“A bird,” he said. He stepped up to the glass and looked closer. “A crow. That’s weird.” And that’s when they heard the sirens.
Chapter 8
The whole neighborhood, it seemed, had turned out to watch the spectacle. Luke, Ellie, and his mom and sisters, all stood at the edge of the crowd surrounding the pool and watched as the firemen and policemen rescued ‘George.’ His dad and little brother had stayed at home.
John, Jimmy and their dad came up and stood with them, joining the growing crowd.
“What’s going on,” Mr. Besner said to Luke’s mom.
“I don’t know. I think someone fell in the pool.”
Luke tried not to look at John and Jimmy, but he could sense their nervousness. Ellie held his hand tight and pressed up against him. He could feel her trembling beside him.
“Are you gonna be ok?” he whispered in her ear.
She nodded quickly but said nothing. Her eyes were shining in the flashing lights and her mouth was set in a tight line. He felt surreal and wondered what they had got themselves into. He looked around at the crowd and thought for sure everyone was staring at them though he knew he was probably imagining things. How could anybody know? No one had seen them he was sure.
The rescue workers grew a little more active and the crowd murmured louder seeing that something was happening. Luke watched as they pulled ‘George’ out of the pool and then quickly lay him on the ground. The paramedics seemed frantic.
Something wasn’t right.
Luke craned his neck to look and saw the paramedics urgently hooking up I.V.’s to ‘George’ and one was pressing on his chest doing CPR. Luke’s knees suddenly felt week and he turned to John next to him, but John stared dumbfounded at the scene, his mouth hanging open.
Luke looked harder, straining to see through the crowd and as he heard Ellie gasp, he saw a small, white hand poke through the sleeve of the clothing they used to make the dummy. Then, as someone shifted in the crowd, he saw a paramedic bend to a white face and press his lips to the cold blue lips of the boy they pulled out of the pool. The paramedic was giving mouth to mouth to a real person.
Luke grabbed Ellie as she swooned and sank to her knees.
Detective Jaxon Jennings, homicide investigator for the Fairfax County Police Department, looked down at the boy the paramedics were frantically working on and shook his head. He turned and scanned the crowd, looking for anything. All he saw were scared parents and children of a quiet neighborhood suddenly turned upside down. He knew this place. He had been here a couple of weeks ago on a call about a mutilated dog. No big deal, right, but the department had a policy of investigating all acts of cruelty toward animals. The FBI training they had received dictated it. Too many people who tortured animals graduated to humans later in their demented lives.
“Is he gonna make it?” Sally Winston, his partner, asked over his shoulder.
One of the paramedics working on the boy thought she was talking to him. “Don’t think so. He’s been gone too long. We don’t even have any electrical activity in his heart.”
She looked at Jaxon and her eyes conveyed a sadness he no longer felt at his age. At forty seven, he’d seen too much to feel anymore.
“How long are you guys gonna work on him?” Jaxon asked.
“As long as it takes,” the paramedic snapped.
Jaxon took it in stride, nodded his head and wandered over to the fence, looking out at the crowd.
“What do you think?” Sally said to his back.
He turned and looked at the boy again. “Hard to say right now. Looks like a simple drowning. There are no marks on him I can see at the moment, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have any.”
He looked around the pool deck and something caught his eye. He wandered over to the southern side of the deck and stared at multiple footprints near the fence. On the other side, they led off into the parking lot and the crowd.
Sally came over and bent down to look.
“Have any of our people been over here?” Jaxon asked.
“No. The area hasn’t been contaminated. Didn’t know if it was a crime scene yet.” She stood, and he watched her follow the footprints with her eyes as they meandered over to the edge of the pool, where they blended with the footprints the paramedics and cops had made.
Jaxon bent down and looked at the imprint of one shoe. “Kids?” he asked.
She joined him. “Looks to be about the right size.”
“We better get some imprints of these,” he said.
“Sure,” and she left to get the kit.
Jaxon continued to look around and noticed something brightly colored, caught on the top of the fence, fluttering in the breeze. He walked over, careful not to disturb any of the other tracks, stood on his tip toes and pulled the piece of fabric off. He studied it, and then stared out into the crowd again not sure what he was looking for. He pulled an evidence bag out of his jacket pocket and slipped the fabric inside. He was beginning to think there was more to this than met the eye.
Luke’s mom knelt in front of Ellie and ran her hand across Ellie’s face. She looked up at Luke. “Lucas, you should get her home. She shouldn’t be seeing all this. It’s upsetting her.”
“I’m alright, Mrs. Harrison. Really,” Ellie said and stood.
“Are you sure?”
Ellie nodded and grasped Luke’s hand. “I’m sure.”
“Alright.”
Ellie gripped Luke’s arm tightly and leaned up against him. “Sorry,” she whispered in his ear.
“It’s ok. It shocked me too.”
“What is going on?”
“I have no clue. Let’s talk about it later, ok?”
She nodded and stared at the ground. Luke turned to John who gave him a worried look and then proceeded to ignore him. Jimmy looked stoic as he watched everything happening in the pool area.
Luke scanned the faces, worried the person behind The Voice was mingling with the crowd. Didn’t they say the person always returned to the scene of the crime? All the faces seemed normal, and he could see no one acting weird or suspicious. He wondered how he looked to everyone else.
He turned back to the pool and saw the cop who had come out to investigate Ellie’s dog, Bentley. He tensed and then shifted a little so he was hidden behind the man in front of him as he watched the cop scan the crowd. Peeking around the shoulders of the man, he stared as the cop talked to another woman and then they walked over to the fence and looked at something on the ground.
Ellie nudged him. “What are they doing?” she whispered.
“I think they’re looking at our footprints. Crap!”
“Maybe we should go.”
“No, not yet. Let’s see what happens.”
They watched for a while longer, and then the paramedics loaded the body onto a stretcher and attached a machine which continued the CPR compressions with a piston like arm. They loaded him up in the ambulance and drove off with the siren wailing. Shortly, a uniformed police officer announced there was nothing more to see and asked if everyone would kindly return to their homes.
People shuffled off, talking about what they had seen. Luke and Ellie joined his family and the rest of the neighbors from his court as they all headed back home. He glanced back as they left and saw the woman cop fiddling with some equipment by the fence. He couldn’t tell what she was doing, but he knew it had something to do with them.
Chapter 9
Jaxon hated this part of the job. He was tempted to pass this on to Sally, but he was the lead and the job was supposed to fall to him. Contacting the family of a deceased relative was never easy, but when it involved a child it was even more difficult.
The boy from the pool was now in a refrigerator at the county morgue awaiting an autopsy, if the family so desired, or if the evidence dictated a crime had taken place. In the boy’s back pocket, a school paper had been found with the name of the boy at the top left. It had been blurry and faint on the soggy paper, but with a l
ittle work they had been able to determine who it had belonged to. It had then been a simple act of pulling School records on the child to get the address and phone number of the parents. He wouldn’t need the phone number. He would do this in person.
Sally decided to go with him and he was glad about that. She handled civilians much better than he did. They arrived at the house at 9:00 in the morning and knocked on the door. His hands were sweating and he was irritated at himself for how he was feeling. He had been quiet all morning and Sally kept turning to look at him as if something was wrong.
“Are you getting a little case of conscience?” Sally finally asked as they waited at the door.
“Why?” he said.
“You look a little nervous and upset.”
He paused, then said, “I’m just pissed I have to be here on a Sunday.”
She shook her head, but said nothing else.
The door was answered by a woman in her mid thirties, brown hair and eyes, pink robe and slippers, holding a spatula, smiling as if the world was good and her life was perfect. He knew he was going to ruin that perception in a few seconds.
Jaxon had his I.D. out and he held it out to the woman. “Morning ma’am, I’m Detective Jennings and this is Detective Winston. We’re with the Fairfax County PD and we’d like to have a word with you regarding your son.”
“My son?” She said, the smile slipping from her face as she glanced at the badge.
“Yes. May we come in?”
She hesitated, and then opened the door wide. “Yes, please do.”
He let Sally go first and followed, entering a foyer with a staircase to his left leading to the upper floor, and a small half bath on his right, painted in a dark red color that reminded him of blood. The entrance to the kitchen was directly in front of him. She led them to the living room, which fell to the right of the kitchen just past the half bath. She gestured to the couch and said, “Let me get my husband.” They nodded and sat.
She disappeared up the stairs and silence permeated the room as they waited. Jaxon glanced around, noting the loveseat to his right, large flat screen TV on a dark stand of wood in front of them, and various tables and cabinets spaced throughout the rest of the room. A small dining room joined the living room and what must be the kitchen through an entrance to the right of the TV.
They heard footsteps on the stairs and then the woman returned, followed by a short, stocky man of about the same age. He had light, sandy, blond hair, blue eyes set wide, and a goatee, neatly trimmed.
“Morning officers,” he said. “What’s this about my son?”
Jaxon cleared his throat. “This is never easy so I’ll get right to it. Your son was found dead early last night.”
The woman’s hand flew to her mouth as a gasp escaped her and the husband, though clearly shocked, turned and supported his wife as her legs gave out and she held on to him trying to remain standing.
“No!” The woman wailed. “It can’t be. He was just with me last night.”
The husband appeared angry, and said, “Where?”
“He was pulled from your neighborhood pool about 8:30 p.m. last night,” Sally said in a soft voice. “We are truly sorry.”
The woman looked at her husband and then began to laugh hysterically. Jaxon had seen a lot of different reactions from people, including screaming, fainting, vomiting, crying, wailing and shocked giggling, but he had never seen the kind of laughter he was watching. He questioned his tactic now, and wondered if he had caused the woman to lose her mind completely.
The woman stopped laughing and turned to him, “You’re wrong officers. My son is not dead.”
As if on cue, a boy of about fourteen entered the room, sleep still in his eyes, a rumpled Washington Redskins t-shirt twisted around his torso. He looked at Jaxon and shock registered for a brief second on the boy’s face and then he seemed to recover.
“What’s going on, Mom?” the boy asked.
Jaxon looked at Sally and had a sinking feeling in his gut as he watched her face. She had come to the same conclusion he had. He turned back to the boy.
“Are you Lucas Neal Harrison?” Jaxon asked.
The boy looked at his parents and then back at Jaxon and said, simply, “That’s me.”
Jaxon cursed quietly under his breath.
Ellie lay in her bed, her head resting on her hands, looking out the window at the bright sunshine streaming in. The vision of the boy being pulled from the pool dressed in the clothes they had used for ‘George’ the dummy had haunted her all night. She hadn’t slept well and had only just dozed off an hour ago when her noisy brother had startled her awake by slamming the toilet seat in the bathroom next to her room.
Jimmy’s idea of putting the dummy in the pool had seemed innocent enough at the time, but even before the revelation of the real body, she had questioned their act when she saw all the activity it had attracted. With the shocking discovery of the real boy in the pool, she had this terrible feeling of sinking in quicksand with no way out and nobody to help her.
She sat up and brushed her short hair, the simple act reminding her of Luke’s finger’s doing the same thing last night before all the weird stuff started happening. She smiled to herself as she remembered how good he felt. Why couldn’t these good feelings stay? Every time something went right, it was followed by something going bad. It made her feel cursed.
She had called Luke in the middle of the night again and found he was wide awake. They had talked for a while, but the comfort she found with him the previous night escaped her last night. She could tell he was tense and worried about what might happen. He wasn’t his usual happy go lucky self and she had been a little disappointed he hadn’t been able to alleviate her fears. She had finally said goodnight to him at about four in the morning.
Two nights in a row with little sleep left her feeling anxious and sluggish all at the same time. She went into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face and then brushed her teeth. The dark circles under her eyes stood out against her pale face like small bruises.
She went back to her room and logged onto the computer wanting to see if there was anything about the incident from last night in the news. She saw she had an e-mail notifying her of a message on Facebook. She logged onto her Facebook account and froze.
The message was from William Smith.
She was afraid to look, but she was also curious. Clicking on the link showed one word: “Surprise!”
“Yeah-it sure was, you sicko!” she said aloud to herself.
There was nothing else. She was relieved there were no pictures. She wondered if Luke got the same message. She didn’t want to call this early since he might be asleep, but then again he had said call anytime. She reached for the phone and held it in her hand not sure if she should call him. It vibrated in her palm and she jumped. It was Luke.
“Hey, I was just thinking about calling you,” she said.
“The police just left my house,” he said.
“Why? What did they want?”
“They thought the body was me. They told my parents I was dead and then I walked into the room. The one cop seemed pissed.”
“Why did they think it was you?”
“That’s the weird part. The cop said they found a school paper with my name on it in the back pants pocket of the kid. I made sure those pockets were empty when we made the dummy. Where did our friend get a school paper of mine?”
“Could he have put your name on a piece of paper and stuck it in the pocket? Did you see the paper?”
“Yeah, the cop showed it to us. It was our homework from last week in Mrs. Litchfield’s class. The crap on nouns and stuff. Remember?”
“That is weird,” she said. “I wonder how he got it.”
“Beats me. My dad went berserk. Really laid into them about scaring the crap out of him and Mom without being sure whose body it was and stuff like that. The two cops kept apologizing, but my dad wouldn’t let it go. I thought he was going to hit
the guy cop. I think his name was Jaxon.”
“That’s the one who came to my house about Bentley.”
“Uh huh. The woman who was at the pool was the other one.”
“It must have scared the crap out of you when you saw them in your house.”
“It was a shock,” he said.
“I just got a message on Facebook. Have you checked yours yet?”
“No. What was the message?”
“It was from him,” she said. “No pictures, just the word ‘Surprise!’”
He was silent for a moment and she thought he hung up.
“Still there?” she asked.
“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking what a bastard this guy is. I’m logging on to my computer now. Let’s see if he sent me something.”
A few minutes passed as she listened to computer keys clicking and then Luke said, “Same message. No pictures. Wait…oh crap!”
“What? What happened?”
“He’s logged in right now. He just sent me a chat request.”
“Are you serious? Don’t accept!” she almost shouted.
“Too late. He says, So, how did you like my surprise?”
“Don’t answer him! He’s just messing with us!”
“I want to see what he has to say.”
“Please, Luke. He’s dangerous.”
“I know. I’ll end it if it gets bad. I’ll tell you everything he says and you can be like my safety gauge, ok?”
She didn’t know what to say. Every fiber of her being was shouting at her to make Luke stop but how could she from her own room? Luke was stubborn sometimes and he would do whatever he wanted.
“I don’t like this,” she told him. “But I’ll stay with you.”
“What should I type back?” he asked.
“Be honest with him,” she said. “Tell him we didn’t like it.” She heard his fingers on the keyboard and she waited.
“He typed, Figures. I make your prank more exciting and you don’t even appreciate it.”
She heard him typing again. “What are you typing,” she said.
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