by Lisa Unger
Boz was a big man with a thinning head of black hair and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He wasn’t part of the Lost Valley Police Department; he was from the state police. The case of a murdered police officer never closes, never goes cold. Detective Earl Bozmoski was a dog with a bone.
We went over it again, every detail. The sound of their voices, the shapes of their mouths, the color of their eyes. What they said to each other. Did they ever use names? He was hoping that as my trauma lifted, as grief lightened, that more details would surface. So far, it hadn’t worked that way. Even though that night was on an eternal loop in my thoughts, in my dreams, nothing helpful had emerged from my traumatized recollections.
We sat in Paul’s cramped kitchen, the aroma of coffee in the air. Boz pulled a manila folder from his weathered leather case and laid it on the table.
“I’ve got some pictures here, Zoey,” he said. “I wondered if you might recognize any of these men.”
His hands were thick and calloused, cuticles ragged, nails short. My mother would have called them a workingman’s hands. I liked the sight of them because they reminded me of my father’s hands, hands that worked wood, held a gun, held my hand, lifted and fixed.
He spread four photos out in front of me.
My father used the word mopes a lot, or skulls, meaning low-level thugs, bad men with bad intentions or just the kind moron that fell into trouble because he came from trouble and didn’t know any other way around the world. Men who stole, or had the gene for violence, bad tempers, or just something addled in the head. The men in the photos were all one kind or another. Even at that age, I could see it in the deadness of their stares, in the turned-down corners of their mouths, the ragged complexions, sloped shoulders. But they were all strangers. I looked at their eyes, at their mouths. But there wasn’t any jolt of recognition.
I shook my head. “I don’t know them.”
“If you heard some voices maybe?”
“Maybe.”
He pulled a recorder out of his bag. “Normally, we’d have to do this at the station. But I didn’t want to do that to you right now—when you’re just settling in here.”
“Is it okay?” Paul asked. I nodded.
“They’re all going to say the same thing,” said Boz. “A sentence from the transcript of your initial interview: ‘You’re not going to save your family and get away with that money. Tell us where it is.’ ”
I must have flinched because he bowed his head and put that big hand over mine. “I’m sorry,” he said.
The first voice was too high pitched, almost girlish. I shook my head. The next voice had a heavy New York accent; that wasn’t it either. The third voice was deeper. Maybe, but no. The fourth voice sent a bolt of electricity through me, deep, gravelly, cold.
“Zoey?”
“Maybe,” I said, feeling my breath come ragged. I couldn’t swear to it, but every nerve ending in my body was tingling, my lungs compressing.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Just a thug, a local screw-up,” he said. He fanned out the pictures again. “Look again now.”
Two of the men had blond facial hair; I eliminated them. One had too much gray. I stared at the mouth of the man who had dark stubble, at his blank dark eyes. Maybe. Maybe. I was shaking a little, from the inside out.
“I just don’t know,” I said. “Him maybe. The masks.”
“I get it,” he said. He raised a palm, gave an understanding nod. “I’m not trying to force you into saying something you’re not sure of.”
“Okay, kid,” said Paul. “Go do your homework.”
I lingered in the hallway just beyond the kitchen door. I heard Paul get up and pour Boz another cup.
“I think we’re going to have to face that she’s got nothing left to give,” said Paul. “She’s shattered, Boz.”
There was a long pause, a sigh. “Did you know he was in trouble?”
“Who?” said Paul. “Chad? What kind of trouble?”
“He was drowning in debt,” said Boz.
A spoon against the edge of a mug. A scraping chair.
“I had a sense that money was tight,” said Paul. “How much debt?”
“He was borrowing for private school. There were high credit card balances, multiple cards. He was nearing ninety thousand.”
“Christ.”
“On a cop’s salary,” Boz said.
“Okay,” said Paul. “So what? So he had debt. Lots of folks have debt.”
“A couple weeks before the murders,” said Boz. “Some money was stolen. A lot of money, a million.”
There was a leaden silence; I slid down the wall to my haunches, vibrating.
“Stolen from where?”
“Word is, from my confidential informant, that three heavily armed masked men shot two guards and absconded with a pile of cash belonging to Whitey Malone.”
“The drug dealer you guys never seem to be able to bring in.”
“That’s right,” said Boz. “My CI says that the robbers were trained, organized, and ruthless. They killed the two thugs on guard, collected their rounds and casings. They knew where the money was buried. Came and went quickly. Word is that they were cops, or maybe paramilitary. My guy was hiding, saw the whole thing go down.”
“You think the two incidents are connected.”
“The men who killed your stepbrother and his wife,” said Boz. “They were looking for money.”
“And why would they be looking at Chad’s?” asked Paul. What was there in his tone? Something I’d never heard.
One of them coughed. “I don’t know,” said Boz. “Why do you think?”
“How the hell should I know?”
More silence.
“So,” said Paul, his voice coming up an octave. “If you think it’s connected, make life a living hell for Malone and his thugs. Who else would be looking for that money but them?”
“We’ve done that,” said Boz. “We’re doing it. No one knows anything; or no one’s talking. Of the locals, these four come closest to Zoey’s physical descriptions—size, coloring, whatnot. They’re by far the worst guys we have on the streets in the area, armed robbers, drug dealers, rapists, killers—convicted felons every one.”
“So it makes sense that they’re out walking around.”
“Hey, I don’t make the laws,” said Boz. “Neither do you.”
“Did they work for Malone?”
“I didn’t find any connections, no.”
I heard a chair groan as one of them shifted his weight.
“You’ve got fibers, the boot print,” said Paul.
“There’s no definitive match on any of it,” he said. “This guy, Beckham, has a size ten boot, but so do a lot of guys. We haven’t found any guns with a ballistics match in their possession. We brought this guy, Didion, in on gun charges; found a cache of illegal weapons—not the ones stolen from Chad’s locker. None of which were used in the commission of the Drake murders. Didion will go back to jail anyway. This other one looks like he’s been trying to go straight, has a job at the gas station. Hasn’t been in any trouble”
More silence.
“So what are you saying, Boz?” said Paul. What was it? Was it menace? Anger? There was something sizzling between them. What?
“Hey, I’m not saying anything,” said Boz gently. “I got to look at everything, for my notes, every single angle. You know that. This is a cop killing. All eyes are on me.”
There was a hard thump on the kitchen table. I couldn’t see what.
“They’re going to get away with it, aren’t they?” said Paul. His voice didn’t even sound like his; it was small now and tight with anger. “The men who did this to Chad and Heather, to Zoey. They’re out there.”
“I swear to you, Paul, and to Zoey,” Boz said, “I’ll never rest until we find who did this.”
Paul made some kind of strangled noise. It took me a second to realize that he was crying.
• • •
The lights were burning inside his tidy Victorian when I pulled up in the old truck that Paul kept in a garage uptown.
I walked up the flower-lined path and knocked at the door, heard the television go off inside. In spite of the hour, he didn’t seem that surprised to see me when he opened the door.
“Zoey,” he said. He wore a tattered old John Jay College sweatshirt. They all went there, Boz, Paul, my dad, even Mike. “Come in.”
He held the door open for me, and I walked into the foyer.
There was a mirror there and before I could look away, I caught sight of myself, someone narrow with shoulders hiked high, pale with dark circles under her eyes, hair pulled back tight. Jeans, black hoodie. Not someone who belonged in this carefully decorated home of older people. An interloper, an unwelcome guest. What’s with the getup? that doorman had asked.
“Mike called you,” I guessed.
“Said Paul’s in a bad way, that you might be stopping by.”
“I want to go over it again.”
Even though the people who killed my parents were never caught, Boz has never stopped working the case, even after he retired. He has an office toward the back of the house, where he still pores over cold cases. Lately, he’s closed a couple. The new DNA technology and evolving federal and state requirements that mandate DNA samples be taken from anyone arrested have led to new evidence on cases that might have forever remained unsolved.
“Where’s Miranda?” I asked. Funny name for a cop’s wife.
“She’s visiting her sister,” he said, motioning that I follow him into the kitchen. He put on the kettle, pulled out a chair for me. I sat at the table, looked around—lots of flowers and ducks, pictures of kids on the refrigerator, a standing mixer, a rack of copper pots. Homey.
“John Didion is dead,” he said, leaning against the counter.
“I heard that, too.”
“They say it was a hunting knife,” he said, putting tea bags in a white porcelain pot. “Through the heart.”
“Oh?”
I flashed on it again, that moment where I came in close, one step, one thrust. My strength, his weakness. A pop. A sigh. He let go of life, as if it were a burden he was glad to unload. His eyes went blank; he almost smiled. Or maybe that’s what I tell myself. I felt nothing. But there’s something that came after, a kind of howl in the back of my brain. I’ve dreamt about it twice, waking to hope it never happened. But it did.
“All we have are theories, you know,” said Boz.
“We have more than that,” I said. “I was there.”
No one was ever arrested for the murder of my parents. The money those men were looking for was never recovered. A few months into the investigation, a cloud of suspicion fell over my father. According to Boz, there was a months-long sideline inquiry being conducted by Internal Affairs into the idea that a group of cops had robbed a local drug dealer, and that the men who killed my father and mother were looking for that money. That investigation, too, died on the vine. There was no evidence tying my father to the robbery.
“There’s word that Rhett Beckham is back in town,” said Boz. The kettle whistled, and he poured the not-quite-boiling water into the pot. It was slow and careful; he liked the ritual. I could tell.
Rhett Beckham, the tall, thin one. The one who dragged me through the window, who cut me with my father’s hunting knife. And then there was Josh Beckham, his brother, the one who tried to say I wasn’t in the barn. That’s what I think, anyway. Those are my theories, based on my long investigation, the fragments of my memory, the recorded voice, the eyes I saw in mug shots.
According to Seth Murphy, who was also still obsessed with what happened that night, there was another man, a man in the passenger seat of the car, sitting, waiting. We had no idea who that might be.
The car they were in was a big old Caddy, black, run-down. Seth didn’t see any tags. It was never found. But Didion had been seen driving something similar a week earlier. All just fragments, pieces that never gelled enough for an arrest, though they were all questioned.
“I heard,” I said.
“He was released,” said Boz. “He rolled into town a week ago, and now he’s his living with his brother and mother.”
“Someone’s moved into the house.” The words backed up in my throat. “She’s renovating it. She has a blog.”
He had his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face.
“Mike thinks the energy has been disturbed,” I went on. “That it’s time for closure.”
“That sounds like something he’d say.”
He watched the steeping pot, then retrieved mugs from the cupboard.
I told Boz about the break-in, about what Paul said. He brought the mugs to the table and sat across from me.
“Paul was scared,” I said. “He said: they’re coming.”
Boz frowned at that, seemed to go internal for a second. He stood and walked off; I heard him padding down the hall, and I took a sip of my tea. It was hot and sweet. After a moment, he came back clutching a thick file folder covered with scribbling and coffee cup stains.
“So,” he said, sitting across from me, putting the folder on the table. He flipped it open. “Three men rob a local drug dealer named Whitey Malone. He’s got a pile of cash, around a million buried outside a cabin he owns in the woods. The men, armed, trained, kill two of the thugs guarding the stash, dig it up, and take off, leaving a CI cowering under a bed. They have foreknowledge of the site, move quickly, and take off. We don’t know what they were driving. CI says he never got a good look.”
I nod. I know all this.
“Two weeks later,” he said. “Three men break into your home and proceed to torture your parents—and you—looking for this money. Your father, according to your retelling, has no idea where the money is, or he doesn’t give it up.”
“He had no idea,” I said. This part always makes me angry, that Boz leaves any doubt that my father would allow us all to be killed for money. He wouldn’t.
“I’m just saying, Zoey,” he said. “It were me? I wouldn’t tell them either. I’d stall as long as I could, hoping for an opportunity, a miracle. They were going to kill you all anyway. He knew that.”
“He didn’t know anything about it,” I said. “I’m telling you.”
“Okay,” he said, lifting his palms. “None of Whitey Malone’s men are ever tied to the scene. We have loose, circumstantial evidence that might, I repeat might, implicate these two men—John Didion and Rhett Beckham—the boot print, Didion seen in an old Caddy, your possible recognition of Didion’s voice. But there was never enough to make a case. Didion got sent away on gun charges, got out, went up again, just released last year. Beckham also went away for armed robbery—stabbed some guy in the joint, had some time added. He was just released last month.”
He took a sip of tea, looked at me over the rim. We did this. Started at the beginning, ran it all down. Again and again. I guess we’d get tired of it when we found answers to all our questions.
“And Josh Beckham, his brother, no criminal record, has been here all along. Took over his father’s business, cares for his elderly mother. The only reason we looked at him was because you said the third man, much younger, seemed afraid and tried to help you hide.”
“You talked to him.”
“We brought them all in,” said Boz. “If it was them, none of them ever talked. Not then, not in the joint, not bragging at a bar.”
“And the money was never found.”
“No,” said Boz. “According to my CI, the money was never
recovered. Whitey Malone died in prison a couple of years ago. That million bucks is like an urban legend now. People look for it, talk about where it might be. Occasionally, cops will find some kids out in the woods behind your old place, digging for it.”
“So maybe the guys who took it from Malone got away with it,” I said. “They’re living in the Caribbean somewhere. Whoever thought my dad took it, they got it wrong.”
“That’s a possibility,” said Boz. “I’ve considered it.”
“But.”
“But nothing,” said Boz. “It’s one of a couple of theories. I don’t have the answers, kid. Believe me, I wish I did.”
We’d had this conversation so many times. I drained my cup, set it down on the table.
“I don’t want to know about Didion, okay?” he said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“But it seems to me like maybe Mike is right. It’s set some wheels in motion.”
“How so?”
“Now Rhett Beckham is back in town. The house is under renovation, and I heard the new owner hired Josh Beckham as the handyman.”
I leaned forward. “Josh Beckham is working at the house?”
Boz nodded, went on: “And you say someone ransacked Paul’s apartment, looking for something.”
“So what does Paul have to do with this?”
“Maybe nothing,” said Boz. “Maybe they were looking for you.”
The thought had occurred to me. But who? And why? And why now? Because of Didion? The video footage; had someone recognized me? I got my mail at Paul’s, didn’t have another address. Maybe someone thought I knew where the money was, had kept the secret all these years.
