By His Own Hand

by Neal Griffin

  “You’re getting yourself all wrapped up, drawn into this case. You’ll just keep heaping it on until finall—”

  “That’s not going to happen this time.” There was some anger in her voice. “It’s a suicide. I think I can handle it.”

  “You said yourself, he was just a kid.”

  “Look, I do the interview with the mom, tie up a few other loose ends, and I’m done, case closed. At least it will be for me,” Tia added, wondering about Livy’s potential reaction to this development.

  “Loose ends, huh?” It came out cruel whether he meant it to or not. She dropped his hands and turned her back.

  “It’s my job, Connor.” A job they both knew she had come very close to losing.

  It had only been a month, thirty-nine days, to be exact, that Tia had been tying up another loose end on a case. A neighboring agency had needed a Spanish translator to interview migrant workers about a sexual assault on a fifteen-year-old girl. The crime scene had been a barn but Tia had to walk through a cornfield to get to it. When she arrived on scene, the victim had already been transported to the hospital in Madison. All Tia needed to do was interview a few peripheral witnesses. She never met the victim, never even saw her.

  Her new private shrink, a nice woman with a practice out of Milwaukee, called it a “trigger,” which had struck Tia right away as a screwed-up label to lay on a cop trying to come back from a pretty nasty shooting. But whatever it was called, the case sent her reeling. She’d slipped and in a big way.

  “Fine, Tia. Go.” She heard doubt in Connor’s voice, and maybe a touch of cynicism. “But when you come up on one of those loose ends that you just can’t manage to tie off, make sure you don’t pull on the rope too hard.”

  As predicted, the trip took less than an hour. After Deputy Jensen spent ten minutes admiring her ride and walking her down his personal teenage hot-rod memory lane, Tia managed to get the vitals on mother and son.

  Apparently both were frequent flyers with the sheriff’s office. Mom, a well-known local hype, had numerous priors for under the influence, petty theft, and solicitation. The boy had been hooked up for an auto theft that had been knocked down to joyriding, then followed that up with a couple of assaults.

  “His last beef was assault with great bodily harm. That landed him in Lincoln Hills up in Irma. According to his sheet he got out a little over three months ago. They must have got his attention, because he’s been laying pretty low.”

  On paper at least the kid struck Tia as one of those hardhead cases that got offered a second chance, then came back for a third and a fourth. It seemed to her that the combination of addict parent and shithead kid was quick becoming the new nuclear family of the rural poor. The deputy offered to tag along but Tia cut him loose, promising to text when she cleared his town.

  Tia followed the deputy’s directions to a single-wide set off a county road five miles outside of Milton. The trailer, not much more than a tin hotbox on cement blocks, sat perched on the edge of a plowed-up field of cracked dirt that Tia guessed hadn’t seen a crop in five years. The driveway was about a quarter-mile long and as Tia got close, a woman in short, cut-off jeans and a tube top came out to stand on a tiny landing that the trailer manufacturer probably promoted as a porch.

  A dark-skinned little girl with a head of kinky brown hair, somewhere around four or five, followed the woman out and stood at her side. A few seconds after that a toddler wearing nothing but a diaper emerged. Tia couldn’t be sure if the littler one, who was as pale as the mother, was a boy or a girl.

  The woman cocked her head and looked suspiciously at Tia out of the corner of one clear eye, the other being creamed over with a buttery yellow glaze. She hugged two bony arms across her body, a cigarette smoldering between fingers she had wrapped around a red plastic cup.

  “That don’t look like no county car I’ve ever seen,” she said as Tia parked and got out of the GTO.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  “Ain’t you Social Services?” Her voice was lazy with phlegm and her lips looked cotton dry. She raised the cup and slurped off the rim, but it sounded as if she had to settle for mostly ice. “Your surprise monthly visit, right?”

  “I don’t know anything about that, ma’am.” Tia held back on identifying herself. “Are you Carla Hayes?”

  The woman’s expression and voice turned wary. “Who’s asking?”

  “I’m a police detective, ma’am.”

  “Driving that?” She pointed a finger at the GTO, still looking at Tia.

  Not about to explain, Tia held up her badge. “Detective Suarez from Newberg. Are you Mrs. Hayes?”

  The woman gave a bit of a snort. “Say it all fancy. Mrs. Hayes.”

  “Carla Hayes.” Tia said it sharply, letting the woman know she was running out of patience. “Yes or no?”

  “I’m Carla but ain’t never been a Mrs. anybody. I guess by looking at all this you’d think so, huh?” She leaned over the railing, looking down on Tia, and gave a sweep of her hand. “Me and all my fine things. These here beautiful children.”

  Tia took a look around and saw an AMC Gremlin sat parked at the end of the trailer, the distinctive rear end poking out from under a canvas tarp. What she could see of the car was layered in an inch of dust and sat on two flat tires. The only green things growing in the hard dirt were tall weeds and random patches of scrub grass. A rusty swing set and a couple of overturned trikes stood as markers of rural poverty. Tia figured Carla spent most afternoons self-medicated, anesthetized against the squalor of what looked to be a pretty damn meager life.

  Judging by her loose gestures and slurred speech, Tia figured Carla would blow around a one-five. Maybe even a little higher, but over the years she’d obviously developed some resilience, and she seemed to be functioning well enough. She was standing rock steady and had no problems being conversational.

  “So now tell me.” Carla kept up with her role-playing. “Why is there a Newberg detective in my courtyard?”

  Tia took a deep breath. Time to get it over with. “I understand from the Rock County sheriff you reported your son, Henry, as a runaway?”

  The playacting stopped and the woman’s voice turned angry. “Well, shit. What now? Goddamn that boy.”

  Tia walked to the bottom of the two steps so her head was right at the woman’s waist. Here it comes, she thought. She looked up to make direct eye contact. “Can we go inside, ma’am?”

  “Why? What’s he gone and done?”

  The woman was slower than most. “Maybe it would be better if we talk inside.” Tia looked at the children, then back at their mother. “In private, I think.”

  That line seemed to do the trick. Carla finally flipped from anger to borderline panic. “Wait. Where is he? Why are you here?”

  “Let’s step inside, Carla. Is it okay if I call you Carla?”

  The woman dropped to the tin porch as if someone had swept her legs out from under her, suddenly face-to-face with Tia, the porch rails separating them like the bars of a jail cell. She pulled the toddler roughly into her lap; the child tried to break away and began to cry. The older girl studied Tia, her face calm with fascination.

  At some point, Tia knew, there would be shrieking. There was always shrieking. When it came, Tia wondered if the truckers passing by on the highway heard Carla scream.

  “Tell me, goddamn it. Just tell me where my Henry is.”

  Tia figured that notifying this pathetic woman about the death of her son while they were clustered around the stairway of a run-down mobile home was no better or worse than doing it inside. When parents learned they’d just become lifetime members of the world’s worst social club, it never went as planned.

  “I’m afraid he’s dead, ma’am.” Tia forced herself to take the woman’s shaking hand. “Henry is dead.”

  THIRTEEN

  Tia sat next to Carla on a floral-print couch in a room so small that if she stretched out her arms, she’d be able to touch both of the thin m
etal walls. It had taken several minutes to get a histrionic Carla into the trailer; she’d sobbed inconsolably for fifteen minutes after that. Tia had managed to settle the children in front of a television, spreading a dingy bedsheet over a brittle, threadbare carpet that crunched under her boots. She figured out the ancient top-loading VCR and stuck in a copy of Finding Nemo. Both children dropped down and stared with vacuous attention at the bleary picture on the twenty-inch screen. Tia was pretty certain the same distraction strategy had been used on these two before.

  Carla Hayes was slumped on the couch, exhausted and spent, head lolling back, eyes closed, dull brown hair lifeless against her bony shoulders. She was that indeterminate age, anywhere between thirty-five and sixty—years of drug abuse had taken a hard toll, leaving her with the sucked-in look found mostly on POW’s or hard-core addicts. Her cut-off jeans extended just past her crotch, exposing ghost-white legs dimpled with cellulite. A frilly orange tube top lay nearly flat against her sunken chest. Her paper-thin skin was the color of paste, dotted with blotches of dried blood on her arms and legs, several oozing a yellowish pus.

  “How much are you using?” Tia asked. “I’m guessing heroin?”

  Carla moaned and wordlessly waved her off, scratching in slow motion at one of the many scabs on her face.

  “Are you sick right now?” Tia knew the answer. She was sure the woman had been using the alcohol to hold off the pain of physical withdrawal but the sudden stress of the moment had brought on the early pains of detoxification.

  Carla gave a weak nod. Tia could see her gray, chipped teeth when she spoke. “Henry was supposed to re-up. But he left yesterday and now…”

  Her voice trailed off but she was done crying over him. “How could he leave me like this?”

  “What do you mean, ‘re-up’? Henry was an addict?”

  “No.” Her head turned back and forth against the couch, eyes closed. “Henry takes care of me is all.”

  “Henry’s your hook-up?” Tia couldn’t keep the judgment from her voice.

  “Never mind all that,” Carla snapped back. “Where is he? I want to see him.”

  Tia pulled her cell phone from her pocket and swiped to the close-up photo of the hand. “Do you recognize this tattoo, Carla?”

  Carla took the phone from Tia and held it inches from her face with a look of bleary-eyed concentration. Slowly her face contorted and she forced out her words: “That’s Henry. That’s his hand. He did that to himself. It was just his initials is all.”

  With the identity confirmed by next of kin, Tia went to take her phone back but not before Carla swiped the screen. The next picture showed the entire body.

  “Jesus-fucking-A-Christ!” Carla threw the phone across the room and put her hands to her face. Her breath came in large ragged gulps, growing in intensity. Tia knew what was coming. She moved back just as Carla turned her head and leaned over the side of the couch, her shoulders hunched. Typical of addicts, there was no actual projection, but a weak heave produced a stream of brown liquid mixed with gray chunks that dribbled onto the carpet, creating a new stain pattern over an old one. The baby looked their way for a moment, then turned back to the screen. The older girl took no notice at all.

  Cursing under her breath, Tia retrieved her phone. It had hit the wall and landed on a relatively nontoxic section of the carpet. She held it up and gave it a close look before reluctantly putting it back in her pocket. She’d de-con it when she got back to the car. She waited impatiently for Carla to finish heaving. She had no sense of fraternal kinship with drunks and addicts. When Tia slipped, she was a “leave me the hell alone” drunk. She never went looking for sympathy and rarely handed it out. Surveying the room, Tia found a moist rag on a lamp table and threw it in Carla’s general direction.

  “Here. Clean yourself up.”

  Ignoring the rag, Carla pulled herself to her feet. She staggered through a nearby doorway and Tia heard more retching followed by the flush of a toilet. A glance at the kids made Tia wonder just what it would take to get a reaction out of them. Anger set up at the edge of her mind, but it was better than despair.

  “This is just great,” Tia mumbled to herself. The summer heat had pushed the temperature in the trailer to somewhere around eighty-plus. She looked around at the space crammed with furniture, junk, and trash. Pizza boxes. Fast-food wrappers. Near the door, a dozen or so shiny green blowflies chowed down on dried-up cat food in a plastic dish. The only other sign of a cat was the lingering stench of urine. Rickety particleboard cabinets hung from the low, eight-foot ceiling and served to partition the kitchen from the living room. Yellowed tape held a number of photographs to a wall of fake wood paneling.

  Tia stepped over for a closer look. One showed a young woman, maybe in her early twenties, standing alongside a mountain of a man with dark skin and jet black hair that hung down past his broad shoulders. Tall and well built, he stood shirtless, his arm draped possessively around the woman’s neck, glaring into the camera. Tia looked close, and concluded the woman was a younger and healthy version of Carla. Her body curvy and full, thick blond hair falling halfway down her back. Her eyes were bright and blue if not a bit tainted with boredom. No doubt about it, the years and the dope had hollowed the woman out.

  Another image was a wallet-size school photo that showed a young boy, eight or nine years old, also with deep brown skin and shiny dark hair, but cut in a choppy, home-done style. He wore a shy smile that showed off the sort of dimples that might eventually open a lot of doors and maybe even break some hearts. Cute kid, she thought, then picked up on a sorrowful look in his near-black eyes. Another photo showed the same boy in his early teens. Carla, still attractive but looking more worn, stood alongside him. Tia could see in her the first signs of the hard life that lay ahead.

  The boy was shorter than his mother, and with a body that seemed out of proportion. His posture was hunched in a way that made him appear smaller still. A cigarette hung from his lips and he held a bottle of Jack Daniel’s down low by his hip. He stood with his weight on one foot and looked into the camera in a way that told the photographer to just get it over with. Tia looked close at the hand around the whiskey bottle and saw the blurred image of a tattoo.

  “Well, hey there, Henry.”

  “Who would do that to him? Kill him like that?” Tia turned and saw Carla standing in the doorway of the bathroom, eyelids drooping. “Who killed my son?”

  Tia zeroed right in on the fresh needle track in the fold of the woman’s left arm and the skin burn from the tie-off still visible as a faded red line encircling her scrawny bicep.

  “Goddamn it, Carla!” Tia shouted, rushing forward. Both kids looked up. She grabbed Carla by the chin and looked into her pinpoint pupils. Shoving past her into the bathroom, Tia found a half-dozen dirty, orange-tinted cotton balls, a syringe, lighter, and spoon. No sign of actual product. No doubt the woman needed a fix but by the look of things, all she’d been able to do was chip at it.

  Returning to the living room, Tia found Carla starting to nod off on the couch, a chunk of vomit still stuck like jelly to her chin. The kids had checked out again, staring at a school of cartoon fish pursued by a shark.

  To counteract the little bit of dope, Tia forced Carla to sit up and drink some warm, watered-down Coke from a Big Gulp cup left out on a table. She scrounged around on a bookshelf and found a cellophane bag of candy corn. When Carla tried to turn her head away, Tia shoved them into her mouth two at a time and ordered her to chew.

  “Carla, you can’t be slamming dope with kids in the house.”

  “I ain’t slamming nothin’,” Carla said, chunks of candy dribbling from her mouth. “Don’t you get it? That’s the problem. I’m sick.”

  “Cotton shooters count, Carla. You say Social Services comes over? Do you know what they’re going to do to you if they show up now?”

  “What happened to Henry?” Her voice was a raspy whine. “Where is he?”

  Tia asked the obvious question
: “Carla, did Henry ever talk about wanting to hurt himself?”

  “What? Henry? Suicide?” Carla managed to sit up on the couch and flipped yet another emotional switch. “Never. He’d never do that. I can’t believe you think that.”

  You bet, Tia thought, looking around. What a crazy leap that would be.

  Tia imagined a boy, growing to be a man, living in this trailer with this woman. She wanted to lash out, to scream, What else would anyone think? She breathed in deep to control her anger.

  “You told the deputy a gun is missing from the house, right?”

  Carla’s voice became less certain. “It was his father’s. But that doesn’t mean—”

  Tia swiped through the pictures on her phone until she came to the shotgun. Gripping the phone firmly, she held it inches from Carla’s face. Carla reached for the device and Tia pulled it away.

  “Just look,” Tia said flatly, with no trace of sympathy. “Does that look like the gun?”

  Carla leaned in, squinting at the phone. “It looks the same, but what does that mean? Who killed Henry?”

  Tia put the phone back in a pocket of her jeans. “When Henry left, he took the shotgun with him. And that’s the gun that killed him, Carla. Do you think maybe, just maybe, Henry was … I don’t know. Hurting? Upset about something you didn’t know about?”

  “Henry? Hurting?” Carla scoffed at the thought. Tia watched as she pulled her withered body to her feet with the effort expected from a person who weighed three hundred pounds not ninety-five. She pushed and stumbled her way past Tia, took three steps from the couch to the kitchen, and scooped an open pack of Newports off the counter. “Believe me. Henry don’t hurt. Him and all his bad-ass Chippewa blood.”

  Carla dug her finger into the crumpled cellophane and came out with a mangled cigarette. She tossed the empty pack on the floor and held the last smoke up to her face, caressing and stroking it back into shape. She pulled back her stringy hair and leaned over the gas stove to fire up. In the second before the blue flame flicked to life, Tia pictured a small explosion, but no luck. Carla straightened and took a deep pull on the cigarette, staring at the pictures taped to the wall.