by Steven James
Not having any traffic cones, I’d opted for the pumpkins, a good seasonal choice—and now deeply discounted after Halloween. The day after the holiday, the price dropped in half. Stores only decorate for upcoming holidays, never the ones in the rearview mirror. They build up to a holiday for months and then, the moment it’s over, start advertising for the next one.
People were already looking ahead to Thanksgiving. Always looking ahead. Frantically scrambling forward.
“I promise to be quick and not to squish any more of ’em,” Tessa vowed with one hand raised in an earnest salute. There she sat in the driver’s seat. Inquisitive yet sad eyes. Light on the makeup—apart from the blood-dipped color of her fingernail polish. Dark, night-washed hair.
“You do know what those pumpkins represent, don’t you?”
“Traffic cones.”
“People.”
“If they were people, they’d get outta my way.”
We lived in New York City—not the ideal place to teach a teenager that it’s not supposed to be the job of pedestrians to avoid getting run over.
“We don’t want you smack-whamming the car into anything,” I said, “let alone running over pedestrians.”
She stared at me coolly.
“What?”
“Did you really just say ‘smack-whamming’? Was that you trying to be hip?”
“It’s just what came out. Why? Was it hip?”
“Um. No.”
She’d flattened two of the eight pumpkins so far, and I wasn’t holding my breath about the other six, especially if we went with the figure-eight pattern again rather than just practicing stopping in time without nudging the fruit, which she was a lot better at.
Earlier, I’d made the mistake of referring to the pumpkins as vegetables, but she was quick to correct me, informing me that, of course, they’re fruit, that everybody knows that.
With her off-the-charts IQ, she would undoubtedly ace the written portion of the test, but the behind-the-wheel part was clearly going to be a challenge.
“Alright, let’s see it.” I pointed to her hands. “Remember, ten o’clock and two o’clock.”
“I still can’t believe you’re stuck on analog,” she complained wearily, but she did move her hands to the places I’d shown her earlier on the steering wheel. “It’s so twentieth-century of you. You’re showing your age.”
“I’m thirty-five years old, Tessa.”
“Uh-huh. And your point is?”
I indicated the line of pumpkins. “Let’s see you do it this time all the way through. And watch out for pedestrians.”
“Right.”
“And remember, if you start to skid for whatever reason, it won’t seem to make sense, but steer into the skid.”
“Steer where you veer.”
“Exactly.”
She rounded the first pumpkin, then the second, and was confidently on her way to cruising past the third when she overcompensated the turn, cranking the wheel too far to the left. The bang and bump made it clear what’d just happened.
She cringed.
“Another fruitality,” I sighed.
She eyed me.
“Come on, now,” I said. “That was funny, right?”
“You’re starting to scare me.” Then she shook her head. “I wasn’t gonna hit that pumpkin. I swear. Maybe it rolled in front of us because of the Coriolis effect.”
“C’mon, let’s pick them up and head home.”
* * *
+++
Lots of people in the city choose to go without personal vehicles—and I understood why. If it hadn’t been necessary for my job at the Bureau, I might not have kept mine.
I aimed the car toward the parkway. From here, at this time of day, I expected we should be back to our apartment within the hour.
“So,” she said. “I watched the video.”
“The video?”
“The one with the senator’s son.”
“Tessa, I told you not—”
“I know, but it’s in the news and . . . It was . . . I didn’t like it. I didn’t like seeing it.”
“Of course you didn’t.” It’s not something anyone should like seeing, I thought.
Our Cyber division was taking down the video wherever it popped up online, but that hadn’t seemed to be doing a whole lot of good. It was out there. And once something’s on the Internet, you’re fighting a losing battle trying to contain it, even with the resources the Bureau has.
“How much did you watch?” I asked her.
“Enough.” Then she added, “But if it’s a suicide, why are you involved? I still don’t get that.”
I didn’t mention my observation that someone else had been present when Jon Murray died. Only a few people knew, including Assistant Director DeYoung and the senator, who’d invited me to his estate tonight so I could have a look around. Otherwise, we hadn’t released the information—I didn’t want the media reporting it. Right now, we had an edge, however slight that might be, and I needed additional information before we released any more details to the public.
“I never said I was involved,” I told Tessa evasively.
“Gotcha.” She’d started chewing a glob of vegan-friendly gum—which I hadn’t even known existed until I met her. “So what’s your plan?”
“I can’t discuss specifics of an investigation.”
“But if you could?”
“Sorry.”
“Broad strokes.”
“My plan . . . Hmm . . . I’d have to say I have a plan so secret that even I don’t know what it is.”
She stopped chewing. “How long have you been waiting to use that line?”
“It is possible I’ve been saving it up for a while.”
“Huh,” she said in a tone that was hard to read.
Oh, this was going brilliantly.
Christie, my wife of less than two months, had told me not to try so hard to connect with Tessa—to just be myself—but I was still trying to figure out what that self looked like in the role of a stepfather. I’d never been a dad before, and I certainly didn’t know the right things to say to a teenage girl.
Tessa was quiet, and I wasn’t sure if I should try to find something to talk about or not. In the end, I said nothing.
Empathy has never been my strong suit, but I’d been doing my best to remain understanding with her. It’d been a tumultuous couple of weeks for this girl.
She’d had a foster sister for a few months, but now that was over, and her mood swings had been more pronounced than usual as she processed being an only child again.
Azaliya Saleem was a fourteen-year-old girl who’d been staying with us through a special arrangement with social services. As it turned out, she was with us nine weeks, and then a relative of hers from her extended family in Kazakhstan agreed to care for her.
Azaliya’s departure from our lives had happened abruptly and took Tessa by surprise. Honestly, it was affecting her more than I thought it would. I hadn’t realized how much having a sister, even if it was only a foster sister, had meant to her.
“Can I ask you something, Patrick?” she said, drawing me out of my thoughts.
“Sure.”
“Do you know why Mom’s pissed at me?”
“What makes you think your mom is mad at you?”
A shrug.
Tessa and Christie were extremely close, and the girl could read my wife even better than I could. But then again, I’d only met Christie in the spring and, after a bit of a whirlwind romance, proposed—and, since we couldn’t come up with any good reason to put off the wedding, had promptly tied the knot.
Neither of them spoke much about Tessa’s biological father, but from what I’d gathered, he hadn’t even stuck around long enough to be present for her birth.
“She just ne
eded some time to herself this weekend,” I explained.
“You mean time away from me.”
From us, I thought.
“From everyone,” I said.
“Yeah, but at a monastery?”
“They have a retreat center there. It’s really not as weird as it sounds.”
“Uh-huh. Well, it sounds pretty weird. I think she’s upset about something, and I want to know what it is.”
Christie, who somewhat enigmatically attended a fundamentalist Baptist church and was also a fan of the Catholic mystics and contemplatives, had taken the weekend to attend a silent retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani in rural Kentucky. One of her favorite authors, Thomas Merton, had lived there as a hermit before his death in 1968.
Over the years, his books had sold hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of copies, and since he’d taken a vow of poverty, the money from the royalties went back to the monastery. Using the funds, they’d built a retreat center beside their church. It was open to the public and, as long as you made a reservation, you could come and participate in a silent, unguided three- or four-day spiritual retreat.
Christie had been there once a few years ago and decided, somewhat on the spur of the moment on Tuesday night, that she wanted to return. As it turned out, they had a room available for this weekend, and she’d flown to Lexington this morning.
Getting back to Tessa’s concern, I said, “Don’t worry about your mom. I’m sure she’s fine. It’s good to give people a little space sometimes.”
“Ha.”
“Ha?”
“I see what you did there—first you said she needed time, then that we need to give people space. Time and space. This from Mr. Geospatial Investigator himself.”
I hadn’t even noticed. “Glad you caught that.”
“You didn’t even realize you said that, did you?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She blew a bubble. “That’s what I thought.”
Time and space. She was right about that much.
I leave means, motive, and opportunity to my associates. I’m looking instead at context, timing, and location since they provide a much more reliable set of indicators on which to base an investigation. Searching for motives is simply a guessing game that we’re not nearly as good at as television crime shows make us out to be.
People love to go motive hunting. They want to know why someone could do such and such a thing, the reason behind it all, and even what initiated the behavior in the first place. A clean-cut and forensic answer, something understandable and definable that they can put their finger on:
“Did you always like lighting fires?”
“No.”
“When did you start?”
“After my mom died. Then everything changed.”
Ah. Yes. So that was it. The loss of his mother. That explains things—that’s the stressor, the psychological trigger we were looking for. Case closed.
It’s somehow comforting to find that single event, that precipitating one, that explains the subsequent choices someone makes, to play pin the motive on the crime. A way to make sense of it all.
However, life isn’t that simple and tidy. Although motives are always present, they can never be established with any degree of certainty. Because of that, the search for them is always a search for circumstantial evidence rather than hard facts, and I want my investigations to be built on facts rather than conjecture.
Normally, I’m only called in when we’ve finished a comparative case analysis, or CCA, and established a link between serial offenses. However, this time since the assistant director knew the senator, he’d asked me to look into things.
“You have a knack for seeing the connection beneath the connection,” he’d told me. “I want you on this.”
* * *
+++
Tessa and I arrived at our apartment, I threw on some canned vegetable soup for dinner—a meal even I could prepare—and then, after we’d eaten, I made sure she was set for the evening and left for the senator’s mansion.
It wasn’t far outside the city, and I would be arriving at the same time of night that his son died two days ago, drowning in their heated outdoor pool.
Being there at the same time would allow me to evaluate any nearby lighting from the streetlights surrounding the estate and help me determine the most logical entrance and exit routes for the person who I believed stood by and watched that young man drown.
3
The video was troubling.
Two nights ago, Jon Murray had turned on his phone’s camera and started live-streaming through a video app. He placed the phone on a deck table next to his father’s swimming pool, then stepped out of the frame for a few minutes. When he returned, he was rolling the executive chair from his dad’s home office.
Two pair of handcuffs waited on the seat of the chair. We still weren’t certain where he’d obtained them from, but we were checking his credit cards for recent purchases.
It was nighttime, but lights from inside the pool and around the grounds gave enough light to see what was happening.
A hedge bordered one side of the pool. The L-shaped mansion lined two other sides of it. A guest house with no lights on sat beyond the pool’s far end.
Jon returned to the camera and repositioned it so the office chair was centered in the screen. He walked over, picked up the handcuffs, and rolled the chair back another foot so that it was resting near the edge of the pool. Then he cuffed his left wrist to the left arm of the chair. The chair’s arm formed a loop so he wouldn’t be able to slide the cuff off.
If it wasn’t clear before then what he was about to do, it was pretty evident at that point.
He turned his attention to the chair’s other arm, locked one of the bracelets around it, then slipped his wrist into the remaining open cuff. He was able to snap it shut by nudging it with his leg. Even on the video, you could hear the ratcheting click as the handcuff closed.
He stared into the camera, tears in his eyes, and said four simple words: “This is for you.” Then he scooted backward, rolling the chair to the lip of the pool. The wheels caught on the splash rim around the ridge.
For a moment, it seemed like he might change his mind, and he hesitated there, staring somewhere beyond the camera, but then, with one violent motion, he threw himself backward. The chair tilted and splashed in, although, with the limited perspective of the phone in that position, you couldn’t see exactly what happened after Jon hit the water.
Yesterday, some of our analysts tested a similar chair, thinking that the cushioning would provide enough flotation, but Jon’s weight and the weight of the base of the chair must’ve been enough to drag him under. Whether the chair flipped around, holding him facedown in the water, or sank right away, we’ll never know. We just know that when his body was found, it was at the bottom of the pool, his wrists still cuffed to the arms of the chair.
The video was live-streamed through a link on the anonymous /b/ bulletin board on 4chan, but since no location or identification had been given at the beginning of it, even though it looked real, since it was Halloween night—the perfect time for a hoax like that—some viewers assumed the footage was faked and began a thread of comments, picking apart how tipping an office chair into a pool like that wouldn’t kill you.
The video continued to feed through for the next three hours until someone who’d seen a picture from a dinner party that the senator’s wife had hosted before she died last year recognized the pool, called it in, and officers responded, finding Jon dead in two meters of water.
This morning, I’d watched the first few minutes of the video over and over again, trying to see if there was anything we’d missed. Only on the ninth time through did I notice a reflection on a darkened window from the guest house just beyond the far end of the pool.
With no lights o
n behind them, the windows were black and reflective, and at first I thought that the image was just the lights from the mansion glimmering off the water and playing tricks on me. I paused the footage and zoomed in but wasn’t able to make out anything for certain until one of the techs in our digital forensics unit enhanced the footage, which I could then see reflected this side of the pool, including the glass sliding doors behind the camera.
And the outline of someone standing in the living room.
I rewound it.
Watched it again.
Yes, the figure first appeared twenty-two seconds after Jon left to get the chair from his dad’s office and finally disappeared only after the water in the pool was still and the young man was dead. Based on the broadness of the person’s shoulders, I started with the working hypothesis that we were looking at a male rather than a female.
So if this was a suicide, someone watched it occur. That person could’ve stopped Jon, helped him, maybe even saved him after he was in the water, but he didn’t. He didn’t even call 911.
There’s nothing illegal about watching someone die. In other words, although mental health officials must act if they feel someone is suicidal, the public has no legal obligation to stop a person from killing himself.
However, don’t assist with someone’s suicide or you might be in real trouble. Help her position the razor blade against her wrist and you could spend the rest of your life in prison, but stand aside and watch her do it and you’ll be able to go on your way without any care or concern. You can even film her doing it and face no legal consequences.
It was the law. It might not be perfect, but it was what it was.
So, even if we could identify who the person was, it wouldn’t make him guilty of homicide—unless he’d somehow coerced the young man into taking his own life or assisted him in some way. Maybe providing the handcuffs or helping Jon obtain that office chair? It was a stretch, but it was possible we could get a conviction based on that.
The senator had three security cameras positioned around his house, in addition to the ones monitoring the perimeter of his estate. Our team was analyzing the exterior feeds. I focused on the footage from the residence and saw no evidence that anyone else had been on the premises at the time of Jon’s death.
