Absolute Liability

by Jennifer Becton

  He was on a reconnaissance mission. Fancy that.

  It was probably a bit early for a stakeout—only a bit after twilight—but this was his first one. He was bound to make some mistakes in planning and such. Just as long as he didn’t get caught, he figured it was okay.

  He’d brought a small spiral-bound notebook and pen in case he needed to take notes, and he’d already written down the details of the house.

  Three exterior doors: front, back, and garage.

  Several windows accessible from the ground.

  Of course, breaking in would be easier with a key, so as soon as it got dark enough, he planned to search for one that might have been hidden outdoors. In the meantime, he would observe the subject’s habits.

  He liked using the term “subject.” It seemed official, impersonal. As if he were the law-abiding citizen and not the guy hiding in the bushes and plotting dark deeds.

  The subject was home when he’d arrived after 8:30 PM. Alone, he thought. A figure had crossed in front of the back windows several times, but other than that, he could not tell what the subject had been doing.

  Once it got darker and the interior lights came on, he’d be able to see better. He might even gather the courage to sneak closer and peek inside.

  Yes, that sounded like a good plan.

  He remained concealed until darkness fell and the lights blinked on one by one inside the house. Soon the TV flickered through the windows. The subject was having a pleasant evening at home, and he figured it was safe enough now for him to creep across the yard toward the house.

  He crawled slowly on his belly along the property line, staying as near to the cover of the bushes as possible before he had to cross a small patch of grass to get to the foundation plantings.

  As he inched his way toward the deep St. Augustine grass, he became conscious of ambient noise. He stopped cold.

  Voices. Movement nearby.

  Dammit. He was going to get caught lying there in the yard.

  He kept still, straining to listen.

  The voices came from next door. Something about hamburgers and hotdogs. Then he heard a grill being rolled across a wooden deck.

  He smelled lighter fluid and, soon afterward, cooking meat.

  Then the sound of kids’ voices floated over the shrubs.

  He had no choice but to remain still and hope no one would see him behind the bushes.

  At first, each breath felt like an eternity, and he worried at every twig snap and rustle of leaves. But soon he began to feel secure in his concealment.

  No one next door could see him, and he was still hidden from the house he was observing. He made sure to use his time wisely, keeping his eyes focused on the structure and the subject within. He observed every nuance. He even studied the gentle rise and fall of the grass, the placement of each azalea, and the position of each paving stone.

  He absorbed the details of the space around him, and some anomalies began to stand out. One of the windows had been replaced with a slightly different style. In another area, some of the siding had been repaired with a different-colored brick. One of the paving stones was cockeyed.

  He wasn’t sure how long he stayed frozen on the ground before the picnicking family went back inside, but he was finally able to slink closer to the house.

  His long wait did not go unrewarded. In the concealment of the darkness, he crept freely around the house, checking the windows and searching for a hidden key. By the time he was finished, he had all the information he needed to undo the damage his partner had caused. Now he just had to wait for the right moment to put the plan into action.

  My phone rang, startling me out of my post-dinner TV-watching stupor. I checked the caller ID and winced. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey, hon.” As usual, her voice sounded tired. I could remember when everything about my mother was well modulated—clothes, hair, voice, manners—but now she always sounded sad.

  Before my sister’s rape, my mother had been the quintessential Southern woman. She belonged to the Civic Club, was active at the Baptist church, and was raising two girls to be just like her. I had nothing but good memories of my mom, and I depended on those memories of the past when I spent time with her in the present.

  It was as if Tricia’s tragedy had caused my mother to reach inside herself and turn off a light switch. She still lived in the same house, did the same activities, and wore the same clothes, but these were all just for show. She was not the same person. Her inner joy was destroyed.

  “What’re you doing?” Mom asked.

  “Just finished dinner.”

  “Do you want to meet somewhere for dessert? Ice cream? I’m buying.”

  “I appreciate it, Mom, but can I take a rain check? I’m exhausted, and I’ve got things I have to do tonight.”

  The part about having things to do wasn’t entirely true, but it took less energy to lie just a little, and I didn’t have any emotional reserves left to keep up the perky act and cheer my mother as well.

  She broke into my thoughts. “But you’re coming over for lunch on Sunday, right?”

  “I’ll be there.” I’d gone faithfully to our old brick house in St. Stephen’s every weekend since I’d moved out, as had Tricia.

  “Good,” she said. “You are going to be so happy when you hear your sister’s news. She’s really getting her life together.”

  I sighed. My sister had “gotten her life together” approximately once every three months. Her moment of recovery was usually followed by a sizable crash. But my mother got her hopes up every time. She was a classic enabler, and she couldn’t seem to help herself. She lived her whole life to take care of Tricia and seemed to come to me only when she needed a little dose of normalcy.

  She spent a great deal of time explaining Tricia’s problems and expecting me to feel sorry enough about them to help in some way.

  What my mother didn’t understand was that no story she told me could make me feel any worse about Tricia’s situation than I already did, and nothing I could do—not give money, send food, or find her a job—could come close to the sacrifices I had already made to help her.

  We chatted for a while longer about people from our old life—or at least my old life; they were still Mom’s friends.

  Finally, she hung up without mentioning one word about my “abduction.”

  There was a time when I would have wondered what it meant that my own mother didn’t seem to care that I might have been kidnapped. Now, I just tried not to think about it. I had other things to mull over. My sister’s rape, for one.

  Deciding to prove that I could be productive, I got up and pulled my sister’s police file from the chest where I stored it. I flipped through the pages, wondering how many times I’d looked at them. How often had I mourned over the words?

  Technically, I’m not supposed to have the police report. Or any of the evidence.

  But I had both, and I guess, if I wanted to be honest about it, it wasn’t exactly ethical. Or legal.

  I was just trying to do the right thing for my sister. I knew about cold cases. I knew about the backlog in the forensics labs. I knew that without me nudging the system, Tricia’s rape would never be solved.

  And the depressing fact was that even with my help, it may still never be solved. But I had to do something.

  So on my way out the door of the MPD, I had copied the file and the fingerprints and taken the tiniest bits of physical evidence. I was careful not to ruin anything.

  To this day, I had kept the evidence in the antique traveling chest next to the air conditioning vent in my living room. The chest kept the light out and the vent helped stabilize the temperature, preserving everything in the best way I knew how.

  While I was between jobs, I’d called my friend Lia Trent who worked at Safeway Systems, a manufacturer of fingerprinting software, and asked her to run the prints through updated databases occasionally. Even though I could run prints myself now that I was with the DOI, she continued runni
ng them. Still, none of our results ever came back positive, leaving me to dream of the day someone would invent a new test that would tell me something about my sister’s rapist.

  Until then, I tried to keep myself from feeling crushed under my own sense of helplessness. Of course, now there was Amber’s disappearance to worry about.

  Thinking my energies would be more effective in that direction, I turned my mind to Amber.

  Vincent and I planned to visit Leona Winchell’s gym the next morning to question her about her accident at the wastewater treatment plant. Even though it wasn’t part of the original investigation, we also wanted to see if we could find proof that she was bilking the worker’s comp system. Personally, I wanted to see if she looked like she wanted to make me disappear. After we did that, I figured I’d try to set up an appointment to speak with James Gerwalt about his role in insuring the water reclamation facility. And see if it looked like he wanted me to disappear.

  I was getting strangely comfortable with the idea that I might have been kidnapped. Time seemed to have taken the emotional jolt out of the concept of people wanting me to vanish off the face of the earth.

  I shuffled idly through my sister’s file. I wondered when familiarity would take the sting out of what had happened to her. Would enough time ever pass? Probably not for me. And definitely not for my sister.

  That’s why I had to think about Amber. To focus on her. I needed to prevent another person or family from experiencing lasting trauma.

  I sat for a long time thinking about Amber with Tricia’s file in my lap. At eleven o’clock, I finally switched off the TV, put the folder back in the antique chest, and went upstairs to bed. Before turning off the light on my bedside table, I opened the gun safe.

  Just in case.

  No intruders entered my house that night, and I woke up feeling refreshed for the first time since Amber’s abduction. I even took another shower and fixed my hair properly.

  Because we were now suspicious that Leona Winchell was still collecting worker’s comp even though her injuries had healed, I decided to go undercover to Shred, the gym she used. I dressed in a pair of brown yoga pants, one of those exercise tank tops, and a pair of well-used running shoes. But I packed dress pants, a blouse, and boots in my gym bag for later. I kept my hair down but put a ponytail holder around my wrist if—God forbid—I needed to work out in order to question Leona. In either case, I was suitably attired for the gym.

  Or so I thought.

  I met Vincent at Shred, which looked like it was tailored to ex-cons and street gangs.

  Great. I would still stick out like a donkey in a herd of horses, but I felt glad that I had not opted to wear the MPD t-shirt I normally wore to work out.

  I doubted a police shirt would make the right impression.

  I stuck my head in the open window of Vincent’s truck. “Maybe you should go in. This looks more like your kind of place.”

  He looked at the dull storefront. “My kind of place? Seriously, Jackson, I’m starting to think I may have not done a good job of presenting myself to you if you think I’d work out in a dump like this.”

  “Oh, come on. You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not dressed for the gym. You are.” He looked me over. He seemed to approve of the tank top.

  But I didn’t care.

  “Fine.” I tucked Amber’s picture and my phone into my gym bag. Then I hauled my reluctant butt inside with the bag slung over my shoulder.

  When I opened the door, the smell of rancid socks hit me full force. I’d been in some fairly unappealing gyms during my time at the MPD, but this place had a special bouquet all its own: sweat, bleach, mold, and coconut body oil. Those were my guesses.

  A bank of treadmills stood unused along the front window. The back section of the room was chock full of weight machines, and the mirrored wall was lined with shelves of free weights. Five bulky-looking men were using the machines. There was no doubt about this gym’s specialty. And it was clearly not cardio.

  A lady sat at the front desk on a tall stool that left most of her spandex-covered body visible. And I say “lady” loosely. She was the size of a large man. Perhaps the size of a small town. Her biceps were the circumference of my thigh, and she had the traps of a linebacker. The only remaining feminine traits were her long, over-processed blond hair and her overdone makeup.

  “Hey,” I said to her, feeling more and more out of place. “I’m looking for Leona Winchell. She’s going to help me get ripped.”

  I heard the thunk and clang of the weights in the background. They reminded me of the cricket sound that follows a bad pun in cartoons.

  Attila the Hun looked me over and rolled her eyes. “Right. You want to get ripped.”

  “No, really. I want to bulk up.” I flexed my bicep at her. I used to be proud of that muscle. Not so much anymore. Not after seeing Attila, and she didn’t appear convinced by my bicep. I made a point of looking around. I didn’t see anyone female at the machines, but then again, one never knew. “Isn’t Leona here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh,” I said, pulling an airheaded voice. “Maybe I was supposed to meet her yesterday. Was she here yesterday? Did she say anything about me?”

  “She was here all afternoon. Didn’t mention you.” Her tone was becoming increasingly irritated, and I knew I was close to being told to take a hike.

  I tried another tactic. “I can pay the guest fee.”

  “What do you think this is? A Curves? We don’t have no guest fee.”

  “Well, I thought Leona was going to be here. She said she’d take care of me.”

  I regretted those words immediately.

  Attila raised a penciled-in eyebrow. “You’re her old gal pal, huh?”

  I stared at Attila and then forced myself to nod.

  “She said you were cute, but a little over the top.” She looked me over. “You don’t seem so needy to me.”

  Yes, that’s me. I was the cute but desperate gal pal. Goody. Attila uncrossed and recrossed her legs. I wondered if she was making a pass at me. I hoped not.

  I took a step back and tried to distance myself mentally too. I played the oldest girly card in the book. “Yeah, well, Leona never shared her innermost thoughts and feelings with me.” I shrugged. “If wanting to know her feelings makes me over the top, then I guess I am.”

  Attila looked disappointed at my neediness and straightened. “Leona won’t be here today. She’s at the fitness competition prelims at the Marriott downtown.”

  I could have asked her all about Leona’s workout habits, but seeing her in action at a bodybuilding competition sounded much better.

  “Oh, well, okay. I’ll just get in touch with her later then.” I turned to head out the door.

  “Yeah, when you see her, tell her she owes me money. This gym ain’t free.”

  “Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

  Attila looked at me as if I’d lost my marbles. “Babe, you must have some balls on you if you even have to ask. Leona scares the hell outta me.”

  I departed the gym slowly after that. If Attila was scared of Leona, I wasn’t looking forward to meeting her.

  I stuck my head in Vincent’s truck window again.

  “How’d it go?” he asked.

  “Leona wasn’t there, but I know where to find her. She’s at a bodybuilding competition downtown.”

  “You learn anything?”

  “I learned that I do not want to get into bodybuilding. That woman in there could be a pro defensive lineman.”

  “Anything pertinent to the case?”

  “Yeah, the linebacker—I’m calling her Attila, by the way—says Leona is scary.”

  “Capable of arranging an abduction, then?”

  “That’s the feeling I got.”

  “Hmm,” Vincent rubbed the side of his face.

  “Oh, and by the way, the woman in that gym thinks I’m Leona’s needy ex-girlfriend. Next time, you’re doing the undercover wor
k.”

  We arrived at the bodybuilding competition within twenty minutes. That was the beauty of Mercer. Everything was within twenty minutes of wherever you happened to be. Unless there was a wreck, in which case a twenty-minute drive took four hours because clearing an accident hadn’t been perfected to a fine science the way it had in Atlanta, where destroyed cars and crumpled bodies were shoved aside to allow traffic to pass. In Mercer, they left everything where it fell and blocked off the rest of the lanes of traffic to accommodate all the emergency personnel who felt compelled to show up and observe the carnage personally.

  Gotta love Mercer.

  Fortunately, I-75 was clear, and we quickly arrived at the hotel, where a stage, a sound system, and a boom box had been set up to host the Central Georgia Bodybuilding Competition. Three judges sat in the front row behind a table covered in a blue cloth, and the rest of the crowd sat in folding chairs. Some stood along the fringes.

  Vincent and I were definitely out of place. I looked like I was ready for a yoga class, Vincent looked like an undercover cop, and everyone else looked like they could crush rocks in their bare hands.

  Through some deft questioning, we discovered that the women’s competition was halfway over and that Leona had yet to make an appearance.

  We hung back to the side of the stage, where we were out of the way but had a good view of the action.

  And some action it was. These women were greased-up muscle held together by spandex and topped with frizzy hair.

  They were impressive in a train-wreck kind of way, both powerful and awe-inspiring, but still uncomfortable to look at. Their breasts were virtually nonexistent, making their tiny bikini tops appear more ceremonial than functional. We watched several contestants flex and bend across the stage, and then Leona’s name was announced.

  She emerged from behind the curtain, and I sucked in a breath.

  Attila was right. She was scary.

  Leona was shorter than I expected, but her body was solid muscle. She seemed to bulge and pulse before us, but it was her face that held my attention. Her flat features, creased from too much tanning, and small, hard eyes reminded me of a bulldog, and I really hate to say that about any woman.