must be in Rusty’s office wondering why his wife was such a whore.
“I’m sorry about your father,” Mason said.
Charlie spun around. “I know who you are.”
Mason looked alarmed.
“I didn’t know when I met you, clearly, but then my sister told me about your sister, and—” She struggled to find the right words. “I’m very sorry for what happened to her. And to you and your family. But what you and I did, that was a one-time mistake, a huge mistake. I’m in love with my husband.”
“You said that before. I understand. I respect that.” Mason nodded to Sam. She had made a space to sit on a straight-back chair. The footage from the school security camera was paused on the TV set beside her. Ben had figured out how to make it work.
Mason stared at the massive screen. “Who’s going to be Kelly’s lawyer now?”
Sam said, “We’ll find someone from Atlanta.”
“I can pay,” he said. “My family has money. My parents do. Did. They had a trucking company.”
Charlie remembered the signs from her childhood. “Huckabee Hauling.”
“Yeah.” He looked at the paused footage again. “Is that from the other day?”
Charlie did not want to open the conversation. “Why are you here?”
“It’s just—” He cut himself off. Instead of offering an explanation for his continued, unwanted presence, he said, “Kelly tried to kill herself. That shows remorse. I read about it on the Internet, that remorse matters in death penalty cases. So you could use that during her trial to make the jury give her life, or maybe life with a chance of parole. They know that, right?”
“Who knows that?” Sam asked.
“The police. The prosecutor. You guys.”
Charlie told him, “They’ll say it was a cry for help. She gave up the gun. She didn’t pull the trigger.”
“She did,” he said. “Three times.”
“What?” Sam stood up from the chair.
Charlie said, “You can’t lie about this. People were there.”
“I’m not lying. She put the gun to her chest. You were twenty feet away. You had to see it, or at least hear it.” He told Sam, “Kelly pressed the muzzle to her chest, and she pulled the trigger three times.”
Charlie had absolutely no recollection of any of this.
“I heard the clicks,” he said. “I bet Judith Pinkman did, too. I’m not making this up. She really tried to kill herself.”
Sam asked, “Then why didn’t you just take away the gun?”
“I didn’t know if she’d reloaded. I’m a Marine. You always assume a weapon is hot unless you can clearly visualize the empty chamber.”
“Reloaded,” Sam repeated, giving weight to the word. “When the shooting began, how many shots did you hear?”
“Six,” he said. “One, then there was a pause, then there were three real quick in a row, then there was a shorter pause, then another shot, then a quick pause, then another shot.” He shrugged. “Six.”
Sam sat back down. She reached into her purse. “You’re sure about that?”
“If you’ve been in close-quarters combat as many times as I have, you learn really fast to count the bullets.”
She had her notepad in her lap. “And Kelly’s revolver holds six shots?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Charlie asked, “Was it empty when you took it?”
Mason glanced nervously at Sam.
She said, “Now would be a good time to explain why you stuck it down the back of your pants.”
“Instinct.” He shrugged, as if committing a felony was inconsequential. “The cop wouldn’t take it, so I just stowed it, temporarily, like you said, in the waist of my pants. And then none of the cops asked me about it, or searched me for it, and then I was out the door and in my truck before I realized it was still there.”
Sam did not poke holes in the thin story. Instead, she asked, “What did you do with the gun?”
“I took it apart and dropped it around the lake. The deepest parts.”
Again, she let him off the hook. “Is it possible to tell whether a gun is loaded just by looking at it?”
“No,” Mason said. “I mean, a nine-mill, the slide will go back, but you can pop the catch and—”
Charlie interrupted, “With a revolver, once the bullets are fired, the shells stay in the cylinder.”
“They do,” Mason confirmed. “All six of them were left in the cylinder, so she hadn’t reloaded.”
Charlie said, “Which means that she knew the gun was empty when she clicked the trigger three times.”
“You don’t know that,” Mason insisted. “Kelly probably thought—”
“Verify the sequence for me, please.” Sam slid the pen out of her notepad. She started writing