Innocent Bystander

by Glenn Richards

“Talk to us,” Farrow said through clenched teeth. “Save your daughter. Before she gets in any deeper.”

  Mr. Blankenship steepled his fingers as he bowed his head. Without looking up, he said, “I can’t help you. Now, unless you have a warrant for my arrest, get the hell out of my office.”

  * * *

  Desmond set a gray, hard-plastic trash can on the blacktop beside its twin. He found it difficult to comprehend how two people managed to generate so much garbage every seven days.

  Straddling the lip at the end of his driveway, he searched north and south for Ryder’s car. A pair of headlights followed a bend in the road. When the vehicle appeared, he recognized it as his neighbor’s minivan.

  The Honda Odyssey braked as it neared him. He waved, and Mrs. Heinz and each of her three young children reflected his greeting. The always pleasant young mother guided her minivan into the driveway across the street.

  Two screaming children burst from the vehicle. Five year-old Jonathan charged toward him with seven year-old Caroline a step behind.

  Desmond trotted across the road in plenty of time to intercept them before they reached the street. People drove much too fast nowadays, and he had witnessed far too many cars fly around the corner at close to forty miles per hour.

  “Uncle Connor,” the two children cried in unison. Jonathon hopped into Desmond’s arms. The professor’s spine took exception to forty-five additional pounds.

  “Look what we got,” Caroline said and shoved a Snickers bar in his face.

  “Looks delicious,” he said and returned the boy to the blacktop. “After dinner, right?”

  “Yes,” Jonathon said, an epic frown displacing a radiant grin.

  Each child grabbed one of Desmond’s hands and dragged him up the driveway. Both children skipped as he labored to keep pace.

  Moments like this offered a painful reminder of a life he had passed up. When he and his wife had exchanged wedding vows twelve years ago, both were in their late thirties. After a great deal of discussion, and gallons of shed tears, they had made the difficult decision not to start a family. He would focus his efforts on his career, and his wife would do the same with hers. Her job involved finding worthy causes to support, primarily by donating enormous amounts of cash from her family’s fortune. These days, it seemed, there was no shortage of worthy causes in need of money.

  As he gazed down at the two bouncing heads beside him, the irony of a five-bedroom ranch with only one bed struck him with renewed force. Never would he be granted the opportunity to play catch with his son, share his love of the physical world with his daughter, or explain the intricacies of time travel to his grandchildren.

  If somehow he lived to see a time machine constructed during his life, he had at least one reason to venture into the past.

  He now stood alongside Mrs. Heinz. While performing a juggling act with a pair of grocery bags, she extracted her wriggling two-year-old daughter from her car seat.

  “Here,” Desmond said, reaching for the bags. “Let me get those.”

  “It’s okay. I can manage.” She turned to her son. “Actually, Jonathon, you should be helping.”

  But before she’d even finished speaking, the boy had spun and darted up the first few steps.

  “Please, let me,” Desmond said. He wrapped an arm around the two bags, then reached inside the minivan and snatched a third.

  Mrs. Heinz cajoled Caroline onto the walkway. She offered Desmond an exhausted smile. “Thank you.”

  “Anytime.”

  “Unbelievable what happened at the school the other day,” she said.

  “You found the perfect word for it.”

  They stopped at the front door.

  Mrs. Heinz fumbled for the house key on her chain. “Jenny Hunter’s daughter’s a freshman at SUNY. She said both students were in your class.”

  “And I thought they were friends.”

  Mrs. Heinz elbowed the door open. Desmond trailed her into the house and down the hall.

  “Could you ever have imagined one of your students doing something like that? Someone you’d seen every week for almost a year?”

  “Actually, I had the young man in a class several years ago.” He set the bags on the kitchen counter.

  The woman’s body shuddered. She attempted to place the two-year-old on the floor. The child would have none of it, and wrapped her legs around the back of her mother’s knees. Mrs. Heinz hoisted the child onto her hip. “Pushing his friend off a balcony. I don’t think I could deal with it. Someone I know doing something like that.” She shook her head with disbelief. “And then that poor girl they found in his trunk.”

  “To be honest, I’m still struggling with that one.”

  “I hope you’ll be all right,” she said.

  “I will.”

  Desmond walked down the hallway with the young mother at his side.

  As he reached for the doorknob, the back of his right hand brushed the side of her left breast. Rather than retract his hand, he forced it forward and opened the door.

  Surely she would understand when he told her it was an accident.

  Maybe she had not noticed.

  Maybe he should pretend he had not noticed, as though he had brushed her shoulder or the back of her arm.

  “Thanks again for your help,” she said, as though nothing awkward had occurred. “Please take good care of yourself.”

  “I plan to.” He descended the nine slate steps and paused on the final one. Across the street, parked just behind his garage door, sat a Cadillac XTS.

  In the fading light the Caddy looked as if it had just been driven off a showroom floor. He knew Ryder was not hurting for cash. Could eliminating people for money be a lucrative business, or did he have an additional source of income?

  Desmond started down the Heinz’s driveway.

  As the man he’d met through his barber exited the Cadillac, Desmond marveled at how easy it had been to employ his services. He’d foolishly considered eliminating Henri himself and had mentioned to his barber, a man who socialized with people from every imaginable background, his desire for an untraceable gun. After fabricating a story that he’d received death threats from a student he had failed, the barber suggested an alternative. He scribbled a name—Desmond still did not know if Ryder was the man’s first or last name—and phone number on a slip of paper.

  For thirty-six hours he had agonized over whether or not to call. He still considered killing Henri himself, but had never murdered anyone. Each time he contemplated it, his heart leapt, his ears buzzed, and his palms turned clammy. This intrigued him as much as it frightened him.

  Of course the likelihood existed that Henri would kill himself after several visits from Audrey, but no guarantee. How could he have guessed Henri would turn out to be so unstable he would leap from his balcony after a single visit?

  In the end he had called Ryder and arranged to have him eliminate Henri if necessary. When his student chose to take his own life, he found other work for his new acquaintance.

  Dumping Audrey’s body in the trunk of Burnett’s car seemed like the perfect solution to two problems. The intensity and accusatory nature of his student’s questions the day after Henri’s suicide revealed the extent of his suspicion. Never could he have imagined Burnett would prove such a dogged opponent.

  He arrived at the rear of the Caddy. It appeared as showroom-new as it had from across the street. He half expected to see a price sticker on one of the rear windows.

  “You got an unmarked cop car at the end of the street, for Christ’s sake,” Ryder said. “They’ll catch him long before he gets here.”

  Dressed in Tommy Hilfiger blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a navy sport-jacket, Desmond thought he could easily be mistaken for a professor or businessman. Ryder’s neatly trimmed hair looked as if it had been cut this morning.

  “And if they don’t, no one need ever know he was here.”

  Ryder pursed his lips and cursed to himself. The two men en
tered the ranch through the garage.

  Once inside, Desmond led him down a hall and into his office. A cherry wood desk sat near the center of the room, surrounded by a filing cabinet and bookshelves. A single, unframed photo hung on each wall. Action shots of lions, elephants, and other animals, each photograph had been snapped on an African safari.

  “Tell me how you know Burnett will show,” Ryder said.

  Desmond opened a small cabinet attached to his desk. A safe rested inside. He punched in the code and tugged on the door. Reaching in with both hands, he withdrew a laptop computer.

  “You stole the man’s computer?”

  “I’m borrowing his friend’s.” He set it down in the center of his desk as gingerly as if it were a million dollar sculpture on loan from the Met.

  “And you know he’s coming for it?”

  Desmond nodded. The mere sight of Henri’s computer awakened his favorite daydream, where several prestigious scientific journals compare him to or proclaim him the next Einstein. His days of mediocrity would soon be over, though not as soon as he would prefer.

  “If he needs the thing so badly,” Ryder said, “just get rid of it.”

  “I can’t.” He didn’t appreciate the reminder of how he still needed it, but need it he did. He was determined to find every paper Henri had begun, but abandoned; every concept he had started, but rejected; every idea he’d deemed worthy of writing down, but forgotten.

  The squeak of the front door surprised Desmond. He knew it was his wife; he just hadn’t expected her for another half hour. He raced out to greet her. She had just slipped off her jacket when he joined her at the coat closet.

  “Whose car is that?” she asked as she draped her jacket around a hanger.

  “A friend from my acting class. We have a couple scenes we need to rehearse from the play.”

  The frown on her face communicated she realized what was coming next. “I wish you’d told me sooner.”

  “I know. I apologize. I completely forgot.”

  “I won’t be a bother this time.”

  “Please, you’re tougher than that New York Times theater critic they just hired.”

  The hint of a smile came to her face. She turned to conceal it. “I won’t even listen.”

  “You know how I feel.”

  She removed her jacket from the hanger. “How late do you think you’ll be?”

  “Late. You want to stay at your sister’s?”

  “I guess so,” she said, not sounding thrilled at the prospect. “Let me grab a few things from the bathroom.”

  “Is there anything you need me to get?”

  She shook her head and trudged down the hallway.

  He returned to his office.

  “Acting class?” Ryder said with a smirk. He lifted Henri’s laptop off the desk.

  “Please,” Desmond said and took three giant steps across the room. “Put that down.”

  He guided the computer, still in Ryder’s hands, onto the desk. Once Ryder released it, Desmond wandered to the window. He drew the curtain aside and glanced back at his desk. Anyone standing in the yard could see the computer.

  He stared out into the growing darkness. No question Burnett would come, he had to. It was just a question of when.

  CHAPTER 37

  Burnett and Emma stood near the intersection of Hamilton Road and a cross street. A quarter of a mile down Hamilton waited Professor Desmond’s home. He examined the two vehicles parked along the bend in the road. The Tesla Roadster twenty-five feet from the corner probably wasn’t a police car. The dark Ford sedan thirty feet farther down very well could be. He maintained a discreet distance from the nearest streetlamp as he led Emma through the intersection.

  With a tense silence accompanying them, they pressed on to the next street. They circled the block and approached Desmond’s house from the south.

  Burnett crouched alongside a hedge between Desmond’s expansive brick and stone ranch and the neighboring Tudor. The majority of lights in the professor’s house were lit.

  “You ready?” Emma asked.

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  “Not a very good liar, are you?”

  “Never have been.”

  “You know how to get the screen off its track if you need to?”

  “I’ll figure it out. Just make sure he doesn’t set the alarm once you’re inside.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  Burnett couldn’t shake the feeling they had almost no chance of success. At the very least they would get caught; at the worst they would end up … but he wouldn’t permit his mind to journey down that dark alley.

  He considered just a handful of the countless reasons to scrap the whole ridiculous scheme. He tried to convince himself that if he had more time he could come up with a better plan, but there was no time.

  Emma stood and took a step toward the ranch. Instinctively he reached out and blocked her path.

  “What are we waiting for?” she asked. “If this asshole’s the reason Henri’s dead, then every second he’s free is a crime.”

  He bent his arm. The time had come for action.

  “Just give me a couple minutes to get inside and get him talking,” she said. “And his wife, if she’s there.”

  “Good luck.”

  He watched from behind the hedge as she neared the front porch. When she stopped at the door and rang the bell a queasy sensation welled in the pit of his stomach. I’ll never see her again. He tried to dismiss the notion and focus on the task at hand.

  The sick feeling in his stomach swelled when Desmond opened the door. Emma and the physics professor exchanged several words and he invited her in.

  As the couple of minutes he was supposed to wait ticked by, he noticed the apprehension he’d felt transforming into a readiness for action. Coming up was the moment that would determine whether or not Desmond had the computer. The fear that the professor didn’t have the computer because he wasn’t involved, or had gotten rid of it, crept into his mind again. He refused to indulge it.

  For Burnett, this alone was extraordinary. Had this been just days ago, his mind would have dwelt upon everything that could go wrong, all but immobilizing him. Instead he stood focused, a soldier ready to charge into battle. This clarity of thought surprised him.

  He stole across the yard beneath a moonless sky. When he arrived at the window of a well-lit room, he pressed his back against the shutter. He leaned forward, craned his neck, and peered inside. It appeared to be a storage room. Nowhere did he see Henri’s computer.

  He shuffled to the next window. A low-watt desk lamp illuminated three-quarters of the room; the rest remained in shadow. Henri Laroche’s computer sat in the middle of a desk. The low light, combined with his viewing angle, made it difficult to be certain, but he believed he recognized his friend’s Grateful Dead decal across the back of the screen.

  The window was raised on the 55-degree evening. He glanced back to make certain he wasn’t being watched.

  With his index finger he pressed the screen. It bowed inward. He had no clue how to remove it from its track. In the upper right corner he spied a small tear. He thrust his index finger through, pulled, and ripped away nearly half the screen.

  He tore off the remainder of the screen. He grasped the inside of the window frame and attempted to pull himself up. It proved difficult to gain leverage. Sliding his hands along the frame, he found a position that afforded better leverage. He pulled himself through the window and landed on the floor with a minor thud.

  With both hands he grabbed the window sill and hauled himself up. He jerked the curtains shut, then crossed the room and eased the office door closed.

  He approached the desk, folded the screen partway down, and stared at the Grateful Dead decal. He unplugged the computer. Then he pushed the screen down until it latched. After he’d tucked it beneath his arm, an alarming thought struck him: this is far too easy. Once benign shadows along the wall now assumed ominous shapes. The open c
loset filled him with a sense of foreboding. Someone could be hiding there.

  A dark shadow bathed the far corner of the office. He almost sensed someone beside the bookcase. At this point it no longer mattered. Committed to a course of action, he strode toward the window.

  “That your computer, son?” a disembodied voice asked from the darkness.

  Burnett didn’t recognize the speaker. He stepped back and set the computer on the edge of the desk. “No.”

  “Then you were right to put it back.”

  “It’s not his either.”

  A man stepped from the shadows, a 9mm Beretta clutched in his gloved left hand. He raised the weapon and pointed it at Burnett’s chest. “It’s on his desk. His office, his house. Good enough for me.”

  “It belonged to one of his students,” Burnett said.

  “Why doesn’t he come get it?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Lame excuse.”

  The gunman waved the Beretta at the door. Burnett plodded over and opened it. With a shove, the gunman forced him down the hall and into the living room.

  Desmond and Emma rose from the sofa in unison and stared as the two men entered the room. Her look of dismay appeared stamped in place.

  The gunman trailed Burnett, the Beretta jammed into his back.

  “You’re nothing if not predictable,” Desmond said to Burnett.

  “You’re not,” Burnett replied. “Who the hell are you? The man I know could never do this.”

  “Henri Laroche brought it on himself,” Desmond said.

  “How dare you say that,” Emma said.

  The gunman seized her arm and positioned her beside Burnett.

  “He needed help,” Burnett said. “Instead, you used his nightmare against him. You knew how stressed he was about failing your class.”

  “You wired?” the gunman asked. He yanked Burnett’s shirt over his face and patted him down. He found nothing and lowered the shirt. “What about you?” He turned to Emma.

  “I’ll check her,” Desmond said. He slid his hands beneath her shirt, to her modest protest, and took his time patting her down. “She’s clean.”

  The scowl she gave him must have registered. Hair on the back of his neck popped up.