Best Intentions

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Nude?”

  “Ten-four.” Even though he was no longer on the radio, Nye tended to use the same phrases designed for it.

  “Can you see her privates?” Coffey asked.

  “That’s affirmative,” Nye replied. “And then some.”

  That last remark seemed to give the lieutenant pause. “You mean her, her rectum?” Apparently there had been no anatomy questions on the most recent lieutenants’ test.

  “Affirmative,” Nye repeated.

  “Tell you what you do,” said Coffey. “You run those photos over to the courthouse right now, see if you can catch Jim Hall before he leaves for the day. We’ll see what he wants to do about this.”

  “Ten-four,” said Gregory Nye.

  What Jim Hall wanted to do about this was simple. As the district attorney, he could barely believe his good fortune. An arrest and prosecution for child pornography: What could possibly look better on his list of accomplishments when campaign time - and especially campaign contribution time - came around? But as a lawyer who might end up having to try the case himself, he also knew the difference between having the evidence delivered to his office by a state trooper, and having it seized from the defendant himself.

  Because, looking at the envelope that Trooper Nye had brought him, and reading the name printed on it, Hall instantly regarded this ‘S. Barrow’ as precisely that: a defendant. A defendant in a criminal prosecution. And pulling out his copy of the New York State Penal Law, Hall thumbed through a list of crimes that might or not apply to the situation at hand. He stopped when he came to something called “Possessing a sexual performance by a child.” Perfect. But the key word was possessing.

  “Get these back to the store,” Hall instructed Nye. “Have them wrap them up just like any other customer’s photos. Only when our Mr. Barrow shows up to pick them up, and actually has them in his hand, you’ll be waiting to arrest him. Got it?”

  “You mean stake out the store?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean.” Hall smiled broadly.

  “But, sir, that could take days.”

  “Well, it doesn’t have to be you personally,” said Hall. “Any trooper’ll do.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Gregory Nye. But he couldn’t have been pleased at the notion. An hour ago, he’d been ready to put his life on the line and engage in hand-to-hand combat against a foaming-at-the-mouth sex abuser; now he was being told it might not even be his arrest to make when the time came, that any old trooper would do.

  Had the photographs been on Stephen Barrow’s mind that Friday afternoon, he could easily have made a detour into South Chatham on the way back home. The Drug Mart, after all, advertised a two-hour turnaround time on prints, something made possible by the ColorMaster 3000. And it had been more like five hours since Stephen had dropped the roll off to be developed.

  But Stephen Barrow either decided there was no rush or forgot about the film altogether; when asked later, he simply couldn’t recall which had been the case. In either event, it would seem reasonable to conclude that if the photographs had already become vitally important to five people - those five being Emma Priestley, Troopers Tim Harrington and Gregory Nye, Lieutenant Elmer Coffey, and District Attorney Jim Hall - they were less than a burning issue to the man who’d taken them.

  For even as Nye returned to the Drug Mart with the photographs and the envelope that would link them to their creator, Stephen Barrow headed north in his Renegade, his daughter seated next to him. In fact, at the precise moment that Nye was handing the damning evidence over to the store’s manager and explaining the necessity of catching the customer in physical possession of them, Stephen and Penny Barrow were singing at the top of their lungs. The song they were singing was a favorite of Penny’s and had been made famous by the recording artist Bobby McFerrin a few years earlier.

  Don’t worry, be happy! was about all they knew of the words, so they sang them over and over again, as loudly and as happily and as worry-free as they could, until their voices cracked and threatened to disappear altogether. But if they were hampered by their lack of lyrics, the four-word refrain seemed a perfect fit for a clear, crisp Friday afternoon and the beginning of what promised to be a beautiful weekend.

  Theresa Mulholland awoke with a hangover, not an alcohol-induced hangover; she’d had a glass of wine the evening before, but only one, which her Irish heritage could easily absorb. No, the culprit had been marijuana this time.

  Not that smoking a joint had been the direct cause of her bloated feeling, or the distinct sensation that there was a small elephant lodged just beneath her breastbone, making it impossible for her to breathe deeply. No, marijuana worked in more devious ways.

  What it did, was to give you the munchies. A few tokes, and suddenly everything tasted wonderful. Mallomars became delicate truffles, Cheez Whiz turned to Welsh rarebit, and salmon spread took on the properties of Beluga caviar (not that she’d ever had Beluga caviar, but she had no trouble imagining what it was like). Sitting on her sofa, nested in a half-dozen throw pillows, covered with an afghan her mother had knitted long ago, she’d spent the evening watching old movie rentals. After all these years, she’d still cried at the end of An Officer and a Gentleman when Richard Gere walked into the cardboard factory to pick up Debra Winger, and at the final number in Dirty Dancing when Jennifer Grey successfully executed the steps Patrick Swayze had taught her. Of course, crying had made Theresa hungrier, so she’d eaten a few more Mallomars, a little more Cheez Whiz, and the rest of the salmon spread. Feeling stuffed, she’d relit the joint and taken a couple of hits. Relief had come instantly, almost magically. She’d taken another hit - no sense in letting good grass go to waste, after all. The stuffed feeling had become a thing of the past, all but forgotten. Using a safety pin as a roach clip, she’d finished off the last of the joint, taking care to quit before burning her lips or inadvertently inhaling the lit roach, a practice well worth avoiding. She’d felt absolutely great. A bit hungry, in fact. . . .

  Now she was paying the price.

  A shower and two cups of black coffee helped, but not that much. Part of the problem was that it was the weekend, and as was usually the case, Theresa had no plans. She could go to the gym and work out with Tony the Trainer, but on Saturdays the place was filled with guys, and they’d stand around in small groups and gawk at her in her boxing gear until one of them would get up the courage to wander over and ask what a nice girl like her was doing in a place like this. She didn’t need that today, not the way she felt.

  She could have read, but she was having trouble getting into Cold Mountain, in spite of how good everyone kept telling her it was once you did.

  She could have made any of a dozen phone calls she had to make, to any of a dozen people who’d left her messages - some multiple - over the last several days. But that would have meant dealing with her mother, who’d want to know if Theresa was seeing anyone, and her sister, who could be counted on to share her latest strategies in the ongoing battle to toilet-train her three-year-old.

  In the end, she did pick up the telephone. But she opted for making business calls instead of personal ones. Even though it meant she’d have to do follow-ups, she started working on the “Coming Events” column, Tom Grady’s assignment. Her assignment now, until Tom dried out. As for the other column she’d inherited, “From the Police Blotter,” well, that could wait.

  Stephen Barrow woke up with a sick daughter. Sometime during the night, he’d heard Penny coughing. Not a bad cough, like the croupy ones she used to get as an infant, when he and Ada had taken turns holding her in the bathroom, with the hot water turned on full blast in the shower to create a pretty impressive tropical rain forest. But enough of a cough to keep him awake for an hour, listening to make sure she was okay.

  From the moment she’d come home from the hospital as a newborn, Stephen’s sleep habits had changed. He’d always been a heavy sleeper, totally impervious to the ringing of a telephone or an alarm clock. “I hear
something,” Ada would tell him in the first years of their marriage, but neither the noise, her comment about it, nor her subsequent shaking of him would rouse Stephen. “The house could burn down,” she complained at one point, and no doubt it could have, so soundly did Stephen sleep.

  All that changed with the arrival of Penny. Suddenly Stephen was alert to every sound coming from the next room - every sigh, every hiccup, every breath. Noises from downstairs or outside that he’d once been oblivious to now caused him to hold his own breath as he tried to identify them as benign or menacing.

  When Penny would wake in the night for her feeding, it was Stephen who’d hear her first whimper, Stephen who’d be at her crib even before her eyes were fully open, Stephen who’d change her and bring her to Ada’s breast, Stephen who’d return her to her crib once mother and daughter had fallen back asleep. Had he only had milk of his own, it would no doubt have been Stephen who’d have done the nursing, too.

  By morning, Penny’s cough had ripened into a bark. “I sound like a seal,” she announced, her voice breaking on the word seal.

  “I’ll see if we have any herring in the refrigerator,” Stephen told her.

  “I don’t want herring,” she said. “I want Cheracol.”

  Cheracol was a cough medicine that was going the way of the dinosaurs. It was one of those old-fashioned syrups that contained alcohol and cherry flavors and little else. Cough medicines these days came in scary blue shades, were mentholated, had serious names followed by qualifying initials, and tasted bad enough to be effective. Penny hated them all with a passion. Cheracol was the only one she’d tolerate. Concerned about the alcohol content (the original formula had also included codeine, but that had long since been eliminated), Stephen had once sat down and calculated just how much there was in a teaspoon, the recommended dosage for a child under twelve. The answer had turned out to be about a drop and a half.

  Cheracol it would be.

  The problem was, you couldn’t find the stuff anymore. Robitussin, Dimetapp, Vicks: no problem. Cheracol? “Oh, we’re out of that.” Later, “We don’t stock that anymore.” Until finally, “They stopped making that.” Every once in a while, Stephen would spot a single bottle - he always looked - usually with an expiration date that was history. (What, the alcohol had evaporated? The cherry bark extract had gone bad?) He’d immediately scoop it up. But with coughs and colds a routine thing for school-age children, it never took long for the red liquid to disappear.

  “If you want Cheracol,” Stephen told Penny now, “we’re going to have to go out hunting for some.”

  “Like a search-and-destroy mission?”

  “Just the search part. Meanwhile, what do you want for breakfast?”

  Penny let out a bark that would have put an adult sea lion to shame. “Cheracol,” she said.

  For Trooper Gregory Nye, that Saturday was an RDO, a regular day off. Nye had tried to swap shifts with several other troopers, so intent was he on being present at the South Chatham Drug Mart when Stephen Barrow showed up to claim his pornographic photos. For, thanks to a minimum of effort on the part of the DA’s investigator, “S. Barrow” now had a first name. He also had a date of birth, an address, a Social Security number, and a driver’s license. That last piece of information meant that he also had a photograph on file, a color photograph that had already been E-mailed to the district attorney’s office - well, actually to the county clerk’s office next door; the DA’s office wasn’t on-line yet. It hadn’t yet been determined if Stephen Barrow also had a daughter whose age was consistent with that of the child depicted in the pornographic photos; that might have to wait until Monday, when school offices reopened.

  But Gregory Nye hadn’t been able to find anyone to swap shifts with him. It wasn’t that there was a stampede to arrest the Unaphotographer (as one trooper had already dubbed Stephen Barrow); it was simply a matter that troopers got paid overtime rates for working weekends and holidays. Even so, you could generally find someone willing to forgo the extra money on Christmas Day, or New Year’s Eve, or on a clear summer day, or during hunting season - especially in hunting season - or at various, assorted other times. But this was February. Too late for hunting, too early for golf, too cold for relaxing in the hammock with a couple of cold ones, but not enough snow on the ground for getting out the Arctic Cat. A Saturday off could mean having to take the wife food shopping, or the kids to swim lessons, or finally getting around to cleaning out the basement. “Sorry, hon,” the sad-faced troopers would tell their wives, “gotta go to work.”

  The particular sad-faced trooper who drew the assignment of staking out the South Chatham Drug Mart that Saturday morning was a tall, thin veteran of eleven years named Todd Stickley, who, for obvious reasons, everyone called “the Stick.” In fact, Stickley was a distant relative of the Stickleys who made fine furniture. Though state troopers tended not to be too knowledgeable when it came to fine furniture; their tastes seemed to run more to pool tables, Formica counters, and La-Z-Boy recliners.

  Todd Stickley had been chosen for the assignment for two reasons. First, he was an investigator, a designation roughly equivalent to that of detective in most metropolitan police departments. As such, he worked in plain clothes rather than uniform. Second, his physical appearance was nonthreatening and belied the fact that he was law enforcement. Someone, whether at the DA’s office or the state police barracks, felt it was critical that Stephen Barrow not be spooked when he showed up for his photos and make a break for it. By having Investigator Stickley inside the store, mingling with the customers, while his partner waited outside in an unmarked vehicle - a late-model black Ford Crown Victoria being the closest thing available to an unmarked vehicle - the hope was to lull Stephen Barrow into believing that the coast was clear and that it was safe to transact his dirty little business.

  So, beginning at 8:00 that morning, Todd Stickley had been wandering the aisles of the South Chatham Drug Mart, trying his best to look inconspicuous, never straying too far from the checkout counter. His 9mm Glock was holstered, but it was fully loaded, with one round already chambered: Although a name-check of Stephen Barrow had revealed no prior record, you never knew when an arrest could turn violent. A radio transmitter was taped to Stickley’s chest and concealed by his sweatshirt: His partner out in the parking lot could hear Stickley’s every fart and belch. And in Stickley’s jacket pocket, where he could slip it out and glance at it from time to time, was the color Motor Vehicle Department photograph of his target, Stephen Barrow.

  The Stick was ready.

  There were a limited number of places in the area that might stock Cheracol, and Stephen Barrow knew them all. There were the big supermarkets, which these days carried a fairly wide assortment of cold remedies. But they tended to go in for the favorites - Robitussin, Vicks, and NyQuil. At the other end of the spectrum were the independent mom-and-pop drugstores. They occasionally came through with off-brands or hard-to-find items. But they also tended to keep odd hours, were geographically concentrated in hard-to-get-to places like Hudson, Poughkeepsie, and Rhinebeck, and they routinely charged double or triple what you might expect to pay elsewhere. In between the two extremes were the large chain pharmacies - places like Walgreens, Rite Aid, Eckerd, and Drug Mart. They usually offered a pretty wide selection, and their prices, though by no means bargain rate, were reasonable. Besides which, there were two of them nearby, one in Chatham and one in South Chatham.

  Stephen Barrow decided they were probably his best bet. Scraping his daughter’s barely touched French toast into the garbage - they had a disposal in the sink, but Stephen didn’t trust it with much beyond crumbs, peelings, and an occasional lemon wedge - he called out to Penny.

  “Get dressed, kiddo,” he told her. “We’ll take a ride into Chatham.”

  “You mean Chat ham?” Ever since she’d first identified the name in print, Penny’d decided it was spelled weirdly. She alternated between calling it “Chat ham,” as though it were some kind of t
alking meat, and “Cha-thom” which she pronounced to rhyme with Shazam.

  “And bundle up. It’s cold outside.”

  “I’m hot,” she said.

  His hands still wet from doing the dishes, Stephen reached out, caught her by one wrist, and pulled himself toward her. She squealed and tried unsuccessfully to wriggle free. He placed his free hand against her forehead.

  “Do I have tempature?” she asked.

  Stephen removed his hand and studied his palm solemnly. “A hundred and twelve point six,” he told her.

  “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” she said.

  “Nose as long as a telephone wire,” he dutifully completed the verse.

  The truth was, she always felt warm to his touch, and she almost never complained of the cold, even on days that sent chills through Stephen’s own adult bones. He attributed it to her youth, to her acceptance of the weather as just another part of her surroundings that, as a child, she couldn’t control. He was certain she felt the cold every bit as much as he did; it was just that she didn’t conceptualize it as something extraordinary that had to be reckoned with, defended against, and endlessly talked about.

  Twenty minutes later, more or less dressed appropriately - he more, she less - Stephen and Penny Barrow climbed into the Renegade, fastened their seat belts, and headed for Chatham.

  Taking full advantage of the miracle of call forwarding (a technology so far beyond his grasp that he placed it in the category of mysteries that included automatic redial, caller identification, and spontaneous human combustion), District Attorney Jim Hall had set up a command post in his living room that Saturday morning. Never much of a fan of spending weekends at the office, Hall had been able to rationalize his decision by pointing out that the county courthouse, which housed his quarters, went unheated from Friday evening to early Monday morning - or at least would be heated only to the point where water pipes wouldn’t freeze solid and burst.

  Joining Hall in his living-room-turned-office was Hank Bournagan, one of his two assistant district attorneys. The other assistant, Wendy Garafolo, was currently out on her last week of maternity leave, which to Hall was just as well: To his way of thinking, the command post of a sex-abuse investigation was no place for a woman, let alone a new mother. Also present was Hall’s investigator, Ed Sprague. Sprague was the former sheriff’s deputy who’d developed a heart murmur and been restricted to modified duty ever since a big black bear had chased him clear across Lew Hatch’s apple orchard one autumn afternoon. It turned out the bear, a good-sized female, had been gobbling up apples in preparation for hibernating. Only there’d been an early hard frost that year, and thousands of apples had fallen, spoiled, and quickly fermented. The bear had not only been in estrus, but she’d been legally drunk - a fact confirmed once she’d been knocked out by a tranquilizer dart, and a blood sample had been taken from her. Her alcohol level tested out at .23, more than twice that required for a DWI conviction. Which was probably a lucky thing for Ed Sprague: Sober, the big gal no doubt could have caught him, and might even have killed him, or - as some folks later suggested - even worse than that.