Chapter 9

Detective Haldeman sat at his desk reading over the file on the McLaughlin murders for about the hundredth time. There was just nothing to go on, not one piece of evidence that pointed in any useful direction, and in spite of the lack of any other suspects, he knew in his heart that Anton was telling the truth. On top of that, from what the emergency room doctor said, the one that examined and treated Anton the day he was brought in, the boy was so weak from starvation, it was unlikely he even had to strength to wield the murder weapon.

The faces of the men who’d paid the pervs to fuck their captives were blanked out on every single photo and video, and there were no payment records to trace back. There were no hits on AFIS on any of the fingerprints lifted from the scene other than the McLaughlins themselves. Nothing! They might have been the lowest of lowlifes, but they were smart and they were careful.

He leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head and wished he could light up a cigarette, but he knew his wife would make his life a living hell if he backslid. She could smell cigarette smoke on his clothing from two rooms away. He hadn’t taken a puff for over four months, and while his chest felt better and his chronic cough had almost completely gone away, he still missed his vice terribly. Such is the power of addiction.

Jerry’s mind drifted back to the initial scene of the three murders. And yeah, as far as he was concerned, the McLaughlins had murdered Sophia since her death, self-inflicted starvation or not, was a direct result of their torture.

The original 911 call had come from the telephone company. One of their technicians found the bodies when he was sent out to investigate an open line. The phone had probably been knocked off the hook during the chaos of the murders.

Haldeman sat up suddenly. Had someone been trying to call the McLaughlin house? And had that someone called to report that open line?

He called the phone company, gave them his name and badge number and requested information about why the tech guy had been sent to the house to track down a problem. It took a few minutes, but the on-duty supervisor told him that according to their records, the original call came from Harrell’s Plumbing reporting that they had not been able to reach the McLaughlin residence for several hours. The phone company then checked the line and found it open.

The detective smacked himself on the forehead, thinking, “Rookie fucking detective work, Haldeman! You dumb shit!”

He grabbed his jacket and headed out the door. It would probably be another dead end, but a good detective had to check out every possibility, and this was one that that should have long since been looked into.

Against all odds, Haldeman struck gold. Ed Harrell, owner and operator of Harrell’s Plumbing Service didn’t hold out for very long under the detective’s intense interrogation, especially since he was so nervous and he looked so scared that the word “guilty” may as well have been printed in block letters across his forehead. It was obvious from the onset that the man had no experience dealing with the police since he passed on the attorney after he was read his rights.

It took only a couple of hours of repeated hammering, catching every inconsistency, making him account for every minute of his time on the day of the crime before the man was reduced to gelatin, finally breaking down and pleading that he didn’t have any choice, that those sons of bitches were the most evil vermin on the face of the earth and they deserved to die.

His story was that it all started when he and a friend were joking around at a bar one night, bragging about their sexual prowess and exaggerating their successes. The friend boasted that the youngest piece of ass he’d ever had was a girl who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve, judging from her little A-size tits. Ed Harrell called him a liar and dared him to prove it.

His friend pulled out his wallet and said he could give him an e-mail address where he could make contact with the couple that pimped the girl out. He even teased that Harrell could have is choice of girl ass or boy ass.

Harrell may not have been a model citizen, but he drew the line at child molestation. He considered himself a decent, moral man and he was very much interested in what kind of pond scum might be into selling their kids like that.

That mental image stewed in his brain for a month before he acted on it. One night he got drunk and sent an e-mail to the address he was given, saying he was interested in some young stuff. An answer came back almost immediately asking what it was worth to him. He asked what the usual rate was and the reply was a hundred bucks.

With every ensuing e-mail, Harrell grew more and more enraged. These people were just asking to be fucked up bad, and he was just the guy to do it. So they e-mailed back and forth until a time and a place were set. It would be cash up front, and if he wanted any photos as mementos, it would be twenty-five bucks a print; two hundred if he wanted a video recording.

When they gave him a location, he was shocked to learn that it was less than two miles away from his own home. The address was an old farmhouse he’d driven by a thousand times. There were fucking kiddie porn peddlers in his own goddam neighborhood!

When he got to the house, he said he wanted to see some photos before he decided if he wanted to go through it. They showed him a few shots of two kids, a boy and a girl in their early teens, but no shots of them actually having sex with anyone. When he asked if the kids were theirs, they grew suspicious and backtracked on their story, saying the two individuals in the photos weren’t really kids and that he must have misunderstood what they were offering. He wanted to see the photos again, but he was quickly ushered out the door.

It was almost a month later and he’d been drinking again. He couldn’t get the image of the two kids in the photo out of his mind, and the more he thought about what was going on in that house, the more he drank and the more enraged he became. He couldn’t let scum-sucking low-life creeps like that get by with it. It was his duty as a citizen to put a stop to it.

His first thought was to just shoot them, but Harrell didn’t own gun. He was a plumber by trade, so he went out to his work van, selected a three-foot section of inch and a half steel pipe and climbed into his pickup. When he got to the farmhouse, he didn’t even knock. He walked right in the back door into the kitchen with every intention of kicking some low-life ass and caught them having dinner at the kitchen table. The man jumped up and came at Harrell around the table, but he caught the pipe across the side of his face and dropped to the floor. The woman screamed and grabbed her steak knife to stab him, but he caved her scull in before she could even get out of her chair. The man recovered enough to scramble to his feet and bolt for the door to the basement, locking it behind him, but Harrell, now in a violent rage, kicked it open and chased him down the steps.

The guy was trying to fit a key into the lock of a steel door, but he was too slow. The end was short and sweet. Harrell stared at the bloody mess at his feet, then stared at the dead-bolted steel door and got a sinking feeling about what was on the other side. When he opened it, he saw a tall, emaciated boy, the one in the photo, standing in the middle of the room staring at him. There was a girl lying on the bed obviously dead and starting to smell pretty bad. He wondered for a moment if he should take out the boy who already looked like he was on the verge of dying. He was, after all, a witness. But Ed couldn’t do it. He grabbed the kid by his shirt and pushed him through the door. The boy tried to resist, saying he needed to bury his sister, but Harrell pushed him out and screamed at him to run.

After surveying the carnage, Harrell had enough presence of mind, even in his drunken condition, to grab a towel and wipe his prints from the piece of pipe. He backtracked through the house and wiped down anything he might have touched. It was stupid of him not to have worn rubber gloves. Outside, he threw the piece of pipe into the weeds, climbed into his pickup and sped from the scene.

He had every intention of just letting the couple rot, but the image of that poor dead girl haunted him. When two weeks passed without anything showing up on the news, he came up with a plan to make sure they were discovered. He stopped at the farmhouse on his way to work, stepped into the kitchen, knocked the wall phone off the hook with his elbow and wrote the number down on is palm. He gagged and almost puked from the smell of the rotting bodies. As soon as he got to his shop, he called the phone company and told them he’d been unable to get through to a number and asked if they would check the line to see if it was still working. He’d no sooner hung up the phone than he realized that he had again done something incredibly stupid! He should have stopped at the Quick Mart and used the pay phone.

The story of the gruesome murder scene was on the news that afternoon.

Haldeman slid Ed Harrell’s printed statement across the table for him to sign in the presence of his public defender. The man looked defeated, but he also seemed relieved that it was all over.

When he handed the signed statement back across to Haldeman, the detective said, “Mr. Harrell, I suppose some would believe you did the world a favor by eliminating those vermin from society, and I might have understood your actions better if they had been brought before a judge and jury and somehow managed to get off on a technicality, but you took it upon yourself to execute them without a trial. There was no need for you to go through what you’re going through because the evidence against them is overwhelming and all you had to do was call the cops. Speaking personally and off the record, you have my sympathies. I hope a jury of your peers will feel the same.”

The police department called a news conference and released the official account of the arrest. Haldeman stood beside the Public Information Officer and answered the few questions that wouldn’t compromise the DA’s case. Looking around the room, he noted that Sarah Bernstein and Ken Early weren’t present and wondered why.

The why for Sarah was because she had been canned for bribing the custodian at Widener’s home to let her into the building. Schuler threatened to expose the TV station’s unethical practices unless Bernstein was properly disciplined and a public apology was issued to Dr. Widener for compromising the wellbeing of her children, and Anton Balan in particular for the story strongly implying that he had committed the murders. The GM had a better idea. He couldn’t believe his good luck in finally having a completely legitimate reason to can the smart-ass bitch.

So he did.

Haldeman called Schuler, and Schuler called Dr. Widener to tell her Anton was now completely off the hook, that the case had been solved.

“Oh my, Horst, that is such a relief! Who was the killer?”

“Some guy who thought he was doing the world a favor. Of course he was right, but he went about it the wrong way. I’m thinking the DA won’t push for anything bigger than manslaughter if he has any sense of justice. Anyhow, I guess you can bring everybody back home now.”

“Yes. Yes, I’ll drive up there right away and give them the good news. I imagine they’re all bored out of their skulls by now.”

Schuler chuckled, “Or not. Personally, I’d love to park my backside up at your cabin for a year or so. It’s beautiful up there.”

“It is, isn’t it? Well let me know when you’re free for a few days and I’ll invite you up as my guest. There’s a nice creek no more than a quarter of a mile from the cabin and I hear it’s loaded with trout. Are you a fisherman?”

“Avid! And I’ll definitely take you up on that offer as soon as I can clear a few cases from my calendar, that is if you’re serious.”

“Of course I’m serious and I’m looking forward to it, Horst. Thanks so much for calling with the good news.”

Dr. Widener arrived at the cabin to find Raul and Anton sitting on the porch in the midst of a music lesson. There was a music stand in front of Anton and he was playing a piece on the guitar that sounded way too advanced for a beginner.

She stood listening until the piece was finished and said, “Anton, that was just beautiful! Raul, you must be an amazing teacher to bring him along so quickly.”

He shook his head and said, “Oh no, Señora, it is not me. Anton learns the music and the guitar as fast as I can teach him. I have heard of such a thing, but I have never seen it before. It is like he can see the music in his head. He hears a piece of music and he just knows where to put his fingers on the keyboard or the fret board. He should be in a music academy like Juilliard studying with a master, but I think he is too young and he has not been to school since he left Romania. If I were a wealthy man, I would hire a tutor for him. If Anton chooses the guitar as his instrument, someday even Pepe Romero himself will be impressed. I can only imagine what he might do with a violin.”

“And the piano?”

“It is the same. Even before this muchacho learned to read music, he played better than me. Dr. Widener, you must find him a patron, someone to pay his way as his gift matures.”

She turned to Anton and asked, “Would you like that?”

“Yes, I would like to study music, but I also want to go to school.”

“Then that’s what you shall have. When we go back to the home, I’ll have you evaluated to see where your education should resume. Now, both of you come inside. I have some wonderful news.”

Rhonda was just putting dinner on the table. “I heard you outside, Dr. Widener, so I set a place for you. We’re havin’ spicy red beans and rice. It’s a Cajun dish I learned from my uncle. I hope I didn’t make it too hot for you.”

“Thank you, Rhonda. Now, everybody pay attention because I have good news. Mr. Schuler called me about two hours ago and told me that Detective Haldeman has solved the case. The man who killed those people is in custody and he’s confessed!”

Everyone cheered and clapped. Except Anton. He had a worried look on his face as he asked, “Dr. Widener, what will happen to that man?”

“Well, I suppose he’ll have to go to court and be sentenced by a judge. Then he’ll go to prison for a while; I don’t know for how long. What is your concern, Anton? You don’t seem pleased with the news of his arrest.”

The boy shrugged and said, “That man was too late to save Sophia, but if he had not come to the house when he did, I too would have died. I cannot feel happy that he must go away to prison for killing people who had no right to live.”

Rhonda spoke up. “Yeah, that’s true! I don’t know what reason he had for killin’ those creeps, but he saved Anton and he ought to get some kind of medal for that, don’t you think?”

Ken tried to explain the nuances of the case. “Look you guys, I’m sure the judge is going to consider all of that before passing judgment. Of course, it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we let the DA know our opinions on the subject. One thing you need to think about, Anton: While it’s true that man saved your life, what the judge has to weigh is why he committed the crime to begin with. If it was specifically to save you, that’s one thing, but if your survival was incidental to the killings, that’s an entirely different matter. What’s important now is that you’re safe. And now that the crime has been solved, I suppose Sophia’s body will be released and you can hold a proper funeral.”

Anton looked pensive, then nodded agreement. “Yes, we should do that right away.” He turned to Widener and asked, “Does a funeral cost a lot of money?”

She hugged him and said, “I have a pre-paid plan we can use, so don’t worry about the expense.”

Eric spoke up, “Hey guys, this talk is way too morbid and this awesome dinner is getting cold. Let’s eat!”

During dinner, Dr. Widener said, “Now that the reason for you hiding out here is resolved, I guess you can all head back home. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the sacrifice you’ve made to protect Anton.”

Ken corrected her thinking. “Doctor, this was no sacrifice. I love it up here, and I’d be happy to stick around as long as you’ll let me. Besides, watching and hearing this kid’s musical genius at work has been quite a thrill.”

“Yeah, put me on that list, too,” Eric chimed in.

Rhonda raised her hand. “And me. I mean, the home is okay, but it ain’t as nice as this.” What she didn’t say but what everybody except Dr. Widener and Raul understood was that she was wondering how she and Anton were going to manage their physical relationship when they were back at the home and living in opposite wings of the building.

Widener was a little surprised. “I thought you’d all be bored to death up here.”

Eric said, “Hardly! Aside from that rough patch when Anton broke out of his shell, this has been a very nice vacation for me.”

There was a knock on the door and Ken got up to answer. There stood Deputy Daniels holding Sarah Bernstein by the collar. The reporter was in handcuffs.

The deputy said, “I have a feeling you all know this character. I drove up and caught her keying somebody’s very beautiful pearl white paint job.”

Widener groaned, “My Lexus? Oh Ms. Bernstein, why ever would you do such a thing?”

Ken’s opinion was, “Because she’s a petty, self-centered loser, that’s why! Jesus, Sarah, why can’t you have the decency to accept defeat and walk away. It’s over, for god’s sake! Get over it!”

Sarah spat out, “Fuck you, faggot! Did you guys know that about this guy? Did you know he was a queer? How about you, Anton? Has this perv been feeling you up when nobody was looking?”

Daniels gave a little jerk of her arm that caused the side of Sarah’s head to smack against the doorsill. “Oops, my bad!”

Bernstein twisted around and screamed, “That’s police brutality, bitch! I’m filing charges!”

Rhonda walked over and stuck her face in Sarah’s and said, “I didn’t see nothin’! You just a clumsy ol’ cow!”

Eric laughed and agreed, “Yeah, that’s the way it looked to me.”

Daniels got back to business. “Dr. Widener, do you want to press charges against this person for vandalism? We can toss in violation of a restraining order as well since she was on the property.”