Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  I swiped the keycard, and the reader buzzed an angry sound. A red light flashed. I tried again, to the same result. I wondered if Jason had slipped the cards into a pocket beside his phone and messed up the magnetic strip.

  I pulled out the second card and tried it. The door made a happy beep, and a green light shone. I stepped inside.

  The rooms – because there were four of them – were all spacious. There was an L-shaped main area, with a kitchenette, the office desk and chair, and a living room with a television forming the stem of the L, and a large closet and the jacuzzi composing the rest. Doors led at approximately equal intervals from this main space to a master bedroom with a king bed; a smaller bedroom with a queen bed; and a bathroom about twice the size of my own bathroom.

  I’d left my investigation boards at home. I hadn’t really wanted to cart those out in front of the cop. He might have thought it was suspicious that I had a bunch of information and pictures of dead people in my house. It might have got back to Clark, to whom I was seriously downplaying the extent of my interest.

  But I’d taken some of the printouts and pictures, and my laptop. I’d have to get new boards, but I could get to work on recreating them.

  Later, though. Right now, my priority was the final riddle: Humpty Dumpty. I’d figured out some kind of meaning from all the rest. I just needed to make sense of that one to validate my theory that each rhyme carried some specific, targeted meaning for the individual victim.

  I pulled out my information on Mason Anderson.

  Twenty-six years old. Caucasian male. I didn’t have an official height or weight, but I estimated six feet, give or take an inch or two, and maybe one-thirty. Lots of priors for drug offenses, vagrancy, and shoplifting. A few stints in lockup. Plenty of surviving relatives.

  So what the hell did any of that have to do with Humpty Dumpty? I spent a long time reading theories about the meaning and origins of the rhyme, trying to answer that question.

  A lot of my reading focused on the English Civil War. Some writers and internet sleuths linked it to siege engines employed during the Siege of Gloucester. Some thought it referenced the Civil War siege on Colchester, and a one-eyed gunner who fired on the parliamentarian troops from the tower of St. Mary at the Walls church. Or perhaps Humpty was the cannon, rather than the gunner.

  There were historical records supporting the existence of the gunner and the cannon. There was documentation aplenty for the sieges on Gloucester and Colchester.

  But what there didn’t seem to be was a single solid evidentiary link between any of them and the poem. Which was a problem. It was a problem from an academic point of view, since a plausible but wrong explanation was of no value to anyone. And it was a problem to me.

  Because if there was no consensus as to what Humpty Dumpty actually meant, I could very easily find myself in the same predicament as those trying to wrestle some meaning out of the words: making up increasingly farfetched scenarios just to have an explanation.

  Jason walked in while I was scowling at my computer, considering the problem. “Uh…everything alright?”

  I glanced up. “Fine. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s almost six. I’m hungry.”

  I checked the laptop clock. It was about three minutes to the hour. “Oh.”

  “I was thinking I could get us some food.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  “Whatever.” I went back to my article on Humpty Dumpty.

  “Okay,” he said. But he didn’t leave. I could see him standing there, unmoving.

  I glanced up again. “What?”

  He shifted in place, and shrugged. “Well, uh…I don’t really have any…money.”

  I sighed and fished two twenties out of my wallet. “Here.”

  He took the money. He didn’t move.

  “What?” I said again.

  “Keys?”

  There was a sub shop across the parking lot. I’d seen it when we pulled in, and I reminded him of the fact now. But he made a face, declaring, “I don’t want subs.”

  I fished the keys out of my pocket. “Fine. But I swear to God, you get a single scratch –”

  He snatched the keys out of my hands. “Yeah, yeah: I know. I won’t.”

  This time, he left, and quickly. Probably so I couldn’t come to my senses and take my keys back. I got back to work.

  I was still spinning my wheels – still coming up with nothing – when he returned. He was carrying a bag of fried chicken and two mega-sized drinks. “I got you a diet Dew,” he said, which I took to mean Mountain Dew. “I didn’t know what you wanted.”

  He set the massive cup down, and pulled out an oversized pail of chicken, a basket of rolls and three heaping buckets of sides.

  “What army are we feeding?” I asked.

  “It was cheaper to get the family deal.”

  “But…there’s two of us.”

  He shrugged. “So? We’ve got leftovers.”

  I didn’t mention that this looked like a heart attack in a bucket. He was already digging in, and my own stomach had started to growl at the plethora of smells. I clearly had some kind of miscommunication between brain and stomach.

  The room came stocked with disposable plate ware, of which I availed myself. He didn’t bother. He flipped the chicken bucket lid, and plopped heaping piles of potatoes and gravy, French fries and mac and cheese down for himself.

  I drew a line when he started to use a drumstick and a wing like some kind of lunatic’s version of chopsticks. I gave him a spork and a dirty look.

  He took the hint and struggled to unwrap the plastic with his greasy fingers. But in a moment, he got it and resumed shoveling food into his mouth.

  For whatever reason, he’d chosen my office area to be the dining room. Probably, because that’s where he’d found me.

  I grabbed a plateful of food with apologies to my arteries, and started to eat. With silverware, like a normal human being.

  We ate in silence for a minute. Or, without speaking, at least. Jason’s eating was not particularly quiet. Not at the rate he was going.

  But after wolfing down a pile of potatoes, two biscuits, a wing and a chicken breast, he started to slow down. “So,” he said, still picking at a hip, “what’s that you’re working on?”

  I ignored him and went on eating.

  “Something to do with Andy?”

  “Nope.” Which was mostly true, since I was focusing on Mason Anderson.

  “Something to do with the case?”

  I said nothing.

  “You working with the detective?”

  I said nothing.

  “I heard a little of what you guys were saying. At the coffeeshop, I mean.”

  I frowned at him. “You were eavesdropping, you mean.”

  He shook his head. “Course not. I just overheard some of it.” He leaned over the desk to get a glimpse of my screen.

  I’d been reading a mostly plain text website. Some random guy’s random blog. I was getting desperate.

  “Humpty Dumpty? The second guy?”

  “Mason Anderson.”

  “So you figure out what the connection between him and the egg is?”

  “He wasn’t an egg.”

  “Of course he was. Dude, everyone knows that.”

  “No he wasn’t. No one knows for sure what he was. Which is the whole point of what I’m trying to figure out.”

  He glanced me over, as if surprised by the aggravation in my tone. “Why does it matter? I mean, if he was an egg or not, or whatever. How does that help Detective Clark?”

  I considered not answering. Jason was a pain in the ass, and I didn’t expect him to be much help. Then again, maybe talking the problem out would help on its own.

  So I explained my theory. I explained what I’d found about the judge, and Andy. He supplied what he’d overheard that morning, about Martinez. “So that’s what you two were talking about.”

 
“Yes. So there’s got to be a reason he picked Humpty Dumpty for Mason.”

  He considered for a long moment, then nodded. “‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,’” he quoted. “‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again.’ I don’t know, man. Sounds like it was some allegory for Mason’s life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The guy’s life was in pieces, right? Just like Humpty Dumpty himself.”

  I considered that for a long moment. Then I grabbed a packet of wet towelettes, cleaned my hands, and returned to my keyboard. I typed in a few search terms.

  And then I sat back and let out a long breath. “Son-of-a-bitch.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that earlier.” I turned the laptop toward him, so he could see the screen. There were half a dozen headlines referencing the second law of thermodynamics and the nursery rhyme, with Humpty’s state before and after the fall serving as a stand-in for lower and greater entropy, and the line about putting him back together again demonstrating that overall entropy within a system never decreases.

  He frowned as he scanned the headlines. “Thermodynamics? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  I explained, and he listened and shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe it’s got nothing to do with science. Maybe he was just saying the guy’s life was a chaotic mess, and he’d never get it straightened out.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  That seemed to be a classic case of the pot and the kettle to me. But I kept that thought to myself. I ate and texted the theory to Clark. Then I decided I needed more foamboard. So I grabbed the keys.

  Jason tagged along. He didn’t have anything better to do, he said. “And I need a few things.”

  The few things turned out to be beer. How a guy who had no money could afford beer, I didn’t know. I didn’t really care as long as it kept him out of my hair.

  I got to work putting my boards back together as soon as I got back. Finding the missing connection for Humpty Dumpty reinvigorated me. I was ready to dive right back in.

  So I shut the bedroom door and got to work. I hung a board on the back of the door itself, and more boards all over the walls with paint safe putty.

  I kept at it for another hour or so. Then my phone dinged. I glanced at the screen, and the news alert that popped up. Breaking news: horrific video emerges in Nursery Rhyme Killer case

  I opened it. An article popped up, sans the mentioned horrific video. I skimmed the text.

  “A video purporting to show the final moments of the Nursery Rhyme Killer’s latest victims is taking the internet by storm.

  “True crimes podcaster and media personality Wyatt Wagley claims the video was taken by a home security camera near the residence of Judge Shelby Dandridge. The video shows what appears to be a small face at one of the windows of the flaming building.”

  I read it – all of it – with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. The article hadn’t included the video, for legal reasons probably. There had to be some kind of law against showing kids burning to death. Didn’t there?

  I pulled up Wagley’s social media feeds. I figured I could find it there.

  And I did. He’d posted and then reshared it several times since then. The thumbnail image was a ghostly black and white shot of Dandridge’s home. It looked gray, and the flames engulfing it looked white.

  I hesitated, my finger hovering over the play button. Part of me wanted to know what the hell had happened. Part of me couldn’t stand the thought of seeing it.

  I ended up hitting play. It started with a text declaring EXCLUSIVE FOOTAGE. Then Wagley’s face popped up, in front of a green, marshy background. Somewhere in Kennington, I was sure. Somewhere on the outskirts of town, I guessed.

  He introduced himself and reiterated that what was about to follow was exclusive footage. Just in case his viewers didn’t know what exclusive meant, he added, “Never before seen, by anyone.”

  Which was good, I guessed, since anyone who took him seriously must have had an IQ that matched a field rock’s.

  He explained that it was security footage but elaborated no further. He mentioned no source, and no details on how he’d acquired it.

  “Now, I need to warn you, this is not for the faint of heart. This is grim, this is awful, and this is reality. This is what we’re dealing with. This is the terror plaguing Kennington. It’s why I am here, and why it’s so damned important that we solve this thing as soon as possible.

  “Alright, Truthers, here it is. Here’s what happened the other night.”

  The image switched to a grayscale of the judge’s house. It looked grainy and faraway, and not quite in focus, like it had been background footage from a larger video. Which matched his claim that it had been security footage. Probably from a neighbor, whose yard had been cropped out until only the Dandridge house in the background could be seen.

  It looked like the still: a great, gray building, with white heat behind the windows and white flame rising out of the northeastern corner. The flames flickered and grew, creeping upward from the first floor to the second.

  Five seconds passed. Then ten. The flames got higher. More of the grey disappeared in a haze of white.

  Then I saw it: a little pale oval in one of the upper story windows. A face. A grainy, pixelated human face. A child’s face.

  Tiny, ghostly stick-like arms beat against the window. Another face, another body, appeared by the first. The flames climbed. The figures grew more frantic, moving from window to window and hammering against the glass.

  The flames climbed. The windows disappeared in fire. The ghostly figures disappeared.

  I got to the bathroom before I puked, but just barely. The video hadn’t been particularly graphic. It was too blurry for that.

  But I’d seen footage like it before: gray and ghostly and faraway, full of fire and death. And women and children. And now I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  I washed my face and ignored how gray I looked in the mirror. Then I headed outside.

  The hotel was in the heart of Kennington, with cars and lights and horns all around. So many of them that they became a kind of blur of background noise. Barely noticeable. I became barely noticeable too, melting into the darkness of night, invisible among the activity.

  I walked hard and fast for about an hour. I’d covered about five miles: a big, circular path through the ways and byways of the city. I still had about two miles to go before I got back to the hotel.

  I took a breather. Long breaths, in and out. The city buzzed past me, not much slower than earlier. Not on a Saturday night.

  The grayscale video played again, behind my eyes, where I couldn’t just close my lids or look away.

  I breathed in and out.

  It had been a long time since I’d seen those images. It had taken a lot of therapy, and medication, to get them out of my head. But here they were again.

  In and out.

  I shouldn’t have watched the video. I should have known better.

  In.

  Out.

  I reminded myself that I needed to see it. I needed to know what was going on. How else was I going to find the son-of-a-bitch who killed my brother?

  And I was going to find him. Upwards of thirty-five percent of murders in the United States were never cleared – no arrests made, no convictions gotten. Even a clearance rate in the mid-sixties wasn’t as good as it sounded. Clearance didn’t mean conviction.

  Clearance just meant the cops found their guy. Maybe he died before they caught up to him. Maybe he got a good lawyer and walked after the arrest. But he still counted toward the clearance rate.

  Andy’s killer wasn’t going to be part of the thirty-five percent of unsolved homicides. And if the cops found him first, his killer wasn’t going to walk when this was all said and done.

  Either the justice system would take care of it, or I would. Either way, justice would be
done.

  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, my mind whispered.

  I ignored it. I closed my eyes and breathed in, and breathed out. I thought about the video – not the old one, the one I couldn’t quite get out of my head. I thought about the new one, the one I’d just watched.

  I thought about the layout of the neighborhood, and the distance between the houses. I wasn’t familiar enough with it to recall the judge’s house, though.

  So I pulled up my map application, and then Dandridge’s neighborhood. I put the app in street view, and I navigated until I saw her house.

  A lot of the places in the area were cookie cutter designs. Rich people cookie cutter, but cookie cutter all the same: massive, with plenty of unnecessary roof peaks and giant floorplans, big windows and huge lawns.

  Dandridge’s had been sided in a tasteful blue-gray with white accents. There were two houses on the opposite side of the street from her with a view of her yard. Neither were directly across, and both were far enough away to give each other an illusion of privacy. But both were close enough for a security video to capture the goings on across the way, either from the left or the right.

  I closed my eyes again, trying to picture the video in my mind. It had been cropped. That was a given. But in which direction? Was it the upper left-hand background we’d seen, or the upper right?

  In the end, I settled on the house just past Dandridge’s: a beige place that looked like hers, but with different eaves and gable windows in the attached garage. Not because of anything I remembered, but because of what the app’s street view showed: the other house had a staggered natural barrier of trees and then shrubs concealing them from the road. I could see almost nothing of their house.

  Which meant they in turn would have seen almost nothing of Judge Dandridge’s home. So the video came from the beige house.

  I put the address of the beige house into google. It came up with the names of Bob and Kacey Thompson. Their names in turn came up as owners of Thompson’s Construction, LLC.