Dave Zeltserman - Bad Karma

“He sexually abused his daughter, huh? Where’s the evidence?”

“The mother sending the other daughter off to France. The way she acted, how she tries so damn hard to look like a teenager. The change in Fred Gibson’s voice when I asked him about Thanksgiving. How he nearly swallowed his tongue when I brought up sexual abuse.”

“You got to be shitting me.” Chase glanced over his shoulder, saw an elderly woman glowering at him. He lowered his voice. “You have Wilson drag me down here because of some circumstantial bullshit and a so-called change in inflection?”

Shannon couldn’t keep from smiling as it finally hit him why Chase seemed so familiar. He could’ve been Ed Poulet’s younger brother. Looked and acted like him. The one big difference was that Shannon instinctively liked this guy more than he ever liked Poulet. Chase asked him what the fuck he was grinning about.

“Nothing. You remind me of a guy I used to work with, that’s all.” Then more seriously, Shannon said, “He abused his daughter, probably both of them. That was what their Thanksgiving blowup was about. That’s why Linda brought Taylor Carver with her; so she’d have a witness to it.”

“And you know this how?”

“From my ten years as a police officer. I was always good at reading people, and there’s no doubt in my mind about any of this. Linda confronted her parents last Thanksgiving about the abuse.”

“Yeah, well, I know about your history as a police detective. That’s why you’ve got some credibility with me, and that’s why I’m here now. But shit, you’ve given me nothing.” He stopped himself in mid-scowl, looked away. “And if what you’re saying’s true, then what? They bump off their own daughter to keep her from making more accusations? This is fucking insane.”

“Chase, where are you from originally? You don’t have a New York or Philly accent, but you sure the fuck don’t talk like a Midwesterner.”

He grinned at that. “As much a Midwesterner as this clown,” he said, pointing a thumb at Wilson. “Born and raised in St. Louis. Getting back to my question you so adroitly sidestepped, are you trying to say they killed their own daughter?”

“I couldn’t tell you. At least not without knowing their whereabouts the time of the murder or if any unusual money transfers had been made. I’d also like to know what the phone records looked like between Linda and her parents. Maybe before her murder she had threatened to go public with the abuse. If they did kill their daughter, I wouldn’t know without further police investigation. But I’ll tell you, I’ve seen stranger things over the years, and just as sickening.”

“Yeah, well, this still sounds pretty farfetched to me.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But even if they had nothing to do with Linda’s murder you still have a child who was sexually abused by her father, and that demands an investigation.”

Chase gave Shannon a hard look and shook his head. “The only real witness to it is dead and buried,” he said. “Even if you’re right, there’s not a goddamn thing I can do about it. Not without something concrete.”

“You could talk to the other daughter.”

“How would I do that? She’s locked away somewhere in France, and from the sound of it, she’s going to be staying there until she’s of age.”

“You could have the authorities there talk to her.”

“Oh, yeah, that would go over swimmingly. I can just imagine what the Cap would say if I asked him to do that with what you’ve given me. He’d laugh me off the force.”

“What do you think, Eric?” Shannon asked.

Wilson had been sitting quietly. He looked up at Shannon, his face a hard white. “I agree with Detective Chase. You’ve shown nothing to merit an investigation.”

“How about answering whether Linda was abused by her dad.”

“How the fuck would he know?” Chase demanded.

“He dated her in high school.”

Chase’s face turned redder as he stared open mouthed at Wilson. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said, incredulous. “When the fuck were you going to say something about that?”

“Calm down,” Wilson told him. “I have no evidence of Mr. Gibson abusing Linda.”

“But you suspect it,” Shannon said.

“I never said anything to you about that.”

“No, you didn’t. But I told you, I’m good at reading people. And you had it written all over you in large print.”

“Damn it, Wilson,” Chase prodded. “Did Gibson abuse his daughter or not?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you suspected that he did,” Shannon said.

Wilson gave a slow and reluctant nod. “I don’t know if I suspected that exactly,” he said. “But I guess I knew something was wrong. Not that Linda ever talked to me about it. More by the way she acted around them, especially with Mr. Gibson. She’d get so quiet and withdrawn when she’d see him. With her mom, I remember times she’d fly off the handle over little things. Sometimes nothing at all. I guess there were other signals, but I was just too dense a kid to pick up on them. Maybe I never really wanted to admit it to myself that any of that happened. Listening to you and thinking back how Linda used to act, it makes sense.”

“Officer Wilson, you didn’t answer my earlier question,” Chase said, his tone completely business. “A simple yes or no. As someone who was intimately involved with the deceased, Linda Gibson, do you now suspect her of being the victim of sexual abuse by her father?”

Wilson gave a weak nod, said, “Yes.”

“Okay, then,” Chase said. “At least I can now consider going to the Cap about an investigation.” He leaned further back in his seat, his wide face looking a bit washed out. Eyeing Shannon’s pie, he asked if it was any good.

“Damn good pie,” Shannon said. “Almost worth a trip to Wichita for.”

Chase nodded grimly and waved the waitress over. “Hey, gorgeous,” he said to the sixtyish grandmotherly woman standing with pad and pen. “How about a piece of that apple pie? Make it big, something that will hold me to late ’cause I’ll be working ’til midnight now thanks to these two clowns. And hide a few scoops of ice cream on it, okay darling?”

Later, the waitress brought over what looked like half a pie with a pint of vanilla ice cream on top of it. Chase ate it quickly, barely coming up for air as he joylessly shoveled it into his mouth. When he was done, he nodded at Shannon and Wilson, and suggested that it would help if they all met with the Cap.

Shannon glanced at Wilson, who appeared deep in his own thoughts. “Eric and I have another matter to talk about,” he said. “How about we meet you at the station?”

Chase scowled suspiciously at both of them, but squeezed himself out of the booth and told them not to take too long. “Cap likes to take off early on Thursdays for Walleye fishing.” After he ambled out of the diner, Shannon asked Wilson if he still wanted to know more about the Winters cousins.

“At this point, I’m not sure what I want to know. I can’t believe I was in such denial about Linda and her parents all these years. Makes me wonder how I could be a police officer if I couldn’t see what was right in front of my face.”

“Sometimes you’re too close to a situation, that’s all. But your instincts were right. At a gut level you knew what was going on. Over time, you’ll learn to listen to your gut more.”

“I hope so. But I’m going to take your advice and think about how much more I want to know about Winters. I might still call you in a few days.”

“Anytime you want, although I hope you don’t-at least not about that.” Shannon paused, scratched the side of his jaw that wasn’t swollen. “I apologize if I dragged you into something you didn’t want to be a part of.”