“They were in the articles, weren’t they? The ones about the serial killer? They were involved?”
“They weren’t involved in anything,” Zachary said quickly. “They knew one of the victims, and that’s how I got the case. I offered to look into Jose’s disappearance for Pat. They were really close and Pat wanted to find out what had happened to him. Didn’t believe that he had just gone back home to El Salvador or was somewhere else, hiding from Immigration. They knew… that something must have happened to him for him to have disappeared suddenly like that.”
“But nobody else did?”
“Other people might have doubted it. But the police didn’t really think there was anything to it. And that’s the trouble… because they were immigrants, no one ever took it seriously. Immigrant men disappear without a trace all the time. On purpose.”
“But you were right.”
“Pat was right,” Zachary corrected. “I wasn’t the one who thought anything. I was just following the evidence and making inquiries. He was the one who knew that something was wrong.”
“Zachary really is a great investigator,” Tyrrell told Heather. “He cares about people and he is good at tracking down details and noticing the things that other people don’t. I was telling you about the other cases that he’s solved recently—”
“I know,” Heather agreed. “The paper talked about some of those cases as well. But those are all murder, right? What about something else? What about rape? Do you have any experience with that?”
Zachary looked away, swallowing. “I haven’t had a lot of cases that I’ve investigated, no. But I’ve worked with other police departments and I’m good at following the clues. I have a friend who helps me with some of the forensics.” He didn’t tell her that Kenzie was with the medical examiner’s office. That might freak Heather out. “So I have all the bases covered. Whatever I don’t know, I can contract help on. I doubt there will be much I’ll need to go to outside consultants on in a case like this. It sounds pretty straightforward.”
“Does it?” When he looked back at her, she leveled her gaze at him. “I haven’t told you anything about it.”
“I just mean that you dealt with the police on it, so things are straightforward from there. We need to reexamine any data that they have, see if we can figure anything else out… identify suspects…”
“How can you do that? How can you find a suspect when they couldn’t all those years ago? You can’t talk to people anymore. You don’t know who might have seen something or been close by. You don’t know who was living in the area. You don’t know anything that would help you to identify who it was in those woods all those years ago.”
“I’ll follow the evidence that the police have on file. I’ll get your statement. You may remember more than you think you do. A lot of attacks by strangers, they aren’t really strangers. It was probably someone who lived in your neighborhood. They might have seen you coming and going to school or other places. Even if you don’t know who it was, the chances that it was someone who just randomly drove into the neighborhood and attacked you are pretty slim.”
“Look at Elizabeth Smart. That’s what happened to her.”
“Even with her, they did have some contact with her father. They had been around the neighborhood and seen her before they targeted her. The police in your case would have canvassed the neighborhood. They would have talked to people they thought were suspicious. They might have talked to the perpetrator and not known it. Or they might have suspected him, but then not been able to prove it. I’ll find out what I can.”
She nodded slowly, studying him. He waited for her to make her decision. Finally, Heather nodded.
“Okay… I’ll tell you what happened. You can talk to the cops, see what they can tell you about the investigation back then.” She paused. “I don’t think they did much. I never heard about any suspects and they never called me back to ask me anything else.”
“They probably wouldn’t have told you very much about the investigation, especially since you were a minor. And I don’t know how much we’ll be able to find of the original file and evidence. Sometimes there isn’t a lot. We’ll cross our fingers…”
“How much do you charge?” Heather asked, shifting and pulling out her purse to find her checkbook. “I assume you’ll need a retainer.”
Zachary shook his head and held up his hand. “Oh, no. You’re family. I wouldn’t charge you…”
“You’re trying to make a living, aren’t you? If you’re working on my case, I want it to get your full attention, not just be something you’re doing on the side between paying gigs.”
He wanted to tell her that he would give it his full attention whether she paid him or not, but he couldn’t quite say that truthfully. Not when he had done Pat’s case pro bono. He needed to get a cash injection. He had plenty of small jobs, the bread and butter jobs that would pay his daily bills, but they also filled up his day. If he were going to put in the effort Heather’s case deserved, he would have to put some of the others on hold for a few days or weeks.
“So how much?” Heather repeated, pen poised above her checkbook.
3
Zachary’s mind wouldn’t let go of Heather’s story as he tried to calm himself down enough to find sleep. He tried to distract himself by thinking about other cases, mundane tasks. It was like counting sheep.
He had been sleeping better since he’d gotten home from the hospital. Not because he was on any different sleep aids. The reason, instead, was that he wanted to shut everything off. The more the stresses built up in his head, the more he just wanted to sleep to shut them off. That had never been the case before. He’d had problems getting to sleep for as long as he could remember.
But since the attack, he was sleeping more and more. He would find himself in bed halfway through the afternoon, unable to cope with the images pressing in on him. He would close his eyes to escape into the nothingness. More than once, he had slept through supper, had slept through Kenzie calling him or knocking on his door, and had wakened long after his usual pre-dawn rising to wonder what the heck had happened to the rest of the hours of the day.
Talking to Heather about her experience decades before had not calmed the beast. Focusing on someone else’s experience instead of his own had not distracted him from his own distress. Instead, Heather’s recollection had been added to his own; the images pressed in on him, mixing with his own experiences, adding their own weight and insistence.
He pressed his face into the pillow, seeking the darkness of sleep, but when it came it was not silent and quiet.
He dreamed he was walking in the woods. Going home from school, cutting through a green park area. He was enjoying the green of the trees and the birdsong and the rustling of squirrels in the leaves, letting the pressures of the day go. Technically, it was out of bounds, but the space called to him and he couldn’t avoid it. What was wrong with walking through a public park on the way home from school? It wasn’t like he was damaging property. He always just walked quietly through and didn’t break branches, cut his initials into the trees, or litter.
Then he became aware of another presence in the woods with him. Not a squirrel or a bird. Something menacing. There was a presence in the woods with him. He could feel someone watching him.
He turned and looked back the way he had come, weighing whether he ought to retreat and go around the park like he was supposed to. He was past the halfway mark, so it was faster to just keep going through the park. If there were someone else there, it was probably just someone else from school, and they wouldn’t want to be caught either. If he actually saw someone threatening, he could run. It wasn’t that much farther. He would soon be out the other side of the park and there would be other people around who could help if he needed assistance.
He shifted the backpack on his back, running his thumbs under the shoulder straps. He looked around for any sign of anyone else around him. He looked back behind him once more to make sur
e he wasn’t being followed. He couldn’t rid himself of the feeling.
Instead of continuing in a straight line, he stepped off the worn trail and ducked behind a tree. For a minute, he just stayed there, frozen, listening for someone else’s footsteps. But he couldn’t hear anyone. Just the birds in the trees and the rustling of the leaves. There was another way out of the woods, a twistier path, less traveled. If someone else were in the woods with him, they would continue to follow the well-traveled path. Zachary could take the quieter path and remain unseen.
He took a few tentative steps through the grass and leaves, stopped and listened, and then took a few more, until he reached the faint trail that led through the darker, denser trees.
He had looked back so many times, not expecting the danger to come from ahead of him. And instead of avoiding trouble, he had walked right into it. A dark shape stepped out of the trees and, before he could turn and run, grabbed him.
Zachary let out a shout and jerked back, trying to pull away. But the man held him tightly.
He towered over Zachary, much taller than he was, face covered with a black balaclava that was a sharp contrast to the warm spring weather. The eyes were blue, fringed with eyelashes that were long and dark, almost feminine.
“Let go!” Zachary croaked, trying to pull away.
But the intruder didn’t let go. With a glistening knife held at Zachary’s throat, he pulled Zachary deeper into the woods. He looked around, making sure that they were alone and no one else who followed the trails through the park would be able to see them.
4
Zachary’s own scream woke him up. He thrashed around, trying to get loose of the blankets, sure that the man was still holding on to him. He could still feel the man’s weight pinning him down. His heart thudded hard and he fought back against the images of Archuro admiring his knife, laughing at Zachary’s inability to get loose from him, the drugs preventing Zachary from being able to control his body properly. Archuro could see the panic in his expression and drank it in, high on Zachary’s terror. He talked to him in a low, pleasant voice, talking about the things he would do to Zachary, all of the delightful tortures he had in store. He had honed his craft on the many men who had come before Zachary and looked forward to the rituals he had developed.
Zachary stumbled out of bed, needing to prove to himself that he had control over his own body and wasn’t still lying in bed to be victimized again. His limbs were clumsy and his head spun, but he was able to control his body enough to stumble and crash his way into the bathroom to turn on the light and look at himself.
His face was slick with sweat, his eyes and hair wild. But the bruises and cuts that had been on his face were gone, what remained blending in with the other scars from the past.
He was not the one who had been attacked cutting through the woods on the way home from school. His experiences had been different. That was not his memory.
With shaking hands, he filled a glass with water and raised it to his lips. His mouth was as dry as a desert. Maybe a side effect of his meds, rather than the terror of the dream. His throat hurt from screaming. He wondered how long he had been yelling before he had woken himself up. He wouldn’t like to be one of his own neighbors, wondering what the heck the weirdo next door was screaming about again. Maybe they thought he watched horror movies late at night.
He sat down on the lid of the toilet, breathing and trying to get his body calmed down. He was still fully dressed. He squinted at the bedroom clock, trying to read the time. Two in the morning. He should go back to bed and try to sleep more, but he didn’t want to fall back into that dream. He’d been sleeping enough lately that being short on sleep one night wouldn’t be a problem. He was used to being chronically short on sleep.
For a while, he just sat there, hands on his face, elbows on his knees, and sought equilibrium. He focused on other images; happier times with Kenzie, Bridget, Tyrrell, Lorne Peterson. The amazing fact that he’d met another of his siblings. That was a highlight in his life, not something to be upset about. He knew two of his siblings now. In the future, maybe there would be more. Maybe eventually, he would have contact with all of them.
They might get together for some holiday reunion and talk and share memories together. Good memories of the games they had played and other things they had done together. Not the fire and the break-up of the family.
Zachary got up, letting out a long, calming breath. He combed his hair and had another drink of water. He splashed cold water on his face and bloodshot eyes. Then he went to his computer.
He worked through reports that he hadn’t completed and made sure that he got final billings out to all of the clients he had finished the work for. He wanted to clear the decks of as much as he could before diving into Heather’s case, and to make sure that he had billed everyone he could so that the household bills would be covered even if Heather’s case took longer than usual. He had to stay on top of the money if he wanted to stay in business. He hated accounting and hated asking people to pay up, even though he knew he was providing a valuable service and that he should expect to get paid for it. It sometimes felt like making money off of someone else’s painful experience was unethical.
He did some research into cold cases and what police were solving with new technology. He was going to need to know what to look for and what to ask for as he went over Heather’s case. It wouldn’t get him anywhere if some file clerk just gave it a cursory scan to make sure that nothing new had popped up on the case. He needed to stay on top of it and to ask the right questions.
There were a lot of advancements in forensics. Back when Heather had been attacked, there would not have been much for the forensics guys to do when they got her evidence. They needed something to compare it against before they could provide any useful information. There weren’t the same databases and computer matching abilities as there were thirty years later. Technology had blown up. As long as they had stored Heather’s evidence properly, the police might be able to use it to find a DNA match to her attacker and get him put behind bars or, if he were already there, to keep him there.
Light had crept in through the windows until the whole apartment was bright, and Zachary looked at the system clock and decided it was time to take a break. He wasn’t hungry, but he forced himself to go to the fridge and pick something for breakfast. His stomach just didn’t appreciate food first thing in the morning, and later on, his appetite would be low because of his meds. A lot of the time he was nauseated, and that didn’t help when he was supposed to be putting weight back on so that his doctor and Kenzie would stop getting on his case about how he looked like a skeleton or a scarecrow. He picked up a cup of cherry yogurt and put it on the table beside a granola bar. The kind with chocolate chips. It was his way of bribing himself to eat breakfast.
He got out a clean spoon and sat down, staring at the food, which, in spite of the sugar levels, seemed incredibly unappetizing. He removed the wrapper from the granola bar and the lid from the yogurt and sat looking at them, smelling them and waiting for his mouth to start watering in anticipation. But of course, he had no such luck. He slid his spoon into the yogurt and managed to finish it off in a few quick swallows. He took the granola bar with him to the computer, even though he was usually disciplined about not eating around the electronics. He would nibble at it while he was checking his social networks and email, and it would be gone before he knew it.
5
A couple of hours later, he decided it was time to make the call to the Clintock police department, where Heather’s rape case had been reported. The day shift would be in and would hopefully have had their coffees and have cleared all of the morning emergencies out of the way. He dialed the main number and prepared himself to have to tell his story to several people as they transferred him around and tried to figure out who would talk to him about getting Heather’s file and evidence pulled for a new review. Police tended not to like it when people started inquiring about old cold cases. They p
referred to let sleeping cases lie, or to let someone else do the footwork. He waited for the formal greeting from the duty officer, stating her name and the department and asking how she could help him.
“My sister asked me if I would call about an old case of hers to see if anything can be done to move it forward,” he explained. “I’m not sure who to ask for, whether I need to talk to someone in archives, or in sex crimes, or whether there is a department that reviews cold cases regularly…”
She made an irritated noise in the back of her throat. “How old is this case?”
“Thirty years.”
“Oh, good grief. It won’t even be here anymore.”
“I imagine it’s in a warehouse somewhere,” Zachary agreed. “But it is a rape, and there’s no statute of limitations, right? So it stays open as a cold case indefinitely.”
“I suppose so. Is there new evidence to be considered?”
“No new evidence,” Zachary admitted. “But there is the old evidence to be considered. There is a lot more they can do with the forensics that they collected back then. You never know, we might just get a hit on CODIS.”
“It happens,” the woman allowed. “But you don’t know what evidence might have been collected that long ago. Whose file is this?”
“My sister’s. She’s asked me to look into it and see if I can find anything out. We’ll need to pull the file and the evidence before we know if there is anything that can be pursued.”
“Maybe she should just let it go. It was a long time ago. She should go on and live her life.”
Zachary could find nothing to say to that. He sat with his mouth open, waiting for the words to come, but he couldn’t think of an appropriate answer. Would the policewoman have said the same thing if it were a murder or kidnapping? Just go on with your life and don’t worry about it? Maybe she would have. Maybe she didn’t understand that a violent crime could leave a black hole in the middle of a person’s life, pulling everything into it, swallowing up all of the light and goodness that was created anywhere else and leaving nothing but a bare crater behind. Someone who hadn’t personally experienced a crime like rape or murder… maybe she just didn’t understand how it consumed a person’s whole life.
He Was Not There Page 3