“I thought you said she was friendly with most guys,” DeMarco said.
His only response to this apparent lie in an attempt to save face was a shrug.
“What about her parents?” Kate asked. “What can you tell me about them?”
“Nothing. I knew who her dad was, you know? I mean, it’s a small town. You sort of know everyone. Plus, she always used to joke that if her dad found out we were fu—having sex,” he said, apparently not finding it appropriate to drop other terminology in front of two female agents, “he’d kill me.”
“And did you believe her?”
“I don’t know. But I guess. A guy never really wants to think about the father of the girl he’s sleeping with finding out. I didn’t know what to think about her parents. I mean, she hated them. Like loathed them, you know?”
“She did?”
“Based on the way she talked about them, yeah I think so. If I can…”
He stopped here and seemed to think about something for a minute. He then looked at Kate and DeMarco as if he were trying to figure out his boundaries.
“What is it?” Kate asked.
“Look. Yeah, it was messed it up that we slept with each other like twenty times or so and I didn’t know her all that well. But I always thought it was sort of weird to hear her talk about her parents like that.”
“Like what?”
Before he could answer, there was a knock on the door. Sheriff Barnes opened it and poked his head inside. There was a quick look exchanged between Barnes and Jeremy, making Kate think this was probably not the first time Jeremy had spent time in this room.
“Jeremy Branch?” he asked. “What the hell is he doing here?”
“You want to tell him or should we?” DeMarco asked. She gave Jeremy a few seconds and when he did not start talking, she brought Barnes up to speed. “He was sleeping with Mercy Fuller…as recently as last week. He was just telling us how he found it strange that Mercy would speak so negatively about her parents. How she hated them.”
“Sleeping with her?” Barnes asked. “Damn, son…how old are you?”
“Seventeen. I don’t turn eighteen for another month.”
“Go on,” Kate said, redirecting him back toward the point. “Tell us what kind of stuff Mercy would say about her parents.”
“Just how they never let her do anything. How they didn’t trust her. I think she had some really bad beef with her mother because I know there were at least two or three times where she said something like ‘I just want to kill that bitch.’ She hated her mom.”
“Did she ever talk about the relationship between her parents?” Kate asked.
“No. She rarely talked about them. She’d vent for a while, get sort of mad, and then that’s usually when we’d have sex. I just…I don’t know. I never thought she’d actually do it.”
“Do what?” Barnes asked.
Jeremy then looked up at them as if they had missed the entire point. “Seriously? Look…like I said. She seems sort of innocent, aside from being sort of a nympho, but if you’re looking for her parents’ killer…find her. I guarantee you Mercy killed her parents and then just split town.”
CHAPTER SIX
So far, no one had actually taken the seat on the opposite side of the desk; Kate, DeMarco, and Barnes were all still standing. But when Jeremy made such a bold statement, Sheriff Barnes walked slowly to the chair and sat down directly across from the teenager. There was a mixture of sadness and fury in his eyes as he pointed an accusatory finger in Jeremy’s face.
“I’ve been sheriff in this town for sixteen years. I knew Wendy and Alvin Fuller quite well. And as far as I know, Mercy Fuller was a stand-up young woman. Certainly not a trouble-making piece of shit like you. So if you’re going to sit here and make such an accusation, I suggest you have a damn good story to back it up.”
Jeremy nodded, clearly very scared now. “I do.”
Barnes folded his arms, leaned back in the chair, and sneered at Jeremy. As Jeremy started to talk, his eyes never left Barnes. If Kate had to venture a guess, he was probably concerned that Barnes might launch himself across the table at any moment to strangle him.
“We’d been fooling around for maybe three or four weeks the first time she ever mentioned running away from home. She asked me if I’d go with her. Said she wanted to go somewhere to North Carolina or something like that. I made fun of her because I didn’t see the point in moving just one state away, you know? Plus, I didn’t like her like that. My brother joked with me how the first guy a girl sleeps with, she gets obsessed. I guess she sort of did. Anyway, there was no way I was going to run away with her. But the way she talked about it…you could tell she had actually thought about it.”
“Do you think she wanted to run away because of just how much she disliked her parents?” Kate asked.
“I guess. I mean, it’s the only real reason I could think of that would make her want to leave home. I mean…my parents are assholes, too. But I didn’t run away or nothing.”
“No,” Barnes said. “You just moved two miles away into your older brother’s trailer. Maybe Mercy didn’t have an option like that.”
“Still,” Kate said, making sure Barnes didn’t take them too far off-topic. “Are you certain she was being for real when she spoke of running away? Not just filling your head with fantasies so you’d stay with her?”
“No. But she kept talking about how her mother would go crazy trying to find her—not because she’d actually want to find her but because she’d feel like Mercy got one over on her by running away.”
“Do you know if there was any abuse in her home?” DeMarco asked.
“I don’t think so. Not recently, anyway. She did tell me one time about how her mother hauled off and just hit her right in the face when she was like eleven or twelve.”
“And you swear she never actually came out and said she was going to kill them?” Kate asked.
“A few times, she did. She would say ‘I can’t wait to kill them.’ And then she talked about whether she’d do it with a knife or a gun. She really liked talking about it. But I told her to shut up. When me and Mercy got together, it was just for the sex. And I didn’t want to hear about her thinking about killing her parents before we got down to it, you know?”
Kate considered it all as Jeremy stopped talking and looked around at all three of them. He had lied about Mercy being promiscuous. Kate wondered if everything else he had said was also a lie.
She leaned down close to a still-sitting Sheriff Barnes and whispered into his ear: “Can we speak outside for a moment?”
He nodded and got up, practically having to tear his eyes away from Jeremy. He didn’t just walk out of the room—he stormed out. Before he said a word to Kate or DeMarco as they followed him, he went straight into his office. He held the door open for them and closed it when they were both inside.
Right away, he said: “Shit.”
“You think he’s telling the truth?” Kate asked.
“I think there are enough truthful tidbits in his story to make it believable. That little story about Wendy Fuller punching Mercy…that really happened. Mercy called the police. She wasn’t sad when she did it, either. It was about five years ago, but I remember it well. She was vindictive about it. Wanted to make sure her mom got into trouble. But in the end, all it took was a little sit-down with the family and all was well.