Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Page 18

  “What?” Lulu asked, coming up behind us.

  “I know that guy.”

  “You’ve probably seen them at church. Good churchgoers, that family,” Elias said. “Decent pledge, too.”

  But no, I hadn’t noticed him at St. Martin’s. I was staring at the man who had interrupted me when I was talking to Sam Humphries. The man, identified as Anthony Salazar under the photograph, was Sam’s boss, the sergeant. I bet he would shit if he saw this video. Or maybe he already had, and that was why he assigned Sam the Rookie to investigate Joe Neilsen’s death. Maybe Ken had a point.

  * * *

  I left the Manwaring family sorting out their issues and walked back to the church, intending to stop off at the columbarium Elias had told me about to see where Joey was laid to rest, as long as I was there. As I walked I called the Tucson Police Department, said I was helping to investigate a case for Anthony Salazar, and asked for his e-mail address at the office. Then I called up YouTube, entered Ken’s user name, and sent Salazar the link to the video of his son choking the kid I identified as Joseph Neilsen, now deceased. I wrote that I wanted to see him. Salazar would have my phone number from the message but I added my e-mail address for good measure. This evening at the Salazar house should be interesting, I thought.

  I was thinking about this when I reached the columbarium, found the black wrought-iron gate in the middle of the high white adobe wall, and walked through. The first thing I noticed was four crosses made up of individual polished marble tiles, each about seven inches square, many engraved. Presumably urns containing ashes lay under each tile.

  The second thing I noticed, sprawled in front of a tiled concrete bench tucked against the wall nearest to the gate, an empty cup next to him, the coffee forming a pool for a number of dead ants, was Adrian Franklin. It seemed the emergency services had forgotten to check the columbarium.

  Poor, cute, friendly Adrian. We wouldn’t see his blazing, bad-boy smile again. All he wanted to do was find a change of scene where he could mourn his wife and make a few friends who wouldn’t constantly remind him of her. Moved all the way to Arizona. Came to St. Martin’s for peace. And found the afterlife instead.

  Thirty–three

  I had made a nine-one-one call, followed by one to Elias, followed by one to Carlo letting him know I’d be home a little late. I was glad Gemma-Kate hadn’t picked up the phone. I wasn’t ready to hear her voice just yet.

  Manriquez was there, joined by the man I had only an hour ago come to know as Tony Salazar, father of Peter, husband of Ruth. Elias was there, too, nearly hysterical, and very distracting.

  “Oh my God, it’s that man,” Elias said.

  I had decided to keep my mouth shut unless I was asked a direct question. Elias provided the name of the deceased. Adrian Franklin. “I remember his name because he asked me to make him a name tag.”

  Salazar had told them to go back home rather than tramp around and possibly spoil some footwear-impression evidence. But he and Lulu stood outside the columbarium, hanging on to the wall surrounding it like they dared not let go.

  “What is going on here?” Elias asked no one in particular. “Accidents. Somebody poisons my congregation. Now this.” His gesture indicated that this was the potential new pledging unit dead on his property. “Is it a hate crime? Who hates Episcopalians? We’re one hymn shy of Unitarian, for Christ’s sake!”

  Tony Salazar must not have received the YouTube link of his son choking Joey Neilsen. He just glanced at me, acknowledging we’d seen each other before. And if he didn’t know who I was when he saw me with Humphries a few days ago, he knew now when I told him my name.

  “Ah, the mighty Quinn,” he said with a wink.

  “Heard that one,” I said.

  He asked me to please calm Elias down while he and Manriquez did a death scene assessment.

  “Good thing you can identify him,” Salazar said, “because he doesn’t have any ID on him.”

  “You have to find where he’s staying,” I said. “He told me he has a dog, and it may have been locked inside for more than a day.”

  We could have all guessed that the body was collateral damage from the poisoning the day before, and it didn’t take the ant crawling out of one of the nostrils to confirm that he had been dead nearly twenty-four hours, but it was Manriquez’s job and he did it. “I don’t see any other signs of violence. We’ll take him back to the lab and run the test for ethylene glycol. I wonder why he was the only one to get a fatal dose.”

  “He comes out here to enjoy his coffee in peace, passes out, gets missed by the paramedics?” Salazar said.

  Manriquez nodded. “Not a bad scenario. With half an ounce and no treatment it would have taken just a couple hours to succumb. Maybe I’ll find something else.”

  I still kept my mouth shut through all this. I hadn’t even called Manriquez this morning because I didn’t want to be asking too many questions given that I suspected my niece might have …

  * * *

  What do I do now, Marylin?

  Maybe the spirit of Marylin had my back just then, because I thought about the video I had seen at the Manwarings’. Then I thought about the way Peter Salazar had stared at Gemma-Kate in the church the day before. What was that look? Was it I can do more than poison a dog? Maybe it was a false hope, or maybe I had locked on to Gemma-Kate too soon. What if?

  I took Manriquez aside while Adrian Franklin’s body was being zipped into a body bag and loaded into an ambulance. I wanted not only to get some answers but to begin the process of casting suspicion on Peter if it was warranted.

  “Do you know about the Choking Game?” I started.

  “A.k.a. the Fainting Game? Space Monkey? Sure.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Epidemiology, mechanism, what?”

  “Just talk to me. I’ll figure out if it’s worth it.”

  “There was a poster session at the NAME conference in Baltimore last year. They figure maybe a thousand kids die every year as a result of the game, but the figures could be higher because if they do it alone it can be mistaken for suicide. I had one case last year that was definitive because there was another kid involved who did the maneuver and confessed.”

  “I saw how they do it to each other on a video. What exactly happens?”

  “Pressing on the carotid artery presses on baroreceptors that cause—”

  “You’re not speaking English again, George.”

  “You know how they say when you’re exercising you shouldn’t take your pulse by pressing your fingers against your neck because you might pass out?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like that.”

  “Can you kill someone that way?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is it obvious?”

  “No. It’s hard to pin the cause of death on that.”

  Now for the information plant. I said, “Let me ask you another question. How well do you know this Sergeant Salazar?”

  “Some. All-right guy. Why do you want to know?”

  “You know that death I’ve been investigating, Joe Neilsen? I just watched a video of the sergeant’s son playing the Choking Game with Neilsen. He said his dad taught him to do it.”

  Manriquez whistled. “Well, that’s awkward.”

  Thirty–four

  My new suspicion of Peter was a long shot, and on the drive home I realized it might be wishful thinking. After all, the poisoning at the church only happened now, after Gemma-Kate arrived. And there was the toad. My spirits dropped again.

  When I walked in the house she and Carlo were having a quiet tête-à-tête in the living room. He was sitting in his reading chair, his book turned pages down over the arm. Gemma-Kate sat cross-legged at his feet like a disciple. Carlo smiled at me; Gemma-Kate turned to look and smiled, too, just like Carlo. I felt my face get hot with anger.

  “What’s wrong?” Carlo asked. I had the feeling the two of them had been talking about what happened at the churc
h the day before; he wanted to glance away, but I was holding his eyes. I forced mine away first and went into my office, where I took a minute to google the name Adrian Franklin. Some hits but none that suggested a restaurant owner in Gainesville, Florida. Didn’t mean much, some people really are nobodies.

  Carlo had followed me. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he demanded.

  I came back into the living room. They were both watching me now. If I’d been feeling better I might have used more subtle interrogation techniques. “Okay, the situation just got bumped up a couple notches. It’s not just a nasty prank where everybody got to drink whisky and was sent home except for the poor woman who broke her leg. Somebody from the church died.”

  “Who?” Carlo asked, looking simultaneously shocked and relieved that I wasn’t the one in imminent danger. “That dear old lady?”

  “Adrian Franklin.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I found him in the outdoor area where they stow people’s ashes.” I was watching Gemma-Kate as I said it. “You and Peter have been out there.”

  Gemma-Kate hadn’t gotten up from the floor. She didn’t speak, but she stopped looking bland. Her eyes turned into twin black holes that waited to take in whatever the world gave them. What she wasn’t doing was claiming innocence. Like me at the church earlier in the day, she was keeping her mouth shut and waiting.

  “Did you do it?” I asked.

  “We need to call someone,” Carlo said.

  “And tell them what?” I said, without taking my gaze away from Gemma-Kate. “Did you do it?”

  “No!”

  “Stand up.”

  She did. I grasped the sides of her face between my hands so she couldn’t look away, and I hoped for once to see truth in those eyes. I tried to get a grip on myself. “Honey, listen to me. He was a nice man. A man who was grieving for a dead wife, and came here to begin life again. He had just adopted a Labrador retriever. He played handball. This man just lost the rest of his life. Can you hear what I’m saying? I understand this was an accident, and I’ll help you deal with it. I don’t want to turn you in, but I swear I will if you don’t tell me the truth now.”

  She tried to get her head out from between my hands, but I found myself gripping her harder and I wasn’t going to let go now if she broke her jaw.

  She sensed this, went still, said quietly, “You don’t know anything, and I’m not going down for something I didn’t do.”

  I felt Carlo’s hand on my shoulder. It had a tentative feel to it, as if he somehow knew I knew my business in matters like this, but could not force himself to stand by observing uselessly.

  My cell phone rang. I let go of Gemma-Kate’s face, went to the front hall, and leaned over to retrieve the phone from the tote bag I’d dropped on the floor. When I stood up a wave of dizziness went through me, a black and white checkerboard effect in front of my eyes, and a feeling of being hot and cold at the same time. Must have been moving too fast, because I still got to the call before it went to voice mail.

  “Anthony Salazar,” the voice said, without a hello. “I need you to come to the office tomorrow at ten.”

  “About?”

  “It’s sure not about that bullshit video you sent me, whatever the fuck that’s about.”

  I hung up, regretting that I’d sent that video of Peter choking Joey and gotten on Salazar’s bad side at an inopportune time. I told Carlo and Gemma-Kate I’d be going downtown to talk with the police.

  “Anything you want me to tell them, Cupkate?”

  “Yeah. Go ahead and tell them I buried a fucking toad and that proves I poisoned everyone at a church. Then tell them you’re nuts.”

  Her round full eyes closed into quarter moons and she disappeared into her room. I called after her, loudly enough to get through the closed door, “And with his father being who he is, I better not catch you talking to Peter Salazar anymore.”

  Gemma-Kate yelled back, “First you think I’m psycho, and now stupid. Fuck you!”

  It felt like the run-up to a war and, with Quinn against Quinn, the outcome was unsure.

  Thirty–five

  Gemma-Kate managed an apology for telling me to fuck myself, and we ate a subdued dinner together, poached salmon with a tahini sauce. I took my pill and wondered when it would make me feel happy. Holding on tight to normal, Carlo and I took our evening walk, me holding the leash for the female Pug and talking about whether she missed her brother.

  He was silent for an awfully long time.

  “What?” I asked him. And because he was taking what felt like forever to respond I said again, “What?”

  “What a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into,” Carlo said.

  “We meant well, bringing her here. You meant well defending her. This could have happened in Fort Lauderdale as easily as here.”

  “I can’t see what to do,” he said. “Can you?”

  I remembered another time when I didn’t trust Carlo to be able to deal with hard things. Right now in the midst of this horrible dilemma I felt a rush of love for him, that I could say anything. That I wasn’t alone. I’d never had a partner before, in any sense of the word. I told him how strongly I felt about being true to Marylin and how that meant not throwing Gemma-Kate under the bus.

  “I can’t believe she did this on purpose,” he said.

  “I can’t either. Even accidental it’s serious enough we could be looking at prison time. At seventeen she’ll be tried as an adult. But, like she said, there really is no evidence, just my suspicions. If there is any evidence I want to be the first one to find it.

  “Perfessor, the complicated thing is, I want to be wrong. I want Gemma-Kate to be innocent of putting that antifreeze in the coffeepot. Not only is she family, but I’ve seen the kind of fallout this causes. One family is going to be ruined forever, and I want it to be Peter Salazar’s family.”

  Carlo didn’t know everything I’d been thinking. “Peter?”

  I nodded but didn’t bother to explain just then. “I want that real bad. But one step at a time. It was good I found the body, because now I can go downtown and see what I can find out tomorrow. I’m glad Salazar has asked to see me, because interviews can go both ways. Then we’ll decide,” I said, putting a little emphasis on the we. I meant it, too; I had learned to be a couple, not just singular, and would depend on Carlo for whatever wisdom I lacked. “It’s still chilly.” I wrapped my sweater more tightly around me, and found it did no good.

  “I was just about to say it’s a little warmer than it has been at night,” Carlo said.

  We were nearly back to the house when I stopped walking. Not because of any choice, but simply because I felt as if my body had turned to stone. I wanted to pick up my right foot and take a step, but my foot wasn’t having it. The chill I had felt a moment before had increased rapidly to the point that my teeth were chattering. They were the one part of my body that was moving, though without any more control on my part than my walking.

  Without realizing I was stopped, Carlo had continued ahead several paces, turned to me to say something, and noticed I wasn’t there. He waited for me to catch up, maybe thinking the Pug was sniffing the gravel, then must have noticed it straining at the leash, its tongue lolling in impatience to go on. He still didn’t say anything, just watched me for a few seconds as if I must have a perfectly good reason for stopping.

  “Carlo,” I said. I was glad that at least my voice was working.

  He must have heard that it was not my normal voice. He came back to where I stood but still didn’t think to offer aid. He peered into my face, our head lamps making it impossible to see anything that close. He took mine off so he could see better. “Is something wrong?” he said.

  Even then, feeling myself shivering from the inside out yet unable to move, I tried to make light of it. “May I take your arm?” I asked. He gallantly offered it, perhaps thinking I was only being playful.

  With that physical or psychological advantage, I can’t tell whi
ch, I was able to get my forward momentum going again until we reached the house. Carlo left me to put the leashes and our head lamps back onto their shelf in the laundry room. I stood in the living room, with the sound of the television coming from what seemed like far, far away. The volume increased, faded, and increased again as if someone was toying with the controls or my hearing was awry.

  Gemma-Kate must be watching television, I remember thinking. It vaguely annoyed me that I couldn’t figure out what program it was. I wanted to speak to her, but found that when I opened my mouth nothing would come out. I think the last thing I remember is swaying, my legs melting under me. Darkness.

  Thirty–six

  Oblivion is nice, in its own way. It’s what we seek nightly when we go to sleep, it’s that desirable feeling that the sodium pentathol is doing its job of putting us “under.” It makes me wonder sometimes why we dread it so. Maybe it’s the assurance of waking up afterward that makes the difference, for better or for worse.

  But what a pleasant thing to think that, along with the nicer aspects of living, there would be a time when none of those regrets, doubts, or fears would slither up from wherever they dwell in our minds. This, I suppose, is the lure of suicide. There was the case of the child who had to go back to the father who had been molesting her, a breach of justice that makes the thought of a second Flood seem like a good idea. My colleague who had been in charge of the case was trying to deal with his failure to save the child. I thought he was talking about her when he said, “God never gives you anything you can’t handle.”

  I was feeling crabby, can’t remember about what anymore, and had no spare sympathy that day. “If that was the case, no one would ever commit suicide,” I said, lightly.

  Three days later my colleague shot himself. I should have been more sensitive that day, and asked, at least, whether he was talking about the child or himself.

  When I came back from my own little death, I found myself in the bathtub, still dressed, but soaking. That was not so pleasant. Carlo and Gemma-Kate were kneeling next to each other at the side of the tub, watching me intently. Carlo’s intentness was a little worried, while Gemma-Kate’s made me feel oddly like a specimen of alien life.