Макс Коллинз - You Can’t Stop Me

Looking at Stanowski, Harrow said, “Any chance I could get into my truck?”

“Not before it’s processed. Why?”

“Cigarettes in the glove compartment.”

Stanowski pulled a pack from his shirt pocket and shook a smoke out for Harrow. The sergeant knew Harrow supposedly had quit, but had the decency not to point it out, and lit up the former sheriff.

Harrow took a long drag, letting the smoke fill the emptiness, as he wished nothing more than for cancer to strike him instantly, right at this moment, right here in the goddamn yard, and kill him. A second later, however, the thought dissolved, like a hailstone battered by rain, replaced by another one: Someone had to find the person who had killed his family.

And in that moment, the decision that would inform years to come was made: if it took every second of the rest of his life, he would find the killer of his wife and son.

“J.C.,” Johnson asked, “you all right?”

Harrow just stared at him.

After a moment, the deputy blanched and said, “Sorry, stupid damn question.”

The detectives drove up then, putting the awkward moment out of its misery, and Harrow was left alone to finish his cigarette as the two deputies talked to the investigators.

The secondary was some young pup that Harrow never saw before — short black hair, a suit that probably cost almost a month’s pay, and the well-scrubbed shine of someone who didn’t like getting his hands dirty. What the hell was he doing in this job?

The lead detective Harrow knew. A short, wide-bodied man in jeans, an open-collar shirt, and a cheap sportcoat, Larry Carstens looked like the one-time college football player he’d been — close-cropped blond hair, wide forehead, wide-set brown eyes, formless nose, and lips as thin as a cut.

Carstens had been a uniformed deputy under Harrow, and had made detective three years after Harrow’s departure. In the last couple of years, they’d even worked a couple of cases together, Harrow representing DCI.

When they had been filled in by the uniforms, the detectives walked over to where Harrow stood next to his truck, his eyes darting between them and the house, which seemed to call to him in a low whisper.

“Larry,” Harrow said with a faint nod.

Carstens returned the gesture. “J.C., we’re all very sorry about your loss.”

Harrow gave another nod, but said nothing.

“We’ll do it by the book,” Carstens said with a world-weary sigh.

“Please.”

“I had patrol cars set up a half-mile in either direction. Any reporter, national or local, that wants to turn this into a circus will have to hike his ass in.”

Harrow sighed. “Appreciate that.”

“Tell me what happened. I know about this afternoon — it’s been all over the media. Start with leaving the state fairgrounds.”

Harrow told Carstens what little there was, right up to the 911 call.

“Let’s back up,” Carstens said. “Take from the morning till the presidential assignment kicked in.”

Harrow did.

Finally Harrow said, “Look, Larry, you’ve got my gun. Run it, and you’ll see it hasn’t been fired.”

Carstens nodded absently. “By the book, J.C. We’ll want to do a GSR test too.”

“Fine, then where the hell is Ogden?” Harrow referred to the only real criminalist employed by the Story County Sheriff’s Office, the man who should be doing the gunshot-residue test.

His eyes narrowing in the darkness, Carstens took half a step toward Harrow. He kept his voice low, tone clipped but not disrespectful. “Try to remember, J.C., you’re not running this investigation. For now, in fact, you’re a suspect.”

Harrow stepped back, stubbed the cigarette out under his foot. “Okay, I’m a suspect. You’re right. But can I ask one question?”

“You can ask.”

“Was there any sign of robbery in there?”

“Nothing so far, unless precious items turn up missing. You have a safe, or a locked box with jewelry or money or anything in it?”

“No.”

Carstens frowned. “Then why the question?”

“Ellen’s wedding ring is gone.”

“...Could she have taken it off to do the dishes? Maybe it’ll turn up on her nightstand or—”

“No. She never took it off. She had a thing about that.”

“Was it valuable?”

“Not particularly. Less than half a karat. She’d never let me upgrade. She was... sentimental.”

Carstens swallowed. “J.C., I’ll look into it.”

“Please.”

When the crime scene van did turn up, Harrow was surprised to see not Story County’s criminalist Ogden, but a crime scene team from the state Department of Criminal Investigation, his own employer.

He watched with detached professionalism as the DCI crime scene team, people he had known for decades and worked with for years, started in. Several went into the house, while others worked the exterior and the driveway. They all scrupulously avoided making eye contact with him. To them, at least for now, he was the invisible man.

The flashlights in the yard and on the driveway bobbed around, wielded by techs who seemed little more than silhouettes in the dim moonlight. Inside the house, every light continued to burn — idly Harrow recalled that the only times every window in a home burned with light were when a party was in progress or a tragedy had just occurred.

The night insects were silent, almost as if they respected the seriousness of the situation. The temperature had dropped, but the cold that Harrow felt emanated from within not without. A crop-riffling breeze carried the smell of someone barbecuing nearby. A family having a meal. The familiar scent took on a strange bitterness.

Eventually, the crime scene investigators started toting out his life, and the lives of Ellen and David as well, in plastic and paper bags, boxes, and envelopes. He had never been on this end of a crime scene and, for all his familiarity with the process, felt violated watching these people, his friends, going through his family’s things and carting off anything that might prove him either innocent or guilty of the murders of his wife and only child.

He wanted to scream for them to stop. Christ, they knew him, didn’t they, they knew he couldn’t have done this, but he also understood they were just doing their jobs, and that job was neither to convict nor to exonerate, but to discern the facts.

Harrow held up pretty well, standing there in the yard, watching them pore and pry over and through every private thing in the house, at least until the coroner’s crew brought out the first gurney.

A sheet was drawn up over the face, but Harrow instantly knew the body beneath the sheet was his son. Wetness striping his face, he took two steps toward the stretcher before Carstens eased a consoling arm around Harrow’s shoulder and turned him gently away.

“Smoke, J.C.?”

Harrow accepted the cigarette automatically and held it between trembling lips as the detective lit him up.

“You found him. You saw him. You don’t need to see him again, not that way.”

As if anything could erase that horrific image burned forever into his brain.

Under their white sheets, David and Ellen would join the others now. They would both be in there with all the other ghosts he’d met over the years at crime scenes. Ghosts that sometimes came when he slept...

...the little girl that wanted to know why he never caught her killer; the old woman who had died of natural causes but hadn’t been found for three days, the only ones aware of her passing her four unfortunately very hungry cats; the twenty-one-year-old wife who had been stabbed to death by a husband who accused her of cheating, even though he’d been the one having the affair.