Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,122
reach out to Ms. Lam, trying to get her to throw John back into Coastal with the pedophiles and rapists. It wasn’t enough to frame him. He wanted John to suffer.
John had adjusted to his loss of freedom over the years, letting himself believe on some level that he belonged with men like Ben Carver. He had been a bad kid, a bad son. Richard Shelley could have testified to that. Even without his father’s damning testimony, in John’s own court of opinion, he did not come out completely blameless in Mary Alice’s murder. He had invited her to the party. He had been stoned. He had given her the alcoholic drink. He had gone back to her house, sneaked into her bedroom. He had snorted the speedball that knocked him on his ass. He had let it all happen.
But knowing it was Michael, his own cousin Woody, who had butchered Mary Alice made John sick with rage. He couldn’t be angry for his own sake, but he could be angry for Mary Alice, livid as hell that Michael had not just raped the girl, not just killed her, but ravaged her like a rabid animal.
The crime scene photographs in the courtroom had been shocking, but John had been there, had seen her body with his own two eyes. The bite marks on her small breasts. The dark bruises and deep lacerations on her inner thighs. The way her eyes were still open, staring at the door like she thought her mother would walk through at any minute and wake her for church. Her mouth had been brimming with her own blood, her hair stuck to the pillow with it.
That fucking bastard. That God damn sick bastard.
It didn’t stop with Mary Alice, though. Michael was still out there, still doing whatever the hell he wanted to do in John’s name. And he was a cop. A cop! He could jam up John anytime, was probably sitting on his ass right now thinking of yet another way to put John in the frame for his own sick crimes. The thought of last night, the tips of John’s fingers touching the folding knife, almost getting caught with a weapon in his hands, made him break out into a cold sweat. Michael could do anything. He could arrest John right now and there was nothing John could do about it.
And maybe John deserved it. Maybe after what he had done to Michael’s neighbor, he deserved to be tossed back in jail with all the other sick bastards. He had mutilated a child. He had used his own hands to defile that girl. It didn’t seem right that he should get away with such a thing.
The way things were looking, he probably wouldn’t.
The dryer stopped and John started folding the towels, piling them up in a rolling sixty-drum trashcan so they could move them around the cars as they worked. He needed to talk to Ben again. John had grown up in prison, but he thought like a prisoner, not a criminal. He needed someone to tell him what to do.
“Are you John?”
The woman in front of him was slim, about five-eight or -nine. Her black hair was in a pixie cut and she wore a close-fit cropped jacket over her tight blue jeans.
“Can I help you?” he asked, looking for the telltale bulge under her jacket. She didn’t look like a cop to him, her jacket was too nice, but John had never been good at spotting the bad guys.
“You’re John Shelley?” she asked.
He glanced over her shoulder. Ray-Ray was sucking on a lollipop, but John could see his eyes were taking in the scene.
John asked, “Do I know you?”
“You moved,” she said. “I thought you lived on Ashby Street.”
He tried to smile when what he really wanted to do was drop the towels and run. “What’s going on?”
She had her hands on her hips, and he thought about Ms. Lam. He couldn’t help himself. He looked right at the metal cap screwed onto the vacuum tank.
“I’m Kathy Keenan,” she said. “A friend of your sister’s.”
He dropped the towels. “Is Joyce—”
“She’s fine,” the woman assured him. “You just need to talk to her.”
“I…” He looked down at the pile of towels, then back up at the woman. He didn’t know who she was or why she was here, but she was crazy if she thought she could make Joyce do anything she didn’t want to do.