Brink of Death

by Brandilyn Collins

  A sob rose in my chest. Kelly squeezed my hand. “Mom, come on. It’s time to go.”

  Go? How can I even move?

  Somehow I managed to pull myself from my seat. To hold Kelly’s hand and slide out of the pew, walk up the aisle and out the door of that church. People moved around me, talking in low tones, but I couldn’t hear their words above the noise in my head. A new mantra had hummed into existence within me, chanting, chanting.

  The wrong house.

  The killer had gotten the wrong house.

  Chapter 23

  I barely remember going to the gravesite, hearing the final words over the closed casket. Driving home woodenly, fear and guilt rendering me silent. I do remember thinking the kids could not know. This was my private nightmare.

  When we arrived home, I hastily changed out of my black dress into shorts and a T-shirt. “I’m going to work in the office,” I informed Kelly and Stephen. “Lots of your grandfather’s stuff to clean out in there.”

  Stephen eyed me with the knowing look of a teenager proud of his perception. Clearly, he thought I was upset over the funeral and now sought to dispel my grief through tackling some new project.

  If he only knew.

  Scuttling into my father’s office, I closed the door and leaned against it, as if to keep some pursuing demon at bay.

  My eyes cruised the office, right to left. Starting with plaques and framed prints of private airplanes in flight on the wall, moving to a leather couch with small glass tables and lamps on either side. The ottoman at one end of the couch.

  Across a few feet of bare floor to the edge of the area rug. On to the front windows, starting at knee height and reaching all the way up to the fourteen-foot ceiling, and in front of the windows, the desk and chair. My gaze moved left, over the edge of the rug and onto bare hardwood floor, then to the matching chairs upon which Dave and Erin had sat four days ago. Bookcases lined the wall from those chairs to the front corner of the office. And to my far left, against the wall that sheltered the door frame, sat the massive oak file cabinet—wide enough to contain legal documents. Four drawers with brass handles.

  My father had been incredibly neat. When I first viewed this office on the day we were called to Redding due to his heart attack, not one file was out of place. His massive oak desk was cleaned off, his computer and printer and stacked in-boxes and penholder and telephone all dusted. I came in from the hospital that evening and sat, shell-shocked, in his leather chair. Looking at the singular perfection of his office and wondering how such a powerful man could be struck down by mere centimeters of arterial plaque.

  Life was so fragile, it was frightening.

  I had not liked my father. But I had loved him. On some deep level I wanted him to reach out to me, to see me. To tell me, as fathers are supposed to do, that he loved me for who I was and what I’d accomplished. But, being his child—and female at that—I was to him another feather in his cap, something he had created, and therefore someone who owed him.

  Just as Jenna owed him, and my mother owed him, and any mistress he’d chosen to bask in his affections owed him.

  Stunned at his death, I’d sat in his chair caught in the gunfire of dueling emotions—a bitter disappointment that what I’d longed for would never come true, and a nauseating relief that I no longer needed to fool myself into thinking it might.

  I’d opened the drawers of his desk one by one. Marveling at the neatness of the long middle drawer—pens, stamps, small notepads of paper, clips, scissors—everything in its place. In the top right drawer, I recalled seeing a ream of typing paper, plus stationery and envelopes bearing the Gerralon & Haynes maroon-and-gray logo. The second drawer held manila envelopes, legal-size folders, an expandable file.

  A hanging rack, full of files, filled the bottom drawer.

  Remembering all this, I now moved toward the desk and lowered myself into my father’s chair. With a deep breath I opened the bottom drawer.

  Even as my eyes sought the file names through their clear plastic tabs, I tried to tell myself that I would find nothing; I had imagined it all. My memory of the Face was real, all right. And he had mentioned a file. But to think that the Face needed some papers from the Sybee trial so desperately that he would stage a chance encounter with me as I reached my car that day…To think that he would want this file in the first place—when the trial was over and done. That he would take the chance of showing his face to me. That he would drive all the way up here to Grove Landing, intent on breaking into the house, and end up on the wrong side of the street…

  My fingers flicked through the closest tabs. These were not even related to my father’s work. There were files about the house mortgage, the landscape and outside light systems, repairs to the airplane, magazine articles related to flying.

  Beyond these lay bills, stock market information, media clippings of my father’s trials. More folders on the airplane.

  Another of pilot maps.

  Not one file from Gerralon & Haynes.

  I flopped back against the chair. For a moment I basked in relief. This drawer would have been the most likely place for such a file. The wooden cabinet surely contained papers of old cases, information Sid Haynes hadn’t asked for to this day.

  In the distance I registered the drone of a private plane.

  One of the Grove Landing residents was about to land. How I wished it was Jenna.

  I crossed the office toward the cabinet. Pulled out the top drawer.

  Dozens more files hung in their green sheaths. One by one I slid them forward, reading their titles and dates. They held papers relating to cases going back four or five years—around the time my father had built the house. None was more recent than three years ago.

  My hands reached the back of the drawer. One down. I pushed it closed and pulled out the second, which held more of the same.

  The third drawer slid out. No files here. Only an array of airplane paraphernalia. Joysticks for the computer and simulation software for flying by instruments. Extra cannulas for the Cessna 210 that my father had passed to Jenna. The craft was capable of flying at over twenty thousand feet, but the cabin wasn’t pressurized. The oxygen tanks and breathing tubes were necessary for the higher cruising altitudes.

  Next I saw books on airports, folded maps, a couple headsets, and a handheld GPS unit. Did Jenna know all this stuff was here?

  In the bottom drawer lay my father’s briefcase.

  I drew back, sudden tears biting my eyes. How many times had I seen that case dangling from my father’s hand?

  Those times it was stuffed to the gills with paper. Now it lay almost collapsed upon itself.

  Sitting on my haunches, I stared at it, unwilling to pick it up. My gaze took in the brass clasp, the supple reddish-brown leather, the matching stitches around its frame and handle, various nicks it had sustained over the years of use.

  What was the briefcase doing here, anyway?

  True, my father had been a neatnik, but putting this away in a drawer? Maybe Jenna had done it. She and I and the kids drove up together when we got the call from a doctor at the hospital in Redding. By the time we arrived at the hospital, my father was already gone. Frowning, I tried my best to remember seeing the briefcase when we came into the house that Saturday night. I didn’t think I had. The heart attack struck early Saturday morning—apparently before he had the chance to so much as enter his office. He’d probably placed the briefcase in this drawer the night before, upon his arrival from the Bay Area.

  I shifted my position to sit cross-legged on the floor.

  Reached into the drawer and pulled out the case. Laid it on my legs. Then I stared at it once more, caught in the predicament of weighing the unknown against the possible known.

  For a moment I considered dumping it back inside, shoving the drawer closed, walking away.

  I pulled open the covering flap. Inside, the briefcase had two compartments. I slid my hand into the back one. Nothing. In the front compartment I to
uched a thin file folder.

  After a moment’s hesitation I pulled it out.

  An ordinary brown folder with a raised tab. No heading.

  Opening the file, I discovered two pages of lined yellow paper, like pieces pulled from a letter-sized writing tablet. The top page was titled “Sybee Interview, 3/14.” A stream of air escaped my mouth.

  Sybee.

  What was that date?

  March 14. The day before my father died—the Friday he flew here to the house. Whatever was in this file represented the last task of his career.

  Chapter 24

  My father’s handwriting left a lot to be desired, I thought as I sat in his desk chair. Letters ran together, part of them cut off. What he had written was not in complete sentences. Still, they gave detailed descriptions through key words. The first paragraph consisted of one sentence: Crime according to S.

  S had to mean Sybee.

  Two months after my father’s death, the Sybee trial began. It had been scheduled for the end of March, but that being two weeks after my father’s unexpected death, Haynes had asked the court for an extension. I covered the case for local media, pouring every ounce of concentration I possessed into studying those faces, drawing those pictures. Especially the pictures of the defense attorney.

  Concentrate on Sid’s square face, I’d told myself, the high forehead, the bald pate with wisps of brown hair. Don’t think that the results of your fingers should have yielded a much different face—one that now lay cold and silent in the grave.

  Even with the artistic concentration, I had absorbed the details of the case—the evidence, the testimony of a grieving widow, the theatrics and prodding questions of both prosecution and defense. I heard enough about Edgar Sybee to detest him. He was thirty-one, the mewling, spoiled dope-fiend son of Matt Sybee, wealthy owner of over half a dozen foreign car dealerships in the Bay Area. Edgar married when he was twenty-eight, promising his young bride, Crystal, that he’d slip out of his drug habits as he slipped on his wedding ring. He had not kept his promise. A year later Crystal had a son. The Sybees lived in an expensive house in Atherton, an upscale area just south of Redwood City.

  Edgar Sybee worked—if that’s what you could call it—as a salesman at his father’s dealership in San Mateo. In that capacity he rubbed shoulders with plenty of other well-to-do folk who came in to look at cars. These people were often of a different caliber than Edgar’s other business associates—those who sold him drugs, and those who bought drugs from him. Edgar was a firm believer in the saying “Never too rich.”

  As far as he was concerned, his commissions from Daddy’s business could not support his intended lifestyle. Selling drugs, on the other hand—now that was big business.

  One of the car dealership customers Edgar served was Barry Draye, an insurance broker in his mid-thirties who, along with his wife, nurtured a secret taste for cocaine. Reportedly, Barry and Edgar got to talking one day, their conversation continuing after the dealership closed for the night. Edgar did not walk away from that discussion with a hefty car sale. But he did walk away with an order for four ounces of cocaine—and the promise of plenty more purchases to come.

  Barry Draye’s wife, Lynn, wasn’t at their Redwood City home when Edgar showed up to sell him the drugs on the night of September 16. According to Lynn’s testimony, Barry had sent her off on an errand, saying he’d promised Edgar she would not be home during the transaction. Apparently, Edgar had told Barry that his ever suspicious supplier insisted on coming along to check Barry out, and this man chose to show his face to as few clients as possible. Lynn was uneasy about the request—and would later regret not paying more attention to her sense. When she came home around ten p.m., she found Barry sprawled on the family room floor, dead from a single stab wound to the chest. There were no defense wounds—bruises or cuts—that would indicate he’d fought his assailant. He must have been surprised by the attack. The knife was never found.

  Nearly hysterical, Lynn wailed to the 911 dispatcher the story about the intended drug purchase from Edgar Sybee.

  Sybee’s name was not new to police—he’d been arrested once before on drug possession. Due to the vast number of drug possessors arrested daily, the California penal system works to keep first-time offenders out of jail. Sybee paid a fine, then was placed on probation and allowed to continue his life.

  When police arrived the night of Draye’s murder with a warrant to search Sybee’s house, he appeared nervous, his answers evasive. They pulled a crisp one hundred dollar bill from his wallet, but the rest of the money Draye had allegedly paid Sybee was nowhere to be found. Police also discovered two ounces of cocaine inside a small vase pushed far back in a kitchen drawer—perhaps Sybee’s personal stash.

  Meanwhile, at the crime scene someone had left a smeared bloody print on an end table in the Drayes’ family room. This fingerprint proved to be highly contended in court, the prosecution’s expert witness saying the print matched Sybee’s, and the defense’s expert saying that because it was smeared, it was at best inconclusive.

  To the prosecution’s disappointment, Lynn’s claim that Sybee came to sell drugs could not be proved, and no charges on the matter were filed. There were no drugs in the Draye home and Sybee wouldn’t cop to pushing dope. He’d just wanted to pay a visit to a friend, he repeated again and again to the police, but this “drug supplier” who’d come with him had evidently formed plans of his own to sell drugs—and ended up stabbing Barry Draye in self defense. In a myopic view common to the courtroom, the prosecution accepted half of Sybee’s tale and discarded the rest. There was no second man, the deputy D.A. told the jury. However, Draye’s murder was the result of a drug deal gone bad—a drug deal that Sybee, and Sybee alone, had aimed to carry out. And the murder certainly had not been in self defense.

  There remained the inconvenient matter that Sybee’s story of a second man did fit with Lynn’s statement to police that she’d been asked to leave the house. Still, police and prosecution discarded the claim. Sybee’s request to Lynn was a mere ruse to assure that Barry would be alone in the first place, they said. Besides, they insisted, there was no evidence that anyone had arrived with Sybee, and what little forensic evidence they’d identified—namely, the smeared fingerprint—pointed to Sybee. Most telling, throughout the trial neither Sybee nor his defense ever produced the name of this supposed second man. The reason was clear, the prosecution declared in final arguments.

  He didn’t exist.

  Sybee did not take the stand. But Haynes, no doubt following through with the defense my father had established, combined Lynn Draye’s statement to police about the second man with some fancy footwork—literally. A shoe print had been lifted from the tiled entryway in the Draye home—one that did not belong to either of the Drayes or Edgar Sybee. And a dark-brown human hair—also unknown in origin—was found on the carpet of the family room. Surely, Haynes argued, these pieces of evidence didn’t belong to some friendly visitor in the Draye home, as the prosecution had suggested. No, these pieces of evidence belonged to the real killer. What’s more, Edgar had repeatedly told police during his videotaped interview that this other man—whose name he would not divulge, “or his family would die”—had stabbed Barry Draye. Anyone, claimed Haynes, could see that Edgar Sybee had no motive whatsoever to kill his friend.

  Public opinion ran strong for the prosecution. Sybee was a slimy, lying, rich-kid druggie, and the holes in his story couldn’t be plugged with a truckload of redwood logs. All the same, the twelve upstanding citizens of the jury fell under the spell of Haynes’s defense tactics.

  Sybee was acquitted.

  The Bay Area was stunned.

  Post-trial interviews with jurors yielded the same general statement: as much as they’d wanted to find Edgar Sybee guilty, the prosecution had not offered sufficient evidence to prove that another person hadn’t been present at the time of Barry Draye’s death, and in fact hadn’t been responsible for it.

  Art Spri
nger, the deputy D.A. who’d handled the case, scuttled through the courthouse halls for the next month with the fire of self-defensiveness in his eyes. He’d lost in front of his colleagues and the public, and his ego drove him to lash out against the firm of Gerralon & Haynes (which hadn’t changed its name yet) to any reporter who would listen—and there were plenty. He hated Sid Haynes. And he hated my father, who he knew had put the case together, although out of public deference to the dead he did not speak my father’s name. Springer’s meager solace was that Sybee would be awarded six months in the county jail for possession of cocaine—his second drug offense.

  As I sat at my father’s desk, I skimmed the first paragraph of his notes, and my heart kicked up my throat. For some reason, two weeks before the trial Sybee had decided to talk.

  Maybe my father convinced him their defense was iffy at best, that Sybee had a choice between serving a long jail term and presenting a name that could be connected to the footprint and hair.

  Taking a deep breath, I began to read, the movie projector in my head whirring into motion. The scene began with Edgar Sybee

  answering a call on the personal business line in his home from “Tip,” his drug supplier. Sybee sees Tip as unpredictable, volatile, and paranoid. One minute the guy’s calm, cool; the next minute his temper is flaring. He’s incessantly careful about getting caught by police. Tip’s calls are the only way Edgar can talk to him. The man has never given Edgar his number, and the digits are blocked from appearing on caller ID. Edgar does not even know his real name.

  Now Edgar tells Tip he wants eight ounces of cocaine.

  “Eight?” Tip’s voice turns suspicious. “Why so much on one day?”

  “No reason.” Edgar waits for Tip to speak but the silence draws out. “What do you care?”

  Tip’s voice ices over. “You are asking me why I care?”

  This is enough to scare Edgar. “Okay, okay. I found a new client.”