The Patrick Bowers Files - 05 - The Queen

by Steven James

  I chose the footstool, she returned to the sofa.

  Though she didn’t seem like she wanted to talk about that night, now that we were into this, I wasn’t ready to drop the conversation in the middle. “Let’s say for a minute that I believed you, that it wasn’t a suicide attempt, that, just as I shot him, you turned the gun on him and squeezed the trigger.”

  “Yeah, but you don’t believe it, though.”

  “How would it change things if I did?”

  She was wearing a gray hoodie and began unconsciously toying with the hood’s string. “What do you mean?”

  “Is that what it would take for you to leave this behind, to stop revisiting it?”

  “For you to believe me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mean like with Sean?”

  “That’s different.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “But maybe,” I backpedaled. “I don’t know. Maybe, yes. Like that. Like if I would’ve believed Sean. Would things be different?”

  She stood and walked across the room, pausing beside a framed cross-stitched picture of a whitetail deer hanging on the wall near Sean’s minibar. “You remember that guy in San Diego like a year ago who tried to . . . well . . . force himself on me?”

  Even now the memory burned hot and intense. “Of course.”

  “Well, what would it mean for me to forgive him? Do I have to be able to go up to him one day and chuck him on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, by the way, it was no big deal that you tried to rape me back there. How ’bout I friend you on Facebook?’”

  “This is serious. Don’t be flippant about it.”

  “I’m not being flippant. It’s the same as what you were saying—what would be different if I forgave him? That’s what we’re talking about. What does forgiving someone even mean?”

  “I think in some way you need to be willing to let go of what happened. Whenever you don’t forgive someone—”

  “Don’t even say ‘you end up hurting yourself.’”

  I was quiet.

  “Were you gonna say that?” She didn’t sound spiteful, and I almost wished she had. More than anything she sounded lost. “Were you going to throw me an overworked cliché?”

  She stared at me, waited for my response.

  “My point is, it’s not helping anything for you to live in the past.”

  “I’m not living in the past,” she said sharply, “but I can’t help being affected by it. Right?”

  I didn’t know what to tell her. Talking through issues like this, finding deep answers for a hurting teenage girl, I felt like I was way out of my league. “You’re right,” I agreed, “yes, the past affects us. It affects everyone.”

  “So is that what it means then? To forgive yourself—is that what you’re saying? To just stop beating yourself up for the past, to stop hating yourself?”

  “Or in this case, hating him, I don’t know. But that’s not exactly what we were discussing. Forgiving someone else is one thing, but we were talking about you, and I’m telling you, I don’t think you need to forgive yourself for what happened that night in DC. That man was threatening to—”

  “All right.” Her tone was stiff and certain. “One last thing, then. That school shooting in Oklahoma last year, remember that?”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Just, do you remember it? Those two sophomores and the sixteen other kids they . . . well . . .”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Well, afterward I heard this guy being interviewed on Fox News; he was, like, some kind of youth motivational speaker or something—you know, who travels around telling kids at school assemblies not to use drugs and to have positive self-esteem, stuff like that. Anyway, on Fox News they asked him why he thought those two kids did it, why they killed those other students.”

  Of course I remembered the incident and the nationwide search for answers that followed it. “What did he say?”

  When she’d mentioned self-esteem, it sent my thoughts flying to the videos I’d been watching earlier and made me think of Lien-hua’s comments on the submissive role of Basque’s partner: more easily dominated, lower self-worth.

  The knives would hold different meaning to him—or none at all.

  In the videos, Basque was—

  “The guy”—Tessa said, crossing the room toward me again—“he was like, ‘I can tell you this much, those two kids didn’t have any answers. They were lost, they hated their classmates, hated themselves.’ And the anchorwoman, she leans forward and says, ‘But what is the answer?’”

  “And did he have one?”

  Only Basque was filmed. So who would stand behind the camera, the dominant partner or the submissive one? I wasn’t certain, but my inclination was that the person behind the camera would be the one calling the shots.

  Unless that’s his signature, recording the murder of women—

  “No.” Tessa looked at me. “The youth speaker guy was, like, ‘I don’t really know, but I know kids oughta feel good about themselves.’”

  “Self-esteem again,” I said, still struggling to follow both her train of thought and my own.

  The locations of the victims matter.

  It’s always about timing and location.

  “So here’s the thing: go to any auditorium full of teenagers and ask ’em if a coach, a teacher, a counselor has ever told them to feel good about themselves, how many hands do you think would go up?”

  “All of them.”

  DNA from two victims was found on a knife in Reiser’s trailer, but no videos of their deaths.

  Torres arrived the day before you did. Lien-hua was in Cincinnati . . .

  The psychosexual background would show a close association between sex and violence . . .

  “Right.” She tapped her finger against the edge of the couch. “So then, ask the kids if they already know that’s not the answer. Guess how many hands go up then?”

  “All of them,” I conceded, still unsure where she was going with all this.

  The videos were planted. That’s why that person returned to Reiser’s trailer Wednesday night . . .

  “Exactly.”

  You need to follow up on any other cases with videos of people being killed during the years of Basque’s imprisonment, see if the person who filmed him might have used a different partner in the intervening—

  “Because,” she went on, “they know they’ve done stuff they shouldn’t feel good about. That’s the thing—any idiot can see that just feeling good about yourself isn’t the answer, and I’m tired of being told that it is. I’m tired of being lied to. Are you even listening to me?”

  Her words scattered my thoughts of Reiser and his murderer. “Yes. Sorry, I am.”

  “You get it, right?”

  I wished I had a quick fix for her, a way to heal her emotional scars, but I didn’t. Honestly, I had the feeling that anything I said would only come out sounding trite or cavalier. “No one likes being lied to. Especially about something as important as dealing with a heavy conscience.”

  It wasn’t a great reply, but she accepted it, then let out a soft breath. “You can’t just make it go away, Patrick. It’s there—guilt or shame or whatever. And trying to feel good about yourself isn’t gonna solve it, not if you’re trying to be honest with yourself at the same time—honest about what you’re capable of. Denial is too cheap a cure for what I did.”

  Having her finally open up like this meant a lot to me, but also left me feeling awkward and ineffectual because I could hear her desperation and brokenness and I had no real answers for her. “Even if you did kill him, Tessa, wouldn’t that be a sign of courage, not weakness?”

  “How would it be courage?”

  “He was unjustly threatening the life of an innocent human being, and you saved her; it’s just that in this case the innocent person happened to be you.”

  She was quiet. “I didn’t feel courageous. I felt terrified.”

  �
��Ralph once told me that fear is one of the key ingredients to courage. That if your life’s in danger and you’re not afraid, you’re just a moron. And a liability.”

  “But it felt good to kill that man,” she said softly, almost imperceptibly, and with fragile honesty. “I was glad I did it. That’s different from just being afraid. I’m not sorry he’s dead, I’m sorry it felt good when I shot him.”

  She was quiet, and the air seemed to beat with dark wings around us.

  I knew this feeling personally, this one she’d articulated. More than once I’d flirted with the seductive lure of the forbidden. Just one example: when I was apprehending Basque, I needlessly broke his jaw, and the gratuitous violence excited a part of me I’m ashamed is even there.

  “Tessa, I don’t—”

  “It’s okay. I know there’s not—”

  “Hang on, let me finish. I’m no expert on any of this. And you’re right, denial isn’t the answer. Somehow forgiveness, or making amends, or some sort of penance, is—has to be, or else—”

  “Or else you just gotta live with it, right? Let bygones be bygones, pick up the pieces and try to move on?”

  “Well . . .” Even I could tell that wasn’t really an answer, more of a metaphysical cop-out.

  Lien-hua’s observation came to mind: “We run from the past and it chases us; we dive into urgency but nothing deep is ultimately healed.”

  “They’re good questions.” I searched for something else, something more solid to offer her. “I need to think about all this some more.” I was struck by how completely unsatisfying a response that was.

  “Yeah, me too.” Then after a pause that went on too long, she said quietly, “I read the note.”

  “The note?”

  “The one from Amber. About last night. In the motel room.”

  “Oh, that note.”

  “Amber gave me her explanation this afternoon. I’ve been wondering if I could hear yours.”

  74

  I fingered the prescription bottle in my pocket. I could confront Tessa about the meds or delve into the whole issue of my dubious relationship with Amber five years ago.

  Great alternatives.

  “What’s the deal with you two?” Tessa pressed.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Whenever people say something’s complicated, they never mean complicated, they mean fractured, that somebody got hurt—and in this case it was both of you, wasn’t it?”

  I hate it when she does that.

  “All right. Here’s the edited version. Amber and I met when she was engaged to Sean. There was chemistry and—”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “No.”

  She waited. “But?”

  “But we did fall in love,” I admitted.

  “And how did that happen?”

  “What do you mean, how did it happen? We fell—”

  “C’mon, no one just falls in love. You drift there purposely. You make choices in that direction or it never happens.”

  It took me a moment to reply. “You’re right. Yes. We made choices in that direction.”

  Tessa was quiet. “What happened last night?”

  “Nothing. I would never cheat on Lien-hua. And I would never do something like that to my brother.”

  “But yet you fell in love with his fiancée.”

  “Yes.” This was not at all the conversation I wanted to be having. “I did.”

  I heard the garage door open. Sean must have finished shoveling.

  “You were right,” Tessa said. “That was highly edited.”

  The garage door rattled shut.

  Hearing Sean enter the garage, I thought of what Tessa had just told me a few minutes ago about my not believing him ever since we were teenagers and how that had hurt things between us. And now, as I thought about the awkward issue of my past with Amber, it struck me that on all fronts I’d been the one, not Sean, who’d sabotaged our relationship.

  Tessa seemed to be reading my mind. “Maybe you should go see how he’s doing.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  Go on. Talk to him, then get back to those videos and follow up with Tait to see if there’s been any progress on finding Kayla. And check for footage from other unsolved cases that might lead you to Reiser’s killer.

  I stood. Reached into my pocket and pulled out the bottle of pills.

  Tessa watched Patrick unpocket a pill bottle.

  “Amber couldn’t get to the pharmacy,” he said, “but she had these here. They’re over-the-counter. She told me you were asking about getting a prescription filled? For sleeping pills?”

  “Um . . .”

  “I wish you would’ve told me.”

  “I was . . . I was trying to work some stuff out on my own.”

  “I would’ve helped. If you would have let me.”

  I was ashamed I needed it, she thought, but said nothing.

  “Where did you get the prescription?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  “You’re seeing a psychiatrist?”

  “I was. I mean, I did. Just a few times.”

  He took a breath. “Look, I understand it’s been rough, but . . . just keep me in the loop. I know I’m just your stepdad but—”

  “No, you’re more than that. I should’ve told you. Seriously. I’m sorry.”

  He put a reassuring hand on her shoulder, then held out the bottle to her, and she could see that he wasn’t angry. Not really. “Amber said to just take one. They’re supposed to be pretty strong.”

  She accepted the bottle. “Just one. Got it.”

  Then Patrick left to talk to his brother.

  And Tessa took one of the pills.

  75

  There was no room for a car in Sean’s garage.

  Instead, the space was jammed full of tackle boxes, cross-country skis, fishing poles, tents, duck hunting decoys, and sleeping bags. A workbench rested against the far wall stacked with boxes of birdshot, shotgun shells, and tools. One of his guns lay on the bench, a Mossberg 930 Tactical; it looked like he might’ve been interrupted in the middle of cleaning it. A small fridge sat beside the door, and I imagined it might be for his night crawlers in the summer, his beer and brats year-round.

  The trophy deer heads and muskie that he’d removed from the living room for Tessa’s benefit were propped against a huge cardboard box stacked high with back issues of Wisconsin Sportsman magazines.

  “So, did you get it all shoveled?” It was a lame conversation starter, I knew that. But that’s the way things were between us.

  “As much as I could. It’s still blowing pretty hard.” He stowed the snow shovel in the corner of the garage near the workbench. “At least we should be able to get out if we need to.”

  The garage was deeply chilled, and even though I’d grabbed my coat, I still caught myself shivering.

  As I was trying to think of a way to transition into the topic of the accident twenty years ago, Sean said abruptly, “I thought there was a detective from Denver you were interested in?” His question took me off guard. I’d never told him about Cheyenne, and I was surprised he’d heard about the potential relationship that had never gotten off the ground.

  “Cheyenne Warren.”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  Cheyenne had been the one to fire the shots at the man who, as it turned out, was Tessa’s father. Since that terrible night, her relationship with Tessa had remained visibly strained, although both of them claimed things were all right. In the disquieting wake of the shooting, Cheyenne had left law enforcement and gone back to ranching. Neither Tessa nor I had seen her in more than three months.

  “I’m with Lien-hua now,” I told my brother.

  “I got to know her a little on the trail groomer. She’s nice.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  Telling him that I was thinking of proposing to Lien-hua seemed like the sort of thing that might serve in some way to draw us closer together, but also a little
too personal to share at this point.

  He stamped the snow off his boots. “Well,” he said ambiguously, then headed for the refrigerator. “Want a beer?”

  “Naw.”

  “Can’t drink while you’re on duty?”

  “Something like that.”

  He went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of Leinenkugel’s for himself, screwed open the top.

  Absently, I picked up one of his ice-fishing poles. “Has it been a good year out on the ice?”

  “Hasn’t been bad.” He watched me. “Oughta take you out before you leave. I know all the best spots in the area.”

  “I’m afraid ice fishing’s never really been my thing.”

  “It’s warm in the shanty. We have lawn chairs in there. A heater. Wieners. Some beer. Unless after what happened in the river . . . I mean, if you need to stay off the ice for a while.”

  I gave him a halfhearted smile. “I appreciate that. When things settle down with this case, I’ll have to give it a shot.” I leaned the pole against the wall again.

  A small pool of silence.

  The more we fumbled around in the quagmire of small talk, the more painfully obvious the shallowness of our relationship was.

  I decided to just go for it.

  “Sean, remember how things used to be between us?”

  He took a long draught of his beer. “How do you mean?”

  “When we were kids.”

  “When we were kids.”

  “Yeah. We’d go fishing with Dad all the time. Never seemed to catch much, but—”

  “I remember.”

  “Trolled around the lake a lot.”

  “Lake Windemere.”

  “Yeah. We got to know that shoreline really well.”

  “I remember.”

  “I think the last time we went fishing together was that autumn before the accident.”

  He regarded me for a moment. “The accident.”

  “On New Year’s Eve.”

  “I know which accident you meant.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No.” He took another drink. “Don’t be.”

  “I mean, I’m sorry for the way things were after that. Between us.”

  “The way things were?”

  “The way they are.”