“How do you know that?”
“He’s not going to talk,” she went on. “They’re going to lead him out of the courthouse in front of everyone and shove him in the back of a patrol car. It’s all meant to scare and humiliate him, but it won’t work. He knows they don’t have enough on him. He’ll bide his time in jail, then be out. A month isn’t forever.”
“You sound as if you feel sorry for him.”
“I don’t feel anything for him,” she said. “Spurrier was into recreational cocaine, according to his attorney, and the night the cops caught him stealing the license tags, he was planning to make a buy. Spurrier was afraid some drug dealer would turn out to be a snitch, record his plate number, maybe give it to the cops. That’s the explanation for the stolen tags.”
“You can’t believe that,” I said heatedly.
Abby straightened out her legs, wincing a little.
Without saying a word, she stood up and walked out of the room. I followed her to the kitchen, my frustration mounting. As she began to fill a glass with ice, I placed my hands on her shoulders and turned her around until we were face-to-face.
“Are you listening to me?”
Her eyes softened. “Please don’t be angry with me.
What I’m doing has nothing to do with you, with our friendship.”
What friendship? 1 feel as if I don’t even know you anymore. You leave money around my house as if I’m nothing more than the damn maid. I don’t remember the last time we ate a meal together. You never talk to me.
You’re so obsessed with this damn book. You see what’s happened to Pat Harvey. Can’t you see that the same thing is happening to you?”
Abby just stared at me.
“It’s as if you’ve made up your mind about something,” I continued to plead with her. “Why won’t you tell me what it is?”
“There’s nothing to make up my mind about,” she said quietly, pulling away from me. “Everything’s already been decided.”
Fielding called early Saturday morning to say there were no autopsies, and exhausted, I went back to bed. It was midmorning when I got up. After a long, hot shower I was ready to deal with Abby and see if we could somehow repair our damaged relationship.
But when I went downstairs and knocked on her door, there was no answer, and when I went out to get the paper I saw her car was gone. Irritated that she had managed to avoid me again, I put on a pot of coffee.
I was sipping my second cup when a small headline caught my attention:
WILLIAMSBURG MAN GIVEN SUSPENDED SENTENCE
Steven Spurrier had not been cuffed and hauled off to jail following his arraignment the day before as Abby had predicted, I read, horrified. He pleaded guilty to petit larceny, and because he had no prior record and had always been a law-abiding citizen of Williamsburg, he was fined one thousand dollars and had walked out of the courthouse a free man.
Everything’s already been decided, Abby had said.
Is this what she had been referring to? If she knew Spurrier would be released, why would she deliberately mislead me? I left the kitchen and opened the door to her room. The bed was made, curtains drawn. Inside the bath, I noticed drops of water in the sink and the faint scent of perfume. She had not been gone long. I looked for her briefcase and tape recorder, but could not find them.
Her .38 was not in its drawer. I went through dressers until I found her notepads, hidden beneath clothes.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I frantically flipped through them. I streaked through her days and weeks as the meaning became clearer.
What had begun as Abby’s crusade to discover the .truth about the couples’ murders had turned into her own ambitious obsession.
She seemed fascinated by Spurrier. If he was guilty, she was determined to make his story the focus of her book, to explore his psychopathic mind. If he was innocent, it would be “another Gainesville,” she wrote, referring to the spree murders of university students in which a suspect became a household name and later turned out to be innocent. “Only it would be worse than Gainesville,” she added. “Because of what the card implies.”