Poison

by Jordyn Redwood

  “When did that start?”

  “About one month ago, a few months after the start of the school year.”

  Finding the home empty did not initially concern the husband. It was Rebecca’s practice, at times, to run a few errands with the children before dinner.

  “Did she leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Did she usually?”

  “Yes.”

  That was the first thing Keelyn clipped in her mind’s eye. The first deviation from normal practice.

  “How is your marriage?”

  He smoothed his palms together. A pacifying gesture. “Good. We have our normal ups and downs.”

  “Any financial trouble?”

  His hands paused. “In this economy, who isn’t having money trouble?”

  “Does Rebecca work?”

  “No.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “I guess that surrounds some of our issues. I had to take a thirty percent cut in pay to keep my job.”

  “How did she respond to that?”

  He shrugged. “It doesn’t really seem to bother her. She’s still buying herself all she wants whenever she wants.”

  “So, you’re going further into debt?”

  He leaned back in his chair and eyed the detective squarely. “To be honest, I don’t know where she’s getting the money.”

  The husband’s interview continued running through Keelyn’s mind.

  Dinnertime came and went, and the husband’s anxiety concerning the situation increased. He’d called family, friends, and neighbors to ascertain her whereabouts. He’d walked the route to school and any alternative routes he could think of. After his calls and search came up empty, he’d called the police. Keelyn’s sense from watching the husband was he was very forthright about what had happened.

  Currently, Rebecca’s story was not on solid ground, and public support of her was beginning to waver.

  Problem one: Rebecca stated she was pulled into a van as she walked to get the children from school. That she’d been kept in a basement as a hostage until dropped off at the park. A woman who called herself Rebecca had called the shelter where Keelyn worked as a volunteer for intake, which is why Keelyn was there to meet her. The real Rebecca claimed otherwise.

  Voice analysis suggested that Rebecca Hanson was the one to call the shelter.

  Problem two: Three women had come forward claiming they’d seen Rebecca meet up with the children in their usual spot but take an alternate turn away from their home. This stuck in one lady’s mind because Rebecca was usually quite rigid in her dealings with the children, and she found it atypical that they’d be “walking a different way home.”

  Rebecca denied this ever happened. She claimed the women never liked her and were setting her up to take the fall for her missing children. To Keelyn, this seemed like a big stretch for a personal vendetta, setting someone up for potential criminal prosecution and jail time out of general dislike. Could PTA disagreements actually lead to someone framing another for a crime?

  Problem three: The partial license plate number Keelyn provided to the police. Not enough information. The truck and the man had not been located. Keelyn couldn’t provide a description of the man because of the ski mask he’d worn. All Rebecca would say was that he was the man who had grabbed her and held her prisoner. She stated he’d rarely talked to her, just provided food at times, until the day he’d dragged her to the park.

  Keelyn cued the player. Voices from the home movie started, and Keelyn grabbed her pad to take notes. The first disk she’d plucked was the most recent. It was video of Bryce’s ninth birthday party a few weeks ago in mid-October. Their backyard was a heavily treed lot and strung between the oaks were orange-colored pumpkin lights with large white lanterns hooked onto the string. One could easily mistake it for a basic Halloween party if not for the view of the birthday cake with a wax number candle denoting the child’s age shoved in the center.

  Keelyn stilled the frame and leaned forward to examine the cake more closely. All reports of Rebecca indicated she was a Martha Stewart wannabe. Friends of hers interviewed by the police commented on how well taken care of her home was, the children always had these overdone special parties that were the envy of working parents everywhere. One had a Candy Land theme where the children actually participated in the game with a ropes-and-ladder training course to simulate the ebb and flow of the game.

  This cake was messy. The wax candle was half buried as if pushed down in anger.

  Smothered.

  Red gel letters—“Happy Birthday, Bryce”—bled into the white frosting. Keelyn grabbed a few photo albums that were stacked beside her. She flipped quickly through the pages until she found Bryce’s eighth birthday party photos.

  A medieval knight theme. The photos of the cake were meticulous in and of themselves. Shots from every angle. The detail on the castle was intricate. It looked covered in small, gray glass bricks.

  Keelyn restarted the disk. Several adults were seated at a picnic table eating a barbecue-style dinner. A light breeze lapped at the edges of the classic red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. Rebecca sat on the end across the table from a gentleman Keelyn didn’t know. Steven, the husband, sat at Rebecca’s right. Keelyn was pleased with this positioning because she could easily see Rebecca’s entire figure. Particularly from the waist down, the area that hadn’t been taught from birth to lie.

  Even though there was ample room to sit comfortably beside her husband on the bench, she was perched almost precariously on the edge, and leaned as far away from him as possible. Her upper body turned diagonally to block him. He would touch her arm, and she would pull away. Generally, the closer the arms were of couples, the more comfortable they felt about the relationship.

  If Keelyn hadn’t already known Rebecca and Steven were married, she would have guessed them to be strangers. And he clearly irritated her.

  The curious thing was the gentleman who sat in front of her. When he spoke, she would lean in. She’d playfully twirl her necklace when she laughed at something he’d said. But it was her foot that gave the telltale signal of how she really felt about this stranger. Each time he spoke, her high-heeled silver shoe would playfully tip from the end of her toes. Movement draws attention, and she wanted this man to notice her. It was an orienting reflex. But when her husband leaned in, she would slap the shoe back on her heel.

  Whoever this man was, he was the one she truly wanted to be with.

  After another twenty minutes of this behavior, young Bryce came up to his mother as the adults were clearing the table. She leaned down to hear him speak over the milling voices of the partygoers. Rebecca then gave a half-hearted pat on his back, her smile icy at best.

  Keelyn edged the scene back, paused it, and forwarded it frame by frame.

  Not an icy smile, a sneer.

  Sneering was a clear sign of contempt. What Keelyn saw was not a loving mother. The impression Rebecca gave off was of a woman unhappy with her current situation. Could that mean something insidious for her children?

  Keelyn pondered the idea. Filicide wasn’t an unknown social deviation but it was rare compared to other social ills. Keelyn’s heart ached for the missing children. She didn’t want to believe their mother could be responsible for their demise.

  Sophia began to bang the blocks together. Keelyn smiled at the sound of her innocent play. Something terrible must have happened to Raven. She would never leave Sophia.

  Keelyn started the movie and turned up the volume. Adults were clearing the picnic table. Bryce was dancing around his mother like a kangaroo on stimulants, begging to open his presents. The gentleman approached her and said something. Rebecca shook her head and cupped her hand behind her ear.

  He spoke louder, but quiet enough not to turn the heads of the other partygoers. “We have some unfinished business.”

  Rebecca smiled coyly.

  Keelyn’s heart stammered to a stop.

  It was the same phrase the man had utt
ered when he threw Rebecca to the ground at the park.

  Chapter 24

  SATURDAY’S WEATHER AND Friday’s blizzard were a dichotomy. The early morning sun was bright. Water dripped from the bare bones of sleeping trees. Rivers of melted ice coursed their way to the city’s underground. The old catch phrase of Colorado weather flashed in Lee’s mind. “If you don’t like today’s weather, just wait until tomorrow.” Though a day was usually considered too long to wait for a change. Most often it occurred in about an hour.

  Lee parked his car in front of Ryan’s small home that sat near the border of Aurora and Denver. It was what Keelyn would call a quaint cottage, not befitting a young man but definitely a home with a magnetizing effect on the opposite sex.

  And likely the rent was cheap.

  After he closed the door to his vehicle, he made his way up the wet pavement. He’d asked the Zurchers for a key under the guise of bringing some of Ryan’s belongings to the hospital. He inserted it into the lock.

  He didn’t divulge he was searching for clues regarding a possible attempted murder.

  The door opened, the squeaky hinges breaking the silence of the quiet day. Lee tapped his boots on the bottom of the door frame to clear muddied slush and stepped inside, easing the door closed behind him.

  It smelled sweet, like someone had baked sugar cookies. Lee walked a few paces down the hall and eyed a small office to the left and an extra tiny dining room to the right. A few more steps brought him to the main living room. Things were in order with the underpinnings of dirt usually overlooked. A turn to the right brought him to the single bedroom.

  The bed was black veneered wood. Walls painted a near-turquoise blue made the room feel like a cave. Lee opened the nightstand drawers. A few fiction books. Glasses. A remote for the television that hung on the opposite wall.

  A small bathroom was off to the right side of the bed. He opened the mirrored medicine chest. Every pharmaceutical looked benign enough. Most were over-the-counter analgesics, cold and allergy medicine. One prescription bottle for steroids filled over two years ago. Lee opened the bottle and counted the pills. Only two missing.

  No syringes or vials.

  Lee made his way to the kitchen and grabbed a kitchen-sized trash bag. On the counter stood several glasses. He examined the rim of each one.

  No lipstick prints mired the edges. He sniffed them. They smelled like sweet tea.

  Returning to the bathroom, he grabbed Ryan’s toothbrush and toothpaste. In the bedroom, he packed clean shorts and several pairs of sweats.

  None of these items mattered if Ryan didn’t recover.

  It was more for the benefit of the parents.

  What was lacking was any evidence a woman had visited. Was it intentional? Someone purposefully trying to hide her fingerprints?

  The backup beep of a dump truck tapped at Lee’s mind. His heart hammered as he raced out the front door to the street, the white bag slapping against the back of his legs as he ran. Trash pickup had been delayed one day due to the storm. It was possible that if someone had ill intentions toward Ryan, he or she had placed incriminating evidence in the trash.

  Lee raced to the street waving his hands and yelling for the trash man to stop. Ryan’s heavy green roadside bin was up in the air, when the arm ground to a halt. The man leaned out the window, his massive eyebrows pulled together.

  “Lose something in there?”

  Lee sighed heavily as the lie slipped out of his mouth. “Yeah, I think I threw away my wallet along with the bathroom trash. Just go ahead and leave everything. I’ll just put it out again next week.”

  The garbage man grinned. “Happens all the time. Just be glad you caught it now instead of after I’d dumped it.”

  Lee waved as the man drove off. Flipping the lid open, he saw one large black trash bag and a smaller white one. He put a finger through the loop of the smaller bag and lifted it out.

  He set the bag on the ground and untied the knot.

  IV equipment and several syringes.

  He grabbed the bag and stood.

  It wasn’t likely he could get the police involved in Ryan’s case at this point. After all, everything seemed to point to a medical malady. No one else seemed suspicious of foul play. And if this syringe contained some weird drug cocktail, he didn’t want Ryan’s name dragged through the mud before he could figure out what really happened. Going back to his friend’s lab seemed the best solution. Of course, he didn’t mind charging Lee a fee, a heavy one, for doing the work fast.

  Unfortunately, Ryan’s toothbrush was not going to make it to the hospital today. He’d need it to see if it matched any DNA on the syringe.

  Chapter 25

  KEELYN SAT OUTSIDE THE interview room and peered at Rebecca Hanson through the two-way mirror. Keelyn’s notepad rested on her lap, a stopwatch in her left hand. She leaned forward and clicked the top of the timepiece. For one minute, she counted certain mannerisms as the woman sat, her pale green eyes looking about her confined space. A curl of red hair circled around her index finger. Her children were missing and her facade was calm. Even being in a police interrogation room didn’t faze her boredom. The detective framed this interview as simple inquiry and therefore she had not been read her rights. When they offered her a phone to call an attorney, she scooted it back across the table, emphatically stating she didn’t have anything to hide.

  We’ll see.

  Keelyn stopped after sixty seconds. Blink rate twelve times per minute. Gum chewed at a relaxed pace. These mannerisms were close to her baseline as observed in the multiple recordings Keelyn had watched of Rebecca’s life. Rebecca was reclined in the chair, her head rested on the back. She swayed lazily side to side.

  Louis Hernandez and Oliver Southway were the Boulder detectives charged with the interview. Louis would take lead inside the room. He busied himself with one final review of his notes; his olive-skinned index finger roved down the list of questions he wanted to ask. He adjusted his earpiece.

  “Check?” Southway asked.

  “Got you loud and clear.”

  Oliver brushed his long sandy hair from his gray-brown eyes. The color was akin to what Keelyn imagined the rough stone of British castles might look like. Had any of Oliver’s relatives graced those ancient homes? Keelyn’s eyes teased at sleep. Louis’s Spanish accent coupled with Oliver’s British one seemed odd for western America.

  Though Boulder, Colorado, was known for its odd pairings.

  “Are we ready?” Oliver asked.

  Louis folded his notes. Keelyn stood and straightened his tie. Too late, she realized the gesture might be misconstrued. She backed up a step.

  “Sorry. I can’t seem to help myself these days since I’ve been taking care of my niece.”

  “No problem.” He winked at her. “Always good to look your best for a murder suspect.”

  Keelyn smiled at his attempt to set her at ease. It would play well with Rebecca. “Remember, try to mimic her movements. It will make her more comfortable.”

  “I don’t think she can get much more comfortable. She already looks like she might fall into a coma,” Oliver noted as he made adjustments to the recording equipment.

  “Won’t that make me come across as feminine?” The cop machismo threatened.

  “You want the truth, right? The best thing will be to convince her you think she’s innocent until you’re convinced it’s a good time to push her to a confession. If she’s really guilty.”

  “You think she’s innocent?” Oliver eyed Keelyn evenly.

  Keelyn scraped her teeth over her lip. “From watching hours of her life, I’d say she and her husband were definitely having trouble and maybe she wasn’t thrilled with being a mother at times. But after being around a little one, I just find it hard to believe any mother could harm her children.”

  Louis snorted. “It’s always the naive ones that fall the hardest.” He entered the room. Rebecca stood. They shook hands briefly.

  “What does
he mean?” Keelyn asked.

  “Parents are most often the ones who harm their children. It’s a tough hurdle for law enforcement to get people to believe it. It’s what makes prosecuting these cases so hard. No one wants to believe the one person on earth designed to give unconditional love would be the one to put a knife to a baby’s throat and slit it.”

  Keelyn froze as the image stuck in her mind. Men had something in them, a violent streak. Not always actualized but genetically woven into their DNA. Could women be the same? A mother?

  “He’s starting.”

  Oliver turned on the intercom. Keelyn sat.

  The first thirty minutes were about building rapport. Louis established how she and her husband met. When their children were born.

  Rebecca rarely looked at the detective. She busied herself with picking lint off her clothes. At one point she reached into her purse to get her mirror and powdered her nose. She pulled off her glasses and rubbed them clean with her cotton shirt, examined the results in the light, and put them back in place using her middle finger to secure their position.

  Though Rebecca likely didn’t realize the micro gesture, Keelyn tilted in her chair at the sight.

  “What is it?” Oliver asked.

  “She has no respect for Louis at all. Self preening is dismissive behavior. You know what it means when someone displays the middle finger.”

  “Usually unhappiness.”

  “Well, she just did it to your partner when she put her glasses back on.”

  Keelyn stopped commenting at Louis’s next question. “How did you feel the first time you held Sadie?”

  During most of the interview, Rebecca had lazily swung her crossed right leg. Now it stilled. She interlaced her fingers and settled them on her lap. Blink rate up. Jaw muscles tight.

  “What?” Rebecca asked.

  “How did you feel when Sadie was born? The first time you held her in your arms. What was it like?”