Nine Years Gone

by Chris Culver

  I’m telling you this not because I want to hurt you, but because I need you to understand. I can’t protect my sister or anyone else, but you can. To prevent me from ever going public, Dominique and his chief of security plan to kill me on the family’s annual ski trip to Vail and make it look as if I had an accident. I overheard them planning it.

  If I go to the press with this now, Moses will kill Samantha. And if not Samantha, then you, or someone else I care about. I can’t let that happen. To prevent someone else I love from being hurt, I’m going to kill myself. I know this will hurt you, but I have to do it.

  When I’m gone, I’m counting on you to go public with everything. Write about what happened to me, talk about it, tell people. Now, I’m just a silly girl with a history of fighting with her stepfather, but if I kill myself, I’ll be a martyr. People will believe you.

  I’m sorry I won’t be there to make you French toast in the morning. I’m sorry I won’t be there to see you grow old. I’m sorry that I’m not strong enough to stay. I can’t do it any more.

  I love you, now and always.

  Tess Girard

  I found that notebook on December 6, ten days before she planned to kill herself. When I read the letter the first time, I was so furious that I couldn’t even think straight. I pocketed the pages she had thrown away, put the journal back on the desk where I found it, and told her that I needed to do a few things before class that afternoon. Tess shouted that she’d see me later, and I left the apartment to drive around the city aimlessly, hoping I’d see Dominique Girard on the street so I could run him down with my car. I had no idea where I was going until I found myself outside a dive bar my Uncle Simon owned in south St. Louis County.

  I pulled out a stool while my uncle—my mother’s brother and the closest man I’ve ever had to a real father—washed glasses. I told him everything, and when I finished, he poured me a drink, ran off the only two other customers—both of whom were already drunk—and locked the door. When he came back, his eyes bored into me, black and steely. He asked what I wanted to do, so I told him I wanted to kill Dominique Girard. He convinced me that was a bad idea, and instead asked me a question the answer to which would hurtle my life in a direction I never anticipated.

  “Do you love her enough to give up everything for her?” he asked me.

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  And I did.

  24

  I don’t know if Simon had thought about it beforehand or if he came up with the idea on the spot, but for good or ill, I agreed to the plan as soon as he said it. With Dominique’s connections and money, we knew we couldn’t bring a case—civil or criminal—against him for what he did to Tess, but we also knew we couldn’t let him hurt her or her sister. We decided, then, that with Tess’s permission, we’d help her disappear permanently and frame her stepfather for her murder. Maybe we were stupid, and maybe we were naive, but we thought it was the only way we could save her life.

  The plan itself was simple, but we couldn’t do it alone, leading me to recruit my two best friends, Isaac and Vince. They were Tess’s friends, too, so they agreed readily once I told them the story. It took a week for the details to come together and another week to put things into motion.

  We followed Dominique and discovered that he went to work at the same time every morning and came home at roughly the same time each night, only departing from the routine for a once-weekly visit with a prostitute while his wife attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. His vice gave us our opening.

  That prostitute, Lindsey Potter, shared custody of her three-year-old daughter with an abusive ex-husband, an arrangement she didn’t appreciate. Simon made her a deal: he’d convince her ex to relinquish his custodial rights—he had a gift for “persuasion”—and he’d give her enough money that she’d never have to see him again. In exchange, she’d do her job and keep Dominique Girard busy for a few hours. The twist is that she’d lie about it to the police if asked. She agreed without hesitation.

  The money was Tess’s responsibility, but it was easy to get. She made her stepfather a care package. I never saw it, but evidently it was quite effective. She made a copy of her journal, medical charts outlining the trauma her body sustained in Africa, a timeline of events, SEC filings discussing Dominique’s African deals, everything a reporter would need to write a story that could take Girard Holdings down. She put it all in an envelope and mailed it to Dominique’s office with a note attached, letting him know that she had five other envelopes filled with the same information, ready to send to newspapers around the country. If he didn’t want that to happen, he would give her half a million dollars for each envelope, two and a half million dollars total, to kill a story that could ruin his life. She had the money within a day. Dominique probably thought he’d get it back when he killed her. He had no idea it had sealed his fate.

  A quarter million would go to Lindsey, a quarter million would go to Tess, and the remaining two million would stay with me for safekeeping. It was our getaway money in case we were caught. The guys didn’t even know about it.

  Once we had the cash, things were easy. Simon gave Lindsey her share, and she went to visit Dominique as usual on one fateful December evening. She kept him busy for three hours, and while she did that, Isaac and Simon stole Dominique’s Mercedes and stashed an empty ampule of ketamine, a very powerful sedative, as well as a hypodermic needle with Tess’s blood on it in his garage. At 8:15 on December 16, 2002, I kissed her goodbye and watched as she climbed into a car Isaac had procured for her. She left with quarter-million dollars cash, a prepaid cell phone, and a plan, the details of which I didn’t know.

  Simon, meanwhile, stowed a shovel, a heavy-duty painter’s tarp, and a 50-pound bag of pulverized Quicklime in the trunk of Dominique’s Mercedes and drove to a rock quarry in Jefferson County, where he had stashed a second car. He doused the Mercedes with gas, lit it on fire, and drove his second car to his bar, his job done for the night. At my parents’ house, Vince hit me with an aluminum flashlight Tess had stolen it from the Girards’ utility closet hard enough to break the bulb.

  We told the police that Tess and I had been hanging out in our backyard when Dominique came over and hit me with a flashlight so hard the blow knocked me out. Vince and Isaac then supposedly came over, only to find me unconscious.

  We made a lot of assumptions with the plan, but we thought it could work. Tess had the hardest part, but she was resourceful and smart. She could survive—thrive even—if she just stayed away. Meanwhile, Dominique would go to jail and Samantha would grow up safely, never knowing the full extent of her stepfather’s sins.

  A week after Tess disappeared, the police found the charred remains of Dominique’s car, including the remnants of a melted tarp, a pile of ashes that laboratory analysis later confirmed to be calcium oxide—quicklime—and the twisted, burnt remains of a shovel. That gave them cause to search Dominique’s garage, where they found the ketamine ampule and syringe with Tess’s blood on it. They even found the flashlight Vince had hit me with, Isaac somehow having snuck back into the Girards’ garage to hide it.

  When they questioned Dominique, he claimed he was with a prostitute at the time of Tess’s abduction. That prostitute lied, saying Dominique had skipped the meeting and then asked her to claim he hadn’t. She even had a credit card receipt supplied by one of her friends from a bar in Laclede’s Landing, “proving” she was sipping a mojito when Dominique claimed they were together.

  Despite Dominique’s money and power, the police arrested him for Tess’s kidnapping two weeks after she disappeared, and despite not finding Tess’s body, the state added a murder charge after the story went viral and the national news picked it up. A jury of Dominique’s peers found him guilty of first-degree murder, kidnapping, assault in the second degree, and half a dozen lesser charges after a trial that lasted two weeks. He was sentenced to death, a sentence that was carried out four nights ago. If the story in Tess’s journal was true, he might have
deserved it.

  That was a big if.

  25

  I closed Tess’s journal and picked up the phone. It was late enough that Ashley should have been in bed, but Katherine might still be up. I dialed and then listened to her breath when she picked up, not saying a word.

  “Are you going to say something, Steve?”

  I pushed the notebook to the center of the table and fluttered my eyelids. “I found Simon.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “No. I think he was hit by a car.”

  Even as a kid, I had been surprised by how easily the lies flowed from my lips. It was one of the few gifts my father had ever given me.

  “Hold on a second,” said Katherine. I heard the sound of a door shutting before she spoke. “I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Vince and I found him. I called the vet, and she gave me the number of a pet cremation service. They’ll take care of his body and give us his ashes in case we want to bury them.”

  “Ashley’s going to be devastated.”

  “Let’s hold off on telling her for a while, at least until it’s safe at home.”

  We lapsed into an awkward silence.

  “Did the police say anything about the house?”

  “No, but I screwed the back door together enough for it to lock. We’ll probably have to get a contractor to come in and reframe it, but I think it should hold for now.”

  Katherine paused. “Is that everything?”

  “No. Are you sure you’re somewhere safe?”

  “Ashley and I are in the hotel. Nobody knows we’re here but you.”

  “I’m glad.”

  Katherine paused again, and once again, I listened to her breath. That assurance, the knowledge that she and Ashley would be safe no matter what happened to me, made me feel better.

  “Do you remember Amanda Hubbard? She’s a pediatrician in my group. Her husband is a criminal defense lawyer,” she said.

  I smiled as I halfheartedly offered up the obvious joke: “We can’t all be perfect.”

  “This isn’t the time to make jokes, Steve,” she said. “Don’t you think this is time, maybe, to talk to a lawyer and see what advice he can give?”

  “A lawyer would just tell me to go to the police and tell them the truth. I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet.”

  “Then tell me why I shouldn’t go on my own and tell the police everything you told me.”

  I looked to Tess’s journal, the book that started everything. “Because if you did, I would go to jail for the rest of my life for saving Tess’s life.”

  “At least you’d be safe.”

  “But you wouldn’t be. Tess and Moses would still be out there, and you and Ashley would still be a target.”

  Katherine didn’t respond for at least a ten count, but then I heard her inhale, as if she were choking back tears. “Why is this happening?”

  “Because I made a mistake and was arrogant enough to think I could get away with it.”

  “If what you told me is true, if Dominique really used Tess like you said, you did the right thing.”

  “That’s not all I did. Can you come over tomorrow? There’s something I need to show you.”

  Katherine hesitated. “What do you have?”

  I thought of the duffel bag and the money it contained, of the evil I had brought to my family. “It’s something you need to see in person.”

  She didn’t answer, so I repeated the question.

  “I’ll come over tomorrow after work,” she said. “Can you pick up Ashley from school?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  I told her that I loved her and asked her to give Ashley a hug for me, before hanging up. As I put my phone back in my pocket, I considered the glass of bourbon I had poured earlier. I took it with me to the kitchen and threw it down the same sink into which I had poured my tea. After that, I took out my cell phone and called Vince.

  “Hey, it’s Steve. Your couch still open? I don’t want to be here tonight.”

  26

  Vince had a gray stucco bungalow in Rock Hill, another one of St. Louis County’s many suburbs. Like many of the historic homes in the area, Vince’s had been built by people who liked compartmentalization, and then renovated sometime in the early nineties by people who disliked historic architecture and loved wallpaper. As I pulled into the driveway, Vince opened the front door and waved me in. Felix, Vince’s Scottish terrier, barked at me from inside.

  “You know where the booze is if you want a drink,” said Vince, shutting and locking his front door. We stood in what the home’s original owner had likely called a parlor, a room a modern realtor would likely call a family room. It had a flat-screen TV on one wall, pictures of Vince’s siblings on another, a fireplace on a third, and an open archway that led to the dining room and kitchen on the fourth. Felix padded over and smelled my feet to make sure I was safe before sitting on the floor beside his owner. “I’m going to bed. Stay up as late as you want and take your pick of guest rooms.”

  “Before you go anywhere, I’ve got something to ask you.”

  Vince nodded, a concerned look on his face. “What do you need?”

  “I want to hire you. Tess isn’t who I thought she was. I need you to watch Katherine and Ashley.”

  Vince’s posture softened and he turned toward the kitchen. I followed him back. “I’m glad you’re seeing Tess clearly, but I don’t know about this. Maybe you should just ask Katherine to leave town.”

  “I will, and if she agrees, I want you to go with them. I can replace my possessions, but I can’t replace them or my friends. I need you to go with them and keep them safe.”

  Vince pulled out a chair from his kitchen table and sat down heavily. “Are you getting sentimental on me?”

  “I just don’t want to see anyone else get hurt. I lost Tess. I can’t afford to lose anyone else.”

  Vince nodded and leaned back in his chair. “What’s Katherine say about this?”

  “I haven’t told her about you yet, but she knows everything else. She’ll understand.”

  Vince raised his eyebrows. “She knows everything?”

  I nodded. “She deserved to know.”

  Vince’s eyes went distant. “I guess if we can trust anybody, we can trust her.” He refocused on me. “Even if I work for free, this won’t be cheap. I’m going to have to pay for hotels and ground transportation, and there’s a chance I might have to hire somebody. A week might cost you a couple grand. Can you afford that?”

  “I can get you as much cash as you need.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “How do you have that kind of money?”

  “Is that really relevant?”

  Vince cocked his head to the side. “If you’re going to give me the kind of money I need to do my job, it’s relevant.”

  I closed my eyes and counted to five to calm myself down and to give myself time to think of a lie. “I’ve been writing erotica and self-publishing it under a penname.”

  “Erotica?” “Yeah, erotica,” I said, throwing up my hands. “You know, books you read with one hand. It’s easy to write, and ever since Fifty Shades of Grey came out, it’s been a hot genre. I make a lot of money with it.”

  Vince lowered his chin. “So you’ve been writing spank books, and you didn’t tell me or Isaac?”

  “If our situation were reversed, would you have told me?”

  “Oh, hell no,” said Vince, shaking his head and chuckling. “I’m going to tell Isaac now, though, as soon as I see him.”

  “I’m glad my situation amuses you.”

  The smile slid off Vince’s face over the next minute, and he exhaled hard enough that I could feel it even from a couple of feet away. “All right. I’ll call the boss and tell him what’s up. Where are Katherine and Ashley now?”

  “At the Homewood Suites in Brentwood.”

  “And who knows they’re there?” />
  I shook my head. “Just us.”

  “That’s good,” said Vince, nodding. “I’ll get a room on the same floor. Ashley will be fine in school, but I’ll drive Katherine to work tomorrow morning and stay with her during the day. Since I’m going to be otherwise occupied, I’ll need you to walk Felix tomorrow morning. He doesn’t have to go as far Simon did, just a couple of blocks. I’ll take him to my pet boarder sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  “If you’re sure about this,” said Vince, standing, “I’m going to pack.”

  “Thank you.”

  Vince nodded and left the living room with his dog trotting faithfully beside him. It didn’t take him long to pack, just a few minutes, which was good because that was all I could keep my eyes open for. Once he left, I put Felix in his kennel and crashed in one of the guest bedrooms, where I slept a worried, troubled sleep.

  The next morning came all too quickly when Felix barked at a quarter after six, waking me up. As Vince had asked, I took him for a short walk and then came back to the house to make coffee. It wasn’t particularly good coffee, but it woke me up enough to call Katherine. Apparently, she had already run into Vince in the lobby at the continental breakfast, so she knew what was going on. She agreed to a bodyguard for the next few days as long as he stayed in the first floor lobby at work, or even in the coffee shop down the street. Vince thought that was an acceptable compromise.