Dark Web (11 page)

“Did you take his laptop?”

“We’re taking a few things from his room. It’s going to be tough, but we’re going to need to search through any of his email accounts, Facebook, Twitter. I’m sorry that . . .”

“Good.”

She surprised him by getting up from the table abruptly and looking around the empty cafeteria. “Take whatever you need and charge those three. I’ll leave. I’m going to go say goodbye first.”

“Mrs. Simpkins.”
Oh no.
“You can’t.”

“I
can’t
?”

“There will be the right time and place for formal goodbyes . . .”

“Thank you, detective, but please get out of my way.”

Fine. Here it comes.
He blocked her path. “Mrs. Simpkins, Your son is about to undergo an internal autopsy.”

Her gaze speared him. “What?”

“We need to know how he died.”

But it was too late. She pushed past him and charged out of the café, through the front door, a little bell chiming.

“Shit,” Swift muttered, and started after her, pressing buttons on his phone to dial emergency services.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Swift drove back south to New Brighton. It was slow going. For a while it had looked like the storm was ending. The precipitation had tapered off to a few twirling flakes, but now it was back with full force, thicker than before. The day was grey, the trees streaks of brown, and the mountains silent behind the gauzy curtain of falling snow.

Callie Simpkins had the body of a star athlete in comparison to his. He’d been unable to reach her before she’d made her way back inside. She’d rushed ahead to the autopsy room. Mercifully, the curtains had been drawn in the observing area, and the door to the lab locked. While she banged on the glass and yanked at the door knob, Swift had finally caught up with her.

She’d fought him off like a wild creature, beating her fists against his chest and arms — he could still feel the impact of her blows. At last she had crumbled, leaning into him, all the sadness and pain released from her in a torrent of inarticulate cries that had at last dissolved into tears. Her body went slack, all the muscles turned to rubber, and he’d held her until emergency services arrived.

They took her to CVPH, where she was now under much heavier sedation. He hoped she would be able to get some rest. There was no doubt she was strong, and during their talk in the café she had shown that her mind was sharp, her instincts on point. He couldn’t blame her for the emotion that overcame her. He could only imagine, after all she had been through with her child, now having to face this.

For a long time to come the waves would batter her, like a boat in a storm, offering only the shortest reprieves when her mind temporarily occupied itself with mundane things, basic, survival things like going to the bathroom, maybe eventually eating. But after each brief moment of forgetting, it would return. Even, in times to come, when she thought she’d reached the shore, she would be in danger of crashing on the rocks.

Swift drew a deep breath, hearing a rattle in his chest. He let the air out in a long, slow exhalation. He drove the car south, the wipers on high to sluice away the thick, wet snow.

* * *

“She’s at the hospital,” Swift told Mike Simpkins. “You’re going to want to go be with her. You and the girls. My troopers will take you there.”

“No,” Mike said. “We’ll go ourselves.”

“Then they’ll escort you. I won’t take no for an answer. The roads are really bad out there.”

Mike was doing the dishes. He had tucked the girls away in the master bedroom where they were watching a movie on his laptop. He said he felt guilty about all the TV they were watching, but he didn’t know what else to do with them. He told Swift he thought with any luck they might go back to sleep.

“And how about you?” asked Swift. Mike had offered him a seat on a stool next to the woodblock island in the kitchen. “How are you holding up?”

“I’ve never been so awake, yet so tired at the same time,” Mike said, turning from the sink with a couple of plates which he dropped into the nearby dishwasher.

Swift nodded. He watched Mike go through the routine for another moment. He knew some people coped with loss by keeping their hands busy. Mike seemed that sort.

“You know it can only help me the more we talk about Braxton,” Swift said. “But this is a hard time; you need to be with your family.”

Mike paused for a moment and looked across the woodblock at Swift. His eyes were puffy. “I will,” he said. “I’ve called one of Callie’s co-workers at the school. Another teacher. We had dinner a few weeks ago. She’s going to come and watch the girls, and I’ll go up to the hospital.”

“I think that’s wise.”

“So we can talk while she makes her way here. Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes?”

“That’s great. I appreciate that.”

Mike nodded. He looked distracted. It seemed to Swift that there was something else that burdened him. The troopers had already cleared out the things from Braxton’s room, under the guidance of Brittney Silas. There was no one else in the house at that moment, so Swift wondered what was occupying Mike’s thoughts.

“Something I asked you before,” Swift said. “Just . . . it’s important. Did you think any more about anyone who might want to harm Braxton?”

“Yes,” Mike said suddenly. He looked up rapidly, directly at Swift. “His father.”

Swift felt something cold flicker through his veins. “You mean his biological father?”

“That’s right. Tori McAfferty.”

“And why do you think that?”

Now Mike glanced away. He took a step back from the dishwasher and leaned against the counter beside the sink. His gaze drifted beyond Swift, through the windows and into the woods outside.

Mike suddenly looked less certain, as if he was going to backtrack from his statement.

“Everything is important right now, Mike. Every single thing. What makes you say you think his biological father would want to hurt him?”

Mike’s chin fell. He reached up and ran a hand through his stringy, black hair. He took a deep breath and exhaled. In the other room, Swift could hear the voices of cartoon characters and calliope music as the girls watched their movie.

“He tried to get in touch with Braxton about a month ago. He lives up here.”

Swift flipped through his notes, but more for effect than anything. He remembered what Callie said without needing to read it. “Your wife says she doesn’t know where Mr. McAfferty lives. You do?”

Mike kept his face down, looking at the floor. His head bobbed. “He found out that Braxton was moving north. I don’t know how. I asked Braxton if he’d been in touch with Tori before, but Braxton said he hadn’t. But, you know, these days, Facebook, and all that. All you have to do is look. Callie’s not a big Facebook person, and neither am I. But we both have accounts. And I have a Google Plus, you know, and who knows all the accounts Braxton might have, or what he says on them.”

“We’ll know soon enough how Mr. McAfferty found out. But, how do
you
know?”

Mike raised his head slowly. “We have this policy about how much time Braxton spends on the computer? On all the devices. You know, we read how harmful it can be for kids. Makes them sedentary, they can get addicted to it, the neuropathology of their developing brains, stuff like that. Especially Brax. I don’t know if Callie told you, but he has Asperger’s.”

“She talked about it. That you avoided diagnosis, and sort of treated it yourselves and tried to blunt the edges where you could.”

Mike’s eyes were hard for a moment. “Well, you could say that. Did she tell you that, with no diagnosis, there is no insurance?”

“She mentioned it.”

“Right, so, everything we’ve had to pay for, and I mean, Brax would only eat real particular foods for like five years, and Callie had him on all this holistic stuff, and vitamins — she had him do acupuncture, we’ve had speech therapy, we’ve had play therapy — I’ve paid for all of that. I mean, we’ve paid for it. Not cheap.”

“I understand.”

Mike hesitated. “So . . . we instituted this system where we would check how much time he spent on his laptop — which he just got for his 13
th
birthday. Two hours a day. Three on weekends. Some people might think that’s too much. Some people think it’s overbearing. It’s hard to get the balance, you know?”

Swift was listening, making the occasional note. He was also forming a picture in his mind of the way Mike and Callie Simpkins operated together in their marriage. Mike seemed like the worrier. A man with something to prove perhaps. This was just a gut observation, and Swift knew he was no psychiatrist. Speaking of which — and he made a note — each of the parents would probably benefit from seeing one, Callie especially. Callie was all guts and emotion and rubato. Mike seemed more intellectual, compromised by a guilt complex, along with some resentment about what his family were costing, which he seemed to feel, at least to some degree, was excessive.

“I understand,” Swift said again. “So you were checking up on the time Braxton spent on the computer and you . . .?”

“I’m not proud of it, you know? We had guests over for dinner. You know, the woman I’ve got coming over. And all during dinner that night, Brax was a bit sulky, and then he made some crass remark. I confronted him about this after the guests left. He got pretty upset, and made a comment about going to go live with his biological father. Then we got into it, and I questioned him, and found out that they’d been corresponding. After that I did a little searching and found out that the guy’s got a little HVAC business not far from here. But this guy, man. You know?” Mike shook his head and stared off now into times past. “The things he did to Callie; what he put her through, and what he put that baby through at such a tender age. Man . . .”

“He was violent?”

Something fierce came across in Mike’s gaze. “Oh yeah. That fucker was violent alright.”

Mike ducked his head and glanced across the room in the direction of the rubbery cartoon voices. He made a face as though his hand had been caught in the cookie jar. Swift saw it was due to his use of forceful language. Then the anger returned. “Yeah, he was abusive.”

“A drinker? That type?”

“Yeah, but more so other things. A huge temper. Violent. Mental problems. Drugs.”

“Like what?”

“Oh . . . Callie told me so many things when we first got together. It took a long time for her to recover. I had to be patient. You know, she was pretty sure he was bipolar. OCD, all of that. Had to have everything just so. When the baby came, he couldn’t deal with it. To messy, too disorganized. Callie is . . . I like to call her Madam Chaos. Somehow she keeps it all together. One of those people who has a method to their madness, you know? Tori, though, he medicated himself. Speed, that sort of thing. To the hyperactive sort, speed actually mellows them out.” Mike looked away, and Swift could tell he was longing for his wife.

“I’ve heard that.” He made a note then looked up. “Sounds like Callie and him were mismatched.”

“You ain’t kidding.”

“So . . .”

Mike got back on track. “So, I was checking on Braxton’s computer one night; the time-check thing. He was in the other room, or something. And he’d left his email open. I just . . . I looked. I saw a thread of emails between the two of them. Tori talking about all these things, how he wanted Braxton to come stay with him, how his mother hadn’t told the truth about him, all that sort of stuff. Calling her a liar, basically, and me an imposter. It really got under my skin. So I wrote back. Stupid. I know it wasn’t right. But I wrote back, I identified myself, saying that this was wrong, to be getting into the kid’s head like this. I don’t know. I don’t know what I said. And him, I mean, he was online right then and there because I sent the email and was looking through other stuff and an email came right back. And there was that same old temper, threatening me. So. I threatened right back.”

Swift was very still. “What did you say?”

“I said I’d hurt him.”

Swift waited.

“I said I’d kill him.”

There it is.

Mike suddenly grew animated, defensive. “I know it was too much. I was so shocked by it, and hurt, and . . .”

Swift was nodding. “I understand. Well, we’ll have a record of all of this, we can piece it together when we go through Braxton’s laptop. We . . .”

But Mike was shaking his head. “It’s deleted.”

“What? As of when? How do you know?”

“I checked this morning. Before your guys came in.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I said I would kill the guy. I thought about him, when, you know, when you first came to the door about Braxton being out there. I panicked, and I’m sorry.”

“Did Braxton see the email you had sent? Did Tori continue to correspond?”

Mike grew quiet. He wouldn’t meet Swift’s gaze. “No. What I said was, the whole thing I said was, if he continued to correspond, or tell Braxton I intervened, I would call the police, I would do everything in my power to wreck him, his business, everything, anything. That if he wrote back again, I would kill him.”

“So he never wrote back.”

“No. I checked.”

“When you got on the computer this morning. After we notified you about Braxton’s death.”

“Yes.”

Swift calculated all of this. “And you think maybe Braxton was affected. Did his mood change after that?”

Mike’s chin started to tremble and he hung his head again. He nodded. “He’d been keeping it from his mother, but I could see it. I know it affected him. Made him depressed.” Mike’s hands flew up and covered his face. “Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus . . .”

At that moment, Swift’s phone buzzed in his pocket. It hadn’t seemed to stop for the past four hours. Mostly he’d been ignoring it. But he decided to take this one. He couldn’t bear watching Mike Simpkins fall apart.

* * *

Swift stepped out of the room, leaving Mike sagging against the kitchen counter. He answered the call.

“We’re about to open this road back up to the public.” It was Brittney Silas.

Swift walked to the front window of the Simpkins place and looked west up the road. He couldn’t see the core scene from here, and the lights were subdued in the grey daylight. Soon the troopers would be pulling out, and the massive plows would come through, scraping the roads down to salty rubble.