Chris Grabenstein - Tilt-a-Whirl

It's extremely cool.

And extremely violent.

We leave the manager's office and go to where two kids are blasting away at the doublewide screens. They're knocking down the enemy, racing through a clip of ammo strung across the screen in a bar graph of bullets.

Their time runs out.

The one on the left must've done pretty good. He gets to enter his initials in the game's flashing list of top scorers.

He'll be number ten.

Another high scorer occupies spots one through nine: H-A-H.

“Harriet,” Ceepak says. “Ashley is her middle name. Harriet Ashley Hart.”

Seeing the letters stacked on top of each other, running down the screen in a list (HAH, HAH, HAH), I can hear Ashley laughing at us.

Ceepak turns his back on the machine.

“This must be where they sent her for target practice.”

I'm a little slow to follow, and my face shows it. He explains.

“Ashley is our shooter. This was her pistol range.”

We're driving up to the city.

Ceepak's riding shotgun, studying the Polaroids of Ashley in her blood-spattered sundress.

Jane Bright is in the back seat, gazing out the window.

I'm up front, wondering what kind of kid kills her own father.

We're on cruise control, doing 85 up the parkway. No sirens or lights, but no state trooper's going to pull over a speeding cop car, even if it is painted turquoise and pink.

I have plenty of time to wonder about the old guy messing around with Ashley. Who was it? Who would do that kind of stuff with a girl her age? I mean, is she even thirteen? Was it the chief? Did he have some kind of mommy-daughter three-way deal going on?

I look up into the rearview mirror and catch Jane's gaze.

“Officer Bright? Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“If some old man was really forcing himself on Ashley, would she even be interested in doing anything with boys like Ben?”

“You mean would she be ‘loose’ like he claims? A hoochie-mama?”

“Yeah. Wouldn't she be sick of sex? Or even anybody, you know- touching her?”

“Many sexually abused children become promiscuous. It's how they've been taught to seek attention. If the abuse has been ongoing, it might be the only way the child knows to earn someone's love.”

Anybody who does this kind of sick stuff to children? I'm starting to think Ceepak should be allowed to shoot them in dark hotel rooms with his sniper weapon system.

“It's why there were no palm prints on her side of the safety bar,” Ceepak says to the stack of photos in his lap.

“Hunh?”

“At the Tilt-A-Whirl. There were no bloody prints on the safety bar. Remember the splatter pattern?”

“No” is probably the wrong answer, so I choose to remain silent.

“Like a flicked paint brush? But only on the bar in front of Mr. Hart. Nothing on Ashley's side.”

Oh, yeah. That. Forgot about that.

All I really remember is the bucket of blood dripping down Ashley's face and dress.

“It's why she was so soaked,” Ceepak says, reading my mind.

I glance over and see that he is re-enacting the shooting as best he can while riding in the front seat of a car. He puts his hands together and aims an imaginary pistol at the windshield.

“She was covered with blood because she stood in front of her father and fired a full clip. If she had been sitting next to him, as we initially chose to believe, only one side of her dress would have picked up the spray. The other side? It would have remained relatively clean.”

He, of course, is right.

It's why the side panels next to the urinals in The Pancake Palace show rust marks spreading out like a cheese wedge. The pee hits the pot, some splashes out sideways, hits the metal wall like radiating sunbeams. If everyone turned around and peed directly against the divider, the floor would be wet and the whole wall would be rusty.

“And the time frame….” Ceepak is shaking his head in the way that means he's kicking himself for not seeing something sooner. I'm starting to know his headshakes.

“I concentrated on how her mother was able to walk from the bank to the Tilt-A-Whirl so quickly. The question I should have asked? What took so long? Why did it take over half an hour for Ashley to run into the road seeking assistance?”

“She was waiting for something,” Jane says from the back seat. “Or someone. Someone to tell her what to do next.”

“It's a possibility,” Ceepak says, tucking the photos back into their envelope. “She was also waiting for us. To be in position at The Pancake Palace. And then, we helped her destroy the most incriminating evidence.”

“I cleaned up her face and hands,” I say. “In the fudge shop. I grabbed towels and wiped away any trace of gunpowder with all that hydrogen peroxide.”

“I bought her a new dress,” Jane adds. “Threw the bloody one away. Helped her in the shower….”

“I fell for it,” Ceepak says, summing up the offense I guess we're all most guilty of.

399 Third Avenue. Pretty swanky address. Not the nicest apartment building in the city, but none too shabby. It looks sort of new, so it's probably wired for high-speed Internet, but the apartments will be cramped white boxes with tiny bedrooms and very few closets.

I see a plumbing van parked across the street. I figure that's the FBI. They just radioed us: Betty and Ashley are upstairs. The feds have been extremely decent about jurisdiction and turf wars. I think Morgan wants Ceepak to bust the bad guys because he saw how the bad guys tried to bust Ceepak.

We enter the lobby of the high-rise and show the doorman our badges. He lets us in without buzzing the tenants upstairs first, because that's what Ceepak tells him to do.

We take the elevator. My ears pop.

Usually I'm totally psyched when I visit the city. Usually we come to have some fun.

Not today.

“Officer Ceepak. What a pleasant surprise.”

Betty Bell Hart greets us at the front door. I forgot what a good actress she is. She's dressed in a soft, bright yellow jogging suit-the kind nobody ever sweats in.

“We need to talk to you,” Ceepak says. “You and Ashley.”

“I really wish you would've telephoned first. We're rather busy at the moment….”

“Packing?”

“No. We're planning a funeral. Reginald's family is flying in on Wednesday.”

Ceepak moves into the living room.

“Let me call Chief Cosgrove,” says Betty.

“You can't. He's been detained.”

“Really? This wrongful death business? Isn't that your problem, Officer Ceepak?”

“The chief's caught up in it too.”

“I see.”

The apartment feels sunny. Betty, the retired meteorologist, has happy-face suns-clay, plastic, porcelain, Mexican-sitting on top of everything. The walls are cluttered with framed photos of her shaking hands with all the celebrities who waltzed through the Channel Five newsroom while she was Queen of the Small Screen, which is what the local TV Times magazine called her on its cover once. It's framed, hanging right next to the one of Betty hugging an astronaut-or somebody famous with really short hair.

There are no pictures of Ashley anywhere.

“Where's Ashley?” Ceepak asks. He's not looking for photos. He wants to see the girl he now knows shot Reginald Hart.

“In her room.”

“This way?” Ceepak starts down the central hall.

“Yes, but Mr. Ceepak….”

“I want to see her collection,” Ceepak says.

“What collection?”

“The turtles? Remember?”

Betty looks like a newscaster who can't read her cue cards in the middle of a live broadcast. I see her mental wheels spinning, the gears grinding.