by Malone, Cara
“We’re lucky to have you,” Amelia said. “Thanks for catching that.”
“It’s my job,” Elise said with a humble shrug.
She went over to the long table in the room to eat her yogurt, and Amelia mused over how messy those cases could have gotten if Elise hadn’t found that mistake. She was staring at the coffee pot, listening to it percolate, when Noah Thomas and his blood transfusion popped into her head.
Tom had said he was a universal recipient—AB+. And hadn’t Cal Thomas said he wanted to donate blood for his son because he was a universal donor?
No way…
Amelia rushed out of the breakroom, with Elise calling behind her, “Don’t you want your coffee?”
Back in her office, Amelia did a quick search on blood group inheritance. It had been a while since she needed this information, but she faintly remembered something from medical school about the various phenotypes, with dominant and recessive alleles…
Yes, there. She found the answer she was looking for.
There wasn’t a lot you could rule out if you didn’t know the mother’s blood type, and as far as Amelia was aware it hadn’t come up in the course of this case. But one thing you definitely could rule out was a Type O father with a Type AB child. It just wasn’t possible.
Amelia switched over to her email and found the message where Tom had told her that Cal was Megan’s biological father. He’d included the lab report as an attachment, and Amelia checked it to be sure. Right there at the top of the page: Cal Thomas, O negative.
He might not have known that he had a kid in Granville for the last nineteen years, but did he know the boy he was raising wasn’t his child?
She picked up her desk phone and dialed Tom’s number. It rang a few times and went to voicemail. Amelia knew he was talking to Elizabeth today, and there was no way he’d want to cut her lose without asking her about Noah’s paternity.
Amelia called the main police switchboard. When a dispatcher picked up, she identified herself and said, “I’m looking for Detective Tom Logan. I believe he’s interviewing someone right now.”
“Do you want to leave a message?” the dispatcher asked, chomping on gum.
“No, it’s urgent,” Amelia said. “Can you send someone into the room?”
“Sure, what would you like them to say?”
“Ask them to tell Tom that Cal Thomas can’t be Noah’s father because–”
“Hold on, hold on,” the gum chewer said, “I can’t write that fast.”
Amelia let out a huff, trying not to make her frustration apparent over the phone. “You know what? Scratch that. I’m only a few minutes away, so just tell Tom not to let Elizabeth go until I get there. Okay?”
“…not to let Elizabeth go…” Amelia gritted her teeth, and when she was sure that the dispatcher had her message right, she hung up. This would be easier and faster to explain in person, and anyway, she was sort of curious to see the woman’s reaction when Tom told her what she’d just discovered.
There was very little chance she didn’t know that Cal wasn’t Noah’s father, unless she’d been sleeping with multiple men at the time of conception, and yet she hadn’t seen fit to bring it up to the police, even after they’d uncovered Megan’s relation to Cal. But what was the motivation for hiding it?
About ten minutes later, Amelia had a police precinct visitor’s badge pinned to her shirt and she was being led through the halls to the interrogation rooms. The officer who was escorting her knocked on one of the doors, and a moment later, Tom poked his head out.
“Dr. Trace, thanks for coming,” he said, then looked back into the room. “Mrs. Thomas, I need to step out for a minute. Do you need anything? Coffee, water, bathroom break?”
“I need to not spend all day here,” she said, her tone sharp.
Tom ignored her comment and stepped into the hall, closing the door behind himself. The other officer headed back to the front of the precinct, and Amelia conveyed what she’d figured out.
“So, does that help you?” she asked, somewhat doubtful, when she’d finished catching him up to speed. To her, it seemed like just another complication in an already difficult case, but maybe it would mean something to Tom.
“It definitely doesn’t hurt,” he said, “although you kind of lost me with the science talk. You want to come in and observe, help me out if I need more official terminology?”
“I doubt she’ll ask you for the definition of an allele, but I was hoping I’d get to watch,” Amelia confessed.
Tom opened the door, holding it for her as they both stepped back into the room. He introduced Amelia, and Elizabeth said she remembered her from the day of the tornado. Amelia and Tom sat down beside each other on the opposite side of the table from where Elizabeth sat, and Tom folded his hands on top of it.
“Dr. Trace just told me something pretty interesting,” he said. He paused for effect so long that even Amelia was tempted to fill the silence, then he asked, “How many people know that Cal is not Noah’s father?”
“What?” Elizabeth’s mouth dropped open. “Yes, he is.”
“Not biologically,” Tom said. “Tell her the stuff about the As and Bs and alleles, Dr. Trace.”
Amelia repeated it all again, putting it into layman’s terms as much as possible. While she talked, Tom studied Elizabeth’s reaction. Then he asked, “So, how many people know?”
Elizabeth folded her arms over her chest defensively. “I don’t see how this is relevant to Megan Hunter.”
“Let me be the judge of that,” Tom replied. “Give me a number, Mrs. Thomas.”
She rolled her eyes. “As few as I could manage.” Then the dam broke and she started being more forthcoming, meeting Tom’s gaze again. “I never wanted Noah to feel like he was different from the other kids. It’s so easy to get a chip on your shoulder when you’re growing up, I didn’t want him to think his dad wasn’t his dad.”
“Sounds like you’ve been holding onto that for a lot of years,” Tom said. He was being sympathetic, making Elizabeth open up to him, and it seemed to be working.
“I couldn’t tell anyone—not even Cal,” she said. “I was too afraid that Noah would find out if anyone knew.”
Tom leaned forward, gave her a sad smile and asked softly, “Did you have an affair, Elizabeth?”
“What? No!” She was angry again in a split second, offended at the mere suggestion. “I am not a cheater!”
“But you were desperate to have a child,” Tom countered. “How did you get pregnant?”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t you think that’s a personal question?”
He leaned back, mirroring her posture. “If you don’t want to talk about that, I could tell you what I think happened to Megan Hunter on the morning of the tornado. Because I’ll tell you right now, I’m not buying the fact that you didn’t see her until after she was dead.”
Elizabeth’s lips went thin and tight and she practically spat her answer. “I went to a fertility clinic.”
“Without Cal?”
“I already told you, I didn’t want anyone to know, for Noah’s sake,” she said. “Besides, the longer we tried to get pregnant without any luck, the worse Cal felt about himself. He never said it in so many words, but I think he felt emasculated. He… you’re not going to repeat any of this to him, are you?”
“The paternity, or the part about his manhood?” Tom asked with a smirk.
Elizabeth frowned. “After a while, he couldn’t… finish. Because he was embarrassed. And we were never going to have a baby that way. I figured it would be better for both of us if I helped the process along, so I got tested. The doctor told me I was fertile, so it was likely that Cal wasn’t. After all the trouble we’d already had I knew telling him his little swimmers weren’t swimming wasn’t going to help, so… I found an anonymous donor and I got inseminated.”
“And told Cal it was his child.”
“Yes! Does that make me the worst person in
the world?” she asked, in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t really asking. “All I wanted was a family, and I did what was necessary to get it.”
“And when your husband’s daughter—his biological daughter—showed up unannounced with a gun in her hand, accusing your husband of raping–”
“Stop saying that!” Elizabeth cried.
“Raping her mother,” Tom went on, “I think you lost your shit. I think you were looking at proof that your husband gave another woman something he wouldn’t or couldn’t give you, and you shot Megan.”
“No,” Elizabeth said, “that’s not what happened!”
“Tell me what did happen.”
“I never saw her,” she insisted. “I’ve already told you on several occasions, Cal had already left for work and I was in the kitchen drinking my morning coffee when the tornado siren went off. It hit quickly. I barely had time to get to the basement and luckily the boys were already down there. I never saw that girl.”
“So she never knocked on the door, and you didn’t answer it?” Tom asked. Elizabeth shook her head. “She didn’t tell you who she was and there wasn’t an altercation as a result?”
“No.”
“You’re telling me that a girl died in your house and you had no idea she was there, you never heard the gun go off? She had a bullet wound in her arm and the autopsy confirmed it was a perimortem injury. That means it occurred very close to the time of death.”
“It… it was very loud,” Elizabeth said. “Between the winds and the siren, and the boys yelling because they were scared… I never saw her and I didn’t hear a gunshot.”
Tom sighed. “That’s bullshit, Elizabeth. Unless… Noah or one of his friends shot Megan? Are you covering for one of them?”
“They weren’t involved!” she said.
“But you were,” Tom insisted. “Tell me what happened or I’ll have no choice but to assume that you’re covering for something Noah did.”
“Fine!” Elizabeth hissed. “I opened the door!”
Amelia was holding her breath. Tom sat calmly beside her, his demeanor completely unchanged even though he’d finally gotten what he wanted.
“She told me she was looking for Cal,” Elizabeth said. “I said he wasn’t home and she didn’t believe me. She came into my house and she told me… what her mom said he did.”
She was clearly struggling with the idea that her husband was capable of such an awful act—she couldn’t even name it.
“She took out the gun and said she wasn’t leaving until she got to talk to him,” Elizabeth said.
“What did she want to talk to him about?” Tom asked.
“She wanted to confront him,” Elizabeth answered. “She wanted to tell him what it felt to be the result of… rape.” She whispered the word this time. “She wanted to know why he did it. I told her she had the wrong guy, the wrong house. And then she turned toward the basement.”
“Where Noah was,” Tom supplied.
“Yes,” Elizabeth confirmed. “I couldn’t let her go down there. I couldn’t let her tell him what his dad did. So I reached for the gun. We fought. I wasn’t trying to shoot her, I just wanted her to leave. The gun went off by accident, and for a second I thought the whole damn world was ending because the tornado siren started ringing at the same time.”
She buried her face in her hands and in a moment of compassion, Tom pulled a travel pack of tissues out of his pocket, sliding them across the table to her. She took one, then continued.
“The kitchen door blew open,” she said. “It must not have latched all the way when the girl came inside. The winds were so strong. I swear I didn’t push her. I was watching the blood trickle down her arm from the gunshot—we were both kinda spooked by that—and then all of a sudden this big gust blew through and it was like she disappeared. Took me a few seconds to realize she fell, and then all I could think was that I needed to get the hell down to the basement too or the tornado was going to suck me up.”
She took a long, ragged breath and looked at Tom again. “I was angry at Cal, and at her for showing up at my house. But I never wanted to hurt her… you have to believe me.”
“Where is the gun now, Elizabeth?” Tom asked.
She opened her mouth, then paused. Her brow furrowed, and she shook her head. “I don’t know. You didn’t find it in the house?”
“No,” Tom said. “Are you sure you didn’t stash it somewhere, Elizabeth?” When she didn’t answer, he relaxed into his seat, explaining, “I understand that you didn’t mean to hurt her, but the fact of the matter is, Megan Hunter is dead. A nineteen-year-old who had her whole life ahead of her. Dead because of what your husband did to her mother twenty years ago, and what you did to her when she showed up at your house. Things will go a lot better for you from here on out if you just tell me the whole truth, and cooperate.”
Elizabeth covered her mouth with the tissue, seeming to consider her options. And then she said, “I think I better have a lawyer now. And I get a phone call, right?”
24
Elizabeth
Detective Logan let Elizabeth sit in the interrogation room for at least another thirty minutes. It seemed to be one of his favorite ways to make her uncomfortable—promising he’d be right back, then disappearing for long stretches.
Well, it gave her lots of time to think about the fact that she’d just confessed to shooting Megan Hunter… whether it had been intentional or not. She also thought about how it should have been Cal in this situation. She was his daughter, and she was mad at him, not Elizabeth.
She also thought a lot about Noah. Would he find out everything now? It seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would get out of all this without at least a trial at this point, and if there was a trial, everything would come out. Sixteen years of protecting him from this ugly truth and it had all fallen apart in the time it took for a tornado to sweep through their neighborhood and destroy their home.
Their family.
Now Noah had a rapist for a father and a murderer for a mother. Or a manslaughterer, if she was lucky with the charges.
At last, the door to the interrogation room opened again and a different police officer, one she didn’t recognize, came in. “Elizabeth? I’m going to take you to a phone so you can make a call, and then I’ll book you into a holding cell for the night, okay?”
Her heart jumped into her throat. This was really happening to her.
“And then what?” she asked.
“You’ll be held overnight, and in the morning you’ll have a chance to meet with your lawyer, or a public defender if you need one. Then you’ll go to court to be arraigned.”
“What am I being charged with?” she asked, the words coming out as a squeak.
“Voluntary manslaughter,” he said, and she wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not.
He gestured for her to stand, and she followed him out of the room and down the hall. They passed a bunch of cubicles where officers in uniform typed up case reports and ran background checks and whatever else cops did at their desks. Elizabeth’s mind was reeling and she was too busy trying to figure out if she knew any lawyers to pay them much attention.
But she thought she heard Detective Logan’s voice somewhere in those cubicles, and her ears automatically honed in on him.
“–really wish we had that gun,” he was saying. “I mean, we’ve got a confession but without physical evidence, you know how shaky that is…”
And then the officer opened a door and guided Elizabeth into another room, and Logan’s voice faded out. Was he talking about her case? Her apparently shaky case? It was a tiny morsel of hope but she clung to it.
“The phone is there,” the officer said, pointing to a desk with an old-fashioned black phone on it. “If you need to look up a phone number, I can help you with that.”
“No, I’ve got it memorized,” she said, sitting down.
“I’ll be right outside,” the officer said. “Come out when you’re done.”
&
nbsp; She nodded and waited until the door had shut completely behind him before she picked up the receiver. It was a miracle her brain was working at all in the state she was in, but she managed to dial Cal’s cell, probably from muscle memory more than anything else.
When he answered, Elizabeth couldn’t decide if she felt more angry or guilty. “Cal, I’ve been arrested.”
“Oh, so now you’re speaking to me,” he said gruffly. It was true, she’d been giving him the silent treatment since the day before, when she found out he was that girl’s father. Now was no time for pettiness, though—not when she was facing a whole night in this cinderblock-walled hell hole.
“Cal, did you hear me? I’m calling you from the police station!”
There was a pause on his end of the line as he digested that information, then he asked, “Arrested for what?”
She could barely say the words: “I shot that girl.”
There was silence on the other end of the line while Cal processed that. Maybe hated her? That girl was his daughter, after all. His daughter that he’d conceived with some strange woman, and yet he couldn’t give Elizabeth the son she’d so desperately wanted.
Once the flood gates opened, she couldn’t stop talking. “It was an accident, but they’re charging me with voluntary manslaughter,” she told him. “I have to go to court in the morning and that detective that keeps pestering us, he said they need the gun or else their case is weak. I need you to get me a lawyer, Cal–”
“With what money, Elizabeth?” he asked. It was the same thing she’d been thinking earlier, but God help her if she had to rely on a public defender to get her out of this mess. When had her life turned into a Jerry Springer episode?
“And I need something else,” she went on, shooting a cautionary glance toward the door, the police officer standing guard right outside. She could see his shoulder in the reinforced window, and she knew someone would listen to this call, but at least no one was watching her.