All Those Who Came Before

by Kathryn Meyer Griffith

  “My name is Frank Lester. I’m with the police department and I would like to ask you a few questions.” Frank bent the truth a little. Since he worked as a consultant for Sheriff Mearl in Spookie, he was way out of his jurisdiction, but the man in front of him didn’t know that. “Can I come in?”

  “Questions about what?” Instantly the man’s attitude became sly, wary, though still as openly hostile. His eyes had formed into slits. His mouth a tight line.

  “Let me come inside and I’ll tell you.”

  “Show me your badge, Officer. You got a warrant? What do want me for anyway?”

  Boy, that sounded like a guilty man.

  Frank pulled out his old badge and, fingers covering part of it because it was from Chicago, he waved it in front of the other man’s face for a fraction of a second but shoved it back into his pocket before Avery could zero in on it. “No warrant. I only want to talk to you, that’s all. A nice friendly conversation. But,” Frank let a soft threat enter his voice, “if you don’t want to answer my questions now, here, I could get a warrant and you could come and answer them at the police station.”

  Avery paused before surrendering, which to Frank was the sign of a weak man. “Nah, come on in. Make it quick, though. I got stuff to do.” Reluctantly, the man stood aside and allowed Frank to enter.

  “Ah, you have a job to get to?” Frank was fairly sure what the answer would be to that question.

  “Nah, I’m unemployed at the moment. In between jobs. You know how it is?”

  That figured.

  Frank wasn’t surprised the inside of the house turned out to be as messy as the outside, worse. It was pure old country squalor. He expected to see a couple of rabid racoons or squirrels come rocketing out from under the heaps of soiled clothes, and piled up trash everywhere, and attack him. Frank had the urge to cover his nose but fought it. There was no place clean enough to sit, so Frank didn’t. He continued to stand in the doorway.

  In the meantime, the man who owned the house was glaring at him, his regard becoming more suspicious as time went by. He waved a hand at Frank. “What do you want to ask me? Make it quick, I don’t have all day.”

  Frank knew he had to be smart if his plan was to work, so he was careful what he said next and how he said it. He would be taking a chance, yet it was the only way to get the information he needed from Avery.

  “I’ve been investigating a crime that happened, oh, about ten years ago or so here in Fairfield. It’s a cold case the police department is hoping to lay to rest and close the books on.”

  “A decade old crime?” Avery snapped. “What has that got to do with me?”

  “It concerned a neighbor of yours, Joel Sutton–maybe you remember him–who disappeared after leaving the local Quick Trip. Well, he went missing first, for years, and then his corpse was found in his car out in the woods not far from here.”

  Frank’s reason for being there seemed to instantly unnerve the man. It stopped him from responding immediately. Frank could almost see the mind behind the blood-shot eyes trying to work out how to answer the cop in front of him–or what lie to use. Frank had interrogated enough guilty people to recognize the veiled guilt in Avery Cartwright’s reactions.

  “You knew Joel Sutton, didn’t you? You remember him?”

  “Why would you think I knew him? I don’t remember him because I didn’t know him,” Avery said in an irritated voice. The man’s manner had become icy. Subtly threatening. Frank had faced many a cornered felon who exhibited the same angry defiance. The man was sweating. Avery was lying.

  Frank’s right hand discreetly moved to rest against the gun clipped at his waist beneath his shirt. He’d be ready to pull his weapon if he had to protect himself.

  “That’s odd. The cashier, a woman named Phyliss, who had been working that night at the Quick Trip, and knew Joel well, told me she remembered you being in the store, speaking with Joel. After he left, she said she saw you, driving an old green Pinto with a smashed rear fender, tail his car out onto the highway and follow him down the road. She identified your Pinto–”

  The other man furiously cut Frank short. “That wasn’t me. That wasn’t my Pinto. I never owned a green Pinto with a smashed rear fender. I rarely ever went to that Quick Trip. And I don’t know no Phyliss, neither. If you’re trying to pin this thing on me, you’ve got the wrong boy. Wasn’t me.”

  Now Frank was sure the man was lying. It was in his nervousness, his eyes. Avery began to inch away from Frank. He had put his right hand into the top of his jeans.

  Careful, careful. Does he have a gun on him? He might.

  Frank continued to push. “You never owned a lime green Pinto with a dented fender? Really? Then whose green Pinto is that out in the garage back there?”

  “What Pinto?”

  “The one I discovered under a tarp in your garage.”

  That’s when Avery’s attention went to Frank’s right hand, which was poised at Frank’s waist. The other man must have suspected Frank might have had a gun on him as well. Frank being a cop and all. The two men’s eyes met and Frank recognized the fear in Avery’s. He had him.

  Frank took a chance, and with a sterner tone in his voice, he pressured, “It was you that night at the Quick Trip who followed Joel Sutton out of the store and it was you who followed his car down the highway? You robbed him, didn’t you?”

  Frank went on. “Maybe, you didn’t mean to kill him, right? Just take his money? You’re not really a killer, are you? You can tell me what happened. I’ll understand.”

  Avery scowled at him. Frank could practically hear the man’s mind ticking along trying to come up with a plausible excuse, a believable lie. Then the man’s expression became one of weary capitulation. He knew he’d been caught. No way out. Frank was familiar with that look, too.

  “That’s right. I’m no killer,” Avery stuttered, his face draining to a sick pallor. “Yeah, it was me that night who drove out behind him. Okay, I did follow him. I kind of hit his car. I didn’t mean to. He slowed down too quickly. It was so rainy, foggy, after all. And...I had been unwell so my brain was fuzzy to begin with. He pulled over on the side of the road to see his car’s damage. I stopped, too. We got into a kind of a...disagreement.”

  “He didn’t want to give you his wallet without a fight, huh?”

  The glare Avery sent Frank was deadly. Caught. The man’s hand was trembling again. “Maybe. I lost my head. I was strung out, sick, drunk on top of it; didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “So...in the unexpected shuffle you...accidently...fatally hurt him? Then you had to hide your crime?”

  Avery’s eyes were now desperate. “I didn’t mean to hit him so hard with the car jack. I didn’t mean to kill him...you have to believe me. I didn’t know what I was doing, you see. It was an accident!”

  “Then why didn’t you call the police, report the death, and tell them that?”

  “Well...there was the car jack with, uh, the blood on it.”

  Frank couldn’t help it. He winced.

  “And I had these priors,” Avery’s ugly voice droned on. “Drugs, you know. Me and the local police were not, are not, friendly, by any stretch.”

  “So that’s why you plunged his car, his dead body inside, into the wood’s ravine? To hide evidence of what you’d done?” Frank thought of Abby and what she’d gone through waiting for a husband, a dead husband, to come home for two long years. A husband who would never come home because of this sad excuse for a human being before him. He couldn’t help it, but his anger must have shown. “Murder.”

  And that did it. Frank identified the panic, the uncertainty, as it drained the other man’s face. Avery realized in that moment he’d been tricked into confessing a crime he’d probably been running and hiding from for almost a decade. A look spread over the other man’s countenance Frank had also seen many times in his police career. Yet, he wasn’t prepared for what occurred next, so it caught him off guard.

  Avery jumped at
him, knocked him aside so violently Frank fell to the floor in the doorway; just long enough for the murderer to rush past, through the kitchen, and out the rear door. Frank never had a chance to pull his gun. It had all happened too fast.

  Avery was on the run.

  As Frank struggled to his feet, though, he felt the familiar dizziness grab at him. Then a dull ache throbbed in his chest and took his breath away for a heartbeat or two. Ignoring the discomfort, he shook off the pain and took off after Avery, chasing him through the dingy kitchen and out the open rear door into the backyard.

  Coming around the house, Frank caught a glimpse of Avery scrambling into the truck that had been parked in the driveway. With a noisy spray of gravel and dirt, the truck roared backward out of the driveway and took off down the country road.

  Frank, knowing he had to catch Avery or the man would disappear to parts unknown, sprinted for his truck, ignoring the growing pain in his chest, and drove after him. He was far behind before he even started, so he raced to catch up. Good thing there was only one main road going in and out of town. Then there was Avery’s truck in front of him.

  He attempted to dig his cell phone out of his pocket so he could call the local police for help, back-up, but he was going too fast and the road was so winding, the phone slipped out of his fingers and scooted away to hide and taunt him from beneath the seat.

  “Damn.” There was nothing to do for it. He couldn’t risk stopping to find the phone and he couldn’t slow down, either. He’d lose Avery for sure. He had to keep going.

  The wild pursuit was at extremely high speeds. Avery’s driving was erratic. The man’s truck rattled and bumped down the country road, careening off the pavement and onto the shoulders many times before returning to it. Once or twice Frank was afraid Avery’s truck would go off into the trees or into a ditch. It didn’t. Frank kept his vehicle close behind his quarry.

  For Frank, heart beating madly in his chest and producing a steady ache, it was like going back in time to when he’d been a cop high-speed chasing the bad guys. It was exhilarating; it was scary as hell. His chest continued to hurt. He should stop. Pull over. Catch his breath and allow his heart to steady. But he couldn’t. Avery would escape and there was no way he was going to let the man escape. No way. “Getting too old for this,” he muttered under his breath as he pushed down harder on the accelerator and his truck surged forward.

  The chase didn’t last long. Avery was a terrible driver or, perhaps, he was unwell or on drugs. The two vehicles raced along the narrow country road that wound through the woods on the outside of town. Their speed increased with every mile as they moved upwards, higher and higher.

  This is not going to end well. I should stop. I should....

  It was on a sharp curve with deep wooded gorges on both sides that Avery lost control of his truck. Frank watched in horror as the Ford, unable to make the curve ahead at the top of the hill, suddenly veered off and plunged into the chasm on its right; vanishing into a black hole on the side of the road.

  Frank brought his truck to a screeching stop, jumped out, and hurried to the edge of the chasm. Looked over. He got there just in time to see Avery’s truck hit the far distant bottom of the tree-filled gorge, explode and burst into flames.

  For a second, Frank mulled over trying to get down to the burning truck and see if he could pull Avery from it. If he could save him. But the burning vehicle was too far down and the decline was too steep for him to even attempt descending. There was nothing he could do but watch and say a prayer for Avery. There was no doubt the man inside the vehicle below could not have made it out alive. Avery Cartwright was dead. As dead as Joel.

  It wasn’t the way he’d planned on the investigation ending, but, at least, Frank knew the man burning in the truck below had been the one who’d robbed and killed, either by accident as Avery had claimed, or on purpose, Abigail’s husband a decade ago. A wave of guilt washed over him. Avery Cartwright was dead now because of him. He hadn’t intended for the man to try to escape, crash and die, but then karma, fate, was a fickle and cruel mistress. Avery had been Joel’s killer. He’d gotten what he deserved. Frank still felt badly for what had happened and his unintentional part in it. A life was precious, even one as reprehensible as Avery’s.

  Frank walked back to his vehicle, located his cell phone on the floor under the seat, and called Chief Alex Dunham to report the accident. Then he’d drive back to the police station, tell Dunham everything and let him and his officers deal with the wreck, disposal of the remains, help him fill out the paperwork; close the case on Joel Sutton’s murder. Later, when he got home, he would have to find a way to tell Abby what had happened. He just prayed she wouldn’t be too upset at him for doing what she hadn’t wanted him to do, which had been to search for and find Joel’s murderer and then accidently cause the man’s death.

  The ache in his chest had subsided. The dizziness had evaporated. So he convinced himself it had been an unusually acute panic attack because of the circumstances. Stuffing down too much food too quickly at too many queasy spoon restaurants. Cornering a potential killer. Participating in a death defying high speed chase. Adrenalin spike off the charts. No wonder why his chest had ached. Silencing the inner voice sending off alarms, he told himself he was fine.

  A little shaky, he drove to the Fairfield police station.

  Before he drove away, after he’d been interviewed and the paperwork had been completed, Chief Dunham made the comment, “When you left the other day I reread the police report on Joel Sutton’s body’s discovery eight years ago in his car in that gorge. Funny thing, you know, Avery’s truck crashed and burnt practically in the same spot or close to it where Joel’s had crashed and been found. Only a quarter mile past it, I’d say, no more. Talk about poetic justice. Strange, huh?”

  “Yeah, strange.” But, on second thought, Frank didn’t believe it was that strange after all. Fate sometimes had an ironic way of claiming its justice. Avery had killed Joel and he’d ended up dead almost in the same place. It’d taken ten years, but Avery had finally paid for the crime he’d so heartlessly committed against Joel Sutton.

  ABIGAIL WAS BEGINNING to worry about Frank. It was nearly dark and he still wasn’t home, which wasn’t like him. He hadn’t left her a note saying where he was going, which also wasn’t like him. She’d called him three times and left messages. He hadn’t answered any of them.

  The heat of the day had dissipated and she breathed in the cooler evening air. Her thoughts were clicking off the domestic chores she’d completed that day, the concentrated work she’d accomplished earlier on the Theiss house paintings at her kitchen table, and what she was going to do the following day. She was going to return to 707 Suncrest to initiate another painting. The place was beckoning her and she could no longer stay away. Her fingers itched to draw and paint. If it hadn’t been so gloomy, swirling shadows dancing around everywhere, she might have driven over there that very minute. Looking out the kitchen window, she knew it was too dark already. If it had been an hour earlier, she could have gone.

  She had an epiphany. Tomorrow she could paint a rendition of the so-called haunted house in the dusk of the day with smudgy shadows crowding around it, the evening sun a pale ghost in the sky behind the structure, and a diffusion of that soft golden light only found as the day was dying. Early twilight. Fireflies twinkling all around the house and in the trees. What a painting that would make. She could already envision it in her mind. That’s when she made the decision to visit the Theiss house tomorrow right before dusk instead of early in the morning. She wanted that twilight version more than another daylight one. So far she’d finished three paintings of 707 Suncrest in the sunlight and one in a storm. It was time to get one cloaked in the shroud of pre-night.

  Nick wasn’t home from band practice yet, so she was alone with the dogs and Snowball. She sat rocking on the front porch, her eyes glued to the end of the driveway. Her whole body tingled with a growing dread. Frank, where are you?
Why haven’t you called me back? Why haven’t you answered my calls and messages? Come home. Come. Home.

  Since she’d spent the day shopping and doing household chores, she was pleasantly weary. Snowball was snuggled in her lap, sleeping. Earlier she’d let the dogs out to run free around the house, but had corralled them in the fenced in backyard. They were whining, barking, waiting for Frank to come home, too.

  Where was he?

  She tried telephoning him again, but just as the call went through his truck drove into the driveway. About time. She cut the call off.

  “Waiting up for me, huh?” He came up on the porch and dropped into the chair beside her.

  “Where have you been, Frank?” There was enough radiance left in the dwindling day for her to see the exhaustion, the reluctance of what he had to tell her, on his face.

  “Frank?”

  He leaned over, kissed her gently, and took her hand in his. “I have a story to tell you. I want you to just sit here beside me and let me tell it to you. All of it. Don’t say anything until I’m done. Please?”

  She was scared. There was something in his manner that told her whatever he had to say was something she wouldn’t like hearing. “What’s wrong? What has happened?”

  “Until I’m done,” he whispered once more, squeezing her hand.

  She dipped her head in a calculated nod.

  Then, as they sat on the porch and night fell over them, she listened to what he needed to tell her. His story was something she could never have guessed. It utterly stunned her.

  When he was finished, he’d told her everything, she lowered her head into her hands and softly cried. Not for what Frank had done, following the leads that Bracco had had in his dossier when she’d asked him not to, not for discovering that someone had actually murdered Joel; not for Avery Cartwright’s due punishment and death–but for the memories and love she’d once had for her first husband. Her tears were also for the memory of the pain she’d gone through when Joel had gone missing and when his dead body had been found. She wept for the brutal and lonely way she now knew Joel had died; for times past. Love lost.