in the future, I couldn’t defend them. I couldn’t turn away from the victims and pretend that someone shouldn’t be punished for their pain. I couldn’t help set men like Penny’s husband and Bruce Vilsack free so that they could hurt others.
I had to continue to fight for what I knew was right, including making sure someone innocent like Mandy didn’t go to prison.
When I looked back up, Vilsack’s roommate was gone, and Elise and Mark exchanged a look that suggested they weren’t sure whether I’d had an epiphany or was showing the aftereffects of a head injury.
I explained who Julia was and my theory. “We need to find out if Mandy’s key worked in her car or not. If Becky didn’t have time to replace it, it might be enough to get us a warrant.”
21
Elise called Chief McTavish while Mark called my mom, and I nestled into Mark’s truck in the puddle of warm afternoon sun shining through the window. I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I knew Mark’s hand was on my shoulder, and I didn’t recognize the landscape around me. For all I knew, we weren’t even in Fair Haven anymore.
“We’re at the impound,” he said.
I blinked out the window. Two police cruisers sat beside the truck. Elise, my mom, and Chief McTavish already stood beside the gate leading inside the chain-link fence.
My body ached and screamed at me as I made it climb out of the truck, but I had to see this through. Then I was asking Mark to take me home to sleep until tomorrow—or at least until Mark or my mom had to wake me up to make sure I wasn’t exhibiting worse concussion symptoms.
Inside the fence, I recognized Mandy’s car, but it looked nothing like it had the last time I saw it. Her hood had bowed up like a tent, the left corner of her bumper hung loose, and one of her headlights was missing a large chunk of glass, leaving the bulb exposed to the light.
A shiver skittered over my body. I pointed at the fractured headlight. “Did you find the missing piece?”
“At the sight of the attack,” Chief McTavish said. “It matches.”
It wasn’t simply that Mandy’s car had been backed in to by a car with the same paint color as Alice Benjamin’s, then. There was no way a piece of her headlight could be at the scene unless her car had been the one used in the attack.
Chief McTavish pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the driver’s door. “The car was unlocked when we arrived at The Sunburnt Arms, but we hauled it here on a flatbed. No one’s tried to start it.”
He held up a set of keys with a book key chain. They had to be Mandy’s. The key chain only held three keys. If I had to guess, they were for her car, the kitchen door of The Sunburnt Arms, and her private room.
Chief McTavish tried the two smaller keys even though it was obvious they weren’t car keys, probably so no one could question it later. He inserted the final key, and it turned in the ignition.
The car didn’t start.
He removed the key and straightened up. “I’ll call a judge about getting a warrant for any keys in Rebecca Holmes’ possession.”
Mark and my mom must have taken turns waking me up in the night to check on me. I had fuzzy memories of one or the other leaning over me and asking me a few questions, then leaving.
The final time, Mark came in with a cup of coffee, a muffin, and an I have news smile. “Becky had a key that worked in Mandy’s car.”
I accepted the coffee and gingerly prodded the edges of my wound. It was still swollen, but it seemed a bit less tender. “Did she confess?”
“Unfortunately not.” Mark sat at the foot of my bed. “The chief said her explanation is that Mandy gave her the key to go to the store and she just forgot to give it back.”
A good defense attorney could work with it. Along with the watch, it cast enough reasonable doubt to result in an acquittal.
The question I had to ask myself was whether I let it go at that or did I ask for a chance to talk to Becky and hope I could convince her to confess. On our drive together to that first PTSD support group meeting, Becky told me the group members understood each other in a way that other people couldn’t. I knew it was true. They were afraid. They wanted justice they hadn’t gotten through the proper channels. And the men they’d killed were a rapist and a wife abuser.
Those were all things I could understand, even sympathize with.
I touched my forehead again. They hadn’t stopped there, though. I hadn’t done anything to hurt them. Alice Benjamin certainly hadn’t done anything to hurt them. Neither had Mandy, and they would have let her take the blame for Vilsack’s murder if I hadn’t made the connection about the keys.
That was the problem with vigilante justice. In theory, it sounded like the right thing. When the law didn’t stop an evil person, didn’t someone have to? But the line was too easy to move, and any action became too easy to justify in the pursuit of righting a wrong. It was why the legal system was established in the first place.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed. “I need you to ask Chief McTavish to hold Becky, and then can you drive me down to the station?”
My mom decided to come along, and I could have sworn I saw Sheila hide a smile behind her hand as we filed into the station. Chief McTavish met us outside of his office.
When I told him what I wanted to do, he looked at me like I asked him to eat a plateful of worms. “Absolutely not.”
I planted my hands on my hips, realized how much it made me look like my mom, and dropped my arms to my sides. “She feels bad about hurting me. I know she does. I think that will make her more open to admitting the truth to me.”
In retrospect, I could see what she’d said to me at the hardware store for what it was. She’d tried, in the only way she could, to apologize.
Chief McTavish looked at me like my hard blow to the head yesterday had knocked out all my common sense. “You can’t be that naïve.”
“Chief.” The tone to my mom’s voice was the same one she used in the courtroom when she said objection. “We need to speak privately.”
He jutted his chin toward his office and let her lead the way.
