Beneath the Cracks

by LS Sygnet

  A thin smile crept across Wendell's face. "I was only suspected of other crimes, Mike. My conviction was for two deaths, and of course the armored car gig with Marie."

  "Fuckin' liberals," Mike spat through the bars. "You should've been put out of our misery a long time ago."

  "Please tell my visitor that even though I am an incarcerated felon, I still have the right to remain silent and have legal counsel present should I choose to speak to anyone."

  The door hummed loudly, signaling the electronic release of the lock. Mike grinned. "Oh, he swears up and down that he ain't here about a crime. Personally, I think he's lying through his giant white teeth."

  "What did he say?" Wendell's graying temples started to throb.

  "Says it's about that bitch daughter of yours. You remember. The one you're always complaining about. Hey Wendell. Maybe it's true. Maybe the apple don't fall far from the tree after all."

  He rose and shuffled to the door to the cell and assumed the position for transfer in shackles.

  "I'll be damned. Don't tell me you really care about her after all that talk, Wendell."

  "It's been a boring decade. Maybe I could use a little good news."

  Wendell's heart slammed against his ribs; worry prickled along nerve endings. Had something else happened to Helen? He'd been so woefully out of control since all of this began, it had eaten away at his soul like a cancer. Now all of his imaginings of Helen's life settling back into some semblance of normalcy evaporated like wisps of smoke. He had to know…had something else happened since she left that bastard she'd married?

  Throughout the long walk to the room where he would meet this mysterious visitor, Wendell fretted and silently cursed his decision to be noble and cloak the sins of his family in order to spare Helen. He should've fought it, done anything in his power to stay on the outside where he could protect her.

  "For a man thinking he's about to get good news, you look more dour than a guy walking down death row, Wendell." Mike smacked the back of his head. "He's in there."

  A doorknob twisted, steel yielded to the shove, and Wendell got his first glimpse of the visitor.

  His first thought was a relative of Larry Bird – on steroids. The massive blond man was NBA tall with WWF muscle cloaking his body with formidable strength. Wendell recognized an aura he once possessed. Power. Righteousness. Superiority.

  This was a cop. His heart sank. Oh Helen. I'm so sorry.

  The door slammed behind him, and the yet to be identified visitor pulled out a chair. He gestured with one hand but didn't speak. Wendell felt the eyes boring into him. The gaze was more than curiosity. The stranger dissected him, like he was searching for something familiar, but wasn't quite sure he found it. Maybe this wasn't about Helen after all, though how anyone could mistake Wendell Eriksson for someone else was absurd.

  "Mike tells me you're here about Helen."

  "Imagine my surprise, finding you alive," the man said.

  Wendell shuffled to the chair and sat with his hands folded on the table top. Desire for any word about Helen overrode his innate reflex to protect her by pretending hate. It had been so long. The cooing infant was never far from his thoughts, or the little girl crying after her first day of kindergarten over the nickname scarecrow, and a million other treasured memories of her life before Wendell was irrevocably ripped out of it.

  He swallowed against the burning sensation in his throat and stared at the chains binding his wrists. "Is Helen all right?"

  Air huffed loudly out of the stranger's lungs. "Well I guess that answers my first question. You love her as much as she loves you. What I can't understand is why she pretends you're dead and why neither one of you has made contact in all these years."

  Wendell's eyes rose slowly. "Who are you?"

  "Johnny Orion. I'm sure you've surmised by now that I'm a cop."

  He nodded. "Is Helen all right? Has she been hurt? Is she in trouble?"

  Johnny shook his head. "You really don't know, do you?"

  "Know what? Why won't you tell me –"

  "Physically, your daughter is fine…" Orion's gaze drifted away. "She's perfect."

  "Oh." Oh indeed. He recognized that besotted expression. "She told you I'm dead?"

  "Sort of," Orion said. "She later admitted that most of our conversation the night we met was less than truthful, though that was one point she never clarified for me."

  "You love my daughter."

  "I'm gonna cut to the chase here, Wendell. We probably haven't got much time before word trickles out of this place that you had a visitor, and I'd rather not be around to answer questions about why I came all this way to see you."

  "Where are you from?"

  "Ever heard of Darkwater Bay?"

  Wendell's eyes narrowed. "Of course I have. It's not a very good place to live. Please tell me Helen isn't living in that cesspool." Dammit, Helen! Would she really be so reckless to go after Datello alone?

  "Oh, she's there all right. Straight out of the FBI and into the ninth circle of hell."

  Wendell brought forth shock in a practiced move of ignorance. "Helen was in the FBI? Even after…after what I did? And what exactly did she do for the FBI?"

  "It seems that someone had the good sense not to hold her accountable for your crimes."

  Wendell breathed heavily through his nose. Who was this guy, and why was he really here? He couldn't know much; at least if he did, he hadn't heard it from Helen. The gears started grinding as Wendell began to profile Orion. How could he use this information to his advantage, to Helen's advantage?

  "Did you ever hear anything about her life after your term started?"

  Wendell shook his head and let the lies roll off his tongue effortlessly. "I wondered. I've always wondered. All these years I've hoped that she forgot about me, about her mother and all that ugliness."

  "Helen was even married," Orion said.

  "Was?"

  "I'm pretty sure that's where things started going wrong for her."

  "What do you mean she was married? Is she divorced? My daughter wouldn't have tolerated any…"

  "Abuse? Yeah, she's a black belt in jujitsu, which I'm sure you're responsible for. I already know that her piano skills are a direct result of pleasing daddy."

  He summoned tears on command, or at least the damp threat of them. "She still plays the piano." Eagerness replaced Wendell's worried mask. "Tell me about her life. Is she happy? What does she do? Did she go to medical school like she wanted to?"

  "No," Johnny said.

  "Why not?"

  "I wouldn't know. Your daughter is very guarded, Wendell. She's got these ideas about honesty that quite frankly, I can only assume she learned from you."

  "If you're not here to tell me about her life, why did you come?" Wendell's thumbs curled around the thin chains that bound the shackles at his wrists.

  Orion leaned forward. "I came here so you could tell me about her life. What did you do to her, Wendell?"

  "I didn't do anything to her!"

  "In case you're curious, her marriage ended in divorce after her husband was arrested."

  "Oh my God."

  "For laundering money for Sully Marcos."

  Wendell stared hard at Orion. He knows more than I'd expect, possibly, no hopefully more than the FBI knows. "Helen would've had nothing to do with that. Do you hear me? She wouldn't –"

  "Because you raised her so well?"

  "She wouldn't have knowingly gotten involved with someone like that! I know my daughter."

  "You knew her, probably better than anybody else on the planet. Tell me something, Wendell. If you weren't locked up in prison for the rest of your life, and you found out Helen married some guy that duped her, went behind her back and made her look like a fool at best with the FBI, what would you have done to a guy like that?"

  "I don't under–"

  "Would you have lured him out into a national park and shot him in the head with a .22 caliber pistol?"

 
Wendell willed the color from his face. His heart thumped heavily in his chest. Orion was a fucking gift, no other way to look at it. Glee tickled over his nerve endings, hidden deep beneath flesh and blood and the visceral façade of horror.

  "What would you have done with the gun, Wendell?"

  "That…that would depend on the location of the national park."

  "Say it's near a large river, like the Potomac."

  "I suppose I would've disposed of it in pieces, in various locations in the river."

  "That would definitely make it impossible to recover."

  "If you love her, you can't possibly believe she would've –"

  "What I feel or believe or anything else is none of your business. We're talking about you, hypothetically speaking of course."

  "All right," Wendell nodded and committed to a risky dance near truthfulness. "Hypothetically speaking then, let's say I wasn't really as ignorant of Helen's situation as I pretended. Say I was aware of what this bastard put my little girl through and used my influence here to put an end to her problem."

  "Did you?"

  "I would do anything for her."

  "Now that, I believe," Orion leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. "It's sort of the conundrum I'm facing at the moment."

  "Oh?" Orion was taking the bait, and Wendell knew his chance was on the tip of the smitten man's tongue.

  "Do I take what I know, what I suspect, and do something about it, or…"

  "I will say this one time, Mr. Orion. If you hurt my daughter, I will find a way to get to you. It'll be the last thing you ever do."

  "Or do I make sure that no one ever asks the questions that have been knocking around in my head for the past few days? I started thinking about it, you see, after I started digging into Helen's past because I do love her, and I couldn't fathom what could've possibly happened to her that made her so emotionally closed off when I know she doesn't really want to live her life this way. And lo and behold, what do I find?"

  "Me. Alive."

  "Yes," Johnny drawled. "You. Probably the one person alive who can help Helen."

  "What can I do? As you so astutely observed, I'm locked up for the rest of my life."

  "You could confess that you arranged for Rick's little mishap in the woods."

  Wendell stared hard at his hands.

  "Which we both know could be disproven in about sixteen seconds, since the only contact you have is with guards who wouldn't walk across the hall to piss on you if you were on fire. So claiming responsibility for his death would simply look like a father trying to protect his guilty daughter. Am I correct in my assumptions, Wendell?"

  "Possibly."

  "So I'm thinking the next best thing you could do would be to put your real skills to work to protect Helen."

  "What do you mean?"

  Johnny rested his elbows on the table and propped his chin on his fists. "I've been reading all about you, Wendell, and your alleged crimes – both those that resulted in your conviction and the ones they suspect you committed but could never find any solid evidence."

  "And?"

  "You weren't some indiscriminate killer or thief, were you?"

  Wendell gnawed on the inside of his lower lip, much as his mother had done when she was debating options. He wondered if Helen still did it too. It was the lack of such little details about her life that made him ache with loneliness.

  "I'm thinking that the best way to help lay this bullshit to rest with a very guilty, very dead ex-husband is if there is irrefutable evidence that someone else committed the crime. What do you think, Wendell? Does that sound like something you'd do?"

  He traced random patterns on the table with his fingertips. "You don't know that Helen did anything," Wendell said. "If you were to…insinuate…that someone else was involved in the murder, it could circumvent true justice and let the real killer walk away scot free."

  "The real killer will walk away scot free. The only suspect on the FBI's radar at the moment is your daughter. And they're gonna keep coming after her until she cracks and does something stupid that either gets her arrested or worse."

  "Worse?"

  "Killed."

  "Jesus," Wendell muttered. He sucked in a deep breath. "A twenty-two?"

  "Yes."

  "That's good," Wendell said. "They won't have more than fragments of fragments, so ballistics will be virtually impossible. Shell casings are another story. Were they recovered from the crime scene?"

  "I don't know, but I could probably find out," Johnny said, gaining a first, chilling glimpse into the mind of the man who raised Helen.

  "You need to find out. I understand that they're able to determine a hell of a lot from bullet casings these days. The first obvious choice would be someone from the Marcos family, which if the FBI had a clue, they'd be focusing on in the first place. I don't know who they're using these days, but before I left Rikers for the lovely Hotel Attica, I heard that Sully had a couple of new guys – Mitchell something or something Mitchell, and Eddie Franchetta. Franchetta I knew from around. He's what they'd call a signature killer these days, or so I've heard from the bits of television they let me watch."

  "What would you say his signature was?"

  Wendell chuckled. "Nothing that could ever be found at a crime scene, that's for sure. Eddie the Confessor Franchetta likes to listen to people's secrets before he kills. As such, he favors, or used to, very isolated locations for his hits. He also favored small caliber weapons, to make ballistics difficult if not impossible."

  "How would you know this unless someone survived a hit to tell the tale?"

  "Mr. Orion, how do you think these guys get their names? It's their number one flaw. They like to brag."

  "So in this ideal situation you imagine, what would it take to move the focus from Helen to someone else?"

  "Three things. One, someone else who has a motive to kill this man. Sounds to me like Marcos had it in spades if the FBI arrested one of his money launderers. Two, a murder weapon that could conceivably have been the one used on my former son-in-law. Three, an event that will require brass balls to pull off."

  "And what event might that be?"

  "Inextricably linking this weapon to the Marcos family in a way that cannot be ignored by the FBI."

  "Such as?"

  "Finding it in a location that belongs to Marcos. Sully's got a few places that fit the bill; at least he used to back in the day. If I were doing this, I'd target his waste processing business. Like I said. Brass ones. It'll take nerves of steel, Mr. Orion. And without question, the police would have to find the weapon before someone from the family stumbled across it and destroyed it. "

  "But the ballistics –"

  "The twenty-two caliber bullet generally shatters. Like I said, it's the weapon of choice to a hitter who knows his business. Even so, a vigorous scrub with a steel brush and say…exposure to acid or extreme heat, say in an explosion in a facility where gases like methane are the end product of recycling waste, these are things that can call ballistics results into question. But the bullet casing, that's the way to link the weapon to a murder."

  Mike banged on the door with one fist before he shoved it open. "Time's up, Eriksson. Kiss your boyfriend goodbye."

  Wendell rose and stared hard at Orion. "Tell her I love her," he said softly. "And I'm not sorry she walked away."

  He thought long and hard about that visit for hours after Orion left. Datello couldn't know who had fallen for Helen, or Wendell would've heard about it through his carefully constructed grapevine. And if Helen still was in Darkwater Bay, she most certainly was on Datello's paranoid radar. Question was, did Helen know the true identity of the man she killed? Did she know if there was a witness, if all of this could still come crashing down on her with devastating consequences? She couldn't know that Orion suspected the truth. If she did, she'd have left Darkwater Bay immediately.

  He the gears in Wendell's mind ground some more. Orion was one of the g
ood guys. It took all of five seconds to figure that out. Would he break the law to protect the woman he loved? He'd admitted as much, but Wendell knew it without the statement. It was written all over the tortured man's face. If his hunch played out, and Orion took the bait, there was no doubt that Helen would learn the truth. She'd bolt for safe cover like a cockroach exposed to light.

  Sending Orion to the waste plant would do the trick, if Wendell's old friend's information was correct. The feds would uncover what Sully was really doing out there, and this little gun would simply provide concrete proof that they needed to drop their investigation into Helen.

  Wendell yelled through the cell block. "Lucero! Get your ass back here! I need to make a phone call."

  Chapter 26

  My trip to MSUH was two-fold. First, I needed to track down the duo in charge of the mobile clinic serving the homeless shelters in the greater Darkwater area. When that task was completed, a quick visit to Maya was in order.

  Shannon Poole was a young resident in emergency medicine with his eye on the prize. He'd authored more papers in his chosen specialty than many attending physicians in the highly regarded teaching hospital. What I liked about him the most was that he genuinely seemed to care about the welfare of the homeless.

  His partner, Carmen Brevard was only slightly less idealistic, no doubt jaded by a few more years of practice than Dr. Poole. Also, Carmen's field was social work, so he was accustomed to hearing as many lies as cops do.

  They eagerly agreed to look at the photographs I provided. While Shannon called up specifics about their medical conditions from memory, Carmen browsed computerized records for names that went along with the faces.

  "Oh, definitely, I remember him," Shannon said. "His name was Willard, I think. He had been on Antabuse for awhile, but couldn't stay away from the booze by the time Friday rolled around. We saw him at the Milford Shelter in Darkwater proper just about every Saturday night for months. When he fell off the radar, I sort of assumed he'd either moved on to another city or…"

  "You can say it, Shan. She knows he's dead. Remember? That's why she's here. Dr. Eriksson, his name is Willard Holcomb, aged forty-five."