The Shadows We Hide

by Allen Eskens

  Twenty-four hours ago, I’d have been certain that Bob was wrong about me. After last night, though, I’m not sure of anything. “I won’t change my mind,” I say, but even as I say the words, I see myself standing where Vicky took me to show me the fields. I shake that image away and say again, “I won’t change my mind―I promise.”

  Bob says, “No offense, Joe, but I’ll believe that when I see it.” With those parting words, he heads out the door.

  Chapter 43

  Bob’s office is quiet after he leaves. I spread the Moody Lynch file out on Jeannie’s desk. The accordion folder holds four sets of papers clamped together with big, black binding clips. There’s also a large manila envelope with the word Recordings written on it. I open the envelope and let the CDs slide onto the desk. At the top of the heap is Nathan’s squad video. I figure that would be a good place to start.

  It takes me a minute to fire up Jeannie’s computer, and another two or three to launch the squad video. When it opens, the computer screen divides into five boxes, a big box on the left and four smaller boxes stacked on the right. The bigger box is obviously the forward-facing squad camera. One of the smaller squares is a camera pointing into the backseat of the squad car. After some study, I figure out that the other three are views of the sides and rear of the car.

  At the start of the video, Nathan’s squad is speeding down a country highway, thin reflections of the emergency lights bouncing off the car’s hood. I hear dispatch inform Nathan that 2804 is near the scene and is responding off duty. I look through some reports to confirm that 2804 is Jeb’s badge number. Nathan replies, “Ten-four,” his voice as calm as a man reading a newspaper.

  I watch for fifteen minutes before I see something I recognize—the bridge where Vicky’s mother died. I know now that Nathan is almost at the scene. He slows as he gets to the farm, and I lean forward to examine every second of footage carefully.

  Through the front windshield, the world rotates as Nathan pulls into the courtyard and parks facing the house, a dim glow falling from one of the windows on the second floor. To the right of the squad car is the horse barn, its door open, light spilling out into the courtyard. The squad camera facing left shows Jeb’s personal vehicle, the one he drove on our trip to Mankato.

  Nathan gets out of his squad and walks to the barn, enters, and bends down over a black lump lying just inside the door. Then he stands up, walks to the door of the barn, and keys his shoulder microphone. “Um, dispatch, we have a ten…um…a ten… Aw, hell, Marlene, we have a homicide here. Better send an ambulance and the coroner. Wake Sheriff Kimball up too.”

  Dispatch responded. “Ten-four. Be advised that 2804 called. He is in the house with a medical.”

  “Ten-four.” Nathan starts running toward the house but stops to look at the highway. Something caught his attention. I click on the rearview camera, and out of the back of Nathan’s squad, I see Vicky sitting on her motorcycle. I can hear her muffled voice as she yells something to Nathan. Nathan hollers back, “It’s police business, go on up to your house and stay put.”

  Vicky pulls her motorcycle into her driveway, and I watch the red brake lights reflect off the white pole barn as she goes to park it.

  Nathan jogs to the house, disappearing inside.

  Nothing happens for a few seconds, but then Ray Pyke’s porch light comes on. Vicky and her father step out and walk down to a split-rail fence that separates their lawn from the highway. There they take up a position to watch the action.

  A few minutes later, Nathan walks out of the house, heading for the barn. As he approaches the black lump again, I realize that the lump is Toke. I can only see his legs because of the angle of the squad to the barn door. For the next fifteen minutes, I watch the flash of emergency lights reflect off the house and the barn and the trees, waiting for something to happen. Vicky and her dad are like statues in the strobe of those lights, their images appearing and disappearing as the red bulb pulses on top of the squad car.

  Then, the cavalry arrives. First, Sheriff Kimball pulls in, followed closely by an ambulance. Nathan directs the EMTs to the house. They enter, and a minute later one returns to the ambulance to grab a gurney. When they wheel Angel out of the house, Jeb is at her side, holding her hand. They load Angel into the back of the ambulance and leave, with Jeb following in his Explorer.

  Things slow down after that, with more squads showing up and more cops milling around the courtyard with flashlights, probably looking for trace evidence. About forty minutes into the footage, a car pulls in, and a woman gets out and walks into the barn. I assume that this is the coroner, there to certify the death of Toke Talbert. Then a second ambulance arrives, the one that will haul Toke Talbert off the property in a body bag.

  I watch as that ambulance leaves the courtyard, its lights off, no emergency. It rolls past Vicky and Ray who are still leaning up against the split-rail fence, and I wonder if Ray might not be silently happy to see Toke zipped in that body bag. But then again, did he even know what was in the bag?

  That thought is but a fleeting curiosity, and is about to leave my head forever, when it digs in and demands my attention. I pause the CD. Something’s not right here. Something terribly important is missing.

  I start the footage from the beginning and watch again, this time focusing on the rear camera. I see Vicky pull up on her motorcycle, talk to Nathan, and then go park her bike in the shed. I slow the footage down, moving it forward frame by frame. When I do that, I glimpse her silhouette walking from the pole barn to her house. I can only see it in a couple of the frames, when the cast of red light from Nathan’s strobe flashes that way. Then she and her father walk down to the fence and stand there for the rest of the video.

  As I’m watching it the second time, I think about the trip she and I took to the Hix Farm on my first day in town—the day Vicky showed me the bloodstain on the barn wall. What did she say? She said that Toke was up against the wall, lying on his stomach. But in the video, Vicky is across the road with her father the whole time. It’s not possible for her to see Toke’s body from there.

  How did she know he was on his stomach? I had seen the autopsy photos―she hadn’t. She knew that his head had been bashed in. She knew where he fell and how he had lain. Yet, she never left her fence until after Toke was hauled away.

  There had to be an explanation. Maybe someone had told her what the scene looked like—Jeb, another cop maybe? Or maybe her father killed Toke, and he told her how Toke had fallen. That made some sense. He hated Toke Talbert. Blamed Toke for the death of his wife. Toke had just executed the option contract that would take the final section of Ray’s farm away.

  I back the footage to the beginning for a third run. This time I focus on the side and rear cameras when Nathan drives up to the farm. As Nathan passes Ray’s house and starts to pull into the courtyard, I pause the CD and begin clicking forward one frame at a time.

  Nathan pulls into the courtyard. Parks. The other camera angles pull at my attention, but I keep my eyes locked on that rearview. Click. Click. Click. I’m watching Ray’s house for any movement at all. Click. Click.

  Then I see it—something so hidden that I wouldn’t have spotted it unless I was looking for it. I enlarge the picture, zeroing in on a small patch of space beside Ray’s house. The truth was there the whole time, hidden in the darkness, but caught in a single flash of a red light.

  I drop my head and mutter, “Son of a bitch.”

  Chapter 44

  With the sun slouching just above the western horizon, I find myself pulling into the courtyard of the Hix farm, on a quest to view in the daylight what I had seen in the darkness of Nathan’s squad video. I cross the road and stand where Vicky and Ray stood as they watched the happenings on the night that Toke died. I am right―there is no way that Vicky could have seen Toke inside the barn from her position at the fence.

  I turn and face Ray’s house. There’s a tree line to my left, and the house is dead ahead of me. But betwee
n the house and the trees lies a small patch of lawn about forty feet wide, where Nathan’s camera caught the image of someone running toward the little house. I'm leaning against the fence calibrating the picture in my mind, when Vicky steps out of the house. I expect her to walk down and join me, but instead she sits on her porch steps. “I’m kind of surprised to see you,” she calls out.

  “I thought I’d take another look at the farm.”

  I walk up to the house, scanning the windows for any sign of Ray. When I am within a few feet, I stop. “Besides, I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You came all this way to see little ol’ me?” She scoots over, making room for me to sit beside her on the porch steps. I hesitate, but then I sit.

  “Did you hear that they arrested Jeb Lewis?” I asked.

  “They did what?”

  “This morning.”

  “Why?”

  “What I hear is that they charged him with altering the crime scene, but they are holding him because they think he might have killed Toke.”

  “Why would Jeb kill Toke?”

  “You haven’t heard?”

  “No. Heard what?”

  “Jeb might be Angel’s biological father.”

  Vicky’s jaw drops open, but she remains mute.

  “It’s true. Jeb and Jeannie had an affair. Kimball thinks it’s the key to what happened to Toke.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. I can’t see Jeb killing anyone.”

  “If he’s willing to break the law, why stop with altering the crime scene?”

  “There’s a world of difference between altering a crime scene and killing a man,” she says. “I mean, sure, if Angel’s his kid then maybe I could see him moving her, but killing Toke in the process? That’s a bridge too far. Now that Charlie character’s a whole different story. I could see him…”

  She stops talking because I’ve dropped my head, and I’m shaking it slowly back and forth.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Vicky, I know what you did.” I don’t say it as an accusation but as a confession, my voice barely rising above a whisper.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know that it was you who killed Toke.”

  “Are you insane? I didn’t kill Toke. Why would I do a fool thing like that?”

  “For starters, he killed your mom.”

  “Good god. That was a decade ago. You think that I would wait this long to—”

  “He was going to execute the contract and take away the last section of your dad’s farm.”

  Vicky looks at me with surprise and quickly turns her focus to the ground in front of her.

  “Yeah, I know about that,” I say.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she says. “I wasn’t even here when he was killed.”

  “Then how did you know that Jeb carried Angel to the house?”

  “What?”

  “You just said that you could understand Jeb moving Angel if she were his kid. How did you know that Jeb moved Angel?”

  “You just told me he did.”

  “No, I told you that Jeb altered the scene. I didn’t say how. You were the one to say that Jeb moved Angel.” I keep my words calm, explanations not accusations. “You couldn’t have known that if you hadn’t been here to see it.”

  “I must have heard it somewhere.” She shrugs her shoulders up around her neck. “You know how gossip gets around this town.”

  “Gossip?” I say. “No one knew about Jeb moving Angel. The sheriff only learned about it when they arrested Jeb a few hours ago. You didn’t even know Jeb was in custody, so your source of information isn’t gossip.”

  “What are you getting at?” She looks at me again, and I can see a hint of fear in her eyes.

  “And how did you know that Toke was lying dead on his stomach?”

  “Lying on his stomach?”

  “When you took me to the barn that first day, you said that Toke was lying on his stomach up against the wall.”

  “I saw it when…” She stops herself. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because I know the truth.”

  “You don’t know anything. Nathan saw me come home after Toke was already dead. It’s probably on his squad camera. I couldn’t have killed Toke.”

  “It’s on the video, that’s true. Bob Mullen had a copy in his office, and I watched it today.”

  “So you saw me come home.” Cracks in her voice tell me that she’s afraid. I don’t want to scare her too much. I want her to keep talking, so I pretend that this next part is hard for me to say.

  “I saw you stop and say something to Nathan Calder. You were on your Triumph.”

  “You see? I couldn’t have…”

  She’s looking at me now with eyes that implore me to believe her. I feel sorry for her, and I no longer have to pretend that I am sad to be telling her what I know. I say, “When Nathan first pulled in—long before you stopped your bike in the middle of the highway to set up your alibi—I saw you.”

  Vicky swallows hard, and her eyes grow with either fear or understanding.

  “You ran from those trees over there.” I point to the windbreak. “To the shed where you park your bike. A few seconds later, I saw the reflection of your brake lights against the wall of the shed as you rolled your motorcycle down the trail behind your house.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I pull a piece of paper from my back pocket. It’s folded so she can’t see the picture inside. I hold it between my index and middle finger, and lightly tap it against the evening breeze, letting Vicky’s curiosity grow until that paper becomes the center of her world. Then I unfold the photo and hand it to her. The picture of her running across her lawn is grainy and out of focus, but it was the best I could do with the single frame of squad video. Her reaction—a sharp inhale—tells me that she won’t try denying that it’s her.

  She curls her shoulders down and puts her face in her hands, the picture of her guilt falling to the porch steps. “You don’t understand,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I say, although my words are a lie. Vicky is crying, and I put an arm around her shoulders. She’s talking to me and I don’t want that to stop, so I play along. “If ever a man on earth deserved what he got, it was Toke.”

  “He called me a bitch,” she says between her sobs. “I went to the barn to help him. He was barely moving—like he was trying to wake up or something. I bent down to help him, and when he saw me, he called me a bitch. I don’t know what happened. I got so mad. He killed my mom, and he was calling me a bitch? I couldn’t stop myself. I saw that gear lying there and…”

  Behind us, some floorboards creak, and I look over my shoulder to see Ray Pyke standing in the doorway, his hair mussed like he’d just gotten up from a nap. He looks at me and then at Vicky, who is crying in my arms―his face twists up in anger.

  “What’s he doing here?” Ray yells.

  Startled, Vicky jumps to her feet and backs away from the porch. She’s wiping tears from her cheek with the back of her hand as she says, “Dad, he knows.”

  “Shut your mouth!” Ray shouts. He’s saying the words to Vicky, but he’s pointing his finger at me. “Don’t you say another word to this bastard. He ain’t your friend.”

  “Daddy, he’s—”

  “I said shut up!” Ray charges down the steps and grabs me by the shirt, pulling my face into his. I can smell the whiskey and chewing tobacco on his breath. I expect him to throw me into the wall, but instead, he rips my shirt open. Both he and Vicky are struck dumb when they see the microphone taped to my chest.

  Chapter 45

  The evening air fills with the distant sound of police sirens. Ray throws me to the ground. “Get going,” he hollers as he turns to run into the house. I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to Vicky. I don’t think she knows either because she doesn’t move. He yells again. “Go to where I took you camping when you were a kid. I’ll get you help. Now go!”

  Vicky runs t
o the pole barn where the Tiger is parked. Ray walks out of the house with a shotgun in his hand, but he doesn’t aim it at me; in fact, he walks right past me as if I’m not even there, taking up a position in the middle of his yard.

  The closest squad car, Nathan’s, had been parked behind some trees about a quarter mile away, close enough to monitor the wire. The rest of the troops had been waiting down at the bridge. Nathan is leading the charge, but as he nears the driveway, Ray raises the shotgun and fires, causing Nathan to drive into a ditch. The other three squad cars park on the shoulder behind Calder, creating a defensive wall.

  Ray keeps the gun aimed at the deputies as Vicky backs her bike out of the shed. Ray is talking to himself, and I hear him say, “No daughter of mine’s going to prison for killing Toke Talbert—I’ll goddamn guarantee you that. I should have killed the prick years ago.”

  Vicky looks back at her father one last time, sparks the Triumph to life, and tears down the trail behind the house.

  After Vicky is safely away, Ray lets the gun settle into the crux of his arm, the butt resting in his armpit. He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, lifts one to his lips, and lights it. He takes a long drag, and then raises the shotgun back up. “Come on, you cowards!” he yells. He fires again, with no noticeable damage to any of the vehicles.

  “Damn it, Ray, put down the gun.” I recognize Sheriff Kimball’s voice calling out from behind one of the vehicles.

  “Go to hell,” Ray shouts back.

  The sound of the motorcycle fades into the distance. Ray’s impromptu plan is working. His daughter is escaping.

  “Put the gun down before this gets out of hand,” Kimball yells. “We don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

  “Bring it on, you sons of bitches,” Ray yells, and when he does, he holds his arms out to the side, opening his chest up to be a target. He is standing about twenty-five feet away from me with his gun in his left hand, the muzzle pointing toward the sky, his finger nowhere near the trigger.