The Shadow Box: Paranormal Suspense and Dark Fantasy Thriller Novels

by Travis Luedke

  “I watched them from the window,” Glenn whined through a curtain of snot and blood. He gestured to the office window overlooking the picnic tables under the carport. Max thought of crushing his head under one of them. “He didn’t touch her! I made sure of that! He just wanted to talk.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  “It was her father, man! He was almost crying—”

  “It was her step-father, ass! The step-father who was molesting her!”

  Glenn rolled his eyes. “Yeah, right.”

  Max roared and broke from James and Unruh—quite a task, considering how strong they were. He kicked Glenn across the jaw, knocking him to the pavement before the police could subdue him. Glenn whined and crawled away with his hand to his bloody mouth.

  “What difference does it make? He didn’t kill her, she killed herself!” It was hard for him to talk with a mouth full of blood.

  “Did he give her anything?” asked James.

  Glenn paused for a moment and looked down.

  “She said it was a new jacket.” He put his hand to his face. “Oh…oh my God!”

  “You God damned jackass!” Max shook against the officers. They were individually stronger than Max, and had redoubled their efforts. There was no way he was getting away from them without hurting one of them, and he was still in control. “You let a child talk to her abuser.”

  “Alleged abuser.” Glenn pointed at Max. “I see how that girl is… was. She wasn’t some innocent little doe-eyed virgin! She knew what she was doing!”

  “You idiot!” The momentary shock from the officers at Glenn’s testimony loosened their grip enough for him to get in a kick to the belly. That sent him to the ground with a yelp and knocked Max off balance. He fell back into Unruh, and was soon taken to the ground in the arms of the burly young policeman.

  “Get up,” James shouted.

  Glenn reached for help, but James stepped back. When Glenn was on his feet, James looked him in the eye.

  “Go home, before the ambulance gets here.”

  “What? I want to press charges.” He pointed at Max, still on the ground under Unruh.

  “For what?” asked James.

  “For what? For assault!” he sounded almost comical with his lip fattened and red. “He just assaulted and battered me.”

  “Did anybody see it?”

  Glenn’s eyes widened. He gave Laura the same baffled look. She crossed her arms and shook her head. He looked down at Unruh.

  “No, sir,” he replied. “I didn’t see any assault.”

  “You pigs! This is why I hate cops.”

  “Oh, man.” Max chuckled. “You are stupid!”

  James stepped into his face. “Go, now.”

  “Don’t come back,” Laura said as he stumbled off. Glenn limped to his car.

  “We can’t prove he gave her the knife.”

  Max pressed the ice pack to his hand. He groaned and shook his head. “James, where else would she—?”

  “Even if we could prove it, it wouldn’t matter. He didn’t stick it in her, and we can’t even prove he told her to do it.”

  Max looked down at the ice pack. His blood trickled around the edges like raindrops.

  “I know. I know. There isn’t anything—”

  “They can test her… the remains,” he didn’t look at James to say it. “They can still do that with what’s left. It’ll prove—”

  “Max, this is a suicide. The complaining witness in the statutory rape case is dead. They aren’t going to go to trial if they can’t present the victim to say who raped her. And even if they would, I don’t know if they can get definite DNA from what was left. It was all over the…” He stopped and took a short breath. “Where would they find a baby in all that?”

  It twisted in him like a drill. Out of the corner of his eyes he kept seeing big bloody tangles against the wall. When he looked, they weren’t there. When he closed his eyes he saw her face, dead. He couldn’t escape.

  There were a few more people at the cottage now, more employees of the Ranch, a couple more cops, and some people from the coroner. They’d have the body out of the basement in an hour or so. Max wasn’t going to stick around that long.

  “Did you get it?” Max asked Unruh when he returned.

  “Yes, sir.” He handed over the camera with a ghostly face. Max thanked him and put the camera back in his bag.

  “You want me to get the nurse to wrap your hand?” asked Laura. Max handed her the ice pack and shook his head.

  “James, George… I need you to do something—”

  “Already on it,” James interrupted. “I had a car pick them up. They’ll be waiting for you at the station.”

  Max nodded. “I’ve just got one thing I need to take care of first.” He hoisted his bag over his shoulder. His knuckles throbbed, but nothing seemed broken. He already had bruises all over his body. A few more probably wouldn’t even be noticeable.

  “Are you sure you want to do this now?” asked James.

  Max nodded and left. He knew if he stopped now, he wouldn’t start again.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Max almost bolted past James at the police station.

  “Where are they?” asked Max.

  “Which they?”

  That was a good question. Max had a lot of theys to deal with today.

  “The Doles.”

  “Yeah, they’re in an interrogation room.” James got in front of Max and led him through the narrow, wood-paneled hallway. Max noticed police stations always had a distinct smell. It was impossible to explain to people who hadn’t been in one, but the best he could come up with was the scent of spilled soda dried on dirty linoleum. That was completely stupid, but it was how they all smelled.

  “Do they know?” Max asked before they got to the room.

  “Yeah, they know. We couldn’t not tell them.”

  Max held up his hand. “It’s fine, I’m not getting on your case. I knew you’d have to tell them—”

  “Yeah, sorry.” James took a breath and rubbed his eyes. “Jesus, I’m tired.”

  “What are you on, like hour twelve yet?

  “Thirteen as of noon.” That would be in an hour.

  “Why are you still here?”

  “Why are you?”

  Max grinned. When they got to the interrogation room, there was a uniformed officer standing in front of the tinted glass. Raquel sat alone at a worn table in an old metal chair.

  “Where’s Hunter?” asked James.

  “They’re taking his statement in a different room.” The officer looked at Max. “Who’re you?”

  “He’s a social worker. He was working with the kid,” James explained. The cop nodded, though he eyed Max’s bruises and torn stitches with suspicion. “He needs to talk to the mom.”

  “Are you gonna need daddy, too?”

  “Step daddy,” Max corrected. “And no, I don’t have anything to say to him.”

  Raquel looked up at him with tear-reddened eyes when he entered. She looked away when he set down his bag.

  “Have you seen her?” He didn’t sit. She nodded as he opened his bag. “When?”

  “At the morgue…” That brought another wave of tears. She ran a soaked tissue across her eyes then squeezed it in her fist. “I saw her face.”

  “You saw her face.” Max nodded and took out a folder. “What did they tell you?”

  It took her a few seconds to answer. “She cut herself.”

  “She cut open her womb with a big knife.” Max had to push to say it, like walking through frigid water. He did it anyway, and he was rewarded with a nasty, tear-drenched look.

  “Why are you here?” She looked at him like he was a snake. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because this is your fault.”

  She looked like she’d been punched in the face.

  “I want to blame Hunter for this.” Max opened the file. “Your sick, degenerate, child molesting husband.” He drew
the first picture without looking at it. He’d printed it on his photo printer at home and used high gloss photo paper. All the reds and browns and pinks came out so well. He tossed it on the table in front of her. “But he’s just one part of the whole in this.”

  She looked at the photo and gasped. Her eyes looked like they might pop in her skull.

  “He’s a monster, Raquel. Your husband is a monster. He raped your daughter and got her pregnant… then convinced her to kill herself in such a way that would make identification of the child’s father next to impossible. You know why he did that?”

  Max tossed the next photo on the table. This was a close up of the cut, complete with the rubber handle jutting from her flesh.

  Raquel shrieked and almost fell out of her chair. When her eyes closed, Max slammed his hand flat on the table. She jumped and looked up at him with red eyes. Max winced. He shouldn’t have used that hand, his knuckles were still swollen. The pain made him look angrier though, and that really seemed to make an impression on Raquel. She didn’t look away again.

  “I want to blame myself, too—”

  “No…” She shook her head and wiped her face.

  “Shut up! I want to blame myself, because I just had to gloat to your sick husband about the amniocentesis. If I’d kept my mouth shut, he wouldn’t have talked this girl… this sweet, poor, misunderstood, abused little girl into cutting her own womb out.”

  “Stop this! Stop this, I want a lawyer!”

  “I’m not a cop, bitch. I’m a social worker. I don’t have to give you a lawyer.” Max slapped a third picture on the other two. This was of Eileen’s still face with just a few splatters of blood on her chin.

  “See, I don’t believe in Hell. I don’t believe in God, or Heaven, or any of that. I don’t believe there’s any justice in the world except what we make. So I had this stupid idea that I was going to put Hunter through some stress. I was going to make his balls shrink a little. I liked the idea of sleepless nights. I bet he tossed and turned and drank… I bet he even took a swing at you, didn’t he?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Because I thought that might be justice. I thought while she was stuck in some rehabilitation cottage with a bunch of strangers, your degenerate husband didn’t deserve a good night’s sleep.”

  Max walked around the table and brought his face close to hers.

  “Did you know she trained herself to wake up with every little sound, because she knew it might be him? He’d come to her at night. He did it so much, the only way she could put herself in control of it was to convince herself she liked it. She had to convince herself that he loved her, and she loved him.”

  Max slammed the forth photo down on top of the others. This was a shot from further back. It showed the tapestry of her womb splayed across her lap.

  “She was eight years old when your husband started watching her take baths. She was ten when he put his fingers inside her and taught her how to French kiss. Three days after her eleventh birthday, he showed her how to suck dick. When she was twelve, he took her virginity. She hadn’t even had her first period yet, and your husband was doing this to her.”

  She wailed for a few minutes. Max walked around the table and took a tissue out of the box. After wiping his eyes, he noticed her reaching for them. The thought of her having comfort, any comfort, made his insides burn. He slapped the box out of her hand. It bounced against the far wall. She gave him a shocked look.

  “You knew. All along you knew. You don’t have a husband sleeping with your own daughter night after night after night and not know.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “I’m not saying you were in on it. I mean, you weren’t doing her. You weren’t listening to it and getting off. You’re not a sicko… you’re just pathetic and weak. And you care more about keeping a marriage going than protecting the child you brought into the world.”

  “I love him—”

  “How do you love a monster?”

  She gave him an indignant stare. It actually caught him off guard. He’d never seen her assert herself.

  “He works hard! He puts food on the table and keeps a roof over our heads—”

  “Oh, he works hard? Everybody works hard! Congratulations, Hunter! You’re a good person for doing the bare minimum expected of everyone on the planet.” Max advanced on the table so fast he almost ran into it. “You think that excuses this? You think that makes it okay for him to do this?” He jabbed a finger into the pictures.

  She looked down at them and shook her head. “No. He didn’t do this. She did this—”

  “He asked her to.”

  “You don’t know that—”

  “I’ve never known anything more in my life. He took her the knife. He told her what to do. He told her what she had to do to prove she loved him. He made her feel guilty for putting him through all this. Made her think it was her fault, and that the only way she could make it up to him was to end it. Like this.”

  Max stood and opened the folder.

  “And you know what? I gave him the idea. I put him in a corner and made him do it. That’s my fault… and nothing I ever do is going to make that go away. But you let your husband use your daughter to keep him happy. Then you called her a liar when she tried to tell you about it. Do you have any idea what that does to a little girl?”

  Raquel looked up at him.

  “You called your own daughter a whore. Your own daughter, Raquel.”

  She looked down, away from the photos. Max took one final photo out of the folder and sat it on top of the rest. This one wasn’t from the batch Unruh took for him in the basement. This was one of his. This was a picture he’d taken of Eileen for the file. She’d smiled for him, something she didn’t do very often. She always had such pale skin but compared to how she looked in the death photos, she seemed to glow like the sun.

  “You’re a terrible mother,” Max said as she looked at the picture. Her fingers hovered over it for a second. She was about to touch it when Max slammed his foot into the table leg. “Don’t you dare touch that!” He snatched it up and put it back in the folder. “That one’s mine. You don’t get that one. You get these.” He pointed at the pictures on the table.

  “I don’t want them—”

  “I don’t give a damn about what you want. You get them whether you take them or not. They’ll never leave you again.” He stuffed the file back in his bag. “You get one chance to make this right. One chance. You tell the police you knew he was raping your daughter.”

  She looked up at him, confused.

  “Tell them you didn’t say so before because you were afraid he’d hit you… lie or something. I don’t care. Just tell them. Give them proof. I know you have it. You do the laundry… you’ve seen his dried cum in her panties or seen sex blood on her sheets.”

  She looked down at the pictures again. Max stopped packing up his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

  “One chance. Are you going to do it?”

  When she looked up, Max saw something motherly in her eyes for a second. It faded quickly, replaced by a wall of tears and shame. Her lips trembled and she shook her head.

  “I still love him.”

  The look he gave her made her twist like being burned. She degenerated into sobbing as Max turned and left the room. He was met by James and the other officer outside.

  “Jesus Christ,” the other officer said. “That was…whoa! You’re like a guilt trip machine.”

  “Satisfied?” James asked as they walked away.

  “Am I ever?”

  “Yeah, no. I guess not.” James yawned as they started up the stairs. “I’ve got some more good news for you.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah… except by good I mean ‘is going to make your day worse’ kind of news.”

  “What’s up?”

  James waited until they got to the top of the stairs. There were windows up there, so it was much brighter, less dreary. James stopped him in the
middle of the foyer.

  “They didn’t bite with the Winnans. No warrant.”

  “What?”

  “Max, you didn’t see them in there. They were like two crazy people. They didn’t even remember the girls name without looking at the notes.”

  “But the mom…”

  “She didn’t remember. I mean she said she did before, but when they pushed her on it, she cracked and said she didn’t. This is… this is just too bizarre for us to handle.” He put his hands on his hips and gave Max a long serious look. “I’m sorry.”

  Max rubbed his head. All his bruises were starting to hurt again, and he felt like he might faint. “This is such bullshit,” he whispered. “Why am I even surprised?”

  “You knew this was a long shot.”

  “Yeah, I know! I just hoped… DAMMIT!” He threw down his bag. People started to stare. Max turned and balled his fists. Fire ran through his veins, and he needed to scream to put it out. But he couldn’t scream. Not here. There wasn’t anywhere he could go where he could scream loud enough to make it go away.

  “Max, go home.” He nodded and picked up his bag. “Do you want me to drive you?”

  Max shook his head. “Thanks, James. For everything.”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.”

  “You did more than enough. Thank you.”

  Max left, but he didn’t go home. He didn’t even get past the sidewalk. The city rushed up on him. People walked by but didn’t stop. Some looked but didn’t say anything. It took him a few minutes to pull out of it, though it may as well have been hours. He looked around at the city. From here, he could see the remnants of the old town. Joplin was a boomtown that stumbled and didn’t get up.

  Across the parking lot, in front of a photo studio, Max saw a familiar sedan. They weren’t making much of an effort to stay out of sight. Why would they? It would almost be insulting his intelligence for them to keep it a secret. He wasn’t sure why it made him angry to see them. After a few minutes of staring, Max felt something inside break. It was almost audible. It took with it the doubt and uncertainty of what had to be done.