Dark Web

by T. J. Brearton

  “It’s not open for discussion,” she said, as if to highlight the point. Then she added, “You get our son when they’re done with him and bring him home to me.”

  “You don’t trust me,” he said.

  “Mike, don’t . . .”

  He could tell from her voice she was on the edge of tears, and he reached for her again. This time she allowed him to take her hand. They stood there like that in the doorway for a moment, and then she left.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  On the third morning after Braxton’s death, a Tuesday, Mike booked flights for Callie and the girls. The plane would leave from Plattsburgh Airport the following afternoon. Mike helped her pack the girls’ stuff. As he moved suitcases into the back of the truck, he realized his wife had a point; she wanted to put a distance between herself and the nightmare that had become their lives, the dark pageantry of hospitals, grim faces, and cops with no answers.

  The cops had remained a disappointment. Detective Swift had come by the other night and, after sharing the gruesome news about Braxton’s cause of death, indicated that they still had no number one suspect. Even Tori McAfferty was someone they would “question thoroughly once apprehended,” but Swift seemed to Mike like he didn’t have his shoulder into it.

  He could tell, too, that the cop had been holding something back. Something he’d been reluctant to bring up, and Mike thought he knew what it was — Swift was biding his time before questioning Mike about the 529 account. Maybe it was best that she left. Let him deal with things on his own.

  After packing, he slipped out in back of the house and called Swift directly from his phone. The day was crisp and bright and cold, and Mike’s breath rose like smoke.

  Swift didn’t answer. Mike left a voice mail.

  “Detective, it’s Mike Simpkins. We’re making some family decisions here; there are things changing on our end I need to speak to you about. Please give me a call back when you can. Thank you.”

  He hung up and went back inside. As he entered the house, he heard a sound that was unfamiliar at first, his heart began to race and he quickened his step, thinking that one of the girls were hurt, or something was wrong. As he turned into the hallway he saw first Hannah dash from one room to the next and then Reno after her, wielding a stuffed animal. He realized what it was. They were playing, and both girls were shrieking with laughter.

  They ran into Braxton’s room.

  Mike’s sudden smile faded, and he continued down the hallway to Braxton’s room. He turned in, ready to corral the girls and get them out of there before Callie discovered them.

  But Callie was already in the room. She was sitting in the middle of the carpet, Indian-style, like a teenager herself. It looked as though she’d been in the room for a little while. Things were put away, boxed up, posters taken down.

  She looked up at him. Tears were running down her face, glistening in the lamplight. But she was smiling.

  The sight of her, and of her tears, tore at Mike’s chest. The girls, in the meantime, were running circles around their mother, until Hannah leapt up onto Braxton’s freshly-made bed.

  Mike dropped to his knees. He let himself fall forward onto the carpet. His entire body seemed to go limp, and he sagged there on all fours, letting his head fall down so that his chin touched his breastplate, and he felt the emotion mount in him as he crawled towards his wife.

  When he reached her and looked up, she still had that expression on her face — a profound mixture of joy and sadness, and something that transcended both. She took him in her arms and he lay across her legs, and then the girls came piling on top of him. His face wet, he smiled, he ached, the four of them, now, all piled together.

  * * *

  Swift called back an hour later while Mike was shoveling a fresh dusting of snow. The precipitation wasn’t much, but he needed the air, the movement, the rhythm of shoveling.

  “Detective Swift, thanks for calling me back.” It was an unfriendly greeting, purely formal.

  Swift got right into it. If he was worried about Mike having seen the news video, he didn’t show it. Or, he was compensating by barreling into the conversation.

  “Mike. Good morning. I was planning to drop by in a bit so we could . . .”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Mike interrupted, leaning on the shovel. He took a deep breath, inhaling through his nostrils. “From now on, after all she’s been through, all we’ve been though, we need to give my wife and family some room.”

  “Mr. Simpkins, we’ve had some developments that I need to—”

  “There have been developments here, too.”

  They were cutting each other off, stepping on one another’s words, frustration in each of their voices. Mike grabbed the shovel like a staff with his free hand, and proceeded before the investigator could interrupt again.

  “Callie is leaving. She’s taking the girls and going back home.”

  This time, Swift was silent for a moment. “Home?”

  “Back to Florida. We think it’s the best for everyone. She can’t imagine going on up here like this. Neither can I. The girls, in school . . . Callie, at her job. The press, hounding us. But that’s just the short term. I understand that. This is a small town. An even smaller region. Something like this follows you around for years. For the rest of your life. And this investigation, this whole thing, especially the way it’s been going . . . she just can’t. She needs to have closure with her son. So if you’re done with his body, you need to turn it over to us.”

  Mike dropped the shovel to the side and stripped his coat off, keeping the phone to his ear by switching hands.

  “I understand,” said Swift.

  “Yeah,” said Mike. You understand, he thought. All the cops understand. The neighbors understand. Everyone understands. People kept their distance, but they understood just fine. Mike couldn’t blame them.

  “So what do you want to tell me?”

  He heard Swift take a breath. “I still would prefer to talk to you in person, Mr. Simpkins. I can tell you this, though; your son’s body is free to go.”

  Mike felt something in him deflate. As if he’d been stoking the anger necessary to stay on top of the pain and anguish. Almost wanting Swift to say that Braxton’s body was still evidence and critical to the investigation and they couldn’t release it back to him at this time. It would give Mike further fuel for anger and frustration. He hadn’t expected Swift to tell him he could have Braxton back. It was a mild shock.

  “You can have the funeral service tend to the body,” Swift said. “I can give them a call if you’d like. It’s not a problem. They will take over and will be in touch to set up a time convenient for you to decide how you would like to proceed. I highly recommend Kristofferson’s. They’ll help you write the obituary, pick out the tombstone, the casket, the—”

  “Yeah, okay,” Mike said, deliberately cutting Swift off.

  “I’d really like to speak with you this evening . . .”

  “Is it critical?” Mike felt his hackles up again. “Is it going to make or break my son’s case? Do I have vital information for you, detective? Or do you have my son’s murderer in custody? If it’s none of those things, then I need to spend the rest of the day with my family, who I’m not going to see for a little while.”

  Another silence from Swift. Then, “I understand.”

  That word again.

  Mike closed his eyes for a moment, and rocked back on his heels, inhaling once again the bright scent of the late winter. Was it possible the trees would be budding soon, in just another month? They’d only been here for eight weeks, and hadn’t even endured much of the winter, but it had still seemed to go on forever.

  The winter that would never end. “I’ll speak to you tomorrow,” Swift said. “You call me after you see your family off, okay, Mike?”

  It was the first time Swift had called him by his first name.

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  A pause. He could sense Swift
going through his options. Was the old cop going to get heavy-handed now, or wither and shrink away?

  Mike realized that he found the older man perplexing in a similar way to his father. Somehow always slightly obtuse, distant; men who prized their personal freedom and independence above all else. Hadn’t Swift even said something that betrayed this just now? Your son is free, he had said. A telling choice of words.

  Mike was surprised Swift was still on the case. Maybe there was a shortage of state police detectives, but he didn’t think so. Possibly it would take a little time to transition someone else in, and bring them up to speed. Probably that was what Swift wanted to talk about anyway. To give Mike some bullshit about how the department thought it best that, for personal reasons, he turn the case over to another investigator who would do a stellar job and blah blah blah. Mike didn’t want to hear it. Swift could save the speech. What Mike did want to hear, though, was something else.

  “I know you want to talk to me in person. But just tell me who you think did it. Can you do that? Are you even going to be around tomorrow? I know what happened to you. I saw the video. So just tell me now before I have to look at some fresh-faced replacement of yours.”

  He hadn’t expected any of that to come out. His words had tumbled from him in a rush. He almost cringed, waiting for Swift’s response. Just like back home in his childhood. Until one day, Mike couldn’t take it anymore.

  “The report indicates that your son died from ligature strangulation.”

  “You told us.”

  “We believe we found the ligature. It was in Tori McAfferty’s house, and it has your son’s DNA on it.”

  Mike’s throat constricted. He was dizzy, his balance off. I knew it.

  Somewhere he thought he heard a bird singing under the bright sun. The warbling of the creature sounded sweet, but haunted, like a dirge.

  Mike stood in the driveway, half the snow shoveled, the other half an inch of powder. The shovel lay at his feet. Holding the phone absently to his ear, he bent and picked up the shovel, as if he needed to grasp something solid, something tangible. He waited for the world and his thoughts to come back into some semblance of sensory order again. The birds singing in the distance, the wind low and stirring the light snow on the ground into delicate eddies, and Braxton, the image of Braxton being strangled to death. He wondered about the last thoughts that might have passed through his stepson’s mind. The terrible sorrow at the thought that Braxton had been scared in his last moments of life, terrified, and alone.

  “Mr. Simpkins? We’re looking into several possibilities . . .” The detective’s voice brought Mike back around again. Swift was hedging. Typical. What possibilities?

  “Mike?”

  “What?”

  “Mike . . .” He heard the detective sigh. “I wanted to speak to you in person. But, okay. Mike, I also have to talk to you about the 529 account that was opened for Braxton, in your name.”

  “No,” Mike said, feeling far away.

  “Oh . . . Uhm, ‘No’?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with anything.”

  “You understand I need to cover everything.”

  “And you understand that it’s been four days since my son died and the biggest news is that you can’t find the guy who did it — he’s out there now, running around while you tip them back at a local bar!”

  Mike ended the call. He put the phone away and gripped the shovel with both hands. He started back down the driveway, scraping and heaving, going faster this time, his breathing deep, his muscles flexing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Leaving Mike behind, leaving their new house, was not nearly as painful as Callie had feared. The house was nothing but boards and tar paper as far as she was concerned. They’d only been there a couple of months and she’d spent the bulk of that time tending to the kids and preparing her syllabi for the courses she was teaching up in Plattsburgh. And it had been the middle of winter when they’d arrived. She’d planned on spring cleaning, making the place cozier and more her own, even doing a little painting, but that time had never arrived, and so the house she left on 9N was just a building, nothing more.

  Mike was a different story, but she still felt relief at their temporary separation. She loved him fiercely. All this would have been difficult for anyone to cope with. Beyond difficult. Downright Atlas-carrying-the-world difficult. For Mike’s part, he was bearing a huge and weighty chunk of guilt. She knew he felt guilty over what he thought of as his complicity in his own stepson’s death, and she felt terrible about this. But something more had changed in Mike. She supposed she had changed, too. But whereas she felt vulnerable, raw, exposed, Mike had become murky.

  Getting in touch with someone from his hidden past. It scared her. It worried her that Mike was not just calling up any old friend, but an old part of himself. A violent part. She had vowed never to live with violence again after Tori. And so far with Mike, there had been none. But she could see the look in his eyes, the set of his jaw, the way his knuckles pressed white against his skin as he curled his hands into fists. He hadn’t been up front with her about a number of things. Major things.

  In truth, if she were to be honest with herself, she didn’t know what to make of the thing with the money. When Mike first told her that his father was setting up an education fund for Braxton, she’d been thrilled. She’d gone to college, she believed in education; it was Braxton’s future. His special character made it tough for him in some social situations. Grade school was tough. But, in college, he would flourish.

  Mike had explained how it worked, to some extent, and she’d left it to him. He told her that Jack had entrusted him with ownership of the account; his father didn’t want paperwork and phone calls bothering him. It all seemed normal enough.

  Yet she knew that part of her reason for leaving was that she didn’t want to be there when the cops came knocking again.

  His guilt and anger were palpable; guilt about what? The email to Tori, lying to her, maybe even something to do with the money? She just didn’t know. Whatever it was, he seemed to be always looking to her for some sort of expiation, some release from the prison he seemed to find himself in.

  And wasn’t she complicit, too, in a way? Had she not allowed Mike to take a background role in the family, afraid of what might become of them if he were allowed to express his true nature? All those times Mike had tried to discipline his stepson and she had come between them, unable to overcome her protective instincts, her self-reproach over what Braxton had gone through when she’d left Tori — had she not robbed Mike of some of his due authority as a father? Had she not done this selfishly, to make herself feel more comfortable? And had this precipitated Mike’s lashing-out when he felt threatened by Braxton’s biological father, after he came poking his deadbeat, drug-dealing nose back into the family?

  She needed just to go away. It wasn’t escape, it wasn’t running away from her emotions — because there was nothing more hurtful that morning than the thought that she was leaving without her son.

  There was a profound emptiness in that thought. It had the finality of a door slamming on a room to which she knew she could never return.

  Whatever it was Mike needed to deal with, whatever he had to get through, he had to do it alone. She couldn’t risk harm to her other children. Above all, this was why she was leaving. To protect her other babies.

  They stood in the small airport terminal. Mike had insisted on coming with them through security and waiting until they boarded the plane.

  They held one another, and she felt Reno’s arms encircle her thighs as the six-year-old girl joined in the family hug. Next to them, Hannah watched and babbled and said “A-daddah,” at her father.

  And then they were waving, and she walked down the gangplank to the airplane that waited on the tarmac. Callie watched Mike recede from her as he stood there in the terminal in the jeans she’d bought him that past Christmas, his flannel shirt and the black coat with the fur aro
und the hood, his dark, wavy hair, his eyes silver in the light shining through the giant windows of the terminal.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Mike finished his call to the funeral home. Braxton’s body would be incinerated that night.

  He went to the refrigerator, pulled a bottle of chilled vodka from the freezer and poured himself a straight drink. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but he didn’t care. He gulped it down and poured another. Then he went to the couch in the living room and sat down with his laptop. The place felt completely different now, alien; too quiet with the girls gone. He took another pull from the vodka and did a Google search on the computer, looking for Detective John Swift.

  There were several stories in the local paper about Swift’s involvement in a case where a young man, Frank Duso, had claimed police harassment.

  Duso, Mike pondered. Duso. There had been a parade of people tramping through his life in the past seventy-two hours, but he seemed to remember that Duso was the name of the man who had found Braxton and placed the emergency call. Who was Frank? His brother? His son?

  Troopers popped Frank Duso for driving under the influence. Not once, but twice. Some people just didn’t learn. The first arrest had happened during the previous summer. In that initial incident, according to the state police, Frank had been unruly and uncooperative and his actions had warranted use of force. Pepper spray. His second offense had occurred several weeks ago. He was drunk again, speeding on the interstate between Plattsburgh and New Brighton. Speeding, inebriated, and under the influence of another substance: crystal meth. Frank Duso wasn’t in possession of the drug, just had it in his system. So the mandatory minimum sentencing laws didn’t apply. He was put in County Jail for three weeks.

  Mike leaned back into the couch, feeling his scalp tingling. South Plattsburgh was where Tori McAfferty lived. Where he, apparently, had a meth operation. Duso’s second arrest report said he’d been driving back from there. Mike thought for a moment, then started a new search.