John Case - The Murder Artist

“That’s Kevin’s,” I say. I seem to speak without volition. “Sean has a green one.” I can’t take my eyes off the shirt. I try to concentrate on the fabric, exclude the image of Kevin in the shirt. There’s a weird metallic taste in my mouth. Liz is shivering in my arms.

“Where did you find it?” I hear myself ask.

“Could you confirm that, Mrs. Callahan? I mean the identity of the shirt?”

Liz stiffens, lifts her head away from my chest. She turns her head, takes a look. She makes a terrible little sound. Her hand flies up to her mouth. She manages a few choppy nods.

Shoffler presses her. “Are you telling me the shirt belonged to your son Kevin?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you find it?” I ask again, but again Shoffler doesn’t answer. He maneuvers the shirt back into the box, pushes the flaps shut with the pencil. Ebinger meticulously tapes it closed.

“There’s one more thing,” Shoffler says. “Would you follow me?”

Shoffler leads, Ebinger follows in our wake. I try not to speculate on the fresh horror he’s going to show us. I concentrate on looking at the back of Liz’s head, the slight sway of her dark ponytail. We enter the boys’ room. I can hardly breathe.

“We decided to leave this in situ for the moment,” Shoffler says, levering open the door of the closet with his pencil. “Can you explain this?” he asks, using the pencil to point to the top shelf. He moves aside, allowing us to peer into the closet. There, next to Candyland and Sorry is a small glass mixing bowl full of a clear liquid. It’s on the very edge of the shelf, ready to topple.

“What is it?” Liz asks. “Is it water?”

“We’re not certain yet – but, ah – as I said, if you can tell us what it’s for, that would help.”

Liz looks at me, but all I can do is shrug. I have no idea what a bowl of liquid is doing on the top shelf of the boys’ closet.

“Did they have a pet or something?” Shoffler asks. “I mean a frog, a bug… a fish? That would make sense.”

“I don’t think so,” I tell him.

“Hunh,” Shoffler says, “you don’t think so.” He turns toward Liz. “Mrs. Callahan?”

Liz just shakes her head and frowns and gives me a funny look.

“We’ll take a sample of the liquid and print the bowl. Is it your bowl, by the way?” He looks from me to Liz.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess so.”

“I don’t recognize it,” Liz says.

“Hunh,” Shoffler says again. “Well, Dave is going to deal with this,” he says, nodding toward the closet, “and the crew can take on the family room. You can have the run of the rest of the house now.” He removes his gloves.

“Detective-”

“It shouldn’t take long,” he says, ignoring me, “and then we’ll be out of your hair. I expect everybody’s pretty tired,” he continues, “especially the grandparents.”

“The shirt,” Liz squeaks, “does that-?”

“Sorry,” Shoffler says, retreating into formality, “the shirt is evidence, and questions about it will have to wait. It would be premature to speculate. We’ll send it to the lab and then I’ll be in a better position to discuss it.”

“But-”

He’s moving toward the door now, walking past Liz and me. There seems to be no choice but to follow him out into the hall. We pause before returning to the family room, so that the two policemen coming out of my study can get to the front door. Each of them carries a large cardboard box sealed with evidence tape.

“What’s that? What are you taking?”

“I think it’s your computer.”

“My computer?”

“Relax, Alex. It’s routine. The kidnapper was here, right? Naturally we have to remove some items to examine them. Detective Ebinger will give you a search warrant inventory when we’re finished, and you should look that over. As for the computer, what if the boys have been in touch with someone over the Internet? We have to examine that possibility.”

Liz turns on me. “You did have parental controls on that thing, didn’t you, Alex?”

“They never used the computer.”

“Alex!”

“They never went near it! I don’t even think they knew how to turn it on.” This is probably true. The Apple engineers disguised the iMac’s on/off switch so well that when I bought the machine, I had to call the shop to ask where it was.

“You promised me.”

“Liz-”

Shoffler interrupts. “Alex,” he says, “would you be willing to take a polygraph test?”

“What?”

I say what, but I heard him. I also know what it means. Murder – even the murder of children – is often a family affair. When children go missing, the parents are automatic suspects. I can hear Officer Christiansen’s voice during our walk back to the Jeep in that deserted field outside the festival gates. “Nine times out of ten, it’s a parent.”

Who could forget the Susan Smith case? The smiling faces of her sons blanketed the news for days as their distraught mother begged for their return, the return of boys she herself had sent rolling into the cold water of a lake, belted into their car seats. How could she do it? I wondered – everyone wondered – did she watch the water rise, did she watch them go under? I also remember a couple in Florida who made tearful appeals for the return of their adorable daughter, whose mangled body was later discovered buried in their backyard.

Would you be willing to take a polygraph test? It is in this company – Susan Smith, the tearful infanticidal Florida couple – that I am being placed.

So I know. Asking me to take a polygraph test means that the bloody shirt… or maybe they’ve found something else in the house… makes them think I might be involved in the boys’ disappearance. And, of course, I also know that they’re wrong.

Before I can answer Shoffler, he does that traffic cop thing with his hand. “You’re not required to take the test,” the detective says. “It’s strictly voluntary – you understand that, right?”

“What?” Liz says. “What?”

I just stand there. Anger bubbles up in me. “I’ll take the test,” I say, “but it’s a waste of time. I don’t get it. There had to be hundreds of people who saw my kids at the fair. And Kevin called me, he called me from here. Your guy – Christiansen – he was in the car.”

Shoffler screws up his face, looks at the ceiling, as if he’s getting some kind of information from up there. Then he nods, makes up his mind about something. “Look,” he says, “the phone call? You say that was your kid – but no one else can confirm that. It could have been anyone. Even if the call did come from here.” It seems as if he’s going to say more, but he changes his mind and just shakes his head.

I know what he’s thinking though, and the word goes off in my mind like a cherry bomb: accomplice .

“It’s just like that shoe you spotted out by the fence,” Shoffler says. “You know? I’m not implying anything here, but the thing is – who spotted it?”

“What shoe?” Liz asks in a panicky voice. “There’s a shoe?”

“We found a child’s shoe at the fairgrounds,” Shoffler says. “According to your husband, it belongs to one of your boys.”

“Kevin,” I say. “One of Kevin’s Nikes.”

“You can understand why we’d like you to take a test,” Shoffler says in what I guess is meant to be a soothing voice, “because… the thing is, what we’ve got, it’s all…” He stops there, ending with a little shrug. He doesn’t say it, but I get the message. I could have put the shoe there, outside the jousting ring, then pointed it out to Shoffler. An accomplice could have made the phone call from this house to my cell phone. There’s been no ransom note, no telephone call. Shoffler himself said it: Why take two kids? It’s not like a bake sale. There’s no outside corroboration for my story. It all begins and ends with me.