Dark Web (24 page)
“Mike, I checked your phone.”
It was the middle of the night. Callie had been in the bed in Hannah’s room and now she crept into the bedroom she shared with Mike. She was standing just inside the doorway. Mike had been lying awake. He sat up and struggled to see her in the dark.
“What?”
“You’ve called New York. And you’ve got text messages. ‘Check out the cop.’ What does that mean, Mike?”
“You’ve been checking my
phone
?”
“Who are you calling?”
Mike sat up further, feeling adrenaline spilling into his veins. “What do you mean you’ve been checking my phone? Callie, listen to me . . .” He swung his legs out of the bed and got up. He walked around the bed to the doorway and stopped in front of her. He could see her only a little bit better. Her eyes were shining in the gloom.
“You’re talking to Bull? Is that who? What are you doing?”
“Honey, the cop, Swift, he . . .”
“I don’t care about the cop.” Although she was whispering, her words were still harsh. “I care about my girls. I care about my son, my sanity.” She paused. It was so silent Mike thought he could hear their hearts beating. “I care about you,” she said finally.
“And I care about you.” He reached for her, touching her hand, but she withdrew.
“I want to take the girls and leave. Go back to Florida.”
He was unable to speak for a moment. Florida? Was this a dream? She was waiting for his response. Finally he managed the words. “Callie, that makes no sense . . .”
“I can’t take it. I can’t take it anymore. The cops, the press, not knowing what’s going on with you, what’s going on with Brax . . . I can’t take the looks from people. Like you said, we don’t have anybody here . . .”
He wanted to tell Callie about the video the previous night, but seeing the lead investigator on their son’s case acting like a loose cannon in some cop show would only add one more reason for her to go. He wanted to tell her that help was a phone call away, but she would never go for it. Not now. Not after he’d kept things from her. Especially his past.
“Callie. You’ve got to hear me out. When we met, you needed someone stable. I knew I could be that guy. I
was
that guy. I’m nothing like him, okay? Okay, Cal? Nothing. But I knew, I just knew, that if you knew about some of the things in my past, when I was just a kid — nothing more than a kid, Callie, but all the same — I knew I would lose you. Before I even had a chance.” He looked at her in the dark, trying to read her face. From what he could make out, she wore her determined look. “Time went by,” he said. “And some things just never made it into the conversation. They never needed to.” He could feel his words failing to make their intended impact.
“We’re going to go stay with your father for a little while,” she said. “The condo never sold. It’s still half-furnished. It’s still ours.” She was talking about their place in Stuart, in Turtle Bay.
“There are renters.”
“Until the end of the month. Then we can move back in.”
“Callie . . .” He stopped and rubbed his face with his hands. His wife had always been strong-willed. Defiant. But they used to talk, work things out. They had been a team. It felt like all that was fading.
“It’s not open for discussion,” she said, as if to highlight the point. Then she added, “You get our son when they’re done with him and bring him home to me.”
“You don’t trust me,” he said.
“Mike, don’t . . .”
He could tell from her voice she was on the edge of tears, and he reached for her again. This time she allowed him to take her hand. They stood there like that in the doorway for a moment, and then she left.
On the third morning after Braxton’s death, a Tuesday, Mike booked flights for Callie and the girls. The plane would leave from Plattsburgh Airport the following afternoon. Mike helped her pack the girls’ stuff. As he moved suitcases into the back of the truck, he realized his wife had a point; she wanted to put a distance between herself and the nightmare that had become their lives, the dark pageantry of hospitals, grim faces, and cops with no answers.
The cops had remained a disappointment. Detective Swift had come by the other night and, after sharing the gruesome news about Braxton’s cause of death, indicated that they still had no number one suspect. Even Tori McAfferty was someone they would “question thoroughly once apprehended,” but Swift seemed to Mike like he didn’t have his shoulder into it.
He could tell, too, that the cop had been holding something back. Something he’d been reluctant to bring up, and Mike thought he knew what it was — Swift was biding his time before questioning Mike about the 529 account. Maybe it was best that she left. Let him deal with things on his own.
After packing, he slipped out in back of the house and called Swift directly from his phone. The day was crisp and bright and cold, and Mike’s breath rose like smoke.
Swift didn’t answer. Mike left a voice mail.
“Detective, it’s Mike Simpkins. We’re making some family decisions here; there are things changing on our end I need to speak to you about. Please give me a call back when you can. Thank you.”
He hung up and went back inside. As he entered the house, he heard a sound that was unfamiliar at first, his heart began to race and he quickened his step, thinking that one of the girls were hurt, or something was wrong. As he turned into the hallway he saw first Hannah dash from one room to the next and then Reno after her, wielding a stuffed animal. He realized what it was. They were playing, and both girls were shrieking with laughter.
They ran into Braxton’s room.
Mike’s sudden smile faded, and he continued down the hallway to Braxton’s room. He turned in, ready to corral the girls and get them out of there before Callie discovered them.
But Callie was already in the room. She was sitting in the middle of the carpet, Indian-style, like a teenager herself. It looked as though she’d been in the room for a little while. Things were put away, boxed up, posters taken down.
She looked up at him. Tears were running down her face, glistening in the lamplight. But she was smiling.
The sight of her, and of her tears, tore at Mike’s chest. The girls, in the meantime, were running circles around their mother, until Hannah leapt up onto Braxton’s freshly-made bed.
Mike dropped to his knees. He let himself fall forward onto the carpet. His entire body seemed to go limp, and he sagged there on all fours, letting his head fall down so that his chin touched his breastplate, and he felt the emotion mount in him as he crawled towards his wife.
When he reached her and looked up, she still had that expression on her face — a profound mixture of joy and sadness, and something that transcended both. She took him in her arms and he lay across her legs, and then the girls came piling on top of him. His face wet, he smiled, he ached, the four of them, now, all piled together.
* * *
Swift called back an hour later while Mike was shoveling a fresh dusting of snow. The precipitation wasn’t much, but he needed the air, the movement, the rhythm of shoveling.
“Detective Swift, thanks for calling me back.” It was an unfriendly greeting, purely formal.
Swift got right into it. If he was worried about Mike having seen the news video, he didn’t show it. Or, he was compensating by barreling into the conversation.
“Mike. Good morning. I was planning to drop by in a bit so we could . . .”
“That won’t be necessary,” Mike interrupted, leaning on the shovel. He took a deep breath, inhaling through his nostrils. “From now on, after all she’s been through, all
we’ve
been though, we need to give my wife and family some room.”
“Mr. Simpkins, we’ve had some developments that I need to—”
“There have been developments here, too.”
They were cutting each other off, stepping on one another’s words, frustration in each of their voices. Mike grabbed the shovel like a staff with his free hand, and proceeded before the investigator could interrupt again.
“Callie is leaving. She’s taking the girls and going back home.”
This time, Swift was silent for a moment. “Home?”
“Back to Florida. We think it’s the best for everyone. She can’t imagine going on up here like this. Neither can I. The girls, in school . . . Callie, at her job. The press, hounding us. But that’s just the short term. I understand that. This is a small town. An even smaller region. Something like this follows you around for years. For the rest of your life. And this investigation, this whole thing, especially the way it’s been going . . . she just can’t. She needs to have closure with her son. So if you’re done with his body, you need to turn it over to us.”
Mike dropped the shovel to the side and stripped his coat off, keeping the phone to his ear by switching hands.
“I understand,” said Swift.
“Yeah,” said Mike.
You understand
, he thought.
All the cops understand. The neighbors understand.
Everyone
understands
. People kept their distance, but they understood just fine. Mike couldn’t blame them.
“So what do you want to tell me?”
He heard Swift take a breath. “I still would prefer to talk to you in person, Mr. Simpkins. I can tell you this, though; your son’s body is free to go.”
Mike felt something in him deflate. As if he’d been stoking the anger necessary to stay on top of the pain and anguish. Almost wanting Swift to say that Braxton’s body was still evidence and critical to the investigation and they couldn’t release it back to him at this time. It would give Mike further fuel for anger and frustration. He hadn’t expected Swift to tell him he could have Braxton back. It was a mild shock.
“You can have the funeral service tend to the body,” Swift said. “I can give them a call if you’d like. It’s not a problem. They will take over and will be in touch to set up a time convenient for you to decide how you would like to proceed. I highly recommend Kristofferson’s. They’ll help you write the obituary, pick out the tombstone, the casket, the—”
“Yeah, okay,” Mike said, deliberately cutting Swift off.
“I’d really like to speak with you this evening . . .”
“Is it critical?” Mike felt his hackles up again. “Is it going to make or break my son’s case? Do I have vital information for you, detective? Or do you have my son’s murderer in custody? If it’s none of those things, then I need to spend the rest of the day with my family, who I’m not going to see for a little while.”
Another silence from Swift. Then, “I understand.”
That word again.
Mike closed his eyes for a moment, and rocked back on his heels, inhaling once again the bright scent of the late winter. Was it possible the trees would be budding soon, in just another month? They’d only been here for eight weeks, and hadn’t even endured much of the winter, but it had still seemed to go on forever.
The winter that would never end.
“I’ll speak to you tomorrow,” Swift said. “You call me after you see your family off, okay, Mike?”
It was the first time Swift had called him by his first name.
“I’ll do what I can.”
A pause. He could sense Swift going through his options. Was the old cop going to get heavy-handed now, or wither and shrink away?
Mike realized that he found the older man perplexing in a similar way to his father. Somehow always slightly obtuse, distant; men who prized their personal freedom and independence above all else. Hadn’t Swift even said something that betrayed this just now?
Your son is free
, he had said. A telling choice of words.
Mike was surprised Swift was still on the case. Maybe there was a shortage of state police detectives, but he didn’t think so. Possibly it would take a little time to transition someone else in, and bring them up to speed. Probably that was what Swift wanted to talk about anyway. To give Mike some bullshit about how the department thought it best that, for personal reasons, he turn the case over to another investigator who would do a stellar job and blah blah blah. Mike didn’t want to hear it. Swift could save the speech. What Mike did want to hear, though, was something else.
“I know you want to talk to me in person. But just tell me who you think did it. Can you do that? Are you even going to be around tomorrow? I know what happened to you. I saw the video. So just tell me now before I have to look at some fresh-faced replacement of yours.”
He hadn’t expected any of that to come out. His words had tumbled from him in a rush. He almost cringed, waiting for Swift’s response. Just like back home in his childhood. Until one day, Mike couldn’t take it anymore.
“The report indicates that your son died from ligature strangulation.”
“You told us.”
“We believe we found the ligature. It was in Tori McAfferty’s house, and it has your son’s DNA on it.”
Mike’s throat constricted. He was dizzy, his balance off.
I knew it
.
Somewhere he thought he heard a bird singing under the bright sun. The warbling of the creature sounded sweet, but haunted, like a dirge.
Mike stood in the driveway, half the snow shoveled, the other half an inch of powder. The shovel lay at his feet. Holding the phone absently to his ear, he bent and picked up the shovel, as if he needed to grasp something solid, something tangible. He waited for the world and his thoughts to come back into some semblance of sensory order again. The birds singing in the distance, the wind low and stirring the light snow on the ground into delicate eddies, and Braxton, the image of Braxton being strangled to death. He wondered about the last thoughts that might have passed through his stepson’s mind. The terrible sorrow at the thought that Braxton had been scared in his last moments of life, terrified, and alone.
“Mr. Simpkins? We’re looking into several possibilities . . .” The detective’s voice brought Mike back around again. Swift was hedging. Typical. What possibilities?
“Mike?”
“What?”
“Mike . . .” He heard the detective sigh. “I wanted to speak to you in person. But, okay. Mike, I also have to talk to you about the 529 account that was opened for Braxton, in your name.”
“No,” Mike said, feeling far away.
“Oh . . . Uhm, ‘No’?”
“That’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“You understand I need to cover everything.”
“And you understand that it’s been four days since my son died and the biggest news is that you can’t find the guy who did it — he’s out there now, running around while you tip them back at a local bar!”
Mike ended the call. He put the phone away and gripped the shovel with both hands. He started back down the driveway, scraping and heaving, going faster this time, his breathing deep, his muscles flexing.
