Cherry looked ill. She turned to my brother. “It still doesn’t make sense: Burton was nothing but dead meat. How do you get revenge on dead meat?”
“Whether Burton was alive or dead is meaningless. He was a strand of symbols inside a coffin. Mr Taithering, fueled by years of agony and imagined retributions, came to vanquish the symbols.”
“Surely the photographs were symbols, Dr Charpentier? Taithering didn’t burn the pictures until now. Why?”
“He couldn’t destroy them, Detective Cherie. As long as Burton was inside Taithering, Burton had control over these pictures. They didn’t belong to Taithering because Taithering didn’t belong to himself.”
“That makes no sense,” Cherry said.
“It makes perfect sense if your life is the singular arc of events and memories that comprise William Taithering. Yesterday, after years of belonging to Sonny Burton, William Taithering employed a power ritual created in his subconscious and gave himself back to William Taithering.”
Cherry shot a glance at the weeping man.
“It seems a shame to arrest him, but …”
Jeremy frowned. “One day of freedom after twenty years in the bleakest of prisons, Taithering goes to jail? Does that seem just, Detective?”
“I truly don’t want to hurt him any more, Doctor. But he’s broken laws.”
“Such as?”
“Creating a public disturbance. Abuse of a corpse. He did it to himself, Doctor. He chose to go to the visitation.”
“He had to go, Detective Cherie,” my brother argued. “It was his only chance to confront his tormentor and escape his past.”
“Only chance?” Cherry said. “Here’s a grisly what-if, Doctor: why not wait until Sonny Burton was buried? Taithering could have dug him up and beaten him like a gong all night long.”
“A very intelligent question,” my brother said. “But to unearth Burton in the dark would have been the coward’s path. Taithering’s salvation demanded three primal elements: personal risk to Taithering, Burton’s metaphoric humiliation by the loss of his face, and a public viewing of that humiliation. Even if William Taithering didn’t realize that, his subconscious did.”
“Danger, destruction, display?” Cherry shuddered and looked to me. “You studied psychology, Ryder. You agree with this?”
In truth they were not connections I would have made so quickly. But when it came to sailing through the dark waters of the human mind, my brother was an Odysseus. I nodded the affirmative.
“Let me talk to Taithering by myself,” Cherry said.
“This is truly insane,” Cherry said as we drove back to Woslee County, Taithering still home in Augusta. “If Krenkler finds out, she’ll tear me apart. My superiors will have no choice but to pull me from my position and … jeez, I don’t even want to know.”
“William Taithering was telling you the truth,” Jeremy said.
Cherry nodded. “Burton was a mentor, a big-brother type, supposedly providing a role model. What Burton provided was increasing amounts of liquor and pornography. His bonding culminated on the floor of the snack truck during a weekend camping trip. The date, as you might expect, was June 23rd. The confused kid let Burton have his way for a couple of months, until Burton found another fish, I imagine.”
“Taithering never told anyone in authority?” I asked.
“You know how it works. Burton convinced Taithering that he initiated the relationship. Plus it would have gotten to Taithering’s parents, very religious folk who …”
“Who would never look at their son the same way again,” I said.
“That’s what used to happen to raped women,” Cherry said, her voice simultaneously sad and angry.
“You’re doing the right thing,” I assured Cherry.
“Would you do the same thing, Ryder? Take that kind of—”
I heard Cherry gasp. I looked down the road. A quarter-mile ahead and coming at us like a flying rage were two black cruisers with grille lights blazing and sirens blasting.
“Get off the road,” I said.
“Where?” Cherry said.
“There,” I pointed. “A farm lane.”
Cherry whipped off the road, skidding on to the lane. She pulled ahead and we turned to watch as the two cruisers howled past. We saw Krenkler in the lead cruiser. And then they were over a hill and gone.
“Is it what it appears?” Jeremy said.
Cherry nodded. “Yes, Doctor. The Feds have discovered William Taithering.”
We returned to the road and drove for several miles before anyone spoke, Cherry taking the honor.
“What happens when Taithering mentions the cop who let him go?” she whispered. “Me.”
“He won’t mention our visit,” Jeremy said. “I suspect that, given Mr Taithering’s mental state, he’ll …” Jeremy paused, settled back in the seat. “Never mind.”
A hushed and pensive Cherry drove back to Woslee, turning down into the hollow to drop Jeremy off, then to my place where I picked up a lonely Mr Mix-up and followed Cherry to the ECKLE office. Whatever was happening in Augusta would get back to her soon enough.
The hour hand swept slowly and the sun dropped in the sky. There was a field behind the office and I walked its perimeter with my dog. He seemed to have absorbed my tension, padding at my side rather than bounding madly through the furrows of earth. Twice I saw Cherry wandering outside her small dank office, as if needing sunlight to clear the shadows left by William Taithering’s tale of menace and grief at the hands of Sonny Burton.
I wasn’t convinced we’d done the right thing in not bringing Taithering back to Woslee. But that was part of the potency of my brother: he had with spellbinding wizardry created a scene where we had bonded with Taithering, a sort of reverse Stockholm syndrome.
I kicked a clod of dirt, sending Mix-up racing after broken clumps of earth. I turned back toward the highway, saw Cherry waving frantically from the door of her trailer office.
News had arrived.
I was running by the time I got to her, Mix-up churning at my heels. Cherry’s face was blank.
“You heard something?” I asked, climbing the metal steps, stepping into the trailer.
“Taithering’s dead.”
“What happened?” I blurted. “How?”
She laughed without humor. “Krenkler put everyone on her team and the Woslee PD to calling florists shops in an expanding radius.”
“The flower box Taithering brought.”
“Had to come from somewhere, right? The calls crept outward, county by county. Someone at a florist shop in Augusta recalled selling a single rose to a man named William Taithering. It stuck in her mind because he asked for a larger-sized box to hold a single flower.”
“The Feds raced up there on that info alone?”
Cherry waved her hand, wait. “Taithering’s purchase seemed odd, so they looked closer at his most recent credit-card purchases. He’d been at a sporting-goods