Grain of Truth

by V. J. Chambers

  “That’s not what you said before,” said Elke, who had spent the morning going over the file and the testimony.

  “Isn’t it?”

  “You were in the house for an hour before you called 911. You aren’t accounting for that time.”

  “Kevin and I were talking,” she said. “In my bedroom. With the door closed. Quietly, so as not to wake my parents. What does it matter, anyway?”

  “I saw the crime scene photos. When you come in the door, there’s a doorway to the living room, and there was blood spatter on the floor there. You would have walked right over it.”

  “It was dark,” she said. “We didn’t see. I would never have thought that there would be blood in my house. Even if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have thought… I would have probably brushed it off.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t have taken blood seriously?”

  “I didn’t kill my parents,” she said. “But if you’re convinced that I did, then nothing I say is going to matter to you.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Kevin Greene seemed much more welcoming. He shook both of their hands, pumping them enthusiastically. “Wow,” he said. “Wow. I read about the new unit that overturns wrongful convictions, and I wondered if maybe we could get our case reviewed, but I didn’t expect you to find us first. This is amazing.”

  “We’re investigating,” said Elke. “We haven’t made any decisions yet.”

  “Right, right,” said Kevin. “But if you look into our case, you’ll see. It’s ludicrous. They have nothing on us. They’re just hyperfocused on the fact we walked past the living room. The thing is, neither of us were paying a bit of attention when we walked in.”

  “No?” said Elke.

  “No,” said Kevin. “We were eighteen. We had come home to her house late like that before, and we were there to do exactly one thing.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

  “I see,” said Elke. “So, you were there to have sex.”

  “Basically,” said Kevin. “I was kissing her the whole way back the hall. We weren’t paying attention. I mean, it’s horrible to think of now. We had no idea, though.”

  “So, is that what you were doing for the hour interval between when you got home and when you called the police?” said Elke. “Having sex?”

  “Yeah,” said Kevin.

  Elke pressed her lips together. “That’s not what Saanvi says.”

  Kevin nodded. “Right, sorry. She never wanted that to come out. It was really upsetting to her. I mean, can you imagine? Doing that right next to your dead parents? I think she wants to forget that ever happened.” He shook his head. “Poor Saanvi. You know, it’s so much worse for her. She lost her parents, and she’s only got her mother’s parents now. Her father’s side of the family think she did it. They cut her off completely. It’s completely disgusting if you ask me.”

  “Let’s go back to talking about the crime scene if we can?” said Elke.

  “Oh, okay,” said Kevin. “Sorry if I’m overly chatty. Not a lot of conversationalists on my cell block, if you know what I mean. And I’m excited that you’re here. This is really, really good news. I just can’t believe it.” He grinned widely.

  Something about the grin made Elke uncomfortable. Possibly, Kevin was simply socially out of practice as he said. Maybe he didn’t realize the way he was behaving while talking about a brutal murder scene was incongruous. He had lived with the reality of this murder for a long time, after all.

  Elke cleared her throat. “So, what happened next? You and Saanvi were intimate, and then?”

  “Uh, she went to the kitchen for water or something. And then she was gone a while, and I hear her screaming. And I throw on my clothes and leave the bedroom and I find her in the living room, and there are her parents, and she’s just—” He sucked in breath, and now all of his smiles were gone. He looked down at the table. “I remember that she was running towards them, and I grabbed her and stopped her, because I was thinking like, if she touched them, she could mess up evidence.” He chuckled softly. “Like any of that mattered.”

  “You were thinking about evidence in that moment?” said Elke.

  “Yeah, it was weird. I mean, I think I should have been more worried about Saanvi, but it was just such a shock. It didn’t seem real, you know. I only ever saw anything like that on TV, on cop shows, and my brain must have just went there.”

  “So, Saanvi found the bodies on her own?” said Elke.

  “Yeah,” said Kevin.

  “That’s not what you said before.”

  “It’s not?” Kevin furrowed his brow.

  “No, when I went over your original interview, you said you heard her calling her parent’s names, and that when you left the room, and that you went into the living room together,” said Elke. Which, incidentally, matched Saanvi’s story, whereas this didn’t match.

  “Oh,” said Kevin. “I said that?”

  Elke nodded.

  He rubbed his chin, seemingly bewildered. “I don’t know. I really remember her screaming. I’ll never forget that scream.”

  * * *

  “I don’t know about any of this,” Elke muttered. She was in the passenger seat of Iain’s car. He was driving them back to Haven Hills from the prison where Saanvi and Kevin were being kept. “They contradict each other all over the place, even now, years after the fact. I think they maybe only agreed back then because they’d had time to get their stories straight.”

  “No, I don’t think that means anything,” said Iain.

  “You don’t?”

  “Well, the contradictions make sense, don’t they?” said Iain. “What he said about the girl wanting to forget that she’d had sex in the same house as her dead parents, that seems likely, doesn’t it? I think that would be deeply disturbing to me, and if it disturbed me, it would disturb anyone.”

  Elke couldn’t help but laugh.

  Iain shot her a look from the driver’s seat. “I said something funny? I didn’t mean to.”

  “Sorry, it’s just that you’re fairly self-aware.”

  “I understand my own limitations,” said Iain. “I’m not pleased about them, but I accept them. A lot of people are so displeased with what’s wrong with them they try to convince themselves that their imperfections don’t exist. I find that cowardly and idiotic.”

  “Of course you do,” said Elke, smiling.

  “I don’t think that was funny either.”

  “No, sorry.” She looked away to hide her smile. He was a bit of an odd duck, but she liked him. He was straightforward, and she appreciated that. She wasn’t one to beat around the bush either.

  “Anyway, I have limited emotional understanding of other people,” said Iain. “It’s not that I’m emotionally stunted myself, it’s simply that the general populace does a good bit of lying to itself about emotions, and I just can’t keep track of all the lies.”

  “What?” Now she was thrown. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, take for instance, when people talk about being so deeply upset that some stranger has been killed. The truth is, they’re not really upset about that stranger at all. It’s not about the stranger, it’s about them. You see, when they hear the story about the stranger dying, someone’s father or brother or son, they think about their own father or brother or son and think about what it might be like if they lost that person. But they don’t actually care about the stranger. They don’t send flowers or offer to help out his widow or spend hours sobbing over this stranger’s loss. Empathy is not really empathy. It’s selfishness. It’s taking someone else’s tragedy and turning it entirely inward.”

  “Um…” Elke shook her head. “I don’t think that’s really—”

  “It is,” said Iain. “And anyway, when I say that I feel truly nothing when I hear about a dead stranger, because I don’t automatically think about what it might feel like if I lost my own father, I’m labeled unfeeling and unemotional and people don’t like me. But it’s not that I can’t feel that
same kind of selfish empathy. It’s only that I didn’t realize we were supposed to do that when we heard about dead strangers.” He gripped the steering wheel tightly.

  Elke wasn’t sure what to say.

  Iain glanced at her. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, even though she was still a little off-balance from his speech.

  “Anyway, I’m only saying that I think that her emotional reason for concealing her sexual activity is sensible, but I suppose I could be wrong. I don’t always understand everything.”

  Elke was quiet a moment. “I suppose so. But they don’t have the events of the evening syncing up either.”

  “People really aren’t very good at remembering things exactly as they happened,” said Iain. “I doubt that’s significant either.”

  “I’m not sure. It doesn’t bode well.”

  “If Alan Kelley and Jeremy Squires were present in that house, then that’s all we need to know,” said Iain. “We need to trust the evidence, not how well something bodes.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Yes?” said the older man who’d opened the door. He had broad shoulders and protruding belly.

  “Isaac Montgomery?” said Elke. She and Iain were shivering on the sidewalk outside the man’s house. It was the listed address for the witness from twenty-five years ago, but it was likely he didn’t still live there. She and Iain were looking up the people who’d provided Saanvi’s and Kevin’s alibi.

  “Yes, that’s me,” said the man. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  Elke smiled. “I’m Elke Lawrence, and this is my associate Iain Hudson. We’re wondering if you might talk to us for a moment about Saanvi Mukherjee and Kevin Greene.”

  “Really?” Isaac was surprised. “After all this time, you want to talk about that?”

  “Just for a moment,” said Elke. “We’re going back over the case to see if it all checks out.”

  “Well, it doesn’t,” said Isaac. “At least as far as I know, it doesn’t. I know I saw those two kids the night of the murder. I know what I saw.” He opened the door wider. “You want to come in?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Elke. She and Iain stepped into the warmth of the man’s house. They stood in the foyer and took off their jackets. “This will only take a moment,” she said to Isaac.

  “Okay,” he said. “You want to sit in the living room?”

  “No, I doubt we’ll be that long,” she said. “Basically, we want to know where and when you saw the two of them?”

  “Well, they were at the bar I worked at,” said Isaac.

  “The Halo?” said Elke.

  “Yeah, that’s the place,” said Isaac. “I worked from nine in the evening until close that night, and I remember that I had just gotten there, because I was trying to tie on the apron that I always wore. They made us wear it. It had the name of the bar on it in big white letters.”

  “You were tying on an apron?” said Elke.

  “Yeah, I remember that because I almost didn’t bother to ask for ID, because my hands were busy behind my back. But that kid comes up, the boy, Kevin, and he ordered two beers. But I got the thing tied, and I asked for ID, and the kid—bold as brass—just hands over their driver’s licenses. But it says Under 21 in big red letters on both of them. I hand ‘em back and say, ‘Nice try, kid.’ So, I sold them some sodas instead.”

  “Did you see them after that?” said Elke.

  “No, just then. It must have been around 9:00-9:15,” he said. “I swear I saw them. They were there.”

  * * *

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Elke, back in the passenger’s seat of Iain’s car. “Even if they were there at 9:00, they’d have had plenty of time to get home and kill her parents.”

  “Probably,” said Iain. “But that’s not what they say they did.”

  “Right,” said Elke. “They say that they stayed there until about 10:00, dancing, and then…”

  “Drove to that all-night diner in Gathopolis,” said Iain.

  “How long you think that drive is?” said Elke.

  “Twenty minutes, thirty minutes?” said Iain. “You want to drive up there now? Time it?”

  “Why not?” said Elke. “Maybe we’ll luck out and the waiter who served them still works there.”

  * * *

  “Anyway, the eye witness swore up and down that the perpetrator had red hair and freckles,” Iain was saying.

  Elke got out of the passenger’s seat of the car. They’d just arrived at the all-night diner where Saanvi and Kevin claimed they’d gone after the bar that night. “Let me guess, he didn’t?”

  “He was black,” said Iain peering at her over the top of the car. “And he wasn’t tall at all. He was five foot four. He didn’t look a thing like the woman claimed.”

  “No, I’ve heard things like this before,” said Elke. “In traumatic situations, people sometimes don’t remember things well. Eyewitness testimony isn’t always reliable.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether there’s trauma or not,” said Iain. “People don’t see the things that they think they saw. Eyewitness testimony is completely worthless.”

  “Now, I wouldn’t go that far,” said Elke.

  Iain shrugged. He shut the door to the car. “That took twenty-five minutes.”

  “So, if they left at 10:00…” She shook her head. “No, I suppose we don’t know that they left at 10:00, do we? No one saw them leave. They could have left right after the bartender saw them at 9:15. That would put them here around 9:40. Then, even if they ate a meal here, they could still be back to Saanvi’s house in plenty of time to commit the murder.” She shook her head. “Honestly, I don’t know if it matters, considering they have an unaccounted hour’s worth of time in the house.”

  “Well,” said Iain, “the later they got there, the less time they would have had to commit the murder and clean up.”

  “Right,” she said.

  They crossed the parking lot to the door to the restaurant and went inside. At the door, they were met by a hostess.

  “How many?” she said brightly.

  “No, actually, we’re looking for someone. David Richards. He used to work here a long time ago,” said Elke. “It’s probably a long shot that he still does—”

  “David’s the owner,” said the hostess. “He’s not here right now, though. What do you guys need to see him about?”

  Elke nodded at Iain.

  Iain showed her his badge.

  “Oh!” said the hostess. “I’ll call him.”

  * * *

  “So, that’s quite a story, going from a waiter here to owning the place?” said Elke.

  David Richards smiled. He was sitting in a booth with the two of them in an empty corner of the diner. “Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. What happened is that I got close to Jim, who owned the place before. He, uh, didn’t have any family, and when he got cancer, I was the one who took him to the hospital and helped him with his prescriptions and everything else. I kept this place running so that he could pay his bills. He ended up leaving it to me.”

  “Wow,” said Elke. “That was good of you to help him out.”

  “Angie said you were the police?” said David. “You really come all the way out here to ask me about how I got this place?”

  “Oh, no, sorry,” said Elke. “We’re here to talk about Saanvi Mukherjee and Kevin Greene. Do you remember them?”

  “Of course I do,” said David. “Because they were sitting right here in this restaurant when those cops say they were murdering her parents.” David pointed. “That booth over there. I remember. I couldn’t tell you what they ordered, but I remember that they were disappointed, because we’d just switched to the more limited late-night menu, and there weren’t any chili fries on that menu, only bacon cheese fries, and the girl—Saanvi—she’d apparently really had her heart set on chili fries. I don’t know what she did order, but she asked about that.”

  “Okay,” said Elke. “But how can you
be sure they were here at that time?”

  “That’s why,” said David. “We switch to the late-night menu at 10:00. So, I know it was after that. And I think it was probably more like 10:30, but I couldn’t be sure. I do know it must have been after 10:00, though. I remember clear as day. She wanted chili fries.”

  Elke shot a glance at Iain.

  He gave her a blank look, as if he didn’t understand what she was trying to communicate to him.

  Hell, he probably didn’t. She got the impression he wasn’t great with social cues.

  Anyway, she was reassured by the eyewitnesses seeing Saanvi and Kevin out and about that night, regardless of how little stock Iain put in such things. It was quite possible the two were actually innocent. She hoped so. Otherwise she was wasting her time.

  “It’s a real shame, you know,” said David. “Those kids didn’t do it. It always upset me that they went away to prison. I know they were here. I just don’t understand why that wasn’t enough to keep them out of jail.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Elke’s heart started pounding in her chest when she saw Felix. She had been dreading this trip, putting it off, but the collect call today had pressed her to do it. She was walking into the visitor’s room in the prison where Felix was being kept. It was a large room with clusters of bolted-down tables and chairs. The floor was checked muted red and gray with pink and white flecks. There was a line of windows along one wall, looking out onto the prison yard—two layers of fences with rolls of razor wire on top.

  Felix sat alone at a table. His hair was cut short now, and his face looked puffy. He was wearing a prison-issue jumpsuit. When he saw her, he stood up.

  She stopped moving at the sight of him. She was struck by an impulse to turn around and run. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to talk to him.

  But she’d come this far. Might as well get this over with.

  She forced her feet to move. She walked over the checked floor, each step bringing her closer and closer to the man that she’d promised to love and cherish until death do them part. But she hadn’t known then what she knew now. She couldn’t be joined to this man anymore.