Victim

by Gary Kinder

  Byron thought back to memories of the six of them as a family: summer sailing on Bear Lake, winter weekends at nearby ski resorts, the annual family vacation to someplace special, like the Caribbean or Hawaii. He didn’t want to mention those times; he just wanted to remind them that they had led a good life together, that there were things to remember from their past that would somehow make their future seem less dark.

  “We have lots of fun memories,” he said, “and we’ll always have those, nobody can take those away from us. Just think how lucky we are to have them, all the fun memories we’ve had as a family. We’ve had lots of fun times, and we’ll have lots more.” He stopped here and took a deep breath. “Our family will just be smaller, that’s all. It’ll be different, but it’ll be okay. Just don’t fret about things. Everything will be okay… .”

  The words stopped, and the four of them stood in silence. The room was nearly empty.

  “Now then,” Byron said, “I want you all to go home and get some rest. There’s nothing more to be done here except wait and you can do that at home.”

  “I’d rather stay here,” Gary said.

  “There’s no reason you have to stay,” said Byron.

  “I know,” said Gary, “I just want to.”

  “All right. Brett, why don’t you and Claire drive Jody home and then take Claire back to the house.”

  Claire still had tears in her eyes. “Dad,” she said softly, “I don’t want to go home alone.”

  “You’ll be okay,” said her father. “The police are watching the house, so there’s nothing to worry about.” He could see his daughter was on the verge of collapsing. From the outside, it appeared she had taken it the hardest of anyone. “Go on back, lock the doors and get some sleep. Brett, you make sure she gets in okay.”

  “What about you?” Gary asked. “You look like you could use a little rest yourself. Why don’t you go back to the house with Claire?”

  “No,” said Byron, “I … I’m going to stick around for a while just to see what develops.” He shook Claire lightly, playfully, and said, “Brett’ll get you all squared away, and Gary or I will be along in a little bit.”

  Claire nodded quietly, hugged her father, and turned toward the door. Brett followed her. As they moved near the door, their father said to Brett: “When you get Diane and Natalie back to your house, lock the doors and keep a gun loaded. This is not going to happen to my family again.”

  When Claire entered her father’s house, she was awed by the silence. She tried to avoid thinking about her mother, but she couldn’t help wondering what life was going to be like now without her. She wanted to be strong like her father, so she concentrated on Cortney as he had told her to do. If thoughts of her mother began creeping again into her head, she would say to herself: “Mom’s at the store, she’ll come home. She’s just at the store.”

  Brett returned to his wife, Diane. He was sweaty and his hair was matted down from the surgical cap. His eyes were bloodshot but dry. He entered his in-laws’ house and Diane was standing in the kitchen. Brett’s Uncle Paul had called her from the hospital and told her what had happened. She didn’t know what to say, and Brett said nothing. They stood across the room and looked at each other for a moment; then Diane went to him and put her arms around him, and everything that Brett had been keeping inside released at once and his eyes filled with tears.

  The doctors who had been with Cortney all night finally left the hospital. Although Gary remained in the waiting room for a while, he soon realized his father had been right: there was nothing he could do but sit and wait, and though he felt he should remain near Cortney he had no idea why. Waiting could be done at home with Claire, and that at least seemed to have a purpose. He left the hospital and drove back to his father’s house.

  Of the crowd of medical technicians and nurses who had rushed about the ICU, working for the past seven hours to save Cortney’s life, many were gone now, and for the first time since late the previous evening, the place was quiet and still. For a minute Cortney’s cubicle went black, except for the thin beam of a small flashlight. A special nurse checked his pupils carefully, then turned the lights on again. From his eyes she went down his body all the way to his feet, routinely suctioning the secretions in his airway, listening to his lungs, glancing at the heart monitor, changing IVs, giving medication, checking reflexes, charting everything she had just done, then beginning again with a dark room and the flashlight shining in Cortney’s eyes.

  In these moments just before dawn Byron stood alone outside the glass front and watched. Not even twelve hours had passed since he had come home from his office and found Carol worrying that Cortney had not yet shown for dinner. When the lights came back on, he could see Cortney’s body in the window, long and thin and yellow, his half-open eyes buried in circles of gray, the bloody tracheostomy tube poking up out of his neck. In a corner next to Cortney’s bed the orange light on the respirator blinked back at Byron. Though he hadn’t mentioned it to his other children, Byron had remained at the hospital for a single reason: If Cortney was going to die, he wanted to be there. He didn’t want his son to die alone.

  Through the blinds in the window of the ICU he could see a thin corona of blue light silhouetting Malan’s Peak rising behind the hospital. Daybreak was not far away, and Ogden was beginning to stir beneath the white cross of St. Benedict’s. The streak and twinkle of the city lights were melting before the first rays of the sun, as the city came alive and prepared for the business of the day.

  Up on that east hill overlooking Ogden, in a little room on the third floor, Byron Naisbitt sat alone waiting for his son to die.

  ARREST

  Morning was approaching, but the streets still were quiet and nearly dark. Only faint light had begun filtering over the mountains, and the image in A. K. Greenwood’s binoculars had evolved from shadow to a featureless block of gray. Greenwood was hunkered down in the front seat of his squad car aiming the glasses across an open field at a small house in west Ogden. He had been watching the house in the dark for a long while now and nothing had happened. With daylight beginning to creep into the darkness, Greenwood was thinking of the panic the city would be waking up to in another hour. As leader of the Ogden Police Tactical Squad, it was his responsibility to capture the killers.

  About ten thirty the previous evening the Tac Squad had stopped for their nightly “lunch,” and had just been served a hot meal at Fred’s Burger Chalet, when Greenwood had received a felony-in-progress call from the dispatcher. Three minutes later the seven-man squad had responded to the front and back of the Hi-Fi Shop, as well as positioned two cars along the adjacent side streets.

  In the alley Greenwood had found the rookie Youngberg, who had given him two facts to go on: the killers were black and they drove a light-colored van. Immediately, Greenwood had notified his men and all patrolmen, all detectives, the Weber County Sheriff’s Office, and the Utah Highway Patrol to stop and search every van that moved in the city of Ogden and along the streets and highways outside the city limits. As soon as the victims still alive had been rushed to the hospital and the crime scene preserved, Greenwood had huddled in the alley with other officers, scrutinizing every member of the black criminal element in Ogden who was then active in robbery, burglary, or drugs. Informants around the city had been dragged out of bed in the early hours of the morning. At four o’clock had come the first break in the case: a beige van had been found parked to the side of a house not far from the Hi-Fi Shop. In the basement of the house was an apartment, and in the apartment lived a black man known to every officer in the Ogden Police Department. He had just been paroled from a federal penitentiary, where he had been serving time for armed robbery. With the Tac Squad surrounding the house, Greenwood had gone down the narrow flight of stairs and arrested the man at gunpoint. But when questioned, the man had seemed as stunned by the brutality of the murders as the police themselves had been. Greenwood had started over.

  Next he had set up sur
veillance on certain houses around the city. In the houses lived known black criminals who roughly met the descriptions given by the eyewitness. That any of them would return home in a van or be caught moving stereo equipment was a long shot, but at the time there had been little else to do except play the long shots and hope for something to break. The rest of the night had passed quietly, the Tac Squad watching and waiting.

  Greenwood was still sitting in his squad car, alone, his binoculars trained on a suspect’s house, when the rays of the sun began spilling over the mountains.

  At seven o’clock, with Ogden beginning to stir, he called off the surveillance around the city and ordered the Tac Squad back to the station for new assignments. Don Moore and his partner Mike Empey were to report to the State Medical Examiner’s office in Salt Lake City at nine o’clock to identify the victims for the autopsies, then collect and preserve all clothes, bullets, hair samples, and other evidence as it came from the bodies. Greenwood assigned his other tactical teams to check on recent van sales and rentals with every new and used car dealership and every truck-leasing agency from Ogden to Salt Lake City. Advised by the chief that he was to have unlimited funds and manpower in his search for the killers, Greenwood borrowed three men from the detective division to begin the tedious interviewing of owners and employees of the stores adjacent to the Hi-Fi Shop.

  Greenwood himself set up a command post at an old desk in the records room at the station. Early that morning an appeal had gone out over public radio asking citizens to call the police if they had any information that might lead to the arrest of the killers. Calls had started coming in, slowly at first, then in greater numbers as the day wore on. Greenwood and another officer answered the phones, took down names, addresses, phone numbers, and descriptions, then transferred their notes to a master list of leads to be assigned and investigated by other officers in the field. The list grew quickly to five pages, seventy-five items to be run down, checked out, then checked off. The pressure to capture the killers already was mounting, and by noon Greenwood was still sitting at the old desk in the records room answering the phones and calling his men on the radio, no closer to the killers now than he had been when he first arrived at the Hi-Fi Shop over twelve hours before.

  By midmorning Cortney’s condition since his neurosurgery had changed neither for the better nor for the worse. For the moment, he was stabilized, his head bandaged, his eyes half-open, and the respirator still pumping air into him each time he initiated a breath. Connie Garner, the nurse in charge of Intensive Care, had been called in during the night to “special” Cortney, and was still at his bedside, catching up on the charting of his medications and continuing the routine of one-to-one care that Cortney required. To keep his temperature down, a cooling mattress had been slid into place beneath him and turned on. A monitor next to his bed continuously recorded his blood pressure, while another monitor recorded his heart rate. Connie checked his blood gases and electrolytes, his venous pressure, his temperature, and the hourly output of sputum being suctioned from his tracheostomy tube. Ampicillin was being administered via his groin catheter and Decadron through the vaporizer attached to the respirator. Every two hours Cortney was repositioned from his back to his side, or his side to his back.

  As part of her routine Connie regularly checked Cortney’s reflexes, including scraping the sole of his foot to test what is known as the Babinski reflex. If the sole on the foot of a baby up to two years old is stroked, the toes will flare, the big toe separating from the others. A normal adult, given the same stimulus, will either jerk his foot away or curl his toes inward. If the same flaring reaction, the Babinski reflex normal to a baby, is seen in an adult, it is a sign of extensive brain damage. That morning, as Connie ran a sharp instrument from Cortney’s heel to the ball of his foot, his toes flared like a newborn’s.

  Before dawn Carol Naisbitt’s body had been removed from the morgue in the basement of the hospital and taken to the State Medical Examiner in Salt Lake City for the autopsy. On the third floor things had begun to quiet down. Dr. Wallace had completed his shift in the emergency room and after looking in on Cortney had gone home. Dr. Rees and Dr. Hauser, who had been with Cortney until just before daybreak, were soon due back at the hospital to check again on his progress. Byron was now sitting alone in the waiting room adjacent to Intensive Care. Since dawn he had been in and out of Cortney’s cubicle, talking to the nurses, watching Cortney’s vital signs as they came off the machines, and reading the doctors’ and nurses’ entries on the chart. For a long while now nothing had changed. Cortney’s supported breathing had become regular, and the machines looking into his body were sending back the same results they had recorded the hour before, and the hour before that. Around ten o’clock Byron went back into Cortney’s room and looked again at the most recent vital signs on Cortney’s chart and the readouts on the machines.

  “Do you expect any change for the next hour or two?” he asked one of the nurses.

  She shook her head and said no.

  “I might head home for a short while then,” said Byron. “Will you call me if there’s any change?”

  Byron then left the hospital alone. The drive home was but a few blocks, but along the way he had time to think about the sudden change that had occurred in his life.

  I knew that I was alone. I knew that Cortney was bad and probably wouldn’t live. What I tried to do right in the beginning is not feel sorry for myself I just tried to remember all the good, fun times that our family had always had together. And just let anything that was adverse leave my mind. My wife had lost her life, and a sixteen-year-old son who was just starting to flower into a young man, who had just started taking an interest in what’s going on… . I was devastated not knowing what his situation was. But I knew there was no sense to keep bringing it all back. If you let that happen, that’s bad news. That is bad news. Then you never recover. If I found myself thinking about those things, I just put them away. Because it wasn’t going to change. I tried to promise myself that I’d just take things and try to look at things as objectively as they actually were, and not read anything into them that wasn’t there, and try just to make a life of what was left.

  I had some feelings of being hurt. And I had some feelings of, oh, I don’t know, just … I had some feelings of tenderness and awareness for the persons that I had lost. I was wondering … I felt that Shorty was fine, my religion let me know that she was fine, that I wouldn’t have to be really worried about her welfare, and that sometime later I would be with her again. But I just felt bad that she had to go through what she did. I was upset about that. And I just had some very tender thoughts toward her. And just wished that things could have been different, but they weren’t.

  On the way home I realized that my house was going to be empty, and when I got there, it was. It was really empty. I mean you open the door to an absolutely different existence. There was something missing in my house, and in my life. No one was going to greet me and no one was going to be there. I had a vacant feeling, it was a hollow feeling, and it was a sad depression. Just a … just a feeling that I’ve never had before.

  I went into the house and everything there from one standpoint or another reminded me of Shorty. She decorated the house, it’s got to reflect who she was and what she thought. Her house, her closet full of her clothes, everything in the house was just her. And now there’s no one there taking care of the house or fixing a meal or taking care of anything. It’s just empty. And your life is empty with it.

  I went upstairs, and I don’t even know if I got into bed or just flopped on it. But I didn’t feel that tired. I never felt the fatigue that I felt sometimes when I was in residency, working. I shed a tear or two by myself. No one ever knew, that I know of. I tried to keep that to a minimum. I cried and that was the end. Then I didn’t cry anymore. But I don’t think there’s any harm in crying. I think that’s a good thing. Sort of lets your soul come clean, and then you feel better. I suspect the events of the
night before ran through my mind, and I’m sure that I had some feelings about that. I’ve wondered several times what would’ve happened had I not been on call and gone to get Cort myself. Probably would not be around. Who knows what the hell would’ve happened then, if I had gone rather than Shorty. There’s no reason to think about that, but it’s gone through my mind. Chances are, had I not been on call and sticking by the phone… . Maybe even the two of us would’ve gone. I hope that maybe one of us would’ve stayed in the car outside and then terminated things differently. I don’t know, who the hell can say. You can’t say what would’ve happened. Only thing we know is what did happen.

  After that, I had a little prayer. I just wanted to make sure that the Lord knew that I understood, as best that I could understand, what had happened. And I wanted Him to know that if He was now looking after my wife, that I knew she was in good hands. And that I believed that I would see her later, that it’s just a matter of time here and then we’d be together again. And that’s comforting insofar as I’m concerned. And I wanted to be appreciative because Cort was alive and I hoped that he would be able to live, to be a functioning person. That’s when I felt that Cort would be all right. I was sick at heart, no question about it. And yet, I had a feeling within me right from day one that he was going to make it. So I didn’t dwell on the fact that he wasn’t going to make it. I expected a phone call from the hospital any minute. I expected it, but I had a feeling that I wasn’t going to get it. I had a feeling inside of me that he was going to make it. And that he’d be all right. And that feeling never left me.

  I lay on the bed and probably did sleep for a minute or two, or for a while anyway, just completely relaxed. I don’t know if I was completely relaxed, but I felt relieved. Then I was anxious to get back and see how he was going to stabilize. So I got up, got showered and dressed, and went back to the hospital.