by Ben Miller
Wendy Jenkins had already returned from her smoke, and she currently cradled Tyler, who reciprocated with his fist wrapped around her left index finger. She bounced him playfully, occasionally pulling him close to rubs noses with him or gently kiss his forehead. She and Tyler seemed to exist in their own space, oblivious to Jack or anything else in their surroundings.
Aiden looked up at Jack. “When can we take him home?”
Jack returned the gaze, but did not answer. He maintained a constant expression—finding a perfect middle ground between aggressively challenging and apathetically bored. Aiden’s facade changed from one of expectation—for an answer—to one of annoyance—at the lack of one.
Keith Billingsley looked from Aiden to Jack and then back again, also hoping for an answer. “Who says he’s going to go home with you?”
Aiden did not drop the irked countenance when he faced Billingsley. “’Cause I’m his dad. He’s my son.”
“Just because you knocked up my daughter doesn’t make you a dad.”
Aiden turned his shoulders fully toward Billingsley and leaned forward. Jack’s instinct suggested that he should intervene, but he forced himself to hold back. He knew what was coming and he didn’t want to lose focus.
“What the f—” Aiden began before catching movement from the hallway out of the corner of his eye. He stopped, displaying restraint—likely a rarity for him.
A cadre of officials filed into the room, led by a well-dressed female physician. She walked over and stood beside Wendy, keeping her hands in the pockets of her impeccably clean and neatly pressed long white coat. Jeff Pine and Rita Ferroni followed, stopping side by side near the middle of the room, just in front of Jack. Two members of hospital security stood behind them.
“Mr. Dolan, Miss Jenkins,” Jeff said sternly, a tone Jack had not heard from him yet. “We were hoping you’d both come down to the police station with us. We’d like to discuss some things with you, and the hospital is not the best place to chat.”
The doctor reached out for Wendy to hand Tyler to her. “We will need to observe Tyler again overnight anyway.”
Wendy, whose joyful expression had gone blank, obediently handed the infant over to the doctor.
The pediatrician took Tyler into her arms and placed him on the white linens in the crib. “He will be very safe here. We’ll have security officials posted outside his room all night,” she reassured.
Jack thought Wendy’s distressed look had much more to do with concern over her own well being than that of little Tyler.
Aiden stood up, picking at the front of his baggy shorts to adjust his genitals. He pointed at the Billingsleys. “What about them?”
“We will have ongoing conversations with Mr. and Mrs. Billingsley,” Rita answered.
Jeff turned to the side, gesturing for Aiden and Wendy to lead them out of the room.
“What about my car?” Wendy still seemed overwhelmed, confused. “I drove here.”
Jeff curled his lip and waved a hand. “Not to worry. We’ll take care of your car. Now, please, after you.”
Aiden stepped between Jeff and Rita unhurriedly. He locked eyes with Jack, who stifled a satisfied smile. Wendy moved much more slowly, just then fully standing up. Jack sidled behind Aiden, providing a purposeful barrier between Aiden and Wendy. They would be kept separate from here on out as per the plan Jack, Jeff, and Rita had designed.
As he followed Aiden out of the room, Jack stared at the back of Aiden’s shoulder. He tried to invoke some sort of X-ray vision to get a better look at the tattoo Camilla had noticed yesterday. He knew the booking officer would take extensive photographs of all of Aiden’s tattoos when he got arrested later today for murdering Fiona Evans and kidnapping Tyler, but Jack hoped he wouldn’t have to wait that long to examine the pentagram design on Aiden’s back.
37
The water was heavy, thick.
No, it wasn’t water. It couldn’t be. It was far too dense to be water. Vicki could barely force her arms through the viscous fluid. She tried to scissor her legs, propel herself up toward the surface, but she could not muster enough momentum to even budge. She was an over-sized banana trapped in a giant Jell-O salad.
She knew she couldn’t dare breathe in; one attempt would surely clog her lungs irreversibly. Yet this notion didn’t bother her. She didn’t have the urge to breathe.
She heard Jonah calling for her. She could actually see his voice, rippling toward her through the bubbly gel surrounding her. She turned her head in all directions trying to see her boy, but he was not in sight. A small figure appeared in her peripheral vision to the right, submerged just below her level in the fluid. She blinked to try to clear some of the emollient from her corneas, and it felt like she had weights attached to her eyelids. When she refocused, she recognized the figure as a fetus, identical to the one in a photo from Sabrina Pine’s anti-abortion article, its umbilical cord floating unattached in the colorless jelly.
She fervently tried again to swim nearer the surface, this time just by flexing and extending her ankles. Perhaps such low amplitude movements would prove more successful than broad strokes, she thought. She did inch upward, but still nowhere near the air above.
Jonah called out again. Vicki turned her head, saw the ripples from a different direction. A figure loomed above the water, but she couldn’t make out any features from so deep. Too tall to be Jonah, she thought. He leaned down slowly, bending his head toward the top of the water. She recognized the imbalanced smile, the evil insanity in his eyes.
Randall.
She was in the swimming pool. She had fallen in this time. She was submerged in the pool, but Jonah wasn’t. Had Jack saved him? How could she know? Jonah still cried out for her, more frantic this time. She had to move. She had to break through this gelatinous prison and find her son. She began to raise her left arm and her right arm came with it; they were bound together at the wrists. Panic set in. Terror. Her only movements came in slow motion and resulted in futility.
She heard Jonah again, more distant. No visual cues flowed through the water to accompany him. He didn’t ask for her this time.
Vicki heard her mother’s voice, shouting her name. She jiggled involuntarily in the thickness, sending vibrations through the entire pool. The billowing around her seemed to confer a molecular change in the liquid, softening it. She began to slip forward. Instead of her moving toward the surface, the water began to fall away from her, as if someone had opened a drain at the bottom of the pool. When she broke through, Randall had vanished. Her mother’s face appeared in front of her, almost larger than life.
She blinked several times, expecting to feel the greasy water flick off her eyelashes. But it didn’t. She looked down at herself, wearing her pajamas and lying in the middle of her bed, tangled sheets at her feet.
“God, Mom,” she uttered.
Her mother put her palms on Vicki’s cheeks and focused her gaze on her daughter’s eyes. “Vicki, are you alright?”
Vicki’s eyes fluttered, trying to wipe away the lasting vestiges of the dream. She looked beside her mother and saw Jonah, standing frightened at the side her bed. “Jonah, sweetie.” She reached out and grabbed his hand.
“Are you OK, Mommy?”
“Yes, sweetheart. I just had a bad dream.” She looked at the digital clock on their nightstand: 10:18. “Oh, my God.”
“What is it, dear?” her mother asked. “I’ve never seen you dream like that. Or sleep like that.”
Vicki shook her head. She released her grasp on Jonah to dig the heels of her hands into her eyes. Her mother was right—Vicki had never dreamt or slept like that. She pressed deeper into her eye sockets, apparently pushing insight into her consciousness. The Xanax. She remembered taking the sedative last night to help her sleep. Instead it put her into a near comatose state.
Another memory quickly followed that of popping those pills in the middle of the night: her perseverating thoughts that coerced her into taking them. The t
houghts of killing Randall Franklin, the man who haunted even her drug-addled dreams.
38
“Good cop, bad cop?”
Jeff’s voice drew Jack’s focus away from the small screen in front of him. He looked over his shoulder to see Jeff oscillating his thumb back and forth between Jack and him with his eyebrows raised.
Jack turned back to examine the figure on the screen again. Aiden Dolan sat alone in a small interrogation room, his left knee bouncing up and down, as if that limb were overcome by an uncontrollable tremor. Jack narrowed his eyes to zoom in on Dolan’s face. He looked pissed.
“Do you really think that works?” Jack asked in response to Jeff’s proposition.
“If it’s done right. I think Aiden Dolan is ripe for the picking.”
Jack spun around in his chair to face Jeff. “Who’s who?”
“You have a preference?” Jeff replied.
“Do you?”
Jeff smiled. “How about we just feel out the vibe in the room?” he said, keeping pace with Jack by answering a question with another question.
“Yeah. Works for me.” Jack conceded that round.
Jeff reached into the small mini-fridge in the corner of the room and handed two bottles of water to Jack. He grabbed a third bottle from the fridge and a manila folder from the table in front of the small closed circuit TV. They went down the hallway into Aiden’s interrogation room.
Jack instantly recognized the air that emerged as soon as he entered, and he welcomed it. He had conducted interviews in dozens of rooms like this throughout the country, and they all seem to have the same atmosphere: cool, a few noticeable degrees cooler than typical room temperature, with a pleasantly crisp scent with just an undertone of sweat. It’s how he imagined a ladies’ locker room might smell, except a little cleaner.
Jeff marched to a chair in the corner opposite Aiden, set the manila folder down on the metal table against the far wall, and sat down without saying a word, leaving Jack standing in the threshold. Jack considered the two bottles of water in his hands. He looked at Aiden, who, after briefly looking up at the men entering the room, kept his attention in a barren corner of the room. Jack glanced over at Jeff, who returned his gaze without expression. Jeff slowly tilted his head to study Aiden.
So much for feeling out the vibe, Jack thought. Jeff had predetermined their roles before they left the surveillance room.
“Bottle of water, Aiden?” Jack asked as he extended it out to him.
Aiden took a breath and forced it out, trying to put on an air of boredom. “Sure,” he said, as he took the water from Jack. He unscrewed the cap and downed nearly half the bottle.
Jack grabbed a chair from the wall beside the door and dragged it into the middle of the room. He sat down, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and dangling his unopened water bottle between his legs.
“What’s goin’ on?” Aiden asked.
“Why don’t you tell us, Aiden?” Jack answered, his voice calm and even.
“I dunno, bro. I just want to get back to see my kid.”
“Tyler.” Jack nodded his head. “Cute kid. Real cute.”
Aiden nodded in return. “Yep,” was all he could think to say.
“Do people think he looks like you?”
Aiden furrowed his brow, taken aback by the question. “I dunno.”
Jack nodded, keeping everything positive. “Or maybe he looks more like his mom?”
Aiden just shrugged this time. “I never really thought about it a whole lot.”
“Tell me about Fiona.”
“What about her?”
Jack’s memory harkened back to their conversation with Aiden yesterday morning. He would need to draw nearly everything out of this concrete-thinking, laconic blockhead. He opened his bottle of water and tipped it back for a sip, taking a beat to keep himself from getting frustrated. “What was your relationship like?”
“Ah, you know.”
“No, I don’t know,” Jack smiled as he spoke. Upbeat. Positive. “Tell me.”
“She was cool, ya know. We hung out for a while, hooked it up. Then she got knocked up, and she stopped being cool.”
Jeff took a swig from his bottle of water, his first movement since he sat down. It drew Aiden’s sudden attention, instinctively leaning away from Jeff as he turned his head toward the movement. Jack looked at Jeff out of the corner of his eye. Jeff’s blank face remained unchanged, just staring at Aiden. Jack began to feel more comfortable with their role assignment. This might work well.
Jack leaned forward and to his left, inching into the sightline between Aiden and Jeff. “How long is a while?”
Aiden snapped back to Jack. “I dunno. A year maybe?”
“Wow. That’s a long time. Sounds like it got pretty serious.”
Aiden looked away, into the upper corner of the room to his left. “Nah. Just, you know, a good time.”
“Uh-huh,” Jack replied. He contemplated Aiden’s response for a moment, deciding how it fit into his role as Good Cop. He knew it wasn’t yet the right time for Jeff to jump in, and he was glad that he hadn’t. Yet Jack recognized the opportunity to pounce, and he couldn’t pass it up. “So tell me about that tattoo there.”
For the first time since Aiden sat down in that chair, his knee stopping bouncing. “What tattoo?”
Jack raised his left hand, serving as a mirror to Aiden, and used his right hand to point to the underside of his left forearm.
Aiden had kept both arms on the rests aside his seat, clutching reinforced plastic. Now he slowly rolled open his right wrist and looked down at his exposed forearm. “Oh.” He chuckled, a clearly unnatural sound coming from his throat. “We got really messed up one night. Ended up at my tattoo place, and…” He shrugged. “I got this.”
“Yeah?” Jack said, still smiling. “Did she get one too?”
Aiden opened his mouth but didn’t say anything, seeming to catch an impulsive response before it could leave his vocal cords. He paused for a moment, his mouth still agape. “No,” he finally said, and then he put on a smile. “Naw. She chickened out.”
Jack laughed, his sounding much more authentic than Aiden’s had a moment ago. Jack had much more practice. “That sounds about right,” he said, as if he had known Fiona Evans, or perhaps just referring to all women in general.
“Actually it sounds like you just made it up.”
Both Jack and Aiden turned to look at Jeff, breaking his silence from his corner chair. Jeff took another drink of his water before putting the bottle down on the corner of the table between Aiden and him. He stood up and moved closer, resting the back of his thighs on the edge of the table, now within arm’s reach of Aiden. “I think Fiona meant a lot more to you than you meant to her.”
Aiden got a confused look on his face and turned to Jack, ostensibly looking for support. Jack kept his eyes wide, sympathetic, doing his best to put on a non-judgmental face, but he waited for Aiden to respond.
“I…no, you know. We just, you know, just hung out.”
Jeff crossed him arms. “Until she got pregnant and decided to clean up her life. And that meant leaving you behind.”
“Naw, man,” Aiden shook his head. “We just, you know, moved on.”
Jack decided now was a good time to intervene, to change course. He knew Jeff could be more effective by tossing unexpected jabs rather than leading the questioning, at least for now. “Aiden, walk me through yesterday morning again. Where were you around 8:30 – 9:00?”
“Home, at my place. With Wendy. We were there all morning.”
“Just the two of you?”
“Yep.”
“You didn’t leave all morning, not for anything?”
Aiden shook his head, but didn’t say anything. His head kept bobbing back and forth for ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.
“Aiden?”
“Naw,” he answered immediately. “We were both there until you all showed up.”
“And where were you
Wednesday morning?” Jack asked.
“Wednesday? What was Wednesday?” Aiden looked truly confused. Jack found it to be perhaps his most earnest expression since they began this interrogation.
Jeff jumped in. “Four days ago. Day after Tuesday, day before Thursday.”
Aiden had cringed a little when Jeff began speaking, as if in fear. Ripe, indeed, Jack thought, agreeing with Jeff’s earlier perception.
Aiden put his palms in the air, searching his memory. “Wednesday…Working! I was working.”
“Working where, Aiden?” Jack asked, without pause but still with an empathic tone.
“We was putting in shrubbery in this industrial park over off 128. Near Cutler Park.”
“We?” Jack queried. “You were working with someone else?”
Aiden nodded. “Yeah. There are three of us on the project—me, Nate, and Dejuan.”
“What time did you get there?”
“I dunno. 9:00?”
“Where were you before that?” Jeff demanded.
“Home?”
“You keep asking us, numbskull. We don’t know. We’re asking you!” Jeff raised his voice, turning up the heat slightly.
“Home. I was home!” Aiden began to match Jeff’s volume, but not his intensity.
“Was anyone with you at home?” Jack continued.
“Wendy. She drove me to work.”
“Of course,” Jeff said as he turned his head away.
Jack reached out and dragged the manila folder across the table toward himself. He opened it and held up a photo of Sara Gardner. “Do you know this woman?”
Aiden glanced at it before looking away, again to his left, the opposite direction from Jeff. “No.”
Jack moved the photo in front of Aiden’s face. “Aiden, look at this photo.” At first Aiden didn’t comply, actually turning his head further toward his left shoulder. “Aiden…” Jack tried to pull him in. He feared Aiden might begin to sense too much pressure and either shut down or request a lawyer. Either way their interrogation would be done.
