Chapter Eight
As I pull into my parking spot at work, I notice that Bradley had left the helmet I wore in the back seat of my car. I want absolutely nothing to do with it. I need to get rid of it fast in case he ever tries putting it on me again and I’m naively wooed onto his death machine. It’s clear that I’m easily love blind when it comes to Bradley.
I snatch it before getting out and heading toward his car to see if it’s unlocked. That’s when my dad gets out of his car and grins at me.
“Was the sex so good that you had to wear a helmet?” he asks, clearly delighted with his joke.
“I’m not answering that question,” I say as I quicken my pace, but Dad just follows after me, laughing.
“You have to admit it was kind of funny.”
“I will never admit anything!”
“Fine. My level of humor is just too far beyond your understanding. So how’d it go?”
I look over at him and smile. “It was amazing. I had so much fun, and I didn’t scare him off or anything.”
He looks just as delighted as me. “That is impressive.”
“He’s so nice and funny, and we hit it off immediately. We’re going on another date Friday.”
“Good! I like him. He’s a good guy,” Dad says as he pats my back.
I warily stare at him. “You’re being too nice.”
“Well, Bradley is walking over here, and I want to make a good impression for my new son-in-law.”
I snort. “Yeah… we’re not making that joke yet.” I turn to look at Bradley as he walks over. “We forgot the second helmet in my car, so I was going to put it in yours.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about that,” he says as he hits unlock.
“Clyde was telling me all about last night and how much fun he had,” Dad says.
“Did he?”
“How’d the bike ride go?” Dad asks.
Bradley looks at me, and I pull open the car door and take far too much time putting the helmet away.
“He can’t even ride a bicycle, so I can only imagine,” Dad says with a grin.
“You can’t ride a bike?” Bradley asks.
“I can ride a bike! My dad took me to Massacre Mountain one time, and when I was too scared to go down it, he laughed at me and ridiculed me for days.”
“It was that little hill off Parker Street,” Dad interrupts.
“There’s a hill there?” Bradley asks before looking at me. “I mean… that’s awful! I wouldn’t want to go down that huge… slightly sloping road either!”
“See?” I tell Dad as I walk over to Bradley. “He’s so much nicer than you.”
“I’ll shield you from his mean comments,” Bradley promises.
“Wow, it’s like you’re perfect,” I joke.
“Bradley, you’re seeing all these red flags, too, right? I’m not the only one?” Dad asks.
Bradley starts laughing but doesn’t commit one way or the other.
“I have been thinking about trading Clyde for you. I would at least have the son I always wanted,” Dad says.
“Ohhh, that was mean,” Bradley says. “Is he always this mean to you?”
“One hundred percent of the time,” I say. “He wonders why I was Googling if children can put themselves up for adoption.”
“He loves me, and he knows it!” Dad says as I try to hurry Bradley away from him.
Once in the office, Officer Sanders waves us over. “We just got a call from Pippin’s Bakery asking to have one of you come see them. I guess they found that guy’s wallet.”
“Hmm… alright, I’ll call them back and tell them we’ll be right over,” Bradley says.
I head to my desk and set down what I don’t need before meeting up with Bradley. It looks like he’s already called them.
“I have the list of stuff Jamal said was in the wallet,” I say as we walk out the front door.
“Great, we can check to see if it matches his description,” he says.
Together we walk out to Bradley’s cruiser and get inside. He begins driving toward the bakery as I look through my notes and try to figure out exactly what Jamal had in his wallet. With the list in hand, we should be able to tell if anything is missing.
“He was pretty detailed about what he was carrying in his wallet,” I tell Bradley after running through everything he had.
“Have there been any payments made before he canceled his credit cards?” Bradley asks as he turns onto Main Street.
“Not that I know of. I know we asked him if he could check with his bank about any purchases that had been made to pinpoint their location, but he brushed it off and said that all cards were canceled before then.”
Bradley taps his finger against the steering wheel. “That seems to be his specialty. Which tells me he’s hiding something that he doesn’t want us to know about.”
“I just wish that he would trust us and realize that we’re here to help him. The next time I see him, I don’t want to find him hurt or dead because he thought he was doing the right thing,” I say as I look over at Bradley. His face shows the same level of emotion that I feel. While we’ve handled cases like this before, they never get easier. Especially when you have someone who refuses help, and then the next day you’re left looking at their body, thinking about what more you could’ve done. It’s times like these I wish that I could show Jamal what could happen if he doesn’t allow us to help him. But I suppose that’s why we can’t give up and we can’t stop looking, even if he thinks he can handle everything alone.
Bradley pulls up in front of the bakery and parks in an empty spot near the alleyway. Together, we get out of the vehicle and head inside. It's small and cozy with almost every seat taken. We squeeze past the tables where a young woman and man are working behind a glass counter filled with sweets.
“Good morning,” Bradley says as he smiles at the woman. “We just received a call from Emma Rossford. Is she available?”
“Hold on just one moment,” she says as she slips into the kitchen.
While we wait, the man left behind the counter gets us two cups of coffee and a couple of cookies. After a few minutes, the young woman returns with another person by her side. The new lady smiles and waves us after her. We follow her into the kitchen and through another door that leads into a break room.
“I’m Emma, thanks for coming out,” she says as she gives us a smile. We follow her over to a desk where I see a wallet sitting. “So I went out this morning to take the trash to the curb, and as I was pulling the trash bin after me, this wallet tumbled out. I don’t know where it’d been wedged or if it’d been stuck under it which is why I hadn’t seen it before. I picked it up and noticed that it belonged to that guy that’d been hurt.”
“Thank you so much for calling us,” Bradley says as he puts it into an evidence bag with a gloved hand.
“Can you show us where the trash bin was? I’m just uncertain how our forensics team missed it,” I say.
“Of course,” she says as she leads us back into the kitchen and out a door that takes us into the alleyway. “I think what happened is that the bin usually sits right here,” she says, which is right next to where Jamal had been sitting when he’d been found. “But when I went to take the trash out the night Jamal was found, the bin had been moved down the alleyway. I didn’t think anything of it, until today. I asked my employees, and Peter, the one behind the counter, said that he’d pulled it back without thinking when he heard what was going on. This was before the paramedics showed up. Do you want me to get him to talk to you?”
“That would be helpful,” I say. “But before you do that, you haven’t seen anyone loitering around at night? Groups of kids? Anyone doing anything suspicious?”
“No, I make sure my workers close up together and that no one is walking home. But we haven’t seen anything suspicious. Very quiet, actually.”
“Where was the trash can when you found it that night?” I ask.
She takes us over to the sp
ot. While it still should have been gone through by the forensics team, it was farther from the scene, so maybe they glossed over it. We’ll have to have a word with them to figure out what happened to let this slip.
“Thanks for your help,” Bradley says.
“Of course. I’m glad to help. I just hope you guys figure out who did that to that poor boy.”
“Us too. Thank you.”
While she’s gone to get Peter, we take some pictures and look the trash bin over to try and figure out if the wallet had been thrown in it or was stuck somewhere. After Jamal had been found, we’d investigated the area, but we hadn’t stumbled across it while searching. We talk to Peter, who claims to have pulled the trash bin further up the alley when Tanner had shown up to get it out of the way. He didn’t think about it afterwards and has nothing else for us.
Once finished, we take our coffees and evidence and head back to the car. I place the list of items that Jamal claimed were in the wallet in front of me, and then I open the wallet with gloves, to make sure I don’t disturb any evidence.
“As I’d guessed,” Bradley says. “All of his cash is still in the wallet.”
“Shit… so we’re right. He hid the wallet in an attempt to make us believe it was a robbery. Why didn’t he go back for it?” I ask.
“Maybe he was scared to, or maybe he hasn’t been able to get away from Tanner to retrieve it.”
“Let’s take it back to the station and turn it in as evidence. I also want to tell Jamal that we have it and see if that gets anything moving forward. Maybe the added pressure will make him willing to talk,” I say.
“I have a feeling he’s planning on taking this to the grave if we don’t have something solid,” Bradley says.
“I fear you’re right. But let’s see what we can do.”
So we take the wallet back to the station, where Bradley calls Jamal. He gets really quiet when Bradley tells him what he’s found, but besides that, doesn’t say anything else. When we ask if he’d like to come in and talk with us, he brushes us off, and we decide to leave it until we find something better to go on.
Instead, we call Tanner and ask him to come in.
***
When Tanner shows up at the station, he looks nervous. I decide to send Bradley over to fetch him since Bradley radiates good feelings and calmness. Or maybe it’s my love blindness talking again because just seeing him puts me in a good mood and I’m trying to force that on others.
Bradley says something that makes Tanner smile and relax a little. Then he leads him over to me. So maybe he’s good at doing that to everyone.
“Good afternoon, Tanner, thanks for coming in,” I say with a smile.
“Of course. Anything I can do to help,” he says, and he sounds legitimate.
“Let’s hope.”
We walk Tanner back to a conference room as he nervously looks between us. Bradley goes in first and waves to a seat that Tanner immediately takes. After asking if he needs water or anything else, Bradley takes the seat across from him and I sit down next to Bradley. We talk about mundane things for a moment to get him to calm down before turning on the recording device.
“I know you already gave us your statement about the night Jamal disappeared,” Bradley starts. “But I want to run through things one more time.”
“You think I had something to do with it?” Tanner asks as his eyes get wide. He begins to fiddle with the water bottles sitting in front of him, telling me that he’s getting nervous again.
Bradley gives him a soft smile as he leans forward, but it just makes Tanner lean back, like he’s trying to get away from Bradley’s questioning. “We’re just trying to help,” Bradley says.
“Tanner, we know that something else happened. All we want to do is help Jamal so that none of this ever happens again,” I say, hoping to play into Tanner’s desire to keep Jamal safe. “Next time it could be worse. Next time it could be more severe or it could even end in something more life-threatening.”
Tanner fiddles even more with his water as he begins to bite his lip, and I know that we have him. The only issue is that Tanner might not know what we need to know. Jamal might be keeping that from him as well. “It was just like any other night,” he says. “We saw each other for a little bit, but then he went to take a nap around seven-thirty and I started working on school stuff. It’s not uncommon for him to take a nap since he works third shift… I don’t want to go over all of this.”
“I know,” Bradley says, voice soft. “But we have to check everything. So what’d you do when you thought he was asleep?”
“I went right to the computer room and started working on my homework. Around nine, he told me he was leaving, and after our goodbyes, I made my way up to my room. I never looked back outside to make sure his car was gone, and I would’ve thought that if something happened, he would’ve called me. That’s why when I woke up in the morning and I saw his car sitting there with the door open and his phone inside, I knew something bad had happened. I just didn’t know what.”
Most of this is stuff we already know, and I feel like he’s not going to give us anything else unless we can make him realize this could happen again. “Did you two argue?”
Tanner vigorously shakes his head. “No, there was nothing wrong with our relationship. Everything seemed to be fine.”
“Relationship?” Bradley asks. “Are you two dating?”
Tanner swallows hard as he begins to pick at the plastic wrapped around his water bottle. “We’re not… we… it’s not like that.”
We’re finally getting somewhere. “What do you mean, not like that?”
“I mean… we’re not… we’re not exactly dating.”
“He doesn’t want to?” Bradley asks.
Tanner shakes his head again. “No! I just… I don’t want to tell everyone! He wanted a relationship and I told him that I’d be in one as long as it wasn’t… public. Why does this matter?”
“Because this is very important. Was he upset when you said you didn’t want a public relationship?”
Tanner’s starting to look frustrated, but at least we are getting more information out of him. “It wasn’t like that. We didn’t have a fight about it. I just said that I wasn’t ready to announce it publicly and he said he was okay with that. That he enjoyed just being around me and loving me the way I am. There was no fight or argument. He seemed happy just to be… with me, you know? That was like a year ago at this point. The relationship and announcing it thing isn’t important to me. I just care about what he wants, and I care about being around him. And I swear this has nothing to do with what happened.”
“What if it does?” I ask. “What if this happened because somebody found out? Hate crimes happen every day, even to people you would never imagine it could happen to. Jamal was lucky this time. He was able to go home to be with you again. But often, people aren’t that lucky. What if this happens again? You have to know something. Who has pressured you to keep it silent?”
“No one’s pressured me. I just… you guys are gay, right?”
“Yes,” I say.
“So you know about the… looks and judgments.”
“Who is looking at you differently or judging you?” Bradley asks.
“No one because no one knows! That’s what I’m saying. I wanted to avoid all of that. There’s no one specifically that is spurring this. It’s just… I don’t want others digging into my life. I’d just come to terms with it myself, so I wanted time to understand it before blurting it to everyone. And why should I have to? Straight people don’t run around shouting, ‘Hey, look at me! I’m straight!’”
“What about Jamal. Do people know he’s gay?”
“Yeah, his family and friends. I guess I don’t know about the rest.”
“If you think about everyone in your life and his and they found out, who would be the most upset? Maybe someone at school, maybe someone in his family, or maybe it was someone from work that had an issue with Jamal?”
We continue to talk to Tanner for quite a while, but he gives us no names and nobody could have known about the relationship. At this point, though, we at least know that they are in a relationship and what happened was possibly a result from it.
As I walk Tanner to the front door, he picks at his pants. I push the door open for him, but he stops before he can pass through. “Do you… think this is my fault? Is this something that I did? Do you think it’ll happen again?”
I wish I could comfort Tanner and tell him that it will never happen again and that the person he cares for will always be safe, but I can’t lie to him. Especially when I have seen the worst, and I have no idea what the future holds. “I can’t give you those answers because I don’t know everything that happened. I don’t know if it was a random incident or if it was someone Jamal sees every day. I promise you that we’re going to try our hardest to figure out what happened to him and keep it from happening ever again. But we need your help to make sure that we are headed in the right direction.”
Tanner nods and gives me a small smile. “Thank you. I will try everything I can to see if Jamal will open up to me and tell me what truly happened.”
After issuing our goodbyes, I watch Tanner as he walks out to his car. It isn’t a moment later that Bradley joins me, and I turn to him.
“I truly believe he wants to help,” Bradley says. “Or maybe he just doesn’t know how. It’s starting to look more and more like a hate crime. Someone knew about their relationship that should never have known. There’s a reason why they both agreed to keep it secret.”
I nod as I watch Tanner get into his car and drive away. “I agree. Because I had parents who accepted me, I didn’t hesitate to tell them about that side of myself. But if I knew that either of them were against it, I probably would’ve tried my hardest to keep it secret.”
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