An Eternity in a Moment

by K Carothers

  “Thanks,” the boy muttered, not quite meeting his eyes.

  “How are you doing?” Luke probed.

  Connor shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”

  “You’ve had an eventful few days.”

  Another shrug and no answer.

  “Where were you around nine o’clock last night?”

  “He was with me,” Meredith answered for him. “All night.”

  “What did you do at your mom’s house?” Luke asked Connor.

  Meredith didn’t get the hint and answered for him again anyway. “We watched a new show on TV. It’s called Vengeance.” Her lips quirked up slightly. “You should check it out sometime. It’s very good.”

  The blatant arrogance on her face irked Luke to no end, but he kept his own expression impassive. “What time was that on?”

  “It was the season premiere,” she easily responded. “A two-hour event from eight to ten. Then we went to bed.”

  “Ten o’clock is pretty early for a sixteen-year-old to go to bed,” Luke said to Connor.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Meredith responded yet again. “‘Early to bed, early to rise,’ as they say.”

  “Is it possible he could have left while you were sleeping?” Luke asked her.

  “The alarm system was on all night, which the security company can verify. And only I know the code.”

  Luke knew there were plenty of ways to get around a security system, and he turned back to the boy. “I need you to answer some of these questions, Connor. Were you supposed to be at your mom’s house last night?”

  Connor paused before answering, glancing at his mother. “No, it’s my dad’s week, but he said he was going to be working late, so I went over to my mom’s.”

  “Do you do that much?”

  Another pause. “Sometimes.”

  “When was the last time you stayed at your mom’s house when it was your dad’s week?”

  Connor didn't respond, glancing at Meredith again.

  “It doesn’t happen often. We try to keep a strict schedule,” she said coolly. “But I think the boy is getting tired of Frank being gone all the time.”

  “So when was it decided that he would stay with you?”

  “He called just before six and asked if he could stay, then came right over.”

  Luke directed the next question at Frank. “Did you know Connor would be with Meredith last night?”

  “Of course,” Frank answered with a good-natured smile, giving Connor’s shoulder a squeeze. “He called and asked me first. And he wasn’t upset at all that I was working last night. He knows it’s part of the job.”

  Luke turned back to Connor, who continued to appear disinterested in the conversation. “Where were you before you went to your mom’s house?”

  “I was at my dad’s.”

  “Was Tina there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  Connor shrugged. “Not much. I just said I was going to my mom’s. She didn’t care.”

  “How did she seem last night?”

  The boy shrugged again. His shoulders were certainly getting a workout. “Normal, I guess.”

  “Was she upset that your dad was at work?”

  “She didn’t seem like it.”

  “Did she say what her plans were last night?”

  “No. She was just about to go down in the basement to work out. I don’t know what she was doing after that.”

  “Did she and your dad argue much?”

  Another shrug. “Not really.”

  “Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to hurt her?”

  “No.”

  Luke turned back to Meredith. It was time to stir the pot a little. “Frank mentioned that you and Tina didn’t get along very well.”

  There was an immediate spark of anger in those deep-set brown eyes at the implication. “I hardly think that’s surprising, given the circumstances,” she said shortly. Then her lips twisted into another mocking smile. “But I have to wonder how Frank and his dearly departed wife really did get along when there was no one around to see.”

  “What do you mean?” Luke asked.

  “I can’t imagine Frank was very happy about his wife’s gambling problem—her very serious gambling problem. Or that his restaurant has been losing money hand over fist.” Meredith's contemptuous smile widened. “Of course, the two are probably related.”

  Luke looked over at Frank, who’d lost a little color in his face, and waited for him to respond.

  “Things weren’t as bad as she’s making them sound,” he said, pulling at his tie. “We were managing just fine.” Luke noted how he unconsciously shook his head as he spoke.

  Meredith laughed. “I have my sources, Frank. Tina had you on the fast track to bankruptcy.” She shifted her gaze back to Luke. “And Connor told me he spent the night at his office. Now isn’t that a coincidence? He just so happens to be away all night when his good for nothing wife gets murdered.”

  Frank glared at her. “You’d like to point the blame at me, wouldn’t you? I’ll bet you had—“

  “Didn’t your wife do enough betting for the both of you?” Meredith interrupted with another one of her malicious smiles.

  Frank’s face turned as red as Santa Claus’s jacket. “Don’t mock me, Meredith. I know you probably had a hand in this. And I swear I’ll hunt down all of your good-for-nothing criminal friends and find out which one of them helped you. This was revenge, plain and simple. You hated Tina because she loved me.”

  “Oh, please,” Meredith said, all amusement gone as she shot daggers at him. “Tina did me a favor by spreading her legs for you. It’s a chore I do not miss, that’s for sure. Hell would have to freeze over before I’d subject myself to that again.”

  “You always were a frigid bitch—”

  “Shut up!” Connor yelled, closing his eyes tightly and fisting his hands in his hair as he leaned over the interview table, rocking back and forth. “Just shut up, both of you! Shut the fuck up!”

  Luke knew he had an opening then. “Did you kill Tina, Connor?”

  “Give me a break, Detective,” Meredith immediately cut in. “You watched the video just as well as I did on Friday. The boy probably wet his pants when the gun went off. There’s no way he would have the guts to commit a murder like that.”

  “Did you kill Tina, Connor?” Luke repeated, ignoring Meredith.

  Connor opened his eyes—a deeper shade of blue than his dad’s—and they glittered with anger. “No.”

  “Why did you shoot Jesse?”

  “Like I told you before, it was an accident.”

  “You said Jesse started it. Why?”

  Connor briefly glanced at Frank. “Because I called him a bastard and said he should go back to Mexico.”

  “Why did you say that?”

  Connor shrugged, and the blank mask returned to his face. “He was being a jerk and I just said it. Jesse is a hothead and things went too far, that’s all.”

  Luke intentionally made his own feelings very apparent, staring at Connor with cold, hard fury in eyes. “Someone helped Jesse escape from the hospital last night, and in the process they nearly killed a police officer. Do you know who helped Jesse?”

  A look of surprise, along with a hint of fear, crossed Connor’s face, and he gave his father another surreptitious glance. “I…I don’t—know.”

  Meredith stood up. “I believe this interview is over, Detective Mathis. My son has told everything he knows. Come along, Connor.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” Luke said in his usual, impassive tone.

  Frank laughed weakly. “Sorry things got a little heated there. Meredith is always a handful, as you know.”

  Luke chose not to comment on that, pulling out a pack
et of paperwork and handing it to Frank. “These are some financial disclosure forms I need you to fill out, along with a list of documents we’ll need: bank and credit card statements, life insurance—”

  “Luke, you can’t possibly think I killed Tina?” Frank interrupted, his expression filled with disbelief.

  “It’s all standard procedure,” Luke responded mildly. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow. I’d like to have everything by the end of the day.”

  The mayor didn’t raise any objections, but he wasn’t looking so jolly when he left.

  Luke called Scott afterward. “Are you and the chief still at the hospital?”

  “Yeah. And we’ve got a lead on who Jesse’s accomplice is. Get this, Luke: It’s probably Wayne Raabe. Just when we thought he’d gone straight. It turns out he got a job working as a nursing assistant here and was on shift last night until midnight. He was the last one to check on Jesse before the nurse found Ben this morning. And the unit clerk up there has seen Jesse stop by and talk to Wayne quite a few times lately. We’re in the security office right now pulling up video surveillance. If you hang on a minute we might have an answer for sure.”

  Luke wasn’t surprised to hear Wayne Raabe’s name come up. The kid was probably about nineteen now, but they’d already been dealing with him for the better part of a decade. He’d quit school at sixteen and had been in and out of jail several times on drug-related charges. But he’d kept out of trouble lately, so they’d figured he was finally getting his life together. More than likely, though, he just wasn’t getting caught. And his lawyer was none other than Meredith Armstrong. Maybe she was paying him this time.

  “Sure as shit, Luke,” Scott said on the other end of the line. “Wayne is pushing Jesse out the back entrance in a wheelchair. Neither of them is even trying to hide their identity. Another camera covers the parking lot back there, so we should be able to ID the car they’re using and get an APB out.”

  “What’s the time on the video?”

  “12:09 a.m.”

  “Within the window Tina Murdock was killed,” Luke noted.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t put murder past Wayne Raabe. Especially after what he and Jesse did to Ben. I wonder if the crime lab will find Ben’s blood on the knife that ended up in Tina Murdock’s chest.”

  Luke grimaced. “That would answer some of our questions and leave a whole lot more. When will you and the chief be back so we can compare notes?”

  “I’d say we should be done here in about half an hour. The chief’s putting out word that he wants all hands on deck at the station for a meeting at one.”

  “I’ll be there,” Luke told him. “In the meantime, I’m going to run over to Seth Slater’s place. I’d like to know where he was last night.”

  “You should have backup, Luke. Why don’t you wait until after the meeting and I’ll go with you?”

  “No, it’ll be fine. I’ve talked to Slater before and haven’t had any problems. I’ll see you at one.”

  Luke ended the call and looked at the time on his phone. Exactly noon. High noon.

  * * *

  The house was on a dead end road just outside of town. And Slater was definitely home.

  Luke parked his unmarked sedan behind Seth’s beat up gray truck in the weed-festooned gravel driveway. Stepping out, he unconsciously rested his hand on the gun in his holster as he surveyed the property. It was eerily quiet there. No sound. No movement. The perfect calm after the storm…Or maybe it was the eye of a hurricane.

  The yard was ragged and overgrown, and the ramshackle two-story house probably hadn’t been painted in decades. Bits of peeling, light green paint stubbornly stuck to the weathered gray wood in places, and the few remaining shutters were a darker shade of peeling green.

  Luke stepped up onto the porch, littered with all kinds of junk, and caught the slight flick of a curtain in the window to his right. Knocking hard on the door, he announced, “New Dublin Police.”

  He waited, watching for any further movement, keeping his ears tuned for any sound. But there was nothing. Only stillness. Silence.

  He waited another minute, then knocked again. “I know you’re in there, Slater,” he said loudly. “This is Detective Mathis. I have a few questions for you.”

  There was no response.

  “This will only take a couple of minutes. It’ll be easier on all of us if you cooperate.”

  Still nothing.

  “I’ll talk to you eventually, Slater.”

  Luke waited another minute. Then another. And when it was clear there would be no answer, he sighed in frustration and finally left.

  So much for a showdown.

  Chapter

  13

  The dam burst, and a river of pain raged through Erin, wild and unstoppable, washing away all the barriers to its flow in her mind. The river was filled with years and years of unacknowledged pain and grief that had slowly built up behind that dam, pushing against it, wearing it away, waiting to be set free.

  And she thought she had set it free with all the tears she’d cried over the last few weeks. But they’d just escaped from a crack in the dam. Now the whole thing was collapsing inside her.

  Erin felt her body shake with the force of it as she sat in the sand by the pond with her arms wrapped around her legs, blindly watching the sunset. And when it became too much to bear, she dropped her forehead to her knees and helplessly sobbed, from the very bottom of her soul.

  After a while she felt a hand gently squeeze her shoulder. “Everything is going to be okay,” Jenna softly said. “Luke will call.”

  Erin lifted her head, letting the tears continue to fall unheeded down her cheeks. “It’s not just Luke. It’s everything—everything that’s happened to us. To me. To you. To your mom. My mom…Oh God, Jenna, I miss my mom.” She buried her head in her hands and continued to cry. “I need her. I’ve needed her so many times…It’s not fair. I want—I want my mom back.”

  “Erin…” Jenna sat down and gathered her into her arms. “I know. I know.”

  “It’s so wrong. She shouldn’t—she shouldn’t have died like that. And I hate my father for what he did. God, I hate him…I can’t believe he’s free. He’s free, but my mom is dead. And I—I have to spend the rest of my life without her.”

  Jenna didn’t say anything, just held Erin close until the deep, wracking sobs subsided. Then she fished some tissues out of her sweater pocket. “Here, I think we need these again.”

  Erin sat back and blew her nose. But she couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. There were just too many things she’d never let herself cry about before. “It’s because of me that a child in Boston doesn’t have a mother, either. And I think about him all the time, wondering if he’s going to be okay.” She briefly paused, drawing in a shuttered breath. “I never told you about that. It happened the day of the pileup in Boston. A pregnant woman came in, and I had to do an emergency C-section to save the baby. But I couldn’t save her. She died at about the same time her baby let out his first cry just a few feet away.”

  “I heard about that on the news,” Jenna whispered. “They never said who the doctor was, and I had really hoped it wasn’t you.”

  “Oh, it was me all right,” Erin said, brushing away the tears on her cheeks. “And an hour before that I was right there when they brought in some of the survivors of the bus crash. One of them was a woman who’d been on vacation with her husband and daughter. They’d taken the trip as a gift to their daughter—one last vacation together before she started college. But the woman’s husband was killed instantly and their daughter died in her arms while other people trampled over them trying to save themselves. When the ambulance crew brought the woman in she had severe smoke inhalation and was struggling to breathe and completely overwhelmed with grief. She told me she wanted to die too, and refused to have anything done at first. But I finally conv
inced her to accept treatment, that her family would want her to live. I had to intubate her, and I’ll never forget the look in her eyes before I put her to sleep. It’s another thing on a very long list of things I wish I could forget—and another thing I’ll always second-guess myself about. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything to change her mind. Maybe she would have been better off dying. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for her to wake up later and have to relive that whole nightmare all over again—and again every day for the rest of her life.”

  “I’m so sorry, Erin,” Jenna said. “But please don’t second-guess yourself. You did the right thing.”

  “I don’t even know if there is a right thing anymore,” Erin bitterly responded. “I think I realized that about a year and a half ago. It all started the previous summer when I was on the night shift and a mother brought her ten-month-old daughter in. She said the basement door had been left open by accident, and while she was in the kitchen cleaning up, her daughter fell down the basement stairs in her walker onto the concrete floor below. The child was somewhat lethargic and didn’t cry or protest much when I examined her, which was the first sign that something was seriously wrong. And there was obvious swelling over the back of her head. I immediately ordered a trauma workup, including CT scans, and did a quick ultrasound to check for internal injuries. But before she was taken over to the CT scanner she became even more lethargic and had spells where she would stop breathing. Her symptoms were consistent with a rapidly worsening brain hemorrhage, and I paged the attending neurosurgeon on call while we were getting everything ready to intubate her. He’d had a long day and wanted to wait to come in until the senior resident finished his evaluation and all the CT scans were done to completely rule out other major injuries. But I knew, I knew with absolute certainty, that the child was bleeding into her brain and that every second mattered. I’d seen her, I’d examined her, and I’d already learned that training, experience, and common sense were more important than a CT scan. So I insisted he come in right away. And he ended up taking her right from the CT scanner to the OR when the scans confirmed that she was bleeding into her brain—badly—and that every second really had mattered. They did a craniotomy, and by the next day she was completely back to normal.”