The Room Where It Happened

by Jason Letts

  It had everything. Employment applications, reports, evaluations, news articles, inter-departmental letters, and Tera couldn’t have been more thrilled. Moments later she hit upon the first item that really caught her interest, one of the few photos, this one a glossy 8x11 of the entire crew with all of the names printed at the bottom according to how they were seated. Evan Iger was listed as being seventh in along the fourth row, and she ran her finger up and along the image until she reached the corresponding face.

  Squinting, she nearly put the photograph right up to her nose to try to make out what she saw. She then tried to cover up the other nearby people with her hand to be able to focus more on what she was looking at. It was a young man with dark hair and a complexion that matched what she would’ve expected.

  This would’ve been long before his accident in the auto-parts workshop, and the smile on his face was one that seemed brighter than anything she ever saw. The eyes, the stringy build. Even though the image was grainy and she hadn’t brought any of her photos to compare, she was sure she was looking at her father, who at the moment this was taken was living another life under another name with another family elsewhere in the city.

  Tera took a deep breath and released it slowly. Letting go of any sexual thoughts of Brady, her half-brother, was easy compared to the animosity that swelled within her about her father and this proof that he’d had people he wanted to spend so much of his time with other than his own true family.

  All of the hardship that she and her mother had endured, the tough times getting by, living with torn clothes or being cold in the winter because they couldn’t afford the heat, never having more than three toys as a kid that were her own, that was all because the man in this picture with the glowing smile was evidently thrilled doing whatever he wanted no matter how much it hurt her or her mom.

  She rifled through the other pages looking for more about him, eagerly attempting to pour salt in her own wound. This would be the last time she’d ever let her father make her hurt, so it may as well hurt to high heavens now. Maybe there was a photocopy of the fake ID he used to get the job that gave him his other name. There may as well have been some candid shots on the job depicting him making a move on a third woman who may have just happened to be around and not known about any of the rest of them.

  All her life, she’d wanted to imagine that she could’ve had it worse, but after reading the evaluations and the application with the same scrawled handwriting she remembered from cheap, handmade birthday cards he cobbled together out of construction paper, she knew her mother was right about him. The thought never even crossed her mind to want to copy anything from the files to take it home. Her mother would never want to see it and neither would she.

  Shutting the file, Tera felt a single tear trickle down her cheek. No matter what had happened the other night, she wasn’t made of iron now. Her father had managed to reach out from the grave and ruin her life one more time. Yeah, Brady had a girlfriend with a girl Tera still largely considered to be a floozy, but she’d felt she had a connection with him. It turned out she did, but it wasn’t the kind she was used to, and she needed to get back to enjoying having him as a friend, because that was all it was ever going to be.

  Having him taking up so much of her mental space made it difficult to envision that there were other great men out there, some that could possibly be even better for her, as long as when she finally met one she didn’t completely screw it up.

  When she made it to the precinct to start work, of course the first person she saw was Brady, who was carrying a folder and flashed her a knowing smirk.

  “Well if it isn’t Triple-Kill Tera,” he said.

  “No, we’re not calling me that,” she replied, glad that he didn’t stop to engage her in a longer conversation. She had no idea how she’d manage to keep herself from blurting out the truth that they were related.

  Things didn’t get much better as she progressed down the hall and nearly bumped into Olivia, who was on her way out for another ticket-writing spree.

  “I think someone’s come to see you,” she said.

  “Thanks.”

  A funny feeling hit Tera. She hadn’t ever had a visitor come for her at work. The list of people who even knew what she did and might conceivably have a reason to stop by was pretty small. Did her Mama hear about the shooting and feel the need to rush in? Did Lawrence have a change of heart and a burning need to apologize? Did Dreck find some way to get back at her for her threat?

  As she stepped into the shared office space, she spotted an older man with wavy white hair and a bushy mustache seated by her desk. His white dress shirt was showing signs of sweat around the armpits.

  “Can I help you?” Tera asked, and the man nodded in a pained sort of way as she sat down next to him.

  “I’m hoping so. I’m Theodore Flint.”

  “Ted Flint,” she said, remembering the name of Kim’s landlord. Tera recalled pretending to have had a conversation with him to avoid Brady finding out about her paternal search. There was also a brief real chat about some repairs he did inside her apartment that had gone nowhere.

  “The same. I reached out to the Parkinson family and they told me you were involved in the investigation of Kimberly’s death. It’s the end of the month and no one’s going to be paying the rent for July. I’m trying to see if the family can be cleared to move out her belongings so I can find a new tenant for the apartment,” he said.

  Tera blinked at him, trying to think of any reason why he shouldn’t be able to do that. The thought crossed her mind to give him the key she had, since she had no intention of ever going back again.

  “The investigation is closed and the perpetrator was killed in an exchange with police, so there’s no more need to preserve the scene. I can reach out to the family and tell them to claim her belongings,” Tera said. Flint offered a warmer smile.

  “That would be stupendous, and the sooner they can do it, the better. I need to get back in there and finish repairing the light fixtures that I started on the other Monday.”

  He was about to get up, but Tera narrowed her eyes and extended a hand to keep him in his seat. That detail wasn’t one he’d shared before.

  “Last Monday you did that.”

  “No, it was a couple of weeks ago now. The middle of the month.”

  Tera watched him carefully.

  “You let yourself in and thought she was asleep or something and did some work anyway,” Tera said to clarify, though she didn’t think for a second that being oblivious to the blood or the nudity was possible.

  “That wouldn’t have been right. Kim let me in.”

  A sensation in Tera’s mind was taking shape that made it feel like her hair could stand on end.

  “You mean Sunday you went in to make some repairs,” she said, and Flint chuckled.

  “I haven’t worked a weekend in thirty years,” he said.

  Suddenly feeling shaken, Tera gripped the armrest of her chair as this man had punctured so many of her theories about what happened. If he was telling the truth, obviously the Sunday night meeting between Wayne Chechy and Kim hadn’t resulted in her death, and Kim hadn’t been dead for as long as she thought when she arrived Monday night.

  “Exactly what time did you go in there on Monday?”

  “Pretty much first thing. Probably nine to ten.”

  “Why didn’t you bring this up when I talked to you before?” Tera asked, ready to pull her hair out.

  “I thought I did. We didn’t?”

  Tera was reeling at the news that Kim had been alive for at least another twelve hours longer than she thought. Now Chechy’s adamance made more sense. He hadn’t been lying when he said he hadn’t killed her, unless he’d come back the next day for no apparent reason after paying Kim off and telling her it was over.

  “Can you wait here, please?” Tera said, barely able to get the words out. She needed help and soon found herself getting out of her chair. Brady’s office was empty
, and then she remembered she’d seen him out in the hall. She broke into a run still in full sight of everyone and flew down the hall and crashed through the front doors. Swinging around on the railing, she looked out across the parking lot, where he was getting into a car.

  “Brady, wait!” she screamed, rushing across the parking lot as fast as her feet could carry her. Startled, he turned to her. She went on. “It wasn’t Chechy. You have to get in here and listen to this. He says he saw her on Monday morning.”

  Without any hesitation, Brady slammed the door closed and ran back with her to the entrance. They took Ted Flint to Brady’s office and had him repeat his story. With his head down and hand on his forehead, Brady looked like he’d just been told he had cancer.

  “Sanders was right. You were right,” he said to Tera. “I’m not saying we wouldn’t have gone after Chechy because of everything he did, but if what Mr. Flint is saying is true the killer is still out there.”

  “But the family will still clean out the apartment, right?” the older man asked, not at all distracted from his purpose by news of the continued threat of the killer who’d gotten into his building.

  “Yes, of course. I’ll take care of it,” Tera said, helping Ted Flint out of the office before returning to Brady, whose pique was growing by the minute.

  “I rushed it. Jumped the gun,” Brady said, brooding. Even with the sudden shift, Tera had difficulty looking at him and not wondering which parts of them were the same. He was a fair amount taller than her and much bigger, but in moments like this they seemed to have the same intensity.

  “It’s not just you. I had made an assumption from the smell and the dried blood that it must’ve been the day before,” she said, remembering how she’d had Perry perform a useless rape test when he should’ve been examining the head wound for an indication about the time of death. The autopsy had given them nothing to cause her to rethink her timeline.

  As much as they could’ve spent all day beating themselves up over missing it, a more important question was still in front of them.

  “If it wasn’t Chechy, then who was it?” Brady asked. “Lawrence? Somebody completely out of left field?”

  Tera would’ve loved if this somehow got turned back around on Lawrence, but she remembered all those pictures of the Nike training camp. It wasn’t him. She closed her eyes and tried to think back to the night, tried to think through the entire case again. One thing stood out that hadn’t seemed important before.

  “I remember her father refused to go into the bedroom with me. At the time I thought it was because he was distraught and repulsed by the sight of his daughter’s cold and naked body, but he was afraid of being tied to the scene, afraid of me figuring out what really happened despite what he was saying. I’d taken too much of what he said at face value,” she said, almost as if in a trance as she talked over her memories.

  “Her dad, really?” Brady asked, skeptical but not dismissive of the idea. “But without her clothes on? I don’t get it.”

  One leg over the other, Tera settled her chin into her palm.

  “When he was outside calling for help, the last thing he expected in that neighborhood was for a cop to come. A woman never would’ve directly approached him either. He was looking for a man, one of the neighborhood’s roaming late-teens youths who skulk around at night. Robert’s plan was to lead some solitary guy into the apartment to fake a rape attempt, leaving them both there naked as if the attack went bad or the guy took his own life after realizing what he’d done.”

  Tera couldn’t have been more sure, and the resolve began to harden on Brady’s face.

  “Obviously we knew he was there, and perhaps he was the last one to see her alive. Robert could’ve pulled the trigger at any point during the day after Flint left and then waited around till the evening to try to lure someone in. But my question is why. We need to lock down the motive,” he said.

  The memories she had left her without much to go on for that one.

  “I can’t say for sure, but it must’ve had to do with the dime bags in the bedroom, which Robert wasn’t ever able to retrieve because I’d been in there and disposed of them. You guessed she might’ve been holding for someone before, and maybe it was him. He may well have had more drugs on him, not to mention the murder weapon. I never even checked him.”

  They spent a moment looking at each other. Just when she started to believe her dad was the worst one possible, the universe served up a double decker. At least her dad hadn’t killed her and tried to create a cover up.

  “All I know is we can’t have another situation like with Chechy where we move in on someone who turns out not to be the one. We’ve got to have this one ironed out flat,” he said, but Tera had already gotten on a completely different track.

  “I spent so much time trying to find a way to get justice for Kim without her family becoming collateral damage, losing benefits and going broke with a painting job that didn’t earn enough, that I completely missed that her own family was responsible. In a way I was the absolute worst person to come across her body, because my relationship with her blinded me to the one who did it.”

  Brady had gotten up in the middle of her thought. He took her by the arm and pulled her away from the chair. His look was piercing and his face was deathly serious. The physical behavior threw her off, and she shook him off once she got to her feat.

  “No, don’t do that,” he said, right in front of her face. “I’m not going to let you throw yourself off a cliff on this one. Cut yourself some slack. If you were another cop strapped into your squad car, this may well have been a double homicide. If anyone else but you had found the body, this case would’ve been buried in a stack two feet deep and a poor young woman who’d been forced to make some bad choices because of some bad people around her never would’ve gotten the justice that she still, yes still, deserves.

  “We’ve made our mistakes, but it’s not too late to set this right. We have the father’s prints at the scene, but we need more about why he would’ve done this. Then we can take the case to him. If the facts add up, we hang it on him.”

  Tera clenched her hands and nodded, ready to finish the job she’d started. If there was any silver lining to everything that happened, it was that they’d ostensibly found a killer and the case was closed as far as the public was concerned. That meant Robert wouldn’t be expecting them to look into him.

  “It’s a good thing Flint just gave me a perfect excuse to go talking to them,” she said.

  CHAPTER 10

  It wasn’t hard for Tera to find the place where Kim’s mother lived, since it was still right down the street from where she grew up. In some ways this block was even worse than the multi-floor apartment buildings of the O-Block. Here, single-family homes were squashed together creating a portrait of all of the ways a house could decay and fall apart.

  Her own home had been condemned shortly after graduating, which was when they moved to her mother’s current apartment. At the time her home had a rotting and detached porch, but as she passed she saw how much worse things had gotten in a few intervening years. The roof was caving in and the building was visibly resting on the one next to it.

  Tera continued on toward the Parkinson’s house farther up, parking her own car and once again wearing her street clothes. Their house was in better shape, but she guessed from the wide distance between Kim’s mother Lucinda and Robert at the funeral that she’d be the only one there. For many people, not seeing a car around might’ve been evident that the place was vacant, but not for folks like these.

  After Tera knocked on the door with the chipping paint, she waited a few moments and then noticed some movement in the drapes. The door creaked open to reveal Lucinda Parkinson, who was wearing a nightgown and holding a cat. The woman was in better physical condition than her own mother, but she was more exhausted and had a look suggesting that her spirit had been pulverized.

  “Tera,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to dis
turb you,” Tera said, trying to put her deceased friend’s mother at ease. “I believe you found out that I’ve been working for the police and you mentioned me to the landlord of Kim’s building.”

  Lucinda crossed her arms, shifting the cat as though it were attached, and leaned against the doorframe. Tera had to assume that she’d found out about her position from Flint.

  “Yeah, I heard you’re a cop. Wonders never cease. To think it wasn’t that long ago that you and Kim were sneaking into clubs to dance with the older boys, grifting for money outside of Bears games from the tailgaters, and skipping school together to go from store to store trying on clothes all around the mall. Oh, she may have told me more than you might’ve thought,” Lucinda said before coughing and rubbing her throat.

  It was certainly more than anything she’d told her own mother, but from the sounds of it Kim had kept hidden a few of the worst incidents.

  “Anyway, the point is that you’re free to begin moving her personal belongings. The landlord is hoping that’ll be done quickly, so he can rent the place,” she said.

  “I’ll find somebody to do it,” she said distantly.

  “Not Kim’s father, Robert?”

  Tera had asked the question casually, but the implication hadn’t slipped by Lucinda at all. She turned her head back to Tera with a barely concealed scowl on her face.

  “Probably not.”

  “I noticed at the funeral that you two weren’t anywhere near each other.”

  As Tera pressed the woman in the doorway, she could sense the reluctance to hide and deflect, to avoid the pain.

  “We’re not together anymore.”

  “Is something going on with him?”

  Tera hated feeling like she was hounding this lady with personal questions, but she burned to get to the answers that might close the door on Kim’s case. Everything she needed to know could be right behind Lucinda’s careful watchfulness.

  “Just because we’re not together anymore doesn’t mean I’m going to break the first rule of the block. You know it as well as anyone. No snitching.”