Kill Switch

by Neal Baer

  Claire looked up at him. “You’re not giving up?” she asked.

  “Give up? This case was cold for more than two decades until you came along, and in just a couple of days we found the perp. Now we’ve just got to work backward.”

  He shot a glance toward Doug. “Are you still game to help us out?”

  Doug, for his part, was undeterred, as if seeing the monster his father had become gave him new strength of conviction. “In any way I can,” he replied.

  “Okay, then,” said Nick, reenergized. “We need to go back to when you were a kid, to see what you remember.”

  “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

  Nick, Hart, and Doug pulled out the other metal chairs, and they sat around one of the small metal tables, Nick and Hart facing Doug and Claire.

  “The day after the thunderstorm, back in eighty-nine,” Nick began. “Your dad said he was out celebrating with the guys. Any idea where he might’ve gone?”

  Doug put his palm to his forehead and thought for a moment, trying to picture the past. “Actually, I remember thinking how weird it was for him to say that. I don’t recall my father having a lot of friends.”

  “Did you ever meet any of the people he worked with at the chemical company here in town?” asked Hart.

  “Sure,” Doug answered, “but if you asked me their names, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. The company still exists, though. We could probably get some names through their human resources department.”

  “Normally that’s exactly what we’d do,” Nick offered. “But if someone leaks it to the press, the Canadian authorities will know we conned them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Claire interjected. “Let’s take this step by step.” She looked at Doug. “The day of the thunderstorm. You told us what happened when you got home from camp. But was your father there before you left the house that morning?”

  Doug bit his bottom lip, thinking. “Yeah, he was. I’m pretty sure he woke me up like usual and made me breakfast.”

  “And he came to my house in the middle of the afternoon,” Claire recalled. “The reason he kidnapped Amy that day is beginning to make sense.”

  Nick caught on. “Because he was fired from his job,” he offered.

  “Why would that push him to do something so horrible?” asked Doug.

  “The same reason people drink, smoke, use drugs, or act promiscuously. Your father was under enormous stress and had always been attracted to young girls. He was probably able to fight the urge, but losing his job put him into a tailspin. He needed a fix to make himself feel better.”

  “And that fix was you,” Doug concluded, shaking his head at the horror of it all. “So, what? Did he just drive around until he saw two girls your age?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Claire. She thought for moment, reviewing her encounter with Lewis. “You were there when I called your father ‘Mr. Winslow.’ Did you see how he responded?”

  “Oh my God,” exclaimed Doug. “He called you ‘Claire.’ He said it as if he remembered you. But how did he know who you were back then?”

  “He stalked you,” Nick said to Claire. “He saw you somewhere, followed you home, and then waited for his chance.”

  “But where?” Claire asked, trying to remember if she’d seen Lewis before that July day in her front yard. She looked at Doug. “You didn’t live in the city proper, did you?”

  “Brighton,” said Doug, referring to the affluent suburb adjacent to the southeast part of Rochester. “Off Elmwood, right near Twelve Corners.”

  “And you grew up off Park Avenue,” added Hart, looking up at Claire, “which is only a couple miles away at most. There’s a hundred places you and Lewis could’ve crossed paths. You were eight years old, and unless you had eyes in the back of your head, this guy could’ve been staring you down and you’d never have known it.”

  Claire knew Hart had a point. Still, she wasn’t about to give up. She turned to Doug. “Were there any special places your father liked to take you back then?”

  “Jeez,” Doug replied, “we used to go to parks, the zoo, beaches. Anywhere around here you’d go to have fun as a kid is where we went.”

  “Claire,” Nick said, “I know where you’re going with this. But we’ve got to narrow it down. We can’t dig up all of Rochester.”

  Claire flashed Nick a look. “Let me ask you this,” she said to Doug. “After your father went to prison, when you left Pickering and moved to Maine. What happened to all of his belongings?”

  “I thought about that,” Doug said. “But the lawyers took care of selling the house and packing up. Mom instructed them to get rid of everything that belonged to my father. She never wanted to see any of it ever again. . . .”

  He stopped, as if he remembered something.

  “What is it?” Claire asked hopefully.

  Doug looked at her. “I almost forgot. I have the transcripts of my father’s court proceedings. From before he went to prison.”

  “Your mother kept those?” Hart asked incredulously.

  “No,” Doug answered. “I requested them from the Canadians about ten years ago. I thought I wanted to read about what happened. But after they arrived at my house, I could barely bring myself to look at them. I only got through a few pages before I put them in the basement.”

  “And you’re sure they’re still there?” asked Nick.

  “Yes,” Doug replied. “I haven’t touched them since.”

  “Can we see them?” asked Claire, standing up.

  “Of course,” offered Doug. “Any time you want.”

  “Now,” Claire said.

  “Please excuse the house,” Doug apologized as he unlocked the front door of his nondescript, single-story white ranch house. “I haven’t exactly had time to clean up.”

  It had been a short drive from downtown Rochester to Doug’s home, just east of the city in the quiet suburb of Penfield. As Claire entered with Nick and Hart behind her, she realized Doug’s idea of a mess was apparently an empty bag from a local restaurant on the kitchen counter and two dishes in the sink. To her, the place appeared perfectly neat.

  And nearly barren. A few random prints hung on the walls. An old blue sofa and love seat occupied the living room, in front of a huge RCA console television that outdated both Claire and Doug. She couldn’t help but think that he’d been so busy trying to outrun his past he barely built a present, let alone a future. She pegged him as a guy who went to work every day, came home, and fell asleep watching that ancient TV.

  He wasn’t kidding when he said he didn’t have much of a life, Claire thought. He’s been hiding from his past—like me.

  “Can I get you guys anything to eat or drink?” Doug offered, though Claire could hardly imagine there was anything in the refrigerator.

  Hart and Nick both shook their heads in the negative. “Why don’t we get the transcripts and then we’ll grab a bite,” Claire suggested.

  Doug opened the door to the basement. “I can bring everything up,” he said, “because it’s a little messy down there.”

  “Nah,” Nick replied, “we’ll give you a hand.”

  “Enter at your own risk,” Doug said, flipping on a light switch and heading down the wooden stairs.

  As Claire followed him, it became apparent that this time Doug wasn’t exaggerating. The unfinished room was filled with file boxes, covered furniture, and who knew what else under tarps and old blankets.

  Everything’s neat on the surface, but behind closed doors and inside drawers, it’s all a mess. The place reminded her of Tammy Sorenson’s apartment—sunny and calm on the outside covering up a storm on the inside.

  Doug seemed to sense what they were thinking. “Bought the place a few years ago because I needed a tax deduction,” he said. “Organized everything but never really had a chance to go through all the boxes.”

  Indeed, Claire could see that every carton was clearly labeled with its contents.

  “You sure you know where to look?�
� Hart asked dubiously.

  Doug answered by pulling two aging bankers’ boxes off the top of a pile. “Right here,” he answered, handing one each to Hart and Nick.

  “This is all of it?” Nick asked.

  “The whole court proceeding lasted only two days,” Doug answered. “From the little I read, my father pleaded insanity. Most of the testimony is the prosecution’s shrink arguing that Dad might’ve been a sicko, but he knew what he did to that girl was wrong.”

  Hart headed for the stairs. “Let’s get this stuff downtown—”

  “Hold on,” Nick interrupted. “Where’s Claire?”

  “Over here,” said Claire from across the room, with a shakiness that prompted Hart and Nick to put their boxes down and hurry in the direction of her voice.

  Doug reached her first, in a corner of the basement barely visible from where they found the boxes. “What is it?” Doug asked. Even in the shadows he could see that her face was ashen.

  Claire pointed, her hand shaking. “Where did you get that?” she asked in a breaking voice.

  Nick and Hart joined them just as Doug began to explain. “It’s a kite. From when I was a kid.”

  The two detectives took in the kite. It looked like one of those long Chinese-dragon kites, though this one was red and blue with squiggly lines painted across like fish scales. It flared out to display a single, huge bloodshot eye atop a large mouth open in a wicked smile with pointy, threatening teeth, flanked by short wings. Or fins.

  Claire looked like she was scared to death.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “I don’t know. I think my father got it for me.”

  “Are you okay?” Nick asked her.

  But all Claire could hear was the sound of her own voice as a little girl.

  “Daddy, I don’t like that monster.”

  “It’s okay, sweetie. It won’t hurt you. It’s not real.”

  She looked up. The eye hung over her against the clear blue sky, an evil force, watching her every move.

  “I can pull it down if you want,” came another voice—from a man behind her.

  Little Claire turned around and looked up. The man was smiling, but just from the corner of his mouth.

  Oh, God.

  “You’re very pretty, you know,” the man said as he reeled in the scary kite.

  She backed away as the eye came closer and closer. Until the man grabbed the kite and folded it up.

  “I promise, it will never hurt you,” the man said.

  “I’m sorry,” said Claire’s father. “I don’t know what got into her.”

  “Please don’t worry,” the man replied. “I don’t want to scare your daughter. Have a nice day.”

  But Little Claire couldn’t help but think there was something about the man she didn’t like.

  And then the man turned back to her and flashed that same, strange smile again. Little Claire turned away. And she saw the reservoir right across the road—

  The reservoir.

  Then it hit Claire. She looked right at Doug.

  “You said your father worked for the water company after PhotoChem fired him?” she asked, her voice unsteady.

  “Yes,” Doug answered. “Why?”

  “Do you know if he worked at their main office?” Claire asked.

  “You mean, over by Cobbs Hill? Yeah, I think so,” Doug said. “I remember Mom dropping me off there that summer, after camp was over. Dad and I would go up by the reservoir and fly this . . . ,” he said, pointing to the kite as his voice trailed off.

  Nick put his hand on her shoulder. “What is it, Claire? What do you remember?”

  “My father took me up there too,” she said, looking only at the kite. “That’s where I saw this. That’s where I saw him.”

  “Lewis?”

  She turned to Doug. “Did he take you up there a lot?” she asked, almost afraid to hear the answer. “To the top of the hill?”

  “Not just there,” answered Doug, “but all over the park. We’d go for picnics next to Lake Riley, hike through Washington Grove to the old water towers. He loved that place. . . .”

  He stopped, as if he realized what he was saying. What it meant.

  Claire clamped her hand onto a nearby box, steadying herself.

  “I think I know where he buried Amy.”

  Just west of the Monroe County Water Authority’s headquarters in Cobbs Hill Park, accessible only through the Authority’s parking lot and a dirt road behind the main building, is a large clearing surrounded on three sides by trees. In late August, when the foliage is at its thickest, the clearing is invisible from anywhere but that dirt road leading in.

  It was here, the following morning, that Claire sat beside Doug Lewis in the backseat of Al Hart’s unmarked Crown Victoria, watching dozens of police cars, trucks, and buses loaded with cops pour in one by one. The sun was just coming up, but they’d arrived hours earlier, at three in the morning, before the city—and especially the media—woke up to witness one of the area’s busiest parks being overrun by a small army of police.

  “You think they can pull it off?” Doug asked Claire.

  Claire shrugged, though she was awed by what was unfolding before her, mostly because it was her doing. As soon as daylight broke, dozens of cops, some from as far west as Buffalo and as far east as Syracuse, would begin a grid search of the entire park—all hundred and ten acres of it—to find the remains of her friend Amy Danforth. For the next several hours, Claire sat in the sedan, staring out into the darkness, remembering fragments of time spent with Amy. Jumping rope. Hugging each other and laughing wildly at some joke she could no longer remember. Coloring together. Amy’s face as Lewis’s car pulled away . . .

  She stirred. The sun was just peeking over the horizon. I must’ve dozed off, she thought as she sat up, just in time to see Hart and Nick crossing over to the car. Hart opened Claire’s door. “It’s time,” he said.

  As she and Doug exited the sedan, a flurry of activity was under way. Platoons of cops were forming as Captain Killian and his boss, the commander of Rochester detectives, assigned each platoon to comb a section of the park.

  “We’re searching the wooded areas only,” Hart told them, turning to Doug. “Your father may have known this place inside and out, but I’m guessing he wasn’t so arrogant that he’d bury a body in the open areas around the reservoir or on one of the softball fields.”

  His statement made Claire and Nick think of another killer—Todd Quimby—who had been arrogant enough to drop a body on a softball field. That was only weeks ago, Claire mused, but it seems like years.

  “Are they checking around the water tanks?” Claire asked.

  Hart chuckled. “Believe it or not, they’ve become a big attraction.”

  “But they were abandoned years ago,” she remembered.

  “Not by the graffiti artists,” Hart explained, “and the photographers who shoot their work. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

  He led them south through the woods. Claire enjoyed the walk. The air was still cool, before the sun would claim the day. The smell of the dewy grass took her back to those wonderful days as a child hiking with her parents. As they emerged from the trees, the two sky-blue water tanks loomed ahead, and she saw Hart had been serious. They were covered in graffiti.

  “People come up here to see this?” Claire asked Hart.

  “And to add to the mess,” Hart answered, shaking his head. “The graffiti artists gather up here admiring one anothers’ work. And nobody stops them. State-sponsored vandalism, I call it.”

  “Nothing a couple hundred gallons of paint won’t cure,” Nick observed, joining them.

  “Which’ll be paid for by your tax dollars and mine,” Hart added.

  Claire had walked away from the men by then, circling the larger of the two tanks. Most of the graffiti was of the usual unimaginative variety, what looked like gang tags and messages. I’m surprised the police don’t crack down on that, she thought.

&nb
sp; But then she came around to a side closer to the tree line, where she saw some work that surprised her. Bart Simpson on a skateboard. A more colorful work in red and orange hues that looked like a spider that had morphed into a symbol of some kind. An Eye of Providence in a pyramid, resembling the one on the back of the dollar bill. Beside it, a badly drawn Eye of Horus, which Claire knew was the Egyptian symbol of protection.

  And then she stopped short. She backtracked several steps to the Eye of Providence, thinking she’d seen something that bothered her. Sure enough, she was right. Something about it was amiss.

  It was bloodshot.

  Just like the eye on the kite in Doug’s house. The one Lewis had flown so many years ago.

  Claire took a closer look. The Eye of Providence, along with the Eye of Horus, were more faded than the other drawings on the tank, as if they had been painted years before the other graffiti.

  Was it possible? Was he that arrogant?

  Excited and terrified, Claire looked at the ground in front of the tank. The grass was green, the earth flat. Even if she’d found the spot where Lewis had buried Amy’s body more than two decades ago, any evidence of a hole would have long since been erased by the elements.

  And then her eyes caught the tree line a few yards away. Walking in a straight line from the all-seeing pyramid, she approached the grove, walked a few feet in, and looked back.

  The eye was staring directly at her.

  The snap of a twig made her wheel around. Nick pushed a tree branch out of his way and was crossing toward her.

  “You’ve got to stop disappearing like that,” he said as he approached. “What are you doing now?”

  “Take a look,” she said as Nick joined her. She pointed to the Eye of Providence.

  Nick stared. Then he stared at her, getting it.

  “It can’t be that easy,” he said.

  Just then, Doug and Hart came into view, rounding the larger tower. “Where are you guys?” Hart shouted.

  “Over here,” Nick yelled back, emerging from the trees. “Think we may have something.” He crossed toward them. “Take a look at the art,” he said, gesturing to the graffiti-covered tower. “Anything up there look familiar?”