had been used, and all but a sliver of the free soap—“Oh, yeah”—but he stood in the hot water for ten minutes, until he heard his cell phone ringing. He used the least-damp towel to pat himself dry, then went to see who’d called.
Coakley.
And at that moment, a text message arrived, also from Coakley.
“My office, IMMEDIATELY.”
“Fifteen minutes,” he tapped out, and went to shave.
Something had happened, and when you hadn’t made it happen, that was usually bad.
HE WAS TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES, tired, dragging his aching ass into Coakley’s office. There were two cops standing in the doorway, with an attitude on them: something had happened. They stepped back when Virgil came up, and he found Coakley, trim, business-like, looking across her desk at Kathleen Spooner.
And Virgil thought, Oh, shit, while he smiled and said, “Miz Spooner. Nice to see you.”
Coakley said, in a voice as crisp as a green apple, “Miss Spooner says she has something to tell us. She wanted you to be here.”
“It’s a statement,” Spooner said to Virgil, and Virgil took a chair. The two deputies were still leaning in the door. “I did something really bad. Then I ran away, but I felt so guilty. I can’t afford a lawyer.”
“We can get you a lawyer,” Virgil said. “If you’re going to tell us something you think might be criminal, I should remind you of your rights. . . .”
She listened quietly as he recited the Miranda warning, then said, “I don’t want a lawyer now. I just want to get it off my chest. But maybe I’ll want one later.”
“That’s just fine,” Coakley said. “The minute you feel you need a lawyer, you tell us.”
Virgil said, “So . . .”
Spooner looked down at her hands. “I was . . . there . . . with Jim, when he killed himself.”
Virgil thought again, Oh, shit. He said, aloud, “He killed himself.”
“Yes. . . . I lied to you. Jim and I had started talking about getting back together. He called me up, and said something terrible had happened at the jail, and could I come over. I went over, and he was freaked. He said a guy in the jail had hanged himself, while he was on duty.”
Coakley: “He said Tripp hanged himself?”
“That’s what he said . . . at first. Then, he got kind of shaky, and I got a really bad feeling about it, like he wasn’t telling me what really happened. He was crying. I’ve known him for a long time, and I’d never seen him cry, and here he was, bawling like a baby. Anyway, I didn’t know what to do, I wanted to make him feel better. . . .”
“You had sex?”
“On the couch. He always liked it . . . that way.”
Virgil said, “Miz Spooner, we’re police officers, and we . . . know just about everything people get up to. When you say, ‘that way,’ what do you mean?”
Her eyes clicked away from him, but he suddenly had the sense that she was enjoying herself. “I, um, performed oral sex on him.”
Virgil nodded. “Then what?”
“Well, I went into the bathroom after he was finished . . . you know, to gargle. . . .” Again, the sense that she was enjoying herself, a kind of exhibitionism.
Coakley said, “There’s nothing criminal about oral sex.”
Virgil thought, Thank God, but he said, to Spooner, “You were in the bathroom. . . .”
“When I heard the shot. It was so loud. So loud. The shot in that little house. I knew what it was. . . . I ran back in there, and he was dead. There wasn’t any doubt about it, he was gone, and I was . . . freaked. I was so scared.”
“He was wearing his gun while you were having sex?” Virgil asked.
“No, no . . . it was on his hip, and when we, uh, opened his fly and pulled down his underpants, he took it out and I took it from him and put it on the floor.”
Coakley: “You took it.”
“Yes,” she said. “There was no end table, and he was kind of sideways on the couch, and I said, ‘Give me that damn thing,’ and I put it on the floor. I should have thrown it out the window. I think, you know, he’d always get a little sad after sex, and he’d already been a wreck . . . and I think he just grabbed it and did it. Just did it.”