Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Read online

  I nodded.

  Mallory came back, and we stopped talking about her. She had pulled herself together again, and the Mallory I glimpsed gulping Valium in the bathroom was safely under wraps. “You’ve got an appointment with Neilsen tomorrow at ten. Will that do?”

  “That’s fast,” I said.

  “I’m sure he wouldn’t do it for anyone but me,” Mallory said. “Bit of a pill pusher, but they all are. Brilliant diagnostician. I told the nurse what symptoms I noticed at lunch.”

  But she wasn’t thinking about me. She had turned to Owen, placed her hand on his heart, then on hers. She turned to Annette, and they discussed having a respiratory therapy specialist and a med tech come in to check the ventilator for malfunction, leakage, flow setting, trigger sensitivity, and other things I can’t remember. Once again I was impressed by how knowledgeable Mallory had become. That completed, she turned her focus back to me and said to Annette, “Darling, do you know where that lavender wrap is?”

  Annette thought she did, and left the room.

  Mallory watched her go. “Annette is so efficient.” Knowing Mallory as I did, the word didn’t sound altogether like praise, more like there was a dash of doubt thrown into the mix. I wondered what else Mallory would share with me about Annette when she was ready. I wondered what else I didn’t know.

  “She seems to think you’re wonderful.”

  Annette walked in with a boneless white rabbit. “There, I heated it up in the microwave.” She draped the rabbit around my shoulders. It was comforting and warm and smelled of lavender. It made me aware of the knots in my muscles as they relaxed. If only it could stop me from seeing things.

  Twenty–four

  Despite feeling like hell, and jarred by what I had witnessed at the Hollinger house, something I would probably have seen before now if I lived there, I continued downtown to keep my appointment with Detective Sam Humphries.

  He had his own small office in the Tucson Police Department. I sat down in the chair next to his desk when he went off to bring me some coffee, and checked out his room. It was neat, without any personal items or clutter, like he hadn’t been in it long. A thick manila file folder with a tab that had NEILSEN typed on it was on the desk. When he returned, with the coffee and a little chewy bar he said someone had brought in (nice touch), I found he matched the office.

  Sam Humphries: Just out of a cop’s uniform and looked like he still felt odd moving about in the dress khakis he now wore as a detective. Sitting with his knees apart so he wouldn’t wrinkle the pants. The kind of kid you want to say “Hello, son” to even if you’ve never had one of your own.

  I kept my voice soft with only a dash of suck-up so he wouldn’t think I was being sarcastic. The gentle grandmother persona. “Thanks for taking the time to see me, Detective Humphries. I used to be in law enforcement myself, so I know what it’s like on both sides. I’d so appreciate anything you’ll tell me.”

  He paused, first savoring the sound of the word “detective,” before he said, “Call me Sam.”

  “Brigid,” I said.

  So far so good. I was fairly open about my conversation with Jacquie Neilsen. “I met her socially and we got to talking. She’s having trouble acquiring any closure on her son’s death.”

  “She called me a few times. I felt bad, but there wasn’t anything more I could tell her. We had the same conversation every time, and then I stopped returning her calls. It’s a job for a psychologist, you know?”

  I gave a deep nod. You and I are sympatico, my friend. “Not that you’ve been anything but professional. Jacquie has just been so addled about what happened that night, and any information she’s had she’s not satisfied with. Not your fault or anything. I’m just sort of reviewing everything so maybe I can put it in words she’ll accept, you know, woman to woman…” I let my words dwindle out in a vague way.

  He was unpretentious about the case having been his first as a death scene investigator. Joked about having to take a laminated checklist with him that he kept in his pocket. “It was pretty straightforward,” he said. “All in here.”

  I took the folder he handed me and tried to keep it from fluttering in my hands. There were photos taken of the patio area, and all the rooms upstairs and down, but no body. Sometimes you already know the answers, but you ask the questions anyway. Sometimes you’re surprised with a different answer the fourth time you ask. “You didn’t see the body at the scene?”

  Sam shook his head. “They probably should have left it there, but it was taken in the ambulance.” He shuffled through the photographs and came up with one. “Here’s the body at the morgue. The medical examiner took it. I was just called in after that.”

  “The same night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you go through the house?”

  “Sure, here’s all the photographs. That was some entertainment center they have. Bigger than my whole house,” he said. “And did you see the fireplace?”

  “Pretty impressive.” I looked impressed.

  “I talked to my boss and found out the trouble with drowning incidents is that it’s hard to reconstruct what happened. I mean, you have water and no matter how hard the victim struggles, when it’s over it’s still just water, you know? And no mangled machinery or skid marks like in a traffic fatality. I even looked for blood trails like the manual said to, and didn’t find anything. Hell, with the low humidity even the flagstones on the side of the pool where the father tried to resuscitate him were pretty dry by the time I got there.”

  “The father, Dr. Timothy Neilsen, he said you grilled him good.” I added a nod for affirmation.

  He took it as a compliment. “Since he was the would-be rescuer I went over the whole thing with him several times, like, you know, ‘show me.’ We walked in the door together, and he tried to re-create all his moves, into the kitchen, turning on the patio lights because it was all dark except for what he had turned on in advance with his smartphone.”

  I find that if I jump in with questions that are off track, to prevent an interviewee from delivering a canned message, sometimes I can get interesting information. So I asked, “No paraphernalia, no ligatures indicating some sort of autoeroticism…”

  “Nothing like that. But if someone does want to do it, all they have to do is hold their breath underwater, right?”

  The kid was learning fast. “Right,” I said.

  Humphries studied the photo of the pool area upside down. “Who knows, maybe he was trying it for the first time and that seemed the best spot.”

  I turned the photos until I got to a morgue shot. Joe’s jeans were unzipped but not pulled down from his hips, and his briefs were in place. What had happened between the time he pulled down the zipper and the time he drowned, that kept him from doing anything more? It seemed odd to me. “Did you ask whether anyone changed the scene? I mean, you know, not to cover anything up, just embarrassed, or wanting to preserve dignity. Say, pulling his pants back up.”

  Sam looked pleased with the questions so far and his ability to answer them, as if I were administering a test. “The manual … I mean, yes, I did ask, and his father said no.”

  “Stepfather,” I corrected.

  “That’s right.” I tried to note in his voice if there was any doubt, any defense, but he seemed very relaxed. I, on the other hand, noticed my knees were bouncing a bit and put my hands on them to steady them without making an excuse for it.

  I got back to the story. “I heard from the parents, but I’d really like to know the professional view of what happened that night.”

  Humphries had to take a minute to review the report, apologizing that he’d forgotten much of it, it being so straightforward and all. Such a polite young man. He partly told me what he remembered and partly read it from the report he had typed up following the investigation. “The father, stepfather, being a physician he knew what to do. He tried CPR. Then he called nine-one-one but confirmed the boy was already deceased when he arrived home ar
ound eight thirty in the evening.”

  “What’s the time of the nine-one-one?”

  Humphries checked his crib sheet again. “Looks like eight fifty.”

  “It took him twenty minutes from discovery of the body to placing the nine-one-one.” I raised an eyebrow.

  “I know, I went over all that, too. He accounted for every minute. He showed me how he walked into the pool—”

  “He didn’t jump? Like Oh my God I have to get to the body?”

  “No telling what people are thinking at a time like that, but no, he showed me how he went to the steps, walked into the water. He said he took his sandals off then because they were slowing him down. He pulled the body, it was unresisting at that point, back to the shallow end, dragged it up the steps … he knocked the head on the edge of the steps and caused some bruising, but that was the only spot. Did CPR, but the lips were already turning black and a foam column was coming out of the mouth.”

  “Sounds like Dr. Neilsen knows his drowning.”

  “Sounds like.”

  “So we got maybe ten minutes max so far. What about the other ten?”

  “He said he went into the pool with his cell phone, panicked. When he tried to call nine-one-one it wasn’t working.”

  “Did you check it?”

  “Yep. They don’t have a landline. He went to a computer they keep on the kitchen counter and he texted the friend who had dropped him off at the house. That was the person who called nine-one-one. Emergency services were there in about seven minutes.”

  “So time of death was…”

  Sam checked his notes again. “Body temperature at the morgue guesses time of death around seven, seven thirty P.M.”

  “Given the water temp.”

  “That’s right, that was taken into account.”

  “So even with the father delaying the nine-one-one call, the kid had been dead at least an hour.”

  Humphries nodded, and the movement of his head made my focus blur slightly. Then I was aware of him speaking. “Ms. Quinn, are you all right?”

  I felt as if I had zoned out for maybe a second. “Of course.”

  “I’m sorry, but you seemed to have … gone away, for a little bit.”

  I ignored him. “No, I’m fine. What was time of death?”

  He looked at me funny. “Around seven, seven thirty P.M.”

  “What about before that? Was it a school day? A weekend?”

  “This was a Monday, September, Labor Day. Joseph had the day off from school. He was in the house from the afternoon on. His parents left around the same time, separately.”

  “What about friends? Was he with friends that day?”

  “He didn’t have friends. He wasn’t what you’d call liked.”

  My brain suddenly rebooted. “How do you know that?”

  Humphries stuttered. He was covering, and he slipped. This was what I was here for, but I wouldn’t get anywhere pressing it now. I let him go and he went on quickly, but repeating himself. “Father at a sports bar with a friend, one of the other doctors in his office. Mother at her book club. Deceased alone at home. Like I said, father gets home first, finds boy’s body floating facedown in the pool.”

  “Did you see the boy’s mother that night?”

  “The stepfather tried to call her, but her cell wasn’t on. The body was removed to the morgue. He was glad she didn’t have to see it that way. Kept saying thank God he was the one to come home first. I hung around until she came home, questioned her, but she was a mess. Understandably, I mean,” he added, trying to be sensitive. “She kept saying to the stepfather ‘What have you done?’ but as far as I could see he hadn’t done anything wrong. It was just grief talking.”

  “How long before she came home?”

  “I was there till about eleven. She came home around ten.”

  “Did the father say all the doors were locked when he got home?”

  “I asked that, too.” Once I hadn’t followed up on his slip about Joe not being liked, Sam was back to the guy who was acing his oral exams. He wasn’t minding my questioning at all. His whole demeanor seemed to say Bring it on. “Except for the patio door they were all bolted from the inside. Father came in through the garage.”

  I remembered Gemma-Kate asking about other people knowing the garage door passcode. I asked the same thing. “Not that he knew,” Sam answered, but his eyes shifted. One point lost.

  “And you don’t think there’s any way it could have been suicide.”

  “I talked with the paramedics and the medical examiner. If it was going to be suicide he would have done something to keep himself from coming to the surface, some weight around himself, cuff his wrists, something. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to commit suicide enough to stay underwater until you stop breathing.”

  “Or homicide, staged to look like accidental.”

  A man appeared at the open door of the office, on cue to save Humphries from having to push an answer out of his slightly slack mouth. The man was big in the chest, suited and tied, and looked authoritative. Didn’t ask who I was. Didn’t look at the folder in my lap as anyone would have done, out of curiosity. Just focused on Humphries. “I need to talk to you,” he said. Then he walked away.

  “Yes, sir,” Humphries said as the man disappeared.

  “The sarge?” I asked.

  Humphries nodded. He stepped out of the office, which left me to go through the folder and skim the rest of the report. This being his first death investigation, Humphries was indeed as thorough as you could get. Besides taking photographs of all the rooms in the house, and several angles of the pool area, he had also done meticulous sketches showing the path Tim had taken through the house, and where the CPR had been performed. It was so cute I wanted to pin it to a refrigerator.

  In a few minutes Humphries came back, apologizing that his boss had some work for him. He held out his hand for the file. Though he didn’t say anything, it was impossible for us both to ignore the fact that I had bled on it a little. I looked down to see I’d been worrying my cuticles again without realizing it.

  I said, “You should get a new folder. There’s blood on this one.”

  I considered shaking his hand in a heartfelt way and then figured he probably wouldn’t want to. So I just stuck my hand in my pocket, where I could wipe the blood from my thumb, and pulled out a business card, which I placed on his desk. Would he please call me if he thought of anything else?

  He said he would. I was sure that was the last I’d hear from him if I didn’t initiate a meeting myself.

  I left the police station and sat in my car a bit, clenching my jaws so my teeth wouldn’t chatter. Definitely I was off coffee from now on. For at least a while. The rest of the day, anyway. The brain farts were a bit more problematic, and they were coming more often. But just now the temporary dementia was at bay as my brain clicked on all cylinders.

  Stepfather comes home. While processing his stepson’s drowning in the swimming pool, attempting resuscitation, and calling emergency services, is careful to note and report all the doors bolted.

  Sam could not be certain that no one else had the passcode for the garage door.

  Jacquie hadn’t mentioned Tim had tried to phone her but her cell phone was off. Did he? Was it?

  Had Joe Joseph Joey really been there and alone all evening as the report said? Were any interviews conducted with associates to corroborate that? And where was he the rest of the day?

  And how had Humphries arrived at the conclusion that Joe was not well liked? Was it enough to walk away from a kid in distress and let him drown?

  Those were just my initial tidbits of interest, little questions that had never been asked by this responsible but rookie investigator who had never processed a death scene before, let alone the more challenging scene that a drowning entails. Sure, it was all probably simple, just what they decided it was, accidental asphyxiation with possible autoeroticism. No known motive or opportunity for anything more dramatic or
sinister. But I was beginning to understand Jacquie’s suspicions along with her guilt. It was all just a little too simple, the investigation having a few holes. The extreme care taken to preserve her from the horror. I wondered who that really benefited.

  I called her. “Jacquie, I just talked with Sam Humphries.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s the detective who did the death investigation for Joseph,” I reminded her. “There may be a few holes to fill in, but it wasn’t bad. He was more thorough than you remembered.”

  “What holes?”

  “Did Joseph have friends? At school? Who were the boys you mentioned that night we met?”

  Skipping past the question about school friends, Jacquie went straight to my second question. “They were in his youth group when we attended St. Martin’s. Ken was all right, Joey said he was nice to him. Peter used to tease him. Do you think there’s something to that?”

  “I’m trying not to lock on any suspicions just yet. I’m still fact-finding. How much do you know about those kids?”

  She told me not much, that Joey didn’t spend a lot of time with the youth group, he was more of a quiet, stay-at-home kind of kid. Daydreamy, imaginative, creative. Maybe a little introverted.

  I told her I’d get back to her when I had some news, and she thanked me. In her thanks I felt her isolation, as if I was the only person left in her world. One world, two kinds of crazy women. That was the kind of odds that attracted me.

  Twenty–five

  Because the police department was close to the medical examiner’s office, I stopped in to see if George Manriquez had been able to find any results of a tox test on Joseph Neilsen’s blood sample. As I’ve said, Manriquez was one of my favorite people, sensitive to relatives of victims, and more sensitive to his patients when he really didn’t need to be. If I was dead I’d want him to do my autopsy. As it was I’d had to drag myself to get to his office, though I was feeling just a tad more like myself.