I glanced at her. “Why are you afraid of that bed?”
“What makes you think I’m afraid of the bed?”
“You can’t answer a question with a question. You have to be truthful, or I won’t answer any more questions.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment. She took a deep breath as her gaze slowly swiveled to the bed. She studied it a moment, then shivered, her eyes quickly falling back to the floor beneath us.
“My mother died in that bed. Fifteen years ago.”
That set off a whole host of questions I wanted to ask. I opened my mouth, but quickly let it snap shut as I remembered the rules I’d set out myself. But when I looked at her, waiting for her next question, it was with new eyes. I’d known there was something haunted about her eyes, but never allowed myself to imagine what it might be. I definitely never would have come to that sort of conclusion.
“Are there other cops involved? Or is it just Lindsay?”
Her head was still tilted toward the floor, but her question hit another nerve. I shook my head. As badly as I wanted to know about her past, I wasn’t going to answer any more questions.
“I’m done,” I said, dropping to my pillows, my arm forced into an upward angle because of the way she’d locked the cuff on the pipe this time. I had to lean over and tug it a little so I could put my arm down.
“That’s it? You make me answer questions about my dark past, but you give up on such an easy question?” She jumped off the counter and came close enough to me to tower over me, but far enough away that I couldn’t make another go for the keys. “Do you really think I’m not beginning to figure it out? I’m a damn good cop, Ox. I know what I’m looking at.”
“Whatever you think you know, it’s only the beginning. It’s the tip of an iceberg that runs so far under the surface that you’ll never be able to avoid it.”
“It’s about bad cops—right? It’s about a bunch of cops who worked with your father who went bad and were threatening you and your family—right?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what? You have to give me something, Ox!”
“Doesn’t the fact that you already know cops are involved frighten you a little, Kinsley?” I leaned forward, trying to look fierce as I glared at her, but I was afraid I was coming off more comical, or childish, because of my restrained wrist. “If they figure out that you’re trying to help me, they will come after you—and they won’t stop until your life is ruined.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve put my life back together once before; I can do it again.”
“How did she die?” I jutted my chin toward the bed. “It wasn’t natural causes, was it?”
She shuddered again even as she hugged herself as tight as a single person could do. She bit her bottom lip hard enough to leave an impression in it that I could see.
“Answer my question, and I’ll tell you what I know about Lindsay. Deal?”
She clearly struggled with my proposition. She turned away at one point, but when her gaze fell on that bed, she stiffened, a sound slipping from between her lips that I’d never heard a human make. It was animalistic. Cold and sad.
“My father was once a good man—at least that’s what my mother swore to me over and over again. She said that when she first knew him, he was a hardworking, honest man who wouldn’t harm a fly. He was putting himself through medical school while working as a clerk in a motel overnight and a cashier at a diner in the mornings. She said she’d never known anyone work so hard in all her life. Said, after coming from a home where her father spent most of his day sleeping in his easy chair while her mother went out to clean other people’s houses, it was refreshing. Honorable. And he was charming, she said. Kind and generous.”
She stopped, turning toward me, her hair falling over her face as she continued to hug herself. She took a few minutes, her breathing a little ragged as memories played out in her mind. I wanted to get up and offer her comfort, but the cold weight of the cuff over the light weight of the gauze bandage reminded me of the restrictions she’d placed on me.
“I remember some of that,” she continued. “I remember a dad who came home from work with a couple of fresh apples, juggling them in the middle of the kitchen until we were laughing. I remember a dad who made jokes and told the most elaborate stories. But what I remember most is the dad who was in and out of hospitals, who was a drooling lump on the couch because the medications they gave him were the wrong doses. I remember learning before I was in kindergarten what the word schizophrenia meant.”
“Oh, Kinsley…”
She shook her head. “We dealt with it. In fact, after one particularly difficult stint in the hospital, my mom decided he’d had enough. We were going to handle his illness ourselves. It was better if he stayed at home and saw a doctor in his office. We moved around for a while until Momma found a doctor she could convince to do things her way.”
“That’s incredibly dangerous. You can’t play with an illness like schizophrenia.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “You think?” Sarcasm dripped from her words. “We found that out.”
“What happened?”
“He stopped taking his pills without anyone knowing. Momma counted out his pills carefully every morning and watched him take them, but he must have been cheeking them or throwing them up the moment her back was turned. We don’t know how long it was happening, but long enough that he began hearing the voices again, that he became delusional. He became convinced that Momma was injected with some sort of technology that was being used by scientists to try and get to information he had in his head.” She shook her head. “He explained it to both of us over and over again, the details growing more elaborate with every telling.”
Kinsley waved a hand over her head and around her body, not turning in case she might catch another look at that bed. “He’d bought this place without Momma knowing about it, scraping the money together for the down payment from money Momma gave him for groceries and bills.” She shook her head. “Momma was really careful with the money, but Dad was something of a mathematical genius. I still can’t piece together how he did it.”
“Kinsley, you don’t have to do this. I think I get the idea.”
“No, Ox. We made a deal.” She leaned back against the counter, her arms still crossed tight over her chest. “They think he’d planned it for a long time, maybe even before we moved here. Even before he stopped going to the hospital.” She shook her head, finally looking at the bed again. Again, she shuddered.
“Kinsley, babe. Maybe—”
“He brought us here, convincing Momma that he wanted us to take a vacation together. He promised to teach me how to fish and promised Momma long baths and foot massages. When we got here and there was no body of water, no bathtub, he claimed he’d been misled by the real estate company. Momma desperately wanted to believe him, I think. And the first couple of days, it was wonderful! We played board games together and cooked up big meals and went for long walks. It was the most relaxed I could remember either of my parents being at any one time together. But then on the fourth day, everything changed.
“I woke before dawn to hear my parents talking in loud whispers. My mother was begging my father not to do something. I was sleeping on the floor because there was only the one bed. I sat up and saw him holding a scalpel above her chest. She couldn’t move, and her words were slurred. I learned later that he’d given her some sort of paralytic that made her muscles unable to answer the messages from the brain. He cut into her and I screamed. He forced me to get up on the bed and he taught me CPR in a rush so that I could breathe for her while he ‘operated.’ ”
She had paled so much that I was almost afraid she’d fall over. I pulled myself to my feet and held out my hand for her. She was still out of my reach, but when she saw my hand she began to reach for it. But then she stopped, stepping back to slip her keys out of her back pocket and set them on the counter.
“Like father, like daughter, I guess,” she sa
id in a semi-hysterical voice. And then she vomited in the sink.
The cuff allowed me to get close enough to lift her hair out of the way as she dry-heaved into the sink. She seemed to get control of herself and turned on the tap to rinse her mouth, cupping the water to splash her face. Her hair grew damp around the sides of her face, some of it splashing back on me.
I knew who she was now. Everyone who lived within two hundred miles of San Antonio had heard the story of little Lucy Marino. I remembered how it had been the lead story on the news and headline in the newspapers for weeks after she escaped. It was the summer before my freshman year of high school. This beautiful little girl was found wandering in a farmer’s field, covered in blood and in shock. When she was finally able to talk to police, to lead them to the place from which she’d escaped, they found a horrific scene. Both her parents dead, the mother missing organs, her chest flailed open like a fish being dressed for dinner. And her father, his wrists slit by his own hand. It took a long time for the police to piece everything together, and when they did, the truth was more horrifying than anything the people in the area could wrap their minds around.
He’d tortured his wife for six weeks. Cutting her open and sewing her closed, removing organs and doing God only knew what else. Forcing his eleven-year-old daughter to assist him in his work, to tend to her mother’s wounds after each procedure.
It was something so dark—something that, even after the death of my sister and the downhill slide my parents embarked on, I couldn’t imagine.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, drawing her into me with one arm. “I’m so fucking sorry!”
She buried her face against my chest and began to sob like it had all just happened yesterday. I held her as tight as I could, pulling her back so that I had more use of my cuffed arm. Suddenly, my problems seemed almost trite compared to what she’d gone through. How she had survived fully intact after something so awful, I couldn’t begin to fathom.
“I haven’t talked about it since I stopped going to a psychiatrist. And even then, I never really…”
“I’m sorry. If I’d known this was what…I should have known.”
“How could you? No one ever thinks things like that are possible, let alone that they’ve actually happened. Even I can’t wrap my mind around it sometimes. I have dreams that are more memory than anything else, but I can convince myself that they were just dreams, nothing more. Nothing like that could ever happen.”
“But this cabin…”
“Everything my parents owned came to me when I turned eighteen. It wasn’t much, just a few pieces of jewelry my mother had managed to hold on to, a record player, some pictures. And this place.” She turned her head, resting it against my shoulder. “To get rid of it, I had to come see it. I knew the police had had someone clean it up, but… I still see blood soaking through the bed, into the mattress and the floor. I still… I don’t know why I didn’t just hire an agent to get rid of it, why I pay a caretaker to keep it from falling down. I just… It’s a talisman I had to carry around until I felt ready to let it go.”
“No one knows it’s here. No one knows you own it.”
She pulled back slightly, catching my eye. “You and your safety are the only things that could have inspired me to come back here.”
Those words hit me hard. I almost stumbled backward, so overwhelmed by the implications that came with those words. I suddenly felt like a damn ass for all the dark thoughts I’d had toward her in the past few hours, all the work I’d done to escape that only proved how little I trusted her. How little I trusted everyone.
What a fool I was!
Chapter 7
Akker
I filled a mug to the brim with coffee, anxious for a little pick-me-up. It wasn’t as easy to stay up all night as it might have been a few years ago. I walked to the table, sipping the brew—which had grown old and a little burnt while I was out—and settled in a chair just as my phone alerted me to a text.
Josie wanted to know when I would be home.
School had just started. It was just another change in Josie’s life as she continued to adjust to her mother’s death. Between dealing with the rumors emerging about her mother’s actions in the days and weeks before her death, moving in with me, and getting to know my new girlfriend—while I was still getting to know my new girlfriend—it was all a little much for her. She’d become attached not only to me, but to my brother Brock, in ways she’d never been before. She didn’t like waking up in an empty house, didn’t like not knowing the exact moment I would return home. She wouldn’t say it, but I knew she was worried something would happen to Brock or I because of our profession.
I texted back, assuring her I would be home as soon as possible. I knew it wasn’t the answer she probably wanted, but it was the best I could do.
“So, we got into the police database,” Cheryl announced as she came into the room, dumping a stack of papers in front of me. “The investigation was pretty straightforward back then. The cops came to the conclusion that his death was accidental. That’s still how it’s listed on his death certificate.”
“As an accident?” I picked up a couple of the papers, skimming through the various reports. “They can’t arrest someone on suspicion of murder when the death certificate lists cause of death as an accident.”
“I thought that was interesting, too.” Cheryl poured herself a cup of coffee and came to join me at the table. She reached over and picked up a couple of papers that were paper-clipped together and held them out to me. “This is all they have against Ox, as far as we could find. If there’s more, it’s not in the database.”
I perused the pages, reading snippets of two statements that claimed Ox was upstairs with his father and that he pushed him down the stairs. One of the statements was from a cop who’d investigated the incident at the time, who had now retired. He claimed that he didn’t tell the truth in the original report because he was trying to show respect for a fellow cop and his family, but that his conscience had begun to bother him. The other was a statement from a witness who was actually in the house at the time of the incident. This witness claimed that Ox was the one arguing with his father over the older Winn’s decision to sell Caballo. Ox had become enraged and pushed his father, causing him to fall down the stairs.
I sat back, reading the second confession slowly for a second time. I referenced the original reports as I did, verifying some of the facts. It took me longer than it should have since my vision was blurring and I had to really force myself to concentrate, but that didn’t stop me from seeing the inconsistencies.
“This is bullshit!”
“The one from his mom? Yeah, I thought so, too.”
I shook my head, reading the name at the bottom of the statement for what must have been the dozenth time. “How could a mother do that to her child?” Then again, I knew how. If my own mother had a reason to turn me over to the cops for something—anything—she wouldn’t think twice about it. I’d known things were bad with Ox’s mother, but I didn’t know it was that bad.
“Here’s the thing, though: even with these statements—which are pretty weak on their own—the cops have nothing. How they got a judge to sign off on a warrant is beyond me! The charge isn’t going to stick.”
“Maybe that’s not what they want. Maybe they just wanted Ox out of the way so that they could do something else, set him up for something else.”
“That’s a possibility, but it would imply that we’ve got a bunch of bad cops, a crooked prosecutor, and a judge who, at best, is on the take.”
“That’s a lot of bad people.”
“Sure is. No wonder Ox never said anything to anyone.”
“Where’s Skylar? We need names.”
Cheryl gestured over her shoulder. “She and Prescott have commandeered the hallway outside her office alcove. They’ve got paperwork scattered everywhere.”
“Have they found anything?”
Cheryl shrugged. “Prescott’s aslee
p, but Skylar looks like a puzzle freak trying to put together an abstract.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I jumped to my feet and stormed down the hall. She was there, all right, dozens and dozens of single sheets of paper spread over the floor and tacked to the wall with clear tape. She was standing in the middle of it all, studying the writing on several sheets.
“What have you got?”
Without turning, she tapped her finger against one of those papers. “A list of the plaintiffs. I’m trying to figure out how they all relate to firm documents.”
“Firm documents?”
“Ox was working on transferring all of his father’s files to the new computer system. He’d put off doing it because he knew it was going to be a big project—his father kept a lot of his paperwork in handwritten files. There were dozens and dozens of file cabinets in the old offices to hold them all. Now they’re in the basement.”
“Did he get them transferred?”
“He started to, about a year ago. But he suddenly decided to stop about a quarter of the way through them all. Told me we had more important things to work on and that he might hire some temp staff to take care of it sometime down the road.”
That seemed a little off to me. Skylar appeared to feel the same way.
“You think he found something he didn’t want to come out?”
“I think that’s a good possibility. And I feel awful that I didn’t realize it at the time. If I had, maybe I could have looked into it myself, spared Ox this ordeal.”
I laid a hand on her shoulder. “We all appear to have missed this, Skylar. Don’t be too hard on yourself. We’re doing all we can now.”
She touched another paper hanging on the wall. “This is the list of the plaintiffs. As far as I can tell, most of them were cops who worked with the older Mr. Winn. There’s a few who were early employees, some for whom I can’t really find any connection to the police force or Caballo.” She pointed out one name in particular. “This is Luna Walsh’s dad. He was on the original list, but he’s been removed because he refused to take part in the lawsuit.”
Caballo Security Box Set Page 83