Intent to Kill

by James Grippando

  “That’s the way I see it,” said Emma. “Getting this back in the news puts the heat on him again.”

  “Maybe he’ll do something stupid to make sure his tracks are still covered—something that will finally get him caught.”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Or maybe Chelsea’s death has been weighing on his conscience for three years. This could be the thing that finally makes him come forward and confess.”

  She didn’t want to crush him, but she had to keep his expectations realistic. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up about that.”

  “You never know. There was a story on the news not too long ago about a forty-something-year-old guy who cleaned himself up through Alcoholics Anonymous and wrote a letter of apology to a woman he raped back in college.”

  “I saw that, too.”

  “So these things can happen.”

  About once every generation, she thought. “Yes, they can.”

  Emma tucked the copy of the newspaper back into her briefcase. “I was going to drop by to see Chelsea’s parents as well,” she said. “I didn’t want any of you to hear about this on the news.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea tonight,” said Ryan. “I’ll call them. They don’t need to see the actual newspaper anyway. Seeing that headline again with Chelsea’s picture…well, that’s just tough on the anniversary.”

  “I understand.”

  Emma took another look at Ryan’s tired expression. The man probably hadn’t slept in two days. Her heart went out to all the victims she worked with, but without question, Ryan was the survivor she worried about most.

  They looked at each other for a moment, not knowing what else to say.

  “Daddy, will you read to me?” Ainsley was standing at the top of the staircase, dressed in her pink pajamas.

  Ryan seemed to welcome the interruption. “In a few minutes, sweetheart. Can you come down here? There’s someone I want you to say hello to.”

  Ainsley laid her book on the top step and walked slowly down the carpeted staircase. Emma tried not to do an obvious double take, because she knew the uncanny resemblance must have been a source of joy and pain to Ryan. His wife had been an astounding beauty, and although this gorgeous little girl was as much his daughter, she was all Chelsea. Ainsley went straight to her father and curled up in his lap. Ryan said, “Do you remember Ms. Carlisle?”

  Ainsley shook her head.

  Emma said, “I’m not surprised. She was probably three the last time I saw her.”

  Ryan said, “Ms. Carlisle is a lawyer.”

  “You’re pretty.”

  Emma blushed. “Thank you.”

  “Ms. Carlisle is also a very smart woman.”

  “How smart?” said Ainsley.

  Ryan said, “One of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”

  Ainsley looked at Emma as if to quiz her. “Do you know the song ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’?”

  “Would you like me to sing it?”

  “No,” said Ainsley, her mind already forming the next question. “Do you know what star is closest to Earth?”

  Emma had to think about that one. She seemed to recall from the old Jodie Foster movie Contact that it was in the Alpha Centauri system, but she was somewhat surprised that a child would have learned that in kindergarten.

  “It’s the sun,” said Ainsley.

  Emma laughed at herself for having made the question so complicated.

  “As usual, the answer is much closer than I thought it was,” she said, and for some reason she looked at Ryan when she said it. And he was looking at her.

  It was as if they could feel Chelsea’s presence in the room. Not in a creepy Sixth Sense, I-see-dead-people kind of way. It was more a simultaneous recognition of the deep bond of trust that defined their unusual friendship. And Emma did consider it a friendship. Driving an hour to Boston to soften the blow about a development in a case typified the deep sense of humanity she brought to her job as a prosecutor. That kind of commitment didn’t leave much time for a personal life, but Emma had always been perfectly happy to keep her career on track and her relationships uncomplicated. In all honesty, living in her world of sexual assaults and domestic violence, of rapists and wife beaters, Emma had almost given up hope that true love existed. The overwhelming love that Ryan still felt toward his wife touched Emma deeply. For that she felt strangely but profoundly indebted to Ryan.

  And to Chelsea.

  “Daddy, can you read to me now?”

  It was the voice of innocence, another bit of comfort.

  “Sure he can,” said Emma, rising. “I should be going.”

  Ryan carried Ainsley in his arms as he escorted Emma to the door. “Thank you for driving all the way up here,” he said.

  “It’s the least I could do,” Emma said. “I want you to feel assured that even though I’ve transferred to another unit, I’m still on the case, following up every lead.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  They shook hands, and Emma said good night.

  Ryan read Ainsley the story of the stray dog three times until she finally fell asleep.

  He reached for the bedside lamp and switched it off. The way she breathed in and out so gently, her little hand against her cheek, Ainsley seemed much younger as she slept beneath her Bambi-and-Thumper blanket with the white lace trim. She was growing up fast. The things that came out of her mouth continually amazed him. Do you know what star is closest to Earth? Her mother would have been really proud.

  Ryan kissed his daughter on the forehead, then tiptoed out of her room and went downstairs. It was dark in the living room, but he didn’t turn on the lights or the television. He just lowered himself into the armchair and sat in silence, staring out the bowfront window. Sometimes when he was up late at night, unable or afraid to fall sleep, he could almost see Chelsea walk up the street and smile at him as she passed by the apartment. Whenever he was alone, away from Ainsley, Chelsea was the only thing that made him feel alive.

  Anniversaries were the worst. People always told him that things would get better, and at times he even believed them. But not on Chelsea’s birthday, not on their wedding anniversary, not on the anniversary of the day they met—and definitely not on the anniversary of the day she died.

  Ryan checked his watch. Nine thirty-three. Chelsea had been dead exactly three years and ninety-seven minutes.

  The one-year anniversary had been much worse. He had opened a bottle of bourbon and dragged out every old photograph of Chelsea, every love note she had ever written to him, every memento that could possibly increase his suffering. Those were the bad days when he was still asking why, a question that tumbled round and round inside his heart like a shard of glass. Ryan had not yet been released from the PawSox, but he knew the ax was coming at the conclusion of that horrendous season. When he got the official word in mid-September, Ivan drove him to Roxbury the following Sunday to listen to a minister who had lost his son, sister, brother, nephew, and niece—all of them murdered. “God is telling me—He’s telling all survivors—that we need Him,” the preacher said. It was a good message. Perhaps it would have stuck if Ryan had been able to get a decent night’s sleep.

  The insomnia, his grief counselor had told him, was partly about guilt. At least a million times Ryan had replayed in his mind the things he could have done differently—things that might have kept Chelsea alive after the accident, things that might have kept her from getting into the accident in the first place. He should have made a nuisance of himself in the emergency room, whipped those doctors into shape, let them know that they had better not let his wife die young. He should never have insisted that Chelsea come to the PawSox game, should have let her go to her night class at Suffolk, should have bought her a bigger and safer car, should have asked for a damn trade to the Dodgers and moved the whole family to Los Angeles—should have, should have…

  Three years of guilt, much of it connected, ironically, to the game he loved so mu
ch. But no one knew about the fear that kept him walking the floors at night.

  Ryan rose from his chair and went to the closet. On the top shelf, in a shoe box, was a collection of old DVDs. He grabbed one at random and shoved it into the DVD player. A smiling Chelsea in a white veil suddenly appeared on-screen; it was the video of their wedding day.

  Ryan’s counselor had told him to put the old movies away, but on anniversaries and other milestones—the nights he knew would be sleepless—he couldn’t help himself. It was all tied to the fear, which in some ways felt a lot like the grieving and the panic attacks. But the fear went beyond chills and breathlessness. Emma had no idea how much she had exacerbated it tonight by telling Ryan about the possible lead on a suspect.

  The fear of what he might do once he knew.

  I’m gonna kill him.

  Ryan went to his chair, fighting back tears in a lonely, dark room where the only source of light was the on-screen image of his beautiful bride.

  I’m sorry, Chelsea. But I just know I’m going to kill that son of a bitch.

  7

  RYAN WOKE WITH ONLY A SEMICONSCIOUS AWARENESS THAT someone was nudging his arm. He grumbled, and the nudge turned into a shove with the force of a linebacker.

  “Mr. James,” said the soft but urgent voice of a woman. “Mr. James, wake up.”

  Things slowly came into focus. Ryan discovered he was still in his living room, slouched in the armchair. The light from the lamp across the room was only sixty watts, but it assaulted his eyes like lasers.

  “You have to get up, sir.”

  The bowfront window was black with night. “What time is it?”

  “Five thirty.”

  Only upon her mention of the ungodly hour did Ryan recognize the voice.

  Claricia Castillo had been Connie and Glenda Garrisen’s full-time housekeeper for years, but they’d offered her services to Ryan when he and Ainsley moved to Boston. At first it was merely a second job for Claricia, but soon she was like a grandmother to Ainsley—la muñeca, she called her, “the doll,” un regalo de Dios, “a gift from God.” Claricia arrived with a smile every weekday morning at five thirty sharp to straighten up the house, get Ainsley ready for school, and drop her off at Brookline Academy by eight. From there Claricia went to the Garrisen’s brownstone on Beacon Hill for her regular day job. The arrangement gave her extra money to send to her five sisters in Bogotá, and it was the only way Ryan as a single dad could do a morning radio talk show at six.

  “You’re going to be late,” said Claricia.

  Ryan was in a daze. The last time he’d checked the clock, it was almost four A.M. He’d finally broken down and taken one of the sleeping pills his doctor had prescribed.

  “I can’t do the show this morning.”

  Claricia shot him a reproving look and said something in her native tongue that needed no translation.

  “You’re upset,” he said.

  “Upset? Why would I be upset? La muñeca—of course she needs a father who is a drunk. What little girl doesn’t? I’m not upset.”

  “I wasn’t drinking,” said Ryan.

  “You said that last time.”

  She was right. A couple of months back, the police had stopped him on suspicion of drunk driving and taken him in. It was the lingering effect of a sleeping pill that had made his driving so erratic, but the media got wind of the situation and reported that he’d been arrested for DUI. He was eventually vindicated and the charges were dropped, but it didn’t stop people—even Claricia—from suspecting a drinking problem. Never mind the studies showing that people who stayed awake for twenty hours drove worse than people with a blood-alcohol level above the legal limit. Ryan could only imagine where he would have fallen in that study—awake for twenty hours or more every day for the past three years.

  “I’m going up to bed,” he said.

  Claricia was already busy straightening up the living room.

  “La muñeca needs a father without a job, too,” she said, never looking up from her work.

  Ryan climbed the stairs slowly. On some level he appreciated her well-intended tough love, but going to work in this condition was more likely to earn him a pink slip than not showing up at all. Upstairs, Ryan found his BlackBerry on the dresser and fired off an I’m-not-feeling-well message to his cohost. His head hit the pillow, and he hoped the sleeping pill he’d swallowed ninety minutes earlier would kick back in and carry him off to dreamland. He worried that it wouldn’t. He worried that worrying about it would keep him awake.

  Just close your eyes, relax, breathe in and out, relax, think happy thoughts, relax.

  This was such bullshit. Falling asleep was like hitting a baseball—the insomniac who tried to achieve sleep step by step was no better off than the hitter who tried to break out of a slump by overanalyzing his swing.

  Ryan’s eyes popped open. The clock said 6:25 A.M.

  Shit! Why did Claricia have to wake me?

  The sleeping pill he’d taken at four was now an official waste of time.

  Ryan rolled out of bed, unplugged the alarm clock, and hid it in the closet. His mattress beckoned, but he hesitated before sliding back beneath the covers. Reconditioning rule number one: never climb into bed until you are ready to go to sleep. Ryan, however, had been ready for three years. It didn’t seem to matter.

  He returned to the closet. There was an assortment of pillows on the top shelf, from extra soft to extra firm, goose down to synthetic. It brought to mind Ivan’s old Dominican saying about the inverse relationship between the number of pillows on a bed and the number of times a couple used it to make love—Ivan’s way of saying, Don’t let the things you accumulate in a marriage get in the way of what’s really important.

  Ryan grabbed a half-dozen pillows and tossed them onto the empty side—Chelsea’s side—of the bed. He chose one made of “memory foam” to cover his face and force his eyes shut, determined not to lose another battle to the single, tiny muscle in each eyelid. Tonight, or this morning—whatever the hell time it was—these eyes were going to shut and stay shut, and Ryan James was going to the Land of Nod, damn it.

  How can I be so dead tired and not fall asleep?

  The telephone rang. Ryan couldn’t tell if it was a minute later or a day later. Maybe that sleeping pill had worked after all, and he had only dreamed about not being able to fall asleep. He grabbed the phone from the nightstand and checked the caller ID display for the time—8:10 A.M.—and the number. It was his in-laws. Rachel probably wanted to know why he wasn’t on the radio. He let it ring through to the answering machine. All hope of falling back to sleep was lost, but he didn’t feel like talking to anyone. He didn’t feel like getting out of bed. He didn’t feel like turning his head three inches to the right to avert the annoying ray of sunlight that was streaming through the window. He didn’t feel like anything.

  He just couldn’t believe that Chelsea had been dead for over three years.

  “No answer,” said Rachel Townsend.

  Her husband shrugged it off. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  “If we’re going to talk to the police, I’d like Ryan to be here.”

  Paul Townsend went to his wife, looked her in the eye, and rested a reassuring hand on each of her shoulders—the near embrace that had come to define their marriage.

  “It will be fine,” he said. “Come on.”

  Paul led her into the living room. A clean-cut man dressed in a blue suit and white shirt rose as they entered. He’d been waiting patiently during the few minutes it took for Paul to pry his nervous wife out of the kitchen.

  “Rachel, this is…” Paul stopped himself. “I’m sorry. Your name again?”

  The man offered a courteous smile and a business card. “Benjamin. Lieutenant Keith Benjamin. Rhode Island Sheriff’s Department,” he said, pronouncing Roe-Dyelin the way all the department veterans did.

  He shook Rachel’s hand as Paul checked his business card. He also reached for the badge he�
�d shown Paul earlier, but Paul waved it off, as if too much officiality might be upsetting to Rachel.

  “This won’t take long at all,” said Benjamin. “It’s just routine follow-up to the tip the attorney general’s office received. I’m sure you saw the report on the news last night.”

  “Actually, our son-in-law called to tell us about it before it aired.”

  “Good. Basically, we’re just trying to do everything we can to determine if this tip is legit or not. If you don’t mind, I’d like to ask a few questions.”

  “Well—” Rachel began to say.

  “Sure,” said Paul.

  The couple looked at each other and sat down on the couch. Benjamin seated himself in the adjacent armchair. A framed photograph of Chelsea rested on the cocktail table between them.

  “I know we’ve never met,” said Benjamin, “but I’m one of the many folks at the department who’ve worked behind the scenes. I don’t need a lot of background, so I’ll keep this short and sweet.” He took a pen and notepad from his coat pocket. “Any idea who this tipster might be?”

  “No,” said Paul.

  Rachel shook her head.

  “What do you think of the list of possibilities the attorney general’s office has come up with so far?”

  “List?” said Paul.

  “I don’t mean a formal written list,” said Benjamin. “Just some of the names the prosecutor’s office is considering.”

  “If they have any names, they haven’t shared them with us,” said Paul. “Isn’t that right, Rachel?”

  “I haven’t heard any names,” said Rachel.

  “So no one from the AG’s office, the sheriff’s office—no one—has expressed any thoughts or theories as to this tipster’s identity?”

  “No,” said Paul.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Can you share them with us?” said Paul.

  “I’m sort of reluctant to, without Ms. Carlisle’s approval. She may want to handle that personally.”