So Weeps the Willow - 33. Salix Babylonica - 11 - The Last Day

Salix Babylonica 11 - The Last Day

The grounds of the place were dominated by several large, old willow trees that towered over the surrounding stone wall and swayed soundlessly in the wind like lost souls.

Haruki Murakami

“Would you get that?” Carl barked, glancing over at Clay with an annoyed, bitchy look.

“We don’t answer the land line,” Clay said, smirking at Carl’s struggles. The smaller teen always had trouble getting the dragon to fly away from the entrance of the cave. His cleric warrior simply didn’t have enough points to cast the right spell so he had to wound the giant fire-breathing drake.

The phone jangled again, beckoning, and Carl managed to thrust a sword into the reptile’s flesh below its breastplate, and the mythical creature roared in response. He was clicking the controller as fast as he could. “Unplug the stupid phone then!” he shouted as a burst of flames surrounded his character.

“Fine,” Clay said, jumping up from the floor. As he approached the side table with the ancient device on it, it rang yet again.

“Pick it up!”

“Alright,” the teen growled. “Hello,” Clay said.

“Can I speak with Mr. Romer please?”

“Who’s speaking?” Clay asked, still watching Carl’s warrior priest fend off the dragon’s clawed attack.

“Hammond asked me to call and give him some news. I really need to speak with him.”

“He’s with the cops now,” Clay said distracted. “Do you want to talk to his associate, Ben?”

“I need to speak directly with Mr. Romer,” the man said.

“Yes!” Carl screamed as the bloodied, furious dragon leaped into the sky and flew away. “I did it! I got in!”

“Let me get Ben for you,” Clay said, suddenly excited by the police call. Compared to Carl’s character chasing off an obstacle in a video game, a call from the police seemed much more interesting.

“What is the report about?” Clay asked. “I’m also helping Rush, er, Mr. Romer with the investigation.”

There was a long pause. “I’ve met with Ben before. Let me speak with him.”

Clay set down the receiver and stepped over Carl. He hit pause and then held his finger to his lips, hushing the other boy. “Be quiet,” he whispered solemnly and Carl nodded.

Clay ran down the hall to the kitchen. Ben was seated at the table tapping at his laptop keyboard.

“You have a call from the police.”

Ben glanced up from his work. He picked up his cell and looked at the screen.

Clay grabbed the phone on the wall and handed it to the man. “He called the house phone. Rush was right. Some people do use it.”

Ben smiled and took it from him. “This is Ben Miller.”

Clay quickly exited and ran down the hallway. Carl was looking at him quizzically. The teen shook his head and holding his hand over the receiver listened in.

“…there is DNA in the basement consistent with the victim. There were attempts to clean up the fluids.”

Ben’s voice responded. “That’s interesting. So, what were the other results from the clothing and sleeping bag?”

“The DNA results were not from the victim. The clothes were freshly laundered, and the sleeping bag had some human and animal hairs along with dead insects and the like. But there were no findings for the deceased.”

“So, there is nothing from the studio to indicate Wylie slept there?”

“No, the studio itself has been tampered with, thoroughly cleaned.”

Ben then told the cop to email him the report. Clay listened as the two men finished up the call. He carefully placed the phone back on the cradle, and then slipped around the end of the couch, joining Carl.

“What was that about?” the smaller teen asked.

“Shh!” Clay said quickly. “My turn?”

“I guess,” Carl answered. He then glanced back when he heard someone enter the room. It was one of his friend’s dads.

“Clay, I’m going to meet Rush at the BCA headquarters. There has been a development he needs to hear about.”

Clay waved his hand, acknowledging he’d heard.

“Don’t eat just chips.” Ben said distractedly. “There’s some leftover hot dish in the fridge. Heat some of it up for lunch. I’ll be back later today.”

“Okay,” Clay answered, furiously hacking through an orc guarding the gate. “Bye.”

The two friends heard Ben leave shutting the front door behind him. Then Carl hit pause.

“What’s going on?”

Clay turned and said, “They found something. The guy they found under the bridge was stashed somewhere for a while. They found the place.”

“Really?” Carl asked excitedly. “Where’s that?”

Clay looked over at the closed door. “They found some DNA evidence in a basement.”

“Whose basement?”

“I didn’t hear that part. But, let’s think about it.” Clay paused and grinned. “Jake’s sister told Rush and Ben she thinks her mom did it. Rush and Ben thought it was the boyfriend.”

“How do you know that?”

“I was listening. Now, which one has a basement?”

Carl shrugged. “How do we know that?”

“Maybe we should look into it. Ben is going to meet with the police and Rush. We can go by those two places and see if we can help.”

“How are we going to help?” Carl asked evenly, but his face lit up with enthusiasm.

Clay’s expression changed. Something occurred to him and he said, “I think Jake’s sister is wrong and Rush is wrong.”

“Why do you think that?” Carl asked.

“Because Jake’s dad has a house.”

Carl crinkled his nose. “What does that mean?”

“Jake’s dad has a basement. Nobody else in the case has that.”

There was something wrong with Clay’s idea, but the Carl wasn’t quite sure what it was yet.

***

Rush listened as Jake’s father prattled on, talking about old television shows and fuse boxes and how his wife cheated on him, but something had clicked. Something important sparked a memory, though he couldn’t grasp it firmly.

He’d followed up with all the other suspects, but he never had with Jake’s father. Rush stopped on the way to meeting Hammond.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Jake’s dad asked.

“What?” Rush asked, but the question was automatic and not genuine. Bits of information started bobbing to the surface in his brain. Things were now churning, foaming, and it wasn’t clear, but the ideas were suggestive.

Like a torrential rain, facts poured through his mind, drenching his hair and clothes, and infuriating him. The sheer volume of memory was drowning him. Rush almost gasped as a series of images, thoughts, and impressions washed over him, overwhelming his senses. Each one morphed into a larger picture, but one he couldn’t quite grasp, like he was trying to seize a gushing stream in his fist.

From an interview, “For example, it doesn’t list the couch and table, the candy dish with change and the blankets.”

“Yeah,” Brenda said slowly. “She was worried she’d get sick as well. So, she opened up the window and tried shaking the victim.”

From Jake’s blog; “Eddie got busy with something and calling me slipped his mind.

Nats was a good friend I thought I could rely on in spite of some rough patches recently.

“You’ve done nothing,” she said curtly. “I have plans tonight. I’m going to Gallivant’s to meet friends.”

“Nats is a potter, you know, like with clay, making bowls and shit. She works part time out of a studio near the local university. Her work, more recent stuff, has been shown in several places and instead of it being that weird, modernistic, blobby stuff, her pots are rather delicate and intricate.”

From their talk with Jake’s sister; Twyla remembered, “Okay. Twyls, I love you. I’m going through a hard time right now, but you know me. I’m okay. I’m a survivor. I get things figured out. Good night.”

From a witness interview; “When you turned the heater off, did you notice anything about it? Anything you didn’t expect?”

“No, I turned it off and that was it.”

From the firefighters: Brenda said, “Yeah. She tried stopping it. When it wouldn’t shut off, she opened the window and left his apartment calling 911.”

“It was off when you entered the apartment.”

Brandon nodded. “The fuel tank was empty. It must have burned out by the time we got there.”

From a deposition: Hardinger: “Thank you. Now, did you say the carbon dioxide level was also high?

Freeman: “In the bathroom?

Hardinger: “Yes, was the carbon dioxide level in the bathroom elevated above normal?”

From Jake’s blog; “I still don’t know about the bucket though. Why was there an empty bucket in my apartment this morning? I didn’t put it there. Weird.”

Hammond had commented, “I don’t know about that,” the detective snorted. “They are the same brand, different models, but both of them have the client’s safety switch on them. Both of the switches failed, so it’s not good.”

Rush realized within those ideas, those facts, was a narrative that made sense. If he could organize them properly, he could figure out who killed Jake and Steve. That’s who those men were to him now, not victims Ogden and Wylie, but two men struck down in the prime of their lives. Someone was the lynchpin that held them together.

The detective interrupted the man. “Mr. Ogden, thanks for your help. I need to get going now.”

“Okay. If I can do anything to help,” Jake’s dad said.

Rush thought, ‘Maybe you just did’. But he didn’t say it.

As he walked out of the man’s house, he called Hammond. After a brief discussion, they agreed to meet at the evidence room. There was something in the evidence that was whispering to him. A piece of the crime scene was speaking so softly, he couldn’t hear the words over the mighty waterfall in his head.

Those whispers were so loud, he could almost hear them from Jake’s grave.

He jumped into his vehicle and took off.

***

Hammond was nowhere to be found at the county sheriff’s headquarters. Rush fidgeted impatiently as the desk sergeant paged the detective. He settled into a hard-backed chair and pulled out his laptop. He read the DNA findings from the studio and the basement in the report that Ben had forwarded. Finding the area where Wylie had been stored was a great discovery. The cops were getting a list of people who would have access to the basement at The Warrens.

Someone had hidden Wylie’s body and then arranged this elaborate, and not terribly effective ruse for some reason. Rush couldn’t imagine what that might be. It made no sense to make it appear Wylie was gay, and to go to such an extreme. Why?

Rush then pulled up the electronic version of the Ogden case file and started looking over all the documents in that case.

There was an update from their contact at the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. The forensics from a couple of items had been sent to him. One was the complete text records for Jake Ogden. The other was his phone records. His cell had been harvested and all the data inside detailed his last communications and movements. It was a huge file.

Rush felt his phone buzz. He looked, saw it was Ben, and then answered.

“Hey, where are you?” Ben asked breathlessly. Rush heard a door shut in the background.

“I’m meeting with Hammond to look over the evidence from Ogden’s case. Then we’re meeting with the district attorney.”

“I thought we were meeting with the state BCA team,” Ben said.

“That was canceled. They sent me Ogden’s cell phone data. Can you look through it and the data from Wylie’s phone?”

“Okay, well I’ll turn back for home then,” Ben said. “Anything else I should look into?”

Rush smiled to himself. “When you see the size of those cell phone files, you will realize how laughable that question is.”

“Great,” Ben said. “I guess I’ll spend the rest of the day looking at texts, photos, and random emoticons.”

Rush chuckled, “Sounds like a blast. If anything crazy comes up, send it to my phone. I’m going into the tech dead zone.”

“Okay, love you,” Ben said.

“Love you too,” Rush answered and hit end.

“Sorry about the wait,” Hammond said, making the private detective look up.

“No problem. I was giving Ben a heads up on the phone data files.”

“Good thing he’s looking over them.” Hammond shook his head. “There’s an awful lot of shit in those files.”

“I know,” Rush said. “Let’s get back to the evidence.

***

Rush held up the Scene Inventory List in the crinkly plastic cover and waved it at Hammond. They were in the evidence room at the Hennepin County Public Safety building going over the physical items collected at the scene.

“This is the firefighters, Freeman and Stangeland, and their evidence list from the scene. Does the police department have an inventory as well?”

Hammond shook his head. Rush ran his finger over the list and noted that the assorted items all appeared ordinary, and nothing special. There was a Styrofoam cup, a notepad, and laptop on the bedside table, which wasn’t all that strange. People did doodle and check email before going to sleep and his bed was the main piece of furniture in that tiny efficiency apartment.

In the bathroom, there were the usual items; toothbrush, toothpaste, a pill bottle, deodorant, and other assorted grooming tools.

Rush paused. “Can I look at this clear plastic splinter and the spring?”

“Sure,” Hammond said, looking in the evidence bin. He pulled out two small clear baggies with labels on them. After glancing at them, he handed them over to Rush. The spring was from a pen, a ballpoint, and it was smashed. The plastic splinter was different. It was clear, flat and jagged.

“Where was this found?” he asked Hammond. Hammond looked at the apartment map and said,
“They were both found on the bathroom floor.”

“That’s odd,” Rush said, looking carefully at the splinter again. He continued. “The bucket?”

Hammond looked at the list. “It was found in the main room next to the heater. There was nothing in the bucket, according to the narrative. Nothing special.”

Rush looked at where the police detective pointed and it was a bucket. It was an empty bucket, completely clean and without any marks or contents. It sat in a corner of this evidence locker, bagged and labeled, and yet what did it mean?

“The bucket Jake never knew about,” Rush said distractedly. He then added urgently, though he didn’t know why. “Can we go to the scene? It’s still empty, right?”

“It is, but it’s not exactly a pristine crime scene. The civil courts sealed the room after the suit was filed, and we then resealed it when the criminal case arose, but it’s been entered and things aren’t exactly the same. The apartment has been polluted, the position of the items changed.”

“That’s okay,” Rush said. “I don’t need it to be exactly the same. I only need to look at the space and get my bearings.” He didn’t know why.

“Let’s go,” Hammond said, replacing the items into the bin.

“Can we take the clear plastic piece with us?”

“I’ll sign it out,” Hammond said.

***

Carl checked the bus route again on his phone. “Are you sure this is the right one?” he asked the other teen.

“Yeah, I entered his address and mapped it out. This is the fastest way.”

“Do you really think we should interfere?” Carl asked, biting his lip nervously. “Won’t your dads be mad?”

“Probably, but I want to help,” Clay answered stubbornly. He was staring out the window, his breath fogging the chilled glass. “They’ve done so much for me.”

Carl didn’t say anything for a few minutes. “You guys really love each other. I can see it when you are together, you know, like, interacting. It’s pretty cool actually.”

Clay sighed, but not in a sad way, but thoughtfully. “When I first met them, I was such a mess. I – I…” The teen stopped talking.

Carl waited. The bus made a wide left turn, and his shoulder rubbed against Clay’s.

“I hated myself. I wanted to die,” he finally said. “After Garrett and everything, I felt like a piece of shit and wanted to just disappear.”

“I didn’t know,” Carl whispered. He leaned into the touch. “You wanted to kill yourself?”

“Not really,” Clay answered. “I wanted to go away and never come back. Committing suicide wasn’t the idea. Dying wasn’t my goal. I…, um, I wanted to fade away.”

“But then you met Rush and Ben.”

“Then I met Ben, and as a result, Rush. Rush understood me. I could tell he really knew how I felt.” Clay turned in the seat and continued, “He knew I wanted to hide and become invisible, and he wouldn’t let me. Somehow he seemed to know.”

Carl put his hand on Clay’s arm and gave him a reassuring squeeze. The teen continued.

“I’d tried some pills and they made me sick, but they also helped me forget.”

Carl said, “I tried getting drunk a few times. I get it, but it never helps.”

“You do understand, don’t you?” Clay said.

“Yeah,” Carl said, nodding. “Maybe you should call Rush and let him know what we’re doing.”

Clay nodded.

He hit a button on the phone in his hand and waited. Carl listened as the teen left his foster dad a message.