Injustice

by Lee Goodman

  I can hear voices and activity in the background of the phone call. “I’m putting together a team,” Isler says. “We can be there in twenty.”

  Now I hear shouting on the phone. I hear chaos. I hear Chip, who has apparently just been notified that his wife and Lizzy are in the path of this unhinged killer. Hearing Chip settles me a bit: He’s obviously in no condition to be running the operation, so the same has to be true about me. I feel myself surrender fully to Sabin. If Lizzy and Flora survive, it’ll be Rachel and Isler who pull it off. Chip and I are just obstacles.

  “Give me Lizzy’s cell number,” Isler says.

  I do.

  “One second,” he says, “we can locate her phone . . . okay . . . one more second. And hold on . . .”

  “Turn right up here,” I tell Sabin. She doesn’t seem to hear me, because she’s approaching the turn without slowing. I think we’ve already passed it, but she does something with the brake and the wheel, and we’ve abruptly made a ninety-degree right turn, and if I hadn’t had my shoulder strap on, I’d be in her lap.

  “There, we’ve got it,” Isler says. “It looks like Lizzy—or her phone, at least—is at home.”

  I think this is good. We know where she is, even if Dunbar does, too.

  “Do you have a cell number for Calvin Dunbar?” Isler asks.

  I find Calvin’s number and give it to Isler.

  “Good,” Isler says. “Now let’s see if we can locate him. How far are you from the house?”

  “About a minute,” I say.

  “Don’t approach yet. We’ll have his location in a second.”

  “Turn left up here,” I tell Sabin.

  The town is zoned rural estates. There are tracts of woods and horse pastures and hayfields. Flora’s house is out of sight from others. The road is serpentine.

  “I’ll drive past at normal speed,” Sabin says. “If he’s really melting down, anything could set him off. We’ll get a quick look.”

  “Got it,” Isler says. His voice startles me. I’d forgotten he was on the phone. “We’ve located his cell phone, and apparently he’s—”

  And the call cuts out. Cell signal lost. We’re on our own.

  “Up around the next curve,” I say.

  Sabin slows to normal driving speed. Flora’s house is on the right. We approach the house like Sunday drivers. Three cars are in the driveway: Flora’s, Lizzy’s, and parked askew and halfway onto the grass, the little blue Audi TT I saw in the Friendly City parking lot last night.

  Sabin cruises past, but the second we’re out of sight, she pulls over.

  “He’s in there,” I say. “We’ve got to do something.”

  Sabin unclips her seat belt and turns to face me. “If he came to kill Lizzy, there’s no time to wait for SWAT. He’s clearly not a sentimentalist. And if he’s really in full meltdown, it means he’s unpredictable and irrational.” Sabin reaches over to the glove box and takes out her gun and a folding knife. “I’m going in,” she says. “You wait here. When reinforcements show up, brief them.”

  I start babbling protests, but she ignores me. She unfolds the knife, then reaches up and presses the blade against the top of her head. “Scalp wounds,” she says, “they bleed like a son of a bitch.”

  With one unflinching motion, she draws the blade forward through her hair as though she’s defining the part. She waits a second, then musses her hair with both hands and rubs her face and arms until she’s covered in blood. She gets out, tucks her gun into the back of her slacks, and runs toward the driveway shrieking. “Help me!” she screams.

  I get out of the car and, keeping out of sight behind trees, watch her sprint toward the house.

  “I think he’s dead! Oh my God, he’s dead! I called 911. Oh my God, help me, call 911!”

  She gets to the door. Pounds on it, then disappears inside. Half a minute later, I hear a shot.

  I burst into the house. There’s blood everywhere. Calvin lies near the kitchen door with blood pouring from his right shoulder. Lizzy is hysterical. “She killed Calvin! She killed Calvin!” Lizzy screams, but this clearly isn’t the case, because now Calvin is sitting upright with his hands cuffed behind him. Flora is just screaming. And Rachel Sabin, looking like Carrie at the prom, is packing towels around Calvin’s shoulder.

  “It’s okay,” Sabin keeps yelling, “it’s okay. I’m with your dad. I’m with Nick.” She sees me and stands up. There’s a gun on the table. She points to it. “Calvin’s,” she says.

  I move Lizzy and Flora into the living room and try to calm them, then go to help Sabin with Calvin Dunbar. Soon—though it doesn’t feel soon—the yard fills with ambulances and police cars. Calvin gets packed into an ambulance with a couple of cops to babysit him and heads for the hospital. Rachel gets a head bandage. Flora and Lizzy get sedatives.

  The medics want to take Rachel to the hospital, but she refuses. “It’s just a scalp wound,” she says. “Scalp wounds bleed like a son of a bitch.”

  Dorsey shows up. Rachel tells him what happened. Flora is talking to another cop while she sits in Chip’s lap with his big arms around her. He looks awful. I sit in the living room with Lizzy and a detective I don’t recognize while Liz gives her version of events.

  “I was just here talking with Calvin when Detective Sabin showed up,” Lizzy says. “But I didn’t recognize her; she’d been in an accident.”

  “Talking about what?” I ask.

  “My research. My investigation,” Lizzy says.

  “Was Calvin acting strangely?”

  “Not really.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wanted to know who else I’d talked to about this legislative research.”

  “How long had he been here?”

  “Only a minute.”

  “Go on,” the detective says.

  “So Calvin started talking about how nice this house is, and he asked if it had a basement, because he’s doing research on furnace systems and energy efficiency. He wanted Mom and me to show him our heating system. And right then was when we heard the screaming.”

  “You mean Detective Sabin?”

  “I guess. And she was at the door and just came inside, and Mom was like—you know Mom—she was trying to help this woman who was hysterical and covered in blood. Then suddenly there was a gun.”

  “Detective Sabin’s or Calvin’s?”

  “Detective Sabin’s. And Calvin: He was standing beside me, but then he grabbed me and pulled me in front of him, and before I even knew what happened, there was a gunshot and Calvin was on the floor. It was all so fast.”

  “Did you ever see Calvin’s gun?”

  “Not till you came in, Dad.”

  The detective keeps working Lizzy for details, and then this detective and Dorsey and the detective who was questioning Flora compare the stories. The only significant difference among the three versions is that Sabin says Calvin grabbed Lizzy and pulled out his gun. Flora and Lizzy say they never saw Calvin’s gun until after Sabin shot him.

  Things settle down. The driveway clears out. Sabin takes me aside and says, “They want me in town, Nick. I’m not supposed to drive. Shall I have someone else drive, or do you want to take me?”

  Good question. I want to be here with Lizzy, but I want to get home and see Tina and Barnaby and to feel the belonging I feel with them. Maybe Tina will invite me to stay. Chip can watch over Flora and Liz this afternoon. I’ll come back out to check on them this evening.

  I walk to the street to get Sabin’s car. I bring a towel for all the blood. I have no doubt that Rachel saved their lives. Calvin came here wanting to kill Lizzy and anyone else who happened to be home; Rachel arrived with no more than minutes to spare. Calvin would have preferred to kill them in the basement, but if they’d resisted, I’m sure he wasn’t going to quibble.

  I don’t care whether Calvin had already pulled his gun when Rachel shot him. And if I have to, I’ll go into court and swear under oath that I saw the whole thing and
that Calvin was waving his gun like a madman before Sabin drew her weapon.

  I wipe down the steering wheel and seat of Rachel’s car. On the seat, I find a thick full-length lock of Rachel’s dark, wavy hair that got sliced off by the knife. I wipe it free of blood, then ball it up and press it to my cheek. I sniff it for the now familiar scent of her shampoo. I straighten the hair, coil it, and put it in my billfold. I’ll find a safe place where it won’t bother Tina but where I can have it—this memento of Sabin, who, whatever else she means to me, is now my daughter’s savior.

  I drive Sabin’s unmarked car into the driveway and walk into the house. The crime scene techs are in the kitchen, while Flora, Chip, Lizzy, Sabin, and Dorsey sit in the living room, appearing uncertain what to do next.

  I sit beside Lizzy on the couch. “Was he really going to kill us?” she asks.

  “I think so.”

  “Daddy,” she says. She pulls her feet up on the cushion and curls in toward me. I wrap my arms around her. We sit that way for a while. Neither of us speaks. We’re both in shock. Later this will pack the wallop of a nuclear explosion, but right now I’m having trouble making sense of it all. I need someone to tell me what to do.

  Lizzy sniffles and pushed me away. “I’ll be okay,” she says. “You’re wanted in town.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes,” Chip says. “The jury is back in the Kyle Runion murder.”

  CHAPTER 55

  Sabin sits beside me. Her head bandage makes her look like a Civil War soldier. She pulls down the visor and bobs around, trying to get a good look at herself in the mirror. She laughs.

  “What?”

  “There’s no good way to bandage a scalp wound,” she says. “But there were so many medics, I finally had to let one of them do something.”

  After that, there is too much to talk about, so we don’t talk about anything. As we get farther from Turner and closer to the city, I think less about Calvin Dunbar and more about Henry Tatlock. I’m thinking about the defense Monica Brill put on. Upton was right: The weakness in her case was that she never offered the jury a good theory for who killed Lydia if it wasn’t Henry. So even though the case technically has nothing to do with Lydia, and even though Monica came up with a believable story of how Henry’s DNA got mixed up with Kyle Runion’s remains, I’m certain the jury has voted to convict Henry. They will convict him because they think he killed his fiancée, which makes them disbelieve Monica’s carefully constructed story about Philbin and Philbin’s sister and Philbin’s simmering, festering rage toward violent men.

  Timing is everything. It was everything last night in the Friendly City parking lot. It was everything today in the kitchen of Flora’s house, and it is everything in Henry Tatlock’s trial. If today’s events with Calvin Dunbar had taken place a week ago, or if Henry’s trial had ended a week from now, Monica Brill would have had a perfect defense: Henry Tatlock was just the innocent cuckold in Lydia’s long-term affair with a homicidal psychopath. If the jury had known this, then Philbin’s dogged pursuit of Henry would have looked irrational and, worse, just plain mean. The jury would have eaten up the idea of Henry being twice victimized—once by Calvin Dunbar, once by Detective Philbin.

  It’s too late now. Nothing about what happened today is grounds for a new trial. And even if Henry were to get a new trial for any reason, Monica’s defense required the element of surprise. Now that the surprise is spent, Gregory Nations would have a thousand ways to head her off. Her case would be dead before the first witness is sworn.

  Timing is everything. The trial is over. All that’s left is the reading of the verdict. Henry has lost.

  “So, about Philbin,” I say to Rachel.

  She looks over at me and smiles sadly. She knows what I’m asking. She doesn’t want to talk about it. She doesn’t want to answer my question, and maybe she wouldn’t have had to yesterday, but many things have changed between us now.

  “Could he have done it?” I ask.

  She doesn’t answer me for a few seconds. Then she sighs. It is her surrender. The resistance goes out of her. “Philly’s complicated,” she says.

  I wait.

  “He pretends he’s Gibraltar,” she says. “Pretends nothing shakes him. But believe me, that man bleeds. If he ever got onto the couch, he’d never get up again. But talking about shit isn’t his style. Philly’s too old-school to get shrunk.”

  She’s silent. I wait.

  “If I knew something, I’d tell you,” she says. “Philly knows I would. And you know it, too, right?”

  I smile at her. I guess I do know it. At least in a case like this, where the only evidence against Henry is what Philbin is accused of planting, I believe Rachel would rat him out if she knew. “So the next logical question,” I say, “is whether you think Philbin is capable of planting the evidence.”

  She doesn’t smile at me this time. She just looks at me with a pained expression. Her answer is clear: Of course he’s capable. Maybe she even suspects him of it. But it’s all too late.

  News vans are in front of the courthouse again. It’s just after seven in the evening, but nobody is heading home. The judge has scheduled court to resume at seven-thirty for reading the verdict. There are more black sedans than usual. I add Sabin’s to the line of cars in the POLICE ONLY parking, and we walk the gauntlet of reporters into the building. With her bandage, and some of the dried blood crusted brown on her face, a cameraman runs after her, shouting questions.

  Inside the courthouse, I see Tina. She sees me. She sees Rachel. She runs back through the metal detector and into my arms. She clings to me. Tears run freely down her cheeks. “Lizzy called,” she says. “Flora called. Everybody called.”

  Tina steps back and looks at Sabin. “Look at you,” she says. She touches the blood on Rachel’s face and strokes the bandage like it’s a puppy. “Thank you,” she whispers.

  I hand Rachel her car keys, and she leaves us. Tina and I get into the elevator and go up to our floor. Everything about this feels wrong, and I don’t know what to do or what to think. Is Henry actually guilty or not? Calvin Dunbar killed Lydia; Patrick Philbin may well have planted Henry’s DNA with Kyle’s remains. I want to slow things down, but this train has lost its brakes. Halfway down the hallway, I stop and face Tina. Fear and tears streak her face. I want her in my arms again, but I don’t want us to be a spectacle.

  “I think Henry is innocent,” I say.

  She nods.

  Everyone is outside the courtroom. There are many FBI agents; too many. This is a state case, but Isler and several of his colleagues stand around with suit jackets bulging at holster level.

  All the usuals are here: the Runions and their entourage, Peggy Devaney, Philbin, Upton, cops from Orchard Grove, and the local cops. Oddly, the one I gravitate to is Arthur Cunningham. He seems so hapless, so uninvolved in the whole thing. He was a simple man out enjoying the woods when his dog led him to a front-row seat for this special pageant of hell. I’m like Arthur. I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t want any of this.

  “Hi, Arthur,” I say.

  He puts his hand out and I grab it in both of mine and our eyes meet and I think he understands what I’m saying. I’m saying that poor Kyle Runion is the central victim, but in a way, all of us have been scarred. Arthur is a victim and I’m a victim and Lydia and Tina and Detective Philbin and maybe even Henry Tatlock—all of us whose lives will never really get back to normal.

  “Nick,” someone says. It’s Upton. My moment of reverie with Arthur is broken. Upton has Isler with him. Isler sees something in my eyes—gratitude for his part in today’s drama—but it will have to wait until later. “Step over here,” Upton says. They guide me away from the crowd.

  “Do you remember Nathan Miller?” Upton asks.

  “Miller? Is that the kid from Ohio who disappeared a couple of years before Kyle?”

  “Right,” Upton says. “There were similarities to the Runion case. And you might recall there was some
trace . . .”

  “Mitochondrial DNA,” Isler says.

  “Right,” Upton says. “Mitochondrial DNA that may or may not have come from the perp. It didn’t really matter who it was from, because it was such a poor sample . . .”

  “Really degraded,” Isler says.

  “So degraded it was useless for identifying a suspect in a database of any size,” Upton says.

  “It was forgotten about,” Isler says. “Until now. But a short strand like that can be a good indicator for testing against a single known suspect.”

  “You tested it against Henry?” I say.

  Isler nods.

  “And?”

  Isler motions with his head toward the FBI agents just now walking into the courtroom. “Crossing state lines makes it federal,” he says.

  “It was a match?”

  “A perfect match,” Isler answers.

  “So Henry’s definitely guilty?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank God,” I say.

  “It doesn’t matter what this jury decides,” Isler says. “We’re arresting Henry Tatlock as soon as the verdict is read: federal charges for the murder, kidnapping, and sexual abuse of Nathan Miller.”

  We are called into the courtroom. I sit beside Tina. She grabs my hand and intertwines her fingers with mine, squeezing with everything she’s got. The jury is brought in. For the FBI agents and for Upton and for me, there is no suspense. The verdict has become nearly irrelevant.

  Judge Ballard smacks the gavel and goes through the formalities. Then he has the jury foreman stand: “Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honor.”

  The judge has Henry stand and says, “Mr. Foreman, would you please read the verdict.”

  The foreman unfolds his scrap of paper and says, “On the charge of murder in the first degree, we the jury find the defendant . . .”

  PART III

  CHAPTER 56

  It hasn’t been easy. I still have my suite at Friendly City, but I’m spending more and more time at home. The important thing, according to Tina and the couples counselor, is to avoid any more upheavals until we can establish a rock-solid rhythm and flow to our lives. I don’t understand any of this, but what they (Tina and the counselor) tell me is that we had a toxic mix of Tina’s issues combined with a series of traumatic events, combined with my response to those events, which were the product of my issues.