Murder One (40 page)

Loving rushed into the conference room carrying a cordless phone. “Skipper—we got a phone call. From Sergeant Matthews.”

“What does that son of a—”

“It’s not for you,” Loving said breathlessly. “It’s for Keri.”

Slowly, Keri’s head lifted. “Wha—”

“They’ve found your brother.”

“Kirk?” Her lips and mouth opened, in a strange, mixed expression. “Where is he?”

“He’s on the roof of the Bank of Oklahoma Tower. And he says he’s going to jump.”

T
HREE ARMED POLICE OFFICERS
led Ben and Keri through the cordon surrounding the Bank of Oklahoma Tower which, at fifty-plus stories, was the tallest building in Tulsa. They took the elevator to the highest level, then rushed up the stairs to the roof.

When Ben emerged through the hatch, he felt as if he had entered another world. Two helicopters were hovering overhead, casting focused beams of light on the otherwise dark tableau. Police officers were swarming over the roof, though they kept a respectful distance from the lone man at the far edge. Only one plainclothes officer stood within twenty paces of the man, an electronic bullhorn dangling from one hand.

Arlen Matthews, of course. Flung into Ben’s face once more, like a cancerous scab that just wouldn’t heal.

The whole scene was all too eerie for Ben, too reminiscent of the night he had been arrested—the copters, the cops, Matthews. That night, of course, it had been a show Matthews and his buddies put on to scare and intimidate him. This time, however, it was all too real. Kirk Dalcanton stood poised on the edge of the roof threatening to jump. One baby step is all it would take. He could do it long before anyone got close to him. No one could possibly stop him.

“Get him!” Keri screamed, as soon as her eyes had adjusted enough to understand what she was seeing. “Someone stop him!”

“They’re trying, ma’am,” a nearby uniform explained. “But there’s not much they can do. He says if they come any closer, he’ll jump. And he looks like he could do it.”

“How did he get up on the roof?” Ben asked.

“No clue,” the officer replied. “We think he must’ve snuck in during office hours, then hid in the stairwell till after most of the security officers got off. But that’s just a guess.”

“But why here?” Ben asked. “There must be other places where it would be easier to kill yourself.”

“Easier, yes. But few more certain.” The officer cast his gaze toward the horizon. “If he takes that step off the edge of the building, ain’t no power on earth that can save him.”

“Someone has to help him!” Keri cried. “Please!”

Officer Matthews spoke into his bullhorn. “Kirk, your sister is here.”

The effect on Kirk, on his lone silhouette poised on the edge of space, was immediate. “No! Send her away! I don’t want her here!”

“Kirk, she cares about you.” The electronics made Matthews’s voice seem weird, inhuman. “She doesn’t want to see you come to any harm.”

“I said, keep her away! I—I don’t want her to see me like this.”

“Then come away from the edge. Let us take you home.”

“There’s nothing for me there. There’s nothing for me anywhere.” All at once, Kirk fell to his knees. “It’s all over for me.”

“Don’t talk like mat, Kirk. It’s never over. Not unless you make it over.”

Ben watched the terrifying tableau from the rear. Keri clung tightly to him.

“What’s going on?” Ben asked her. “Do you know what he’s so upset about?”

Keri did not immediately respond.

“Keri?” He took her by the shoulders and lifted her up to his eye level. “Keri, if you know something, you’ve got to tell the police.”

Her voice was quiet. “I know what’s wrong with him.”

He pulled her closer. “Keri, does this have something to do with the case?”

He was interrupted by Sergeant Matthews. “Can you give me some hint what to say to him? Something that might persuade him to step away from the edge?”

Keri hesitated before answering. “Tell him he’s forgiven.”

“Forgiven? What did he do?”

She shook her head. “Just tell him—tell him it doesn’t matter anymore. That it’s all over.”

Matthews frowned. “Could you give me a little to go on here? The more information I have, the better able I am to do my job.”

“That’s all I can say.”

Matthews frowned, then returned to his previous position, the closest he could come to Kirk without sending him into a panic. “Kirk … listen to me.”

Kirk’s head jerked up. “What?”

“Kirk … you’ve been forgiven.”

“You’re wrong,” he shouted back. His face was wet, illuminated in the cascading beams of light from the helicopters circling overhead. “I can never be forgiven. No punishment is enough. Even God has turned His back on me.”

“Now listen to me, Kirk, I don’t know what church you went to, but when I was growing up, they taught me that God never turns His back on anyone. We’re all sinners. But God forgives us.”

“Not this time.” His eyes slowly turned toward the edge of the building. “Not now.”

“Don’t do anything crazy, Kirk. Let’s just talk awhile. There’s no hurry.”

“It’s over,” Kirk said, monotone. He inched closer to the edge. “Time to end it.” His body swayed back and forth, teetering on the brink.

“Kirk, listen to me!” Matthews was turning one way, then the other, looking anywhere for help. “We’ll do whatever you want. We’ve got your sister here. Look, I’ll send her out to talk to you. She—”

“
No!
” he shouted, and a second later, he was gone.

Ben and Keri rushed to the edge, just in time to see his body dropping out of sight, drifting downward like a skydiver without a parachute, plummeting silently out of their view toward the harsh reality of the pavement fifty stories below.

“
Kirk!
” Keri screamed. She fell, her face cradled in her hands. Ben knelt beside her, steadying her, holding her tight. “
Kirk!
”

But it was much too late. No one could do anything for Kirk now, not Keri, not Ben, not Sergeant Matthews, not even God. There was nothing in Kirk’s future now but a cold hard death and, if Father Danney was right, the afterlife, which no matter what form or shape it took could not possibly be crueler to Kirk than the life he had finally left behind.

It was hours later, back at police headquarters, before Keri had recovered sufficiently that she could even speak intelligently. Her face was red and swollen from crying. Her eyes were so weary she could barely keep them open.

“Come on,” Ben said, wrapping his arm around her. “Let me take you home.”

She shook her head, with what little energy she had left. “No. We need to talk.”

“About … us?”

“About the trial.”

“Keri, I don’t think this is the time. I’ll get a continuance—”

“I can testify now.”

Ben stared at her, lips parted. “I don’t understand …”

“I can testify now. I want to testify now.”

“But you said before—”

“Don’t you see?” She raised her head and her eyes turned upward, pleadingly, toward the heavens. “Everything has changed now. Everything.”

T
HE COURTROOM WAS QUIET
as a funeral as Keri Dalcanton took her place in the witness box. To say that there was some interest in her testimony was like saying there were animals at the zoo. All eyes were focused on Keri. Everyone had the same suspicion as Ben—that the outcome of this trial would depend on what happened in the next few minutes.

Judge Cable had called a two-day recess after Kirk’s death, and he had explained to the jury that the defendant had unexpectedly lost her brother, so Ben knew they would have some understanding of the altered figure who now sat before them at center stage. Keri’s eyes were bloodshot and lined in red; too much crying and too little sleep. Although she had usually conducted herself with calm and sobriety in the courtroom, there had also always been a bounce in her step, a liveliness in her eyes. She was nineteen, after all. But not today. Today she moved with slow care, like the flow of a river, heavy and deliberate. She sat before the jury unadorned, almost as if she was helpless to do anything but respond to the questions put to her—the questions that she told Ben she could now answer truthfully, for the very first time.

“When did you leave Stroud and come to Tulsa?” Ben asked, after they finished the preliminaries.

“Just after the Level Five tornado hit. Little over a year ago.” Her voice was flat and uninflected, and yet at the same time packed with raw emotion. “It had been a hard year. For both me and my brother.”

“What had happened?”

“We … lost our parents.” Again, the fact that she was not overtly emotional, that she was obviously fighting it back, made what she had to say all the more tragic. “They were young—early fifties—but there was a tragedy. A traffic accident. They were driving late at night and a truck came out of nowhere at an intersection and—”As she paused, Ben could almost see the strain, the furious energy it took to suppress her anguish. “They were killed instantly.”

“Where did that leave you?” Ben asked.

“In a mess. Kirk and I didn’t know what to do. I was only eighteen, then—I hadn’t even finished high school. We both worked at the Tanger Outlet Mall. For two kids living at home, that was fine. But once Dad was gone—and there was no insurance—we couldn’t make ends meet. And then after the tornado hit and destroyed the mall—” Her head drooped slightly. “Well, that just seemed to be the killing stroke. There was nothing left for us in Stroud. So we came to Tulsa.”

Ben kept the pace of the questioning slow and easy. She was doing great so far, but he knew it would not take much to push her over the brink. “That must have been a difficult decision.”

“To leave everything you’ve ever known and come to an unfamiliar city full of strangers? Yes, you could say that.” She looked up, and for the first time, a tiny spark of fire seemed to light in her eyes. “At the same time, it was an adventure, if you know what I mean. We were starting fresh, leaving the pain of the past behind.” She paused a moment. “I heard what that … psychologist said about me, about how the repeated traumas and the change of environment unbalanced my mind or something. But she’s got it all wrong. I still had Kirk, and I had my head together, and it’s not as if I was moving to the moon, after all. I had to get out of Stroud. If I’d stayed, I would’ve been much worse off. Even now, I still know that.”

“What happened when you got to Tulsa?” Ben asked. He appreciated her unwillingness to play the martyr, and her defensiveness about being called crazy, but at the same time, if the jury was going to sympathize with her, they needed to understand the full horror of her situation. “Did everything go as planned?”

“No. Nothing went as planned. Everything was harder than I anticipated. Couldn’t find an affordable place to stay. Couldn’t find work. It seemed like the only jobs available were minimum wage—burger joints, that sort of thing. We couldn’t make it in Stroud on that kind of money—what were our chances of making it in the big city? Plus, Kirk wasn’t working at all. He was having some serious emotional problems. He took the death of our parents hard, and the trauma of the tornado even harder. He still talked to Mom and Dad as if they were in the room with us, and he used to sleep in the bathtub at night—because he figured that would be the safest place to be if a tornado hit. He had always been … confused, and everything just seemed to get worse for him. He was in a bad way. So there was no chance of him working. I was on my own.”

“That’s why you ended up working at a stripper club, isn’t it?”

“It was the only thing I could find that paid a decent wage—not counting those jobs that were illegal and a lot more disgusting than stripping. Contrary to what you’ve heard, I never worked as a hooker and I never would. I didn’t like stripping—it was humiliating and, frankly, hard work. Dressing up like a nurse or a schoolteacher or whatever, then peeling off your clothes in front of a bunch of drooling men. But it did pay enough to get a small apartment for me and Kirk. And some of the other girls became friends. I can’t tell you what a difference that made. Say what you like about those girls—when you’re all alone in the big city, it’s good to have friends. Any friends.”

“Were you happy at this time?”

“Happy might be stretching it. I was surviving. I was eating regularly. At the same time, I had zero security. One missed check would’ve been enough to put us on the skids. I started having trouble sleeping, worrying about what might happen if I lost my job.” She paused thoughtfully. “No, I can’t say I was happy. I was walking a very thin tightrope, and I knew that the tightrope could snap at any moment. Still, it was better than before.”

As always, Ben kept a careful watch on the faces in the jury box. They seemed attentive; they seemed to be absorbing what she had to say. There were no expressions of outright disbelief or contempt. At the same time, he knew that he was going to have to give them more than this if he hoped to undo the tremendous damage done by Andrea McNaughton and the rest of the prosecution case. “Keri, would you please tell the jury when you met Joe McNaughton?”

A tiny involuntary shudder signaled to all present that this subject was more difficult, more unpleasant than what they had previously discussed. But she dutifully pressed forward.

“It was about four months after I started working at the gentlemen’s club. He came in with a group of cop buddies. I’d seen him watching me while I did my act, but I didn’t think anything of it. They were all watching me. But there was something more … intense about Joe. Something that stood out in your memory.”

“Did you contact him during your … work?”

“Oh no. I finished my show in the usual way and forgot all about him. Until I left to go home that night, just after midnight.” A moment’s hesitation. “He was waiting for me in the alley behind the club.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Not at first. I ran back into the club and locked the door. I might be from Stroud, but I’m no idiot. When you find a man lurking in the alley, you run.”

“But that changed.”

“Yes. He talked to me, through the door. Assured me he wasn’t going to harm me or force himself on me. Showed me his badge. Said he’d seen me during the show and he’d been taken with me—that was his phrase. ‘Taken with me.’ He asked if I would do him the honor of allowing him to escort me to my car. He was really very charming. And in time … I gave into it.”