Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  “No, no, Blake, stop. This is insanity. I didn’t need you to get Keesee off me forever. I just needed you to delay him a little. Come Monday, call him back and tell him you changed your mind. By then I’ll be able to fight my own battle. You can’t . . . I mean, thank you, but I can’t have you throwing yourself on the sword for me like this. You don’t owe me this.”

  “Oh, but I do.”

  He reached out with one finger and lightly tapped the spot on my chest where I would always bear the scar of one deranged man’s idea of lobbying his senator.

  “Oh now, hold on, because of that? Blake, it wasn’t like I dove in front of you and took that bullet. I was just trying to scramble out of the way like everyone else. It was nothing more than a random, stupid accident. You don’t carry some debt because of that. And even if you did, you got me this job. We were square a long time ago.”

  He was shaking his head.

  “Look, I know now’s not a good time,” he said. “But it never seems like it’s a good time. And I’ve been . . . This is something I’ve been wanting to tell you for . . . Well, ever since it happened. And even now, I don’t quite . . . I’m not sure how to say this.”

  It was so unusual to hear the ever-eloquent Senator Franklin stumble over his words or express uncertainty, I think I was too surprised to even try to interrupt him.

  “That bullet,” he said finally. “It wasn’t an accident. It was actually meant for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You remember how we had been passing around that gun bill you wrote, trying to get everyone behind it?”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “Well, I knew it was dead before we ever announced it. It had been made very clear to me that with the people aligned against it, and with what they were willing to do to sink the thing, it had absolutely no chance of passing. But I . . . I was so stubborn, I went ahead and announced it anyway. I really thought that once the world saw how . . . how reasonable it was, how good a job you had done writing it . . . I thought there would be this groundswell of public support and everyone would have no choice but to line up behind it.”

  “Blake, that doesn’t make you responsible for—”

  “I got this phone call,” he said, not acknowledging I had tried to speak. “It was the day before the press conference. It came from a pay phone. I don’t know how the guy even got my number. But he was pretty clear. Everyone on the Hill knew you had written that bill, and this guy, he said that if I went ahead and announced it, he was gonna . . . he was gonna . . .”

  Blake swallowed hard, then expelled a large breath. “He said he was going to shoot you. He was very specific. He said, ‘You hold that press conference, and your boy Scott Sampson is going to take one in the heart.’ I thought it was a bunch of malarkey and I didn’t want to seem like I was scared or intimidated. You get known as a guy who can be pushed around and . . . It was just arrogance on my part. That’s all it was. Plain, stupid arrogance. I really thought no one would make a move against big, bad Blake Franklin or anyone on his staff. I could have asked you to skip the press conference or wear a bulletproof vest. I could have told the cops to be on the lookout. I could have done a million things. But I didn’t. I was just full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, thinking only about myself and my idiotic reputation.

  “And then when that whackadoodle actually went through with it, I was just . . . I was so ashamed of what I had done, of what I had let happen. I couldn’t even bring myself to tell anyone about it. Not you. Not the FBI. I was so worried about what everyone would think of me.”

  “Blake, you still can’t blame yourself for—”

  “Now, let me finish, damn it,” he said, flashing a quick smile. “I know you’re the judge now and you’ve gotten used to telling people to stop talking, but I’m still in the Senate for a little longer, and we get to filibuster, okay?

  “What I’m trying to say is you’re like a son to me. You were then and you are now. And I didn’t do a very simple thing to keep harm from coming to you way back when. So I’m going to do a not-as-simple thing to keep harm from coming to you now. And it’s not because I think I owe you some debt. It’s because it’s the right thing to do, and I’m not going to hear another word about it. Now, come here.”

  He enveloped me in a hug.

  What Blake said had, in some way I couldn’t fully appreciate in the moment, altered the narrative of my life. It would take a while to figure out how I felt about it, to decide how it impacted my relationship with Blake.

  For now, I just knew his willingness to relinquish his seat in the highest legislature in the land, with all its trappings, both awed and humbled me. It also gave my daughter a lease on life she would have otherwise lost. And someday I hoped I’d be able to tell her the story of just what an angel her godfather had been to her.

  “Blake, I’m not sure I even know where to start,” I began.

  “Then don’t. I didn’t tell you about this because I wanted you to gush all over me. I just needed to clear the air. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m standing in the way of a judge who doesn’t need to listen to an old man ramble anymore. I’ll let myself out.”

  He clapped me on the shoulder once. Before I could resume my efforts to talk sense into him, I was looking at his back as he left my office.

  * * *

  I stood there for a full minute, trying to consider a future world in which Blake Franklin was no longer my senator.

  Then I snapped back to the present. I could contemplate Citizen Blake some other time. I had some fingerprint results to collect.

  The hallway had mostly cleared. There was only a small cluster of people at the elevator, waiting for it to take them down. Not wanting to be gawked at by a bunch of strangers—and hoping to catch Ben Gardner without a crowd around him—I took the stairs instead.

  As I walked the three flights down, I pulled my phone out of my pocket, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I felt like the kidnappers should have reached out by now. During the Skavron case, they had texted me how many times? The relative silence was unnerving. As much as I hated hearing from them, not hearing from them was worse.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I opened the door to find Ben Gardner sitting in his usual chair. It was about five minutes of noon, just in time to beat the lunch rush. He was alone.

  He stood when he saw me.

  “Hey, Judge, got some things for you,” he said.

  He handed me the brass keychain, still in its plastic bag. Then he pulled a folded slip of paper from his pocket and held it in the air for a moment.

  “You tell your missus this comes straight from NGI. That’s the latest and greatest in FBI fingerprint identification. It stands for Next Generation something-or-other. It’s ninety-nine point nine-nine-whatever percent accurate, and between the criminals and the civilians, they got more than a hundred million names in there. You were right about them not being able to identify one of the sets of prints on there. But they got a hit on the other one.”

  He handed me the slip.

  “Thank you, Ben, I really appreciate this,” I said, taking it in my palm.

  “Not a problem. Tell your missus I said hello.”

  Wanting to maintain the appearance of indifference, I gave him an easy smile as I passed by. As soon as I was in the parking lot, I took out the piece of paper.

  I glanced to my left and right, as if anyone else knew the significance of the thing I held in my hand. But there was just the usual prelunch nothing on the street. My only spectator was one lonely seagull.

  The paper had been folded in half. With a nod, I unfolded it and peered down at the name.

  Then I felt everything swirl. I actually had to lean on a parked car for support.

  There is treachery in this world that we have become jaded enough to almost expect. The kindly widow has poisoned he
r three dead husbands. Everyone’s favorite neighbor is actually a pedophile. Pastor Jim embezzles from the weekly offering.

  We hold these things out as being surprising—but somehow still possible—because they do not come from that deep inner circle of people in our lives; people we have been able to observe at close quarters for decades; whose benevolent nature we have confirmed through repeated acts of good faith; whose motives we never need bother to question because, on some atomic level, they are always in sync with us.

  Then comes this. Evidence of a perfidy that literally left me staggered, momentarily unable to pry myself off the side of the Subaru that was keeping me upright.

  And it was committed by someone who first held Sam and Emma on the day they were born, who had never missed one of their birthday parties, who was listed in our wills as being the children’s legal guardian should Alison and I meet an untimely death.

  I read that slip of paper again, still in something beyond disbelief.

  The name written in neatly printed letters was Karen Lowe.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  I stumbled to my car and sat heavily inside it.

  Karen. Alison’s sister. My sister-in-law. My children’s aunt.

  Was this some kind of misunderstanding or . . .

  Or had Karen really attacked our family like this?

  There were, possibly, innocent explanations for her fingerprint being on that keychain. Maybe she recently drove the car without my knowing it. Maybe she and Alison had been in the Honda together and Karen grabbed the keys. Or maybe Karen had needed to borrow the car for some reason I didn’t know about.

  As for the non-innocent explanations, I could already start making some guesses. She knew we kept the key to the Honda on that hook right by the front door of the cottage. She would also know the cottage was never locked. And a Wednesday afternoon would be an easy time to pilfer the car for a few quick hours: Alison and I would be at work; Justina would be at class. She could take it and return it without us ever knowing.

  I flashed to the footage from the Montessori school and replayed it in my mind. There was a slender blond woman with a ponytail pulled through the back of a pink cap. When I first saw it, I certainly thought it could have been Alison.

  But it also could have just as easily been Karen. They had the same coloring, the same dimensions. As teenagers, they were sometimes mistaken for twins. Even now, you had to be able to see their faces to tell them apart. From the side or behind, which was the angle at which Miss Pam and the children would have seen her as they spilled out of the front door to school, she would have been indistinguishable from Alison.

  And once she got them rolling in a minivan with those cartoons on, would the kids have noticed? Apparently not. Sam hadn’t, anyway.

  There was still the question of why, of course. What motivation would Karen have to kidnap her niece and nephew? What could she possibly gain from it?

  Or, again, was there some perfectly benign way to account for that fingerprint?

  I didn’t know. But Alison might. Still in my car, I dialed her number.

  “Do you have her?” Alison answered.

  “No. Not yet. Sorry. We’re just breaking for lunch.”

  “Oh,” she said, her voice falling. “How’s everything going?”

  “Fine. Listen, I’ve got a really important question to ask you. Is there any possibility that in the few days before the kids were taken, Karen drove the Honda?”

  “Karen? Why would Karen drive the Honda?”

  “Just answer the question. Did she borrow the car? Did you drive with her in it or let her drive it for some reason?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because I got the fingerprint results back. Her print is—”

  Alison inhaled so quickly it made a squeaking noise. Her exhale came out as: “Oh God. Oh God, no. No, no. It can’t be.”

  I immediately ached for my beautiful wife, already cancer bitten and daughterless, now having to wrestle with the possibility that her own sister had done something this terrible. She was breathing so fast I worried she was going to hyperventilate.

  “But Karen is . . . I mean, she couldn’t,” Alison continued. “She just couldn’t. Why would she do this? There’s just no . . . This is Karen we’re talking about. Karen. You should have seen her when I told her about the lump. She sprang right into action. It’s like she made my cancer her part-time job. Are you sure there’s not some mistake? I mean, I know our prints are in that database because of Dad, but . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “But is there a possibility—”

  “Yes, there is a point-oh-oh-something percent chance of a false match. But that means the chance of it being right is well beyond ninety-nine percent. This is the very latest technology from the FBI.”

  “Oh God,” she moaned again.

  “Look, just . . . think with me here for a second. Is it possible there’s some perfectly harmless reason her fingerprint was on that keychain?”

  But Alison was already putting things together.

  “That was her in the security footage at school, wasn’t it?” Alison said. “That was the back of her head.”

  “It sure seems possible.”

  “I have to go.”

  “Where?”

  “To Karen’s. I have to ask her about this.”

  “I’m coming,” I said.

  “Okay. I’m at my mother’s right now. I’m leaving Sam here. I’ll be at Karen’s in five minutes.”

  “Wait for me.”

  * * *

  The Lowes’ subdivision was about fifteen minutes from the courthouse. Alison was parked at the entrance of it when I arrived.

  I hopped out of my car and jogged over to hers. She rolled down the window. Her face, which had become so gaunt in the past few weeks, was sunken even further.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, which had to be the dumbest question I had asked in a while.

  She closed her eyes, bent her head, and shook it slightly. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So how are we doing this?”

  “I think we just present her with the evidence and see if she’ll tell us the truth.”

  “You think she’s going to be honest about having kidnapped our children?”

  “Let’s just confront her,” Alison said. “I mean, why would Karen do something like this? To her own niece and nephew? To us? It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I know,” I said. Then I caught a glimpse of a cylindrical piece of metal poking out from underneath a sweatshirt on the seat next to her.

  “You brought the gun?” I asked.

  “It was an impulse when I left the house this morning. I just wanted to have it.”

  I understood how she felt. “Okay. Did you hear anything from the doctor, by the way?”

  “I can’t think about that right now. Come on. Let’s go.”

  I patted the side of her car and walked away. Then I drove behind her for the final two-tenths of a mile to Karen’s place. We pulled alongside the curb and marched up to the front porch.

  Ordinarily we just waltzed into the house like we owned it. This time, Alison rang the doorbell. Karen answered dressed in workout clothes, mystified to see us.

  “Hey, guys,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  “We need to talk,” Alison said stiffly, then made a straight line for the living room before Karen could respond.

  “Is everything okay?” Karen said, trailing after her.

  Alison took a seat. Karen and I followed her lead.

  “I need to ask you about our minivan,” Alison said. “The Honda. The one Justina used to pick the kids up from school.”

  “Uh, okay, what about it?” Karen said.

  “Have you driven it recently?”


  Karen didn’t miss a beat. “No. Why would I?”

  “Think hard. Are you sure you didn’t maybe borrow it or run an errand in it?”

  This time, Karen twisted her mouth to one side and thought it over. “Not that . . . not that I can remember. I don’t think I’ve ever even been in that van.”

  And there was the lie. That she delivered it without the slightest hitch was an insight into a side of my sister-in-law’s character I had never seen. I knew the surface Karen: tough, yes; bossy, for sure; but ultimately, I thought, a straight-shooting daughter of a colonel who would never be capable of something so pernicious. Obviously, there was a lot more to her than I had ever dreamed.

  Alison’s eyes flicked toward me.

  “Scott, do you have the keychain with you?”

  “I do.”

  “Could you show it to Karen, please?”

  I pulled it out of my pocket, where its brass bulk had formed a lump. I placed it on the coffee table in front of me.

  “That’s the keychain for the Honda,” Alison said. “Can you explain why we found your fingerprint on it?”

  Karen’s head went from Alison, to me, back to Alison.

  Then she burst into tears.

  * * *

  At first, Karen’s words were unintelligible. She was gulping air and crying and trying to talk all at the same time.

  The first thing I was able to understand was, “They made me do it.”

  “Wait, stop,” I said. “Who made you do it?”

  “These men . . .”

  “What men?”

  “I don’t know. I had never seen them before and I never want to see them again. There were two of them. They had beards and accents and they were very . . . I mean, my God, they were just terrifying. It was like they didn’t even care that I was seeing their faces or anything. They came to the house one day and they said I had to”—she paused for a large breath—“I had to pick up Sam and Emma from school for them. They told me I had to take the van from your property and then drive it to school. It was like they had been watching you and they knew everything about you. They knew that most days Justina drove the van. They knew that Justina had class on Wednesdays. They knew how everything was supposed to go.