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

“And what was Kelly Wilson doing at this time?”

Charlie realized she hadn’t mentioned the gun. “She had a revolver.”

“Five shot? Six?”

“I would only be guessing. It looked older. Not snub-nosed, but—” Charlie stopped. “Was there another gun? Another shooter?”

“Why would you ask that?”

“Because you asked how many shots were fired, and you asked how many bullets were in the revolver.”

“I wouldn’t extrapolate from my questions, Ms. Quinn. At this point in the investigation, we can say with a high degree of certainty that there was not another gun and there was not another shooter.”

Charlie pressed together her lips. Had she heard more than four gunshots in the beginning? Had she heard more than six?

Suddenly, she wasn’t certain of anything.

Delia said, “You said that Kelly Wilson had the revolver. What was she doing with it?”

Charlie closed her eyes to give her brain a moment to reset back to the hallway. “Kelly was sitting on the floor like I said. Her back was to the wall. She had the revolver pointed at her chest, like this.” Charlie clasped her hands together, miming the way the girl had held the gun with both hands, her thumb looped inside the trigger guard. “She looked like she was going to kill herself.”

“Her left thumb was inside the trigger guard?”

Charlie looked at her hands. “Sorry, I’m only guessing. I’m left-handed. I don’t know which thumb was inside the trigger guard, but one of them was.”

Delia continued writing. “And?”

Charlie said, “Carlson and Rodgers were screaming for Kelly to put down the gun. They were freaked out. We were all freaked out. Except for Huck. I guess he’s seen combat or …” She didn’t speculate. “Huck had his hand out. He told Kelly to give him the revolver.”

“Did Kelly Wilson make a statement at any time?”

Charlie wasn’t going to validate that Kelly Wilson had spoken, because she didn’t trust the two men who had heard her words to relay them truthfully.

She said, “Huck was negotiating Kelly’s surrender. She was complying.” Charlie’s gaze went back to the mirror, where she hoped Ken Coin was about to piss himself. “Kelly placed the revolver in Huck’s hand. She had completely relinquished it. That’s when Officer Rodgers shot Mr. Huckabee.”

Ben opened his mouth to speak, but Delia held up her hand to stop him.

“Where was he shot?” the agent asked.

“Here.” Charlie indicated her bicep.

“What was Kelly Wilson’s affect during this time?”

“She looked dazed.” Charlie silently berated herself for answering the question. “That’s just a guess. I don’t know her. I’m not an expert. I can’t speak to her state of mind.”

“Understood,” Delia said. “Was Mr. Huckabee unarmed when he was shot?”

“Well, he had the revolver in his hand, but sideways, the way Kelly had put it there.”

“Show me?” She took a Glock 45 out of her purse. She dropped the clip, pulled on the slide to eject the cartridge, and placed the gun on the table.

Charlie didn’t want to take the Glock. She hated guns, even though she practiced twice a month at the range. She was never, ever going to find herself in another situation where she didn’t know how to use a gun.

Delia said, “Ms. Quinn, you don’t have to, but it would be helpful if you could show me the position of the revolver when it was placed in Mr. Huckabee’s hand.”

“Oh.” Charlie felt like a giant light bulb turned on over her head. She had been so overwhelmed by the murders that she hadn’t processed the fact that there was a second investigation into the officer-involved shooting. If Rodgers had moved his gun an inch in the wrong direction, Huck could’ve been a third body lying in the front office hallway.

“It was like this.” Charlie picked up the Glock. The black metal felt cold against her skin. She hefted it into her left hand, but that was wrong. Huck had reached back with his right. She put the gun in her open right palm, turned sideways, muzzle facing backward, the same way Kelly had with the revolver.

Delia already had her cell phone in her hands. She took several pictures, saying, “You don’t mind?” when she knew full well it was too late if Charlie minded. “What happened to the revolver?”

Charlie placed the Glock on the table so that the muzzle pointed toward the back wall. “I don’t know. Huck didn’t really move. I mean, he flinched, I guess from the pain of a bullet shredding his arm, but he didn’t fall down or anything. He told Rodgers to take the revolver, but I don’t remember whether or not Rodgers took it, or if someone else did.”

Delia’s pen had stopped writing. “After Mr. Huckabee was shot, he told Rodgers to take the revolver?”

“Yes. He was very calm about it, but I mean, it was tense, because nobody knew whether or not Rodgers was going to shoot him again. He still had his Glock pointed at Huck. Carlson still had his shotgun.”

“But there wasn’t another shot fired?”

“No.”

“Could you see if anyone had their finger on a trigger?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t see Mr. Huckabee hand the revolver to anyone?”

“No.”

“Did you see him put it anywhere on his person? On the ground?”

“I don’t—” Charlie shook her head. “I was more concerned that he had been shot.”

“Okay.” She made a few more notes before looking up. “What do you remember next?”

Charlie didn’t know what she remembered next. Had she looked down at her hands the same way she was looking down at them now? She could remember the sound of heavy breathing from Carlson and Rodgers. Both men had looked as terrified as Charlie had felt, sweating profusely, their chests heaving up and down under the weight of their bulletproof vests.

My girl’s that age.

Pink coached me up.

Carlson hadn’t buckled his bulletproof vest. The sides had flapped open as he ran into the school with his shotgun. He’d had no idea what he would find when he turned that corner; bodies, carnage, a bullet to the head.

If you’ve never seen anything like that before, it could break you.

Delia asked, “Ms. Quinn, do you need a moment?”

Charlie thought about the terrified look on Carlson’s face when he slipped in the patch of blood. Had there been tears in his eyes? Was he wondering if the dead girl a few feet away from his face was his own child?

“I’d like to go now.” Charlie didn’t know that she was going to say the words until she heard them come out of her mouth. “I’m leaving.”

“You should finish your statement.” Delia smiled. “I’ll only need a few more minutes.”

“I’d like to finish it at a later date.” Charlie gripped the table so she could stand. “You said that I’m free to go.”

“Absolutely.” Delia Wofford again proved unflappable. She handed Charlie one of her business cards. “I look forward to speaking with you again soon.”

Charlie took the card. Her vision was still out of focus. Her stomach sloshed acid up into her throat.

Ben said, “I’ll take you out the back way. Are you okay to walk to your office?”

Charlie wasn’t sure about anything except that she had to get out of here. The walls were closing in. She couldn’t breathe through her nose. She was going to suffocate if she didn’t get out of this room.

Ben tucked her water bottle into his jacket pocket. He opened the door. Charlie practically fell into the hallway. She braced her hands against the wall opposite the door. Forty years of paint had turned the cinder blocks smooth. She pressed her cheek against the cold surface. She took a few deep breaths and waited for the nausea to pass.

“Charlie?” Ben said.

She turned back around. There was suddenly a river of people between them. The building was teeming with law enforcement. Muscle-bound men and women with big rifles strapped to their wide chests rushed back and forth. State troopers. Sheriff’s deputies. Highway patrol. Ben was right; they had all shown up. She saw letters on the backs of their shirts. GBI. FBI. ATF. SWAT. ICE. BOMB SQUAD.

When the hall finally cleared, Ben had his phone in his hands. He was silent as his thumbs moved across the screen.

She leaned against the wall and waited for him to finish texting whoever he was texting. Maybe the twenty-six-year-old from his office. Kaylee Collins. The girl was Ben’s type. Charlie knew this because, at that age, she had been her husband’s type, too.

“Shit.” Ben’s thumbs swiped across the screen. “Gimme another second.”

Charlie could’ve walked herself out of the police station. She could’ve walked the six blocks to her office.

But she didn’t.

She studied the top of Ben’s head, the way his hair grew from the crown like a spiral ham. She wanted to fold herself into his body. To lose herself in him.

Instead, Charlie silently repeated the phrases she had practiced in her car, in the kitchen, sometimes in front of the bathroom mirror:

I can’t live without you.

The last nine months have been the loneliest of my life.

Please come home because I can’t take it anymore.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry.

“Plea deal on another case went south.” Ben dropped the phone into his jacket pocket. It clinked against Charlie’s half-empty water bottle. “Ready?”

She had no choice but to walk. She kept her fingertips to the wall, turning sideways as more cops in black tactical gear passed by. Their expressions were cold, unreadable. They were either going somewhere or coming back from something, their collective jaws set against the world.

This was a school shooting.

Charlie had been so focused on the what that she had forgotten the where.

She wasn’t an expert, but she knew enough about these investigations to understand that every school shooting informed the next one. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook. Law enforcement agencies studied these tragedies in an effort to prevent, or at the very least understand, the next one.

The ATF would comb the middle school for bombs because others had used bombs before. The GBI would look for accomplices because sometimes, rarely, there were accomplices. Canine officers would hunt for suspicious backpacks in the halls. They would check every locker, every teacher’s desk, every closet for explosives. Investigators would look for Kelly’s diary or a hit list, diagrams of the school, stashes of weaponry, a plan of assault. Tech people would look at computers, phones, Facebook pages, Snapchat accounts. Everyone would search for a motive, but what motive could they find? What answer could an eighteen-year-old offer to explain why she had decided to commit cold-blooded murder?

That was Rusty’s problem now. Exactly the kind of thorny, moral and legal issue that got him out of bed in the morning.

Exactly the kind of law that Charlie had never wanted to practice.

“Come on.” Ben walked ahead of her. He had a long, loping stride because he always put too much weight on the balls of his feet.

Was Kelly Wilson being abused? That would be Rusty’s first line of inquiry. Was there some sort of mitigating circumstance that would keep her off death row? She had been held back at least one year in school. Did that indicate a low IQ? Diminished capacity? Was Kelly Wilson capable of telling right from wrong? Could she participate in her own defense, as required by law?

Ben pushed open the exit door.

Was Kelly Wilson a bad seed? Was the explanation here the only explanation that would never make sense? Would Delia Wofford tell Lucy Alexander’s parents and Mrs. Pinkman that the reason they lost their loved ones was because Kelly Wilson was bad?

“Charlie,” Ben said. He was holding open the door. His iPhone was back in his hand.

Charlie shielded her eyes as she walked outside. The sunlight was as sharp as a blade. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Here.” Ben handed her a pair of sunglasses. They belonged to her. He must have gotten them out of her car.

Charlie took the glasses but couldn’t put them on her tender nose. She opened her mouth for air. The sudden heat was too much. She leaned down, hand braced on her knee.

“Are you going to be sick?”

“No,” she said, then “maybe,” then she threw up just enough to make a splatter.

Ben didn’t step back. He managed to gather her hair away from her face without touching her skin. Charlie retched two more times before he asked, “All right?”

“Maybe.” Charlie opened her mouth. She waited for more. A line of spit came out, but nothing else. “Okay.”

He let her hair drop back around her shoulders. “The paramedic told me that you have a concussion.”

Charlie couldn’t lift her head, but she told him, “There’s nothing they can do about it.”

“They can monitor you for symptoms like nausea and blurred vision and headaches and forgetting names and not tracking when you’re asked a simple question.”

“They wouldn’t know the names I was forgetting,” she said. “I don’t want to spend the night in a hospital.”

“Stay at the HP.” The higgledy-piggledy. Sam’s name for the meandering farmhouse had stuck. Ben said, “Rusty can watch you.”

“So I die from second-hand smoke instead of a brain aneurysm?”

“That’s not funny.”

Head still down, Charlie reached back for the wall. The feel of the solid concrete block gave her enough steadiness to risk standing up straight. She cupped her hand to her eyes. She remembered cupping her hand to the window of the front office this morning.

Ben handed her the water bottle. He had already taken the top off for her. She took a few slow sips and tried not to read too much into his thoughtfulness. Her husband was thoughtful with everybody.

She asked, “Where was Mrs. Jenkins when the shooting started?”

“In the file room.”

“Did she see anything?”

“Rusty will find out everything during discovery.”

“Everything,” Charlie repeated. In the coming months, Ken Coin would be required by law to turn over any material in the investigation that could be reasonably interpreted as evidence. Coin’s idea of “reasonable” was as fixed as a spider’s web.

She asked Ben, “Is Mrs. Pinkman okay?”

He didn’t bring up her “Heller” slip because that wasn’t his way. “She’s at the hospital. They had to sedate her.”

Charlie should visit her, but she knew that she would find an excuse not to. “You let me think Kelly Wilson was sixteen years old.”

“I thought you could figure it out by holding a sphere in your hand and pulling apart time.”

Charlie laughed. “That was some next-level bullshit I laid down in there.”

“There’s some out here, too.”

Charlie wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She smelled dried blood again. Like everything else, she remembered the smell from before. She remembered the dark flecks falling like ash from her hair. She remembered that even after she’d bathed, even after she’d scrubbed herself raw, the odor of death had lingered.

She said, “You called me this morning.”

Ben shrugged like it didn’t matter.

Charlie poured the rest of the water onto her hands to clean them. “Have you talked to your mom and your sisters? They’ll be worried.”

“We talked.” He did that shrug again. “I should go back in.”

Charlie waited, but he didn’t go back in. She grappled for a reason to make him stay. “How’s Barkzilla?”

“Barky.” Ben took the empty bottle. He screwed on the cap. He dropped it back into his jacket pocket. “How’s Eleanor Roosevelt?”

“Quiet.”

He tucked his chin into his chest, returning to silence. This was nothing new. Her normally articulate husband had not articulated much to her in the past nine months.

But he wasn’t leaving. He wasn’t nodding her along, urging her to go. He wasn’t telling her that the only reason he wasn’t asking her if she was okay was because she would say that she was okay even if she wasn’t. Especially if she wasn’t.

She asked, “Why did you call me this morning?”

Ben groaned. He leaned his head back against the wall.

Charlie leaned her head back against the wall, too.

She studied the sharp line of his jaw. This was her type—a lanky, laid-back nerd who could quote Monty Python as easily as the United States constitution. He read graphic novels. He drank a glass of milk every night before he went to bed. He loved potato salad, and Lord of the Rings, and model trains. He preferred fantasy football to the real kind. He could not put on weight if you force-fed him butter. He was six feet tall when he stood up straight, which didn’t happen often.

She loved him so much that her heart literally hurt at the thought of never holding him again.

Ben said, “Peggy had this friend when she was fourteen. Her name was Violet.”

Peggy was the bossiest of his three older sisters.

“She was killed in a car crash. She was on her bicycle. We went to the funeral. I don’t know what my mom was thinking, taking me. I was too young to see that kind of thing. It was open casket. Carla held me up so I could see her.” His throat worked. “I, like, lost my shit. Mom had to take me out into the parking lot. It gave me nightmares. I thought that was the worst thing that I would ever see. A dead kid. A dead little girl. But she was cleaned up. You couldn’t see what had happened, that the car had hit her in the back. That she had bled to death, but inside. Not like the girl today. Not like what I saw at the school.”

There were tears in his eyes. Each word out of his mouth broke another piece of Charlie’s heart. She had to clench her fists to keep from reaching out to him.

Ben said, “Murder is murder. I can deal with that. Dealers. Gangbangers. Even domestic violence. But a kid? A little girl?” He kept shaking his head. “She didn’t look like she was sleeping, did she?”

“No.”

“She looked like she had been murdered. Like someone had fired a gun at her throat and the bullet ripped it open and she died a horrible, violent death.”

Charlie looked up into the sun because she didn’t want to see Lucy Alexander dying all over again.

Ben said, “The guy’s a war hero. Did you know that?”

He was talking about Huck.

“He saved a platoon or something, but he won’t talk about it because he’s like fucking Batman or something.” Ben pushed himself away from the wall, away from Charlie. “And this morning, he took a bullet in his arm. To save a murderer, whom he kept from getting murdered. And then he stood up for the guy who almost killed him. He lied in a sworn statement to keep another guy out of trouble. He’s so fucking handsome, right?” Ben was angry now, but his voice was low, shrunken by the humiliation that came courtesy of his bitch wife. “A guy like that, you see him walking down the street, you don’t know whether you want to fuck him or have a beer with him.”

Charlie looked down at the ground. They knew she had done both.

“Lenore’s here.”

Rusty’s secretary had pulled up to the gate in her red Mazda.

Charlie said, “Ben, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. An awful, awful mistake.”

“Did you let him on top?”

“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.”

Lenore tapped the horn. She rolled down her window and waved. Charlie waved back, her hand splayed, trying to let Lenore know that she needed a minute.

“Ben—”

It was too late. Ben was already pulling the door closed behind him.

4

Charlie sniffed her sunglasses as she walked toward Lenore’s car. She knew she was acting like a foolish girl in a teen romance, but she wanted to smell Ben. What she got instead was a whiff of her own sweat tinged with vomit.

Lenore leaned across the car to push open the door. “You put those on your nose, sweetheart, not in front of it.”

Charlie couldn’t put anything on her nose. She tossed the cheap glasses onto the dashboard as she got in. “Did Daddy send you?”

“Ben texted me, but, listen, your dad wants us to fetch the Wilsons and bring them back to the office. Coin’s trying to execute a search warrant. I brought your court clothes to change into.”

Charlie had started shaking her head as soon as she heard the words “your dad wants.” She asked, “Where’s Rusty?”

“At the hospital with the Wilson girl.”

Charlie huffed a laugh. Ben had really honed his deception skills. “How long before Dad figured out she wasn’t being held at the station?”

“Over an hour.”

Charlie put on her seat belt. “I was thinking how much Coin loves to play his games.” She had no doubt the district attorney had put Kelly Wilson in the back of an ambulance for the trip to the hospital. By maintaining the illusion that she wasn’t in police custody, he could argue that any statement she made absent counsel was voluntary. “She’s eighteen years old.”

“Rusty told me. The girl was practically catatonic at the hospital. He barely got her mama’s phone number out of her.”

“That’s how she was when I saw her. Almost in a fugue state.” Charlie hoped Kelly Wilson snapped out of it soon. At the moment, she was Rusty’s most vital source of information. Until he received the discovery materials from Ken Coin—witness lists, police statements, investigators’ notes, forensics—her father would be flying blind.

Lenore put her hand on the gear. “Where am I taking you?”

Charlie pictured herself at home, standing under a hot shower, surrounding herself with pillows in bed. And then she remembered that Ben wouldn’t be there and said, “I guess to the Wilsons.”

“They live on the backside of the Holler.” Lenore put the car in gear. She made a wide U-turn and drove up the street. “There’s no street address. Your dad sent me country directions—take a left at the old white dog, take a right at the crooked oak tree.”

“That’s good news for Kelly, I guess.” Rusty could break a search warrant that didn’t have the right address or at least a proper description of the house. The odds were against Ken Coin to come up with either. There were hundreds of rental houses and trailers up and down the Holler. No one knew exactly how many people lived there, what their names were or whether or not their children were attending school. The slumlords didn’t bother with leases or background checks so long as the right amount of cash showed up every week.

Charlie asked, “How long do you think we have before Ken locates the house?”

“No idea. They brought in a helicopter from Atlanta an hour ago, but from what I can tell, it’s on the other side of the mountain.”

Charlie knew that she could find the Wilson house. She was in the Holler at least twice a month chasing down past-due legal bills. Ben had been horrified when she’d casually mentioned her night-time excursions. Sixty percent of the crime in Pikeville was committed in or near Sadie’s Holler.

Lenore said, “I packed a sandwich for you.”

“I’m not hungry.” Charlie looked at the clock on the dash: 11:52 AM. Less than five hours ago, she’d been looking inside the darkened front office at the middle school. Less than ten minutes after that, two people were dead, another was shot, and Charlie was about to get her nose broken.

Lenore said, “You should eat.”

“I will.” Charlie stared out the window. Sunlight strobed through the tall trees behind the buildings. The flickering light flashed images into her mind like an old-timey slideshow. Charlie allowed herself the rare indulgence of lingering on the ones of Gamma and Sam—running down the long driveway to the farmhouse, giggling over a thrown plastic fork. She knew what came later, so she fast-forwarded until Sam and Gamma were firmly back in the past and all that remained was the aftermath of this morning.

Lucy Alexander. Mr. Pinkman.

A little girl. A middle-school principal.

The victims didn’t seem to have much in common except that they had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. If Charlie had to guess, she would assume that Kelly Wilson’s plan was to stand in the middle of the hall, revolver out in front of her, and wait for the bell to ring.