Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  That I remember it so well, and can recount it with such vivid detail, is only because I have replayed it thousands of times in my own head.

  The Macedonians tore along unabated for perhaps another ten yards. That was how long it took for them to recognize they were heading toward what appeared to be a police ambush.

  The driver slammed on the breaks, hard. The van skidded off our rutted dirt path and onto the combination of grass and pine straw that serves as our yard. Dust flew into the air as the van went from roughly fifty miles an hour to a dead stop.

  For less than a second, it stayed there, perfectly still. Then it started going backward.

  The Macedonians, a pair of wanted men with a kidnapped child in their cargo hold, wanted no part of explaining themselves to the Gloucester County Sheriff’s Office.

  It was around this time the door to the Buick opened. It was Alison. When I say she hit the ground running, I mean I had never seen my wife move so fast. She charged toward the van. The Smith & Wesson was a blur of metal in her hand.

  She was closing in, quickly. First thirty yards out. Then twenty. The only problem was, the van had shifted into reverse and was accelerating. Soon, it was traveling backward faster than she could go forward.

  There was no chance of her catching up. Those Macedonian men were going to drive off with Emma. It was difficult to imagine any scenario where we’d see her alive again. The Macedonians were on the run now. They would value their own freedom over whatever flimsy arrangement they had with Andy Whipple. They would dispose of Emma and climb back down into whatever dark hole they had first crawled out of.

  Alison was obviously having the same thoughts. She leveled the gun and, still running, started firing.

  She was aiming low, at the van’s tires. I suspect it was because she didn’t dare shoot at the body of a van that had Emma inside.

  Three small puffs of dirt appeared in front of the van as her first rounds missed short. I had seen my wife in action on the range. Even being out of practice as she was, hitting a tire from less than a hundred feet should not have been a problem. Either her running was throwing her off, or she was being too cautious with her aim. I suspected it was the latter.

  Then more gunshots started ringing out. They were coming from the passenger side of the van.

  One of the Macedonians was returning fire.

  The barrel of the weapon jutted out of the window. It was an AR-15, a deadly assault rifle with a long banana clip attached. It was semiautomatic, but he was pulling the trigger as fast as his finger could move, clearly unconcerned about running out of rounds. I could see the muzzle flashes sparking in rapid succession.

  It wasn’t a fair fight. The Macedonian had a superior weapon and more ammunition. He was also surrounded by several tons of glass and steel. Alison, meanwhile, didn’t even have a blade of grass for cover.

  My initial reaction was delayed by the shock of the gunshots, by the compulsion—one that was especially strong in me, given past events—to duck for cover when the lead started flying. But finally that impulse was overwhelmed by the urge to protect my wife. I started charging toward her.

  “No!” I shouted. “No, Alison. No!”

  I didn’t get very far. Two cops weren’t going to let a civilian—even one they suspected of murdering their former colleague—run toward a raging firefight. Harold Curry grabbed me by the back of my jacket, which slowed me just enough for the beefy, baby-faced deputy to grab me with both arms.

  Seemingly oblivious to the danger she was facing, Alison actually stopped running. She assumed a classic shooting stance: legs braced, one slightly in front of the other; shoulders square to her target; hands thrust out in front of her. She fired twice. The van’s front left tire exploded. She shifted her sights and squeezed off three more rounds, reducing the front right tire to a mass of shredded rubber.

  I knew the magazine on the Smith & Wesson held fifteen rounds and that she had started off with it full. By my count, she was down to seven bullets.

  The van was now essentially riding on its rims. The wrecked tires were no longer helping. If anything, they were now a hindrance. The vehicle was foundering badly, unable to get any traction.

  By stopping, Alison had greatly improved her accuracy. She had also made herself an easy target.

  I shouted again. Actually, I was probably shouting the whole time, though what I said neither mattered nor made sense. At some point, Harold Curry had grabbed the deputy’s radio from his shoulder and was frantically telling the dispatch to send all available units to my address.

  Help was coming. Alison just had to hang on.

  She had shifted her efforts to the back passenger tire, which she blew apart on the second try. The van lurched to the right and was now almost completely disabled.

  That was when the Macedonian who had been driving tried to make a break for it. It was a huge mistake. As soon as he was clear of the van—and was no longer unwittingly using my daughter as cover—Alison cut him down with two shots in the back. His arms flew out to either side and he fell facedown.

  The other Macedonian, who was either not as foolish or a whole lot bolder because of his AR-15, kept shooting wildly. I was now praying for him to leave the van too. Or for him to run out of ammunition.

  Then something almost as good happened. Alison was on the move.

  She was running away, dashing toward the safety of the woods. And she was going to make it. I let out a ragged cheer. She really was going to make it. She knew the battle had been won and now she was going to let the rest of the Gloucester County Sheriff’s Office win the war. Let the lone Macedonian just try to take on all those armed deputies. He would either surrender or die while trying to fight it out.

  Alison was mere seconds away from the greatest escape of her life. The trees couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away. They were her refuge, her sanctuary, their thick trunks offering all the protection she would need.

  Then, to my horror, she tumbled.

  The way she flopped to the ground, limbs akimbo, told me a bullet had hit her leg. She tried, just once, to get up. But her lower body wasn’t up to the task.

  She rolled just as the Macedonian unleashed a new volley. Mounds of pine straw exploded where she had been lying mere nanoseconds before.

  Then she came up to a sitting position, her worthless leg in front of her, the gun raised. Incredibly, she had a perfect shot at him. She was also savagely exposed to his fire.

  I couldn’t tell you which in the following happened first. For all intents and purposes, they happened simultaneously.

  With one of her three remaining rounds, Alison buried a shot in the Macedonian’s forehead. His head jerked violently backward. A red mist splattered the inside of the van’s windows.

  Concurrently, the Macedonian’s aim finally became true. Two bullets ripped into Alison’s chest. Her arms splayed to either side.

  She fell backward.

  I’m not sure if I managed to break free from the cops or if they simply let me go. I sprinted toward Alison’s wilted form, bellowing for help, my arms and legs pumping. Yelling and running. Yelling and running. I was moving at glacial speed. It was like one of those nightmares where the worst thing you can imagine is chasing you but your feet can’t seem to gain any purchase and your thighs are too weak to move you and the harder you struggle the slower you go.

  When I reached her, I skidded next to her body on my knees, ready to pound life into her heart or breathe oxygen into her lungs.

  But there was no point.

  The slugs had torn into her with lethal force, leaving two jagged, plum-size cavities in the center of her torso. The carnage was devastating.

  Her chest was not moving. Her pupils were fixed and dilated. There was something about her stillness that was absolute. One moment there had been a fully functioning woman, in charge of all her motor
functions, both large and small. And then someone pressed an off button.

  She was already gone.

  * * *

  I have tried to tell myself this meant she died instantly, without much pain or suffering. Maybe it’s because I like that version of things.

  As long as I’m deluding myself, I tell myself she died with the full knowledge of what she had accomplished: that both Macedonians were dead; that Andy Whipple, who had been cowering in the bottom of my Buick as soon as the bullets began flying, was going to allow himself to be arrested without resistance; and, most important, that Emma was safely in my arms not three minutes after the shooting ended.

  Maybe she understood all that in her final, fleeting second of consciousness. Maybe she didn’t.

  All I can say is that I know the truth. She died so our daughter could live.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  In the following minutes, hours, and days, so much happened that I’m not sure I can accurately recall the order of it.

  Retrieving data from the dead men’s phones, the authorities were able to track their hiding spot to a ranch house deep in the woods in Mathews, the next county over from Gloucester, a place so rural it does not have a single stoplight.

  There, they found ample evidence of Emma’s twenty-three days in captivity. They also discovered a piece of Tupperware in the refrigerator containing Herb Thrift’s remaining fingers and all of his teeth, which effectively cleared me of that murder.

  Andy Whipple, on the other hand, was just beginning his journey in the criminal justice system. He had made elaborate plans to mislead and frustrate the Securities and Exchange Commission, the FBI Securities Fraud Unit and the US Attorneys Office. He had not counted on the Gloucester County Sheriff’s Office or the Virginia State Police, whose homicide charges took precedence over those financial crimes.

  Murder for hire is a capital offense in Virginia. So is serial murder, which state statutes define as the taking of two lives in less than three years. So is murder in the commission of a criminal enterprise. The Macedonians in Andy Whipple’s employ had killed both Herbert Thrift and Alison Sampson, all while engaged in a conspiracy to blackmail me by kidnapping my children. That put Whipple on the way to the needle in at least three different ways.

  The prosecutor asked me if I thought he should pursue the death penalty. But I’ve never been all that interested in retribution. It wouldn’t bring back my wife or restore Herb Thrift to his happy life. It wouldn’t erase whatever emotional damage was done to Sam and Emma.

  As it was, Whipple would never draw another breath as a free man. Karen’s and Mark’s testimonies were more than enough to put him away. The Lowes were also heading for what looked like many decades of incarceration, their cooperation in Whipple’s prosecution notwithstanding. The only sadness I felt about that was related to their children. At least Aunt Jenny had agreed to take them in.

  In the meantime, I was able to explain my Skavron ruling to Jeb Byers, who proved sympathetic. He saw to it the ruling was vacated, then issued a warrant for Skavron’s arrest. The judge and I then agreed I should take some time off but that I could resume hearing cases when I was ready.

  Neal Keesee was harder to appease. But he had the scalp he wanted: Blake Franklin followed through on his promise to pull out of the election. I felt more than a measure of guilt over it. But Blake, God bless him, assured me he was relieved to be done with the whole thing and that I was actually doing him a favor.

  The matter of Palgraff vs. ApotheGen went away more quietly. Roland Hemans, soundly beaten and not wanting to waste more of anyone’s time, withdrew his complaint. The moment I heard about it, I alerted Steve Politi, then waited an hour until I notified the clerk of court. A promise was a promise.

  In truth, all of that was happening on the periphery of my life. The center of it, more than ever before, was Sam and Emma, two children who needed me more than ever now that I was their only parent.

  The three of us slept in the same bed at their grandmother’s house that Friday night, and the two nights after that. They were just beginning to grieve for their mother, a process that would likely continue for the rest of their lives. And I was going to be their beacon of strength for all of it. Had I done differently, I have no doubt Alison would have found a way to come down from heaven and kick my ass.

  I didn’t return to the farm that weekend. I think I already suspected I never would. At some point on Sunday, Jenny and Gina bravely went back there and carried out a few precious items, the things that reminded us of Alison most. I planned to give the rest away and start fresh in a new house. Something near Gina, Jenny, and the cousins.

  Just not on a cul-de-sac. I knew how Alison felt about those.

  Mostly, I was still in shock, still trying to set in order what had happened, seeing Alison’s final actions—heroic, selfless, and stupid as they were—in my mind a thousand times.

  For the first few days, they still didn’t really make sense to me. It was clear the Macedonians were going to get away if she didn’t intercede. But why couldn’t she have been more cautious? Why had she valued her own life so little?

  Then, on Monday morning, at 8:43 A.M., Alison’s phone rang. I had been keeping it with me, telling myself I was just being practical: People needed to know she had passed away. I’m sure any amateur psychologist could have diagnosed there was more going on.

  Nevertheless, when it rang, coming from a number neither I nor the phone recognized, I answered with a simple, “Hello?”

  “Uh, hello,” said a female voice, one that was clearly expecting another female voice to answer. “This is Laurie Lyckholm. Is Alison there?”

  “This is her husband, Scott,” I said. “I’m afraid Alison passed away on Friday.”

  There was a silence on the line, followed by: “I’m very sorry to hear that. May I ask what happened?”

  I told her as briefly as I could. Laurie Lyckholm listened without interrupting. I finished with: “I’m sorry, I know I should recognize your name, but there’s been a lot going on and I can’t place it.”

  “I was Alison’s oncologist.”

  “Oh right,” I said.

  There was a pause on the line. Then the doctor said, “This is none of my business, so please don’t answer if you don’t want to. But I have to ask: Did she tell you about the conversation we had on Friday?”

  “No.”

  There was another silence. Finally, she said, “I know Alison wanted to keep her battle with cancer very private. But there’s no point in withholding this from you now. Alison and I talked that morning. I told her that her blood work showed abnormally high liver enzyme levels and that her CAT scan had confirmed she had an enlarged liver. The cancer had spread from her breast to her liver.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “We were going to finalize her treatment plan this morning. She said she needed the weekend to think about things. But I can tell you what I told her. Primary liver cancer, when a tumor starts in the liver, is very serious, of course, but it is curable. Secondary liver cancer, when it has come to the liver from somewhere else, is not curable.”

  “Not curable. As in terminal.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And she knew that?”

  “She most certainly did.”

  “How much time did she have left?”

  “That’s always difficult to predict. And of course it would have depended on what treatment she chose. But not very long. Three months? Four months? Six months? To be perfectly frank with you, the cancer was already fairly advanced. Whatever time she had left would have been increasingly difficult. And I had told her as much. So what happened to your wife, well, I would never call it a blessing. But in the strangest way, it was a more merciful, less painful end than what she would have faced otherwise.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  And this time I d
id.

  * * *

  We held the memorial service three days later, on a heartlessly perfect autumn afternoon, the kind I wished Alison had been around to enjoy. On the way to the church, I started having a conversation with her about how nice it was. I already sensed I would be doing that for a long time to come.

  The church was full, naturally; overfull, actually, with people spilling out the back. Alison’s colleagues, the children and families she had worked with at school, our friends and neighbors, people whose lives she had touched in ways large and small, they all came out to pay their respects.

  I had asked for no flowers, requesting that people make a donation to a scholarship fund that had already been set up in Alison’s name at her school. A bunch of folks had gone ahead and bought flowers anyway. The bouquets covered several feet on both sides of Alison, and their fragrance filled the sanctuary.

  The casket was open. It wasn’t, necessarily, my preference. Or, perhaps, Alison’s. But Gina had insisted. She said she wanted to be able to see her daughter one last time. I didn’t feel like I could deny a mother’s last request.

  Seeing Alison lying there was disorienting at first. She seemed so serene, so peaceful. None of her wounds had been to her face or head. I still was having a difficult time processing that she wasn’t going to be at home with me that night, letting me hold her as we went to sleep.

  The funeral home had used a light touch with the makeup. She was wearing the dress she had bought a few years earlier to celebrate our fifteenth wedding anniversary, a dress she loved. She looked beautiful.

  We sang a few of Alison’s favorite hymns. The pastor had asked me if I wanted to say something, but I assured him I wouldn’t be able to make it through even half a sentence. Jenny delivered the eulogy instead, bravely forcing her way through it. Then the pastor gave a sermon. I think they were both nice, but I couldn’t be sure. To be honest, I had a hard time concentrating on the words.

  Part of me wasn’t really there. I was back in our sophomore year, reliving the first time I saw her, that wow-who’s-that? moment that started it all. I was seeing her hair, her shoulders, her very being radiating in the setting sun.