Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

“That’s right!” Sullivan exclaimed indignantly.

Kristine Kjarstad nodded.

“We checked into that, and we found a witness who saw you at the apartment block shortly after two that afternoon, just after the bodies were discovered. That’s a twenty-minute drive from Renton. There’s no way you could have got back in time.”

She glanced quickly at Steve Warren, who seemed to be about to protest. Leading questions about the type of gun used were one thing, inventing nonexistent witnesses another. She gave her partner a hard look.

“I did it earlier,” Sullivan said at last.

Kristine Kjarstad nodded helpfully.

“How much earlier?”

“On my lunch break. I didn’t want the boss coming by and finding I wasn’t at work. It’s tough to get jobs these days.”

He looked up at Kristine, as though to confirm the clinching effect of this down-to-earth detail.

“So what time would that have been?” she asked.

Sullivan considered.

“Between twelve and one, maybe.”

“And you were back at work by one?”

Sullivan nodded.

“How do you know?”

“I was listening to the radio while I got the paint ready. Thought there might be something about it on the news.”

Kristine Kjarstad was silent.

“What’s the deal here, anyway?” Sullivan demanded with a touch of anger. “I told you I did it! That’s all that matters.”

He was clearly aggrieved at the way he was being treated. He had voluntarily confessed to the murders, thereby saving the police a whole lot of trouble, and what happened? They started fussing over details and looking for discrepancies, just as though it was his innocence he was trying to establish, not his guilt! Why didn’t they just book him and be done with it?

Kristine Kjarstad would have been only too happy to oblige, if she’d thought she could take the case to the DA’s office with the slightest chance of success. Unfortunately that was out of the question. Wayne Sullivan’s spirit might be willing, but his story was weak. The chronology he’d come up with to accommodate the imaginary witness who’d seen him at Bellevue shortly after two o’clock was the final blow. Before she was shot, Mrs. Sullivan had left a message on her friend Kelly Shelden’s voice mail. Like all such messages, it had been dated and timed, proving beyond doubt that Dawn Sullivan had been alive at seventeen minutes past one that afternoon. If Wayne was at work by one o’clock, there was no way he could have killed her.

Over the next two days, Kjarstad and Warren, working in relays with Harrison and Borg, took Wayne Sullivan’s story to pieces like kids disassembling a junked appliance. It was hard work. Sullivan had clearly hated his wife’s guts and resented her influence over the children, particularly the two boys. He was also grieving in a mute, inarticulate way for their deaths, and feeling guilty for having left them alone and defenseless. The scenario he had invented satisfied and explained all these emotions, as well as casting him as a star player instead of a weak, ineffectual onlooker in his own tragedy. It took a long time-much longer than it would have done if he had been guilty-to break him down and force him to admit that his confession was false.

With Wayne Sullivan’s release, the investigation had to start all over again from scratch. But in the absence of any other leads, the case was in practice relegated to inactive status. In most homicides the perpetrator is arrested within hours of the crime, often at the scene. At the very least his identity is established, and it is just a matter of waiting until he is picked up. Intensive, time-consuming investigations of cases where there is no known suspect are simply not cost-effective.

Kristine Kjarstad had gleaned only one additional piece of information since then. A month after the shootings, Jamie Sullivan and his sister Megan moved to Nebraska to live with their maternal aunt. Before they left, Kristine spoke with the boy. By now he had recovered, as much as he ever would, from the shock of what had happened. It had become a story, and Jamie no longer had any problems talking about it. He confirmed to Kristine Kjarstad the account which had been passed on earlier by the social worker, and added one further detail: the man who had come down to the basement of the house that day had been wearing a pair of expensive athletic shoes. He had even been able to identify the model, the Nike Air Jordan.

I made a vow never to let chance interfere in my arrangements again. My presumption was punished, as it seemed, in the most terrible way.

One day in early spring, three or four months after my meeting with Sam, our son, David, came back from school with an invitation to a birthday party in his lunchbox. A bunch of the kids in his class were going, he told us, displaying the card decorated with red and blue balloons and a clown’s exaggerated rictus.

Like many only children, David found socializing problematic, alternating between bouts of bossy domination and moody withdrawal. Rachael and I were the more disturbed by this because we knew that he was not going to have any siblings. Her second pregnancy had been terminated as a result of complications which precluded the possibility of her having any more children. Birthday parties, with their structured activities and reassuring rituals, were one of the few occasions for peer interaction which David didn’t have to be talked into. Neither of us knew the child whose party it was, a girl who had only just moved to the school, so we called another couple whose son was the nearest thing David had to a friend. They said that he was going too, and offered to collect both boys from school and drop them off at the party. I would then pick up David on my way back from work.

The afternoon the party was held was not an easy one for me. A group of students had lodged a formal complaint against the low grades I had given them, on the grounds that they were the result of “white male Eurocentrist bias.” My initial reaction was to laugh this off, but in the course of an hour-long meeting with the associate dean I quickly learned that it was no laughing matter. I had told one of my better classes a few anecdotes about my experiences at schools in Europe, naively thinking that this would help overcome the teacher-student barrier and foster a sense of shared purpose. This story had apparently gone the rounds of the college, and when I penalized a different group of students who had persistently underperformed, it was raised as a way of bringing my judgment into disrepute. I had expected the associate dean to back me up, but by the end of the interview I had been made to feel that it was I who had flunked some basic test, not the students.

Having ditched out of the dean’s office at the earliest possible opportunity, I was the first parent to arrive at the house. I parked at the curb and walked up the path to the front door. Inside I could hear kids screaming and shouting. It sounded a little out of control, but we’d given similar parties ourselves and I knew that they always tended to come apart toward the end.

I rang the doorbell. There was no response. Close up, it was apparent that not all the screams inside were of excitement or over-tiredness. Some of the children sounded seriously panicked. I rapped on the door. I was expecting a rapid response, an adult face corroded with stress, relief and a sense of failure. “Hi, I’m David’s father,” I’d say with a big smile. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full here. Just remember, next time you get to go shopping.”

No one came. I rapped again, then tried the handle. I thought at first the door was locked, but it was just jammed against the frame, and gave when I pushed hard with my shoulder. Something nudged up against me, about the same height as David. Then I saw that it was a balloon, one of those shiny metallic pillow-shaped ones filled with helium. It moved past me on a current of air and drifted away, rising rapidly until it was just a dark shape against the eggshell-blue sky.