Ashes to Ashes (20 page)

He wanted to read the notes over thoroughly
but didn’t want to push his luck and have his friend walk back into
the office to catch him snooping. He visually scanned his area and
found a printer placed on a side shelf of Sheth’s desk. CTL P. He
began to print. Even though the machine spat out page after page in
rapid succession, Ashe swelled with impatience, every little sound
resembled hard soled shoes. When the final page fell, Ashe tore the
stack from the tray and rushed from the room. He was sorry that he
had to betray another friend, but what other choice did he
have?

Chapter 21

It was a garden. Indeed. But instead of
pretty flowers, colorful and various, or fruit, juicy and
delicious, the garden around Ashe was filled with planted slabs of
stone, polished and engraved. Also, below the planted stones, other
things were planted into the earth, husbands, wives, sons, and
daughters. It was a garden of loss and memories, of pain and
longing.

After managing to make it back from
Cleveland, Ashe didn’t know where else to go or who else to talk
to. He had learned some important things about Owen, but the path
seemed to have faded beneath his feet. If he only knew the full
name of Scott’s girlfriend. Many things were spiraling around in
his mind, threatened to bring his high mood down to the dirt. He
needed a kind ear, someone he loved to comfort him. Kneeling at the
grave of his late wife, he decided to speak to the only person he
ever truly trusted.

He leaned down and ran his eyes across her
name. Susanne Walters. The normal feelings of guilt and anger and
regret washed over him like a strong, hot spring. No. It was more
like quick flowing rapids, deadly, if not journeyed with
caution.

He pictured his wife.

Her dark black hair, which seemed to hold
perfectly formed natural curls, was always tied up in a ponytail,
no matter how many times Ashe insisted that she leave it down. She
looked sexy as hell with her hair down, hanging loose against her
shoulders, one side tucked behind her right ear. Moments had
existed in those days, either during the first minutes of the
morning, before his wife had had the chance to completely start her
day, or during the last minutes of a long evening, when she would
had finally let herself relax, in which her hair would be allowed
to tumble down. It had been beautiful.

Ashe had also loved Susanne’s smile, which
never seemed to touch more than one side of her lips, making it
more of a smirk than a grin. It was a clever bend of her mouth, as
if she knew a truth about things, a truth which was both funny and
clever at the same time. He always wished he could have shared that
truth with his wife. But she had taken the answer to that mystery
with her.

“Dust of the dead/inhaled each
day/in/through/and out again.” Ashe thought hard about the next
lines of the poem. “Ashes to ashes/one breath at a
time/in/through/and out again.” It was one of her poems that
managed to get lodged in head for days at a time, both as wonderful
as it was truthful. “Taste it on the tongue/those who fill our
chests/in/through/and out again.”

Before meeting his wife, he had only a
passing interest in poetry, in the writings of T.S. Eliot or W.B.
Yeats. But Susanne’s passion for that type of literature affected
him, because he felt it like heat coming from an oven.

He loved his wife’s poems more than anything.
They were always simple. He was far from an expert when it came to
prose or stanzas, but Susanne’s writing always spoke to him, as if
they were his own thoughts and emotions expressed in a way that he
wished he could express himself. And what more could a person ask
from a poem.

“Ashes to ashes/one breath at a time,” he
repeated.

“Baby,” Ashe said in a low voice. “I love
you. More now…than ever before. I wish you were here with me now.
Dear god, I wish that so very much. I need you. I need your
strength.” He felt his eyes getting warm. “Scott’s in trouble. Your
baby boy is in real bad trouble, hun. And I’m trying…but I don’t
know if I can help him. I am trying so hard…but I don’t know if I
can do it.”

Ashe paused. Tears lined the bottom of his
eyes, but never fully fell.

“He killed someone.” The words hurt. But they
were true. There was no more denying it. Scott was guilty. In the
beginning, Ashe wanted to prove his son’s innocent. He wanted to
show that Scott had not killed Owen. Even though everything that
happened proved to him otherwise, he had hung on to the hope of his
son’s innocence. It was reckless. It was biased. And it
was
compromised. But that finally changed. It was no longer about
innocence. It was about…why?

Why?

“I don’t know where to go from here,” Ashe
admitted. “But I’m going to keep going. For you. For our son.”

Oscar had been right. He was emotionally
compromised. But he was also driven, more than anyone outside the
situation would be. He was not on a mission to simply find Scott,
as Oscar and the rest of his group may be. He was on a mission to
find the reason…the reason behind the bodies.

The reason. That was where he needed to find
his way to.

His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a
sight.

Lying on the dirt directly next to Susanne’s
tombstone, sat a bundle yellow flowers. They looked fresh. But they
weren’t the kind of flowers someone would buy at a flower store.
They were more like the type that would grow wild in some yard,
growing in the Spring only to die off in the Fall. They weren’t
even flowers at all. They were Dandelions. Weeds. Weeds that
sprouted all over Ohio. In fact, there were clusters of them all
around the cemetery, ready and waiting for someone to spontaneously
pluck them during an unplanned visit to the cemetery.

Ashe rose from his leaning position and began
to look around him. When were the flowers placed? Recently? Scott?
Could his son have just been there, leaving flowers, the only
flowers that he could find in a hurry, at his mother’s grave?

Looking around, his heart beating fast, Ashe
searched the graveyard for another body, but not another figure
could be seen. He fought the urge to run around the cemetery,
checking each shadow and behind every tree. But he didn’t. Scott
was not there. He would once again be chasing a ghost.

He needed to get his head clear.

There
were
flowers in the garden of
stone, after all, he admitted.

Chapter 22

A few hours later Ashe found himself at home,
sitting hunched over his circular dining room table, sipping on his
third Sam Adams. He took a drink and put down the sweaty bottle. A
pen wiggled in his other hand as he tried to concentrate. He was in
the process of putting down notes into one of his many spiral
notebooks. He was trying to list facts about Scott and the killings
that were solid and indisputable. From the facts he might be able
to logically deduce the reasoning behind them, mainly the reasoning
behind Owen.

He was not part of the investigation and did
not have access to even half of the evidence or information that
the police had obtained. He was at a major disadvantage. All he had
to go on was a few facts and lot of assumptions and logical ideas
based on his own professional experience.

He took a large gulp of Sam Adams. The beer
did little to loosen the gears in his mind. Even so, he took
another gulp of the lager and sighed as it slid across his tongue
and down his throat.

He jotted.

Owen was killed while he slept in his bed. A
single gunshot to the head. Scott ran.

Killing someone in their bed meant that the
crime was most likely committed out of spontaneity or fear of the
victim or both. Ashe thought more about the fear aspect. Fear, at
least that type of fear, could lead to desperation. By shooting
someone, perhaps dangerous or intimidating, while they were
helpless, the shooter bypassed any chances of reaction or
retaliation.

He thought again of Tela, the battered wife
who fought back by killing her husband in his bed. She had feared
his retaliation. She had feared for her own life, which had caused
her to stab her husband while he slept.

Had Scott been desperate?

Had Scott been afraid of Owen?

If Owen would have roused or been awake,
would the crime have happened? Doubtful.

Understanding that fear and desperation could
have been the main emotions behind the crime was one thing, but he
could not claim to understand the root behind the fear itself.

Scott had obviously been far from a battered
wife. What had been his trigger?

Why had Scott been afraid of Owen?

Why had he been desperate?

A physical confrontation had taken place
between Scott and Owen, or so said two leads. If true, what could
the confrontation have been about? Could it have been the precursor
to the shooting? Owen had a documented history of extreme violence
while on drugs. The violent history shows a patter in Owen’s
behavior which might have spilled over onto Scott, making Scott
react in a violent way.

He thought about what Regime had told
him.

Scott had been irritable and distant during
the time leading up to the shooting.

Why?

If Scott had been afraid for his own safety
because of Owen, alternate steps could have been taken that would
not have ended in bloodshed and death.

He thought hard for a few minutes, but
eventually jotted down another note, another question that he had
no choice but to at least consider, even if he hated it down to the
core of himself.

Drugs were found in apartment, even if the
only evidence of drugs seemed to be in Owen’s bedroom only. Owen
had a solid pattern of drug use which matches the evidence found at
the scene. But had Scott become involved in the drugs with Owen?
Had they been a factor? Doesn’t seem likely, but can’t be entirely
ruled out.

Ashe was well aware of the affects that
drugs, any form of drugs, could have on a person’s mental
stability. If Scott had actually become involved in drugs like
hallucinogens or other types of drugs that could cause drastic
changes in personality, he might not have realized what he was
doing, just like Owen didn’t recognize his own roommate. His common
sense could have been clouded, tilted of their center, meaning that
the murder could have taken place in a drug induced daze.

He took another drink of beer.

Was a mental illness a factor?

For some reason the idea that a serious
mental illness could have been at the root of the killing almost
comforted Ashe. To him, a mental illness was not an invincible
dragon. It was not an immortal beast. It was a disease like any
virus or bacteria. It could be documented. It could be understood.
And most of all it could be treated.

Ashe tried to treat Scott like any other
person with a possible mental illness. At that moment, he could
only document what he believed that he knew about his son. But the
information could be subject to change in the future.

Documented case of Alzheimer’s in the
paternal grandfather. No other history of mental illness has been
documented. No personal history of mental illness or treatment for
mental illness had been discovered. No known history of substance
use or abuse existed, but the possibility must be noted.

Possible symptoms…

Ashe wasn’t sure what to write after possible
symptoms. He needed more information. He needed more witnesses. He
needed more data. Too many possibilities existed beyond the
reported irritability and distraction. Paranoia. Hallucinations.
Delusions. Depression. Mania. And many, many more.

He felt like he was running in circles.
Instead of long list of facts, he was jotting down mostly
assumptions and inferences. Ashe took his beer bottle and swallowed
the rest of the liquid. Before rising to grab another from the
fridge, he wrote down a few things about the shootings in the
park.

Self-defense.

Jacket and gun had been left behind.

Victims were known criminals and thugs.

Scott could have left the jacket behind for a
specific reason. But what? Did he want to prove self-defense? Was
the jacket simply a clue? But why did Scott feel the need to prove
that the killings in the park had been self-defense? Did he want to
separate those acts from what happened to Owen? Differentiate the
shootings from one another?

Considering the possibility, Ashe got to his
feet. After dropping his empty bottle into the trash, he moved to
open his fridge. But before he could his land line began to ring.
It broke the silence and startled him. He leapt to the phone and
answered it.

“Scott?”

At first there was only silence, but he then
heard a familiar female voice at the other end, “Ashe? Did I dial
the wrong the number again? Damn rotary phone. You just can’t trust
em.”

“Katherine?”

“Ashe?”

“Yea,” he said, trying to gather his
thoughts. “Hi. How is it going? Didn’t expect you to call…at all,
to be honest.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Katherine admitted. “Did
that hurt your feelings? Good. You deserve it. I am just joking,
though. I was always going to call you. I like men who play hard to
get.” She laughed. It was a cute giggle.

“I’m sorry that I ran out on you,” Ashe
said.

“And haven’t called,” she added.

“And haven’t called,” he admitted. “I’ve
actually been extensively preoccupied. A lot of things are going
on.”

“Right this second?” Katherine asked.

“I guess not right this second,” he admitted.
“Why?”

“How do you, me, a couple bloody steaks, and
a shit load of Sam Adams sound?” she said. “Does that sound like a
good time?”

“It kind of does.”

“Can I come over, then?”