Unwritten Laws 01(344)

The sound of sirens grows to a wail, and a convoy of spinning red lights comes flying up the lake road.

“How much do we tell?” she asks. “To the police, I mean.”

Brody Royal’s last accusation against my father echoes in my mind. “Is it worth lying at this point?”

She turns to me, her survivor’s will burning through the shock and exhaustion in her eyes. “I hate to say it, but we may have to. We’d better decide fast.”

Dreading contact with the larger world, we walk back to wait beside the body of Sleepy Johnston. A low thump makes the ground shudder, and then a tower of flame rises from the burning lake house.

“The flamethrower?” Caitlin asks.

“Probably.”

As the orange and blue geyser rises into the night sky, I realize I’m witnessing the cremation of a man who three days ago meant little more to me than a byline under a newspaper article. But without him, Caitlin and I would now be charred flesh and ligaments over scorched bone. In this moment, it comes to me that my father is somewhere out in this same darkness, lost in a maze of his own making. Yet he’s never seemed farther from me in my life. The question of who really killed Viola Turner seems like some mystery from another age, like the death of Amelia Earhart.

What happened tonight? Caitlin asked me.

For my part, only this: to save my father, I tried to make a deal with the devil, and I almost lost everything because of it. My father is going to have to save himself.

And the rest of it? What was the point? For most of his life, Henry Sexton fought to gain justice for nameless victims and for families who had no voice. Did he accomplish that? Will anyone care? I don’t know. But Henry did something that police detectives, FBI agents, and attorneys with a lot more training and resources than he possessed had failed to do for forty years.

Henry got his man.