A Twist of the Knife

by Becky Masterman

  “How much did money have to do with it?”

  “What do you mean? The fact that he had it and I didn’t? I said—”

  “No. I mean the fact that he didn’t have as much money as you thought he had.”

  “You think I would have thrown him under the bus for that?”

  “Did he tell you he was in financial trouble?”

  Shayna wasn’t sweating as much as she had been inside the studio, but she was still a little steamy. I got the feeling she was sorry she had sat down like this, and was now figuring out how to get the latest news on the Creighton kids while getting back inside the house and locking the door.

  I repeated, more softly, like it was just idle conversation and I didn’t really care about the answer, “Did he tell you he was in financial trouble?”

  I guess she decided it couldn’t do any harm to answer at this late date. “There was one night about six months before the … murders when we’d shared a couple bottles of wine and had sex on the beach. I asked him why we didn’t do it on his boat anymore. He said he sold the boat. Then he said, ‘I’m in one of those situations where I’m worth more dead than alive.’”

  “He was talking about assets,” I prodded gently.

  Shayna nodded. “That was when I found out he had borrowed money from a loan shark, and had a term life insurance policy on him and his wife, the kind that pays double for accidental death and dismemberment.”

  Keeping my voice just as gentle so she wouldn’t be tipped off, I said, “Why didn’t this come up at the trial?”

  Shayna jerked her head in my direction. “Wha?” she managed.

  “In the court transcripts. I don’t have them with me, but it was something like, Prosecutor: Did you have any idea that Marcus Creighton was in financial trouble? You: No, I had no idea. Something like that. That’s not just about feelings, is it? That’s a statement of fact.”

  Shayna paled, trying desperately to remember what she had said back then. Whether I was just lying for some purpose she couldn’t see. Stuttering a bit as she tried to get out the words, but raising her tiny chin in defiance, she said, “I don’t care what I said. Maybe I remembered it all wrong. I’m sticking by my testimony, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Marcus Creighton killed his family. And I had nothing to do with it.”

  “I didn’t say you did.” I got up from the porch and dusted off the back of my jeans. I still would not reveal the cell phone evidence that was more proof of her perjury. Better save that for later. “There’s more, Shayna. I know you’re a liar. Probably not about being in love with Marcus Creighton; that sounds right. But about other things. I don’t know why you’re lying, but we’ve got better proof of it than what you just gave me. I’m here to tell you you’d be better off coming clean now than before Marcus Creighton is retried. Because then you won’t be in a position to make any deals.”

  Her face was closed off. She’d had years of practice. She might process what I said later, and come around, but for now all she wanted was me gone. Yet she wanted something else even more. “Wait. You said you’d tell me about the children.”

  I shrugged. “I think you already know it’s the children. And you know where we found them.”

  “But I don’t!” she sobbed.

  I almost believed her then. I almost felt bummed about tricking her like that, but then I thought of Marcus Creighton’s face when we forced him to acknowledge his children had been found buried in a shallow grave.

  One last try. “Shayna. There’s a man who’s going to die because of you. Shortly after midnight tomorrow. Someone who genuinely loved you. We’ve got a case for appeal, but you’re the one who put the nail in his coffin, and you’re the only one who can pry it out. If you come forward now you can stop his death. Tell me what happened that night. Tell me what you’ve known all these years. I promise you it will feel good to say it.”

  Shayna didn’t speak but instead started to tremble, and then started to shake. She got up off the step and, weaving like a drunk, using the doorjamb for support, went back into the house. I got up, too, and started to follow. I stopped when she reappeared, blowtorch in hand. It was on full blast.

  “Get off my goddamn property,” she screamed and cried at the same time, a little spit popping in the flames.

  Twenty-five

  On the drive home Laura kept wiping her nose on the back of her fingers as if I wouldn’t know her tears were leaking despite her best effort to hide them. I handed her a Kleenex from my tote and muttered something about summer allergies. She didn’t say what had happened when she was alone with Creighton, and I didn’t ask. I told her about how I had cornered Shayna Murry and got the feeling from our conversation that she was like Tracy Mack, Gabriel Delgado, even Todd’s girlfriend Madeline Stanley, knowing more than they were saying. Laura was unresponsive, lost in her own thoughts and leaving me to mine, which, as always, turned to Mom and Dad.

  I would go back to the hospital, I told myself after calling Mom on the cell phone that she still did not answer, but before that I needed an hour with no one and nothing in it. After I dropped Laura off at home and got back to the Howard Johnson’s, I walked across the street and down to the hot sand that, barefoot, would feel like walking across hot coals. I kicked off my sneakers when I got to the water’s edge and in doing so felt the unaccustomed stiffness in my muscles. I stretched my arms behind me and felt the resistance. Oh man, I needed to work out. I tested my leg where I’d been shot some months before. Wondered if my back could take a run like in the old days. Tried a few tentative steps. Not too bad. The soft sand both cushioned the impact and created a challenge that I knew was good for me. Up down up down into the thin sheet of water that was the farthest point of the waves. I hadn’t been back so long that I couldn’t still smell the salty fishy smell.

  I passed a few jellyfish washed up on the beach, looking like blueberry chewing-gum bubbles, and hoped to avoid their invisible tentacles that could be stretched out twelve feet in any direction and give a painful sting even when the jellyfish itself wasn’t attached. I passed a wad of netting. A filtered cigarette butt. A small dead fish. Danger and death all around, but then a tern ran into the receding water, so light its feet hardly left a mark in the sand. It picked up something I couldn’t see and ran back up the beach ahead of the next wave.

  The eighty percent humidity might have made the running rough, but it was balanced against the drop in elevation, coming from thirty-five hundred feet where I live in Arizona to sea level. Huffing just a bit, but knowing it would pass as the endorphins kicked in, I headed along the water’s edge toward a small group of people standing solemnly in an uneven circle, looking down.

  I remembered Alison Samuels’s story about the starfish and thought how weird that would be. Then I thought of a photograph I had seen in one of Dad’s homicide textbooks when I was six years old. The face of a man who had been in the sea for two weeks. His head looked like a white balloon. The photograph had never really left me, and my psychologist friend has suggested that I went into law enforcement because of it. He thinks I’ve spent my whole life confronting that image before it could get me. Hunting for it rather than turning my back to avoid it and letting it creep up behind me. It may be that the memories of events before the age of ten are the memories that stay implanted most firmly for the rest of our lives. They make us who we are. There had been many times before now when I wished I’d never seen that photograph.

  Please, nothing awful this afternoon, I thought. So often in my life it had been something awful, and a dozen of those images flashed through my head before I came up to the group.

  I laughed out loud that it was neither a floater nor starfish. It was turtles.

  Some mother turtle, after enjoying wild aquatic sex, had crawled up onto the beach late one night, dug a hole with her flippers, and deposited roughly fifty eggs the size, color, and shape of Ping-Pong balls. She had covered up the hole with the sand she dug out of it, and then the bitch had h
eaded back to sea without so much as a Good luck, kids.

  Some mothers were like that. Some mothers, like mine, said that children should be like cookies; you should be able to throw out the first batch. Some mothers got in the bathtub with a glass of wine after taking a sleeping pill, leaving three children untended, undefended. Unalive.

  Stop it, Brigid. Just stop.

  Then, without trying, my attention was hauled kicking and screaming back from the internal vision of a crime scene to the real sight of about fifty baby turtles, each about the size of a silver dollar, following the same path as their mother.

  The other people who had got there before me, most in T-shirts and shorts, each out for their own morning walk or run, had instinctively formed a rough cordon on both sides of the nest, leading to the water. No one seemed to be in charge. Without waiting for an invitation I lined up with them, and we watched the slow progress of the little feet and shells, with heads like a plug of licorice, over the sand. Some few of the turtles got confused and pointed their licorice plug in the wrong direction, west to where they’d be run over by cars or find themselves trapped against a two-foot-high concrete wall running along the sidewalk. One of my fellow turtle watchers put himself in charge of these. When he picked them up, he didn’t carry the turtles all the way to the ocean. He only brought them back to the vicinity of the nest and got them started in the right direction. One can only do so much to change the world, and then the world has to take care of itself.

  A woman dressed in a long gauzy skirt flapped it and yelled “Ha!” at several seagulls who were also witnessing the activity, probably with breakfast in mind.

  I bent down and picked up one little guy who had gotten himself stuck in the depression left in the sand by someone’s foot. His paws scrabbled uselessly and continued to do so until I put him down outside the footprint, where he gained traction again.

  A half dozen of the turtles made it as far as the water’s edge and stopped, too exhausted to go on. Someone tried picking them up and putting them in the water, but they were too far gone and didn’t try to swim. You can’t save everyone. But most of the fifty made it at least into the water, where more would be food and who knows how many would survive to breed again. The ones who made it swam for a few seconds with their heads above water. In the afternoon sun their heads looked even blacker against the surface of the water, interspersed with the diamonds cast by the sunlight on the small rippling waves.

  It would be nice to say they looked back at us, but we’re talking biology here. Over the course of a minute they were gone, without so much as a thank-you, and our role was finished. The seven of us stood on the beach, watching as if we could still see them. No one cheered. We looked around as if we hoped we could do it again, but there were no more turtles. I waved; what could you say, after all? It wasn’t until I started back to the hotel that I realized I’d gone a good twenty minutes without an ugly picture in my head.

  My cell phone rang. Wanting the peace to last a little longer, I looked at my watch. Three P.M. It wouldn’t be Carlo; he was three hours earlier than me and always had lunch at precisely noon. Mom? I scowled to myself and answered it.

  It was Laura. The tears that had finally burst their dam made it hard to talk, but she managed to tell me that nothing had done any good, a capricious judge had denied the stay of execution, and on June 23, 2015, at twelve o’clock A.M., Marcus Creighton would be put to death. I checked my watch. Thirty-three hours from now.

  Twenty-six

  Will had gone ballistic, Laura said, and was already on his way to appeal to the governor, the same one who had signed the Timely Justice Act. I admired Will for his perseverance.

  Right after Laura, my phone rang again. Used to be this didn’t happen when you were at the beach.

  “Brigid, it’s Mom. I’m at the hospital. I think it’s bad.” Her voice sounded like an old woman’s, that weak reedy whisper, and it struck me that she had never sounded quite so elderly before.

  Why do things happen this way, bad news on bad news, like it’s a plan, the goal of which is to fuck you over?

  “What happened?” I asked. “Was it the breathing?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted you to know we’re in a different room.”

  “What’s the number?”

  “It’s on the fourth floor now” was all she said. “I think it’s intensive care.”

  “Did you call Todd?”

  “Not yet.”

  So I’d have to call Todd, too. I had a fuckin’ innocent on death row with his execution scheduled, but I still had to play the part of the oldest girl. Oh, and excuse my language. When I get stressed I get angry.

  I called Todd on my way to St. Luke’s, and he just said thanks. I made it to the hospital in short order and got Dad’s room number from the front desk, got up to 416 in no time.

  Dad still had a private room. He was pretty unresponsive, eyes not quite closed, his nose and mouth covered with a nebulizer. I wouldn’t have thought my heart would break a little when I saw him like this, without that fight, but it did. I never realized how important the fight was before now. Mom was there, too, with a paper in her hand.

  “What did they tell you?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “They didn’t tell you why he’s here.” I sat down on the corner of the bed and pointed to the paper she held. I said, “What do you have there, some explanation of what’s up?”

  “It’s that thing you said we should sign. Living will.”

  “The Do Not Resuscitate order? Did they give that to you?”

  “No. I brought a copy from home.”

  “Why? Good God, he doesn’t look like he needs life support.”

  “I don’t know” was all Mom said.

  I left the room and went to the nurses’ station, which was only three doors down the antiseptically gleaming hallway.

  “Status of Fergus Quinn, room 416,” I said. Okay, maybe I snarled it, but only a little.

  The nurse at the desk, protected behind a bank of black-and-white monitors, looked up at me with no sense of urgency. “Excuse me. You are?”

  “Brigid Quinn. Daughter.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m not authorized to—” she started, and looked back at her computer monitor, a response I would have ignored if I wasn’t already pre-pissed at the Florida criminal justice system, not to mention health care in general.

  “My mother is in room 416 with my father, who was brought to intensive care. No one told her why. Right now she’s sitting there holding a living will and wondering if he’s about to die. So you get me a doctor or whoever the hell can tell us what’s going on. Otherwise you’re going to have to call security.”

  She kept an eye on me as she picked up the house phone and called someone. Luckily for the hospital he was on afternoon rounds and just one floor away. A white coat and stethoscope marked him as he strode down the hall toward me.

  “I’m Dr. McGee,” he gruffed, towering over me so far he couldn’t have got in my face if he bent from the waist.

  Ooh, scare me with your white coat, will you? “I need to know the status of Fergus Quinn in room 416. Why is he in intensive care?” Not bothering to lift my chin, I stared at where his eyes would have been if he wasn’t invading my personal space.

  “I’m sorry. Are you a doctor?” he asked, without an obvious smirk but with an edge I knew too well.

  “Is sarcasm now a treatment protocol?” I asked, keeping my own voice mild.

  He looked startled, scowled, and then fired off, “The patient had been on oral beta-lactam plus macrolide, but the strain of bacteria was resistant and there was risk of sepsis. So we moved him here for extra monitoring and put him on IV beta-lactam, plus aminoglycoside, plus quinolone as an added precaution.”

  I could tell he was attempting a smackdown, physician-style. Intimidate the ignorant woman with medicalese she’d never understand.

  “Antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Sepsis. Three-drug cocktail
to blast it.” As I said that, I tapped the lapel of his lab coat, not hard, but just enough to show he had not achieved intimidation. He backed away, but slowly so as not to let it look like he was cringing.

  “Now. Prognosis,” I said, looking him in the eye.

  “His lungs are like tissue paper. But there is some hope that he’ll pull through this. Small, but I should be able to give you a better picture within the next forty-eight hours.”

  “May I have your card,” I said, without it being a question.

  He hesitated, then took out a little case and handed me one. “Can I answer any other questions for you?”

  “Just one. What other drugs you got if this doesn’t work?”

  “I’m afraid this is our best and final recourse,” he said, with something of a sympathetic tone.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said. We stared at each other a moment more, both, I hope to think, finally seeing actual people. I was the one to turn first and head off back down the hall.

  “They’re doing everything they should,” I said to Mom when I got back to the room. I translated what the doctor had said, short of the sobering prognosis. When Mom got upset she got an attack of colitis, so we tried to protect her, for our own sake as well as hers. “So you can put the DNR authorization away. No matter what you say, it makes you look eager.”

  Mom looked like her mind was elsewhere, and I started to bend down and take the sheet of paper from her. But she gripped it tighter and looked up at me. “You think I don’t know what this means? You’re saying it makes me look like I want your father to die? Why do you joke about everything?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s how I deal with stress,” I said. “Let me take care of the form. We’re not at that point yet. When did you eat, Mom? I can get you something from the coffee shop.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” she said. She looked around, but nothing in the room was any different from the other room he’d been in, the IV pole, the bin for waste linens, the metal rails on both sides of the bed. “You were born here,” Mom said, making it sound like it was this very room.