He Defended Her, He Said I Deserved It novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: The Face in the Car

Lainie's hospital sketch of the face in the car matches Kerri, but the detective calls a parked car nothing, and she moves into a hotel with one bag before learning Kerri won't be charged.

"Play it again," I said.

Ike Bonner played it again.

The white Audi. The lights going off. The blue glow coming up under her chin.

The phone rising toward the alley and holding there.

On the third time I made myself watch my own car go past.

It was going so fast it blurred.

"Daddy said a bad word when he saw it," Nettie said from the card table.

"Homework," Ike said.

"He said it four times. That's a dollar."

"Put it on my tab."

"Your tab is eleven dollars."

He didn't smile, but something moved in his beard.

I sat down in the chair across from his desk because my knees had decided for me.

"Why didn't you check this in August?" I asked.

"Police wanted the back camera. The back camera had his plate." He rubbed his jaw. "Front camera's just Marshall Street. Drunks and lawyers. I never look at it."

"What made you look?"

He reached under the desk and laid Sunday's paper in front of me.

It was folded to a short piece on page four.

A source close to the defense said the young associate was at home all night.

"I don't like being lied to in my own newspaper," he said.

I dug in my bag.

My sketchbook from that week was still in there. I'd never taken it out.

I flipped past three days of a fraud trial to the page with the hospital's paper bracelet stuck to it with tape.

The face was done in blue pastel and charcoal.

A woman, lit from underneath. Two small bright dots at the ears.

I'd drawn it at three in the morning with a cracked rib and a nurse telling me to lie still.

I laid it next to the monitor.

Ike looked at the screen. He looked at the page.

He took his reading glasses off his collar and put them on and looked again.

"Well, hell," he said.

"Dollar twenty-five," said Nettie.

"You drew that before you saw this," he said to me.

"I drew it in the emergency room."

"From what?"

"From the half a second I looked over my shoulder." I swallowed. "Before he slammed me into the van."

He took the glasses off and folded them very carefully.

"Okay," he said. "Let's go see your detective."

Ike forwarded the office phone to his cell and locked up, and Nettie came with us, because there was nobody to leave her with.

She sat in the plastic chairs at police headquarters doing fractions and glaring at a vending machine.

The detective was the same one.

Gray mustache, coffee breath, a tie he'd loosened sometime in the nineties.

He watched it on Ike's laptop with his arms folded.

Then he watched it again with them still folded.

"It's a car parked on a public street," he said.

"It's her car," I said. "It's her face."

"It's a white sedan and a woman on her phone. Half this city is a woman on her phone."

"She was filming."

"You can't tell that."

"I can tell that. I've drawn eight thousand faces from forty feet away. She was holding it up and she was holding it steady."

He sighed through his mustache.

"Mrs. Treadway."

"Shore."

"Ms. Shore. Your husband's submission came in this morning. Ninety-six pages." He tapped the desk. "It's very thorough. It says the man in the van is a liar with a record who'll say anything for a deal. It says Ms. Gaskill was home."

"Then this says the submission is wrong."

"This says a car was there." He pushed the laptop back toward Ike. "Hang on to it. If anybody asks, I'll know where it is."

"That's it?" Ike said.

It was the first thing he'd said since we came in.

The detective looked up at him. Way up.

"That's it, Mr. Bonner."

In the parking lot, I stood by my car and couldn't remember which pocket my keys were in.

Ike waited.

He didn't offer to drive me. He didn't tell me to calm down.

He just stood there in his flannel shirt.

"You got somewhere to sleep?" he asked finally.

"Yes."

"Is it his house?"

"No."

"Okay."

That was all.

Nettie looked up at me from beside his hip.

"You can't go home?"

"I left my key on a desk," I said.

"That's dumb."

"Nettie."

"It's a little dumb, Dad."

I laughed.

It came out wrong and too loud, and I put my hand over my mouth.

It was the first time I'd laughed since August.

I checked into a hotel on Franklin Street at nine forty.

One bag. My tackle box of pastels, my sketchbook, a phone charger and a toothbrush from the drugstore next door.

The clerk looked at the scar on my cheek and then gave me a room on a high floor without asking anything.

I sat on the bed in my coat.

I didn't turn on the TV. My own drawings might be on it.

At ten fifteen my phone buzzed.

The victim advocate. A kind woman with a careful voice who texted me every Monday.

I'm so sorry to tell you this by text. The commonwealth's attorney has decided not to charge Ms. Gaskill at this time.

Then a second one.

The plea hearing for the defendant is set for Friday at 9 a.m.

You have the right to give a statement in court, if you want to.

I read it until the screen went dark.

Then I opened my sketchbook to a clean page and wrote the day across the top.

Friday.

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