Cursed myself for not having disposable gloves—also left behind in the Mustang—and resigned myself to being careful. Grabbed the clipboard from the front seat and did the ‘lock up and stroll’ routine again.
I glimpsed the roof of the Wright house beyond another downtrodden two-story home in the middle of the block. I stopped, looked down the path beside the house, pretended to consult my clipboard. I looked up, down again, then stepped off the sidewalk with purpose and walked between the house and the side fence. The locked gate halfway down the lot was out of sight from the street and I had no problems hopping it.
I landed in a crouch and waited. I didn’t want to be surprised by dogs, actual meter readers, or the lady of the house sunbathing nude, though I wouldn’t have complained about the latter.
Silence.
I walked to the rear of the house, checking windows and readying excuses on the way.
Followed the fence line to the corner of the backyard and hoisted myself up to peer over it. I was looking into the backyard of the house next door to the Wright’s. I crossed to the other corner of the yard, looked over my shoulder once, then heaved myself over the fence. Hidden from the curbside gaggle of the righteous and vocal, I scanned the Wright’s backyard as I crossed to the back door.
Like the front of the house, everything was tidy but held an air of general aging. Not unloved or abandoned, more just a ‘doing the best with what we’ve got’ feel. The house needed painting but the lawn had been cut recently. Badly. Thin grass patches, baked dry by the recent weather, lay like liver spots.
A basketball hoop rusted out of its bracket above a square of concrete. A swingset and slide in the far corner looked ignored, and liable to disintegrate on the slightest touch.
The wooden screen door flapped a corner of loose flywire as it creaked open, and I held it with my hip while working my magic on the door lock. Took a few minutes, but the black art of lock picking has always been kind to me, and the lock finally popped. I wiped the doorknob with a handkerchief and stepped inside.
Stood still in the kitchen and listened. I had no reason, especially after the fine recon work done by Ruthie, to think there was anyone in the house but it pays to play all the angles. An empty house has a particular feel and it didn’t take long for me to be convinced I was alone.
Okay, I was here now. What I was looking for?
Proof.
Of what? Bradley’s innocence? Guilt? Evidence of a torture dungeon where Charlene had turned her son into a stone-cold killer? That was a long way down the list of possibilities but it never hurt to keep an open mind.
Still, I figured even the cops would have recognized the significance of something so obvious in their sweep, so anything I might find was likely to be a tad more subtle than blood-encrusted chains hanging from the ceiling. And, speaking of things that should have been obvious, it didn’t look like the cops had been through the house at all.
Crime scene investigation is not like TV and film producers would have us believe. Cops—for the most part—are respectful, so they wouldn’t have trashed the place during their time here, but I still expected to see some detritus left behind. Maybe not upturned drawers and holes in the walls, but at least some remnants of the team dusting for fingerprints, personal items not yet returned to their correct places, a track of muddy boot prints on the floor, that kind of thing.
The kitchen showed none of these. The fittings and surfaces were old and well-used. Water stained the sink underneath the dripping faucet and the Formica counters were chipped in places. But for all that, there wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, and a comprehensive organizational system in place, including labelled plastic containers in the shelves and fridge. Dry and empty dishwasher, clean dishtowel folded and hanging over the oven door handle, and a fresh garbage bag in the trashcan. Windows had been washed. The frames needed paint.
The kitchen had two doors—not counting the one to the backyard—which opened into a garage and a laundry respectively. Just like everything I’d seen about the house so far, a place for everything and everything in its place.
Mid-size station wagon, parked straight in the middle of the garage, hanging tennis ball resting against the windshield. Small bench, a space for your basic D-I-Y problems, nothing serious. Some cheap and nasty tools hung on pegboards above an empty workbench. A few small paint cans stacked underneath. Boy’s bike hanging from the ceiling, tires soft and chrome freckled with rust.
The laundry also a picture of domestic efficiency. Washer and dryer in one corner, hanging rails above a sink. Cupboard with half-full laundry basket at the bottom and a black void above. Laundry chute from the second story, I guessed.
Stepped into the hallway, scuffed hardwood floor with a blood-red carpet runner stretching towards the front door, between dented and chipped skirting boards. Dining room to the right, to judge by the corner of the dark brown table, with wide windows that would have overlooked the street had the curtains been open.
Still, the low murmur of the protestors on the front lawn encouraged me to keep away from the front windows. I hugged the left-hand side of the hallway, alongside the stairs. With wavy yellow glass in the front door and sidelights, I’d be dead unlucky to be seen through them but I crouched anyway as I rounded the foot of the stairs. Living room opposite the dining, with comfortable, mismatched furniture, all inexpensive and worn.
Time to check out the boudoir.
I crept up the first half of the stairs, until I was sure I wouldn’t cast a silhouette on the front door glass, then worked back to full height by the time I got to the second floor. A carpeted hallway ran at right angles to the stairs, and judging from the light spill, all the upstairs rooms had been left with open doors.
Main bedroom on the left. Bed made, pillows fluffed, no underwear or laundry laying around. I had a fleeting, time-capsule inspired thought about the whole place being a hotel, or a museum.
The other end of the hallway had three rooms opening off it: a small office and what looked like a guest bedroom facing the street and a teenage boy’s bedroom overlooking the backyard.
The guest room was plain and boring, as they most always are. Single bed jutting out from one wall, a three-drawer side table with lamp, and a smattering of framed prints on the wall. Mostly desert landscapes. Scuffed leather suitcase lay on the floor, lid open, Ray’s clothes inside. The bed had been slept in recently but, like the rest of the house I’d seen, it was made, and the rest of the room was neat and tidy.
The office had a bookshelf at one end, and a few more desert prints on the walls. The bookshelves had a wide range of titles, thriller fiction to money management guides, and no discernible organizational system. A comfortable-looking wingback chair angled in a corner alongside a floor lamp. Small desk on the other wall, with a stack of envelopes, and a corkboard above with what looked like bills and reminders fixed with brightly-colored plastic pins. A metal three-drawer filing cabinet butted up against the desk and tantalizingly held all sorts of imagined clues, but I didn’t want to be seen through the window to the front yard mob, so I put that on the back burner and moved on to Bradley’s room.
With the privacy of only the empty backyard visible through the window, I stepped inside.
Bradley’s room was larger than the other two rooms at this end of the house. Points to Mom for letting the teenager have his way. Or was it a matter of a belligerent kid demanding the best and getting angry—perhaps violent—when he didn’t get what he wanted?
Double bed underneath the window, made and neat, simple dark blue blankets and matching sheets. A skateboard peeked out from underneath, alongside several pairs of sneakers.
Cheap student desk which made a pigeon pair with the one in the office. Probably bought on a two-for-one special. School binders aligned across the back edge of the desk: Geography, Mathematics, English, Biology, and so forth. Shiny, dust-free square in the middle of the desk. I assumed a computer confiscated by the cops had sat there ’til two weeks
ago.
Mid-size stereo system on the floor, with a stack of records in the cabinet underneath.
Bookshelves in here too, again with a mix of titles. I guessed most of the non-fiction to be school textbooks, but South and The Oregon Trail were more likely to be a personal interest. Non-fiction aside, this kid was a serious reader. I didn’t take the time to read all of the spines, but I could see a whole section of science fiction—Isaac Asimov, Ursula K Le Guin, Arthur C Clarke—what looked like the whole collection of Tolkien, and a bunch of Greek classics. A gap at one end of the bottom shelf held testament to whatever it was that had been there, but gave me nothing as to what that might’ve been.
Three white mice scampered about in a glass-walled enclosure on top of one of the lower bookshelves. One ran endlessly on a wheel, while the other two dashed laps from end to end like their lives depended on it.
Maybe they did.
Two-door closet, clothes folded and hung neatly. Nothing out of place, and all a damn sight neater than I remember my teenage room being.
I guess every teenager’s room has posters on the wall and Bradley’s room didn’t disappoint. A mix of singer and band posters and sports. Not that I recognized any of them right off the bat, but most of the posters had names helpfully attached. Bon Jovi, Poison, Whitesnake, and someone called Cyndi Lauper who looked like she was having trouble seeing out from underneath all the eye makeup. Didn’t know anything about their music, but it looked like big hair was a necessity. Especially for the guys.
A couple posters of kids doing their best to ignore the laws of gravity, launching out of swimming pools and off ramps on skateboards and BMX bikes, and the obligatory Texas shrine to the Cowboys and Rangers.
Realized that I’d been hoping to find a definitive story about Bradley when I first set foot in the house, particularly where the anger that led him to picking up a gun and shooting four people had stemmed from, but so far the only phrase screaming in my head was ‘typical teenager.’
So I tossed his room.
Without gloves, I took it slow and careful, setting everything back the way it was and wiping down anything I touched. Didn’t need the hassle of Mom calling the cops, the cops calling me, and … well, it was just easier for things to look like I hadn’t been there.
Fat lot of good it did me.
I give the cops a lot of credit for their investigation. They do a good job, but they would have been looking for the obvious. Guns and ammo, ranting diatribes on the computer, that kind of thing.
But I’m a lot sneakier than most cops, so I figured I’d have no trouble finding the not-so-obvious key: diary hidden in an A/C duct. Manifesto tucked behind a loose baseboard. Polaroids of murdered animals secreted in a hollowed-out bedpost. Something.
Nope.
After a good hour, I’d confirmed that the details of the room reflected the surface impressions. Bradley was a kid who worked hard enough at school to get by but no more—a couple of his report cards I found in his desk drawers used that exact phrase—had healthy, and pretty tame, interests in sports and music, and exhibited no signs of anger or rage anywhere.
And I’d looked.
I’d found the empty hiding space under the loose floorboard. Thought it smelled like pot down there, but it was musty and hard to tell for sure.
Also found a couple of dog-eared copies of Penthouse magazine on the top shelf of his closet. And the record single wedged between two LPs under the stereo. Some band called Bad English, more of the big hair, with a song called When I see You Smile. Hand-written across the mostly blank back of the record sleeve was a note that said, Love U 4 Ever Bradley! B. xxx, surrounded by a big heart. In glittery pink pen.
So Bradley maybe smoked the occasional joint, probably whacked off from time to time, and had, or used to have, a girlfriend.
Big fucking deal.
Once I made sure everything was back in its place and the room looked the same as when I walked in, I sat on the floor in the middle of Bradley’s room, surrounded by the bits and pieces that made up his life and tried to think. The back of my scalp prickled and the whole goddamn situation was starting to feel wrong.
Neither the house, nor Bradley’s bedroom, fit my expected mold of Bradley as the pissed-off killer taking out retribution on the rest of the school. Everything I’d seen indicated that he was the typical, and very ordinary, teenager. Like his mother had said, I couldn’t find any indication that he knew the other two shooters, much less spent any time with them. There was no sign that he had weapons, ammo, another duffel bag, a penchant for violent imagery, or had written anything that might indicate he was gearing up to murder three of his classmates and a teacher.
And that didn’t make sense.
Because that’s what happened.
No wonder his mother didn’t want to believe what her son did—there wasn’t a single warning sign to be seen anywhere. The girlfriend might know more, probably did, but trying to track her down from a single initial? Without spending interminable amounts of time talking to teenagers who might have known them both. ‘Like, I was so like, jealous of Bradley and B … (Barbara, Betty, Bathilda?) They were so in love, you know.’
Like, ugh.
I’d think again about it all later, but for the moment, I wasn’t going to have an epiphany sitting around in that tired, empty house. Thought about the office filing cabinet again but didn’t figure I could pull that off without at least one of the front yard crowd seeing me.
So I decided to get out of there and head home, to a beer and Hilda.
I checked the bathroom on the way back down the hall, more of the same. Clean, ordered. Towels folded and hung. Floor rug laying without wrinkles on stained and cracked linoleum. One toothbrush standing in a glass by the sink, which confused me for a minute until I realized the master bedroom must have a closet and master bath tucked around the corner and out of my sightline from the hallway.
The final door in the hallway opened to reveal a closet. The usual familial stuff tucked away; taped and labelled boxes on the floor and up high, crisp folded linens on the middle shelves complete with shelf labels. Boring.
I crept back down the stairs, went back to the kitchen. Double-checked the staircase, laundry and garage to make sure I hadn’t missed a door to a basement or other hidey-hole. Nope, I hadn’t.
And I was done.
I pulled the rear door closed, making sure it locked, and let the screen door swing shut with a soft thump. I stepped off the porch and was three strides closer to the back fence when a voice behind me said, “Freeze!”
I halted mid-step and turned towards the voice, which turned out to belong to a DPD officer about the same age as my Mustang. “Hey pal! You deaf? I said freeze!”
His canned dialogue would have been easy to ignore.
But the service weapons he and his partner—standing ten feet to the side—had triangulated upon the body that Hilda loved and craved caused me some discontent. I stopped moving, held my hands away from all my pockets and took them up on their generous offer to inspect the lawn from a very close distance.
Chapter 16
At the cop shop, I was marched down the corridor by my elbows and treated to all the charm and hospitality the Dallas constabulary had to share.
It’s a good thing they weren’t trying to wedge their way into the tourist accommodation market.
This auspicious occasion would mark my debut in the Grand DPD Arrest Stage Show and Musical. I’d played the role to critical acclaim in rural East Texas, but this would be my first time under the bright lights of the big city.
After processing, they let me sit in holding and I wondered how long it would take for the news of my capture to filter up to Ed. Then I wondered how long he would wait before letting me in on his innermost thoughts. I had no expectations it would be any time soon, so I sat in the corner farthest from the drunks, silently blessed the guys in Processing who let me keep my pipe and tobacco pouch, and smoked the time away.
There was a decent progression in and out of the cell: bail bondsmen, and women in house-dresses springing their charges for more truncated time on the outside, a revolving carousel of drunks, and a nervous junkie who twitched his way around the cell asking each of us if we could see the lizard men. Two of the drunks agreed with him.
I did my best to ignore the hell out of them all.
Two pipes and a short nap later, I stood at the bars and tried to get one of the uniforms interested in bringing me a cup of coffee. None of them shared my enthusiasm for the idea.
Since I had nothing better to do, I sat on the hard bench and thought about the different facades of Bradley Wright.
To his mother he was a typical teenager with acceptable grades and pictures of the latest bands and football players on his walls.
His school friends saw him as the quiet kid, aloof, which could mean anything. And nothing.
I watched a desperate killer with a handgun stalk the rec-area of Columbus High.
A skinny kid in a Deep Ellum alleyway terrified about the idea of being taken to the cops and desperate to stop me doing so.
Begging me to shoot him because that couldn’t hurt any worse, whatever the hell that meant.
And finally, as an unmoving shape beneath sheets and blankets, being kept alive by medical technology and whatever human survival instinct lurked in his deepest recesses.
Would we see another side to Bradley Wright? Would he join us back in the land of the conscious and tell us what really happened in the schoolyard that Monday morning?
Until that happened, I’d have to make do with what I already knew, and what I could find out. Which, to date, hadn’t been all that enlightening.
The longer I sat there, too, the more I thought I might have trouble with Ed this time. Normally, I could find a way to square things and convince him we’re on the same side. The lockpicks could be a problem, unless I could improvise a few good lines when my curtain call came.
Wright & Wrong Page 12