The Absence of Mercy (27 page)

“Oldest boy,” Danny said, and with that he stepped out of the car and headed into the station, where it was warm.

Sam Garston sat back in his chair. The two detectives exchanged glances, but neither of them spoke further. Their phone call had caught him in the middle of dinner. Was he available to speak with them? “Of course,” he'd said. “What's up?” Perhaps it was better if they spoke in person, Detective Schroeder had suggested.

“Well, I'm not heading out again unless it's an emergency,” Sam had replied, glancing out through the kitchen window at the sleet that had begun to fall. “You boys might ‘s well meet with me at home, if it needs to be tonight.”

And so the two younger men had driven through mostly deserted streets and had trudged up the walkway to their boss's front door.

“Cold out tonight,” Carla observed, ushering them in. “Interest you men in some hot coffee? Freshly brewed.”

Neither one of them had to think twice about
that
.

Having heard them out, Sam now turned his head to the right, his eyes studying his own living room wall. It was sparsely populated with photographs he'd taken over the years, mostly from the few vacations he'd managed during the course of his adult life. Those vacations had been short and all too infrequent. He and Carla had simply been too busy most of the time, distracted with a parade of unending duties and obligations. Their world had been small and neatly packaged, just the way they liked it. He just hadn't thought of it that way until recently. Lately, though, Sam found his thoughts turning with increasing frequency toward retirement, and he wondered with a sort of tentative excitement what it would be like to return to a place in his life where his options once more seemed far greater than the sum of his responsibilities. It wasn't far off now; he could feel it. In the meantime, there remained a few unresolved matters that demanded his attention.

“We'd better be damn sure about this before we start hauling people in for questioning,” he said at last. “If we're wrong, the situation will be . . .” He searched for the right word. “Irreparable.” He looked at them both to make certain they understood. “Ben Stevenson not only has a close working relationship with this department, but he also happens to be a personal friend of mine.”

“A fingerprint match would clinch it,” Schroeder noted.

“No. I don't want the boy brought in for fingerprinting until we're reasonably certain.”

“A search warrant of the house would likely yield sufficient prints from the kid's bedroom,” Danny suggested, “in addition to anything else we might find.”

“I'm not serving Dr. Stevenson with a search warrant of his home based on an observation
you
made from a photograph,” Sam told him, shooting an irritated glare in Detective Hunt's direction. He tried to tell himself that it wasn't Hunt's fault. He was simply doing his job—a job Sam himself had assigned him to do.
You have to follow the evidence where it leads,
he reminded himself,
no matter whose door it takes you to.

“Why don't we petition a judge to order the release of the kid's dental records, now that we have someone specific we're interested in?” Danny suggested.

Sam considered it for a moment. “There are three local dentists in town,” he replied. “We don't know which one he goes to. We'd have to ask the judge for a court-ordered release of records from all three. That's going to raise some local interest. It's the kind of thing that's hard to keep quiet in a small town.”

“How likely is it, anyway,” Carl wondered, “that he's had recent dental imprints made, and that a physical casting would be available to send to the forensic odontologist. It would be a gamble that might very well turn up nothing.”

“I don't know, Chief,” Danny sighed. “A limited search warrant of the home may be the most straightforward approach here—just to get fingerprints from the kid's room and to take a quick look around. If we're right, we've got him. If we're wrong and the prints don't match, we apologize to the doc and trust that, given the gravity of the investigation, he'll understand.”

“I'd really like to avoid that if we could,” Sam responded. “I mean, what's your degree of certainty here? I know Thomas Stevenson. He's a good kid: smart, athletic, very likable . . .”

“Fits the profile,” Carl observed.

Sam traced his thumb across the leather armrest of his chair. “You really think he's responsible for murdering and desecrating those kids, for attacking Monica Dressler? You think he's
capable
of that?”

“We won't know unless we check it out, Chief,” Carl said. Truth be told, he was somewhat surprised by his boss's reluctance to pursue this lead.

“But what does your
gut
tell you?” Garston asked. “You think he actually did it?”

Carl shrugged. “Lord knows, I don't want it to be him any more than you do. But just because we don't want it to be so, doesn't mean it isn't.”

“Why don't you try the high school,” a thin voice proposed from the kitchen, and Carla Garston's frame appeared in the doorway. They all turned to look. “I'm sorry,” she told the detectives. “I know I'm not supposed to be eavesdropping. But after twenty-eight years of marriage, I can say with relative certainty that my husband will end up discussing this with me later tonight anyway. It saves him the trouble, if you think about it.” She raised her hands in a half shrug, as if to say,
Gentlemen, let's not quibble on the details
. “I hope you'll excuse the interruption.”

“What do you mean, ‘try the high school'?” Sam asked, nonplussed by his wife's interjection.

“For prints,” she responded, drying her hands on a dish towel.

“Carla, do you have any idea how many sets of prints would be covering that place?” her husband asked incredulously.

“Not that many,” she replied. “You just have to limit your search to a finite area.”

“Such as?” Detective Schroeder asked.

“The door to his locker, of course.” She disappeared into the kitchen for a moment as she returned the towel to its rack near the oven, then rejoined them in the living room. “School grounds are county property. That should alleviate your search warrant predicament. Plus, the building's empty for winter break. You could be in and out of there without disturbing a soul, except for maybe the janitor who could locate it and unlock the door for you.”

They looked at each other, each considering the idea and finding it basically sound.

Carla shrugged. “Seems like a good starting place, anyway,” she said. “Care for a refill on that coffee, Detective Hunt? Detective Schroeder? I still have half a pot here that will go to waste if you don't drink it. Sam's doctor says he's not allowed to have caffeine before he goes to bed. He's been struggling with a little insomnia lately.”

“I don't think the detectives need to hear about
that,
Carla,” Sam advised her. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“It's no secret,” his wife replied. “With the bags you carry around under your eyes some days, I'm sure any detective worth his rank could deduce as much just by looking at you.”

“I'll take some more coffee, ma'am,” Danny Hunt said with a grin. “I can drink a whole pot and sleep like a baby. Got used to it in college, I guess.”

“I should've known you were a college boy.” She smiled at him and refilled his cup. “No wonder you're so smart.”

Danny was twenty-seven, and still had the tendency to blush an embarrassing shade of magenta when the situation called for it.

“Criminal justice major, I presume?” Carla inquired.

“No, ma'am. Philosophy with a minor in biochemistry.”

“Ahh. All the makings of a fine detective,” she said, turning to refresh Carl's mug as well. With the pot empty and a reasonable course of action now decided upon, she excused herself to get ready for bed.

“Thanks for the pictures.” She spoke into the cordless phone cradled between her neck and shoulder. She stepped into her bedroom and closed the door for privacy.

“You're welcome,” he replied.

“I wish I was there with you.” Monica went to her computer and scrolled through the digital photos Thomas had e-mailed her that afternoon. Her favorite was a picture of him standing on a rocky outcrop overlooking the impressive expanse of a valley far below. Thomas was turned at an oblique angle to the camera, such that half of his face was highlighted by the light of the setting sun, while the other hemisphere was lost in shadows. The rocky landscape had taken on a deep ruddy crimson complexion, and the soft orange sky hovered in the background like an artist who chooses to add a few remaining strokes to a work he knows is already finished, simply because he cannot bear to pull himself away. She touched the photo with her thumb, stroking the side of his face. “When do you come home?”

“Three days. You think you can wait until then?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you'll have to go find some other guy then.”

She smiled. “I don't want another guy. I want you.”

He was quiet for a moment, and Monica crossed the room, sitting down on the side of her bed. She ran her fingers across the sheets, thinking about the day they had lain here together, his deeply tanned arms wrapped protectively around her while the afternoon unfolded splendidly around them.

“What've you been doing since I've been gone?” he asked.

“Nothing exciting,” she said. “Schoolwork and physical therapy, mostly. They've got me jogging on a treadmill now. Three days a week for thirty minutes.” She grimaced. “I hate running.”

“You shouldn't. You're good at it.”

“How would you know?” she said, a reflexive note of challenge in her voice. “You've never seen me run.”

There was a slight pause. “No, but you're good at everything,” he told her. “I'll bet you're fast as hell when you want to be.”

She had a brief image of herself hurtling through the woods, her breath coming in ragged, terrified sobs—and then it was gone.

“Not fast enough,” she said, standing up and walking to the window. She pressed her fingers up against the glass. The front yard was still blanketed in heavy drifts. Tree branches spread their naked fingers toward the sky.

“Listen, I've gotta go,” he said. “Hang in there. I'll be home in a few days.”

Don't go yet,
she felt like saying.
We can talk for a little while longer, can't we
? She pressed her lips together and remained silent.

“I'll call you tomorrow,” he promised. “Okay?”

“Okay,” she replied, her voice faltering a bit on the last syllable.

She listened to the receiver until the connection was lost, until the mechanical voice on the other end told her that if she would like to make a call she could hang up and try again. She thumbed the off button and placed the phone on the desktop beside her, but remained standing at the window for a long time, looking out at the bleak afternoon. Except for a few parked cars, the street outside was vacant, devoid of the children who so frequently played there. These days everyone was being careful. Her eyes wandered across the stillness of front yards and driveways, overturned sleds lying lifeless and abandoned in the snow. From her vantage point behind the protective pane of glass, the scene suddenly struck her as offensive, almost obscene—as if she'd unexpectedly come across a dirty magazine sitting on the dresser in her parents' bedroom. She had the urge to turn away, to pretend she hadn't noticed.

“It'll be okay,” she told herself, but she wondered now if it ever really would be—for any of them.

These days she wondered about that a lot.

It was Monday afternoon. The cold snap had finally decided to relinquish its hold on the region, and the snow and ice that had collected on the frozen ground almost a month ago had now, at long last, initiated its inevitable metamorphosis toward oblivion. Trillions of rivulets of muddied water set out on their sluggish, unhurried journeys into sewer drains, streams, ponds, reservoirs, and even into the porous flesh of the earth itself. The white landscape that had maintained a constant presence during the past few weeks now gave way to patches of brownish, puddled muck. Tree limbs, unencumbered of their heavy loads of frozen precipitation, stretched out their wooden spines as if straightening themselves at the end of a long day of stooped, hunchbacked labor, and the spines of many of the town's residents bent to shoveling sidewalks newly freed from the thick layer of ice that had rendered the concrete walkways nearly impossible to clear only a day before.

So it was that Sam Garston found himself sitting in his office watching the snowmelt dribble past his window in large pregnant drops from the station's roof down onto the sidewalk below. He had gotten a call from the lab less than an hour ago. Several of the prints they'd collected from the Stevenson kid's locker that morning had matched those found on two of the three victims. (The body of the last victim, having been buried in the snow for several weeks, hadn't yielded any salvageable prints at all.) “Was there any question about the match—any doubt in the analyst's mind?” Sam had asked. “Not much,” the man on the other end of the phone had replied. The error rate of the software program they used for such purposes was about one in 1.6 million. That didn't leave a whole lot of room for wishful thinking.

That had been enough to request a search warrant of the Stevenson residence, which Judge Natalie Grossman, presiding over the Jefferson County Courthouse that day, had granted them. Detectives Schroeder and Hunt had gone to pick up the document and would be contacting Sam in his office as soon as they had it in hand. He'd already notified Larry Culver from the FBI of their findings and pending search of the home. The bureau would send its own forensic team to assist them with evidence collection. The Stevenson boy would be arrested on-site and taken in for questioning. The rest of the family would also need to be questioned, however painful that might be for Sam personally. It was important to ensure that the boy had acted alone.