There was a question there, and Dyer understood. “The county took it two years later. Unpaid taxes.”
Adrian leaned against the wall. The land had been in his family since before the Civil War. Losing it to the same people who’d locked him away for thirteen years was an unbearable injustice. “I didn’t kill Julia.”
“Don’t.”
“We’re just talking.”
“Not about her, we’re not.”
Every angle in Francis Dyer seemed to sharpen. The shoulders. The jaw.
“Tell me about the beer can.”
“What?”
Adrian watched him, looking for the lie. “A twelve-ounce Foster’s can with my prints on it was found in a ditch thirty yards from the church. It linked me to the murder scene, but here’s the thing.” Adrian stepped closer. Dyer didn’t budge. “I never drank a beer near that church. I never left a can there, I wouldn’t. The last time I drank a Foster’s was here, in this house, two days before she died.”
“You think I planted evidence?”
“Did you?”
“There were other people here that night. Beckett. Randolph. Even Liz was here. I could name fifty people. It was a party. Besides, no one needed to plant evidence to convict you. You handled that part just fine by yourself.”
Dyer meant DNA and skin and scratches. That was logical and fine, but the can was first-day evidence. Without Adrian’s prints at the scene there’d have been no court order subjecting him to a physical exam, no knowledge of the scratches on his neck, and nothing connecting him to the murder.
“Someone planted that can.”
“No one framed you.”
“It didn’t get there by itself.”
“You know what? We’re done.”
“I didn’t kill her, Francis.”
“Mention Julia again, and I’ll shoot you for real. I mean it.”
Adrian didn’t blink or back down. He held his ex-partner’s gaze and felt all the emotion behind it. “Do you really hate me so much?”
“You know why,” Dyer said; and looking in his black and bitter eyes, Adrian did.
Because Francis Dyer had always been jealous.
Because he’d loved Julia, too.
* * *
That certainty grew as Adrian walked out of his old partner’s neighborhood. The can was peripheral at trial, not a nonevent but almost an afterthought. By then, the prosecutor had scratches on Adrian’s neck and skin under Julia’s nails; he had prints in the house and Adrian’s own partner to testify against him. Those things made a case so strong the beer can at the church was a blip. But, that was the trial, and the early days of the investigation had been very different. Liz had found Julia’s body in the old church, and it was like marble on the altar, white and lifeless and clean. Adrian could still feel the rage and sadness that ripped through him when he got the call; he remembered every second—had lived them a million times: the drive to the church and the sight of her there, the love of his life gone lifeless, hardwood under his knees as he’d wept like a child, uncaring.
But, people saw: Francis and other cops. They saw and they wondered. Then a tech pulled Adrian’s print, and everything changed. Not just the doubts and dirty looks, but the court-ordered blood sample and the physical exam that found the scratches on his neck. After years behind the badge Adrian was on the outside, a suspect. He lost standing, trust, and, in the end, everything he’d ever loved.
Julia first.
Then life as he’d known it.
That his partner might have been jealous enough to plant evidence didn’t occur to Adrian until his first year in solitary. It was so out there and so extreme, a thought born of the smallest memory. Julia lay propped on an elbow, a sheet gathered at her waist. They were in a hotel in Charlotte, tenth floor. Light from the city spilled in, but all else was dark. It was a week before she died, and she was beautiful.
Are we bad people, Adrian?
He’d stroked her face. Maybe.
Is it worth it?
It was an old question between them. He’d kissed her, then, and said, Yes, it has to be.
But doubt was in the room, a dark conjuring.
I think your partner knows.
Why?
A look, she said. A feel.
Like what?
Like he watches more than he should.
That was it, a nothing in the night. But nothings grow when the world is eight by six and hours stretch forever. Adrian replayed the memory a hundred times, and then a thousand. Two days later, he added the can to see how the pieces fit. It seemed possible, he’d thought, which was not the same as probable.