No Mercy

by John Burley

  ‘A search warrant of the house would likely yield sufficient prints from the kid’s bedroom,’ Danny suggested, ‘in addition to anything else we might find.’

  ‘I’m not serving Dr Stevenson with a search warrant of his home based on an observation you made from a photograph,’ Sam told him, shooting an irritated glare in Detective Hunt’s direction. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t Hunt’s fault. He was simply doing his job – a job Sam himself had assigned him to do. You have to follow the evidence where it leads, he reminded himself, no matter whose door it takes you to.

  ‘Why don’t we petition a judge to order the release of the kid’s dental records, now that we have someone specific we’re interested in?’ Danny suggested.

  Sam considered it for a moment. ‘There are three local dentists in town,’ he replied. ‘We don’t know which one he goes to. We’d have to ask the judge for a court-ordered release of records from all three. That’s going to raise some local interest. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to keep quiet in a small town.’

  ‘How likely is it, anyway,’ Carl wondered, ‘that he’s had recent dental imprints made, and that a physical casting would be available to send to the forensic odontologist. It would be a gamble that might very well turn up nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know, Chief,’ Danny sighed. ‘A limited search warrant of the home may be the most straightforward approach here – just to get fingerprints from the kid’s room and to take a quick look around. If we’re right, we’ve got him. If we’re wrong and the prints don’t match, we apologize to the doc and trust that, given the gravity of the investigation, he’ll understand.’

  ‘I’d really like to avoid that if we could,’ Sam responded. ‘I mean, what’s your degree of certainty here? I know Thomas Stevenson. He’s a good kid: smart, athletic, very likable …’

  ‘Fits the profile,’ Carl observed.

  Sam traced his thumb across the leather armrest of his chair. ‘You really think he’s responsible for murdering and desecrating those kids, for attacking Monica Dressler? You think he’s capable of that?’

  ‘We won’t know unless we check it out, Chief,’ Carl said. Truth be told, he was somewhat surprised by his boss’s reluctance to pursue this lead.

  ‘But what does your gut tell you?’ Garston asked. ‘You think he actually did it?’

  Carl shrugged. ‘Lord knows, I don’t want it to be him any more than you do. But just because we don’t want it to be so, doesn’t mean it isn’t.’

  ‘Why don’t you try the high school,’ a thin voice proposed from the kitchen, and Carla Garston’s frame appeared in the doorway. They all turned to look. ‘I’m sorry,’ she told the detectives. ‘I know I’m not supposed to be eavesdropping. But after twenty-eight years of marriage, I can say with relative certainty that my husband will end up discussing this with me later tonight anyway. It saves him the trouble, if you think about it.’ She raised her hands in a half shrug, as if to say, Gentlemen, let’s not quibble on the details. ‘I hope you’ll excuse the interruption.’

  ‘What do you mean, “try the high school”?’ Sam asked, nonplussed by his wife’s interjection.

  ‘For prints,’ she responded, drying her hands on a dish towel.

  ‘Carla, do you have any idea how many sets of prints would be covering that place?’ her husband asked incredulously.

  ‘Not that many,’ she replied. ‘You just have to limit your search to a finite area.’

  ‘Such as?’ Detective Schroeder asked.

  ‘The door to his locker, of course.’ She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment as she returned the towel to its rack near the oven, then rejoined them in the living room. ‘School grounds are county property. That should alleviate your search warrant predicament. Plus, the building’s empty for winter break. You could be in and out of there without disturbing a soul, except for maybe the janitor who could locate it and unlock the door for you.’

  They looked at each other, each considering the idea and finding it basically sound.

  Carla shrugged. ‘Seems like a good starting place, anyway,’ she said. ‘Care for a refill on that coffee, Detective Hunt? Detective Schroeder? I still have half a pot here that will go to waste if you don’t drink it. Sam’s doctor says he’s not allowed to have caffeine before he goes to bed. He’s been struggling with a little insomnia lately.’

  ‘I don’t think the detectives need to hear about that, Carla,’ Sam advised her. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘It’s no secret,’ his wife replied. ‘With the bags you carry around under your eyes some days, I’m sure any detective worth his rank could deduce as much just by looking at you.’

  ‘I’ll take some more coffee, ma’am,’ Danny Hunt said with a grin. ‘I can drink a whole pot and sleep like a baby. Got used to it in college, I guess.’

  ‘I should’ve known you were a college boy.’ She smiled at him and refilled his cup. ‘No wonder you’re so smart.’

  Danny was twenty-seven, and still had the tendency to blush an embarrassing shade of magenta when the situation called for it.

  ‘Criminal justice major, I presume?’ Carla inquired.

  ‘No, ma’am. Philosophy with a minor in biochemistry.’

  ‘Ahh. All the makings of a fine detective,’ she said, turning to refresh Carl’s mug as well. With the pot empty and a reasonable course of action now decided upon, she excused herself to get ready for bed.

  Chapter 44

  ‘Thanks for the pictures.’ She spoke into the cordless phone cradled between her neck and shoulder. She stepped into her bedroom and closed the door for privacy.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he replied.

  ‘I wish I was there with you.’ Monica went to her computer and scrolled through the digital photos Thomas had e-mailed her that afternoon. Her favorite was a picture of him standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking the impressive expanse of a valley far below. Thomas was turned at an oblique angle to the camera, such that half of his face was highlighted by the light of the setting sun, while the other hemisphere was lost in shadows. The rocky landscape had taken on a deep ruddy crimson complexion, and the soft orange sky hovered in the background like an artist who chooses to add a few remaining strokes to a work he knows is already finished, simply because he cannot bear to pull himself away. She touched the photo with her thumb, stroking the side of his face. ‘When do you come home?’

  ‘Three days. You think you can wait until then?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to go find some other guy then.’

  She smiled. ‘I don’t want another guy. I want you.’

  He was quiet for a moment, and Monica crossed the room, sitting down on the side of her bed. She ran her fingers across the sheets, thinking about the day they had lain here together, his deeply tanned arms wrapped protectively around her while the afternoon unfolded splendidly around them.

  ‘What’ve you been doing since I’ve been gone?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing exciting,’ she said. ‘Schoolwork and physical therapy, mostly. They’ve got me jogging on a treadmill now. Three days a week for thirty minutes.’ She grimaced. ‘I hate running.’

  ‘You shouldn’t. You’re good at it.’

  ‘How would you know?’ she said, a reflexive note of challenge in her voice. ‘You’ve never seen me run.’

  There was a slight pause. ‘No, but you’re good at everything,’ he told her. ‘I’ll bet you’re fast as hell when you want to be.’

  She had a brief image of herself hurtling through the woods, her breath coming in ragged, terrified sobs – and then it was gone.

  ‘Not fast enough,’ she said, standing up and walking to the window. She pressed her fingers up against the glass. The front yard was still blanketed in heavy drifts. Tree branches spread their naked fingers toward the sky.

  ‘Listen, I’ve gotta go,’ he said. ‘Hang in there. I’ll be home in a few days.’

  Don’t go yet, she f
elt like saying. We can talk for a little while longer, can’t we? She pressed her lips together and remained silent.

  ‘I’ll call you tomorrow,’ he promised. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she replied, her voice faltering a bit on the last syllable.

  She listened to the receiver until the connection was lost, until the mechanical voice on the other end told her that if she would like to make a call she could hang up and try again. She thumbed the off button and placed the phone on the desktop beside her, but remained standing at the window for a long time, looking out at the bleak afternoon. Except for a few parked cars, the street outside was vacant, devoid of the children who so frequently played there. These days everyone was being careful. Her eyes wandered across the stillness of front yards and driveways, overturned sleds lying lifeless and abandoned in the snow. From her vantage point behind the protective pane of glass, the scene suddenly struck her as offensive, almost obscene – as if she’d unexpectedly come across a dirty magazine sitting on the dresser in her parents’ bedroom. She had the urge to turn away, to pretend she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘It’ll be okay,’ she told herself, but she wondered now if it ever really would be – for any of them.

  These days she wondered about that a lot.

  Chapter 45

  It was Monday afternoon. The cold snap had finally decided to relinquish its hold on the region, and the snow and ice that had collected on the frozen ground almost a month ago had now, at long last, initiated its inevitable metamorphosis toward oblivion. Trillions of rivulets of muddied water set out on their sluggish, unhurried journeys into sewer drains, streams, ponds, reservoirs and even into the porous flesh of the earth itself. The white landscape that had maintained a constant presence during the past few weeks now gave way to patches of brownish, puddled muck. Tree limbs, unencumbered of their heavy loads of frozen precipitation, stretched out their wooden spines as if straightening themselves at the end of a long day of stooped, hunchbacked labor, and the spines of many of the town’s residents bent to shoveling sidewalks newly freed from the thick layer of ice that had rendered the concrete walkways nearly impossible to clear only a day before.

  So it was that Sam Garston found himself sitting in his office watching the snowmelt dribble past his window in large pregnant drops from the station’s roof down onto the sidewalk below. He had gotten a call from the lab less than an hour ago. Several of the prints they’d collected from the Stevenson kid’s locker that morning had matched those found on two of the three victims. (The body of the last victim, having been buried in the snow for several weeks, hadn’t yielded any salvageable prints at all.) ‘Was there any question about the match – any doubt in the analyst’s mind?’ Sam had asked. ‘Not much,’ the man on the other end of the phone had replied. The error rate of the software program they used for such purposes was about one in 1.6 million. That didn’t leave a whole lot of room for wishful thinking.

  That had been enough to request a search warrant of the Stevenson residence, which Judge Natalie Grossman, presiding over the Jefferson County Courthouse that day, had granted them. Detectives Schroeder and Hunt had gone to pick up the document and would be contacting Sam in his office as soon as they had it in hand. He’d already notified Larry Culver from the FBI of their findings and pending search of the home. The bureau would send its own forensic team to assist them with evidence collection. The Stevenson boy would be arrested on-site and taken in for questioning. The rest of the family would also need to be questioned, however painful that might be for Sam personally. It was important to ensure that the boy had acted alone.

  The call from the crime lab regarding the fingerprint match had invoked in Sam an unpleasant surge of nausea that he’d been unable to shake over the last fifty minutes, despite a generous swig from the bottle of Maalox he kept in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. That, mixed with the onset of just a touch of mild chest pressure, made him wonder (with no small degree of concern) whether he might be in the process of having himself one of those all-American heart attacks he’d heard so much about over the years. Why not? he asked himself. He’d put in his time at a few greasy spoons in his day. He was certainly due for a few rounds in the ring with the ol’ Massive Coronary. If so, perhaps he’d be staring up at the inside of a closed casket before the week was through. ‘Now there’s a nice thought,’ he muttered, as he watched a piece of melting ice abandon its grip on the gutter above him and tumble unceremoniously like the corpse of a dead bird to the concrete below. He took another swig from the bottle of antacid in his right hand, wincing at the thick, nasty artificial sweetness of it. Heart attack. Just the idea caused him to break out in a light sweat.

  This is one of the many unpleasantries of the job, he thought: finding out that someone you knew, someone whose parents you’d had dinner with on more than one occasion and whose father was not only a colleague but also a friend, had wandered onto the wrong side of the law. (Hell, in this case ‘wandering onto the wrong side of the law’ was a monumental understatement now, wasn’t it?) And yet, when Sam thought about the fury that had been unleashed on those young souls … When he thought about the heartbreaking agony sustained by those children’s parents … Indeed, that was the worst of it, he reminded himself. Not this.

  As for this part – the arrest and its aftermath – Sam was merely fulfilling his responsibility, wasn’t he? It was a responsibility that’d begun when he’d entered the training academy as a young man. Back then, it had only been an idea, a concept – words he had uttered with the rest of his class during a graduation ceremony almost forty years ago. Still, he’d never suspected the measure of sacrifice the job would ultimately demand of him, or the personal casualties that would be sustained along the way. Now, decades later and near the end of his career, he could look back and finally take stock of the full weight of those casualties. His restless nights and the half-empty bottle of Maalox he now clutched in his hand were only the beginning. The uncomfortable pressure that had taken up residence in his chest this afternoon was also a part of it. But most of all, there were certain tragedies he had witnessed – their images stuck in his mind like desert burrs, caked with the dirt of time but sharp and tenacious nonetheless – that served to remind him that the world, or at least the human race, was indeed broken in some fundamental and perhaps irreparable way. That was the true measure of payment the job had exacted upon him over the years.

  The phone on his desk began to ring. It would be Detective Schroeder, notifying him that they’d obtained the search warrant. The final act of this investigation was about to commence, and Chief Samuel J. Garston of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, having served steadfastly and dutifully on the force for the past thirty-eight years, two months and fourteen days, realized he wanted nothing to do with it.

  I do solemnly swear, he thought to himself, reaching for the phone, that I will faithfully and impartially execute the duties of my office … to the best of my skill, abilities, and judgment; so help me God.

  It was Carl Schroeder on the line. The conversation was brief, a simple confirmation, and Sam hung up the phone within thirty seconds. He grabbed his coat off the rack and opened the door to his office. The chest discomfort he’d experienced earlier was subsiding, at least. There was that much. Hopefully, it had been nothing too serious. So help him God.

  Chapter 46

  Detectives Schroeder and Hunt were the first to arrive at the Stevensons’ residence. There was one car in the driveway – Susan’s gray Saab – but after a protracted series of knocks on the front door it became clear that the house was empty. This wasn’t completely surprising, since it was the middle of the day and both of the physicians would presumably be at work. Officers were immediately dispatched to the hospital where Ben worked, and to the medical office Susan shared with a colleague. On the off chance that Ben was engaged in official duties at the Coroner’s Office, a car was sent to that address, as well. The building would need to be secured and thoroughly
inspected regardless, since its numerous drawers, racks, and countertops could very conceivably host the weapons used in one or all of the murders. Chief Garston pulled into the driveway a few minutes after Schroeder and Hunt, and two additional cruisers arrived shortly thereafter, along with a van from the forensic investigation unit that had been dispatched to assist with the search of the premises and related evidence-gathering. The congregation of law enforcement vehicles and personnel quickly filled the Stevensons’ driveway and spilled out onto the narrow road servicing the suburban neighborhood.

  Mary Jennings, who lived just across the street in a modest two-story split-foyer, noticed the accumulation of sheriff’s deputies and emergency vehicles from her kitchen window as she was preparing lunch. In a state of concern, she picked up the phone and dialed Susan Stevenson’s cell phone. As circumstances would have it, the voice that answered was neither across the street in the house now surrounded by police officers, nor at her medical office three miles away, but rather almost two thousand miles away, on the other side of the country.

  ‘Hey, Mary. What’s up?’

  Susan sounds particularly nonplussed, Mary thought, given the fact that half of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department is walking around on her front lawn. ‘I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay,’ she replied. ‘There’re a bunch of cop cars sitting in your driveway. I thought maybe you guys might’ve had a break-in this morning.’

  There was no response from the other end of the line, and Mary wondered if perhaps they’d been disconnected. ‘Sue?’ she asked tentatively. ‘You still there?’

  At first she thought that, indeed, she’d lost the connection. But as she listened she realized that the line was not completely dead. She could hear something in the background: the muffled voice of what sounded like a convenience store clerk ringing up a purchase (‘Will that be all? Can I get you anything else today?’) beneath the subtle static of the open line. She began to take the receiver away from her ear when she heard – or at least thought she heard – a reply on the other end.