Part 55 (1/2)

On the screen, Chad Seabright walked around in front of the video camera and joined Erin on the bed.

They kneeled face-to-face on the stained mattress.

”How do you like it, baby?” he asked.

Erin looked up at him and smiled like a vixen. ”You know how I like it. I like it rough.”

They both started to laugh. Two kids having fun. Actors rehearsing.

Landry glanced over at the one-way mirror, nodding to someone on the other side, then went to the door and opened it on the excuse of telling something to the guard outside.

”You f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h!” Chad Seabright screamed into the room as a deputy pulled him past in handcuffs.

Seabright tried to jerk away, lunging toward the interview room. ”I loved you! I loved you!”

He tried to spit at her from ten feet away. Landry stepped to the side, frowning in distaste.

”Some people just aren't well brought up,” he commented as he closed the door.

Onjo puffed up. ”This is outrageous! Terrorizing my client with her attacker-”

”Give it up, Counselor,” Roca said wearily. ”A jury takes one look at this tape, and your client can kiss her movie future good-bye.”

”I want a deal!” Chad shouted. ”I want a deal!”

Erin jumped up from her chair. ”Shut up! Shut up!”

”I did it for you! I loved you!”

Erin glared at him with venomous disdain. ”You stupid f.u.c.king idiot.”

L andry went out onto the sidewalk to stand in the hot afternoon sun and smoke a cigarette. He had to get the taste of other people's lies out of his mouth, burn out the stink of what they had done.

Chad Seabright had copped to everything, giving up his claims of innocence in order to hurt Erin. He claimed Erin had come to him with the plan. They would fake her kidnapping, and collect the ransom from Bruce Seabright. If he didn't pay one way, he would pay another: with his reputation, with his marriage. At the same time, Don Jade would be implicated and ruined, and Paris Montgomery would get what she wanted-Jade's business and Trey Hughes' stables.

A simple plan.

The three of them had sat down together and come up with the scripts for the videotapes as if they were shooting a movie for a film cla.s.s. According to Chad, the beating had been Erin's idea. She had insisted he actually strike her with the whip for the sake of realism.

It was Erin's idea. It was Paris Montgomery's idea. It wasn't Chad's fault.

Nothing was ever anybody's fault.

Chad had been deceived and used by Erin. He was an innocent. Erin's mother hadn't raised her right. Bruce Seabright didn't love her. Paris Montgomery had brainwashed her.

Paris Montgomery had yet to be questioned, but Landry would eventually have to listen to her while she cried and told him how her father made her play the skin flute when she was three, and how she lost out on being the homecoming queen in high school, and how that all warped her.

Chad claimed not to know anything about Tomas Van Zandt or about the death of Jill Morone. Landry figured that would turn out not to be anyone's fault either.

What Landry wanted to know was: If nothing was ever anybody's fault, then how was it people ended up murdered, orphaned, lives destroyed? Paris Montgomery and Erin Seabright and Chad Seabright had made decisions that had ruined people's lives, ended people's lives. How was all that n.o.body's fault?

In the uncertain hour before the morning Near the ending of the interminable night . . .