“Her death wasn’t your fault, Patrick.”
“Sure it was.” Another cabinet door slammed shut, then, “I’m her son. I’m supposed to look out for my mother. I’m the good son. Do you want to hear a secret?”
“Yes.”
“On second thought, it’s best I don’t tell you.” He started laughing. “I’m going to go now, but I’ll be seeing you soon.”
“Wait, Pat—” But it was too late. He’d already hung up.
When I called him back, the line was busy. After a minute, I tried again with the same result. I got in touch with a patrol officer at the station and requested someone run a wellness check on Patrick Crabbe at his home. It was obvious he’d been drinking, but there was something else there, something darker and more disturbing than simply one too many beers.
By the time the officer got to Crabbe’s house, Crabbe and his car were gone. I spent the rest of the evening praying he wasn’t drinking and driving.
In the early morning hours of the next day, it was obvious I’d been praying and hoping for the wrong thing. They say hindsight is 20/20, but in my heart of hearts, I’m convinced I should have known what was coming.
Chapter Thirty-five
Monday morning.
In the east, the rising sun was obscured by a quilt of clouds, patched together in shades of dove gray and dirty white. To the west, the mountains loomed out of a heavy mist that left a sheen of moisture over the world.
I was nearly to the station when a frantic voice came over the police scanner and said shots had been fired downtown at the Crimson Café. I waited for more information to come, but the dispatcher merely repeated the call.
It was five minutes to eight o’clock: the start of business hours and carpool drop-offs.
God.
Wilson Elementary School was three short blocks from the café.
Heart racing, I pulled a U-turn in the middle of the road, against the angry horns of oncoming traffic. I slapped on my red dash light and sped toward the Crimson, praying the dispatcher had been wrong in her call. We’d never had an active shooter event in Cedar Valley before and, though we participated in quarterly trainings, I knew we’d never be ready, not really, for such a situation.
If there were hostages …
Two minutes later, I slowed to a crawl and took a left on Second Street. At first glance, the street was quiet. This time of day the traffic should have been brisk, the sidewalks crowded. In addition to the Crimson, there was a breakfast diner, a couple of retail shops, two banks, and a small branch library. I pulled over and parked three buildings down from the Crimson, and it was then that I realized the street was quiet because everyone who had been on it had sought shelter.
Terrified faces peered out of storefront windows. Three bikes and a tipped stroller lay on the sidewalk, abandoned by their owners. A blue-and-green crocheted baby blanket spilled out of the stroller, and my stomach dropped at the thought of what might be happening in the Crimson.
In the distance, the sound of police and ambulance sirens grew loud. I spent precious seconds sitting in the car, torn between my instincts—run to the Crimson and offer aid—and my professional training—sit in the damn car and wait for backup.
There is absolutely a time and place for a single-officer response; this was not it.
The sirens were on top of me now, their shrill call punctuating the cool, wet air, and I watched in my rearview mirror as a sedan pulled in behind me. It was Louis Moriarty and Lucas Armstrong. Two ambulances pulled into the street and hung back, idling.
I slid out of my car, weapon drawn, and crept backward, keeping my eyes on the Crimson. Moriarty and Armstrong joined me on the sidewalk. We stayed down, crouching on our knees, using the car as a shield between us and the café. Moriarty and Armstrong were breathing hard, and I realized to my surprise that I was, too.
We were scared.
“I heard the initial call and nothing since. Is this still an active shooter event?” I asked. Nodding my head toward the shops, I added, “We’ve got civilians in the stores.”
Armstrong said, “Three shots fired. We have one person confirmed dead. The suspect is contained.”
“What do you mean contained?”
“He’s being held at gunpoint by the Crimson’s owner and a customer.”
“Okay.” I took a deep breath, willing my heart to stop racing.
Though the situation was somewhat under control, we still did things by the book: single-file approach, weapons drawn, watching our front and back. Armstrong was first into the café, and I followed him, watching as his neck and back muscles visibly relaxed. He holstered his weapon. Then he moved to the side, and I saw the scene for the first time.
I gasped. “Oh no. Oh, my god.”
The back of the café was taken up by a long glass display case with a short service counter at the south end. A single bullet had punctured the glass, shattering it and exploding pastries and pies.
Slumped down in front of the case, his head tilted and resting on his right shoulder, sat Patrick Crabbe. His eyes were open and vacant, his breathing shallow. His skin was a pasty, pale color.
Five feet from his right leg was a Smith & Wesson 9mm handgun.
Two men stood over him. One of them was Dave Zusak, proprietor of the Crimson. He loosely held a handgun of his own, and though it wasn’t pointed at Patrick Crabbe, it was obvious that Zusak was ready to go there if needed.
The other man was a young guy in a tweed jacket and jeans, his forehead soaked in sweat. He stood over the Smith & Wesson, not touching it, but also clearly ready to move it farther away from Crabbe if needed.
Zusak’s eyes, wide with emotion, slid to the right, to something behind me, and for a moment sheer panic walloped my chest.
Had we gotten it wrong?
Was Crabbe a victim and the real shooter behind us?
But Zusak’s eyes didn’t hold fear. They held sadness.
Armstrong and Moriarty noticed, too, and together, moving as one unit, the three of us turned and took in the awful scene. Quick images flooded my mind, and I knew I would relive this day, again and again, in the weeks to come.
A young blond waitress in khaki pants and black polo shirt holds a glass carafe of coffee in her violently shaking hand. She moans as her eyes meet mine and I try to smile reassuringly, but what comes over my face is a grimace. She drops the carafe, and the sound of shattering glass fills the room.
Kent Starbuck sits at a small, round table. His back is to the door. A napkin covered in blue writing and a painted porcelain cup occupy the table top. The cup appears to be white with scarlet paint abstractedly applied, and then I realize it’s not paint at all, but blood. The back of Kent’s head is an open trauma of wet blood and crisp bone and gray brain matter. The bullet is somewhere in there, inside his head, and next to me, Lucas Armstrong is gagging, his large body shaking violently with dry heaves.
As if in a dream, I moved to the table and read aloud the last words of Kent Starbuck, a self-described “man of the land”: “I am the one who travels by moonlight, a chosen witness to God’s own dreams. Around me are silences more deep than the oceans, broken only by the shrill cries of the creatures that inhabit the shadows. They are furtive things—the cries and the animals—and I ride alone; fast; with purpose. I am a journeyman of the dark.”
* * *
Moriarty called it in. He requested emergency medical services, to treat Patrick Crabbe for suspected shock, as well as the medical examiner, and a team of crime scene techs. Lucas Armstrong secured the handgun on the floor while I crouched in front of Patrick Crabbe, mindful of the mess around us from the exploded pastry case.
“Patrick?”
At the sound of my voice, Crabbe roused. I watched his eyes grow fearful, hysterical. He began to babble, and his voice was that of a man who’s been haunted by ghosts of his own creation for so long that he struggles to discern reality from fantasy.
I was deeply sorry I hadn’t seen this
coming in the short time we’d spent together.
Perhaps, somehow, I might have prevented Kent Starbuck’s death.
Crabbe used words I’d never heard before, stringing them together in sentences upon sentences. He spoke without swallowing, and spittle pooled at the edges of his mouth, spilling forward, wetting his chin and neck.
I tried to calm him. “Patrick, shhh now, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be okay.”
Crabbe furrowed his brow, and his eyes became unreadable. Suddenly, he leaned forward and growled. Surprised, I fell backward, landing on my rear. Crabbe put his hands on the ground in front of him and began to crawl toward me. I tried to scoot back, but I was caught in the sticky mess of pastries and I couldn’t gain ground.
Moriarty was on Crabbe in less than a second. He gently but firmly pushed him facedown and secured handcuffs on him.
“You okay?”
I nodded, picked myself up, and brushed crumbs from my rear. Shaken by the look in Crabbe’s eyes and the hatred in the growl, I took a moment to compose myself.
“He should have been cuffed the minute we walked in.”
“Yeah. He seemed comatose,” Moriarty said. “Goddamn situation we have on our hands. I always knew Kent Starbuck was going to end up in a bad way. I never figured it would be his own brother who would do him in.”
“Patrick believes Kent killed their mother,” I replied. “This was a revenge killing.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
We turned to the young waitress. She knelt on the floor with a brush and dust pan, slowly collecting shards of glass from the shattered carafe. She dropped the brush and wiped away tears then looked up at us, a heartbreaking expression on her face. I was sorry that she’d had to witness this. Murder is a terrible thing to see at any age but especially for someone so young.
“What do you mean, ‘ridiculous’?” I asked.
“Kent’s a good man. He’s been coming to the Crimson twice a week for ages. He’s sweet, polite. Tips well and always asks how school’s going,” she said. Her voice was heavy with conviction, fierce. “I know he’s got a drinking problem, but he can’t be a killer.”
“Sweetheart, you’re what, seventeen? This guy may have been a nice customer. That doesn’t mean he was a nice guy,” Moriarty said.
The waitress stood and straightened her shoulders. She looked Lou Moriarty straight in the eyes. “Sir, I was taught to believe that the character of a person shines brightest in how they treat the people who serve them. I don’t see how my age plays into this. And I’m not your sweetheart. I’m not anyone’s sweetheart.”
She turned away and Moriarty flushed. “Everyone’s a critic.”
I looked again at Kent’s body, the way his sightless eyes seemed to take in the room, the same way his mother’s eyes had.
I excused myself.
In the restroom, I stood under the light of a single, bare bulb, staring into a streaky mirror that both softened the lines on my face and enhanced them. After a moment, I bent over and ran cold water into the sink. As I splashed it on my face, one thought kept rolling through my mind.
Had we been chasing the wrong brother all this time?
Had we missed something along the way?
Had I sat in a murderer’s apartment and offered him a damn box of tissues?
“What the hell is happening?” I whispered to my reflection. Then I grabbed a handful of paper towels, dried my face, joined the macabre party out front, and got back to work.
Chapter Thirty-six
Patrick Crabbe was evaluated by paramedics at the café, then released back to our custody. Chief Chavez arrived, and we secured the café. Armstrong and Moriarty carefully placed Crabbe in the back of their squad car and then headed to the station to book him on murder charges. By then, the crime scene unit had arrived, and they got to work flagging evidence.
The media descended quickly. Chief Chavez gave a brief press conference outside the café, praising the quick actions of Dave Zusak and the lone customer in containing the situation and likely preventing further deaths. I watched long enough to see Bryce Ventura and a handful of citizens hound the chief about the increase in violence in Cedar Valley, then I turned away and collected official statements from the witnesses and pieced together the timeline of the killing:
At 7:52 a.m., Crabbe had entered the café and fired three shots: one at the glass pastry case; the second at the floor; then the final, fatal shot at his brother. Then he’d dropped the gun, taken a step back, and collapsed. The customer had called the police while Dave Zusak grabbed his own weapon and stood guard over Crabbe. Between the second and third shots, the brothers had exchanged words, but no one was close enough to hear what was said.
As I was about to leave the café, I got a call from Moriarty.
Patrick Crabbe had begun to complain of chest pains en route to the station. Armstrong was driving, Moriarty on the passenger side, Crabbe in the backseat. Armstrong looked in the rearview mirror and saw that Crabbe’s lips were an unnatural shade of blue. He pulled a hard right and headed to the hospital. By the time they arrived, Crabbe’s breathing was labored and he was doubled over in pain.
I met Moriarty in the lobby of the hospital.
Moriarty didn’t mince words. “Massive heart attack.”
“Oh no.” I groaned. “Is he going to make it?”
Moriarty shrugged. He pulled a mint from his pocket and unwrapped it. Before popping it into his mouth, he said, “He’s stable, whatever that means. One of the nurses told me if we’d gotten here any later, Crabbe would be dead.”
“When can we talk to him?”
“Who knows?” Moriarty moved the mint back and forth in his mouth, making a clicking noise with his tongue. He pointed to a tall man in blue scrubs striding toward us. “That’s Crabbe’s doctor. Pompous asshole. Good luck getting through to him.”
The doctor was dour, with red chapped lips and a thick Texas accent. “I’m placing Mr. Crabbe in isolation. I don’t want anyone talking to him until he’s ready to be released. Three days minimum, probably more like five. The last thing he needs is additional stress and excitement. He’s lucky to be alive.”
My jaw dropped. “You do realize this man killed someone, right? We have to talk to him, as soon as possible.”
The doctor shrugged. A faint smile danced on his lips. I felt like wiping it away with my boot. “No one is talking to him.”
Moriarty responsed with “You ever hear of obstruction of justice?”
The doctor crossed his arms and took a step forward. He was inches from Moriarty and mimicked his sarcastic tone. “You ever hear of the Hippocratic oath?”
“Gentlemen, please. This isn’t helping anything,” I laid a hand on Moriarty’s arm. “Come on, Lou. We’ll get a court order.”
Moriarty backed down, the red slowly fading from his face. “Yeah, sure, Monroe. Whatever you say.”
The doctor turned to me. “Monroe? Are you by any chance Gemma Monroe?”
I nodded.
“Why didn’t you say that in the first place?” He withdrew a folded piece of paper from his pocket. “Before he went into surgery, Crabbe insisted my nurse write this down. He said no one should see it but you.”
I reached for it, but the doctor held it back. The scowl dropped from his face and suddenly he looked immensely weary. “You should know that the patient asked to die, Detective. As we prepped him for surgery, he asked me not to save his life but instead to execute him. Whatever this man did—whatever that note says—you’re dealing with someone who is unstable. His actions, however heinous, may not have been under his control.”
“I’ll keep that mind. I spoke with Patrick Crabbe last night. He was disturbed, frightened. But when he recovers, as I’m sure he will under your excellent care, he will be arrested for murder.”
The doctor shrugged again. He handed me the note and walked away, his hands clasped behind his back, his head down.
“Well?” Moriarty asked.
“What’s the damn note say?”
I unfolded the piece of paper and stared down at the neat, cursive writing.
“I was mistaken.”
“That’s it? What the hell is he talking about? What mistake? Killing his brother, or something else?” Moriarty’s face again grew florid. “What a fucking mess. The man I saw in the café couldn’t put two sentences together … Then his heart stops and suddenly he confesses? Three homicides in a week. When does it stop?”
Moriarty’s words gave me pause.
Cedar Valley is not inherently a dangerous place. There is death—car accidents, domestic abuse, hunting mishaps, ski fatalities, and of course heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and the like—but murders are outliers and three in one week was, as he’d put it, “a fucking mess.”
Betty Starbuck … Sari Chesney … Kent Starbuck.
Once again, the sense that I’d honed in on the wrong brother hit me.
I recalled the receipts in Patrick Crabbe’s office, the hoarded old papers. Was Crabbe the Bookkeeper? I thought it through, trying to imagine how it could have happened. Maybe he and Sari met at the museum, through his mother. Sari was young, attractive … Patrick was alone, lonely. Did she scam him? Promise him love, affection in exchange for money? Did she then withdraw that love, and did he then kill her?
Patrick Crabbe murdered his brother in cold blood.… Who knew what else he was capable of?
* * *
“Talk to me, people. What’s the latest?”
We sat in the conference room, the chief at the head of the table while Finn, Moriarty, Armstrong, and I took seats in the middle. At the last minute, Finn had pulled in the intern. The young man sat in the corner of the room, taking notes on a tablet. He looked a little green around the gills, and I realized that from where he sat, he could see the photographs of the café scene, of Kent Starbuck’s body.
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