by Gregg Olsen
“Thanks for your time,” Jason said. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
She looked at the young man and smiled. “Be good to your wife, deputy. She’s depending on you.”
“Thanks, ma’am. Will do.”
Darla Montague, Mitch Crawford’s assistant, was cleaning the “guest” tables from a day of free hot dogs. The dealership smelled more like a fast food place than a place that sold cars. Her spirit seemed to brighten when she saw Emily and Jason enter the showroom. She always expected good things would come her way, simply because she was good. Or tried to be.
“Hi, Mrs. Sheriff Kenyon,” she said, letting out a little laugh.
“Hi, Darla. My deputy and I are here to see your boss. Is he in?”
“Yes, he is.” She set down a bottle of diluted bleach and a cleaning cloth. “Mr. Crawford has been gone most of the day, but he came back an hour or so ago. He’s in his office.” She indicated the direction of the big glass windows that had enclosed the owner’s office since Mitch’s father opened up for business. A slogan painted on the window still endured: WE’LL STAND ON OUR HEADS TO MAKE YOU A GREAT DEAL.
Mitch was on the phone; his back was turned to face the car lot when Emily and Jason approached. When their reflections appeared on the glass, his body tightened and he turned around.
“Gotta go. Have some visitors here.” He hung up and stood, his manner stiff and unwelcoming. “What do you want? Are you here to mess with my head some more?”
Emily inched closer. Jason lingered just a few paces behind her.
“No,” she said. “We’re here with what may be upsetting news.”
“What could be more disturbing than having my wife and baby killed by some creep and having half of the town I love think that I’m the one who did it?”
“I’m sure it has been very hard for you, too,” Emily said, her voice cool. “But you’ve put yourself in this position, Mitch.”
“Are you here to tell me how to act?”
The conversation was escalating to a place that would have no victors. “No. I’m not. As I said, I’m here with some very disturbing news.”
Mitch folded his arms across his chest. “Yeah? What?”
“DNA results indicate that the baby your wife was carrying was not yours.”
Silence. His dark brown eyes looked around the room and his mouth tightened.
“Mitch, did you hear me?”
He turned and looked across the dealership. It was the end of the day and the balloons had fallen to the ground. A pair of salesmen, young and in need of commissions, stood at the ready in case someone came on to the lot in search of a deal.
“I heard you. And you ask me if I knew? Let me tell you this. What you’re saying is a goddamn lie. My wife would never cheat on me. She would never do that to me. She knew I could never forgive that. Now, get out. I don’t ever want to see you here on my lot again. Get your next car somewhere else. I don’t care. Leave me the hell alone.”
Before he turned his back on them, Emily and Jason thought they’d seen a tear in his eye.
Chapter Thirty-five
The next morning, Camille Hazelton gave the word and Mitch Crawford was arrested for the murder of his wife and daughter. There was no fanfare. No TV-style chase toward a chain-link fence. It was mundane, as criminal cases often are. Emily and Jason picked him up as he was going into the dealership.
“This is the biggest mistake you ever made,” he said, setting his briefcase down. “And you’ve made a lot of them.”
He looked right at Emily and she just dug her eyes deeper into his gaze.
“That’s fine,” Jason shot back. “We learn from all of our mistakes. Guess you don’t.”
Jason kicked the black briefcase to the side.
“Hey that’s pig leather! Be careful or I’ll sue!”
“You have the right to remain silent,” Emily began. The words came from her lips, and with each one she thought of Mandy and her baby. This monster standing cuffed in front of her would never hurt anyone again.
The Cherrystone jail staffers—and two guys in custody for driving under the influence—could barely contain their glee over the arrest of Mitch Crawford. He came into the jail kicking like the brat that most of his advance publicity pegged him to be.
“These coveralls smell bad,” he said. “I can’t wear this filthy thing.”
“You’ll wear it or you’ll walk around naked,” a jailer said. “You pick.”
The car dealer with the dead wife and baby had a complaint for everything. The food was bad, the place was filthy, and the staff was unprofessional.
“He thinks he’s on a damn vacation,” one of the DUIs said to the other with whom he was sharing a cell.
“Yeah. Cry me a river. This is no all-inclusive resort, that’s for sure.”
When it came time to shower, Mitch Crawford begged for unused flip-flops so his feet “didn’t have to feel the slime of the vermin who’ve been here before me.”
That didn’t win him any friends, in a place where he probably could use one. It wasn’t that anyone was going to “shank” him for a pack of smokes. It was more like someone might rough him up a little just because they could. It was also because in jail, outside of watching TV for an hour and hoping for a litter detail, there wasn’t much to do.
Mitch Crawford was fresh blood and a welcome break from the jailhouse ennui that ensured long days.
“Shut up, you big baby,” the older of the DUIs called over when the murder defendant complained about the filthy conditions of his holding cell. “Your dad sold me a lemon and I might just take it out on you.”
As Emily continued to work on what she knew was a thin case, she skipped out on the arraignment and the bail hearing the next day. While it was true she was busy, she also saw no need to see Cary McConnell argue on behalf of his client. It would be, she thought, like a barracuda cuddling up with a great white shark.
Camille Hazelton called her from the courthouse. Emily could hear the sound of the prosecutor’s heels as they smacked the marble floor.
“Interesting morning in court,” she said.
“I’m guessing that he’s already out.”
“You’d be guessing wrong then.”
“How much?” Emily expected the bail figure to be around $1 million. There weren’t many murder cases in the history of Cherrystone, but the few such cases in recent memory usually ended up with the suspect behind bars pending the outcome of their trials. Few had the means of a successful businessman like Mitch Crawford.
Camille presented her words like she was pulling a tablecloth from under a china tea set.
“I asked for—and got—five million.”
“You’re kidding. How did you manage that?”
“I really don’t know. I mean, I know I’m persuasive, but even I didn’t expect that. I threw the number out, stating all that was true—flight risk, private plane, more money than God. Cary objected, of course, but he didn’t challenge me on the flight-risk aspect, which was key. He told the judge that his client’s wealth shouldn’t hold him to a higher standard, but it was halfhearted.”
“I love it when Cary has an off day.”
“Yeah, there aren’t too many of them.”
“How long do you think it will take for Crawford to raise the money?”
“It’ll take some doing. We’ve seen his finances. Very few of his assets are liquid. I’m not sure he’ll put up the dealership—and I’m not sure if he can. Seems that his stepmother still owns a chunk of the place. And they haven’t spoken in ten years.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Garden Grove
The first time that Olivia Barton saw the news clipping in her husband’s wallet, she was doing laundry in the basement of their tidy house in Garden Grove, California. Olivia was an exceedingly organized woman who somehow managed to get all the laundry done, folded, and put away before her Saturday was shot. She hung sheets and towels outside because she and Michael liked
the crispness that came with a line-dry. Darks were tumbled because no one liked a pair of jeans that stood on their own.
That morning Danny and Carla were watching the Cartoon Network with cups of Cheerios and apple juice drink boxes. From the downstairs, she could hear the TV and the relentless laugh track. It was the comforting soundtrack of her weekends.
Michael had left his wallet inside his jeans pocket and when she pulled it out, a small laminated newspaper clipping protruded. She’d never have opened his wallet to see what was inside. She’d learned from her own mother’s mistakes—“Never look into something that doesn’t concern you…you just might find something that does.”
It was silly advice, convoluted, like most of her mother’s, but she got the essence of it.
Don’t look for things that will break your heart.
That day she did just that, and her heart indeed shattered. It wasn’t because of a motel receipt or a canceled check for an expensive gift that he never gave to her. That she could deal with. That she could scream about.
Not this. She looked at the clipping and started to cry. The picture of a little boy and a toddler girl wearing Mickey Mouse ears and sitting in a police station shook her. The boy looked like her son, though she knew it wasn’t.
It was her husband.
Boy, Girl Abandoned at Disneyland
By Gwen Trexler, SEA BREEZE GAZETTE Reporter
Disneyland is supposed to be “The Happiest Place on Earth” but not for two children who were abandoned there Wednesday when a woman—presumed to be their mother—asked an amusement park attendee to watch her son and daughter while she searched for a phone.
“She said she had an emergency call to make,” Martina Montoya of Tustin said Thursday morning when contacted by the SEA BREEZE GAZETTE. “I waited for an hour. She never came back. I hope she’s okay.”
The park closed an hour later and Disney security searched for the missing woman. Her children, ages believed to be 10 and 2, are now in police custody.
Olivia wanted to cry, but with her own children around, she held it together. She couldn’t fathom why Michael’s mother had left her children. How could anyone do that to a child? Michael had told her only snippets about his past, including the fact that he’d had a sister that had been adopted by another family.
Later that afternoon, Michael, all sweaty from planting two small date palms and an enormous fan-shaped bird of paradise plant along the crisp white stucco wall that ran along the backside of the property, came inside.
Olivia’s expression told him something was wrong, though she hadn’t tried to show it.
“You OK?” he asked, pulling a gritty T-shirt over his head and tossing it into the now-empty laundry basket.
“I’m fine,” she said.
There were things they never talked about. Things about his past that just seemed to be silent between them. Olivia’s parents had known great hardship when they sneaked across the border at Nogales and made their way up to Washington State’s Yakima Valley, where they picked apples and sent as much of the money home to Mexico as they could. That meant no new clothes, no books, no “extras” of any kind. There were days when they had nothing to eat but blocks of government surplus cheese and pinto beans.
Olivia made light of those days.
“Try living in a two-room shack with five brothers who have eaten nothing but beans, and you’ll know what a nightmare really is,” she’d say in her canned answer to those who asked about her past. It was always said with a laugh. Yet there was hurt there, too.
She’d been the reason her family came across the border that night. Her mother had her a week later in a motel outside of El Paso. When she was well enough to travel, they swaddled her and took a bus up north. In the years since, her three oldest brothers became naturalized citizens and successful businessmen. The two youngest never bothered.
All of that was an open book. It had to be. She needed her own children to understand where she had come from in order to be more than she’d ever dared to dream.
But not her husband. Michael was closed off from his past and even the slightest nudge toward some information about it brought rebuke. Sometimes even anger.
“I saw the clipping in your wallet,” she said, her voice tentative. Her big eyes stayed fixed on him.
“That was a long time ago,” he said.
“I know. But you’ve never told me about it. About your mom. What happened?”
“I’m not going to start now, Olivia.”
He pulled off his jeans and took off his underwear, toe-kicking it into the basket. He was a pretty good shot and if she hadn’t been trying to uncover more of his life she might have said so just then. She might even have said something about his physique. The workout in the yard left his muscles bulging and he’d looked more like an underwear model, sans underwear, than he did a computer systems geek. He turned on the shower and stepped inside, keeping his distance from the icy spray while waiting for it to warm.
Olivia stood by the glass door.
“Michael, I just want to know you better,” she said.
He ducked his head under the water and she wondered if he’d heard her at all.
“I love you, Olivia, but I can’t talk about that, babe. Don’t ever ask again.”
Olivia stood in the bathroom, the steam swirling from the shower and the image of her husband standing before her growing more and more distant. It was more than a metaphor for who he was, but who he’d always be.
Inside the shower, Michael Barton’s tears mixed with the water.
The thought that just scuttled through his mind almost made him laugh, had it not been so painful. Robert and Helen Hansen had the first foster home that he and his sister had been assigned to after their mother failed to show up after leaving them at Disneyland. The Hansens were what he would later call “K4Ms” or Kids for Money—the kind of family who pretends to want to help children, but really only wants the $300 per head they get from the State of California each month.
Although state law prohibited keeping more than two children in a bedroom—and they had to be two children of the same gender—Michael and Sarah slept in a back bedroom of the Hansens’ house in Tustin with four other children. The Hansens outfitted the room with three bunk beds that Robert Hansen had built himself out of pressure-treated timber he stole from a landscaper three blocks away. The chemicals in the wood made the kids sick, which made Helen Hansen madder than usual.
The first time that Robert Hansen abused Michael was a couple of weeks after he and his little sister arrived for foster care. Michael and the oldest boy in the house, a lanky kid with red hair and a swarm of freckles, were watching TV when Mr. Hansen came into the den. Mrs. Hansen, a morose brunette with spider veins that practically crocheted the skin around her ankles, had gone to the grocery store. The other kids were napping in the little warren of beds that met the minimum requirements for youth housing.
“Tim, you watch the kids,” he told the redhead.
“OK, Papa,” the boy said, barely looking up from the TV.
“Son, I want to show you something,” he said, taking Michael by the hand and leading him to the garage. A cat meandered past them, and for a second, Michael thought that he was there to play with the cat. But the cat kept going, and Mr. Hansen said nothing to stop it. It was a two-car garage, but inside there was a single car and a workbench, a bed for the dog, and an old sofa.
Mr. Hansen was working on a Corvette that he’d been restoring for months, if not years. Its red fiberglass body was spotted with Bondo.
“Hop in,” he said, holding open the passenger door.
Michael climbed inside. The car fascinated him at first. He’d had a Hot Wheels car similar to it back in Portland, though that, and everything else he owned, had been left behind.
“Beauty, huh?”
Michael watched as the man slid into the driver’s seat. He reached over and clicked the automatic garage door opener and the gears overhead started to
grind as the hinged panel rolled down, shuttering the sun from the garage. It went from a blast of light to a slit, to near darkness. Michael felt Mr. Hansen take his hand and press it into his crotch.
“That’s a good boy,” he said.
Michael wasn’t sure what was happening, but he knew it was wrong. He tried to pull his hand away, but Mr. Hansen wouldn’t let him.
“Hold on, cowboy,” he said, leaning closer, his hot breath now against Michael’s cheek. “You’re gonna make Papa feel good.”
The rest of what happened was lost in his memory. It wasn’t because it wasn’t traumatic, because to Michael Barton, it absolutely was. It was lost because, over time, Michael just turned it off.
“Suck on me until I tell you to stop,” Mr. Hansen said.
Michael looked up and started to cry. “I want my mom.”
“Stop crying and suck. Your mom dumped you because you were a bad boy.”
Michael protested some more, but Mr. Hansen palmed the back of his head like a volleyball and pressed it to his groin.
“Yeah, that’s a good boy. That’s my good boy.”
It seemed to last a long time. Horrifically long. Inside his head, Michael sang the Itsy Bitsy Spider song over and over. It was a mantra that helped him through the hours he’d ended up spending in the Corvette, the laundry room at the end of the hall, the bathroom when Mrs. Hansen had gone to bed. As time went on and the incident was repeated, Michael knew it would end. He could read Mr. Hansen’s body for the telltale signs that it was almost over. Mr. Hansen would stiffen his legs, moan about how good it felt, and then relax.
Mr. Hansen was a cigar smoker who liked to light up afterward and wave the cigar around, taunting the boy.
“Bet you’d like this in your mouth, too?”
While Michael was able to push most of the repulsion and shame that he felt out of his mind, whenever he smelled the pungent smoke of a While Owl cigar, his stomach would roil into knots.