He Was Not There

by P. D. Workman

  “What else were we going to do? It wasn’t like we had electronics or the latest toys. We had ourselves, whatever we could find outside. Rocks, sticks, stuff we scavenged from other people’s garbage. We had to do something.”

  “It was really different raising my children. They expected to have all of the things that their friends did. To be able to do all of the same things. I was always trying to get them involved in imaginary games, role playing, stuff like that, and they just wanted to watch TV or play video games. We never had that choice. We had to use our imaginations.”

  Zachary nodded his agreement. Tyrrell gave a bit of a nod, but he wouldn’t remember much. He had only been five or six when they had been separated. He wouldn’t have much memory of those lean times and how much they had lacked that other kids had. Not having the latest and greatest toys had not been their worry. They had been more concerned with getting enough to eat, and avoiding the back of one parent’s hand or the other’s. Or worse.

  “So they moved you out how long after we were separated?” Zachary asked. “Was it right away? They never gave me an update on how either one of you was doing. I used to ask Mrs. Pratt, but she would just give me the brush-off, like she didn’t even know. I knew she knew. She just didn’t want to tell me.”

  “I don’t know how long we were together. Maybe a few months or a year. Then they decided I needed to go somewhere else.”

  “Did you get moved a lot?”

  “No, not too much. I was mostly with one family, the Astors. They weren’t too bad.”

  Zachary nodded slowly. It was good if she’d managed to stay in one place. Not like him, jumping from one family to another so quickly that sometimes he couldn’t remember where to go home after school. And institutions and group homes in between, when his behavior or anxiety was too much for a family to handle.

  “I was there until I was sixteen, almost seventeen,” Heather offered. “Then… mostly groups homes and shelters until I aged out. I figured I’d better get myself straightened out and either get a husband or a job, or I wasn’t going to be able to last on the streets.”

  “Yeah.” Zachary too had been driven to find a way to support himself right away. Mr. Peterson—Lorne—was the one who had suggested putting his photography skills to use in a way that would bring in some money. Art obviously didn’t make anything, but private investigator work had brought in enough to pay the rent most of the time. “So what did you get into?”

  “Into?” she repeated vaguely. “Oh… I didn’t ever really find a job that would make me anything. I was in and out of a few relationships before I found Grant. Since then… he’s a good supporter. I didn’t have to work when the kids were little. Then once they were gone… he said there wasn’t any reason for me to be rushing out to find a job just because they were old enough to look after themselves. So… I didn’t. I just stayed at home. Kept house. Kept myself busy.”

  “Yeah? Good for you. I bet you were a really good mom. You were so good with us when we were kids.”

  “I don’t think I was too bad at it. But… I don’t think I ever really excelled at anything, including being a mother.” She shook her head and made a face, as if he’d tried to feed her something bitter. “I didn’t come here to talk about small-talk and get caught up on each other’s lives.”

  Her words were clipped and abrupt. Zachary blinked at her. He thought that he’d been putting her at ease so that she would be able to share whatever it was she had come to him about. If it wasn’t about the family and reuniting, then what was it?

  Heather opened her mouth, but she seemed uncertain of herself, no longer able to speak. She looked at Tyrrell as if he might help her.

  Tyrrell hesitated for a moment before venturing, “Heather saw reports of what happened with Teddy Archuro.”

  So had everyone else in the country. Even on the international stage. Teddy Archuro had been big news. A serial killer who, for so many years, had flown under the police radar, primarily because the men that he used and killed were illegal immigrants whose status as missing persons was never reported to the police department. No missing persons meant no investigation, and he was able to keep torturing and killing men until Zachary had investigated the missing Jose Flores. Then everything had changed.

  “Uh-huh,” Zachary waited for Tyrrell to finish the thought and explain why Heather wanted to contact him after the announcement of his involvement with the capture of serial killer Teddy Archuro.

  Tyrrell looked at Heather to see if she would explain it to Zachary, but she said nothing, chewing on the inside of her lip.

  “Heather wants to know if you would investigate an old case for her. Something that happened a long time ago.”

  Zachary looked at Heather. “What kind of case?”

  She stared down at her coffee. Zachary again regretted that he hadn’t gotten one for himself as soon as he walked into the coffee shop, but he seemed to have missed the opportunity. He waited, not pressing Heather to answer. She would get to it faster if he waited than if he tried to force her. He’d learned at least that much from his investigations and interrogations as a private detective. The hard-hitting style of the noir private eye didn’t work. At least, not for him.

  “It happened a long time ago,” she said. “I don’t know whether there is anything you can even do now. Cold cases are… I know a lot of them never get solved.”

  “Some of them do get solved,” Zachary assured her. “Especially as new technologies come into existence. There are a lot of cases that have been solved recently solely on forensic evidence where the technology to use it just wasn’t there ten or twenty years ago, but now they can go back and test the materials that they already have.”

  Heather nodded. “I know… I think about that… whenever I see one of those cases…”

  “You never know until you try it. What kind of case was it?” Most of his high-profile cases had been murder. With Heather approaching him due to his appearance on the national news scene, he was anxious about whether it was another murder case. What kind of murder could Heather have been involved in years before?

  “I saw on the news, about that serial killer, how he would… abuse the men he kidnapped before he killed them.”

  “Yes,” Zachary agreed. He focused on the pulse pounding in his head. He didn’t want to go back there. He didn’t need to replay what had happened to him. He had been rescued, and everything that had happened between being kidnapped and being rescued was like it had happened to someone else. He didn’t need to integrate it as his own memory.

  “Zachary?”

  He didn’t even hear Heather or Tyrrell trying to call him back to earth. He just saw and heard and felt the things that had been done to him. He was in the grip of the memory, trying to pull away from what happened to his body. Trying to separate from it. He didn’t want to allow it to become part of his consciousness.

  “Zachary.” Tyrrell’s hand on his arm made Zachary jerk back instantly. He looked at Tyrrell in panic, then looked at Heather, rising an inch or two off of his seat, before he realized that he wasn’t in any danger and plopped back down.

  “Sorry.” He swallowed. He looked at Heather. “What happened?”

  “I… I was just telling you… about how… I didn’t know whether…” she looked back at Tyrrell for help. He didn’t offer anything, just looking from her to Zachary. “They said that he had captured you. They said it like it was just a few minutes. Was it… just a few minutes?”

  It might have been only a few minutes or it might have been hours. Zachary had no way to measure the time that had passed. Teddy had given Zachary drugs so that he could act without any resistance. Zachary had been so doped up, there had been no chance of escape from the sadist who worked him over, doing whatever his twisted little brain could come up with. And yet, he’d been conscious the whole time.

  “I don’t know,” he told Heather honestly. “It seemed like a long time.”

  Heather nodded, and he saw und
erstanding in her eyes. Not just a surface emotion, but something that told him that she too understood that disassociation and time distortion. As if she, too, had been through a similar experience. He looked at her, hesitating to ask.

  “What happened to you?”

  2

  She resisted, not answering his query. “That man. What did he do to you? Did he…?”

  Zachary looked at Tyrrell, self-conscious. Then back at Heather. “I don’t really want to talk about it, Heather. I don’t… I don’t even know you. My foster father wanted to know. My girlfriend wanted to know. But I can’t… I don’t want to talk about it to anyone.”

  She nodded. “Then he did, didn’t he? He hurt you and you couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

  He shrugged. She had read the news articles. She had read about the conditions of the bodies that they had discovered. She could read between the lines. She knew that he hadn’t just been held as a hostage, but that Teddy had centered his time and attention on Zachary. He had exercised the power he had over Zachary to take whatever pleasure he wanted.

  Heather looked away again, breaking eye contact. She swallowed and looked at the surface of her coffee.

  “I was raped when I was fourteen,” she said baldly. “They never figured out who it was, and I want you to find out. I want to know that he’s been punished and been stopped from doing it to anyone else.”

  “These guys… like the guy that held me. They don’t stop after one. If he assaulted you, you can bet that he assaulted other girls as well. It wasn’t the first time. They don’t stop unless they are behind bars.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she admitted, still looking down. “That’s why I want to put him there. If he’s not already. And to make sure that he’s not getting out again.”

  “Thirty years ago. It’s not going to be easy to find him, unless you have a really good memory or some evidence. If he was thirty or forty at the time he hurt you… then he’s sixty or seventy now. Hopefully, not a threat anymore.”

  Teddy had not been a young man. He was probably sixty. But he had still been strong and virile and able to do all kinds of unthinkable damage. He’d had plenty of experience and lots of time to experiment over the years. There was no way he would stop being a predator just because he was sixty or seventy. He would be one of the men who was always going to victimize people around him. He would always take on a new victim, as long as he had the ability.

  “No. I think… unless he’s lost his drive… he’s going to just keep going on and on as long as they let him.”

  Heather nodded.

  Zachary looked down at his hands, focusing on a freckle near the webbing of his first finger and thumb.

  “Would you help me?” Heather prompted.

  “I should,” Zachary said, which he knew wasn’t any kind of answer. “I don’t know… how much evidence was kept? What do you remember?”

  “Are you going to find him? Are you going to put him behind bars?” Heather pressed, not satisfied with his non-answer.

  “I don’t know. I’ll start out… doing what I can to help. But I don’t know how far I’ll be able to get with it. I don’t want to promise you results when…. there might not be anything I can do.”

  He took a glance in her direction. She was looking at him angrily, wanting to insist that he put her attacker behind bars. But he couldn’t promise anything on a case, especially one that he hadn’t been given any information on. She had undoubtedly been told before that no one could promise her anything, but that didn’t stop her from wanting it. From needing it so badly.

  Heather put her hands over her face and bowed, leaning her elbows on the table. “I need someone to do something about it.”

  “I’ll try. If you’ll give me the information you have now, I’ll do everything I possibly can… but I don’t know what to say. If there aren’t some pretty good leads, I can’t very well promise results. Did the police look into it at the time? Did you report it?”

  Heather nodded. “Mrs. Astor took me to the police and made an official report. I had to go to the hospital, get a rape kit.” She swallowed hard and tried to keep her composure. She looked at Tyrrell instead of Zachary, explaining it to him. “It was… almost worse than the rape itself. It took hours and hours… having to describe everything, them processing my clothes, my skin, every part of my body. Everything. You have no clue what it’s like. When they talk about it on TV, it’s like, they just do a cheek swab and clip your fingernails. But what it’s like… it’s like being assaulted all over again. It’s like they don’t even care what happened to you. They examine every inch of your body. Every… orifice.”

  Tyrrell nodded, his face pale. It was probably more than he wanted to know, and it was certainly more than Zachary wanted to hear, having been through a forensic exam himself much too recently. He stared away from Heather and Tyrrell, looking out one of the side windows of the coffee shop into the parking lot. He didn’t have to remember anything he didn’t want to. In his earlier years, he’d been able to just forget about what they did to him and go on with his life, since otherwise, there was no way he could carry on.

  There was silence from both Heather and Tyrrell. Eventually he turned back toward them. Heather looked at him for an instant, the raw pain in her own eyes. How could it be so raw after so many years? Zachary cleared his throat, wishing that he at least had a drink of water in front of him, and spoke as unemotionally as he could.

  “It’s good that they opened an investigation and did a kit,” he said brusquely. “That means that there is a cold case file somewhere with information in it that we can access, and evidence that we can have retested. You never know. With today’s technology, they may be able to get a hit.”

  Heather nodded.

  “I’ll need the details of what police department it was reported to and it will probably take me a few days at least to track down the file and get it pulled from storage. Pray there were no black mold infestations. It would be good if you could come in with me to talk to them, because they’ll be more likely to put the time and effort into it if they can put a face to the victim and understand that you’re still waiting for justice than if it’s just some annoying little PI demanding answers.”

  Heather gave a little smile at his words, but shook her head. “I don’t know if I can do that,” she said. “I’m not… very good with people and with talking about it. I haven’t talked about it since it happened. I just… never told anyone else about it.”

  “What about your husband?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t think… there wasn’t any point in having to relive it and get all emotional. It wasn’t like there was anything he could do. Knowing wouldn’t make either of us feel any better, so I just didn’t talk about it.”

  Zachary couldn’t imagine her having a relationship with someone for so long and not talking about the things that had affected her so intimately.

  Or maybe he could, since he had pushed his own memories away and had never discussed them with Bridget. But she would have been overwhelmed if he had told her everything that had ever happened to him. She was overwhelmed enough by just dealing with him on a daily basis.

  For something to do, Zachary pulled out his notepad and flipped through it to find a blank page. He smoothed the paper. “What’s he like? Your husband.”

  She eyed his pencil and paper. “He doesn’t have anything to do with this. It happened long before he was ever in the picture. And he doesn’t even know about it.”

  “I know. I’m not looking at him as a suspect or even as a witness. I’m just looking for something easy to talk about. To get warmed up before we get into anything that might be painful.”

  She looked doubtful. “I don’t know how that’s going to help. Grant is… he’s a good guy. Bookkeeper. He’s always been a good supporter for the family. Hasn’t ever been out of work. He’s changed jobs a few times, but he always has something new lined up before he gives up on the old job. He has a lot of friends
. Likes to get out and do things. I don’t know… what else you want to know about him? He’s a good father. Loves the kids. He wasn’t ever one of these dads who came home and read the paper and didn’t want anyone to make any noise until he’d had his smoke and his dinner. He’d come home and want to know all about what they’d been doing that day, how things were going at school, he’d help them with homework or ooh and ah over projects that they brought home.”

  Zachary smiled, nodding. “He sounds like a really good guy.”

  “He is. Nothing like some of the dads you run into…” she didn’t finish the sentence, but he assumed she was going to say ‘in foster care.’ There were a lot of good dads in foster care too. It was just that some of the others, the dads who didn’t want anything to do with the kids, or who were violent, or who wanted too much contact of the wrong sort, ruined it for everyone. Spend time in one home with a dad like that, and it felt like he represented every other home.

  “One of the foster dads I had,” Zachary told her, “he was like that. He was really great. Always interested in hearing about what had happened during the day. He introduced me to photography, and even though I wasn’t in the home anymore, he still helped me to develop my film over the years after that. I’m still in touch with him, even though I was only in the home for a couple of weeks. He’s the only one who I would consider… a parent.”

  “Really?” Heather cocked her head, thinking about it. “That’s really cool. I’m glad you found someone like that. There are some really great parents in foster care.”

  “It’s just that those bad apples make it a miserable experience for everyone,” Zachary agreed.

  “Is that your Mr. Peterson?” Tyrrell asked. “Lorne?”

  Zachary nodded. Of course it was. “Yeah.”

  “I had dinner with him and his partner,” Tyrrell informed Heather. “Zachary invited me over to dinner. And Lorne and Pat are really great. You’d never guess that they weren’t Zachary’s foster dads for years.”