Intent to Kill

by James Grippando

  Lomax was smiling so widely that it almost hurt. “No, Doctor,” he said, chuckling at the look of concern on his campaign manager’s face. “On second thought, it looks like I won’t be needing your services at all.”

  25

  EMMA DROVE STRAIGHT TO HER OFFICE. SHE WANTED TO BELIEVE that Babes’s confession cleared Brandon Lomax’s name, but she was having a hard time imagining how it could have been true. To sort it out, Emma went right to the top: Criminal Division chief Glenda Garrisen.

  “Did Babes even have a driver’s license?” asked the chief.

  “He got one at seventeen, but he’s never had his own car, and his parents never let him drive alone.”

  The chief looked around her office, thinking. Her gaze settled on a museum-quality oil painting on the wall directly behind Emma, as if searching the Impressionistic seascape for wisdom and inspiration.

  “Here’s my take,” said the chief. “On the night of the accident, only Chelsea and Ainsley had a ticket to the big game, right?”

  “That’s right. Ryan left Babes out because he was afraid that the crowd and the noise might be too much for him to handle.”

  “From what I know about the case, Babes probably hadn’t missed a home game all year.”

  “That’s true. No offense to your husband or his team, but most games aren’t sellouts or anywhere near that level of excitement.”

  “That’s my point. He was probably boiling mad when he found out that he wasn’t going to the biggest and final game of the regular season, in which his beloved PawSox, the best team in the International League, battled against the Toledo Mud Hens, the league’s second best.”

  Her awareness of the standings was impressive, even if she was married to a team owner. “I would imagine that’s true,” said Emma.

  The chief continued, “Babes was so angry, in fact, that when Chelsea was driving to the game, Babes ran out of the house, took his father’s car, and chased her down the road. Plausible?”

  “I’d say yes. Ryan, Chelsea, and Ainsley lived in the flat above Chelsea’s parents at one time.”

  “Okay, good,” said the chief. “Now, the forensic evidence showed tire tracks on and off the shoulder of the road, suggesting a swerving car. We inferred that those tracks were made by a drunk driver. In light of this confession, however, I suggest that those erratic tire tracks indicate that the man behind the wheel was Babes, a driver of limited skills who was in the throes of an Asperger’s meltdown. Babes ran her off the road.”

  “Accidentally?” said Emma.

  “Maybe it was an accident. Or in his rage, maybe it was on purpose. He did say he killed her.”

  “True. But in this context I think ‘killed’ means that he caused her death. Not necessarily murder. I’m no expert on Asperger’s syndrome, but we do need to take his condition into consideration when evaluating this confession.”

  “That’s why, at the very least, he needs to be brought in for questioning. Coordinate with the sheriff’s office on that.”

  “Unfortunately, no one knows where he is.”

  The chief mulled this over in silence. “Give his parents twenty-four hours to bring him downtown. Be sure to tell them he can have a lawyer present if they wish.”

  “And if they can’t find him, then what?”

  “What else can we do?” said the chief. “Get an arrest warrant.”

  Ryan walked straight into a media storm.

  They were camped outside the main entrance to the radio station. Photographers, cameramen, television reporters, print journalists, the local sports bloggers—everybody, it seemed, had either heard or heard about Babes’s on-air confession. Coming out of a windowless radio station was always a bit like crawling out of a cocoon, no telling what might be waiting outside—wind, rain, snow. Ryan would have preferred nuclear winter to this frenzy. Chaos was literally on his doorstep, and it had caught him so off guard that, instinctively, he turned around and went back inside the lobby to plan another exit strategy.

  His cell rang. It was Ivan calling from his hotel room in California.

  “Dude, I haven’t even had breakfast, and I’m getting bombarded by reporters. Is this stuff about Babes true?”

  Ryan confirmed everything Ivan had heard.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Ivan.

  “I’m headed to Pawtucket now to see Chelsea’s parents,” he said. “I’ll figure it out from there.”

  “This on-air confession is so bizarre. You might want some advice from a criminal attorney.”

  “The only lawyer I know does wills,” said Ryan.

  “Call mine. His specialty is sports and entertainment, but in the legal food chain, that’s just one shark tank away from criminal.”

  “I appreciate that,” Ryan said. “I think.”

  Ivan gave him the phone number. “One other thing. The way they’re hounding me, this is definitely going to be page one in sports, if not A-one news. Be careful with the photographers. They will trick you, taunt you, hound you—anything to get the photo they want.”

  “I hear you.”

  “I’ll be in L.A. till the end of the Angels series. But if there’s anything else you need, you call me, you hear?”

  “Thanks, man. I’ll do that.”

  Ryan closed his flip phone and checked the security monitor by the door. A black-and-white video camera, mainly for the graveyard DJs who left late at night, provided a fish-eye view of the outside entrance. The mob outside had actually grown larger. He would simply have to forge through it before it got any worse. Ryan started toward the exit, but his producer entered the lobby and stopped him.

  Beatrice was out of breath and was holding a high-heeled shoe in each hand, having raced barefoot down two flights of stairs to catch him. “You aren’t going to talk to the press, are you?”

  “Not a chance,” said Ryan.

  “Good,” she said, her tone conveying a curious sense of relief. She put her shoes back on and then laid a hand gently on Ryan’s forearm, as if to emphasize her concern. Beatrice wasn’t one of those touchy-feely folks, however, so it didn’t come across as genuine. “I just wanted to say that I know how difficult this must be for you. As far as the radio show goes, whatever you need to do, you have the freedom to do it.”

  “Thanks. I may need some time off.”

  “No!” she said, and then she caught her own overreaction. “I mean…no problem. On the other hand, don’t put the show on hold out of any concern that this is sports talk radio. If Babes calls in again, feel free to talk to him. On the air. If you think that’s best, of course.”

  Best for Babes or best for ratings?

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  “Great. Now just head for your car, and don’t say a word to those reporters.”

  It was clear that Beatrice smelled a serious and ongoing news exclusive for her station, and Ryan wanted to tell her to shove it. But it suddenly occurred to him that as long as Babes remained on the run, the radio was the only proven way of communicating with him. He kept his feelings to himself, opened the door, and faced the music.

  Cameras clicked, microphones were immediately thrust into his face, and questions came from everywhere.

  “Have you spoken to the police?”

  “Where is your brother-in-law?”

  “How did he kill her?”

  Those were the ones that Ryan could hear, but mostly it sounded like one person shouting over the next one, a cacophony of interrogation. Ryan simply put one foot in front of another, moving himself and the mob of reporters toward the parking lot next to the building.

  “I’m sorry,” said Ryan, “but I can’t talk about any of this.”

  The questions kept coming, and it was getting harder to make forward progress. This was a hundred times worse than anything he had ever faced as a ballplayer. On the journalistic scale of newsworthiness, being MVP of the College World Series in Omaha was nothing compared to an on-air scandal in Boston.

&
nbsp; His car was ten feet away. Ryan unlocked it with his key remote and forged ahead, but the photographers pushed back. Ivan had told him stories about the paparazzi, but this was the first time Ryan had seen them in action. Each was trying to outmaneuver the other for the front-page shot of the onetime rising baseball star who had fallen with the tragic death of his wife, and who was falling all over again with a shocking confession.

  “Hey, asshole! Was Babes fucking her, too?”

  Ryan turned and glared with contempt, which was immediately met by a camera flash. It was a tried-and-true paparazzi tactic to get celebrities to look toward the lens and cast the angry, out-of-control expression that ended up on the front page of the tabloids. Ivan had warned him, and Ryan had fallen for it.

  Ryan jumped in the car and burned rubber out of the parking lot.

  He called Emma on his cell. Of course she had heard everything. Ryan hardly knew where to begin.

  “We need to sort one thing out right away,” he said. “The phone call.”

  “What phone call?”

  “I asked Babes why he went to the diner, expecting him to say that he got the information from the attorney general’s Web site. But he said that someone called him yesterday and said to meet at the diner if he wanted to avoid trouble with the police. That means he wasn’t the person who accessed the Web site and entered the password—he didn’t send the e-mail tip to you.”

  “Two thoughts on that,” said Emma.

  “I’m listening.”

  “One, Babes is lying. He’s afraid of getting into trouble for giving false tips to the police, so he made up a story about some stranger calling him out of the blue.”

  “Let me hear number two,” said Ryan.

  “Well, there was a guy at the diner who caught my attention. He left right before I spotted Babes across the street. Nothing concrete. I just had a hunch about him.”

  “I need to read that e-mail,” said Ryan.

  “I had it delivered to your house.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That’s right on my way to Pawtucket.”

  26

  RYAN OPENED HIS FRONT DOOR AND NEARLY STEPPED ON THE envelope from Emma, which the courier had slipped through the mail slot. He tore it open, not even taking the time to sit before reading it.

  The first line was jarring enough: “Why haven’t you arrested him? Are you going to LET HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS?” The sender’s screen name was a seemingly random sequence of numbers, not a recognizable name. Ryan read on into the body of the message:

  The first clue said I know who did it. The second one said it’s him. Didn’t you see the picture of XXXXXXXX?

  The name was blacked out. Apparently Emma had taken the added precaution of redacting all references to Brandon Lomax, just in case Ryan let the letter slip into someone else’s hands. The e-mail continued:

  What more do you jerk-offs need? Maybe this will help: VOMIT. You know what I mean. That bastard XXXXXXX was so drunk that he vomited when he got out of the car and saw what happened to Chelsea. The cops kept that juicy tidbit a secret, didn’t they? I never read anything in the paper about any vomit being found at the scene. But I don’t believe for one sec your CSI guys fucking missed it. Soooo…NOW DO YOU BELIEVE ME?

  There was nothing more.

  Ryan put the e-mail down. The vomit made sense—it must have been the reason the police were so convinced that the driver had been drinking. Alcohol would have shown up in the sample, though proving that it was in the driver’s blood would have been another matter. Ryan wasn’t sure why they hadn’t released that information to the public, but he had heard of police withholding pieces of evidence for strategic reasons, and the e-mail was right on: nowhere and at no time in the past three years had there been any public mention of the vomit found on the scene.

  Emma had first suspected that Babes might be the tipster when she sat on the Townsends’ front porch and saw the circled words and handwritten anagrams on Babes’s copy of the New York Times. Ryan tended to agree with Chelsea’s father that Babes would not have held on to evidence that could have revealed the drunk who had run Chelsea off the road. But the e-mail presented a different problem entirely.

  It just didn’t sound like Babes.

  Ryan put the e-mail in his coat pocket, headed back to his car, and took one more detour before heading down to Pawtucket to see Paul and Rachel.

  Fifteen minutes later, he was in the office of Dr. Fisch, Babes’s neuropsychiatrist.

  “Thank you for making time to see me, Doctor,” said Ryan.

  “My pleasure. So what is it you would like me to read?”

  “This,” said Ryan, as he laid the printed copy of the e-mail message on the desk before him.

  Dr. Fisch picked it up, but he didn’t read it right away. He was Babes’s neuropsychiatrist because he was a gentle human being who took the time to know his patients and their families. He seemed to notice that Ryan was wound a bit too tightly.

  “How have you been sleeping, Ryan?” he said.

  “About as well as you would expect.”

  “A colleague of mine over at Brown has had very impressive results with cognitive behavior therapy and insomnia. That’s something you may want to look into.”

  Everyone always had “the cure,” from counting sheep to melatonin. Even the receptionist at the radio station had put in her two cents last week: a coffee enema. Ryan was somewhat more inclined to go with Dr. Fisch’s recommendation.

  “Thank you, I will definitely check that out. But if you could take a look at the e-mail, I’d really appreciate it.”

  The doctor read it once then looked up and said, “How can I help you with this?”

  “The question I have is whether there is any way for you to tell if this e-mail came from Babes.”

  He removed his eyeglasses, clearly not needing to reread the message to answer the question. “People with AS can be very talented writers. Their handwriting is often poor, but as long as they can type, that’s not an issue.”

  “I wish I could address this only in general terms, but I’m afraid I need specifics: Does this look like it could have been written by Babes?”

  The doctor paused, obviously uncomfortable with specific questions about his patient.

  “Doctor, I understand your concerns about patient confidentiality. But I was married to Chelsea, and Babes just went on my radio show to tell the world that he killed his sister.”

  “I’m aware of that. I spoke with his mother ten minutes ago.”

  “Then you understand the urgency.”

  “I do,” he said. He pondered the matter a moment longer, an internal debate raging as to how much he could say without betraying Babes. Finally, he folded his hands on top of the desk and spoke in a tone that would have been suitable in a courtroom.

  “When Babes addresses a person of authority, he uses an even more formal language register than one might expect. Rarely in any context—and never in writing—does he use profanity. Babes also has a tendency to overpunctuate his writings. For example, he uses more semicolons than a neurotypical writer, and he often uses them incorrectly.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I think that should be sufficient for your purposes.”

  Ryan reached across the desk and gave the e-mail another read, bearing the doctor’s comments in mind. “I don’t see any of those traits in this writing,” he said. “This is breezy, like barroom talk. Profane in places. Not formal and overpunctuated.”

  “I would agree,” said Dr. Fisch.

  “So, your opinion is—what?”

  “Between you and me, this e-mail was not written by Babes. Unless…”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless someone helped him.”

  The doctor’s words gave him something to think about. Ryan thanked him and left his office, his mind abuzz as he descended alone in the elevator.

  For whatever reason, collaboration was a possibility that he had not yet considered. An accomplice
was certainly an interesting notion.

  Perhaps it was one he should discuss with Babes’s oldest friend—Tom Bales.

  27

  EMMA ATE DINNER ALONE AT HOME: MICROWAVE POPCORN, A tangerine, and for dessert, a scoop of low-fat Chunky Monkey ice cream with sugar-free chocolate sauce. It was the only food in the house, and she was too stressed and too tired to worry about nutrition.

  She’d tried to reach Ryan and Babes’s parents right after her meeting with Chief Garrisen, but they hadn’t answered her phone calls. Emma wasn’t surprised. When a relative confessed to a crime, families often avoided the prosecutor until all the ducks were in a row. She was forced to convey Chief Garrisen’s deadline in a voice-mail message: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but in light of Babes’s confession, we’ll have to issue an arrest warrant unless he contacts us and arranges a meeting within twenty-four hours. You and an attorney are, of course, invited to come with him.”

  It wasn’t often that Emma hated her job, but that phone call was definitely one of those moments.

  She sank into the couch with her bowl of ice cream, grabbed the remote, and switched on the local evening news. Babes was the top story, and her friend Doug Wells was the crime reporter on the scene. Archived photographs of Chelsea and the crash site flashed on the television screen as Doug reminded viewers of “the tragic death of the young wife of Boston radio host and former PawSox star Ryan James, whose two-year-old daughter, Ainsley, survived the crash.”

  Emma’s image appeared next—for once, a great photo of her.

  Gotta give the boy points for trying to keep me happy.

  Doug’s report continued: “Investigators have suspected all along that Chelsea James was run off the road by a drunk driver, but there were no suspects or meaningful leads in the case until the recent three-year anniversary of the crash, when prosecuting attorney Emma Carlisle received an anonymous tip. Then today, a bombshell exploded when Ryan James received this on-the-air phone call from his brother-in-law, Chelsea’s younger brother, during the final segment of Jocks in the Morning, the top-rated sports talk-radio show in Boston.”