The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,145

body. You feel your own breath swishing in and out of your lungs.”

Without thinking, Sam had let her breathing match her father’s.

“Then they ask him for his last words, and he says something about forgiveness, or hoping his death brings the family peace, or that he is innocent, but his voice is shaking, because he knows this is it. The red phone on the wall will not ring. He will never see his mother again. He will never hold his child. This is it. His death is nigh.”

Sam pressed together her lips. She could not tell if her own heartbeat was matching the cadence of Rusty’s or if she had let herself again get wrapped up in his words.

He said, “The warden nods the go-ahead. There’s two men in the room. They each press separate buttons to deliver the drug cocktail. This is so no one knows for sure who killed him.” Rusty was silent for a few seconds, as if he was watching the buttons being pressed. “You get a taste in your mouth, like a chemical, like you can taste the thing that’s about to kill him. He tenses, and then slowly, surely, his muscles start to let go until he is completely, utterly without movement. And that’s when you start to feel it, this sensation of tiredness, as if the drug is going into your own veins. And your head starts to nod. You’re almost relieved, because you’ve been so tense the whole time, during the waiting time, and now it’s finally seconds from being over.” Rusty paused again. “Your heart slows. You feel your breaths start to taper off.”

Sam waited for the rest.

Rusty said nothing.

She asked, “And then?”

“And then it’s over.” He patted her hand. “That’s it. They shut the curtains. You leave the room. You get in your car. You go home. You have a drink. You brush your teeth. You go to bed, and you stare at the ceiling for the rest of your life the same way that condemned man stared at the ceiling tiles over his head.” He held tight to Sam’s hand. “This is what Zachariah Culpepper thinks about every second of his life, and he’ll keep thinking about it every day until he’s wheeled into that room and they open that curtain.”

Sam pulled away from him. The skin of her hand felt tight, as if she’d been singed. “Lenore told you that we found the letters.”

“I never was able to keep you girls out of my files.” He gripped the arms of his wheelchair. He looked into the distance. “He’s being punished. I know you wanted him to suffer. He is suffering. There is no need to pursue anything to do with that man. You need to go back to New York and forget about him. Live your life. That’s how you get your revenge.”

Sam shook her head. She should have seen this coming. She was infuriated with herself for always letting Rusty hide in her blind spot.

He said, “If you can’t do it for yourself, do it for your sister.”

“I’ve tried to help my sister. She doesn’t want it.”

Rusty grabbed her arm. “Listen to me, baby. You need to hear this, because it’s important.” He waited until she looked at him. “If you get Charlotte stirred up about Zachariah Culpepper right now, she will never, ever come back from the bad place that she’s in.”

“What does Zachariah think that you owe him?”

Rusty let her go. He sat back in his chair. “To borrow from Churchill, it is a riddle wrapped in a canard.”

“A canard is an unfounded rumor or fable.”

“Also, a winglike projection on an airplane. Or, in the French, duck.”

“Rusty,” Sam said. “He mails these letters to you, the same letter with the same message, the second Friday of every month.”

“Is that so?”

“You know it’s so,” Sam said. “It’s the same day you always call me.”

“I am glad to know you look forward to my phone calls.”

Sam shook her head. They both knew those were not her words. “Dad, why does he send you that same letter? What do you owe him?”

“I owe him nothing. On my life.” Rusty held up his right hand as if he was swearing on a Bible. “The police know about the letters. It’s just something he does. The miserable fuck has got an awful lot of time on his hands. It’s easy to keep to a regular schedule.”

“So there’s nothing behind the letters? He’s just an inmate on death row who feels