by Chaz McGee
You couldn’t take the Italian out of Connie if you tried. The thought of someone caring so little about their own child that they would not bother to be present at a police interrogation pissed her off royally. She lit into Maggie and Calvano with both barrels blazing.
‘His father may have signed that waiver,’ she lectured them, ‘but I’d like to know what Adam wants to do. And if he doesn’t want to talk to you, he’s not going to talk to you.’
She stared at Maggie with a fierce confidence she had inherited from her mother. Calvano took an instinctive step backward when he saw the look and Maggie took a very deep breath before she replied.
‘If Adam wants you to be present during the questioning,’ Maggie said, ‘it’s OK with us.’ She cast a glance at Calvano, who was clearly so terrified of Connie that he was likely to agree to anything she said.
‘Don’t I know you?’ Connie asked Calvano suddenly. He shook his head rapidly and she peered at him suspiciously, but let it drop.
Yeah, she knew him all right. She had smacked him in the face once in front of four dozen other people for grabbing her ass at a Christmas party three years ago. It was a good thing for Calvano she didn’t remember him or he’d have gotten a fresh earful about it now.
‘I’ll see what Adam says,’ Connie said, her voice tight. She was not about to be mollified easily. She left Maggie and Calvano standing on the doorstep, but returned a moment later with Adam Mullins in tow. She gestured for them to come in, pointing grimly to the living room, which she kept impeccably clean in case of disasters like neighbors dropping by unexpectedly – or the police showing up on your doorstep.
It was a living room just like every other living room in our town, no worse off and no fancier than the rest. Maggie and Calvano relaxed in the familiarity of their surroundings. They’d both grown up in living rooms just like this one. Not even the plastic mudguard on the bottom of the couch threw them. They sat down, side-by-side, as if Connie was getting ready to interrogate them, instead of the other way around.
Adam sat uneasily on the edge of an armchair, where Connie could shoot him significant glances that the kid had no hope of ever interpreting. I had been at the receiving end of Connie’s unspoken signals and, trust me, it was a loser’s game.
It was her home and so it was her right: Connie decided to take charge. ‘Why are you here?’ she challenged them.
Maggie never missed a beat. She had grown up among women just like Connie. ‘We are questioning anyone with a connection to Holloway who also has a connection to Darcy Swan,’ she explained. ‘It’s in connection with Darcy’s murder. Since Adam is her ex-boyfriend, I need to talk to him.’ Maggie’s voice faltered as she spotted Sean and Michael spying on them from the hallway. ‘He’s been at Holloway often visiting your son this past week, so that puts him in the group for questioning.’
‘It’s OK,’ Adam interrupted suddenly. The adults looked startled at his confidence. ‘I spoke to her before,’ he told Connie. ‘I have something for her.’ He retrieved his knapsack from the front hall and rummaged in it for a moment, pulling out some folded sheets of paper and handing them over to Maggie. ‘This is the list of Darcy’s Facebook friends,’ he explained. ‘There’s only a couple I don’t know and I think they might be from some online games she played a long time ago. I marked them for you.’
Calvano looked suspicious, but Maggie took the papers with a nod of thanks. ‘I appreciate that,’ she said. ‘I thought you had forgotten.’
Adam sat down across from her again and looked more dignified than any of them. ‘I told you I wanted to help you,’ he said. ‘I want whoever did this to Darcy to be caught.’
It was hard to read what Maggie thought of the boy. ‘Do you have any idea where her cell phone might be?’ she asked him. ‘Apparently, it’s a disposable one. She doesn’t appear to have an account with any of the carriers in this area, and we have no evidence that it’s been used since her . . .’ Maggie’s voice faltered.
Adam saved her from continuing. ‘She always used prepaid phones,’ he explained. ‘And hid them from her mother, because she would take them and use up all the minutes. Did you ask her mother about it? Maybe she’s been using it?’
‘We haven’t been able to get in touch with her mother for the last few days,’ Maggie said. ‘She’s not returning our calls.’
‘Probably too busy giving media interviews about how horrible it is for her that Darcy was killed,’ Michael interrupted angrily from the hallway.
Connie looked like she was getting ready to tear Michael a new one for interrupting, but Maggie was nonplussed. ‘Can I ask you some more questions today?’ she asked Adam.
Connie interrupted. ‘If you ask him anything that I feel is inappropriate,’ she warned her, ‘I’m going to tell him not to answer you. Understand?’
Maggie had decided not to take on Connie. ‘Understood,’ she said.
‘I told you everything I knew when you came by my house the other day,’ Adam said. I wondered if Maggie was as impressed as I was that Adam looked her directly in the eye when he talked to her. ‘You have to remember what my father is like. You know the kind of person he is. If I talk to you, he’s not going to like it. He just said it was OK because he can’t be bothered to put down his beer long enough to drive to the station to be with me.’
Maggie’s eyes moved to the bruise on Adam’s cheek, correctly guessing when it had been inflicted.
‘Look,’ she said more kindly. ‘We just need your help. Whoever killed Darcy has a connection to Holloway. I can’t tell you why we think that, or how we know it, but trust me. It’s true. I don’t think you had anything to do with her death, but you were the only person we’ve heard of so far who really knew her well. You might be the only one who can lead us to her killer. Who can help us figure out what her connection to Holloway was.’
I think even Connie believed Maggie was sincere and was ready to let Adam talk more freely. But, as usual, Calvano missed the undercurrents in the room and displayed all the tact of a rogue elephant in the middle of a rampage. ‘Your father says you’re having a lot of trouble at school,’ Calvano said to Adam in a challenging voice. ‘What’s all that about?’
‘That’s not true!’ Michael interrupted. The comment made him angry enough to drop the pretense of hiding. He entered the living room and was indignant. ‘Adam does great in school. He’s won a whole lot of writing contests and he gets really good grades. He even tutors me in English.’
‘Then why is he a year older than you but in the same grade?’ Calvano asked. I did not like the fact that Calvano had done enough background work on my son to know he and Adam were in the same grade. And then it occurred to me that both Maggie and Calvano had to know that Michael, too, was one of the few people in town who had ties to both Darcy and Holloway.
I wondered if they had really come to talk to Adam after all.
I wasn’t the only one who was suddenly more suspicious of their motives. Calvano moved straight to the top spot of Connie’s shitlist with his last comment.
‘Adam lost an academic year when his mother died,’ she said with poisonous contempt. I’d had that voice leveled at me more than once and it was impossible to ignore. ‘Soon after that, his grandmother became ill and it was left to Adam to make the arrangements for her care. Thanks to him, she gets home health care aides but Adam still does a lot of the work himself. Please tell me you’ve done your homework and you know the background? You must know how his mother died and how traumatic it was for him.’
Clearly, Calvano had not. The best he could do to salvage his dignity was stay silent.
Maggie tried to regain control over the questioning. ‘We have looked into his background,’ she hurriedly said. ‘My partner is only asking because we’ve heard rumors that what happened to Darcy is somehow connected to a bigger plot at her high school. It’s been suggested that she knew about some upcoming violence and was killed to keep her silent.’
‘That’s
ridiculous,’ Adam said. ‘First of all, Darcy only stayed at school long enough to take the least number of classes she needed to graduate. She’d be the last person to know what was going on. I already told you, her mother was a real jerk and made her give her money each week for rent, so Darcy had to work all the hours she could. She was trying to save up enough money to get out of this dump. All she wanted was to be able to go to a new town and start over. But it was hard with her mother always asking for rent money.’
Connie looked scandalized at this.
‘Besides, if there was some kind of big plot at school, I’d know about it,’ Adam insisted, not realizing how it sounded. ‘People are always shooting off at the mouth, acting like big shots, bragging about having guns. It’s never true.’
Connie did not like what she was hearing. She stood up and her tone was abrupt. ‘I’m not sure where you’re going with this,’ she said. ‘But this interview is over. Adam had nothing to do with Darcy’s death, and he certainly would not have anything to do with some plot at his school. You should know better than to believe rumors.’ She aimed her gaze at Calvano, having decided to give Maggie a pass this time around.
Maggie’s face was unreadable as she rose and extended a hand to Adam. The kid shook it limply, unsure of what to do.
‘I apologize for our intrusion on your family dinner,’ Maggie said to Connie. ‘I think this can wait for another day.’
Calvano was smart enough to let Maggie call the shots. He made a big show of stowing his notebook away in his breast pocket and followed her out the door.
As the door shut behind him, I could tell by the look on Connie’s face that she was every bit as worried as I was at what she had heard. How much was Adam involved? And how well did she really know him?
Worse, how much did Michael know?
TWENTY-NINE
‘Is it just me, or did we look like complete idiots just now?’ Maggie asked Calvano as soon as they were alone in their squad car. Or at least thought they were alone. I was enjoying my usual bird’s-eye view of their partnership from the perp seat.
‘Connie Fahey will do that to you every time,’ Calvano mumbled. ‘She comes from a long line of ball busters. It’s genetic.’
‘You’re going to have to do better than that, Adrian,’ Maggie said. ‘You did pull the jacket on the death of the kid’s mother, right? You were supposed to check any and all police reports. Deep background, remember?’
‘Sure, I pulled it,’ Calvano said. ‘I just haven’t gotten around to reading it.’
Maggie stared at him with something close to disgust, threw the car into gear and sped toward the station. She did not have to say a word. When they arrived, she kept the car idling by the front door while Calvano headed straight to the fourth floor. It took him a couple of minutes to locate the right file, but at least he brought it back to Maggie with just enough humility to mollify her.
Adam’s mother had been named Charlotte Mullins. Maggie flipped through the file, quickly reading the notes. When she was done, she tossed it on to the back seat where the file landed beside me, falling open to reveal a horrific photograph of a woman sprawled across a bed, killed by what was clearly a shotgun wound.
Damn. I was already dead, but that didn’t mean I was immune to the horrors of death. I moved as far away from the file as I could get while Maggie sped through the streets like an Italian taxi driver on crack.
‘Where the hell are we going?’ Calvano asked. ‘And would it be OK if we got there alive?’
‘To see my father,’ Maggie said as she missed the bumper of a bus by inches. ‘He was on the scene when the kid’s mother died.’
‘You think it’s connected?’ Calvano asked.
‘I have no idea,’ Maggie admitted. ‘Which is starting to be a familiar feeling.’
‘You know Gonzales has it in for the kid, right?’ Calvano told her. ‘He’s pitched about the media jumping on the Otis Parker bandwagon and he’s determined to prove them wrong. Some of the guys told me they’re working on the theory that the Mullins kid is a drug dealer and was getting his supplies from the orderly who got offed. The theory is that Darcy Swan found out and was killed because of it, or maybe she was in on it with him and something went wrong. They think maybe the shrink found out his prescription pads had been stolen or something. You’ve got to admit it all fits together.’
‘Yeah, but where does Otis Parker fit into that theory?’ Maggie asked.
Calvano looked uncomfortable. ‘They’re still not buying that he’s involved. They’re saying the kid admired him, so he copied him to throw people off and that’s the connection.’
‘Copied him down to the very last detail?’ Maggie said. ‘Even the ones not released?’
‘You know we have bad leaks. One of the guys thinks that the details of Parker’s signature leaked and got picked up on the Internet somehow and we just never found out. The kid is an online genius, apparently. It would be easy for him to find the details.’
‘And we know this how?’
‘The father’s been talking to a couple of the other teams about it. The old man knows more about what his son’s been up to than the kid thinks. That kid is hiding something.’
I felt panic flicker in Maggie at this news. I couldn’t tell if it was because she didn’t share everyone’s enthusiasm for Adam Mullins as a suspect, or because she feared what would happen should Gonzales find out that she had questioned him without a parent’s permission early in the case. If the kid turned out to be the killer, and his defense lawyer found out, it could screw up the entire case.
No wonder Maggie wanted her father’s help.
Colin Gunn was an old man in a wheelchair, but he had once been a legendary detective. He lived in a stone house a few miles from the station. He preferred to spend most of his days on his front porch, where he could see the comings and goings of his neighbors and use the sixth sense he had developed during his years on the force to keep his small world safe. He had called in half a dozen complaints to the department since his retirement and not once had he been wrong about someone lingering too long on the block, claiming to be a delivery man, or sitting in a car outside the elementary school watching the children play. He was still good at what he did.
Maggie greeted him by tucking his blanket around him and scolding him for not being more careful of his health. Colin endured her babying because he loved her beyond all reason and knew that mothering him made Maggie happy.
At first, I watched them from a distance, cautious about approaching Colin. He could sense my presence with the same remarkable intuition that enabled him to spot a con man. But I finally joined them on the porch, too curious to stay away. I had just settled in when the old man snapped his head toward me, but said nothing. I smiled, knowing that claiming to sense a ghost would do nothing for his reputation for still being sharp as a tack.
It was as if he could read my mind. He gave me the same Colin Gunn glare that had once stopped juvenile offenders in their tracks, but turned back to his guests without comment.
‘I saw your name as one of the investigating officers,’ Maggie said to her father. ‘I thought maybe you remembered what was left out of the jacket?’
‘Oh, I remember plenty,’ her father said. ‘I remember that the kid was the one who found her when he got home from school. He tried to resuscitate her, never mind that half her face was gone. A neighbor saw him screaming in the middle of the sidewalk, covered with blood, and called 911. The father was a plumber and out on an emergency call when it happened.’
‘Jesus,’ Calvano said. ‘That’ll warp a kid for good.’
Colin Gunn was no fool. ‘What’s this all about? Is this about the murders?’
‘It might be,’ Maggie admitted. ‘Adam Mullins used to date Darcy Swan, the girl who was killed last week. We’re looking into his background. He seems unnaturally poised for his age. My guess is he’s keeping an awful lot inside.’
‘He was like that when it happened
,’ Colin remembered. ‘Don’t get me wrong – it was horrific. It was one of the last calls I ever took before retirement and it was also probably the worst call I ever took. His mother must have wanted to check out an awful lot, because that was one serious shotgun wound. But I never could understand her doing it when she had to know her kid might find her. That’s just unforgivable.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Maggie agreed. ‘I can’t think of a woman who would let that happen.’
Colin glanced at her. ‘You don’t think it was a suicide?’
‘I have no idea. I’m asking if you think there’s a chance it was something else.’
‘We looked into the possibility,’ Colin admitted. ‘The cops had been called out to the house a couple of times for domestic disputes. Her husband liked to use his fists. But that’s not uncommon for that part of town. There were never any allegations about child abuse, and the kid was doing really well in school, as I recall. That probably didn’t continue after her suicide, of course.’
‘He dropped out of school for a year,’ Maggie said.
Colin nodded. ‘That makes sense. If I recall, Social Services stepped in to make sure the kid got the counseling he needed. You can’t live through something like that at that age and get through it without help. Like I say, he was the one who found her.’
‘Could something like that turn a kid bad?’ Calvano asked.
Colin gave Calvano the look he used on people he wasn’t quite sure he liked. ‘I’m not a shrink,’ he said. ‘But I doubt it. Not unless there were a lot of other factors at play. Besides, I think the kid was in pretty heavy-duty therapy for months after it happened. The system did everything right. There was even some question about him going back to live in the same house. But he wanted to go back there, and the grandmother stepped forward to move in with them, so Social Services OK’d the deal.’
‘The grandmother got sick a couple of years later,’ Maggie told him. ‘Adam Mullins ended up having to take care of her.’
