Without Sin (An Owen Day Thriller)

by Rachel Ford

  I nodded and stood aside. “Sure.”

  She glanced at the closed bedroom door. “Jason?”

  “Asleep, I think.”

  She nodded and stepped inside. I shut the door after her, and she stood there awkwardly for a moment, fidgeting with her ring.

  “How are the kids?”

  “What? Oh, they’re fine. Ben took a while to get to sleep, but I turned on some cartoons. He’s out like a light.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Okay.”

  “Listen, I…I know I lost my temper the other day. I don’t know what was going through my head. I just…I’m angry all the time. And scared.” Tears started to well up in her eyes. “So, so scared.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “It’s not,” she said. “I shouldn’t have – I had no right to talk to you like that. I’m sorry, Owen.”

  “It’s fine, Megan. Really.”

  “It’s not,” she said again.

  “Jason’s the one you should talk to,” I said. “He’s really worried about you. I know he’s a pain in the ass, but he loves you and the kids.”

  She nodded absently. “I know. I was hard on him too, wasn’t I?”

  I didn’t answer. I figured it would be better not to.

  “I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Whenever we can get back in the house – well, I want him to come back with us.”

  I nodded. “He’ll like that.”

  “And maybe you could spend a night or two too,” she said. “Just until they find this guy.”

  “We’ll see what shakes out,” I said. I was going to commit to nothing. Not after being thrown out a few days earlier.

  “The kids felt much safer having you there.”

  “Well, I’ll definitely be checking in.”

  “I felt much safer with you there,” she said. She took a step closer.

  I didn’t like her tone. I didn’t like her nearness. I took a step backward. “Well, I’m going to be going back to my overnight work schedule soon. But I could set up in the kitchen maybe. Work overnight, stick around for breakfast.”

  She took another step toward me. Her voice was soft. “That would be nice.”

  I took half a step back, until I felt the kitchenette counter behind me. “Yeah. Well, I should probably let you get some sleep.”

  She nodded but didn’t move.

  “We’ve both got a lot of calls we’re going to have to make tomorrow…”

  She closed the final half step between us. Her voice was very soft now. “You’re a good guy, Owen. Andy always said that. I didn’t realize it before. But you’re a good guy. Just like he was.”

  “You don’t want Ben to wake up,” I said.

  She leaned forward, resting her head on my shoulder. Tentatively at first, and then more heavily. She wrapped an arm around me, and then the other.

  “Megan,” I said, “I think –”

  She started to sniffle. “Oh Owen. What am I going to do without him? I feel so alone. So lost.” She pressed her face into my shoulder, and loosed a long, shuddering sob.

  I hesitated. I was no kind of expert on emotions, but I was getting some seriously mixed ones from her. Or at least, I thought I was. And I didn’t like the situation. I didn’t like her here in my room in the dark. I didn’t like the intimate tones, or the closeness.

  But maybe I was overthinking this. She was my sister-in-law. Her husband – my brother – had just died. Someone had tried to light her house on fire. There was nothing untoward about needing a shoulder to cry on. That was perfectly normal. Perfectly human.

  So I wrapped an arm around her, just lightly enough to make contact. “It’ll be okay, Megan.”

  She held me for a long moment. Then, she half-laughed. “God, you smell just like him, you know that? Is that a weird thing to notice? But it’s true. Just like him.” She closed her eyes and breathed in.

  The uneasy feeling came back, in spades. I tried to pivot out of her embrace gently. Nothing obvious, but enough to get away anyway.

  But she held on. “You want to know something?”

  I groped around the countertop behind me. There was a lamp somewhere. I needed to find it.

  “I don’t even remember why we fought. Isn’t that strange?” She started to run her fingers up my back.

  I found the lamp and felt around the base for the switch. A second later, I found it too. And a fraction of a second after that, light flared through the room.

  She squinted and took a step backward. “Jesus.” She laughed. “That’s bright.”

  “I think you should check on Ben,” I said.

  She shrugged. “He’ll be fine.”

  “Megan –”

  A sound issued from Jason’s room, a kind of disturbed grunt. Then a bar of light appeared below the door.

  “We must have woken Jason up,” I said. For the first time in my life, I was genuinely grateful for the other man’s presence.

  She nodded and took a second step backward. “Well, uh…well, I should let you guys get some sleep.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I’ll go check on Ben.”

  “Right.”

  She glanced at Jason’s door, then at me, and flashed a brief smile. “I’ll see you around, Owen.”

  She moved to the door, too fast to be casual. Not fast enough for me.

  She left a moment before Jason emerged, rubbing his eyes and yawning. He blinked at me, clearly surprised. “What’s up, dude?”

  “Couldn’t sleep,” I lied.

  “I got gummies to help with that.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I gotta pee.”

  I didn’t get to sleep until sometime after five in the morning. So when Jason tried rousing me a few hours later, I was having none of it. I pushed him away and rolled over with a grunt.

  “Dude, you got to wake up.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “This is important.”

  I pulled the blanket over my head. “It’ll wait.”

  Jason tried to tug the blanket away, but I held on. He sighed in frustration. “You know how Wyatt Wagley had a theory about the killer?”

  I didn’t bother to respond. There was no way I was waking up for this.

  “He was supposed to release it yesterday, but he didn’t. He was still suspended from a couple of sites, so he had to wait.”

  I said nothing.

  “He released it this morning.”

  I said nothing.

  “Dude, you’re never going to believe who he thinks the killer is.”

  “I don’t care.”

  He shoved my shoulder. “You’re going to care.”

  “Go away.”

  He shoved me again. “Wake up, dammit. You need to see this.”

  I pulled the blanket away and sat up scowling, about to let loose a whole lot of pent-up rage Jason’s way. A week’s worth of it. But I froze. He’d stuck his phone in my face. There was a video still on screen, and a very familiar face staring back at me.

  My own. I blinked. “What the hell?”

  “Dude, it’s you: Wagley thinks you’re the killer.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The video was a masterclass in how to say things without getting sued. Wagley prefaced the whole thing by saying he was making no accusations. “My job is to ask questions and find facts. I’m not drawing conclusions. I’m not making accusations. Any opinions are just that: opinions. And I try to keep those to a bare minimum, because, well, you don’t watch Wyatt Wagley for opinion. You watch Wyatt Wagley for truth.”

  Then, he got to it, in the form of questions. He wasn’t accusing me of murder. He was just asking questions. Questions like, “What happened to the truck in Owen Day’s yard?” He had footage of it: a burned-out shell, blackened and charred in my front yard. “You know me, Truthers: I’ve got a suspicious mind. You can’t do the kind of work I do without getting a little
jaded.

  “But you don’t need a suspicious mind to think something’s a little funny here. I mean, the guy’s brother dies and two days later there’s a vehicle that mysteriously goes up in smoke in his yard?

  “I mean, there’s some serious questions that need to be asked here. Who burned it? Why? Were they trying to hide something? Was there evidence in that truck that needed to be destroyed?”

  He ran the footage from our first encounter intermittently throughout the video: me, finger jutting toward him angrily, threatening to make him a true crime case. Sometimes he’d play the full few seconds. Sometimes, it would be a still, some carefully chosen image where I looked just shy of psychotic.

  But the real kicker was footage of my house, and my office. He had wide views of the whole thing, of the crazy wall covered in printouts and photographs and notes. He had closeups of my investigation boards, with my lists of victims and how they’d died.

  He played ominous background music and applied black and white filters. He spoke with a sense of urgency and tension in his tone.

  He called it exclusive footage. “Maybe the most important piece of investigative journalism in my lifetime.” He didn’t mention he’d got it by breaking and entering.

  Because now, seeing that footage of my home and office, I had no doubt as to who had jimmied the window. Not Tiny. Wyatt Wagley.

  “We’ve got dozens of victims faces and names, their histories and how they were killed. These cases go back well over a decade,” he narrated, as he panned over board after board.

  Which was true, and not. There were fifty and sixty year old cases in my pile, which was technically well over a single decade; but so well over – so much older than I was – that the omission of specifics could not have been an accident. He wanted his viewers to conclude that I was some kind of serial killer, and these were all my victims.

  He ran through some of them, showing the boards in an ominous black and white with a vignette filter applied. Again, those that fit his implied narrative. “Janet Morris, 40 years old, Tennessee. Married, mother of three. Disappeared on her fortieth birthday, on the way home from work. Her husband had a surprise party waiting for her.

  “But she never showed up. The police found her body three weeks later. She’d been raped and beaten to death, and left in the woods, naked and bound.”

  He switched to another board. “Karen Richards, 38, Arkansas. Divorced mom of two. Disappeared on the way to work, in the early hours of the morning. Found near the Mississippi border. Raped and beaten to death.”

  Another board, another picture; another woman who had died at the hands of a serial rapist and killer. Wagley ran through four more victims, and four more stories. He didn’t mention that I had suspect boards, and a possible killer ID’ed.

  He let the partial facts speak for themselves and went back to commentary. “There are literal dozens of these, all tucked away behind a closed door at the far end of the house. Dozens of pictures of sexual assault victims. Dozens of murder victims. Dozens of stories, with the details of their last moments all neatly charted out.

  “Why? To answer that question, I decided I needed to answer another: who is Owen Day?”

  Here began a segment that was lean on facts and heavy on filter effects and ominous music. I was an army veteran, he said, in a way that made it sound like a criminal conviction. I’d been discharged early for medical reasons.

  I was just wondering how the hell he knew that when he switched to an interview. An old woman’s face appeared on the screen. An old woman I knew well. She’d been old the last time I saw her. Now, she looked ancient, like some kind of old-world demon.

  “To get a better sense of Owen Day, I spoke to his grandmother, Roxanne. Now you helped raise Owen and Andrew, didn’t you? After their mother – your daughter – passed away?”

  She nodded. “I did.”

  He asked what she thought of Andrew. She had nothing but good to say. He was the sweetest boy. “Just like his momma. I can’t believe he’s dead – both of them, gone.”

  He asked what she thought of me. “A strange boy. Quiet, always thinking. To tell you the truth, Mr. Wagley, he scared me.”

  I laughed out loud. A harsh sound in the stillness. Jason stared at me.

  I remembered the angry, drunken tantrums like they were yesterday: the thrashings, the slapping and scratching. And the words. That stupid bitch went and died, and left me with you two. A retard and a brat. A goddamned freak.

  I could still feel the knobby sections of bone in my right hand, where the fingers had mended themselves back together. I could remember the searing pain as she’d slammed a door shut on them. I could still hear me begging her not to. And her response. You won’t touch my food with broken fingers, will you, you son-of-a-bitch?

  And she’d been afraid of me?

  She went on. “He was like his father, I think. Not well.” She raised a wizened hand to her temple, and tapped it. “Up there. He killed himself, you know. His father I mean.”

  “You think some kind of mental illness runs in the family?”

  “Oh, I’m sure of it. He was a strange man, Owen’s father. I warned Kate about marrying him. But she didn’t listen. She was very young, and she was in love.” She spread her hands and shrugged. “You know how it is.”

  “Was it a happy marriage?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Was there ever any violence, do you know?”

  “Oh, I don’t doubt it. He didn’t let her see me much. I’m sure he beat her, but there was nothing I could do. She thought he walked on water. And then he shot himself.”

  “Were you sorry about that?”

  “To be honest? No. I was relieved. And then she got remarried, to Andy’s dad. He was a nice man. Just like my Andy.”

  “What about Owen? What kind of man was he?”

  She shook her head. “Not a nice man. He was a very violent boy. He bloodied Andy’s nose once, you know.”

  “Did he? Why?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember. They were staying with someone else at the time, and I heard about it later.” She paused to consider. “I think it was about chicken nuggets.”

  “He bloodied his brother’s nose over chicken nuggets?”

  “He was a violent boy.”

  “And then he grew up and joined the army?”

  “Yes. Until they kicked him out, anyway.”

  “Hold on. They kicked him out?”

  “Yes. There was some kind of incident. I don’t know much about it, but Andy told me people got killed.”

  “People? As in, more than one?”

  The old woman nodded. “Yes. It was some kind of scandal. Very hush-hush.”

  Wagley had an interview with Edith, too. She stared suspiciously into the camera as he asked, “What do you think of your neighbor, Mr. Day? Do you like him?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s too much trouble. People coming and going. Asking me questions.”

  This last bit was said in a pointed way toward Wagley, but he didn’t take the hint. “What kind of people coming and going?”

  “Weirdos, that’s what kind.”

  “Is he a friendly neighbor?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I keep to myself and mind my own business.”

  “So you haven’t tried to get to know him?”

  She snorted, as if the idea was absurd. “Of course not.”

  He wrapped up his video with a summary and load of leading questions. Why had I been discharged? Had the army covered up crimes to save face? Why did I have so many dead people’s pictures in my house? Whose truck had burned in my yard, and why? Was someone trying to hide something? Had someone destroyed evidence in that fire?

  Then he finished with a long spiel about how he was doing the job of the police. “At the end of the day, Truthers, I’m just a guy with a camera. I ask questions, I try to get to the truth.

  “But I don’t have all the answers
. Maybe Owen Day has a good reason to have a house full of pictures of dead people. Maybe there’s a good reason his truck, or someone else’s truck, burned in his yard. Maybe his grandmother got the facts wrong, and there’s nothing worrying about his service record. And maybe not.

  “But it’s up to the cops to be asking these questions and finding the answers. Not a guy with a camera, and an army of Truthers. They’re the professionals, supposedly.

  “So where is Kennington Police Department, asking these questions? I tried to contact them. I tried to ask them myself, but they didn’t have time for me.

  “Meanwhile, where is Owen Day? Not at home. Not anywhere I can find. He’s just up and vanished.

  “And what are the police doing? I don’t know, but if I lived in Kennington, I certainly wouldn’t be happy right now.”

  Jason had questions. Lots and lots of questions. For my part, I felt like puking. It had been years since I’d seen my grandmother. I’d hoped I would never see her again.

  It didn’t help that Jason wanted to talk about her. “That really your grandma?”

  I nodded. “That’s her.”

  “Her telling didn’t really match what Andy said.”

  “You mean, because she left out the part about how she used to beat us, and not feed us? Or how she broke my hand, and put Andy in the hospital with a concussion before the state finally took us away from her?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Among other things.”

  “Yeah. She’s evil incarnate. She would act sweet as pie when the social workers showed up. She was good at it. Then she’d turn around and beat you black and blue and lock you in the cellar for half a week without food. She’s the most vicious, sadistic bitch you ever met.”

  He seemed a little surprised by my word choice. But he nodded. “And the stuff she said about the army?”

  “What about it?”

  “Any of that true?”

  “What, you think I’m a killer now, Jason?”

  “No, man. Just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Just, I guess I never heard the full story.”

  The video flashed through my thoughts. Grayscale. Grainy. Fire. Death.