by Candice Fox
The car took off, rolling its high beams over the RV, then the darkness of the desert air. Nawlet hung his hand backwards over the seat, a shiny silver wrapper pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
‘Gum?’ he’d asked Axe.
‘Sure,’ Axe said.
CHAPTER 19
They sat together at the eight-seater dining room table, a solid oak affair she had bought in an online auction that looked as if it was designed to host a Viking feast but had never hosted anyone but her. Keeps sucked the end of his beer and let it make a loud pop as he unsealed his lips from the bottle.
‘We got one problem here,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ Celine asked.
‘I don’t know nothin’ about investigating murders,’ he said.
‘Well, neither do I.’
‘And I also don’t see what this is going to achieve,’ he continued, opening his email account, the fingers of one hand dancing over the keys. Celine tried not to look, but she noticed he had plenty of emails from women. ‘I mean, what? You find out the guy is innocent and you’re gonna stop chasing him?’
‘I just need to know the truth about this, Keeps.’
‘You gonna turn around and help him?’
‘Keeps, please.’
‘All right.’ He tore out a page of the notebook she had brought to the table and took up the pen. ‘We’re gonna do what I always do with my lawyer. We’re gonna write down some stuff in a couple of lists, Guilty and Not Guilty.’
‘You do this with your lawyer?’
‘Yeah.’ He smirked. ‘We look at what evidence we got, then we decide how we’re gonna plead.’
He folded the page in half lengthways, unfolded it again, drew a line down the crease and labelled the columns.
‘You have surprisingly delicate handwriting,’ Celine said.
‘You’re probably shocked someone with my record can write at all.’
‘I’m not,’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking through inmate mail for fifteen years. I’ve seen the best and the worst of the written word in there. What I am surprised by is the loop on that “y”. Look at that. That’s adorable.’
‘Stay focused. I’m tired. And we’ve got fifty-eight minutes on the timer.’
Celine glanced at the numbers ticking down silently on her phone, felt a desire to crack more jokes, to draw the numbers further and further down, until she ran out of time to discover that she had been wrong about John Kradle for all these years. Because, if she was wrong about him, that meant not only had her grandfather’s actions on that fateful day taken away everyone she had ever loved, but she had also let him take something away from another human being. A man outside the family. It meant that the destruction hadn’t stopped, hadn’t been contained, when the firing ended on that day. The pain and the loss had in fact, through her own stubbornness and weakness and bias, her inability to shake off what had happened, stretched into the present moment. With as much courage as she could muster, she pulled the laptop towards her and followed a path she had trodden almost a decade earlier, into the online information regarding the Kradle Family murders.
The screen lit up with images of John Kradle, his tall, broad-shouldered son, Mason, and his petite, curvy wife, Christine. Kradle’s other victim, the second to be shot dead in their house in Mesquite, only appeared in some of the images. The press liked to forget about the sister-in-law. The real horror and intrigue here was the suggestion of a ticking time bomb nestled in every family – the father who snaps, who comes home from work and cleans house, either to start afresh with a mistress or to go out himself in a blaze of glory. Celine scrolled through headlines. Mesquite Father Slays Family. Loving Home Blazes As Killer Father Watches. The infamous photograph of John Kradle appeared, a picture taken by a neighbour – Kradle stood on the lawn watching smoke billow into the sky from the upper windows of his house, hands by his sides, face expressionless. It was the picture that had made national and, briefly, international headlines. A father doing nothing to remedy the most terrible of actions, the slaughter of his loved ones.
‘Guilty,’ Celine said. She was startled by the vitriol in her tone, so cleared her throat and tried to sound expressionless. ‘Put it in the guilty column. This, right here. He did nothing to fight the fire raging through the house, to go back in and try to get any of the members of his family out. He just stood on the lawn and watched the place burn with them inside. Everybody in the street saw him.’
‘Says here’—Keeps scrolled—‘that physical evidence showed Kradle had just been in the house. That he was covered in his son’s blood and there was soot in his clothes.’
‘Right,’ Celine said. ‘He went in, shot Christine and Audrey in the kitchen. They were standing in there having a glass of white wine. Then he went upstairs and shot Mason while the boy showered. Mason fought him, even with a bullet in his skull. The police know this because the shower screen was smashed. He had to shoot the boy in the head a second time to kill him. Kradle then poured gasoline all down the stairs, lit up the place and walked out.’
Keeps made notes in the Guilty column. Celine looked at the blank stretch of page that said Not Guilty in Keeps’s glorious, curly, schoolgirl handwriting. Celine scrolled Google until she found a true crime website that had a section on the Kradle Family murders. A signed copy of Kradle’s statement in his chunky, windblown lettering loaded on the screen.
‘I walked in and found my wife and sister-in-law lying dead on the floor of the kitchen,’ Keeps read. ‘I went upstairs and found Mason in the shower. I tried to pick him up, but he was gone. The house was getting smokier and I was worried I was going to get caught in the fire. I tried to drag Mason down the stairs, but—’
‘See?’ Celine pointed at the screen. ‘Look at the language. My wife and my sister-in-law. He doesn’t say their names.’
‘He says Mason’s name,’ Keeps said.
‘I was worried I was going to get caught in the fire. I went upstairs. I tried to pick him up,’ Celine said. ‘He’s a narcissist. I’ve read about psychopaths, they—’
‘How about we stop trying to read what we want to read into this,’ Keeps said. ‘You’re just trying to see signs of guilt, and you can see them everywhere if you try. I can do the same thing in reverse. Look. Look, uh—’ He pointed to the screen. ‘He says he knew Mason was gone. Like, he was dead. But then he says he tried to drag him down the stairs. That’s a father trying to get his son’s body out of the house even though he knows there’s no point.’
‘I guess,’ Celine said.
‘And all this I, I, I stuff,’ Keeps snorted. ‘Man, the dude is a tinkerer. He messes around with cars and wood and shit all day. He’s not a poet. There might be fifteen ways to write a sentence, but I did this and I did that is just the plainest.’
‘So find me something to put in the Not Guilty column, then,’ Celine said.
Keeps clicked around the website. The timer told Celine they had thirty-five minutes left.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m looking for the experts.’ Keeps was scrolling through a scanned document that Celine could see was seven hundred and sixty pages long. ‘The DNA guys. Fingerprint guys. Blood guys. Bullet guys. Whatever. That’s the sort of stuff we should be looking for here. The hard facts.’
‘What is this?’
‘It’s the trial transcript.’
‘It’ll take longer than an hour to look through this,’ Celine said.
‘They usually bring in the experts on day three of defence witnesses in a murder trial,’ Keeps said. ‘Two days to paint the picture, tell the story, get the emotions going before you bring in all the boring old guys with their graphs.’
Celine tapped the table and shifted in her seat. Keeps sucked his beer dry.
‘You know a fair bit about investigating murders for someone who doesn’t know anything about investigating murders,’ Celine ventured.
‘I know about trials,’ Keeps said. ‘I’m not a kille
r, in case you were wondering.’
‘Good to know. I figured as much, though, you coming from minimum.’
‘But you looked at my jacket, right?’
‘No.’
‘You googled me.’
‘No.’
‘What?’ Keeps turned and gawked at her. ‘You serious, girl?’
‘I told you that already.’
‘Man.’ He shook his head. ‘You’re some kind of fool.’
‘I told you, it’s all about the feeling,’ Celine said. She nodded at the screen. ‘I’m making a point here. Kradle gave me that feeling as soon as I laid eyes on him. I knew he was bad. I got the feeling you’re good, Keeps. I don’t need to check up on that.’
They sat in silence for a while, Keeps scrolling, not focusing on the words traversing the screen before him.
‘I’m a con man.’
‘We really don’t need to get into it.’
‘No, we should,’ Keeps said. ‘Even if it’s just so you get to know your feelings about people can be wrong sometimes. I’m a bad person. Real bad. But I seem good. I use the same skills you’ve seen in me, and I take them out there into the world to do my work of ripping people off. I notice details. I’ve got the gift of the gab. People underestimate me because of the tattoos and the baggy pants. Sometimes I wear cornrows. That’s my costume. That’s my in. Some con men wear suits. I wear this. Kaylene? There is no Kaylene.’ He gestured to the tattoo on his neck. ‘It’s an act. I show up looking like this, but I let people know I’m smart and they think: Here he is, my diamond in the rough. All he needs is someone to trust him and give him some responsibility, and he’ll be all polished up.’
‘That’s not true,’ Celine said, smirking. ‘None of that is true.’
‘I’m sitting in your dining room.’ Keeps looked at her, his eyes wide. Celine glanced about them at the empty house, the gaping, dark rooms. A clock was ticking somewhere. A pipe groaned. Keeps’s hand was resting gently on the keys of her laptop, where all her banking, email and credit card details were auto-saved. Jake leaped from nowhere up into Keeps’s lap, and he scratched the cat behind the ears.
‘Maybe you’ve got a point,’ she said.
‘Mmm-hmm.’
‘What kind of scams do you run?’ Celine asked.
‘It’s not important.’
‘Come on. You started this. I’m curious now.’
‘I try to invent something new every time,’ he sighed, reading the screen, half-paying attention to her. ‘I’ve done the traditional robocall scams and confidence games. You dig around on social media, find somebody whose kid is at summer camp. You call them up, tell them the kid’s been in an accident, their insurance isn’t covering the ambulance or whatever. They need to direct transfer some money to you via Western Union. Or maybe you find an old lady, an old veteran: you bug their house, bug their car, find out a bunch of stuff, worm your way in as someone from the energy company or someone from the bank. All that stuff gets very routine after a while. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You’re just hanging around in nursing homes or sitting in front of a computer playing sound effects from YouTube in the background of calls. Sirens. Kids crying. People screaming.’
Celine felt her stomach turning. She watched his eyes as he read, those expert fingers stroking the keys.
‘Lately I’ve been into tools. I was in Pronghorn last year with this guy who’s deep into wood. Like, real deep. He builds furniture out of crazy expensive wood from, like, Colombia or some shit. Anyway, I went to his workshop and found out he’s got table saws in that place that are worth fifteen grand.’ Keeps smiled, remembering. ‘Fifteen grand! For a saw! So we knocked up this scam together. He made all these signs out of real nice wood that read Daddy’s Workshop. We made a hundred of them. Advertised them on mommy’n’baby pages on Facebook. Whole bunch of wives bought them for their husbands for Father’s Day. Then we looked at who bought them. Like, where do they live? What kind of space do they have on their property? What do they do for a living? That kind of thing. Once we figured out who was most likely to have expensive tools, we hit the road with the list of delivery addresses, and when – okay, look here.’
He turned the laptop towards her. Celine was so lost in her thoughts she had to shake herself to remember what they were doing.
‘This guy here, the expert, guy named . . .’ Keeps peered down his wire-framed glasses to read the name. ‘Dr Martin Stinway. He’s here talking about Kradle’s shirt. Says he’s some kind of micro-pattern-whatever analyst.’
They read quietly together, Keeps scrolling as Celine tapped the edge of the laptop to tell him she was ready to turn the page.
‘Stinway says gunshot residue on Kradle’s shirt indicated he fired the gun that killed all three victims,’ Celine said.
‘Right, so that’s bullshit,’ Keeps said.
‘How so?’
‘Gunshot residue is the most junk science there is,’ Keeps said. ‘The FBI don’t even use it no more. I know that because my lawyer won a major defence case with it. Guy had been sentenced to twenty-five to life, hanging on gunshot residue as the major piece of evidence that locked him up.’
‘But Kradle had the residue on his shirt,’ Celine said. ‘There’s no mistaking it. Says so right here. Look. There are photos.’
‘Right.’ Keeps shrugged. ‘It was there. But how did it get there? Stinway says it was because he fired the gun. But the dude had been in the house. He admitted it. You fire a gun in a house, there’ll be gunshot residue all over the place. It’ll be on the floor, on the ceiling, hanging around in the air. It’ll be on the victims. It’ll also be on the cops who come into the house to check out what happened. They will have picked some up from touching their own weapons. Man, police stations are covered in that shit. Anybody who walks into a police station will come out with gunshot residue on them. The guy who my lawyer saved from the life sentence? The police sat him in the back of a squad car. There was GSR all over that thing. They did some tests and showed it.’
‘But I’m looking here.’ Celine was typing into the laptop. ‘This Dr Martin Stinway guy has been doing this for thirty years. Look at all his college degrees. He’d know the difference.’
‘Would he, though?’ Keeps said. ‘I mean, maybe you should ask him.’
‘It’s three o’clock in the morning.’
‘So?’
Celine tapped the keys, scrolled. She left Dr Martin Stinway’s Wikipedia page and started down a list of newspaper articles.
‘Oh, no,’ she said.
‘What?’ Keeps leaned over. Celine clicked the article and the screen was dominated by a huge headline.
Renowned Scientist Discredited in Shock Ruling.
The timer went off on Celine’s phone.
CHAPTER 20
Kradle could walk. He reminded himself that this was an achievement in itself. The streets of Mesquite were dark, the streetlights blurry and molten in his vision, and the cold breeze coming off the desert felt like cactus needles slicing at his neck and hands. But he had patched the hole in his body, kneeling in a godforsaken corner of a parking lot, using the sickly green light of an exit sign to stitch himself up. He had cash in his pocket and a destination in mind, and his limbs were still cooperating with him. All was not lost.
The encampment consumed the base of highway overpass on both sides and was surprisingly loud. Rap music thumped from a long shanty at the centre of the collection of dwellings, a lopsided headquarters made from blue tarps and sheets of plywood. It was bigger than Kradle had anticipated, but he remembered a documentary he’d watched about fentanyl and knew that smaller cities like Mesquite were having trouble with it. Tiny police forces, giant wildlands of desert in which to cook and mix and bag drugs in RVs and campers.
Kradle had never technically been homeless, but he knew from the tales of other inmates that many of the guys here probably had records, were on the run from the law, or were in active pursuit of criminal enterprises. And if h
e knew anything about cons and ex-cons, it was that they hated strangers encroaching on their space. He decided the best course of action, then, was to try to pick off a target from the edge of the herd. He approached a man who stood at the kerb, smoking, the sharp angles of his face lit red by the burning end of his hand-rolled cigarette.
‘Hey man, can I—’
‘Fuck off, bro.’
‘Right.’ Kradle backed up, his hands out. ‘Right. No problem.’
He received a few more ‘Fuck off’s for his trouble, approaching and finding men on the outer limits of the camp from the north and west. On his fourth attempt, he found an old man sitting on a wooden crate, staring at the lit screen of a cell phone.
Kradle forwent the greeting this time.
‘I have money,’ he said, instead. It was the same thing that had saved his life only a day before, and it saved him again now. The old man looked up. One side of his face was webbed with burn scars, which took on hideous depths in the harsh, blue light.
‘Whatchu want?’
‘A place to sleep. Someone to keep lookout. Some new clothes. Food, if you’ve got it.’
‘You one of those Pronghorn creeps?’ the scarred man asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Well, you better have more cash than they’ll give me as a reward for turning you in.’
‘You’re not going to turn me in,’ Kradle said, and they both knew he was right, because bringing the law down on the camp for any reason would have the man blacklisted for life among the homeless community of Mesquite. And, chances were, he was probably wanted himself. The old man extracted himself from his little wooden seat with difficulty, and when he rose to full height he was a foot taller than Kradle, who stood slightly bent from his injuries. Kradle pulled out his bundle of cash and handed over a couple of hundred-dollar notes to his new friend.