by Jan Burke
“I should have known,” he said stubbornly. “Never should have turned my back on them.”
“Josh,” Ben said, “Irene and I were in the mountains with him when he was shackled and heavily guarded—more people guarding him than you had available. He escaped then, and he didn’t have a team to help him do it. We’re the last people who will ever believe you were responsible for his escape. We’re glad you survived.”
Enwill winced and lowered his gaze.
I felt a rush of a familiar, half-forgotten emotion—a feeling that once upon a time had nearly drowned me where I stood. I swallowed hard, failed to fight tears, and said, “It’s the hardest part, Josh. Forgiving yourself for surviving.”
He looked up at me.
“It took me a long time,” I said, “and it damned near drove me out of my head until I realized it was what I had to do. You get so busy healing—”
“At first just dealing with injuries—” Ben said and pulled up his pant leg to show his prosthesis. “Just getting through the next day. So you set aside everything else.”
“But the whole time,” I said, “it’s as if someone’s winding up this jack-in-the-box inside you. The tension mounts, and then from wherever inside you all this stuff is buried, that jack-inthe-box flies open, and brings out a memory.”
“Sometimes it plays a movie in your head,” Ben said. “The if-only-I-had movie.”
“Yeah,” Josh said. “I know that one.”
“Are you seeing a therapist?” I asked. “A good one can really help.”
“Not yet,” he said and glanced at Andrea.
“He did have a few visits from a social worker at the hospital, but most of that was about dealing with the consequences of a head injury. Can you recommend someone?”
“Yes,” Ben and I said in unison, and I wrote down the information.
“If you can’t stay long enough in Las Piernas to work with her, maybe she’ll recommend someone to you in your area.”
“Thanks. I think we could both use it,” Andrea said.
“In the meantime, Josh,” Ben said, “please understand this—we don’t hold you at all responsible for Parrish’s escape.”
“You hear that, Josh?” Andrea said. She moved nearer and took the notebook, wrote what Ben had said in it. “I’m going to put that on a dozen Post-it notes and plaster them all over the house.”
“Thanks,” Josh said to us, and for a moment seemed unable to speak.
Andrea studied him, then said, “We had a kind of rough morning with the police. Bunch of assholes—”
Ethan and Ben glanced at me but read my look. They kept their mouths shut about Frank.
“Nah,” Josh said, “most of them were okay. Just that last guy we met with, and who could blame him?”
“Who was he?” Ben asked.
Josh looked through his notes. “Detective Vincent Adams.” He looked up. “But don’t blame him or anyone else there. I wasn’t all that helpful.”
“Why did you visit the police?” I asked.
He leaned back and rubbed a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I can’t really remember the escape at all. I remember them loading Parrish into the ambulance, and Stan …” His voice trailed off, then he took a deep breath and went on. “And Stan getting into the cab, and me sitting down in the back. But after that? It’s like a tape has been erased. The doctors tell me it’s not unusual with a head injury, but that doesn’t keep me from thinking that I should remember it.”
He fell silent.
Andrea said, “That’s been bothering Josh a lot, understandably. Some of the investigators thought if they could question him enough times, hint at things, it would come back to him. The doctors finally told them the memories probably never would return and to stop pestering Josh. A couple of the investigators thought Josh might be in on it, because he lived. So they pawed through his background—and mine—but that didn’t pan out, either.”
“If anything,” he said, “this has ruined us.”
“No,” she said. “We’ll be fine. It was hard at first, because they were holding off on paying his bills, and he couldn’t work, and I had to quit my job to take care of him. But we got a good lawyer, an amazing guy who has helped us out, so we sued. We had to sell our house in the meantime, but now that they’ve settled, we’ll be fine. Moving, and the changes and the stress—it’s all been hard on us, especially Josh. But as you can probably tell, my husband isn’t the kind who gives up.”
“And neither are you,” I said.
“I’ve had the easy part,” she said, a statement I didn’t wholly believe, “but no, I don’t give up, either. Which is part of why we have another reason to talk to you today. You’re a reporter, so maybe you can help us with the problem with the police.”
“I should mention to you that I’m married to a homicide detective in Vince’s department.”
She shrugged. “I married someone in law enforcement, too. No problem.” She turned to her husband. “You okay with me going ahead with my plan to tell her about the photo you saw?”
“Yes,” Josh said.
“Like he said, Josh couldn’t remember the journey from the prison, but he did remember loading Parrish in the ambulance. He vaguely remembered the guy who was there in the back of the ambulance with him, the one who probably attacked him while the other one attacked Stan.”
“A nerd,” Josh said. “Red hair, big glasses.”
“They checked, but the ambulance company had never hired anyone who looked like that. So Josh and I have been trying to think of other ways to find him. I know a bit about computers—”
“She’s a nerd, too,” Josh said with a lopsided smile.
“Yes,” she agreed, smiling back at him. “Lucky thing, huh?”
“Yes.”
“So, I’ve been keeping track of the stories about Parrish, listening to your station, and reading the stories about the Moths. You know the stories you had online when you were trying to find people who had known Lisa King?”
“Yes.”
“There was one taken at a park, a concert.” She opened the folder and pulled out a print made from one of the photos one of our listeners had posted when we asked them to send in any pictures they had of Lisa King. When those went up, the Las Piernas Police Department had been visiting our site more than usual.
Andrea passed the photo to me, and Ethan and Ben peered at it over my shoulders. One of the faces in the photo had been circled. It was not that of Lisa or any of the people close to her, whose faces were turned with rapt attention on the performers, a band not seen in the photo. The face circled was that of a young man in the background, who at the moment the photo was taken was watching not the band but Lisa and the people around her.
He did not have red hair. He was not wearing glasses. He didn’t look especially nerdy, whatever that actually is.
“That’s him,” Josh said, and as if he had read my thoughts, added, “I realized that the thing that made me say he was nerdy was how he acted, not really what he looked like.”
All three of us looked up at him, the same question on our faces.
“I’m certain,” he said.
“Josh—” Ben began but was interrupted.
“Show him the other one, Andrea.”
She pulled a second print from the folder. She had used software to alter the image, so that the person in the photo now resembled the description Josh had given earlier—red hair, glasses.
“You could do that to a photo of anyone,” Ben countered.
“She didn’t mess with the structure of his face. She only added the glasses and hair color.”
“Well,” I said, “since we posted that photo on the Web site, we’ve learned more about it. The concert took place around the date Lisa King’s family last heard from her. It was at Weissman Park, and the band was Needlesmith. The band contacted us when one of their members saw the photo, and they’ve offered to help in any way they can. They have a fan mailing list. Maybe they ca
n put the word out for other photos from the day.”
Ben frowned and said, “Irene—be reasonable. Surely you can understand why Vince was skeptical.”
“Yes, but I don’t have the limitations set on me that Vince does.”
“What do you mean?” Andrea asked.
“The police have to be concerned with convincing judges who sign warrants, district attorneys who worry about conviction rates, and ultimately, juries who will question the way they obtained evidence. That said, Vince might have tried to get you to lower your expectations, but don’t assume he’s refusing to think about what you told him—did he keep copies of your printouts?”
“Yes.”
“Which means you should keep your nose out of it,” Ben said to me, “and not interfere with his work.”
I ignored that. “Josh, you’re hoping we can find out who he is, right? You’re not looking for vigilante justice?”
“No, and even if I was, I’m in no shape to deliver it. We just want to keep him from ruining anybody else’s life. And besides, I think he killed that girl.” He consulted his notes. “Lisa King.”
“Andrea, do you have spare copies of these printouts? May we keep a set here?”
“Sure,” she said, “keep those.”
“Would you mind e-mailing the JPGs to me?” Ethan asked, handing over his business card.
“I’ll give you a copy right now,” she said. She said she had hoped he would ask for them and had prepared a CD. She handed it to Ethan. We asked for phone contact information, and she gave us her cell phone number and her sister’s number.
Ben wrote their numbers down, too, and put a lid on his protests—two facts that told me he was seeing possibilities. Good.
“One other thing,” Ethan said. “Josh and Andrea, you’ve already had a long day, but if you don’t mind, I’d like you to let Irene record an interview with you. I think it will help us.”
We made it a two-part story. In the first segment, our listeners heard what had happened to the surviving guard. It upped our traffic enough so that the second segment—carefully vetted by our legal team—had a wide audience. We talked about elusive and sometimes unreliable memories, gave the unaltered concert photo a prominent place on our Web site, and asked our audience—especially those who might have been at the Needle-smith concert in Weissman Park four years ago—to help us find information that might lead nowhere or might be vital to a murder investigation: could they identify any of the people who were pictured with Lisa King?
I wasn’t too surprised that one of the first of the many calls we received was from Vince Adams, who tried to give me grief. I held the phone away from my ear so that Ethan could hear him yelling. Ethan’s grin reflected my own. As soon as Vince took a breath, I told him get the knot out of his tighty whities and call me back when he could be polite. I then hung up on him—which wasn’t polite on my part, and, in truth, it was unfair to Vince. But damn it felt good.
TWENTY-THREE
When I walked down Douglas Street, it was in the middle of a sunny afternoon, and I was not alone. Rachel, Ben, and Ethan were with me, as were two of the dogs, Altair and Bingle. The only one officially on bodyguard duty was Rachel, and she was armed, although her martial arts skills made the need for a weapon unlikely.
Thanks to Rachel, my own skills were improving—not that I had advanced much beyond a basic level. Otherwise, I was armed with only the tools of my own trade. I had a notebook. (A paper notebook, not a computer. Old habits die hard.) A pen. And my recorder, ostensibly to record a story about search dogs.
If that had been what we were really up to, it would have been a perfect day for their work—cool, moist air, with a light breeze. Altair and Bingle were wearing their working vests, which attracted a kind of attention that four people walking a couple of dogs might not have otherwise. This was essentially what we were hoping for, and when two kids in the company of their mother and two elderly couples made their way over to admire the handsome canines, Ethan’s look was downright smug. The idea to use the dogs as busybody bait was his.
I probably should have objected more vehemently to his plan—for a number of reasons. Alas, Ethan knew more than a few of my weaknesses, and he appealed to my curiosity and—I’m ashamed to admit it—a desire to royally avenge myself on Vince.
Vince had not only gone public with his objections to my story via scathing interviews with other media but further showed his displeasure by stonewalling us at every turn on that or any other story that involved one of his investigations.
Although it was great publicity for the station and upped our listenership, I was angered on behalf of the Enwills—Vince made more than one public statement in which he said that “reporters at KCLP are being misled by someone police investigators do not believe is reliable.” Even that probably wouldn’t have been enough to make me go against my better judgment, but then Vince upped the ante by doing all he could to make Frank’s life miserable at work.
I heard about this not from Frank but from Rachel. Frank’s partner, Pete, never discreet about departmental gossip, ratted Vince out to his wife, who in turn let me know about it. Rachel and I were both furious. Frank told us to ignore it, that Vince was just trying to piss me off. Trouble was, his efforts worked. Really well.
Ethan decided that if Vince wanted to see what life was like without cooperation, he’d be happy to oblige.
So when the calls started coming in, Ethan declared we’d investigate on our own and strictly forbade passing any information on to the police. “This time, we won’t contact them until we are certain,” he said.
“Certain?” I said. “You planning on setting up a DNA lab in the back office?”
“Okay, until I feel confident.”
There wasn’t much to feel confident about at first. Dozens of names were mentioned in the calls that came in. Many were clearly hoax calls. Eventually—a word that covers a lot of footwork and Internet searches—we narrowed the possibilities. One of the most promising of those possibilities was a young man named Kai Loudon, who lived with his mother, somewhere on Douglas Street.
Loudon was mentioned by several callers, all former high school classmates. Most didn’t know him well. None of them thought he had dated Lisa King, saying that Kai didn’t date anyone after his junior year. The junior year was mentioned as a clear memory, because at the beginning of his senior year, he had left school and finished his diploma through online courses. Everyone knew that, because after the start of his senior year, Kai Loudon spent all his time taking care of his injured mom.
The story was a class legend, but I heard a firsthand account from a young man who had accompanied Kai home that day, and had been with him when he discovered his mom lying at the bottom of the basement stairs. At first they both thought she was dead, but even as Kai was dialing 911, his friend saw that she was breathing and had a pulse.
“But she was almost completely paralyzed,” he said. “She had both spine and head injuries. Kai had to do everything for her. Feed her, bathe her, comb her hair, give her medications—everything. Luckily, he had just turned eighteen that summer, so he was legally an adult and was able to deal with all of the legal aspect of things. He gave up his whole life to take care of her. I hope you aren’t implying he had anything to do with the death of that girl.”
The others told similar stories. When I asked them if they had seen Kai lately, they confessed guiltily that they had rarely been in contact with him after the accident. Once in a while they would see him in a grocery store or at the mall. The withdrawal had been his choice, which they saw as Kai spurning pity.
I began to doubt Josh’s identification. Weaknesses in eyewitness memories of events had been studied extensively, especially since the “false memory” studies of the mid-1970s. Given his head injury, any confusion he experienced about events of that day was not surprising. Was it possible that we had unwittingly set him up for a false memory? If he was searching for an answer, a face to fill in the blank in
his memory of his attacker, perhaps the faces in the photos of Lisa King on the KCLP Web site had suggested one to him that wasn’t real.
Despite what Vince claimed in his interviews, though, we had never said that anyone in the Weissman Park photo killed Lisa King, or come close to making that accusation. I had been careful to make the story on Josh about his struggle after his injuries, and the request for information about the photo was not couched as an accusation—we all, Josh included, knew that he could be wrong. We asked for the public’s help to find people who might have known Lisa King, and fully acknowledged that identifying the people in the photo might lead nowhere in terms of the murder investigation.
If it was leading nowhere, so be it. But what ultimately bothered me was that it led a little too perfectly to nowhere.
Even for a guy who was caring for an invalid, Kai Loudon was more than reclusive. He seemed to have disappeared. If he had answered the phone when I called and said, “Leave me and my poor mother alone, I was in a photo with a girl who happened to be at that same concert, so what?” that might have been that. But he wasn’t answering his phone, and none of his “friends” had seen him for years. I was curious.
Normally, I would have just knocked on his door or camped out near his house, waiting for him to emerge to go shopping or mail a letter or take a walk. But given the now seemingly slight possibility that he was connected to Nick Parrish, there was not a chance in hell that I was going to be allowed to come within a hundred yards of him without an escort.
Which led to Ethan’s Plan B.
The dogs were relaxed but in ready-to-work mode, friendly to approaching strangers but focused on Ben and Ethan, waiting for commands. The two young neighborhood boys asked for and received permission to pet the dogs. They were peppering Ben and Ethan with questions (What are the dogs’ names? Are they boys or girls? How old are they? Why are they wearing clothes?), all of which I recorded. After all, I might end up with nothing but the story we said we were there for.
Fortunately, when it came to that other story, my three human companions let me ask the questions of the small crowd gathering on Douglas Street.