The Watcher

by Jennifer Pashley

  She can hear sirens from town.

  “Fucking Christ, Fisher,” Hurt says from the doorway, the hot smell of gunshot lingering inside.

  Kateri stands and keeps petting the dog, to stop him from going inside to Bear. She tries to answer Hurt, but she cannot unclench her teeth, and her insides vibrate like a motor. She stays there while Hurt goes back inside, and she hears an animal wail from Bear.

  “Where did I hit him?” she whispers when Hurt comes back out. Her head is so filled with static she doesn’t know if the words have any voice to them. She hates herself for bringing her own fear, her own feeling into it. She thinks, I would have shot him anyway. I wanted to shoot him.

  Hurt looks down at the dog, slumped against Kateri’s leg.

  “Where should you have hit him?” he asks, and then adds, “Fisher, you’re not a rookie.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “Your arm jumped,” Hurt says. “You hit his neck.” He spits blood onto the grass and watches behind her, at the activity in town.

  She gasps hard, all at once, like she has not been breathing for a long time.

  * * *

  She takes the dog home. She asks Hurt if he thinks anyone will notice or care, and he says no, not in the face of everything that has happened. She takes the dog home first, lets him into her apartment, and leaves him with a bowl of water and a soft blanket, which he seems to settle down with in a patch of sun coming in her back window.

  The ambulance sped off toward Mercy Hospital. The voices a blur of commands. Blood pressure. Oxygen. Intubation. Kateri stood on the sidelines, dazed.

  In the office, a mountain of procedure. Interviews, paperwork. Statements.

  She hears Hurt in his own interview. “We were both threatened,” Hurt says. “I was out cold for a few minutes. He grabbed Fisher’s firearm,” he says. She repeats this over and over herself. Grabbed. Ambushed. Reached for my weapon. It was what she was trained to do. She’s not sure who she’s convincing anymore. Other than herself.

  It feels like the longest day of her life. Longer than when she crashed her car, which she mostly doesn’t remember. She can’t remember her own ride in the ambulance; she remembers the days in the hospital bed as faded, gray. Without the blur of booze, the drip of narcotics, this day feels sharp, long, torturous.

  It’s midnight before the chief, Bill Whittaker, tells her she did a good job and that she should go home, that she should rest, and that he’s recommending time off.

  She is stunned when he says it was a good job. She’d thought for sure he was calling her in to fire her.

  “You broke this wide open,” Whittaker tells her. He’s a man in his fifties who looks like he was thin in his twenties but now bears the barrel chest of administrative work. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and has a buzz cut like someone from an earlier decade.

  “And Miller?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “Didn’t survive the surgery.”

  She feels a chill up the back of her neck, into her hair, tingling. “He’s dead,” she says.

  “Good job,” Whittaker says.

  “Sir,” she says.

  “We’ll see this through,” Whittaker says. “But for now, you should take some time.”

  “I can’t,” Kateri says. “The Jenkins arraignment is tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s not a suggestion, Fisher,” he says.

  “Oh.”

  She stands and undoes her belt, releases her firearm, and leaves it on the table.

  “You can be at the arraignment,” he says. “But Hurt will close the case.”

  * * *

  She can’t tell Shannon. She can’t leave him with the knowledge that Bear has been shot dead—by her—the night before he sees the judge. She calls Brewer to plead with him not to tell Shannon. But when she reaches him on the third try, close to one in the morning, he tells her he quit the case.

  “When?” Kateri asks. She remembers Shannon saying, Tell Bear I fired you. She sits in her office in the dark, just the glow of her computer and the light from the hallway.

  “This afternoon,” Brewer says. “I can’t work with that kid,” he says. “And he doesn’t want me. Trust me, he says it was mutual. What the fuck happened up there?”

  Kateri leans into her hand. “What have you heard?” she says.

  “Standoff. Shots fired.”

  “I may need you for questioning,” Kateri says.

  “Well, fire away,” Brewer says, “but I don’t know anything.”

  “I thought he was your friend,” Kateri says.

  Brewer laughs. On the phone, his voice is low, gravel but sharp. It’s a sexy radio voice. A good phone voice. “Bear Miller is no one’s friend,” he tells her.

  “I thought he hired you,” she says.

  “He did,” Brewer says. “And I’ve known him for fifteen years, but you’re a fool if you think he’s a friend to anyone.”

  “I see,” Kateri says, completely unmoored by what is happening, how things are revealing themselves.

  “He’s a sociopath.” He laughs again. “He always has been.”

  “I’m sure someone would like to get a statement from you,” Kateri says.

  Brewer breathes into the phone, a low hum. “Shit sure is wild,” he says.

  * * *

  At home, the dog has chewed through her hiking boots. When she opens the door, he lies with his head flush to the floor, in a land mine of leather and rubber debris.

  “Oh, no,” Kateri says to him, and he shifts his body onto his side, his belly exposed, his tail thumping weakly.

  “Buddy,” she says.

  His back legs flail. If she’s not careful, he’ll start to pee.

  She picks up the scraps of leather and gets the dog more water, her body slow-moving and stiff. She’s sitting on the floor with the dog pressed into her when Hurt calls.

  “Buick spotted near Brasher Falls,” he tells her. “Side roads,” he continues.

  She feels empty, raw. Her jaw is tired from clenching. The dog smells like a velvety biscuit.

  “Did you send anyone?” she asks.

  “Stopped at a Stewart’s, paid cash,” he says. “Kid in the front seat. Driver bought her Skittles. Security footage from Stewart’s shows the kid clear as day,” he says. “Driver in a flannel shirt and a knit cap. Kept their face down the whole time.”

  “Is it Park Jenkins?”

  “He hasn’t been released,” Hurt says.

  “You checked.”

  He laughs a little. “It’s the first thing I checked, Fisher.”

  “Did you run the plate?”

  “Either they wrote it down wrong or it doesn’t exist.”

  “No record?” she asks.

  “None. We put deputies on 374, and there are road blocks on 30 and 11,” Hurt says. “But there are so many back roads, it’s hard to say. They won’t get past us,” he adds.

  “Unless they do,” Kateri says. She’s weary down to the bones, her shoulder still ringing from the kick of her weapon. She looks at the map of the roads winding through the mountains, many of them not even marked. An email comes in from Hurt, who is still on the line with her. It’s the surveillance screen grab of the little girl, her face turned up to the camera, her hair in two puffball ponytails. She holds on to the shirt of the person who pays, her little hand tucked into the hem.

  TWENTY-NINE: SHANNON

  FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 3

  I lean my head against the glass door. No one is around. I know that it’s Thursday, because the arraignment is set for tomorrow, on Friday, when the judge will decide what to do with me and then set another date. Everything inches forward.

  I want to know what Kateri knows.

  Why won’t Bear answer?

  I tried him twice, with no pickup, no voice mail, nothing but endless ringing.

  I imagine him back where he came from, in the mountains, in a smaller but even nicer chalet in the woods.

  Why did he just leave me here?


  No one else is here. The cell sits at the end of a mint-green hallway, chilled with cement and stainless steel.

  I eat a bologna sandwich and drink a carton of room-temperature milk. Then I lie flat on the metal bed with the book open on my chest, but I don’t read. I close my eyes and try to imagine something of comfort. What do normal people think of? Their mothers? I’m haunted by the kitchen, and by the image of a boy I didn’t even know.

  I can’t even cry. I’ve cried so much I was a dried-out shell, brittle and pearlescent.

  I don’t know when I finally fall asleep, the black-and-red scrunch of my closed eyes easing into a heavy, sinking dream.

  But when I wake up, I’m covered with a rough, warm blanket. It smells just like clean fiber, a cottony, woolly smell. My feet stick out the bottom, still in their socks, but the rest of me is blanketed, held down, warm, safe. I try to remember anyone coming in, the heavy chunk of the cell door opening. Anyone, tucking me in, watching, praying, the way a parent or a guardian angel might. But I can’t.

  * * *

  In the morning, I attend the arraignment in scrubs. I get a shower, and a clean set, with new socks. Kateri comes in with another officer I’ve never seen, and I ask her if I should change into regular clothes, or a suit, even though I don’t have one. She says no. I didn’t come in anything particularly nice, and I don’t know where those clothes have gone.

  There’s a tense hush in the building, down the corridor, into the offices and the courtroom. There’s some discussion between Kateri and the new officer—a young man, not much older than I am, but baby clean and buff, his hair like white down on his head. He asks her if I should be shackled, either by hand or by foot or both.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Kateri says.

  She wears a suit, and her hair is down, long, to her midback, and a rich dark brown that is scattered with something warm and nearly red.

  “I could walk him in myself,” she tells the officer, “but they’re making me take you.”

  He flicks his eyebrows and won’t look at me.

  They have barricaded off the lobby, and through the windows I can see that the press has gathered outside—TV cameras, reporters, photographers. There are guards at the door, not letting anyone in, but people outside hold up cameras, iPhones, and a reporter from Watertown with a microphone shouts over the top of the crowd.

  There are JUSTICE FOR CRAIG signs everywhere, and that unsettling American flag that’s black and white with a blue stripe through the middle.

  In the precinct office, Kateri talks with the newly appointed lawyer, a woman with a girl’s face and a mother’s body.

  Kateri says, “This is Mandy Donovan. She’s been brought up to speed on your case.”

  Mandy shakes my hand and smiles, like she’s half surprised that I’m a normal person, a kid, not a deranged killer. She has strawberry-blond curls, freckles, a kelly-green suit.

  They walk me down the windowed hallway to a small courtroom, and I wonder, for just enough of a second that it gives me a prickly nausea, what it would be like to be walked to a death chamber.

  We don’t have the death penalty in New York.

  Even if they convict me, it won’t happen. I’ll have years to sit it out.

  I’m not the only one in the courtroom for arraignment. There are two other cases before me, a DUI and a domestic assault. The woman with the DUI pleads guilty, and the judge sets a further court date in December. The domestic case involves a restraining order and supervised visits with children. It’s a man in his thirties, with short hair and thick arms. He too gets another date. This is how it goes. They inch you along with further dates.

  Where is Bear?

  I wanted him to be here. I want to look over and see him, in a suit, his hair knotted behind his head. Wearing a pair of shoes that shine, that click on the tile floor. Watching me, believing in something. I just wanted him to be the thing that stops it all from going any further. The thing that saves me. The thing that causes the judge to say I’m free to go.

  But there’s no one else here. No one but Kateri Fisher believes in me. After the first case, Detective Hurt comes in and leans to say something in Kateri’s ear that I can’t hear except for the word Buick.

  I sit between Kateri and the lawyer, and I turn my head for just a fraction toward Kateri and say, “It’s him.” I say to her, “I’m sure of it.”

  I hear her breathe through her teeth.

  I feel like I’m at the very edge of a cliff and someone I can’t even see is about to push me off. I’ll fall and fall, and when I hit the bottom it’ll feel like falling into bed, except it will break all my bones.

  She turns in the chair to face me, her legs crossed, and beside me, Mandy is struggling to hear us.

  “Shannon,” Kateri whispers. “Does he smoke?”

  “Yes,” I say. And the memory of it is suddenly sharp with fragrance, from the cigarettes, the whiskey, the smell of the pines underneath the wheels of the car, the damp smell of leaves. “Luckys,” I say. I feel my gut rising up against my lungs, shortening my breath.

  “He has her, doesn’t he?” I say, a little too loud. “He has her.”

  Kateri stares at me and hushes me. I notice the darkness under her eyes, that she has covered it with makeup. Her lashes are stiff and curled with mascara. Her eyes deep, deep brown.

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Yes,” I say, and my hands tremble. “And no,” I say. “I don’t know anything about him.”

  Mandy pats my unshackled hand. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. Then, “I wish we’d had more time to go over this.”

  Kateri turns forward again but keeps talking to me, barely moving her lips. “Is there any chance Bear could have hired someone to kill your mother?” Her voice is hoarse, raspy.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and I feel like all my hair is standing on end. “He could hire anyone to do anything. Couldn’t he?”

  She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know anything anymore.”

  When the judge calls me up, Mandy goes with me, and Kateri stays behind on the chair that is linked to all the other chairs and bolted to the floor. I stand a few feet back from the bench and say my whole name, Shannon Lee Jenkins, and then repeat my date of birth and social security number into the microphone.

  There’s a bustling of whispers behind me, and I hear Kateri’s voice, and I wish it were her standing up here with me, but she says, “No, no cameras,” and then I hear Detective Hurt’s voice telling someone to get out.

  The judge shuffles a stack of papers, straightening them, and then reads the charge:

  “One count second-degree homicide in the killing of Craig John O’Neil. One count,” he continues, “of second-degree homicide in the killing of Pearl June Jenkins. One count, kidnapping and endangering the welfare of a child under the age of eight,” he says.

  I shoot a look at Mandy, and she twitches her head, as if to say, hear him out.

  The doors swish behind us. The previous arraignments are allowed to leave, and there’s a gust of warm air, and more voices, more of Kateri’s voice, and a kid’s voice even, which makes me think the domestic case dragged the kids in on one parent’s behalf or the other’s.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” the judge says. “You have the right to a speedy, public jury trial. You have the right to representation, which I see has been provided for you. Miss Donovan,” he says.

  “Good morning, Your Honor,” Mandy says.

  The judge must be seventy. He looks like I imagine a professor would. Longish white hair, a white goatee. There’s a looseness in his arms, the way he leans, that I don’t expect but makes him seem more likable.

  “Miss Donovan,” he says again, and smiles brightly at her. She’s cute, in her suit, with her gingery hair. “Do you have any question, or doubt in your mind, that your client is fit, mentally or otherwise, to stand trial in the charges placed against him?”

  “
No, sir, I do not,” she says.

  “Is the defendant ready to enter a plea?” the judge asks.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Mandy says.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” the judge says, “how would you like to plead to the charges listed against you?” It takes him a minute to look up from the paperwork and at me. When he does, when I have his eye contact, I answer.

  “Not guilty,” I say into the microphone, and it echoes in the courtroom. “Your Honor,” I add, forgetting.

  “Do you understand the charges brought against you?” he asks, and Mandy is about to answer for me when I say, “No, Your Honor.”

  I don’t know what Brewer was working on, or how much of it was directed by Bear. I thought he was trying to reduce something, but the judge said homicide anyway, not self-defense, and there was the cop, and Birdie, and all I can think of is that I will never, ever get out of this. I am about to spend the next thirty years in jail. Just like my dad. Just like any other Jenkins.

  Where the fuck is Bear?

  The judge looks at Mandy, about to ask her more questions.

  “Miss Donovan,” he says, “it seems to me here that the charges are pretty straightforward. I’ll ask you again if you have any doubt in your client’s ability to stand trial for the charges that have been brought against him.”

  “No, Your Honor,” she says. “However, we have just met.”

  “Have you discussed the charges with the defendant, Miss Donovan?”

  “No, Your Honor. I was brought up to speed yesterday,” she says. “The original attorney recused himself from the case,” she says.

  “I see.” He watches the back of the courtroom, behind me, over my head, while again there’s a whip of air as the door buzzes open and closed.

  “Pardon the interruption,” the judge says, and then calls to the bailiff, “What in the hell is going on back there?”

  I hear Birdie’s voice. I hear it, and my heart leaps so hard I think I will choke on it. I feel my knees buckle.

  “Jeez Louise,” Birdie says in her sharp, sassy little voice. “You don’t have to hang on so tight.”