by Shane Lusher
We climbed into the car in silence, and we’d left the parking lot, on our way to I-74, before she spoke.
“Fine,” she said. “We started seeing each other not long after we both got elected. That was six years ago, in case you can’t remember. It started out with the election, and our kids—actually, we got to know each other through our kids—but he was so...bitter, I guess, although that really doesn’t describe it.”
“He always seemed older than he really was,” I offered. “Even in high school.”
“That’s it,” she said. “Except when you say a high school kid is older, you mean he’s mature. Tad was—old. I’m sorry to say it that way, but it’s true.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Tad never really opened up to anybody. He did to me, but he did it in a way that made you feel like you were talking to somebody’s father. He made you forget that you were older than he was.”
She sighed and turned to me. “Where are we going? I know it’s not even ten, but I’m beat. You mind if we call it an early night?”
I shook my head. I watched the lights over the interstate glinting off her hair as we drove, fighting off the impulse to reach up and tuck a loose strand behind an ear.
“He would sleep over,” she said. “Whenever Erin was sleeping over, he would come, too, because he didn’t like to leave her alone after Heather.”
I nodded. “He told me that after Heather died, he hated having Erin being out of his sight, let alone being gone for more than a few hours.”
Kelly shook her head. “He was afraid someone would get her,” she said.
“Get her?” I asked. “Erin? What do you mean, ‘get her’? Kidnap her? He never mentioned anything like that to me.”
“Yeah, well,” Kelly said. “But wait. When he slept over with me, he slept on the couch. It never went any further than that.”
“It doesn’t matter, Kel,” I said. “It really doesn’t.”
“It does,” she said. “The reason we never—became lovers wasn’t what you think.” She chewed at her upper lip. “He didn’t want to get close to me, either.”
“He was damaged by what happened to his wife.”
“No he wasn’t,” Kelly snapped. “Not in the way that you think. He-”
“You know what he said when he died, right?” I interrupted.
“Who? What are you talking about?”
“Tad. Rassi told me that he said something about ‘they’re going to kill me’ right before Alisha Stamm shot him.”
Kelly looked at me for a moment. Then she shook her head. “How would Dave know that?” she murmured. “He wasn’t even there.”
We’d left I-74 at Route 29 and were now on our way through East Peoria.
“He was on the phone with Rassi when it happened,” I said.
“No, he wasn’t.” Kelly shook her head. “Dave wasn’t even here that day. He wasn’t in the county.”
“Well, like I said, he was on the phone,” I said. “It really doesn’t matter where he was.”
She reached down and put her hand on mine.
“No, see, it does,” she said after a moment.
“What are you trying to say, Kelly?”
“Dave was in court that day. He was gone from morning to night. Remember that federal meth task force I mentioned earlier? He was testifying about a ring down in Mason County.”
“So? He could have used his phone any time he was doing that.”
“Have you seen the file?” she asked.
“No,” I admitted. “Why would Rassi’s location be in there?”
We were just leaving Creve Coeur, passing by the sign at the bottom of the hill that led up to Marquette Heights.
“You’re right,” she said. “That wouldn’t be in there.”
“So he left the courtroom, talked to Tad, heard the shots,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “You check up on that. There has to be a record of his testimony, and what time he gave it.
“Because Dave told me personally that Tad had tried to call him and he wasn’t available because he was sitting in the courtroom with his cell phone turned off.”
She looked over at me, the lights of the streets flashing in her eyes. I took out my phone, and when I pulled up the list of recent calls, I realized I’d already tried to get in touch with Rassi three or four times that day.
I put the phone back in my pocket and we drove in silence for a few minutes. Kelly took the turn into Lake Windsor and slowed the car.
“Can I ask you something, Dana?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Why did you strike that doctor?”
I swallowed as I stared out the windshield at the asphalt street in front of us.
“I thought you knew about it,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I know what happened afterwards. I know that somebody in Chicago helped you out, that you paid a lot of money, all of that.” She went on, “But why did you do it?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
“No,” she said quietly. “But I need to.”
I shrugged. It was a twenty-second sequence I played over and over in my head every day.
“Jake fell off the bed,” I said. “I wasn’t home. Colleen called 911, but before he fell, it was pretty clear there was something seriously wrong with him.” I paused, took a breath and then continued. “Later, we would start thinking it was the vaccine he’d gotten the day before, because there are reactions to medications all the time.”
I trailed off, watching as Kelly’s house came into view.
“It was the doctor who called the police. It was the doctor who told them we’d—she’d—been beating him. Which wasn’t true,” I said.
I looked at her. She nodded, and I went on.
“Specifically, the doctor told the police he suspected that Colleen had done it. He even tried to get me on his side, claiming there was no way I knew what my wife did while I was at work. He said there was no way I could trust her.”
I was still looking at her. It was the first time I’d mentioned my ex-wife’s name in her presence. It didn’t seem to faze her.
“I kept thinking about my son, and about Colleen. Colleen and I were a lot of things, we didn’t have the greatest marriage, we fought all the time, maybe we were never really meant for each other.”
“But one thing I did do, was trust her completely,” I said. “I trusted her with my son’s life.”
I cleared my throat. “I punched the doctor because he’d spent forty-eight hours telling us there was a chance Jake would wake up. I sat there all that time, watching those monitors, my heart going up and down each time his blood pressure, his oxygen saturation, his EEG did anything out of the ordinary. And I punched him because he violated that trust.”
I looked away from her.
“The thing is, he was DOA,” I said quietly. “Brain dead. They let us sit there—hoping, believing—that something would change. When all of the time he was just building a case against us. Watching us. Listening to us. And writing everything down.”
I turned back to her slowly, watching her face for her reaction. She was still listening, waiting for me to say more, her face a blank.
“They’d given up on Jake the minute he was wheeled into the emergency room.”
I looked at her, and the feeling that she needed me to say more was still there. I waited for a few moments, looking out at the lights of the houses and the moon glistening off the lake between them.
“They gave up on him, Kel,” I said. “They didn’t even try. You don’t do that. You don’t leave people behind.”
We were parked in front of her house. Through the front window I could see the girls sitting with Gabby, all of them peering into the television.
We got out and I walked around to the driver’s side.
“Get some sleep,” she said. “You look awful.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You look awful, too. I had a good time tonight, by th
e way.”
“Me, too,” she said. “We should do this again.”
She stepped away, went up the walk, and stood on the porch looking at me.
“About Erin-” I began.
“Look,” she said. “She’s going to be fine.” She hesitated a moment and then said, more to herself than me, “We’re all going to be fine. I hope.”
“Kelly?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“Why the change of heart?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“About me,” I said.
She smiled. “That was just for tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow, I’m back to full-on bitch mode.”
Fifteen
The trailer park was a faded sixties dream, built back when the Caterpillar Corporation was the main employer in Central Illinois, and residency at Cottagewood Homes had been a mere stepping stone on the way up to homeownership in Pekin proper or, perhaps, Marquette Heights.
It reminded Tuan of his childhood, the part he’d survived after Father died, traveling from foster family to foster family, never knowing where he’d wind up on any given day, and usually landing somewhere he didn’t want to be.
Only in this childhood, all of the houses were miniature, and he was a giant, larger than anybody who could cause him any harm, presiding over everything like a judge.
Still, Tuan had to admit as he turned into the entrance off Route 98, the place could have been much worse. There weren’t any cars on blocks, for example, and the junk sitting out in the yards had, for the most part, not yet gone to rust. And though the only pavement came in the form of the concrete slabs beneath the trailers, the gravel of the roads that wound through it had been replaced every few years, giving the park a tidy feeling.
It was also shady and full of elm trees, a tribute to its old age. What gaudiness it possessed was at least partially hidden by prime timber.
As he made his way toward the back, he saw that there were only a few parked cars. Most of the gravel driveways and bare spots of grass were empty. More importantly, there were no people in sight. The employed were already at work, the unemployed still sleeping.
Tuan parked next to Jasper’s car and maneuvered his bulk out onto the lawn. He squinted at the sun coming up through the tree line and looked around, fingering the plastic baggie in his pocket.
Stevens lived in the bad section of Cottagewood Homes, across the proverbial tracks from the semblance of shabby bliss to be found near the entrance to the park.
Back here, amongst the trees, the smell of rotting garbage accompanied by the faint whiff of urine were the backdrop to the detritus of mobile home living. A pile of broken bottles next to the neighbor’s doorstep, a wheel-less ten-speed frame shoved half under the trailer, a forlorn pair of women’s panties lying out in the driveway.
Gina Boyd, whose front door faced Jasper’s, didn’t appear to be home. Gina was a checker at a local supermarket. A steady job full of responsibility she managed to somehow hold onto even though she spent most of her off hours clutching a bottle of Mad Dog and blowing whoever came her way in order to earn extra cash for her drinking habit, which she somehow was able to hide from her place of employment.
Just how she did this was a mystery to Tuan, and any respect he did have for the woman was based solely on this. In the age of compulsory urine testing, pissing clean wasn’t a romp in the woods. Then again, this was alcohol we were talking about here.
The neighbor across the road, Jermaine Potts, was one of the five black people living in North Pekin. Potts was just as much a dilemma to Tuan, who’d never understood why anyone who wasn’t white or Asian would even want to drive through town, let alone live here.
Potts was as clean as Jasper was a junkie, and twice as intense. His trailer was surrounded by free weights and other sports equipment he financed by moonlighting as a security guard for a massive self-storage complex in West Peoria.
As Tuan walked up to the door to Jasper’s trailer, he saw that Potts was out in the side yard across the street, performing lunges in a patch of sunlight filtering down through the leaf canopy above. Potts was wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs, the sweat running in rivulets down his naked upper body. The bar spanning his massive shoulders looked to be holding about five hundred pounds.
Potts ignored him, which was just fine with Tuan. As he knocked on Jasper’s door, he watched as Potts stepped forward, went down on one knee, and then stood back up again, all the time screaming “Yes! Yes!” in a deep bellowing tone.
Intense. Not paying attention.
Tuan knocked again. He waited a few seconds and then tried the door. Locked.
He went over to the window and, standing on tiptoe, cupped his hands around his face and peered inside. It took him a moment, his eyes adjusting to the darkness, and then, in the flickering of the television, he saw it.
His body splayed out over the couch, the front of his pants soiled, Jasper’s lifeless eyes stared back at him. A trickle of blood ran down the side of the couch and onto the floor, where it had pooled into a sticky gel.
Tuan backed away, wiping at the window with his shirtsleeve. He looked over at Potts, who was standing with his back to him.
Would he remember the fat Asian guy who’d come calling?
Tuan would have to chance it.
He got back into his car and drove slowly out through the faded glory of Cottagewood Homes. When he got back out on 98, he rolled down the window and tossed the plastic baggy out onto the roadside.
Only then did he smile. He was in the clear. Father had always told him that prayers had a way of being answered, even if you didn’t recognize it at first.
He thought to himself, as he turned left on 29, that maybe he should start praying more often.
Sixteen
I was up and out of the house by seven-thirty, riding on five hours of sleep and three cups of coffee. I’d run out of cinnamon sticks the night before, and as I got into my car, I found a plastic straw in the glove compartment and chewed on that instead.
Rassi had passed out on the couch around one, and I’d sat up with the Roe file for nearly an hour, poring through the dearth of information it contained. The file was thin, and there was precious little that wasn’t straightforward: statements from Tasha Roe, a Jasper Stevens, who’d been the last to see Roe alive, when they’d shared a beer in Roe’s back yard on the day of his death, and other employees at Darren Roe’s place of work.
If he had spoken to Tad just days before Roe had been murdered, then why wasn’t there anything in the file? At some point I’d nudged Rassi awake to ask him, but he hadn’t been any help.
“There’s nothing else,” he’d said before passing out again. “Everything that’s in there, that’s all there is.”
Whatever had gone between Darren Roe and Tad had died with the both of them.
As I merged onto 155 out of Tremont, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Kelly. She came on the line sounding chipper.
“You awake already?” she asked. “It’s not even a school day.”
This was a refreshing alternative to being asked about my alcohol consumption.
“Hi, Kel,” I said. “How’s Erin?”
“Sleeping,” she said. “Which is where most people are who don’t have jobs.”
“I have a job,” I said.
“Who said I meant you?” she said, and then lowered her voice. “You sound hung over.”
There it was. I’d known it was coming.
“I am,” I admitted. “But not for the usual reasons. You know that I’m working for the sheriff’s department now, right?”
“Dubois called last night,” she murmured.
“What about?” I asked.
“About you,” she said. “About the Trueblood case.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said I was to give you a minimum of cooperation,” she said. “Typical Dubois.”
“Is he allowed to tell you that?”
“He can tell me anything he likes,” she said. “Whether I do what he says is another thing.”
“My house got broken into last night,” I said.
“Oh my god,” Kelly said. “What—were you there?”
“No, I was at Wayne and Hannah Trueblood’s and then at Crossroads with Dave Rassi,” I said.
“What did the police say?”
“I didn’t call them,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I’d rather talk to you about that in person,” I said.
“Okay,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Did anything get stolen?”
“Not that I can tell,” I said. “Anyway, I also need to talk to you about Roe.”
I heard the ding of her microwave in the background. “What does Roe have to do with your house getting broken into?”
“Probably nothing,” I said. “But it has something to do with Tad.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Tad spoke to Roe about something before he was killed.”
Kelly sighed. “Well if he did, it would be in the file.”
“It’s not in the file,” I said as I left 155 and got onto 74 toward Bloomington.
“Well, then it didn’t happen,” she said.
“Tasha Roe says differently,” I said.
“Tasha Roe says a lot of things,” Kelly said.
“Can you just take fifteen minutes to go over a few things?” I asked.
I was running down the long hill on 74 from the flatlands into the Mackinaw River bottom. When I got to Goodfield, I took the exit and then turned left onto Route 9 in the direction of Deer Creek.
“I don’t do jack until I get my bribe,” she said. “Or did you forget already?”
Dinner. Steak. Grown-ups going out.
“I didn’t forget,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Erin wants you to come to lunch today, too, by the way.”
“Um,” I said as I slowed and entered the town. “What time? I’m supposed to meet with somebody around noon.”
“Well, you’ll just have to cancel that,” Kelly said.
