by Jo Macgregor
He was pointing at the sloped ramp on the side of the barn.
“It goes to the hayloft above the barn,” I said.
“Wait here,” he said, positioning me behind a stack of old tires near the ramp. “I’ll check the main level of the barn.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, though I had no intention of waiting anywhere. “Watch out for the trapdoor.”
Ryan clearly thought that if Kehoe was here, he’d be in the main level of the barn. That’s why he wanted to check it out for any danger first. But I could feel that wasn’t where Derek was. I waited until Ryan, gun in his hand, disappeared around the side of the barn, and then made my way to the base of the ramp. With every step I took up the incline, my feet moved more surely, my heart hammered faster in my chest, and the awareness of my prey grew stronger.
No, Garnet!
Ignoring Colby, I slipped through the open door at the top of the sloped drive and moved inside. At the edge of the hayloft platform stood the man I’d thought was Lawrence Johnson, but the neat, tidy button expert was gone. He still wore the black-and-blue checked shirt, but now it was crumpled and stained with dirt. His hair lay lank with grease against his putty-pale skin, the long bangs only partially obscuring the evidence of his old head injury. His eyes burned with an emotion closer to exhilaration than fear.
“Hello, Derek,” I said gently.
A look of surprise rippled over his features, followed by a moment of recognition.
“You!” he said.
“Yes, me.”
He glanced back over his shoulder at the gaping circle of space at the core of the barn, looked over the edge down at the barn floor below, and then back up at me. His eyes narrowed, and I felt rather than saw him tense his body. With no time to protest or run, I braced myself for the impact of his charge. But instead of hurling himself at me, he simply stepped off the edge of the platform and disappeared.
– 49 –
A thud and a grunt sounded from the barn floor below.
Shit! I sure as hell had not expected that.
I ran to the edge of the platform and peered over. Kehoe had landed directly on top of Ryan.
“Ryan!” I yelled in terror. “Ryan!”
When he didn’t move, I told myself he’d merely been winded or knocked unconscious, but I needed to get down there and check to see if he was okay. I didn’t dare make the leap. It was a good twenty feet to the barn floor. The heavy chain with the hay hook hung from a nearby beam. I could grab that and inch my way down. But even as I considered whether my upper arm strength would be sufficient to stop me from falling, Kehoe reached for the firearm lying a few feet away from Ryan’s unmoving hand. So much for the chain idea. Kehoe would shoot me where I dangled.
I sped out of the hayloft, jumped off the sloping drive, and fell to the ground. I leapt back up, frantic to check on Ryan. I couldn’t just rush blindly into the barn, though — Kehoe might freak out and shoot Ryan. Or me. I spun in an agitated circle, looking for help, for ideas. What to do? Think! Remembering my phone, I called Singh. Answer, I willed him. Answer the bloody phone. The ringing continued uninterrupted. Just for once in your precious, patronizing life answer the damn phone, you utter asshole! The call clicked over to voicemail.
I muttered a frantic message. “This is Garnet McGee. I’m at the Kehoe farm outside Crowbury, and the killer’s here. Do you hear me? He’s in the barn, and he’s got a gun. There’s an officer down. And I don’t know what the fuck to do. Just get here! Now! Before—”
A beep cut me off. I shoved the phone back into my pocket and crept around the curved red walls, down toward the main level of the barn. Another idea, an obvious idea that should’ve occurred to me immediately, hit me. I should call Washington. Surely, he would answer? But even as my right hand moved around to my back pocket, Derek Kehoe stepped out of the barn, pointing Ryan’s gun at me.
“Put your hands where I can see them!” he ordered.
Shit. I did as I was told.
“Come inside the barn, where your friend is waiting for you. And move slowly.”
“Okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “But don’t shoot, okay? I’m not armed.”
No, no, no!
Keeping my empty hands stretched out in front of me, I edged past Kehoe into the twilight gloom of the barn.
“Go over there.” With the gun, Kehoe waved me toward the spot where Ryan sat slumped, head on his chest, against one of the wooden poles that supported the hayloft overhead. His phone lay in pieces beside him.
Walking backward so Kehoe wouldn’t see my own phone in my back pocket, I moved to Ryan. When I reached him, I saw that his hands were behind his back, handcuffed around the pole.
“Sit down next to him,” Kehoe said.
As I sat down cross-legged in the dirt, Ryan began coming to. Raising his head as if it weighed a ton, he focused his gaze on me.
I rubbed his face gently, leaning close to whisper, “I’ve called Singh.” Then out loud, I said, “Ryan, Ryan! Are you okay?”
“No talking!” Kehoe barked.
Ryan nodded grimly. His lip was bloody, and his expression was a blend of pain and fury, but he was conscious and didn’t appear to be seriously injured.
Kehoe glanced through the open door at the deepening darkness outside. “You,” he said to me. “What’s your name?”
“Garnet.”
“Garnet? Well, Garnet, come light this lantern here.”
I took slow steps to the oil lantern, which sat on the ground beside the heavy chain with the hay hook, desperately trying to come up with an idea of how to use this opportunity to Ryan’s and my advantage. Kehoe backed up as I drew near, so I wasn’t able to rush him. Throwing the lantern at him wouldn’t incapacitate him, even if I did manage to hit him. I knelt, lit the wick, dropped the box of matches beside it as he instructed, and stood up again. There was no point in toppling or tossing the lit lantern — it would make this tinderbox of a barn go up in flames, trapping Ryan in the inferno. So I went back to sit next to Ryan, frantically running through possible next moves in my mind.
I needed to play to my strengths, which were more psychological than physical. And I needed to get Kehoe talking to buy time for Singh to send help. Please let Singh check his messages, even though it’s a Saturday evening. Please. Behind my back, I reached for Ryan’s fingers, welcoming their comforting squeeze.
But Derek Kehoe didn’t want us comfortable. “Hands in front, where I can see them!” He moved back to stand beside the lantern, and the flickering light cast strange shadows over the bland features of his face.
I let my hands lie limply on my thighs, but Ryan shifted impatiently, yanking against the wooden pole a few times, though neither it nor the handcuffs were going to give way. I placed a hand on his thigh and rubbed it back and forth, telling him with my fingers to take it easy.
I hoisted a gentle smile onto my face and directed it at Kehoe. “I can understand why you’d want to be able to see, Derek, why you’d want lots of light. The dark must be hard for you, especially in this place.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded, frowning.
“I know what happened to you, Derek, what your grandfather did. What he did to your mother.” I spoke slowly and kept my tone sympathetic.
He sneered at me. “You know nothing. No one knew.”
“And I know what happened here in this barn, how your grandfather locked you in that cage in the cellar below us and left you there in the dark,” I said.
Kehoe’s face tightened, and the hand at his side bunched into a fist. Traumatic memories, no matter how hard people tried to suppress them, were never far below the surface.
“And I know how he punished you with buttons,” I continued. “How he made you kneel on them when you were just a little boy. That must’ve hurt so bad.”
Kehoe’s bottom lip extended a bit, and he blinked several times. Then he seemed to push down the vulnerable feelings that threatened to rise. Straightening his sho
ulders, he jutted out his chin and said, “You get used to the pain after a while.”
I arranged my features into a compassionate expression, thinking through the implications of what he’d just said. “After a while, it didn’t work as well as a punishment?”
Kehoe nodded.
“So he had to find new ways, crueler ways?”
A ripple of distress crossed Kehoe’s face. Was he recollecting memories even more disturbing and painful that the ones I’d seen?
“That’s what you meant at the conference when you said those framed brass buttons were a reminder of your time in combat,” I said. “You kept them from when you were a child, didn’t you?”
Kehoe nodded slowly.
“You weren’t in the military, but you were at war — with your grandfather.”
“Yes,” he said and then, surrendering to the irresistible lure of my understanding and empathy, began talking about the trauma and terror he’d bottled up for so long. “If I talked back, he’d make me hold a button to my mouth.” Kehoe held an index finger up to his lips in a shushing gesture. “It doesn’t sound so bad, but it is when you have to do it for hours. Your arm aches, and your finger gets stiff and goes into spasm. But you better not move, or you’ll get worse. He’ll make you put the buttons inside your mouth, lots of them sometimes, and hold them there.”
I made a sound of sympathy. “You were scared you might swallow them.”
“He counted them, before and after, to make sure I didn’t.”
“Were you frightened you might choke on them?” I said. “Can you still remember the feel of them on your tongue, on your cheeks, clicking against your teeth?”
I could feel Ryan’s curious gaze on me. He must know that I was stalling for time, but did he understand that I was trying to regress Kehoe to a less dangerous, more childlike state? Could he tell that it was working?
Kehoe ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth as if the metallic tang of a brass button still lingered there. “I can still taste them.”
“And you weren’t allowed to cry, were you?” I said.
“Grandpa said crying was for sissies. For girls. If I cried, he put me in the cage.”
“And that was so scary down there in the dark.”
“One time, he said he was gonna get one of my mother’s needles and sew my mouth shut with tomato twine. ‘That’ll teach you a lesson. That’ll stop your blubbering for good!’ That’s what he said.”
“So you had to keep quiet. You had to button your lip.”
He nodded. “I had to learn control.”
“Ah, you were such a brave little boy, all alone in the cage in the dark.” Sweat was trickling into my eyes. I wiped my face on my arm, moving slowly so as not to startle him.
Ryan spoke into the silence. “Man, you must’ve hated your grandfather.”
“I didn’t! I didn’t hate him. I loved and respected him!”
Even after what he did to your mother? I wanted to ask but didn’t. I wanted him to regard me as an ally. So instead, I said, “You needed your grandfather too.”
Kehoe rubbed the toe of his shoe in the dirt beside the lantern, muttering, “Without him, where would we be? How would we survive?”
“That’s what your mom said?” I guessed.
Ryan drew a breath as though about to say something — perhaps that Kehoe must’ve hated his mom, too, for not protecting her son — but I cut in quickly. “She wasn’t brave and strong like you were. She wasn’t strong enough to stop your grandfather. You had to do that, didn’t you?”
– 50 –
Kehoe watched me uncertainly, his left hand clutching the firearm, his right rubbing the base of his spine. Had he hurt his coccyx in the fall? Good. I hoped it hurt like hell.
“That’s why you pushed your grandfather into the well?” I said.
“I didn’t push him. He fell. It was an accident!”
Ryan made a soft sound of disbelief, but I said soothingly, “I understand, Derek. You were just trying to make him stop, and then he fell.”
“He wouldn’t stop. He kept shouting at me,” Kehoe said, dashing a hand across his forehead to wipe hair out of his eyes, revealing the shadowed dent at his hairline. “He always shouted at me.”
“Saying cruel things, calling you ugly names.” In the flickering lamplight, it was hard to tell, but I thought I saw the shine of tears in Kehoe’s eyes. “You had to push him back. And then when he fell, he was so angry that you had to leave him down in the well, didn’t you?” Phrasing my accusations as questions softened them. Another therapist’s trick.
“I only meant to leave him there for the night. To teach him a lesson. You have to stay there until you’ve learned your lesson!” Was he repeating what he’d said to his grandfather or what his grandfather had told him on so many occasions? “But when I went back in the morning and slid the well cap off and dropped the ladder, he didn’t come up.”
“Maybe you thought he was playing a trick on you?” I suggested. “He wanted you to go down, and then he’d leave you there.”
“Yeah. But I went down and checked anyway because I loved him!” He directed the last part at Ryan.
“And he was dead?” I said. “That must have been so awful for you.”
“It was an accident. That’s what momma said. Just an unfortunate accident.” Kehoe’s bottom lip trembled.
“Killing Larry wasn’t an accident though, was it?” Ryan accused, his tone tough and mean.
Was he playing bad cop to my good cop in order to keep Kehoe off-balance, to keep him talking? I wanted to keep Kehoe calm; I hadn’t given up hope of talking our way out of this, so I shot Ryan a look and, turning my head so Kehoe wouldn’t be able to see, mouthed, “Trust me.”
Ryan gave me a small reluctant nod.
“That was his own fault,” Kehoe spat. “When boys are bad, they have to be punished. And he did bad things. He hurt my mother! He was a problem, and I had to make him go away.”
“How did it feel?” I asked.
Kehoe smiled, his dark eyes glinting in the yellow light of the lamp. “It felt good,” he said, drawing out the last word.
Ryan squirmed uncomfortably, no doubt thinking it would feel good to drive a fist into Kehoe’s face, but said nothing.
Keeping any hint of judgement out of my voice, I asked Kehoe, “Good in what way?”
“Like I’d fixed something that was wrong.” His smile widened. “Like I was in control for the first time in my life.”
“Yeah, I can understand that. So were those other young men problems too? Or were they bad boys who needed to be punished?”
“They were wrong,” he snapped.
“Wrong how?” I asked, trying to keep my tone soothing.
“They liked other men. That’s not right. It’s bad. Unnatural. Grandpa said so.”
Ryan sighed in exasperated contempt. I knew it must be killing him to say nothing.
“Grandpa believed men should be men,” I said to Kehoe. “And you wanted to be a real man, just like your grandpa wanted you to be.”
Kehoe nodded. “Just like he was.”
It took all my self-control not to tell this pathetic excuse for a human being that the toxic masculinity his grandfather had embodied was anything but manly. “You never had sex with them, did you?” I guessed. “The young men you gave rides to.”
His face contorted into a rictus of disgust and fury. “I’m not one of them.”
“No, no,” I said quickly. “Of course not.”
“I’m straight! I like women. I was married once. I’m not some kind of disgusting freak!”
Biting back a dozen hot retorts, I merely said, “You’re not like that.”
“No.” He sounded irate that I might ever have considered it. “I’m normal. They’re disgusting.”
“They should’ve kept that part of themselves buttoned up?” I said.
“That’s right. We can’t all just have what we want. What if I’m in a jewelry store and I
really want a Rolex? I can’t just steal it, can I? Because it’s wrong to steal.”
“Is that how your grandfather explained it to you?” I asked. “That it’s wrong for a man to love another man?”
He nodded several times. “Maybe they can’t help what they feel, what they want. But they do have a choice about what they do, and they made the wrong choice. So I had to stop them.”
“Once they were dead, they couldn’t say or do the bad things anymore,” I said.
“That’s right.” He was calming down, feeling understood.
“And you sewed their lips shut because …?”
“To keep them closed,” Kehoe said like it should be obvious. “Buttoned up, like grandpa wanted. It was my duty. Though sometimes” — a sly smile crept over his features — “doing your duty can be a pleasure. The purest kind of pleasure.”
I wanted to throw up. I’d felt pity for Derek Kehoe, for the boy he’d been and the pain he’d suffered. Now, I merely felt sickened. I couldn’t show him that, though. “You were just doing your duty,” I said. “Perhaps even God’s work?”
Kehoe snorted. “There is no God. I was doing my grandfather’s work, like I vowed I would.”
“You made your grandfather a promise?”
“Yes, after I— After he died. I promised him I would be good, that I would make it up to him by doing what I knew would make him proud of me.”
I’d had him so wrong. Wrong name, wrong job, wrong motives. Derek Kehoe hadn’t killed for the thrill of it — or not primarily anyway — and certainly not from motives rooted in lust. Yes, he’d gotten off on the power and the control. And yes, perhaps beating and killing his victims allowed him to vent the deep rage the helpless boy had felt toward the adults who’d abused, abandoned and betrayed him. But primarily, he was a mission killer. He’d internalized his grandfather’s beliefs about what it meant to be a man and murdered young gay men because their sexuality was forbidden by the patriarch’s rules.
Derek had never really gotten free of this place, of his grandfather’s abuse and toxic attitudes. He’d merely kept it all buried inside, where it had festered and putrefied until he felt compelled to act.