Fatal Option
Page 23
“Out of the car!”
Niles then shoved his wallet back into the side pocket of his coat and gripped the gun in a shooting stance and pointed it at the driver of the Rover, as if the occupants of the car posed some kind of threat. The driver’s side door opened and a teenaged girl stepped out. She wore a white ski jacket with a fur collar and had long, blonde hair, whipped sideways by a gust of wind as she raised her hands.
Madison, he thought. Sara’s friend.
Niles grabbed her forearm and pulled her away from the car and continued holding the gun out in front of him as he walked quickly around the front.
The passenger side door opened.
His son stepped out.
“Ken!” he called out without thinking. Niles jerkily looked his way, his eyes widening for an instant before he wrapped his arm around Kenny’s narrow chest and held the gun to his head.
Stephen stayed silent, terrified of any sudden sound or motion that would make Niles pull the trigger, and heard a faint, high-pitched sound and looked toward Madison, then followed her line of sight.
There was a body on the road, lying in a pool of blood.
Madison shook her head…and tried to scream, her voice stunted even before Niles swung his gun arm around and slammed his elbow into the side of her face, knocking her to the ground.
Kenneth met Stephen’s eyes, his feet frozen in place as Niles jammed the barrel of the gun into Kenneth’s ear. Kenneth was wearing the North Face coat Lori had bought him in the fall but no hat or gloves, and was visibly shivering in the cold, his eyes hollowed by fear.
Stephen tried to fathom the words that would stop Niles from pulling the trigger.
Calm him down. Reason with him.
“Detective Niles—”
“Shut the fuck up!” Spit flew from Niles’ mouth as he whipped Kenny around as if he weighed nothing; Kenny’s feet moving in frantic steps to make contact with the ground as Niles headed toward the white Hummer. A gust of wind lifted the cap from Niles’ head and sent it flying. The gust was followed by another, the sound like a roar sweeping down from the top of the mountain, nearly drowning Niles’ voice—
“I’ll shoot him!”
Niles was directing the threat toward someone inside the Hummer. Stephen squinted, his eyes stinging from the frigid air.
And watched as the passenger side door opened.
Sara.
She was crouched very low in the seat, her head just barely rising above the dashboard, as if she had taken cover. Her face was emaciated by terror, her mouth open and moving, as if she was struggling to breathe.
Niles took a step toward her.
“Get the fuck OUT!”
Stephen saw a change in Sara’s expression. Her eyes were sharper, calculating, he thought, as Niles took another step toward the Hummer. It looked as if Niles’ attention was focused solely on Sara as she slowly opened the door, her head still low and her body level with the dashboard. Stephen silently prayed, don’t get out and tried to imagine that the tight space in the car would protect her as she slid sideways in the front seat, her boots planted on the ground beneath the open door.
Niles took no notice of the sudden change in Kenneth’s posture—the drop of his shoulders and the forward roll of his head. But then from twenty feet away Stephen heard him grunt with exertion as Kenneth’s whole body went limp in Niles’ arms, his weight no longer supported at all by his own legs. There was another sound—a weary exhalation as Niles gave up trying to hold Kenneth’s dead weight and shoved him away.
Kenneth fell clumsily down on his knees. The sight took Stephen back to the night before; the tears streaming down Kenneth’s cheeks after the beating at school. He felt a tightening in his chest…and watched as Kenneth stood back up and ducked his head and charged back at Niles, with two running steps and a leap that rammed his shoulder into the small of the big man’s back.
The sight was surreal—Kenneth’s 130-pound body knocking Niles into a forward fall, Niles’ arms flying outward to keep his balance as Kenneth toppled to the ground behind him. Niles landed on his knees but quickly got back up, still unsteady and surprised, his attention diverted to Kenneth as Sara stepped out from behind the door of the car, awkwardly holding something in both of her hands that looked like a gun.
A clack-clack-clack sound filled the air.
Niles screamed, his lips rolling back from his teeth as he dropped to his knees again. Sara was holding a stun gun with both hands, her face reddened by the sudden exertion. Niles fired his gun wildly into the air and flailed toward Sara, his arm knocking the weapon from her hand.
And that was when Stephen charged forward, ignoring the ripping pain in his rib cage as he rammed his shoulder into Niles’ gut.
Niles doubled over as the air rushed out of his lungs, then landed a hard punch against Stephen’s chest, knocking him to the ground. He rolled sideways as Niles aimed a kick at his head, felt a rush of air at the side of his face and frantically scrabbled back, conscious of nothing else but the gun in Niles’ hand and the sudden steadiness of his posture as he raised it.
He stared up into the barrel of the gun and then looked into Niles’ eyes, searching for the slightest inkling of compassion, or reason, or anything to stop him from pulling the trigger.
Niles stared back. A bubble of blood popped from his left nostril and trickled toward his mouth. He squinted, pressed his lips together.
“DADDY!” Sara screamed, and ran out from behind the open door of the Hummer.
A clear shot, Stephen saw what was about to happen. Sara and then Kenneth and then you—
The sudden blare of a horn filled the air, seizing Niles’ attention toward the burning truck, sitting crosswise on the road, the driver’s side door wide open. But then the flash of a gunshot from behind the door sent Niles into a rolling dive behind the Hummer. Niles came up and fired back, shattering the truck’s intact window as Kieran O’Shea came out from behind it, his face masked by blood, staggering as he stood up and looking as if he was about to topple back down as he held his gun in a trembling, two-handed grip—slow, unbalanced and no match for Niles as he brought his own gun up into a concentrated aim. But then three more shots in rapid succession came from O’Shea’s gun, two pinging against the Hummer’s metal hood, the third striking Niles with a muffled, wet sound against his thigh, not enough to hurt him, Stephen thought, an instant before a stream of blood shot out from Niles’ leg—a bright red geyser that arced upward in rhythmic spurts as Niles fell back against the car. Stephen heard a guttural sound and watched as Niles dropped the gun. The blood streamed up in a low loop that ended five feet from his body. Niles gasped as he clamped both hands against the wound, the blood shooting between his fingers and becoming a diffuse, wide sweeping spray. Stephen felt the wet mist of it on his face and stumbled backwards, his eyes spotting the discarded gun in the snow, his mind telling him to grab it but his legs immobilized as he watched Niles pull one hand away from the wound and yank at the zipper of his coat and then frantically jerk it down.
He realized the bullet had hit Niles’ femoral artery. Niles was struggling to unbuckle his belt, to tie off the wound, Stephen thought as their eyes met and Niles silently implored him—help me. He took a step forward and Niles fell to the ground, the blood shooting off to the side but arcing out at a shorter angle. Stephen felt his own balance tilting, a buzzing dizziness in his head as he stooped down and caught the stench of feces as Niles lost control of his bowels. He gagged, his gut clenching as he loosened Niles’ belt buckle and pulled. The leather stretched slightly but it was pinned between Niles’ heavy weight and the ground. Stephen grabbed it with both hands and pulled harder. Niles’ face was wrenched in agony, his breath coming in short audible gasps, both of them realizing the belt wasn’t going to come off as Niles jerked violently, the pressure sending waves of pain through his leg, his skin graying with the onset of shock.
His next thought—You can’t stop—came to him as Niles’ eyes widened and then rolled backwards. He looked down. Blood covered his arms and neck and chest. The stench of it and the stench of waste filled his throat and coated his tongue but he managed to suppress the urge to gag as he pressed down again, realizing then that the pace of the bleeding had slackened.
He kept his hands in place but knew there was nothing else he could do as he turned and caught the sight of movement near the Hummer. Sara’s friend Madison was back on her feet and staring down at the body in the road, a large red welt blooming on her cheek. In the distance Kieran O’Shea collapsed against a tree just a few feet from the back of the burning truck. To his left Kenneth and Sara were holding each other in a tight embrace, both of them staring fearfully at Niles, as if he might somehow rise back up.
Stephen stayed in place, still conscious of the phone in his pocket and the need to call 911 and the forlorn sound of the wind.
“It’s okay, you’re safe,” he told them, as they watched Joseph Niles bleed out into the snow.
Sara slipped into her new coat and wrapped a soft flannel scarf around her neck and took a moment to compose herself before stepping into the first floor study and lying to her father for what she hoped would be the last time.
The door to the study was almost completely closed, but through the two inches of space she saw him behind the desk. He was gazing straight ahead, the tip of a pen resting on his chin, concentrating on something, she thought.
She hoped his preoccupation would work in her favor.
“Daddy?”
He smiled. His eyes were less bloodshot than they had been for the past week, as if he had somehow finally managed to sleep, but his skin was still pale and she knew he had lost weight.
“Yeah honey, come in.”
She stepped up behind him, and gave him a brief hug. The desk’s file drawer was open and the desktop was covered with bank statements and financial forms.
“I’m heading out,” she said.
She felt a tensing in his shoulders. He placed his hand over hers with a gentle pressure, as if he wanted to hold her back.
“Where to?”
“I need to check on Madison.”
Her voice wavered. She was glad he wasn’t looking at her face.
“I told her I’d spend a little time with her. She hasn’t been doing too well.”
He turned around and gave her a long look, as if he was worrying as much about Madison as herself. “Is she going back to school on Monday?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s only been a week. There are all kinds of rumors flying around and I don’t think she’s up to reliving any of it.”
She gave the papers on the desk another glance, saw an open tablet of lined paper next to them. Her father had written “Monthly Expenses” and the top and had drawn two columns, “Fixed” and “Optional” underneath. She wanted to believe he was doing nothing more than routine budget balancing but felt a pressure around her heart as she spied the smaller scribbles at the right of the page.
6 months
1 year
3 years
5 years
She stared at the numbers for several seconds, until the feeling of regret became too much.
She kissed the top of his head and turned toward the door.
“Sara.”
There was a rasp in his voice.
“Be careful.”
He looked as if she had just given him a fresh reason to worry, as if he somehow knew what she was about to do. She started to remind him that Madison’s house was only a few blocks away but didn’t want to repeat the lie she had told the week before.
She glanced down at the table beside the door. There were three NetFlix envelopes there, a reminder of the evening he had planned. Next to them was another stack of DVDs they owned—movies that she and Kenneth loved and viewed over and over. She knew that he had retrieved all of them just to be assured there would be something they would all want to watch.
Anything to keep us home, she thought, with him.
“I’ll be back by 8 o’clock,” she said. “Any movie you want is fine with me.”
He looked both grateful and relieved. “Good. We’ll have dinner first. Kenny’s finally got an appetite so we need to make the most of it.”
She smiled back, thinking of the three of them in front of the fire and the television, a Saturday night at home with her father and her brother and no one else. The last thing she would have wanted a week ago; the thing she wanted most right now.
“I’ll be here,” she told him, doing her best to ignore the flurry of nerves that stayed with her as she turned away.
John Caruso sat behind his desk and read through the Frederick News Post articles that chronicled the most intense week of his professional life, an experience that would have been rewarding if not for his nagging dread of what was to come.
The stories began with a Sunday morning story about the crime scene on the mountain, with a description of the deaths of Joseph and Marco Niles and the injuries to Kieran O’Shea—an initial just-the-facts rendition written under a reporter’s deadline that promised more details in the coming hours.
As chronicled by the stories that appeared at the middle of the week, bullet casings from the April Devon crime scene matched those fired by Joseph in his attempt to take out Stephen Porter and his family. An inspection of Marco Niles’ computer showed he visited the sex site where Cherilynn Jenkins had posted her online profile, and his DNA was a match to the semen taken from her bed sheets and that left on Danica Morris’ body as well.
And then there were the emails, between April Devon and Lori Porter, a written record that chronicled April’s shame in knowing about her sister’s sexual abuse of her own son, her sister’s murder by Joseph Niles, and her belief that Marco Niles had seen it happen.
The arrest warrant for Stephen Porter was ready. He had delayed serving it after the violence on the mountain, giving Porter and his family some space to recover. The evidence against Porter now included a DVD of video footage that had been taken at the Advance Auto store in Rockville, Maryland. The store was brightly lit against the pitch darkness outside the windows, and the security camera video of the checkout line was shot from a distance of about eight feet. Unfortunately the picture was grainy, the images equally indistinct on the original and the copy.
He had tracked down the video after learning from the inspection of Porter’s vehicle that that the cover to the rear taillight had very recently replaced. There were only a handful of places where Porter could have purchased a cover in the brief period of time before the vehicle had been seized and he only had to hunt a short while to find the store and the video, which was time-stamped at 6:13 a.m. on the morning of Aidan O’Shea’s death.
The man in the video was approximately Porter’s height but he seemed much heavier in his nondescript dark coat. He wore a knit cap that was pulled halfway down his forehead, which would have looked awkward if not for the frigid temperatures outside. The glasses were a brilliant touch. Close up they had altered the man’s appearance just enough to make it impossible for the clerk to positively identify him in the driver’s license photo of Stephen Porter that Caruso had presented to him. The thick lenses in the glasses also reflected the overhead lights in the grainy footage from the security cameras, and almost completely obscured the man’s eyes.
Which meant that the video would ultimately fall short of proof, without positive identification from the clerk and with the difference in the way Porter would look in a court
room. Porter had made things both worse and better for himself by paying cash and rushing away without waiting for change. The behavior was erratic enough to embed the interaction in the clerk’s memory, but because of it there was no electronic record of what Porter had purchased. Caruso had only been able to suggest, “Could it have been a tail light cover?”
The clerk had nodded, but with a shrug and then told him he really had no idea.
Caruso put the DVD into the player at the side of his computer one more time, mentally chastising himself once again for the vague hope that Porter would somehow avoid the trouble that was coming to him. The feeling would have been complicated enough without the haunting memory of Kieran O’Shea holding Aidan in his arms. O’Shea had been held in the hospital for two days after the accident and shootings on the mountain—spending half of the time in the Intensive Care Unit as the doctors monitored the swelling and damage to his brain. Caruso had questioned him twice in the days since. O’Shea was now claiming that he had almost no memory of the accident that killed Aidan. Caruso would have known he was lying even if O’Shea hadn’t pointedly mentioned that the doctors had told him that his head injury would affect his memory for awhile, but “there’s a good chance it’ll come back.”
As if the only question is when, Caruso turned back to the computer screen, his instincts telling him once again that O’Shea was holding back for a reason, biding his time. Eyewitness testimony was the most important factor in a successful hit-and-run prosecution. If O’Shea did indeed remember, then Stephen’s fate would be sealed. But without an eyewitness the case was limited to circumstantial evidence compromised by the weather and conditions at the scene.
Certainly not a slam-dunk, he thought.
Especially with a good defense team.
And the inevitable sympathies of a jury.
An electronic chirp from his computer signaled an incoming message from the civilian consultant who had been tasked to find anything that might be useful on Joseph Niles’ home computer. Caruso had made a special request based on the emails between Lori Porter and April Devon. His hopes were unrealistically high given the low likelihood of success.