David Dean - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 125, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 763 & 764, March/April 2005

They drove him over to Smithtown, no one talking on the way. As they entered the office, one of them, the younger one, asked him if he wanted a drink of water. “Yes. Please,” he stammered, hardly audible.

The interrogation started: “Where do you work?” “What do you do?” “Do you love your wife?” “Have you ever been arrested?” The agents were relatively polite, but slowly they inched closer to him. The younger one began to stick his face right in front of Fred’s, commanding a hold on his eyes, gripping them like a steel trap. “How often do you look at porn sites?” “Do you own any porn magazines or videotapes?” “Do you like little girls?” The lights and the questioning were beginning to suffocate Fred. He was sweating. He was answering all of their questions truthfully. He hardly ever looked at porn sites; he was normal; he was a good husband and a good father. He hadn’t done anything.

They finally honed in on the few facts they had. “Look, we have retrieved everything off her hard disk. There is a record of where she surfed. She had software that captured her chats. The owners of the site are cooperating fully. They have determined that ‘Hotdamndaddy’ is you. Look at this.” The young one threw some stapled papers at Fred.

He glanced down and looked at the typed transcript, his eye running quickly through the cryptic lines of sexual innuendo. He could feel himself paling, the blood draining from his face as he reached the final damning passage:

SWEETNESS: have u evr bn with a virgin

HOTDAMNDADDY: I’ve had my share... have you ever been with a daddy?

Shortly after typing that question — or was it an offer? — he had grown uncomfortable. He didn’t know why he was there, exchanging sexual suggestions with a stranger. He had quickly logged out of the chat room, discomfited, if a little titillated.

They started in on him again. “So you like little girls? You’ve had your share of virgins?” Up until this point, the older agent could have been an executive at Fred’s company. He had been polite and businesslike. Suddenly, he slammed his hand down on the desk and screamed at Fred, spittle spraying into Fred’s face, “WHERE IS SHE? DID YOU KILL HER? OR IS SHE HIDDEN SOMEWHERE? TELL US NOW, AND WE CAN HELP YOU. IF SHE DIES WHILE YOU’RE JERKING US AROUND, WE’LL PUT A NEEDLE IN YOUR ARM FOR SURE!”

He told his story again. “Look, my brother-in-law was over for the holidays. He’s single. He’s only twenty-six. He must have used my computer to visit some of those sites. He asked me if he could check his e-mail and of course I let him, but I didn’t watch him. After that I started to get all these junk e-mails, enticing come-ons: triple X, enhance your size, adult pictures, teenage pictures, all nude... all kinds of this crap. I deleted most of them, most of the time, but every now and then I clicked on one. I went to a few of the sites, but never for very long and never for very deep. I never paid a penny. I’d only see the tamer stuff that they show for free. But I did see nude pictures. I did see what looked like teenage girls. I felt guilty, thought of my own daughters. Then one day, for some reason, I guess I was bored, I did click on a chat-room button. I slid right into this joking that you see, back and forth, a few times. I don’t know how it happened. I can’t explain it. It only lasted a few minutes and I caught myself and logged off. I never even looked at that kind of site again after that. I was disgusted with myself. I didn’t know who ‘Sweetness’ was. She could have been an old woman in Sweden for all I knew. Or a fag pretending to be a young girl. I know all those things happen and I felt so foolish. I made a mistake. And I’m sorry. But it’s not what you think. I’m not a pervert. I had nothing to do with this poor girl’s disappearance.”

It went on like this all evening, throughout the night, and into the next morning. He was exhausted, tired, hungry. His spirit was broken. Each telling he’d get harder and harder on himself, feeling worse and worse for his indiscretion, beginning to believe that he was a pervert, that he did do something to hurt this girl. He cried, out loud now, visibly sobbing. He banged his head against the table as he blurted, “What do you want me to confess to, for God’s sake?”

Just then, the older agent was called outside, and he stayed outside for a good five minutes. The younger one lit up a cigarette, blew smoke into Fred’s face. When his partner came back in, he was a changed man. He looked defeated. He walked over to Fred and said, “You can go home now.”

The younger one mumbled, “What the—?”

Fred put his head down and cried in relief, purging himself, draining his emotions into his sleeve. After a minute or so, he looked up. “What happened? Did you find her? Is she all right? Is she dead? Did you find the killer?”

The older one just repeated, “You can go home now.”

Fred pulled himself together and went to the bathroom to wash his face. He held his hands over the sink and stared into his own eyes. They were hollow and dark and he could not see himself in them. He was afraid of the depth of the darkness, the emptiness that stared back at him.

He walked towards the front door, but was stopped by the younger agent. “No, there are too many reporters out there. We have a back way.” They went down into a cellar, across a long dark alleyway, and emerged almost a block away from where they had entered the night before. Another late-model black sedan was waiting for him, engine running, with a different agent in it, one he had not met before. Again, they drove in silence. As they turned the corner on his block, he saw the throng: multiple satellite dishes, TV vans, and at least fifty people hanging around on his front lawn. He asked the agent to pull all the way up into the driveway and he made a run for the back door before they could organize to block him. The door was locked, and he banged on it till Sheila finally came and let him in. The agent left without saying a word.

As he quickly closed the door behind him, locking it before the horde of reporters could muscle in, he reached for his wife and put his arms around her. He began to sob, crying openly, and repeating, “I’m sorry, Hon, I’m so sorry.” It took him a long minute before he realized that Sheila was not hugging him back, was not responding with any feeling at all. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, her body almost rigid. He stepped back a little, sliding his arms away, but kept his hands on her shoulders and looked into her face. Obviously, she had had a miserable night as well. She had been crying, her face swollen, her eyes red and puffy, her hair unkempt and damp. She wore no makeup and looked as if she hadn’t slept a moment, either.

He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what she knew. He took a deep breath and tried again. “Sheila, I’m sorry, but I didn’t do anything, you know that, don’t you?”

“Please, spare me. No more lies. I can’t take it.” She turned away from his grasp, walked out of the kitchen, through the living room where the kids were sprawled on the floor with blankets and pillows, past the blaring television. She kept going, up the stairs towards the bedroom, but he stopped in his tracks, his very being pulled as if by a tractor beam into the TV screen, where he saw pictures of the killer: a young, disheveled, hirsute man in a dirty flannel shirt and torn jeans. Fred sat down on the edge of the chair, noticed the CNN logo in the corner, and tried to read all of the text crawling along the bottom of the screen: “Drifter followed victim home from local mall. Suspect chose victim at random. No prior relationship. Victim apparently strangled. No signs of sexual assault. Long Island salesman freed.”