The Death and Life of Gabriel Phillips (3 page)

“10-4, 52-2,” the radio crackled back. “Are you sure you want to make the call on the body, Andy? I can have a paramedic and ambulance to you in no time.”

Andy paused for a moment. I don’t know what he hoped to accomplish, but he told the dispatcher, “Okay. Do that. I guess it couldn’t hurt.” Maybe he wanted the kid to still have a chance. More than likely, he just didn’t want to be haunted by the “what-if” questions that follow emergency responders even when they do everything they possibly can. “What-ifs” are about as useful as wishful thinking, but they can sure be hard to shake in the middle of the night. Andy reached over and lightly stroked the boy’s head with his right hand, then stood to his feet. I think it was his way of telling Gabe good-bye. Once the paramedics and sheriff’s deputies showed up, he wouldn’t have another moment alone with the boy. Well, almost alone. The dad was still standing in the bedroom doorway.

“Did you know my son long, Officer?” the father asked.

“No, not too long,” Andy replied as he let out a long sigh. Turning from the boy, he scanned the bedroom. Toys were scattered across the floor, along with a variety of clothes. Typical kid’s room. The sheets and blankets of both bunk beds were strewn about, which seemed odd if Gabe slept in the room by himself. “Did you stay in this room with your son, sir?”

“No, he’s a big boy. He’s able to sleep in his room all by himself,” the dad smiled and said.

If my old man wasn’t already about to pop, that smile put him over the edge. He couldn’t figure out how any father worth a dime could carry on a normal conversation right after his son died in his arms. “Which bed was your son sleeping in?” Andy asked. He also wondered why such a small room had bunk beds if Gabe was the only child in the house.

“I tucked him into the bottom bunk, but I guess he climbed up on top sometime during the night. You know how kids are.” That’s just it. Andy didn’t know how kids were, but he nodded his head as if he did and kept studying the father. About that time he heard the dispatcher notifying the local ambulance service, which back then was run by the volunteer fire department.

“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t catch your name,” Andy said.

“John, John Phillips. And you?” he replied with a smile as he stuck out his hand. Andy refused it, using the blood on his hand as a convenient excuse.
Funny. I’ve never known anyone who shakes with his left hand
.

“Officer Andrew Myers,” he replied.

“Are you the same Andy Myers who took my boy to a ball game a few weeks ago?” Andy nodded. “Oh, I have to tell you, my son never stopped talking about that game. He had the time of his life. Thank you for taking him.”

Andy didn’t reply. The ball game felt like a lifetime ago. I guess in a way it was, because nothing was ever the same after my dad walked into that apartment. Nothing.

Chapter 2

A
LOT OF YEARS
went by before my old man told me about that night. Called it the longest night of his life, when he did talk about it. He arrived at the apartment complex somewhere around two in the morning, and didn’t get back to his apartment until nearly noon. He tried to wash away the night with a thirty-minute shower, and when that didn’t do the trick, he tried to wash it away with a couple of bottles of Jack Daniel’s. That was his third time to fall off the wagon, but who’s counting? Jack didn’t help, which made the longest night of Andy’s life stretch out over a couple of days. He was pretty much sober by the time he reported to work the next evening at eleven, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

You’d think that finding the dead body of a little boy my dad was growing to love was what haunted him. That’s true, but that was only part of it. A small part of it. Finding the body was only the beginning of his problems that night.

The first cop to arrive on a crime scene cannot leave until dismissed by a superior officer, who then assumes control of the situation. In the middle of the night in Trask, the superior officer usually meant someone from the sheriff’s department, at least in a case like this with a dead body and more blood than any one child should have been able to produce. As it turns out, there wasn’t nearly as much blood as it appeared. The water from the broken goldfish bowl made the scene look a lot worse. None of the first responders made the connection—not my dad, and not the volunteer firemen who came in with the paramedics. Those guys, God bless them, only made matters worse. The first two in the room immediately recognized Gabe. Apparently, he played on the same Little League baseball team as their sons. As soon as they made the connection, they lost it. Add vomit to the blood and you have a real mess on your hands. They also tracked blood all over the apartment. That caused a lot of confusion later on when the district attorney got involved. Andy could not remember seeing bloody footprints leading out of the room when he first arrived, although investigators found some bloody house shoes and pajamas in the bathroom, both of which belonged to the father. The first responders also shoved the small chest of drawers next to the bed out of their way when they started working on the body. Like I said, the bedroom was really small.

The room was small, and bloody. Very bloody. But, as I already mentioned, the water from the shattered fishbowl made it worse. No one caught that little detail until Dr. Daniel Warner, the county coroner, showed up. Warner was a royal pain in the butt, but he knew his stuff. He was already in a bad mood when he arrived. “Christ,” he said as he walked into the apartment, “I think the whole town turned out for this little party. It looks like a freaking carnival out there. I nearly ran over a couple of little kids chasing each other around the freakin’ parking lot. And did we really have to call in every emergency vehicle in the entire county for a dead kid? Holy crap.”

Before he could take another step, a young rookie sheriff’s deputy with a clipboard stopped him. Unfortunately for her, she was both a rookie and a woman, a bad combination when it came to Warner. “I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “Authorized personnel only in this area. I’m afraid you cannot come in here.”

“What the hell is this, amateur hour?” he growled. “Do you think I would venture into this little slice of heaven if I didn’t have to be here, sweetheart?” Then he looked over toward Andy, who was sitting on the couch next to John Phillips. “Hey, Barney Fife, you running this show? You wanna tell Farrah Fawcett here who I am?”

Before Andy could respond, the lead detective for Harris County stepped out from the hallway. “Sorry, Dan,” Deputy Ted Jackson said. “It’s okay,” he said to the rookie with the clipboard, “he’s the coroner.” Jackson then took Warner by the arm and said, “Good to see you. Sorry to have to get you out in the middle of the night.” Jackson was a twelve-year veteran of the sheriff’s department and had been a detective for the past two.

“Whatever,” Warner replied. “What have we got?”

“Eight-year-old boy, dead. Father claims it was an accident. Says the kid fell out of bed and hit his head.”

“It’s always an accident, isn’t it?” Warner said. “Pronounced a woman dead once, bullet hole right in the middle of her forehead, back half of her skull blown off completely. Husband claimed it was an accident. Said he only wanted to scare her by popping a couple of rounds over her head, but his aim was low. True story. Accident. Hell, no one ever does anything on purpose. It’s always an accident. Like that dead baby last week up in Middletown. Mom had shaken the crap out of the kid, turned its brains into scrambled eggs. By the time I got there, the woman’s crying like there’s no tomorrow. Can’t believe her baby is dead. All an accident, she said. Says she was just trying to get the kid to stop crying. Yeah, she stopped it, all right. Friggin’ idiot. Some accident. Just once I’d like to meet someone who’d say, ‘Yeah, I killed the bastard. What of it?’ But, no, it’s always an accident. No one ever means to do nothing. So where’s this accident?” Andy told me that Warner’s rant was the only thing that made him smile all night.

“Up here,” Jackson replied without commenting on anything Warner had said. Like I said, Warner was a royal pain, but he knew his stuff. Most people said it was a good thing he spent the majority of his time around dead people, because they were the only ones who could stand to be in a room with him.

Jackson started to lead Warner back to the bedroom when Warner stopped, pointed toward Andy and John, and asked, “So what’s the story with these two and what are they doing in the middle of my crime scene?”

“That’s Andy Myers,” Jackson replied. “He found the kid’s body. The other man is the boy’s father, John Phillips.” Andy stood, but Warner ignored him. Phillips continued sitting with his head down and eyes closed. “I asked Andy to stick around to answer any questions you may have. We’ve established that the accident was confined to the bedroom, not the whole apartment, which is why I let them stay in the living room,” Jackson said. “As you’ve already seen, it’s sort of a circus outside.”

“So that’s the boy’s father. What happened to the mother? Don’t tell me she’s in the back, holding the dead kid or something?”

“The parents no longer live together,” Jackson said. “The mother lives in Adamsburg, and I’ve already arranged for another officer and the department chaplain to break the news to her. Don’t worry. She won’t come here. I told them to not allow her to come here and to take her to department headquarters. She’s probably already there by now.”

“Good,” Warner said, “that’s all we need is a hysterical mother running around here.” Then he looked over at John. “So what’s the deal with the dad. He stoned or something?”

“I think he’s praying,” Andy replied.

“Praying? Really. Huh. No kidding? Well, if this thing wasn’t an accident, then he’s going to need it. So where’s the kid?” Warner said.

Andy didn’t
think
John was praying, he knew it. If he didn’t know it then, he knew it later. At the time Andy assumed the guy was asking God to forgive him for what he had done. Already parts of John’s story didn’t add up. For one thing, he wondered how falling out of bed could kill a child. If every kid who ever fell out of bed died, they’d have to start shutting down grade schools all over the country. And then there was all the blood. The image of so much blood pooled across the bedroom’s tile floor made Andy shudder. And the damp feeling of the blood of the only child he ever cared for soaked into his slacks and sloshing in his shoes made him want to run out, screaming, into the night. But he couldn’t run away. He had to sit there next to the one person who really knew what happened in that room, while the blood slowly dried into his uniform trousers. He kept asking himself how he got there, and it wouldn’t be the last time he had that thought.

Andy settled down onto the sofa and waited for the coroner to do his work. In those odd moments when he could shove the image of Gabriel Phillips’s dead body out of his head, he immediately would think of Loraine. He beat himself up for a long while because he wasn’t the one to tell her that her only son was dead. But he couldn’t leave, not until the coroner let him go.

Even if he’d been able to pull away long enough to break the news to her, Andy didn’t know what he would have said. They were lovers, but they didn’t feel like friends. The more he thought about the past several months, the more Andy realized he didn’t even know Loraine. He wondered if his presence would comfort her, or make matters worse. As it turns out, he had good reason to wonder. Except for the one morning when Gabe happened into the kitchen, Loraine always made sure the boy was gone when Andy slept over. There really wasn’t any regular pattern to when she would call, which made Andy think that she didn’t schedule her romps in the hay with him around the boy’s regular visitation time with his father. If the boy even had regularly scheduled visits. The father talked like he and his wife hadn’t been separated for long, but Andy had been seeing Loraine for quite a while. He let out a long sigh, and stopped running down that line of thought. Deep down he knew where it could lead, and he didn’t want to go there, at least while he had a choice.

Ted Jackson led the coroner to the back bedroom, where Gabriel Phillips lay dead on the floor. No one had lifted him back onto the bottom bunk after Andy’s and the paramedics’ failed attempts to revive him. Bright flashes from the back of the apartment lit up the hallway every few seconds. Matt Rivers, who took the phrase “boys from the lab” to a whole new level, was busy snapping pictures of everything, and everybody, in the bedroom. When he first arrived, Andy thought the kid was all of fifteen. He looked more like a reporter from the local high school paper than a part of the county investigative team. Rivers had taken pictures of Andy’s bloody hand and pants legs, then snapped several shots of John, especially his hands. Only then was Andy allowed to wash. Once he was finished with the two of them, Rivers went down the hallway, snapping pictures every foot or so, carefully placing numbered placards into each shot. For the past half hour he’d been in the tiny bedroom.

Although the apartment was small, Andy could only make out bits and pieces of the conversation between Dan Warner and the detectives in the bedroom. There was no missing Warner’s shout of profanity when Rivers made him wait before entering the room. Andy also heard Warner say with a loud, clear voice, “Yeah, hard call on this one. The kid’s dead.” Andy wouldn’t learn all that Warner discovered in Gabe’s bedroom until several days later. Yet, he was already growing suspicious that everything was not as it appeared. A few minutes after the coroner started his work, Ted Jackson walked out and said, “Andy, would you do me a favor and take Mr. Phillips over to the sheriff’s department? We need to get a full statement from him.” Jackson hadn’t said much, but what he did say spoke volumes to Andy. It wasn’t so much Jackson’s words in that moment that grabbed Andy’s attention, but the look the two exchanged. Andy and Ted went way back. They’d worked together on the Trask Police Department before Ted moved on to bigger and better things with the sheriff’s department. The two had even been drinking buddies before Andy’s first stroll through the twelve steps. Then Jackson said, “Ask Duncan to handle it for me. He’s on duty tonight. You might also make sure he asks the standard questions and follows Miranda.” The Supreme Court Miranda decision made sure all suspects were read their rights. Andy read this as Jackson saying,
This is important. We don’t want to screw it up
.