Page 49 of Race With The Devil

“Where’d you hear all this?” I just couldn’t picture Tanner wearing chain metal, his hair flowing down to his waist. I supposed that would stand out in a place like West Memphis, from what little I knew.

Lyric shrugged. “Google. I got real curious after he helped save my ass at our house that day. Tanner Principato. Not many of them.”

That’s for fucking sure. Not many of them. “Well,” I sniffed, “it’s not like it matters anyway. He’s going back to St. Louis the second we find Lavinia’s body.”

“Which you’re not going to do,” said Bellamy, “if you don’t make it up with Tanner. I’ll just bet he’s going to refuse to finish his job without you. That’s how honorable he is.”

“Honorable?” I scoffed. “There must’ve been some evidence linking him to the rape to get a conviction. He must’ve at least been watching.”

“Apparently not,” said Lyric. “It was a real railroad job. Haven’t you even googled your own boyfriend?”

Apparently not. “Well! Just maybe I’ll do that!” I said childishly and stomped into the house with my margarita glass.

I opened the front door for Bellamy’s sister, Ginny. I guessed she’d been invited over to cheer me up along with some other women, refugees from Bihari, all of them sterilized at the cult’s “bath house.” I felt a sisterhood with Gia, Sunyade, and Rhetta. I’d been inadvertently sterilized after a few too many abortion pills, but it was all the same. We’d been physically and psychically assaulted against our will time after time, relentlessly, when least expected. How was I supposed to keep associating with a man who’d served time for rape?

After showing the gals to the margaritas, I went into the home office. Luckily, I didn’t need a password to get onto the desktop computer.

The first thing that popped up was Hang Town Ranch, Tanner’s dog compound on the outskirts of St. Louis. It looked like an old, up-and-coming neighborhood, with some houses having broken windows and boarded-up doors, and some of the Queen Annes painted intricately in a pastel of colors. Tanner’s house was somewhere in between. He’d apparently bought two lots, maybe knocking down one of the slums, to make room for outdoor playing areas and covered training outbuildings. I wondered who his sponsor was, his benefactor. You don’t just get out of the Air Force and get enough money to build a compound like that. And his stepfather the garbage dump layabout obviously didn’t help.

It was sweet, though. He had a helper, Curly, an adorable little man with Down’s Syndrome who was probably so sweet to the dogs. And there was a young girl with stick-black hair and maybe half as many tattoos as me. Josie was a licensed pilot as well.

Browsing through the photos made me nostalgic, almost made me fall in love with Tanner all over again. For I was in love with him, no doubt about it. I was drawn in by his surly, gruff persona. He didn’t smile often in real life, but he sure did when around dogs. One photo depicted him shirtless cradling a little dog of some kind, and he sure was a carved fucking beast. I actually saved the photo into an email I sent myself.

One section of the website was devoted to his Puppies Behind Bars work. There I had to see him in his prison whites, melding in with his fellow inmates. I could see where he was one of them. Though Tanner had no ink or piercings, he was their equal in his ability to wreak havoc.

Becoming serious, I read a few news stories on how Tanner had been exonerated. Aaron “Slushy” McGill proclaimed, “Tanner Principato was set up by a prejudicial closely-knit community who saw anyone different from them as evil. These boys ran in crowds doing inexplicable things like playing death metal music, playing their own instruments, wearing all black, drawing pentagrams on their foreheads—not a sign of demonic intent, but of the music they loved.”

The beaten, raped girl had crawled to the side of the road and waved down a car. At the hospital, she said how it was one of “those death metal boys” who had done it—acting alone. Cops went immediately to the garbage dump and because Sonny hid when he saw them coming, Tanner allowed himself to be arrested.

That was pretty much it. Because Tanner was younger than Sonny, they imagined cops would go easier on him. It sounded like the opposite. He had a shitty court-appointed lawyer who basically sounded like he went along with everything the court told him. In fact, because Tanner sat there with arms crossed chewing gum and rolling his eyes, they had thrown a contempt charge at him as well. He was clearly the fall guy for a lot of back woods hatred for unconventional teens.

When I googled for “Sonny Principato” I saw that cops had arrested him at a traffic stop where it sure looked like he was heading into Canada. There was already a BOLO on his ass because they’d matched DNA from the rape crime scene to him. So it was pretty cut-and-dried for them to arrest him and charge him for the rape and assault for which Tanner had already walked free.

I was looking at a photo of a smiling, happy Tanner with his arm around some slut when Knoxie came busting in the office door. The caption said the slut was Joy Shapiro, owner of Lucky Dog Pet Rescue. She was handing over to Tanner a maltipoo mix who’d been hit by a car and left for dead. Tanner was taking it to his vet in St. Louis, and there to his rehab. It was all very sappy and sentimental, and I felt like belting Joy one. I could just tell by their smug smiles that they’d banged one out, maybe just prior to the asinine photo shoot posing in front of his plane on a runway.

“Unity, Unity, thank God you’re here,” said Knoxie, out of breath as though he’d run up the hill.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, rising from his desk chair.

He quickly fell into the chair, then grabbed my hands. “Look, what I said was fucked and irresponsible. I guess I just, ah, just assumed you already knew what he was in the big house for. It was a shitdongles thing for me to say.”

“But it was true.”

“Well, yes, but it’s up to Tanner himself to give you that information, not me.”

I shook his hands free from mine. “But he served time for rape, Knoxie!”

“A rape he didn’t do!”

“You know what?” I jammed my forefinger into my chest. “It doesn’t make that shit-all much difference to me, deep down. He was in prison, with other real rapists who he associated with and considered his pals.”

Knoxie laughed at the wall. “Unity. I hardly think he was making campfires and S’mores with those assholes. Why would the air force let him in if they didn’t believe he was a hundred percent innocent?”

It was true. Articles had talked about Tanner’s “exoneration,” “sad mistaken identity,” and “freedom from all false claims.” It just didn’t sit right with me on an emotional level, that was it. You could hand me any number of facts and figures and I’d still be creeped out by a guy who had shared a cell, maybe, with some boy-raping pedo. “I’m sorry, Knoxie. I can’t. I just can’t. Tanner and Wolf will have to continue to look for Lavinia without me. Then he’ll go back to St. Louis with his shitty reputation and this slut—“

“Oh, Unity, thank god you’re here.” Wolf Glaser entered the office, also out of breath, as though he’d followed Knoxie jogging up Mescal Mountain. Was I stuck on some kind of tape loop? Who would bust through the door next? I took a seat, but it was just so I could sink my fingers into Beetle’s adorable ruff and kiss his fluffy forehead. “Man, I just ran from . . . from . . . parking lot . . .Unity, Tanner’s going to lose his religion if you don’t talk to him again. He feels like a complete and utter—“

“Shitdongle?” I suggested.