“Yes,” Mike said suddenly. He looked up rapidly, directly at Swift. “His father.”
Swift felt something cold flicker through his veins. “You mean his biological father?”
“That’s right. Tori McAfferty.”
“And why do you think that?”
Now Mike glanced away. He took a step back from the dishwasher and leaned against the counter beside the sink. His gaze drifted beyond Swift, through the windows and into the woods outside.
Mike suddenly looked less certain, as if he was going to backtrack from his statement.
“Everything is important right now, Mike. Every single thing. What makes you say you think his biological father would want to hurt him?”
Mike’s chin fell. He reached up and ran a hand through his stringy, black hair. He took a deep breath and exhaled. In the other room, Swift could hear the voices of cartoon characters and calliope music as the girls watched their movie.
“He tried to get in touch with Braxton about a month ago. He lives up here.”
Swift flipped through his notes, but more for effect than anything. He remembered what Callie said without needing to read it. “Your wife says she doesn’t know where Mr. McAfferty lives. You do?”
Mike kept his face down, looking at the floor. His head bobbed. “He found out that Braxton was moving north. I don’t know how. I asked Braxton if he’d been in touch with Tori before, but Braxton said he hadn’t. But, you know, these days, Facebook, and all that. All you have to do is look. Callie’s not a big Facebook person, and neither am I. But we both have accounts. And I have a Google Plus, you know, and who knows all the accounts Braxton might have, or what he says on them.”
“We’ll know soon enough how Mr. McAfferty found out. But, how do you know?”
Mike raised his head slowly. “We have this policy about how much time Braxton spends on the computer? On all the devices. You know, we read how harmful it can be for kids. Makes them sedentary, they can get addicted to it, the neuropathology of their developing brains, stuff like that. Especially Brax. I don’t know if Callie told you, but he has Asperger’s.”
“She talked about it. That you avoided diagnosis, and sort of treated it yourselves and tried to blunt the edges where you could.”
Mike’s eyes were hard for a moment. “Well, you could say that. Did she tell you that, with no diagnosis, there is no insurance?”
“She mentioned it.”
“Right, so, everything we’ve had to pay for, and I mean, Brax would only eat real particular foods for like five years, and Callie had him on all this holistic stuff, and vitamins — she had him do acupuncture, we’ve had speech therapy, we’ve had play therapy — I’ve paid for all of that. I mean, we’ve paid for it. Not cheap.”
“I understand.”
Mike hesitated. “So . . . we instituted this system where we would check how much time he spent on his laptop — which he just got for his 13th birthday. Two hours a day. Three on weekends. Some people might think that’s too much. Some people think it’s overbearing. It’s hard to get the balance, you know?”
Swift was listening, making the occasional note. He was also forming a picture in his mind of the way Mike and Callie Simpkins operated together in their marriage. Mike seemed like the worrier. A man with something to prove perhaps. This was just a gut observation, and Swift knew he was no psychiatrist. Speaking of which — and he made a note — each of the parents would probably benefit from seeing one, Callie especially. Callie was all guts and emotion and rubato. Mike seemed more intellectual, compromised by a guilt complex, along with some resentment about what his family were costing, which he seemed to feel, at least to some degree, was excessive.
“I understand,” Swift said again. “So you were checking up on the time Braxton spent on the computer and you . . .?”
“I’m not proud of it, you know? We had guests over for dinner. You know, the woman I’ve got coming over. And all during dinner that night, Brax was a bit sulky, and then he made some crass remark. I confronted him about this after the guests left. He got pretty upset, and made a comment about going to go live with his biological father. Then we got into it, and I questioned him, and found out that they’d been corresponding. After that I did a little searching and found out that the guy’s got a little HVAC business not far from here. But this guy, man. You know?” Mike shook his head and stared off now into times past. “The things he did to Callie; what he put her through, and what he put that baby through at such a tender age. Man . . .”
“He was violent?”
Something fierce came across in Mike’s gaze. “Oh yeah. That fucker was violent alright.”
Mike ducked his head and glanced across the room in the direction of the rubbery cartoon voices. He made a face as though his hand had been caught in the cookie jar. Swift saw it was due to his use of forceful language. Then the anger returned. “Yeah, he was abusive.”
“A drinker? That type?”
“Yeah, but more so other things. A huge temper. Violent. Mental problems. Drugs.”
“Like what?”
“Oh . . . Callie told me so many things when we first got together. It took a long time for her to recover. I had to be patient. You know, she was pretty sure he was bipolar. OCD, all of that. Had to have everything just so. When the baby came, he couldn’t deal with it. To messy, too disorganized. Callie is . . . I like to call her Madam Chaos. Somehow she keeps it all together. One of those people who has a method to their madness, you know? Tori, though, he medicated himself. Speed, that sort of thing. To the hyperactive sort, speed actually mellows them out.” Mike looked away, and Swift could tell he was longing for his wife.
“I’ve heard that.” He made a note then looked up. “Sounds like Callie and him were mismatched.”
“You ain’t kidding.”
“So . . .”
Mike got back on track. “So, I was checking on Braxton’s computer one night; the time-check thing. He was in the other room, or something. And he’d left his email open. I just . . . I looked. I saw a thread of emails between the two of them. Tori talking about all these things, how he wanted Braxton to come stay with him, how his mother hadn’t told the truth about him, all that sort of stuff. Calling her a liar, basically, and me an imposter. It really got under my skin. So I wrote back. Stupid. I know it wasn’t right. But I wrote back, I identified myself, saying that this was wrong, to be getting into the kid’s head like this. I don’t know. I don’t know what I said. And him, I mean, he was online right then and there because I sent the email and was looking through other stuff and an email came right back. And there was that same old temper, threatening me. So. I threatened right back.”
Swift was very still. “What did you say?”
“I said I’d hurt him.”
Swift waited.
“I said I’d kill him.”
There it is.
Mike suddenly grew animated, defensive. “I know it was too much. I was so shocked by it, and hurt, and . . .”
Swift was nodding. “I understand. Well, we’ll have a record of all of this, we can piece it together when we go through Braxton’s laptop. We . . .”
But Mike was shaking his head. “It’s deleted.”
“What? As of when? How do you know?”
“I checked this morning. Before your guys came in.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because I said I would kill the guy. I thought about him, when, you know, when you first came to the door about Braxton being out there. I panicked, and I’m sorry.”
“Did Braxton see the email you had sent? Did Tori continue to correspond?”
Mike grew quiet. He wouldn’t meet Swift’s gaze. “No. What I said was, the whole thing I said was, if he continued to correspond, or tell Braxton I intervened, I would call the police, I would do everything in my power to wreck him, his business, everything, anything. That if he wrote back again, I would kill him.”
“So he never wrote back.”
&
nbsp; “No. I checked.”
“When you got on the computer this morning. After we notified you about Braxton’s death.”
“Yes.”
Swift calculated all of this. “And you think maybe Braxton was affected. Did his mood change after that?”
Mike’s chin started to tremble and he hung his head again. He nodded. “He’d been keeping it from his mother, but I could see it. I know it affected him. Made him depressed.” Mike’s hands flew up and covered his face. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus . . .”
At that moment, Swift’s phone buzzed in his pocket. It hadn’t seemed to stop for the past four hours. Mostly he’d been ignoring it. But he decided to take this one. He couldn’t bear watching Mike Simpkins fall apart.
* * *
Swift stepped out of the room, leaving Mike sagging against the kitchen counter. He answered the call.
“We’re about to open this road back up to the public.” It was Brittney Silas.
Swift walked to the front window of the Simpkins place and looked west up the road. He couldn’t see the core scene from here, and the lights were subdued in the grey daylight. Soon the troopers would be pulling out, and the massive plows would come through, scraping the roads down to salty rubble.
It was one of the fastest tear-downs of a crime scene he’d ever heard of. Normally you took your time with a scene. It was all you had. Silas was telling him the road was open because she was nervous. But they’d already gone over this. She wanted his approval, he decided, since he’d been calling the shots.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I think we got everything we’re going to get from there. How you doing?”
“Doing okay,” she said. It sounded like she was in her car, heat blasting away. “Little frozen.”
“Yeah.”
The silence that lasted just long enough to be awkward. “You did a good job.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. Let’s just say I consider you more than just a supplemental party.”
“Shut up,” she said, and he thought he could hear her grinning.
“You’re more than just an evidence tech.”
“Ha ha,” she said. “No one has used the term ‘evidence tech’ since back in your day. Fifty years ago or whenever.”
“Touché.”
She laughed, but it wasn’t a full laugh, it had no real joy in it. He couldn’t blame her. Still, Swift could never resist the opportunity to get someone going, crack a smile, something. His ex-wife said it was because he couldn’t handle unhappiness. “Well I picked the right career, then,” he would tell her. But with Alicia, nothing. Couldn’t get a half-smile out of her. It had been impossible to make her laugh. Maybe, he wondered, the new guy could do it. Maybe he was making her laugh right now while Swift was stuck working out of his tiny State Police sub-station in an office barely bigger than a walk-in closet. He could be in that box with some killer for seventeen hours, looking for somatic indicators, trying to draw a confession out, make a friend, always pitching and selling. When you were an investigator you had to be a salesman. You had to sell someone what they didn’t want — ever — their own stinking, filthy truth.
Swift was making himself depressed.
“How you doing?” Brittney asked, perhaps sensing it.
He looked out the window, into the faint light of the day, watching the snow blow down at an angle, and the wind whip it up off the eaves of the house, spiraling it, spreading it like a crop dusting.
“I’m okay.”
“Don’t believe you.”
“You shouldn’t. You’re right. Look, you did fine. You processed your scene, you didn’t touch the body — we bagged it, and we’ve got the bag for trace analysis. There was nothing else anyone could have done at that scene.”
She was quiet, considering. “Thanks, John.”
“Sure.”
“We’ll catch up at the station? Or, what do you want?”
“I want you to stay with your evidence, keep me comfortable that we’ve got case continuity with all this moving around and shucking and jiving. And ask Cohen if he’ll meet me at the diner in town in one hour.”
“Altos?”
“That’s the place. Oh, one last thing. When you talk to Cohen, give him a little assignment from me. Can you?”
“He’ll like that. Sure.”
“Have him just do a search on the name Robert Matthew Darring. He can cross it with Queens, and also just do a general search.”
“Got it.”
She fell silent again, and this time it felt heavy, like she was waiting for something else from Swift. He’d been prepared for that.
“Not asking you because I have other plans in mind for you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Dinner.”
He thought she might just be smiling again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mike stood in the kitchen, staring off into space. The water was running behind him. He’d never felt anything like this before in his life. He had no idea how to handle it. The detective was talking to him again. Asking him something. Looking at him. He needed to get to his wife. Callie was in the hospital and he was standing here doing the dishes, answering this man’s questions.
“What does your wife teach?”
“She, ah . . . she teaches art.”
“Art?”
“Yeah. Studio Art. The kind where models come in and pose.”
“She’s a painter?”
“Painter, sketcher, illustrator, tattoo designer; she’s done it all.”
“That sounds great.”
The detective, Swift, put on another one of his smiles that made Mike feel as if his blood were seeping into places it shouldn’t. What did they call that when the heart stopped pumping and the blood drained down? It wasn’t rigor mortis . . . livor mortis, that was it. Mike wondered if Braxton had livor mortis. What was happening to Braxton right now? Was he being cut open? Swift had mentioned the autopsy. But Mike hadn’t heard anything much after the detective told him Callie was in the hospital. That she’d basically become unmanageable.
“Hey, Mike?”
“Huh?” Mike looked up at Swift. The detective was looking behind him. It took a second to register before he turned round and saw the faucet running. He hit the lever with the heel of his hand.
Where the hell was Callie’s co-worker, Sarah? She’d sure picked the wrong day to take her time getting to where she needed to be. Of course, it was brutal outside, with the wind picking up into gales, dumping the snow all over the place, creating cowls and ridges like sand dunes. Mike checked the clock on the stove. Had it only been ten minutes since he looked at it last? Time was all over the place. One moment he lost whole chunks of it, and then it slowed to an agonizing crawl.
Braxton, somewhere in a room where they were digging into him and separating him with stainless steel tools that glinted beneath the fluorescent lights.
The kid had been standing there in the kitchen. Right where the detective was now. Last night. Eating his final snack before bed. He’d had a few handfuls of Combos and some milk. He only drank milk at Mike’s insistence. All he really liked was grape juice, the kid. It used to aggravate Mike. They’d gotten in little heated battles over it. Mike had raised his voice about it once. It all seemed so stupid and petty now. Mike felt waves of guilt churning up, choking him.
He leaned into the sink and an explosive, unexpected regurgitation of his previous night’s dinner splattered into the steel basin.
His body was shaking as he reached up and turned the tap on. He was beginning to lose his grip.
“Mike. Maybe you should be looked at, too. Let me take you, when your friend gets here to watch the girls.”
Mike leaned down and put his mouth to the water frothing from the tap. As he let it pour over his lips and tongue he was reminded of the week-long crusade Braxton had undertaken not long ago, to conserve water. He’d seen a documentary or read an article online, and suddenly he’d been afraid that they were all
going to run out of water — not today, but when the girls had grown up and were about to start families of their own.
“We waste water like it’s nothing,” he’d said, his eyes animated beneath the mop of highlighted hair. The only time Braxton ever really came out of his shell was when he was on some crusade. “People think the Third World is the only place to have water shortages, but we have it right here in the United States. Lake Mead is running out. Vegas is going to pipeline all the way up into northern Nevada and steal the water from there. Then that’s gonna run out, too.”
Over the years, Mike and Callie had held several private discussions about Braxton’s bouts of anxiety over environmental and economic issues. They admired the kid for his knowledge, but worried that his concern, sometimes amounting to panic, was not healthy. He was easily agitated, and he blew the issues out of proportion, obsessing over it for days, sometimes weeks, like the water issue. Or he would champion something like The Venus Project for hours on end. Callie’s biggest fear was that this behavior showed traces of his biological father’s symptoms. The mood swings and the obsessive-compulsiveness. Braxton didn’t have the signature peculiarities that were supposed to accompany OCD, like turning a light switch on and off, having shoes that didn’t touch together in the closet, but he worried about things that were not yet happening, he perseverated endlessly over some eventuality that might just come to pass, and Callie described his father that way, too.
The detective was still behind him, standing just next to the woodblock, no doubt looking at him with that frown of empathy and concern that was making Mike sick. He was getting annoyed with the detective now. Standing there, asking questions about Callie, about Mike, about who they were; assessing what kind of parents they were.
He spun around, half-aware of the water running from the corners of his mouth.
“Why don’t you stop, huh? Give us a little space. I already told you what I think. I think you need to look at the kid’s biological father. Alright?”
The detective was nodding, still with that I understand expression on his face that Mike hated, wanted to smash, wanted to run away and hide from. He wanted to get away from this entire day, this whole nightmare. He wanted to wake up and have his wife next to him and the kids — all three— snoozing contentedly, soft sounds of sleep drifting through the air, as the house, satisfied with their warmth and presence, creaked and sighed around them.
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