All The Hidden Pieces

by Jillian Thomadsen

  “I see,” Hardy said again. He then asked a few questions about Greta – her name, her address, her phone number. A few minutes later, tow trucks arrived to clear the accident scene and Greta was free to drive back home.

  With John finally asleep in the backseat, Greta drove the remainder of the way home in a trance. She felt stunned and horrified by what she’d witnessed. She was mildly placated by the news Officer Hardy had given her that everyone involved was going to live…but the experience itself was scarring. She wondered what long-term psychological effects John would suffer from watching the aftermath of the collision. She wondered what combination of factors – maybe alcohol, mixed with hubris – had fueled the driver of the Ferrari to plow through the red light at top speed. And mostly she was jolted by the knowledge that her involvement in the scene would have been much greater and more horrific were it not for a few seconds of time.

  ***

  Greta gently opened the front door to their small house on Avery Place and carried John up the stairs and into his bedroom. He mumbled as she placed him neatly in his bed but he didn’t wake up.

  In the master bedroom, Griffin was lightly grunting and tossing his weight around their double bed. Greta tried to be quiet, but Griffin woke up as soon as she got under the covers.

  “What the hell, Greta,” he slurred in a dream-like voice. “What time is it?”

  Greta glanced over and saw that his eyes remained closed and his body was still.

  “It’s late,” Greta whispered. “Sorry – I didn’t know if I should call and wake you up.”

  Griffin pulled the top sheet over his head and turned on his side, away from her. He muttered to the wall, “I was worried about you. I heard sirens.”

  Greta got onto her back and faced the ceiling. She realized that she was still shivering, and she pulled her side of the covers closer to her body. She sighed. “I know. I saw an accident.”

  “Mmmm. Was it bad?”

  “It was bad, although the police say everyone is going to be okay. A car ran a red light and plowed right into a pickup truck.”

  “Dangerous,” Griffin said sleepily.

  “It was dangerous. A few seconds earlier and it would have been John and me. Anyway, I stuck around and gave an account of what I saw to the police. It was so strange. The driver at fault had a yellow Ferrari. Two men in suits were inside the car. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Ferrari since I’ve lived in Vetta Park—”

  John shot out of bed. “What a minute. Wait a minute!” he yelled. Suddenly he was fully awake – words articulated and springing off the walls of their room. He slammed shut the door to their bedroom and flicked on the lights. “What did you just say?” he demanded.

  Greta’s face went pale. She sat up in bed and held the covers even closer in front of her – as though they were breastplates that could shield her.

  “Greta…what did you just say?” Griffin repeated.

  “I said I’d never seen a Ferrari in Vetta Park before,” she whispered.

  “It was a yellow Ferrari?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Two men in suits inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you spoke to the police and told them the Ferrari driver was at fault?”

  Greta nodded.

  “FUCK! GRETA!” he bellowed. At the same time, he picked up a VHS tape from the TV stand in front of him and launched it at the far wall. It marked the pale yellow paint before shattering into pieces on the ground.

  Greta had never seen him this angry. “Griffin, please stop; you’re going to wake up John!” she pleaded. Tears started furiously rolling down her cheeks. Her shivering had evolved into quaking and then sweating. It seemed both cold and hot at the same time, as if her body didn’t know how to deal with the present situation and was staging a confused response.

  Griffin left the doorway and sat next to her on the edge of her bed, facing the closet. She thought he might make a sudden move – whirl backwards and strike her or grab her exposed hands. Instead he clenched his hands together and said to the closet: “Tomorrow you will go to the police station and tell them you got it wrong. The other driver was at fault, not the Ferrari driver. You couldn’t see clearly and you got confused. Do you understand me?”

  Greta shook her head. “I can’t lie to the police, Griffin. I know what I saw–”

  Griffin stood up and towered over her. His face was so furious that he looked foreign to her – her husband wearing a mask of rage. He bent down until his face was just inches away from hers. “Tomorrow. You will go to the police station. And you will tell them you got it wrong,” he repeated. “Do you understand me?”

  Greta swallowed and nodded.

  Griffin bent down and cupped her chin with a firm hold.

  “Greta?”

  “Yes?” she responded beneath the strain of his grip.

  “Don’t get cute. Don’t try to outsmart me. Don’t think you can fuck with me. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded and he let go.

  Griffin stood up straight again and walked calmly to the other side of the bed. He grabbed his pillow and marched out of the room, turning off the lights on his way out.

  After he left the room, Greta shuddered underneath her covers for a long time. She stared up at the ceiling and blinked away tears for most of the night – drops that fell in small rolling cascades that stung her cheeks.

  It wasn’t just the task Griffin had set before her – the demand that she lie to the police and blame an innocent person for an offense he hadn’t committed. It wasn’t just the cryptic nature of this particular situation. She knew now that he was in some way involved with these men in the Ferrari and he didn’t feel the need to tell her who they were, or what their particular dilemma meant for him.

  It was the way he treated her – the way he yelled and broke things and grabbed her. If she was upset before that he was mysterious and unknowable, now she saw that he was threatening and forbidding. He had secrets, which he ferociously guarded, even at the expense of their relationship.

  That night in February – staring at the ceiling of their bedroom and reviewing the timeline of the night’s events, Greta realized she could no longer be in the marriage. She would rather parade their troubles in front of strangers in a courtroom than quietly put up with the charade any longer.

  She knew what she had to do. At six or seven in the morning -- when the sun finally emerged and rays of light came through the window and bounced off the shattered pieces of plastic on their carpet, Greta came up with her plan. First she would lie to the police – as promised. Then she would tell Griffin she wanted a divorce.

  Chapter Eight

  September 17, 2017

  Detective Hobbs lay awake in bed and sighed. She glanced over at Lt. Adams and sighed again. It was eleven-thirty at night and neither of them was asleep. At least Adams wasn’t trying to fight it. He was thumbing through a detective novel, vigorously turning each page. Clad only in boxer shorts, he looked like a model from a fireman’s catalog – naturally tan and hairless, with muscles that clung to his frame while he read.

  Hobbs and Adams had been sleeping together for three months and both were amazed that no one else had figured it out. At first there were code names and dates in nearby towns, late-night meet-ups and secret texts. It was as though they were a detective story within a detective story. But as the weeks progressed, they grew sloppier about protecting their liaison. They went out by the light of day and attended outings together in Vetta Park – once, only a few miles from the police station. Still there were no sightings, no surprised colleagues, no leaked gossip – at least not as far as Hobbs could tell.

  Hobbs was at first surprised by the interest from Adams. She was over a decade older than him – although they didn’t look mismatched to the casual observer. In addition to being young, Adams often acted young. At times he seemed driven primarily by his libido, he laughed at puerile jokes and he seemed openly, irrationally optimis
tic about the world. The job hadn’t hardened him yet, and even though Hobbs knew it eventually would, she kept her cynicism to herself.

  Hobbs could not have been more different from Adams. She didn’t tell dirty jokes with her colleagues, didn’t implore her colleagues to tell her stories and didn’t howl with laughter when they did, didn’t believe in some illusory future destiny that awaited them just for being good people.

  Hobbs felt most comfortable in the presence of her partner – Ray Martinez – simply because he’d known her the longest out of anyone. And even those encounters could be stilted. Late nights in the squad car, watching a doorway or an alley for hours, Detective Martinez would often implore her to tell him stories – her childhood, her parents, what college was like. Hobbs would listen to his requests but do her best to retain her laconic shell…and she heard the refrain from him and others multiple times: she was tough and unreadable, a closed book.

  The closed book might have been an accurate analogy but tough couldn’t have been further from the truth. Hobbs was quiet because her personal life was a mostly-kept secret and she wanted to keep it that way.

  Hobbs also believed that the squad car talks should reflect the nature of their professional lives. Even as they were mired in boredom and searching for conversation topics, she didn’t want to talk about herself; she wanted to talk about unsolved cases and overlooked leads. As they sat in the front seat and stared at a vast landscape of stillness, she passed the time by telling stories of old – and if Martinez had heard them all before, he never protested and she didn’t really care. In this line of work, she needed to keep her safeguards in place.

  Hobbs viewed Adams as different from most of the men who propositioned her because he was immature and blithe and still in the phase of moving from one doting female acolyte to the next. If he just wanted to add a notch to his bedpost, Hobbs was fine with that. She had no particular desire to settle down anyway.

  Adams closed the book and rolled over to face her. “We should get some shuteye Roberta,” he said quietly, moving closer to her.

  Hobbs smiled and caressed his hair with her fingertips. She tried not to flinch when he mentioned her first name. It was that same contamination of professional into personal. He was a colleague – a subordinate, actually – but here in the bedroom, they were intimate and on the same terms. It was only right that he use her first name when they were lying next to each other and she tried to do the same.

  “I know, Dean. There’s just something about the case that’s keeping me up.” Her words lurched from her mouth unnaturally. She didn’t want to talk at all, to explain why sleep wasn’t coming to her despite the late hour. She just wanted to lie awake with her thoughts.

  “It’s okay, baby,” he said, and flicked off the light next to her bedside table. In the darkness he couldn’t see her flinch again. At some point she was going to have to talk to him about the pet names. Enough with the baby and the sweetie, she would say. And, if she was really feeling honest: please just call me Hobbs until I can get used to someone from the precinct calling me Roberta.

  For now, she settled with staying still and silent while he tried to wrap his body around hers. Hobbs’ mind was swimming with details – hidden puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit together. There had been the phone call from Tuck’s brother, the home search, numerous interviews, the press conference and the APB – all of which had turned up very little. Perhaps there was some bit of minutia she had overlooked. As her mind continued to race, she tried to think of where a family of four could hide for days without being sighted. Or, if she let herself think about it, where a perpetrator could hide a family of four without any trace. Hobbs shuddered and tried to move her thoughts back into the past.

  It was a long time before sleep finally came.

  Chapter Nine

  September 18, 2017

  Hobbs woke up suddenly, forcefully, at 3am. She gasped and tossed the duvet cover off of her side of the bed, shot straight up and breathed heavily a few times. Beads of sweat covered her forehead and the collar of her shirt.

  “Roberta…are you okay?”

  Hobbs looked over and saw that Adams was sitting up too – squinting and blinking. He looked half-dazed, as if he couldn’t tell if he was still in a dream. He tenderly brushed her hair away from her face.

  “Did you have a bad dream?” Adams asked.

  Hobbs shook her head. “No, no, it was nothing like that.” Her voice sounded soft, unusually quiet. She scratched her temple as she caught her breath, still reconciling the subconscious with the conscious – what was real and what was imagined.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” he pressed.

  Hobbs turned and examined the shape of her knees underneath the sheets. She circled them with her hands and drew them up to her chest – a protective stance. “I remember her,” Hobbs said.

  “Who?”

  “Greta. Carpenter. Although at that time she was Greta Brock. I know where I’ve seen her before. She came into the police station. She was scared.”

  Adams leaned over and turned on the desk light. He reached slowly, delicately, as though a sudden move might corrupt her memory.

  “What was she scared of?” he asked.

  Roberta shrugged. “I don’t know. But I remember thinking that someone got to her. She had seen a car accident and she gave a report to the police at the scene of the incident. Then she showed up at the police station the next morning and gave a completely different story. And I remember…I remember that she seemed so scared and so shaken.”

  Adams was quiet for a moment while he considered this and then asked, “Did you update the police report after she came into the station?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Then why didn’t it show up in our records search?”

  “Because, this happened…I mean…this must have been over a decade ago.” She grew quiet and stared out the window, preferring to see the dark shadows in her backyard than to look at his face. Discussions of the past unnerved them both – especially occurrences that happened in the far distance, when she had been a young police officer and he was no more than a teenager.

  “I don’t understand. The precinct didn’t use computers over a decade ago?”

  Roberta brought her gaze back to him. “Yes, we had computers but we still primarily wrote everything down on paper. The computer system we had then was entirely different than what we have now and even the building was different. When the paper files were moved to the current building, a lot of them were misplaced or got stored out of order. When the systems were upgraded, some of the data was lost. I’m not surprised we didn’t find her in our search, but I know…Dean I know it was her. It was Greta.”

  Hobbs was staring at him, imploring him to believe her – unblinking and steadfast.

  “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “So, let’s say it was Greta. What do we do now?”

  Hobbs leaned back and rested her head against the tawny, polished bedframe. “We’ll need to search the paper files and see what we can find…”

  Adams recoiled. “We? Roberta, there are probably tens of thousands of files down there.”

  Hobbs nodded. “I know.” She reached forward and caressed his shoulder. It was a compassionate gesture – an act she didn’t typically do. But they both knew that there was going to be no we in the exercise she had proposed. There was only him – low-ranking, new to the force and young. Maybe Weaver would assign a grunt to help him through the task.

  Something else they both understood: the chore would be mind-numbing and tedious. Felonies such as violent crimes had been meticulously filed and archived…but the same couldn’t be said for traffic incidents. It could take days or weeks for Adams to sort through all of the paperwork in the basement until he came up with the correct file.

  “Anything else you remember?” Adams asked.

  “Yeah,” Hobbs said softly. “There was a Ferrari involved – a yellow Ferrari.”

  “A yello
w Ferrari,” Adams repeated. “Huh. That’s different. Was Greta driving it?”

  “No, it was one of the cars involved in the accident,” Hobbs said. “I wish I could remember more.”

  Adams nodded but instead of saying anything, he leaned closer to her and ran his palm up and down her arm. Hobbs neither reciprocated nor balked. She allowed him this gesture for five minutes until sleep overcame him and he sank back to his side of the bed.

  Hobbs stayed awake for another hour or so. With cases like these, her mind felt like a runaway train – proceeding along tracks of uncertain relevance. The only thing that helped was to mentally review the long list of tasks she would assume the next day.

  The Carpenter family’s cell phone files had finally come in, and Hobbs and Martinez were going to look through them in the morning. There was also bank and credit card activity to look into, and now Adams would likely be holed up in the precinct’s basement, looking through traffic files.

  All of this occupied her mind with possibilities and scenarios – best and worst cases. As soon as her eyelids finally felt heavy, she was dreaming about a scared young woman, a yellow Ferrari, and a family who had abandoned their home in a terrible hurry.

  ***

  Hobbs usually woke up before Adams, and this morning was no different. She was in and out of the shower and dressed before he rolled over, patted her side of the bed and sat up. “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Six-thirty,” she said as she stepped into her shoes. The sun was just beginning to rise, although thick storm clouds hung in the sky. It had been raining heavily in the early morning and it was going to storm again.

  “It’s early,” he said. Then he looked at her for an extended beat, surveyed her blue pantsuit and said admiringly, “You look nice.”

  Hobbs smiled. “I’ll see you at the office.” She knew he wanted a kiss, an acknowledgement or perhaps just a return compliment but there was too much to do, too much clouding her thoughts. She grabbed a cup of coffee from the kitchen counter, affixed her badge to the belt of her slacks and then she was off.