I ducked through by the wheels and met him on the other side.
“It’s Tommy’s truck,” Bud said. “Tommy Kinakis.”
“Help me get the driver’s side door open.”
We yanked it until there was a few feet of space to crawl through and I poked my head inside.
Tommy looked like he’d been swallowed by the steering column of his truck. The whole dashboard was crushed against the seats, with Tommy slumped in between. Blood dripped off the wheel and over the shredded fabric, where some empty liquor bottles were lying. I reached to take a pulse without any hope. The boy’s eyes were open and blank.
I backed out of the wreck and shook my head at Bud, then called dispatch for an ambulance on a DOA.
“Jesus, he’s dead?” The truck driver held his head like it was going to fall off and paced in the ditch next to his cab. I left Bud to go talk to him.
“Tell me again what happened. Slow it down this time.”
“I was supposed to drop half the load in Rochester and half in Red Wing. I just left Rochester and was thinking I should have gassed up, and then this huge boom came out of nowhere.”
“Demo crew blew a barn up right over that hill. Less than a mile away.”
“Oh. Oh, okay.” He took to wiping his forehead.
“So after the blast . . .”
“It was then, right at the boom, that this truck ran into me. He was coming from the opposite direction and it looked like he just spun out, going at least seventy. His back end kind of swerved and I hit the brakes and tried to move to the shoulder. He was under me before I knew it. I heard the crunch and the whole rig jolted to a stop. I jumped out to see if he was hurt, and all I could make out was his head, but he didn’t move and he didn’t answer me when I yelled, so I ran back and called it in.”
“No other cars coming at the same time? Anyone else see it?”
“No, none. It’s pretty backwater out here. Maybe there was some afterwards, I don’t remember.”
“Del!” Bud shouted and I looked to see him half inside Tommy’s truck.
“Watch for that ambulance,” I told the driver, and jogged back. Could Tommy actually be alive? I hadn’t felt any heartbeat.
“What is it?”
Bud withdrew, staring inside the truck like someone had just poleaxed him in the back of the head. He held up a finger and pointed.
I checked inside, but nothing had changed. Tommy was still dead. I didn’t smell any fuel.
“The door,” Bud spat, and then I saw it.
The inside panel of the driver’s-side door was cracked open, and there, stained dark with dried and crusted blood, was Mary Beth Lund’s chicken-butchering knife. The knife I’d dreamed about, the knife we couldn’t pull out of that lake. I leaned in farther and saw a rectangular box with buttons underneath the knife. I’d bet a thousand dollars it was Hattie’s missing camcorder.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered.
Bud stepped up next to me and we stood there, staring at Tommy’s mutilated body, watching his blood congeal.
“Lund,” Bud said, quiet and low, and I knew he was thinking the same thing I was thinking. Peter Lund had confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. Maybe he thought he was protecting someone else or maybe he wanted to pay for his other sins, but in all likelihood he was going to rot in prison for the next twenty to thirty years, and the only thing in the world that would prevent that was right in front of us.
I glanced at Bud. In the distance came the wail of the ambulance and another police siren. There was no time to think it through. No time to wonder about the morality of a man’s actions, whether he owed more to a friend or to the law and the country that depended on that law, no time to sift through the dozens of questions that would haunt me in the middle of the night for years to come, sitting up in a pitch-black living room staring at the neighbors’ cat and feeling like I had no right to wear a badge, that I had failed the institution I’d given my life to and not even knowing what that meant. The sirens came closer and closer and I turned to Bud, my oldest, broken friend, and I gave him back a crumb of what he’d lost of himself.
“It’s your call.”
Tears coursed down his unshaved cheeks. “I don’t know, Del.”
“Decide for Hattie, then. Choose for her.”
I watched as Bud’s hand slowly reached out, to either pry open that hidden compartment or to seal it from the world’s eyes forever. To reveal who had murdered his daughter or to sentence her lover to a lifetime of penance.
His hand shook while he decided.
DEL / Sunday, May 11, 2008
JAKE AND I watched the tape from the beginning. Hattie’s image filled the interrogation room, bright and bubbling one minute, big-eyed and somber the next, telling us everything she had done in the last year of her short life. This was the diary I’d expected to find when I’d searched her room all those weeks ago.
When the scene switched from her bedroom to the dark, splintered boards of the barn, we both sat up straighter. Everything in me tensed and went cold. Hattie was oblivious to any danger, bursting with details about her rendezvous with Lund and their plans to run away together. She was glowing, pulsing with life and hope. Then a squeaking noise pulled her gaze away from the camera and her face brightened.
“Did you forget—”
Her smile died. She tripped backward, away from the camera and from the person who’d just walked into the barn.