He was Walking Alone

by P. D. Workman

  “Richard was being cyberstalked. It was… very brutal. Very threatening. He was doing everything he could to keep out of this stalker’s reach. He closed all of his social media accounts, changed his phone and his email.”

  A light went on in Ashley’s face. Suddenly, it all came together for her. “I didn’t know! He said he was spending too much time online and that’s why he was shutting down his accounts. He dropped his phone in the water and had to get a new one. He said he was getting too much spam email and needed to start fresh… I never connected them all. He spread it out, it wasn’t all in one day, and I never… I didn’t realize what he was doing. He never said a word about being stalked.”

  “Men tend to feel like they should be the strong ones in a relationship. That they should be the protector, keep bad things from happening. He was probably embarrassed and didn’t want you to think that he was weak for trying to avoid this guy instead of ‘being a man’ and ‘taking care of it.’”

  “I never would have expected him to act like that. We never had gendered roles or felt like we had to follow those societal pressures. I told him I liked a man to be sensitive and to have real emotions.” She shook her head. “He never should have felt like he had to play the big, strong man for me. That’s not the way we were.”

  Zachary nodded slowly. He pulled out his notepad and jotted down a few thoughts and things to check before they could flit away from his churning brain.

  “So he never told you anything about this.”

  “No. I’m sorry. He should have. I would have supported him. He knew I’d support him through anything.”

  Did he? It seemed to Zachary that their devotion to one another hadn’t really been tested. It didn’t seem like a passionate relationship, but like a partnership of convenience. Something warm and comfortable, where they could cuddle up and watch a movie together, but didn’t have to be totally devoted to each other all of the time. They each kept their own residences, their own jobs, their own vehicles. They were still themselves more than a couple. How could Harding have known how Ashley would react to the news that he was being hunted and harassed?

  “Is there anything you need to tell me?”

  Ashley looked at him for a long time, her eyes swimming in tears, looking helpless and uncertain. But she didn’t offer him anything. It wasn’t the depression. It wasn’t the stalking. She was still holding something back from him.

  “If you don’t tell me everything, how do you expect me to find out what really happened?”

  Ashley shook her head. “I’ve told you all I can. I know it wasn’t accidental, and this proves it. He was being stalked by someone. That person caught up with him in real life and killed him!”

  “You think the trucker was his stalker? Why turn himself in to the police?”

  “I… I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t the one who really hit Richard. Maybe he hit a deer and someone else hit Richard. Or maybe when he hit Richard, he was already dead. I don’t know. But whoever was stalking Richard, that’s who killed him.”

  “I’ll pursue it as far as I can,” Zachary promised. “But you need to tell me the rest if you want me to sort it out.”

  Chapter Seven

  Z

  achary looked at the letter from Tyrrell, still in its protective sleeve on his desk. Was it really from Tyrrell? His Tyrrell?

  He remembered his little brother. So anxious to please, so trusting of everything his parents or teachers told him. The perfect little man, always trying to be well-behaved and follow the rules. More like a firstborn than one so far down the line in the birth order.

  Tyrrell cried when their parents fought and often crawled into bed with Zachary to cuddle, too afraid to go to sleep on his own. Zachary would hold him gently and hum to him, trying to drown out any noise from their fighting parents and lull the little boy to sleep. And then he lay awake himself, staring into the darkness, listening to Tyrrell and Vincent breathing, waiting for sleep to come and take him, but it always took hours to come. He couldn’t sleep when their parents were still up. He had to wait until they had stopped fighting and had gone to bed, and everything was quiet and peaceful with no danger of the argument blowing up again. Then he could start to relax, but the process still took a long time.

  The nights when the police were called were the worst, and they were a relief. It was humiliating for the whole neighborhood to see what was going on in the Goldman home. He hated for the kids at school to know that his parents didn’t get along. If it was just arguing, he could have laughed it off. But not when the neighbors saw his mother or father being put into handcuffs to be carted off to jail for assault. The next day, when it had all blown over, the arrested parent would be back, and things would go on as usual, but that didn’t stop the teasing and bullying at school.

  And on the other hand, it was a relief to have the police come and break it up. Zachary would be able to get to sleep sooner, knowing that the fight was over. While they had sometimes threatened to put both parents in jail, they never had, always picking out the one who they thought had been most at fault and leaving the other at home so they didn’t have to call Social Services to find emergency homes for six children.

  Tyrrell. Zachary touched the plastic bag. Do you remember me? How could Zachary ever forget? He couldn’t forget any of his siblings, not ever. He longed to call Tyrrell or to write him back. But he couldn’t bring himself to. Not when Tyrrell might blame him. It had been Zachary’s fault that they had all been taken away. Tyrrell had been old enough to understand that.

  He closed his eyes and tried to remember everything Mrs. Pratt had said about the other children back in the beginning. They hadn’t been able to keep the other five children together. It was just too many for one home to take. Joss and Heather had been put in one home, and the littles in another. Had they stayed there? Had they been good homes where they were treated fairly and the parents were interested in adopting them permanently? Or had they been emergency placements that had never been meant to be anything but temporary?

  Mrs. Pratt had said it was best to let them settle into their foster placements to start with. Not to disrupt them with visits by Zachary. That meant that they had been meant to stay in those homes permanently. Or at least long-term. Every time Zachary had asked about being allowed to visit them, the answer had been no, and eventually, he had stopped asking, though he had never stopped thinking about them.

  Joshua Campbell was a busy man, but he agreed to meet and spend a few minutes with Zachary on the Harding case. Zachary had, after all, managed to dig up additional evidence, so maybe he merited a face-to-face conversation when Campbell would normally expect a PI to just be happy to get access to the paper file.

  He graciously offered Zachary coffee, which he accepted, even knowing it was likely to be hours old and bitter as grapefruit. He took a sip without wincing and put it down on the offered coaster as he sat down on the other side of Campbell’s desk.

  “How is the case coming along then?” Campbell asked genially. He stretched and leaned back in his chair as if he were ready for a nap. He’d probably started his day pretty early.

  “It’s intriguing,” Zachary said slowly. “There may be something to the girlfriend’s claims, but she’s not been completely open about her reasons, so I’m still a bit in the dark.”

  “Why would someone hire you and not tell you all of the reasons why?”

  Zachary gave a shrug. “It’s actually not as unusual as you think. People usually hold something back. Maybe it’s something inconsequential, maybe it’s a secret, or maybe they just want to see if you can find it, so they know you’re really putting some effort into the investigation.”

  Campbell nodded. “I know they hold back from the police, but it never occurred to me that they’d hire you and then not produce.”

  Zachary leaned forward. “I’m wondering whether Richard Harding ever filed a complaint with the police.”

  Campbell raised his brows. “A complaint? For
what?”

  “Criminal harassment. Cyberstalking.”

  “No… something like that would have shown up when we opened the missing persons report and when we started the investigation into his death. You think he was being harassed?”

  “I know he was. Email, social media, texts, calls. I don’t know whether he got snail mail or any face-to-face harassment, but he was the victim of some of the worst cyber-harassment I’ve ever seen.”

  “You need to turn those records over so we can have a look at them. How did you get access? I’m sure my guys must have taken a look at his electronic footprint.”

  “He’d closed his social media and replaced his phone and his email address. Recently, he’d been anonymizing all of his online activity. Trying to keep this guy from tracking him down again.”

  “Okay. Yeah. Pass on what you’ve got so we can investigate it further. We’ll see whether there is any connection between Rusty Donaldson and this cyberstalker.”

  “None that I can find. I’ve been through everything with a fine-toothed comb, and it doesn’t follow the patterns you’d expect to see from a long-haul trucker. The times he is sending his messages follow more of the pattern you’d expect to see with someone with a nine-to-five job or school schedule. Little or nothing from nine until noon or one until four. A lot more in the early morning, noon hour, and evening. A long-haul trucker… wouldn’t follow a distribution like that.”

  “Unless he was smart enough to use some kind of scheduler.”

  Zachary shrugged. “I suppose. In my experience, people take a lot of care to cover up the things that can be traced back to them electronically—burner phones, anonymous accounts, stuff like that—but they don’t think to cover up behavioral patterns.”

  “I’ll see what we can find. We might be able to trace some of the messages back to the source. I assume you’ve already done the preliminaries.”

  “The obvious stuff. With the amount of harassment that went on, it’s impossible for me to check everything, but with a few more people following the trail, maybe you’ll be able to.”

  “Might call on the feds for help. They have a lot more manpower and some pretty slick technology.”

  Zachary nodded. “You’ll let me know what you find?”

  “Usual answer.” Campbell took a sip of his coffee. “It depends. If we have enough for an arrest, we’re just going to move in and do it, and you won’t be involved. If the feds find something, we might be prohibited from sharing it with you. If it’s a rat’s nest that I can’t do anything with… you’re welcome to it.”

  Zachary grinned. He liked Campbell’s open, honest manner. He knew the strengths of the police department, and he knew Zachary’s strengths, and he had no problem with feeding information to Zachary if he thought that Zachary had a better chance of coming up with an answer than his own staff.

  “Fair enough.”

  Campbell took another drink, his eyes distant as he thought things over. “Do you think this stalker had anything to do with his death?”

  “Right now… I can’t see a connection. I don’t believe Rusty Donaldson has any connection with the stalker. It just doesn’t feel right. Does that mean that the stalker didn’t have something to do with why Harding was out there on the road that night? I can think of a few different scenarios that could connect them… but nothing that feels right yet. So far, it still seems like an accident.”

  “Well, you’ve proven to have a pretty good instinct for these things, so I’m glad to hear it.”

  “You haven’t heard anything back from your accident reconstruction guys yet…?”

  “Early days. They want confirmation of the weight of the truck, so we’re in the process of getting a warrant for the weigh station records and looking into the possibility that Donaldson might have added something to his load without telling anyone. Truckers sometimes supplement their incomes by carrying extras they don’t tell their employers about.”

  Zachary wasn’t a math guy, but most of the things he could think of a trucker transporting for extra money didn’t weigh enough that he thought they would make a difference.

  “How much extra weight would it have taken? Would a passenger have made up the difference?”

  “A passenger.” Campbell looked at him sharply. “Do you have anything to suggest that he had a passenger?”

  “No. I’m just spitballing. Could we put the stalker in the truck? I’m not sure that makes any sense even if the answer is yes…”

  Campbell shook his head. “What’s he going to do? Tell Rusty Donaldson to run down the guy walking by the side of the road?”

  “Probably not. Unless it’s a woman and she tells him that the guy is trying to kill her or did something to her in the past. More likely… distracts him at the key moment, grabs the wheel without warning…”

  “I’m sure he would have been eager to tell us something like that if it was his passenger’s fault. He wouldn’t have a reason to protect the passenger.”

  “Unless they knew each other.” Zachary sighed and blinked his eyes a few times, trying to refocus. “No evidence, just trying to think of what would fit.”

  “Chances are, he was just going faster than he wants us to believe.”

  Zachary nodded.

  Campbell sat up and leaned forward over his desk, his body language indicating that the interview was over and he had other work to do. “Good luck. Get us the information you’ve got, and we’ll see where the evidence leads us. How is Bridget doing, by the way?”

  Zachary swallowed and attempted a smile. “She’s recovered from the kidnapping, seems back to her usual self.” Which was to say, she still had no interest in getting back together with Zachary and hadn’t had much reason to call him since the Salter case was closed. While Zachary might occasionally run into her around town, he couldn’t make direct contact with her or she might just call up Joshua Campbell or one of her other friends in the police department and take out a restraining order against Zachary.

  “Good. It was too bad things didn’t work out between the two of you. Cancer is a bitch. I think the two of you might have had a chance if that hadn’t thrown a wrench into the works.”

  Little did Campbell know that things were already bad between them before the cancer diagnosis. It had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was nice to think that they might have worked things out without the cancer, but seeing the relationship Bridget had with Gordon Drake, Zachary had to face the fact that he could never have been the kind of spouse that Gordon was. Women like Ashley might say that they liked sensitive men who weren’t afraid to cry or wear their hearts on their sleeves, but in his experience, they just liked the idea of that kind of man. Bridget’s declarations of love had quickly faded as she came to realize just how broken Zachary really was. That he had real problems that weren’t just going to be healed by their relationship or her no-nonsense advice.

  “Zachary.”

  Zachary tried to force himself back to the present. He had picked up the cup of coffee as he prepared to leave. He put it up to his lips, letting the bitterness of it shock his senses and help to ground him. He didn’t want to get swallowed up in the past. Not even his past with Bridget, where the memories started out sweet but quickly descended into something even more bitter than the stale coffee.

  “Sorry,” he told Campbell, pushing himself to his feet. “I’ll be getting on my way.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to reopen old wounds. I thought you were over it…”

  Zachary tried to say that he didn’t think he’d ever be over Bridget. But he couldn’t get the words out. He just nodded and fled as quickly as he could.

  Kenzie had suggested that Zachary could conquer his own depression by helping someone else. Zachary decided to put it to the test. Maybe he could head off the rapidly descending darkness by making a difference in some one else’s life. After checking with Vera Salter, Zachary sent an instant message to her grandson Rhys, asking whether he woul
d like to go out for a burger.

  Following his usual protocol of answering with a gif rather than words, Rhys sent back a picture of a chihuahua nodding eagerly, the bold text “yes!!!” superimposed on top of the picture. Zachary chuckled. That seemed clear enough. He sent back the details and confirmed that Vera had already approved the activity. Rhys returned a thumbs-up, and they were on.

  He was at the school waiting when classes let out for the day. He watched the waves of teens leaving the school, some singly and some in groups, feeling that same knot of dread in his stomach that he used to feel whenever he was at school or thinking about being at school. It was hard to fathom that even after so many years, just watching students at school brought back that same anxiety. He was glad not to be a teenager anymore. Glad to be on his own and independent and no longer to have to follow all of the rules of a foster home, school, or other facility. There were still societal rules, but he could live his own life without fear of being beaten, humiliated, or locked up.

  His eyes were drawn to a thin black boy with a familiar loping stride, and reached over to unlock the door for Rhys.

  Rhys climbed in, giving him a nod and a shy sort of smile.

  “Hey, Rhys!” Zachary greeted, holding out his fist for Rhys to bump. Rhys was quick to do so, his smile broadening to show a few teeth. He put on his seatbelt as Zachary backed out of the parking space he had been occupying.

  “Find something on the radio if you like,” Zachary suggested, not wanting Rhys to feel like he was going to have to hold a conversation while they drove. Rhys ran through Zachary’s presets quickly, then scanned for something more acceptable. Zachary let the pounding beat of the station Rhys picked fill him up and block out any worries he had about meeting with Rhys or about the approaching Christmas season. Maybe he should listen to music more often. It wasn’t something he usually thought of when he was having a bad turn.

  The burger joint was conveniently close to the school, prime real estate for a place that targeted kids as its customer base. It wasn’t until they got inside that Zachary realized it might not be the best place for them to meet. Rhys’s friends and peers would be there. Would they think it was odd that he was meeting with an older white guy for dinner? Would he be teased and bullied for it?