by J. D. Barker
“Gone where?”
“Heaven, I’m afraid. That’s why you came here yesterday to live with us.”
“I don’t want to live here. I want to live with Mama.”
Dr. Bart fell silent, then said, “You want to live with her back at the motel with her boyfriend Maxwell Pullen?”
“Just with Mama. I don’t like Max. Max is mean.”
“Mean to you, or mean to your mama?”
“Mean to everyone.”
“Is that why the police found you in the closet? Because Max was being mean to you?”
Silence.
“Michael?”
“It was dark in the closet, like in here.”
“And you went in there because it was safe, like here. Nothing can hurt you in the closet, and nothing can hurt you here.”
“Max sometimes found me in the closet, but not all the time.”
“Not that time.”
Silence again.
“Where was your mama when you were in the closet hiding from Max?” Dr. Bart’s voice had grown slightly louder, like he’d leaned in closer to the recorder.
Again, I was quiet.
“Michael? Where was Mama?”
“Mama was sleeping in the bathtub.”
“Your mama was sleeping in the bathtub when you hid in the closet? She wasn’t in the bed?”
“In the bathtub. Mama likes baths.”
“Where was Max?”
“Max wasn’t home.”
“But he came home, didn’t he? Did he come home while your mama was in the bath?”
My little voice, barely audible: “Yeah.”
“What happened when Max came home? This is important, Michael, so I want you to think about it carefully before you answer. Can you do that for me?”
“Okay.”
“You said your mama was sleeping in the bathtub. A lot of important people are trying to figure out if she was already sleeping when Max came in or if he made her go to sleep. Do you understand?”
I didn’t answer.
“If you heard her speak to Max, then we know he made her go to sleep.”
“I don’t know.”
“Did Max speak to you when he got home?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re a smart boy, Michael. I know you understand the question. Did Max speak to you when he got home?”
My reply came softly. “Yeah.”
“What did he say?”
My little voice dropped nearly an octave in an effort to imitate Max. “He said, ‘Not a fucking word outta you, you little shit.’”
“Were you in the closet when he said this?”
“No.”
“Where were you?”
“I was sitting on the bed watching the TV. Max came in, was mean to me, and went to mama to be mean to her. He was loud.”
“Did he close the bathroom door?”
“Yes.”
“What did your mama say when he came in the room?”
Silence.
“What did Max say to your mama?”
“He said she was supposed to be working. He said, ‘We wouldn’t be so fucked right now if you went to work when you’re supposed to!’”
“Your mother worked for a restaurant, right? As a waitress?”
“Waffle Castle. I like waffles.”
Dr. Bart said, “You’re being a good boy. If you keep answering my questions, maybe we can have waffles when we’re done.”
I said nothing.
“Max worked in construction, right?”
“Mama said Max was a lazy shit who couldn’t hold down a construction job ’cause he drank so much.”
“She said that from the bath?”
“No. She was sleeping. She always said that, though.”
Dr. Bart went on. “Max blamed your mama for losing the house, having to move into the motel?”
“That’s what he was yelling about. Max was always yelling.”
“In the bathroom?”
“Yeah.”
“Did your mama yell back?”
Nothing.
“Michael? Did your mama yell back at Max?”
“I heard splashing. Lots of splashing.”
“But not your mama?”
“Max screamed. Max screamed so loud. So loud! Max screamed. I couldn’t hear nothin’ else.” My little voice screamed then, my voice on the tape, in order to show Dr. Bart, make him understand. Loud enough to reach out from the past and rattle the speakers in my Porsche. Loud enough to reach through my chest, yank at my heart, and threaten to pull the organ out mid-beat.
I nearly drove off the shoulder of the highway; the wheels spun, grabbed gravel, then found the pavement again.
I scrambled for the volume knob and turned down the stereo.
Neither Dr. Bart nor the younger me spoke for a moment. The seconds ticked by. When my four-year-old voice came back, it was a whisper.
“That’s when I went into the closet.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Dobbs
It smells like barbecue, Detective. It’s okay, you can say it. We’re all thinking it. This isn’t my first car fire, and they all smell this way,” Special Agent Gimble said. She chugged a Red Bull, crushed the can, and set it on the bumper of her Chevy Suburban. “The nasty smell, the one that really turns your gut, that comes from the tires. I always thought that seemed a little backward.”
“I’m a homicide detective in Los Angeles,” Dobbs replied. “When I started out on patrol, I probably caught one of these a week.”
“With a body?”
Dobbs shook his head. “Most around here are kids torching stolen wheels after a joyride. A couple with bodies. Usually gang-related. The smell doesn’t bother me, not anymore.”
The Ford Escort had been doused in gasoline and set ablaze. By the time the fire department had responded, there was nothing left but a burned-out hull. The body of Philip Wardwell was still in the passenger seat, the remains of his suit fused to what was left of his body, two holes clearly visible in his skull—the entrance and exit wounds of a bullet fired at close range. The stolen Glock from the police station lay in his lap.
“If it’s not the smell, why’s your nose all scrunched up like that?”
“I’m thinking.”
“That’s your thinking face?”
“Kepler’s actions don’t add up.” Dobbs picked up Gimble’s empty Red Bull can and turned it in his hands. “Sillman—that’s the cop who got attacked in the interview room back at headquarters—he swore up and down it was the attorney who hit him. He was shaken up, though, slight concussion. I figured it had to be Kepler, and Sillman just remembered it wrong. Then we’ve got the two of them walking out of the building—Kepler’s not forcing him, he’s not forcing Kepler. They get in this car, Kepler drives, not the attorney. Drives to here—”
“And shoots his attorney in the head,” Gimble interrupted. “What kind of attorney throws away his life and career for a client?”
Sammy Goggans poked his head out of the SUV’s back door. “The kind of attorney who isn’t an attorney.”
Gimble rounded the side of the Chevy with Dobbs behind her. “What’d you find, Sammy?”
“I’ve got one Philip Wardwell licensed to practice law in the state of California, but unless he somehow managed to morph from a ninety-three-year-old black man to an overweight white guy half his age, the cooked man in the Ford over there ain’t him.”
Gimble faced the various law enforcement officers and investigators in the Edward Hotel parking lot, her eyes darting around. “Begley! Where are you?” She started toward the burned-out Ford. “Begley!”
A hand went up from a group of FBI agents huddled at the ground near the side of the Dumpster. Dobbs followed her over to them.
Begley was poking at a bundle of crumpled napkins in the grass with a pencil. “We’ve got blood on these. They haven’t been here long.”
Gimble’s eyes narrowed. “Blood? As in Kepler�
�s injured?”
Begley shook his head. “Not unless he’s dead. There’s brain matter too. My guess is he used these to clean up after shooting Wardwell.”
“Wardwell’s not Wardwell,” Dobbs said.
Gimble explained what Sammy Goggans had found.
Dobbs neared the burned-out husk of a car, carefully avoiding the water pooled on the ground, and studied what remained of the man in the passenger seat. “Are you able to print him?”
“No way,” Begley said. “Too much damage from the fire. I can run dental, but we’ll need someone to match to.” With a gloved hand, he placed the napkins in an evidence bag.
Gimble turned to Dobbs. “What kind of ID check would they have done before letting him in to see Kepler?”
Dobbs shrugged. “Driver’s license, business card. Tough to say.”
“Business card,” Gimble repeated.
Dobbs realized what she was getting at. “Wilkins would have it. I sent him back to Tepper’s apartment for something.” He took out his phone and dialed his partner on speaker.
Wilkins picked up on the second ring. “It’s gone.”
“How’s it gone?” Dobbs replied.
“What’s gone?” Gimble asked.
Dobbs pulled up the photograph of the sparrow feather on a leather strap taken at the Tepper crime scene earlier and showed it to her and Begley.
Gimble frowned. “The girl from the bathtub had that?”
“When we found the feathers in the truck, I remembered seeing this. It was just sitting at the bottom of a jewelry box. I told Wilkins to go back and get it, put it in evidence,” Dobbs told her.
On the phone, Wilkins said, “He either grabbed it when we walked him through the place or he somehow came back for it, but it’s definitely gone.”
“Fuck,” Gimble muttered.
“Kepler’s attorney. Please tell me he gave you a business card,” Dobbs said.
“Kepler’s attorney gave me a business card.”
“And you still have it?”
“Yeah, why?”
Gimble started pacing, snapping her fingers.
Dobbs said, “I need you to run it for prints. Philip Wardwell is not Philip Wardwell.”
“Of course not,” Wilkins grumbled. “What else can go wrong today?”
Dobbs disconnected the call.
“We need to get in front of this,” Gimble said, her fingers snapping so quick it pained Dobbs to look at them. “I think I’m gonna have the sister picked up.”
Dobbs bit his lower lip. “A family like that, they’ll lawyer up before you get a chance to talk to her. She’s not going to sell out her brother.”
“Adoptive brother.”
“Whatever. She’s got no reason to talk to you. We’ll continue to watch her phone, wait for him to make contact, then work backward. That’s the move. I’m still not sure you should have called her.”
Gimble stopped pacing, took out her cell phone, and made a show of dialing Megan Fitzgerald again. When the call went to voice mail, she left another message, then slipped the phone back into the pocket of her jeans. “We want her spooked. People who are spooked make mistakes. Spook, rattle, then roll—that’s the plan until we pick her up.”
She turned and her eyes locked on Special Agent Vela, leaning on the wall of the Edward Hotel near the service entrance, scrolling through something on his phone. She started toward him, Dobbs following, and shouted across the parking lot, “Vela? Where are you on a profile? You’ve had half a day since we ID’d this guy. You should be able to tell me what color underwear he’s wearing at this point. I need to know where he went from here!”
Vela held out the phone to her. “You’ll want to read this.”
“What is it?” She took the phone, began scrolling through the text.
Vela looked at Dobbs. “You said his adoptive family was Fitzgerald. I didn’t make the connection at first, not until we saw all those books back at the storage unit, the audiobooks you found in his truck. Several were written by the Fitzgeralds. He was adopted by Rosela and Barton Fitzgerald.”
“They’re shrinks, teachers at Cornell. Why does that matter?”
Vela nodded toward his phone in Gimble’s hand. “He wasn’t just adopted, he was placed. That’s a copy of the police report from the last night he spent with his real mother.”
Gimble glanced up at Dobbs and Vela only long enough to whisper, “My God, this is horrible.” She went back to the small screen, lost in the text.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Michael
The tape continued, neither me nor Dr. Bart speaking, only a delicate hiss from my car speakers. When Dr. Bart’s voice came back, it was less steady but intent on pressing on.
Dr. Bart said, “Did your mama scream, too? When Max screamed?”
“Mama couldn’t scream.”
“Why not, Michael?”
“Because Mama was sleeping.”
Silence again. Nearly ten seconds. Then: “What happened next?”
“Someone knocked on the door.”
“Your closet door or the motel-room door?”
“A man knocked on the front door of our room, and Max came out of the bathroom to answer.”
“Who was there?”
“I couldn’t see.”
“Because you were in the closet?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you heard him? What did he say?”
“He wanted to know if everything was okay. He heard Max being loud. Max told him it was all okay. He told him it was the TV. The man must have believed him, because he went away.”
“What did Max do after the man went away?”
“He sat on the bed for a long time.”
“You could see him?”
“I laid down on the floor of the closet. I could see his shoes from under the door.”
“What did Max do next? When he got up from the bed.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“We need to, Michael, it’s very important.”
“No.”
“Is that when Max went out to his truck? The police report said he kept his tools in his work truck.”
“No! No! No! I don’t wanna!”
Silence again.
“Michael.” Dr. Bart lowered his deep voice; it sounded calming, soothing. “I want you to take a deep breath.”
I turned up the volume again. I couldn’t help myself. Barely audible, deep in the background, I heard myself breathing in fast, gasping breaths, nearly hyperventilating.
“You’re safe here, Michael. This is a safe place. Max can’t hurt you. Max can’t hurt anyone, not anymore.”
“Max is dead.”
“Yes, Michael. Max is dead,” Dr. Bart said. “Take another breath, calm yourself. Nobody can hurt you here. Not Max, not anyone.”
A minute passed.
Two minutes.
Three minutes.
Nearly five before Dr. Bart spoke again. “Do you feel better, Michael?”
No reply.
“Michael?”
“I’m not—”
The tape clicked. Then came a loud clunk as it reached the end of the side and reversed. The second side was blank. I let it play anyway. Thirty minutes of the loudest silence.
At some point, my foot sank on the accelerator. I realized I was doing nearly ninety. I slowed as the first sign for Needles, California, flew past on the right. Not much longer now.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Dobbs
When Gimble finished reading the police report, she lowered Vela’s phone to her side. Her face had gone pale. “What does something like that do to a kid?”
“Something like what?” Dobbs asked, eyeing the phone.
Vela’s gaze met Gimble’s, and then he turned to Dobbs. “Back in 1996, when Kepler was only four years old, they found him in the closet of a run-down motel room outside Dryden, New York. He’d been in there all night. Not locked in, mind you; he was hiding. On the other
side of that door, a tweaker named Maxwell Pullen started to dismember the boy’s mother with a hacksaw. He wrapped the pieces in plastic painter’s tarps and lined them up on the floor. The investigating officer thinks he planned on disposing of her remains once he’d finished but then got cold feet. They found a high concentration of methamphetamines and alcohol in his blood, and there’s no way to know what was going on in his head, but when he’d cut up about half of her, he sat on the edge of the bed, put a thirty-eight in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. If anyone heard the gunshot, they didn’t report it. A cleaning woman stumbled into the mess and found Kepler the next morning.”
“Shit.”
Vela went on. “According to the medical examiner, the actual cause of death for the mother was drowning.”
“Drowning?” Dobbs repeated.
Gimble handed him Vela’s phone. “Page three, second paragraph.”
Dobbs studied the text. “Drowned in the bathtub. Unlikely accidental. No drugs or alcohol found in her system.”
Vela nodded. “But here’s where things get weird—rigor had started to set in before Pullen made his first cut. Normally, rigor starts to set in about two hours after death and lasts for about eight to twelve hours. The ME set the time of death somewhere between four and seven p.m. Security footage for the motel has Maxwell Pullen leaving at just a little past one in the afternoon and returning at six thirty.”
“So he wasn’t there when the mother drowned?” Dobbs asked.
Vela shook his head. “Guess who was, though.”
“Kepler.”
Gimble’s fingers were snapping again. Softly this time. A nervous tic. “If she drowned in the tub, how would the water temperature affect time of death?”
Dobbs said, “I caught a bathtub drowning two years ago—a mother in East LA swallowed a handful of pills, passed out, eventually went under the water. The ME measured the water temperature versus air temp and figured in both when calculating TOD. She was confident within thirty minutes. They probably did something similar here.”
“No way a four-year-old kid drowned a grown woman,” Gimble replied. “How about someone else? Another unsub in the room before this? Before Maxwell Pullen got back?”