He Was Not There

by P. D. Workman

  “I know it was him,” Heather confirmed. “As soon as that lady said it was from one of the Astors, I knew.”

  “Because of the way he behaved toward you? Had he… been inappropriate before?”

  “No.” Her tone was confused. “He was always really strict. He wasn’t creepy. He didn’t sit on my bed or touch me when he talked or anything like that. He never tried to be the only one in the house with me, and when he was… nothing ever happened.”

  “So he never gave you any sign that he had designs on you?”

  Heather sighed. “He ignored me most of the time. It was Mrs. Astor who was the parent. He would go off to his office and just work on stuff there. I never even knew what it was he did. He just wasn’t even there most of the time.”

  Zachary shook his head. He touched the earphone over his ear uncomfortably. He didn’t like over-the-ear models. He liked the ones that fit inside his ear. That was what he used for his phone. They were distracting him from the conversation.

  “So he kept to himself. Whatever he was thinking, he just kept it inside. You didn’t have any way of knowing what he was up to. You couldn’t have known.”

  “Yeah. No warning,” Heather agreed.

  Would it have been better if she had known his inner thoughts? Or would that just have drawn the torture out?

  “He knew that was the way you came home from school?”

  “It’s the only way I ever came home. He knew. I had fights with Mrs. Astor about it all the time. She’d get calls or notes from the school. Then she’d get after me, tell me I had to obey the rules and go around the park like everyone else. Because that was the rule. But… I didn’t like going around. I didn’t want to be out on the road, with all of the traffic. Why should we have to avoid the park? It was a public park, it was meant to be enjoyed. I like being in nature. At least, back then I did.”

  He wondered how she enjoyed nature now. Did she still go out for walks in the park? Or did she stay at home, where she felt more safe?

  “Could I come in, Heather?”

  Jones spoke in Zachary’s ear again. “You are not allowed to go in there. No one is allowed to go in.”

  He put his hand around his mike to muffle it, not sure if he had a mute button somewhere. “If she wants me to go in, I can go in and help to calm her down. I can keep her from shooting Mr. freaking Astor. As much as he deserves it.”

  “It’s against policy. We can’t send more potential victims in there. Especially civilians.”

  Zachary grunted. He looked for a way around the rule. There was always a way around. He was an inveterate rule-breaker. “What if I go sit on the doorstep. Can I do that?”

  “No.”

  “She could come out to talk to me. I wouldn’t have to go in. You want her out of there, don’t you?”

  “You would still be putting yourself in the line of fire.”

  Zachary shook his head. He took his hand off of the mike to talk to Heather. “Never mind. They won’t let me come in there.”

  “That’s probably a good thing.”

  “Do you think it’s time to come out?” he suggested.

  “I need to do this.”

  “I don’t think you can. Can you?”

  “I can. I just need to get my courage up. It would help if he wasn’t such a weaselly little snot. That isn’t what he was like when I was little. He was the dad. I was so used to… you know what our dad was like. You didn’t disobey him, or he was likely to take your head off. We all knew that. When I went to the Astors, I just thought… he was the dad. He had to be obeyed like that. He was the authority.”

  “Yeah. It’s always different when you’re at another home, the rules change, the roles change, it takes forever to figure out the way things work. And for me, by the time I figured things out, I was always on my way somewhere else. You know?”

  “You changed families way more than I did. I just had the Astors.”

  There was a voice in the background that Zachary couldn’t make out. Then Heather’s voice shouting directly into his ear. “You shut up!”

  Zachary waited for the ringing in his ears to stop. He glanced around the command center at the others listening in on the call and saw that a number of them had pulled the earpieces away from their ears momentarily.

  “Hey, Heather. What’s going on there?”

  “I don’t want him to speak!”

  “Okay. Gotcha. Is he… physically okay?”

  “Have I hurt him?”

  “Have you?”

  “Why do you care? You know about people like him. You know what he did to you.”

  Zachary noticed her pronoun confusion and tried to let it float over him. Mr. Astor hadn’t done anything to Zachary. It had been Archuro who had hurt him. But Archuro wasn’t in there. Zachary wasn’t with him. He breathed through his brain’s attempts to sweep him back in time.

  “I’m just wondering,” he said casually. “The cops are wondering. Whether he’s tied up, or injured, or you’ve got your gun pointed at him. You know. They want the whole picture.”

  “He banged up his face a bit. I told him to take his clothes off to humiliate him, but I can’t stand looking at his body, so the joke’s on me. He’s sitting here in his tighty-whities looking like some dead fish the dog drug in. But he won’t shut up!” She shouted the last few words again.

  Jones was looking anxious, but Zachary shook his head at him. It was good for Heather to be getting her frustration out by yelling. She had said a couple of times that she was trying to work herself up to killing Astor, but Zachary thought that if he kept bleeding off her anger safely, he could bring her down.

  “What’s he saying?” Zachary asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s saying that he’d never hurt anyone. But he did! You know what he did to me.”

  “I know. He should have to pay for that. He should have to go to prison.”

  Zachary motioned to Jones for his phone, but it took a few mimed requests before Jones got it out and handed it to him, frowning. Zachary thumbed through the photos, turning to one that just showed teenage Heather’s face, battered and bruised, which he turned around and showed to Jones.

  Jones’s lips tightened as he looked at the young teen’s injuries. He shook his head slowly. “I hate it when we have to protect scum like that,” he said in Zachary’s ear, “but it’s part of the job.”

  Zachary nodded his agreement. “You want him to go to prison, don’t you, Feathers?”

  “Yes.” Her voice sounded teary and sullen.

  “If you want him to go to prison, then you need to let the police arrest him. You need to let them in there.”

  “But he has to say what he did! They won’t arrest him if he doesn’t admit it.”

  “He’ll admit it. He’s just scared right now. Once he gets out of there and gets a lawyer, he’s going to be trying to get a plea. That’s what his lawyer will tell him to do. They’ll know that we have him dead to rights and they’ll tell him to plead it out.”

  “I don’t want him to plead!”

  There was a loud crash. Zachary pulled his earpieces away from his ears, looking anxiously at the other people in the command center. No one seemed to be panicking or ramping up a response to the next level, so the loud noise had been something other than a gunshot.

  “What was that?” Zachary asked.

  “His chair fell over,” she said more calmly.

  There were a couple of muffled laughs inside the bus.

  “He peed himself,” Heather said, disgust in her voice. “How could I have been so scared of this little rat? I spent every day of my life worrying that the man who raped me was going to come back and do it again. I was afraid to go out of the house, to take my kids to the playground. I thought he was a big, scary monster.”

  “But he’s just a man. And not even as big as you remember him being.”

  “He barely even had to raise his voice and I’d start shaking. I never let anyone see it, I always put on a fron
t, but you know what it was like. They were all bigger than we were. The grown-ups who controlled our lives.”

  Zachary could taste the fear when she talked about it. He remembered how his heart would freeze as soon as one of his parents raised their voices. He put on a brave face for the younger kids, telling them how everything would be okay and that he would take care of them, but he still felt it.

  He still knew that bowel-loosening terror that one of his parents was going to kill the other, or that they would turn on one of the children. All of the kids had been in the hospital at one time or another after suffering an ‘accident’ at home. Falling off a ladder, jumping a bike off a ramp, climbing up a dresser or bookshelf and pulling it over onto himself; he and the others could all be very inventive explaining their injuries to the authorities.

  They had taken that fear with them to all of the families they went to. They still carried it with them.

  “I know,” he whispered, unable to raise his voice as the memories flooded his brain. As if one of his parents might hear him and fly into a rage. “I know, Feathers. But it’s okay now. He’s not going to hurt you anymore. None of them are.”

  The specters of their parents would never be gone. They would continue to taint every relationship he had. Even Mr. Peterson, who had always remained calm and had never raised his voice to Zachary, could still set Zachary off by touching him when he didn’t expect it.

  Heather’s foster father had done more than accidentally triggering her. He had betrayed her trust and taken something precious from her.

  Zachary realized that Heather was crying. He tried to swallow the lump in his own throat and to comfort her.

  “Grant is out here. He doesn’t want anything to happen to you. And I just met you again. I want to get to know you and the strong, loving woman you became. Don’t give that scumbag another thought. He’s not worth all of the time and agony you’ve wasted on him. He’s in the past now. You have so much to look forward to.”

  She tried to answer, but her words were scrambled and he could only hear her crying.

  “Put the gun down. You don’t need it anymore. You’re free of that fear now. Come on out. You have so much more to look forward to now.”

  Zachary was aware that the others in the bus were watching him, everyone so silent they would hear a pin drop, waiting for Heather’s response.

  “She’s on the move,” someone said in Zachary’s headset. He didn’t know if they could see her through the window or were watching her heat signature through the side of the house. He waited, holding his breath. “Subject is moving away from the hostage.”

  He hated that they referred to Mr. Astor as the hostage. He was the one who had held Heather hostage for three decades. But they didn’t care about the history. Only about whether she was going to shoot him or not.

  There was a dial tone in his headset for a brief moment before it was cut out by whoever was managing the audio.

  “Subject has terminated the call.”

  Zachary headed for the door of the command center.

  “Stay here, Mr. Goldman.”

  “I need to go out and meet her.”

  “Stay inside where it’s safe. They will need to secure the sub—your sister—before you can see her.”

  “I can at least be out there so she can see me, see that I’m there for her.”

  “She already knows that, you’ve just been on the phone with her.”

  Ignoring him, Zachary stepped more quickly and got out of the bus without any of the cops grabbing him. Outside the command center, it was another story. He immediately ran into a wall of cops, most of whom were watching the house, listening to their earbuds, radios, and headsets. But a few of them were alert enough of their surroundings to immediately identify Zachary as a civilian who shouldn’t have the run of the secured area, and a couple of them grabbed him to prevent him from going any farther.

  “Sir!”

  Zachary could at least see the door of the house from his position, so he didn’t fight their hands, but stood still, watching. On cue, the door swung open. Heather stood framed by the door, her hands held up, empty. No attempt at suicide by cop; she was surrendering. Zachary breathed a sigh of relief.

  She was swarmed by a black-suited tactical squad. They took her to the ground, but they didn’t throw her down. They weren’t yelling or hitting her, but had to frisk her to make sure she didn’t still have the gun or any other weapons. Zachary tried not to react to the sight of her being frisked and handcuffed. Just because she was being taken into custody, that didn’t mean they were going to charge her with kidnapping or assault.

  There were extenuating circumstances. Once the authorities understood what had happened, they would go easy on her. She could plead down to minor charges, maybe not have to serve any time. Some community service, a suspended sentence, probation…

  “Now let me go see her,” he told the cops holding on to him, once Heather was in handcuffs and on her feet again. They looked around for someone to give them directions. Jones was standing behind them, in the doorway of the bus. He nodded.

  “Go ahead. But escort him over, I don’t want chaos.”

  Zachary allowed the two big cops to walk him toward the house. Heather was back on her feet and a group of them were moving her toward a vehicle. Zachary hastened his step.

  “Heather. Wait. Please let me see her.”

  They were talking in loud, clipped voices, but Zachary managed to make himself heard. They turned to him.

  “Just let me see her. Let me talk for a minute.”

  Heather turned to him. Her eyes were sunken and her face streaked with tears. That morning, she had looked so fresh and bright and neatly-pressed, but the day had taken its toll on her.

  “Heather. It’s okay. He’s going to be arrested and you’re going to be all right. It’s okay.”

  “I wanted to hear him say it. I wanted him to admit what he’d done.”

  “He still will. And he’ll say it without a gun to his head.”

  He wanted to give her a hug, but didn’t figure the cops were going to let him get that close to her. He sniffled back tears of his own. “You need to let her see her husband too. Let him know where you’re taking her so he can pick her up.”

  The head of the tactical team looked at him. “She’s not going to be going home.”

  “You just watch. When the media and the judge see the pictures of how she looked after he raped and beat her, she’ll be going home.”

  They turned her away from him and continued getting her into a car for transport.

  32

  Zachary was exhausted. Jones caught up with him after Heather was given a chance to speak to Grant and then transported from the scene. Zachary was watching the house, waiting for the men who had gone in to escort Robert Astor out. He wanted a good look at the man who had hurt his sister.

  “You’re a private eye?” Jones asked. He’d obviously talked to someone. Zachary’s face and name had been in the media a lot over the past months and somebody had recognized him.

  Zachary nodded. “Yeah. Zachary Goldman. Goldman Investigations.”

  “What do you have by way of proof that Astor was the one who assaulted your sister?”

  “Besides her word?”

  Jones shifted uncomfortably. He nodded. “Besides her word.”

  “We have the DNA profile of the baby she conceived as a result. It leads back to the Astors. You do a paternity test, and it will verify that he is the father. She was fourteen.”

  “We’ll need a sample to test for ourselves.”

  “It’s already in the hands of the PD. Talk to Detective Able. He should be around here somewhere, he’s the one who called this in.”

  Jones gazed around, then nodded. He put his hands in his pockets, trying, Zachary thought, to look casual and relaxed. “You did a good job talking her down. A little irregular, but it worked.”

  “Yeah. I’m glad she didn’t kill him. I was afraid she might befo
re we got here…”

  “He’s a lucky man.”

  “Are you going to arrest him?”

  “We’re going to… invite him in for questioning. And if he doesn’t give a DNA swab voluntarily, we’ll get a warrant.”

  Zachary looked toward the door again. “I don’t think you’ll need a warrant.”

  “You think he’ll give it voluntarily?”

  “I think Heather already saw to that. Is he in there changing out of wet underpants?”

  Jones’s nose wrinkled in distaste.

  “Bag them up and test them,” Zachary advised. “Then you can confront him with the evidence.”

  Eventually, Zachary saw the door open, and several uniformed policemen escorted Robert Astor down the sidewalk to a waiting car. He wasn’t handcuffed like Heather had been, but Zachary knew that he was going to have to face some pretty tough questioning anyway. There wouldn’t be any way for the police to look the other direction and say that she was just some crackpot making wild accusations. After causing such a big circus, they were going to have to show either that she was right or that she was wrong. There would be no waffling about it. She wasn’t going to be relegated to a quiet corner somewhere.

  Astor was not a big man, as Heather had observed. Taller and heavier than Zachary, but that wasn’t saying much. Zachary had always been the smallest in his school classes. Astor was in his early seventies, so he no longer looked like the man that Heather had respected and feared as a father figure. He was slightly stooped, had brown spots on his skin, and had hair that was more gray than its original dark brown. He didn’t have a lot of wrinkles, so his face probably still looked pretty similar to what it had when he had been Heather’s foster father. For the moment, he looked beaten-down and frightened. Zachary didn’t know if that would last, or if he would be yelling about his rights and insisting that they release him once he’d had a chance to recover from the encounter with Heather. At least things had ended pretty quickly. He hadn’t been locked in the house with Heather for hours on end. Some standoffs went on for hours or days.