“And if I don’t?” That calm which had filled me follows his nicety off into oblivion.
One of Dave’s friends, former cop written all over him, stands and lays a look on me, aiming to intimidate. Dave puts a hand on the man’s shoulder. “This is Gus Jerome’s boy.”
“You going to let this guy do your dirty work for you, Dave? Like you did Neil?”
There is an instant of dead stillness. I am certain the world moves on around us, balls skidding down lanes, shoes clopping on wood, laughing and cheering, empty beer bottles clinking as they are collected on servers’ trays. But not where we stand. It is not that we stare each other down, some old west, high noon confrontation playing itself out. I wonder if, in some cosmic way, we have fooled God, and he knows not how to let this moment proceed.
And then, it seems, God decides. Dave Benz steps past his friend and grabs my collar with a meaty fist, nearly lifting me off the ground as he propels me away from the lanes and up to the viewing area. I glimpse Chris running toward us as I break free of his grip and grab a chair, windmilling it toward Dave and letting it fly. It sails wildly past and smashes one bank of the long trophy case. Glass rains onto the aged tile, awards within toppling, tiny brass bowlers atop each tumbling to the floor. A gasp rolls across the lanes, men rushing toward me, but Dave orders them back and gets hold of me again, pulling me past the main counter, clerks aghast, and into the men’s room.
He shoves me deep into the space, one frightened bowler just done relieving himself fleeing just before Dave locks the door. Pounding echoes on it from beyond, Chris trying to beat her way in, calling my name, her voice muffled terror. I end up backside to the handicapped stall, its door flapping hard inward as my arm rebounds off of it. Dave stalks toward me, thick finger jabbed straight at my face.
“You need to leave this alone!”
“Like hell!”
He quiets for a moment, drawing a hard breath, nostrils flaring. A bull deciding whether to charge.
“I’m supposed to turn away from knowing, finally, why Katie was killed? No! Fuck you!”
The words are so uncharacteristic of me, so alien, he suddenly regards me with something approximating pity. A fashioned concern that, still, does not overcome the fullness of his violence. “Mike, you have to stop this. If you ever trust anyone who tells you anything, trust me, now. End this and get on with your life.”
I push off the stall and move toward him. He shoves me back and I swing at him. His hand grabs my blow mid-air and before I can react my arm is in a twist behind my back, face planted against the porcelain wall opposite the sinks. He presses painfully hard against me, making it plain who is in control.
“You listen to me, Mike—some things are what they are, and you just have to accept that.” He plants his free hand on the wall next to my face, and I notice now a smattering of bruises and cuts across his knuckles, scabbed over. Signs of recent, violent use.
“Did you give this same speech to James Estcek before you beat the life out of him?”
He jerks me off the wall, my free limbs flopping like a rag doll, right arm still jammed up against my back as he forces me to the door, unlocks it, and jams me out. We fly by Chris and a crowd that has gathered as he levers me toward the side exit. Chris chases after us, coming through the door just as he releases me into a heap on the snowy asphalt. He stands over me, and I think of how I must have looked to Neil Benz not yet a day ago, looming over him on the shore of the lake, threatening with words, not presence, as Dave Benz so easily does.
“I’ll square the mess you made with the owner,” he nearly growls, snow dusting his flannel shirt. Chris pushes past him and drops to her knees next to me, checking to see that I am not hurt. Dave puzzles at this, the almost intimate attention his friend’s son the priest is being paid by a woman. She looks from me to him, a protective ire plain about her. He seems suddenly disarmed by her proximity and takes a step backward. “Stop before you regret it, Mike.”
In another life he would surely be referring to Chris, and the closeness apparent between us. But I know what he means. And I know what it means that he is desperate for me to stop.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Dyson Fury
“He’s afraid,” I say once Dave Benz is back inside. I stand with Chris’ help. The weather has lightened, a soft drizzle of flakes settling from the sky now, glinting like dying gossamer moths as they drift past the lights in the parking lot.
“He’s afraid?” she challenges me.
I nod. “What does that tell you?”
She doesn’t know. I chock up to the chaotic situation her slowness to process. But where it has shaken her, it has invigorated me, and for a moment at least I am imbued with the journalistic knack so natural, in normal moments, to her.
“Neil said some guys got popped and cut loose,” I explain. “Arrested and released because some woman had to be protected.”
“So it is Michelle Hammond. You knew that then. What’s changed now that—” Her instincts kick back into gear. “There’s someone out there still.”
She gets it. “James Estcek and Eric Ray Redmond are dead. Neil said ‘some guys’. Why would Dave be so worried about me pushing this if all the players are accounted for?”
Chris nods agreement, and glances toward the car. “You have that list of the folks James Estcek ran with?”
“Yeah.”
She takes my hand. Pulls me toward the car, suddenly energized. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
She releases me near the driver’s door and dashes around to the passenger side. “My office.”
* * *
We huddle at Chris’s workspace, an extra chair for me wedged next to hers. On the computer screen before us is a criminal database, not exactly like that I’d sampled on Kerrigan’s terminal, but not far from it.
“Okay, after Katie’s murder, if Neil was telling you the truth, James and Eric were arrested. And we presume someone else.” She types in the names of the dead perpetrators, pulling up their arrest records. Next she looks to my handwritten list and begins inputting each name, their own criminal histories culled from the electronic ether. My eyes scan the array of arrest dates in the aftermath of my sister’s death, two drawing my attention immediately.
“May 17
th
,” I say, noting the date little more than a week after that terrible day. “Both James and Eric were arrested that day.” The next date of consequence correlates between them as well. “And both out of custody on the 19
th
.”
Chris scans the screen. “Now we have to find anyone else picked up that day, or close, and released on the 19
th
.”
I join her as she processes the names and dates, the both of us searching for the match. The missing other who can tell me, without evasion, who wanted Katie dead. I want no longer to suspect who it is—I need to
know
.
“Got it!” Chris exclaims, too loud, co workers popping their heads up like groundhogs to spy the commotion. Her finger taps the screen.
I read what she has found. “Dyson Fury, arrested May 18
th
, out of custody May 19
th
.”
A wave of relief washes over me. She digs into the who, what, and where of this Dyson Fury, and within a minute she looks to me, any hint of elation gone. Some new hill to suddenly climb before this is over.
“He’s on death row,” she tells me.
Chapter Twenty Nine
But Now I See
I reach the prison late in the morning, distant clouds dragging curtains of icy rain across the patchwork of whitewashed fields surrounding the Westville Correctional Facility. Two hours have brought me from skyscrapers and expressways to two-lane roads and bucolic farms, frozen limbs snapped and littering the byway. Two hours and too many days. Too many revelations. I come here for closure. To finally know.
To stop.
Protesters, about a half dozen, brave the chill just outside the prison, holding signs decrying the death penalty. Within the walls through which I will soon pass the state puts men to death for their crimes—once the lawyers and the courts grind the gears of justice past the natural resistance our kind has against killing its own. My faith has hardened that very resistance. Or had. I no longer know what I truly believe beyond what the church teaches me I should. What dogma and doctrine instructs me to feel. To accept. To preach.
Eric Ray Redmond killed my sister. James Estcek killed my sister. Both are dead. Dyson Fury, whom these walls separate from the society he preyed upon, may be my last hope to fill in the final pieces of the puzzle I first stumbled upon, but now find myself frantically trying to assemble before its form is lost to a needle and a precise brew of chemicals.
I move through the multiple security checks upon entering. First my car, which is given what I sense is a very cursory check, possibly because of the collar visible under my overcoat. At the next control point it is verified who I claim to be, and that I have indeed been approved for a visit with condemned inmate number 71-09-3349. All items but my bible are taken from me, and an attentive officer hangs my coat and leads me into a small, closet-like room. There is a thick window ahead, with a small shelf just below, and a chair pushed close.
“He’ll be in in a minute,” the officer says, then closes and locks the door behind. A button on the wall next to it is labeled ‘Call For Release’. Freedom, on this side of the glass, takes only the press of a button.
I slide the chair out and sit and place my bible on the shelf before me. Two small lights are set into the wall to my left, one red, off, and one green, glowing bright. A sign above warns visitors that conversations are monitored when the red light is lit. Clerical collars and law degrees demand confidentiality.
One minute becomes two, then three. They do not drag, but fly past. For some reason I find interest in the glass before me, small round metal speaker within connecting the free world to its opposite. I wonder how many words have passed through the device. How many faux touches have been placed upon the transparent barrier, palm pressed to palm, no true connection possible. This space, I realize, is about illusion. Pretending that a few words exchanged, a look, an implied touch, mean life still goes on. The cold reality is that, shortly, I will be talking to a man who is already dead. Only a decade of paperwork need be done to make it official.
On the far side of the glass the door opens to the space that is a near mirror image to that in which I wait. Dyson Fury steps in, hands shackled to a chain around his waist, a guard settling him into the chair before stepping out and closing the door. He looks at me with one good eye, the other clouded and drooping, scars all around it. He is thin and battered, in the most miserable existence, and yet he smiles.
“Hey, father.” His voice crackles through the speaker, an electronic hiss appended to every word so that I hear
‘Heysss, fatherssss’.
He laughs after a moment and says, “Thump it.”
‘Thumpsss itsss’.
I reach up and tap the speaker with the heel of my hand.
“Better?” he asks, the hiss gone.
“Yes.” He is so unremarkable, save the white jumpsuit and deformed eye. We could be chatting across a booth in some bar. Sharing a joke waiting for the L.
I wanted him to be a monster.
He glances away from me to the green light on my side of the glass. “Secret time.”
“Anything you say, I won’t repeat,” I tell him.
“What kinda things would I say that anyone would repeat?”
I do not want to engage in some bout of banter, every exchange whittling away bit by bit at the inconsequential surface. The energy for that I have spent already just getting here. And I do not mean the traverse of miles. “They tell you who your visitors are. You know who I am.”
“Yes I do.” He sniffs a softish laugh and shakes his head.
“Something’s funny?” I probe, disturbed by his reaction. Were there not an impenetrable barrier between us I wonder if my hands would be on him now, around his throat, beating him to the ground as I had James Estcek when his words slighted the horror he’d visited upon my sister.
“Just that I’ve been here two years and you’re the first person other than my lawyer who’s seen fit to stop by.” The chuckle he’d loosed, which quieted to a thin smile upon my challenge, softens further, becoming almost wistful. “Always kind of hoped that…” He stops fully now, the smile in all its measure gone, his cyclopic gaze upon me. There is sadness in that one eye. Nowhere near verging on any overt expression such as tears, but there and real all the same. Were I to forget why I am here, and who this man is, I might feel pity for whatever churns and troubles him within.
But I do not. Forgetting, and its abettor avoidance, were the crutches with which I have tramped through life since Katie’s murder. No more.
“You know who I am,” I affirm. “Then you know why I’m here.”
He thinks for a moment, seeming to dredge some possibility from a grab bag. “You want an apology? I have no problem with that.” He leans forward, tugging on his chains a bit to get his cuffed hands on the shelf before him. “I am sorry, man. Truly. Life would have been better for a lotta folks if I’d been killed dead on the street long ago.” He eases back in his chair. “Man’s done judging me. I’ve got God coming up next, and I don’t think he’s gonna go easy. Not after all I’ve done.”
His words roll out before me, sincere and meaningless. Eric Ray Redmond wanted absolution. Dyson Fury offers apology. I withheld one and reject this other.
“That doesn’t mean much to me,” I say with brutal honesty, the collar I wear a visual cue to the duality Dyson Fury is staring at, a sudden, stunned roughness about his face. He considers me for a moment, likely wondering if I am a pretender to my faith, and of it, or…
And then he gets it, a cold sparkle of realization in his singular gaze. His dead eye twitches and his head cocks quizzically at me. “You don’t know.”