Powers of Arrest

by Jon Talton

  Leaning forward, she said quietly, You must have really hated her to do such a horrible thing…”

  “I cared about her! I was grateful to her!”

  The room stayed silent for a long time. The prosecutor was getting antsy. Henderson turned motherly again. “I can understand. So you started out a little reluctant with her, you wanted a girl your age. And then you fell for her. She was attractive. Did she know you cared about her? How did she react?”

  “She laughed at me afterwards and never took my call again.”

  “Did that make you angry?”

  “It hurt.”

  “And made you angry.”

  “Yes.” His mouth turned down violently.

  Will saw a stranger’s face. It chilled him. His right quads starting jumping. It had come to this: what if he was wrong? What if John were about to confess?

  Henderson said, “You wanted to get back at her.”

  “No.” The stranger’s face went away.

  “These photos: you on the bed, you and her. Where were they taken?”

  “In her condo.” But Will already recognized the surroundings. At least that wasn’t a lie.

  “It must have really pissed you off when she dismissed you.”

  “It hurt,” he said. “I didn’t understand.”

  “Did you know she saw other men?”

  “No.” He sounded surprised.

  “You sure? She broke up with you, she was two-timing you. That would make any man really angry. Mad enough to take revenge.”

  “No! Never!”

  “Mad enough to kill her.”

  “I didn’t kill her!” Now the tears were coming down and his hands were helpless to wipe them away.

  She let him stew for several minutes. Will had a sudden sense of disorientation. For a moment, from the back with her fair hair, Henderson looked like the avenging ghost of Kristen Gruber. The ghost pointed and spoke: “How about these pictures here?”

  “We went bike riding.”

  “Where?”

  “The trail out in Loveland, that used to be train tracks.”

  Will whispered, “Goddamn.”

  “It’s a nice place,” Henderson said. “Do you go there often?”

  “A few times.”

  “Have you been there this spring?”

  He nodded.

  “Speak up, John.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I was out there a few weeks ago.”

  “With some friends?”

  “Alone.”

  Henderson flipped through her portfolio and put a photo of Lauren Benish in front of him.

  “Did you see her?”

  “No.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure. She’s pretty. I would have noticed.”

  “I bet you would have. I bet you did. She was also murdered last weekend.”

  John’s face lost all its color.

  “Now wait a minute…”

  “John, we know you went to bars at Oxford. She was a nursing student at Miami. What if I have a witness who said you were on the trail with her and then started stalking her?”

  “That’s crazy! I never…”

  Henderson said, “Let’s go through this again.”

  Dodds turned down the speaker and said, “What do you think?”

  “We don’t have enough to hold him once his mother gets here with a lawyer,” the prosecutor said.

  Will shook his head, looked back at Cheryl Beth for some reassurance. She telegraphed it. He said, “I don’t know what the hell to think, J.C. He’s lied and lied. But he’s not bald.”

  “You can buy a bald cap from the Internet. It’d be a good disguise, because that’s the first thing any witness would remember.”

  Will said, “You don’t really think…”

  “No,” Dodds said. “He’s tall but looks out of shape. I don’t see him overpowering Noah Smith. He doesn’t have a knife.”

  Now the hole in Will’s stomach was big enough to drop a baseball through.

  “But,” Dodds continued, “It’s all what a jury believes.”

  He turned the speaker back up.

  “So she liked it rough,” Henderson was saying. “Liked to be tied up.”

  “Not by me,” John said. “I didn’t like that. It scared me.”

  “You never tied her up?”

  “I wouldn’t. She wanted me to. She wanted me to call her names and slap her, force myself on her. She said it helped her get off.”

  Henderson shook her head and pushed back the chair. “Now you’re lying to me again, John. Why would any woman enjoy that?”

  He tried to answer but couldn’t form the words through his sobs.

  When he was able to speak, they could barely hear him. “I tried to understand why she was that way. Finally, she told me she’d been raped when she was twenty-five. She’d been on duty when it happened. I don’t know if that had anything to do with how she was, but that was all she’d tell me.”

  A tap came at their door and a uniformed officer stuck his head inside.

  “His mother and lawyer are here, raising hell.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  They made it out to the parking lot and into the car before Will’s phone rang. Cheryl Beth could only hear his side of the conversation.

  “Yes, chief…I told Detective Dodds this morning and Covington brought him down for interrogation…No, sir, he lives with his mother, my ex-wife…No, sir…” She watched his face lose its color. “I haven’t read it yet…I don’t know how they could have put together the information about Noah Smith…”

  She felt her body tense at the mention of Noah’s name.

  Will kept talking, “So the Oxford cops said nothing?” The voice on the other end talked a long time. Will silently gripped his leg. “Sir, with all due respect to Lieutenant Fassbinder, he’s misremembering. I urged him to go public with the connection between Oxford and Gruber. I think it might help bring forward some new witnesses, throw the suspect off balance. Lieutenant Fassbinder declined my advice…Yes, sir…I’d really like to be there. If for no other reason because I think the suspect still might try to make contact with me…”

  The police jargon both amused and horrified her. “Contact me.” Sure as hell.

  “I don’t believe John is the suspect, sir,” Will said. “He’s stupid and was in the wrong time and wrong place. Based on that, he might end up like Noah Smith, who was a suspect once himself…”

  Cheryl Beth hadn’t even considered that. She watched Covington cops coming and going.

  Will gave a final “yes, sir” and put the phone down, a defeated look on his face.

  “The Dayton Daily News had a story this morning saying the suspect in the Miami killings had committed suicide in Cincinnati last week. The chief wants to know how they put that together. How the hell do I know? We never released Noah’s name. The newspaper didn’t even call me for a comment. Hank Brooks was helpful, giving a ‘no comment,’ which makes a good reporter think something’s being hidden. Goddamn it to hell…”

  She put a hand on his arm. He slumped into the seat.

  “Now I have to explain this disaster with John. And Fassbinder told the chief that I was the one who said we shouldn’t go public with the connection between Gruber and your students. Damn him. If you don’t mind, would you pull the knife out of my back?”

  She smiled. He didn’t.

  “They’re going to give a media briefing this afternoon and bring in the Oxford murders and their connection to Gruber. I’m not to be there. The chief wants me to take a leave.”

  He suddenly slammed his fist on the steering wheel.

  “I’m useless! I’m done! All they see is this fucking cane and they judge me. They keep it to themselves in their nice Cincinnati way, but they judge me and stab me in the back. I’ve cleared more homicide cases than anyone in the unit except for Dodds, but does that mean anything? No. I didn’t even want this case, but the chief assigned me. Now I’m a liabi
lity. I’m a cripple who can’t cut it anymore…”

  “Stop that!” The words were out of her mouth before she realized it, and all the tension and anger that she had held inside blew out like a high-pressure oil well. “You are not useless, or done, or a liability! The only one who sees that cane is you. The only one who doesn’t see a tall, handsome, impressive man is you. Do you know how lucky you are, Will Borders? Do you remember all those people in neuro-rehab, the quads who couldn’t move the arms and legs? I see people every day who are sick and dying. You’re alive and strong! You got a second chance that so many people never get!”

  She was fighting tears now. She tended to cry when she got mad. But her anger quickly dissipated.

  In the silence, he took her hand and held it to his face. She could feel his tears, too. His kissed her palm, whispered, “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

  The car’s layout, with radios and a computer between the seats, made it difficult, but she scrunched over and gave him a long hug. She didn’t care who was watching.

  “No displays of affection in an official police vehicle!”

  It was Dodds, standing by Will’s door.

  “Check this out.” He handed an official-looking piece of paper to Will. The upper part showed a mug shot of a hard face staring at the camera and above it no hair.

  “Charles Wayne Whitaker,” Will said. “Registered sex offender. Convicted of raping a woman in Columbus ten years ago.”

  “Yep,” Dodds said. “It gets better. Remember Kristen’s fan mail? We took it back from Covington. They didn’t have the manpower. So I had police recruits go through two-hundred letters yesterday. Mister Whitaker wrote to Kristen, telling her all the things he’s like to do to her.”

  “No shit? Does Henderson know?”

  “I’m going to tell her. Why do all your white psychos have Wayne as a middle name?”

  “Yours have De-Wayne,” Will shot back, but she could see his body relax.

  Dodds put a hand on Will’s shoulder. “We’re going to get him. All this is going to work out.”

  “Chief wants me to take a leave.”

  “Oh, bullshit.”

  “Yes, sir, Chief Dodds.”

  They rode back through Covington’s old streets in silence. From the bridge, she could see the river filled with pleasure craft, as if Kristen Gruber’s murder had never happened.

  “Turn here,” she said quietly once they reached the other side.

  She gave a couple more directions and he knew where she wanted to go. In five minutes, they slipped out of downtown, around Mount Adams, and into Eden Park. It was the grandest of Cincinnati’s hilltop parks, with its abundance of trees, grass, gardens, and a view into the distant blue-green hills that instantly relaxed her. The flowers were in full bloom, in more colors than she could count or name. He illegally parked where they could look across the shallow reflecting pond of Mirror Lake at the gazebo. Its jet-stream fountain shot six stories in the air. For a long time, they sat and took in the views, the sweet spring air, and the people walking and sitting in a happy normality, where babies didn’t die, men weren’t struck down in their prime, and killers didn’t roam the darkness.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “I should call the university and get them to send my students home. I should have done this before, but first I thought…” Noah Smith’s face hovered before her and she stopped herself. “First I didn’t know if Noah was the killer. Then, I thought my students wouldn’t be in danger because the killer was after you, after us. There’s no excuse. They’ve worked so hard for this clinical time and it’s almost the end of the semester. They want to get this over with. That’s the way I felt when I was a student nurse. But they can make it up in the summer. They’re all potential targets of this Charles Whitaker.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said.

  “Do I have your permission to tell them there’s a killer at large?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  He smiled. “I’m already in trouble. It’s my middle name. William Howard Taft Trouble Borders.”

  “Then, I’ll be at loose ends,” she said. “They probably won’t even pay me for the rest of the semester.”

  She watched him carefully. His eyes looked so tired.

  “Maybe if you’re not sick of my company,” he said, “we could…”

  She smiled. “I’m not sick of your company, Will.”

  “If you want to leave, I understand,” he said quietly. “Now would be a good time because…”

  “I don’t!”

  She spoke over him, regretted it, because he might have thought she didn’t hear the rest of his sentence.

  “I’m falling in love with you, too,” she said. “You’re the bravest, truest man I’ve ever known. I lost my temper back there because I can’t stand to hear you talk about yourself that way. Maybe a year after my daughter died, a friend of mine was talking about something in her family, and she said, ‘I guess everything happens for a reason.’ I asked her if she really believed that, because at that moment I thought the whole universe was so fucked up that nobody knew why anything happened. That’s how angry I was for years, and I still don’t know why these things happen, why life is so unfair. I know how much discomfort and pain you’re in. I know how hard it is to stand and walk and make it look easy. You carry it off with such grace. I’m not sure I could. But you do it every day. You can tell me stories that make me fall in love with this city all over again. You’re a wonderful lover. You’re kind. But more than any of that, Will Borders, you stand for something good. You’re willing to fight for it. In this fucked-up, unfair universe, the only hope and protection we have are people like you. And if your bosses are acting like assholes, it’s not because of your physical condition. It’s because they’re assholes.”

  He ran his hand across her hair, touched the curve of her cheek, and brought his lips to hers. The kiss lasted until they heard a tap on a horn. A marked police car behind them was saying, move along, get a room. When the cop swung alongside, she waved and Will saluted back.

  She laughed. “No displays of affection in an official police vehicle.”

  Will’s phone rang. He answered it and listened, then put it away.

  “Well, that was short but pleasurable. I hope it was good for you, too.” His voice had a cutting tone. “That was Dodds. Turns out Charles Wayne Whitaker has been in jail in Indianapolis for the past month. Hell.”

  Cheryl Beth sighed. “So back to square one?”

  He dropped the shift into drive.

  “Maybe not,” he said, “Let’s go catch a killer.”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  The Seven Hills Marina sat on the other side of Lunken Airport, where Kellogg Avenue crossed the Little Miami River. It was separated from the river by a tree-lined sandbar. Hills covered with more thick trees rose up in every direction. Through the marina’s mouth, a boater would steer into the brown Little Miami, turn south, go around a bend, and the big Ohio River awaited: running fast nearly a thousand miles from Pittsburgh all the way to the Mississippi near Cairo, Illinois. There, the Ohio was actually the larger river.

  The marina seemed in the country and a little down-market for Kenneth Buchanan, although it was fairly close to his house. Aside from parking lots, outbuildings, storage sheds, and boats for sale, it had room for five sets of floating berths, each one having several slips. They had wide walkways in the center and then narrow walks out to the boats. You learned many things working homicide and from a case several years ago, Will knew the narrow walkways were called fingerfloats.

  He also knew from the reports of the detectives that had already been out here where Kristen’s boat had been moored. It was gone now, evidence. Buchanan’s big boat was tied up and looked deserted. About half the slips were empty. In others, groups of people were aboard their boats, either coming back or preparing to go out. It was a warm afternoon and everyone looked happy. Will parked w
here he had a view and turned off the engine.

  “What are you looking for?” Cheryl Beth asked.

  “I don’t know. I keep thinking about the river…”

  “Mind if I make phone calls?”

  He didn’t mind. While she called her bosses and explained the situation, Will watched.

  When his phone rang, he stepped outside to take the call.

  “Detective Borders?” It was a man with a heavy Southern accent, a harsh sound with none of the lilt and music in Cheryl Beth’s voice.

  “This is Special Agent Ricky Northcutt with the FBI,” the man said. “I’ve been out on vacation and only got back to Atlanta yesterday. I saw your ViCAP request.”

  Will leaned on the hood and his pulse picked up. “That’s right. It came back with no matches.”

  “That might not be quite true,” the fed drawled. “There was nothing for metro Atlanta. But we had a case in Athens two-and-a-half years ago. A coed at the University of Georgia was kidnapped and her body turned up the next day. It had the same genital mutilation you describe. And the scene was clean as a whistle. Not a damned bit of DNA or much other evidence.”

  “Much other?”

  “She was restrained,” he said. “Her wrists seemed to have been tied with duct tape. There were marks on her wrists and some duct-tape fiber. Works for everything, right?”

  “How far is Athens from Atlanta?” Will had never been to Georgia.

  Northcutt said about sixty miles. “I’m not sure if that’s any help to you. I would have called sooner, but our resources are stretched so thin now on criminal cases. Anti-terrorism is the priority…”

  “Any suspects?”

  “Not a one. The other thing that caught my eye about your report was the word ‘deathscape.’ There was an index card pinned on this girl’s forehead that said, ‘Deathscape Number One.’ It was written in block letters with a felt-tipped pen.”

  Will stood and nervously walked around the car, taking the information in.

  “Was she a nursing student?”

  “No,” Northcutt said. “I think she was computer science. But she was out on a secluded trail near campus, riding alone on her bicycle.”