Here Lies Daniel Tate

by Cristin Terrill

  “You never had any fear,” Lex said with a sad smile.

  The picture suddenly grew dark, cutting from the kids horsing around in the water to the family huddled together under blankets after the sun had gone down.

  “Remember the fireworks?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh, Danny.” She put a hand on my leg. “I’m sorry.”

  On the screen the fireworks began. Robert panned between the colors and the family. Jessica had her arms around Nicholas, Lex and Patrick were smooshed together under one big blanket, and Danny was lying on the deck, looking straight up at the sky.

  “Stay still,” I heard Jessica say while Robert was filming the fireworks above.

  Nicholas said, “Danny pinched me—”

  “I did not,” Danny said. “Don’t be such a girl.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Boys!” Robert barked.

  Lex grabbed the remote. “You know I love your dad, but he was obsessed with that camera. Who wants to watch a video of fireworks?”

  She fast-forwarded until the picture changed from the darkness of the fireworks to another sunny day on a beach somewhere. Nicholas was the one filming this time. First, he captured Robert, Patrick, and Danny throwing a football back and forth, then panned to Jessica talking on her cell phone farther down the beach, then Lex holding Mia in her lap while she stuck her chubby little hands into the sand.

  It was easy to forget how young Lex had been when Danny disappeared, just seventeen. Younger than I was and only a year older than Danny would be now. She was such a good sister, singing Mia a little song as they played in the sand together back then and taking care of all of us now.

  But she might be a killer.

  That was the only reason I was here. Because a crime couldn’t be investigated, its perpetrator put in prison, if the crime had never happened. Someone in this family had killed Danny and was using me to make it all disappear.

  Lex and Patrick were my only ironclad suspects, because they were the only ones I knew were aware I wasn’t really Danny. But at this moment it was impossible to imagine Lex had anything to do with Danny’s death, even knowing what a gifted actress she was. She’d obviously had her troubles—I thought of how sickly thin she’d looked in the last home movie I watched and the vague allusions she’d made to problems that kept her from finishing college on time—but her love for her siblings was palpable. She was Mother Lex, the one who’d stepped into the vacuum Jessica had left when she retreated behind her bedroom door, who made us all breakfast every morning and adjusted Mia’s brace four times a day and was comforting me now, when she didn’t have to, even though she knew I was a liar. I couldn’t believe she could hurt Danny.

  I could believe her love for her family would make her play along in order to protect someone else.

  I watched the rest of the video closely, taking in every detail I could and turning my eyes as often as I could to Lex to see if there were any clues I could glean from her face as she watched her old family on the screen. I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for, since it was unlikely that one of the Tates, in the midst of frolicking on an exotic beach or attending some family function, would threaten to kill Danny while the camera was rolling. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that people are bad at keeping secrets, and eventually everything shows. You can learn all there is to know by watching someone hard enough, long enough.

  Slowly, as we watched the movie, it dawned on me what I was doing.

  I was investigating Danny Tate’s death.

  • • •

  For weeks I’d been living in Danny’s skin. Sleeping in his bed, sitting in his chair at the table, answering to his name. I had mingled his pain with my own in that FBI interrogation room, and I had smothered myself so that he could live inside of me. I was Danny Tate, and he was me. I felt a strange loyalty to him, maybe even an affection for him, and I couldn’t let what had really happened to him stay buried. When someone hurts a child, that person should pay. I was a liar and a con artist and probably a terrible person, but I still believed that.

  I would find out the truth, because Danny deserved it. And because Mia, who was the only person I knew to be innocent in all of this, deserved it. I could get them that justice.

  . . . or, because I was a terrible person, I could use the truth for myself, as leverage whenever I needed to.

  I hadn’t decided yet.

  • • •

  That weekend I made a password protected folder on my laptop to hold all of my research on Danny’s disappearance. When I was supposed to be sleeping, I spent hours scouring the Internet, adding to it. There was a lot less information online than I’d hoped to find. A photogenic young white boy had gone missing from one of America’s safest and wealthiest communities. The story was a cable news producer’s dream. It should have been everywhere, but it had barely made a blip on the radar.

  It seemed the rarefied nature of Hidden Hills, the very exclusivity that made Danny’s kidnapping such a shocking story, also helped keep it from becoming a widely known one. The gates around Hidden Hills slammed shut after Danny disappeared, the community withdrawing to protect its people and its way of life. The Tate family did the same thing. Other than one televised appeal given by Robert with the rest of the family in the background and the occasional comment from the family’s spokesperson and lawyer, the Tates never spoke publicly about Danny. When I’d first found out about this, I’d chalked it up to a weird rich people thing I couldn’t understand. Like seeking out publicity in the midst of their personal tragedy would seem common and crass to them. But it made more sense once I realized someone in the family had something to hide.

  There was still some information to be found now that I was really digging, though. The basics were well documented in the recent LA Magazine article and elsewhere. Jessica had called the police at eight in the evening on a Saturday to report Danny missing. The last time he’d been seen was at breakfast that morning, when he’d told the family he was going to ride his bike to his friend Andrew’s house. When Jessica got home at six and Danny still wasn’t back, she and the kids—Robert was out of town on business—called Danny’s friends and drove around the neighborhood looking for him. When she got ahold of Andrew’s parents and learned that Danny had never been to their house that day, Jessica phoned the police.

  The cops immediately issued an AMBER Alert. A house-to-house search was conducted in Hidden Hills, and the security tapes and logs from the community’s gates were examined. Nothing suspicious was found. It was like Danny had disappeared into thin air. More likely, of course, was that he had left the community in the trunk of a car or the back of one of the dozens of authorized work vans that had passed through the gates that day.

  The press that was following the case—mostly the local paper and news stations—was focused on the idea of an outside threat. Hidden Hills was home to wealthy CEOs and movie stars; what better place to scoop up a kid who could be ransomed for millions?

  But from the start law enforcement seemed to have a different view. Judging by the number of times he was reportedly brought in for questioning, it was clear to me who the FBI’s main suspect was.

  Patrick.

  • • •

  Patrick found me out by the pool, where I was keeping an eye on Mia as she swam.

  “Hey,” he said as he sat down in the lounge chair next to mine.

  “Patrick!” Mia said. “Look how fast I am!”

  She dog-paddled with little grace but great enthusiasm across the shallow end of the pool. Ever since the weather had turned warmer, she’d been practically living in the water, only emerging for school and meals, her fingers permanently puckered.

  “That’s great, Mia,” Patrick said with a wide, white toothed smile. For a second I imagined him with blood spattered across his face, and I had to shake my head to lose the image. His smile was gone when he turned to me. “I need to talk to you.”

  “Sur
e,” I said. I had a handful of quarters that I’d been throwing one at a time for Mia to dive for. I grabbed them all and chucked them into the pool at once. Mia shrieked and dove. “What’s up?”

  “It’s the FBI,” Patrick said. “I’ve put them off as long as I can. We need to go in again tomorrow.”

  I swallowed. “Okay. At least I had a little time off, right?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder, and I wondered why the FBI had suspected him. Was it just demographics, the fact that most killers are young men, and Patrick was the only one who fit the bill? Or was there some evidence against him I didn’t know about?

  “I’m sorry, D,” he said, “but after this we’ll both be done with them.”

  Mia swam up to the edge of the pool closest to us and dropped another quarter onto the small, wet pile on the concrete. “I’m rich!” she said.

  • • •

  Lex was not pleased.

  “No way!” she said, slamming the cabinet door shut after pulling out a stack of plates for the takeout she’d ordered for dinner. “He’s not doing it!”

  “Lexi, you knew this was coming,” Patrick said.

  “It’s too much to ask of him,” she said, tearing up. I knew now that she was only scared for herself and whomever she was protecting, but for a moment it felt like it was me she was protecting again. “He’s only been home a few months. He needs time to heal, not all this constant questioning.”

  “I wish there was something I could do, but—”

  “Well try harder!” Lex snapped.

  She fled the room, throwing off Patrick’s hand when he tried to catch her, and didn’t come out of her room for the rest of the night.

  • • •

  Patrick and I went back to the L.A. field office alone. Lex pulled a Jessica and disappeared after spending the night locked in her room. Maybe if I spent more time locked in my room, any suspicions Morales might have that I wasn’t really a Tate would be laid to rest.

  Morales greeted us coolly when we met in the lobby. I understood now why just the sight of her made Patrick and Lex so tense and angry. Her cool professionalism, brisk walk, and smartly pressed slacks felt like a slap in the face when she was trying so hard to ruin my life. It made me want to shake her until she was as much of a mess as the rest of us.

  “How’s school, Danny?” Morales asked as she walked us back into the office.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Are you catching up okay?”

  I could feel Patrick’s eyes on me. I just shrugged. “It’s a lot to catch up on.”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll get there,” she said.

  She took the two of us back to the same interview room we’d used last time. Lynch came in a minute later with a laptop under one arm and a couple of bottles of water cradled in the other. He put the water on the table in front of us while he got the laptop up and running. Neither Patrick nor I took one.

  Morales and Lynch showed me dozens and dozens of mug shots, asking if anyone looked familiar. I told them no a hundred times, that I had been blindfolded for most of my abduction, but pointed out a couple of men who I said looked a little like the men who’d held me captive over the years. I picked them out of the sea of faces at random. Hopefully that would keep them busy for a little while.

  “Thank you, Danny. This is helpful,” Morales said. “Now my colleague Margaret Hamilton is going to come in here and talk to you. I’d like you to tell her your story, and Mr. McConnell, while that’s happening, I’d like to speak with you privately, if you don’t mind.”

  Patrick’s hands curled into loose fists on the table. “Actually, I do. I wasn’t aware I was here to be questioned. I came as Danny’s lawyer, and I need to be present during his questioning.”

  “It’s not questioning, Mr. McConnell,” Morales said. “Danny’s not in trouble. We just want to see if there’s any other information he may have that can help us catch whoever did this to him.”

  “Regardless, I won’t—”

  “It’s okay,” I interjected.

  “No, Danny, it isn’t,” Patrick said.

  “Really, it is,” I said. Hopefully, cooperating with Morales would earn me some goodwill, and I could lie just as easily—if not more so—without Patrick hovering over my shoulder.

  Plus, there was a chance that being questioned by Morales would knock Patrick enough off-balance that I might be able to learn something from him.

  “I’ll be fine,” I told Patrick when he continued to protest. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  Patrick’s jaw strained against his skin, but he had to know that if he continued to argue, he risked making himself look more suspicious to a woman who already had her doubts about him. He looked at me and I looked right back at him, and something like honesty passed between us. I wasn’t his traumatized kid brother; I was a practiced con artist, and he knew it. I could handle this, and he knew that, too.

  “Fine,” he said. “But if you start to feel uncomfortable, you tell them you want to see me, and you don’t say another word until I get here, got it?”

  I nodded, and Patrick left the room with Morales while Margaret Hamilton came in and took Morales’s vacated chair. She was older than Morales and not as put together—wavy blonde hair that was graying at the roots, like she hadn’t had time to dye it in a while, a suit with a button coming undone, glasses instead of contact lenses—and she was wearing a wedding ring and another band with three small stones, the kind husbands bought for their wives to represent their children.

  I wasn’t worried.

  Agent Hamilton settled herself in the interview room and offered me a soda. I said no thanks. No playing fast and loose with my DNA inside the FBI field office.

  “Good choice,” the agent said. “I always tell my kids that stuff will rot your teeth right out of your head.”

  She was trying to make an emotional connection with me, to put me at ease. It was such a transparent tactic that I felt compelled to use one of my own.

  “It tastes too sweet to me,” I said with a shy little shrug. “I guess I’m just . . . not used to it.”

  The smile melted off her face, and I knew I had her.

  Agent Hamilton had me tell her my entire story again. The abduction, the weeks of torture, the places they took me and the things they made me do with the men there. She tried hard to maintain her professionalism, but I saw the sheen in her eyes when I told her some particularly gruesome detail, and it spurred me on. Most of my story was pre-scripted with Patrick, but I also made up a few flourishes as I went along, because all great artists follow their intuition sometimes. I focused on things that I thought would really get to someone like her, like how I would comfort myself at night by quietly humming the tune of a lullaby my mother used to sing to me long after I forgot the words. She actually teared up when I said that.

  It took more than an hour for Hamilton to finish with me, and then I was passed off to another agent. It was clear to me now what they were doing—testing to see if my story would change at all as I told it over and over again. They were probably doing the same thing with Patrick, making sure our stories aligned with each other’s as well.

  Agent Willis took me to his office for our interview. He was in his sixties, a gruff and grizzled man who walked with a limp I was willing to bet was the result of an injury on the job, either with the FBI or in the military. I took a quick look at the two framed photos on his desk that were angled enough for me to glimpse them. A staged family photo with a couple of kids and a couple of grandkids, and three men in camouflage in a deer stand. Vulnerable and emotional wouldn’t work with Willis the way it had with Hamilton. It would make him uncomfortable, and he’d start looking for holes in my story as a way to keep his distance from it. So with Willis I went tough. Danny Tate was defiant in the face of what had been done to him, angry and ashamed of his victimization.

  When Willis asked, “What can we do for you, Danny?” I looked him in the eye and said, “You can fin
d those bastards and kill them.” And Willis nodded.

  When Willis was done with me, he clapped his hand on my shoulder and said I was a damn brave kid and those sons of bitches wouldn’t get away with this. Then he passed me on to the next person.

  Interviewer number three introduced himself to me as Sean Graves, and I knew even before he told me—from the way he shook my hand and the soothing tone of his voice as he asked me to call him Sean—that he was a psychologist.

  This one was going to be a little bit trickier.

  Sean took me to a different kind of room, one with a leather couch and armchair and a ficus that needed dusting.

  “So, Danny—do you mind if I call you Danny?” he said.

  “Everyone does,” I said.

  His grin was sharp around the edges. “That’s not what I asked.”

  Shit.

  “Danny’s fine,” I said.

  “Okay then, that’s what I’ll call you,” he said. “First, I just want to make it clear that I’m not here in any law enforcement capacity. The agents just wanted me to talk to you and see how you’re doing.”

  “You’re not FBI?” I asked.

  “I’m a consultant,” he said. “Do you want to tell me a little bit about how things have been since you returned home?”

  Sean was hard for me to nail down. He was a young guy, probably early thirties. He wore no wedding ring. His suit was nicer than the ones worn by most of the agents—the result of not being on a federal salary—but it wasn’t particularly nice either. His expression was pleasant but bland, and it never wavered. It was a mask as unmoving as the plastic ones kids wore at Halloween and only slightly more lifelike. He was smart and observant, but beyond that he was a cipher. Without knowing who he was, I didn’t know who I needed to be for him, and that made me uneasy.

  “Things have been okay,” I said. Without knowing what role to play, I decided not to play one. Something told me Sean would see through theatrics anyway. “It’s been hard, but it’s good to be with my family.”

  Sean just nodded. “How has it been hard?”