First the Thunder Read online

  “You need to get the phone out of your mouth, Stevie. I can’t understand you.”

  “I said why would he do such a thing?”

  “You know why. You saw the photos. More than I did probably.”

  “Okay. But why Kenny’s mother? What did she have to do with anything?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Stevie, I don’t know! That’s not what matters now. We need to get our stories straight. Sheriff wants to talk to me in a little while. He’s going to want to talk to you too.”

  “What are we supposed to say?”

  “What you don’t say,” Will told him, “is that you saw Harvey tonight. You haven’t seen him since . . . when? Since we had pizza and watched that movie with Nicolas Cage in it. But whatever you do, don’t mention Harvey asking to use my revolver. Just say he dropped by but didn’t stay long. You could maybe say he seemed antsy, restless, but you don’t know why.”

  “Where am I supposed to say I was tonight? Can I say I was with you?”

  “No! Laci knows you weren’t.”

  “I’ll just say I was home by myself all night.”

  “That’s not good enough. They’ll think you were with Harvey breaking into the school. You need to get yourself an alibi of some kind. Get one of your buddies to say you were out spotting for deer or something.”

  “It’s too early to be spotting.”

  “For God’s sake, Stevie. Just think of something. You don’t know anything about the stuff you bought or about Harvey breaking into the school.”

  “I’m not a very good liar, Will. I’m terrible at poker. You know that.”

  “Because that’s a bad kind of lie. When you’re trying to take advantage of somebody. I’m asking you to tell the good kind of lie. It will help Harvey if you do. It will make people think better of him. You can lie to help Harvey, can’t you?”

  “I’d do anything for Harvey. Or for you. Or for Laci or Molly or . . . any of my family.”

  “Good. Then all you have to say is that Harvey never talked to you about him and Jennalee. You never knew a thing about her screwing other men or anything like that. Laci has that flash drive you found—”

  “She what? What the hell, Will?”

  “She found it at Harvey’s place and picked it up for some crazy reason. I guess she thought she was protecting me, I don’t know. But we don’t know anything about a flash drive. That’s all you need to remember. Just play dumb on everything. And if he asks if you and me talked about this, you’re going to have to say yes, we talked, because if he wants to he can pull the phone records and see I called you twice. Just don’t tell him what we talked about, other than we talked about Harvey. You understand?”

  “Give me a little credit, Will. When are you ever going to do that?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just . . . You’re going to do fine. Better than me probably.”

  Stevie was silent for a few moments. Then he asked, “What happens now? To Harvey, I mean.”

  “They’re taking him down to Donaldson’s tonight. How about you meet me at the sheriff’s office at nine in the morning. Afterward we’ll go to the funeral home together and get things figured out.”

  “He going to let us see Harvey?”

  “Doesn’t matter if he wants to let us or not,” Will said. “We’re going to.”

  “Okay,” Stevie said.

  “You all right, then? Going to be okay?”

  “I’m going to say a prayer for Harvey now.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Will said. “Say one for all of us.”

  61

  Both men were standing near the bottom of the stairs as Laci descended. “There’s our girl,” the coroner said, looking up, smiling.

  Halfway down she could detect the odor, not nearly as strong as in Harvey’s house. Vague behind the mask, but recognizable. Blood and urine and defecation. All the ignominy of violent death.

  She paused on the bottom step and surveyed the room. Louise nearby in a blue velveteen house robe and matching slippers, belly and left cheek to the floor, legs spread wide, one knee hooked. Her face was unrecognizable, hair and skin painted with blood. Thighs fat and white, exposed up to her thick support panties. Laci felt sorry for her, revulsion and pity.

  A yellow tennis ball. Broken glass. A set of andirons, pieces scattered.

  Across the room, Kenny lay on his side with his back to her, forehead up against the paneled wall, his body bent around the corner of the sofa, arms twisted beneath his chest. She would have to squeeze in behind the sofa to photograph his face.

  She could feel the flash drive against her ankle. And in Kenny’s posture, saw an opportunity.

  The sheriff asked, “How’s Will handling all this?”

  “He’s in a fog,” she said. “I told him you wanted to talk in the morning, and he’ll be there. Just don’t expect a lot.” Then she turned to the coroner. “Okay if I get in behind the sofa?”

  “If there’s room,” he said. “If not, just shoot a few close-ups from above. We both checked him out already. It’s pretty clear what happened here.”

  “The final result is clear,” the sheriff said. “Not the sequence.”

  She nodded. She started by walking to her left around the perimeter of the room, recording the scene in full. When she came to Kenny’s body near the opposite wall, she turned back toward the sheriff and coroner, walking slowly in front of the sofa, and continued with the long-range shots. She knew that she was breathing too shallowly, thinking too much about the flash drive in her shoe, and concentrated on regulating her breath. Sometimes her eyes watered but she kept clicking anyway.

  She walked carefully, blood everywhere, streaks and splotches all over the carpet, a few splatters on the walls. But at the end of the sofa, where the padded arm rested barely a foot and a half from the wall, she pulled up short. Louise’s little dog lay curled and still against the corner of the room, head and chest bloody, back end caked with its own waste. She realized what she was breathing and tasting, and gagged twice before getting herself under control again.

  “Crawled back there to die probably,” the sheriff said.

  She had to step over and to the right of the dog, swinging her body to put her back to the wall. When she brought her left foot over the dog too, she saw that everything was going to be all right. This was going to work. Keep inching behind the sofa to the other end. Take several shots down at Kenny’s face while standing erect. Then a few while easing into a squat. Not much space to maneuver. Keep easing down, body twisting. Camera dipping below the top of the sofa. Hands hidden as she went down on one knee. If she were any bigger, this would be impossible. Left hand letting go of the camera, hand dipping toward her foot. Fingers searching beneath the papery bootie.

  There. Plastic. She worked it out with finger and thumb. Gave it a soft flick under the sofa.

  Looked toward the men. Both smiled. The sheriff said, “It’s not worth pulling a muscle over, Laci.”

  The coroner said, “She’ll get it done. One way or the other, she always does.”

  A few minutes later she started to back away from the corpse, camera and hands invisible behind the sofa. Then stopped suddenly. Cocked her head. Looked toward the men again, her eyebrows knitted.

  “You stuck?” the sheriff said.

  “My hand touched something. Underneath the sofa. Did you check under here already?”

  “I had a look,” the sheriff said, but was crossing toward her now.

  “I’m pretty sure I touched something.”

  He reached for the flashlight on his belt. Flicked it on and dropped to his knees. Lowered his head to the floor.

  “I’ll keep my hand here,” Laci said. “Whatever I touched is just a few inches away.”

  The sheriff checked the carpet for blood, repositioned himself, touched his head to the floor. Laid the flashlight close to his chin. Shined the light into the darkness. “I got it,” he said. “It’s pink.”

  “From blood?” the coroner asked
.

  “Nope.”

  Laci said, “Do you want me to pick it up?”

  The sheriff said, “Not before you shoot it.”

  “I doubt I can get a camera on it from here.”

  The sheriff did not reply, so she set the camera on the floor, aimed it underneath the sofa, and clicked off several shots, subtly redirecting the camera’s aim each time.

  When satisfied that she had captured the drive’s location, she clicked off twenty or so close-ups of Kenny’s face, then worked her way out from behind the sofa, took more photos of Kenny, then more shots underneath the sofa from the front.

  When the clicking stopped, the sheriff said, “Go ahead and pull that thing out now.”

  She stuck her arm under the sofa, reached toward the back, pulled her arm back out. “I can’t reach it,” she told him. “My arm’s too short.”

  The sheriff came forward, lay on his side in front of the sofa, slid his arm underneath. He had to flatten himself against the sofa and stretch his fingers to their limit to reach the flash drive. He pulled it out, sat up, looked at the drive, then laid it atop the sofa cushion before standing.

  “A couple close-ups ought to do it,” he told Laci.

  She clicked off half a dozen. Then, to calm herself, to keep busy, she said, “I still need to do medium range and the rest of the close-ups.”

  “Have at it,” he told her.

  She photographed everything, every body, every object in the room. The ball and broken glass and fireplace tools and the flash drive again. Close-ups, medium shots, wall-to-wall shots. A headful of clicks. Each seemed to go into her ears like the snap from a string of firecrackers, then bounced and ricocheted and echoed through her skull.

  When she finished she could feel the pressure behind her eyes, all those clicks crowded on top of each other. She blinked. Looked around the room. Saw the men watching her. “I’m satisfied if you are,” she said.

  “Thanks again, Laci,” the coroner told her. “I know it’s been a hard night for you.”

  She nodded. “There’s a lot of hardness ahead, I think.”

  The sheriff touched her shoulder as she started up the stairs. “Do me a favor and tell the deputy he can start bagging now.”

  She turned to face him. Even from the first step she had to look up. “Any chance you could tell me how it looks to you?”

  “It looks ugly,” he said. “But I’m betting you already know that.”

  His eyes were soft. Understanding. She held his gaze and took a chance. “There’s nothing here to prove it was Harvey,” she said. “Nothing I could see.”

  “Hmm,” he said, a deep quick growl in the back of his throat. He looked about to say more, to contradict her. But then he smiled, and his smile made her feel small, a child. “We’ll piece it all together,” he said.

  “Even if it was him,” she said. “You know Harvey. He was rough-spoken, sure, but he didn’t hurt people. He loved Jennalee and he loved this town. How do you know he wasn’t just defending himself?”

  The sheriff held his smile. “You go on back and be with your own family now, okay? Try to get some sleep. I’ll talk to Will in the morning. As close to nine as he can make it.”

  She went up the stairs and out through the kitchen and into the foyer. At the door she removed her gloves and booties and mask and left them on the floor.

  The state policeman and Deputy Landers were standing together on the porch, talking softly. It seemed a long way across the street from where she stood. The neighbors in their yards and on their own porches seemed far away and small. All around the large house was empty space. She had a fleeting sensation of standing on a floating island in a vast sea of tiny, distant lights.

  To the deputy, she said, “Sheriff needs you to start bagging the evidence now.”

  “I hate to even go back down into that room,” he told her.

  “It’s okay,” she told him. “You’ll be okay.”

  62

  They lay awake for a long time, exhausted, holding hands, speaking in whispers.

  “He’ll probably look at it as soon as he gets back to his office,” Laci said. “Maybe sooner if he has a laptop in his car. And that will explain why Harvey did it. What I’m worried about is you and Stevie and what you did at the school.”

  “Hardly anything,” Will told her. “Some graffiti on the walls is all.”

  “Breaking and entering,” she said. “Trespassing.”

  “We were all wearing gloves. All except Harvey.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t leave anything behind? Nothing that can be traced to you?”

  He remembered the cans of spray paint. “Stevie said he got everything.”

  “And you trust him?”

  “What choice do I have?”

  She blew out a breath. “I can’t believe you were that stupid, Will. I really can’t believe it.”

  “You and me both,” he said.

  They lay side by side on their backs, only their hands touching. Even so he could feel the stiffness of her body, as rigid with tension as his.

  She said, “Let’s just go through it all again. Get it straight in your head for morning. So you know what not to say.”

  “Do it,” he said.

  “You guys went into the school around midnight.”

  “Earlier than that,” he said. “We were out before midnight.” And now he remembered looking at the bar clock when he and Harvey came through the door. He said, “It was eleven fifty-four when Harvey and I got back to the bar.”

  “Okay,” she said. “And almost one-thirty when I got the call about Harvey and Jennalee. So all you have to tell the sheriff is that you were working on the books until Harvey showed up. Then not long after I left for the school, Harvey left too. Said he was going to go see what was happening over there. You were at the bar the whole time.”

  “I wish I had been able to see him at his house,” Will said.

  “No you don’t.”

  “I should have been allowed in.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to see him like that.”

  “He’s my brother,” Will told her. “My brother.”

  “But what good would it have done? Why would you want to see him looking like that?”

  Ten seconds passed before he spoke. “You have the pictures you took, right? Still on your camera?”

  He was already moving, preparing to rise from the bed. She reached out, touched his back. And lied. “I gave the memory card to the coroner.”

  “Before I could see them?” he said.

  “Not because of that. Because he asked for it. Needed to study them, he said. They’re police property anyway.”

  He remained motionless, leaning on one elbow.

  “Lie back down,” she told him. “You’ll see him soon.”

  Half a minute passed before he acquiesced and eased down beside her again. “What if his . . . What if his soul was still there in the house for a while? What if he didn’t even realize what had happened to him?”

  She heard the catch in his throat, knew that tears were sliding down his cheeks in the darkness. She put out her hand, felt for his. Held it and said nothing for a while. Felt the trembling of his body as he silently wept.

  Only when he was still again did she speak. “The sheriff’s probably going to ask you if you knew about what was going on with Jennalee and Kenny. He’ll ask you about the flash drive.”

  “What do I say?”

  “I keep going back and forth on that,” she said. “Is it better to say you knew about it, or better to say you didn’t?”

  “Better for who?”

  “For you. First you have to protect yourself. Keep yourself out of the whole thing.”

  “I don’t want people thinking Harvey just went berserk or something. Like he was some kind of crazy man. Jennalee’s the one responsible for all this.”

  “It matters what people think about you too.”

  “No it doesn’t. I d
on’t give a damn about that.”

  “You better,” she said. “If you love Molly and me, you better care.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “Besides, you’re in the best position of all for deciding what people think and what they don’t.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The bar,” she told him. “Sooner or later you’re going to be asked why Harvey did what he did.”

  “I’ll tell them to mind their own damn business.”

  “No you won’t. You’ll tell them what Jennalee was doing. What Harvey told you he found out she and Kenny were doing. You won’t have to tell more than one or two people. And within thirty-six hours the whole town will know. They’ll probably know anyway, because somebody in the police department is going to whisper it to somebody else. You think Chris Landers will keep his mouth shut about what was on the flash drive? You think Ronnie Walters won’t tell his wife?”

  “Then why do I have to tell it?”

  “Corroboration. You’re closer to the source. And don’t forget, you said there were other men in those photos with Jennalee. Did you recognize any of them?”

  “Yes,” he said, his mouth tight.

  “All right then,” she said. “I don’t want to know any names. Kenny and Jennalee are the ones at fault here. Her especially. She’s the one who lied, not Harvey. She’s the one who cheated. He found out, did something about it, and she killed him for it.”

  “That’s how it happened,” he said.

  “And that’s all anybody needs to know.”

  63

  “So as far as you know,” the sheriff said, and drank the last sip of coffee in his mug, his third of the morning, “that’s the only reason he was upset? Because of that deal with the motorcycle?”

  Will rubbed his forehead, looked at the photograph on the wall behind the sheriff’s chair. It was a picture of somewhere out west, a wide green valley with snowcapped mountains in the background. Five brown and black horses were grazing in the valley, everything green below the frozen gray and white. He could feel the coroner’s presence behind him, a silent man seated against the opposite wall, listening.