A LAWYER FOR THE PARENTSof James Wagner, the boy killed by Dunn, announced plans to sue Audrey Coil, but nothing happened with that, because Audrey had no assets of her own. They did sue Dunn’s estate and eventually got most of it, amounting to over a million dollars even after the attorney’s fees. Part of the money was used to create a bronze statue of their son, which was erected in the schoolyard, showing him about to shoot a basketball. The rest of it was donated to a local animal shelter, as both mother and son had volunteered at the shelter and were committed to animal rescue.
—
HENDERSON CALLED A SECONDtime and asked, “Can you believe it?”
“Can I believe what?”
“Audrey Coil. You don’t know?”
“Oh, Jesus, she didn’t—”
“No, no. She didn’t get shot. Listen, I won’t tell you about it, you got to see it to believe it. I’m sending you an email with a YouTube link. I’m sending it... now. Watch it.”
Mystified, Lucas opened his email and clicked on a link. A video came up, with a freeze-frame on Audrey Coil’s face, which was carefully made up to look like a Leonardo da VinciMadonna. Her hair was covered by a white shawl, like the Virgin Mary might have worn, and a voice-over said, “Audrey Coil, by Blake Winston.”
The freeze frame began to move, and then pulled back, and Audrey Coil was shown walking barefoot along a dirt path with a half dozen other women, all wearing white shawls over their hair and long white gowns that might have been sewn from bedsheets. Music: a woman and choir began singing “Down to the River to Pray” as the women walked slowly down a bank to the edge of a narrow, slow-moving river. A black preacher waited by the water’s edge, and as the chorus of music swelled, the women were taken one at a time and dipped in the river, newly baptized.
When the baptisms were over, the camera tracked back to Audrey Coil, who began, “I know there’s no way that I can make full recompense...”
Lucas was struck dumb and stayed that way for a while, walking around in his living room, running his hands through his hair.
—
JANE CHASE CALLED LUCASa couple of weeks after he got home.
“It took me a while, but I put it all together,” she said.
“Put what together?” Lucas asked.
“What you did,” she said. “I wondered right from the beginning why you wanted to interview William Christopher Walton, or Bill-Boy as we now call him, at the federal lockup. I had a quiet off-the-record chat with Brett Abelman, Bill-Boy’s attorney, and he told me what you did during the interview. Youpoked at Bill-Boy to see what would happen. He blew up and that’s what you wanted to see.”
“Why do you call him Bill-Boy?”
“Apparently, many years ago there was a TV series calledThe Waltonsand one of the main characters was called John-Boy—but you’re trying to move me away from the question of why you got Bill-Boy to blow up.”
“Jane...”
“I thought, now why did he do that? The answer is, because you thought Dunn would react the same way. He’d be enraged and he’d go after Audrey Coil. You used a teenaged girl as a tethered goat to attract Dunn to the place where you could kill him. But how could you set up Audrey Coil? Well, you didn’t know who Dunn was, so she’d have to be exposed as the creator of the website—Dunn would have to be told that the whole site was a fake. You could only reach him through the media. I talked to the media outlets that got the original tips on Audrey, and guess what? Gasp! The phone that the calls came from was a burner.”
“Everybody’s got one of those. Except me,” Lucas said. He’d thrown the burner in the Potomac.
“And then I asked myself, why would Davenport, who’d just exposed Dunn as the killer, not even hang around to see if we could bag him right there in the Washington area? Why would he race to the Marshals Service headquarters and get afucking high-powered rifleand fly out to Atlanta and then drive to Tifton before we’d even finished processing the house? Why would he lie to me about being out jogging when he was probably at National getting ready to fly?”
“I wasn’t lying. Actually, I was jogging to the gate. I was a little late,” Lucas said.
“The real answer to that question was,” Jane Chase said, “Davenport didn’t want a bunch of agents converging on Tifton and interfering with his killing of Dunn. Davenport didn’t want Dunn arrested, he wanted him dead.”
“Did you ever see the boy who was killed?” Lucas asked. “Or his mother? Or were they gone by the time you came down the hill, to school?”
After a moment of silence, she said, “They’d already moved the body...”
“You didn’t see him. Didn’t see his face, didn’t see his mother weeping over his body. So don’t give me any bullshit lectures about Dunn. Dunn got what he needed to get.”
“It was murder.”
“No, it was a killing,” Lucas said. “But not murder. I called out to him, he fired first, and I shot back. I gave him a chance to quit and he didn’t take it.”
“We’ve only got your word for that,” Jane Chase said.
