by Brad Parks
It was pure catastrophe. We had no financial cushion. We had spent most of it on the down payment for the house, and the rest of it on whatever small renovations we could afford. My checking account currently had about $900 in it. My savings account had $50, the minimum amount needed to keep it open.
Ben might have had a little more. He and I still had separate accounts. Everything leading up to Alex’s arrival had happened so quickly—my rape, my pregnancy, our shotgun wedding, buying the house, having the baby—consolidating our finances had not been a priority.
But he also might have had even less. We certainly didn’t have any kind of investments we could liquidate. Nor did we have any true valuables to sell, other than maybe Ben’s vinyl record collection. That would buy us, what, a few weeks’ worth of groceries? Maybe a mortgage payment?
There wasn’t even anyone we could appeal to for help. Ben’s father was a high school janitor. His mother worked at a grocery store. They didn’t have anything to loan us. They were counting the minutes until they could collect Social Security and get a little breathing room.
And my parents? Ha. I couldn’t imagine what kind of sad shape they were in by now. If they were even still alive. It wasn’t hard to imagine one of them killing the other, or themselves.
We were on our own in every way.
One thing was for sure: There was now no chance of being able to shuffle around our finances to pay for a private lawyer. We’d be lucky if we could keep the house.
Then there was our family’s health insurance, which I had also just lost. Diamond Trucking would have to offer me COBRA coverage, but I doubted we could afford it.
Or there was the biggest issue of all: How would I convince a judge to give me Alex back when I might not even be able to provide for his basic needs?
I suddenly understood what it was like to live in one of those war-torn countries salted with land mines. Everywhere I even thought about stepping, there was something blowing up on me.
By the time I reached the JMU campus, I was desperate to find Ben. I was glad he didn’t have a class. It meant I would have him to myself for a little while.
I would have called to find out where he was, but I still didn’t have a phone. Maybe Ben was right to focus on that this morning, after all. I was tired of being in the Dark Ages of communications.
No matter. I would just have to find him the old-fashioned way. I parked and headed into the library, where he had a small study carrel assigned to him.
Except he wasn’t there. The tiny room was dark and locked.
I knocked just in case. No Ben.
The only other place he could have been was the history department. He and the other PhD candidates had desks in a windowless interior room they referred to as the broom closet.
The history department was on the second floor of Jackson Hall, just across the quad from the library. I walked as quickly as I could, passing knots of oblivious undergraduates, all of them blissful in their little college cocoon.
I took the stairs, passing through the department’s small reception area, then down a long hallway of professors’ offices, one of which would hopefully belong to my husband someday.
When I reached the broom closet, I was disappointed again. Still no Ben. The small desks were crowded with books and papers, as they always were, but there were no people sitting at them.
I reversed track to the reception area, where there was an older woman, sitting by herself, staring at her computer screen—the department secretary, I presumed.
“Excuse me,” I said, and she looked up from the screen. “I’m trying to find Ben Barrick. Have you seen him?”
Her head tilted. “Ben Barrick?”
The woman must have been new. “He’s a grad student. He has a desk just down the hall.”
“I know who you’re talking about,” she said. “But he’s not here. Ben’s not with the program anymore.”
I shook my head, refusing to believe the words I was hearing. “Are you sure we’re talking about the same person? My Ben Barrick is about five-nine, glasses, dark skin. He’s . . . he’s TAing a class for Professor Kremer this semester.”
“Yes, that’s the same Ben Barrick,” she said. “And I can assure you he’s not TAing anything for Professor Kremer. Professor Kremer left last spring. He’s at Temple University in Philadelphia now. Didn’t you hear?”
TWENTY
There were two ways Amy Kaye could go about handling the Sprite can that was, she hoped, teeming with Warren Plotz’s genetic material.
She could do it the conventional way, which was to slip it in a padded evidence envelope and mail it to the Virginia Department of Forensic Science’s Western Laboratory, a state-run facility located in Roanoke.
There, it would be placed in line behind the enormous mountain of evidence that came in from all over the western half of Virginia. Murder cases got priority. Everything else was handled in the order it was received. The average wait time, according to the Department of Forensic Science’s most recent report, was 156 days.
Or she could do it the unconventional way, which involved driving and begging.
She opted for the drive. With the Sprite can sealed in an evidence bag next to her on the front seat, she got on Interstate 81. Then she began tracing her way south through the Blue Ridge Mountains, enjoying the scenery as she fought past slow-moving trucks.
She was about halfway there, just south of Lexington, when her phone rang. She practically groaned when she saw the caller was Aaron Dansby.
“Amy Kaye.”
“Amy, it’s Aaron.”
“Hey.”
“Where are you?”
The commonwealth’s attorney seldom expressed interest in where she was or what she was doing at a given moment. It was one of the nice things about working for Aaron Dansby. He wasn’t the type of boss who breathed down anyone’s neck—mostly because he couldn’t be bothered, but whatever. When she wasn’t in court, Amy set her own schedule free from his harassment.
“Uhh, I’m driving some evidence down to Roanoke. Why?”
“I thought you were presenting Coke Mom to the grand jury today.”
“I am,” she said.
“Okay. I want to do it with you.”
Amy’s face formed a question mark. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“No offense, but I think it would make a real impression on the grand jury if they get to see the commonwealth’s attorney, the guy they actually elected, and not the chief deputy. I’ll talk to them a little, give them a rah-rah speech, let them know how important this case is. Then you can take it from there.”
Amy wished she had a recording of this to play for the next meeting of the Commonwealth’s Attorneys’ Executive Conference. No one would believe it otherwise.
“Aaron,” she said carefully, slowly, “the grand jury meets in secret.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s secret from us too.”
For a moment, Amy heard nothing but dead air on the line. More than three years into his four-year term, Aaron Dansby still didn’t know how some of the basics worked.
“Oh,” he said at last.
“They get to ask questions of the investigator or whatever other witnesses they want to hear from, but it’s actually illegal for us to be in there with them, unless we’re appearing as witnesses or they tell the clerk they need advice on a legal question.”
“Oh,” he said again.
Because she was actually enjoying herself, she added, “If you or I even stepped foot in the room and spoke to them without being invited, it would invalidate whatever indictment we were seeking.”
“Right. Got it,” Dansby said.
“I’ll let you know when the clerk has issued a capias. I know you’re an eager beaver on this one.”
“That’s good, then. Thank
you,” he said, suddenly using his politician voice, the one that was a little more commanding—and a little more fake—than his normal voice, which was already pretty fake. “I’ll look forward to hearing about the . . . the capias. I’d like to leak this—”
Then, amazingly, he actually corrected himself: “I’d like to report this to the media as soon as we have an indictment.”
“Sure thing, Aaron.”
“Talk to you later.”
“You got it.”
She hung up. And then, for the first time in days, she laughed.
* * *
• • •
The Western Laboratory was not an old building to begin with but had recently gone through a multimillion-dollar renovation that made it even more modern, from its array of cutting-edge gadgetry to its LEED certification.
Amy was soon entering the office of its director, a man with bushy white eyebrows named Chap Burleson.
She was holding her evidence bag in her left hand. She thrust her right hand across the desk as Burleson stood up.
“Dr. Burleson, I’m Amy Kaye with the Augusta County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office,” she said.
“Augusta County,” he said. “That’s quite a haul.”
“A little more than an hour,” Amy said. “Not so bad.”
“Have a seat, have a seat,” he said in a friendly manner, waving toward the chairs in front of his desk. Amy selected the one on the left. “So what can I do for you, Ms. Kaye?”
“You can help me catch a rapist,” she replied evenly.
“Happy to. That’s what we do here.”
“Great,” she said, bringing the evidence bag up and placing it gently on his desk. “Then you can put a rush on this for me?”
The eyebrows rose for a moment before falling. “Well, Ms. Kaye. That’s always the issue, isn’t it? Let me explain how things work here at Western. You may not be aware, but we have—”
Amy cut him off with a torrent of words: “A backlog of twelve-hundred cases, all of which are very important to someone somewhere in the state; an obligation to treat every case like it’s of the greatest concern; a need to be fair to the many jurisdictions that rely on you for forensic services. Yes, sir. I’m very aware of all of this.”
Burleson cracked a quick grin before his face settled back to its original state of indifference. “You’re stealing my speech, Ms. Kaye.”
“I know. And I want to convince you this case is more important. It’s term day in Augusta County. I skipped out on babysitting a grand jury so I could drive down here and convince you of it.”
“Okay. So what’s the case?”
In brief, broad strokes, Amy told him about the man who had been terrorizing her county for two decades and how he had eluded detection for so long. Then she described how she had painstakingly assembled his brutal history, one case at a time—and one long wait for DNA results at a time.
“Why haven’t I heard about this?” Burleson asked, his eyebrows mashing together into a long white line across his forehead.
“Because my boss is afraid of the negative publicity associated with an unsolved case and ordered me to keep it quiet.”
“I see.”
“And to be honest, I haven’t bothered you with any of my other requests, because I knew it was a cold case, and I couldn’t really make the argument that this had to take precedence over the many, many other important investigations you have,” Amy said, letting that very reasonable statement hang out there for a second before she brought home her demand. “But things are different now. I actually have a name to go with all these vague descriptions. And I have this soda can with his DNA on it. We have the key to catching this bastard right here.”
She shoved the bagged Sprite can a little closer to him.
“His pattern has been pretty clear,” she said. “He attacks every three to five months. It’s been four months since his last one. I’m playing with fire right now.”
“And if you have to wait five or six months for results, he might attack two more women before you can bring him in,” Burleson said.
“Now you’re stealing my speech. But yes, every day that goes by—”
“I get it,” he said, dragging the Sprite can over to his side of the desk. “I’ll see what I can do.”
TWENTY-ONE
I drove away from JMU feeling some combination of a blind rage and an all-seeing depression.
To state the obvious: Ben had been lying to me. For months now. About nearly everything.
I thought of all the seemingly benign conversations we had, about all the deception he had shoveled at me in his attempts to keep me believing he was still a grad student, about how hard he had worked to sustain this elaborate fabrication.
It was the level of detail that really shocked me. Because when I asked him, How was your section today? he didn’t just dismiss it with a simple, junior varsity lie like Good. No, no, he went straight for Olympic-level prevarication.
Kremer gave me a good group this term. They’re really making some thoughtful connections between the readings we picked for them and the lectures.
And then he’d prattle on for a while about some esoteric aspect of historiography they had mistakenly stumbled upon.
Or he’d discuss how woefully unprepared his tutoring students were to do anything resembling real research, how their local high schools had spent four years teaching them to take tests but hadn’t prepared them to perform any scholarly interrogation that went beyond a Google search.
There were now hundreds of conversations coming back to me, all of them apparently exercises in fiction. Had all of that really been invented for my benefit? To keep me believing I was married to a young academic? If he wanted to drop out, why didn’t he just tell me? Did he think I wouldn’t understand? Or that I’d try to talk him out of it?
And then there was the other question:
If Ben hadn’t been at JMU, what the hell had he been doing?
All I knew for sure was that he left sometime after me each morning, was still gone when I came back after work with Alex, and returned around eight thirty or nine each night. Was he just out there somewhere, wandering around, dreaming up all the nonsense he was going to spout at me later on? Did he have some bizarre second life he felt he couldn’t tell me about?
It was just stupefying. And infuriating.
And what made my head hurt most—and this, let’s be clear, was purely selfish—was that this meant my life had been a lie too. Throughout our relationship, but especially in the anguished aftermath of my attack, Ben had been my rock, the one human being I could always rely on.
And now my rock turned out to be nothing more than painted dust.
When I returned to Staunton, I went straight to our wireless provider’s storefront, where they outfitted me with a two-generations-old knockoff iPhone for free, which still somehow felt like more than I could afford.
Once I got out in the parking lot, I sat in my car and wrestled with my next dilemma, which was what I ought to do with this awful newfound knowledge. Did I confront him immediately? Send him a text? Call him and catch him in one last lie?
Or did I wait until he came home that evening, so I could do it in person?
And then what? Would he have some explanation? Would I even care what it was? Were there some wrongs that couldn’t be forgiven?
Part of me thought this was too great a breach of trust to possibly allow our relationship to continue. A marriage could perhaps survive an isolated, unpremeditated lie; like, say, a onetime infidelity born of lust or alcohol or stupidity.
This deceit felt so much larger than that, because it had been so carefully constructed and sustained over such a long period, with such a high degree of continuing duplicity. How could I ever again trust a single sentence that came out of his mouth?
And yet an
other part of me thought I had much bigger problems to deal with. I was currently facing felony charges stemming from two different causes. I had no job, virtually no money, and very little prospect of improving either situation until I got this cleared up. Without Ben, I would not be able to keep the house. I might not even be able to keep eating.
And—paramount above all those things—my baby was currently in the control of the Department of Social Services, which was a lot more likely to return custody to a stable two-parent household than to a single mom in the throes of a divorce.
But could I really forgive him just because it was the expedient thing to do? Did the human heart work that way?
There were no answers. And so I sat in the parking lot, staring down at my new phone. It was an implement of immediate marital destruction, but only if I had the fortitude to use it.
* * *
• • •
I didn’t make the call. I was too afraid of setting that chain of events into motion.
Defeated and overwhelmed, I eventually forced myself to drive out of the parking lot and back toward Desper Hollow Road.
When I returned home, I resisted the urge to pull the covers over my head and die—which is what I felt like doing—and instead took the breast pumps inside with me.
I’m sure I was imagining it, but I already felt like my milk was faltering. Or at least it wasn’t as plentiful as it had been.
When I finished pumping, I went through several days’ worth of text messages. There were a few from Marcus, which grew increasingly anxious in their level of concern. I fired off a quick reply to him, saying I had lost my phone and that, yes, things were a mess. He was the kind of friend who could handle the truth.
The rest? I couldn’t even deal. They were from friends I hadn’t seen in a while—from my Starbucks days, from college, even from high school—who had obviously seen the media coverage of me and were checking in to see how I was doing. Some expressed wary support. Most were of the timid “Hey, you okay?” variety.
And how was I supposed to answer that?