Austin Camacho - Collateral damage

Dean’s brow knit for a moment. “Nobody.” Hannibal slid his glasses off and stared hard into Dean’s face.

“Now, Dean, I want you to go back there now,” Cindy said in her most soothing tones. “I want you to really be there that day. Can you do that?” Dean nodded his head but was otherwise still. “Where are you, Dean?” Cindy asked.

Dean snapped his head back and forth, as if trying to shake something off. A lie, perhaps. “I’m on the dining room floor, behind the door. There’s yelling. A fight.”

“Whose voices?”

“Papa’s,” Dean said. “Papa and…Mama?”

Cindy leaned closer. “Are you sure it’s her voice?”

“I think so. It’s a woman, but she’s kind of whispering. But Papa’s shouting. Really loud.”

Hannibal felt Bea shuddering beside him, but his focus was on Dean’s face, which showed an inner conflict of some kind.

“After the fighting, tell me what you heard,” Cindy said. “Everything you heard. Like you’re there right now.”

Dean’s eyebrows rose without his eyes opening. He cocked his head, as if he could hear those awful sounds again. “They’re fighting. Papa yelling, yelling. Then… then the door. Yes, the door opening. Now it’s quiet for a second. Then the thump.”

“Thump?” Cindy asked after a moment of silence.

“The thump. And now I hear footsteps. Quiet again. I get up to see what’s going on now it’s quiet.” Dean shuddered in his bed, then snapped upright like a puppet whose strings had been yanked hard. “Mama screams really really loud so I run out to see what happened and…”

Everyone jumped when Dean’s eyes snapped open. He sat still, and Hannibal could tell he wasn’t seeing anything. At least, not anything in the room right then. Perspiration dripped into Dean’s eyes, but they did not blink from the horror in his mind. Cindy reached out to cover one of his hands with her own.

“Tell me what you see, Dean,” Cindy said. “You have to tell me what you see.”

Dean’s eyes clamped shut and big tears dropped from them onto the white sheets. “Mama. Mama is standing over Papa with this huge knife in her hand. Blood’s coming off the knife. She’s standing in his blood. It’s on her shoes. It’s all over.” Dean’s voice rose into hysterics before Quincy pulled Cindy away and took her seat.

“Dean, this is Dr. Roberts. All that you saw is in the past. The distant past. It can’t hurt you now.”

“Want to bet?” Hannibal said under his breath.

Cindy turned to Hannibal, wrapping her arms around him. She was shaken by her part in this drama, but he was barely able to hold her. He was energized by what he had heard. He stood, pulling her with him, struggling to be quiet while Quincy talked Dean back into a restful sleep.

“If that’s the truth it’s sure not what he said in court,” Hannibal said. “Did you hear it?”

Bea looked up, her brow knit. “I heard him say he caught his mother with the knife, standing over his father. What a horrible thing for a child to see.”

“No, no,” Hannibal said, breaking away from Cindy and pacing toward the bed. “There was an argument, but he didn’t see his mother. Whoever it was left. Remember, the door opening? Then the thump. Surely Grant’s body hitting the floor. Then a pause. Then Francis walks in, finds the body…”

“There’s a lot of supposition there, don’t you think?” Quincy said.

“No I don’t,” Hannibal said, facing the doctor across Dean’s sleeping form. “What’s the alternative? She opens the door, stabs him, stands there for a minute to think about it, and THEN screams? No, she came in after the fact and found the body. Wake him up.”

Quincy hesitated. “That might not be a good idea.”

“There’s no time, Doc,” Hannibal said. “If you want to save him, wake him up.”

Dean still looked like a child to Hannibal, even after dressing in chinos and a sweatshirt. Bea sat beside him on the edge of the bed and held him for a good five minutes while Hannibal conferred in a corner with Cindy and Quincy. They had agreed to stay away until he felt receptive to questioning.

“I’m ready to talk, Mr. Jones,” he called over Bea’s shoulder. When she shook her head at him, he added, “I want to find out what really happened. I think you can help me find out.”

Hannibal walked in close to Dean, looking into his eyes, which were as big as those of a Japanese anime figure, and asked himself one last time if the boy could really understand the truth.

“Okay Dean, what I need now is not what you saw or what you heard. I need to know what you thought. Are you ready to talk about that?”

Dean shrugged and sighed. “I’ve got nothing to hide, Mr. Jones. I just don’t know if I know what I was thinking ten years ago.”

“Let’s keep this simple,” Hannibal said, pulling a chair over to the bed and dropping into it. “You do remember who your baby-sitter was in those days, don’t you?”

Dean’s eyes widened for a second, then narrowed to slits. He lowered his head to look down at Hannibal’s hands. “Yes. It was Joan Kitteridge.”

Bea pulled his arm and turned him to herself. “Your boss was your baby-sitter?”

“Coincidence?” Cindy asked, standing behind Hannibal’s chair.

Dean shook his head. “I’ve tried to stay close to her. Thought I could maybe find out. Something.”

“You thought she had something to do with your father’s death, didn’t you?” Hannibal asked. “Maybe it was her voice you heard arguing with your father that night.”

“But baby,” Bea said, pulling his head to her with a moan and staring deep into his eyes. “I don’t understand. If you suspected Joan enough to follow her for all these years, why did you try to tell people you killed your father? You said you killed him and Oscar. Why?”

Dean seized Bea’s arms. It was the first intensity Hannibal had seen out of him. His breath was labored, as if pushing a great weight. Hannibal thought maybe there was a great weight, but it was on his chest.

“Don’t you see? At first I thought mother had killed him, because he was with Joan. I’m the one who told mother they were together. If I’d kept my mouth shut, she wouldn’t have known, and my father would be alive today. I’m the one responsible. I killed him.”

Hannibal stood and started pacing again, rounding the three sides of the bed and turning around to retrace his steps. “Okay, Dean, the little boy in you might believe that, but when you grew up you must have realized there were other possible answers. And you obviously thought Joan Kitteridge knew something, right? That’s why you followed her around.”

Bea looked at Dean with a different expression now, as if just accepting an unexpected depth in this man she loved. “You followed her?”

“She was my father’s girlfriend,” Dean said, squeezing Bea with one arm. “She watched me every day. Practically family. But when the trial started up, she was nowhere to be seen. And over the years I started to wonder why. I began to remember that there was another man. I think she had another boyfriend.”

“Actually,” Hannibal said, “There’s good reason to believe she was married at the time.”

“Well, that didn’t change my guilt,” Dean said. “If Joan’s other man did it, mother must have told him about Joan and my father. Again, if I’d kept my mouth shut, Papa would be alive today.”

“Or Joan did it herself,” Hannibal put it, “to keep him from confronting her husband.”

“Well anyway, I felt like I had to know what really happened. So when I finished school, I tracked her down. I think she gave me a job out of sympathy.”

Now Cindy looked at Dean out the corner of her eye. “Now I’m thinking you were close to Oscar, but not for the reason I first thought.”