by Blake Banner
“We need to talk to the inspector…”
She nodded. “I agree.”
“But before we do that, I want to go back to the Reynolds and see if we can locate Celeste’s computer. There is no mention of it in Lenny’s report. It has to be somewhere. Maybe she didn’t have one, but that’s unlikely. If she did and we find it, then we might strike gold with her emails.”
She didn’t look happy, but she nodded. “OK.”
We climbed back in the car and followed the route that Dehan had suggested. It was, like she’d said, fast and easy. Only, instead of going all the way up to the playground, we turned right for three blocks on Watson and then left into Beach Avenue. Dehan sighed as I pulled up outside the house, spread her hands and shook her head, like she’d been having some long, internal dialogue with herself.
“I’m going around in circles. You’re right, anyone could have made the call and got to either the Reynolds’ house or the playground in just a few minutes. But, like you yourself also said, Samuel had already called her on the landline. And Chad called her from his phone, so why would either of them then jump in a car, drive down to Storey Avenue, call her on a burner, and drive up to the playground? It doesn’t make any sense!”
“I agree, it doesn’t make sense, Dehan. But we need to take baby steps here and not jump to conclusions. For a start, we don’t know for a fact that it was Samuel who called her on the landline. We only know that somebody called her from the house.” I shrugged. “Plucking a theory at random from thin air, maybe Helen called to warn her that Samuel was in a rage and had gone after her! Perhaps Samuel went to the station house to talk to Lenny, to ask him to intervene because he believed Chad was leading Celeste down the path of perdition. Lenny couldn’t help, so Samuel called Celeste and said, ‘Wait for me, we need to talk.’” We stared at each other for a long moment, then I went on. “I’m not saying that’s what happened, I’m saying we need to be very careful that we are sure of each premise before we accept it as a fact. Right now, we don’t know who used the burner.”
She nodded. “OK, yup. You’re right. Let’s go get that computer.”
The slam of the doors sounded somehow damp in the gray afternoon light. Dehan followed me to the door of the ugly cube of a house and I rang the bell. It was Helen who opened it for us. She stood a while, smiling, her eyes appearing to see things we could not. She was in her early thirties, blonde, and could have been pretty but for the expression on her face that said, however far you searched, you would never find her.
“Hi, Helen,” I smiled at her. “Is Samuel at home?”
“He’s not here. He’s gone.”
“How about Sean? Can we see him?”
She frowned. “I took my meds. But that isn’t always clear. Samuel is dealing with that.”
Dehan said, “May we come in, please, Helen?”
She nodded. “Yeah, that should be OK. I just have to be careful not to let them start.” She stood back and we stepped over the threshold. Dehan closed the door and Helen said, “Talking to me.”
“May we go through to the living room and see your father now?”
“I was in my room. So far, that seems to be OK…” She nodded and made an almost placating gesture with her hands. “But I mustn’t go out because they play tricks on me and I don’t know how to get back. The stairs are OK, and so far my room is pretty solid.”
I smiled at her again. “That’s good news. Would you like us to take you up to your room?”
She nodded. “That’s probably OK.”
We climbed the stairs with her to a long, dark landing that led onto an equally long, but darker passage. At the end, the bathroom door stood open, and a dull, gray light, insufficient to make shadows or contrasts, showed another door, on our left, that also stood open onto a dark room. I pointed to the door.
“Is that your room?”
She nodded.
I asked, “Don’t you want the lights on?”
She shook her head. “No, they told me the darkness keeps it all from cracking. The light has vibrations that make things crack. It’s OK for other people. Samuel is strong, but Daddy is cracking. So for now, I’m playing it safe.” She smiled. “Keeping things tight.”
Two more doors stood closed, and at the far end, opposite the bathroom, a third. She pointed to the door next to hers. “Samuel is there in case they start making problems. I don’t know how they get in, but Samuel can usually make them shut up. He says for now, the way forward is to take the meds, and pray to Our Father. I’m not sure, but I do what he says, for now. Play it safe is what I say.”
I said, “And your daddy sleeps downstairs…”
“Until we can fix the cracks. We’ll have to see how that goes. We’re trying to find the right balance. He used to sleep in that room. But he’s gone now.”
She pointed to the room next to Samuel’s. Which left the one at the end, opposite the bathroom, as Celeste’s. Helen stared at that door for a while. When she spoke, her voice sounded empty. “Celeste took Mom away, and then she went away too. They get sucked through the cracks. We’re trying to make sure Daddy doesn’t get sucked out, but we’ll have to see...” She crossed the landing toward the dark door, speaking over her shoulder. “I better get back. That’s a lot of light for one day. Let’s hope this rain keeps up. Bye.”
And she closed the door.
I followed Dehan back down the stairs into the hall. She snapped on the light, but the overhead bulb, held under a green, plastic shade, only seemed to add to the gloom. She moved to the mahogany living room door and knocked. We heard some grunting and shuffling, then Reynolds’ voice, shrouded with recent sleep.
“Who is it?”
“Detectives Dehan and Stone, Mr. Reynolds, may we speak to you briefly?”
There was silence, then some creaking of bedsprings, then, “Yes, I was sleeping, but come in.”
We opened the door. The room was almost as dark as Helen’s, except that gray light managed to creep in through the window that gave onto the backyard. Outside, shreds of wet washing dripped from a clothesline, and tall, scrubby blades of uncut grass quivered in the cold wind. Sean was up on one elbow.
“I was asleep,” he said again. “Where’s Samuel? He’ll see you.”
We sat without being invited: Dehan in the armchair where she’d sat before, I on the straight-backed chair by the window, where I could see his face better.
“It’s actually you we would like to talk to, Mr. Reynolds. Just a couple of minor details.” I smiled. “No need to trouble Samuel with them.” I glanced at my watch. “Four o’clock. I imagine he’s at work, right?”
He nodded. “More than likely.”
“Where does he work?”
“He’s self-employed. He’s a welder, amongst other things. That boy can turn his hand to anything. Godsend to me: fix a washing machine, fix your car, even fix a leak in the roof.”
“He’s a fixer.”
“He sure is that. What did you want to ask me?”
Dehan said, “Did Celeste have a computer?”
“’Course she did. She was never off the damned thing. When she wasn’t on her damned phone, she was on her computer. I don’t know what it is with kids these days, they always gotta be staring at some goddamn screen. It’s either the damn phone, the damn computer or the damn TV.” He wagged a finger at Dehan. “I tell you this, them damn screens are gonna be the end of decent family life in this country. You mark my words. Separates the family. Breaks people up. Each one in her own room, glued to a damn screen.”
I spoke almost without thinking. “Cracks…”
“What?”
“Cracks appearing,” I said. “In families and society…”
He pointed at me. “That’s exactly it. Family is the basis of society, and there are cracks appearing. I always said so. The Lord guide us, for we have gone astray.”
“Mr. Reynolds, where would Celeste’s computer be now? Did Lenny take it away?”
His eyes became abstracted and he stared into the gloom, as though he was seeing something that wasn’t there. I had seen the same look on Helen’s face a little earlier. “No,” he said, “No, I don’t believe he did.”
Dehan asked him, “What happened to all Celeste’s stuff? Where is it now?”
“Up in her room.” He shook his head. “We haven’t had the heart to go in and do anything. I know we should, but my angina and my blood pressure, anytime I think about…” His face crumpled and he started to cry. “I can’t. I can’t just kick her out like that, chuck her out with the trash. I can’t do that…”
“Of course not, nobody would expect you to do that. You should treasure her memory.”
He nodded at her, with his mouth open under wet cheeks. “Thank you.”
“Sean,” she went on, frowning. “Are you saying that Celeste’s room is pretty much as it was that Sunday, when she walked out?”
He blew his nose and wiped his eyes. “Hasn’t been touched.”
“Lenny didn’t go up there?”
“He said he didn’t need to. ‘No need to go upsetting you, old friend,’ that’s what he said.”
I nodded a few times. “Well, Lenny is a good man, but I am afraid we are going to need to go up and have a look around, Mr. Reynolds. We need Celeste’s computer.”
“I understand. Just makes me cry every time I think… Don’t break anything, or throw anything away, will you?”
“We wouldn’t dream of it, Sean. And we won’t take anything without your permission. But we do need her computer.”
“OK…”
We climbed the stairs again and found the door unlocked. I pulled some latex gloves from my pocket and saw that Dehan was doing the same. I pulled them on, pushed open the door and switched on the light. The room was large, and tidier than I had expected. A window at the far end overlooked the street. The drapes were closed and I went over and pulled them open. The bed was made, but under the duvet, the sheets were rumpled and not fresh. The pillows still had indentations, as of a head. There was a desk with very little on it. I looked at Dehan. “Call dispatch, get them to send a forensics team out.”
She frowned as she pulled out her cell. “Forensics? What are you expecting to find?”
“Something. I’m not sure what.”
She made the call while I went through the desk and found nothing there. She had boxes below the desk. An exploration of them revealed stuff from when she was a kid. There was no laptop, no cable, no box a laptop once came in.
Dehan hung up. “They’re on their way.” She moved to a pine bookcase and started going through the books. “Mostly chic-lit,” she said. “Women complain that they are stereotyped, then they read chic-lit and dress up as vaginas.” I laughed. “Seriously, Stone. How many guys read guy-lit and dress up as penises?”
“None many that I know of.”
“Exactly. This looks like a diary.” She took it over and leaned on the windowsill, started leafing through it. “It’s from a few years back. Twenty thirteen, she’s what? Fifteen?”
“Mm-hm.”
I looked around. There were no posters on the walls. The books on the bookcase were, as Dehan had said, mainly chic-lit, but adolescent, as though she had bought it at the time of the diary. There was absolutely nothing in the room to suggest an eighteen year-old Celeste had ever occupied it.
Dehan spoke again, while reading, “This is just page after page of complaint about Samuel, her sister and her dad. She doesn’t talk about any boys she likes, friends at school, bands… nada. Her whole damn life seems to revolve around her frustration with her family.”
She snapped it closed, pulled an evidence bag from her pocket and bagged the diary.
“Stone, how can Lenny believe that he can get away with this? A murder investigation where it is clear that the victim received a call from somebody she probably knew, using a burner, minutes before her death, and he neglects to search her room. What the hell is he playing at? The phone records, the witnesses… He could not possibly believe that he could get away with that.”
“I know.” I went and stood next to her, she looking into the room with her elbows on the windowsill, I looking out at the damp, gray road. “And the weirdest thing of all is that he is too good a cop not to realize it’s just a matter of time.”
Outside, the forensics van pulled up. I sighed as I watched them climb out. “The computer isn’t here, Dehan. But I think I might know where it is.”
We went down and opened the door. Bob was approaching across the sidewalk, dressed in plastic and grinning among his beard. Behind him was his team.
“Hey guys, how’s married life?”
“Hell, but you should know that, Bob. You’ve been happily divorced for years.”
He laughed like Santa and asked, “What’s it about? What are we looking for?”
I hesitated a moment. “We are looking for fingerprints that do not belong to the family. If I’m right, you’re going to find overwhelmingly Celeste’s prints and very few others, maybe Samuel, her brother. But there may be one other, a man, and if you run him through the system, you’ll get a hit. Let me know immediately, Bob. It’s important.
“Also, check the bed for DNA. Again, if I’m right, you’ll find Celeste’s and a man.”
He frowned. “OK.”
“It could be a delicate matter. Go on up, room opposite the bathroom. I’ll tell Mr. Reynolds you’re here.”
I found Dehan sitting on the hood of the Jag with her long legs stuck out in front of her. Dusk was gathering and she watched me approach with frowning eyes. “You think Lenny was having an affair with Celeste?”
I stopped in my tracks and thought about my answer. Finally, I said, “Somebody was. If not Lenny, somebody.”
EIGHT
It was a short drive down Gleason Avenue in the gathering gloom to Chad’s place. He had the drapes closed, but warm light was filtering around the edges, touching the iron railings and the trash cans out front. He opened the door, closed his eyes and sighed.
“You know? It is really hard for me to focus on my work when…”
I decided to save him time and distraction and cut across him. “This will only take a couple of minutes, Chad, and the sooner we get it over with, the sooner you can get back to your studies.”
“Fine. Come in.”
He made way for us. We didn’t go through to the living room, we stayed in the hall. He spread his hands. “What?”
“After your row, you made it sound as though you and Celeste might be fixing things.”
He shrugged. “If you want to put it that way.”
“Did she keep stuff here?”
“Yeah, she’d been doing that for a while. I think she was trying to move in. I told her...”
I interrupted him. “So when she went home Sunday. She didn’t take that stuff with her. She left it here.”
His face went blank. He hadn’t been expecting the question. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“What did you do with that stuff?”
He frowned. “Well, after a few days, it was obvious she wasn’t coming back and she wasn’t answering my calls, so I boxed it up and stuck it in the basement.”
I could feel a hot pellet in my gut. I asked him the million dollar question. “Was her laptop among that stuff?”
He nodded. “Sure. She kept it here because she thought her freak of a brother was trying to read her mail.”
“We’re going to need to take that stuff away, Chad.”
“Knock yourselves out. I’m going to assume you have either authority or permission, and if you haven’t, I don’t want to know about it.” He pointed to a door in the wall under the stairs. “Key’s in the door. It’s a big box labeled ‘Celeste’. You’ll find it.”
The basement had a bare, concrete floor which was largely hidden by an accumulation of junk that had not quite descended to the status of trash. It covered the rear and the left-hand wall. There were a couple of sofas, a couple of chai
rs, a big dining table, and it was all buried under more crates and cartons than you could easily count. The crates and the cartons contained everything from books and magazines to old toys, ancient Nintendos, vinyl records, tennis rackets and baseball bats, plastic bags full of cassette tapes and an infinite number of receipts for everything imaginable. There was also dust, a washing machine, a dryer and an old fridge.
We made a plan of attack and worked methodically. The plan was to take everything that was on the left and rear of the room and put it on the front and left, item by item, until we found the carton with Celeste’s name on it. We cleared a sofa and two chairs and moved two years’ worth of receipts and invoices, essays, reports and magazines from on top and underneath the dining table to the back of the room before we eventually found it.
It was not a carton. It was a semi-transparent, plastic, IKEA storage crate with a blue lid, like a giant Tupperware box four feet long, three feet across and eighteen inches deep. It was sealed with packing tape, and across one of the strips of tape, her name was written in indelible black ink. I lifted it and carried it to the table. There, I cut the tape with my Swiss Army knife and we removed the lid.
It was mainly clothes: jeans, blouses, shirts and T-shirts, a Columbia University sweatshirt, several pairs of panties and a couple of bras, socks, a pair of Timberland boots. There was a copy of the Lord of the Rings, and also a copy of Albert Camus’ The Outsider. On the first page, there was a dedication to Celeste from Chad, dated two weeks before her death. I flipped through the pages and saw they were annotated in what seemed to be Chad’s handwriting. I handed it to Dehan, removed a pair of Levis from the crate and found the laptop with its power cable and wireless mouse.
We stood staring at it for a moment, then Dehan dropped the book by Camus and picked up the Lord of the Rings. She leafed through the first pages. “There’s no dedication on this one,” she said.
I shook my head. “Looks like he was trying to educate her.”
“There is more to Chad Norris than meets the eye. A touch of Professor Higgins.”
She dropped the big tome back in the crate and I resealed it. “Let’s get this back to the station and go through it.” As we climbed the stairs back up to the hall, I sang, softly, “Oh, why can’t a woman be more like a man?”