The Only Witness

by Pamela Beason

  Brittany sat on the couch in front of the television, which displayed a movie. In a chair to the left sprawled little brother Danny, using rapid-fire thumbs to play a game on a small device he held in his hands. Brittany's hands were folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on her knees.

  Noah forced a bright note into his voice. "Detective Finn! We saw that story about gorillas last night on the news. What in the world is going on?"

  "I can't talk about it," Finn told him. He turned to Brittany and held out the laptop with both hands. "Brittany, I brought your computer back."

  She didn't even raise her head. Her hair was clean and combed into a ponytail, and she was dressed neatly in jeans and a T-shirt, but she was as lifeless as a mannequin. Pale yellow and purple bruises still circled her neck.

  "Brittany…" Noah said in the low tone that parents used to warn their children.

  The girl's gaze rose to meet Finn's. Her blue eyes were as cool and vacant as lake water. Moving robotically, she held out her arms. He placed the laptop in her hands.

  "Thanks." She settled it in her lap, folded her hands on top of the computer, and looked up at the television.

  On the screen, a girl in a soccer uniform scored a goal and the room filled with raucous cheers of the television crowd.

  "Good one," Noah said. His reaction seemed forced.

  It was like watching a movie at a funeral. The atmosphere was claustrophobic. Danny was probably oblivious, but Noah radiated anxiety, and Brittany was the embodiment of total despair. This was worse than informing a family about the death of a loved one. At least that was final. This was like awaiting the walk to the electric chair, all the while hoping for a last-minute reprieve.

  "Can I talk to Brittany alone for a moment?" Finn finally asked.

  "I guess so," Noah murmured. He placed a hand on his daughter's shoulder. "Brittany, why don't you take your computer and Detective Finn up to your room? But remember—say nothing about the case. Just like the lawyer told you."

  Finn cringed inwardly. Obviously, Brittany's father thought he was out to convict the girl. "I won't ask her any questions," he said. "I assure you, I have her best interests at heart."

  "Right," Noah said.

  "Come if you want," Finn told him.

  Noah eyed his daughter. She seemed nearly catatonic.

  The phone rang three times, and then the answering machine picked up. "If you have a tip about Ivy—"

  Noah was clearly straining to listen. Brittany didn't seem interested. Her father flapped a hand in her direction. "Just go," he said. "I'll be up in a second."

  The girl stood up, tucked the laptop under her arm, and marched woodenly up the stairs. Finn followed her to her bedroom, leaving the door open behind him.

  She put her computer on her desk. There was an odd little winged baby dress lying over the desk chair. Brittany sat on her neatly made bed and pulled a little white teddy bear into her lap. Her eyes watched the floor.

  "Brittany, please look at me."

  She did. Her expression was as flat as if Botox flooded every facial muscle. She was probably full of tranquilizers. He had to give this poor girl something to think about other than death. "You know that news story about the gorillas?" he asked.

  She nodded dully, as if it were an everyday occurrence for gorillas to romp through the woods around Evansburg. He moved the winged green thing from the chair to the desk. Then he pulled out her chair and turned it around, straddled it and crossed his arms on the top of the backrest.

  He caught her gaze, and said softly, "You can't tell anyone what I'm going to say to you. It's our secret."

  She swallowed, but didn't even blink. She was paying attention, though. He could feel her waiting.

  "One of those gorillas—her name is Neema—might have the key to finding Ivy."

  Life returned to Brittany's eyes, as if a different person had suddenly dropped into her body. She leaned forward. "How?" she asked.

  What had she expected to see from the helicopter? Grace frowned. There was little to view below except for endless treetops, an occasional rock outcropping, logging roads and trailside parking lots. No shaggy black lumps of apes careening through the trees.

  Grace tried to visualize the wilderness surroundings through Neema's eyes. Trees everywhere. Neema loved to climb trees, but the straight tall firs with their closely packed branches didn't lend themselves to easy climbing by thick-bodied apes.

  The chopper passed above the search parties, lines of volunteers and armed Fish and Wildlife officers, walking in a wave through the forest.

  The racket of the helicopter overhead would terrify both gorillas. So would the shouting and crashing of strangers through the underbrush. Gumu and Neema would be seeking places to hide. It had been nearly twenty hours since they'd last eaten. The gorillas would be looking for food and water, too.

  "Dr. McKenna?" The pilot eyed her in the rearview mirror.

  She shook her head, almost dislodging the too-large headset. She pulled the microphone back into position and said, "I don't see anything useful."

  That wasn't precisely true. At that moment, they were flying over an unusual piece of land. At one time it had probably been an old homestead. There was a pile of collapsed and mossy timbers that had once been a cabin. A few gnarled, ancient apple trees were scattered among the evergreens, rotting red fruit visible on the ground beneath them. Near a small stream stood a huge old willow with branches that drooped down to its roots. Good climbing trees, fruit, and a good hiding place. She quickly glanced between the two forward seats, noted the GPS position on the dashboard readout, closed her eyes and committed the coordinates to memory.

  They rapidly passed on, moving over dense forest again. Grace chanted the GPS coordinates in her head as she watched a doe and two half-grown fawns dash up a logging road, spooked by the helicopter. What were the odds that Neema and Gumu would chance upon the old homestead site? The fallen apples and the stream gave her hope. Gorilla noses were keen. And the site was in the general direction the gorillas were heading when she'd seen them last.

  Too many people or a helicopter could spook the gorillas into disappearing forever. She'd have to go alone, or with Josh.

  "Are you good to land, Dr. McKenna?" They hovered over her compound.

  "Yes, thanks for the ride," she said wearily.

  They touched down in the yard, and exchanged shouted expressions of regret over the lack of progress. Then she huddled against the side of the barn as the chopper took off in a tornado of flying grit. As the noise faded, she uncovered her head.

  "Dr. McKenna?"

  Grace startled at the unexpected voice. A young girl stood at her right shoulder. She had long reddish-blonde hair banded back into a ponytail. Her blue eyes were heartbreakingly sad. Grace had seen her before. On television. In the newspaper. Red tail soft soft. "Brittany Morgan?"

  Brittany nodded. "I want to help."

  Grace hadn't seen a car from the helicopter. "How'd you get here?"

  "Hitchhiked."

  "Do your parents know where you are?" Multicolored bruises darkened the girl's neck.

  Brittany raised a hand to her throat, covering the marks. "Please," she said. "I'll call them later."

  Grace studied her. T-shirt, jeans. The girl was wan and had deep shadows under her eyes, but otherwise appeared fit. She stared at the flip-flops on the girl's feet.

  "I have hiking boots in my pack," Brittany said, pointing to a black backpack leaning against the fence.

  "Good," Grace told her. "You're going to need them."

  Finn's inbox was full of call slips, most from the press. As he was sorting through them, his desk phone rang.

  "Bad news, Detective," the judge said without preamble. "Jimson is fighting the subpoena."

  No. It was his only hope. "Can they do that?"

  "Just like I predicted, they're alleging that the scope is too broad."

  "It has to be," Finn argued. "We have no way of knowing which employees might
be involved."

  "When they lose on that score, I guarantee they're going to try for invasion of privacy." A slurping noise followed, and Finn envisioned Sobriski sipping tea during a break. "But they won't get it."

  "So what happens now?"

  "They will report with the records to the Courthouse within 24 hours, or I'll hold them in contempt."

  Good.

  "Then we'll all have to sit down and go through the records and determine which are applicable and which will be excluded. So clear your calendar, Detective; this is going to take awhile."

  Not so good.

  Another slurp. "Any news on the gorillas?"

  "Not that I've heard."

  "Drat. My clerk will call when the records arrive tomorrow, and we can meet in my chambers."

  "I'll be there." Finn hung up and stared at the phone with mixed feelings. Sobriski appeared to be firmly on his side, but he was clearly going to pull no extraordinary legal strings to make things work out.

  "Don't you have a life, Finn?" Dawes stood in front of his desk.

  Finn gave him a look. "Do I really need to answer that?"

  "Nope; the answer would be obvious to a blind man. Thought you might like to know that Kittitas County finally coughed up autopsy results on your doll baby." Dawes slapped down a sheet of paper on his desk.

  Autopsy? Then he remembered Baby Doe, the tiny corpse found by the farm dog.

  According to the coroner, the corpse had been buried for months, and due to decay, the victim's age, time of death, and cause of death were impossible to pinpoint. The baby was somewhere between one and six weeks old. Male. He saw the words "Likely Hispanic" near the bottom of the sheet. So his initial hypothesis was probably a good one; the baby belonged to an illegal, probably a Mexican woman working the farm fields, who couldn't afford to be discovered by immigration authorities. Had the tiny boy been sick from birth, or died in an accident? He hoped that a husband or boyfriend had been by the poor mother's side.

  In Chicago, unclaimed corpses were buried in cheap coffins in group graves. Finn had no clue what happened to the unidentified dead in this jurisdiction. He dialed the coroner's office. "What happens to the body?" he asked.

  "They preserve pieces in case they need them later for DNA, and then they cremate the rest," the clerk told him.

  Finn thought the guy sounded a little detached from his job, but then, if he worked with dead bodies all day, he'd want to detach, too. "What do you do with the ashes?"

  "Uh … it all goes into the trash." There was a pause. "Why? Did you want them or something?"

  It just seemed wrong, that an infant could end up as trash. "Yes," he said, surprising himself, "I want that baby's ashes."

  An hour later, with Juan Doe's ashes in a small sealed cardboard cylinder sitting in his cup holder, he drove home. Cargo was waiting for him on the porch, and Kee escaped outside the instant Finn opened the door. Finn fed the monster dog, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took it outside to the deck to watch the sun go down. He walked the perimeter of the yard, half-heartedly yelling, "Lok! Come here, kitty, kitty!" now and then. "Lok!" Was Grace doing this now, strolling through the forest, yelling for Neema and Gumu?

  His cell phone vibrated and he pulled it out. Noah Morgan.

  "Finn," he answered.

  "Detective, Brittany snuck out of the house this afternoon after your visit."

  Uh-oh.

  "We just received a text message from her, saying she was with Dr. McKenna, looking for the gorillas."

  Finn blew out a breath. "Then she's safe. Grace will take care of her."

  "Did you encourage Brittany to do this? Because if something happens to her—"

  "She couldn't be in better hands, Mr. Morgan. I believe that right now, Brittany's better off taking action instead of medication, don't you?"

  "You're obviously not a parent. She was taking action when she broke into that house; she was taking action when she tried to hang herself. If anything happens to Brittany—"

  "Grace won't let anything happen to her."

  "What if they don't find the gorillas? Or if the gorillas don't survive?"

  Those possibilities were too horrible to contemplate. "I guess we'll all deal with that if it happens," Finn murmured.

  After another few seconds of vague threats, the man finally gave up, and Finn resumed his search around the backyard. The daylight was almost gone. A coyote yipped somewhere to the west and another answered from the south, sounding closer.

  His heart skipped a beat when an orange tabby emerged from the bushes, but it was Kee, who followed him into the house through the sliding glass door. Finn sat in his easy chair and flicked on the television. A commercial for some kind of glue that could hold anything together was on the screen, and Finn hit the Mute button. Kee meowed from the floor beside him. Finn picked up a plastic wall walker toy from the basket on his side table and lobbed it at Wendy's photo. It stuck just above her right eye for a second, and then Kee watched it roll on its suction-cup feet down the wall. When it dropped to the floor, he looked up at Finn with confused amber eyes.

  Finn reached down and lifted the cat into his lap. "I know," he said, rubbing Kee's ears. "I miss him too."

  The room wavered into a blur. No. This was idiotic. He had been involved in cases of missing and murdered people, for chrissakes, and he'd never broken down. Now he was crying over a cat he'd never wanted in the first place?

  Arnhh, Cargo sighed, and licked his other hand.

  "Don't slobber on the remote," Finn warned. He wiped his nose and eyes on his shirt sleeve and clicked the television volume back on.

  The major station out of Seattle had picked up the local news feed and showed the YouTube video, then the footage of Fish and Wildlife and volunteers searching for the gorillas. Grace had to be pulling her hair out now. Then the focus changed to show a rotund silver-haired man standing between the thick white pillars of a church entrance, responding to a group of reporters clustered around. Finn upped the volume.

  Silver Hair read from a page he held in his hand, glancing up periodically at the camera. "As you know, our charitable organizations offer the formerly lost a chance to redeem themselves through honest labor. Some of our employees have pasts that are painful to reveal, and such revelations may obstruct their healing process. Now we have been ordered to expose these painful secrets by Detective Matthew Finn, the detective seen in the recent YouTube videos of escaping gorillas."

  "Crap." Finn leaned forward. Kee leapt to the floor and disappeared into the kitchen. Cargo studied him for a moment with worried eyes before the dog lay his head back down on his paws.

  Silver Hair stared at the camera. "Apparently, from what my organization has been able to piece together, Detective Finn gets his information from a woman who believes that gorillas can talk—Grace McKenna."

  "Sign!" Finn shouted at the television. "They can sign, not talk, you idiot!"

  "This Grace McKenna, this careless keeper of these dangerous escaped apes, has made accusations about our employees. This is yet another thinly disguised attack on good Christians by secular humanists who believe we all descended from monkeys."

  "For God's sake," Finn groaned, then snorted at the irony of his own statement.

  Silver Hair—no doubt the Reverend Abram Jimson—folded the piece of paper he had read from and lowered his hands. "New Dawn Industries has no choice but to respond to this request, but we urge all our supporters to let the authorities know that we—and you—consider this to be harassment of the worst sort by anti-religious government authorities. Thank you."

  The blonde newscaster chirped, "And now for the weather—James, can we expect this wonderful sunshine to continue to the weekend?"

  Finn lowered the volume, levered the footrest up, and lay staring at the ceiling for a long moment. He could hardly wait for morning.

  "Ow." Brittany stumbled into a depression. In the dark, it was hard to see what was shadow and what was a hole, with only a narrow f
lashlight beam lighting the way. "Are we getting close?"

  They'd been walking through the dark woods forever. She was trying not to complain, but she wanted to stop. Since Detective Finn told her about the gorilla, she'd been spitting out the pills, but she still felt like she had mashed potatoes filling the space behind her eyes. Her head felt heavy and her legs were rubbery; she wasn't used to walking anymore.

  Grace, checking her GPS device in the light of her headlamp, stumbled into the same hole. "Damn it!" she muttered.

  Putting her palm out to the nearest tree, she rested for a moment while she twirled her foot in the air, testing her ankle. "Sorry," she said, shooting a glance at Brittany. "Yes, we're almost there."

  It was interesting and a little scary, hiking through the woods at night. It would have been much easier on a trail, but Grace said they were following the direct route to the most likely place the gorillas would be.

  Brittany checked her watch. One a.m. Her parents were probably freaked, in spite of the text she'd sent. The only other times she'd stayed out all night had resulted in…well…Ivy. She hoped this all-nighter would result in Ivy, too.

  It had to. She just couldn't go on without her baby. Yeah, she understood now how she'd hurt her parents and the psychiatrist made her promise to try hard for a month, but she didn't want to stay in a world without Ivy.

  Brittany shifted her backpack. The water bottle inside of it was digging into her back, or maybe that was the sleeping pad or the rain jacket Grace had made her carry. She wished she had a fancier pack with a waist strap—that was supposed to make the shoulder straps work better. Her shoulders ached already and she had a blister on her left foot. Still, it felt right to be out here, doing something. Fighting. She rubbed her fingers over the ivy tattoo.

  Grace stood straight again, and gestured at her to continue. After a few steps, Brittany heard a noise in the woods close by, a sort of snort, followed by cracking of sticks. She stopped. "What do gorillas sound like?"

  "That was most likely a deer. Gorillas hoot and whimper," Grace said. "Gumu pounds his chest when he's trying to impress someone."