Needled to Death

by Annelise Ryan

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’m stunned by Carol’s response. “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, if Toby’s mother really cared all that much about him, she would have been here by now, or would be here today, looking for answers. And yet you’re here instead. I think bad parenting is behind so many of the troubles young people have these days. I suspect Toby’s mother wasn’t involved enough in his life, and that’s why he turned to drugs and the kinds of people who do drugs.”

  “That’s a bit harsh,” Bob says.

  Carol shrugs. “Perhaps, but it’s often true.”

  “I take it you weren’t a very good parent either,” Bob says, his mouth tight. “Otherwise your son wouldn’t have killed himself.”

  I shoot Bob a what the hell? look. If he is hoping to shock or offend Carol, he is quickly disappointed.

  “That is correct,” Carol says unemotionally. “I wasn’t there for Russell the way I should have been. That’s why I’m here now, to make up for what I didn’t do right the first time.”

  I intervene quickly, hoping to keep this conversation from deteriorating into something that won’t help any of us. “Carol, how close were you to Toby?”

  “Not as close as I am with some of the other boys,” she says, shifting her gaze to me. “He was quiet, kind of a loner, very focused on his academics and gaming. There’s a game room up on the second floor, and often that’s where you’d find Toby.”

  “Any idea when he started using drugs?” I ask. “Did you see a radical change in his personality or behavior?”

  She frowns, looking thoughtful. “Not really, but then I’m not sure I would have. I didn’t interact with him that often. You should talk to Heath Monroe. He was his roommate.”

  “There are some other boys we think he might have been close to,” Bob says. He takes out his phone and reads off the names of the boys who responded to Toby’s emails, both the one he sent himself and the one I inadvertently sent.

  “Ah, yes, our gaming team,” Carol says with a wry shake of her head.

  “Gaming team?” I say.

  “Yes. Some of our boys belong to a club that meets every week to strategize and organize new tournaments centered around some online games. They play against other frat house groups, other campus groups, and even some outside groups that have nothing to do with the university. Toby was a member.”

  “And these other three boys are as well?” I ask. Carol nods. “Are they here now? We’d really like to talk to them.”

  “I think Alex Parnell is at swim practice, but the other two are here. Let me get them for you.” She gets up and walks out of the room, leaving us to ourselves.

  The boys in the center of the room are still debating their various political strategies, but I see a curious look cast our way every so often. There is an odd air of superiority I sense in them that puzzles me at first. But as I study them longer, I begin to think it’s more affluent arrogance. I recognize money behind their clothing and shoe choices, their precise haircuts, and even in the arguments they are making for political strategies that protect big business and reduce taxing on the wealthy.

  After a few minutes, a tall, thin, gangly boy with a pockmarked face enters the room. He pauses just inside the door, stares at us, and swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing wildly. Then he makes his way over to us looking like a death row inmate walking to the electric chair. I can tell right away that this boy doesn’t come from money. His clothes and shoes look old and well-worn, and while this could be a fashion choice, I don’t think it is. My opinion is only strengthened as he passes the group of boys and I see a couple of them look at him with a hint of disdain.

  “I’m Mitch Sawyer,” he says, stopping in front of us. He offers no hand to shake; in fact, his hands are clasped behind his back. “Carol said you wanted to talk to me about Toby Cochran?”

  “Yes, we do,” I say, before Bob can speak and scare the kid away. Mitch looks like he would explode up through the ceiling if we said a gentle boo to him. “Please have a seat.” I gesture toward the chair Carol occupied earlier. The kid looks at it, back at me, and then at Bob. Then he casts a wary look over his shoulder toward the group of boys. “Is it okay if I stand?” he says.

  “If it makes you more comfortable,” I say.

  “It does.” He swallows hard again, making the Adam’s apple bounce.

  “We’re trying to help Toby’s mother,” I say, craning my neck to look up at him. Given his height, my lack thereof, and his desire to stand, it’s a strain. “We were hoping to chat with some of the people who knew him best, who spent time with him before he died, to see if we can get any insight into what led up to his drug problem.”

  “How would I know?” Mitch says. “I didn’t do drugs. I don’t do drugs,” he emphasizes. “I’d lose my scholarship if I did, and then I’d have to drop out.”

  This confirms my guess about his financial status.

  “We’re not implying anything,” I assure him. “We’re just trying to understand what went wrong with Toby at the end. His mom, she’s been a single mom all of Toby’s life, and she’s convinced that she failed him somewhere, somehow. She needs some answers. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “She didn’t do anything wrong,” Mitch says without hesitation. “Toby talked about her a lot, about what a rock she was for him, about how hard she worked. He loved her, and it sounded like she loved him.”

  “Were you aware of anything that was troubling Toby toward the end?” Bob asks. His tone surprises me a little. It is tender, conciliatory, kind. No hint of cop in it.

  Mitch turns his head to the side, and his eyes dart toward the other boys, who are still in their group but suddenly quiet.

  “You know what?” I say, pushing up from the couch. “It’s a beautiful day outside. Why don’t we go walk?”

  Mitch appears to consider this, glancing first out the window, then over his shoulder toward the front entrance. “I’d like to, but I’m afraid I need to be somewhere. I’m late already. And I don’t think I have anything to offer you. I’m sorry.”

  With that, he whirls around with amazing grace, given his gangly build, and strides from the room, not giving the group of boys a second look. They, however, watch him, I note. And as soon as Mitch is out of sight, they turn in unison, as if they are one multiheaded creature, and look at us. Bob and I stare back at them for an interminable amount of time until the boys finally break our visual standoff, turning away in unison. As they take up their debate again, with several of them speaking at the same time, I suppress a shiver and give Bob a wide-eyed, wary look.

  “Are we supposed to wait for the second boy, do you suppose?” I ask in a low voice.

  He answers me with a nod of his head toward the living room entrance. Another boy is coming into the room, this one short, bespectacled, and pudgy. I guess that this one is Liam Michaelson since Mrs. Barlow told us Alex isn’t here. He has a hint of a smile on his face, and I get a sense that this is his default expression, that he’s an inherently happy, fun-loving kind of person who always has a joke at the ready. The social worker part of my brain immediately questions my assumption, wondering if I’m stereotyping the boy because of his build and an oft-held belief that overweight people are jolly and love to joke. I suspect this typecasting exists because a lot of kids use humor to deflect hurt feelings when they’re picked on or made fun of, and overweight kids almost always fall into the picked-on category. I too, fell into the picked-on category a lot, not because of weight—I was thin as a child—but because I was noticeably different due to my foster child status and a wardrobe that often consisted of used clothing and ill-fitting hand-me-downs.

  I watch Liam cross the room, noting that he acknowledges the group of boys with a smile and a brief “Hey, guys” as he passes them. None of them smile back at him but they also don’t look at him with the same level of contempt they afforded Mitch.

  When Liam’s attention turns back to us his sm
ile broadens.

  “Hi there,” he says, extending a hand to Bob. “I’m Liam Michaelson.” They exchange a vigorous shake and Liam then extends his hand to me. His grip is solid and warm, not limp or wimpy, but also not bone-crushing. I wonder if his approach to Bob was the same, or if he displayed a little more strength in the man-to-man exchange. After releasing my hand, he takes the seat we had tried to give to Mitch, sitting forward eagerly on its front edge, forearms resting on his legs, hands clasped by his knees.

  My instincts tell me to let Bob take this one, and I’m trying to figure out a subtle way to communicate that to him when he does so.

  “I’m Bob, and this is Hildy,” he says. “Thanks for taking the time to talk with us.”

  “No problem. Carol said this is about Toby?”

  “Yes,” Bob says, nodding solemnly. “Toby’s mother is my sister and she’s having a really difficult time dealing with Toby’s death. We’re trying to help her out. She’s shouldering a lot of guilt, guilt we don’t think she deserves. A counselor suggested that we try to convince her of that, so we’re hoping to get a better read on Toby’s life in the months before he died. We understand you were a close friend of his.”

  I’m impressed with how easily and glibly Bob has adopted and regurgitated our lie. Then again, I imagine cops lie all the time when questioning people, enough so that they probably get to be good at it.

  “Don’t know if I’d say we were close,” Liam says. “We knew each other and played on the same game teams. I mean, we hung out from time to time, but it was always in a group. He didn’t confide in me or anything like that.”

  Based on the emails we read, this would seem to be a lie, and I wonder why Liam is trying to distance himself from Toby.

  “Do you know why he dropped out of school?” I ask.

  Liam grimaces and shrugs. “Not really, though there was a rumor going around that he was really devastated over his breakup with Lori.”

  “Lori?” Bob says.

  “His girlfriend, or at least the girl he was seeing around the time he dropped out.”

  “What is Lori’s last name?” Bob asks.

  “Davenport,” Liam says. “She lives in a house downtown on West Wash,” he explains, using the shortened vernacular for Washington Avenue I’ve heard other Madisonians use. “Shares it with four other girls. I don’t know the exact address, but I went to a party there once and I remember that it’s the only yellow house on the block.”

  “Were Toby and Lori dating for long?” I ask.

  “Since the start of the second semester,” Liam offers. “They seemed like one of those couples that’s destined to be, you know? They really liked each other and had a lot in common. They were both kind of shy, very academic, not sports inclined, and from single-parent homes. I was surprised when I heard that Toby had broken things off with her.”

  “Toby broke up with Lori?” I ask to clarify.

  “That’s the rumor,” Liam says with a shrug. “Though I didn’t talk to either of them about it, so I don’t know for sure.”

  “And you’ve never heard anyone speculate as to why?” I ask.

  Liam shakes his head. “Not really. One of her roommates was dating my roommate at the time, so I got some insider info for a while. I know Lori was upset over it, but I never heard any details about why it happened. I don’t think Lori knew.”

  “Did you ever see Toby using drugs, or hanging out with people who were using drugs?” Bob asks.

  Liam rolls his lips inward and arches his brows, looking like the proverbial cat that swallowed the canary. “Well, it depends on your definition of drugs,” he says in a low voice. “Anyone who’s been to any kind of campus shindig has been around people who smoke pot, even if they don’t do it themselves.” He pauses, looking thoughtful for a moment. “I don’t think I ever saw Toby smoke any pot, though. And he never bought anything on his own that I know of. That kind of stuff is for the rich kids. People like me and Toby, we don’t have money for drugs. We barely have enough to buy a cup of coffee from the student union.” He looks from Bob to me and then back to Bob again. “I heard Toby died of a drug overdose. Is that true?”

  I jump in to answer this because I’m afraid Bob might not want to. “He was found with heroin in his system and a syringe in his arm,” I say. I feel, rather than see, Bob give me a look.

  “Heroin?” Liam says, making a face. “How the heck did he get into that? It’s about as far from the Toby I knew as you can get.”

  “No idea who might have provided him with the drugs?” Bob asks.

  Liam glances over at the other boys and leans in closer to us, dropping his voice down several decibels. “Like I said, the kids from the wealthier families do that stuff a lot. But there are class divisions here in this house just like there are out in society.” He shrugs and gives us a sad smile. “The rich kids don’t socialize with us poorer kids much.”

  “Did you stay in contact with Toby after he dropped out of school?” I ask.

  Liam starts to shake his head but hesitates. I suspect he is recalling the email from the dead that he received yesterday. “Not really,” he says finally. “Though I did get an email from him yesterday. Kind of freaked me out because I heard about his death two weeks ago. Eventually I realized someone else had to have sent it using his email address, but I confess it freaked me out at first.”

  “Sorry about that,” Bob says with a smile. “That was my sister’s doing. She was looking through Toby’s laptop and I think when she opened up his email program it sent an email out that had been sitting in his outbox.”

  “That makes sense,” Liam says with a nervous laugh and a look of relief. “I let my imagination get the better of me there for a while. I think I need to back off on the horror flicks.”

  “It looks like Toby wrote that email right before he died, but it got hung up in his outbox because the power went out,” Bob says, pinning Liam with his laser blue eyes. “It said ‘I need to tell someone.’ What was he referring to?”

  Liam’s smile fades. “I have no idea,” he says. “I figured it was someone who was spoofing Toby’s email address, playing a practical joke.”

  I recall that Liam’s response to the email had been to ask if it was really Toby sending it, and then questioning if his death had been a hoax.

  “That email went to two other people besides you,” Bob says, looking at his phone. “Mitch Sawyer and Alex Parnell. How do you know them?”

  Liam fidgets and shifts in his seat while casting a brief sidelong glance at the group of boys. “Well, they live here,” he says.

  “As do a lot of other people,” Bob fires back. He’s reverting to cop mode, and I try to figure out a way to get him to back off.

  “Why did you three get Toby’s email?” Bob pushes, leaning closer to the boy. “What else did you have in common?”

  Liam licks his lips and looks at Bob’s hands, then mine. He shifts his gaze to Bob’s face and narrows his eyes. “You two aren’t married, are you?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “And you’re not Toby’s uncle, either, are you?” Again, he doesn’t wait for an answer. He slaps himself on the side of the head and says, “How stupid am I? Toby was always going on about how he and his mom were all alone in the world, how it was just the two of them, and how much he admired her for working so hard and providing him with a good home.” His expression changes to one of cynical disbelief. “Now he suddenly has an uncle who is worried about how well his mom is coping? I don’t think so.”

  There’s a long silence while Liam and Bob stare at each other. Suddenly the boys in the other group rise from their seats, moving with uncanny coordination, and file out of the room.

  When they’re gone, Liam says, “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

  Bob, knowing the jig is up, nods but says nothing.

  “Why are you here? Is there something suspect about Toby’s death?”

  “What do you think?” Bob asks. “Is there?”

  Liam pa
les, and shoots a nervous glance at me. He wipes his hands on his pant legs and licks his lips again. “I need to go,” he says. And then, with no additional explanation, he hoists himself up and leaves the room.

  Bob sighs and looks at me questioningly. “Do you get a sense that there’s something strange going on here?”

  “Most definitely. That group of boys that was in here, even they were acting strange.”

  Bob gets up from the couch and stares out the window, hands in his pockets.

  “What about Toby’s roommate, Heath Monroe?” I say. “Should we try to talk to him next?”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Bob says to the window. “But now that they know who we are, I doubt we’ll get much out of anyone.”

  “We won’t know unless we try, right?”

  Bob glances at me over his shoulder, giving me a wan smile. “Are you always this upbeat and positive? Because that can get downright annoying at times.”

  I don’t hear any irritation in his voice and sense he is only teasing me. “I assure you I can be as much of a Debbie Downer as the next guy,” I tell him.

  “Good to know.” He turns and looks across the empty room toward the door. “I guess we should go find someone.”

  As if she was waiting just around the corner—and I wonder if she had perhaps stationed herself there during our talks with the boys—Carol sweeps into the room with a smile painted on her face. “How’s it going?” she asks, and something about her forced congeniality and overdone effort to appear casual convinces me she’s been eavesdropping.

  “We’d like to talk to Toby’s roommate, Heath Monroe,” Bob says.

  “Oh, dear,” Carol says with a frown. “You just missed him. And I’m not sure when he’ll be back. If you’d like to leave a number where he can reach you, I’ll see to it that he gets it. I’m sure you have a business card, given that you’re a cop, right?”

  She and Bob engage in a staring contest that lasts an impressive thirty seconds or more without either of them blinking or altering their expressions in any way. I mentally place my money on Bob as the winning holdout, but no sooner does this thought cross my mind than Bob looks away, lips pursed.