by Joshua Corin
“Why didn’t you contact Phillip?”
“I should have. Especially with what…happened. But you don’t understand. I just wanted to put the whole thing behind me. Plus…hey, I know you and Phillip were tight and all, but that dude was a major dick. I’m sorry. He was. I’m not saying I wanted anything bad to happen to him. I don’t know. I did what I did. I’m sorry. End of story.”
“Almost.” Jessabelle finished off her glass of sweet tea. Then removed a small canister of Mace from her pocketbook and sprayed Gary directly in the eyes. He howled in pain and tore at his face with his fingers, making it quite easy for Jessabelle to take a switchblade, also in her pocketbook, and jab its pointy end seven times into Gary’s chest. He crumpled to the floor and began moaning blood.
Ross leapt backward out of his folding chair, tripping over it. As he began to scream, Jessabelle returned the Mace and switchblade to her pocketbook and checked the time on her smartwatch.
2:01 P.M.
How long, she wondered, until Nanita came home from school?
Chapter 40
Detective Konquist and Xanadu Marx rendezvoused with Detective Chau at the headquarters for Atlantans Helping Atlantans. Everyone but Michaela had left for the day.
“I never trusted him,” she was telling Chau as Konquist and Xana emerged from the shadow-infested staircase. “Guys like him get too wound up and then you find out they got human organs in their freezer, you know?”
“As I told the others, you’re free to go.”
“No, that’s OK. I don’t mind sticking around.”
Chau rephrased his statement, removing any element of politeness from his tone.
Michaela left for the day, although not without making sure the three remaining people noticed her pouty-lipped displeasure.
Then Chau replayed the video he had described over the phone. Despite their having been forewarned, the actual visual of Ross Berman beating a man with a baseball bat was…well, usually acts of violence were quick, shockingly so, but this barbaric brutality, according to the time on the video, went on for almost six full minutes. Without sound, but that was for their benefit. It did little to benefit the victim, whose body became more and more misshapen and mangled with each blow. His clothes became red. His skin became purple. Contusions rose like hills. Blood formed a pond underneath his skull.
The video ended.
Xana broke the silence with, “Surely he’s dead.”
“We could ask Ross, but he’s not here.”
“Is there a date on the video?”
Chau shook his head. “I checked. The file was created today. That’s all we know.”
“So we call the hospitals, find out if anyone’s been brought in with excessive blunt-force trauma from head to toe.”
“Maybe,” said Xana.
She was staring at the final frame of the video. She felt a hunch formulating.
She nudged Chau out of his seat and she opened a Web browser.
“You’re queen bitch,” said Chau. “You know that, don’t you?”
“I do,” she replied, and googled “Ross Berman” and “Georgia,” limiting the search results to news items. She came up with seventeen hits. Eleven of those pertained to their Ross Berman. The articles were in descending order by date, with the most recent article first. A brief PR item about the convention dated October 5 of this year. A photograph from the AJC featuring Ross and some others helping out at a soup kitchen over Labor Day weekend. Then nothing…nothing…nothing until a series of articles from a little over twenty years ago.
LOCAL BOY SERIOUSLY INJURED IN HIGH SCHOOL PRANK
BULLYING SENDS NORTH FULTON FRESHMAN TO HOSPITAL
BASEBALL STAR GETS TWO-GAME SUSPENSION FOR PRANK
“Yikes,” said Detective Konquist.
“High school,” agreed Detective Chau.
“Which were you in school,” Xana asked them, “the victimizer or the victim? Wait, let me guess. Chau, you were a bit of a bully, but you didn’t go out of your way to torture anyone unless you got a D on a math quiz or something. Konquist, you…you weren’t a bully, but you weren’t a victim either. You were middle-of-the-road.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“It’s where you’re most likely to get run over by a bus.”
Chau scoffed at Xana. “I don’t have to guess about you. I know. You were supreme bully of your entire school.”
“I didn’t go to school, actually. My childhood was untraditional.”
“You didn’t go to school? That’s awful.”
“Seems like all I missed was a daily dose of hell.”
“Yeah, but it builds character.”
“I seem to be doing OK.”
They read one of the articles.
Chau called the precinct and got the current address for Walker Berno. They piled in the Buick, with Konquist behind the wheel, Chau riding shotgun, and Xana in the backseat.
“He could be dead,” said Xana.
“He’s not,” Chau replied. “I just checked the obits over the past five years. And he hasn’t gone missing either. Which means he’s home.”
“Or at work.”
“A man gets a beating like that? What kind of work is he going to be good for?”
Konquist chimed in, “I read somewhere—I don’t remember where and it doesn’t matter—they like to use people with handicaps in action movies. You know, you’re shooting a scene where a bomb goes off or a what-do-you-call-it eats a guy’s arms. It’s a lot easier to just hire someone who’s already missing body parts than to, you know, do the other thing.”
“That’s grisly.”
“No. That’s gainful employment.”
Xana checked her phone. Three missed texts from Em.
Sorry, she wrote back. Just saw these. Been busy.
She typed a line about Hayley, and then erased it, and then typed it again, and hovered her thumb above send. Why was she so reluctant to inform Em about Hayley? Em wasn’t made of glass, and treating her as if she was had led to their blowout last night. Xana would tell Em.
Just not right now.
Em had enough on her plate. For example, there was that author who had flaked out on her. There was the Halloween party the bookstore was hosting at the end of the month. And speaking of hosting, tomorrow night she was set to lead the graveyard shift AA meeting. Xana had insisted, repeatedly, that there not be any form of celebration in honor of her one-year sobriety, but she knew Em was planning to surprise her with something, and probably at the meeting. It would be meaningful and embarrassing and Xana would have to lie and say she loved the gift because she loved the giver.
One year since she’d been on the sauce also meant one year since she’d been on the job.
Anniversaries were not always happy occasions.
Plus, and this was a minor point, there was still the prospect of someone brutalizing Xana. Em had that to worry about as well. So maybe adding the bad news about Hayley and having her worry some more about somebody else would be a cruelty. And to inform her by text? No. Xana would tell her when she saw her.
They pulled into the lot in front of Walker’s small home. Em still hadn’t replied, but it had only been a few minutes. Xana turned off her phone and followed the two detectives up to Walker’s ugly green door.
Chau rang the doorbell.
“Maybe he’s an invalid,” suggested Konquist. “Maybe whoever answers the door will be his nurse.”
“I like nurses,” Xana mused.
Chau rolled his eyes. “You’re a pig.”
“I like pigs too. And you’re telling me you don’t have a thing for an attractive woman in a tight uniform, maybe bending over to take your temperature, and her collar’s undone, and…”
Chau glared.
The door opened. All three of them had to lower their heads.
Walker Berno was in a wheelchair.
“Help you?” he asked through a truly magnificent, mountainous brown beard. He wore not a tight
uniform but a loose wife-beater speckled with beer stains. His hands were encased in fingerless gloves.
A cloud of pot from inside the filthy house traveled outside the filthy house, briefly stopping to invade the nostrils of all assembled.
Chau and Konquist showed their badges, gave their names. Introduced Xana as an associate. Asked if they could come in.
“Hm.” Walker thought it over. Ran his fingers through his beard and everything. “Nah, that’s OK. You can stay out here.”
“Sir, if you don’t mind, it would be better if we asked our questions indoors.”
“Yeah, I get that. You want me to make things easy. That’s cool. I just don’t feel like obliging.”
Konquist and Chau exchanged a look, and then the latter said, “Mind if we ask why?”
“You can ask all the questions you want. It’s a free country. But you’re going to ask them from where you’re standing.”
“If it’s about any…contraband you might have, we’re not here about that.”
“It’s medicinal.”
“We don’t care. Really. We’re here on another matter.”
“So speak.”
Chau sighed. Fine. If this was how he wanted to play this game, this was how this game was going to be played.
“Mr. Berno, do you know the name ‘Ross Berman’?”
“Yep.”
“Can you tell us the last time you saw him?”
“Nope.”
“No, you don’t remember or no, you don’t want to tell us?”
“Yep.”
Now Konquist sighed. “We’re actually here as part of a murder investigation. It’s imperative that you provide your cooperation. Do you understand?”
“Yep.”
Chau muttered into Xana’s ear, “You want to give it a try? You speak ‘asshole.’ ”
So Xana stepped forward. She knelt down until she was eye-level with the man, and smiled at him.
“Hi, there,” she said.
“Hello.”
She looked past him at the chaos in his living room. The arms of the couch seemed to be functioning as hangers for his T-shirts and boxers. A cardboard box beside it was piled with beer cans and crumpled bags of Doritos. Beyond that was the kitchenette and a small table with two chairs and an empty space where the third chair would go, where Walker would go when he wanted to eat or drink—since the man came with his own chair—and even more detritus on top of the table, three open hamburger wrappers with actual half-eaten hamburgers still on them—well, a hamburger and two Big Macs—and also cups of soda, three cups—one burger and one cup at each spot, including the empty spot…and Walker Berno must have caught the direction of her gaze, because he then turned to look at his food, and so did Konquist and Chau, and everyone came to the same conclusion about two seconds before Detective Konquist felt the barrel of a police-issue Glock 22 against the small of his back.
“It’s OK, Walker,” said Henry Hoyt. “They can come in now.”
Chapter 41
“Mind if we finish eating?” Henry asked his captives.
His captives didn’t respond, at least not verbally, and so he took their silence as consent and motioned to his wife, Dotty, and his accomplice, Walker, to enjoy the rest of their burgers and Cokes.
They were at the table. The captives were on the couch, with Xana in the middle. Chau was handcuffed to her right wrist and Konquist was handcuffed to her left. Their service weapons were on top of the refrigerator, far away in the kitchenette.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Henry said to Xana. “You’re Xanadu Marx, right? I heard of you. I read about you in the files, but I heard of you too.”
“The files you hacked from the Serendipity Group?”
“Yes. Want to read them?”
“It’s like reading Mein Kampf,” observed Dotty. “The way we as a species are able to justify all the evil we commit…it’s astonishing.”
Henry nodded. “Want to know how they justified cutting the brake line on my wife’s car? That was the part…I was unsure until I read that. It was in a memo. You know, like the kind we get to remind us about a fundraiser for the PBA. That’s how they decided that my wife…my dear, amazing wife…qualified for a ‘special connection.’ ”
“Who was it?” Xana tried to crane her neck so she could see Dotty but only got a smudgy glimpse of the woman out of the periphery. “Who did you hurt?”
“She never hurt anyone in her life!”
“It was the parents of one of my kindergarteners,” Dotty answered quietly. “They were the ones who—”
“That doesn’t make it right!”
“I know, Henry. I know. But she has a right to know. You said it yourself. They chose her too.”
Henry backed off.
“Back in 2011, I had this boy in class. His name was Omar. Real sweet kid. Loved fire trucks. And I don’t just mean loved. He knew all the names. He knew all the parts. He knew how long the ladders were, how many gallons in a hydrant. I guess I don’t need to tell you that his father is a volunteer firefighter. And then there was Ezra. Omar’s twin brother. Every now and then, a teacher gets a kid who is, for lack of a better word, just plain mean. For no reason. It wasn’t that Ezra enjoyed getting in trouble. Troublemakers I can handle. But Ezra…you could see it…he enjoyed inflicting harm. And he could have tried to blame his twin brother, but he never did. Maybe because he knew no one would believe him. Maybe because he wanted people to know that he was the one who stuck a stick in Brittney’s ear or defecated in Johnny’s lunch box.”
“He really took a shit in another kid’s lunch box?”
“Yeah. Omar and Ezra. One of them dreaming of putting out fires and the other probably dreaming of starting them. The good one and the bad one. It’s a cliché with twins, isn’t it? But I’ve had twins and even triplets before, and I never saw anything like these two. The principal didn’t do anything. I met with their parents. They didn’t do anything. They said Ezra was going through a phase. They told me I needed better classroom management. Maybe they were right.”
“There was no way you could have known,” insisted her husband. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“Sure, I can. I’m not saying I was the only person responsible…but I was responsible, Henry. I was their teacher.”
“What happened?” interjected Xana.
Dotty steeled herself with a sip of Coke and then she told the tale.
“Omar and Ezra were twins, but it was easy to tell them apart, and not just from their behavior. Omar was very skinny. Arms like twigs. And Ezra was…well, not skinny.”
“He was fat,” Henry said.
“It’s not relevant. What is relevant is on March twentieth, we went outside for recess. It was the first warm day in months. One of those beautiful days you try to memorize so you can think about it on the other days, when it’s raining. Or am I the only one who does that? The point is, it was nice out, and so Con and I took the kids to the little playground for recess. Con was my para. Para is short for paraprofessional. Con is short for Constance. Sorry. I’ll always be a teacher. The school had two playgrounds. The little playground was for the pre-K to second graders. We were the only ones out there. They climbed the jungle gym and took turns on the swings and the slide and there were mats under everything and it was all safe but I kept an eye on Ezra because I knew I had to. Omar had taken a toy fire engine out to the sandbox. He was playing there with two other boys. Hidalgo Brewster and Ren Tuttle. Hidalgo had a toy police car and Ren had a toy ambulance. Ren’s mom…every time I spoke with her, she’d ask me if I had an EpiPen in my desk. Her son was allergic to peanuts and she wanted to make sure…well, I promised her that I did, and that I knew how to use it. That’s what kindergarten is like these days. Everybody’s allergic to something and so every teacher has to be prepared.”
Dotty stopped. The emotional weight of the story filled the room. Even the three on the couch could feel it, and they didn’t know how the story ended.
“Ezra was by the swings. Not on the swings, but standing behind them, and I could tell he was plotting some sort of sadistic mischief. I didn’t know if he was thinking about pushing someone off or grabbing one of the chains. As a teacher, you need to think like your students so you can try to predict what they’re going to do, but his mind was like reading a block of coal. I know it sounds means, but if you’d seen him…so I walked over to the swings, hoping that my presence might convince him not to go ahead with whatever he was planning. Or he could have done it anyway, even with me watching, but not on March twentieth. On March twentieth, he saw me coming toward him and his shoulders sagged. Whatever he was going to do, he didn’t, and it was because of me. It was because I was there. And I felt like singing. And then, from the other side of the playground, Ren Tuttle screamed.
“I ran over as fast as I could. Con ran over. Half my class ran over. Ren and Hidalgo were sitting in the sandbox and Ren was sobbing and Hidalgo kept yelling, ‘It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!’ and lying there in the sandbox a few feet away from them was Omar…and he wasn’t breathing. I shouted to Con to call nine-one-one and I checked Omar’s pulse and I couldn’t find it on his wrist and I didn’t know if it was because I was terrified or because there just wasn’t a pulse to find and so I administered CPR. The kids formed a circle around us. Nobody stepped into the sandbox. Not even Con. I remember that. The light sand under Ren had turned into dark mud. He’d wet himself. I remember all of it. What I don’t remember was pinching Omar’s nose and breathing into his mouth and applying chest compressions, but Con told me later that I did, so I must have. The next thing I remember is the paramedics shooing me away. I staggered up. My kneecaps were covered with sand. I took a step back and I tripped because there was something in the sand. I figured it was one of their toys, buried, but it wasn’t. It was the EpiPen. Omar had taken it from my desk.”
“Why?” Detective Konquist asked.
“I honestly don’t know. In the days after, I was convinced that it was Ezra who must have taken the EpiPen. Everyone was convinced it was Ezra. Ezra kept denying it and denying it, but nobody except his parents believed him. We all knew what kind of kid he was. And Omar was in the hospital. Turns out he was so thin because he had pediatric hyperthyroidism. Not that his parents had shared that information with the school. Pediatric hyperthyroidism is not that big a deal, but the one thing you don’t want to combine it with is epinephrine, and Omar…died. Those poor parents.”
