in front of his beer, a gloomy hunch to his bony shoulders.
“You’re that judge from Raythune County, right?” he said. “Last time I saw you was in church.”
Bell slid onto the stool next to him. Rhonda took the one on the other side.
“It’s prosecutor, not judge,” Bell said. “And that’s the first time anyone’s ever said that they remember me from church.” She laughed. “Buy you another beer, Lenny?”
“Sure.” He looked uneasy. This time, it was more than just an aversion to law enforcement. The Tie Yard Tavern was not the sort of place where people bought each other beers. Any beer bought for somebody else was automatically one less beer for yourself. Do the math.
“Lenny, this is Rhonda Lovejoy. She’s my assistant.”
He gave Rhonda a brief sideways swipe of a glance, and then came back to Bell. She signaled Kirk that Lenny would be having another.
“Whadda you want?” he said.
“I need your help,” Bell said.
“My help.”
“Oh, yes. You see, Lenny…” Bell paused, because Kirk had just set a sticky-looking bottle of Budweiser in front of her, and she had to push it down the line to Lenny. “It’s like this. Darlene died pretty close to here. She was run off the road. Hit a tree and died instantly. Do you remember that, Lenny? I’m sure you do. She was your friend, after all. Tragic story, don’t you think?”
“She wasn’t run off no damned road,” he muttered. “She was drunk off her ass. Everybody says so.” He kept his eyes forward.
“That’s what we thought at first, too, Lenny. But we were wrong. Her car was forced off that road.”
“Forced.” He flung up his head and twisted it sideways, peering at her. Under the bar lights his skin looked even worse than usual, redder and shinier and flakier, as if an ancient disease were reawakening under the surface, a roused dragon. “Nope, that ain’t the way it happened.”
“Oh, yes, Lenny.” Now that Bell had his eyes, she intended to hold onto them. “And I think you know that. You were here that Saturday night with Darlene. You sat and drank with her. You knew she had a problem—you knew she shouldn’t be drinking. But you needed her to be impaired. So that when that truck came along and bumped her car, she wouldn’t have the reflexes to save herself.”
“That’s a lie.” He said it mildly, like someone ordering fries at a drive-through window.
“We have witnesses, Lenny. People who saw you in the bar that night, buying her drinks. Why’d you do that?”
“Me and Darlene, we go way back.”
“So that’s all it was. Just some drinks with an old friend.”
“Yeah.” His face was in lockdown. No emotions were allowed in or out.
“Okay, fine,” Bell said. “Let’s move on. We know you placed several calls to Darlene’s home. You used a voice changer. You told her to stop asking questions about her father’s death.”
“Didn’t do no such thing.”
Bell let out a don’t make this harder than it has to be sigh. “Once again, Lenny, we have proof.”
He shrugged. “Don’t matter. No big thing. So maybe I made some calls. No law against it.”
Bell raised an eyebrow at Rhonda, who had been waiting for the signal. Her turn.
“Hey, Lenny?” Rhonda’s voice offered its just between us lilt that Bell admired. A lot of very sly people had admitted to some very bad things while relaxing in the shade of that voice. “Remember the night you went out to Marcy Coates’s house? You needed to shut her up. Isn’t that right? I bet she was threatening to turn you in. Was that it? Marcy was a good woman. She took your money, because she wanted to help somebody else, and because the people she took care of at Thornapple Terrace were so far gone, anyway. And then she smothered Harmon Strayer—just like you’d told her to. She used a pillow, maybe. And put it over the old man’s face. He was helpless, and he died right away. Just like the other two. But she couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t live with herself. So she called you and said she was going to go to the police. No way that was happening, Lenny—right?”
Rhonda leaned closer to him. His elbows were locked tight at his sides and he was looking straight ahead, at the rows of liquor bottles lined up on stacked shelves at the back of the bar, avoiding her eyes. The room was hot and crowded, and the thumping music never stopped, but it was as