Closer Than You Know

by Brad Parks

  Of course. I knew the name, from having read the paper. I just didn’t know the face.

  Didn’t it all make even more sense now? I had always assumed the man who attacked me was some kind of degenerate or drifter, some antisocial misfit who lived on society’s outer fringes.

  Aaron Dansby was none of those things. He came from a prominent family whose members had been among Augusta County’s leading citizens for generations. And he wasn’t just a lawyer, but the lawyer responsible for prosecuting all the crimes in the county.

  Was that how he had gotten away with it for so long? He had practically been born into the seat of power, raised with intimate access to the inner workings of law and government. And then he actually assumed the seat, and it enabled him to guide investigative priorities, manipulate evidence, and stay one step ahead of anyone who might figure him out.

  Or maybe he was just that good at not getting caught in the first place. That’s part of what the whispering accomplished, wasn’t it? None of his victims would be able to recognize his voice from, say, a political advertisement.

  And there were victims. Plural. Even though Amy Kaye had never confirmed it, I had seen it in her eyes when I asked, I’m not the only one, am I?

  There were probably scores of us. I wondered if they were all like me. Young. Confused. Clueless. Powerless.

  Had any of us ever lobbed an accusation his way? Or would it not have mattered? Would he—with his influence and family connections—have been able to swat it out of the sky before it had a chance to take flight?

  I could now see everything. Dansby had probably been keeping an eye on me. He had seen my belly swell throughout the summer and fall and had known there was a reasonably good chance the child I carried was his.

  My move to a single-family house had been easy enough to track—home sales were public record. If anything, it made his life simpler. There were fewer potential witnesses to his stalking out on Desper Hollow Road.

  Once the baby came out, healthy and desirable and half his, he made his move. I could only imagine what Social Services thought of Aaron Dansby and his wife—this young, wealthy, connected couple—when they first expressed an interest in adopting a baby. None of the foster families I had ever come across would have come close to comparing. Social Services probably couldn’t wait to give Dansby a child.

  Then the challenge became how to separate me from Alex. But really, how difficult was it for a commonwealth’s attorney to frame someone for drug possession?

  He obviously had unfettered access to the evidence room. He could have come and gone from that room without arousing suspicion. What’s more, he would know the security procedures at the Sheriff’s Office and would therefore be able find a way to circumvent them.

  And then, in Richard Coduri, Dansby had found a willing accomplice: a seasoned drug snitch, and the kind of opportunist who would love an easy payday. Dansby hired Coduri to plant drugs in my house, reveal to the Sheriff’s Office I was a dealer, and tell Social Services I planned to sell my baby.

  Dansby thought Coduri would remain anonymous. When Mr. Honeywell jeopardized that, Dansby eliminated Coduri, knowing everyone would think I had done it. That put me on the road to prison—and to the permanent loss of my child—in two ways.

  “Hello?” Ben said. “You with me?”

  Again, I didn’t have words for him. It was all so disorienting, I had entered a kind of trance. I couldn’t summon anger, or relief, or satisfaction, or whatever combination of emotions I once imagined I would have in the unlikely event I ever learned my rapist’s identity.

  All I wanted was my son back.

  I looked at Mr. Honeywell. If I blurted out, “Aaron Dansby was the man who raped me,” even the lawyer who had just helped save my life would look at me like I was drunk or high or both. Aaron Dansby was political royalty, not to mention the chief law enforcement officer of Augusta County.

  No. I needed evidence first.

  And it was already occurring to me there was a very simple way to get it. All I had to do was go to Dansby’s house. If he had Alex, it was all the confirmation I needed.

  One picture of Dansby or his wife holding Alex would prove everything.

  SIXTY-ONE

  I waited until I had processed out of Middle River Regional Jail before telling Ben what I now knew, explaining it to him as we made the drive back home.

  Even unflappable Ben was shocked. But once he got over that—and digested the implications of what I was saying—he agreed with my logic.

  It was the logistics he was stumbling over.

  How, he asked, were we going to get this picture? The sum total of our photographic equipment consisted of the cameras on our phones, neither of which had a very powerful zoom function.

  I didn’t have an answer for him until we passed Bobby Ray’s house, with its SMILE! YOUR ON CAMERA! sign out front.

  “You think Bobby Ray can help?” I asked.

  “That’s not a bad idea,” he said.

  Teddy and Wendy were waiting for us at the top of the driveway, having already decorated my front door with a sign that read WELCOME HOME MELANIE!

  I thanked them for the sentiment, then told them about the work we had to do. Neither of them had a decent camera either, so I set them on the task of getting on the Internet and learning where Dansby lived. Ben and I trooped down the driveway to Bobby Ray’s trailer and knocked on the front door.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw me. “You won?”

  “I sure did. Thanks for your help. I’d be in jail for a long time if it weren’t for you.”

  “No sweat, man. As far as I’m concerned, it’s like this shirt I got: ‘You mess with me, you mess with the whole trailer park,’” Bobby Ray said, grinning. “I’d let you borrow it sometime, except it’s got one of them flags on it you don’t like.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “But I’m actually looking for another favor, if you don’t mind.”

  I described what I needed to accomplish. When I was done, he said, “Oh, yeah, sure. I got a camera that can zoom in real nice for you. It’ll take me a little while to unhook it. But then I can be ready to rock and roll.”

  “Great,” Ben said. “And there’s one more thing, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure. Shoot.”

  “Do you have a gun we can borrow?”

  I could barely believe the words had come from my pacifist husband’s mouth. Ben despised guns. He was constantly railing about the need for more gun control, particularly as young African American men used them to slaughter one another across American cities.

  Bobby Ray shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “Uh, actually, I don’t.”

  “You don’t?” Ben asked.

  “Look, don’t tell no one,” he said. “But I’m a convicted felon. I could get in a lot of trouble, getting caught with a gun. I just make people think I got a lot of them so they don’t fool with me none.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Two hours later, the five of us—Ben, Teddy, Wendy, Bobby Ray, and me—were crammed into Ben’s car, cruising through Staunton’s nicest neighborhood.

  We had decided to wait until after the sun was down, relying on darkness to conceal our movements. We were armed with a camera but not a firearm. I didn’t want to know how Dansby might respond if he found us skulking around outside his house.

  The address Teddy found was on Dogwood Road, which was lined with spacious houses set well back from the road. The Dansby residence was a Greek revival, done in red brick, complete with towering white columns. It was perched on top of a small hill.

  “Keep driving,” I told Ben. “Park down the street. I don’t want anyone inside to see us.”

  Ben did as instructed.

  “Okay, so what’s the plan?” Bobby Ray asked me when we stopped. The camera was on his lap.r />
  “Get as close as you can with that thing and then zoom in. If you get a shot of a baby, your job is done.”

  “So you want me to go up to the house and shoot in the windows?”

  “Yeah, if you can.”

  “Sorry, I ain’t trespassing for you. I’m still on probation.”

  I looked to Teddy. I would have done it myself, but Teddy was taller, in case there were high windows; and he was faster, in case a quick getaway was needed. He was also a lot less likely to scream the moment he saw Alex.

  “I got it,” he said.

  “You’ll be careful, right? Don’t take any chances. If you think you’ve been seen, you’ll take off running?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s not like they know we’re coming.”

  Bobby Ray gave Teddy a brief lesson on how to work the camera’s functions. Then my brother left the car, loped up the street, and crossed into a neighbor’s yard.

  There was silence in the car once he left. No one had anything worth saying.

  I was in another body, or another mind, or something. I had woken up that morning in administrative segregation, with nothing more than a toothbrush at my disposal, and was now perhaps moments away from having the evidence I needed to end this awful conspiracy.

  Ben was clutching my hand. It was so strange to have him back. I didn’t know what our life together would be like, exactly. There was the matter of all the lies he had told me, to say nothing of his shattered career.

  But we could figure that all out. He still wanted to be my husband. I knew that now. And I wanted to be his wife.

  Maybe that would be enough to give us a new start.

  We had rolled down the windows, allowing the sounds of the night to enter the car. There were not many of them. A lone car, somewhere else in the neighborhood. A few crickets chirping. That was really it.

  The quiet didn’t last long.

  Maybe three minutes had passed when we heard automobile engines, lots of them, coming fast.

  Three Staunton City police cars ripped past us. Then a Staunton City police van. They were followed by two Virginia state police vehicles; and several more from the Augusta County Sheriff’s Office; and an unmarked car—a Subaru, of all things.

  “What the . . . ,” Ben began.

  “Teddy,” I said.

  The four of us vaulted out of the car.

  The police cars turned into Dansby’s place. I broke into a jog toward his driveway.

  Then I heard the gunshot.

  It came from the direction of Dansby’s house.

  “Teddy!” I shrieked, and started sprinting.

  Why had I let Teddy go into such an obviously dangerous situation? What kind of big sister was I? I had allowed my own zealousness to put him in danger, rather than letting good sense guide my actions.

  I reached the Dansby driveway and didn’t stop, running up it with my arms pumping, heading toward the house. I could hear yelling coming from inside. The front door was wide open. There were cops crouched just inside with their guns drawn. More cops were outside, hiding behind their cars.

  Then I saw a blur, dashing away from the side of the house.

  It was Teddy, hurtling away from the house.

  There were suddenly a half dozen guns trained on him. In the chaos, the cops didn’t know whether he was friend or foe, and they weren’t taking any chances.

  A chorus of shouts filled the night: “Hands up! Hands up! Stop right there!”

  “Don’t shoot him!” I tried to bellow over the din. “He’s my brother!”

  As if they knew who I was.

  Teddy thrust his hands up and fell to his knees. He was quickly swarmed by three officers, who grabbed various parts of him and dragged him awkwardly behind one of their cars.

  “Teddy,” I screamed. “Teddy!”

  I ran toward him.

  “Oh God. Oh God,” he was saying.

  He was sobbing. I had seen my brother in all kinds of woeful states—as high and as low as you can ever witness another human being. I had never seen him this distraught.

  The words coming from him were so garbled by his hysteria I couldn’t even make them out. Finally, between gasps, it became clearer.

  “Help her. Please, God. Help her.”

  “Sir, calm down,” said one of the cops, who was kneeling next to him behind the patrol car. “Help who?”

  “He shot her,” my brother managed. “He shot her.”

  “Who shot her?” the cop asked.

  “Dansby. He shot his wife. I was watching her in the living room. As soon as the patrol cars came up the driveway, he walked into the room and he . . . He shot her in the back of the head.”

  Teddy brought his hands to his face. He couldn’t control himself.

  “Her head, it . . .” he said.

  And then he collapsed, vomiting on the driveway as he did so. I was now behind the car with him.

  “Teddy,” I said. “It’s me, Teddy.”

  I put my hand on his back, for what little good that would do.

  “Requesting emergency medical services,” I heard the radio squawk. “We have a white female with a single GSW to the head. No breathing. No pulse.”

  “Copy that,” the dispatch replied.

  Then a new voice burst through the static.

  “We’re going to need a hostage negotiator in here. The suspect has barricaded himself in a room upstairs. He’s taken an infant with him. He says he’ll shoot the baby if anyone tries to come in.”

  SIXTY-TWO

  From the time she left the courtroom, it had taken Amy Kaye about forty minutes to figure it out.

  Longer than she might have liked. But still less time than an episode of Dancing with the Stars.

  She started with Dansby’s fury over her decision to drop all charges against Melanie Barrick. He couched it in all the usual ways—it was bad for his reelection chances, what would the party think, they couldn’t be soft on crime, et cetera—but it was still notable for its vehemence. She had never seen Dansby care that much about one of their cases.

  She thought about the evidence lockup. Who, besides sheriff’s deputies, had access to it? Personnel from the Augusta County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, of course.

  Then she thought about the fingerprint. And the fact that it wasn’t in the database. Amy was in the database. So were the other prosecutors. Everyone connected with law enforcement eventually wound up in that database.

  Except for one man:

  Dapper Dansby, the guy who promenaded in front of the cameras every chance he got but who never went to crime scenes and never dirtied his hands with the hard work of investigation.

  It also explained his Augusta County exclusivity. After all, who had preceded Aaron as commonwealth’s attorney? His father. Had the elder Dansby covered for his son? That remained an open question.

  The timeline of attacks certainly molded neatly into Dansby’s biography. Those three hits in 2002–03? Dansby was just finishing up high school. The sporadic hits from 2004–10? He was off at college, then law school. Then in 2011, he returned home, and the rapes came in bunches.

  It all fit. Still, she had to be absolutely sure this time.

  Dansby had not returned to the office after the trial, allowing Amy to make an unfettered trip into the pages of Southern Living to grab a few items that would surely have his prints on them.

  She drove the things up to the Sheriff’s Office, where Justin Herzog was happy to help. From his noxious-smelling nerve center, he was able to confirm that the fingerprints matched Person B and the Room 307 unsub.

  Amy guessed she’d eventually be able to get the state crime lab to confirm Dansby’s DNA had also been found under Richard Coduri’s fingernails.

  But from a legal standpoint, she already had everything she needed.
She called Judge Robbins, who was three scotches into his evening but still agreed to sign the arrest warrant for Aaron Dansby without hesitation.

  “I never liked that li’l sumbitch,” he slurred.

  Then Amy took this neat package—the fingerprints, the warrant—to Jason Powers, who was playing the nineteenth hole when she found him. A smile spread across his face as she explained everything to him. He then called Staunton City Police Chief Jim Williams, who mobilized his Critical Incident Response Team. With assistance from Augusta County’s CIRT, they quickly planned their strike on the Dansby residence.

  Ever since then, Amy had been more of a spectator than a participant, driving along and then watching from afar as a salad of badges and uniforms mixed together. Now and then, she received updates—including that Dansby had barricaded himself in the house with an infant, of all things.

  She had received her most recent briefing—negotiations had apparently stalled—when she wandered past a patrol car.

  Amy had hung back and not gotten involved as they did their jobs. Then she passed a patrol car and recognized Melanie Barrick sitting inside.

  “What’s she doing here?” Amy asked one of the deputies.

  “Supposedly, that’s her kid inside,” he said. “She tried to get into the house. Took four officers to restrain her. We didn’t know what else to do with her, so . . .”

  He nodded toward the car, where Melanie Barrick was handcuffed to the backseat.

  Her kid. Of course it was.

  The child who had been removed from his mother’s care shortly after the raid. That was Dansby’s son. That’s why Dansby had Richard Coduri plant those stolen drugs in the first place. He needed Melanie Barrick to be framed with something serious enough she’d never get the boy back.

  How had Dansby managed to convince Social Services to give him the baby? It couldn’t have been difficult. The Dogwood Road address and the Dansby pedigree were more than enough.