R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning (6 page)

My son Cole and I were finally repairing a relationship that sailed downhill at bobsled speeds after the death of Isabel, Cole’s mother and my first wife—the first deep love (and lover) I’d really ever had. But Cole was in his late twenties and after some years of pot smoking and other drugs (thank God nothing as ruining as crack or heroin or other demonstrably destructive narcotics), plus some reckless sexual exploits, had come back around and was about to finish his college degree. He’d lost his Division I hockey career after a drug testing, and then asked to leave Bemidji State “officially” for grades (because there was no arrest record for the drug use, it was his poor grades that nailed the coffin on the four-year degree there).

But he’d rebounded, was almost finished with a degree in pre-Law at the University of Colorado Denver. Straight As. His application for the Law College at the University of Wyoming had already been accepted. His future was shaping up and our relationship was healing, albeit slowly still.

Children—strike that;
teenagers
—sometimes come out of the hurtful, hateful years with skewed memories of what really went down. Most of us eventually realize that our parents knew best, did their best, and that most of what they did (right or wrong) was done through an undying and nearly unconditional love for them.

Problem? Some realized it at twenty. Some fifty. Some not until their parents were in the cold ground. But most eventually wiped the fog off the window and saw the true landscape all around them. The lucky ones still had time to reconnect and repair old wrongs.

And some never figured it out.

Life again. A strange, cruel beast. You tossed the dice, you took your chances.

The information I finally got from Reba Carrigan really didn’t help us out much beyond confirming our victim’s identity, and that was important, too. CID came back with cause and time of death but not much more:

Deena Ballou was indeed hanged—the rope was thicker than your average laundry line—good, sturdy, towing-grade; the forensics team believed whoever hanged our victim used a proper hangman’s knot, which broke the neck upon impact. This meant she had likely been dropped from a distance of greater than three feet and that she did not suffer. That fact offered our profiler, psychiatrist Tag Brewer, M.D.—a great doctor cursed with a name more suited for a soap opera star—more to chew on.

(Equally unfair to Tag, by the way, were his purely average looks. No Romance cover modeling in his future.)

At least at the moment of her death Deena had been shown some mercy. The level of muscle deterioration suggested Deena Ballou had been held captive on food rations for several months. In cases like this the endured psychological terror was a suffering that was worse than physical pain but left scars, though less visible, that were equally impossible for live victims to erase fully.

My boss, Elias Shackleford, called me in for a briefing. As usual, the man was impeccably dressed, his desk uncluttered and looking as if he’d just swiped it with a dust rag.

“Let’s hear where we’re at, Mac.”

“Yes, sir. Victim is Deena Ballou from Toledo. Rodriguez and Trent canvassed Colfax, Five Points, and a few other hot spots. No one seemed to remember her turning tricks. Heavy drug use and no consistent job history we’ve found, however, so—”

Shackleford waved his impatient ‘I get it, no arrests is all that means’ wave.

“We’re about finished with the halfway houses; no luck.”

“Have you considered releasing her photo to the media?” Shackleford said.

“I’d like to keep it close for a bit longer. The killer obviously gets off on the notoriety. Staging the way he does. We’ve kept all of it except ‘female murder victim’ off the news.”

“He?”

“Doc Brewer feels the profile is most definitely male now.”

“How so?”

“The mercy of quick death shown at the time of death. No torture or other signs of serious physical abuse. Statistics suggest women are more probable to do damage to the vic.”

“Bobbit syndrome,” he said absently.

“Excuse me, Lieutenant?”

“Lorena Bobbit. Cut her husband’s penis off and threw it out the window.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said. “I suddenly had
Lord of the Rings
in my head.”

“Hobbit,” he said, a bit more derisively than I preferred. Shackleford had never been the same since Idaho.

“Got it,” I said, giving him a pass. Shackleford played middle linebacker in Division I and still looked like he could. I was a decent boxer but my boss still looked like he could tear me a new one, head gear or no.

“Any leads?”

“Next of kin has been notified. The mother says she was living with her at the time she left. She was classified as a runaway. She was sixteen when she was killed. Almost seventeen.”

“So she’s ostensibly lived here in the city for, what, three years? Must have had some help somewhere,” Shackelford said.

“The mother says her estranged brother lives here. Last known address was a bust, but Trent is working on tracking him down. Guy by the name of Carrigan. Burly Carrigan.”

“You think we’ve seen the last of this guy? The killer, I mean.”

“No, sir. I don’t.”

“Me either. Let’s get this guy before we’ve got a media circus on our hands.”

“And more victims,” I said.

“Right. More victims. We’re done.”

Present Day, two months post-abduction

HAILEY AWOKE in a different cell, this time strapped to a chair. Her head felt like it was filled with hardening concrete mix. She thought maybe she’d been drugged, but it was difficult to concentrate, to remember what were her last memories. Dinner. She remembered eating the ration of potatoes, meat scraps from the bowl, on hands and knees, and lapping up the milk.

Her captor wasn’t particularly unkind. Excepting the feeding like a dog behavior.

She could not focus; she only really knew she was in a chair because of her seated position. Her arms were tied behind her back; her legs were bound to the legs of the chair.

“You’re awake,” he said, startling her so close to her ear. “It’s time, my lovely.”

“W-who are you?”

“A friend.”

She’d never seen her captor. He spoke to her often through the slat he could have easily used to give her a tray and flatware. Almost kind. She felt a strange attraction to him. Stockholm Syndrome, probably, but also because she’d not known her own father and there was something deeply fatherly in the tone of her captor’s voice and certain words and phrases he used. He never spoke unkindly or unfairly to her, even when she cried or snapped and called him every hateful name in the book.

“I’ve never seen you,” Hailey said, trembling, even though she was well-secured. “You could let me go and I wouldn’t know what to tell them.”

“I could never do that to you,” the voice said.

“What?”

“I’m here to give you a gift. Something I know you will cherish forever.”

“A gift?”

“Death.”

Hailey’s trembling grew to a quake. Then she began sobbing. “Please don’t hurt me. I want to go home.”

“You weren’t
home
,” the man said. “How long has it been since you were actually home? Did you ever really even know one?”

“My mother,” she began.

“Will never even know you’re gone, will she?”

Hailey cried harder. She wouldn’t. Her mother hated her; spat in her face and called her a “drug whore” the last time they spoke, over seven months past. Her, saving for college, at worst smoking a little ganja.

The man put his gloved hands on either side of her face and he kissed the top of her head. “If you only understood how lucky you are.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” Hailey whispered again. She was so terrified she wet herself.

“Oh, baby. You aren’t going to feel a thing.”

The man removed his hands from her face and placed a noose around her neck. The same kind of noose she’d stared at for hours on end. The same type noose she’d always known would one day be tied for
her neck
. She’d long since become convinced that indeed this was Judas. The rope fibers pricked at the soft skin of Hailey’s slender neck. The man tightened the knot at the base of her skull and she felt another bee sting.

Hailey stopped wailing. A strange calmness descended on her. Euphoric.

“Who will I be?” she said.

“What?” Judas said, thrown off, unsure where he demanded sureness from himself at all times.

“How will I be famous?”

The drug—Dilaudid, an extremely strong opiate unknown to Hailey—had her feeling almost excited at the prospect of posthumous fame.

Judas was silent for a few beats. Then she felt the cool wetness of a kiss on her right cheek and just before a lever was pulled and the world fell out from beneath her feet and she went weightless for a moment in time, the killer spoke:

“Nicole Brown Simpson.”

“How gauche,” Hailey thought dreamily.

Then, mercifully—nothing.

MY SON, Cole, sat across from me at the restaurant table, that look of discomfort screwing up his face as I’d seen it so many times in his teens. It was hard for a parent to stop parenting. A teen would say he doesn’t
need
parenting and he’d be dead wrong. A twenty-seven-year-old man would say he doesn’t need parenting and he’d be one hundred percent correct. The problem between us went deeper than a dad still trying to tell a son what he should do.

I was robbed of my parenting when Cole
was
in his late teens. He completely shut down, lived with his grandparents for a while after his mother died of cancer. He couldn’t understand why I wanted him in my life. To that point I thought I’d done the best possible; that all I’d done was the best I could. Sometimes parents are wrong, and we forget that fact too often with our children. Simply because they lack years does not always mean they are wrong, and even when they are wrong about a fact of life it doesn’t alter the reality that their belief system still
affects
them profoundly. I’d taken that truth into account far too infrequently.

On the other side of the same coin, all I’d ever asked of him was the best he could do. As a parent I could accept a C-student, for example, if that child had worked his ass off to arrive at a C grade. But Cole would turn in half his assignments and end up with a D or an F. I refused to accept that as the “best he could do”, but what never occurred to me was the idea that
under the circumstances
it was the best he could do.

All I was capable of focusing on was the fact that the assignments he
did
turn in, he averaged a
ninety-five percent score
.

D’s and F’s were absolutely
not
the best my son could do. Not even in the same neighborhood. So I rode him. And rode him. I preached the sermon of the bewildered parent a hundred times. Rinse and repeat.

They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.

The lies he began to tell—in part to appease me, in part to simply avoid the “same old conversations”—totally destroyed me. A child does not understand the significance of a lie, no more than the toddler understands the significance of a hot surface until they touch it. You cannot touch a lie; it is a completely intangible thing and, in the end, something I was both incapable of accepting and incapable of explaining to my son.

I remember the first lie he ever told me—I don’t mean the four-year-old saying he didn’t eat the cookie; I’m talking “look me in the eye and tell me the truth, no matter what the truth is, and we can work this out” and him looking me straight in the eye and lying completely, without a second thought or so much as a pause in his breathing.

I’ve had many a perp who could not lie as soundly as that.

It is also impossible to make a child understand that the one thousandth lie cuts as deeply as the first. I no longer remembered all of them, of course. The lies, too, became one thick, storm-filled cloud where the lightning could strike you from anywhere at any time.

We eventually made amends. The prodigal son returned, the father with (mostly) open arms. The younger we are, the more forgiveness seems to come with little or no cost. As we age we become petrified in our viewpoints, so much less capable of letting go of the past. But as I said, we made amends and by that time in our lives took on roles more peer-like than father and son—those years were gone and I could never have them back. It didn’t stop me, however, from being a parent.

The current impasse had to do with Cole’s acceptance at the Law College at the University of Wyoming, just across the Colorado northern border, about a hundred and thirty or forty miles north. Out of the blue, my son didn’t think UW was prestigious enough. Admittedly he had applied himself at Denver Metro, worked his way into the University of Colorado system, and yes, finally graduated with honors. But it wasn’t as if he’d aced Harvard or Stanford or NYU.

“Wyoming is a decent school,” I said. “They broke the top one hundred a couple years back. Firms would respect a J.D. from that school.”

“
That’s
exactly what I am talking about,” Cole said, poking at his chicken. “You don’t pay attention. I want to go
east
.”

“Because the schools are better?”

“That’s part of the reason.”

“Cole, what’s going on? You need to talk to me. Be honest.”

“I can’t,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to talk to you.”

“Whose fault is that?” I said.

“See—it’s always about fault and blame with you.”

He was right. But I didn’t understand his thought processes any better now than when he was fifteen or sixteen. Here’s something I learned long before my son was in diapers:

There
is
right and wrong. Always. I didn’t believe in black and white—extremes—but the truth was different. Something either happened or it didn’t. A conversation took place, certain things were said, or they weren’t.

In every argument, in every courtroom, and in every decision. Yes, there were always two sides to a story. And there were
degrees
of correctness. The challenge should be
finding
the right answer. Or the most correct. The most logical, or the better financial decision. But teens—and it seemed to me, Cole, still—landed on a square patch of ground and no matter what or who or how circumstances put them there, defended it to the death.

I, on the other hand, just wanted to know the facts. The truth. And the truth had long ago become vaporous between us when it mattered most. I told him the Golden Rule when he was younger. I said, “You can lie, and lie again, but the day you lose another person’s
trust
, it is over. Even if that person
wants
to believe you, they can’t. They’ll never know if the words coming out of your mouth are the real thing or another untruth, molded to your own designs. Once that happens, the choice is taken from the one who’s been lied to so much. They might even try, but it is then out of their control.”

It didn’t help that Cole was the best liar I’d ever known (and that was saying a truckload, me being a cop—all we did day in and out, it seemed, was deal with seasoned liars). Cole could look me in the eye, tell an elaborate story, and hook me like a big, fat trout skimming the surface of a placid lake, watching for bugs. I bit every time. For a while.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to know why the school you applied to is suddenly not right for you. I think it’s a fair question.”

Cole nodded. “It
is
a fair question. You’re right.”

Telling me what I wanted to hear. Like a fighter softening the other with body blows and hidden kidney shots.

“Talk to me, Cole. I swear, I’ll shut up and listen.”

“I want to go to Fordham. In New York.”

“Fordham Law?” I said, trying not to sound incredulous.

“Yes.”

“Pal, Fordham is top twenty or thirty in the country.”

“I know.”

“Colorado is ranked around fifty and they turned down your app. Your
in state
application.”

“I
know
.”

I stopped for a moment. I’d heard these short, non-informative answers before. There was most definitely something else happening; something was being withheld. Time to quit dancing.

“Fordham has a helluva Master’s program in Social Services, don’t they?” I said. I was a detective; did he really expect I would come into the conversation with no hole cards at all?

“I love her, dad. I really do. Like you and mom.”

“Her” was Brianne Finnegan. They’d been dating for three years; met at a class he took at the University of Denver, where Amber used to teach and where Brianne was finishing her undergrad degree in Social Science. Cole
did
look like I did when I first met Isabel.

Stunned, almost. Reverent. In love.

I remembered Isabel for the first time in a while—
allowed myself the memories of my first honest love
—and yes, the feelings I had for Isabel were far more than overwhelming. They were a living part of me. When she died it was as if they severed all my limbs.

“If you can get accepted,” I told Cole, taking a large bite of my hoagie, “we’ll figure out a way.”

Cole’s eyes brightened and he waited a breath, wanting to make sure, no doubt, he’d heard what he thought he’d heard.

“Thank you,” he managed.

“If you aren’t going to eat that here,” I said, pointing at his plate of Alfredo, “take it home and promise me you’ll warm it up later for you and Bri.”

The next morning Hailey Carpenter’s corpse was found on the sidewalk in front of a home in Cherry Hills Estates, the closest thing Denver had to a luxurious Southern California neighborhood like Brentwood. A corporate VP walking outside to head off to work found the two bodies lying inside his gate.

One male and one female victim. After dropping his coffee cup and throwing up the previous few swallows, the man called 9-1-1.

 Hailey Carpenter exhibited the same ligature and rope burns on the neck as the previous victims. She was stabbed twenty-two times in the head, postmortem, and her throat had a full gash from one side to the other. The fucking sick bastard had even incised her C3 vertebrae, all reported in the Nicole Brown Simpson autopsy in 1994.

The young man—Stan Perry, 27—was a pizza delivery employee called to the address twenty minutes before Judas positioned Hailey Carpenter’s body; our team believed he was murdered after her body was placed due to  blood spatter on the woman’s corpse matching Perry’s and the differences in post-mortem signs of T.O.D.

“When did the call come in at the pizza place,” I asked Manny. He flipped through the last few pages of notes.

“According to the manager, who checked the tickets himself, around eight-forty P.M. M.E. puts time of death of the delivery guy at between nine and nine-thirty. The homeowner confirms that he did not make any calls to the pizza joint.”

“Incoming phone number?” I said.

“Traces to a burner. But we caught a break. Serial number tracks back to a lot received at a 7-11 store near the crime scene. Judas may have picked up the cell on the way to the Cherry Hills home.”

“Video surveillance?”

“Just getting ready to make the drive. Owner says they keep only twenty-four hours on tape—can you believe they still use tape? I got to him in time. We can watch all the video from four differently-angled cameras.”

“It’s a long shot,” I said.

“In the dark.”

“I’d prefer something more solid.”

“Like the movie
Se7en
? Perp walks into the station house and delivers himself up to you personally?” Manny said, smiling.