Cut to the Bone(85)

He arched a single eyebrow.

“Verna Monroe was supposed to be the family witness that day.”

“That’s Danny and Earl’s mom, right?”

“Mm-hm,” she said. “But Danny went to Stateville. He told the case detectives, Burr and Rogan, that she’d gotten ill that morning and begged Danny to attend in her place. Later, they discovered Verna with her wrists slashed.”

“Danny’s one sick puppy,” Marty said, rubbing his own. “Murdering his own mother.”

“He didn’t. He’s the one who found her,” Emily said. She explained what Rogan told her from his Florida retirement home, and how Johnny Sanders’s bombshell helped them recreate that long-ago Execution Day.

Marty shifted to his other hip. “No wonder Danny went nuts,” he said. “Finds his mom in a pool of blood, watches his brother fry, sees twelve rubbernecks watch like a day at the races. So Danny delivers his own death penalty.”

“Because they murdered his brother,” Emily said.

“Symbolically, if not literally.”

“Right. The big question is, Why now?” He scratched his heavy stubble, thinking. “It would have made sense killing those folks in the seventies. But he let it go. What changed?”

Emily played air piano. Movement helped her think. “Something profound,” she said, finishing the Minute Waltz in thirty. “Drastic enough to trigger a nationwide serial spree-”

“The chair,” Marty said, snapping his fingers. “That’s the trigger.”

“How?”

“Earl was Illinois’s final execution,” he said. “The Supreme Court banned them nationwide that same day.”

She strained to remember the law lectures from the academy. “Uh, Furball versus Georgia, right?”

“Furman. The Supremes issued the ruling right during Earl’s electrocution.”

She made a face. “Talk about rotten timing.”

“Yeah. Then four years later, the Supremes said whoops, executions are constitutional after all, so y’all go ahead,” he said. “Illinois obliged, but in the interim decided to mothball the chair for lethal injections. Needles were more warm ‘n’ fuzzy than flaming eyeballs.”

“Don’t start.”

His grin said, Who, me? “Danny came to grips with Earl’s death because the electric chair had been scrapped,” he said. “We know that because he spared the twelve witnesses. Then Covington gets elected and brings it back.”

Emily sprang to her feet. “The exact same chair, too,” she said, pacing. “He retrieved it from Stateville for his new center. Announced it to the planet, and none too subtly.”

“‘Rabid dogs must die,’“ Marty recalled from the campaign trail.

“‘Condemned prisoners have no souls,’” she said. “‘Fry ‘em like onions.’“

“The chair and Wayne’s hyperbole were such a staggering insult, so personal, that Danny snapped,” Marty said. “Now he wants to kill the people who watched his brother die. The ones who stood shoulder to shoulder while Covington killed Earl.”

“But they’re dead,” Emily said. “Or otherwise unreachable. So he takes out their families. Like the witnesses and Covington took out his.”

“Speaking of Covington, I assume he knows?”

“Chief Cross told him.”

“Only good news in this mess,” Marty said. “At least he’ll stay out of Dodge.”

She sighed.

3:47 a.m.

“Goddammit, Wayne, don’t be an idiot,” Cross snapped into his cell. “Tell Angel Rogers to issue a press release saying you caught the flu and-”

“Show fear to a predator, he tears your throat out,” Covington said. “Face him down, let him know you’re in charge, he cowers and slinks away.”

“This isn’t George of the Jungle,” Cross said. “Danny Monroe is the brother of the man you electrocuted thirty-five years ago. He won’t be impressed you’re alpha wolf.”

“So find him.”

“We’re trying,” Cross said. “He left Idaho with a busload of congregants-”

“Congregants?”

“Danny’s the minister of a small church in Boise. According to their cops, he’s a wheel in the Idaho anti-death-penalty movement. Branch just talked to his wife. She says they’re traveling here to protest the reintroduction of the chair. They don’t have cell phones, so she can’t contact them. He’s undoubtedly here already, with the bazillion other buses. We’re checking every license plate, and I’ve circulated Danny’s picture to all hands.”