Gone Again

by James Grippando

  “I don’t live there. How would I know?”

  Jack stayed with it. “And to be honest, you didn’t seem all that eager to call nine-one-one. You seemed more keen on finding a way to blame Debra for his disappearance.”

  “Gavin, I don’t see this as productive,” said Nicole.

  Jack kept going. “And then I talked to Aquinnah. I heard what I heard. My client is innocent.”

  Gavin was getting that look on his face that Jack had seen at their first meeting—when Gavin had threatened to punch him out. “What you heard,” says Gavin, “is a twenty-year-old woman with the emotional maturity of a seventeen-year-old girl who is still not over her parents’ divorce and will do anything to get her mother’s love and attention. It’s like the old joke, Swyteck. How many seventeen-year-old girls does it take to change a lightbulb? One: she stands still, and the rest of the world revolves around her.”

  “I’ve heard it,” Jack said drily, staying on task. “Here’s the bottom line, Gavin. I believe Aquinnah gave her sister those pills. And I don’t believe you would have let my client die for a murder he didn’t commit just to keep it a secret that Aquinnah encouraged her sister to commit suicide.”

  “I would never let anyone die for a murder he didn’t commit.”

  “You might,” said Jack. “To save yourself.”

  “That’s fantasy.”

  “Is it?” asked Jack. “Here’s my theory on why Aquinnah took Alexander. She was worried that her father was going to take him and rehome him.”

  “That’s such a stupid thing to say,” said Gavin. “Anyone who was even halfway paying attention at the hearing would know that one parent can’t rehome a child. It takes both.”

  “Not if the mother has lost custody,” said Jack, tightening his glare. “That’s why you sicced DCFS on Debra, isn’t it? Did you do it anonymously, Gavin? What horrendous lies did you pass along to the department to make those social workers drive out to Debra’s house and threaten to take away her son after all the suffering she’s been through?”

  Jack noted the suspicious glance that Nicole suddenly shot in her client’s direction. Gavin was simply glowering.

  “Really, Swyteck? What conceivable reason would I have to rehome a perfect son like Alexander?”

  “Because your perfect son was home on that Friday night,” said Jack, leveling his gaze—ready to take his shot. “He was no sleeping baby. He was a very smart six-year-old. Old enough and smart enough to know that you killed Sashi.”

  “What?”

  “Okay, that is it!” said Nicole as she rose from behind her desk. “This meeting is officially over. Gavin, do not say another word. Mr. Swyteck, the only thing further that I want to hear from you is ‘goodbye.’”

  Gavin remained in his chair, fuming. Nicole walked around her desk, as if ready to lift Jack from his chair if he didn’t move fast enough. Jack rose, locking eyes with Gavin, reading what nearly two decades of experience in criminal law had taught him to read.

  “I’m right,” Jack said—and he knew he was.

  Jack turned and showed himself to the door.

  CHAPTER 69

  Andie’s talk with Alexander was at the one-hour mark.

  She’d tried to keep his recounting of the day of Sashi’s disappearance on some semblance of a timeline, starting with when he’d arrived home from school that afternoon. But he kept getting ahead of things. Each time Andie brought him back to the chronology, he’d skip ahead again. It was obviously painful for him; yet a part of him seemed eager to tell them—to finally tell someone—about the last time he saw Sashi.

  They were just passing the point when Aquinnah had burst into Sashi’s bedroom and thrown something at her. He didn’t know that it had been his mother’s sleeping pills—but Andie did.

  “Where were you, Alexander, when that happened?”

  “In the bathroom—the one between our bedrooms.”

  They’d covered the upstairs floor plan earlier. Debra had originally divided the “Jack and Jill” bedrooms between Sashi and Aquinnah, but the wars over the common bathroom, which was accessible from either room, eventually became epic. Aquinnah had moved to the room down the hall. Alexander became “Jack”; Sashi was “Jill.”

  “Could you see anything from inside the bathroom?” asked Andie.

  He nodded. “Through the crack. The door doesn’t slide all the way closed.”

  There was a pocket door, Andie inferred, between Sashi’s room and the bathroom. “What did you see?”

  He swallowed the little lump in his throat. “Sashi. She was crying.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “They were fighting.”

  “Arguing? Or fighting?”

  He blinked, as if fending off a bad memory. “Yelling. There was a lot of yelling. I was scared. So I hid in the bathroom.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I just stayed in the bathroom.”

  “How long?”

  “A long time.”

  “Did you see anything else?”

  He nodded. “After a while, I looked through the crack again. I saw Sashi.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “Sleeping.”

  “Did you see anything else?”

  He paused for a minute, seeming to gather his thoughts. “Yes. Later. After my dad came home.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I heard him first.”

  “Okay. What did you hear?”

  “He came up the steps. Real fast. Real hard.”

  “Like he was running?”

  “Yeah. In the hall, too. Sounded like running.”

  “Then what?”

  “I heard Sashi’s door open.”

  “You didn’t hear a knock first?”

  He twisted his mouth, thinking. “No. No knock. It was like the door flew open. And then he started yelling, ‘Sashi! Sashi! Wake up, Sashi!’”

  “What were you doing then? When he was yelling at Sashi to wake up.”

  “I was so scared. I was still in the bathroom. But I peeked out the crack.”

  “What did you see?”

  His voice shook as he answered. “Sashi was on the bed. She was kind of sitting up, but slouchy, like she was still sleeping. Dad was holding her up, but it was like she kept wanting to fall back.”

  Andie paused to let the image in her mind come into focus. “What else did you see?”

  He looked at Andie and then at the psychiatrist. The words seemed trapped in his mouth.

  Dr. Cohen brought out the doll they’d been using before—the Sashi doll—and gave it to Andie, who placed the doll on the blanket. The three of them formed the points of a surrounding triangle.

  “Okay, Alexander. So this is Sashi lying on her bed,” Andie said. “Where was your father?”

  He pointed, indicating the spot next to Sashi. “He was standing right there.”

  “Standing up in the bed?” asked Andie.

  Alexander shook his head. “No. Sashi was in the bed. He was standing on the floor. Over Sashi.”

  “Okay? What did you see next?”

  Alexander focused his gaze on the doll. “He . . . reached toward Sashi.”

  “With one hand or two hands?”

  “Two hands.”

  “Show me how he held his hands,” said Andie.

  Alexander laid the left palm over the back of his right hand.

  “Good,” said Andie. “Did he touch Sashi?”

  He nodded slowly.

  Andie paused, trying extra hard to tread gently. “Show me how he touched her.”

  Alexander kept his hands as they were as he rose up on both knees. Then he leaned toward the doll. Slowly, his hands moved toward the doll’s face. He placed both hands over the doll and pressed down—and not just for an instant.

  “How long did he keep his hands there?” asked Andie.

  Alexander kept pressing. Tears started to fall. “A long, long time.”

  “Did Sashi move?�
��

  A teardrop fell from his chin and landed on the doll. “Just her leg. A little.”

  “What did your dad do when her leg moved?”

  “Nothing. He just kept pressing. And then her leg stopped.”

  Andie quietly drew a breath. “Then what did he do?”

  Alexander eased up on the pressure he was putting on the doll’s face. “Dad took his hands away.”

  Andie gave him a few seconds. “Then what?”

  Alexander sat back on his haunches, staring down at the doll on the blanket. “Sashi didn’t move.”

  An eerie silence came over the room. Andie could only imagine what Debra was going through in the next room, behind the one-way mirror.

  “Do you want to take a break now, Alexander?”

  He sniffled back his tears and nodded.

  Andie had seen a lot with the Bureau, heard too many horrible stories, and thought she’d gone tough on the inside. But she had to fight the urge to hug this boy—and fight hard she did. They were being videotaped, and in her world, a display of affection or even of concern would only have given Gavin Burgette’s future criminal defense lawyer a basis to argue that a pregnant FBI agent had co-opted this child and planted a story in his head.

  “Thank you, Alexander,” she said in an approving tone. “You’re a very brave boy.”

  CHAPTER 70

  Jack crossed the palm-tree-lined median on Bayshore Drive and continued toward the parking lot across from Nicole’s law office. Thunderclouds were rolling in from the bay, and in the afternoon air Jack detected a mixed scent of seawater and the coming rain. Coconut Grove Marina was nearby, and beneath the threatening cloud cover the tall and steely assortment of gray and barren masts was probably Miami’s closest cousin to a windswept, wintry forest.

  “Swyteck!”

  Jack was on the sidewalk at the parking lot’s edge. He stopped, turned, and saw Gavin Burgette walking toward him. If Jack had left a smoldering ember in Nicole’s office, it was now a raging fire. Jack could see it in his eyes.

  “Something you need from me, Gavin?”

  Burgette didn’t even acknowledge the pleasantry. He came right up to Jack, standing so close that both men were within the same square of sidewalk. Jack didn’t back away, but he prepared himself for a verbal encounter that could instantly turn physical.

  “You are so fucking smug, aren’t you?”

  “You need to watch your tone, Gavin.”

  “You think you and your pretty pregnant wife have it all, don’t you? You’re going to have this wonderful child who will love you and make your life all you ever wanted it to be. Well, I got news for you, pal. That isn’t the real world.”

  “Gavin, you’re bothering me.”

  “I’m doing you a favor here, Swyteck. Because you know who else had it all? I did. For thirteen years, Debra, Aquinnah, and I did. And we still would, if Debra had listened to me and drawn the line on adoption with Alexander. But we made one mistake—one too many kids from Russia—and it was all fucked. For all of us. Do you have any idea what it’s like to have a kid like Sashi? A daughter who destroys your wife, your marriage, your other children?”

  “I admit, I don’t know what I would do if I found myself in that situation. But I know what I wouldn’t do.”

  Gavin shook his head, and the anger he exuded hung over them like the worsening weather. “You really think I did it, don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, you can poke and jab like a world-class middleweight all you want. But you can’t get me to go there.”

  Jack knew he could—if he could just navigate this growing storm. “I had a talk this morning with a sleep-disorder specialist,” said Jack. “Funny thing: we don’t live in the world of Marilyn Monroe anymore. Unless you buy from a pill mill or hire a personal pusher like Michael Jackson did, it’s really, really hard to die from an overdose of the pills that doctors prescribe these days for common sleeping problems. You might end up with brain damage, but the chances of surviving are pretty damn good. Isn’t that interesting?”

  Gavin was silent. He also seemed to deflate just a bit—his confidence, not his anger.

  “So here’s the timeline in my head,” said Jack. “Sashi swallowed those pills right after dark. We have your Porsche going through Golden Glades turnpike interchange in time to put you at home just after six. It’s a virtual medical certainty that Sashi was still alive when you got home. She was, wasn’t she, Gavin?”

  He didn’t respond right away, but Jack saw the first crack in the granite facade.

  “But she was dead and gone—literally—by the time Debra came home at around eight,” said Jack. “We know that.”

  Another crack. Jack didn’t expect a full confession, but he could see something building inside this man—something that he’d been living with longer than anyone with a conscience could. Finally, he spoke.

  “Aquinnah didn’t kill her.”

  “I know she didn’t. But you let her believe that Sashi died from an overdose. That was quite a handy way to keep her under your thumb, wasn’t it? Let her think that the police could swoop in at any moment and throw her in jail for causing Sashi’s death.”

  Gavin was clearly struggling to show no reaction, but he was failing.

  Jack kept at it. “That’s why Aquinnah won’t give me an affidavit and tell the court what she told me last night. You and Nicole have her believing that she’ll go to jail for giving Sashi those pills.”

  Gavin closed his eyes tightly, then opened them. It surprised Jack a little to see that he apparently had some shame.

  “What did you do, Gavin? Go upstairs and finish Sashi off, and then bring her downstairs? Or did you stuff her in the trunk of your car, still breathing but unconscious, and let the Everglades do the job for you?”

  Gavin took a telling step back, giving Jack his own square of sidewalk. The afternoon sun had completely disappeared. Jack felt a raindrop on the back of his neck. And then he heard the sirens blaring in the distance.

  Police sirens.

  For an instant, Jack wondered if Gavin would make a run for it, but he must have seen the futility of it. Two lines of MDPD squad cars, one from each direction on Bayshore Drive, were speeding toward them. Police beacons swirled and sirens screamed as the show of force squealed into the parking lot, jumped the curb onto the grassy swale, and blocked off the sidewalk at both ends. Jack and Sashi’s killer were surrounded.

  The first pair of MDPD officers jumped out of their vehicle and assumed the stance, pistols drawn: “Hands over your head! Now!”

  Jack complied immediately, locking eyes with Gavin, who stared right back at him.

  “Hands up! Both of you! Right now!”

  Gavin stared for a moment longer at Jack, and, slowly raising his arms, he spoke in a low, angry tone.

  “You’re dead wrong, Swyteck.”

  Jack was expecting another lame denial, but that wasn’t what he got.

  “Nobody knows what he wouldn’t do,” said Gavin.

  Two MDPD officers hurried toward them. They grabbed the suspect and quickly cuffed his hands behind his back.

  “Don’t forget to Mirandize him,” said Jack.

  The senior cop did it, and Jack made damn sure he didn’t miss even one constitutionally required word of it. The officers took Gavin straight to the squad car, and Jack watched as they shoved him into the backseat and slammed the door shut. The squad car sped away. Two more vehicles were right behind it. Jack’s gaze followed the blurring line of police lights until they rounded the bend and the flashing orange faded into a gray afternoon.

  Another MDPD officer approached with an umbrella. The rain was falling a little harder. “Are you all right, Mr. Swyteck?”

  Jack reached for his cell phone to dial the warden’s office at Florida State Prison.

  “We are now,” said Jack.

  EPILOGUE

  Dylan Reeves’ execution date came and went. No lethal cocktails were served. Nor wer
e there any hugs or high fives with Jack at the prison gates to mark his release. He was moved up one floor in Q-wing, from death row to gen-pop, where he would serve out his sentence for the aggravated sexual assault of Sashi Burgette.

  Jack would probably never hear from him again—unless he and Carlos “Bad Boy” Mendoza failed to get along.

  “I give it a fifty-fifty shot that one of ’em ends up stabbed,” said Theo.

  Jack was sitting on a bar stool at Cy’s Place, cashing in once again on that promise Theo had made to him upon his release from death row: free beer for life.

  “Could happen,” said Jack. He didn’t know if the bad blood between Mendoza and Volkov had spilled over to Reeves, but having any kind of a past with a thug like Mendoza was hardly a plus behind prison walls. While the Miami-Dade state attorney and the Florida attorney general’s office had joined in Jack’s motion to vacate his client’s murder conviction and death sentence, Reeves was on his own when it came to a change of correctional facility.

  “Could be real fireworks if Volkov ends up back at FSP for stalking Debra.”

  “Stalking?”

  “I’m sure his lawyer will argue that making those phone calls on Sashi’s birthday is more harassment than stalking. Not sure a jury would agree. Especially after Debra saw him watching her outside some Russian deli.”

  “Piece a shit.”

  “Yup.”

  “Speaking of . . . what’s the word on Mr. Wall Street?”

  Gavin had never actually worked on Wall Street, but since he was clearly going to prison, Theo figured that he had earned the title.

  “He’s cooked. Aquinnah cut a deal and will testify against him.”

  “What’ll happen to her?”

  “Throwing sleeping pills at someone from across the room isn’t a Dr. Kevorkian assisted-suicide situation. I don’t know the details of her deal with Carmichael. My guess: no jail time. But she won’t be voting in any future elections. At least not in Florida.”

  “And Debra?”