Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Read online

  Sixteen

  “Brigid,” he said, without adding anything about what a nice surprise.

  “Dr. Neilsen,” I said.

  “It’s still Tim,” he smiled, which came across more as a grimace. He glanced at the coffee table in front of the couch, noted my empty cup. “Brigid might like a refill,” he said to Jacquie. Now he kissed her on the cheek while she murmured apologies. He had missed her smile because she couldn’t hold it that long without looking demented.

  “No, I’ll do it.” He carried my cup into the kitchen-area section of the great room. “I’m having one, too,” he said without asking what flavor I wanted, popping another little self-contained package into the brewer and pressing the button.

  Jacquie had ducked her head and seemed ill disposed for further conversation at this point, so I turned a bit to observe Tim working in the kitchen. He went into a cabinet, took out a prescription pill container, opened it, and glanced inside without knowing he was watched. Was he counting Jacquie’s meds to see what condition she was in? I looked away. It only took a few more moments for him to fix two coffees. He added cream to his, handed me a mug, and went to sit down in a chair close by. He had come in relaxed, but that was already dissipating.

  During all this Jacquie had kept her head low, looking over some of Joe’s works of art. I got the sense she did that a lot. Now she looked up at Tim. Her mouth went straight and her jaw thrust up and out in a blink of defiance. “How was your golf game?” she asked late, showing how little she cared.

  He pretended she did. “Racquetball. Larry whipped my ass,” he said.

  It didn’t take any great intuition to see that Tim guessed my presence had something to do with their troubles, and that he wasn’t liking it. I could feel lines being drawn in the marital sand, both of them daring the other to cross. Someone had to speak, so I did. “Mrs. Neilsen wanted to talk to me in my capacity as a private investigator, about your son,” I said. “I know some people, and I know how to get answers that you don’t have.”

  A light, not pleased but enlightened, went on in Tim’s eyes as he said drily, “You mean, just like on TV.”

  “Brigid is an FBI agent,” Jacquie said.

  “Retired,” I said.

  “I heard,” Tim said.

  “She wants to find out what really happened to Joey,” Jacquie said, though I had said nothing of the kind. She made it sound like I had forced this meeting on her. The defiance had gone as quickly as it had come, pleading now in her eyes.

  I watched them lock in silent battle while I sipped my coffee to make it look like I wasn’t watching them. Even without having been in a relationship for most of my life, I still couldn’t mistake the kind of intimate warfare that only comes with marriage. I would have bet the farm that Tim would win, that Jacquie hadn’t enough will to stand up to the force of her husband, but I was wrong.

  Tim put his coffee mug on the table next to his chair. He closed his eyes. When he opened them they were glistening. He had given her this round. You just never know with people. I noticed for the first time how blue his eyes were, and how the watery sheen made them look like melting ice. But he didn’t touch her now, hardly looked in her direction. I remembered how attentive he had been the evening of the fund-raiser, how he had kissed her hand, had put his over hers, and how he might save that attention for times when it would be seen by more people. Perhaps this would be one of those men not given to private displays of affection.

  “Jaq,” he said. He turned to me. “We’ve talked about this before,” he said. “Many times.”

  “Well, since I’m here, and I’m not quite finished with my coffee yet, would you like to talk a little more?”

  Jacquie looked to Timothy to begin, but he sat with his mouth in a straight line, resisting. So she started again, telling me everything they must have told the police six months ago, repeating some of what she said when I first arrived and adding some new information. How Joey had seemed to be leading a relatively happy life until he hit his teens. How they had joined St. Martin’s in the Fields and were so happy to have found the youth group because Joey didn’t make many friends at school. Like Gemma-Kate, I thought, and wondered what else he might have in common with her. Science, I found.

  “Joseph talked to me about going into medicine, and we talked about the different fields. He was interested in neurology, maybe research,” Tim said, apparently warming to the subject despite himself, or else wanting to show me he knew something about his stepson just like a real father would.

  “He wasn’t really interested,” Jacquie said. “Joey just told you those things hoping you wouldn’t hate him because he was gay.”

  Man the torpedo stations. Stupid Jacquie, that’s no way to get what you want.

  Tim carefully kept his face turned in my direction, answering Jacquie’s accusation without addressing it. I wondered how much or little they actually knew about her son, and how much they really knew about themselves. He smiled before he spoke, but not at Jacquie. The smile wasn’t quite in sync with what he said next.

  “Has Jacquie told you yet that I found Joe’s body? Did she tell you how I dragged him out of the pool and called nine-one-one? Did she tell you yet how I was grilled over and over by a death investigator until I felt like I was being accused of murdering my stepson? I don’t suppose you know what it’s like to be on the other side of the law, do you, Brigid? To be suspected of killing someone.”

  “No,” I said. Everybody lies.

  “Did she tell you they even made me give them the clothes I was wearing when I went into the pool, as if they might be evidence? No, Brigid. We did everything the right way. We followed procedure. We cooperated,” Tim said, plaintively, as if life was rational and orderly, as if there was a right and wrong way to process a boy’s death if you knew how to plead just right. He seemed to be saying that the universe was now expected to do its part and operate his way. I wanted to respond that I had not yet suggested they did anything inappropriate or illegal. But I stayed quiet for now.

  “If you’re curious,” and his tone suggested that’s what I must be and it was distasteful to him, “you can read the official reports. I’m sure that investigator wrote it all down and it’s on file somewhere. Somebody like you should be able to get it. Frankly, when you look over the paperwork I think you’ll agree there’s nothing more to be done,” Tim said.

  “That’s not what she’s been saying at all,” Jacquie said, crossing her arms over her stomach.

  “I don’t think we should do this,” Tim said. The words were spoken singly, as if he was hoping they would exert sufficient power without communicating why. Was it that he couldn’t say it in front of me or couldn’t say it at all?

  “Why not?” Jacquie asked, and I had to admit I was beginning to ask the same question. “Are you afraid you’ll have to give back the life insurance money if Joey committed suicide?”

  Blam, another shot fired across Tim’s bow. For a mouse, she was very talented at the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf zinger, Jacquie was. Tim shot her an angry glance. She had pushed him past politeness. “Honestly, because I said we had done everything.” He turned to me. It’s interesting how people confuse professional investigators with confessors. Things they wouldn’t say to just anyone come out. “We’ve done the church route, and shrinks. She’s been to fortune tellers, for God’s sake.”

  “They’re psychics,” Jacquie said.

  “And talk about hedging your bets. She had me pay for the new air conditioner at the church we’re attending now. Like that would bring Joe back. Like God is a heating and air contractor who operates on trade.” He turned back in her direction. “Truthfully, that didn’t make you feel better either, did it?”

  He was losing his cool. I felt uncomfortable in the middle of what was escalating into a domestic. There was a poker by the fireplace but no knives in view.

  “But I need to know what happened.” Jacquie reached both her hands in my direction as if I she was
going under and I was a flotation device. “I was so stupid. Something was going on with Joey and I didn’t know and if I knew I could have stopped it, or done something differently. But there’s something I don’t know. Mothers sense these things. Maybe you can find it.” She seemed to hold her breath waiting for my answer.

  Tim was holding his, too, and something about that pissed me off a little, so I said, “Here’s what I can do. I know people and I know what questions to ask. Sometimes I can get answers that regular people can’t. I’ll find out if there’s anything at all you haven’t been told. Maybe there’s nothing else to know. Maybe then I can refer you to a support group. Maybe then you can begin to heal.”

  Jacquie wasn’t willing to let it rest. “There was never a blood test done. You know, to see if he was poisoned.”

  “I spoke with the ME, the medical examiner. He said he took blood and sent it to the lab, but he doesn’t have a report back.”

  “See what I mean? It’s been six months! Don’t you think there’s something suspicious about that?”

  “I know this sounds awful, but it happens that way sometimes. There’s no conspiracy.” I didn’t mention that Manriquez told me Tim asked him not to do an autopsy, that it would disturb his wife. It didn’t sound right now like that would have been the actual case. Jacquie sounded like she might have demanded one if she’d been given the chance. So I gave her some of the truth now.

  “Whether or not there was any controlled substance in your son’s blood, the medical examiner would still have ruled it an accidental death. They might have kept the blood samples, but if the tests haven’t been done by now, the blood would have metabolized any foreign substance, eaten it, if you will. There wouldn’t be anything to find.”

  Jacquie said, “What about exhuming his body and running more tests?”

  I explained a little about how only certain poisons, such as arsenic, gravitated to the tissues, bones, and hair, that in the course of embalming all the blood is removed so for something like prescription, street drugs, or alcohol, there wouldn’t be any evidence left even without the metabolism.

  “Well, what about arsenic?” Jacquie said, nodding so vigorously she appeared to want to influence my head to do the same.

  As she spoke I glanced at Tim to see how he was reacting to all this. He stood up as tall as he could to get the most out of his average height. Jacquie stood up and got between him and me. I never had a child, but I knew that a woman who would never stand up for herself would get between a mountain lion and her kid. Tim took his car keys out of his shorts pocket. “My wife is a huge fan of those CSI shows,” he said. “But I guess this show’s over. Excuse me, I’ve got some running around to do.” Then he left.

  He was right about the show. You could tell it was a script they had rehearsed before, probably often. They used to ask me how I could work among the criminal element, encounter evil without being broken by it. Well, the fact is we all get broken by it. We’re the walking wounded, dealing with the trauma through drugs, alcohol, sex, or psychiatry. Lucky for me I found Carlo rather than wind up like the Neilsens. I find myself more stunned by this cruel sadness than by the most heinous serial killer. It takes you by surprise no matter how much you know it’s the human condition, just under the surface everywhere.

  Seventeen

  Jacquie turned to me, more spent than triumphant, yet when she spoke her voice was surprisingly steady. “I still don’t understand why they didn’t do a toxicological test. They can do those in twenty-four hours, can’t they?”

  “Oh, Jacquie.” Seeing her desperation to create information where there was none, seeing how she was all alone in her need, made me want to help her more. “It really isn’t like on TV. They don’t just press a button marked Poison and the answer comes out. They have to test for all kinds of things.”

  She protested, “I know that already.”

  “And they get backed up. There are some larger jurisdictions that have literally thousands of DNA samples waiting for analysis. Even here in Tucson they prioritize. And the medical examiner felt one hundred percent this was an accident.”

  “I can pay you,” she said. “I have my own account that Tim gives me.”

  I said that wasn’t the point, but if she insisted on hiring me I charged one hundred and fifty dollars per hour with a five-hundred-dollar retainer. For that I would do some preliminaries, make sure that the investigation had been thorough, make a list of people who should have been interviewed, and let her know if I discovered anything. I asked her about whether she had found a support group, but she ignored me on that point, too.

  Jacquie left the room and came back with a check for a thousand dollars and a more recent picture she had of the three of them, full size rather than portrait. Joe was slight, and in this picture dark like Jacquie, hair nearly the same length and color. No similarity to his stepfather, of course; Tim’s contrasting paleness made him look something like a ghost in the background. Joe was toasting the camera with a plastic water bottle, and one of those smiles that people call ironic. His eyes squinted in the bright sun. He stood between his parents with his arm around his mother, a line of light between himself and his stepfather. “A handsome young man,” I said.

  “It was about five months before he died,” she said. “We had just dropped him off for a youth group hike in Sabino Canyon, when the weather was still nice. The pictures were posted on the St. Martin’s Facebook page. I printed it.”

  “Is the lighting different? His hair looks so much darker here than in the younger pictures you showed me. I would have guessed he was a blond, but sometimes that happens as children age.”

  Jacquie looked at it fondly. “No, he had just done his hair the same color as mine. It was a funny Mother’s Day present. So people could see he was proud we were mother and son.”

  God forbid someone should mistake him for his stepfather’s child, I thought, but said, “Is his biological father fair?”

  Jacquie nodded, looking a little sadder, but still staring at the photo.

  I said, “You don’t mind parting with this one?”

  She shook her head no.

  We spent some more time talking about all the details she knew of Joe Neilsen’s life, whether he got good grades, whether he was the sort of kid to get into trouble, again whether he had any friends—male or female—part-time job, credit card accounts, a learner’s permit. The answer to everything was a listless no. “We tried to get him involved with different things, like with the youth group at St. Martin’s, but he was more of a solitary boy. Wasn’t very interested in things outside the house.”

  “How comfortable were you and he with his sexual orientation?” I asked.

  “The Manwarings told you,” Jacquie stated with a frown. “I could tell when you didn’t react to what I said to Tim. It could have just been a phase, you know? Experimental, right? He could have been wrong.”

  Noting to myself that she hadn’t answered my question, I put an information form on the coffee table for her to fill out when she had a chance to look up some numbers and maybe remember other facts. I could spend a lot of time on this, but there were ways to prioritize the fact-finding, too. “Who did the death investigation?” I said. “Metro?”

  “Do you mean the police? I have a card he gave me. But I only saw him once. He really didn’t do anything. There was no investigation.” Jacquie had it ready, having assumed I would want it. I looked at the card. Sam Humphries.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. I would find out if George Manriquez was right about Humphries being thorough. “The ME said there was no autopsy performed.”

  “Not … a whole one. Tim said it wasn’t necessary, and he said the medical examiner agreed.” Jacquie rubbed her face hard with both hands. “His body was removed, pronounced dead. Funeral at St. Martin’s. That was the last time I was there. It all went so fast it’s hard to remember what actually happened. It’s as if…”

  “You haven’t yet been able to feel that J
oe is actually gone,” I finished for her, going into my head where there were other times, other parents.

  Jacquie opened her mouth and blew out all her air in one rush, my words punching her in the gut. I regretted them, but there was nothing I could do to soften the moment. She nodded. “He’s in his room,” she whispered, as if he could hear us talking.

  “Would you be able to show me?”

  Jacquie stood up, and I followed her for another walk, this time up a curving stairway that started in the living room, down a long hallway. It was one of those spaces littered with framed photographs, but I locked in on one of them. It was of all the Neilsens, costumed as the Marx Brothers. They had let Joe be Groucho, a diminutive boy with the glasses, nose, and mustache. He even had a cigar. Tim was Chico, an embarrassed smile, a brown wig under that funny coned cap. And Jacquie as Harpo, in a blond curly wig and openmouthed grin, pretending to blast a bicycle horn in Joey’s ear. That was all it took to see why Tim loved, or had once loved, her.

  We kept on to a closed door. Jacquie forced herself to open it, revealing a typical boy’s bedroom done up in brown and forest green. Lots of electronics; I couldn’t tell whether Joe was particularly spoiled or this was just what young people’s rooms looked like these days.

  From beneath the corduroy bedspread a sheet peeked that had cowboy boots with spurs on it. Either Jacquie was still buying sheets with cowboys for a fourteen-year-old, or she was thrifty and the sheets were so good they’d never worn out. At any rate, it was all nicely masculine. I stepped inside and looked around, trying to notice details that others might have missed. The only detail I could see was that there were none. Someone had cleaned well. I bet I wouldn’t even find a candy wrapper under the bed.

  I turned around, but Jacquie hadn’t followed. She stood at the door of the bedroom and tentatively pointed with a limp index finger at the adjoining bathroom doorway.