“I’ve said it all before. Years ago. Said it to the sheriff and to every friend I’ve got and to any soul who’ll listen.”
“But you haven’t said it to me.”
McMillan squinted at him, taking Shepherd’s measure. Slowly he nodded.
“Okay, Detective. Let’s go sit on the porch and watch the sunset like a couple of old ladies, shall we? And I’ll tell it all again. I’ll explain to you why I care so much about the woman who shot my boy.”
*
The porch was up high, offering a good view of the desert around the McMillan house — a ranch house with adobe walls, resting on an acre of unincorporated county land west of Safford.
Shepherd had obtained the address from a phone book — as he’d expected, there was only one Anson McMillan in Graham County — and had tracked down the one-lane rural route after only a few wrong turns.
On the porch McMillan offered him a root beer, which Shepherd accepted out of politeness, though he hated the beverage. He sipped a little, swallowed it without a grimace, and set down the bottle on a hardwood table that had been hewed by hand.
Anson’s hand, surely. The man’s thick fingers were callused and misshapen from a lifetime of serious labor.
“So,” Shepherd said, letting silence complete the question.
McMillan stared at the sun now kissing the rim of the mountain range, its harsh theatrical light ruddy on his face.
“To understand Kaylie,” he began finally, “you first have to know about Justin. And about the guns.”
“Guns?”
“That’s what did it, I think. Or at least, what brought it out in him.”
“I don’t follow you, Mr. McMillan.”
“Hell, call me Anson.”
“And I’m Roy”
“Okay, Roy. That root beer cold enough, by the way?”
“Perfect,” Shepherd said. He hadn’t touched the bottle after his first reluctant sip.
“I love a good root beer. Takes me back. Well, anyhow, the guns. Thing is, my wife, Regina — may she rest in peace — never permitted a single gun in this house. That was her ironclad rule, and I went along with it, which marked me as unusual among fellows in these parts. Most of them would sooner die than give up their guns, or at least that’s what their bumper stickers say. Me, though — well, I just never cared for the damn things.”
Shepherd, who had seen what a gun could do in the hands of a drunk or a gangbanger or a child, nodded slowly.
“So Justin grew up playing softball and washing the neighbors’ cars for pocket money, and he never had a rifle to his name. Never went hunting. None of that.”
Hunting. The word stirred a small, furtive anxiety in the back of Shepherd’s mind.
He hunts them, Kaylie had said to the 911 operator. It’s a sport for him. He lets them go, and he tracks them, hunts them down like animals.
“Now, I don’t want to mislead you, Roy. When I speak of Justin’s boyhood, I don’t want you to think he was any sort of angel. Guns or not, he did get into trouble. He hot-wired cars, for one thing. Got himself a rap sheet by the age of fourteen for joyriding around.”
“Did he?” Shepherd said softly.
McMillan showed him a sly look. “Yes, sir. You’re thinking of Kaylie, aren’t you? The way she hot-wired a truck after she busted out of the institute twelve years ago?”
“As a matter of fact, I was.”
“She learned it from Justin. Must have. He was chock-full of these special talents.” The man sighed, releasing a great billow of breath. “I don’t mean to make light of it. Fact is, matters got pretty serious for a while. Justin set a fire in the high school gymnasium. Might’ve done some real damage if the gym teacher hadn’t smelled smoke and doused the flames with a fire extinguisher.”
“Why did Justin do that?”
A lift of McMillan’s shoulders. “Why does a cat play with a ball of string? For the sheer pleasure of it, I expect.”
“Were there other fires?”
“None that were linked to him. There were a few, though, that were never explained. The Gilfoyles lost their mobile home in one blaze. Justin swore he didn’t do it. Me and Regina — we wanted to believe him.”
Shepherd had read up on the behavioral development of psychopaths. Fire starting was often one of the earliest warning signs.
“This sort of thing went on for couple years,” McMillan said quietly. “Then a miracle. Justin straightened out. He quit the joyriding, the shoplifting — yes, there’d been some of that, too. But not anymore. He was a normal kid suddenly. Better than normal. Outstanding. Folks started saying that Justin McMillan, after a spate of hell-raising, had turned out all right.”
“What happened? Why did he change?”
“There was no reason. Certainly nothing we did for him. It appeared to be just what I said — a miracle.” Anson stared at the far mountains, their humped backs red with the ebbing glow of the sunset. “But maybe there are no miracles. Maybe he never really changed at all. Maybe he just pushed it down deep — that part of him — and it took a while to burrow its way back to the surface.”
He took a long swig of his root beer, and Shepherd, out of courtesy, made a pretense of swallowing another sip.
“Justin graduated from high school, moved out on his own. He got a good job clerking in the hardware store. He was going to night school to learn the computer trade. You know anything about computers, Roy?”
“Not much. My wife was the expert.”
“Was? You divorced?”
“She died.”
“Sorry to hear it. My Regina’s gone too. I visit her grave once a week and on holidays. Never miss her birthday. You visit your wife?”
“Sometimes.”
“We all lose what we love, don’t we? In the old country they have a saying about it. In the end, they say, the world will break your heart.”
Shepherd watched the sunset’s afterglow. He was silent,
“Anyway, Justin was learning all about computers. He had a future, or so we all thought. Then to top it off, he started dating Kaylie Henderson, who was, I believe, just about the prettiest girl in town. She was the quiet type, sort of aloof, and people got the idea she was stuck up. They were wrong. She was shy, that’s all, painfully shy. You couldn’t blame her, after the life she’d had.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know? She’d had it rough, Roy. Her mom and dad both died in a car wreck back when she was ten years old. After that she was raised by an uncle who hardly gave her the time of day. She learned to keep to herself. She still does. She’s never told me — I mean, she never did tell me exactly what happened on the day Justin died.”