way.”
Sometimes you get lucky, Nelse Miller had said. In the small hours of the morning, Nelse had been apt to find philosophy at the bottom of a shot glass, or in the glow of his last cigarette. He maintained that for every case that stays unsolved by chance—no one happened to see anything, no one happened to find the weapon—there is another case that is solved by the same random luck. “This time the coin came up your way,” he’d said when he got back to find the suspect already in custody and the evidence tagged for trial.
Now Spencer wondered whose luck it had been—his windfall or Fate Harkryder’s misfortune? He found the kid at the truck stop, still shooting pool with a couple of truckers. Harmon pointed him out. Spencer recognized the scraggly youth with the peach-fuzz mustache as one of the Harkryders, and he’d asked to see the jewelry the kid had been trying to sell. The kid had made a move, as if to put his hand into the pocket of his jacket, but instead he had shoved the player with the cue stick against Spencer Arrowood and made a run for the door. He’d been about three truckers short of a getaway, and instead of making it to his car, he found himself facedown on the sticky floor of the truck stop, while the deputy
cuffed his hands behind his back.
“It’s your move,” Alton Banner told his patient, tapping the chessboard with a black pawn.
Spencer blinked and the carved wooden pieces came back into focus, but he had forgotten now what maneuver he had been setting up. “Did we miss anything?” he asked his opponent.
The old doctor shrugged. “Are you referring to my designs on your king’s bishop, or are you over there wool-gathering again?”
“I was thinking about the night of the Trail Murders,” said Spencer. “When you and I were at the crime scene. Is there anything we overlooked? Anything you’d do differently now—with more experience, I mean.”
“Speak for yourself, boy. I was fifty-one back in those days, and I can’t say that experience has improved me much since then. As for technology, maybe there’s something we could have gained if we’d had Luminol and DNA testing, and all the rest of the new tools, but there’s no use worrying about that now. The evidence has long since degraded. It went into the trash the decade before last. What good will it do to dwell on that now?”
“I want to be sure. I’ve never had anybody executed before—and it’s on my say-so. The evidence was circumstantial.”
“Circumstantial. Would you listen to yourself? Most of the people in prison are there on circumstantial evidence, aren’t they? Even felons are smart enough not to commit the crime in front of a bunch of eyewitnesses. Excepting John Wilkes Booth, that is.”
Spencer smiled. “I know that. And most killers are not inclined to think that confession is good for the soul, either. We had a solid case. He had Emily Stanton’s jewelry in his possession and was attempting to sell it, which gave us a motive of robbery. His blood—type A-negative—was found at the crime scene. He had no alibi.”
“Are you trying to convince me or yourself? Because if you’re saying all this for my benefit, let me say now that I never had one moment’s doubt from that day until this that you had the killer. He had A-negative blood, Spencer. That’s rare enough so that if you walk into a blood bank and offer to give them some, they start dancing for joy and offering you refills on the orange juice.”
“I just wondered if there’s anything I’ve forgotten about that case.”
“My memory is long. I can still see those two young people crumpled on the ground in that clearing, looking as if they’d been caught in a threshing machine. No, I never will forget that. So don’t ask me to spare too much time helping you agonize over Fate Harkryder’s execution, because the night we found the bodies of his victims, I could have shot him myself without a flicker of hesitation. I swear I could’ve.”
Spencer pushed a rook forward. “My summons to the execution said that as sheriff of the prisoner’s home county, I could appoint another witness besides myself to attend as well. Would you like to go?”
Alton Banner sighed. “I would not,” he said. “I have spent a lifetime trying to keep people from dying, and I have no intention this late in the game of