“So, maybe.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be more of a help. What else?”
“The cause of death was strangulation.”
“Right.”
“What could they tell from the bruises on his throat? On TV, they can always tell what caused the bruises. Chain links in a ligature, hand size in a manual strangulation, they can always tell.”
Kenzie snorted. “I gather you’ve already guessed that isn’t always the case.”
“I was hoping that a closer examination of the bruises might give us some more information.”
There was silence while Kenzie examined the report. “There are probably more photos available than are in the coroner’s report, but from these, and the narrative description, no. Can’t tell much. It was not a narrow ligature like a belt or a chain. Something wider that left an indistinct bruise.”
“But no pattern or impression that might be helpful?”
“No.”
“The institution said that he had the ends of his blanket wrapped around his neck and twisted tight.”
“That’s consistent.”
“But could it have been something else? Maybe a chokehold?”
“Yes, an arm across his throat, especially if it was someone wearing sleeves, wouldn’t leave a mark that was significantly different than a blanket. Unless the person giving the chokehold had cufflinks or something else distinctive that left a mark.”
Zachary pictured the aides and security guards at the institution. Even Dr. Abato didn’t wear cufflinks. The white lab coat of a doctor with no embellishments on the sleeves, over a dress shirt. He hadn’t noticed the shirt sleeves extending out of the jacket.
“No, not a lot of cufflinks around at Summit. So, nothing useful? You don’t see anything the coroner might have missed?”
“The report seems to be complete. I’m sorry, I’m not seeing anything else.”
“Nothing that you question even a little? Look twice at?”
“The cause of death is obvious. I can’t speak for the police investigation, how thorough they were, but no, there’s nothing in here that suggests it might have been a third party. No stray fibers, finger marks on his neck, anything like that.”
“He’d never attempted suicide before.”
“The suicide rate among people with autism is pretty high. It may have been his first attempt, or it may not have been. It might not have been noticed before, if he’d tried the same method and failed. He might just never have tightened it that much before.”
Zachary closed his eyes. He tried to avoid the image of Quentin twisting the ends of the blanket tighter and tighter. He could hardly breathe thinking about it. He would never have thought of that method himself. Had someone else suggested it to Quentin? Had someone killed him? Or was he just seeking the comfort of deep pressure and went too far? Maybe Mira would be happier with that suggestion. That it wasn’t intentional, and it wasn’t murder, it was just an accident. Quentin hadn’t understood what he was doing.
“You still there, Zach?”
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“You okay?”
He let the question sit for a few minutes, thinking about it. The case was disturbing on many levels. More triggering for him than Declan’s case had been. He wanted to help the other kids at Summit, but what could he do? The public already knew what was going on there. They knew the broad strokes, even if they didn’t know the details like Zachary did. And they still wanted Summit to remain in operation. Was the public’s fear of people who were different that pathological? They kept saying it was because the residents of Summit were violent, but Zachary found them to be eerily like him, or like he was when he was younger. He had not been violent, but they had locked him up repeatedly because he didn’t fit anywhere else.
“Zachary? I asked if you’re okay.”
“Yeah. I guess. It’s been a long day, Kenz. And this case is pretty disturbing. I know you don’t have time to talk about it right now, but the things I saw over there today… I think you would change your mind about the kind of place Summit is.”
“They’re very highly acclaimed,” Kenzie said. “I know their methods are controversial, but the parents swear by them.”
“Yeah,” Zachary agreed. “I know. But I think if you saw what I did, you’d think differently. We’ll have to talk about it another time.”
“Sure. Will you be okay…? Are you alone?”
Zachary rubbed the bridge of his nose and looked around. Sitting in the living room of Bowman’s apartment, he hadn’t even looked to see if Bowman was home.
“I think so.” He got up and went into the kitchen, where Bowman’s shift calendar was posted on the fridge like a kid’s drawing. “Yeah. Bowman should be back in another hour. I’ll be fine.”
Waiting for Bowman to get home, Zachary pulled out Margaret Beacher’s business card to look up her number, which he hadn’t yet put in his phone as he should have. He tapped it in and listened for it to ring. She answered it after just a couple of rings, which probably meant the first ring on her end.
“Hello?”
“Margaret? It’s Zachary Goldman.”
“Yeah, I know,” she agreed. “What do you want?” She didn’t say it in a challenging way, but it still disconcerted Zachary a little for her to completely bypass the usual niceties. He was used to having to go through all of the usual ‘how are yous.’
“I have some questions for you,” he said. “But… they’re not about shocks or Summit specifically.”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
“When you talk about yourself or the residents at Summit, you say ‘autistic person.’ I thought… the politically correct thing these days was person with autism.”
Margaret laughed. “You spend the afternoon talking with the cute aide from Summit, and that’s what you call me about? Person-first language?”
“Well…” Zachary was grateful that she couldn’t see him blushing. “I just… well, I noticed that at Summit they say it one way, but you say it the other. I didn’t know if it was like… black guys calling themselves the n-word, or what.”
She chuckled again. “Political correctness says that you can’t put autism first, because I am a person first and autistic second. Autism is not my identity, just something I am afflicted with. I hate to tell you, but… it is absolutely who I am. It is a pervasive developmental delay. That means it affects every aspect of my life. Political correctness says that you can’t put a negative qualifier at the front of a person’s identity. You are allowed to say a brilliant woman, rather than a woman who is brilliant. But you aren’t supposed to say autistic woman, because autism is negative. It’s like disabled or mentally handicapped. You’re not supposed to admit that it is what you identify me by. That it’s the first thing you see.”
“But you want it to be first, because…”
“Because it is my identity, like I said. That’s my community, my tribe. It’s the language I speak. It’s how I approach life. It’s how I succeed or fail. It may make people uncomfortable, but that’s just too bad.”
“So is it only okay for someone who has—for someone who is autistic—to say it that way, or do you want everyone to use it?”
“You can do what you feel like. But I’m quite happy to be called autistic. That’s what I am.”
“Okay. Got it.”
“And while you’re at it, you can lose the ‘non-verbal’ designation as well. A lot of our community prefers ‘nonspeaking’ over ‘non-verbal,’ but what difference does it really make how we communicate?”
Zachary considered. “Summit makes a big deal about making their kids speak. I don’t really know about other communication methods. Do they work?”
“Have you ever written a note? Typed an email? Nodded your head?”
Zachary again felt a flush of embarrassment. “Of course.”
“Then you’ve used alternative methods of communication. Did it work?”
“Yeah.”
“Y
eah. Sometimes it works better than others. And sometimes nonspeaking communication works better than speaking. Just be open to other methods of communication and don’t assume that speaking is the only option.”
“Yeah. Makes sense.”
“How did your visit with that aide go?”
“I wish I could say she gave me information that would crack the case… but she didn’t really have anything new. It was really just more of the same.”
Margaret made a noise in her throat. “Why was she so eager to talk to you, then? She was acting like she held the key.”
“I think… she just wanted to talk to someone about what it was like to work there.”
“You feel sorry for her?” It was more of a statement than a question.
Zachary considered it. “I do, and I don’t,” he admitted. “I can see that it’s not an easy place to work and I wouldn’t wish PTSD on anyone. But… she chooses to stay there. She knows what she is doing is harmful to others, but she stays there. Maybe she’s not trained to do anything else, but…” He trailed off, uncertain.
“I wouldn’t believe anything she says,” Margaret said. “I was tortured by people like her for years. She may put on a nice front for visitors, but behind the scenes, when it is just her and a child, she’s not that same person.”
“Yeah.” Zachary’s own experience with institutions and caregivers confirmed this, and maybe that’s why he was reluctant to feel too sorry for Clarissa despite her apparent issues.
He’d seen too many women and men who were all sweet smiles for the public, social workers, and school teachers, but behind the scenes, it was a whole different story.
When Bowman walked in the door, he froze. He sniffed the air. He looked around and saw the pizza box on the table.
“Any left?”
“It just got here.”
“Nice!” Bowman opened the box to see that it was untouched. Zachary walked in from the living room, and they both got out plates and dished up a slice each. “What’s the occasion?”
“Well, I figured you’d be tired at the end of your shift…”
Bowman raised an eyebrow at Zachary. As it was the first time that Zachary had ever surprised him with pizza, Zachary supposed he had the right to be skeptical.
“I wanted to pick your brain,” Zachary admitted.
Bowman nodded. “Here, or living room?” As the one guy at the station house who knew how to bribe anyone, he had no problem with Zachary buying his time.
Sitting at the kitchen table seemed too formal, too much like a meeting with an agenda. So Zachary motioned to the living room. “We can relax better in here.”
Bowman threw another piece of pizza on top of the first, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and followed Zachary into the living room. They ate for a few minutes without saying anything. Mario with gusto, Zachary just picking at his toppings.
“I know Summit Living Center is out of your jurisdiction,” Zachary said.
Bowman nodded, chewing a big bite of the pizza. “Way out of it,” he agreed.
“But close enough that you might hear some rumors about what goes on there?”
Bowman considered this, looking serious. “I might have heard a few things over the years,” he admitted.
“Do the police have a lot of involvement at Summit? They deal with violent residents, so I would assume that sometimes…?”
“No, not that I’ve heard. I don’t think they call the police to deal with problems with their kids. Not like some of the schools and institutions.”
Zachary pulled a section of crust off of his pizza slice and worried it. “Some of the places I was at, they would call the police if someone assaulted the staff.”
“Yep. Pretty common. But Summit keeps things quiet. They have some kind of therapy to deal with violent students, so they just deal with it themselves. Internally.”
“So the police never get called in to arrest someone for being violent.”
“No, not that I heard of. And there’d probably be a lot of questions if they ever did, because the police there would know what kind of people they have at that institution. That they probably aren’t competent. Don’t have the judgment. It’s like when we get called to a school to arrest a six-year-old. If you’re smart, you ask a lot of questions before you put the cuffs on a little kid. You know it’s going to get reviewed. It’s going to get to the papers—the internet. So you make damn sure there’s cause for an arrest.”
“Yeah. I remember when they arrested a girl with autism at one of the places I was at.” Zachary paused to swallow and take a deep breath, keeping himself as calm as possible. “The police were pretty ticked off when they brought her back, because no one had told them about her… disability.”
“I would have given them crap if it was me, you can bet on that. They should have known better.”
Zachary nodded. He took a bite of the pizza, focusing hard on the sweetness and spiciness in an effort not to let himself slide back into the memories of Annie.
“What about other stuff? They’ve been investigated before, right? And then they had to be called in with Quentin’s death. Have you heard anything else? What they’ve had to go there for? How they felt about it?”
“I can try to hook you up with someone local… I don’t know very much. They get calls sometimes. There was one in the news a few months ago, you’ve probably already seen it online, where a mother was trying to take her child out, said that they wouldn’t release him. She said that he’d been abused. The police went in with her, and there was no trouble getting him out. She just had to sign the right papers. When they investigated, the boy—or was it a girl? —was covered with bruises. But the staff said it was all self-inflicted. You know how some of these kids hit themselves or bang their heads when they’re upset about something.”
Zachary had read something about the incident. The news articles had kept the story very small, had sided with the institution. Made it sound like the mother was crazy or attention-seeking. But having seen Summit, Zachary was a little more inclined to side with the mother and to believe that there had been something going on there. Even if the child was self-harming, chances were, he would have been shocked for it. And maybe the mother had decided she didn’t like the shock therapy as much as the other parents did.
“I get the feeling that the director over there is something of an egomaniac,” Bowman said. “He likes the publicity that the place gets, even if it’s controversial. They’ve been investigated enough times that nobody really wants to go take another look.”
“Yeah.” Zachary picked a piece of pepperoni off of his pizza. “He makes a big show out of how open they are. How transparent. But the therapies they use… I just don’t know how the authorities can let them keep it up.”
“As long as they’ve got the parents and the courts behind them, they can do pretty much anything they want.”
“Do you know the officers who handled the investigation? Of Quentin’s death?”
“Haven’t heard through the grapevine. Who was it?”
Zachary put his plate aside, happy to be rid of it, and opened his laptop. “Trainer and Benz.”
“No, don’t know them personally. You concerned that the investigation was mishandled?”
Zachary drummed his fingers over the keys. “I don’t know what to think. I think that if the police were told that it was a suicide, that’s what they would investigate. And if there wasn’t anything that jumped out and said, ‘not a suicide,’ they would just put it to bed.”
Bowman nodded. “Yes. Sounds about right. If you can’t disprove it… why put the family or the institution through all of the anxiety of a murder investigation? You don’t investigate a suicide the same was as a murder. It would cause too much extra work.”
“And so far, I haven’t found anything that says, ‘not a suicide.’”
“Do you think it wasn’t? What does your gut tell you?”
“My gut tells me… I’m not finished yet.”
Zachary felt depressed putting the thought into words. He did not want to go back to Summit again. He’d had enough of the place. Much more, and he’d be a basket case himself. “There are still… unexplored corners.”
“Well, be careful. If it is a cover-up, you don’t want to go turning over too many stones and making yourself a target. The reason police officers have partners is so that someone can watch their backs. You don’t have anyone watching yours.”
Zachary nodded. “Thanks. I’ll be careful.”
It wasn’t really late when there was a knock on the door, but late enough that Zachary wondered who would be knocking on Bowman’s door at that hour. Bowman lived a pretty quiet life and didn’t get a lot of visitors, scheduled or not.
Bowman was in a food coma, slumped on the couch after having eaten nearly the entire pizza. He roused a little at the knocking, but didn’t get up to answer it, so Zachary did.
He didn’t check through the peephole before opening the door, which was a stupid thing to do. He knew better than that. Bowman was a cop and Zachary was a private detective. Both of them could have unsavory visitors. He should have looked through the peephole and kept the chain on until he was sure who it was and that Bowman wanted to let them in. But he too was tired, his brain spent three times over.
Bridget was at the door.
For a moment, Zachary just stood there, stunned by her loveliness. By her unexpected appearance on his doorstep. His shocked brain ran through several different reasons she might be there. Did she want to get back together with him? Was she in trouble? Did she think that he had done something wrong?
He immediately searched his memory for anything he might have done to tick her off in the past few days. The compulsion to chase after her was still so strong, even with medication, group therapy, and his psychologist, that some days he felt like a junkie in withdrawal. In actual physical pain over her absence. He wanted to follow her, to watch her, to know where she was every minute of the day. So far, he’d been able to resist stalking her any further. It helped to have a case that occupied his attention as much as the Quentin Thatcher case did. It kept his brain from falling back into the same ruts again. Helped him to think of things other than Bridget late at night when the loneliness was the worst.
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