Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  Somewhere in the midst of that back-and-forth, Amy got the additional punch in the mouth that was the phone call from Chap Burleson, the lab director in Roanoke.

  Unsurprisingly, the DNA sample on the soda can did not match the DNA from the other sexual assaults. Burleson was civil about it, but there was a why-did-you-waste-my-time undertone to his words.

  All the while, Amy stewed in her chief mistake: She had allowed herself to become overly emotional and therefore overzealous. That had led her to ignore policies and procedures that had been put in place for just this reason, to prevent one person’s passion from having undue influence on what was supposed to be a dispassionate process.

  By Wednesday night, at which point Amy had felt like a puppy whose nose had been rubbed in her mistakes altogether too much, she finally went and did what she should have done all along: Go to the restaurant where her husband worked, get slowly and thoroughly inebriated on whiskey, and then let him take her home and tuck her into bed.

  Which had all seemed like a fine, wonderful idea—until she had to wake up Thursday morning.

  So that was the first headache.

  The second came shortly after she was alerted that an appeal had been filed on behalf of one Demetrius “Mookie” Myers. The appeal itself was no surprise—Myers had a new lawyer who had filed notice a month earlier.

  She hadn’t been expecting trouble. Maybe a claim for ineffective assistance of counsel or some kind of quibble with the jury instructions, neither of which would really involve her. Most criminal appeals were basically legal spaghetti, flung against the walls of the Court of Appeals in Richmond in the hopes they might stick.

  But to Amy’s surprise, this particular appeal was gooey enough to do just that. One of the witnesses against Myers had been an elderly neighbor who bravely testified she had repeatedly seen Myers selling cocaine in a small alley behind their apartment building. She had come forward against Myers because she was tired of all the undesirables Myers’s activities were attracting to her home.

  According to the petition, the witness, who was afraid of Myers’s remaining foot soldiers, had been paid $5,000 out of a victim/witness fund to relocate out of the county. There was nothing illegal about that, of course. The Sheriff’s Office did it all the time.

  Except this small fact had never been introduced at trial. And Myers’s new lawyer was pointing out—rightly, unfortunately—that the jury should have heard about it, the argument being that the payment might have helped motivate her testimony. Depending on how profound a slip the appellate judge deemed it to be, it could result in a new trial for Myers.

  If it was true. And there was one way to quickly find out.

  Amy pulled out her phone, hoping this was one of the times Sheriff Jason Powers could be quickly found.

  Two rings later, she heard, “’Lo?”

  “Hey, Jason, it’s Amy Kaye.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “Not good. I’m looking at the appeal in the Mookie Myers case.”

  “Yeah? And?”

  “You remember that nice little old lady who brought the case to you guys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you pay her five grand to help her move out of that apartment building and into a new place?”

  “Uh-huh. She was doing that whole ‘I’m on a fixed income’ thing. She said she wouldn’t testify until we got her out of there. Why?”

  “Don’t you think you could have, I don’t know, told me about that?”

  “We didn’t?” Powers asked.

  Amy let out a long sigh and shook her throbbing head.

  * * *

  • • •

  Two hours later, having swallowed some aspirin and drank as much water as she could force down her throat, Amy was walking through the glass front doors at the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office.

  She was already thinking about her evidence and how she’d have to present it all over again. Lieutenant Kempe had been the lead investigator, and obviously he wouldn’t give her trouble about testifying a second time—he had only himself to blame for not telling Amy about the payout.

  Then there was the old lady. Amy wanted Kempe to contact her to make sure she hadn’t moved again.

  That left the drugs and the guns.

  The latter were still in existence. They had been confiscated and were waiting to be melted down, something the Sheriff’s Office did once a year, in December.

  The former should have been handled already. After the trial, it’s the duty of the Sheriff’s Office investigator to destroy the drugs, then certify to a judge he has done so. But Amy couldn’t find the certification in the file.

  That meant the drugs were still in the evidence lockup, which was a small break in Amy’s favor. In larger drug cases like this one, she liked to put the product in front of the jury, to make the crime more concrete. Look here, see this? This is what the menace looks like. This is the sickness this man was spreading throughout our community.

  Now she just needed to make sure the drugs weren’t scheduled to be destroyed, say, today.

  Amy could have done all this with a phone call. But it was a delicate thing, telling the lead investigator he had botched a detail like this, and she valued her relationship with Lieutenant Kempe enough to do it in person.

  She found the lieutenant in his small office just off the detective’s bullpen. Skip Kempe had always reminded her of an introverted high school English teacher in some way she couldn’t quite place. Maybe it was his unassuming air. Or that she had once caught him reading an Aldous Huxley novel over lunch.

  As soon as Kempe saw Amy, he slumped his shoulders and hung his head.

  “I am so, so sorry,” he said. “Sheriff just reamed me out pretty good, but if you want to take a turn, I fully deserve it.”

  “It’s okay,” Amy said. “No one bats a thousand.”

  “No, it’s really not okay. As soon as Sheriff told me, I . . . I mean, I just couldn’t believe I bungled something so basic.”

  “Seriously, don’t beat yourself up too much,” Amy said. “It’s possible the judge will let us off the hook and decide this disclosure wouldn’t have changed the outcome. And look, if there is a new trial, our case will be every bit as solid the second time as it was the first, okay?”

  “Yeah, I know, I know. It’s just . . . I feel like we spent too much time landing this fish to throw it back like this.”

  “We’ll land him again, don’t worry,” Amy said. “Speaking of which, I noticed there wasn’t anything in the file about the drugs being destroyed. Have you not done that yet?”

  If it was at all possible, Kempe shrunk even further.

  “You’re not going to like this,” he said.

  Amy just cocked her head.

  “A few weeks after the trial, I was collecting all my notes and everything, getting ready to put them in the morgue. That’s usually when I get rid of the drugs, right? Then I do that little write-up for the judge and sign my name in blood that I’ve done it and all that. But when I went back to evidence and started looking for them, they were . . . they were sort of gone.”

  “Gone?” Amy said. “What do you mean, gone?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. The sergeant and I literally emptied the entire lockup and went through every item piece by piece. The drugs weren’t there.”

  “So where are they?”

  Kempe just spread his hands wide. “I wish I could tell you, but I can’t even make something up. According to the chain-of-custody sheet, they’re still in there.”

  “When were you planning on telling me about this?”

  “To be perfectly honest, I was hoping they’d either turn up or we’d figure out which one of our guys stole them so we could flay him alive and then put the stuff back before anyone outside the department knew it was gone.”

&nb
sp; Amy’s headache, which had only recently abated, was returning with a terrible vengeance. If this came out at the second trial, they would look like fools.

  Depending on how good Myers’s new attorney was and how much he exploited this blunder, they might even lose the conviction.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  My first shift began Thursday morning and stretched into Thursday afternoon, encompassing both the breakfast and lunch rushes. The manager believed in leadership by beratement, so most of my time was spent being chastised for one minor transgression or another, like how I didn’t properly orient the bills in the cash register.

  For eight hours of hard labor and censure, my tips totaled $51.74, the most generous of which came when a trucker told me to keep the change after handing me a ten for a $5.79 tab. To be fair, I earned it: he had stayed there two hours, insisted on nine coffee refills, and ogled my ass every time I walked away.

  As I trudged back out toward my car, wearing my blue button-down Waffle House shirt and cheap black pants, the urge to quit was overwhelming. My feet and ankles throbbed. My hair felt and smelled like it had been infused with bacon grease. The rest of me reeked like burnt coffee.

  The only thing that stopped me from turning back around and telling the manager where she could shove her cash register was Alex. I thought of Judge Stone, staring at me haughtily from on high, asking me if I had gotten a job like he asked. I needed to be able to answer in the affirmative.

  I flopped in my car and, feeling too tired to even turn the ignition right away, checked my phone. It had two messages waiting.

  The first was a voicemail from Mr. Honeywell. He had filed a motion to suppress the search warrant in my criminal case. He said the clerk would schedule us for a motion hearing, and that it would likely be soon. The matter needed to be adjudicated before the April 9 trial date.

  Then he hung up. He did not acknowledge or attempt to explain the strange end to our conversation on the bench. Maybe he never would.

  The second message was a text from Teddy.

  Hey, I have some good news that might lead to better news. Where ru?

  I don’t want to say I had forgotten about Teddy since Monday, when I had learned he was once again gallivanting with Wendy. But his newest dalliance with danger simply hadn’t been a priority. As had been the case in the past with Teddy, I had enough problems without adding in his issues.

  Where am I? I thought. Where are you, Teddy? And what the hell have you been up to?

  But I didn’t text that. I was too tired for the drama. So I just tapped out

  Heading home. Where ru?

  Then I got back on my way toward Desper Hollow. Halfway there, Teddy texted back.

  I’ll be right there. I have a surprise. A good one.

  Great, I thought. I can’t wait.

  When I got home, it seemed to take the breast pump longer than ever to draw milk out of me. It was one more thing that was making me feel grim as I changed out of my Waffle House finery. I had just finished when I heard a truck rumbling up the driveway. I opened a slit in the blinds to have a look. Sure enough, it was Teddy.

  But that wasn’t the reason I was cursing and fuming as I ran back down the steps toward the front door. It was who he had in the passenger seat.

  Wendy Mataya. The succubus herself.

  The first time I met Wendy, she was maybe sixteen, and she was already beautiful to the point of distraction, this human concoction that I thought only existed in romance novels: hair so dark brown it was practically black; flawless pale skin; huge green eyes that brought to mind emeralds; and, what the guys liked best, an hourglass figure so curvy, and yet so impossibly slim in the waist, that you’d swear she was wearing a corset.

  But let’s be clear, I didn’t hate her because she was gorgeous or had a great body. I hated her because, in all the time I had known her, she had done nothing but lie to me, steal from me, and lead my baby brother to the gates of hell and back.

  I was on my front porch as they got out of the truck.

  “What is she doing here?” I demanded.

  “She’s been helping me,” Teddy said, innocently and a bit goofily, the way he always talked when he was around Wendy. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in two days. Wendy liked scruff.

  “Are you sober?”

  “Yes,” he insisted. “You can stop with the Spanish Inquisition. We’re both sober.”

  He had joined her at the hood of the truck and they were now coming up the walk, hand in hand. Wendy wore tight jeans, a T-shirt that barely contained her oversize bosom, and a hoodie that was unzipped so as not to obscure her best feature.

  “She can’t come in,” I said, because while I could always tell whether Teddy was stoned, I was never sure with Wendy. Her looks had this way of hiding everything.

  “Would you take it easy? She’s finally trying to get right.”

  “Yeah? How long have you been clean, Wendy?”

  “Three weeks,” she said.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said, rolling my eyes. How many times had I heard earnest professions of new leaves being turned over that lasted a week or two or four before they reverted back? A junkie claiming sobriety after three weeks was really just someone whose resolve had yet to be adequately tested.

  Wendy was now directly beneath me, still clutching Teddy’s hand, looking up at me with those witchy emerald eyes.

  “Melanie, I know I’ve . . . I’ve wronged you. I’ve wronged a lot of people, actually. But when I think of you, I . . . I know I’ve done a lot of bad stuff to you. I mean, there was the bracelet . . . and the thing with your credit card . . . and that time with your car . . . and I guess there have been a bunch of times, and I’m sorry, okay? I really am sorry. And I’m going to try to do everything I can to make it up to you.”

  “Nice speech,” I spat. “Where’d you get it, the Narcotics Anonymous website?”

  “Come on, sis. She’s trying. Would you give her a chance?”

  “I did. Seven years ago. Then again six years ago. Do you really need me to rehash everything? I can if you want.”

  Teddy took a step boldly forward. “Okay, okay, I get it. You’re still pissed. But we don’t have time for that right now.”

  And then, with his free hand, he reached into his back pocket, unfolded a piece of photo paper he had extracted, then held it out so I could see it. I recognized the side view of my A1 plumber mystery man, blown up to an eight-by-ten.

  “She knows who this guy is,” Teddy said. “And he might be meeting with us in a little bit. You want to hear more or not?”

  * * *

  • • •

  They followed me inside and sat stiffly on the couch, like they were meeting someone’s mother for the first time.

  I remained standing in front of them with my arms crossed, still too distrustful of Wendy to let my guard down.

  “Let’s hear it,” I said.

  “As soon as I saw the picture, I recognized the guy,” Teddy said. “I didn’t know his name or anything, but he’s one of those guys who kind of hangs around downtown or out at the mission.”

  Valley Mission was a homeless shelter in a storefront on West Beverley Street, on the other side of Thornrose Cemetery. I had tried it once or twice after I got kicked out of my apartment but decided I preferred my car. The mission itself was clean and well run. It was the clientele that proved a bit much for me.

  The area around the mission served as ground zero for Staunton drug culture. There had been at least a dozen times, during Teddy’s wild years, when his mother called me in a panic and told me he had disappeared again. Probably half the time, I found him hanging out on the well-worn path between the bars downtown and the mission, stoned out of his mind.

  Teddy continued: “So I know you said I was just supposed to look at the picture and not do anything with it, but I kind of assumed you di
dn’t really mean it—especially since you were in jail and couldn’t do anything about it. And well, anyway, on Saturday, I kind of went out to the mission, just to scope things out.”

  “Oh, Teddy,” I said, burying my face in my hands. The scenario he was describing—putting himself among the people and places that had so often led to his drug use—was a recipe for relapse.

  “Relax, relax, I was just looking, not talking to anyone or anything. Anyway, that’s when I saw Wendy.”

  Naturally.

  “The people at the mission are trying to hook me up with a real job,” she said. “In the meantime, I’ve been volunteering, serving lunches and that sort of thing.”

  Of course she had been. Because now that she was three weeks sober, she was practically a candidate for sainthood.

  “I didn’t actually talk to her at first,” Teddy said. “Because, you know, she’s a trigger and all that.”

  “Wait, I thought you were a trigger for me,” she teased, patting him on the knee.

  They were being so nauseatingly sweet with each other, I didn’t have to ask if they were sleeping together again. My plight had become their romantic quest. And yes, it had started with noble intentions. I feared its end all the same. In truth, it wasn’t alcohol, marijuana, or heroin that was the common theme in my brother’s battle with addiction. Wendy Mataya had always been his drug of choice.

  “Anyway, I kind of hung back, not wanting to talk to her or anyone, really,” Teddy said. “I was just there to look for the guy from the picture. And then she finally came up to me.”

  Wendy picked up the story: “And I was like, ‘I see you, you big dummy. It’s kind of hard to miss a guy who’s six-four and gorgeous, you know.’”

  Teddy: “Anyway, we started talking, and she was telling me about how things were different this time.”

  Wendy: “They had to be different after what happened to me. I woke up in the back of an ambulance and, like, three days of my life were gone. The EMTs said when they found me, my heart was stopped. They had to give me Narcan and everything.”