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“And what did he say?”
“He said that he would take them all up to the morgue at Biloxi. He said they had better facilities for long-term storage.”
Gaines sighed. “Hell of a thing, eh? Better facilities for long-term storage. This is what it comes down to.”
He left Hagen standing there with nothing to say and headed down the back hallway to his office.
Once inside, he closed the door, sat at his desk. and pulled off his boots.
Marya
And then they had left.
At the front door, just there inside the porch, there had been a strange moment. Holland had gone on to the car, was getting in on the passenger side, and Marya
Gaines said nothing, but evidently there was a question in his eyes, an unspoken request for clarification.
“I just find it strange—don’t you?—that you are the person now trying to find out who killed my best friend, but you are twenty years too late.”
“I don’t think I am too late,” Gaines said.
“Too late to have the guilty suffer the rightful consequences, Sheriff. If Matthias Wade strangled Nancy, then he should have hanged two decades ago. But no, he has lived the best kind of life, always enough money, never wanting for anything—”
“Except for the very thing he really wanted.”
“For Nancy Denton to love him.”
“And the knowledge that he was the one who removed any hope of that ever happening.”
Marya
Gaines hesitated. He wanted to hear what she would say next. He wanted to ask her why Nancy would have liked him, or if it was simply a way of Marya
Perhaps he wanted to see if he had the courage to say something himself, to tell her that talking to her seemed to be the only thing among all this madness that made him feel like a real human being.
But he did not say anything, and neither did Marya
Gaines stood there. He sensed that she was right there on the other side of the door, that she had not yet walked away.
He could hear his own heart. He felt like a teenager. He smiled at his own foolishness and then he walked back to the car.
What Marya
Gaines confronted the worst-case scenario—another two dead, Clifton Regis and Marya
Gaines got up and walked to the window. He was thinking crazy. He was arguing for his own prosecution.
The real issue here was that he could not see any other way to approach this obstacle. Where would he go if he could not reach Della? Eugene? Eugene did not live there and had not lived at the family home for some considerable time. Did Eugene possess some knowledge that would incriminate his brother, or even some burning desire to see his brother incriminated? Or the older of the two sisters, Catherine? Would she help?
Gaines felt boxed in whichever way he turned. Was it possible that Wade would just never be called to account for what he had done? Of course it was. This was the fundamental difference between justice and law. Guilt was no guarantee of punishment. The legal system had created its own Machiavellian intricacies with a view to retaining its exclusivity and self-preservative nature, but in doing so had built in such levels of complexity and loopholes that even the very worst human beings could walk free, every step legal, every step visible, every step taking them closer and closer to the opportunity to perpetrate the same crimes again. A cynical view, but a realistic one.
Ultimately, only those who worked within the courts benefited from the courts. More often than not, those who most needed justice, people whose lives and livelihoods depended upon it, were those who were granted the least. It was a sad state of affairs, but tearing yourself apart about it served no purpose. No one man could change it, and until the very society was ripped apart and built once more on foundations of honesty, then that system would not change. Corruption and deceit had become inherent and implicit in the very fabric of the culture. So, how far would he go? If it came down to it, if all avenues had been exhausted and there was insufficient evidence to secure an arrest, would Gaines take the law into his own hands? Could he just go on up to the Wade house and shoot the man in the head? Could he just run him off the road? Could he pull him over, get him out of his car, engage him in a struggle, shoot him, and then leave a gun at the scene to imply that Wade had threatened him first? Such things had been done, would be done again. Gaines had killed before, at a distance and up close. It had been in war, sure, but wasn’t this also some kind of war? Did money and influence always buy you exemption from due process and consequences? Perhaps it did, but that did not make it right.