His jaw clenches, and he glares at me with venomous hatred.
“According to the coroner’s report Ms. Block was murdered between eleven thirty and midnight. Ms. Findings must have seen you entering the apartment, and recognized you when we interviewed her in the early morning. She was scared of you.”
“You’ve got no proof,” he hissed. “This is all conjecture and smoke and mirrors, just to throw me off guard.”
“Why would I need to throw you off guard if you didn’t do anything?”
“Then you’re just trying to get under my skin to blame me because you don’t like the way I manage this police department.”
“Your narcissism is going to end your career. Not me.”
His nostrils flare. “I don’t believe you’ve got anything against me.”
“I’ve got all the proof,” I say. “Or, I should say, you’ve got the proof,” pointing to the piece of paper in the breast pocket of his dress shirt.
He shakes his head, smirking, showing me his teeth, like a teenage bully I used to know in grade school, who tormented me for being gay.
I think of my father and see him in the chief’s temper.
“Why did you kill those women? Out of shame? Anger? Blackmail?” I pause. “Do women intimidate you, sir?”
“I didn’t do anything to those women,” is all he says, his voice faltering.
“It’s over,” I say, the words rolling off my tongue easily. “Whether or not you confess to me isn’t the issue. All the proof I need is in the report. And something you said at Ms. Block’s apartment.”
He looks at me squarely, his jaw jutting, trying to keep a cool composure. “What did I say?”
“It’s been bothering me since the investigation.”
He waits.
“You slipped badly when you mentioned Ms. Block’s missing Jeep.”
“Jeep?”
“I remembered you saying it in passing at the victim’s apartment this morning. I didn’t think anything of it because you didn’t tell Ryan or me directly. It was a fly-by comment, which went by the wayside until a little while ago when I picked Ryan up at Snake Eyes and noticed his Jeep parked in the parking lot. It triggered something you said the morning at the crime scene about a missing Jeep Cherokee.”
“So what?”
“How did you know the victim drove a Jeep Cherokee, and why wasn’t it part of our investigation?”
“I think you’re confused.”
“I don’t think I am. I noticed it in your garage before you invited me inside. It’s sneaky of you to hide such a large piece of the puzzle on your property, where nobody would have ever looked for it.”
He is speechless.
“All of this suggests that you knew or were romantically involved with Ms. Block,” I say. “Now, not only will the college be under months of investigation, but you’ve also compromised the police department. We can expect a lawsuit against the victim’s parents.”
I let Barton soak in all the information.
“I think you need to check yourself, Ballinger,” he says.
“I think you need to stop lying and confess.”
“You’re out of line.”
“Does Stella know?”
He goes rigid. “Does Stella know what?”
“That you and the victim were…seeing each other?”
“You’re crossing a very fine line, Ballinger. Don’t you dare bring my wife into this convoluted conversation.” He thrusts a finger in my face.
“Why are you so angry?”
He laughs nervously. “Why am I angry? Because you’re in my house making up lies about me and accusing me of things I haven’t done.”
“I’m not lying about anything.” I am struggling to keep calm as my heart races like a beating drum in my chest. “It’s all in the details.”
He closes his eyes.
“Maybe you can explain the elaborate display of Ms. Block’s body at the crime scene. Why so dramatic? Do you despise women that much?”
He looks irritated.
“You strangled her to death and stabbed her in the forehead with a pocketknife, which you held up in an evidence bag for everyone to see. You wore gloves, obviously, so your DNA wouldn’t be detected.”
He turns away from me.
“What about the pentagram?” I ask. “Or the rosary glued to Ms. Block’s palm. What’s the significance?”
“Past sins,” he says, barely audible, glancing down at his hands, untwining the silk tie and letting it fall to the floor.
“Whose sins? Yours or hers?”
“I want you to leave.”
“And the rosary glued to her hand? Why?”
After a beat, he says, “Out of spite.”
“Were you blackmailing Ms. Block and trying to keep your relationship with her on the down low, and away from her sorority sisters?”
“Get out of my house.”
“I’m not leaving until you answer me. Why did you do it?”
“You’re accusing me of murder. This is outrageous!”
I wait for him to settle down before I continue. “Tell me what happened, sir.”
As he looks up, his face pales.
I feel the anger in his stare when I say, “My interview with Mrs. Jackson started to put things into perspective for me. When I decided to investigate on my own, I went to Ms. Findings’ apartment, and it all started to make sense. I just wasn’t expecting you to lie to me and send the rest of the officers on a wild goose chase.” I pause. “The nail in the coffin was the medical examiner’s report. You lied to me—to all of us—about what happened. But now you can explain yourself, and tell me what happened.”
He shakes his head, and it looks like he is going to cry.
“Why did you do it, sir?”
The chief takes a deep breath and I watch him look down at his hands. “When I first started this job twenty years ago, the job wasn’t as much bullshit as it is today.” He shakes his head. “Sure, we had the occasional drunk who went home after work and beat up his old lady, or we’d have to investigate an arson or burglary.”
He lifts his head to look up at me briefly, and turns away, pursing his lips into a tight thin line. “Murders were few and far between. Not like today, when every other call we receive is a homicide case.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” I ask, restless, fidgeting with the handcuffs on my utility belt.
He is quiet for a long time, and I think he is asleep, his head falling in front of him, his eyes closed.
“Chief?” I say, stirring him awake.
“When I started at the police department, I liked coming to work every day. I liked seeing the faces of my rookies, the young men and women whom I would help shape into lieutenants one day. Their hunger for power and enthusiasm fueled their ego. I enjoyed watching them grow into brave men and women, better than me. I wanted them to succeed. I wanted them to be more than they were. Most of them moved away from Black Falls to better their lives, and grow into higher ranks and positions.” His voice got bleaker. “But I’ve seen so much death and destruction over the years. Many of it has changed my view on life and everybody around me. I’m a different man, tired and worn out.”
And a murderer, I want to say, but I don’t.
He pauses. Then, “No one man, as powerful and strong as he is, can take on what I’ve had to tackle in this work. I’ve seen horrible deaths, suicides, and murders. I’ve killed people in the name of protecting fellow officers, and myself. And now the table has turned. After years of seeing people die all around me, it’s changed me. It’s made me—”
His voice trails off, and I wait for him to say something.
But he doesn’t.
Not right away.
So I ask again, “What’s made you do it?”
He looks at me, his gaze drifting to me and down to his wringing hands. “The world is a different place,” he says.
“It’s not the world we have to worry about, Chief. It’s the p
eople in it.”
People like you.
He clears his throat. “It’s everything.”
“What do you mean?”
He raises his pronounced chin, nodding smugly at me as if he has all the right answers. “Life has changed.”
“Are you sure it’s you that has changed and not the world?”
I see him thinking about what I’ve said. He closes his eyes and rocks back and forth, as if the slow motion of his body is calming, and he reflects on the times. “At this stage in my life I’m hardwired to feel this way, and to act on these feelings.”
“Do you blame the job for what you’ve done?”
He turns to me, and he is sneering. “You’re not the sharpest knife on the team, Ballinger.”
A sting of electricity stabs the back of my neck, making me stand up taller. I stare at the chief, cool as a cucumber. “I’m not the one who killed two people,” I say.
I think he might charge at me, or fist punch me to the floor.
He doesn’t move, but he laughs, and the deep-throated snicker is grating and cruel. “Life has a way of chewing all of us up and spitting us out.”
“We’re all on borrowed time.”
“I guess mine is up,” he says. “This is the end.”
“You can make it easy or hard on yourself.” I pause. “It’s your choice.”
He grunts. “My choice is to take the high road.”
Is he going to run and make me chase after him?
Or…
Wait.
After a long minute, he says, “I’ve worked hard. I’ve paid my dues. I don’t want it to end like this.”
“Like what?”
He tweaks his nose, and when he pulls away, a pinprick of blood glosses the tip of his finger.
I reach for a tissue from the Kleenex box sitting on an end table. I hand it to him, but he brings his finger to his mouth and sucks the blood off it.
It makes me uneasy when he closes his eyes and swallows, looking satisfied.
“These last few weeks have felt like a bloody nose, Ballinger.”
I don’t know what to say so I let him keep talking.
“Do you know what I’m saying?” he asks, sounding delirious.
I stand there, speechless, wondering where he is going with all this gibberish. “I don’t know, sir.”
“I couldn’t control myself,” he says.
It all sounds like a confession to me.
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
His nose is bleeding again, a thin syrupy line of dark blood trickling through the maze of his mustache and mouth, and congealing in his wiry beard.
“Chief?”
“I feel sick,” he says.
From tasting your blood or committing murder?
“Why?” I ask.
His complexion turns pale and chalky and he looks like he might throw up. “I did what I had to do. I did what I thought was right.”
“Tell me what happened.”
His bravery is shattered with fear when he looks at me with a spooky stare. His ego is crumbling in front of me.
I can’t say I’m not amused. It all seems right and fair.
I listen to his confession.
Seconds pass and he leans against the long couch, releasing a ragged breath. “We’d been seeing each other for about a month. I’d pick her up a block from her apartment so nobody would notice my SUV, and we’d drive around town and find a place near the edge of the lake downtown to fool around. She was kind. Pretty. She had more going for her than Stella. Great body. Smile. Innocence.” He licks his lips. “It was the initial meeting that I’ll never forget. I met Ms. Block at her apartment when I was investigating a domestic abuse call. She was leaving as I was arriving, and she held the door open for me. It was her smile that persuaded me to ask her out. Guys know that look when girls stare them down. They want one thing. But dudes—we always get the bad rap for returning the stare or smile.” He shakes his head. “Ms. Block wanted me. I knew it.”
He looks up at me. “I don’t regret any of it. But then things started to change. She had become distant. She wasn’t returning my calls. I thought people knew about us. I was scared that she might’ve said something to her sorority sisters about our late-night hookups. I didn’t know.” He takes a breath. “She accused me of being a filthy, horny old man. Well, if she was going to play hard to get, I thought I could turn the tables and humiliate her.”
He stares down at the floor. “Her religion got in the way. She said if anybody found out about us—her parents or sorority sisters or friends—she’d go to hell. She said it over and over: I’m going to hell. I’m going to hell.” He pauses to unclasp his cuffs, and rolls up his shirtsleeves to his elbows. “I thought it was a cop out. She was yelling fire in a theater, and making me out to be a pedophile.” He shakes his head. “So, I shamed her. When I went to her apartment last night, I ended it.” He twists his hands into fists. “If she was going to blow the whistle on us, and I do believe she was thinking seriously about it, I had to shame her and her religion. I made up an elaborate scenario that would take the blame away from me. If she wanted to play the religion card, I’d deal her right hand. The pentagram was the polar opposite of Ms. Block’s beliefs.” More as an afterthought, he adds, “Now she can rot in hell.”
I remember Stella telling me she hadn’t seen her husband much in the last few weeks.
Now I know why.
Barton slides down to the floor, pulling himself up against the back of the couch, legs splayed out in front of him. He drops the tie to the floor. “It was worth it. I don’t have any regrets.”
“And Ms. Findings?” I ask. “What was your motivation for killing an elderly woman?”
After a long pause, he says, “What do you think?”
Ms. Findings had seen something, that much I know.
I fold my hands in front of me and stare down at him, shaking my head, but staying quiet.
When the front door swings open and I whirl around to see the chief’s wife running into the house, out of breath, sweating from her late afternoon jog, she looks terrified, eyes wide, staring down at her husband.
It is the nail in the coffin.
“Danny?” Stella says, looking from him to me, and back to him, her mouth fixed in the shape of an O. “What’s happening?”
The truth will set you free.
I hear tires squealing outside the house, and when I go to the door, there are five police cruisers blocking both sides of the street, driving across the front lawn and sidewalk.
I look to the chief.
He will have to tell his story publically.
I say, “It’s time. Stand up. Turn around. Put both hands behind your back.”
“You’re making a big mistake, Ballinger.”
“Danny.” Stella is crying into her hands and pleading with me not to take her husband, even when she discovers a pair of red Milanos overturned on the hardwood floor next to the stone hearth.
She looks to Barton and asks the inevitable question, “Whose are these? And why does it smell like smoke in here?”
He doesn’t answer, and I walk him out the front door to a block of gawking neighbors and police officers waiting for him in the street.
Before I leave, I want to tell Stella about the young brunette woman who I saw driving away from the house in a blue Honda when I arrived at the house earlier.
But she already knows.
She’s known about his infidelity for a long time.
Chapter 12
One week later
Police Chief Charged in Double Homicide.
The newspaper headline from Black Falls Daily stares back at me from the kitchen counter as I read the article that has rattled the small upstate New York town.
A week after the incident, the residents of Black Falls are still reeling. Taking a temporary leave has given me time to do some serious thinking about my future as a police officer.
By mid-week, I meet up
with my pal Ryan for a drink at his place, and we are sitting in his living room, talking about football and work. I tell him I don’t want to discuss the job, and he opens another beer for me.
“What are you going to do?” he asks, his gaze glued to the screen as The Patriots’ Michael Bennett tackles a Los Angeles Ram player near the end zone.
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Whatever you do, don’t quit,” he says, and I stay for another hour to finish watching the game and the six-pack of Switchback.
* * * *
“You can’t quit,” Steve says to me when I invite him to my apartment for an afternoon drink a few days at the end of August when there is nothing or nobody to distract us. “It’s who you are.”
“Who I was,” I say.
He stares at me intensely and lifts his wine glass, taking a sip.
I stare at the blonde highlights in his braided hair and the way he wears his pink bangs, cut in jagged, zigzag lines as if it was styled by Edward Scissorhands. I smile at the chameleon colors of his constantly changing eyes. “Your eyes are beautiful,” I say, rambling, and sounding stupid.
“I like your eyes as well.”
I laugh. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”
He reaches for my hand across the table, and squeezes.
I find his gaze, and hold it. “I do like your eyes, though.”
He laughs and sets his glass down on the table, looking away, shy and speechless. His fingers interlock with mine, his friendly touch is warm.
“Why did you call me to come over?” he asks, pulling his hand away to pour a generous amount of pinot grigio into his glass, overfilling it and leaning forward to slurp the drink before it spills over the top. “Tell me.”
I finger a hangnail on my right thumb, pulling at the tag of skin gently, wincing as a spume of blood fizzes to the surface. I dab at the cut with my paper napkin and look up to find Steve waiting for an answer.
So I tell him.
I tell him how much I’ve missed him and that I’ve done some serious thinking about us following the days after the arrest of the department’s police chief and a looming lawsuit against the local college and police department. “You’re the only thing that makes me want to get out of bed,” I say. I tell him that he is the only person who makes me happy these days and I want to spend more time with him.
Past Sins Page 9
