The next thing Callie knew, she was on the ground. She was only a few yards away from him. The woman was talking about a crime scene, that Callie must help her son by giving them space to work, that she had to be still now, be still.
Callie was looking at him.
None of it made any sense. Not the shouts nor the lights, nor this woman lying on top of her. This was a dream, wasn’t it? She was still home in Florida; she would soon wake up and go to his room, and he would smile up at her from his desk, the secret smile that only the two of them shared, because they had been through everything together; they had survived his biological father, they had survived the painful divorce, they had survived being on their own together before Mike. It had always been just the two of them, the last two people in the world.
They would survive this.
They would survive.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Mike was getting angry. He felt it rising, breaking in waves in his brain.
The detective was holding his hands out in a calming gesture.
“She’ll be okay. You need to stay here with your other children. Please. Let me ask you a few questions. We think what may have happened to your son — we think possible assailants left the scene only a half hour ago, and we’re trying to track them.”
“What?”
There were words coming out of the cop’s mouth that Mike didn’t understand. Where was Braxton? Why had Callie run off? Had the cop said something? Had the cop said something fucking stupid about Braxton? Did he say he was out there? Out in the road? What was he doing in the road?
“Anything you tell me right now could expedite their capture. Sir? Do you understand me? We can get whoever did this, but time is critical. Did your son have any enemies? Anyone who might want to hurt him?”
“What? No.” Mike kept looking out the front window. All he could see were those harsh lights in the trees. He was dimly aware of Reno crying in the other room. He needed to go to her. Just a second, though. Just a second. Hold on.
“You just moved here. He started a new school, right? Any problems with other kids? Arguments? Bullying?”
“No. Kids at school? No, no problems.” Mike’s lips felt waxy, numb. He couldn’t see Callie. He wanted to go out on to the porch. This man must get out of his way.
Shhh, said a voice in his head. Calm down, baby.
Callie, where did you go?
“Ok. What about other people? Who did he hang out with?”
“Hang out? No one.” Mike strained to see further. He pressed his forehead to the window. It was cold, so cold. He shut his eyes for a moment. “Did he get hit by a car?”
“We don’t know yet. But it doesn’t appear that way.”
“Then why . . .” Mike struggled to find the words. He licked his lips. His tongue was chalky. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”
“The person who found your son out there said that moments after he arrived, there was a—”
The walkie-talkie on the detective’s belt burst with static. Then, “Detective Swift, Trooper Bronze.”
He pulled the device out, in front of his mouth and pressed a button. “This is Swift. Go ahead, Bronze.”
“Swift, Troopers Day and Wyckoff got a . . . we’ve got a dark green Hyundai at Exit 30. New York plates. Three people. One Robert Darring from New York, one Hide-oh . . . I can’t pronounce it. Hide-oh Miko? Asian kid; Philadelphia. The third has no I.D. He says he’s fifteen. The other two are older. Over.”
“They say they were at the scene?”
Static, then the trooper broke over again. “Affirmative. Say they are friends with the decedent.”
Swift pressed the button, scowling. “Say what they were doing up here at three in the morning?”
“Coming to visit. Saw the kid in the road, the old guy next to him, thought he’d done something bad, and turned and hightailed it.”
Swift made a dismissive sound, blowing air out of his lips. “Hmm,” he grunted without pressing the transmit button. Then he pressed again, and said, “Have Day and Wyckoff bring them in. I’ll contact the prosecutor. Keep old Lenny Duso handy.”
“Copy that.”
Mike withdrew from the window and watched Swift as he placed the walkie-talkie back on his belt. Swift fixed him with a level gaze.
“Okay, Mr. . . .”
“Simpkins.” His voice sounded far away. Reno was still crying. He needed to go to her now. He felt as though some explosive charge had just detonated, silently, as if underwater, bursting apart his family and flinging them all into different shoals.
“Mr. Simpkins? New York State gives us seventy-two hours to bring formal charges against the arrestees. I’m going to be honest — there’s not a lot of physical evidence out there. The wind and snow have destroyed a lot. But these kids — you just heard — might know something. And if so, they could lawyer-up real quick; obtain a writ of habeas corpus and, if there’s no charge, a judge will let them go.”
Mike tried to absorb the words. Why was the cop saying all this? He moved towards his daughters in the other room.
The detective nodded. “You stay with them. I’ll be back. We’re going to need to find out how your son knew these three, if he did. So you be thinking about that. Think about anyone who may have wanted to do him harm. Don’t worry about your wife — we’ll take care of her. We’ll bring her back in so you can all be together.”
“Mr. Simpkins. I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you.” His words seemed to come from someone else.
He turned into the hallway in time to see Hannah emerge from the bedroom, sleep in her eyes, her mouth turned down into a sad frown, Reno beside her, tears streaming down her face.
His heart broke.
CHAPTER NINE
Swift stepped off the porch and into the snowy night. The wind blew and bit into him, chapping his face and hands. He pulled his parka tighter around him and looked up the road.
The scene was still lit up, all those lights turning the snow pink, the trees a darker purple. He walked briskly down the driveway of the Getty— now the Simpkins place. He’d had to deliver such news to many people during his years as a homicide detective, but this one was bad. The look on that woman’s face. And the father — though for some reason Swift didn’t place him as the biological father. It was just a guess; something in the man’s body language, something in the way he spoke. Like he was overcompensating a little, the way stepparents maybe sometimes did. Biological parents, they got the child’s love unconditionally. Steps had to work a little bit harder, had to earn that love. It wasn’t fair, and for a job as thankless as parenting usually was, it probably made it all the tougher.
Swift himself had been raised by a stepfather. A brutal son of a gun, who had been a cop, too — for twenty-two years. He wasn’t one of the nice cops, but one who took his badge and gun as a license to do whatever he wanted. To come and go and do as he pleased.
Swift didn’t place Mike Simpkins as that sort of man, that sort of father. He sensed that Simpkins was a pretty healthy guy, mentally and all the rest, who genuinely loved the kid. But, you never knew. There was that itch in the back of Swift’s brain that said Simpkins might be someone to look at. It could have just been that he wasn’t the bio-parent, but it could have been something else, too, something that planted this little germ in Swift’s mind. Such as the flare of anger he saw rise up in the man’s eyes. Or maybe the way he had looked, just for a moment, when Swift asked if he knew of anyone who might hurt the kid.
He might be trying too hard. This case was already tough, and Swift had a feeling it was only going to get tougher — for everyone. The irony was, he’d been courted by the Attorney General’s office for the past two months; they were grooming him for a job much cushier than the life of a senior investigator with the State Police. He could’ve already said yes. He needn’t be here, dealing with this, at all. He could be in Albany right now, he and his dog Kady in a nice little house on a nice little subu
rban street, dealing with white collar problems. But he’d said he had to think about it. Now he wondered what the hell he’d been waiting for. Dead body in the snow, in the middle of the road in the witching hours of the night — and a kid, no less. New family just relocated to town, and look what happens. And he was in the middle of it. When this thing was over, he was going to call Paul Greenberg at the Attorney General’s office and say, “Yes, sir, thank you sir, be down as soon as I can shine and pack my shoes.”
Huddled into himself in the cold, Swift turned towards the scene of the crime, a couple hundred yards away, the wind now cutting from the side, kicking up curls of snow, destroying more and more possible evidence, let alone a crime scene reconstruction.
The troopers were bringing the three from the Hyundai to the County Jail five miles north of New Brighton. The arrest had occurred no more than ten minutes ago, and they were a half an hour away. Swift had twenty minutes before they would arrive at County to be processed, and then a half an hour to an hour after that he’d have his best opportunity to speak with them. It would be a good idea to get in before any one of them acquired counsel. He thought he had a little time. They were all from out of town, it seemed, which meant calling lawyers from afar, or, if they wanted public defense, a PD wouldn’t be available until at least later in the morning. They would be his for a few precious hours.
First he needed to check in with Brittney Silas, and see how she was coming along with the crime scene. And he needed to talk to the mother, if she’d calmed down. He hadn’t even gotten her name.
As he approached, he watched as one of his troopers turned around a vehicle that was trying to drive west on Route 9N. He could see the driver ogling him through the bare window of the snow-encrusted vehicle as it passed.
CHAPTER TEN
Mike stood looking at the open laptop on Braxton’s desk. He held both girls in his arms. Hannah weighed next to nothing, but Reno was heavier and pulled on his shoulder as he kept her against him.
As he looked at the computer screen, his mind was blank. He seemed to be having trouble putting even the most rudimentary thoughts together. A moment later, the screen went black, and the cartoon criminal disappeared. When the screen shut down, something in Mike’s mind switched on.
“Daddy? Where’s Mommy?” Reno snuffled against his neck. He could feel her tears soaking the collar of his t-shirt.
“A-mommah?” Hannah said on the other side of him.
“She’s outside.”
That screen timer is set to sixty minutes, Mike thought. He remembered having a conversation with Braxton about it not long ago. Braxton had been given a personal laptop on his thirteenth birthday. He’d had access to one before, an old one of Callie’s, with limits to internet access that both he and Callie enforced. Prior to his thirteenth birthday, he had campaigned hard for an iPad Air or a Kindle Fire. He was an avid reader. He had canvassed Mike and Callie endlessly in his brooding, mumbling fashion. But they had decided on a laptop because it seemed the most useful for school. His homework assignments frequently required him to go online, and the laptop seemed like the wisest choice. And this time, it was agreed that there would be no parental control over online use. Instead, Mike and Callie monitored the number of hours Braxton spent each day. Two hours out of every twenty-four, for the purposes of entertainment. It seemed reasonable; two hours was either enough for one movie a day, or, should he choose otherwise, two hours of social networking or gaming — usually that game called The Don. No more than that.
In the beginning, they had been vigilant about checking how long Braxton spent online each day. But — life happened. They grew lax. Callie rationalized that it was no big deal, they could still count the days. Of course, though, they started to lose track. Without a system for who checked and when, and in the midst of dinners and work, and Mike putting his business back together, and the girls and all of their needs, monitoring web-time got lost in the family shuffle. It had been about a month since Mike could remember last looking at the stats — and Mike knew this because that was the day Braxton had shown Callie how to set a computer to sleep mode, and he’d demonstrated by showing her on his own computer. Seeing them together had reminded Mike to check how much time the kid was spending online.
Braxton was a tech whiz, like most kids these days. The scariest thing about the digital generation was how much natural aptitude the youth seemed to have. It was hard to mount a real argument against technology when it came to kids so readily. Hannah, at two, could already navigate around iPads and smartphones. She knew where the apps were on Mommy’s phone and would scroll to them, double-tap to open them, and then play Counting-Sheep or Animal Farm Jigsaw or Cake Factory. Couldn’t speak yet, not in full sentences anyway, but could operate wireless media devices with aplomb.
Braxton was doing things that were already beyond Mike’s capabilities. He could see that the time restriction, loose as it was, was preventing Braxton from doing much more online. If given free reign, the kid could probably live online eighteen hours a day. Mike didn’t doubt that Braxton would be able to write code for Flash websites if he wanted to, or even begin to design his own video game.
With one arm cupping each of the girls against his body, Mike leaned over, stretched a finger to the keyboard and tapped the space bar. The laptop woke up. The face of the mobster reappeared. It grinned at him and arched an eyebrow.
One hour. If Brax’s computer sat dormant for more than an hour, it would go dark. An hour after that, and the CPU would go into hibernation.
One hour. So Braxton was sitting here at his computer one hour ago from now, playing this game.
The clock on the lower right side of the screen read that it was 3:48 a.m. At about 2:48, then, his son was probably sitting right here.
Mike leaned over again, feeling his daughters turning to lead in his arms. Hannah was sucking her thumb, her head on his shoulder. Reno was still burying her face in his neck. When she spoke, he could feel her lips move against his skin. She’d just asked where her mother was. Now she asked a more difficult question.
“Where’s Braxton?”
“Braxton is outside, too, with Mommy.”
His own words sent a spike through his heart, and Mike felt his lower lip tremble. His eyes stung for a moment with tears. But he couldn’t lose it. Not now.
“Come on. Who wants something to eat? You girls want some breakfast?”
The notion of putting them back to sleep had crossed his mind, but Mike didn’t think it very plausible. Hannah might go back to sleep for fifteen minutes or so, but Reno was much too upset at this point. He needed to ply them with food, fill their bellies and plop them in front of a TV show or something. There would be men, anyway, he realized, coming through the house in their boots with their pens clicking, their heads swiveling, asking questions, jotting things down. Men like the one who’d just been at the door, men like scavengers picking through remains.
The media, too, ogling and watching, and asking their questions.
He needed to feed the girls and get them situated so that he could get back to Braxton’s computer for a moment, just to check a couple of things. Those men who would come and rake their way through the house would take away the laptop. Mike had to get something off of there first. Something better not seen by anyone.
“Here we go,” he said to the girls, bouncing them a bit as he carried them down the hallway. “Here we go,” he said in a sing-song voice.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Someone wrapped a blanket around her, but she wasn’t feeling cold.
They put him in a black bag. Then they were putting him in the back of a van. Someone told her it was the mortuary service. She would go with them.
They told her no, you need to go home, get warm. We’ll need you to come down and formally identify the body in just a couple of hours.
She said if you touch me again, I’ll rip your throat out. She got in.
They let her stay with him.
She lo
oked at the man who had come to the door — Death, she thought of him as. He reminded her of something buried deep in her memory, something she had studied in school; The Pardoner’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer. It was the plague; death was in town.
To Callie, this man in his black slacks and parka, his thinning hair blowing in the wind, was death. That look of detachment on his face as he watched her. They closed the doors of the van and his face shrank in the small rear windows.
And then she was alone with her son. She knelt down beside him as the vehicle drove through the night, and she put her head on his chest and held him through the body bag. She felt his arm and his hand and over it she placed her own.
Callie felt such a wave of sorrow and grief that she was unable to breathe. She gasped for air, her heart a drum beating in her chest. Her vision started to black out, and she felt hands on her. She fought and came to herself, pushing the groping hands away. She took deep, ragged breaths and regained control. They said he hadn’t been shot or stabbed, that he didn’t appear to have any broken bones. They were going to have to do some tests to determine the cause of death.
This made her throat and heart constrict again. She felt the blackness encroaching; she warded it off, she pushed it back — she threw her head back and expelled a long breath that felt like a geyser.
That great rush of air seemed to exorcise some demon, and everything became quiet. The van neared the mortuary and Callie was at peace. She kept her hand on the bag, even as they unloaded him and brought him inside. She never left him.
* * *
Swift watched the woman go. It was highly inappropriate and broke all procedure to let a victim’s relative ride along to the lab. But there were trained professionals with her who knew how to handle such grief. Swift himself, despite all his years on the job, felt he did not.
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