Stephen White - Critical Conditions

He kept his eyes on Brenda. He said, “Why? What’s this about? I’ve been trying to help for weeks. Why are you willing to let me in now, Brenda? What’s changed?”

Brenda said, “Sam, I’m sorry you’ve been caught up by…me and Sherry. But this is about Merritt. I’m afraid,” she pointed at me with her chin, “he’s afraid that she’s in trouble. I want your advice, okay? Alan, would you take him upstairs and show him what we found up there? I don’t think I can go through all that again.”

I said, “Of course. Sam?”

He hesitated before he followed me up the stairs. When we reached the landing, I began to explain about the call I had received from Brenda earlier in the evening urging me to come right over, and then I recounted Brenda’s story about rifling through Merritt’s things, hoping to find an explanation for her suicide attempt.

“What did she find? A note?”

“Worse. See for yourself.”

We moved into Merritt’s room. Sam paused at the door and his shoulders sagged. He gazed upon the cozy space as an uncle would, not as a cop would. His eyes were warm and hovered on the basketball tribute wall with silent approval. For him, it was a poignant introduction, another significant step or two into his niece’s life.

He said, “Have to get this girl some hockey posters, what do you think?”

I said, “That would be nice, Sam. Maybe Forsberg, or Ricci, the girls seem to go for them.”

“Yeah. I’ll get her a Forsberg. Maybe I can get it signed. I know some people.”

He hadn’t turned toward the storage case. “Anyway, when Brenda looked under the bed…Sam, do you have gloves with you? Latex gloves?”

“No.” His voice betrayed his increasing concern. “Do I need them? There’s some in the car.”

“You decide.” I pointed at the plastic storage case on the floor by the bed. “Those are Merritt’s things in there. A basketball uniform she uses for practice. Her shoes.”

He lowered himself gracefully and squinted at the contents of the box. He pulled a pen from his shirt pocket and moved a couple of garments with the blunt end.

In one long exhale, he said, “And this is blood. Lots…and lots and lots of blood.”

“Brenda says some of it was still tacky earlier. She fished around in there before I came over.”

“This thing was where?”

“Under the bed, with the lid closed.”

“You know that for sure, or is that what Brenda says?”

“It’s what Brenda says.”

Over the years I’ve learned that when he ponders things, Sam’s breathing grows shallow, and I sometimes find myself straining to see the smallest movement of his chest or back to be certain he is still inhaling. I didn’t see a quake in his muscles before he spoke again half a minute later.

“If you and Brenda thought this was Merritt’s blood all over these clothes, you wouldn’t have called me, would you? There wouldn’t have been a reason to call me. Kids bleed all the time, and ninety-nine point nine percent of the time it’s not a crime.”

Sam was thinking out loud and seemed to be reaching a conclusion that he had been summoned here more as cop than as uncle. His question about the blood had been rhetorical. But I was anxious, so I answered anyway.

“Merritt’s not cut anywhere. Brenda helped sponge-bathe her in the hospital when she was still unconscious. She says she doesn’t remember seeing even a scratch.”

He swallowed. “Menstrual blood?”

I shrugged but he wasn’t looking at me. “Possible, but not likely. Brenda says the underwear that’s in that pile has only a couple of small streaks of blood on it. Take a look yourself.”

He exhaled deeply. “No…thanks, I’ll pass. I think I’ll leave it to someone else to examine my niece’s underwear for evidence of someone else’s blood. Jeez. What does Brenda want me to do? Get the blood tested?”

“Calling you was my idea, Sam. I had to talk Brenda into it. And it wasn’t just because of the clothes, but also because we found a gun.”

“Oh, hell, this is great, you found a gun, too?” His voice betrayed resignation now, no longer curiosity.

“After the suicide attempt, the friend who came over and found Merritt found her in the bathroom.” I pointed to the open doorway across the bedroom. “I went in there to see if there were signs of blood there. I was figuring that there was so much blood on Merritt that she had to have washed up somewhere because she wasn’t bloody when she was brought into the ER. I lifted the bar of soap on the vanity, and sure enough, there’s pink scum underneath it. When I took a towel to dry my hands, I saw a gun sitting on top of the next towel in the pile. I knew then we had to call you. We didn’t touch it.”

Sam eased me out of the way with a swipe of his forearm and leaned close to the chunky handgun. “It’s a Smith and Wesson. And it’s caked with dried blood, right? Is that how you have it?”

I didn’t know about the Smith and Wesson part. “Yeah, that’s how it looks to me.”

“Is the gun John’s?”

“Brenda says it’s not, they don’t keep any guns in the house.”

Sam’s mind took bits and flakes of information and turned them into criminal theories with the artistic skill a mosaic artist uses to assemble tiles.

“Well, they have a gun in the house now. Except I’d bet a pitcher of beer that the serial number on this one is going to tell me that where it really belongs is over in Dead Ed Robilio’s house. What on earth is Merritt mixed up with? Do you know what kinds of kids she’s been hanging around with? You don’t know the answer to that, do you?”

Sam was asking me if Merritt was talking to me, her psychologist, about Dead Ed or guns or bloody clothes. He knew I shouldn’t answer. He didn’t expect that to matter. This was family.

“Let’s just say this is news to me. My guess now, Sam, is that I’m beginning to understand the reason she’s not talking to anyone. This…this discovery is an important step. Maybe it’ll shake her out of her silence.”

“Alan, if that gun is the one missing from Dead Ed’s house, and if the blood all over those clothes is Dead Ed’s blood, Merritt’s going to receive enough of a jolt either to shake her out of any stupor, or to jar her into total catatonia.”

“You’re right, there’s no telling.”

“You know, Malloy doesn’t have shit on Dead Ed. They don’t know what to do about that suicide note. If it’s murder, they don’t even have a suspect. There’s two dozen people working on it and the investigation is wide open. And now it looks like I’m going to hand them my niece on a silver platter.”

“Maybe we’re wrong. How long will it take to analyze things? The blood and the gun?”

“The serial number on the weapon? I just need to make a call. The ballistics should be straightforward. We have the slugs from Dead Ed’s house. Everett could do the match in his sleep. Given the hour, he may have to. The blood? The lab guys will know something tentative by morning, maybe later tonight if they’re motivated. And I have a funny feeling they’re going to get motivated.”

“DNA?”

“Takes weeks, even months.”

“Why don’t you make the call about the serial number? The suspense isn’t doing anyone any good.”

“Yeah.” He started to walk out of the room. Took a few seconds to assess Merritt’s space. “Neat room. Neat kid. This doesn’t add up.”

“No, it doesn’t, I agree.”

I am not someone naive about teenagers, and never really expect adolescent lives to line up in patterns that approach orderliness, but at that moment Sam was an uncle, not a cop, and was seeking solace from me, not counsel.

In my outpatient practice I was treating a sweet nineteen-year-old girl with an eating disorder. Over the past week she had begun talking about having molested her young male cousin over a two-year period when she was younger. I didn’t believe her at first. Believing that such a sweet, fragile kid was a child molester was like discovering that Mother Teresa masqueraded as a hooker.