Brian Freeman - In the Dark aka The Watcher

“Yes.”

“Did you wash them?”

“No, they’re in a basket.”

“We’re going to need those, okay? I’ll have to take them with me.”

“Okay, sure.”

“And shoes.”

“I wasn’t wearing shoes.”

“Ah.” Wallace pulled a Polaroid snapshot from his shirt pocket. “This is you last night, right?”

“Right.”

“There’s some blood around your hands and on your legs and feet.”

“Yes, I know. I told you, I stepped-”

Wallace shook his head. “It’s okay. Don’t worry. The lab people tell me whoever did this would have been drenched in blood. I mean drenched. Head to toe. Not a little around the edges.” He looked at William Starr. “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t mean to be so graphic. What I’m saying is that we already concluded that it was very unlikely that Cindy was involved. But I like to see people’s faces before I draw my own conclusions.”

“If you want to blame anyone, blame me,” Dad announced.

Wallace shifted, and the wooden chair squealed. He looked curious. “What do you mean, sir?”

“I mean, first it was my wife and now my daughter. They’re both dead. It doesn’t matter who held the bat. It was God who killed her.”

“I don’t believe God kills eighteen-year-old girls,” Wallace said.

“You’re wrong. He does it all the time. Every day. Sinners get punished.”

“I see.” Wallace’s voice became flat and cold. “Mr. Starr, your neighbors overheard you shouting at Laura the night before she was killed.”

I saw Dad’s fingers tighten on the Bible in his lap.

“Yes, we argued sometimes.”

“What was the fight about?”

“I wanted her to stay on God’s path.”

“But she didn’t?” Wallace asked.

“Not always.”

“In what way?”

“That’s between me and Laura,” Dad snapped. “How can you ask me that when God is deciding the fate of her soul right now?”

Wallace didn’t like that answer.

“Mr. Starr, did you know Laura wasn’t home last night?”

“Yes. I went to her room around ten o’clock, and she wasn’t there.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I went to bed.”

“Did you know where Laura had gone?”

“No.”

“Did you stay up to wait for her?”

“Yes, but I fell asleep.”

“Were you home all night?”

“Of course, I just told you that.”

“Did you talk to anyone?”

“No.”

Wallace nodded. “Mr. Starr, did you ever hit your daughter?”

Dad bolted out of his chair, trembling. His white shirt fluttered. I hadn’t seen him move so quickly in years. “How dare you!”

Wallace didn’t shrink. “You heard the question, sir.”

“Never,” my dad insisted.

“Sometimes fights get out of hand.”

“I never touched her.”

Wallace eyed me. It was as if, without saying it flat out, he wanted me to tell him yes or no. Pass the secret silently between us. He wanted to know if it was true, if Dad had ever struck Laura. Or me. I met his gaze.

“My father wouldn’t do that,” I said.

Wallace nodded. That was enough for now. I told myself that I was right, because I knew my father had never lifted a hand against me, and I didn’t believe he had ever done so to Laura. Even so, I couldn’t get Laura’s voice out of my head.

What if Dad were abusing me? Could you kill him?

I said nothing about that.

Wallace kept his attention on me. “Cindy, you’ve gone over with my men what happened last night. I’m going to ask you to repeat some of it for me.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I know you’ve been through hell, and I know how hard this is for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Please tell me again exactly what you did last night and everything that happened right up until the time when the police responded to the call. Don’t leave anything out.”

So I told him.

Well, I told him some of it. There were things I left out. About me and Jonny that night. And other things, too. Jonny chimed in along the way, about Peter and the baseball game, about the storm, and Peter’s bat lying in the field. I could see Wallace’s mind working furiously whenever Peter Stanhope’s name came up, like part of him was with us and part of him was somewhere else. I wasn’t stupid. We were practically accusing the son of one of the richest men in the city of murder. A cop hears that, and he looks for a place to run. Wallace found that place right away. A black man in the woods.

“So you and Laura thought someone was watching you,” he said when we were done.

Nothing about the stalker note. Nothing about Laura and Peter dating and then breaking up because Peter was demanding sex. Nothing about the bat, or the threats against Laura he made during the game.

“Yes.”

“It couldn’t have been Peter Stanhope, though, right? Because he was still in the baseball field with Jon here when you heard somebody.”

Jonny and I looked at each other. We both nodded.

“You’re sure it was marijuana you smelled?”

I glanced at my dad. “I’ve never used it, but I know what it smells like.”

“Did you see this black guy that Jon talked about?”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

Wallace looked at Jonny. “You must have seen this guy, this vagrant, in almost the same place where the girls were. Right?”

“Within a hundred yards or so,” Jonny said.

“Okay, tell me more about this guy with the dreadlocks.”

“They call him Dada.”

Wallace wet his lips with his tongue. “Whoa, whoa here, you know who this guy is? You’ve seen him before?”

Jonny nodded. “He hangs out by the tracks in the harbor. Where the trains head south.”

“What were you doing down in that area?”

“It’s somewhere to go,” Jonny said.

I knew why he went there. It was his private spot, his getaway, his place to think. Jonny told me he liked to hike down there, among the wanderers who came and went, eluding the police and the railway security. In his head, Jonny felt like a traveler, too. Homeless.

“Okay, so who is this guy?”

“I first saw him a month ago. He was in the woods down near Raleigh Street, where it heads out across the Arrowhead Bridge. The others are scared of him, because he’s so big. They think he’s some kind of ghost.”

Wallace snorted. “Ghost.”

“Most of the guys down there are a little crazy. They see someone like Dada, it’s easy to believe almost anything.”

“Is he violent?”

“I don’t know. I’ve only seen him a couple times.”

“Can you show me where you saw him?”

Jonny nodded. “Yeah, I think so. He moves around, though. They all do.”

“If he killed a girl, he probably took the first train south,” Wallace said. “My guess is he’s long gone.”

He stood up. His right leg, the one that limped, looked stiff. He rubbed his knee, and I saw him grimace in pain.

“I think that’s all for now,” he said. Then he looked at Jonny. “I could use your help, Jon. Do you have time to come with me?”

Jonny looked at me, and I nodded.

“Sure.”

Wallace cinched up his slacks over his stomach. I was disappointed. He was leaping at the idea that some stranger did this, even though Laura had been receiving threats for months. Even though Peter Stanhope’s bat killed her. Money talks.

“So you’re going after this man Dada?” my dad asked.

He believed it, too. Everyone did. No one wanted to think about the alternative, because it was too complicated. Too scary.

“Nope,” Wallace said. “I mean, we will, but not yet.”

I stared at him, surprised. But maybe I shouldn’t have been. After all, he was smart.