Fatal Option

by Chris Beakey

  “Are you okay?”

  He grabbed her wrist and yanked her arm upward, over her head. Bright red splotches appeared on his cheeks and his jaw was tightly clenched.

  “Kieran —”

  “I’m not ready for you to see me…like that.”

  “Like what?”

  He held her wrist in a vise-like grip, his face twisted into a scowl. The pressure became painful. She was an instant away from asking him to release her when he grabbed her other hand and brought her other arm up over her head and clamped her wrists together against the hard floor.

  “Kieran, that hurts.”

  He looked into her eyes, and nodded slightly. Then without relieving any of the pressure he lowered himself over her again. His penis was fully erect and pressing against her as he took one hand away from her wrists and yanked her underwear down, shifting his body a few inches to the side and probing her more deeply with his fingers.

  Her breath came in gasps as he slipped his tongue back between her lips. She tried to look into his eyes but they were closed, as if he had gone into some kind of trance. She looked past him, toward the ceiling, where the pot smoke lingered. It seemed like half an hour ago that they had put the bong down but the smoke was denser and grayer than before.

  It also had a slightly different smell, a vaguely familiar scent she could not place. She turned her head toward the low table where Kieran had set the bong down. The water in the pipe was low and there was no longer any smoke coming out.

  But the smoke on the ceiling was still there, and thickening.

  She shifted slightly, for a better look. “Kieran?”

  He held her firmly down. The smell was stronger now. It made her think of the Jeep, the erratic rumble under the hood.

  The smell of rubber, she thought. Burning.

  All at once she realized what was happening.

  Clothes in the dryer. Burning rubber from the dryer.

  The air exploded with the sudden shriek of the smoke alarm.

  Kieran jerked up, his eyes wide with confusion.

  “I think it’s the dryer!” she called out, her voice lost in the overwhelming loudness of the alarm. Kieran put his hands against his ears and squeezed his eyes tightly shut, as if the sound was causing some kind of unbearable pain in his head.

  And then he was up and running, back into the hallway wearing nothing but his underwear, shirt and socks. She sat up as the acrid smoke scratched the back of her throat, and saw Aidan in her peripheral vision as he ran into the room with his hands covering his ears in a gesture that mirrored Kieran’s, his mouth working in spasms as if he was screaming.

  Aidan had on gray denim jeans and a bright red long sleeved thermal undershirt. Different clothes from what he’d been wearing all night. He was shaking his head from side to side.

  “Aidan!” she called out as he dropped to his knees, as if he had been crippled by the sound. She started toward him, her arms raised, hoping to calm him down, then tripped over one of the floor pillows. Her arms partially broke her fall but her head struck the corner of the low table with the bong, toppling it.

  Pain shot through her forehead as she slowly stood back up.

  She looked back toward the hallway, where Kieran stood with a cylindrical fire extinguisher, looking enraged as he sent a rush of white foam directly into the closet that held the washer and dryer. There was another large poof of gray smoke. He waved his hands through it, took a closer look at the machines, and then disappeared down the hallway.

  Seconds later, the alarm stopped. But the ringing continued between her ears for several seconds, vibrating painfully before fading away.

  Kieran appeared in the doorway, and ran his hands through his hair. “Jesus fuck,” he said, then met her eyes. “What happened to you?”

  She felt wetness on her forehead, and reached up to touch it. Her fingertips came away slick with blood.

  “I fell,” she said. “But I think I’m okay.”

  She looked into Kieran’s eyes, expecting to see concern, but the sight of the wound only seemed to make him angrier as he stepped back into the kitchen and came out with a towel and tossed it to her. She tried to catch it and missed. The room tilted and her legs felt weak as she leaned down to get it.

  She stepped carefully over to the couch and sat down.

  “The dryer is second-hand,” Kieran said. “I did some rewiring yesterday when I installed it. I must have really fucked it up.”

  She tried to smile as she dabbed at the blood and imagined herself saying Kieran you cuss like a sailor, and wondering what it would be like to go back to school on Monday after this strange night of passion. Plus a weird near-death experience.

  She would have laughed if not for the lingering rage in Kieran’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The look of disgust stayed on his face as he turned back toward the closet.

  She remembered the way Aidan had cowered, his hands covering his ears, and looked toward the hallway that led to his room. “Is Aidan okay?”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “He ran in here for a second when the alarm went off. He looked terrified, and he was covering his ears as if he was hurt.”

  “He’s sensitive to certain sounds.” Kieran went into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. “High-pitched noises make him crazy.”

  “Is he back in his room?”

  “He better be. Aidan?”

  She heard him call out twice more, then heard the banging sound of a window being slammed down.

  “Goddamn it!” Kieran yelled.

  She stepped closer to the dying fire. “What’s wrong?”

  Kieran rushed back into the room, grabbed his jeans.

  “Aidan’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “He crawled out his window—probably to get away from the noise. He’s out there now. In the snow.”

  John Caruso worked the Cherilynn Jenkins murder deep into the night, reserving his last fifteen minutes alone in the small office that he normally shared with Detective Niles for a final review of everything that he did and did not know.

  There were fingerprints on the outside of the first floor bedroom window, but they did not match any offenders in the FBI’s IAFIS database. Caruso wasn’t surprised. Given the level of preparation involved in the crime—the use of the stun gun, the wadded cloth, and the entry during what was probably the darkest time of night—he was certain the killer had worn gloves.

  The footprints in the plush pile carpeting were only marginally more useful. They were from a common make of Timberland boots, men’s size 11, available at thousands of retail and online outlets worldwide.

  The initial autopsy results verified most of what he had expected. The victim had indeed been sexually assaulted, which was probably easier once she was immobilized by the Taser. Her cheekbones had been fractured by the brutal beating and the hyoid bone at the top of her neck had been crushed; most likely, the coroner suggested, because the killer had climbed onto her chest and put the full weight of his body into the strangulation. There were striations on the whites of her eyes, indicating she had managed to struggle in the moments leading up to her death.

  Unfortunately, there wasn’t any skin underneath her fingernails, and although semen was found on the bed sheets it would take at least a week before a DNA analysis came back. Which meant there was no physical evidence that could be readily matched to his leading suspect, a fellow teacher who was well-known to the Frederick County Sheriff’s Department.

  Of course that hadn’t stopped him from making an impromptu visit to Kieran O’Shea’s office at Langford Secondary. It had been predictably awkward, initiated with a handshake and small talk about Kieran and Aidan’s well-being, followed by the direct questions that had triggered a nervous blinking of Kieran’s eyes as he claimed no more
than an acquaintance with Cherilynn Jenkins, and asserted he’d been home throughout the previous night.

  Now, as the day drew to a close, Caruso wondered what might have happened if he’d been more direct with his questions. If Kieran—in a moment of emotional weakness—might have given in to the history between them and confessed to the crime.

  Unfortunately, that hadn’t happened, and since he was admittedly jumping to conclusions based on conjecture, he knew he had to keep his mind open to other possibilities; other men who might have had a reason to rape and murder a beautiful young woman in a carefully-planned crime driven by an obvious sense of rage.

  Easier said than done, he thought, as he shut the computer down and looked out at the swiftly falling snow, then made his way down to the parking lot. The roads were icy despite the ample coating of salt and the early runs of the city’s plows, but the snow tires on his Chevy Blazer gave him a confidence-boosting amount of traction as he headed up to his home on Short Mountain. Half an hour later he reached the fork in the road that gave him two alternatives: a straight shot to the left that would deliver him to his cabin just four miles away. Or a veer to the right for the more circuitous journey that would take him around the curve and the view of Brighton Gorge.

  He had been taking the roundabout way more often during the investigation into Lori Porter’s death; had become accustomed to slowing down and imagining her last moments before her car overshot the curve. Despite the seemingly intentional nature of what had happened and the suicide note that had been discovered afterward, he would never believe the woman had taken her own life.

  In his heart he knew it was fear that had propelled her; fear of a car—or a truck—chasing her and the fear of what she had probably seen by the side of the road just moments earlier, less than two miles from Kieran O’Shea’s mountain house. That was where the body of Danica Morris had been found.

  There was nothing that overtly tied the two deaths together, no hard evidence to prove his theory that Lori had come upon the woman being attacked, or perhaps already dead, being seen by the killer, and then chased as she tried to drive away. But it made circumstantial and common sense as he thought of the steep, winding road that led to the sharp curve, the short and nearly useless guardrail, and the eighty-foot plunge to the swollen creek at the bottom.

  Tonight, once again, he slowed and looked off to the right as he went around the curve even though he knew it was a waste of time. The guardrail was invisible in the rapidly falling snow, and at 12:30 a.m. he needed to be home sleeping, preparing for the next step in the investigation. It would happen tomorrow, with a request for Kieran O’Shea to come into the station and be fingerprinted and agree to another round of questions.

  The questions would be tougher this time, and more focused on the absolute quest for truth, because he was almost certain that Kieran had gotten away with murder before.

  Sara stepped around the foam on the hallway floor and looked at the narrow space behind the clothes dryer to make sure the fire was completely extinguished, then grabbed some towels from the bathroom and did her best to mop up the mess. Kieran’s house looked very different with the lights turned all the way up. The paint was faded and there were cobwebs in the corners underneath the ceiling. With the upended bong and lingering smell of pot the whole place had a sordid, dirty feel to it now.

  It also felt suddenly colder, as if the heating system had cut out. Anxious to get warm, she put all of her clothes back on, and then slipped into the bathroom for a glance in the mirror. She looked pale and tired. She doubted she and Kieran could recapture the mood that the shrieking alarm had blasted away. She thought about the Visine she kept in her purse, a must for countering those moments when the sudden sting of tears reddened the whites of her eyes; thought of the burgundy gloss that would bring some much needed luster to her bloodless lips—

  And then she thought of her mother, watching her. The feeling intensified as she looked into her eyes in the mirror, the shape and shade of green being the main physical trait that they shared. She crossed her arms over her chest, remembered the last time her mother hugged her, on the last day of her life, which followed an afternoon of shopping for clothes. They had come home empty-handed; everything she had tried on had felt awkward for her body. “Don’t worry baby, there are a lot of worse things than having such big boobs,” her mother had said with a laugh. There had also been numerous disagreements about what to buy; Sara had already begun gravitating toward the blacks and maroons and the occasional dash of lavender, which her mother had pronounced as “depressing,” and hours of perusing the racks turned up nothing to make her the least bit excited about starting the year at a new school, where she already knew she wouldn’t fit in.

  The hug had come as a surprise, just as she was turning to walk up the stairs. It had felt like an impulse, with a hint of desperation. Sara had hugged her back, acquiescing with a growing sense of melancholy as the embrace lingered. Her mother’s eyes were teary when she finally let her go, and murmured, “It’s okay by me if you want to be your own person, baby. It’s good to be different.”

  It was a strange moment. From any other mother it would have sounded like a declaration of pride, but she had felt something behind the words; a reluctant reckoning of the distance between them. Then, because she had wanted nothing more than to be alone with her journal and her music, she had broken the embrace and was heading up the stairs when her mother called her name and suggested a “girls night” with carry-out Chinese and cards, a supposedly “perfect” way to spend the evening.

  “Nah,” she had answered, with an off-handedness that sounded unintentionally dismissive, and pretended not to notice the shadow of disappointment on her mother’s face. Then in a moment that felt even more callous she had retreated without another word and shut her door as soon as she stepped into her room, putting up a barrier to halt any further discussion. She spent the next hour reading meaningless Facebook postings from friends at her former school who she knew she’d never see again, imagining how easy it would have been for her mother as a teenager to step into a completely new environment; how easily she would have connected with new people who would have loved to meet her. The thought had filled her with a mixture of envy and sadness that she knew, from experience, could only be dealt with by spending several hours alone.

  She remembered only a few details of the night that followed: the note on the message board that her mother left about going to see her friend April, who lived up on the mountain. The sound of thunder and the rain battering the roof. Looking out her bedroom window and watching her mother’s Lexus driving off into the night.

  God, I’m so sorry, she thought, as if it mattered now. She rubbed her eyes and tried to ignore the knowledge that would always be with her; the dreadful fact that she had been at least partially responsible for her mother’s death; that if not for her own petty jealousy and moodiness she never would have left the house.

  As usual the memory brought a sudden rush of tears. She gripped the front edge of the sink, summoning the mental image of a thick marble wall stopping the sadness, like a giant dam holding back a flood. The image had come to her on the first day back at school after the accident. All day she had fixated on it, willing it to push her sorrow to the back of her mind. For the most part it had proven to be a useful mental device.

  She needed it to work for her now. The last thing she wanted was for Kieran and Aidan to return and find her weeping uncontrollably.

  “Just think of something else,” she whispered, and looked out the window that faced the woods, seeing nothing but a snowbound whiteness under the night sky. It sounded as if Aidan had run out without a coat. If he were a normal boy he couldn’t have gone far. Yet she knew that one of the afflictions of his autism was a bizarre insensitivity to cold—Kieran had told her that he had to remind his brother to wear his parka no matter how cold it got outside.

  She crossed her arms
over her chest and leaned closer to draw some warmth from the fading fire. Then to pass the time she cleaned up the pot residue and straightened the pillows on the couch to bring some sense of order to the room. Aidan would be half-frozen by the time Kieran brought him back, so she took two logs from the basket and put them on top of the embers.

  She looked at her watch. It had been almost twenty minutes since Kieran had gone out. She thought of the landscape she had driven past on the way up to the house—nothing but thick woods and winding roads around the gorge—and hoped that he had had some idea of which direction to look.

  You should have gone out with him, she thought. You could have split up and searched different areas.

  But here she was, doing nothing.

  So call him. Find out what’s going on.

  She went back into the main room and reached into the side pocket of her purse.

  The phone wasn’t there. She tried to remember what she had done with it after texting her father. She thought of Aidan, asking to see it a few weeks earlier; remembered his fascination with it and remembered Kieran telling her, “He’s crazy about ‘em because he can’t have one. He sees all these kids at school with them and it makes him feel more alone. I feel guilty but I know he’d lose it and I can’t afford to keep replacing them. So I made a rule.”

  She sat back down on the couch and looked toward the hallway again. There had been three doors besides the one that led outside. One for Aidan’s room. One for what was probably a closet. One that had to be for Kieran’s room.

  It’s probably just messy. That’s why he didn’t show it to you.

  Right, she thought. Keep telling yourself that. She expected the real reason came down to privacy; Kieran wasn’t ready for her to see his bedroom, not before he led her there, as a sign of his willingness to bring her even farther into his life. But now, in the wake of their intimacy, it was easy to believe they had crossed a threshold; easy to believe that was where they would have been at this moment if not for the interruption.