by Chris Beakey
And now, as she stared at her tired face in her own bathroom mirror, she thought that maybe it had all gone too far. The fight had been a big deal—something people talked about for the rest of the day. Marco’s father would be enraged—an especially scary thought since Marco already believed that one day the man might lose control completely and actually murder him. “You’ll hear about it afterwards,” he had said. “Some kind of terrible accident, but there’s no way in Hell anything will happen to him.”
The thought gave her a chill as she wrapped herself in her heaviest robe and went down the hall, past the doorway to her mother’s bedroom, which was shut and would remain that way until noon or as long as it took to forestall yet another hangover.
The espresso machine was built into the cabinetry of the kitchen that her mother had had redesigned and upgraded with stainless steel “restaurant grade” appliances after her last divorce. It took just a minute to craft a double-sized cup. She took a sip and felt an instant jolt as she thought of Darrell Deane with his pants around his ankles while Marco remained downstairs, so totally oblivious…
“Oh Hell,” she muttered, and went to the freezer and pulled out the bottle of Stoli, then poured and knocked back a quick, ice-cold shot. For clarity, she thought.
She took the espresso with her to the couch that faced the big flat screen TV. By habit she went straight to VH1. A video starring the latest pop sensation was on—featuring a girl who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, gyrating in a weird dominatrix costume, surrounded by dancing men.
Queers, she thought, like Kenneth Porter.
There you go again.
She took a long hit of the espresso, felt it burn down her throat as she thought of Kenneth being thrown against the cinder block wall. Poor defenseless Kenneth, who still smiled shyly at her in the hallways, and still looked into her eyes with dumb confusion over why she shunned him.
The sudden sense of shame was overwhelming.
Nothing you can do now. She finished the espresso, and felt the first slight buzz from the liquor. Get beyond it.
She clicked through to MTV, which was showing a boring interview of another teen star, then kept clicking through Saturday morning cartoons. She landed on a local news station and started to keep going, but stopped at the sight of Aidan O’Shea, in a yearbook photo that filled the screen, and the sound of the news anchor’s voice.
“Police sources say the boy was struck during the night by a hit-and-run driver.”
She leaned forward, and set the empty cup on the coffee table.
“He was pronounced dead at the scene.”
The video switched to a shot of police cars on a snowy mountain road. She gazed at it for several seconds, her thoughts dulled by the vodka buzz, before her mind filled with the memory of Aidan O’Shea with Sara Porter, in the tutoring center at school. She had seen them there for the first time on her way to cheerleading practice just two weeks after Sara’s mother drove her car off a cliff on the mountain. Sara was helping Aidan with homework, and Kieran O’Shea was watching them. Kieran’s smile was easy and relaxed as he leaned down and patted Sara on the shoulder then kept his hand there; a paternal gesture. The good teacher acknowledging the good girl; Sara looking freaky as usual in her gothic black and tinted hair but undeniably sweet for all the time she was spending with Kieran’s autistic brother.
But now Aidan was dead; run down by a car in the middle of the night.
The screen filled once again with Aidan’s photo from last year’s yearbook. She tasted the bitterness deep in her throat; glanced at her reflection in the vague early morning light in the panels of the French door and had the strange sensation of seeing herself as someone else might have; haggard and ugly and at the edge of falling apart as she stared at the dead boy’s photo.
But she wasn’t crying for Aidan…not really. She was crying—nearly weeping now—because of the image looming bigger in her mind: Sara and Aidan, in the tutoring lab. Sweet, shy, awkward Sara, who spent her own time trying to make an autistic boy’s life better simply because she cared about him. Sara, who was loyal enough to her loser brother to walk into a fight and try to save him.
The opposite of you in every way.
The tears were coming faster now, and with them the hiccups that always gave her a panicky feeling as she tried to catch her breath.
She brought her knees up to her chest; covered her face with her hands, felt powerless against the sobs that wracked her body; felt completely alone.
She cried for several minutes, until the room became a teary blur around her, and then in the back of her mind saw herself walking home alone, trudging through the knee-deep snow without once looking back at Marco’s house behind her. At the time she had been certain that he hadn’t even noticed that she had left. And hadn’t cared.
But maybe he did. She grasped at the idea like a lifeline, let her mind form an image of Marco going back upstairs, looking for her, missing her.
Of course it was possible. The last time they had had sex he had come twice; and had covered her face with kisses when it was over. A reaction completely at odds with the way he had treated her the night before.
He was drinking, tooting up. That’s the only reason why.
She let herself imagine the idea of him being alone—and lonely. Thinking of her as she was thinking of him. And then without allowing herself to think anymore she pulled the phone out of her pocket tapped a text message:
I’m alone. Downstairs at my house. I WANT you. Come now PLEASE.
In the memory of the phone she had a photo of herself, her breasts exposed, her hand beneath the waist of her panties. Marco had taken it just a few days before, and then, minutes later, had made love to her standing up, against the wall of her basement family room.
She attached the photo to the message.
And hit send.
Caruso drove carefully over the slick road that led back up the mountain, his thoughts fixated on the text from Niles, which affirmed that the crime scene was compromised by the weather, the remote location, and the more than two hours it had taken for the tech team to get there.
Which made it all the more crucial to obtain physical evidence, which could include Aidan’s blood, or fibers from his clothing, or flecks of paint that could be matched to Porter’s vehicle.
The sign marked “Rolling Road” was nearly concealed by the heavy snowfall. He slowed and started to make the turn when he saw a white vehicle crest the steep hill a hundred yards ahead. There was a brief moment of eye contact with the driver before the vehicle abruptly slowed. Caruso instinctively did the same.
He then lowered his driver’s side window and stuck his left hand out, his palm forward, motioning for the vehicle to stop.
The driver wore glasses in a tortoiseshell frame, but even from the distance Caruso saw the wariness in her eyes. He responded with what he hoped was a calm, disarming look. Keep it friendly, he thought. As if you’re nothing more than a helpful cop.
As directed, she stopped when they were parallel, and lowered her window. Up close her eyes were bloodshot, as they had been a week before, when Caruso had questioned her for the third time. Her name was April Devon, and she was the woman Lori Porter had planned to meet with on the night she died. The interview, like the one before it, had left him feeling certain that she was holding something back.
He faced her through the open window, feeling momentarily invigorated by the cold air.
“I guess you heard,” he said.
She nodded. “I saw the story on the news this morning. It was a hit and run?”
“Looks that way.” He glanced down at the logo—a stitch in time—on the driver’s side door of her Kia Sorrento, a cross between an SUV and a minivan, suitable for delivering pieces of furniture and fabrics and for navigating the steep mountain terrain. According to what April had told him, and backed up by
what he had researched online, she had run the business from her home in Fairfax, Virginia for several years before recently moving to a home on the mountain. She advertised in local circulars and online and did most of her work in the house’s large living room, which had a panoramic view of the valley below the mountain.
That house was less than a mile away.
“I don’t suppose you saw anything,” he said.
“When?”
“Last night. When it happened.”
She lowered her hands from the steering wheel. “No. I was snowed in like everyone else up here.”
His mind skipped through her answers to his previous questions about Lori Porter, who had hired April to make curtains and slipcovers for the Porter home. April had first told him they were merely acquaintances, but her eyes had filled with tears as she recounted her movements on the night Lori died.
She glanced to her left, toward the Rolling Road intersection. “Do you have any idea who did it?”
“Maybe. We’re still investigating.”
He paused, and waited until she looked at him again.
“This is the third bad thing to happen on the mountain in five months,” he said.
She looked down at her lap.
“So far the death of Lori Porter’s the only investigation that’s been concluded.”
She looked up. “What do you mean?”
“It’s a suicide, officially. Because that’s the only option I have.”
Her jaw tensed.
“You look like you don’t believe it.”
“No.”
“But you’re sure there’s nothing else you can tell me.”
She shook her head, which left him with the same odd sequence of events he had grappled with from the beginning—that Lori Porter had left her home at 8 p.m. and driven up Short Mountain in the middle of a torrential thunderstorm simply because she wanted to take a look at some fabric samples.
April brought her hands back to the wheel, and flexed her fingers in a nervous gesture. “I heard about the teacher at the high school.”
“Yeah. Another tragedy,” he said, watching her carefully as he added. “And so similar to the murder that happened the night Lori—”
“I know that.”
He nearly winced at the sharpness of her tone.
“So…” he said, and paused.
“What?”
“There’s still nothing else?”
She shook her head again, looking annoyed now. “I need to get going. Have to take some pieces into town.”
“Didn’t mean to hold you up,” he said. “Just want you to know the door’s always open. If you think of anything more.”
“I’ve told you everything I can think of.”
“You sure?”
His tone was more accusatory than he intended, but she met his eyes with a stoic expression, and nodded.
“All right then,” he said. He stayed put as her window came up, and then proceeded toward the turn off to Rolling Road. He slowed to a crawl as he approached the scene, now blocked off by the van used by the tech team and patrol cars from the Frederick County Sheriff’s office, and one of the Hummers that Niles drove.
Niles was sitting inside the Hummer, watching as the technicians finished up. He stepped out as Caruso pulled to a stop. There was a prominent bruise on his cheek that hadn’t been there the day before, and his balance was a bit unsteady as he walked toward the car. Caruso might have believed his awkward gait and red eyes were a result of being up all night, but he caught the faint whiff of booze when Niles was two feet away.
The conversation that followed wound its way through everything that was wrong with the scene, including the techs’ inability to get decent tire prints from the skid marks that Caruso had tried to protect, and the lack of physical evidence—paint, plastic, glass or metal—that could be tied to the striking vehicle.
“So without a witness…” Niles said, as his eyes strayed farther up the road, toward Kieran O’Shea’s house. He had one hand resting on the top of the patrol car, as if he needed it for support. The other was deep within the pocket of his parka. Caruso wondered if there was a bottle of liquor in there, or if it was sitting underneath the driver’s seat, because there was no doubt about Niles’ condition.
As a higher-ranking detective he considered asking Niles for his gun and insisting he ride down the mountain in the passenger seat of the patrol car. But then Niles derailed his train of thought:
“So what did Porter have to say?”
Caruso took a moment before responding. Because they were partners in the investigation of Aidan O’Shea’s death, he had had no choice but to tell Niles about Porter’s middle-of-the-night 911 call about his daughter being stranded at the O’Shea residence.
“He’s scared,” Caruso said.
Niles gave him a wry smile. “Ya’ think?”
He felt a flash of anger. “It’s nothing to joke about.”
The smile became a sneer. “Relax man. Just tellin’ it like it is.”
Caruso paused, making conscious effort to breathe, knowing he needed to be alone with his thoughts, and away from Niles. He glanced toward his Blazer, which he had parked over the skid marks in the effort to protect them from the falling snow hours earlier. It was now parked farther up Rolling Road. It would be up to a deputy to bring it back down to town once the processing of the scene was completed.
“I want you to stay up here until the guys pack everything up,” he said.
Niles flushed. “That an order?”
Caruso felt a twitch in his cheek. “Yeah,” he said, and hit the button to roll up the window, then did a three-quarter turn at a speed that was a bit faster than it should have been and headed back down the mountain.
The deputy he had placed in front of Porter’s house called two minutes later.
“You wanted me to check in if anything happened,” he said.
“That’s right. Has he tried to leave?”
“No, but he had a visitor. In a black Ford F-150 pickup. It pulled into the driveway and sat there for a couple of minutes before a teenaged girl came out of the house.”
Caruso’s hands tensed on the wheel.
“The driver was a white male, late twenties. I ran the plate—”
“I know who the driver was. What did you do next?”
“You told me to stay here. But I thought it looked a little funny, and wanted you to know.”
“Smart,” Caruso said. “Anything else?”
The deputy paused. “Not really. Except the vehicle’s registered to a residence on Short Mountain but I thought the driver was headed to another place in the development. Instead of going out toward the front gate he went farther down the street and turned toward the part that’s still under construction.”
Caruso vaguely remembered the layout of the new subdivision where the Porters lived. The front entrance was built around a grand stone gate. The other entrance was at a section with several vacant lots still for sale.
So he went out the back way, Caruso thought.
But to where?
He had planned on going back to headquarters and waiting there until the warrant to seize Porter’s car came through, but quickly changed his mind.
“I’m going to put a BOLO out on the 150,” he said. “The girl might be in danger. Stay put and let me know if anything else happens.”
He hung up. Twenty minutes later he was back in Stephen Porter’s neighborhood again. A road crew had given the subdivision’s streets one run of the plows, which had piled the snow up high enough to block in most of the cars parked at the curbs, but the road surface was still slick. He drove cautiously as he passed the big houses, toward the street where Stephen Porter lived.
Half a block ahead, a wide, boxy SUV was approaching the intersection from a side s
treet, moving way too fast for the icy pavement. The driver ignored the stop sign, and the car’s back end slid sideways as it turned into the intersection, the driver just barely in control.
“Whoa,” Caruso said, and watched as the car continued on, down the center of the road.
He turned on the flashing red lights. The driver was slow to react and maintained his speed. It took two blasts of the siren before the vehicle pulled over.
It was a Hummer, tricked-out with extra chrome and a three-tone silver-gray-blue paint job.
He stepped out and approached from the driver’s side. The driver was a teenaged boy. He scowled as Caruso approached. His right eye had a massive shiner—with a black crescent at the top of the cheekbone and a smattering of burst capillaries beneath the yellowed skin.
Caruso stopped four feet from the driver’s side door and motioned for him to lower the window.
The teenager waited several moments before complying. Caruso caught the sweet, heavy smell of marijuana driving out of the car’s interior as the glass came down.
“Step out of your vehicle,” he said.
The boy’s stare drifted forward. He looked as if he was gauging the distance between his front bumper and the patrol car’s back end; as if he was an instant away from ramming the patrol car and trying to pull away.
Go ahead and try it, Caruso thought, but said instead:
“You heard me. Out.”
The boy waited just a few more seconds before opening the door, and slowly complied.
Stephen sat on the bed, his hands gripping his knees as Kieran O’Shea’s last words cycled through his mind.
“You killed my brother.”
“I saw you…”
He turned away from the window and went into the second floor study. The computer was in sleep mode. He powered it up and went to Google and typed in Kieran O’Shea. The web site showing the Langford Secondary faculty was the first page that came up. O’Shea faced the camera in his head shot. His skin was pale. His eyes were blue; his hair black and long, and parted at the center.
