by James Halpin
The woman scribbled the order into her tiny notepad and turned away without a word.
Emily pulled a metal chair out from under the table and looped the strap from her purse over the back before taking a seat.
“So,” she said.
“So,” Daly said, awkwardly. “That was crazy, what happened last night.”
“Oh my God. It was absolutely bananas. Did you see the look on Judge Perry’s face when Emma’s father jumped the rail?” Emily said, breaking into a laugh. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“I thought he was going to lose it,” Daly said, laughing along.
“I mean, I can’t say that I blame him. Can you imagine your daughter’s killer almost getting off?”
“I’d go nuts,” Daly said, turning serious. “It was a crazy verdict. I thought it would be all or nothing. It seemed like if he was guilty of some of it, he should have been guilty of the rest.”
“Well, the manslaughter charge means they believed he was acting negligently during his counseling sessions,” Emily said. “I guess they just didn’t think the evidence was there to tie him to Gillespie. Either that or they just compromised so they could go home.”
“So what’s he looking at anyway? Dr. Radcliffe, I mean,” Daly said.
“Involuntary manslaughter is a misdemeanor. Maximum of five years on each count.”
“Holy shit. So he’s looking at an absolute max of twenty years in prison?” Daly said.
“That’s the worst he could get.”
Daly shook his head, trying to make sense of it all. All this death. All this suffering. And now, the man behind it all could foreseeably get out of prison one day — possibly after serving only a few years behind bars. Up to this point, Daly had been adamant that he’d done nothing wrong in confronting Radcliffe. He was a reporter doing what good reporters do: researching and fact-checking and trying to get both sides of the story. But for the first time, he really began questioning his decision. He couldn’t escape the fact that his actions could have helped Radcliffe get off easy.
Emily could see the worry in Daly’s face and gave him a slight smile, pulling a strand of red hair from her cheek.
“That’s not your fault,” she said. “It’s the DA’s job to get the conviction, regardless of what obstacles come with the case. Don’t let him dump this on you.”
“I know,” Daly said, unconvincingly.
“Just think, without your research in this case they might never have linked Dr. Radcliffe at all. He could still be out there preying on kids,” she said.
Emily reached across the table and wrapped her delicate hands around Daly’s interlocked fingers. She smiled the kind of smile Daly hadn’t seen in years. Not since Jessica died. Emily’s gaze was warm and inviting. It frightened Daly. For years, he had been left alone to look after Lauren, and he had nearly forgotten the feel of a woman’s gentle touch. Inside, he longed for the companionship. But he also knew he was damaged goods, an overweight, middle-aged, low-paid journalist. He was struggling as a single parent to put his daughter through a school he could not afford. And he drank too much because he was haunted — still and likely always — by the memory of Jessica.
Daly pulled his hands free from Emily’s grasp and leaned back in his chair.
“Emily, I like you. I really do,” Daly said.
“Erik, you don’t have to ...”
“Hold on,” Daly said. “I just want to get this out, before this goes any further. You know I have a daughter, right?”
“Yeah, Lauren,” Emily said. “I’ve seen her picture on Facebook.”
“Well, did you know that I was married to her mother?” Daly asked.
“I figured you might have been. That doesn’t matter to me,” Emily said.
“No, it’s not that. It’s how things ended for us. We didn’t get divorced. She was killed,” Daly said.
“I’m … sorry. I didn’t realize.”
Daly paused a moment, looking into Emily’s eyes. He could feel a bond growing between them and decided he wanted to level with her. If Emily was getting involved, she had a right to know what she was buying into.
* * *
Daly first met Ken Duncan on January 23, 2004. It had been a Friday in the dead of winter, a cold night with an icy mist drifting down from pink-tinted clouds above. Daly had just been promoted from being a clerk at the Observer, a job he landed to get his foot in the door right after college, to general assignment reporter — a gig he had aspired to for years. With a wife and young daughter at home, Daly needed a job that paid better than a clerk’s salary. But more importantly, it would let Daly report the news and get a byline in a professional newspaper. He felt like he’d hit the big time.
That meant it was time to celebrate. When Daly got home from work that evening, Jessica had surprised him by wearing a tight black dress with her hair made up. She met Daly at the door and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pressing herself against his chest as she whispered that Lauren was at the sitter’s.
“We’ve got the place to ourselves,” she had said.
Daly dropped his computer bag near the door and smiled as he embraced Jessica, letting his hands drift south.
“Not so fast,” Jessica said. “I didn’t get all made up so you could ruin it the second you walked in the door. We’re going out.”
Daly put on a blazer and a tie, and they headed out for a night on the town.
For dinner, they went to Daly’s favorite spot for a night out, Mackenzie’s Steak and Seafood. The drinks were exorbitant and the food even more so, but for a special occasion they could justify a dinner at the best restaurant around.
Jessica got the roast chicken and a glass of water. Daly ordered the prime rib, medium-rare, and a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon.
“We don’t need the bottle,” Jessica had said. “I’m not drinking.”
“What? We’re celebrating,” Daly said, turning to the waiter. “We’ll take the bottle.”
They talked about the new job and Lauren and their plans for the summer. Jessica had always dreamed of going to Iceland to see the glaciers and fjords, and Daly began talking about how it finally might be a possibility. He had expected Jessica to jump out of her seat with excitement. Instead, he was disappointed when she put the brakes on the trip. The timing didn’t seem right, she said.
“If it’s the money, don’t worry about it,” Daly said. “I know it’s not that big of a raise, but we can make it work.”
“It’s not the money,” Jessica said. “I’m pregnant.”
For a moment, Daly tried to comprehend the abrupt shift in the conversation. Thoughts of sipping champagne in a hot tub under the shimmering aurora borealis were replaced by those of dirty diapers and sleepless nights. The look of shock on Daly’s face was enough to draw the waiter’s attention.
“Is everything all right, sir?” he asked.
For Daly, everything was, in fact, fine. The news startled him. They hadn’t been trying for another child, but they hadn’t exactly not been trying either. They both wanted more children at some point and had felt it would happen when the time was right. It seemed that now the time had come.
“Everything is perfect,” Daly said, smiling.
They spent the rest of the meal talking about baby names and layout decisions for the nursery. They left the restaurant in each other’s arms.
“Are you okay to drive?” Jessica asked when they got to the car. “You’ve had a few.”
“I’m fine,” Daly said. “I only had three drinks.”
They slid into the car and headed for home. The road to the Back Mountain had been clear coming down, but during dinner the icy mist had turned to a steady snow. The road was now blanketed in a thin layer of white, sliced by tires to reveal the black pavement below. Wind caused the snow to whip across the road, and as Daly hit the
wipers to clear off the melted flakes on the windshield, the frigid air froze a trail of moisture in their wake.
Daly tapped his brakes to gauge the road’s slickness. The car immediately slowed, showing no sign of slipping. Again he hit the gas and continued climbing the mountain. At a sharp bend in the highway, they came up behind an eighteen-wheeled tractor trailer lumbering up the road with its flashers on, going well below the speed limit. After a few moments spent riding in the disorienting wake of spray the truck kicked up, Daly moved over to the passing lane to get around it. The right lane was more traveled and thus more clear, but the left lane still seemed passable.
Daly hit the accelerator as he tried to clear the water the truck’s massive wheels were throwing off to the back and sides. As the car crept alongside the truck, its massive wheels belted out one last burst of spray, blurring Daly’s windshield. It lasted only a second, until the next tick of the windshield wiper blades, but when the view cleared Daly saw he was closing in fast on a dark pickup truck.
The pickup had also been passing the tractor-trailer, but much more slowly.
Daly heard Jessica shout, “Look out!” and had time to jerk the wheel to the left in a futile attempt to avoid a collision. The front right corner of the car clipped the back left of the pickup before both vehicles lost their grip on the slick road. Daly’s car spun to the left, continuing the trajectory of the turn until it had completed a one-hundred-eighty degree rotation and slammed into the Jersey barrier in the median of the highway.
Having been tapped from the left side, the pickup began a clockwise spin and rotated forty-five degrees before the tractor-trailer made contact with the passenger door. The impact sent the sound of shattering glass and crunching metal into the night sky.
The tractor-trailer driver hit the brakes and brought the rig to a stop with its load jackknifing across most of the highway. The passenger side of the pickup appeared to be in the engine compartment of the rig. It was impossible to tell where one vehicle ended and the other began.
For a moment, the road was eerily silent as soft-falling snow began laying an icy blanket over the vehicles’ tracks. Then, the sound of a man shrieking rose into the night, a guttural, agonized cry from a man brought to the breaking point by pain.
The tractor-trailer driver popped open the door to the cab and stuck his head out, tossing the remains of a Camel cigarette to the ice below. He slowly stepped down to the highway, looking at the gnarled mess of a pickup that was now embedded in his livelihood.
A moment later, the severity of the crash registered, and the truck driver ran forward to assess the injuries in the pickup. He came around to the driver’s side door, which had a shattered window and crumpled frame.
Peering inside, he saw that the driver had slid over to the passenger’s side and was clutching the bloody head of a young girl, perhaps twelve years old. The child was limp. Blood was spattered across the interior of the truck’s cab.
The man looked out to the truck driver, tears streaming down his face as he held Kelly Duncan like a rag doll, her open eyes staring upward but seeing nothing.
“Oh my God,” the wide-eyed trucker whispered, reaching to his pocket to get his cellphone to call 911. He turned away from the carnage and ran his hand through his hair as he started relaying the location of the crash to a call-taker. Whether from the shock of the crash or being distracted by his conversation with emergency services, the trucker didn’t seem to notice when the other driver kicked open the pickup’s door with a jarring screech of metal.
With blood on his hands and a wild look in his eye, Ken Duncan pushed through the crunched, bent metal that had been the door to his pickup truck and stepped onto the icy pavement. For a moment he had stood there, looking confused. Then he saw Daly’s car crumpled against the Jersey barrier and headed toward it.
Inside the car, Daly shook his head back and forth, trying to clear his mind after his temple had slammed into the window. He looked across to Jessica, who had a trickle of blood running down her cheek from a cut on her forehead.
“Are you okay?” Daly asked.
“I think so. I just bumped my head,” Jessica said.
“Me too,” Daly said. He reached for the door handle and pulled it, but there was no movement. He pulled the handle again and threw his shoulder into the motion. Finally, the door creaked open with a painful squeal.
Daly unfastened his seat belt and stepped out of the car. Down the hill, a growing line of cars shone bright white lights toward Daly’s car, their brake lights bathing the trees along the highway in red. Up the hill, he could see the yellow hazard lights of the tractor-trailer flashing, highlighting the twisted remains of the pickup at regular intervals.
In the golden flashes, Daly could also see the silhouette of someone staggering toward him, slipping on the pavement as he made his way down the hill. When the man got closer, the headlights from the blocked cars revealed a man with a goatee and a leather jacket, his torn and faded jeans tucked into black biker boots. A tuft of long, greasy hair obscured the man’s left eye, but as he approached Daly could see the man had blood on his hands.
He could also see that the man he would come to know as Ken Duncan was carrying a revolver.
“Is everyone okay?” Daly asked. “I’m so sorry. The road ...”
“You killed her,” Duncan cut in, staring coldly at Daly.
The words hit Daly like an icy wave, knocking him back on his feet.
I wasn’t going that fast, he thought. Could someone really be dead?
“Where is she?” Daly asked, pulling out his cellphone to call 911. “Let me see if I can help.”
“You’ve done enough,” Duncan said, raising the gun toward Daly.
“Hold on,” Daly blurted out, panic rising in his voice. He raised his hands, palms out. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. It was an accident.”
“My baby is dead,” Duncan said. “And I smell booze on your breath. It wasn’t no accident.”
“Let me get my wife,” Daly said. “She’s got some first-aid training. She might be able to help.”
Duncan turned his attention to Daly’s car, seeming to notice it for the first time. Then he pushed past Daly, nearly knocking him to the ground, and bee-lined to the car where Jessica was still reeling from the crash. Duncan peered inside through the open door and met Jessica’s gaze. As she looked at Duncan’s hands and saw the blood and gun, her breathing quickened, sending short puffs of steam billowing from her lips in the cold air.
Daly ran toward Duncan, yelling for him to stop. Duncan raised his .38 Special. Jessica, trapped and with no way of blocking the shot, turned and looked toward Daly with tears in her eyes.
The shot exploded in the quiet of the night. Daly reached Duncan and grabbed his wrist, trying to turn the gun away. The men fell to the ground and started struggling for a brief moment, until their figures were bathed in flashing blue and red lights as a police car arrived on the scene. The cop got out, saw the gun, and drew his own.
“Freeze!” he yelled, aiming at the men brawling on the pavement.
Duncan dropped the gun and both men put their hands up, sitting on the ground.
“My wife!” Daly yelled. “She’s been shot!”
From where he sat, Daly could only see Jessica’s left arm draped across the center console and resting on the driver’s seat. It was covered in blood.
And it wasn’t moving.
Under his breath, quietly enough so the cop wouldn’t hear, Duncan whispered to Daly the last words they would ever exchange.
“Now we’re even,” he said.
Jessica had been shot through the neck, a wound that tore through her jugular vein and ripped out her throat.
Blood spatter covered the windshield and dashboard, and the front of Jessica’s black dress was soaked. Authorities later told Daly she had died within seconds of massive blood l
oss.
She hadn’t suffered long, they assured him.
The police charged Duncan with murder. At trial, his lawyer had argued that Duncan was guilty, at most, of voluntary manslaughter because Duncan acted in a sudden and intense passion after his daughter had been killed in the crash. Prosecutors argued that Duncan’s passion was the result of a perceived provocation by Daly, not Jessica, and that Duncan’s decision to get even with Daly by killing his wife amounted to a cold-blooded execution. Jurors agreed and convicted Duncan of first-degree murder.
He got life in prison.
Daly got no solace.
For some time, Daly had lived under the threat of being charged as well. For weeks, as he struggled to cope with the loss of his wife, he had to live with the possibility that Lauren could also lose her father — for at least a little while. If the blood tests came back showing he had been over the limit, he would be charged with vehicular homicide. Then, in addition to losing his wife, Daly would risk losing his daughter and his career.
When the results came back from the laboratory, they showed Daly had been just under the limit to be considered a drunken driver. Daly was cited for careless driving, but the district attorney declined to press criminal charges in the case. Daly had been able to get back to the new normal of life, in the absence of Jessica.
Lauren had cried when Daly told her about Jessica, but she was only three. She clearly didn’t grasp that she would never see mommy again. And she never mourned the sibling she almost had, because Daly had never been able to bring himself to tell her about it.
* * *
Emily sat in stunned silence, at a rare loss for words. She brought her hand to cover her gaping mouth and tried to comprehend what Daly had been through that night.
“Ever since then, I’ve had this dream where she dies,” Daly said. “Except, in the dream, it’s not Ken Duncan who kills her. It’s me. For months after, I went to a therapist about it, but the dream kept coming back. Eventually, I just started drinking it away. That worked, mostly. But the rest of the time, the guilt tears me up. I just can’t stop thinking about Kelly’s picture. And what Jessica looked like afterward ...