You Will Never Know

by You Will Never Know (retail) (epub)

  Craig waited. He didn’t feel good. His mom—his real mom—had always said as they drove by the brick building, “You be a good boy, Craig, or the police will take you and put you in there for a long, long time.”

  He thought, I’m trying to be good, Mom. Honest I am.

  He brought up his right hand and tapped on the glass.

  Jessica ran after Craig but gave up halfway across the small, well-tended lawn. Now what? She could burst into the lobby and try to convince him not to speak to Detective Rafferty, but what if he started yelling nonsense? The lobby and everyplace else was bugged, she remembered that.

  And then? If Craig wouldn’t listen, if she tried to pull him away, the door would open up, Detective Rafferty would come out, and—

  No.

  Jessica turned around, walked briskly back to her illegally parked Sentra.

  No.

  She got in her car, started it up, heard her phone chiming. Jessica took it out, saw rhonda appear, and let it go to voicemail. Her dear friend. Wanting to help, eager to do what she could. Bless her.

  Then she checked the time. School would be letting out soon. Emma didn’t have any practice or meets today. She would go straight home. And between now and then, Jessica would come up with something. She had to.

  Jessica eased her Sentra into traffic and started driving home.

  The woman behind the glass looked up, startled.

  Craig tried to smile, look relaxed, not in trouble.

  The woman lifted a finger, as if to say, C’mon, kid, give me another minute or two, and then she went back to her typing.

  Craig noticed his legs were shaking.

  All the way home, different thoughts and options raced through Jessica’s head. Call Detective Rafferty and plead her case that Craig was upset and would start talking nonsense. Call Detective Rafferty and tell him that she had new information on the case and would pass it along if he ignored what Craig was trying to tell him.

  Or . . . find a public phone between here and home, make a quick anonymous call to the police station, tell them that the person who killed Sam Warner was someone with a grudge, someone who despised the young man, someone . . .

  Someone like Percy Prescott.

  It felt like a gift box inside of her mind had just opened up.

  Sure. Percy. Already arrested by the police, known to hate Sam Warner, loudly telling people at the bank how much Sam and his wrestling buddies had mistreated him.

  Percy.

  Craig waited and waited. A police officer came in, the woman typing glanced up and pressed a buzzer system to open the door, and now he was alone again in the lobby.

  With each passing moment, doubts started to grow. Was he doing the right thing? What would Emma and Jessica do? And most of all, would the police believe him? Would they?

  Screw this, he thought, and he picked up his knapsack, turned, and—

  “Yes?” The woman was standing behind the glass, speaking through a little round metal grille. “How can I help you?”

  Craig just stared at her.

  “Well?”

  He said, “I was hoping—”

  “You’ll have to speak up louder, I’m sorry,” she snapped at him.

  He stepped closer to the glass. Smudged fingerprints were on the lower part of the glass.

  “Uh, I’d like to speak to the detective who’s handling the, uh, Sam Warner investigation.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she looked suspicious. “And who are you?”

  “Craig Donovan,” he said. “My dad, uh, is Ted Donovan, and I’d like to speak to the detective handling the case.” He paused. “Please.”

  She said, “All right. That’d be Detective Rafferty. Take a seat. I’ll see if he’s free.”

  Craig’s face was burning, and he sat down in the orange chair, lowered his head. Dad, he thought, I’m doing this for you.

  Jessica pulled into the small driveway in front of her house.

  Public phones? Damn it, there were none!

  She remembered as a kid that every gas station, drugstore, 7-Eleven had a public pay phone outside, and of course she hadn’t been paying attention these past years as they were all taken down. Now? She could buy a burner phone, but by the time she got that powered up, programmed, and paid for . . . no, she didn’t have time.

  Jessica got out of the Sentra, all her senses seeming to burn and tingle. What to do?

  First things first: protect Emma. She should be home from school in about fifteen minutes, and Jessica would sit her down, have a frank talk with her, and then . . . well, leave. Pack a couple of bags, get out of Warner, see what she could find out from afar, either through watching the news at some motel room somewhere or by visiting another town’s public library and using its open computers.

  She unlocked the door, pushed her shoulder against it—shove, shove, shove—and the door squeaked open, and she looked down at the hardwood floor.

  No mail. Odd.

  She closed the door behind her, dropped her coat and purse on the chair nearby, walked into the dining room, and stopped.

  Her husband was sitting at the dining room table, the day’s mail at his elbow.

  “Hello, Jessica,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Craig snapped up straight when the civilian police employee said, “Craig? Craig Donovan?”

  “Yes,” he said, getting up and walking over to the glass.

  The older woman said, “He’s in a meeting. Once he gets out, I’ll let him know you’re waiting for him.”

  Craig nodded. “Okay, thanks.”

  And he went back to the empty chair.

  Jessica had no memory of walking farther into the dining room.

  Ted was home. Ted was sitting there, looking tired, wearing his usual real estate agent clothing of gray slacks and a button-down oxford shirt, but the slacks and shirt were wrinkled, stained. Ted’s eyes were tired and haunted, and while she knew he had been in the county jail for only three nights, his pallor and expression made it look like he had been there for three years.

  “Ted . . . are you . . . are you out on bail?”

  A weary smile and a shake of the head. “No. I’m out.”

  “Out?”

  “Charges dropped,” he said. “I . . . ah, I just can’t believe it.”

  Jessica watched as her husband started weeping.

  And then there was a heavy knock on the door.

  She went back to the front door, ashamed but glad to have her back to her crying husband. Jessica considered herself a feminist and a tough woman of the world—as much as she could be while living in Warner and working as a bank teller—but there was something so bone-deep wrong about watching your husband cry.

  Tug, tug, tug at the door, not even bothering to wonder who might be there. Seeing Ted at the kitchen table was enough of a shock, but then the door ground open and she stepped back as Helen Wray, the attorney, said, “Hey, surprise! What a great day, am I right?”

  Jessica backed away as Helen strode in with confidence, a heavy leather briefcase with a strap hanging from her shoulder. She was carrying what looked to be a bottle of . . . champagne? For real?

  Helen said, “So after I got Ted out, I thought, Hey, let’s bring him home, and let’s get a bottle of champagne to celebrate.” She glanced at the label and said, “Shit. Looks like sparking wine from California, but so what? We’ve got a lot to celebrate.”

  The attorney brushed past her, and Jessica got the door shut, seeing a light-blue Mercedes-Benz parked next to her sad Sentra, and went back into the dining room. Ted was at least smiling now, as Helen went straight into the kitchen.

  “Jessica, Ted, you folks have any champagne glasses around here? Do you?”

  Jessica slowly sat down across from her husband. She called out, “Uh, no, no, we don’t. There might be wineglasses in the upper cabinet, to the left of the kitchen sink.”

  “Okay, thanks, I’ll be right in,” Helen said.

  Jessica loo
ked at Ted. He still looked haunted.

  He said, “The charges were dropped.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I didn’t kill the kid, that’s why,” he said, voice sharp.

  Jessica reached over, grasped his right hand. “No, no, no,” she said. “I meant, well, how? How did it happen?”

  Helen came back into the dining room holding three wineglasses by their stems, and Jessica felt a slight flush of shame that one of them didn’t match the other two. Helen put the glasses down on the table and said, “It happened because of a screwup, that’s how. A big screwup.” She undid the foil around the top of the bottle, then the wire, and started twisting and twisting the white plastic cork.

  Ted said, “Ah, yeah, there was a mistake. About Sam’s time of death.”

  There was a pop! and the white plastic cork flew to the other side of the room, rattling to the hardwood floor, and Helen deftly poured the overflowing sparkling wine into each of the glasses.

  “Ted,” Helen said, “a mistake is when you list a property for two hundred thousand dollars and the seller really wanted to list it for two hundred ten. That’s a mistake. Screwing up the time of death—guaranteed this’ll be on the front page of the Globe and Herald tomorrow.”

  “How?” Jessica said, not daring to reach over to pick up a glass. “What happened?”

  Helen pulled a chair away from the table and said with pride, “I nearly predicted it, didn’t I? Law enforcement and forensics have had a couple of rough years here in the Bay State. Thousands of drug cases have been tossed out because the forensics tech was making shit up. Other drug cases were tossed because another forensics tech was in love with an assistant DA and was faking evidence to get in his good graces. And don’t get me started with the state police and how some troopers have been padding their payroll and expense accounts over the years and brooming away cases because some judge’s kid or wife got caught.”

  Ted repeated, “Forensics got the time of Sam’s death wrong.”

  Jessica’s voice was nearly a whisper. “How?”

  Helen reached over, pulled a laptop out of her leather briefcase, lifted the cover, and powered it up. “The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner investigates cause and time of death in violent crimes and assists small departments like Warner. Nearest office to Warner is Boston, but when Sam’s body was discovered, nobody was available. It got bumped over to the regional office in Sandwich, and the lead folks were on some sort of boondoggle trip to DC, so it was a new kid who did the initial exam.”

  Jessica hadn’t even sipped from the sparkling wine and she already felt drunk. Not the happy, loose-limbed, relaxed kind of drunk, but the kind of drunk when you put your hand out to touch a table and the table feels like carpeting and the room is canted and voices echo and re-echo.

  “And being a new kid, and under pressure, he screwed up,” Helen said. “Based on core temperature, rigor mortis, and lividity, Sam Warner was murdered between six and eleven P.M. last Monday. Not last Tuesday. But the kid”—Helen laughed—“he put the wrong date down in his hurry and was too scared to correct his mistake.”

  “How could something that simple happen?” Jessica asked, still bewildered at how quickly everything was unfolding in front of her, as if a stage magician had suddenly halted his act and was now busily pulling apart props and displays to show the secrets hidden in plain sight.

  “Because politicians around here don’t learn,” Helen said. “Look, the National Association of Medical Examiners recommends that forensic examiners not take on more than two hundred and fifty cases per year. Two hundred and fifty. You know what the number is in Massachusetts? A few years ago they were performing nearly four hundred and fifty, and the numbers were getting worse. It’s a wonder there aren’t more screwups like this.”

  Jessica said, “But Sam’s parents—”

  Helen was tapping on the computer screen. “Sam told them he was going to spend the night at a friend’s house. And they weren’t concerned too much when he didn’t return on Tuesday. And the school—well, I guess Sam was such a precious child, stuff like recording his absences weren’t a priority.”

  Ted swallowed. “And Monday night . . .”

  “Oh, God,” Jessica said. “The Chamber of Commerce event.”

  With triumph in her voice, Helen said, “That’s right! You and your family were at the Chamber event, and who was the MC at the podium all night long? This guy!” She spun the laptop around, and there was a YouTube video put up by the Warner Chamber of Commerce, and standing at the podium was a relaxed, happy, and joking Ted Donovan. Helen said, “Your man was there from five P.M. to nearly midnight, being the happy master of ceremonies.”

  Helen pressed a key on her laptop, and through the tiny speakers Jessica heard applause and laughter and the little echoing voice of Ted saying, “Okay, okay, simmer down, guys and girls, we got a lot of ground to cover,” and there was more happy, joyous laughter, and Jessica thought, all that laughter, all those happy people, and Sam Warner was either dead or on his way to be killed.

  Helen grinned and picked up a wineglass, and so did Ted, and so did Jessica, and the happy attorney said, “Here’s to incompetence, and to videotape!”

  Ted smiled more widely and repeated the phrase, and Jessica joined in, but all the time, while sipping the sparkling white wine, she thought, Craig. What was Craig saying to the police at this moment?

  Craig Donovan got up again from the orange plastic chair. His legs felt as if little ants were crawling up and down inside the skin, making him jumpy, twitchy.

  What was taking the detective so long?

  He tried to pass the dragging time by looking at the dusty glass display cases. Old police badges. Whistles. Civil Defense helmets and armbands. Black-and-white photos, most curling around the edges, showing policemen from long ago, even way back when they wore those funny tall helmets like the cops in London. Some faded color prints showing various years of past police departments, everyone looking so serious, so plain, the color prints fading into yellow. Lots of fading away, until nothing was left but these stupid little souvenirs.

  “Young man?”

  Craig turned. The woman at the window seemed just a bit more cheerful.

  “Detective Rafferty will be here in a few minutes.”

  Jessica said, “What now?”

  “Ah, yes, what now,” Helen said. “Right now, Ted, you take the rest of the day off, and go right back to work tomorrow morning like nothing ever happened.” She laughed for a moment. “You know, you might even see a jump in business. Potential and curious customers coming by to see what’s what.”

  Jessica said, “But isn’t there other evidence? Like the guy who said he heard a gunshot? And the police thinking Ted’s shotgun had recently been fired?”

  Helen turned to her, an amused smile on her carefully made-up face. “What? You looking to put Ted back in the county lockup?”

  “No, no, I just don’t want . . . I mean, this is such great news. I don’t want the Warner police coming back and trying to arrest Ted again.”

  Helen shook her head, started to shut down her computer. “Not going to happen. First of all, having the time of death be wrong like this is going to make the police very, very concerned and careful. Not to mention the Middlesex County DA. And trust me, if all they have is the sound of a gunshot and Ted’s shotgun, I would relish cross-examining whatever witnesses they could dig up. A sound of gunfire? Nice. Did you see who fired the gun? No? Oh, and are you sure it was a gunshot and not something else? A car backfiring? A tractor-trailer truck accidentally dropping a piece of equipment? A boiler somewhere blowing up?”

  Jessica looked on in awe as Helen kept on talking, reciting facts, questions, and assertions, and she wished she could have gone to the same schools and had the same breaks as this attorney had. How differently her life could have turned out!

  “And then there’s the recently fired shotgun. Dear me, after the medical examiner’s office screwed
up the time of death, about as basic a piece of evidence as you can have, I would love, love to cross-examine the forensics crew determining when the shotgun was fired,” Helen said, taking a good swig of the sparkling wine. “Your smell determined it had been fired recently,” she went on in the voice of a determined cross-examiner. “Is that measurable? How does your sense of smell compare to others? And you said that powder residue also suggested it had been recently fired. Suggested? Is a suggestion measurable? Can you give the jury an exact time when this firearm was discharged? You can’t? Tell me, is there any way to determine if the shotgun pellets that killed young Sam Warner came from Mr. Donovan’s shotgun? Oh, you can’t do that? Well, at least can you tell me how many shotguns there are in Middlesex County? Oh, that many? All right, witness dismissed.”

  Another healthy swig and her glass was empty. She slapped it down on the dining room table. “Nope, for you, Ted, and your family, it’s over.”

  Ted’s eyes were filling up again, and Jessica knew it was wrong to feel this, but for God’s sake, she was thinking, Ted, keep it together. Don’t start crying in front of me and your lawyer.

  “But in other cases . . . I mean, the cops might back off, but they’ll keep you under surveillance, dig around—look for other evidence.”

  Helen picked up her computer and slipped it into her bulging leather briefcase. “What, you think this is an episode of CSI Warner? That show 48 Hours? Or Dateline? Ted, it’s done. Over. And besides, the cops have found other evidence and are chasing it down as we speak. By this time tomorrow the cops are going to have at least a dozen other suspects.”

  Ted said, “How? What’s going on?”

  Helen got up, slung her bag over her shoulder. “A friend of mine in the DA’s office passed this along. Investigators seized Sam Warner’s computer, based on a couple of tips they received. It seems the star of the wrestling team, the perfect child of his parents, the wonderful athlete and scholar, was a rapist.”