by Ben Miller
With that observation, Jack came to the realization that Troy and Jacob had staged this revelation for that sole purpose. He suddenly understood why this had felt so much like an interrogation—because it was one. Troy and Jacob had known about the autopsy report before Jack arrived that morning. Naturally, given his prior tabloid “relationship” with Melissa and his receiving her ostensibly final phone call, Jack became a “person of interest,” if not an actual suspect.
Jack looked back up at Troy, trying to get a read out of him: his face, his posture, his breathing pattern. Troy gave away nothing. Had Jack thought about this for a while, he may have decided to let this all slide, to not let on that he recognized the rouse. His initial instinct, however, forced him to prove that they hadn’t tricked him. Jackson Byrne couldn’t just walk away from such an intellectual battle.
“Troy,” Jack said. Troy turned his head to look at Jack for the first time since he re-entered the room. “Did you know that when I spoke with you this morning?”
Troy tried to look perplexed. “No, I just got off the phone.”
Jack gave him a disappointed look. “Troy? Come on, man. This felt like The Spanish Inquisition since I sat down here.”
“Jack,” Troy began, but Jack cut him off by putting his hands in the air.
“No hard feelings, Troy. I probably would have done the same thing if the roles were reversed.”
Troy’s shoulders began to slump, as if this were the first time he had allowed himself to relax in a week.
“Except I would have asked the questions myself,” Jack added. “But Torquemada here did a bang-up job.”
“Sorry, Jack, I just…” Troy began to trail off.
“Seriously, don’t think twice about it,” Jack reassured. “For the record, I know nothing about her death other than what I told you—the voicemail, and that’s it.”
“While we’re on the record, Jack, I got the phone call from the coroner’s office about ten minutes before you got here,” Troy confessed. “I didn’t know about it when we first spoke this morning.”
Jacob dropped his pen and rubbed his eyes. “Do you wanna hear it?” he asked Troy.
“Yeah. Let’s have you play it one more time, and then—if it’s OK with you—we’ll have you take it over to our forensics guys so they can record it.”
“Sure,” Jack obliged. He played the message aloud again.
“She sounds terrified,” Troy observed.
Pinching the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, his eyes closed tightly, Jacob offered, “The killer made her say it.”
Jack and Troy exchanged a glance, tacitly displaying their agreement. In the context of a murder, the message seemed to make a lot more sense.
“That’s why it sounds like she’s reciting something,” Jacob continued. He opened his eyes and looked at Jack. “Because she is. And it would seem—this being your voicemail, and all—it would seem that the killer had her recite it for you.”
55
Randall lay on the grey, black, and tan plaid couch in his above-the-garage apartment, his office, his sanctuary. He had just put a new album on the turntable—James Taylor’s breakthrough album, his 1970 masterpiece Sweet Baby James. Randall always found JT’s pure, soulful voice—the original and best JT, by the way, not the modern-day pop icon Justin Timberlake—uplifting, and this particular album showcased it better than any other. Though he had experienced pain and torment, and these emotions shone through in his performances, JT never let them eclipse hope, the hope of something better, the phoenix rising from the ashes. This record perfectly matched Randall’s current mood.
For the first time in weeks, Randall felt tired. He hadn’t slept more than four hours a day in probably two months, and most nights he didn’t sleep at all during this stretch. He knew this would eventually creep up on him and bring him crashing down, but he had hoped that he could complete his Work first. He would have plenty of time to rest once he finished his Work. Thankfully, he didn’t feel sleepy yet. Just tired, worn down.
He knew he should spend this time on the next phase of his Work, but, for right now, he preferred to reflect. He wanted to spend a little time recounting his accomplishments thus far.
The Prozac enabled him—or at least helped him substantially, gave him the necessary nudge—to keep propelling himself on little to no sleep these past months. He had learned this lesson—unintentionally, unfortunately—back in college. During his sophomore year, when he began to delve deeply into the core coursework of his major, Randall suffered a “nervous breakdown,” to use a lay term.
Many people assume this kind of event happens abruptly. The word “breakdown” probably invites this presupposition, as if a person’s psyche behaved like a ’77 Chevy, smoke billowing from under the hood as it sits idly along the side of the highway. In reality, for the majority of cases of incapacitating depression, the symptoms come on gradually.
That fall Randall’s cousin died in a car accident. By Thanksgiving break, his girlfriend since the second month of freshman year broke up with him. (He had always considered this the main impetus for his emotional decline. Yet, had he listened to his nineteen-year-old girlfriend two decades ago, he would have learned that his depression was the major force behind the dissolution of their relationship.) When the ever-important finals week came in early December, Randall found it increasingly difficult to focus on his work. He couldn’t sleep well. His appetite diminished. He had no energy. He performed quite poorly on every exam, bringing his semester grades down to one B and four Cs, a horrible underachievement by his standards.
When he got home for the holiday break, his mother quickly realized that her son was depressed. She set up an appointment for him with her therapist, Dr. Beatrice Joust, an insightful and delightfully optimistic psychiatrist from Sweden. Even her name—pronounced “Yoost”—seemed to have an uplifting quality. At the end of their first session, Dr. Joust prescribed Prozac for Randall, as this medication had worked so well for his mother over the past year. Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI, had first appeared on the market about two years earlier and had gained notoriety as a miracle drug for sufferers of major depression. He had one more session with Dr. Joust before going back to school for the spring semester, and he began to feel better already.
Once the drug reached a steady state in mid-January, Randall felt wonderful. Better than he had every felt in his life, in fact. He had more energy than he had ever had before. He experienced one epiphany after another, making huge strides towards completing his senior thesis in electrical engineering—and he was just barely past halfway in his sophomore year!
Amazingly, he also taught himself how to play the guitar that winter. He began writing songs, and in less than two weeks he had enough material for what he guessed would generate two entire albums, one of them a concept album.
One night a hall mate in his dorm knocked on Randall’s door at 3:30 in the morning. Apparently, while he could endure it the past five nights, this student didn’t appreciate Randall’s guitar playing all night long, as he had a big exam the next day. He politely asked Randall to stop playing, or at least play only into his own headphones. Randall dismissed him and closed the door, going back to his music. The neighbor knocked again, this time wording his request more as an ultimatum. Randall did not reply. Instead, without warning, he punched the student square in the nose, knocking him to the ground. He shut the door again and tried to further refine the third act of his concept album. Campus police called his family later that morning to let them know that they had detained Randall since the incident, and someone would need to come down to the university to claim him.
Randall went home with his parents that day and never returned to that university. Clearly recognizing his mental state of disrepair, his parents took Randall straight to Dr. Joust’s office. An astute psychiatrist, she easily recognized Randall’s manic condition. Also an honest psychiatrist, she admitted to Randall’s family that
she had previously misdiagnosed him. Randall did not suffer from major depression; rather, he suffered from bipolar disorder, known commonly as manic depression. She decided to initiate lithium therapy along with the Prozac.
In the next decade, mental health research would demonstrate that SSRIs such as Prozac can precipitate manic episodes when used alone to treat bipolar disorder. They should instead be used in conjunction with a mood stabilizer, such as lithium.
Though Randall hated taking the lithium, due to the relatively constant side effects of nausea and fatigue, he took it religiously. It worked beautifully to help control his mood for over a dozen years. In 2004, Dr. Joust—still Randall’s primary psychiatrist—switched him from lithium to Zyprexa, a drug previously used to treat schizophrenia that had also recently been approved for the treatment of bipolar disorder. Randall’s side effects mostly went away, yet he still maintained adequate control of his mood disorder.
Until nine months ago. When his world ended.
No amount or type of medication created by God or man could stave off the awful grief and depression that ensued.
Finally, though, while staring at the television one night, Randall found a way out, a path to salvage him from his hell, a purpose to make life worth living.
His Work.
That was the last day he took his Zyprexa.
But not the Prozac, though. The Prozac he took every day.
56
“What do you mean, the message was meant for you? I don’t… I don’t know what you mean?” Vicki asked.
They sat on opposite sides of their bed, each with one bent leg on top of the mattress and the other dangling over the side, facing each other. Jack had just finished telling her about his meeting with Troy Scharf and his partner in DC. He left out some of the details, of course, especially the ones known only to him. He also omitted that when he volunteered to go help investigate the crime scene with Troy and Jacob Sednick, they denied his help. They both thought it best that Jack, as a possible witness due to the phone call, not muddle the investigation in any way with his presence at the crime scene. Troy assured Jack that he did not consider him a person of interest, yet it still left Jack with an unsettling feeling.
“I think it was a message, directly from the killer to me, read by Melissa Hollows before he killed her,” Jack explained.
“What did Troy think? Did he agree?”
Jack nodded. “Yeah.”
“What does it mean? Play it for me again,” she requested.
Listening to Melissa Hollows’ quivering, sobbing voice induced nausea, but Jack played it one more time for Vicki. He tried to remove all emotion—sadness, guilt, remorse—and pay close attention to any subtlety, any background sounds, anything that might provide an additional clue. To devoid himself of emotion usually came easily, given his years of experience in investigating violent crimes, yet no previous investigation had hit quite this close to home before. At the conclusion of the voicemail, he looked up at Vicki expectantly. “Anything?”
She shrugged. “I don’t even know what to listen for. She sounds… miserable. Terrified.”
Jack nodded. He tossed his phone onto the bed beside him. “I made a side trip after my meeting with Troy. That’s why I didn’t get home until late.” He had arrived at dusk, just in time for dinner. He didn’t discuss his day until now, after they had put Jonah to bed. “My first thought was about Melvin Young.”
Vicki gasped involuntarily and put her hand to her mouth. She normally possessed a very composed demeanor, though certainly not stoic, so her demonstratively shocked reaction struck Jack as oddly stereotypical.
“Yeah.” Jack said, agreeing with the enormity of the concept that Melvin Yong could have somehow gotten out of jail to begin to exact his revenge on Jack and the Hollows family. “I tried to think of who would want to hurt her and involve me at the same time. Any way I stack this up, it keeps coming back to him. So I went to Jessup.”
Located about halfway between Washington, DC, and Baltimore, the Jessup Correctional Institution had a maximum security division where Melvin Young currently resided. Jack had called ahead and spoke to a man named Steve Kurwood, the Chief of Security and the highest in command at the institution on a Sunday afternoon. Kurwood welcomed Jack at the main entrance and led him to his office. From there they went to the nearby video surveillance room. Kurwood leaned over the main console, shooing away a seated security guard. He used a mouse to click through a small menu on a screen on the right.
“There.” Kurwood pointed at a black and white screen in front of Jack. “He’s right there.”
Rumor had it that Melvin Young had a rough go of his first year in prison, not uncommon for pedophiles, especially a pedophile incarcerated in the state of Maryland who kidnapped and murdered the child of a Redskins superstar. Sure enough, when Jack focused on the image in front of him, he recognized Young, lying in a cot in the infirmary.
“Got the shit beat out of him again two nights ago,” Kurwood explained. “Broken nose—second or third one since he got here, I think—broken arm, bruised nuts.”
“Bruised nuts?” Jack asked.
“Got kicked in the nuts so hard that they bled a little.”
Jack scowled, an involuntary response for most any man when presented with such a story. Kurwood noticed the expression and agreed. “Yep. He’s still in the infirmary for pain control. And to protect him a little while his buddies cool down a little.”
Jack studied the man on the video screen in front of him. Though Young’s cot sat at least twenty feet from the closed circuit camera mounted in the corner of the infirmary ward, Jack recognized Melvin Young without a doubt. He looked quite different, at least forty pounds lighter and with an uneven, scruffy beard, but the mannerisms and those cold, menacing eyes were unmistakable. He felt a twinge of relief, knowing that Young had not somehow murdered Melissa.
“That’s him, all right,” Jack confirmed. “Can we go look at his visitor’s log?”
Kurwood nodded. “Sure.” He tilted his head to the right abruptly, signaling for Jack to follow him in that direction. They exited the closed circuit surveillance room and went back to Kurwood’s office. “It’s all computerized now,” he said as he sat down at his desk.
Jack looked around but could not find any other places to sit in the small office. He crossed his arms and stood in place, waiting for Kurwood to search the database in his desktop computer. Neither said anything for several minutes, the only sound in the office Kurwood’s pecking on his keyboard.
“None,” Kurwood finally said.
“None?”
Kurwood pursed his lips, raised his eyebrows, and shook his head slowly. “Not a one. He’s been here since the day after his sentencing. Not one visitor in nearly a year.”
When Jack finished retelling this part of his day to Vicki, he added the comment: “Can’t say I’m surprised.”
“No,” Vicki agreed. “So you were worried that he might have hired someone to kill Melissa?”
“Something like that. I called Troy as I left, suggesting that they look more into Young and his activities from inside Jessup, especially any correspondence, cell mates, anything like that. But, I needed to see him with my own eyes, you know?”
Vicki nodded. “So now what?”
Jack shrugged, looking down at the empty space on the comforter between them. “I don’t know. I’ll help Troy any way I can, but it’s really outside my jurisdiction.”
Vicki leaned in, trying to catch his eye. “Plus…?”
“Plus?” Jack met her eyes, not understanding the question.
“Plus, it’s not really your line of work anymore, right? Don’t you have a meeting with Philip tomorrow?”
“Yeah, plus that. More importantly, that.” He leaned over and kissed Vicki on the forehead. “Which reminds me that I need to go prepare. I got kind of sidetracked today.”
“I’ll say. You can take the agent out of the FBI…” She smiled.
J
ack rolled his eyes good-naturedly. “But you can’t take the FBI out of the agent.”
Vicki’s smile began to fade. “You probably can’t, can you?”
“I don’t know,” Jack smirked. “That’s a little too deep for me right now.”
“OK, Senator.” Vicki got off the bed and walked around to kiss Jack on the cheek. “I’m going to get a glass of water from downstairs. You want one?”
Jack put his arms around her waist. “That sounds great.”
A few minutes later, Vicki arrived in the study, glass of ice water in hand as promised. Jack sat in front of his computer, but he focused on the front cover of his copy of Class Dismissed. “We’ve got to fix this,” Jack said to her, tapping the book in his hands. “Seeing Melvin Young today reminds me of what a poor system we have in place right now. We can do better, I know it.”
“I know it too. And you’re just the man for the job,” she said before she dipped down to kiss him. “Goodnight, honey.”
“Goodnight,” Jack echoed. She left him alone in the study. He looked back down at the book. He thought that rereading chapter nine would serve as a good starting point in preparation for his talk with Philip Prince tomorrow. He thumbed quickly from the back of the book to the penultimate chapter, the one that discussed how Melvin Young, a convicted child molester, came to work as a teacher at an elementary school.
57
CHAPTER 9
MELVIN YOUNG, AND HOW THE SYSTEM FAILED
Over the last two decades, several federal and state laws have been enacted to help protect the general public, and children in particular, from sexual predators. Though these laws were created with the best intentions, they are inherently flawed. No fewer than four such gaps in this system designed to protect children led to the abduction and murder of Lamaya Hollows by the convicted sexual offender Melvin Young.