The Intersection of Purgatory and Paradise (16 page)

“How long are you going to run?” he asked.

“Till I can’t run anymore,” Christopher said, as though it should be obvious.

“Have lunch with me when you’re done?”

“Do you even need to ask?”

Doug leaned into the open window of Christopher’s car and kissed him good-bye, right there in the parking lot. A few of his coworkers could see them, and they stopped to stare, openmouthed.

“People are watching,” Christopher whispered against Doug’s lips.

“Are they?” Doug wrapped his fingers around the back of Christopher’s head and kissed him harder, slipping his tongue inside Christopher’s mouth. When he finally pulled away with a wet pop, it left Christopher with a bigger smile on his face than a night of sex ever had. “I’ll text you if I’m running late.” He kissed Christopher once more, then headed toward the door.

Even the twinges in his still recovering right leg couldn’t kill his mood as he ran the now familiar course around Elkin. It took him over an hour to cover the six-mile route, but he didn’t care. He was slower than he used to be, but the promise of a lunch date where he could actually reach across the table and touch Doug’s hand more than made up for it.

He rounded the corner toward the last straightaway that would take him past the park, the high school, and back to the sheriff’s office and eased his pace to let his muscles cool down before he stopped. He felt calm and at peace with himself again. He didn’t have to hope Doug felt the same; every look Doug sent his way, every lingering touch and suggestive smile, promised Christopher they’d be all right.

A streak of black across the sky caught his attention, and he slowed down. The high school football field, surrounded by a new running track, was set back behind four large sets of wooden bleachers. School was done for the summer, so the bleachers and the field were empty.

Except for birds. Turkey vultures were spiraling in the air, screeching and dive bombing smaller crows, who were squawking and ramming each other in the air. Christopher stared at the fighting birds. One pair collided in the air and screeched at each other before diving again.

“What the hell is that?”

Christopher turned and found Chuck Peterson, the town’s one and only coach for everything from Little League to high school football, standing behind him with an equipment bag slung over his shoulder. Little League was finishing soon, and Christopher knew Peterson’s team would be out on the tiny baseball diamond in the park within an hour. “Morning, Coach. Is there something out there?”

Coach Peterson shook his head and squinted across the field. “Something in the end zone. I can’t tell what it is from here. Garbage bag, maybe?” He set the baseball equipment down carefully and pointed across the stadium. “Something on the goal post.”

A vulture soared across the field, turning in the air as it cut off a smaller crow. They were fighting over something. Whatever the crow tried to escape with dropped into the grass. Peterson stomped toward it and bent down. “Looks like pork from someone’s trash. We get pranks sometimes. Other schools in the division are always trying to prank each other, but not during summer vacation.”

Christopher grabbed Peterson’s arm as he bent down to poke the pink piece of meat. “Don’t touch it. You don’t know what it is. It could be gross.”

“It’s been inside a crow’s beak. I’d say that automatically makes it gross.”

Christopher stepped past the bleachers to try and get a better view. He covered his eyes to cut down the glare from the morning sun. “They’re fighting over whatever’s in that garbage bag. It’s probably a dead animal.”

“Might as well find out. I’m the one who’s going to be stuck cleaning it up anyway,” Coach Peterson said, striding forward. “Animal control ain’t going to be out here before my Little League kids, and I don’t want them poking at it.”

Christopher followed him, but as they drew close enough to see what the crows were fighting over, both men stopped, stunned. It had originally been a large black garbage bag, duct-taped to the goal post to hold it upright. The birds had shredded the plastic, but they hadn’t been able to rip through the tape. The body inside was sagging against the reflective gray tape. Coach Peterson reacted first, diving toward the body with a pained cry. Christopher caught him and held him back. “No! It’s too late! Whoever it is, it’s way too late. If we touch anything, we’ll contaminate the scene.”

“It’s Levi!” Coach Peterson yelled, trying to push past him again.

“We have to call the police. They’ll send an ambulance. They’ll figure it out.”

“It’s Levi Campbell. That’s a varsity jacket, and he’s the only redhead on the team.”

Christopher squinted at the purple and red mass. He made out the green and gold of the high school’s letterman jackets, and the red around the skull was too light and orange to be blood. “Another member of the football team?”

D
OUG
TRIPLE
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CHECKED
the address in the case file before climbing out of the cruiser. The Owens family lived in a sprawling ranch-style home with an immaculate lawn and perfect flower beds. The curtains were open, and a single car sat in front of the closed garage. There was no flood of family and neighbors, no friends of Caleb Owens lingering to share the family’s grief. There was just Mrs. Owens, in khaki shorts and a light pink shirt, adjusting mulch in one of the flower beds. She wore a white sun hat and pastel green gardening gloves.

“Ma’am?” Doug approached her slowly.

From a distance she didn’t look like a woman who’d lost her only child. But when she glanced up at him, Doug noticed the swollen bags beneath her eyes. Her skin was pallid and gaunt, as if she’d been ill, but she greeted him with a smile.

“Mrs. Owens?” he asked to be sure. “I’m Sergeant Heavy Runner, Elkin Sheriff’s Department. I’m sorry to hear about your loss.”

Her smile stayed fixed in place, rigid. “Thank you for your sympathy,” she said automatically.

“We’re working on closing Caleb’s case, and I was hoping I could talk to you for a few minutes. Is this a bad time?”

She gestured toward the garden. “This is the only thing around the house that needs to be done. The longer I can drag it out, the better. I’m not very good at being idle, I’m afraid.”

“I have a friend who’s like that,” Doug said gently. “When something is bothering him, he can’t sit still to save his life.”

She sniffled and nodded slowly, her sun hat bobbing up and down. “Would you like some iced tea?”

“No, thank you. Just a few minutes of your time, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

Inside a spotless kitchen that might have been decorated by his mother, Doug sat down with Mrs. Owens and went over the typed copy of her statement with her, had her sign it, and left her husband’s copy so he could sign it when he got home. Listening to Doug read the statement coaxed a trail of silent tears from the older woman’s eyes, but she listened intently, nodding every now and then.

“All right.” Doug slipped her statement back into the file. “I have a couple of questions. The gun found in Caleb’s bedroom, the gun he used, is licensed to your husband. In his statement, he said he kept the gun locked in a safe in your bedroom.”

“That’s right. Caleb was in the Pathways Clinic up in Kalispell from February to the end of April. After he quit school in January, he started drinking, doing drugs even. He spiraled out of control so fast, it’s like he became a different person overnight. When Caleb came home from treatment, we were warned to keep an eye on him and to keep anything he could use to hurt himself locked away. We’ve always kept the gun in the safe—that didn’t change—but I put everything else in there too. Every pill bottle, my good kitchen knives, all of it.”

“The first time he tried to kill himself was a drug overdose?”

She wiped at the corners of her eyes. “Before this, I was still hoping the overdose was an accident, but I locked up everything anyway.”

“How did he get to the gun?”

“My purse,” she said, sniffling. “The safe is opened with a key instead of a combination. I keep a copy on my key chain. I was outside grilling hamburgers when I heard the shot. The police and firefighters found the safe open with my keys sitting on the floor in front of it.”

Doug nodded and glanced at his notes again. “And in your statement, you said a friend visited him the night before he died. What was his name?”

“That was our neighbor’s son, Nate. They were friends when they were little, and I’d hoped him visiting might cheer Caleb up. It seemed like it worked, too. He was happy when Nate said good-bye. He smiled for the first time in months.”

Doug scribbled a quick note, jotting down the name and making a note about the sudden shift in Caleb’s mood. Dramatic mood swings, even when they seemed to be an improvement, were seldom a good sign when someone was depressed and suicidal. Too often, they became cheerful when they’d formed a solid plan to kill themselves. The depression and pain they were coping with became bearable when they could see relief on the horizon. “Can you go over those months? From February to April? Or from when he dropped out?”

“It was months ago.”

“I know, but I’d like you to tell me about it. I think it’s fairly obvious whatever made him take his own life started then. I understand Caleb was a talented gymnast, a member of the National Honor Society, and he wanted to go on to college.”

She nodded. “He was always a good boy. It’s my fault, really. We put him in karate when he was little, drove down to Ronan for it three times a week. And he started gymnastics at the YMCA so he could do all the flips and tumbles he saw martial artists do on TV. But the gymnastics lessons were closer to home, and they were sixty dollars a month cheaper, so after a year or so, I pulled him out of martial arts and let him keep going with the gymnastics. My husband, David, swears that’s what made him…. Well….”

“Gay?”

She pressed her lips together tight and glared. “If you would like to hear about my son’s problems, you will not disgrace his memory in my home.”

Doug leaned back, horrified but trying to keep a neutral expression on his face.

“Strange,” she clarified, her expression daring him to suggest anything else. “We knew he’d have trouble fitting in, we knew the other kids would tease him, and we tried to give him strategies to make the best decisions he could. David made him try out for football, and when he was there, Caleb recognized some friends from his gymnastics class. They were all cheerleaders, of course, and they talked him into helping them with flips and throws, so they could try out some of the more dangerous routines they’d seen other schools perform. Caleb was told he could either be a second string JV football player, or he could help take the cheer team to the national level. He was talented. Not the kind of talent David had hoped for, but even David had to admit he was good at it. And it wasn’t like he wore the same skimpy costumes the girls did. But it made the bullying worse.”

“Bullying?”

“Yeah. It was teasing before, but some of the boys who’d been giving him a hard time since freshman year were on the JV team. He started coming home with bruises, a black eye once…. At the end of that season, he got into a fight on the way home from the state tournament in Helena. He was angry about it, and he made up some vicious and horrible things to try and get the boys who were bullying him kicked off the team or arrested.”

“He made stuff up?” Doug asked, his stomach sinking.

She nodded and wiped a stream of fresh tears away. “David asked Terry Marshall to talk to him about it. Terry, bless him, did a full-blown investigation, but eventually Caleb admitted he lied about it all. I’m sure things got worse after the truth came out, but he never talked to me about problems at school again. He never spoke to me about much of anything again. His grades started to slip, which meant he was off the cheer team, of course. Then he was skipping classes so often the school said he’d have to repeat the year, and he just dropped out. He even got arrested for shoplifting from the pharmacy downtown, but Terry came to his rescue then, too.”

“Shoplifting? What….” Doug took a deep breath, not entirely sure he wanted to know the answers to the questions he had to ask. “What was he trying to steal?”

She huffed, almost laughing. “Laxatives, if you can believe it. I don’t know what he was thinking. David said he was doing it for attention, maybe for the girls on the cheer team, because he says they use it to lose weight. Terry suggested he was planning some kind of practical joke. We went through his room to see if there was anything else, anything we didn’t pay for that he shouldn’t have been able to afford, and that’s when we found the drugs.”

“Drugs?”

“Pot, mostly, but we found alcohol and a bunch of pills too. Terry said the pills were Percocet. I don’t even know where kids in Elkin could get things like that, but he had some.”

“And then you put him into treatment?”

“Yes. We had to take out a home equity loan to cover it, but when it’s your child, you do whatever you can to help them.”