Intervention

by Terri Blackstock

  Why weren’t the networks reporting on the beautiful teenager who’d gone missing, instead of the drug addict who may have committed murder?

  Maybe she did need to talk to the media, to make them understand the truth: that Emily was an innocent bystander, that she was fragile and frightened, and that she could be in the hands of a killer crazed enough to murder a woman in a public place.

  “Got it up, Mom. Here’s her MySpace page.”

  Barbara went to sit beside him in front of the laptop. Snapshots of Emily wearing too little clothing and looking like someone on a three-day drunk filled the screen. “This is public? For anyone to see?”

  “It is now. But I can set it to Private if you want.”

  “What would that do?”

  “It would keep FOX and CNN from accessing it, if they haven’t already. Only her friends could read her blogs then.”

  Barbara studied the statistics on the page. “She has four hundred thirty-two friends.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem.”

  “Well, do it anyway.”

  “Okay, give me a minute, and pray I’ve got her latest password.”

  Barbara frowned. “How do you know her password?”

  “She wrote it in the back cover of her journal.”

  Barbara got the journal and looked at it. Just as he said, it was right there.

  “It worked,” he said. “Great.” He was quiet as he banged on the keyboard for a few minutes. “Love this laptop. Please, can I have it?”

  “No, just do what you have to do.”

  “Okay,” he said after a moment. “It’s done. Now they’ll have to pay off one of her friends to get on there.”

  “But can’t we unfriend her friends?”

  “Maybe, if you want me to do that. I could even dump her whole account. If I cancel it, though, all her messages will disappear, and we won’t find any clues she might have left.”

  “What about Facebook?”

  “That’s always set to private. See, Mom, only friends you’ve accepted can access it, so the press can’t get into it right away. But most of the time, people randomly accept friends of friends, so even on Facebook there could be lots of people you don’t know viewing your pages.”

  She sighed. “All right, let’s see if Trish has a MySpace page.”

  He typed in Trish’s name. Up came her page, full of comments from grieving friends who’d heard about her death.

  “How do I get to her blog posts?”

  Lance showed her. Barbara started to read.

  “I’m going to take a shower while you read, Mom, in case we wind up on national television. You got a razor?”

  She shot him a look. “You don’t shave.”

  He rubbed his jaw, offended. “Sometimes I do. I want to look nice for the camera so they’ll know we’re not total losers.”

  “Just go shower.”

  He picked up his duffel bag and took it into the bathroom with him. “Try not to mess anything up on the laptop.”

  Barbara ignored him and quickly scanned Trish’s blogs. There wasn’t time to read every word, but they gave her a feel for the dead woman’s life. Some spoke of her past addictions, and the fact that, even though she wasn’t using now, her family still accused her of addictive behaviors.

  She studied the comments from friends before her murder, searching for anyone who displayed mental illness or anger.

  When there were no red flags on Trish’s pages, she went back to Emily’s blogs. Her words cut like knives.

  I hated my mother when my father died. She got over it so quickly. The Saturday morning after we buried him she made pancakes. She hosted people in our house for days afterward. It was like Christmas. People came and went, laughing and talking, like we cared that their daughters were getting married and their sons had graduated. They brought casseroles that made me want to puke, and Mom gushed in gratitude, inviting them to come and share them with us.

  Didn’t she care that Dad was gone? I heard her telling people she was sad for herself and us, but thrilled for him. That he was out of pain and romping around heaven somewhere.

  But I didn’t even believe that anymore. I’d prayed for him to get well and he didn’t, so I figured if there wasn’t a healing, there wasn’t a heaven, either. That heaven was just something we told ourselves about so we’d feel better. Mom was in the worst denial of all. I wondered, then, if she even loved my dad. If she even cared that he was dead.

  Barbara stopped reading and looked at the ceiling, horrified at her daughter’s perception of the whole thing.

  Those days following John’s death were a blur of suffering, worse even than the days preceding his death, when she’d gone days without sleep as she tried to help him with his pain, while he valiantly fought the disease eating away at him.

  In the aftermath, she’d felt such a void. If her purpose before was to keep John from suffering, what was it now? Her head told her that her children needed her, that she had to go on and not fold into herself. Emily was fourteen, and Lance was only ten. She didn’t have the luxury of grief.

  So she saved her tears and anguish for those long, lonely nights in the bed he’d died in. Then when morning came, she forced herself up and went through the motions of living. She tried to keep her children distracted and happy … tried to be cheerful and calm.

  She remembered the pancake morning. She’d cried so hard the night before that she had to go into her closet and cover her face with a pillow, so her children wouldn’t hear. She hadn’t slept a wink, and had showered at dawn in the hope of cleaning up her face and looking like a person who wasn’t battered and abused by the anguish of life and death. She’d used ice packs to battle the swelling in her eyes.

  She had washed a load of clothes before her children got up, because that was what mothers did, and she dressed in freshly ironed jeans and a crisp white blouse, determined that her children would have normalcy that day. After pancakes, she took them swimming at the neighborhood pool. Lance splashed around with his friend while she sat in a chair, fully dressed, staring into space. Emily had only gone along because Barbara insisted, but her daughter glued herself to a book.

  All that time, Emily was thinking how cold and heartless Barbara was?

  Lance came out of the shower, steam bursting into the room. Quickly, Barbara wiped her face. But he saw her tears. “You okay, Mom?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “She’s gonna be okay. We’ll find her.”

  “I know.”

  He stared at her a few seconds longer. “Find out anything by reading her blog?”

  “Not really.” But that was a lie. She’d found out plenty about what her daughter thought of her, and the mistakes she’d made. She would, no doubt, learn of many more before their nightmare was over.

  thirteen

  Kent sat at his desk rubbing his eyes, wishing he’d taken an hour or two to sleep. But the case had kept him working all night. He flipped through the notes he’d already taken, compared them to the Medical Examiner’s notes. Trish had been injected just where he’d suspected — in her back, where he’d seen the blood spot.

  His phone rang, and he picked it up. “Harlan.”

  “Kent, Rick Graves.”

  Kent sighed, glad the toxicologist had gotten back to him so quickly. “Rick, you know what was in the syringe yet?”

  “It was Tubarine.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A paralytic drug used in surgery to stop convulsions.”

  Kent frowned. “How did that kill her?”

  “It would have paralyzed her to the point that she couldn’t breathe. She would have asphyxiated. Interesting drug, that one. Pharmaceutical companies get it from a few plants in South America, used to make arrow poison.”

  “Arrow poison? How would an eighteen-year-old girl get her hands on that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she had a friend in the medical profession, who got it from a hospital.”

  He th
ought that over for a minute. “So let me get this straight. The killer would have knocked her out with the chloroform, so she wouldn’t struggle. Then injected her with the paralytic.”

  “Looks like it. They didn’t even need a vein. It could be done pretty quickly.”

  When Kent hung up, he stared at his notes again. He could see a teenaged drug addict injecting the woman with heroin or something, but Tubarine? It wasn’t like it was sold on the streets. And where would she have gotten chloroform? Surely she hadn’t gotten through security with that. There was a strict limit on liquids.

  He opened his laptop and found the security video he’d watched at least a hundred times. He played it again, checking out Emily’s purse, hanging on her shoulder. It wasn’t very big, and as she stood smoking outside the car, she didn’t dig into it at all. Her hands were empty after she dropped the cigarette.

  Besides that, she was only in the car for a couple of seconds. There hadn’t been time for her to pour chloroform into a rag, knock Trish out with it, then inject her. Even if she’d had it all in her hands before she got into the car — which she hadn’t — it seemed like too much to do that quickly.

  And the girl didn’t have to kill to escape going to treatment. She could have walked away at any point, and Trish couldn’t have stopped her.

  He played the video in slow motion during the moments that the murder must have occurred, and focused on other areas of the car. He could see nothing through the windows, so he watched the other side of the Lexus — the side hidden from the cameras — trying to see if there was a reflection in the car next to them, something that showed what was going on in the Lexus.

  Emily got out then and ran. He slowed it even more, squinting, watching for some sign that the woman inside was fighting for her life, or that there was someone else there with her.

  Then he saw it — something moving on Trish’s side of the car. Was it the back door opening? He zoomed in as much as he could, circled that area, then blew it up even more.

  “Hey, Kent, I just heard back — ”

  Kent cut Andy off as he came up behind him. “Look at this,” he said. “This is the area over Trish Massey’s back door. Is the door opening?”

  Andy bent down and looked at it. “It’s too grainy, but I don’t think so.”

  Something white came into view. “What’s that?” Kent asked, pointing.

  Andy took over the laptop and blew that up even more. “I don’t know. Maybe a child was walking by or something. Could be a baseball cap.”

  “Or a hand opening that back door.” Kent used every tool he had to bring it into clearer view, but it was still blurred, grainy. He wasn’t going to get the picture any clearer. He’d need the video lab to enhance it.

  He picked up the phone, called the video tech he trusted the most. “Jack, I need you to enhance the clip I’m sending over. Tell me if somebody is getting out of the backseat on the driver’s side, or what it is we’re seeing there. I’ll come over in a little while and see what you’ve come up with. Call me if you find anything conclusive.”

  Kent hung up and looked at his partner. “If that’s someone getting out of the car … ”

  “It’s not,” Andy said. “I just got Trish Massey’s credit card company to fax me her activity. Looks like our little runaway used Trish’s Visa card right after she ran off last night.” Andy handed him the credit card report.

  Kent checked the times on yesterday’s purchases, saw the one that must have happened after the murder. “Capital Cab Company.”

  “I just got off the phone with them, and they say the passenger caught the cab at the airport. I was able to talk to the driver, and he says it was a couple — man and woman. The girl was a blonde.”

  Kent stood up. “So where did he take them?”

  “To the Day-Nite Motel. Right in the middle of crack town.”

  He read the report again. The cab company was the last purchase made, and it was definitely after the time of death. “So how did Emily wind up in a cab after she got into the black Infiniti?”

  “Got me. Maybe she had the Infiniti drop her off at the taxi line.”

  “So who was with her in the cab?” Kent asked. “Her mother says it was just her and the interventionist.”

  “Maybe she met somebody on the plane.”

  Kent frowned and sorted through the facts, wishing they made sense. “I guess the Infiniti driver could have parked and gone in the cab with her. If he was in cahoots with her, maybe he realized his car could have been seen.” He got his coat. “I’ll get somebody to look for that car. It could be still at the airport. And I’ll have security pull the tape for the cameras around the taxi line. Maybe we can see her getting in. But first, this motel is a lead we need to check out. Let’s go. Maybe they’re still there.”

  fourteen

  Barbara left Lance in the room and took the laptop down to the business center to print out Emily’s and Trish’s blogs. It took much more time than she could afford, but it was necessary. She didn’t want to be glued to the computer all day, when she could be looking for Emily.

  Too many things needed to be done, and she didn’t know where to begin.

  How had this happened? How had her precious daughter gone from being a debutante-in-training to a drug addict? How had she wound up on the run for a murder charge?

  As the blogs printed out, Barbara rubbed her face wearily. She had a crick in her neck, and pain down her spine urged her to lie down. It wasn’t unusual. She’d lived in a constant state of stress, going from one emergency to another, for the last few years. Though she’d read all the books on codependency and knew everything there was to know about tough love, her stomach still had a perpetual acidic knot and her temples always ached.

  Doctors told her she needed to find a way to lower the stress in her life. She’d paid for that advice, while her symptoms persisted. One physician suggested she had a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. “How can it be post when I’m still in it?” she’d asked him.

  She was a soldier on the front lines of the drug war. And her daughter had been captured by an enemy without a face. If she had to walk into oncoming bullets, she would. She’d go anywhere … do anything.

  Her mind rolled to Ephesians 6, where Paul the Apostle spoke of wearing the shield of faith, to “extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.” If that wasn’t written for her, she didn’t know what was. The arrows were deadly and aimed right at her forehead, where her thoughts originated.

  How many times in the past few years had Barbara wanted to run away screaming? When Emily was high, she chattered nonstop and practically bounced off the walls, trailing a mess from room to room. Besides dealing with that, Barbara busied herself locking up jewelry and pharmaceuticals and financial records in her house. When Emily wasn’t home, Barbara spent her time searching for her car, drilling boyfriends, racing to Emily’s friends’ houses to drag her home. Barbara had grown way too familiar with bail bondsmen and their function, attorneys and judges and jail guards. The whole ordeal was a day-to-day drain, one that seemed to have no end.

  She was still laboring to solve Emily’s problems. If things didn’t change, there would come a time when Barbara would have to lock down her own maternal emotions and turn her back on her daughter.

  But today wasn’t that day. Today she believed this emergency wasn’t Emily’s fault, that this crime had been done to her and not by her.

  She pulled the blogs out of the printer and closed her laptop. Fatigue was catching up with her. She wondered if Emily had slept …

  Emily was alive, wasn’t she? Wouldn’t Barbara feel it in her burning gut if she weren’t? Wasn’t that something a mother would know?

  Please, God. You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?

  She rode the elevator up to her floor, and as she stepped off, she saw that her door was ajar. Hadn’t she told Lance to keep it locked?

  She broke into a trot and burst through the door. “Lance?”

 
; “In here, Mom.”

  Lance was sitting on his unmade bed. A man sat across from him in the chair. He’d made himself comfortable.

  “Mom, this is Richard Gray. He’s a reporter.”

  She caught her breath and opened her mouth to yell at her son, but for a moment nothing came out. Finally, words bellowed forth. “I told you to lock the door, Lance! You can’t let strangers into the room!” She turned to the reporter. “What’s the matter with you, taking advantage of a fourteen-year-old kid?”

  Richard What’s-His-Name got to his feet. “Mrs. Covington, I’m sorry to surprise you. Lance invited me in to wait for you — ”

  Heat pounded in her face. “I don’t have anything to say to you. Get out before I call the police!” She went to the phone, snatched it up.

  “Are you sure? Because if you came on my network and made an appeal for Emily, chances are that public opinion would sway in her favor and she’d be found.”

  “Public opinion? I don’t care about public opinion! My daughter is in trouble.”

  “Then don’t you think going on television would be a great way to help her?”

  Tears came to her eyes. She hated herself for crying in front of this pushy man. How dare he? “Please leave.”

  “Don’t you even want to give us a statement?”

  “Get out, I said!”

  Lance sprang up. “Mom, we need the publicity. It would help a lot.”

  She pointed to Lance and ground her teeth. “You! Quiet!”

  “But someone might have seen her. Someone might know where she is! This guy can help us get the word out. That’s a whole heck of a lot better than pinning up a bunch of posters.”

  The reporter dared to speak again. “I can see you’re a private person. But this is a public matter, ma’am. It’s already on the news, whether you like it or not.”

  “Mom, they think she’s a killer. If you could go on and tell them she’s not, that she’s just some messed-up kid, maybe people would try harder to find her.”

  She couldn’t think. She turned away, sliding her fingers through the roots of her hair. Her empty suitcase sat against the wall. She kicked it, and it toppled onto the floor.