Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  When he saw me, he actually did a double-take, like he was surprised I was there. He quickly excused himself from his conversation, then came my way. He had a limp that caused him to favor his left leg, something I hadn’t been able to see on camera.

  He was staring at me strangely, like maybe I had some food stuck on my cheek and he was debating whether to tell me. Then he mustered a weary smile.

  “Ms. Barrick, if I may say, you look lovely this morning,” he said in a way that managed to come off as kind, not old-man sleazy. I think it was the warmth of the smile. And the eye contact.

  I realized he hadn’t seen me in person before either. The other times I was on a television screen, dressed in jailhouse orange.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He looked at me for about three beats longer than he probably needed to, then sat next to me so we could talk in voices that couldn’t be heard up front.

  “The other matters scheduled for this morning have all wrapped up, so Judge Stone is just taking a break,” he said.

  He then ran through the people in the courtroom: Donna Fell, the attorney who would represent Social Services, an attractive dark-haired woman who looked to be in her mid-forties; Tina Anderson, the family services specialist, whom I had already met; the guardian ad litem, who would speak on Alex’s behalf; the representative from Court Appointed Special Advocates; and so on.

  Then Mr. Honeywell’s eyes bugged out even further than usual. I followed his line of sight back to the front of the room, where Shenandoah Valley Social Services director Nancy Dement was now entering. She wore a jacket with a loud pattern and epaulettes on the shoulders. Her face seemed to have an extra caking of makeup.

  “What’s she doing here?” he muttered, mostly to himself. Then, not taking his attention from the front of the room, he began, “That’s—”

  “Nancy Dement. I know. Does she not normally show up at these things?”

  “Not for years. Not since she went up to management,” he said. His already lined face got a deeper set to it.

  “Then what’s she doing here?”

  “No idea,” he said. “But let’s go to the table up front. I think we’re about to get under way.”

  We had just gotten settled there when a sheriff’s deputy strode purposefully into the courtroom and announced, “All rise!”

  As I stood, Judge Stone entered the room. He was a tall African American man with just the right amount of gray in his otherwise black hair.

  “Have a seat, everyone,” he said in a deep voice that could have easily anchored the bass section in a church choir. “This is the preliminary removal hearing for DSS versus Barrick. Mr. Honeywell, I assume this is Ms. Barrick?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Is everyone else here that we need?”

  Heads around the room bobbed.

  “Okay, then let’s get started. Ms. Fell, why don’t you go ahead?”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” Donna Fell said. “I’d like to start by calling Tina Anderson, family services specialist from Shenandoah Valley Social Services.”

  Over the next twenty minutes, Fell led Anderson through her testimony. Some of it was perfunctory—how long she had worked at Social Services, what her qualifications were, that sort of thing. Then they moved on to the meat of the matter. She described how the Sheriff’s Office notified Social Services it was executing a warrant on my house, how there was believed to be a child at the residence, and how she was on the premises when the raid occurred.

  “You were standing outside on the lawn, is that right?” Fell asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And what did you then observe?”

  “The deputies started coming out with drug paraphernalia that they said was consistent with a large distribution ring. They showed me a box with scales, baggies for packaging drugs, a list of phone numbers of what they said were known drug users in the area, and Ms. Barrick’s mobile phone.”

  Ms. Barrick’s mobile phone? Was that why I hadn’t been able to find the thing? But how had it possibly gotten into that box along with all sorts of items I had never seen before?

  And then, just as quickly, I understood. The people who were framing me must have stolen it off the table by the front door—where I made it all too easy for them to find—then planted it with the other evidence, knowing it would likely seal my guilt. I couldn’t very well claim I had never seen the stuff in the box when my phone was with it.

  “And where did the deputies say they found this box?” Fell asked.

  “In a closet in the nursery.”

  Good God.

  “You’re calling it ‘the nursery.’ This is the room where the child slept?” Fell asked, not wanting the judge to miss the point.

  “Yes.”

  “Did the deputies bring out anything else?”

  “Yes. After they found the drug paraphernalia, they discovered the drugs themselves. They showed me several bags of white powder that they said was cocaine.”

  “And where did they tell you they had found that?”

  “Also in the nursery, though they had been taped inside the air duct.”

  Which told me why the air-conditioning exchange cover had been removed. It also meant Alex spent a night sleeping a few feet from a half kilo of cocaine.

  Anderson then testified how she “developed” knowledge that Alex was cared for by Ida Ferncliff, who was licensed with Shenandoah Valley Social Services as an at-home childcare provider; and how she went to remove Alex from there.

  “And could you describe the condition of Alex at that time?” Fell asked.

  I braced myself.

  “He was in excellent condition,” Anderson said. “He appeared to be healthy in all ways, very alert. He had just been changed. He was clearly well cared for.”

  “Did you ask the childcare provider for her observations about the child?”

  “Yes. She told me that in her opinion the child’s mother was very loving and was doing an excellent job caring for the boy. She was reluctant to surrender the child at first, because she didn’t feel it was possible there had been any abuse.”

  I felt such a flood of gratitude toward Mrs. Ferncliff, I nearly started to cry.

  Then Fell asked, “And what did you do to convince her that this was the necessary course of action?”

  “I told her about what the Sheriff’s Office had found in Ms. Barrick’s house.”

  “About the cocaine?”

  “Yes.”

  Which explained why Mrs. Ferncliff had turned on me.

  “What did you do next?”

  “I took the child to our office in Verona, where we performed a more thorough examination.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “The child appeared to be very healthy. There were no bruises or other signs of physical abuse. But given that there was cocaine found in the home, it’s standard procedure for us to test the child for drugs.”

  “What kind of tests did you administer?”

  “We performed a blood test, a hair-follicle test, and a skin test.”

  I was actually relieved to hear this: Finally, there would be some hard science here, not just anonymous accusations and easily misled sheriff’s deputies. The people doing this to me could plant drugs in my home, but there’s no way they could pump drugs inside my baby.

  This would be a crucial first step toward proving my innocence. I leaned forward on the desk as the testimony continued.

  “You’ve been trained in how to perform these tests?” Fell asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Multiple times.”

  “Have you gotten the results back yet?”

  “Not for the blood test and the hair-follicle test. Those take a little while. We only have results for the skin test.”

  “Then let’s talk ab
out the skin test. Can you please describe for the court how this test is done?”

  “It’s pretty simple. You run a swab over the child’s skin, paying particular attention to the hands, because that’s the most likely way a child will ingest drugs—if there are, in fact, drugs present in the home. You then seal the swab in a tube and sign your name on the seal, so there’s no dispute later about someone else in the chain of custody tampering with it. Then you send the tube to a laboratory here in Staunton.”

  “Have you gotten the results back yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am. The child’s skin and hands tested positive for cocaine.”

  Before I even knew what I was doing, I was on my feet. This was just too bizarre, and I couldn’t take it sitting down for one second longer.

  “No,” I said. “No, that is not possible. She did the test wrong.”

  “Ms. Barrick, that’s enough,” Judge Stone said, scowling at me.

  “She either did the test wrong, or she faked the results.”

  “Ms. Barrick, you’re going to contain yourself or I’ll have you removed from the courtroom.”

  “But, Judge, you don’t understand, there has to have been a mistake of some kind. There is no way Alex could possibly have—”

  And then I stopped myself. A recent memory came to me. It was from the morning after I had been bailed out for the first time.

  I had gone into the nursery, marveling at its emptiness, thinking about Hemingway as I stared down into the crib. There, I had seen that fine white dust on the sheet cover.

  It hadn’t been baby powder.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The computer the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office used to scan in fingerprints was a desktop model that was absolutely cutting-edge. For 2003.

  A decade and a half later, it was cranky, interfaced poorly with every other piece of electronics brought within a dozen feet of it, and was so slow, Amy swore it was being powered by a hamster running on a wheel somewhere.

  The man whose unfortunate job it was to massage results out of this imperfect system was Deputy Justin Herzog, a powerfully built former kickboxing champion whose close-cropped hair looked like it came straight out of a police equipment catalogue. Whatever aggressions he built up while battling the computer during his shift, he worked them out later on a heavy bag.

  His hideaway at work was a small room that was nearly overpowered by the smell of chemicals. With Amy looking on, he slowly scanned the prints into the computer and digitally cleaned them so there would be a better chance of finding a match. Eventually, he got annoyed with Amy’s shoulder-hovering and said, “How ’bout I just call you when I’m done?”

  It was nearing noontime when that phone call came. Amy, who had been killing time in the detectives’ bullpen, stopped just short of running down the hall to rejoin him.

  “Okay, so what do you got?” she asked, not feeling any fatigue from having been up since three.

  “Not enough, I’m afraid,” Herzog said. “The detectives came back with a lot of prints and I haven’t processed all of them, of course. But we’re looking at prints from two individuals.”

  “The victim and the perpetrator,” Amy said.

  “I’ve referred to them as Person A and Person B. The set of prints the victim gave us is Person A, and of course hers are all over the place. With Person B, I’m mostly working off a few partials—it’s not like he was nice enough to press his fingers down on our scanner or anything.”

  “I understand.”

  “I picked the best two and ran them through our system and got three likely matches”—which wasn’t unusual, though Amy didn’t need to be told that. “But as soon as I looked at them, sorry, no dice.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I can talk you through all the arches, whorls, and loops if you want, or you can take my word for it. They’re not a hit for anything we got. Person B is not known to us.”

  “Okay,” Amy said. “So what now?”

  “That’s up to you,” Herzog said. “We can send them down to Roanoke, if you want.”

  She didn’t. The backlog for fingerprints at the state crime lab wasn’t as long as it was for DNA. But it would still take months.

  “Can you check for me if you have someone named Warren Plotz in the system?”

  “Yeah, sure. Spell it for me.”

  She did, then watched him manipulate the tired, grubby mouse, filling in the appropriate fields. He clicked Search, the hamster went for a jog, and Amy waited.

  “Sorry,” Herzog said at last. “No Warren Plotz.”

  Amy crossed her arms and stared at the screen, taking in a deep whiff of chemically tinged air. She had been here before with Warren Plotz. Close. Achingly close. But not close enough.

  It was possible that DNA result would come back from the state lab any day, making all this fingerprint stuff unnecessary. For that matter, the Sprite can might have Plotz’s prints on it. She hadn’t bothered checking, because the rapist had never before been duped into leaving prints.

  But in either case, that would involve waiting. What if begging the lab director for an expedited result only knocked thirty or sixty days off the 156-day backlog?

  In the past, she hadn’t pressed the issue with Plotz. She had been patient, measured, careful . . .

  All the things she was not going to be anymore. She was thinking of Lilly Pritchett, whom she hadn’t been able to protect from this scourge; of Daphne Hasper and the other victims; even of Melanie Barrick, who deserved to have her attacker sent to prison whether she was a drug dealer or not.

  But Amy was also thinking of a woman she hoped she’d never have to meet: the woman who wouldn’t become a victim if she acted decisively.

  “When does your shift end?” she asked Deputy Herzog.

  “Not till six.”

  “Good. Don’t go far. I’m going to get you a match for Person B this afternoon.”

  She marched out of the room and into the detectives’ bullpen, where she prevailed on one of the deputies to let her borrow a computer that had printer access. She went to Warren Plotz’s Facebook page, selected one of the photos without the douchebag aviator glasses, and hit Print.

  Then she stared at the screen for a moment. She knew a legally viable witness ID of a perpetrator had to involve a properly arranged photo lineup. There needed to be a minimum of six pictures, all of people similar in size, appearance, and coloring. Even the setting had to be the same: you couldn’t show, say, five portraits and one candid.

  The case law governing the subject had generated enough paperwork to fell entire forests. The Supreme Court typically revisited the topic every few years for one reason or another, killing off another few hundred trees in the process. The Attorney General’s advisory on the subject ran for many pages and was constantly being updated.

  It would take time to create a proper mug book.

  Time Amy could no longer tolerate wasting.

  Without giving it further thought, she printed out five more Warren Plotz Facebook photos. She tucked them in a folder with the first one, then made the short drive back to Augusta Health. She paused at the door to Lilly’s room in case she was sleeping, but the young woman was sitting up, almost like she was expecting company.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi, Lilly. How are you?”

  “Still tired.”

  “I’ve got a photo ID book for you to look at. You think you can handle that?”

  Lilly nodded.

  “I’m going to show these to you one by one,” Amy said. “Take as much time as you need. The man might not be in here. If he’s not, no big deal, okay? Just do your best.”

  Amy handed the first photo to Lilly, who looked at it for ten seconds or so, then placed it facedown on the bed in front of her and gestured for the next one.

  After the third, sh
e said, “These are . . . these are all the same guy, aren’t they?”

  “No,” Amy said firmly. “They’re not.”

  Three years of law school. Fourteen years of prosecuting hundreds of cases in Fairfax. Three years and hundreds more in Staunton. Never once had she knowingly broken the law.

  And now she was doing it without so much as a hitch in her voice.

  Lilly returned her attention to the photos. She made it all the way through, then went back to two of the ones in the middle. She studied them a little more, then selected the fourth one.

  “This could be him,” she said. “It looks more like him than any of the other ones do.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Amy said.

  The witness positively identified the suspect from a sequential photo lineup. Amy was already writing the charging documents in her mind. She would get the warrant issued within two hours.

  She could fix the mug book later. By the time it went to Warren Plotz’s lawyer, it would little resemble what Lilly Pritchett had just thumbed through.

  To hell with the Supreme Court.

  TWENTY-NINE

  It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to sit there in a court of law and have respectable, rational, upstanding people scrutinizing you like you’re the kind of mother who lets her three-month-old baby roll around in cocaine.

  The clerk’s face had this dour downward cast, like she was offended to be breathing the same air as me.

  The bailiff was staring at me with open contempt. He couldn’t wait to get home and tell his wife about the human cockroach who crawled into his courtroom.

  Judge Stone, who stopped just short of kicking me out of his courtroom after my outburst, kept giving me sideways glances. I wasn’t merely one of Those Women who couldn’t control their impulses anymore. I was maleficence personified.

  Beyond that, there were my concerns for Alex’s health. Were those trace amounts of cocaine on him, or had he really gotten enough on him to ingest it? If he did, what kind of long-term consequences would that have?