Too Close to Home (18 page)

“Maybe,” Derek said, his voice weak, “maybe the phone was wrong or something.”

“You think Penny’s phone was wrong, too? Because it shows a call coming in at the exact same time as the Langley phone shows a call going out. She said your cell was breaking up, so you had to use a land line.”

“You don’t understand,” Derek said. “Okay, maybe I was there but—”

“Derek,” I said, “don’t say anything.”

“What do you mean,” Ellen snapped at me, “telling him not to say anything? He didn’t have anything to do with this!”

“That’s right,” he said, his eyes beginning to water. “I didn’t. I swear.”

“But you were in the house, weren’t you, Derek?” Barry said, his voice taking a more conciliatory tone. “It started out innocently enough, am I right? Go ahead and tell us. Penny filled me in a bit.”

“It was just, it was . . .” A look of hopelessness came over his face. “Okay, the thing was, I had this idea, because the Langleys were going to be away for a week, if the house was empty, it would be this great spot for me and Penny, you know, a place for us . . .”

“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Ellen said. “What the hell were you thinking? What did you do? Did Adam give you a key?”

The tears were coming down his face now. “We just wanted a place we could go. When I was leaving, I said goodbye to Adam, I made like I was going out the back door, but then I snuck downstairs and hid in the crawlspace until they were gone. That’s all. And after they left, I came out, and I called Penny a couple of times, but she had been grounded. She was in trouble with her dad because she dented their car, you know? That’s all.”

“Okay,” Barry said, almost friendly, like he understood. “I can see all that. It sort of makes sense. So that’s where you were the whole time, hiding in the basement?”

“That’s right.”

“You weren’t anyplace else in the house?”

“Well, I wandered through. The kitchen and stuff. And I was in Adam’s room before they went away.”

“Anyplace else?” Barry persisted.

Derek shook his head in frustration. “No!”

Barry nodded, then, almost offhandedly, pointed to Derek’s left ear and said, “Did you used to have a stud or an earring there? I can see the little hole.”

Derek held his ear briefly between his thumb and forefinger, just as he had in the truck a few days earlier when I’d noticed the peace sign stud he used to wear was gone.

“I don’t know what happened to it,” he said.

“Okay,” said Barry, again adopting a softer tone, “but then, when the Langleys came home, unexpectedly, because Mrs. Langley got sick, they must have been pretty pissed to find you in the house. More than pissed, I’ll bet. Pretty goddamn furious, is my guess. And then something happened, I can totally see how a situation like that could spiral out of control. Did Mr. Langley threaten you, come at you or something? He had a bit of a temper, am I right?”

“No,” Derek said. “No.”

“It’d be pretty embarrassing, getting caught hiding out in your best friend’s house. They must have felt pretty betrayed, Mr. and Mrs. Langley. Maybe even Adam. Or was Adam in on the idea? Did he know what you were going to do?”

“No, Jesus, no, he didn’t know.”

“So he must have felt pretty pissed, too,” Barry surmised. “You didn’t just go behind his parents’ backs, you went behind his, too.”

“Okay! Fuck! I know!” Derek said, his cheeks flushed. “It was a stupid, shitty thing to do. I’m really, really sorry.”

You dumb kid,
I was thinking,
you dumbass kid.

But I said, to Barry, “There, you see? He did a stupid thing, and he’s admitted it, but that’s where it ends.”

“No,” said Barry, still looking at Derek, ignoring me, “there’s more, right? They came home, found you, and you panicked. You had access to a gun, maybe a gun that was in the house—”

“No!” Derek shouted. “No! I didn’t do anything! Someone else did it! Not me!”

“Then who was it, Derek?” Barry said. “You know who it was?”

“No!”

“Barry,” I said, “can’t you see he’s upset? Ease off a little.”

He turned and looked at me. “I don’t like this any more than you do, Jim.”

Derek was almost sobbing now and Ellen had taken him into her arms. “Look what you’ve done,” she said to Barry.

The detective ignored her. “Okay, Derek, you say you didn’t do it, but we’ve got you placed at the house right around the time the whole thing went down. But you didn’t see who did it. You can’t have it both ways.”

“I never saw anybody,” he said. “I was hiding.”

Barry was shaking his head sadly when one of the tech guys who’d been upstairs appeared in the kitchen. He was using just a finger and a thumb to hold a shoe. One of Derek’s many pairs of sneakers.

“Detective Duckworth,” the cop said, and turned the shoe around, displaying the sole. He pointed to a dark smudge near the heel. “Bingo,” he said.

Barry leaned in for a closer look. “You sure it’s blood?” he asked.

“Pretty sure,” said the cop. “And once we get a DNA test done, we’ll know a hell of a lot more.”

Neither Ellen nor I seemed to be breathing at that moment. But Derek was sobbing, muttering under his breath, “No, no, no . . .”

“Barry,” I said.

Then Derek said, “I didn’t see anything. But I heard it! I heard them come in! I heard the shots! I heard all of them die! I swear to God!”

Barry appeared unmoved.

He said, “Derek Cutter, I’m arresting you for the murders of Albert Langley, Donna Langley, and Adam Langley. You—”

“Barry, Jesus,” I said. “He admits he was there. Listen to him for Christ’s—”

“Jim, please,” Barry said, holding up his hand. He continued. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and you can have that attorney present during any questioning. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you.”

He took a set of handcuffs from his belt, turned our son around, and cuffed him.

It seemed to me that our world, at that moment, more or less ended.

TWENTY-ONE

D
EREK WAS ARRAIGNED the following morning. Ellen and I had been up all night, first just dealing with the shock of his arrest, then scrambling to find our son legal representation. Under other circumstances, of course, we would have gone straight to Albert Langley. We knew him, we trusted his reputation, we knew he knew his stuff.

Not exactly an option at the moment.

Nor did we feel we could call on anyone else in Langley’s firm. Who would want to defend the person charged with the murder of a colleague and his family? And besides, even if someone Langley had worked with agreed to represent Derek, we didn’t want to take any chances there might be underlying animosity. So Ellen put in a call to some people she knew from Thackeray, asking for recommendations, and came up with the name Natalie Bondurant. Eight years working as a criminal defense lawyer in Promise Falls, and according to at least one person Ellen talked to, a “smart cookie.” We put in a call to her service sometime around nine, and she called us back before ten.

I laid it out for her over the phone, my voice shaking at times. Then she had a number of questions for me, which I tried to answer as succinctly as possible. Her questions were clear and direct. She managed to cut through the emotions that were overwhelming us, got us to focus on the facts, to try as best we could to view the situation rationally, even if it was impossible for us to see it very objectively.

“So the police have no weapon,” she said. “That’s a problem for them. Unless they find it, in which case that could change things.”

“They won’t find it,” I said. “He didn’t do it.”

Natalie Bondurant chose not to argue. “It weakens their case. Your son had opportunity, he was there, that’s bad, but he has no record of violence—”

“He was in a bit of trouble once. He went joyriding with a friend, who’d taken his dad’s car without permission, and the car got smashed up. Another time, he was caught with some friends playing on the roof of the school and—”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about those things. They’re a far cry from killing three people in cold blood. But I think there’s more to this than meets the eye. The police are saying your son killed the Langleys because they discovered he’d hidden out in their house, but I don’t know. That doesn’t strike me as much of a motive. I’m worried they haven’t played all their cards yet. We’ll have to see. I’m going to want to talk to this Penny Tucker, find out exactly what Derek’s state of mind was when he talked to her on the phone from the house. I’ll have a chance to speak with him tomorrow morning before he goes before the judge, but I don’t think you should expect he’s going to get bail. He’s a suspect in a triple homicide. The state’s case may seem weak, but until we knock it down, I don’t think he’s going to be allowed out.”

Ellen, on the bedroom extension, said, “What’s going to happen to him? In jail? Is he going to be safe there?”

“I’ll talk to some people. Given the nature of the charges, I think it’s more likely he’ll be put in a separate cell, rather than with the general population.”

I knew Ellen was thinking what I was thinking. Our seventeen-year-old boy sharing a cell with grown men being held for God knows what. I didn’t want to think about it, but all I could do was think about it.

“There’s going to be a lot of media attention, too,” Natalie warned us.

“What do you mean?” Ellen asked.

“An arrest in a case this big, it’ll be a mini-circus outside the court. All the Albany media will be here. Probably a contingent from New York, as well. It’s going to be bad.”

“Oh God,” Ellen said.

“You have cell phones?” We gave her the numbers. “Because if I need to get in touch, I’ll call one of those. Your house phone, you’re going to reach a point where you’re not going to want to answer it. You may want to unplug it altogether. Media, crank calls, threats, the whole gamut. Don’t watch the news. The cops still have someone on the Langley house, it’s still a crime scene, they may keep the media from your door. I’ll talk to Barry and see if that’s possible.”

Barry. Like he was going to do us any favors.

As though reading my mind through the phone line, Natalie said, “He’s an okay guy. I’ll see what I can do. Also, there’s the matter of money. I don’t come cheap.” She outlined her fees. “It could go on for a while.”

Ellen, who looked after the finances in our house, said, “Okay. We’ve got some IRAs we could cash in, but not that much.” I could feel her desperation and hopelessness coming through the line from our upstairs bedroom. “I’ll start looking into that tomorrow.”

“Okay,” said Natalie. “We’ll talk then.”

NATALIE BONDURANT WAS RIGHT. Derek didn’t get bail. She gave it her best shot, said Derek had no prior charges or convictions, came from a good home, was not a flight risk, but the judge would have none of it. He acceded to the prosecution’s request that Derek be held without bail. He was charged, said prosecutor Dwayne Hillman with much fanfare, in the most horrific murder case in the history of Promise Falls. Surely, if ever there was a case where bail should be denied, this was it.

In court, Ellen wept. I did my best to be stoic.

Derek, standing next to Natalie in the high-ceilinged prestigious courtroom, seemed smaller, almost childlike compared to the day before. In beltless jeans and a T-shirt, his hair an oily mess, he stared down at the floor, his shoulders hunched forward, as though he’d caved in on himself. If this was how he looked after only a few hours in jail, how would he look after a week or, God forbid, after—

I couldn’t let my mind go there.

He tried to give us a small wave, with his wrists cuffed together in front of him, as he was led to a door near the front of the courtroom.

“Derek . . .” Ellen said. “Derek . . .”

Neither Ellen nor I had slept, and we looked it. Ellen had aged ten years since Friday, before any of this madness had begun. And I was running on empty.

Natalie met us in the courthouse hallway. It was our first face-to-face meeting. She was black, mid to late thirties, tall, maybe six feet, short black hair, dressed in a conservative blue suit. Her solemn expression gave us no reason for optimism.

“Okay,” she said. “There was no way they were going to let him post bond, no matter what the amount was. No surprise there. They’ve got him in a cell of his own so he’s away from the other prisoners most of the time.”

I looked at Ellen. She was dying inside.

“We don’t have anything back yet on the blood on your son’s shoe, but we’re assuming it’s going to be Adam Langley’s. Your son admits he had to step over him to get out of the house, and must have stepped in some blood. He left a small trail of it, heading in the direction of your house. They’ve also taken a DNA sample from Derek, which isn’t exactly surprising.”

She gave us a more detailed account of Derek’s version of the events. How he’d hid out in the Langley home in the hopes that he and Penny could rendezvous there all week. How Derek was trapped inside the house when the Langleys returned unexpectedly, how he hid in the basement, how not long after that someone else came to the house and shot Albert and Donna Langley, and then Adam as he tried to escape by way of the back door.

Derek told his lawyer that someone came down to the basement while he hid behind a couch, holding his breath, fearing for his life. Derek slipped out once he was confident the killer or killers were gone.

“I can’t believe he kept all this to himself,” Ellen said.

“He’s a teenager,” Natalie said. “Scared of whoever murdered the Langleys, maybe even more scared of you two, and the trouble he’d get into by admitting he was in the house, how he came to be there. He said you’d told him”—she was looking at me now—“that after the incident at the school, when he was jumping from roof to roof, that the next time he did something dumb, you’d throw him out on his ass.”

I remembered that.

“Still,” said Ellen, “for something like this, he should have known he could come to us.”

Natalie paused, then said, “There’s something else that might be a problem.” Neither Ellen nor I said anything. We weren’t up for even more bad news. “The police are looking at links between the Langley killings and two others in the Promise Falls area in recent weeks.”

“How?” Ellen asked. “What do you mean?”

“The police say the gun used to kill the Langleys is the same one that was used to kill a man named Edgar Winsome out back of the Trenton bar, nearly a month ago, and another man, Peter Knight, about a week before that.”

“I don’t know either of those people,” I said. I did have a vague recollection, however, of Barry Duckworth mentioning these cases to me on Sunday.

“But you said the police don’t have the gun,” Ellen said. “How can they know the same gun was used?”

“You’re right, they don’t have the weapon,” Natalie Bondurant said. “But they have the bullets. And the ones taken from the Langleys match these other two cases. Do you know of any connection between your son and these two men?”

“Nothing,” I said, at almost the same moment Ellen did. “They want to blame those murders on Derek, too?”

“They’re not saying that. But the cases are linked by the ballistics reports. It’s a part of the investigation and you need to be aware of it. I want to keep you informed. That’s the way I do things.” She must have judged, by the looks on our faces, that we needed a pep talk. “Look,” she said. “The whole rah-rah thing is not my specialty. I’m not going to tell you there’s nothing to worry about. There is. But the case against your son is far from perfect. It has holes, and I think Barry knows it. The motive, as it’s been laid out so far, is weak. And as far as how you’re bearing up, you have to know that this is the worst time. You’re still in shock. Your world feels as though it’s falling apart. But hold it together. Your son needs you. And believe it or not, there’s actually some good news.”

Ellen and I both blinked. “What?” I asked.

“Well, if we accept Derek’s story as gospel, that he was in the house at the time of the murders, that he actually heard these executions take place, and that he slipped out of the house without being seen by the perpetrator or perpetrators, the good news is, your son is alive.”

Ellen and I exchanged looks and held each other. I’m sure neither of us had looked at it that way yet, that Derek was fortunate not to have ended up like the Langleys. I said, “And
do
you accept Derek’s story?”

Natalie Bondurant waited a moment, looked me in the eye, and said, “I was going to say it doesn’t matter. My clients don’t have to be innocent for me to defend them. But I think Derek’s giving it to me straight.”

“Shouldn’t Derek be telling all this to Barry?” I said. “What he heard? I mean, maybe Derek heard something, anything, that might help Barry find out who really did this. Because there’s still someone out there, someone who killed the Langleys.”

“Barry’s aware of all of this,” Natalie said. “But right now he figures he’s nailed this one.” She paused. “Derek did say he heard one thing.”

“What?” Ellen asked.

“ ‘Shame,’” Natalie said. “He heard a man say ‘shame.’”

Ellen and I looked at each other, not knowing what to make of that.

I reached into my pocket for something I’d brought along with me from home. I handed the disc, the one Derek had used to make a copy of
A Missing Part,
or as Brett Stockwell had called it,
Nicholas Dickless,
to Natalie Bondurant.

“What’s this?” she asked, Ellen watching as I placed the disc in her hand.

“Just hang on to it for me,” I said. “For safekeeping.”