That was when the man with the daughters spoke loudly into the silence. “See, girls? He’s nothing! He’s a pathetic retard, nothing to be scared of.”
It took a split second for Will’s gaze to find the man, and then he lunged toward him with a savage growl. Jericho had been so intent on keeping the tension from his body that he barely reacted in time. But he managed to hang on, and then the deputies were there, getting between Will and the crowd, pushing, wrestling, and finally shoving Will into the car, where he flopped on his side and cried in silent gasps.
Goddamn it.Jericho forced himself to remember Lorraine’s battered face and lifeless body. She was the victim here, not Will Archer, and the deputies had responded with appropriate force to a threat against the public. Everything had gone the way it was supposed to go.
Still, as he headed for the driver’s seat, he couldn’t bring himself to look in Mr. Appleby’s direction. He paused as he passed the man with the two daughters, and said, “We have your address? I’ll be over tonight to take your statement.”
“We already spoke to one of the deputies.”
“Okay, I’ll read that statement, and I’ll come over to ask you some questions about it.”
For a moment, the man didn’t have his expression under control, and Jericho saw what he’d known was there. The petulance, the resentment, the desire to make life unpleasant for others. Jericho didn’t think he was going to learn too much about the case at hand from this character, but he had other law enforcement responsibilities. A good cop knew the criminals in his neighborhood, but he also knew the assholes, the ones who followed the rules but still caused problems for everyone. This guy was pretty clearly an asshole, and Jericho wasn’t going to pass up a chance to get to know him a little and figure out what he could about the guy’s trouble-making tendencies. Besides, it would be nice to have a concern other than Will to think about at least temporarily.
The man’s face immediately fell back into blank, slightly confused, but ultimately cooperative citizen mode. The mask he wore to make his dickishness socially acceptable. “Of course,” he said. “We’ll be in all evening.”
“Thanks for your cooperation.” Jericho slid into the cruiser and glanced through the plexiglass to see Will, still flopped over, lost in his private world of misery.
Jericho put the car in gear and eased it around the crowd and out toward the street. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at Mr. Appleby. And, strangely, it was almost as hard to look in Wade’s direction.
That was simply good thinking, he told himself as he headed toward the station. There was no reason to think about Wade, no reason to make contact with him, not in this situation or any other. Maybe Jericho was finally getting some common sense and giving a bit of attention to self-preservation.
That was what he wanted to be true, and he managed to believe it all through that evening. He got Will processed and settled in a holding cell at the station, contacted the public defender and arranged psychiatric consults for as soon as possible, did the paperwork, got the search warrant so he could send deputies over to Will’s place to root around, and then he went to talk to Keith Wooderson, the asshole with the daughters.
The guy behaved exactly as Jericho had thought he would—he knew his rights and was damn well going to ensure that every one of them was respected. He gave Jericho the basic information about himself: he was forty-two, he worked as a web designer, he had no criminal record. He let Jericho speak to his daughters, but only with himself in the room. In most cases Jericho would have considered that good parenting, but in this case it felt controlling. It was enough to tweak Jericho’s instincts to look for signs of child abuse, but nothing jumped out at him. Sometimes assholes were just assholes. So Jericho did his job, then went home exhausted.
But as soon as he pulled up in front of his building and saw the shadows by the front door move a little, he wasn’t tired anymore. And as Wade separated himself from the darkness and stood in the semicircle of light from the building, Jericho realized that his common sense and self-preservation were still woefully underdeveloped. Talking to Wade was stupid, and he was absolutely going to do it anyway.
