The Good Daughter: The gripping new bestselling thriller from a No. 1 author

2

Charlie watched Huck’s left shoulder jerk as the bullet ripped through his arm. His nostrils flared. His lips parted for breath. Blood wicked into the fibers of his shirt like a red iris. Still, he held onto the revolver that Kelly had placed in his hand.

Someone whispered, “Jesus Christ.”

“I’m all right,” Huck told the cop who had shot him. “You can holster your weapon, okay?”

The cop’s hands shook so hard that he could barely hold onto his gun.

Huck said, “Officer Rodgers, holster your weapon and take this revolver.”

Charlie felt rather than saw a swarm of police officers run past her. The air billowed around them like the cartoon swirls that came out of clouds, nothing more than thin, curved lines that indicated movement.

Then a paramedic was holding tightly to Charlie’s arm. Then someone was shining a flashlight into her eyes, asking if she was hurt, if she was in shock, if she wanted to go to the hospital.

“No,” Mrs. Pinkman said. Another paramedic was checking her for injuries. Her red shirt was soaked with blood. “Please. I’m fine.”

No one was checking on Mr. Pinkman.

No one was checking on the little girl.

Charlie looked down at her hands. The bones inside the tips of her fingers were vibrating. The sensation slowly spread until she felt like she was standing an inch outside of her body, that every breath was a reverberation of another breath that she had previously taken.

Mrs. Pinkman cupped her hand to Charlie’s cheek. She used her thumb to wipe away tears. Pain was etched into the deep wrinkles lining the woman’s face. With anyone else, Charlie would’ve pulled away, but she leaned into Mrs. Pinkman’s warmth.

They had been here before.

Twenty-eight years ago, Mrs. Pinkman was Miss Heller, living with her parents two miles away from the farmhouse. She was the one who’d answered the tentative knock at her door and found thirteen-year-old Charlie standing on the front porch, covered in sweat, streaked with blood, asking if they had any ice cream.

That was what people focused on when they told the story—not that Gamma had been murdered or that Sam had been buried alive, but that Charlie had eaten two bowls of ice cream before she’d told Miss Heller that something bad had happened.

“Charlotte.” Huck grabbed her shoulder. She watched his mouth move as he repeated the name that wasn’t her name anymore. His tie was undone. She saw the red splotches dotting the white bandage around his arm.

“Charlotte.” He shook her again. “You need to call your dad. Now.”

Charlie looked up, looked around. Time had moved on without her. Mrs. Pinkman was gone. The paramedics had disappeared. The only thing that remained the same was the bodies. They were still there, just a few feet away. Mr. Pinkman with his tie over his shoulder. The little girl with her pink jacket that was stained with blood.

“Call him,” Huck said.

Charlie fumbled for the phone in her back pocket. He was right. Rusty would be worried. She needed to let him know that she was okay.

Huck said, “Tell him to bring the newspapers, the chief of police, whoever he can get down here.” He looked away. “I can’t stop them on my own.”

Charlie felt a tightness in her chest, her body telling her that she was trapped inside something dangerous. She followed Huck’s gaze down the hallway.

He wasn’t worried about Charlie.

He was worried about Kelly Wilson.

The teenager was face down on the floor, both arms handcuffed tightly behind her back. She was petite, no more than Charlie’s size, but she was pinned down the same as if she were a violent con. One cop had his knee pressed into her back, another kneeled on her legs and yet another was grinding the sole of his boot into the side of the girl’s face.

These actions alone could be seen through the wide lens of admissible restraint, but that’s not why Huck had told her to call Rusty. Five more cops stood in a circle around the girl. She hadn’t heard them before but she could hear them clearly now. They were screaming, cursing, waving their arms around. Charlie knew some of these men, recognized them from high school or the courtroom or both. The expressions on their faces were all painted in the same shade of rage. They were furious about the deaths, livid about their own feelings of helplessness. This was their town. Their school. They had children who were students here, teachers, friends.

One of the cops punched a locker so hard that the hinge broke on the metal door. Others kept clenching and unclenching their hands. A few walked back and forth across the short length of the hall like animals in a cage. Maybe they were animals. One wrong word could spark a kick, then a punch, then batons would be pulled, guns would be drawn, and they would set upon Kelly Wilson like jackals.

“My girl’s that age,” someone hissed between gritted teeth. “They were in the same class.”

Another fist slammed into another locker.

“Pink coached me up,” someone said.

“He ain’t never gonna coach nobody up never again.”

Yet another locker door was kicked off its hinges.

“You—” Charlie’s voice cracked before she could finish. This was dangerous. Too dangerous. “Stop,” she said, then begged, “Please stop.”

They either didn’t hear her or didn’t care.

“Charlotte,” Huck said. “Don’t get into this. Just—”

“Fucking bitch.” The cop with his knee jammed into Kelly’s back yanked a fistful of the girl’s hair. “Why’d you do it? Why’d you kill ’em?”

“Stop,” Charlie said. Huck’s hand went to her arm, but she stood up anyway. “Stop,” she repeated.

No one was listening. Her voice was too timid because every muscle in her body was telling her not to insert herself into this buzz saw of masculine fury. It was like trying to stop dogs from fighting, except the dogs had loaded guns.

“Hey,” Charlie said, fear making her choke on the word. “Take her to the station. Put her in lock-up.”

Jonah Vickery, an asshole jock she knew from high school, snapped out his metal baton.

“Jonah.” Charlie’s knees were so weak that she had to lean against the wall to keep from sliding to the floor. “You need to Mirandize her and—”

“Charlotte.” Huck motioned for her to sit back down on the floor. “Don’t get into this. Call your dad. He can stop this.”

He was right. Cops were afraid of her father. They knew about his lawsuits, his public platform. Charlie tried to press the home button on the phone. Her fingers were too thick. Sweat had turned the dried blood into a thick paste.

“Hurry,” Huck said. “They’re going to end up killing her.”

Charlie watched a foot swing into Kelly’s side hard enough to make the girl’s hips leave the ground.

Another metal baton snapped out.

Charlie finally managed to press the home button. A photo of Huck’s dog filled the screen. She didn’t ask Huck for the code. It was too late to call Rusty. He wouldn’t make it to the school in time. She tapped the camera icon, knowing it bypassed the lock screen. Two swipes later, the video was recording. She zoomed in on the girl’s face. “Kelly Wilson. Look at me. Can you breathe?”

Kelly blinked. Her head looked like it was the size of a doll’s compared to the black police-issue boot that was pressing into the side of her face.

Charlie said, “Kelly, look into the camera.”

“God dammit,” Huck cursed. “I said to—”

“You guys need to stop this.” Charlie dragged her shoulder against the lockers as she walked closer to the lion’s den. “Take her to the station. Photograph her. Fingerprint her. Don’t let this blow back on—”

“She’s filming us,” one of the cops said. Greg Brenner. Another asshole jock. “Put it down, Quinn.”

“She’s a sixteen-year-old girl.” Charlie kept recording. “I’ll ride with her in the back of the car. You can arrest her and—”

“Make her stop,” Jonah said. He was the one with his foot pressed against the face of a teenage girl. “She’s worse than her fucking father.”

“Give her a bowl of ice cream,” Al Larrisy suggested.

Charlie said, “Jonah, get your boot off her head.” She trained the camera onto each man’s face. “There’s a right way to do this. You all know that. Don’t be the reason this case gets tossed.”

Jonah pressed his foot down so hard that Kelly’s jaw was forced open. Blood dribbled out where her braces had cut into her cheek. He said, “You see that dead baby over there?” He pointed up the hallway. “You see where her neck got blowed off?”

“What do you think?” Charlie asked, because she had the little girl’s blood all over her hands.

“I think you care more about a fucking murderer than you do about two innocent victims.”

“That’s enough.” Greg tried to grab the phone. “Turn it off.”

Charlie turned away so she could keep filming. “Put us both in the car,” she said. “Take us to the station and—”

“Give me that.” Greg reached for the phone again.

Charlie tried to feint away, but Greg was too fast. He snatched the phone out of her hand and threw it to the ground.

Charlie leaned down to retrieve it.

“Leave it,” he ordered.

Charlie kept reaching for the phone.

Without warning, the point of Greg’s elbow cracked against the bridge of her nose. Her head snapped back, banging into the locker. The pain was like a bomb had gone off inside of her face. Charlie’s mouth opened. She coughed out blood.

No one moved.

No one spoke.

Charlie cupped her hands to her face. Blood poured from her nose like a faucet. She felt stunned. Greg looked stunned. He held up his hands as if to say he didn’t mean it. But the damage had already been done. Charlie staggered sideways. She tripped over her own feet. Greg reached out to catch her. He was too late.

The last thing she saw was the ceiling spinning over her head as she hit the ground.

3

Charlie sat on the floor of the interview room with her back wedged into the corner. She had no idea how much time had passed since she’d been hauled off to the police station. An hour at least. Her wrists were still handcuffed. Toilet paper was still shoved up her broken nose. Stitches prickled the back of her scalp. Her head was pounding. Her vision was blurry. Her stomach was churning. She had been photographed. She had been fingerprinted. She was still wearing the same clothes. Her jeans were dotted with dark red splotches. The same pattern riddled her Duke Blue Devils T-shirt. Her hands were still caked with dried blood, because the cell where they had let her use the toilet only had a trickle of cold, brown water coming out of the filthy sink faucet.

Twenty-eight years ago, she had begged the nurses at the hospital to let her take a bath. Gamma’s blood was seared to her skin. Everything was sticky. Charlie had not completely submerged herself in water since the red-brick house had burned down. She’d wanted to feel the warmth envelop her, to watch the blood and bone float away like a bad dream fading from her memory.

Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.

Charlie let out a slow breath. She rested the side of her head against the wall. She closed her eyes. She saw the dead little girl in the school hallway, the way her color had drained like winter, the way her hand had fallen from Charlie’s hand the same way that Gamma’s hand had fallen away.

The little girl would still be in the cold hallway at school—her body, at least, along with Mr. Pinkman’s. Both still dead. Both still exposed to one more final injustice. They would be left out in the open, uncovered, unprotected, while people traipsed back and forth around them. That was how homicides worked. No one moved anything, not even a child, not even a beloved coach, until every inch of the crime scene was photographed, cataloged, measured, diagrammed, investigated.

Charlie opened her eyes.

This was all such sad, familiar territory: the images she couldn’t get out of her head, the dark places that her brain kept going to over and over again like car wheels wearing down a gravel road.

She breathed through her mouth. Her nose had a painful pulse. The paramedic had said it wasn’t broken, but Charlie didn’t trust any of them. Even while her head was being sutured, the cops were scrambling to cover for each other, articulating their reports, all of them agreeing that Charlie had been hostile, that she had knocked herself against Greg’s elbow, that the phone had been broken when she accidentally stepped on it.

Huck’s phone.

Mr. Huckleberry had repeatedly made that point that the phone and its contents belonged to him. He’d even shown them the screen so that they could watch the video being deleted.

While it was happening, it had hurt too much to shake her head, but Charlie did so now. They had shot Huck, unprovoked, and he was taking up for them. She had seen this kind of behavior in almost every police force she had ever dealt with.

No matter what, these guys always, always covered for each other.

The door opened. Jonah came in. He carried two folding chairs, one in each hand. He winked at Charlie, because he liked her better now that she was in his custody. He’d been the same kind of sadist in high school. The uniform had only codified it.

“I want my father,” she said, the same thing she said every time someone entered the room.

Jonah winked again as he unfolded the chairs on either side of the table.

“I have a legal right to counsel.”

“I just talked to him on the phone.” This came not from Jonah, but from Ben Bernard, an assistant district attorney for the county. He barely glanced at Charlie as he tossed a folder onto the table and sat down. “Take the cuffs off her.”

Jonah asked, “You want me to hook her leash to the table?”

Ben smoothed down his tie. He looked up at the man. “I said to take those fucking handcuffs off my wife right now.”

Ben had raised his voice to say this, but he hadn’t yelled. He never yelled, at least not in the eighteen years that Charlie had known him.

Jonah swung his keys around his fingers, making it clear that he was going to do this in his own time, of his own volition. He roughly unlocked the cuffs and stripped them from Charlie’s wrists, but the joke was on him because she was so numb that she didn’t feel any of it.

Jonah slammed the door when he left the room.

Charlie listened to the slam echo off the concrete walls. She stayed seated on the floor. She waited for Ben to say something jokey, like nobody puts baby in a corner, but Ben had two homicide victims at the middle school, a suicidal teenage murderer in custody and his wife was sitting in a corner covered in blood, so instead she took consolation in the way he lifted his chin to indicate that she should sit in the chair across from him.

She asked, “Is Kelly all right?”

“She’s on suicide watch. Two female officers, around the clock.”

“She’s sixteen,” Charlie said, though they both knew that Kelly Wilson would be direct filed as an adult. The teenager’s only saving grace—literally—was that minors were no longer eligible for the death penalty. “If she asked for a parent, that can be construed as the equivalent of asking for a lawyer.”

“Depends on the judge.”

“You know Dad will get a change of venue.” Charlie knew her father was the only lawyer in town who would take the case.

The overhead light flashed off Ben’s glasses as he nodded toward the chair again.

Charlie pushed herself up against the wall. A wave of dizziness made her close her eyes.

Ben asked, “Do you need medical treatment?”

“Somebody already asked me that.” Charlie didn’t want to go to a hospital. She probably had a concussion. But she could still walk as long as she kept some part of her body in contact with something solid. “I’m fine.”

He said nothing, but the silent, “of course you’re fine, you’re always fine,” reverberated around the room.

“See?” She touched the wall with the tips of her fingers, an acrobat on a wire.

Ben didn’t look up. He adjusted his glasses. He opened the file folder in front of him. There was a single form inside. Charlie’s eyes wouldn’t focus to read the words, even when he began writing in his big, blocky letters.

She asked, “With what offense have I been charged?”

“Obstruction of justice.”

“That’s a handy catch-all.”

He kept writing. He kept not looking at her.

She asked, “You already saw what they did to me, didn’t you?”

The only sound Ben made was his pen scratching across the paper.

“That’s why you won’t look at me now, because you already looked at me through that.” She nodded toward the two-way mirror. “Who else is there? Coin?” District Attorney Ken Coin was Ben’s boss, an insufferable dickslap of a man who saw everything in black and white and, more recently, brown, because of the housing boom that had brought an influx of Mexican immigrants up from Atlanta.

Charlie watched the reflection of her raised hand in the mirror, her middle finger extending in a salute to DA Coin.

Ben said, “I’ve taken nine witness statements that said you were inconsolable at the scene, and in the course of being comforted by Officer Brenner, your nose met with his elbow.”

If he was going to talk to her like a lawyer, then she was going to be a lawyer. “Is that what the video on the phone showed, or do I need to get a subpoena for a forensic examination of any deleted files?”

Ben’s shoulder went up in a shrug. “Do what you have to do.”

“All right.” Charlie braced her palms on the table so that she could sit. “Is this the part where you offer to drop the bogus obstruction charge if I don’t file an excessive force complaint?”

“I already dropped the bogus obstruction charge.” His pen moved down to the next line. “You can file as many complaints as you want.”

“All I want is an apology.”

She heard a sound behind the mirror, something close to a gasp. In the past twelve years, Charlie had filed two very successful lawsuits against the Pikeville Police force on behalf of her clients. Ken Coin had probably assumed she was sitting in here counting all of the money she was going to make off the city instead of grieving for the child who had died in her arms, or mourning the loss of the principal who had given her detention instead of kicking her out of school when they both knew that Charlie deserved it.

Ben kept his head bent down. He tapped his pen against the table. She tried not to think about Huck doing the same thing at his school desk.

He asked, “Are you sure?”

Charlie waved toward the mirror, hoping Coin was there. “If you guys could just admit when you did something wrong, then when you said that you did something right, people would believe you.”

Ben finally looked at her. His eyes tracked across her face, taking in the damage. She saw the fine lines around his mouth when he frowned, the deep furrow in his brow, and wondered if he had ever noticed the same signs of age in her face.

They had met in law school. He had moved to Pikeville in order to be with her. They had planned on spending the rest of their lives together.

She said, “Kelly Wilson has a right to—”

Ben held up his hand to stop her. “You know that I agree with everything you’re going to say.”

Charlie sat back in the chair. She had to remind herself that neither she nor Ben had ever bought into Rusty and Ken Coin’s “us against them” mentality.

She said, “I want a written apology from Greg Brenner. A real apology, not some bullshit, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ excuse like I’m a hysterical woman and he wasn’t acting like a God damn Brownshirt.”

Ben nodded. “Done.”

Charlie reached for the form. She grabbed the pen. The words were a blur, but she had read enough witness statements to know where you were supposed to sign your name. She scrawled her signature near the bottom, then slid the form back toward Ben. “I’ll trust you to keep your side of the bargain. Fill in the statement however you want.”