Death Benefits

by Jennifer Becton

She stopped and eyed me, and it was probably the first crack I’d seen in her rock-like determination. “Yeah, well, you already know he’s dead,” she said as she began pulling Marston toward the back door of the house. “He was in the LTD.” Kathy’s tone sounded uncertain, but her face had hardened further, as if she were now set on some predetermined course.

  I couldn’t read her mind, but her body language wasn’t encouraging. Her posture looked stiff, and her eyes were distant. She was cut off from reality. If she exited through that door, she would be out of view of the SWAT team, which I’d just left behind in the southeast corner of the yard. No one would be able to stop her from taking Marston as a hostage and maybe killing him.

  I studied her expression and decided to proceed as if I were just here about the car fire.

  “But that wasn’t Theo in the car, was it, Kathy?” I asked, trying not to sound judgmental as I followed carefully while she backed Marston onto the rear porch. “He didn’t die in a car accident.”

  Kathy stopped and stared at me. “But Theo is dead,” Kathy said. “I saw his body myself.”

  “The body in the car wasn’t Theo,” I repeated.

  She huffed audibly, and if she hadn’t been holding Marston and dragging him awkwardly down the stairs, she probably would have stomped a foot in frustration. “I know that,” she snapped. “Theo’s in the shed”—her voice broke—“dead.”

  I stared at her, trying to decide what to say next. I decided to go with honesty. “I’m sorry about what happened to Theo,” I said, meaning it, all the while wondering if she had killed him and was doing anything to cover that fact. “Why don’t you let Marston go, and we can work together to find out what happened to him? We’ll figure out who did this to him.”

  “Hell, no!” Kathy’s little face began to contort and twist, and I knew she wouldn’t walk away from this. She jerked Marston along faster now that she was off the stairs, and I continued to follow her progress toward the tree line.

  I looked around, hoping to see a black-clad SWAT member in the vicinity. But I saw no one. Sheltered here in the backyard, we were completely out of sight of the SWAT team, which was no doubt still dealing with Theo’s body. I could expect no backup. Still, I kept going.

  Kathy’s eyebrows dropped further at my persistence. She was preparing herself in case she needed to do something desperate to get rid of me.

  “Just stop right there,” she hissed at me. “Don’t come no closer. I’ve had enough today.”

  “What do you mean? Had enough?” I asked.

  “I ain’t a fool. I know you’re here to arrest me. But I ain’t going to jail. Everything’s changed. Somebody killed Theo and now he’s after me!”

  “Who?” I asked, adding calmly. “If you tell us who did this to your husband, we can find him and make sure he’s punished.”

  Frankly, I wasn’t sure that Kathy hadn’t killed Theo herself, and she wasn’t making any sense at all, but my first priority was freeing Marston. Then we’d figure out what had actually happened on the Vanderbilt property that morning.

  But Kathy ignored my question. “I heard Theo screaming and I ran to the shed. There was a guy with a big-ass knife. And I’ll tell you two things: I wasn’t going to let him cut me up, and I ain’t going to let you take me to prison.”

  “Who? Who threatened you with a knife?”

  “I have no idea!” Kathy shrieked, causing Marston to stiffen visibly in her arms. “His face was all covered in my Theo’s blood….”

  Kathy’s words ended in a strangled cry, and I decided not to push her. “It’s okay, Kathy. You don’t have to talk about it anymore. Just let Marston go, and we don’t have to say another word about it.”

  I watched Kathy’s bottom lip wobble. “I…I…found him like that…dead…bloody.” A sob burst from her throat, and I knew I had to change the subject quickly to keep her from becoming too emotional.

  “Did you see the police show up?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know you were cops. I didn’t know who you were! I just heard a ruckus and saw a black van come up the drive. I didn’t know what the hell was going on, so I stayed hid in the attic and y’all didn’t find me up there. The knife guy didn’t either. I was safe there.”

  “Well, now that you know we are police, why don’t we sit down somewhere and figure out what happened to Theo?” I repeated myself in order to help Kathy see that there was still a nonviolent way to try to solve this.

  But Kathy was beyond the point of listening to me and seemed to be talking to herself. “I know what happened to Theo, and if that psycho comes back, he’ll do the same to me. All we were trying to do was get a little money. I don’t know what the hell is going on now.” Her eyes went wide and panicky, and my hand dropped automatically to my M&P. “But he’s dead! Dead! And I ain’t sticking around to join him.”

  I was certain she was about to go off the deep end and take Deputy Marston with her.

  “Don’t you think about it, lady,” Kathy warned as she noticed my hand on my sidearm. “I got a revolver right here on this guy that says you’re going to obey me. Now, put that gun down and we won’t have no trouble.”

  I took a deep breath, willing my mind to function. I nodded at Deputy Marston as if I knew what I was doing and then laid my weapon on the ground.

  “Look,” I said. “Let’s just talk. What can I do to help you out of this mess, Kathy?” She appeared to contemplate my offer even though I’d made the same one several times already, so I added, “If we work together, we can figure out what happened. We can find justice for Theo.”

  She squinted at me as if she just now recognized me. “You’re the chick who interviewed me about the insurance policy, right? You’re some big-shot state investigator.”

  I did not want to confirm that fact. I didn’t want her to set her sights on me as a more valuable hostage. Maybe now was the time to take a risk, I thought, but one look at Deputy Marston told me that he was too frozen to attempt anything in his own defense, so talking was still the safest course. “Yes, we spoke a few days ago.”

  “Well,” Kathy drew out the word. “I’ll tell you what. You come with me, and we’ll talk it out.”

  That didn’t go well at all, I thought. Now she wanted me to become her hostage.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I can do more for you if we just forget the guns and talk.”

  “No!” Kathy said. “I am not going to jail, and as long as I’ve got this kid, you’ve got no choice but to let me go or I’ll shoot him, I swear!”

  “Okay, okay,” I said with my hands raised in front of me. I wasn’t sure if they were there as a defense or as a ploy of submission. Maybe both.

  By this point, Deputy Marston looked like he was about to vomit. There was no doubt in my mind that he was well past the point of acting and would just go along with Kathy while she had the gun in his back.

  I could not let that happen. I could not let an innocent suffer if I had a means of preventing it.

  “Get over here,” she said.

  “Let him go first,” I said, hands still in front of me.

  “Oh, I’ll let him go,” Kathy spat, “but I’ll be aiming at his head the whole time. You hear me?” she asked Marston. “I’ll blow your brains out.”

  Time stopped for a moment, and then Kathy shoved Marston forward, her gun still trained on him.

  “Get over here,” she said to me. “Now.”

  Suddenly, she was beside me, pushing a revolver into my lower back just under the Kevlar.

  With the gun shoved into my flesh, I had no opportunity to disobey, and for a moment, I was just as frozen as Marston had been.

  A gun to the kidney will do that to most people, but this was my worst fear coming to fruition. I’d been too frozen to take advantage of Kathy’s moment of vulnerability, and now I was a hostage.

  “You’re going to walk with me, and then we’ll talk somewhere safe.” Kathy’s grip tightened and the gun pressed harder i
nto my lower back, bruising me I was sure, as she pushed me into the woods. “And don’t you try anything. I’ll shoot you right here.”

  Everything seemed to solidify when I felt her shove the muzzle hard against my body one more time, pushing me in the direction she wanted me to go.

  Here is where I should have gone back to Hostage Negotiation 101 and given her the same spiel about helping her out of this mess. About it being us against the world. But honestly, I was fed up with the situation, with Kathy, with myself.

  I couldn’t believe a tiny woman had appeared from nowhere with a gun and managed to gain an advantage on a sheriff’s deputy. And now me.

  Of course, I knew this sort of thing happens with alarming frequency. Police officers make mistakes.

  Still, statistics didn’t stop me from feeling like the biggest idiot on the planet, and that made me angry. Really angry.

  I had done everything right, dammit.

  I had called in the SWAT team.

  I made sure the place was clear before entering.

  I had a police escort.

  I had my own damn weapon and wore Kevlar.

  And still.

  When the moment had come, I’d frozen.

  Kathy’s hand grasped my left arm, and she dug the gun harder into my side, using it to angle me deeper into the woods, but I have this crazy rule that I don’t go anywhere with whackos wielding guns.

  Adrenaline began to race through my body, and my mind seemed to unlock. Hell, no, I thought. I was not going to let her drag me to the woods and kill me. I took a deep breath, preparing to pivot and try to take her down, when Kathy suddenly stiffened and went down like a ton of bricks.

  And a millisecond later, so did I.

  My world stopped.

  Every muscle in my body went rigid, like one giant, full-body cramp.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t call out for help. I couldn’t do a damn thing except feel pain pulsating through me. I somehow felt numb and itchy at the same time.

  Then the sensation ended.

  Just like that.

  I blinked and a little bit of the world around me came into focus. I became conscious of a pounding in my head, and I struggled to see where Kathy was.

  Every movement was like a knife to my skull, but I looked anyway. I had to know if she was going to shoot me. It turns out Kathy was lying partially underneath me. We had somehow ended up in a heap on the ground.

  I struggled to move off her, but I couldn’t get far under my own power.

  Then I heard the sound of metal clinking and a voice from above saying, “Shit, shit, shit. I’m sorry, ma’am. I was aiming for her.”

  “What?” I asked, totally confused, as I looked up and saw Deputy Marston kneeling above us. “What happened?”

  “I watched her lead you farther from the house and into the woods. I stayed close. She didn’t even notice me. After what you did for me, I had to at least try. You saved my life,” he said. “So when I got close enough, I figured I’d subdue the suspect with my Taser. Only I guess she was touching you at the time.”

  Ah. I’d been tased. That explained the blinding pain and nausea. I’d probably hit my head on something—a rock or tree root—when I fell.

  Deputy Marston paused for a moment to haul Kathy’s legs out from under me.

  I pulled myself into a sitting position to look at her, but I regretted it almost immediately and lay back down, clutching my forehead in my palms. My head pounded, and I suddenly felt woozy.

  “Is she conscious?” I asked as I gritted my teeth and closed my eyes against the pain.

  “Don’t worry. She’s cuffed,” Deputy Marston said, “and her weapon is secured. I’ve notified SWAT and an ambulance is on the way.”

  Well, in the grand scheme of things, being tased and sent to the hospital was a hell of a lot better than being dragged into the woods and then shot.

  Or cut up and left to bleed to death.

  “I can’t believe that happened,” Marston rambled. “I mean, we did everything right and this place is crawling with LEOs. And this was my first takedown. How’d I do?”

  I squinted up at him, but it made me dizzy so I squeezed my eyes shut again. “You got disarmed by a ninety-pound woman.”

  “She caught me unprepared,” Marston said.

  “Then you tased me,” I pointed out.

  “But I cuffed the suspect,” he said.

  “Yeah, you did.” Thank God he’d at least done that right because I was feeling a blackness wash over me, and then I was gone.

  The next time I tried to open my eyes, I caught sight of a crowd of SWAT team guys and deputies gathered, and a team of paramedics was working around me.

  Kathy had apparently already been taken to an ambulance or to a sheriff’s car—I didn’t know which—and now they were in the process of shifting me onto the transfer board en route to the stretcher.

  “No,” I said, trying to lift a hand. “Wait. Where are you taking me?”

  “Cranford General.”

  “A few tests, or is this an overnight?” I managed to ask.

  One of the paramedics leaned closer to me. “Ma’am, I can’t say for certain, but sometimes head trauma symptoms don’t show up for hours. The doctors might want to observe you overnight.”

  Well, that was a yes to the overnight stay.

  “No,” I said again, trying to sound forceful.

  “I strongly recommend you go now and have a CT scan.”

  “Where’s Vincent?” I asked. Something in me knew this was random, but my mind was foggy.

  “Who?” the paramedic asked.

  “My partner. Vincent.”

  From somewhere behind me, I heard someone say, “He’s still at the U-Strip-Em with the other team.”

  Damn, I thought. I’d been hoping he’d take me to Mercer Med. If I was going to be in the hospital overnight, I at least wanted to be in the same one as my sister.

  “Get me off this thing, and let me sit up,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I was capable of sitting without vomiting. “I’ll ask one of the Cranford deputies to take me to Mercer Med.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the paramedic, “but again, I strongly caution you against it. You hit your head pretty hard when you fell, and you’re risking subdural hematoma or subarachnoid hemorrhage even now.”

  I blinked at him.

  “In short, this is serious. If you’ll just let us take you—”

  I waved a hand at him. “My decision is made.”

  “Okay,” the paramedic relented, “but you’re doing this against medical advice.”

  I gritted my teeth and allowed him to help me to a waiting Cranford County cruiser, and somehow my personal effects, purse and ID, had appeared beside me. A deputy I didn’t know was at the wheel. I sighed, partially from the pain I was suffering and partially from knowing that every LEO in the Middle Georgia area would hear about this.

  “My weapon?” I asked the deputy as he began to pull out of the Vanderbilts’ driveway.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I left instructions to give it to your partner.”

  I admit I zoned in and out as we made the trip back to Mercer, and my hours in the hospital getting carted from room to room and test to test were not much more than a vague blur. I saw ER doctors, a neurosurgeon, and a neurologist. I had a CT scan.

  Apparently, I had no bleeding on the brain.

  So that was good.

  And my cervical spine was okay.

  But I was still in too much pain to celebrate these victories.

  Eventually, I was admitted to the ICU, which was probably overkill, but I was okay with that too because I was finally settled in a room with a reasonably comfortable bed. And I was near Tricia but apparently in another wing.

  That’s when I asked for the good drugs.

  “Sorry, Special Agent Jackson,” an evil nurse told me. “Acetaminophen only tonight.”

  “Can I have a dozen, then?”

  She laughed
and handed me two pills and a cup of water.

  I pretty much hated her, and that feeling only grew as the night progressed and nurses came in every hour to evaluate my mental status.

  Well, I could tell you what my mental status was: not good. I was in pain and tired, and no one would let me sleep.

  At some point, Vincent appeared in the room. I don’t know how he got there, but after one of my wonderful hourly tests, I looked over to find him sprawled out on the recliner beside the bed.

  If he’d looked out of scale at the dainty iron café table at Hugo’s, he looked ridiculous now. His head hung off the top of the chair, and his calves were barely supported by the footrest.

  I would have laughed but my head hurt too much.

  “Hey,” I said to him softly. “You looked more comfortable on the floor last night than you do in that chair.”

  In the dim light, I saw him turn his head and smile. He looked tired, but the relief and care that showed on his features caused an unnameable feeling to wash over me.

  Suddenly, I was a lot less annoyed at being in the hospital.

  “You’re here,” I said.

  His gruff voice came back soft, almost gentle. “Of course I am.”

  “You’re not going to mock me for getting tased, are you?”

  “Maybe later,” he said. “And only a little. But I’ll definitely congratulate you on saving that deputy’s life.”

  By now, I’d figured Marston would have told the story so that he’d saved me and not the other way around. “He told you what happened?”

  “Yeah, I forced him.”

  I laughed a bit and then regretted it.

  “Figures,” I said as I watched Vincent shift in the recliner. “You don’t have to stay here, you know. You had a long day too, I understand.”

  “Yeah, we moved Theo’s body to the state lab. We’re waiting for the full autopsy, but so far, we’ve found no other apparent injuries. He bled out in less than two minutes.”

  “Kathy?”

  “She’s in here too under lock and key and in much better condition than you.”

  “Yeah, lucky her.” Then I recalled what Deputy Marston had told me earlier. “The deputy who assisted me, Marston, mentioned a rumored affair between Sheriff Harper and Kathy Vanderbilt. Said he’d seen her around the station often.”