[Whistleblower 01.0] Wounded Animals

by Jim Heskett

  “I’m fine, Alan. I can’t really talk right now, though. It’s just not a good time for me to be talking to you.” The words felt distant coming out of my mouth as if I were speaking in a tunnel, listening to echoes of myself.

  I took a step back, and my knees wanted to buckle again. Felt dizzy, as if the world was sinking. Weak knees led me to sit in the snow, and it felt cold through my slacks. I sat there as the moisture seeped through the fabric.

  Alan was talking, but the words bounced around in the air and found no place in my ears. He was gesturing, pointing, asking me questions. None of it made it into my brain.

  I needed to talk to Grace. My hand shot into my pocket and pulled out my phone, almost out of instinct, and I smudged blood on the glass screen. Paul’s blood. I couldn’t even think of his last name, no matter how hard I tried.

  She didn’t answer her phone. So I dialed 9-1-1, and I think that’s when I passed out.

  Within a half hour, my house was swarming with a collection of men and women in uniform. Blue ones, white ones, black ones. Cops, EMTs—although I don’t know why they send paramedics for a dead person—two detectives, crime scene photographers, and several others who made no effort to introduce themselves to me.

  The cul de sac swirled with so many official vehicles, I didn’t think my neighbors would be too happy about being locked into their driveways. Blinking lights bounced off the surrounding houses. I imagined them peeking through drawn curtains, texting their friends. Besides Alan, I wasn’t acquainted with any of those people.

  I didn’t remember talking to anyone on the phone, and I had only the vaguest memory of talking to the first cop on the scene, so when a detective in a suit with a tablet computer clutched in his hands came to speak to me, I initially froze. What had I told the cops already?

  The note on the back of the toilet. Do not tell the police you know him.

  I was sitting on the couch in the living room, still wearing my slacks and button down I’d worn in Dallas today. As the detective stood in front of me, he turned on the tablet and started tapping. He had a cop mustache, but not the big handlebar kind you’d expect. Also, he was tall, at least 6’3”, with a square jaw and chiseled hair like someone had laid it on his head. Grace watched those cop procedural shows, not me, but I’d seen enough to know this guy would have fit right in.

  “Mr. Candle, my name is Detective Stan Shelton. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  I motioned to a chair behind him, and he sat, paying attention only to his tablet so far. I wanted him to look at me. I wanted him to understand what I was going through and see the weariness in my face.

  “I know you already gave a statement, and you’re probably tired and want to rest, but I just have a few things to clear up, okay? This should only take a few minutes.”

  He was wearing a broad smile, but I knew it wasn’t for real. He was trying to calm me. Maybe he’d taken courses in bedside manner at whatever cop college these guys went to.

  “Sure, I’ll help any way I can.” My voice still sounded strange.

  “Tucker Candle, age 32. Denver resident for the last five years, originally from Texas, then bounced around for a while. What brought you out to Colorado?”

  “Job offer.”

  “I can certainly relate to that. I’m from Austin, myself. Hook ‘em horns.”

  I stared at him. Why the hell had he said that?

  “Do you have any idea who the man is in your bathroom upstairs?”

  I hesitated. How on earth could I explain that I had shaken this man’s hand, had given him an introductory course in HTML & CSS less than twelve hours ago?

  He was looking at me, waiting for an answer. I knew I had to make a choice, but neither path seemed palatable. The note had said not to say anything, and my insides churned when I thought about it.

  I shook my head.

  “No idea at all how this man came to be in your house?”

  Now I wondered if he was messing with me. Thought maybe I should come clean. No, that would be crazy. I’d already lied, and was starting to feel like that had been a terrible choice.

  I could at least backtrack a little, maybe vague things up a bit. “I mean, I didn’t really get a good look at him, you know. There was so much blood.”

  Burgundy, painted on my walls, my floor, even on my shower curtain.

  “Good," Shelton said.

  What an odd comment. He approved of my answer? He wore no expression when he said it, but it seemed so out of place, I hesitated for a few seconds.

  “Do any of your neighbors have a key?”

  “No, why?”

  He sighed. “There were no signs of a break-in. He came in through the front door, and he didn’t break it.”

  All I could do was shrug.

  “What happened after you discovered the body?”

  “I saw him, then I went outside to talk to my next-door neighbor.”

  “I see.” Tap tap tap on the screen. “And what did you and your neighbor talk about?”

  “I asked him if he’d seen anyone come in or out of my house today, or if he’d seen my wife.”

  He flicked along his tablet. “Grace Candle, age 30. Your wife hasn’t been around?”

  I shook my head again. Felt pressure at the base of my neck, then a trickle of sweat dribbled down the side of my face. “No, we haven’t spoken in a couple days.”

  “Whose car is that out front? The Subaru in the driveway?”

  “It’s hers, but she’s not here. I haven’t seen her since I got back into town.”

  “Uh-huh.” Tap tap tap. “Mr. Candle, I understand witnessing what you did upstairs must have caused you a lot of discomfort, and I’m sorry for that. I hope it will help ease your mind a little if I tell you that you are not a suspect at this time. These are all just standard questions.”

  “Why not?”

  He looked up from his tablet and met my eyes. “Excuse me?”

  “Why am I not a suspect?”

  “In your statement, you mentioned taking the toll road home from the airport, and we’ve been able to confirm that with CDOT. ExpressToll Records show it was used an hour after your flight landed. We’ve requested the toll booth photographs to corroborate, but for now, we’re satisfied.”

  I should have been relieved, but it made no difference.

  “Mr. Candle, do you know where your wife is?”

  I heard footsteps on the stairs, and a few seconds later, four men carrying a wrapped sheet on a stretcher followed. Dead body being transported like an injured football player through my house. The image made me think of Von Miller tearing his ACL, and the crowd of people carting him off the field. For some reason, that made me want to giggle, but I forced it out of my head.

  “I don’t know where she is.”

  Detective Shelton took a business card from his pocket and slid it across the coffee table to me. “When you speak to her, please give me a call at that number. We’d like to ask her a few questions.”

  I picked up the card, and my hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped it.

  “We’re considering this a homicide for the time being, and it’s important that she give a statement. Could clear a lot of things up. The next 48 hours are the most crucial in a case like this, so time is of the essence.”

  “Of course,” I said, still looking at the business card.

  “I hate to sound like an old-timey movie, but it would help if you didn’t leave town for a few days. We still have a great deal of unknowns, and we may need to talk to you again.”

  I had to stifle another urge to giggle. Sorry, Alison and Wyatt, now I really can’t travel to Dallas for more training because there’s this dead man in my bathroom, my wife has taken off, and the cops won’t let me leave town. The urge to let out some tension weighed on me. I needed to scream, or punch something, or belly laugh until I could calm down. Instead, I rubbed my hands together and took a few deep breaths.

  “Here’s another card,”
he said, passing me a second one. “Cleanup crew. They can take care of the mess in your bathroom.”

  He stood up and shook my hand. Big strong grip, just like Wyatt’s. My hand felt limp and weak as if he could crush it with no effort.

  He left me alone in the living room, staring at his business card. The room had grown silent as the uniformed people shuffled out in groups.

  Shelton’s offhanded “good” comment rang throughout my head. Why had he said that? It seemed so out of place, what could he have possibly meant?

  Chapter Eight

  I SLEPT ON the couch, restless and fitful, no dreams of spiders or anything else. Every time I opened my eyes, I looked up those stairs to the bathroom. Thought of blood seeping into the grout between the tiles.

  I only woke up to let in the cleaning crew, decked out in their hazmat suits and masks. The one in front handed me a clipboard stacked with forms and releases for me to fill out.

  As they were setting up their gear in my living room, I had an urge to take a shower, to clean the memory of the dead man off me, but I couldn’t do that. My shower was drenched in Paul’s blood.

  I had to prioritize and think about my options. I had a dead trainee in my bathroom. He wasn’t there anymore, and what was left of him was being sucked into wet-vacs by the men in the rubberized clothing.

  I had a wife who was missing and had to make that my top priority. I remembered hearing that you’re supposed to wait twenty-four hours before reporting someone missing, so that would be later today, I assumed. Didn’t think I could count the time in Texas.

  But her car was still out front. Where could she possibly have gone without her car, six months pregnant, in a snowy Colorado November?

  I wiped the dried blood from my phone and dialed Grace’s sister. She picked up on the third ring, and I cupped my hands over my ears to hear her over the sounds of the hazmat crew.

  “Hey there, Tucker Candle, how’s it going? How I love your social calls,” she said, yawning through the last few words of the greeting. She was a saucy woman, and her sarcasm often drifted into passive-aggressiveness.

  “Please tell me you’ve seen Grace today, or in the last couple days.”

  A pause. “I haven’t seen her. Did you lose your wife?”

  I didn’t even know where to start, and her attitude wasn’t helping. “I just got back in town, and she wasn’t home. Not answering her phone. She didn’t leave me a note or anything to tell me where she’d gone, so I thought maybe you’d come and picked her up.”

  That was a long shot since her sister lived in Aspen, a four-hour drive from here.

  Another pause. “I know this isn’t any of my business, but is everything okay between you two?”

  Stinging came to the corners of my eyes. Wetness followed, and my lips pulled down. Was everything okay between me and Grace?

  “As far as I know,” I said. “Do you think she…”

  “I don’t know. She hasn’t told me anything, and we haven’t spoken much in the last couple months. A few texts, a little bit online here and there. She was supposed to come up here for my birthday, remember?”

  “Morning sickness,” I said. “She spent your birthday weekend puking like a sorority girl at Homecoming.”

  She promised to tell me immediately if Grace called, so we got off the phone, and I called her parents. Same story. If Grace had run out on me, would any of these people be honest with me? I couldn’t imagine that she had run away. I wasn’t husband of the year or anything, but I wasn’t a bad guy. Didn’t drink much. Never cheated on her or raised my voice in anger.

  Not that I could remember, at least.

  I climbed the stairs and stepped over the giant hose of a vacuum cleaner. As I passed the bathroom, I turned my head so I didn’t have to look at the cleanup crew. I just wanted it over with.

  I went into the future baby’s room. We’d recently decked it out with a crib, changing table, and a glider chair for nursing. Our theme for the room was African Safari, and Grace had painted a series of animal portraits that hung in small square canvasses on the walls: lion, monkey, elephant, giraffe, rhino. I’d lobbied to have a Star Wars theme, but she wouldn’t let me get more than two sentences into that argument.

  I walked to the crib and pulled the string on the animal mobile clamped to the rail, the little device that would entertain my future son and hopefully soothe him to sleep.

  The twinkling notes of Brahms’ lullaby came back. The first time I’d heard it a month ago when we installed the mobile, it had stuck a knife in my spine. I don’t know why it made me feel like panicking. Something so real about that sound, imagining our child cooing and squirming underneath those rotating animals.

  Grace and I had argued about it. Don’t ask me why, but I became unreasonable against the backdrop of that song, and I picked a fight with her. Over something so stupid, I don’t even remember.

  Her zealous nesting, that was it. She’d blown a ton of money at IKEA on all kinds of baby things we could have easily gotten second-hand. That fight had ended with me sleeping on the couch for three nights.

  A thought creeped in that maybe she was having an affair, but that seemed ludicrous. As if my six-months pregnant wife would start sleeping around. No, there had to be a better reason for her to take off so suddenly and with no warning.

  Dead guy in the bathroom. Wife disappeared. Possibly, those things were connected, although I didn’t have the first clue how they could be.

  Unless Grace had killed him.

  I ran through the scenario as I went back to the kitchen and opened a beer from the fridge. For some insane reason, my trainee Paul had followed me from Texas to Colorado. He had gotten to my house before me. He forced his way into the house. Fought with Grace, and she killed him. Then she fled, thinking she’d get arrested for the murder.

  But there were no signs of struggle, no break in, and Paul’s wrists and throat had been slit. There was no murder weapon. And where would she run if not to her sister’s or her parents’? Pregnant, fleeing without a car?

  And the note next to the body would make no sense at all if Grace had written it. Ask Kareem why. Ask Kareem why this man was dead? How would the magic man from the bar know anything about it?

  A thought struck me and I called Grace’s boss. He answered on the second ring.

  “Candle?”

  “Hey Rodrick, it’s me. Grace’s husband,” I said, then immediately felt stupid. He knew who I was. We’d had endless discussions about fantasy football over drinks at barbecues at various people’s houses.

  “It’s a little early to be calling,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about that, but it’s important.”

  “Go ahead, buddy. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “Do you know where Grace is?”

  “At home, I assume. She called in sick the last three days. Said it was the flu or something. Is she not at home?”

  “No, she’s not. The last time you talked to her was three days ago?”

  “Well, actually no,” he said. “We texted. We’ve been texting every day, just keeping in touch. Did she go to the hospital?”

  I ignored his question. “Have her text messages been weird, as in not like the kinds of things she would say?”

  A few seconds ticked by. I thought I heard a copier whirring and beeping in the background. “Nope. Everything seems on the up and up to me. Regular old Grace stuff.”

  I sucked up the foamy dregs of my beer and dropped the empty bottle in the recycling bin. Watched some snow tumble from a tree branch in the backyard.

  He wasn't being honest with me, and I could tell. I didn’t like the hesitancy in his voice. “That’s what I figured. If she calls, please let me know.”

  “For sure. If there’s something I can do to help, please let me know, okay?”

  I thought about answering Rodrick’s question, but couldn’t make the words come to my lips. I mumbled something, then ended the call. I was nowhere closer to finding h
er, and her boss was hiding something.

  I told the cleaning crew to let themselves out when they were done, then went outside to check out Grace’s car. Her set of keys was missing from the bowl by the front door, but she kept a spare key in one of those magnetic boxes, hidden under the front of the car. Lucky for me, the box was still there.

  Her car was a mess. Nothing out of the ordinary for Grace, but there was so much junk that I had to step back and think about which area to search first.

  Her work stuff flooded the front passenger seat. Grace was an account manager at a company that made closed captioning software, and she’d left a pile of sales contracts two feet high in the front seat. As I flipped through them, I thought more about her boss Rodrick’s strange tone when he said everything was on the “up and up.” What a weird phrase.

  I couldn’t find anything useful amidst the junk. Papers, folders, pens and pencils, lots of empty chocolate candy bar wrappers.

  The back seat contained more personal things like empty cloth grocery shopping bags, an endless number of receipts from Whole Foods, Target, Pottery Barn and various clothing stores. I studied the dates on the receipts but couldn’t find anything within the last few weeks. Maybe if she’d been shopping somewhere while I was gone, I could get some kind of clue. Then I almost laughed when I realized how silly that was. If she had bought organic lettuce at Whole Foods two days ago, what would that tell me?

  I also found a collection of yoga mats. Why did she need more than one? I mainly used martial arts classes for my physical release, but Grace was the yoga, Pilates, and spin class type.

  I stood back and shut the door, feeling worse than I had when I’d started. Felt foolish for thinking I’d find some big clue hiding in her car.

  I put the key in my pocket, then clicked the key holder into its magnetic hiding spot, and then hopped in my car and left the neighborhood. Her boss’ strange words had been enough that I felt an impulse to drive over to her work and check him out. Maybe if I could look him straight in the eye and hear his story, I might believe it. Or he might crack.