by Brad Parks
The older brother disarmed the security system and waited impatiently by the door for the younger brother to stumble in.
“Where have you been?” the older brother demanded. “You’ve been gone all day.”
The younger brother was bearing a large Tupperware container and a small grin.
“You were supposed to call me,” the older said. “I was worried.”
“I was fine,” he said. The smile grew a little wider.
“Why do you smell like whiskey?”
“I stopped at a bar.”
“What? Are you out of your mind?
“I’m tired of being cooped up. You get out all the time and leave me here.”
“We are being well compensated for our work,” the older admonished. “That should be enough.”
“I was just celebrating a little.”
“It was a stupid risk. What if someone recognized you?”
The younger brother just laughed. “You think any of these rednecks”—he used the English word—“search the Interpol website for pictures of fugitives?”
The older brother grimaced. “Anyhow, what happened out there? Who is this man lurking in the trees?”
“He’s nothing to worry about.”
“What do you mean?”
He handed over the Tupperware. The older brother lifted the lid then immediately closed it and handed it back. “My God,” he said.
The younger brother smiled some more, then placed the container in the refrigerator.
FIFTY
As of Friday afternoon, two things had not yet happened.
One, Herb Thrift had not called me, despite several more messages imploring him to do so. And, two, Roland Hemans had not found Denny Palgraff.
The second item was, according to my earlier threat, supposed to lead to the defense counsel’s detainment for the weekend. But when Jeremy Freeland begged for more time on his lover’s behalf, I acceded. From a practical standpoint, Hemans was going to have a hard time finding his client if he was surrounded by fifteen-foot-high razor-wire fences.
As for Herb Thrift, he had seemingly gone on walkabout. Maybe it was for the best. I had continued my gentle interrogations of my son throughout the week, and there had been no discrepancies between his accounting of each day’s activities and Alison’s—no unexplained absences, no unaccounted time with aunts, no naps that weren’t. My continued stalking of her Facebook account also yielded nothing noteworthy.
My final judicial act of the week, scheduled for two o’clock that afternoon, was a revocation hearing. This meant a felon out on supervised release had done something—or, often, several somethings—he shouldn’t have, and now the government was pressing to have him sent back to prison. I would have called it a routine matter, except of course there’s nothing routine to the man whose freedom is at stake.
The defendant was bald and white and weathered, a hard character like so many I had seen before. He had a private lawyer, a man in a bad suit who was a newcomer to my courtroom.
The prosecutor was, once again, Will Hubbard. As court was brought to order—normally a time when assistant US attorneys stood at attention and submitted themselves to the pomp and circumstance of the moment—he had his head down, like he was trying not to look at me. I was quite sure I didn’t want to know what he had told Jeb Byers about my Rayshaun Skavron ruling.
After beginning the proceeding with as few words as possible, I turned it over to Hubbard, who still wasn’t making eye contact as he said, “Thank you, Your Honor.”
Hubbard launched into a recitation of the allegations against the defendant, namely, that he had already flunked two drug tests and then refused to take a third; and also that he had been hanging around people he had been ordered to stay away from—allegations that put him on a path back toward prison in several ways.
He still had to prove it, of course, so he put the probation officer on the stand. Her testimony was all very pro forma, things she had said—and things I had heard—at least a hundred times before. The way the woman flicked her hair reminded me a little of Alison, and I found myself thinking about, of all things, potpourri.
Sometime in the past week, little bowls filled with dried flowers and other assorted perfumy things had shown up in all the bathrooms in our house. It puzzled me at first. Alison wasn’t really a potpourri kind of gal.
Then came Thursday night, shortly after dinner. I had gone into the downstairs bathroom, and underneath the fragrance of lilac, cinnamon, and who knew what else, I caught another, far less inviting odor.
Vomit. The anxiety was playing such hell on her stomach, she hadn’t been able to keep her dinner down. Upon further investigation, I also found a can of air freshener—another product that had never been in our house before.
Beyond that, just looking at Alison, I could continue to see the physical toll this was taking on her. She had dropped more weight. Her eyes seemed to be permanently sunken. The girlishness that once defined her movements had been replaced by this creaking hesitance. It was like she had gotten old all at once.
You couldn’t fake that, right? And these kind of extreme stress reactions wouldn’t be happening if you knew your daughter really was safe and sound, being fed nutritionally balanced meals and kept away from peanuts and dangerous men’s knives.
I was somewhere in the midst of this thought when a noise from the defendant’s lawyer brought me back into the courtroom.
“Objection,” he yelped. “I fail to see how any of this is material to the matter at hand.”
Hubbard parried with: “It shows a pattern of risk-taking behavior on the defendant’s part.”
“It is incredibly prejudicial, Your Honor. It’s well outside the scope of a revocation hearing. And once it’s out there, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle. I can think of at least three cases right off the top of my head that speak to this: Bennett, Brown, and US versus Feller.”
I stared at them dumbly, clearly caught flat-footed. I shot a glance at the court reporter, wondering if she might take the cue that I was lost and read back the testimony that prompted this sparring match. But she was just looking back at me expectantly, waiting for me to say something.
Because that’s what a judge is supposed to do.
I could feel my ears getting hot. My law clerk was craning her neck to get a look at me. The court security officer shifted his weight uneasily.
It was Hubbard who spoke first.
“Your Honor, you have no idea what we’re talking about right now, do you?” he said.
He threw up his hands to show his exasperation. No other attorney would have dared such a demonstrative gesture, except Hubbard clearly felt entitled to it, given our recent history.
That he was actually right to feel that way was now beside the point. I had to get control of this situation, if only to save what little face I had left.
“Mr. Hubbard, you’re out of line right now,” I said, trying to put some conviction behind it. “You will show this court the respect it is due. Are we clear?”
He sneered at me, but he muttered, “Yes, Your Honor.”
“Good,” I said. “Objection sustained. Now, move on.”
Hubbard’s mouth had a nasty set to it. And although he managed to restrain himself from saying anything that would escalate the situation, he was probably already formulating his complaint to Jeb Byers. Judge Sampson’s behavior is unbefitting his position and discredits the Eastern District of Virginia . . .
What he couldn’t have known was that I was at least twice as furious with myself as he was with me. For however prosaic this hearing was to me, it was still the most consequential thing in this defendant’s life. Felon or not, he deserved better; so did the entire system I had sworn an oath to faithfully represent.
It went to something one of my new colleagues told me shortly after I was c
onfirmed: Judges don’t get to have off days. Every time we take to the bench, what we do matters.
I was still embarrassed and irritated with myself by the time I formally dispatched the defendant, sending him back to the cell he so richly deserved to inhabit. I returned to my chambers, practically tearing off my robe before depositing myself roughly in my chair.
There was a new pile of papers on the corner of my desk, where Mrs. Smith put things that required my attention. Sitting on top was a FedEx package with a slight bulge to it. The words PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL jumped off the side of the envelope at me.
I frowned at it, then picked it up. That’s when I saw the sender’s name.
Rayshaun Skavron.
There was an address and phone number, all certainly fake. And I’m sure any attempt to trace its origin—or lift fingerprints off it, or get anything else useful out of it—would have led nowhere. The kidnappers had already proven their caution when it came to this sort of thing.
I tried to hold off the by-now-familiar feeling of another panic attack setting in as I grasped the plastic strip at the top of the envelope and tore it open.
Then I immediately felt the bottom drop out of my stomach.
Resting at the bottom of the envelope, neatly sealed in a Ziploc sandwich bag like a lunchtime carrot stick, was a human finger.
FIFTY-ONE
It wasn’t Emma’s. It had clearly belonged to an adult, likely a male.
But whatever solace I could wrest from that over the remainder of the afternoon—after I buried the finger at the bottom of the Dumpster outside the courthouse—was otherwise overwhelmed by abject horror. I could come up with a thousand scenarios to explain how that digit had been separated from a human being and wound up snuggled in a plastic bag at the bottom of a FedEx package. All of them were ghastly.
When I got home, I made noises about a bad day, a headache, indigestion, and every other excuse I could think of not to have to perpetuate the guise of human interaction. There was no way I was telling Alison about what had happened. My vomiting wife clearly didn’t need more stress.
As I tried to fall asleep—an enterprise that was an exercise in wistful fantasy—I was having a bad case of the self-absorbed why-mes. I had done everything right in this life. Or at least I had tried. I worked hard. I obeyed traffic laws. I was faithful to my wife. I had done my best by my children. What had I possibly done to deserve having a finger sent to me in the mail?
I was so happy to see the night end that I sprang out of bed and made breakfast for Sam so Alison could sleep in.
After I tidied the kitchen, Sam suggested we go roaming in the woods. It struck me as an excellent idea. Since Monday, when he had his meltdown, I had been especially cognizant of the fact that, even though he might not always be showing it or voicing it, he was still hurting from Emma’s continued absence. The busier we kept him, the better.
We spilled out of the house to find a crisp morning, the dew silvery on the grass. Fall comes late, and gradually, to our part of Virginia. This was the first hint that it might visit again this year.
I let Sam set our course, inasmuch as we even had a course, and stayed far enough behind him that when he crashed through branches or brambles, they didn’t snap back and whack me in the face.
Sam’s monologue was punctuated with its usual degree of marvel, and I loved that he felt compelled to share his discoveries. It was like some kind of adorable existential crisis where what he was seeing didn’t become real unless I also saw it. Hence, I heard an endless stream of “Dad, look at this spider! . . . Dad, three trees, one root! . . . Dad, deer tracks!”
As we got deeper into the woods, I was mostly just enjoying his chatter and his joy at living in a world punctuated by exclamation points. I wasn’t paying particular attention to the content until I heard:
“Dad, check out those vultures!”
Sure enough, there was a small flock of hook-beaked, bald-headed buzzards clustered tightly around some carrion.
“Oh wow,” I said, because that was what he wanted to hear.
Sam halted in his tracks. I closed the gap between us until I was side by side with him. I draped a protective arm on his shoulder. We were still roughly two hundred feet away. The birds were having a fine time with their breakfast, which was large enough to feed seven or eight of them.
I was assuming it was a deer, because nothing else out here was big enough to attract such a crowd. But you couldn’t really see what they were pecking at. Not at first, anyway.
Then one of the birds hopped to the side.
That’s when I saw a pair of battered black loafers.
* * *
It took me about a quarter second to wheel around and block Sam’s view.
“Okay, Sammy,” I said, picking him up and pointing us in the opposition direction. “Time to head back to the house.”
He squirmed against me, giggling a little because he thought it was a game and that I was just roughhousing.
“But, Daaaad.”
“Momma is going to be waking up soon. We didn’t leave a note. She’ll get nervous.”
“Because of Emma?”
“What do you mean, ‘because of Emma’?” I said, even though I knew exactly what he meant.
“Ever since Emma,” he said, referencing his sister as if she were a historical event, “Momma gets a lot of nervous when she can’t see me.”
“Yeah, bud, because of Emma.”
The walk back was slow, with Sam’s fifty-something extra pounds weighing me down as I picked through the underbrush. As soon as we were out of the forest, I hoisted him on my shoulders and covered the ground back to the house with rapid strides.
“Why don’t you race cars for a little while?” I said, depositing him in the family room.
Alison was in the kitchen. She was still in her pajamas, making herself a fresh pot of coffee, moving stiffly, as if she hadn’t woken up yet.
“I need you to keep Sam in the house,” I said, still breathing heavily.
“Is everything okay?”
“No, it’s not. Just keep him in the house.”
“What’s going—”
“Alison,” I said fiercely, then I drew close so I could whisper. “There’s a body out there. Those two shots you heard yesterday? They hit a man. He’s dead.”
“Oh my God,” she said, bringing her hand to her mouth.
I pulled away, with the intent of going back outside, but she grabbed my shirt. “Wait, wait. Is it . . . Who is it? Do you know?”
“No clue,” I lied.
“Oh my God,” she repeated. “Do you think the kidnappers did it?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense. Some poor guy must have bumped across them and they . . .”
I made a shooting gesture with my hand.
“So what are you going to do?”
“What do you think? I’m going to bury the body.”
“But—”
“What? You want me to call the sheriff’s department? We’ll have cop cars, the county coroner, the state medical examiner’s office. It’ll be like a law enforcement picnic. You want that?”
She didn’t reply.
“Just keep Sam away,” I said. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”
She released my shirt. I turned and went out the back door, stopping in the garage to get a shovel. Retracing my steps, I found where the vultures were still huddled. Once I was close enough, I broke into a run, swinging the shovel and yelling until they dispersed.
I closed in on Herb Thrift’s corpse, now fully visible. The scavenging was actually fairly superficial. The majority of the damage was human inflicted.
A big chunk from the top half of his head was missing. He also had a gaping exit wound in his chest. That accounted for the two gunshots Alison reported hearing on Wednesday.
>
But those wounds weren’t all. The body had been mutilated. The fingers were missing, which explained the delivery that had showed up at my office the day before. The teeth also appeared to have been ripped out. The killer had done some fairly gruesome work to impede the identification of the remains.
It all added up to a mess of meat. As a judge, I have seen my share of crime scene photos. And I thought, therefore, I could handle this. I was wrong. I went to one knee and retched. Then again. I kept going until I was dry heaving.
This death was not, in the legal sense, my fault. I hadn’t pulled the trigger. But morally?
I had led Herb Thrift to a slaughter. And I hadn’t even explained to him what danger he was facing. He came into contact with armed killers with nothing more than a camera to protect him.
“I’m sorry,” I said several times, as I tried to regain my composure. “I’m really, really sorry.”
Was I saying it to Herb Thrift? Or to the trees? Or to whatever God I had apparently pissed off in the worst way?
The thing that brought me back to my feet was the same force that kept me going through all of this: Emma. If someone else found this body and called the authorities, she’d suffer terribly for it.
I found the shovel where I had let it drop, and started digging. I chose a spot maybe ten feet from where Thrift was lying—far enough away that I wouldn’t have to look at him, close enough that I would be able to move the body into the hole I was creating without too much trouble. I kept my back to him as I shoveled.
One scoop at a time, I made his grave and assembled the story of how it was he came to need one.
It started when he received permission to be on my property. The problem was, there had been someone else on my property—without my permission. I knew that. I just hadn’t, somehow, been thinking about that when I asked Herb to follow my wife.
I could picture Herb, crouched in the woods, using the zoom lens of his camera as binoculars, keeping an eye on the house. Then I imagined his surprise when he came across one of the kidnappers—or, perhaps, two or three of them—doing the same thing.
