'The sheriff just told me to give you the tour, Mr Holland.'
She put on a pair of dark green aviator's sunglasses and looked at the river.
'Did Lucas attack her in his truck, then pass out? Or did he attack her in the brush and walk back to his truck, have a few more drinks and then pass out?' I said. 'You don't have an opinion?'
'I'll drive you back to your car if you're ready,' she said.
'Why not?' I said.
We drove through rolling fields that were thick with bluebonnets and buttercups, then crossed a rusted iron bridge over the river. The river's bottom was soap rock, and deep in the current you could see the gray, moss-covered tops of boulders and the shadows they made in the current.
'You're pleading your man innocent?' she said.
'You bet… You think I'm firing in the well?'
'I just wondered,' she said, and didn't speak again until we pulled into the shade of the live oaks that surrounded the courthouse.
I walked to my car, then turned unexpectedly and caught her watching me, her sunglasses hanging from her fingers.
I stopped the prosecutor outside his office just before Lucas's arraignment. The corridor was empty, and our voices echoed off the old marble floor and high wood ceiling.
'You're not going to jam us up on the bail, are you, Marvin?' I said.
'Don't expect any slack on this one, Billy Bob,' he replied.
He wore a bowtie and seersucker suit, and his face looked at me with the quiet moral certitude of an ax blade.
'You don't have a rape case. You're not going to make assault and battery without a weapon, either,' I said.
'Oh?'
'Lucas doesn't have a bruise on him.'
'You see the medical report on her genitalia? Or maybe that's just Lucas's idea of rough sex… You want to talk about weapons? How about if he beat her face on the side of the truck?'
'You have evidence of that?'
'It poured down Saturday night. The whole crime scene was washed clean.'
'Pretty convenient, Marvin.'
'No, pretty sickening. And the charge isn't assault and battery. Where have you been this morning?'
I stared into the righteous light in his eyes and knew, with a sinking of the heart, what was coming next.
'She died an hour ago. The doc says it was probably a brain hemorrhage. You want to plea out, give me a call. He's not going to do the big sleep, but I guarantee you he'll get to be an expert at picking state cotton,' he said.
Because Lucas was being arraigned on a Monday morning, he was brought to court on the same wrist chain as the collection of DWIs, wife beaters, and barroom brawlers who had been in the drunk tank over the weekend. Each Monday morning they would ride down to the first floor in an elevator that resembled a packed zoo cage and, in stumbling peckerwood or black or Mexican accents, offer their explanations for the mercurial behavior that seemed to affect their lives like a windstorm blowing arbitrarily through a deserted house.
Normally the weekend miscreants waved at their friends in the courtroom or punched one another in the ribs and snickered while one of their members tried to talk his bail down. But not today. When they sat in the row of chairs at the front of the court and the bailiff unlocked their wrists and dropped the chain to the wood floor, they rounded their shoulders and looked at their shoes or moved a chair space away from Lucas, as though eye contact or proximity to him would stain them with a level of guilt that was not theirs.
I stood next to him when it was his turn to rise and face the court. His father had brought him a clean white shirt and flowered tie and pair of starched khakis, but he was unshaved and his wavy hair was uncut and wet and combed straight back on his collar, so that he looked like a 1950s hood rather an uneducated rural kid whose father had belittled him since he was a child.
Marvin, the prosecutor, asked that Lucas's bail be set at $200,000.
I heard Lucas's breath catch in his throat. I touched the back of his wrist with mine.
'Your Honor, my client is just nineteen and has very little in the way of resources. He has no felony arrests of any kind. He's lived his whole life in this county. The bail request is not only unreasonable, it's deliberately punitive. The real problem is, Marvin doesn't have a case and he knows it.'