The Single Staircase (7 page)

“Yes.”

Raccoon’s heart fell a bit. “When?”

“A long time ago.”

“How long?”

“Before he met
Daphne
.”

“
Monica
, how do you feel about
Daphne
?”

“She’s fine, I guess.”

Silence.

“She’s just a kid. She’s still a little girl.”

“Do you feel like she stole David from you?”

Monica
started to tear up a bit. “Maybe. Not really. We were never, we never dated, we were never together.”

“What was David and
Daphne
’s relationship like?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what was it like? Were they happy?”

It took Monica a minute to answer. She thought, bit her lip. She said,
“I think marriage is hard. It sounds hard. People who are married have a hard time sometimes making things work. It changes things.”

“Did David ever talk to you about divorce?”

“Yes. But
he stopped.”

“Stopped?”

“A
couple of weeks ago,
he stopped
.
He said things had changed.
”

“Changed how?
”

“Just changed. He said things had changed.”

“So they weren’t getting divorced.”

“A couple weeks ago, maybe even just ten days ago. He just said everything was better.”

Chap. 59

Raccoon opened the door to the recording room. Owl
swiveled around and
looked up at him.

“What do you think?” Raccoon asked.

“Let her go,” Owl said. “We’ve got nothing.”

Chap. 60

Only seven men were in the meeting room at the station that night. It was only dinnertime, but they all looked tired, and hungry, and sick of everything. Atrex and Samuelson from the bureau. Jefferson and Mateo from surveillance. Only one patrolman, Officer Viggio, the same young officer who had tracked down
The Matrix
and Scoot H. Johnson.

On the whiteboard, Owl wrote:
Press conference.

Sweep.

Daphne and David.

Daphne’s phone.

T
hen Owl said, “This case is dying, men. We’ve got no body, no evidence and right now we only have two suspects. Three days in. We have nothing we didn’t hav
e when we started.”

He looked around. Hoping someone would contradict him, say something he hadn’t thought of before.

Silence.

He went on. “
So tomorrow we’re going to have a press conference to ask for the public’s help. Hopefully, we’ll get some tips out of that. Hopefully, we’ll get some heat, some additional time with you all. I know you all
have other cases stacking up.”

He looked at Atrex and
Samuelson and they nodded back. “Yeah, we’
re getting pulled on
to other stuff. Probably as early as tomorrow.”

“Well, we’ll see. Maybe we can get you back for a couple days. We’ve asked for more men and we keep getting less. So, uh, just be at the press conference if you can be.
The
PIO
has it set up downstairs on the steps. Maybe the mayor will come. I don’t know.”

He looked at the board and pointed at the word, “Sweep.”

“It’s done Owl. They shut it down this afternoon. Everybody got pulled back in. If the body is out there, we’re not going to find it.”

Owl looked at the floor and imagined some day, two months from now, a couple of 10-year-olds playing in a ditch, stumbling across a tiny body, covered in seaweed, the flesh pee
ling away, the bugs everywhere.

He tried to blot out the image and failed.

He had to go on.

He pointed at the next item on the whiteboard. “
Daphne
and David. They didn’t like being parents. They were unhappy, thinking about divorce, fighting all the time. Then they decide to kill the kid. Things get better. They fall back in love. They smother her in her, her fucking crib. They smother her in her crib and David goes and buries the body somewhere too good for us to find,
Daphne
fucks up the house, they have a drink and call 911. Yes?”

He looked around the room. N
othing but n
odding heads.

“Does anybody have any other
ideas
?”

Silence. Almost imperceptible shrugs
. No.

“Raccoon, any other
ideas
?”

Raccoon whispered, “No.”

“Well
,
where the fuck is the body? Where the fuck is the body?” Owl made a sound that sounded like the devil was pushing out of his throat.
He stamped his foot and then f
ocus
ed
.
“Daphne
’s missing phone. They say they lost it. They were nervous as hell about it. It’s the only loose thread we have. Anybody got an idea where it could be?”

“That’s going to be a hard one to find, Owl.”

“Yeah.
All right. I don’t know what to say here. Anybody got anything?”

Silence.

“Let’s just see. Maybe the press conference will buy us some heat, buy us some time. Someone will crack.
S
omeone always cracks. Go home.”

Chap. 61

The officers filed out. One by one.
Failure and exhaustion
on their faces.

And then
Owl
looked up. He squinted and breathed. He stopped clenching his fists so he could signal
Raccoon and
then
he
called out, “Jefferson, wait.”

The detective stopped, turned around, looked at Owl. Looked at Raccoon. Looked back at Owl.
Owl’s face was no longer sad. Just tense, the eyebrows pushed together, the lips drawn tight.

“Yeah, Owl?”

“
W
hat do we know about roofies? It’s a date rape drug, right? Guys use them to knock out girls and then rape them.”

“Can be. Sometimes. Not usually. That’s sort of a media thing.”

“What’s that?”

“The date rape thing. It was the flavor of the month
a few years back
. But that’s, like, two percent of what the kids use them for. The rave kids, they take roofies all the time. Nine times out of ten, you bust kids for
roofies at
dance club
s
, not a frat house.”

“Why?”

“Sedative for the kids who are trying to come down off something. Others just like the high.”

“What’s it like?”

“Just like being really, really drunk. Really drunk.”

“But what’s the date rape thing?”

“Yeah, I mean, take enough of it, it knocks you out. Takes 30 minutes to kick in, you wake up a couple hours later barely remembering your own name. Guys give it to girls, the girls don’t even know they’ve been raped sometimes. They’re just confused. But like I said, that’s rare.”

Owl had been born an adult. He’d been a serious child,
and then
a sniper, a drinker, a man who
searched for
evil
and who made his life moving among bad
people. Nothing ever surprised him. Nothing ever really made him happy. Yet now he said out loud, nearly bellowed, “I got it. I got it. I know what happened to
her
.”

Chap. 62

Owl wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t explain. He sent Racco
on for coffee and Raccoon went.

Owl placed a long-distance phone call.
He did paperwork. He stared at the wall. Finally, three
hours later, he got an email with an image attached.

He made two calls. The first was to Harrison, the
PIO
. He told him to cancel the press conference, that the whole thing was a
mistake. Harrison
protested that the mayor’s office was sending an aide. Owl just repeated, he needed the whole thing cancelled.

Then Owl called the surveillance officer and told him to arrest David Grey.

“On what charge?”

“Just bring him in.”

Chap. 63

It was almost 10 p.m.

David Grey sat in interrogation. The same room as three days ago. The same spartan metal table. The same untouched coffee. The same lack of lawyers, no David
A. Davidson.

And the same Raccoon, sitting alone in another room, hunched over a video monitor.

And then Owl was in the room with Raccoon.

“I need you to turn it off.”

“What?”

“Off. I need the recorder off.”

“You know we can’t do that.”

Owl breathed
. Paused. And said,
“Please?”

A
moment
passed. And then Raccoon did it. He reached over and turned the recorder off.

“Thanks, Raccoon.”

Raccoon nodded. “I’m still listening, you know? Don’t fuck this up, this
thing
you’re doing.”

“I know,” Owl said. “Just wait.”

Chap. 64

Owl walked in and sat across from David Grey. He looked at the man for a moment and saw that Grey looked nervous this time. And then Owl put a photo on the table.

It wasn’t the clearest photo, taken in haste by a state trooper from a moving car. But it very clearly showed a cabin by a lake.

A small cabin, secluded in
a far—
away
woods
.
The eastern sky brightening with emerging stars, the trees covered with shadows in the setting sun.

A cabin with a little patio on which sat two elderly people, at least 60, maybe 70 years old. A man and
a
woman. A husband and a wife. And in the woman’s arms, there was a
blanket, a bundle, a
baby.

Sophia Grey.

And Owl said, “This photo was taken at your parent’s cabin in Indiana. Thirty minutes ago.”

David sighed a little sigh. The wheels in his head were turning. Finally he said, “You found the cabin.”

“You’d have been here an hour ago if your parents hadn’t taken her there. The Indiana troopers went to your parents’ house first. When they found out
from the neighbors that
they’d taken off that afternoon, after you texted them about the press conference, the officers tracked them down to their property by the lake. Where your parents currently have your daughter. Alive.”

David Grey breathed. What could he say? Only, “Yes.”

“What did you do with
Daphne
’s phone, David?”

David laughed to himself. He looked at Owl and nodded. “I trashed it. Pulled the battery and tossed it into a dumpster that evening. Before… Before.”

“Before you bombed your wife with her own roofies, the ones she normally took to get high and dance and have sex. Because you couldn’t take the chance we’d find
Daphne
’s phone and find what you found on it.”

“Yes.”

“Because then we would have had probable cause to arrest you both. And your whole plan would have fallen apart.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, what? What all did you find on her phone, I mean? Chloroform? Drugs? SIDS?”

“All of it.”

“All of it?
”

“Yes, all of it. SIDS. Suffocation. M
urder statutes.”

“All of it.”

“
I tried to search ‘How long does it take to get to New York’ and her browser filled in ‘How long does
it take a body to decompose.’”
David Grey looked at the
wall, looked down at the table,
and spilled his guts. “I… didn’t think, I didn’t think she was serious at first, when she started talking about how much she, she hated Sophia. But when I found that… Do you have any idea what it’s like to find out your wife is planning to murder your daughter?”

“No.”

“You can’t imagine.”

“Explain it to me.”

“I had no choice.”

“You had all sorts of choices. Starting with divorce and custody. A legal right that thousands of people exercise every day.”

“I tried that.”

“David A. Davidson, attorney-at-law.”