by Gregg Olsen
“No, as far as we can tell he was assaulted. We don’t know what happened but we’re going to do our best to find out.”
“He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” she asked, spitting out the words one at a time as she caught her breath between her sobs.
“All I know is that it’s very serious, Mrs. Collins,” Jake said, trying to wind down the call. “You’ll need to talk to the doctors at the hospital.”
There was a slight pause on the line, long enough for Jake to wonder if the victim’s mother had dropped the phone.
“Mrs. Collins?” he asked.
When she finally spoke, her words were choked with tears. “Did someone hurt him because of the way he is?” she asked, calming herself with a deep breath. “Is that what happened?”
“We don’t know,” Jake said, wondering if she meant because of her son being gay, or a pedophile. He couldn’t see anything to be gained from asking for clarification.
Another longer pause. Mrs. Collins stopped crying. She said she was a caregiver for an elderly sister with cancer and it would take her a couple of days to arrange things to come to Oregon.
“It’s pretty serious, ma’am,” Jake said. “Doctor says to hurry.”
She reiterated her responsibilities with her sister and said she’d get there as quickly as she could.
“He’s a good boy,” she finally said. “He really is. I don’t think it’s anyone’s business who my son runs around with.”
Liz saw Charlie’s face everywhere. In the swirl of foam in her coffee. In the line of kids waiting for a turn to skateboard at the park. On TV. In Carole’s eyes.
Especially in Carole’s eyes.
Liz went for a run to try to bolster her weakened self back into someone who could—and would—do the right thing. As she ran, she kept coming back to how betraying Owen and her promise to him would only serve to visit more misery on an innocent party. He didn’t deserve to have his world collapse because of what she did.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
MISSING: NINETEEN DAYS
Esther didn’t need the help of the Pines office manager to let her inside the cabin where Brad Collins had been staying. The door was ajar, and she eased it gently open, looking around the small space—at the bed, the chair, the nightstand, the tiny kitchenette—to be sure that Brad Collins’s attacker was gone. What she saw momentarily took her breath away. It was as if a bloody cyclone had rearranged the furniture and splattered red on the sheets. There could be no doubt that the man fighting for his life had endured his beating there.
She dialed Jake.
“We’ll need some techs at the Pines to process the scene,” she said. “Big mess here, that’s for sure.”
“Rage beating,” Jake said. “That’s pretty messed up.”
Esther exhaled. Her blood pressure was up. “That idiot Massey should never have told the paper Collins’s name,” she said. “I told him how messed up that was. Might have made Collins a target of some vigilante. Wouldn’t be hard to find him, drive around any motel and look for Ohio plates.”
Her eyes landed on the phone jack that had been pulled out of the wall.
“Check with dispatch to see if any 911 calls were made from here,” Esther said.
When she ended the call, Esther again scanned the room’s wreckage. Yes, it was sadly possible that this was the work of some kind of vigilante, spurred by the media coverage of the Franklin case. But it could also be something totally random. Maybe Brad Collins met someone locally and things went very wrong. Maybe he’d tried to pick up the wrong guy—a vigilante of another stripe. While Oregon was very liberal, things were a lot more conservative in the central and eastern parts of the state.
“Are you sure you don’t want tea?” Liz asked as she lowered herself into the sun-bleached Adirondack chair next to Carole’s on the Jarretts’ riverfront porch. Her eyes stayed on the gleaming surface of the Deschutes. Looking at Carole only made the bile in her stomach rise.
“No,” Carole said. “Wine is fine.”
Carole didn’t seem to need or want any eye contact anyway.
“Charlie’s out there,” she said.
“I know,” Liz said, pouring herself a second glass from the bottle she’d set on the deck next to her chair.
“He’s coming home,” Carole said, reaching over to Liz but still not looking at her.
“Yes,” Liz said, shrinking smaller and smaller. “That’s right.”
“Who took him? Who would do that to a little boy? What kind of evil do we have here?”
Carole was like a mother cat that had been dumped at the humane society not long ago. She stalked every corner of the facility, calling out and trying to find where her babies had gone.
“We don’t know everyone,” Liz said. “Not like we used to.”
“Strangers come here for a good time,” Carole said. “They come, they go.” The alcohol was working its way into her system. Calming her. Numbing her. Not that Carole needed an excuse. “They take our peace and quiet with their drunken paddling, and then they take our children.”
Liz took a gulp of wine. The bottle was nearly empty. She’d need more. They both would. There was likely nothing she could say to quell her friend’s unbridled agony. She was a sham of a sounding board, and she knew it. She could nod. She could sprinkle a few words here and there to show her closest friend that she was listening. But there was nothing she could say that would even begin to approach the truth of what had truly happened.
“There’s a special place in hell for those who harm children,” Carole declared.
“Yes. I agree,” Liz said. “We’re out of wine. Stay here and I’ll be right back.”
Carole tilted her head backward and emptied her glass. “You’re a good friend, Liz.”
Liz slipped through the old screen door and made her way to the kitchen. She deposited the empty bottle on the counter and went into the bathroom. She turned on the sink tap the way some with shy bladders do to mask the sound of using the toilet. She gripped the edges of the pedestal sink and hung her head over the now-steaming water. The hot vapors primed her tear ducts. She stood there crying as quietly as she could. She looked up at her reflection, then swung the mirrored door open so she could no longer view herself. She would have smashed that mirror without hesitation if she could have done so without making any noise.
Silent screams are the most gut-wrenching of all. She deserved every bit of the pain that she was feeling at that moment. She was the most loathsome creature on the planet. The cause of Charlie’s death no longer mattered. So what if it had been an accident? She’d killed the boy in her carelessness and weakness. So what if none of what had transpired after that had malice attached to it? Had she known that her effort to retreat and save herself would ultimately prove futile, she’d never have attempted it. But she had. It was like the tightest knot, a noose around her neck: there was no undoing what she’d done.
Owen’s threats were a cobra striking her: “He’s gone. He’s over. You’ll be over too. David and Carole will be in agony but they, too, will get past this. Our lives will never, ever recover. Think about that, Liz. Don’t be so selfish. Doing the right thing means keeping this all between the two of us.”
Her knuckles were white as she gripped the edge of the sink.
“You okay in there?”
It was Carole.
Her hands were superglued to the porcelain. “I’m okay,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
“Something didn’t agree with me,” Liz said, flushing the toilet.
“Sorry. All right then,” Carole said, her footsteps fading from the bathroom door as she made her way to the kitchen.
A bottle of pills beckoned from the medicine cabinet’s center shelf.
All she had to do was open the cap, swallow them all, and tell Carole that she wanted to lie down. She’d set the stage for such a plan by saying she didn’t feel well and by spending all this time in the bathroom. It would take a w
hile for the Percodan to ease her away from what she’d done, but if Carole was the kind soul that Liz knew she was, she’d let her sleep.
I could leave a note. I could write something and stick it under my pillow.
She amended her plan. There was a chance that Owen would find the note and then he’d dispatch it to the trash.
Or maybe slip it into Carole’s purse, she considered. That way only Carole would find it. Only Carole mattered anyway.
She steadied herself in front of the shuttered medicine cabinet. She was ugly in every way possible. Death would be a relief she knew she didn’t deserve. Her suicide would truly be a selfish act. She only hoped that she could come up with the words that would deflect any blame on her husband.
She worked it out in her head, line by line:
Dear Carole and David,
God will never forgive me for what I’ve done. You won’t, either. I want you to know that what happened to Charlie was a terrible accident. It was my fault. I didn’t see him. I swear I didn’t. I was backing out of the garage on the way to my test that morning and I felt a bump. I’m sorry. I just didn’t know what to do. He was gone. I must have hit him so hard. I don’t know how to explain what happened next. I panicked. I put him in the garage. I was in shock. I don’t even know who I was when I did it. I was a stranger to myself. Later I put his body out under the stars off the highway. I thought that someone would find him and that you would know he was gone. I loved Charlie so much. I love you so much. I never told Owen what I’d done. I should have gone to the police but I just couldn’t. As I write this I know you will hate me forever. I am sorry. I really am.
Liz
She took the pill bottle and the idea for the note and went back out to the kitchen.
Carole was in tears. “I know you don’t feel well,” she said. “I just need someone to talk to. I can’t get through this without you. Without someone.”
Liz put the pills in her pocket. She put her arms around her friend.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
In a way, she was saying the words for what she’d done. The pills could wait. So could the note. She held her friend and they both cried.
CHAPTER FIFTY
MISSING: TWENTY DAYS
Esther found Jake in his cubicle typing something on Facebook.
He did that a lot.
“If I can tear you away from that, we need to get going.”
Jake jumped up. “Sorry. Just checking my feed.”
Facebook. Twitter. Instagram and Snapchat. She didn’t get the attraction of any of it.
“Dr. Cortez called,” she said. “Brad Collins is conscious.”
“Wow,” Jake said. “I thought he was going to die.”
“Me too. He might still. She says it’s touch and go. This is our window to find out if he knows who attacked him.”
Dr. Cortez intercepted the detectives just outside of ICU.
“We’re taking him in for surgery. You have five minutes.”
“That’s fine. Appreciate it,” Esther said. “Did he say anything to you? The staff?”
“When he opened his eyes—and honestly they’re still so swollen and bruised that I don’t think he can even see much; maybe some light—he said something about how he wanted to see his mother.”
“She’s on her way,” Jake said. “She had affairs to settle, then needed to take the bus from Ohio.”
“That’s good,” the doctor said. “Too bad she couldn’t be here before the surgery.”
“Is he going to make it?” Jake asked.
The doctor didn’t know. “That he can even speak is a minor miracle. And, to tell the truth, we don’t deal much in miracles around here. Go in. Five minutes.”
The sounds of the machines keeping Brad Collins alive filled the space around his bed. The bruises on his face had shifted from red and blue to a mosaic of purple and yellow. A no-nonsense ICU nurse hovered nearby.
Esther identified herself and Jake, telling the patient that they were there to help find out who had done this to him. She asked Brad if he could hear what she was saying, and he nodded slightly.
“Mr. Collins,” she said, leaning a little closer to where he lay, “your mother is coming from Ohio. She wanted you to know that. She’s on her way.”
The man in the hospital bed gestured for Esther to come closer.
She bent down, turning her head so that she could hear him better. He whispered in her ear.
“Charlie Franklin’s father.”
“Are you sure?”
He gave a slight nod and then closed the slits of his swollen eyes.
“I think he’s had enough,” the nurse said.
Jake looked at Esther. “What did he say?”
She told him.
“Holy shit.”
“You can say that again.”
Two minutes later they were in the car for the drive to David Franklin’s restaurant.
“What a mess,” Jake said. “Successful businessman. Seemed like he had his shit together.”
“You say shit too much,” Esther said. “But, yes, you would think.”
Jake cracked the window. “He must have gone berserk.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Losing your kid—that’s pretty heavy,” Jake went on. “But Collins isn’t our guy. We told Franklin that.”
“Right,” she said. “But for whatever reason he decided that we were wrong. He’s not thinking clearly.”
“Who could? You know, given the circumstances. I thought about what I would do if my little sister had been taken and if I knew who did it.”
“And?”
“And I thought that I just might want to beat the shit out of him.”
“That word. We going to have to set up a swear jar for you?”
Jake laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “My point is I’d want to get him to tell me everything he knew.”
“I suspect that Brad Collins did just that. He told Franklin everything he knew about Charlie’s disappearance.”
“Which was nothing.”
“And now look at Franklin. Talk about making matters worse. He’s about to be picked up for assault. DA could charge him with attempted murder. Or worse. We don’t know if Collins is going to make it.”
“Wow,” Jake said. “Losing your kid and then killing some poor SOB out-of-towner. That’s bigger than making matters worse. That’s creating a shit storm.”
“That’s a buck, Jake.”
Jake grinned. “I barely make enough to pay my bills. Cut me a break, Detective.”
She looked at Jake and gave him a half smile. She liked him. He was a nice kid.
“Okay. Grace period. Now let’s go to Sweetwater and see David Franklin.”
David Franklin was at the hostess’s desk with Amanda when Esther and Jake arrived. David’s eyes stayed fixed on the pair of investigators, and the life seemed to drain from his body.
“You aren’t here for dinner,” he said.
“No,” Esther said. “I’m afraid not.”
“Did you find my boy?”
Esther shook her head. “No. That’s not why we’re here. You know that, don’t you, Mr. Franklin?” Her eyes landed on his bruised and scraped right hand.
“I couldn’t stop myself,” he said. “I was sure that freak took Charlie.”
Esther motioned for the restaurateur to come from around the desk. “I need to see your hands,” she said.
“What are they talking about, David?” Amanda asked. “What’s going on here?”
“Can I call my wife?” he asked, refusing to look in her direction.
“From my office, of course,” Esther said.
Jake retrieved a pair of handcuffs. They were still shiny and new, and he’d looked forward to clasping them onto someone’s wrists from the moment they’d been issued.
“No, Jake,” Esther said, shaking her head slightly. “We’ll be fine without those.”
“What’s happening here?�
� Amanda asked again. Her voice had grown louder, and it carried past the hostess’s desk. The two patrons sitting closest to the door looked up to see what the commotion was all about.
“Amanda,” David said, his tone calm, words measured, “I need you to handle things until I get back.”
She started to shake. “Where are they taking you?” she asked, pushing past the detectives and standing next to David. “What did you do? Did you do something to Charlie?”
He turned around just as he was about to be taken outside. He looked around the entrance to Sweetwater and then over at the young woman.
“Never,” he said. Her words had stung. “Not Charlie. Not ever.”
The next morning, Carole sat in the Jarretts’ kitchen and stared at the paper. Her phone had gone off what seemed like a hundred times during the night. Some were texts from her husband, but most were media requests. She’d ignored them all. There was nothing left inside of her but the ache for her missing son. Everything else felt like a pile-on that was burying her. Bertie folded herself on Carole’s lap and purred.
Liz emerged from the bedroom. She wore her running clothes; her hair was in a loose ponytail. Each day she felt worse than the day before. She knew how things would go. Carole would cry. She would cry. Carole would rage about David. She’d complain that the police weren’t doing enough. She’d remind Liz over and over that there would be no point in going on without Charlie.
That morning, though, there was no instant litany of those same old subjects.
“What is it?” Liz asked, sliding into the chair next to Carole.
Carole tapped her finger on the screen of her phone, showing the latest post from the Bend Bulletin.
Liz read, occasionally taking her eyes away to meet Carole’s.
Restaurateur Charged with Assault of Ohio Man
David Franklin, a popular Bend restaurateur, was arrested on suspicion of assault in the beating of Bradley Collins, an Ohio man recently interviewed by police in connection with the disappearance of Franklin’s three-year-old son, Charlie.