Agent Sanders looked up as Grubbs and I walked in. “Library,” she said, inclining her head. We walked down the hall and found Bill Alston and four uniformed police officers, two wearing Mountain Brook police livery, the others City of Birmingham. The cops were having a discussion about jurisdiction. They stood flanking an expressionless Susan Kramer, who sat on the red couch wearing a beige pantsuit of a nubby material that might have been raw silk. Her makeup flawless, her wrists and neck encircled with gold, gold loops with green stones in her ears, she might have been waiting for a table at the Mountain Brook Country Club.
Grubbs solved the cops’ jurisdiction issue. “We’re in the city of Mountain Brook. Officers, this city has jurisdiction. I’d suggest that you exercise that jurisdiction and take this woman down to the jail.”
“And charge her with what?” asked one of the Mountain Brook cops, a balding heavy guy, sweating even in wintertime under his bulletproof vest and uniform. “Being an overprotective mother?”
“Unlawful imprisonment in the second degree, violation of Alabama Code Section thirteen A dash six dash forty-two, restraining another person of the age of eighteen or older. A class C misdemeanor in Alabama.” Grubbs turned to me. “Miss Kramer is eighteen, isn’t she?”
“She’s nineteen,” I said.
“Well, there you go,” Grubbs nodded at the officer. “What are you waiting for?”
“I have to hear from my chief,” the officer said. “I’m not arresting someone in these circumstances without his okay.”
“Give me your radio,” Grubbs said.
The Mountain Brook officer unclipped his handheld radio from its place on his belt and passed it to Grubbs.
Grubbs spoke into the radio for thirty seconds, then passed the radio to the officer.
The officer listened for fifteen seconds, then, “Yes, sir,” the officer said. “Yes sir, we’re bringing her in now.”
He turned to the other Mountain Brook officer. “Drive the car around to the garage. We’ll take her out through the back.” He took two steps over to Susan Kramer. “Mrs. Kramer, stand, please,” he said. “Hold out your hands.”
Susan Kramer obeyed the orders without a change of expression. The officer placed the cuffs over her wrists and snapped them closed. “Mrs. Kramer, you are under arrest,” he said.
While the policeman recited the Miranda warning, he and Grubbs escorted Susan Kramer down the hall, bypassing the kitchen, where Agent Sanders and Kris Kramer remained huddled over their tea, and took her out the door leading to the home’s attached garage.
Catching Agent Sanders’ eye, I raised my eyebrows in a question. In answer she shrugged slightly. I walked up and introduced myself to Kris Kramer.
“Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “Kristina Kramer.”
“Yes, I know. Lots of folks have been looking for you.”
The young woman shrugged. “I know. Sorry to cause trouble. Ms. Sanders has explained a little of it to me.”
“I’m just happy to see that you’re safe,” I said.
“Where were they taking my mother?”
“Your mother … has some questions to answer. The Mountain Brook officers are taking her to the Mountain Brook jail.”
“Jail? My mother hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Agent Sanders looked over at me. She raised her eyebrows and mouthed “Stockholm?”
I spoke again to Kris Kramer. “I’m sure this will all get sorted out.”
She nodded. “With my mother it will. But my father’s dead. Agent Sanders just told me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“How did he die?” The question seemed directed to both of us.
Agent Sanders leaned over the table and extended a hand toward Kris Kramer. The girl’s hands remained in her lap, the fingers on the head of the stuffed deer moving seemingly on their own volition. “I’m afraid he was … killed,” Agent Sanders told her.
“Killed how? An accident?”
“No. Kris, he was murdered.”
“Oh.” The fingers on the stuffed animal stopped their movement. “Who?”
“We don’t know yet,” Agent Sanders said. “But we’re all working to find out.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Kris Kramer told her. “Where is my brother?”
“He’s with Coach Kronenberg,” I told her.
“Good,” she said. “He’ll be safe there.” She looked up at me. “Tell him I’m okay, would you?”
“I will,” I said. “I’d best be going now. It was nice to meet you, Kris.”
“Same here,” she said.
In the foyer I ran into Agent Alston. “So, what happened here?” I asked.
“We all made mistakes,” he said. “You. Me. My partner. Local cops. Maybe even your client Don Kramer.”
“Not looking behind the family’s story, assuming that what seems obvious is also the truth, accepting the conclusions of the group. I could name several more. But how?”
“Turns out that the house has a secret room in the basement. You absolutely cannot see it if you don’t know it’s there. The basement appears to be a perfect rectangle, but another basement room, completely underground, juts out toward the street. That front wall of the basement is paneled in such a way that one of the panels is actually a door. I walked all through the house alone the night Don Kramer called us in, and I never saw it.”
“But Kramer knew it was there.”
“Sure. But from what I understand, the family rarely used that room. Offseason clothing storage, an old safe, old toys, some odds and ends. Nothing much, really. The first owner of the house constructed the room to serve as a storm shelter. Solid walls. Even soundproof.
“The family entered the room so rarely the Kramer woman even left the boy alone in the house. Finally, though, he suspected his sister was there but apparently couldn’t confront his mother. So he called someone from Alabama Southern, maybe one of his sister’s teammates, hitched a ride out to the campus, and told his sister’s soccer coach that he thought his mother had his sister hidden away.”
“Why?”
“Why did she do it? How? What? When? Where? I’m good at answering those questions. Or at least, usually I’m pretty good, or I wouldn’t have the badge in my pocket. Why? For that you need someone at a higher pay grade.” He shrugged. “But apparently it’s got something to do with needing attention. I’ve been on the phone with one of our shrinks. Excuse me. Forensic psychologists. He mentioned a mental disorder call Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy.
“This thing that happened to the Kramer woman — it isn’t quite that. That’s where a parent, usually the mother, fakes the kid’s illness because the parent craves attention. Here the Kramer woman faked the kidnapping, maybe for the same reasons that drive people with this Munchausen Syndrome. The psychologist is on his way down here from Washington. Thinks it’s an interesting case, he says, unusual in the literature but not unique. Thinks it’s also somewhat analogous to certain cases of child snatching by the non-custodial parent.”
“Needing attention,” I said.
“Yep. Something like that, sport. Why?”
“Nothing,” I said, but I was thinking of Kramer and Sally. “So who’s going to take care of these kids?” I asked Alston.
“We’re working on it,” he said. “A neighbor with children their age spoke with a Mountain Brook officer and me a few minutes ago out on the sidewalk. She will be taken into the house through the garden and the rear entrance. She seems capable and willing.”
“Good,” I said. “I’d just as soon not have anyone do something stupid like calling the Department of Human Resources.”
“Makes two of us, sport. In any event, the young lady in there is over the age of majority.”
“Right. Later, Alston.”
Outside, Leon Grubbs stood in front of a swarm of handheld news microphones, cameras, and recorders. The cameras wore plastic hoods to protect them from the steady mist. The looks in the eyes of the
scribes said Grubbs would be occupied for awhile. I saluted in his general direction, got into my car and drove away. Not one member of the media showed me the slightest interest. Maybe I needed to work out more often.
Back at Sally’s office, someone had scrounged a mug of hot chocolate mix for Paul Kramer. Sally gestured for me to follow her to her outer office. She stood facing me only a foot or so away, her arms folded across her chest. “He’s now aware that his sister is physically unharmed and in reasonably good spirits and that his mother is not in the house. He seems to be settling down. But someone needs to find a competent counselor for the Kramer children,” she said. “They were not the sort of family to keep a psychiatric practice on speed dial.”
“No. But as it happens, I do,” I said. “I know some good people. I’ll see what I can put together on short or emergency notice.”
Sally went inside, and I used my iPhone to call Dr. Bev Adams’ office. It was two in the afternoon, and Bev happened to be between appointments. I described the situation, and she promised to send a crisis counseling team from the UAB psychiatry department to the Kramer house. “Promise me, though, one thing, Bev: no state agencies,” I said.
“I work for a state agency,” she pointed out.
“Yes, but you’re different. You know what I’m saying. No Alabama do-gooder
bureaucrats. Back when I practiced full time, I did some pro bono work in juvenile court. I’ve seen kids taken away from loving parents who were trying the best they could and not abusing the kids at all. I saw some appalling things.”
“I understand,” she said. “Bad things happen even when good intentions abound.”
“Especially when some of those good intentions are exercised by state agents with unlimited power in their little worlds.”
“Slate, I don’t disagree. But let me be practical for a second. Aren’t the children now in two locations? We don’t have the staffing power for that.”
“I’m about to deal with that,” I said. “Both will be at the home in Mountain Brook by the time your people arrive.”
I stepped back into Sally’s office. Paul Kramer was finishing his hot chocolate. “Listen, Paul,” I said. “Your sister is with some members of law enforcement at your home, and I understand a neighbor with kids your age may be there. She wanted you to know that she’s okay. Wouldn’t you like to be with Kris now?”
He looked up at me. “Yes,” he said. “I’d like that a lot. Could someone take me there?”
“I’ll drive you,” Sally said.
“We’ll both go,” Miller said. “Take my school car. Official visit.”
“Let’s go,” Sally said to Paul.
Sally, Chief Miller, and Paul Kramer left the office together as I tagged along behind. Sally locked her office door, and we walked together down to the building’s lobby.
“My car is parked in back,” Miller said.
“I’ll call you,” Sally said to me.
“I’ll be around,” I told her.
The three of them headed toward the rear exit of the sports complex, Paul Kramer between Miller and Sally. Miller had a hand on the boy’s shoulder. I watched them for a moment, then turned and made my way out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Outside, the weather had not improved. Students scurried across soggy school quadrangles, eyes half shut, heads bent against the cold mist, the reds and blues and yellows of their rain gear blurring to gray in the filtered winter light.
My work on the matter of Kris Kramer was done. More accurately, it was over, since I had done nothing to lead to the girl’s return to her family. But then, neither had the FBI, or Leon Grubbs, or Bill Woolf, or, indeed, her own father. What was more, her father’s theory of the reason for her disappearance, a theory that I and every law enforcement agency had adopted as our own, had been disproved by the facts. In the course of looking into that theory, I’d managed to stir a nest of hornets and set them buzzing into my face, despite the fact that these particular hornets had, as to the matter at hand, been minding their own business. My client had been killed, execution style, almost certainly by a professional hired by the organized crime interests at the center of the investigation Michael Godchaux had instigated when he’d walked into the office of the United States attorney in New Orleans. And a young woman with a promising future had died, no doubt for the same reason.
In the car, I started the engine and, idling in my visitor’s space in front of the athletic complex, called Woolf White and asked for Bill Woolf. Though I was certain the news of Kris Kramer’s reappearance and her mother’s arrest had spread throughout the law firm by now, I thought I had a certain duty to speak with him.
But he wasn’t in. I left a message with his legal assistant letting him know I wouldn’t be back in the office and that I would return the firm’s files and arrange for the FBI’s return of the thumb drive to someone at the law firm. I put the car in reverse, drove slowly out of the parking lot, down the access road and through the automatic exit gate, and left the Alabama Southern campus behind. Having nowhere else to go, I drove back to Sally’s condo, let myself in, and changed into workout clothes.
Shoeless, I dragged my cushions out to the middle of Sally’s living room and just sat for fifteen minutes. Every meditator from the most advanced practitioner to the beginner experiences monkey mind, but today my mental monkey jabbered and skittered from tree to tree and threw bananas and coconuts at me for ten minutes until I wrestled him to the ground. For the last five minutes, focusing on the breath, I just watched thoughts arise and allowed them to pass away.
Then I pulled on my running shoes and a hooded rain jacket and jogged twice around the perimeter of the Highland Park golf course. About halfway around the second time, it occurred to me that I had skipped lunch.
Back at Sally’s condo I showered and changed. When I powered up my iPhone, I had a text from Sally: “On way home.” I texted back “Here now. Early supper Bottega?” After a minute, she answered “Sure. “It’s close.”
Kristina Kramer had turned up safe and sound, but I didn’t feel much like a victory celebration. Susan Kramer’s mental illness, the unspoken possibility that Sally’s relationship with Don Kramer may have fueled in Susan Kramer an emotional crisis that resulted in — what to call it? — the sequestration of her daughter in order to try to gain attention.
After we ordered, winter lettuces and risotto with veal cheeks and artichokes for Sally, crab cakes and guinea hen with pancetta, cipollini onions, polenta and red wine for me, Sally said, “We’re both quiet, considering.”
“We are,” I agreed. “Sometimes words fail in the face of human complexity.” We’d been seated promptly on a slow afternoon in a front corner seat in the two-story neoclassic building, the glass of the window at our elbows soaring all the way to the twenty-foot ceiling.
“Something you don’t know,” Sally said. “After everyone left my office this afternoon, I met with Akilah Ziyenga’s parents. They were here to claim their daughter’s body and fly back home with it.” She brushed her hair back behind one ear. “And I’m thinking about resigning as soccer coach at Southern.”
I considered a response while I watched the commuters go by on the wet pavement of Highland Avenue. “Well,” I said finally. “I think the team needs you right now.”
She nodded. “Thanks for saying that. But I’m not so sure. Maybe a new coach, fresh ideas, new approach, would help them put all this behind them. Not sure they don’t somehow, some of them, blame me for Akilah.”
“Did the parents say anything?”
“No. They could not have been more gracious in the circumstances. No, but some of the girls, well, I don’t know, they know who found her, maybe think I had some involvement, even if it was peripheral, in the matters you were working on. It wouldn’t surprise me if some of them transferred. So I thought, maybe I should go back to Chicago, maybe coach high school soccer again.”
“Hmm. I never asked, but, did any of them know about yo
u and Don Kramer?”
She frowned. “Not the time to talk about that. Thought we wouldn’t. Ever. But no. No one knew. Not for sure. I suppose a close group of young women might notice things.”
“Like a jury, collectively, misses nothing.”
She put down her fork and glared at me. “A jury? What we did wasn’t a crime.”
“No, of course not. It’s just a lawyer’s analogy. Collectively, juries don’t miss anything. Similarly, maybe a women’s soccer team wouldn’t miss much either.”
She sighed. “Maybe silence was better. Let’s just finish dinner.”
In the condo, I made two cups of hot tea, and we sat together on Sally’s couch gazing at the lights on Red Mountain. After some time, Sally asked, “You remember when you told me about meditation and Buddhism?”
“Yes.”
“You never asked me about my religious views.”
“No, but I think I was headed out the door then.”
“Maybe. Anyway. I grew up Catholic. But I’m a very lapsed Catholic. Not really a believer anymore. At all.”
I sipped my tea. “Neither I nor most Buddhists would have a problem with that. No deity in Buddhism. Buddhism teaches what to do, not what to think. It’s a practice. A mental discipline.”
She nodded slowly. After a few minutes, I said, “I think we’re both tired from the last couple of days. I’m getting sleepy.” I carried my teacup to the sink and rinsed it and returned and sat cross-legged on the floor facing the couch. “My work here in Birmingham is done,” I said.
“I know.” Sally shrugged. “You did your best.”
We sat in those positions for a few more minutes without speaking, then Sally carried her teacup to the kitchen. “I’m getting a bath and turning in early,” she said.
While Sally was in the shower, I prepared for the night as well. I slept fitfully but must have finally drifted into a deeper sleep, early morning, because when I awoke around six, Sally was already gone. She’d left a note on the counter, saying to leave the key in a kitchen drawer if I was leaving today and to let her know I’d arrived safely back home. I showered, dressed, packed, left the key where Sally wanted it, and let myself out.
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