by Blake Banner
He stared at me, but didn’t answer. The paramedic climbed in and grabbed the doors. “We have to get them to hospital, Detective. We’ll find his doctor.”
I nodded. She pulled the doors closed and we watched the red rear lights disappear through the drizzle in the failing light of the late afternoon. I turned to Dehan. “You OK?”
She nodded. “You?”
“I want guards put on all their doors. Samuel’s, the dad’s and Helen’s. I don’t want anybody—anybody—going in or out except their doctors and the nurses. I especially don’t want them going into each other’s rooms. Make sure they are separated. If anyone goes in, I want a cop to go in with them. Will you see to that?”
“Sure.” She frowned.
I said, “You understand what I am saying. I want them kept away from each other.”
“I get it, Stone. What are you going to do?”
“I need to have a word with Father Arundel. I won’t be long.”
What I learned from Father Arundel was exactly what I expected to learn. So I made a phone call to Blackstone’s and joined Dehan ten minutes later, where she was sitting in the Jag, watching the fire department hose the house down while the cops evacuated the neighboring houses. I said, “Come on, let’s go to the hospital and wrap this thing up.”
She stared at me for a moment with mild surprise on her face, then went around and climbed in the passenger seat while I got behind the wheel. As we pulled away, with the growing flames playing on the wet road, Dehan was frowning. “I don’t know how you plan to wrap it up, Stone. As far as I can see, we are exactly where we were. We can charge him with kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon and arson, but we still can’t pin him to Celeste’s murder.”
I nodded. “That’s true.”
She eyed me a while. “That’s it? ‘That’s true.’ That’s your answer?”
“You’re right. You deserve more. We’ll play it by ear when we get there.”
She looked away. “Dork.”
“You know that was my nickname at school, right?”
“You told me.”
Half an hour later, we arrived at the Jacobi and the receptionist, after looking dubiously at us and our badges, told us how to find the Reynolds’ rooms. They had put Samuel and his father next to each other, with a cop sitting outside each room. Helen was sleeping after surgery. The cut had not been life threatening, but it had been deep and needed stitches. She was very traumatized and was under observation by a psychiatrist.
Samuel was awake. He had second degree burns to his face and hands. When he saw us come in, he said, “I’ll confess to everything and take my punishment.”
I gave a single nod. “Don’t you think we’ve had enough punishment and redemption and cleansing of sins for one night, Samuel? How about we stop burning things down and start building them up?”
He looked away at the black window, where distant lights and luminous raindrops speckled the glass. “I don’t know what you mean.”
I sat on the edge of a chair under that black window with my elbows on my knees and looked at his partially bandaged face.
“I’m not going to question you tonight, Samuel. You need to rest and sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow. But I’d like you to think about something. Will you do that?”
“I never stop thinking.” He said it sullenly, to the window.
“A lot of people got hurt tonight, a lot of innocent people. It’s a miracle nobody got killed. Those people are paying the price for your guilt. Maybe it’s time you started taking responsibility, instead of guilt tripping everybody.” His eyes shifted and he stared at me. I leaned over and patted his foot. “I’ll see you tomorrow, not too early.”
Out in the corridor, Dehan screwed up her face at me. “What was that supposed to mean, Stone? Take responsibility instead of guilt tripping everybody. What does that mean?”
“It means it’s time he took responsibility for what he’s done.”
She watched me go into the old man’s room. He was sitting up in bed, looking depressed. A nurse was checking the bandages on the back of his hands. I asked her, “How is he?” I showed her my badge. “Detective Stone. This is my partner, Detective Dehan.”
She glanced at the badge and smiled at me. “He’s fine. Some minor burns to his hands, but he’ll be OK.”
“Have you been able to locate his doctor?”
She frowned. “I’m not sure what you mean… Dr. Patel is just here…”
I nodded, then smiled. “OK, thanks.”
“Don’t tire him. He needs rest.”
She left us. Dehan sat on a chair on the far side of the bed, by the door. I sat on a chair under the window, where I had sat in his son’s room.
“You’re a very tough man, Mr. Reynolds. Good stock. Your whole family are as tough as old boot leather.”
He gave something like a smile. “The Irish,” he said. “We’re a tough lot.”
“Sure are. How’s the angina?”
“I’ll live.”
“And the blood pressure? They must have checked that straight away when you came in, right?”
He nodded. “It’s under control.”
“But you should give them your doctor’s details, Sean, so they can contact him and get your medical records. That kind of thing is important.”
“Oh yeah, I will, don’t worry. They have everything under control.”
“How long has it been?”
“What?”
“That you’ve been incapacitated by angina and high blood pressure?”
He shrugged. “Few years.”
“You know, I don’t know a lot about medicine, but I never heard of a case before where somebody was actually bedridden by high blood pressure and angina. I always thought gentle exercise was advisable. Just goes to show, right? What do I know?”
“Rest.” He nodded several times. “That’s the thing. Lots of rest, and don’t get excited or upset.”
“I asked Father Arundel.”
“What?”
Dehan was frowning at me.
I said, “How long you had been bedridden. He said it was two years. He said it was your daughter’s death that crippled you physically and emotionally.”
He looked down at his hands on his lap. “I never did recover. Poor Samuel had to shoulder the burden of everything. He’s a strong lad, but I suppose the pressure got to him, and he cracked.”
“He supports all three of you, financially, doesn’t he?”
“Him and a small pension from my wife’s insurance. We get by.”
“Because before, it was both of you working, wasn’t it? You and Samuel both. Until Celeste was killed. Then you were broken by grief and he had to manage alone.” He didn’t answer. I waited a moment. Then I smiled and gave a small laugh. “Come on, Sean. It’s over. And God knows, who could blame you? You did it for your family, didn’t you? Nobody knows who hasn’t been there on the front line, nobody can possibly know what it’s like, trying to pull your family through, keeping them on the righteous path, on your own, with no help or support from anybody.”
He looked back at his hands. “It’s not easy.”
“And when Celeste came along, she killed your wife, and in the same fell swoop drove poor Helen into a psychotic state. But you loved her nonetheless, right? God had taken your wife, but he had given you this beautiful little baby girl. Am I right?”
He nodded. “I adored her. I doted on her. I prayed every night and day that Helen would be healed, and I thanked the good Lord for giving me Samuel, he was my rock, my support. But most of all, I thanked the Lord for the love of my life, little Celeste. My child of Heaven.”
“It must have been tough when she strayed from the righteous path.”
“I knew she would return. I knew she wouldn’t stray far. I had faith that God would lead her back to me.”
“But that weekend was more than any man could take. After all the love and devotion you had given her, after taking your wife and your eldest dau
ghter from you, to then turn and insult you and heap abuse on you, to fall into sin and revel in it, be proud of it, boast about it, and finally, to cap it all, to tell you she was leaving—leaving to live in sin with a man. The ingratitude, the disloyalty to her own family, to her father. I get it, Sean. It must have been too much to bear.”
He shook his head at his hands. He was silent for a long while. Then, he said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Samuel tried to reason with her. She just gave him a mouthful of abuse. You interceded. Tried to calm them both, lead them back to the loving harmony of a Christian family. But she wouldn’t have it and you ended up getting mad. Maybe you hoped, after she stormed up to her room, that she’d cool off and come to her senses and apologize. But instead of that, when she came down that evening, she gave you both more of the same.”
He still wouldn’t look at me, but he said, “That’s old news.”
“Sure, but I am willing to bet that that was when she dropped the bombshell that she’d been having an affair with Lenny. But now she was dumping him and moving in with Chad. And then you realized that what your son had been saying was true. She was evil, and her evil was spreading, touching not just her family now, but old friends, too. Samuel called her and begged her to wait and talk. But instead of him, you went. You probably begged her to see sense, to return to the fold, but all she would do was scream at you.”
He shook his head. “No. You’re wrong.”
“Was it the screaming, Sean? Was it the screaming that made you snap and want to shut her up? And before you realized what you’d done, she was dead. You repented and put your arms around her. Chad saw you, standing there, hugging her. You picked her up, put her in the truck and took her to Blackstone’s. You broke in—you knew there was no alarm on the gate and no CCTV. You dragged her through the improvised gate in the fence, loaded her down with rubble, and dropped her in the river.”
He shook his head again, small shakes, still staring at his hands. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“At first, we were thrown by your being bedridden. You looked so frail. But that isn’t a physical condition at all, is it? It’s emotional. You’re an emotional wreck, but physically you are an ox, just like your son. Your angina and your blood pressure, it’s all self-diagnosed, isn’t it? You haven’t even got a doctor. And when I realized that, I realized it wasn’t Sam Reynolds that worked at Blackstone’s, it was Sean.”
“I’m ill, I need you to go now. I need to rest. All this, it’ll bring on my angina and my blood pressure.”
I stood and went to the door. I poked my head out and asked the uniform sitting there. “Have they arrived?”
He glanced down the passage a bit. I followed his gaze, smiled and said, “Please come in.”
Geoff and Kate Blackstone approached and stepped into the room. Geoff beamed. “Reynolds! What have you been up to, you old dog? What is this all about?”
Sean covered his face with his hands and started to weep. Kate frowned at me. I said, “It wasn’t Sam, was it? It was Sean.”
“If you’d asked me from the start, I would have told you. Geoff has no memory at all, but I remember everything. Sean Reynolds. That’s him.” She gave me a lurid smile. “What has he done?”
I sighed. “He’s been cheating the Devil.”
EPILOGUE
It was still raining. It looked as though it would never stop. Occasionally, a human body transited across the window, wrapped in a mac or an anorak, leaning slightly forward, pushing an umbrella into the wind. I didn’t care. Nothing could touch me.
I was lying on the sofa, watching the trees bow and toss, watching the desultory passers-by getting wet. I had been propped with pillows under my neck and under my socked feet, and I had a large glass of Bushmills balanced on my belly. In my nostrils, I had the delicious blend of roasting lamb tinged with wood smoke from where Dehan was hunkered down, lighting the fire. I heard it crackle and spark, and then she came over, lifted my feet and sat under them, resting them down on her lap as she picked up her martini.
“Level with me, when did you first suspect Sean?”
“Day one.”
“Come on!”
“That was when the first alarm bells went off. He was too much, too devoted, too committed to his family, too devout in his religion and yet…” I shook my head. “He wasn’t really any of those things. What he was under that patriarchal exterior was a lazy narcissist who was not devoted to his family at all, but wanted his family devoted to him.
“Then I started to be more suspicious when we told them about Lenny. I never really bought Lenny as Celeste’s killer. The circumstantial evidence against him was strong, but it all pointed to the affair, not to his killing her, and the disposal of the body pointed firmly to an amateur, not a pro like Lenny. And when we gave Sean and Samuel the news, Sean stated categorically that Lenny did not kill his Celeste. Samuel was shocked, incensed, outraged, furious, but Sean simply repeated over and over that Lenny had not killed her. He didn’t say he couldn’t have, he said he didn’t. He was categorical. That told me that he knew who had killed her.
“His physical condition seemed to rule him out, but it was always in the back of my mind that it could be psychosomatic, or simply that he was a lazy bastard who felt sorry for himself and wanted the world waiting on him.
“Then, when Samuel wanted me to cleanse Helen’s soul and rid her of Celeste’s evil, it struck me very forcefully that he could not do it himself. He was incapable. He wanted me to take the responsibility for the killing. That was not congruent with his having killed Celeste with his own bare hands.
“And the clincher was when I tried to drag him out of the bed and I saw how damned big and strong he was. He was not the frail old man he liked to pretend to be. He was an ox, at least as strong as his son, and he fit Chad’s description just as well or better.
“So I asked Father Arundel how long he had been bedridden—we had assumed for some reason that it had been for a long time—but it had only been since his daughter’s death. So at the time of her death, he was just as able-bodied as anybody else, and he had just as much motive, or more. So I called Geoff Blackstone and asked him to ask his wife what Reynolds’ first name was. She came back straight away, not Sam, but Sean. Remember, we told Geoff it was Sam Reynolds. He agreed—it’s an easy mistake to make. But his wife was the one with the excellent memory, and she remembered it was Sean, not Sam. So I asked them to come over to the hospital to identify him.”
She sat gazing at the fire, nodding slowly with her bottom lip stuck out. “It never crossed my mind.”
“I won’t say he was my number one suspect, but I just had this constant nagging feeling, all the other suspects just didn’t quite fit.”
We sat in comfortable, companionable silence for a while, sipping our drinks and listening to the fire crackle and occasionally spit. Dehan’s gaze was lost in the flames, with the orange light tinting her skin. After a while, she said, “Stone, I don’t want kids.” She looked at me and I frowned. “I’m focused on my career. But, you know, if we did, eventually, one day, decide to have kids, and build that extension, what do you think it would be, a boy or a girl?”
“I really don’t mind.”
“But what do you think?”
“Well, it might be a boy, or it might be a girl.”
“If it was a boy, what would we call him?”
“I always liked Thorvald, or maybe Bullvine…”
“Be serious…”
“Perhaps Ragnar…”
“Stone!”
BOOK 14
TRICK OR TREAT
ONE
I was looking through the window at the ash-gray sky. The naked plane trees looked cold, and the occasional, drifting flakes of sleet made them look colder. The search for cold cases on a day like this seemed almost an unwarranted excess. Desultory cars, their headlamps switched on despite being only eleven AM, sighed on the wet blackto
p. People, muffled like Eskimos, leaned forward as they walked, with their hands deep in their pockets.
It was December. It was December with a vengeance.
Dehan was not looking out the window. She was chewing the butt end of a pencil and frowning at the insides of an old manila file.
“This case,” she said without looking up, “was twelve years old last Halloween. We should have a look at it.”
I examined the content of my mug and found there was nothing. It was empty but for the dregs. “Why, because it just had its birthday?”
“Cosmic cycles.” She looked up, ignoring my bitter humor, and frowned a little harder. “Cosmic cycles,” she said again. “Twelve months in the year, twelve signs in the zodiac… And also it seems insoluble. Not locked-room insoluble—that’s always a hidden hole in the wall—but a genuine puzzle.”
I reached out my hand and she tossed over the file. As I leafed through it, she started to recite.
“Sue Benedict, twenty-four, died on Halloween, three days before her twenty-fifth birthday. Sucks, huh?”
“Born in November,” I said, scanning the ME’s report. “All the best people are.”
“Yeah, right. So, her body was found in the bedroom, on the bed, raped, strangled and stabbed.”
“How do we know she was raped and not just killed post-coitus?”
“Abrasions on her inner thighs and around her groin suggest she fought against him. Also, there was a lot of pre-mortem bruising on her neck and thighs, suggesting there was a sexual struggle before he killed her.
“The position of the body on the bed, with the legs spread open, and the bruising from the thumbs on the trachea, suggest that strangulation occurred either during or immediately at the end of the actual rape, while he was still on top of her. He then followed up with what looks like a frenzy of stabbing in the belly, especially around the lower belly. Apparently this is consistent with sexual rage, as it mimics the act of penetration. Semen was fresh and they were able to get a profile. He also left clear finger and thumb prints all over her body, especially her neck and throat. No match was found on CODIS or IAFIS. Swabs and prints were taken from everyone at the party, but no match was found there either.”