“It’s not a matter of whether or not it makes sense to me” Adams had told him. “It’ll make sense to the judge. That’s what counts, I’m afraid.”
“Can’t we fight it?”
“We can,” Adams had said, “but we’d probably lose. It’s not like it’s a criminal proceeding, where they have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt. In a civil case, the standard is much less. And remember, you’d be paying me seventy-five bucks an hour. What’s the thing worth, anyway?”
Not much, Stephen knew. Still, it was his Jeep, his car, the only car he and Penny had. It didn’t seem fair, that they could take it away from him, just like that. Not that any of this seemed fair.
“What’ll happen to it?” he asked.
“What?”
“My Jeep.”
“Sheriff’ll sell it at auction a couple months from now. You can always go to the auction, buy it back, if you like.”
now, an hour later, Stephen stood in the parking lot of Jensen’s Oil and Tire, kicking the tires of a tiny ‘83 Ford Fiesta with a cracked windshield and extra rust as a heavyset man who went by the name of Butch stood nearby, scratching the back of his neck.
“Easy on that,” said Butch. “You’re liable to knock the wheel off.”
Stephen laughed; Butch didn’t. Evidently, he hadn’t been joking.
“How much for this one?” Stephen asked. He’d already given up on a Dodge pickup truck and a Subaru wagon as more than he could afford. Winter was almost over, after all. How much longer would he really need four-wheel drive?
“I can put you in that one for 800,” said Butch, scratching his belly now.
“That’s it?”
“You can pay me the other 800 when you get a chance.”
“You’re sure it runs?” Stephen asked.
“Had it out myself the other day.”
Looking at Butch, Stephen wasn’t convinced he could even fit in the thing, let alone drive it. “Mind if I ask you where you got it from?” he asked.
“Where I get most of ‘em,” said Butch, scratching yet another part of his anatomy now.
“Where’s that?”
“Sheriff’s sale.”
An hour later and $800 poorer, Stephen had coaxed the Fiesta up his driveway, wedged a brick behind one of the tires as an emergency brake, and notified his insurance company of his change in vehicles. “We’ll send you out a new card right away,” the helpful representative assured him. “As well as a bill for the increase in premium.”
“Increase? Why should there be an increase?”
“The ‘83 Fiesta is so small, we list it as a sports car.”
By the time she got back home from her workout at the gym, Theresa had three messages stored on her answering machine. The first two she ignored, having little desire to speak with either her mother or the MCI representative who promised he could save her 50 percent on her long-distance calls. The third call, the one she returned, was from Neil Witt. No doubt he was phoning to let her know how positive the reaction had been to her crime story. He picked up on the first ring.
“Witt here.” Neil was definitely not a graduate of the Lou Grant School for Editorial Charm.
“Hi, Neil. It’s Terry.”
“Oh, hi, Terry. Lemme think. Why did I call you?”
“The story?”
“Right, the story. ‘Coming Events.’ Is it done yet?”
“‘Coming Events’ ?” He had to be kidding. “I’ve been working on that child pornography case.”
“Still?”
“Yes, still. It’s not quite over, you know.”
“Well,” Witt asked, “what did you have in mind?”
“A follow-up, several follow-ups, maybe. A series.”
“With what kinda slant?”
“I don’t know,” she was forced to admit. “But it’s an important story. Child abuse, exploitation. A Jekyll-and-Hyde type living right next door. C’mon, I haven’t even scratched the surface yet.”
“Well, do me a favor, will you? Scratch out ‘Coming Events’ first.”
“Can’t you give that to someone else?” Theresa asked. “Pretend I’m on special assignment?”
“No way. You know I’m already shorthanded.”
Shortsighted was more like it. Couldn’t he see there was a series here? “Good-bye, Neil,” she said.
If there was good news, it was that at least he hadn’t taken her off the story and given it back to Tom Grady. Not yet, anyway.
But if there was going to be a Part Two, it was going to have to happen pretty soon: The clock was ticking. Reflexively, Theresa looked at her watch. But for some reason, what caught her eye wasn’t the time of day, but the date: mon feb 14, it said. Valentine’s Day. Not that anyone had sent her so much as a card.
Speaking of clocks ticking.
With the grand jury presentation scheduled for Wednesday, Jim Hall didn’t want to waste any time before executing a search warrant against Stephen Barrow’s home. He knew he already had enough to indict Barrow - hell, he could indict Mother Teresa, if he put his mind to it - but he didn’t want to have to go back to the grand jury to ask for a superseding indictment in the event the sheriff’s deputies came up with more evidence that warranted additional charges. Even more important, he didn’t want to give Barrow time to dispose of evidence. Bad guys were always flushing drugs down the toilet, tossing incriminating business records into the fireplace, and burying guns in the compost pile. Not that this particular bad guy seemed smart enough to cover his tracks - look at the way he’d dropped his film off at the local drugstore for everybody to see - but still, there was no use giving him time to get rid of anything.
So by noon, Jim Hall had an affidavit that had been drawn up by one of his assistants and signed by Investigator Todd Stickley, a warrant authorizing the search of Stephen Barrow’s home and any other structures on his property, and a document called a return, on which the searching deputies would inventory anything they seized. Because Hall claimed that it was likely Barrow might attempt to dispose of evidence when the authorities showed up (by trying to flush a camera down the toilet, say, or swallowing a computer), the papers sought permission for a “no-knock” entry, as well as one not limited to daytime hours.
Around 12:30, Hall walked upstairs and found Justice Everett Wainwright in chambers, on the phone with his broker. The NASDAQ was up eighty-three points, it seemed, and Justice Wainwright was in good spirits.
“Hey, Jimbo. What can I do for you?”
“You can put your John Hancock on the dotted line right here, if you don’t mind.”
Justice Wainwright scanned the affidavit. “‘Sexual paraphernalia,’ huh? What are you really expecting to find?”
“Tell you the truth,” said Hall, “I haven’t the foggiest.”
“Going fishin’, huh?”
“You might say that.”
“Well, good luck to you,” said the judge. “Any man exploits his own daughter like that oughta have his pecker cut off. Not that I’m prejudging the case or anything like that.”
“No, sir. I know you wouldn’t do that.”
“Got a pen handy?” asked Justice Wainwright.
By evening - and in northern Columbia County, February evenings have a habit of setting in around three-thirty in the afternoon - Stephen Barrow needed to get out of the house.
He’d gotten home, courtesy of the Ford Fiesta, around noon. Over the next three hours, he’d dealt with his insurance company, put away the dishes, walked past Penny’s room a few times, straightened things up, sat down at the computer and tried to write, walked by Penny’s room a couple more times, stood in front of the open refrigerator for a good five minutes, tried to write some more, and checked Penny’s room one last time.
All the while, he’d alternated between bursts of activity so intense as to cause him to pace back and forth frantically and even begin hyperventilating once or twice, and waves of exhaustion so profound that there were times he felt he coul
d no longer keep his head up, and was forced to lie down on the sofa just to avoid collapsing on the floor.
Fears - real fears and imagined fears - filled his every thought. Penny was alone and uncared-for. Ada was punishing her, depriving her, beating her. He was never going to see her again. He was going to jail, where she wouldn’t be permitted to visit him.
At one point, he thought he heard water running in the house, and he ran from room to room trying to locate the source. It turned out to be the refrigerator motor that had kicked on. A little later, he panicked that his manuscript wasn’t properly backed up on disks and decided he couldn’t possibly wait another minute to print it out. But the next moment, after noticing that his printer was out of paper, exhaustion overcame him, and he couldn’t summon the energy to walk the ten feet to the closet to refill it, and was forced to abandon the idea.
It was going on four o’clock when he decided he had to get out of the house before he went completely crazy. He grabbed the keys to the Fiesta, slammed the door behind him, and literally ran to the driveway, so convinced he was that if he confined himself to a walk, fatigue would set in, and he’d never make it.
He headed for East Chatham - it was the only place he could think of going. He’d pick up a New York Times at Slattery’s and check his mailbox. He panicked only once on the way, when the bizarre notion struck him that the walls of the post office would be plastered with his photograph as the new Number One on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Most wanted what, though? What was he, after all? A sex abuser? A child pornographer? A pedophile? All he’d done was to snap his daughter’s photo the instant she’d mooned him. But already, his entire life was unraveling because of it.
He paid for the Times with quarters - they were far enough north of the city that it took four of them. And if Don Elsasser seemed to look at him a little longer than usual, he said nothing. Then again, Don was a guy who’d been through enough troubles of his own, his wife losing a long bout to cancer, his grandson born damaged, his old store up for sale.
“Have a good one,” he told Stephen.
Have a good one. That itself was a good one. The truth was, there weren’t going to be any good ones for Stephen, not anymore.
His photo, it turned out, wasn’t on display at the post office. He picked up his mail quietly, furtively, afraid that if he made too much noise, whoever was on duty might spot him, and, and . . .
And whatever.
The fatigue crept up on him again on the drive back home, and Stephen had to grip the wheel tightly and concentrate as hard as he could on the road in front of him, just to keep the Fiesta from wandering off it. He cranked the window open a couple of inches, letting in a blast of cold air that stung him, punished him.
Punished him. Right.
By the time he reached his driveway, it was all he could do to tuck the paper and his mail under his arm, stagger into the house, dump everything on the kitchen table, and flop onto the sofa once more. It was becoming a home base of sorts, the sofa. He knew that these waves of fatigue and these retreats into sleep were nothing more than flight - his way of escaping a life that had suddenly become too difficult to bear. But even knowing that and understanding it didn’t change things. He was still exhausted; he still couldn’t keep his head up; he still couldn’t help curling up on the sofa in a fetal position, his knees drawn up almost to his chest, his hands sandwiched between his thighs for warmth. His eyes burned, no doubt from the fumes of the Fiesta and the wind that had been hitting his face on the drive home. His eyelids felt as though they’d somehow developed these enormous, irresistible weights to them. He allowed them to shut - or rather they simply did so of their own accord, returning to their natural, intended position as though spring-loaded. And as they shut, they brought him darkness - sweet, blank, merciful darkness - sealing him off from all the terrible, chaotic things that lay out there.
In his dream, Stephen was holding the camera with both hands, peering through the viewfinder at Penny. For some reason he couldn’t understand, she was wearing all black - black dress, black shoes, and a strange black hat. Her face, so pale it seemed almost white, wore a calm, resigned expression on it, as if she understood how things were going to turn out better than he did.
He went to snap the picture, but couldn’t find the button on the camera. Not wanting to lose his daughter’s image in the viewfinder, he held the camera focused on her with one hand while groping around blindly with the other one for the button. At last he found a device that felt like a trigger, and figured that had to be it. He squeezed it, gently at first, so as not to ruin the picture by jerking it, then harder, until finally he felt it give.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash and a deafening BANG! The explosion was so loud and so violent that it caused Stephen to shout out loud-
-and bolt upright on the sofa.
The room was dark, except for the front door - or at least where the front door was supposed to be. Beams of light, the same light that had blinded him a moment ago, reached toward him from there. It took him a while to grasp that the beams were coming from flashlights, powerful flashlights held by men in gray uniforms who lifted their feet awkwardly as they began to approach him. It took him even longer to realize that the reason they were lifting their feet was to step over or around the front door - his front door - which now lay flat on the floor, just inside the open frame, splintered and ripped from its hinges.
“POLICE!” one of them shouted. “We’ve got a search warrant!” And indeed, another one waved a piece of paper in his face, too fast and too close for him to make out a word of it.
For the next three hours, Stephen was shuttled from room to room as a half-dozen deputy sheriffs went through every cabinet, every closet, every drawer, every carton, every inch of his home.
His home.
He was told that as long as he sat still and kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t be handcuffed. No, he couldn’t call his lawyer. Yes, he could go to the bathroom, but only if one of them stood by while he peed. Each time they moved him to another room, it was to get him out of the area they wanted to search. It wasn’t hard to figure out that they didn’t want him to be there to see what they were doing, what they were taking, what they were breaking.
Not that they were being intentionally destructive; they weren’t, not so far as he could tell, not in the way vandals might have been. But the difference was largely academic: Clothes still got yanked out of closets and dumped onto the floor, desk drawers got turned upside down and spilled out, mattresses were pulled off beds and flipped over, and books scooped up from shelves by the handful and left on the floor in random heaps. By the time they were finished, it would take him a full week just to put everything back in place.
He had no way of knowing exactly what they were taking, except for the larger items he could see them carrying out through the doorway. (They’d propped the door up in an attempt to keep out some of the cold, and one of them even suggested to Stephen that he might be able to get reimbursed for the damage they’d caused in kicking it down.) They took his computer, at least the part with the hard drive, as well as all his disks. They took his camera, and any photographs and film they found. They took his mail, including the letters he’d just picked up at the post office and hadn’t even had a chance to open. They took all sorts of things from Penny’s room - books, dolls, pictures she’d painted, stuffed animals, underpants. They went through the medicine chest in his bathroom, seizing ointments and salves and prescription drugs. And all the while, he was forced to sit silently, uncomplainingly, wherever they told him to, a powerless victim to a court-ordered invasion of his home. When finally they were done, they offered no apology, provided no explanation; they just marched out with whatever of his belongings they’d decided they felt like taking. Although one of them - the one who seemed the nicest, the one who’d told him about the possibility of getting reimbursed for the damage they’d done to his door - stopped in the doorway and turned around, just long enough to say somet
hing to him.
“Seeya in court, ya prick,” is what he said.
By Wednesday, a mix of rain and wet snow had begun to fall. Theresa Mulholland knew that if there was going to be a follow-up story, she’d better get working on it. She phoned Flynt Adams, Stephen Barrow’s lawyer, and offered him a chance to say something, anything that she could print that might be helpful to his client.
“I really can’t comment,” was all that Adams would say.
She called the state police headquarters down in Claverack. They put her on hold and shuttled her around for ten minutes. Finally, a Sergeant Somebody told her that once a case was in the courts, they could no longer comment on it publicly. He referred her to Jim Hall at the district attorney’s office. She thanked him and hung up.
She found Hall’s number and dialed it. A woman put her through to Hall.
“Anything new on the Barrow case?” she asked him.
“Sure is,” he said. “Going into the grand jury this morning. And Monday evening, we executed a search warrant at Mr. Barrow’s residence.”
“Find anything?”
“Yup, we sure did. All sorts of goodies.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, I can’t comment on that,” said Hall. “We’re still in the process of inventorying it.”
“But it’s incriminating stuff?”
“You could say that.”
“Can I write it?”
Hall seemed to think a minute before answering. “Sure, why not?” he said. “Long as you don’t say you heard it from me.”
Great. A source close to the investigation, who insisted on remaining anonymous, stated that incriminating evidence was removed from the defendant’s home, but declined to say what it was. Now there’s a story for you.
Barrow’s lawyer wouldn’t comment; the state police couldn’t comment, and the DA wouldn’t give Theresa any details or allow her to use his name. So where did that leave her?
It left her with Stephen Barrow himself, is where it left her. And he’d already refused to talk to her. Still, it was worth another crack. Besides which, what did she have to lose?
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