Don't Look In (Gus Young Thrillers Book 1)

by Tom Saric

  I floated out of the room, gliding between the stacks of newspapers until I reached Ned. I squeezed the cross between my fingers until the edges drew blood, then held it in front of Ned's face.

  "You fucking killer."

  Ned stiffened. His eyes bulged.

  "You killed her. You crazy animal."

  "No, no-"

  "You lied to me." I spoke through my teeth. "You killed and then you lied. You killer."

  Any remaining bravado drained from Ned's face. Fear overcame him, and I saw the eyes of a little boy who’d found his dad dead.

  "I didn't, I, I, I didn't, please. Believe me!" He covered his ears, closed his eyes, and fell to his knees.

  "And you took this as a souvenir." I squeezed Wanda's necklace in my fist and punched Ned twice in the face, knocking him onto the floor.

  "No, I didn't, please." He looked up at me, pleading.

  "Where'd you get the gun, Ned? How'd you get it?"

  "No, I didn't."

  "You break in? When? Where?"

  He shook his head.

  "I wanted to protect her," he whimpered. "I was coming back to check on her. She was so, so vulnerable. And I found her on the road." He broke down into stuttering sobs.

  "You did it."

  "No, no, I didn't. Please believe me, Doc."

  "Then why? Why the necklace?"

  "So I don't forget." His eyes were angry now.

  "Forget what?"

  "That I failed! I failed her. I couldn't save her."

  I took a deep breath and watched Ned. His entire external persona seemed to have dissolved into a puddle, a man destroyed, left in ruins on the floor. I'd smashed his veneer of denial, the only psychological protective mechanism he had. I'd killed the spirit that lived in him.

  Nausea spread through me and I left, stumbling out of the house, tripping off the stairs onto his driveway. I found my way to the truck, then tossed the necklace onto the passenger seat, threw it in reverse, and peeled away.

  15

  I recalled coming home, throwing up twice, and stumbling into bed. For the first time in months I slept hard and didn't remember the night. I woke up at 8:57 a.m. to Anna whimpering beside the door to go out. Although I had a long sleep, my head still felt woolly, and I felt like I could stay in bed for another eight hours. I had forgotten to take my nighttime pills, so my back was pinching and the back of my leg burned.

  I rolled out of bed, threw on my housecoat and slippers, and opened the sliding door. I wandered over to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and waited for the water to boil on the gas stove. When the kettle whistled I poured the water into a mug, added two tablespoons of instant coffee, and made my way to the deck.

  It was autumn-crisp and steam rose up from the still lake like a thick fog. Anna stood by the shore, lapping up water. A skein of geese flew across the overcast sky, headed south, running from the cold as fast as they could. I sat on a patio chair and put my feet up on the railing.

  Ned. All those years I'd never really taken him seriously, viewing him as a caricature to be tamed rather than a whole person to be respected. I'd failed him. The thought made my throat tighten.

  How hard had I hit him? Did it matter? I tried to rationalize like an abusive husband: my fist wasn't completely closed, so it wasn't that bad.

  It was as though with that punch, I sent my fist cracking right through Ned's psyche, leaving nothing but a helpless little boy alone on the floor. I'd destroyed who he was. It must have been incomprehensible to him to have the one person he trusted be the very person who hurt him.

  I didn’t want that tantrum-that violence-to be me. But that rage lived in me. Wanda's death activated the part of me I'd forgotten existed. An almost irrational need to protect her. So powerful that I'd trampled and spat all over my duty to help Ned. Why did Wanda mean so much to me?

  I didn't, as a rule, do nasty things. Even Meg would agree with that. Through the whole divorce, I never resorted to the tit-for-tat nastiness that seemed to characterize most modern separations. I kept it transactional. She wanted the house? She got the house. I wanted my books. She got the car. Karen blamed me for the breakdown of the marriage. But even with my daughter I never strayed from a level-headed, rational approach.

  I must also have a dark side if I am to be whole, Jung said. It was as though I'd ignored that part of me. But intimately understanding that darkness was the very thing that would allow me to deal with the darkness of others. I was merely afraid to look in the mirror, and Ned became the casualty.

  I took a sip of coffee and it tasted acidic, burning as it went down.

  Ned wasn't easy to deal with. But in his own way, he only wanted good to happen. I wasn't sure I could confidently say the same for myself.

  The man I saw curled up on the floor didn't murder Wanda. Of this I was certain. He was naked and vulnerable; there was nothing left of him. There was no rage, just terror and loss.

  He felt he'd failed Wanda. Just as I did.

  If not Ned, then who? Joe denied involvement. I had no idea if the sheriff's department was even looking at him. Ned had mentioned that Buddy was coming around Wanda's house. Did he have a vendetta against Randy and murder her as retribution?

  My cell phone buzzed twice, so I went inside and picked it up.

  "Gus Young?"

  "Yes."

  "This is John Knox from the fire department. Just wanted to let you know that we got the report back and your home is clear to return to, as long as you stay out of the boarded-up area. Electricity is back on."

  I flicked on the kitchen light to test it. "Thank you."

  I didn't bother telling him that I had already spent two nights in my bed in case that was some kind of code violation.

  "We were able to salvage some of your old records and the player. I left them in a box out front."

  I hung up and walked around to the front of my house, then ripped open the cardboard box sitting there. A half dozen vinyl records were still inside, which made me smile a bit.

  My phone buzzed and I saw that I had several missed text messages from last night, all from Renee.

  Are you close?

  Forget about me?

  I'm getting worried.

  And last,

  I'm going to bed. It's been a long time since I've been stood up.

  I had completely forgotten about my plans with Renee. After she drove my inebriated self home, I wanted to make things up to her, so my timing couldn't have been worse. I decided it was best to call her immediately and apologize rather than delay.

  "Hello?"

  "Am I too late to apologize?"

  A pause. "Depends on where you were. Or who you were with."

  "It was completely accidental." I sighed. "I was dealing with a crisis. With a patient, and I just forgot." It was sort of true, I figured. I left out that the crisis was of my own making.

  "What happened?"

  "I can't tell you. It's confidential."

  "Convenient."

  "Trust me. I would have much rather been with you last night than where I was."

  "I believe you."

  "You do?"

  "Well, why would you stand me up, right? I'm fun, funny, charming, beautiful-"

  There was a sharpness in her voice that made me briefly question whether she was joking, but I thought it was best to play along. "And that's being modest," I said.

  "Well, Doctor, you have certainly beaten me in the charm department."

  Renee had an ability to make me smile. I'd briefly forgotten all about my altercation with Ned.

  "So, what are you going to do to make it up to me?"

  I puffed out my cheeks and let out a breath as I looked at my kitchen. The addition was still boarded up, but now that the electricity was connected, it was fully functional.

  "I'll make you dinner. My place."

  "Your place? Is it safe?"

  "Volunteer firefighters say so."

  She paused. "Well, inviting me to your place a second t
ime is a bit forward, but I like a man who's bold. And you have a nice behind. What's on the menu?"

  "I recently caught some venison."

  "Well, you appear to have figured out that the way to a woman's heart is with... wild game."

  "If you like it, I'll consider us soul mates."

  She chuckled.

  "I'll see you tonight."

  Anna had run around the cabin and was barking at the end of the driveway. I wondered if Herman was wandering over.

  I was about to put my phone down when I noticed that I had a voicemail. I played it as I walked to the driveway.

  "Hi... Dad. Just confirming about tomorrow. I have a car, so I can just come by your place around seven. Maybe just keep your phone on in case I need directions."

  I pressed my fist against my forehead. I had forgotten Karen was coming over for dinner, which meant I had to cancel again with Renee. I wondered how long she would put up with me before she told me to take a hike.

  Anna suddenly sprinted past me up the driveway to stand beside the road and bark incessantly.

  I followed her, and when I reached the driveway I looked up the road. Two sheriff's cruisers were barreling toward me, kicking up dust clouds behind them. They didn't have lights or sirens on, which made me wonder why they were driving so quickly. They stopped on the shoulder, blocking my driveway. I put my coffee mug on the driveway, got Anna on a leash, and commanded her to quiet down.

  Debbie Parks got out of one cruiser and Ernie Weagle the other.

  Anna strained on the leash so I held her by the collar, but she kept jumping and barking wildly.

  "Morning, Ernie. Debbie."

  They exchanged glances. Debbie stopped five yards in front of me and promptly looked at her feet, deferring to Ernie, who came closer.

  "Doc, uh, Gus." He crossed his arms and avoided eye contact. "We need you to come in."

  "Okay, sure," I said. "Let me get changed and then I can meet you there?"

  "I'm afraid you need to come with us."

  "You're arresting me?"

  "No." Ernie shuffled his feet. "You're a person of interest and we need a statement."

  "Guys, Wanda is-"

  "It's not Wanda." He looked up. "Ned Gamble was found dead in his home late last night."

  16

  The Bridgetown sheriff's detachment was a single-story brick building the size of a small grade school, too large for the size of town it operated in. It sat on an expanse of grass, alone on the edge of the town. A single cruiser was parked in front when we arrived. I followed Ernie and Debbie into the building.

  Ernie had me sit in the reception area. It consisted of eight seats welded together beside a table littered with pamphlets for reporting poaching, illegal burning, and drunk driving.

  The receptionist had her hair up in a bun with a pencil stuck through it. She didn't look at me, just sat at her desk furiously typing behind bulletproof glass. I wondered why they required the glass. In Bridgetown, everyone knew where everyone else lived. If someone wanted someone else dead, they could do it elsewhere and have a better chance of getting away with it.

  Ernie said he needed to get some paperwork together before taking my statement. I'd asked him half a dozen times on the ride over if I was under arrest. Despite his assurances that I wasn't, the formality with which he had picked me up-two cruisers, two officers, official statements, a formal interview-made me realize that I was their suspect.

  He wouldn't tell me anything about how Ned died. “Active investigation,” he said. I knew that if they reviewed Ned’s security cameras, they could place me at the scene. But they were clear that they weren't arresting me, which meant there was something more to the story.

  I could have killed Ned last night. Seeing Wanda's necklace caused a moment of rage that overcame me with such force that I had no idea how I stopped myself after only two punches. It was the feeling of betrayal, the idea that Ned had somehow duped me, that made me furious.

  But Ned was dead. I thought of him lying on the floor pleading with me. His last moments were sheer agony, a man broken. If he'd lived, I'm not sure how he could have psychologically recovered from the damage I caused.

  It was a dereliction of my duty to help him.

  There seemed to be two possibilities. The first was that Ned had shot Wanda and someone else had killed him, perhaps as retribution for Wanda's death. I immediately thought of Randy.

  But after my confrontation with Ned, I couldn't reasonably believe he killed Wanda. Which meant someone else had. And that someone might have taken my gun. Could the same person have killed Ned? He'd said that he was close to figuring out Wanda’s killer, and mentioned both Buddy and Joe.

  Debbie Parks walked up to the door beside the receptionist and buzzed it open.

  "Doctor Young, you can come in now."

  I followed Debbie past the cubicles and down a hall into a room marked Interview 1. She held the door for me and I sat down at a small, scratched table holding a laptop and microphone. The walls were stark white but had black scuff marks around the bottom. A window looked out into a hallway. Debbie sat across from me and placed a legal pad and pen in front of her.

  Her hair was pulled back tightly into a low bun. She wore minimal makeup aside from a swipe of mascara and was devoid of any jewelry. She had the rigid posture and demeanor of an ex-service person. She was simultaneously warm and distant, as though she were looking at me from a hundred yards away.

  After getting my consent, she pressed the button on the tape recorder and asked me to state my tombstone data.

  "Dr. Young, can you tell me where you were yesterday, October 16, between five p.m. and midnight?"

  "I believe I was in my office in Buck's Hardware."

  "The building closes at five, does it not?"

  "Yes, it does. But an employee let me in."

  "Sheila Gustafson?"

  "Yes. Sheila was with me."

  "Is it usual for you to be in your office after hours?"

  "Not typically."

  "Why did you go yesterday?"

  "To check a file."

  I remembered going into the office to check Ned's file. I realized that the rest of the night was fuzzy.

  "Whose file?"

  "A patient's. It’s confidential."

  "And you stayed there for the night?"

  "No. I didn't stay long."

  "Where did you go?"

  "I went to Ned Gamble's place."

  "He was a patient of yours?"

  I hesitated. Although Ned was dead, he was still my patient. As far as I was concerned, Debbie didn't need to know that.

  "I'm not able to tell you who my patients are. Confidential."

  "Okay. Can you tell me why you went there?"

  That information would essentially confirm Ned as one of my patients. I had to proceed cautiously. "I went to ask him something."

  "Care to elaborate?"

  "No."

  "Even if—hypothetically speaking, Doctor—Mr. Gamble was a patient of yours, telling me about this as part of a murder investigation is not just permitted, it’s required."

  "That's not correct."

  Debbie stopped writing and looked up at me.

  "It's a common misunderstanding among law enforcement that as soon as a crime is committed the therapist-patient confidentiality is effectively void,” I explained. “But the truth is that confidentiality remains intact unless it is, according to case law, 'more probable than not that a person is at risk of imminent harm to self or others.'"

  It was also a common misconception among therapists. Typically, the moment a police officer or lawyer asked for records as part of a criminal investigation, therapists got nervous and handed over everything—an ethical violation on the therapists' part and damaging to the patient.

  But no court would ever fault the therapist. The courts still had the archaic notion that being mentally ill generally meant the person was incapable of providing valid consent.

  "I could
get a warrant."

  "And I'd have to read it."

  I had no trouble staring down law enforcement officers. While spending years shuttling from courtroom to courtroom to testify as an expert witness, I'd endured tedious cross-examinations with bullheaded lawyers who tried to turn my nuanced opinions into something black-and-white. A district attorney once said to me, “So you're telling me, Dr. Young, that there is no objective way to quantify a person's risk to re-offend? That it's just a guess. That your profession is 'a series of educated guesses.' Is that what you're telling me?” I cleared my throat and said into the microphone, “That's precisely what I'm telling you.” She looked at me as though I had offended her firstborn.

  I saw the same look on Debbie's face. Law enforcement worked in absolutes, in binaries. A crime was either committed or it wasn't. People were guilty or they weren't.

  But humans inhabited a world of infinite possibilities. They had endless motives and drives for their behavior. There was no limit to the lies they told others or themselves. In my world there were no absolutes. And so if I'm asked to keep a secret, I keep the damn secret.

  Debbie inhaled so deeply through her nose that it whistled.

  "Ned was shot dead last night, in his house. We came to the scene three hours after the estimated time of death." She punched a few keys on the laptop and spun it around so that we could both see it. A frozen video frame was on the screen, footage from one of the cameras on Ned's porch looking down at his front stairs. I could see my truck parked ten yards ahead at the edge of the screen.

  "Mr. Gamble kept surveillance footage running twenty-four hours a day. We were able to pull this from his camera last night."

  She pushed play, and I could see myself scrambling off Ned's porch and tripping onto the driveway before getting into my truck and racing away. If there was ever a guilty-looking exit, this was it.

  "This was at 10:36 p.m." She pressed pause. "Could you explain this?"

  I realized I had to offer something. "We had an altercation." I sighed. "We had a disagreement, things escalated, and I struck him."

  "Struck him?"

  "I punched him. Twice. In the head."