A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) Read online

  She shook her head. "My mom told the cops that she'd asked him to leave the second or third time he came around, but she hadn't. She said it after the fact to reinforce the complaint. He must've shown up a dozen times before she called it in."

  "How long before your mom told him to leave the two of you alone?"

  "A month, maybe? Then a week or two more before she made a complaint."

  "Why wait?"

  "She wasn't sure what to do. I mean, you report a cop to the cops and what happens? If you're lucky, they blow it off. If you're not, he hears about it and takes it out on you, right? But a friend convinced her that filing a complaint was what she had to do."

  "So he had six weeks around you and your mom and your house before anyone even thought of slapping his hand."

  "Yes."

  "He ever come by when it was just you?"

  "Yes."

  "Alone?"

  "His partner was with him most of the time, but sometimes he came by himself."

  "Who was his partner?"

  She thought about it. "You know, I can barely recall. A real tall guy. He'd always stay with the car, leaning against the door." She shook her head. "That's it. I only ever paid attention to Michael."

  A December breeze kicked up and slipped an icy hand inside my collar. I hunched my shoulders and shoved my fists deeper into my pockets. "It was my case, after all, so I already know, or think I know, but I have to ask."

  "He didn't molest me."

  "And the next question is?"

  "Yes, I'm sure. And, no, I'm not suppressing. I've been in therapy since I was twelve, Marty. It would've come out. All I remember was Michael being kind, being good. He made me a local celebrity with the other kids, coming to the house in his uniform, or bringing other cops around to show off. There always seemed to be a police car outside our place. No, if I blocked anything out, it was later, when Mom yelled at him, telling him to stay away. I hated her for that. I wanted her to like him. In retrospect, I know he was using me to get to her, but at the time I thought she was being a bitch."

  "So how does this bring us to what's going on now?"

  She sighed. "Michael came by a lot more often than Mom knew, since she was at work all the time. After he started scaring her, she sent me straight to the Jansen's, next door. Even the night she was…she was killed, I was at the Jansen's. But for weeks before that he would come by after school."

  I blinked, surprised, but didn't say anything. She continued, staring ahead but looking into the past.

  "He would leave me these white flowers, tiny things. I would find them on the porch or stuck in the front gate. I thought they were roses. What did I know? They were just carnations. He probably bought them at a grocery store or something, ten for a dollar."

  "What did you do with them?"

  "I was careful to hide or trash most of them, but I kept one or two in my room. Mom found them and asked me where they'd come from, but I was embarrassed. I lied and told her they were from a boy at school. She thought it was cute."

  "What about after your mom reported him?"

  She made a face. "He came by a few times before Mom got really paranoid, then I didn't see him for…well, never. But even after she chased him off, I'd find flowers on the back porch or one in the basket of my bike. He got sneaky and would spread the petals on the sidewalk. The worst was when I found one on my pillow, a few days before…before it happened."

  Even twelve years later, I felt sick. Brenda Lane's complaints should've been enough to save her life. They hadn't because they'd been dismissed with a shrug and a so what? But if you add obsessive pedophiliac tendencies to Wheeler's profile, somebody at MPDC would've paid attention. The hammer would've been dropped on him, hard. Maybe Brenda Lane would be alive. If anyone had known about it. My blood pressure spiked. "Why the hell didn't you tell someone?"

  "I was twelve years old," she said, her anger flaring to match mine. "I barely knew what the hell happened the night my mom was shot. I was in Child Services for two days before anyone even told me she was dead. And I still didn't believe it was Michael, not even after he was arrested. It took me a long time to accept that and what happened at the trial didn't help."

  I rubbed a hand over my jaw. "Sorry. It's just a hell of a thing to miss when you're trying to nail a guy for murder. And he walks."

  We were both quiet. I stared down at the sidewalk under my feet. I counted five cracks before I said, "That fills in some gaps but doesn't change the past. What's going on now?"

  She stopped abruptly and dropped her backpack to the ground. She unzipped a small pocket, fished around, and removed a Ziploc bag, Then, from the plastic bag, she pulled out exactly what I didn't want to see.

  A small white carnation.

  Chapter Three

  "I found it in front of my door two nights ago."

  "Couldn't be an accident? Roommate, boyfriend, secret admirer?"

  She shook her head. "No roommates. Too long since the last boyfriend. And it's an odd gift for a secret admirer, wouldn't you say?"

  "Where do you work?"

  "I'm a graduate student at George Washington University. Women's Studies."

  I looked at her. "Students, rival grads, angry professors?"

  "How would they know? What significance does it have if it's not from Michael?"

  I took the flower from her and twirled it by the stem. A few petals fell off, littering the ground. It was a shoddy way to treat evidence, but the thing had been squashed in her backpack for two nights, destroying any integrity it might've had. Oh, and I wasn't a cop anymore. "So," I said, handing it back. "Why now?"

  "I know. I asked myself, why should he come looking for me? It sounds stupid when I say it out loud."

  "No, the why isn't stupid," I said. "There could be a hundred reasons why. The question is why now? Where's he been? And wherever that is, what's happened to trigger contact after so many years?"

  "I did some digging around," she said. "You know, the kind of things you can do on the web."

  "Sure," I said, like I knew. "What'd you find?"

  "Nothing," she said. She hauled her backpack over a shoulder and we started walking again. We'd covered some serious ground and I was starting to feel it. "Not a damn thing. It's as if Michael was locked up for a decade, then walked out and decided to find me."

  I grimaced and said, "We both know that didn't happen. The being locked-up part, I mean."

  "I know. But it really is as if he vanished."

  "It's not that hard to disappear," I said. "Especially for an ex-cop who knows the ropes. And, especially--no offense--to someone not trained to find people."

  "I didn't just Google him," she said. "I've got friends at the university that can look into some sophisticated stuff. Not NSA-level, sure, but access to credit reports, arrest records, job applications, stuff like that."

  That got my attention. "Really?"

  "GW has programs for journalists, law enforcement officers, lawyers, poli-sci analysts, most of whom intern at government agencies or high-powered law firms. They've got juice."

  I snorted. "Juice?"

  A blush started under her chin. "I heard it on TV."

  "Don't worry about it," I said. "What did you find?"

  "Everything I got was from the initial search. There was big press about my mom's murder when it happened, then a resurgence when Michael got off, then nothing. It became old news, fast. It was the Wild West in the mayor's office. He was making enough headlines to bump anybody off the front page."

  "Tell me about it. I worked for the guy. Then what?"

  "Then nothing," she said. "There were some follow-up articles about him moving out of the city, but they never said where he went. After that, it's as if he ceased to exist."

  "We should be so lucky," I said. My breath steamed in the air and the sky was getting gray. "All right, we've got a couple possibilities. One, Wheeler's lived a quiet life raising pigs in Idaho and one day decides twelve years later is as good a
time as any to risk jail time by coming back and throwing carnations at you."

  "Or, he's wanted to stalk me this whole time, but been stuck somewhere else for twelve years."

  "Like where?" I asked.

  "I don't know. Overseas? The military?"

  A bus passed us, drowning out conversation. Bored looking passengers stared out of the windows. I waited until it got to the end of the street. "First one, no. You can get a plane any day of the week from most countries and it didn't take him twelve years to save money for a flight to DC. Second one, no. Unless we're talking the French Foreign Legion, soldiers still get leave, still get time off. It isn't prison, even if it feels like it."

  "You said there were a couple of possibilities."

  "Two. It's someone else entirely."

  "It has to be Michael. I never told anyone about the flowers," she said. "You didn't even know."

  "Sure, you never told anyone. But what if he did? He was such a smug prick, it's hard to believe he didn't confide in a buddy, a girlfriend, a coworker. This thing with the flowers didn't surface during the investigation or trial, so he knew we never found out about them. It would've been a tiny victory for him. Like he pulled one over on all of us. Guys like him would brag about something like that."

  Her shoulders slumped. "So where does that leave me? It might be Michael or it might not. My life might be in danger or it might be a prank by some copycat sicko that wants to torture me about my mom's death."

  I hesitated, then reached out and patted her shoulder. I'm not good at comforting people, but I've seen it done before. "First things first. You still at your apartment?"

  She shook her head. "No. I freaked out as soon as I saw the flower. I packed a bag and spent the night at a friend's place."

  "You've been there since?" I asked.

  "Yes."

  "All right, find another friend. Don't go there directly. Catch the Metro, grab a cab, whatever. Even better, switch a couple times. Don't just walk there. All right?"

  She looked unhappy, but nodded.

  "Next, can you take a break from classes?"

  "Not really. And I have office hours, too."

  I shook my head. "Show up for class late. Cancel a few, if you can. Don't move around alone, don't go anywhere after dark by yourself. Don't do office hours. Ask people to call if they need you. Posting the hours you'll actually be somewhere is, well, putting out a sign telling him where you're going to be."

  Amanda was pale, but her narrow jaw jutted forward. "I can't stop everything I'm doing. I won't stop living. I refused to do that after Mom died and I'm not going to do it now."

  I held up a hand. "You're not. We're just going to take some precautions."

  She paused, then said, "We?"

  "We. For now. Retirement is turning out to be pretty lousy and this gives me an excuse to leave the house. There are some things I can do, folks I can call. This is no accident. Someone is doing it. Therefore, we can make them stop." I smiled. "I still have a little juice."

  "I…can't pay you much--" she began.

  I stopped her. "Let's let my pension cover this. I think we owe you one. The least I can do is ask a couple questions, give you some advice. If you need me to break somebody's arm, then we'll talk price."

  "I hope your rates are low," she said, her smile tentative. "What's your first move?"

  "We've narrowed it down to Michael Wheeler or the rest of humanity," I said. "So let's start with Wheeler."

  ii.

  There were points in life, he'd come to realize, that offered moments of absolute choice. The proverbial fork in the road. Either you did this thing or you didn't. Life would be this way...or that way. Compressed intervals of time that, before they turned up, meant you lived and acted and suffered in one way and--after them?--in a completely different way. If you were lucky enough to survive, you popped out the other side utterly changed. With a different set of values. And a different set of goals.

  He'd had his moment already. It had taken him time to realize that it had even occurred because he hadn't suffered right away. He'd paid later--fuck, yes, he'd been put through the wringer--but at the time, he thought he'd ducked and dodged his way out of the consequences. In the end, fate had caught up with him and he'd learned the hard way what value and power those moments of change possessed.

  But who said you couldn't have another moment? To make one for yourself? That you couldn't grab the edges of your destiny and pinch them when you wanted to, bring the moments of your life together and force the world to give you another chance? To undo the worst that had happened and return to the beginning.

  Maybe, given enough time, it would simply happen on its own. But he wasn't willing to wait to find out if the universe was ready to open a door for him. He was going to grab his past, pull it into the present, and carve out a new future.

  Chapter Four

  I told Amanda to call campus security and fill them in on her situation, then made her promise to call me on the nines--once in the morning, once at night--to let me know she was okay. Like my other suggestions for her safety, they made her bristle, but I asked her if she wanted my help or not and that ended the protest. She took off and I headed home at a brisk walk, trying not to think about how little it took to put the jump back in my step these days. Back in the coffee shop, I'd been ready to tell Amanda to take a hike. Now, for the first time in weeks, I was looking forward to going home and doing something meaningful.

  My slice of heaven is a three-bedroom Cape Cod with a decent-sized front porch, a backyard I can mow in thirty-two minutes, and neighbors to either side that change every few months. The furniture is decent and the decorations minimal. I'm cheap and unimaginative and generally buy things as Ikea sales dictate. It's five blocks from coffee shops, stores, and restaurants and not far from the major highways in the area, though given the Washington DC area's ubiquitous traffic snarl, that just means you get caught in a line of cars faster and closer to home.

  When I got home, I headed straight for the kitchen, cracked open a can of food for my cat Pierre, and stepped back. He's large and has a temper. The smell coming from the food bowl was enough to put off even a healthy adult human, but he attacked it like it was his last meal, grunting and yowling while he ate.

  "Easy, killer," I said. Pierre looked up at me like I was next. When he'd licked the last morsel out of the bowl, he ran his tongue around his teeth, then bounded out the swinging inside-outside door to commit atrocities on the local squirrel population.

  Holding my breath, I rinsed his bowl out, then headed upstairs to my office. My house, built in the slap-dash optimism of the post-war forties, was small and probably meant to shelter a family of four, all of them apparently of smaller than average proportions and not put off by sharing bedroom or bathroom space. My office had been the kids' bedroom, with the slanted ceiling of the dormer interrupted by a solitary window overlooking the porch roof. I have to be careful I don't stand up too fast or I'll brain myself on the ceiling.

  The room is austere. No computer. Just a typewriter, a stack of legal pads, and a Mason jar full of black pens sitting on a dented steel desk I rescued from a salvage pile. The desk is gunship gray, with a sticky vinyl bumper going around the lip of a slab top that would've looked more at home in a coroner's lab. Completing the décor is a battered office chair I filched from MPDC HQ and a filing cabinet. Five drawers are devoted to case files, one to personal items. Making it, I suppose, emblematic of my life.

  We weren't supposed to do it, but I'd always made personal copies of all my work files when I was on the force. I never regretted it, at least not from a professional standpoint. Of all the cases I'd broken open in my career, I'd come up with the answers for half of them sitting in this office at three in the morning, leaning back in my scuzzy chair, my hands laced behind my head, staring at the ceiling.

  After I'd retired, I hadn't been able to bring myself to throw the files out. I didn't know when I was going to do it, I just felt each day
that today wasn't the right time. And now I was glad I hadn't been able to cross that bridge. I rummaged through the drawers, looking for the right folder. Since I filed cases under the victim's name, not the perpetrator's, Wheeler's well-thumbed file was in the fourth drawer under L for Lane, Brenda. The case file was an inch thick. Not the best sign. Most of my cases took two hands to pick up.

  I threw the file on the desk and plopped down in the chair. A wave of irritation and depression hit me, catching me off guard. Old feelings of failure and lost opportunity welled up like the case was twelve hours, not years, old. I sat there and rolled the feelings around like they were flavors, savoring and tasting them again after the long hiatus. There was a lot of bitter and very little sweet. Things hadn't gone the way I thought they would, or should. Maybe this was my chance to make a difference.

  Or maybe nothing could change what had happened.

  I tamped down the surge of emotions and started flipping pages on the Lane case. The way I remembered it.

  Chapter Five

  In the late-nineties, Mike Wheeler was a patrolman with three years in and a soft beat in the Palisades, a moderately wealthy suburb hugging the Potomac River in northwest Washington DC. It's an overlooked corner of the city, full of leafy oaks and broad lanes, all within spitting distance of the more posh and accessible neighborhood of Georgetown. Not that anyone would ever spit there. That would've been the worst crime ever reported in the history of the neighborhood.

  Until, that is, Wheeler met Brenda Lane, a good-looking, thirty-something with a daughter and a cat in a nice, three-bedroom Tudor. Modest for the Palisades, a wealthy home anywhere else, it said that the Lanes were solidly well to-do. The missing piece was Brenda's husband, who had been killed in the Persian Gulf five years before. Single parent homes weren't the norm in the community, but a life insurance payout and Brenda's job as a team lead for a technology company on the cusp of the dot-com revolution kept the tiny family of two comfortable.