Last Lie (34 page)

Her head is lolling back against the leather chair, her face tilted away from the camera lens.

Lauren asked, "Is she still awake at that point? Can you tell?"

"I don't know. Yes, no. I would say the drugs have started to take effect."

Mattin is sitting on the arm of the same chair as the woman. He's in the same outfit as before, but he has covered his head with a surgeon's cap.

With his left hand, the one that was not burned, he is holding the woman's right hand to his crotch. He is leaning forward and seems to be speaking to her.

Behind the victim and the rapist is an empty kitchen. Mimi is somewhere beyond the lens of Jonas's camera phone.

The photo that follows moves the story forward. Mattin has changed his position. He is standing beside the woman's chair. He has lowered the pants of her pajamas to her ankles. He has lowered his own pants, too, but only a few inches. He is well prepared for this moment. The cap with the sailboats. His pubic region is shaved. His feet and forearms appear hairless, too.

He is leaning down toward the young widow. She is looking in his direction, her mouth open. Her eyes are dull. She seems to be struggling to keep them open.

"Does he have his waistband behind his . . . scrotum?" Lauren asked. She was not believing what she was seeing.

"Yes."

The widow's face isn't far from Mattin's not-quite-erect penis.

"God," Lauren says. "God."

God,
I thought,
was taking a break.

I point out that the kitchen in the background remains unoccupied.

The next photo shows that things are starting to go very wrong for Mimi and Mattin.

"Some of this next part of the story," I told Lauren, "is speculation."

Mimi's son needs to use the bathroom. There wasn't a basement bathroom in the house. It had been an issue for decades. Peter was planning to install one around the time he was murdered. Adrienne had arranged to have two new bathrooms--one in the basement, one near the family room--included when she built the missing turret on the southwest corner of the house.

Mimi and Mattin were undoubtedly planning to make similar additions during their upcoming renovation.

But Mimi's son didn't know any of the plumbing remodeling plans. All he knew was that he needed a toilet and he couldn't find one downstairs. He listened for footsteps or voices upstairs, waited until he heard nothing, and climbed the stairs to the main floor to find a bathroom.

Jonas had moved a little by the time he took the next photograph in the series. Maybe only a couple of feet--the angle is different from the earlier shots by a few degrees.

The foreground shows a continuation of the same horrific violation as the photograph before. But it's worse. Mattin is now standing on the arms of the chair, hovering above the woman's head and mouth, his erection in front of his oddly displayed testicles. This picture makes it even clearer that Mattin's pubic hair is shaved.

The background is different in this photograph. In the background is the kitchen, again. But it's no longer vacant.

Mimi is standing at the kitchen island. Her husband's rape of their friend is ongoing in the family room, in her clear view. She is not watching.

In the photograph she is looking, and pointing, across her body, in the direction of the basement staircase.

On the very edge of the photo, cut in half vertically, is the focus of her attention: a young man in a stocking cap and a Rossignol T-shirt. No hoodie. No day pack.

Her son, Emerson, is standing at the top of the basement stairs.

The shock in Mimi's face has the clarity of untracked snow. It's unmistakable. With her arm in motion, she is banishing her son back down to the basement.

But her eyes reveal that she is aware it is already too late. If Jonas's camera can find the young man in that frame, then the young man has already witnessed his stepfather's quasi-acrobatic sexual assault on the woman by the fire.

Mimi's son went back downstairs. Maybe he hesitated before he went. His bladder was still full. His anger? Only God knows how full that was.

Upstairs the rape, eventually, concluded.

Mattin's fantasy had its own sick progression. He didn't ejaculate in the widow's mouth. Either he didn't choose to, or he was too careful for that. Maybe his ejaculation was on her exposed chest. Maybe he didn't come at all.

If he ejaculated on her chest, he cleaned her carefully before he carried her limp body to the guest room.

Lauren said, "I'm sure Mattin was one meticulous bastard. Cleaning her was part of his ritual."

He must have had to support his victim's weight as he guided her to the guest room. Once there, he removed her robe, threw it on the chair at the end of the bed, and buttoned her pajama top. He may have taken an additional minute or two to goad her into allowing him to brush her teeth, or maybe into rinsing her mouth with antiseptic mouthwash. Maybe both.

Finally, he got her into bed.

He did one final review of his precautions. He was satisfied. He went upstairs to join his wife.

Feeling what? I cannot imagine.

Mimi's son waited in the basement until he no longer heard any noise upstairs. Maybe he waited a long time after that. He might have still been in shock from what he had seen earlier, or he might have been plotting how he could use any of it to his advantage.

He eventually climbed the stairs a second time, perhaps still in need of a bathroom. There was only one bathroom on the main floor. Emerson located it when he walked into the guest suite.

That is the last photo in the graphic novel. The young man is standing, now hatless and shoeless, in the doorway of the guest suite.

By the time Jonas takes that final photo, Emerson has already seen the sedated, sleeping woman whom his stepfather had just orally raped. In Jonas's photo, Emerson is looking back over his shoulder toward the family room. He is checking to see if anyone else is aware that he is there.

That is all that Jonas's photographs show. "That is all that our son saw," I told Lauren.

For the rest, we're left to fill in blanks.

Emerson decided that he and the woman were alone on the main floor. He stepped the rest of the way into the guest room. He closed the door behind him.

Jonas stayed on the first floor for a while. Or he didn't. We don't know yet what sounds he heard from the guest room. But Jonas knew the basement was empty. His path back out of the house was clear. At some point, Jonas made his way downstairs, and he went back outside. He scooted across the lane, around our house, and entered our basement on the west side.

Lauren said, "Where photography ends, forensics take over.

"Mimi's son Emerson raped the poor woman for the second time. He took off her pajamas, top and bottoms, and he . . . I don't know exactly what he did, but in the end, he raped her vaginally. He didn't use a condom, he probably didn't have one, but he didn't come inside of her. He ejaculated on her abdomen. He cleaned her off afterward. Like stepfather, like stepson. Maybe he used one of the bathroom towels to clean her. Even used soap and water. Eventually, he redressed her, but he was not as careful or meticulous as his stepfather. Emerson was a kid. He didn't really know anything about forensics.

"He made mistakes. He didn't clean her body well enough. He put her pajama bottoms on backward. He left behind traces of his own DNA. Two hairs. Some semen. One of the two rape-kit swabs that was positive for semen came from inside her navel."

Lauren knew things that I didn't know.

She continued, "Mimi and Hake woke the next morning to find their friend gone. They knew nothing of the second rape. Hake assumed the woman had left to go home none the wiser, her memories erased by Rohypnol. Hake assumed he'd gotten away with rape. Probably not for the first time.

"Mimi was not as confident that all the ends were tied up. She knew that Emerson had seen what her husband was doing the night before. She knew her son was asleep on a cot in the basement.

"But she didn't know what her son did in the guest room later on.

"Mimi knew her final steps in the precaution dance. She completely stripped and scrubbed the guest room and did a quick load of laundry before she and Hake left in the limo to head to the airport to fly to Napa.

"Sometime, later that day, Hake got a call on his cell phone from the sheriff's investigator about an allegation of sexual assault at his house the night before.

"Hake didn't know about the second rape. Neither did Mimi. He wondered what he might have done wrong in committing and covering up the first rape. He called Casey Sparrow. Denied everything to her."

It would have been tempting to conclude that Mattin was overconfident at that point, because that was the juncture at which he had decided to go all in. He volunteered his DNA for private analysis. But Lauren didn't know about the private DNA results. I couldn't tell her I knew that.

Lauren said, "But Mimi eventually guessed what had gone wrong--that the rape that had been reported wasn't the one by her husband. She confronted Emerson. He admitted what he had done. He told her everything, even about the chef seeing him earlier on the lane.

"For Mimi, the dominos had started to fall. She knew she was facing the prospect of losing both her husband and her son. She couldn't bear it."

I said, "She killed Preston Georges to protect her family."

"And herself," Lauren said. "Ultimately, she was protecting herself."

48

I
was suddenly in the dark.

Lauren revealed that the sheriff had retrieved the missing revolver from behind the burned house. Then she stopped talking with me about the ongoing investigations.

Hella had decided to change supervisors. When we met to discuss her decision, I called it resistance. She called it prudence. We agreed to disagree. I wished her well.

Sam was busy investigating a pair of vicious assaults that had taken place after hours near the Downtown Mall. I asked him once if he'd heard anything new about the rape. He told me it wasn't his case.

I knew that Mattin Snow hadn't been arrested only because the media wasn't screaming about it. If the DA's office was negotiating a plea bargain with Mimi Snow about the death of Preston Georges, those negotiations were ongoing well outside of my vision.

I'd stopped by Cozier Maitlin's office with a sealed Tyvek envelope containing Jonas's phone and eight-by-ten images of each of the photographs that Jonas had taken the night of the damn housewarming. On the outside of the envelope, I'd scrawled a cliche: "To be opened in the event of my serious injury or death." I'd signed it.

Cozy thought it was a joke of some kind.

I told him it wasn't.

He asked me if he could peek.

SOMEONE FROM THE SHERIFF'S OFFICE took down the crime scene tape a week after the fire. It was the day of Jonas's second appointment with his new psychologist.

It was the day before Lauren and I would have our first appointment with our new couple's therapist.

The same afternoon, a demolition contractor stuffed a notice in our doorjamb informing us that final demo of the debris from the fire would take place ten days later.

I told Jonas he could skip school if he wanted to be there to watch the cleanup. He declined.

I wanted to be there.

I half hoped Mattin would show up for the final demolition. If the asshole were slipping back into denial, seeing me would certainly jolt him back into the reality that the face he was shaving each morning in the mirror was that of a rapist.

Just in case we had a confrontation, I'd arranged for backup. Sam had accepted my invitation to come over to join me in my ringside seats to the removal of all that remained of the old ranch house. I was feeling somber about it all. The feelings of loss I'd had at Peter's and at Adrienne's funerals haunted me anew. The complexities of all of Jonas's losses continued to stun me.

THE FIRST MEMBERS of the demolition squad arrived midmorning. Their initial task was to stand outside their pickup trucks and drink McDonald's coffee. A caravan of heavy equipment rolled up soon after. I pulled a couple of lawn chairs out of the garage and set them up in front of Peter's barn. Despite a bitter fall chill under cloudless skies, and despite the fact that the festivities started a good hour before noon, I also retrieved a couple of beers from the refrigerator.

I was wearing a parka, my biking half gloves, and a good ski hat. When Sam arrived, I noted that he didn't even zip up his light jacket.

After one look at my outfit, he called me a wuss.

I didn't reveal that I was also wearing a base layer of long underwear. I wasn't in the mood to listen to another story about growing up on the Iron Range and how cold it could get ice fishing in northern Minnesota in January.

The next time he told me that story, I promised myself I was going to admit to him that I didn't even like walleye.

Once the diesels came to life, Sam and I reserved our conversational efforts for the interludes when the roar of the engines wasn't deafening.

During an early break in the heavy equipment action, he pointed toward the debris across the lane, where a winch was pulling Mimi's big SUV out of the rubble that had been the garage. "Didn't know that was in there," Sam said. Then, without any segue at all, he added, "Lucy told me last night there will be no charges filed, you know, after all. Courtney Rea has been keeping her up to date on the sheriff's side of things. Turns out they've become buds. Girlfriends."

The way he said "girlfriends" would have irritated Lucy were she with us. Sam knew that.

I raised an eyebrow. "Really? You're talking about the housewarming? Here? There won't be any charges? I did not know that."

"The evidence has all lined up behind a dead suspect. What are you going to do?" Sam said.

"I guess." Something about Sam's affect was making me uneasy. I set my beer on the dusty ground beside my flimsy chair. I tried to prepare myself for something I wasn't prepared for. I wanted both hands free, just in case.

"Cozier Maitlin has officially informed the DA's office that the accuser has decided not to testify about the alleged rape. If rape is what it was, of course. We don't know for sure there was a rape, do we?" Sam asked.

I felt like I was approaching a trap or a trip wire. But I couldn't see it. "We don't," I said.

"We do, though, right? Really. Know there was a rape." He stared at me. He wasn't looking in my eyes; he was watching my eyes. "But we don't, not officially," Sam said. "Mental health concern, I hear. For the victim. That's the reason for her not testifying. Since that's your neck of the woods--other people's mental health--I'm kind of wondering if you have any thoughts about it. Not testifying because of mental health concerns?"

My pulse was picking up speed. Could Sam know about my supervision role with the victim? I decided to play it as though he didn't. What choice did I have?

"Maybe the mental health concerns are valid," I said. "From what . . . I know, the woman must have been through a lot."

"What you know?"

Shit
. "The rape," I said.

Sam was still examining my eyes. I was increasingly discomfited. "If there was a rape," Sam said. "Everything's alleged, you know."
A-ledge-ed.

"Yeah? Even the kid's involvement? That's alleged?"

"You got me there," Sam said. "That's kind of confirmed by forensics. Back to the other--I think every rape victim would have mental health concerns about testifying. Don't you? Nature of the beast. Trauma being trauma. Many vics testify anyway. Some, I hear, even consider testifying to be therapeutic."

Sam said
therapeutic
in a manner that was packed with disdain.

"May be true," I said. I wished I had an app that would tell me where this conversation was heading. I couldn't see out ahead of us more than a few metaphorical feet, but I wasn't liking the current vector.

The heavy equipment provided a long break in the conversation. Thank God for excavators and dump trucks. After the next break in the action, I hoped Sam and I would start up someplace other than where we'd left off.

Sam had other ideas. When the noise dropped back to very loud, he said, "Lucy told me she's heard rumors about a settlement, too. Between the parties."

Wow.
A settlement would mean there was a civil suit. If a civil suit had been filed naming Mattin Snow as a defendant, then the accusations against him would be public. At that point, his career and reputation would be gone. He'd have nothing left to lose. That freedom would make the man dangerous in completely novel ways.

If he had nothing to lose, why would he settle? I knew I was missing something crucial. Which I figured was just the way Sam wanted it right then.

The dilemma that Cozier Maitlin and Casey Sparrow had been busy confronting was how to settle a civil suit that couldn't actually be filed. Cozy's client, the victim, wanted a measure of justice from the still-living perpetrator of the rape--Casey's client, Mattin Snow. But if the rape victim filed her civil suit against Mattin Snow--a most public act--Mattin's career as a women's legal advocate was over. Even the faintest hint of the allegation would flatten him as completely as a direct hit from a meteorite. Any motivation he would have had to play nice--certainly to settle a suit with his accuser--would disappear.

Sam's Kobe Bryant story had taught me a clear lesson about accusations of sexual license with a celebrity: once the allegations were public, the accused Snow would have no choice but to begin a phase of mutually assured destruction with his victim.

I asked Sam, "What . . . parties settled . . . what?"

Sam nodded. If I had to translate the nod, I would have guessed it to mean, "Well played."

"The vic," Sam finally said. "And the family of the kid. The victim sued Emerson Abbott's mother and father, and his stepfather, for damages for the rape. I don't know the details, but some subset of that group, they're the ones who are settling."

Elegant solution,
I thought.
Mimi and Mattin would pay their pound of flesh, the victim would feel some vindication, but Mattin's assault on her would never become public.

Damn but these lawyers are good. Wizardy, even.

A truck filled with charred debris pulled away down the lane. Its empty twin backed immediately into the space that had been vacated. Across the way, the bed of a flatbed was starting to tilt down to await the arrival of the roasted SUV. I waited until all the backing-up
beep-beep-beep
ing stopped before I replied to Sam.

"I didn't know about the suit or the settlement," I said.

It was true. I hadn't heard. My usual sources were quiet. Lauren wasn't talking much about work at all, certainly not about the rape after the housewarming or the Devil's Thumb murder. And since Hella's supervision had ended, the legal updates I'd counted on during supervision sessions were no longer available.

"All just happened," Sam said.

"You have thoughts about all this, Sam? You seem to know a lot. Given that it's not your case."

"People talk to me," he said. "I'm a good listener. And I do have thoughts." He paused before he added, "You and Lauren, too."

I didn't know what that meant. "What?"

"No charges for either of you, right? That's something, too, eh?"

From Sam's mouth, the Canadian
eh?
wasn't mimicry or unconscious affectation. It was intentional punctuation. He was getting my attention.

I thought,
Oh, so that's where you're going. But why?

The fact that Lauren and I wouldn't be charged wasn't real news. Word that Lauren had been cleared in the shooting and that I wouldn't be charged in a break-in had dribbled out of the DA's office over the previous week. I thought the decisions had been communicated in a way that was intended to maximally irritate us. I blamed that on Elliot Bellhaven, Lauren's boss.

"My opinion?" I said. "I thought Elliot kept Lauren at the end of the gangplank longer than he had to, but I'm relieved that she's finally cleared. She was just protecting her son that night. You know that."

"No charges against you, either, buddy." Sam raised his beer in a toast. Or a mock toast. I was so off balance, I couldn't be sure. I didn't like that I couldn't tell what was going on.

I didn't raise my bottle to join Sam in the toast. "I was protecting my son, too. And my dog. I haven't been that worried about the system doing anything to me."

Sam sat quietly for a full minute. The machinery was active, but I thought the interlude of silence had more to do with process than cacophonic competition.

"You're saying no deals were cut for either of you?" Sam asked finally. "No lawyer wizard Merliny shit was involved?"

I decided to wait to answer him until the front loader finished emptying a shovel load of charcoal chunks into the dump truck. I could feel myself getting defensive. Or more defensive. "No deals, Sam. We just relied on facts. The sheriff investigated. The special prosecutor weighed the evidence. We were innocent. The authorities recognized that.
Fini.
"

"
Fini
?" he said. "This is going to end with you speaking French? Really? I can't tell you how disappointing that will be for me." He didn't wait for me to reply. "Most people of means don't like to leave such things to the whim of . . . the prosecuting authorities. They prefer playing with a deck that's been carefully stacked."

Here it comes.
"By?"

"Lawyer wizards, preferably."

I looked at him, determined to try to understand what the fuck was going on. "What are you suggesting? Is there a question lurking in there?" I asked.

"So . . . no civil suits have been filed that I haven't heard anything about? No private settlements you want to share?"

"You talking about us? Lauren and me?"

"I am."

"No. No settlements." Sam's face revealed nothing. I said, "In fact, we heard that the homeowner, Mr. Snow, is putting this property back on the market. Given real estate these days, he'll probably take a loss. Since he moved into the neighborhood, he has taken . . . a lot of losses." I intended my reply to be a just-desserts punctuation mark.

Sam nodded slowly. But it wasn't an agreeable nod; it was a contemplative nod. He said, "I got to ask. Please don't get all offended. No money changed hands? I shouldn't be waiting for someone to stand up and claim that nothing was exchanged in return for anyone's silence? You know how that particular bullshit gets stuck in my craw."