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The Murder Artist

Page 10

by John Case


  I nod. “That’s true. But it wasn’t because of the money. I was abroad. On assignment. You can check with the station.”

  “Abroad,” Price says. His face twitches when he repeats the word, as if he just got a whiff of something unpleasant. “Abroad,” he says again. “I see.”

  He says nothing for a good long minute or two. I look at my feet and resist the urge to fill in the silence. Price rocks back on his chair, then tilts his head and looks at me. “The preliminary separation agreement takes a good chunk out of your salary, right?”

  I nod.

  “Your house – that’s a pricey neighborhood, isn’t it? If you don’t work things out with Liz, you’re going to have to sell, isn’t that right?”

  I shrug. “That’s true.” And then, before I can stop myself: “I don’t care about that. It’s not important to me.”

  I hesitate. I don’t like the way I’m trying to explain myself to this guy. I don’t like the way he refers to my wife by her first name. He’s never even met her.

  “So will you lose the house?”

  I suddenly get angry. “What are you saying? You think I killed my kids because I don’t want to move out of Cleveland Park? Is that what you think? Jesus.”

  He makes a conciliatory gesture. “Okay, new subject. Did the boys have insurance? Some policy out there? Because if they did, it would be best if you told us now.”

  “Insurance? You mean medical insurance?”

  Price shakes his head. “I mean life insurance.”

  “Life insurance? They’re six years old!”

  Then I get it, and my voice, angry and too loud, shows it. “Now you’re suggesting I killed my kids for insurance!? What – and after a decent interval, I’m going to cash in and move to fucking Brazil! Are you out of your mind?”

  “No,” Price says, his voice calm and reasonable. “No one’s suggesting anything of the sort. We’re just talking about the pressures you’re under, that’s all, we’re just exploring that area. Personally, I think it’s far more likely that someone like you – you simply lost your temper, the way you did just now, and it went a little further than you intended, you know…”

  Of course, I go ballistic. “Look,” I say, my voice shaking. “I didn’t kill my children.”

  “Mr. Callahan. Maybe we should take a break here. Maybe you should consult an attorney.”

  “I don’t need a break and I don’t need a fucking attorney.”

  “Did Detective Shoffler tell you that someone saw you in the parking lot, opening your car – and this was after you reported the boys missing.”

  “I was checking to see if the boys went to the car when they couldn’t find me. The security guy – he suggested it.”

  It goes on like this. One hour, two hours, three, four. We’re into hour five, when Price, after asking me if I need to use the facilities, excuses himself to do so. When he comes back, he brings me some water and suggests we go over the whole story again.

  We do. “Remind me,” he starts, “whose idea was it to go to this festival? You come up with that?”

  “No,” I tell him, “I’ve told you. It was their idea. It’s not my kind of thing.”

  “What is your kind of thing?”

  It goes on.

  “You say you heard Kevin’s voice on your cell phone,” Price says when we reach that point. “He said one word: ‘Daddy.’ So what I want to know is – how you could tell it was Kevin? They’re identical twins, right?”

  “They’re my kids. I could tell.”

  “You could tell.” Price makes quotation marks in the air.

  “That’s right.”

  He looks as if he’s about to challenge this, but then he smiles. “I guess I can accept that.” He shakes his head. “Must have been rough, though,” he says with what seems to be genuine concern. “Tantalizing.” A regretful sigh. “Just that one word, and then he never called back.”

  “No. That was it.”

  “Boy,” Price says, then suddenly veers off in another direction. “Why don’t you tell me about the night before. Hmmmm?”

  “I don’t see-”

  “Do you not want to talk about that?” He frowns and then apologizes, as if he’s inadvertently hit a sore spot.

  “No, I don’t mind talking about it. I just-”

  Price shrugs. “Look, you never know when something’s gonna come up that will help.”

  I nod.

  “Okay, so the night before – Friday night – you said you had a lot of work to do. So, let’s talk about dinner, okay? You cook, or did you eat out?”

  “We ate out. Pizza.”

  “What pizza? Where?”

  “The Two Amys – on Wisconsin.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “Sure. The waiter, other customers.”

  “You pay with a credit card or cash?”

  “Probably a credit card.”

  “You don’t remember.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  He waves the significance of this away, tosses me a smile. “I don’t always keep track of that kind of shit, either.”

  Jason Price has a powerful charm and he uses it all to persuade me that he wants to be my friend, he really does. And the way to get in tight with my new friend is to tell him what he wants to hear. And what he wants to hear – not that he’d hold it against me, he’s had some bad moments with Derrick, he wouldn’t lie to me – is that I did it. I lost it, we all do, it’s the human condition. Nobody is under control 100 percent of the time. And so on.

  I’m making it sound hokey and easy to dismiss, but it isn’t like that. It’s an almost religious yearning, the impulse to confess. If only I could confess, I’d be cleansed and reborn, I could start over.

  As the hours slide by, I begin to slip into a dangerous apathy. I want to stop talking. I want to sleep.

  I’ve read more than once about survivors pulled back from the brink. There’s a point where the will begins to fade. Just before freezing to death, the victim of hypothermia is said to get warm and sleepy; the drowning person, to find himself immersed in a burst of light. I take it from such accounts that oblivion can be enticing, a welcome respite from struggle and pain.

  We’re going over the journey through the fairgrounds yet again when someone raps on the door. Detective Price frowns, says “excuse me one moment,” gets up, opens the door a crack, conducts a brief conversation with someone else. Although this discussion is conducted at the volume of a whisper, I can tell it’s an argument. Then, without a word, he leaves me alone.

  I wait in a kind of dull reverie, checking my watch every few minutes. Ten minutes go by. Twenty. Half an hour.

  When Price comes back, he launches into a whole new line of questioning, one that baffles me.

  “What is your religion, Alex?”

  “What?”

  “Your religious conviction. Your faith.”

  “I’m not very religious.”

  “Are you an atheist, then?”

  “No, not exactly. What does this have to do with anything?”

  “Bear with me, okay? Say you had to check off a box, for instance – would you check off atheist?”

  “No. I’m sort of a lapsed Catholic. I – I don’t know. I’d check off Christian, I guess.”

  “You guess.”

  There are questions about what I think about animal sacrifice, about a piece I once did about Santería in south Florida, about my spiritual convictions, my opinion on religions such as Wicca.

  “Look,” I say finally, “where are we going with this? I don’t understand the relevance.”

  “You don’t like this line of questioning?” Price asks, a surprised frown on his face.

  “I just don’t get it,” I tell him.

  “It’s not idle curiosity,” he says. “I can assure you of that.”

  And looking at him, at the professionally disappointed expression on his face, I finally realize that no amount of cooperation on my part is going to exon
erate me. I’m trying to prove a null hypothesis – and you just can’t do that. No matter how many questions I answer correctly, Jason Price is interested only in answers that point toward my guilt. And since I’m not guilty, there’s no reason to sit here and endure this.

  I tell him I want to go home.

  “You refuse to submit to further questioning.”

  “I don’t see the point.”

  “You refuse. Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I shake my head. “You don’t quit, do you?”

  Jason Price offers a thin smile. “Is that a yes?”

  I decide to oblige him. What can it matter? “Yes,” I say. “I refuse.”

  Price gets up. He leaves me alone in the room.

  CHAPTER 12

  A rap on the door jolts me out of a half-sleep. I don’t know how much time has passed, but it’s Shoffler, not Price, who steps into the room. “Let’s go,” he says.

  I know right away that something’s happened. His attitude toward me has changed, but in a way I can’t read. He turns off the tape recorder, and I follow him out to his car. It’s a big white Ford, a Crown Victoria. It’s daytime – morning. I spent the night in the interrogation room.

  It scares me when Shoffler holds open the door for me. Why is he suddenly solicitous of my feelings? Because: He feels sorry for me.

  When he gets in and fastens his seat belt, I brace myself, rigid against the expected somber tone, the terrible news, the very worst news. It isn’t until we’ve gone a couple of blocks that I realize I’m holding my breath.

  “The test came back,” Shoffler says, shaking his head.

  “What?” This is not what I’m expecting, and my relief is immediate and profound. “You mean the polygraph test?”

  “No,” Shoffler says. “No – the lab test. The test on the T-shirt.” He lets out a jet of air as he steers the car around a corner.

  “And… what?”

  “Chicken blood,” he says, with a quick look my way. “The shirt was soaked in chicken blood.”

  “Chicken blood!” I repeat, elated. I’m not sure what it means, but it’s good news, I know that much. The blood was not human blood. It wasn’t my kid’s blood.

  “UmmmHmmmm,” Shoffler says.

  I realize now what Jason Price was getting at with his questions about religion and animal sacrifice. My elation fades.

  “Look,” Shoffler says, “we pretty much, well, we also came up with some solid witnesses who saw you at the fair with the boys.”

  “Huh.”

  “Coupla fair employees,” Shoffler goes on. “The guy who runs the Jacob’s ladder – he remembered your boys real well. Told us one of the kids climbed the ladder like a monkey.”

  “Sean.”

  Shoffler nods. “Yeah, well for a while after your kid got to the top, there was a big line to try the ladder – older kids who figured if the little guy could do it, it must be a piece of cake. At a buck a try, the guy who ran the concession was grateful, so he had a good reason to remember.”

  “He just sort of came out of the woodwork?”

  “Had the Sunday and Monday off, so we didn’t get to him until this morning. He’s a local, doesn’t travel with the fair. And then after we questioned him, we wanted to check him out.” A sigh. “Make sure he doesn’t know you, doesn’t know Liz, doesn’t know the kids – that kind of thing. Actually, we got a number of fair employees who saw you and the kids. The guy who runs the archery concession – he remembers you and your boys real well. And there were others.”

  “Hunh.”

  “After we found that T-shirt, we had to check, you understand? Because if you went to the fair to set up an alibi – well…”

  “I guess.”

  “Look” – Shoffler is irritated and makes a dismissive gesture with his hand – “The chicken blood, all the people who saw you – none of that lets you off the hook.”

  “No?”

  “Think about it. Even if you’re at the fair with the boys, who’s to say you didn’t take them somewhere afterwards, you know? – then go back to Prebble yellin’ about how you can’t find your kids. The chicken blood? I don’t know. Maybe you got a secret life.” A blue Mercedes SUV cuts him off, and he reacts by hitting the horn. “Jesus, look at that guy. I should stick on the bubble. Anyway, what does get you off the hook is we got your afternoon pieced together now from stand-up witness to stand-up witness, got you covered from the time you dropped off the tape at the TV station with the kids in tow to the time you showed up at security saying the kids were missing.” He pauses. “So… looks like I owe you an apology, Alex.”

  We’re sitting at a light. My euphoria lasts about as long as it takes for the light to turn. Yes, it feels good that I’m no longer a suspect. But the kids are still gone. It’s still the same nightmare.

  I say nothing.

  “I’m sorry about the polygraph test,” Shoffler continues, “and that whole routine with Price. I apologize. I really do.”

  “You thought I did it.”

  He shrugs.

  We turn onto Klingle Road and head toward Connecticut. I look out the window, shake my head. “And in the meantime, whoever took my kids has all the time in the world…”

  I think of the kidnapper with my kids, in my house, that creepy folded rabbit, the line of dimes, the shirt soaked in blood. And me in the interrogation room – and all the while the trail getting colder.

  I rant on about this, and Shoffler just lets me go at it until finally, it seems pointless to continue. Out the window, a couple of little kids holding balloons from the zoo walk past with their mother. If only we’d gone to the zoo. I try to suppress these useless excursions into rearranging the past, but they pop up at least a hundred times a day. I press my eyes shut.

  After a while, Shoffler says: “This man with the dog, at the jousting ring. Got a couple of witnesses claim they saw him with your boys.”

  My heart goes cold. “You think that’s the guy?”

  “Well… we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. The tall man, the dog with the ruff – all that was in the news, so we take everything with a grain of salt. Still, we start asking if anyone saw the missing twins with this guy? And of course people did see this. Or at least they” – he makes quotation marks in the air – “think so.”

  “They think so.”

  “Lucky for us, somehow it never got into the news what kind of dog it was – so that gives us a kinda litmus test for the witnesses. We know it was a whippet, so if they saw a man with a German shepherd or a dachshund…”

  “Right.”

  “I was gonna ask you about what kinda look you got at the guy? You remember his face?”

  I hesitate. I can bring the scene up in my memory, but what I was looking for was Kevin and Sean, to reassure myself they were still where they were supposed to be. As soon as I spotted them in the crowd of cheering kids, I relaxed. “I don’t know,” I tell Shoffler. “I didn’t really pay attention. I noticed his costume, and the dog. I thought he worked for the fair.”

  “I’d like to put you with a sketch artist – see what you come up with. I’ll set it up.”

  The light changes and we turn onto Connecticut. “I’ve got a press conference at five,” Shoffler says. “You want to join me? You and Liz? I mean it’s your vindication. You maybe ought to be there to take questions.”

  There’s no maybe about it. I know what Claire Carosella would tell me. If it will maximize airtime, Liz and I will stand in front of the crowd of reporters all night.

  I know from experience what it will be like. They’ll shout each other down for the right to lob questions at us. The questions will be either rhetorical (“Are you relieved that suspicion has been lifted from your shoulders?”) or impossible to answer (“Do you feel the police are getting closer to finding your boys?”).

  “We’ll be there,” I tell him.

  In the next two days, energetic friends and neighbors rally around. Now that I’m no longer a
suspect, the floodgates are open again. The household is inundated with food – casseroles, cookies, salads, enormous baskets stuffed with every imaginable edible.

  Ordway Street is aglow with yellow ribbons. Connecticut Avenue is decorated, too, for blocks in both directions.

  A courier brings handmade cards from the boys’ fellow campers at St. Albans: Magic-Marker flowers, carefully printed words of support, cramped and juvenile signatures.

  The accumulation of teddy bears and flowers left at the curb gets to me. They remind me of roadside displays at crash sites, the posthumous tributes in Oklahoma City, the heaps of flowers and stuffed animals that followed Princess Di’s accident, the mounds of commemorative tribute outside Ground Zero. Funerary offerings.

  The police established a hotline and although they discourage the idea of a second one, a tag team of neighbors can’t be stopped. Jack organizes the volunteers who run this “totline,” coordinating their shifts. Unlike the official hotline, this one promises a reward plus confidentiality.

  My old friend Ezra Sidran, a computer genius, sponsors the construction of a website: findkevinandsean.com. Liz’s friend Molly launches a drive to enroll volunteers to monitor the site. Within two days it’s pulling in almost four hundred hits an hour.

  Since I’ve been exonerated, the station revives the reward fund, with Krista herself doing stand-ups to make appeals. Fox tops up its original seed money with another five grand. The station’s accounting firm contributes time to receive and tally contributed funds. Within a few days, the fund holds more than $90,000.

  A trio of Liz’s old running buddies organizes the printing and distribution of thousands of flyers. For the most part, we’re captives in the house, but we’re told that the boys’ faces are on every conceivable storefront, bus shelter, telephone pole, each flyer with its little fringe of tear-offs imprinted with the hotline number and Web address.

  I have a conference with Mary McCafferty, the private eye I hired to help search for the boys. She explains to me what she’s done, which is mostly to “troll for clues” by interviewing dozens of our friends and acquaintances – and new friends and acquaintances of Liz and the boys up in Maine. This has produced “nothing so far.” Recently, she’s been concentrating her efforts on household help: plumbers, babysitters, plaster repair guys, dishwasher installers, painters (I gave her the entire file of home-repair receipts). “It’s amazing how many times it turns out to be someone like that.”

 

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