The Good Daughter (The Good Daughter #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,47

is usually true.” She turned back to look at the Wilson house. Captain Isaac was carrying out a plastic box full of Kelly’s clothes.

Charlie told Huck, “If you really want to help Kelly, stay away from any and all reporters, don’t go on camera, don’t let them get a good photo of you, don’t even talk to your friends about what happened, because they’ll go on camera or they’ll talk to reporters and you won’t be able to control what comes out of their mouths.”

“That’s good advice.” He let out a short breath and said, “Hey, I need to tell you that I’m sorry.”

“For?”

“B2. Ben Bernard. Your husband called you this morning. I almost answered.”

Charlie felt her cheeks flush.

He said, “I didn’t know until one of the cops told me. This was after I had talked to him, told him what we’d been up to, why you were at the school.”

Charlie put her head in her hand. She knew how certain types of men talked about women, especially the ones they screwed in their trucks outside of bars.

Huck said, “You could’ve warned me. It put us all in an even worse situation.”

“You apologize, but really, it’s my fault?” She couldn’t believe this guy. “When would I have told you? Before Greg Brenner knocked me out? Or after you deleted the video? Or how about when you lied in your witness statement about how my nose got broken, which is a felony, by the way—the lying to cover a cop’s ass, not the standing around with your thumb up your ass while a woman gets punched in the face. That’s perfectly legal.”

Huck pushed out another sigh. “You don’t know what it’s like running into something like that. People make mistakes.”

“I don’t know what it’s like?” Charlie felt shaken by a sudden fury. “I think I was there, Huck. I think I got there before you did, so I know exactly what it’s like to run into something like that, and not for nothing, but if you really grew up in Pikeville, then you know I’ve done it twice now, so fuck you with your ‘You don’t know what it’s like.’”

“Okay, you’re right. I’m sorry.”

Charlie wasn’t finished. “You lied about Kelly’s age.”

“Sixteen, seventeen.” She could picture Huck shaking his head. “She’s in the eleventh grade. What difference does it make?”

“She’s eighteen, and the difference is the death penalty.”

He gasped. There was no other word for it—the sudden, quick inhalation that came from absolute shock.

Charlie waited for him to speak. She checked the bars on the phone. “Hello?”

He cleared his throat. “I need a minute.”

Charlie needed a minute, too. She was missing something big. Why had Huck been interviewed for four hours? The average interrogation lasted somewhere between half an hour and two hours. Charlie’s had topped out at around forty-five minutes. The entirety of her and Huck’s involvement with the crime had been less than ten minutes. Why had Delia Wofford brought in the FBI to play good cop/bad cop with Huck? He was hardly a hostile witness. He had been shot in the arm. But he’d said he was interrogated before he went to the hospital. Delia Wofford wasn’t the kind of cop who didn’t follow procedure. The FBI sure as shit didn’t mess around.

So why had they kept their star witness at the police station for four hours? That wasn’t how you treated a witness. That was how you treated a suspect who wasn’t playing ball.

“Okay, I’m back,” Huck said. “Kelly’s—what are they calling it now? Remedial? Intellectually handicapped? She’s in basic classes. She can’t retain concepts.”

“The law would call it diminished capacity, as in she’s too incapable to form the mental state required for a crime, but that’s a very hard argument to make,” Charlie told him. “There are very different priorities between a government-run school system and a government-run murder prosecution. One is trying to help her and the other is trying to kill her.”

He was so quiet that all she could hear was his breathing.

Charlie asked, “Did the two agents, Wofford and Avery, talk to you for four hours straight, or was there time in between?”

“What?” He seemed thrown by the question. “Yeah, one of them was always in the room. And your husband sometimes. And that guy, what’s his name? He wears those shiny suits?”

“Ken Coin. He’s the district attorney.” Charlie shifted tactics. “Was Kelly bullied?”

“Not in my classroom.” He added, “Off-campus, social media, we can’t regulate that.”

“So you’re saying she was bullied?”

“I’m saying she was