by Chris Mooney
Ben could have told her everything and she still would have killed him. She had known that the second she decided to follow him from the drugstore.
Jamie reached inside the boot, pinched his eye and came away with a bright blue contact lens. Ben’s real eyes were brown, just as she remembered.
She searched his zippered pockets and found a Tiffany key ring and wallet. She wondered if one of the keys opened the house in Charlestown. Maybe the fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt lived there. Maybe he was the man who had killed her husband.
She stuffed Ben’s things in her pockets. Slammed the boot lid shut, placed her hands on the bumper and started to push. The damp ground was muddy but sloped forward and after a moment the car started to pick up speed.
I’ll let you in on a secret, Ben had told her. I’m a cop.
Bullshit. An undercover cop or Fed wouldn’t have forced his way inside a house and shot two children in cold blood. A cop wouldn’t have allowed two men to shove someone’s hand inside a running waste-disposal unit and wrap a noose around their neck. A cop wouldn’t have broken into a house and slit a woman’s throat. Ben had made it up, a last-ditch attempt to spare his life.
The front tyres dripped over the edge. Jamie gave a final push and let go. She stood hunched forward with her hands on her knees, sweating and sucking in the muggy night air as the car disappeared from her view.
For a moment the only sounds she heard were the crickets chirping from the woods. Then a loud splash that sounded far away, as though it was happening in another place, at another time. Standing at the cliff’s edge, she watched the car being swallowed inside a cyclone of silver moonlit bubbles. Growing up in Belham, she remembered the time some drunk had fallen over in the water. For days divers searched for the man’s body. It was never found.
Her muscles tensed and her skin grew cold. What if the car didn’t sink? What if the water was too shallow? In the evening’s chaos she hadn’t thought through that possibility.
All her worrying, it turned out, was for nothing. The car sank below the black water shivering with moonlight. The surface grew calm again.
She headed towards the path, hot and uncomfortable underneath the bloody windbreaker. She wished she could take it off but it covered the shoulder holster and Ben’s Glock, which was wedged in the back of her jeans. The extended magazine kept digging into her lower back.
She had a long walk ahead of her. She had parked on Kale, a busy neighbourhood off Blakely full of other suburban homes with minivans much like her own. She knew she couldn’t watch him from the neighbourhood – too risky, too exposed; plus Ben or his partner had started drawing the front shades of the house. Fortunately, she knew Belham and knew where to park.
Jamie hoped the teenager was okay.
She hadn’t known he was inside, not at first. Standing in the hot, dark woods behind the house, she had debated about moving to the back fence for a closer view, then ruled it out. The homes were too close together. Someone might be watching from a window, see her and call the police. Safer to watch from inside the woods.
In addition to the Magnum, she’d brought the small pair of binoculars she kept in the back of the minivan. (Michael liked to use them; Dan had bought them for sporting events and those rare times he went hunting. She kept them in the glovebox.) From her vantage point she could see only part of the kitchen. She had an excellent view of the sliding glass door leading into the living room and for a long time watched Ben search every inch of the room, even going so far as to cut the chair and sofa cushions. Not once did she see the teenager tied down to the chair.
That changed later, when she heard a car pull into the driveway, and the mechanical chug as the motor hauled up the garage door.
Jamie remembered trying to find a new vantage point. The tree limbs kept obstructing her view. Walking through woods in the dark, in a hurry and without the aid of a flashlight, wasn’t desirable. She kept tripping and bumping into things. It was slow, tedious work.
By the time she’d found a new spot, the blonde-haired woman in the blue T-shirt was taped down to a chair seated across from her son, their eyes covered with duct tape. The boy’s mouth was taped shut but not the woman’s; Jamie could see her screaming as the man with the suit started breaking her fingers. Ben stood behind him holding a barber’s straight-edged razor.
Jamie reached for her phone, then remembered she’d left it in the minivan. It didn’t matter. Even if she had brought it, by the time she stammered through the 911 call the woman and boy would be dead. Ben had just cut off one of the woman’s fingers.
Jamie’s first thought – and it shamed her to admit this – was evidence. As a former cop, her fingerprints were stored on a database. She couldn’t leave her prints or any other evidence for the police to find; she had to protect her children. She fumbled at her zippered pocket for the latex gloves.
What happened next came back to her in a series of flashes: running down the incline, slipping and falling. Getting up and tripping again. Finally finding the gate. Unzipping her jacket, grabbing the Magnum and sprinting across the lawn. Moving quietly up the back steps, not wanting to alert Ben and his partner, then discovering that the sliding glass door was locked. The woman screaming. Two shots and the glass shattering. Climbing inside. From the living room, firing two shots at the suited man, hitting him in the stomach. Swinging the Magnum to Ben and seeing the woman’s cut throat. A shot to the thigh and Ben falling backwards, on top of the boy, tipping over the chair. Kicking Ben in the stomach and then grabbing the handcuffs from the suited man lying on the floor, bleeding out of his chest. Wrestling Ben on the floor and cuffing him. Then picking up the spent brass.
A quick search of the woman’s pockets revealed the set of keys for the Honda. With Ben cuffed and taped inside the boot, Jamie came back, picked up the straight-edged razor and cut through the boy’s bindings. She left the strips of tape covering his eyes, placed the cordless phone she’d found on the floor in his hand and ran fast to the waiting car.
Jamie wished she could talk to the boy. Hold his hand and share her story, a fellow traveller who could help him navigate his way through this new landscape of grief.
Jamie drove well under the speed limit in case any cops were out on patrol. She turned on the radio and moved the dial to Boston’s all-news radio station, WBZ.
She had to wait fifteen minutes to find out what had happened in Belham.
Police hadn’t released the names of the woman or the boy. A reporter on the scene described ‘an intense shootout in the woods behind the home that included stun and smoke grenades’. The reporter didn’t have any details, as ‘police have refused to comment’.
Jamie wondered if the fat man in the Hawaiian shirt was involved. He had parked the BMW at the end of the street. Had the police somehow found him? Maybe tried to corner his BMW? Had Mr Hawaii tried to escape through the woods?
The reporter had a breaking development. One of the victims, a male teenager who had been rushed to hospital, had apparently committed suicide. Nothing more was given, but the reporter urged listeners to stay tuned for further details.
Suicide. The boy had seemed around the same age as Michael, her thirteen-year-old. Jamie drove the rest of the way home numb all over.
Forty minutes later she pulled into her driveway. She didn’t open the garage, not wanting to wake the kids. She ran to the back of the house and unlocked the cellar door. She heard the beep for the burglar alarm, entered the code, and then placed Ben’s Glock and the things from her pocket on Dan’s old desk – a slab of plywood the size of a door set across two metal filing cabinets. When he was alive, Dan would come down here to catch up on paperwork or to read through one of his woodworking magazines.
She picked up Ben’s wallet. No credit cards, just a licence with the name Benjamin Masters. Local address too: Boston. Has he been living here all this time?
She picked up the Glock, turning it over in her hands.
Three safeties, three modes of
fire: safe, automatic and semi-automatic. Laser-targeting sight mounted against the frame. She examined the barrel and found the model number. A Glock eighteen. She’d never heard of it. She ejected the extended magazine and read the words stamped into the metal tubing: RESTRICTED IN THE USA.
The rounds had a pitted nose. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
She knew about hollow-point rounds, how they expanded when they hit the victim’s skin, the pressure from the rush of blood expanding the snub-nose tip and turning it into a spinning mushroom of razor-sharp lead claws that shred tissue and organs as it spiralled its way through the body. Hollow-point rounds were one-stop shots. Even with immediate medical attention, victims usually died from massive blood loss.
If Ben had shot me, she thought, placing the Glock back on the desk, I wouldn’t be alive right now.
Standing inside the kitchen, she stuffed all of her clothing and the spent brass inside a rubbish bag. She tossed the bag inside the garage. She’d find a place to dump it later. She walked back down the hall to use the shower. Scrubbed clean, she grabbed a pair of cotton shorts and a T-shirt from the dryer and went upstairs to see the kids.
Michael’s room first. She kissed him on the forehead. Michael, with his sandy-brown hair and lean swimmer’s build, looked so much like his father it was painful.
Carter wasn’t in his bedroom.
She found him sleeping in her bed.
Jamie crawled underneath the sheets and cuddled up next to her six-year-old. He smelled clean. Good. Michael had remembered to give him a bath.
She wrapped her arm around Carter’s small waist and pulled him close. The blond stubble of his buzz cut tickled her chin.
She was too wired to sleep. She stared out of the window at the dark sky and rubbed her fingers across the thick lines of scars covering his stomach – permanent reminders of the scalpels that had cut him open to save his life. The ER doctors had managed to stem the bleeding and repair the damage to his stomach and lungs.
‘Dead,’ she whispered against Carter’s ear. ‘Killed him.’
Her son breathed softly beside her. He didn’t suffer from nightmares any more, not like he had the first year, when he’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night. Sometimes he’d crawled into bed with her. Sometimes she’d woken to find him standing at her bedroom window, chewing the corner of his ratty blue blanket. She’d asked him what was wrong but the answer was always the same: I’m watching for the bad men, Mom. Do you think they’ll come back?
Jamie hugged her son.
‘I will… find… find… partners,’ she whispered. ‘Kill… them.’ She said the words to Carter. To the cool air inside the locked house. To God. ‘I will… kill them to… to… keep you and Michael safe.’
Day 2
15
The following morning, at half past eight, Darby sat in her office chair with her feet propped up on the corner of the desk. She stared out of the windows overlooking another grey sky while listening to Dr Aaron Goldstein, a Boston-based neurologist brought in to treat the boy, John/Sean Hallcox. The man spoke in a dry monotone, as though he were reciting from a medical textbook.
‘The bullet entered underneath the boy’s chin,’ Dr Goldstein was saying. ‘Instead of traversing the cranial cavity and leaving through an exit wound, the bullet ricocheted inside the skull, with massive tearing caused by the shock waves. This resulted in –’
‘Doctor, I don’t mean to be rude, but I was in the hospital room when John Hallcox shot himself. I know the bullet didn’t pass through the skull. I want to know his condition.’ She popped a couple of Advils in her mouth and washed them down with cold water fizzing with Alka-Seltzer.
‘We performed a debridement,’ Goldstein said. ‘The procedure involves removing bone and bullet fragments from the brain. We removed a good majority of them, but I’m sorry to say there were some fragments that were so deeply imbedded near sensitive areas that I had to leave them behind. I’m more concerned about what we refer to as secondary effects.’
‘Swelling and bleeding from ruptured blood vessels.’
‘Yes.’ A bright tone in the man’s voice, surprised that she knew such things. ‘With gunshot wounds to the head there’s always a high risk of oedema and, in Mr Hallcox’s case, infection. We’re treating him with strong antibiotics, but these kinds of infections – the ones involving the brain – are extremely difficult to overcome. Fortunately, he hasn’t experienced a seizure, but he’s still in a coma.’
‘Where does he fall on the Glasgow Coma Scale?’
‘I can’t give you an accurate GCS score at the moment. Because of the intubation and severe facial swelling, he can’t talk and I can’t test his eyes’ responses.’
‘Do you think there’s a chance he’ll be able to talk?’
‘To you?’
‘To anyone, Doctor.’
‘There’s always a possibility, but I’m inclined to say no. I doubt he’ll survive – not from the gunshot wound but from the infection. Does he have any family in the area? My understanding is the mother died rather tragically.’
‘She was murdered.’
‘Well, if you find any family members, please let us know. Certain arrangements will need to be made. That’s all I can tell you right now, Miss McCormick.’
‘Would you call me if there’s any change? I’d like… I want to know how he’s doing.’
‘Of course. What’s the best way to reach you?’
They exchanged numbers. Darby thanked the doctor, swung her legs off the desk and dialled directory inquiries to ask for the number of the FBI’s field office in Albany, New York.
She introduced herself to the woman who answered the phone and asked to speak to SAC Dylan Phillips.
‘Let me connect you to his office,’ the woman said.
Phillips wasn’t in his office yet. Darby left a message with the man’s secretary.
Pine had told her he was working on locating the owner of the house, Dr Martin Wexler and his wife, Elaine. Darby didn’t want to wait. She turned to her computer. When she had the information she needed, she started working the phone.
An hour later she had tracked down one of Wexler’s children – his eldest son, David, who lived in Wisconsin. He had the number for his parents’ home in the South of France. The names Amy and John Hallcox didn’t mean anything to him.
Darby called the number. A machine picked up, the voice in French. She left a detailed message along with her office and mobile numbers, and asked them to call regardless of the time.
Darby hung up and sat in the silence of her office, her thoughts drifting to John Hallcox – Sean, she reminded herself. The twelve-year-old was lying in a coma. Her father had lain in a coma for a month. His GCS score had been 1. He never opened his eyes, never made any verbal sounds or physical movements. He was brain dead.
She remembered gripping his hand in her own while the doctor explained to her mother what would happen to Big Red after his life-support machine was turned off. Darby remembered digging her fingernails into his callused palm and drawing blood. She remembered hoping – no, believing – the pain would wake up her father. Then the machine was turned off and they waited for his body to die. Darby propped her elbows on her desk and looked at her hands. They were bigger now, the callused skin on her palms and fingers stained with dried blood. Sean’s blood. She had held him while screaming for help.
A soft knock on the door. She looked up and saw Police Commissioner Christina Chadzynski.
‘May I come in?’
Darby nodded. Chadzynski took one of the chairs across from the desk, crossed her legs and folded her hands on her lap. This morning she was dressed in a stylish black suit. It was the only colour she seemed to wear. The woman was thin and trim – she was an avid runner – but no amount of exercise, sleep or makeup could hid the fatigue etched in the skin around her ice-blue eyes.
‘It’s quiet in here,’ Chadzynski said.
‘The entire lab is i
n Belham processing the house. Did you read my report?’ Darby had filed it late the previous night before crashing on the office sofa.
‘I read it first thing this morning,’ Chadzynski said. ‘It’s all over the news, what happened in Belham, the hospital, all of it.’
‘Did the news mention anything about the FBI trying to take over the investigation?’
‘No, they didn’t.’ She seemed to be drawing out her words, measuring each one carefully before she spoke. ‘Those men you saw in the woods – have you heard anything?’
‘Nothing’s come over the wire about any hospitals treating a white male for a gunshot wound, but Pine and his men are calling around just to be sure. He’s on his way to Vermont to meet with the police to go through Amy Hallcox’s apartment.’
‘You mentioned the woman’s parents were murdered but you didn’t list any details.’
‘Her son didn’t give me any, and I can’t find any homicides involving the name Hallcox.’
‘Do you have any news on the boy’s condition?’
‘I just got off the phone with the neurologist,’ Darby said, and told Chadzynski about her conversation with Dr Goldstein.
‘How did the Hallcox boy get the gun?’ Chadzynski asked. ‘It wasn’t mentioned in your report.’
‘I didn’t find out until this morning. He had a thigh holster. His baggy shorts covered it.’
‘I can’t believe no one noticed it.’
‘He wasn’t a suspect, so there was no reason for anyone to pat him down. When the EMTs brought him to the hospital, the kid refused to let anyone touch him. Threw a fit, the doctor told me. He was in shock, so they gave him some space to calm down. Based upon what the boy told me last night, I wouldn’t be surprised if the mother gave the revolver to him.’
‘What’s this business about him requesting to speak to your father?’
‘I don’t know.’ Darby rubbed her face, then ran her fingers through her hair. She couldn’t remember a time when she had felt this tired. ‘Right now your guess is as good as mine.’
