Chapter 28
Tanner Estate
Carson stood on the sidewalk and stared up at the house looming in the darkness.
He hadn’t been back here in four years, three months, and two days.
He’d awakened in his car or at least he thought he had.
Parts of that evening after the blackout remained sketchy.
He had driven from the Mountain Brook Park.
As best he could determine the time had been eight or eight thirty.
The house had stood in the darkness, as it did now.
Staggering up the steps that night, he had dropped his keys twice before reaching the front door.
He retraced those steps now. He was exhausted. He’d left Holman and driven around with no destination for a while. Then he’d come here. The entire trip, scenario after scenario had played out in his head. None made sense. None added up to a logical conclusion.
As he reached the door, he recalled that on October 10 fifteen years ago the front door had been unlocked. Ajar. The realization had confused him at the time, but then he’d still been fairly inebriated. Later, though, he had remembered vividly that the door was unlocked and partially open.
The investigating officers had suggested that he’d wanted to remember it that way.
Maybe he had.
Carson reached into his jacket pocket and removed his cell phone. He entered the number and waited for her to answer. “You know where I am. Meet me.”
Tonight he would have the answers he needed. All of them.
From the only source willing to give him the truth, as ironic as it might be.
Annette Baxter.
How screwed up was that?
Carson slid the key that he still carried on his key ring into the lock and opened the door.
The musty odor of disuse filled his lungs. The house no longer smelled like home. New carpet and fresh paint a few months after the murders had stolen the stench of death as well as the scent of his family from the air.
A flip of a switch filled the entry hall with light.
A maintenance crew kept the house in good order so that he didn’t have to think about it or come here.
The furnishings were free of dust, the floors pristine.
No one would ever suspect that the worst a man could do had been carried out here against his family.
The sickening sensation that expanded in his chest whenever he thought of that day did so now, tightening his muscles, threatening to explode.
He stood at the bottom of the staircase, his left hand on the newel post. The police had dragged him away that night.
For hours he had remained covered in his family’s blood .
. . until Senator Drake had taken him to his own home and helped him clean up.
He’d dressed in Dane’s clothes until his own could be salvaged from the wreckage that had been his life.
Carson took the first step upward. His shoes sank into the thick carpeting that lined the treads. His heart pounded. Sweat dampened his skin.
Another step, then another, until he reached the second-story landing.
He halted there. Couldn’t force his feet to move.
If he turned to the right, he would find his bedroom and his sister’s.
Katie had been playing a game on her computer.
To the left, at the other end of the hall, was his parents’ suite of rooms. His mother had been resting after a particularly stressful day at her office.
But her stress hadn’t been the usual kind related to her patients. It had been about Carson.
I hate you! Do you hear me, Mother? I hate you!
Just before five that day he’d stormed into Dr. Olivia Tanner’s office and confronted her right in front of her patient.
He’d demanded to know why she and his father no longer wanted him to see Elizabeth .
. . why they wanted to ship him off to a private academy for the next three years.
He hadn’t gotten any answers . . . only the hurt in his mother’s eyes as he’d told her that he hated her.
She’d given so much of herself to her family, to her patients. Children had come from all over Alabama as well as the surrounding states to be treated by the very best child psychologist in the region.
His mother . . . and Carson had hurt her in the most devastating way a child could.
Then she was dead and there was nothing he could do to fix it . . . to make it right.
The pounding in Carson’s chest accelerated until he could scarcely draw in a breath.
He turned right. Put one unsteady foot in front of the other until he reached the door to his sister’s room. For an eternity he stood there and stared at the brass knob. Told his hand to reach out, take hold, and then turn. He trembled with the effort.
Finally he forced the movement, opened the door, and turned on the light.
For several seconds he kept his eyes shut tight. Knew the room by heart. Pink walls, white canopy bed. Loads of stuffed animals. Dance trophies.
When he opened his eyes he saw none of that.
He saw the blood.
On the bed.
On the floor.
And his sister’s slim, pale body sprawled there. Her throat slit and gaping. Her eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling.
He remembered dropping to the floor beside her. Trying to wake her. Trying to stop the blood that had already emptied from her pale body and congealed.
Carson closed his eyes against the images.
He tried to set aside the emotion and think of all that he had seen .
. . besides the blood and the body. Nothing downstairs had been disturbed.
The intruder had walked into the house and gone straight upstairs.
The front door had evidently been unlocked since there had been no sign of forced entry.
No murder weapon. No prints. No usable evidence at all.
Fifteen years ago he had left his sister’s room and rushed to the other end of the hall.
Carson followed that route slowly. His legs were heavy, his feet reluctant to make the journey. He’d fallen to his hands and knees midway. Puked. Sobbed. Screamed. Then he’d gotten up and run the rest of the way.
He stood at the closed door. Repeated the same ritual he’d gone through at his sister’s.
Inside the room looked exactly the same as before that horrific day.
Then the memories rushed in, filling his vision with the gore that had surrounded his parents’ bodies.
His mother on the bed . . . his father close by on the floor.
Craig Tanner had been at his weekly poker game with his professional cronies, as Carson’s mother had called them.
Drake, Wainwright, Holderfield, Roper, the biggest investment banker in Birmingham, and Weller, then a state representative, now a US congressman.
The police had concluded that Craig had arrived home in the midst of the killing frenzy.
His death had been markedly more violent.
Already hysterical when he’d found his parents’ bodies, Carson had moved from one to the other, uncertain how to help. Some part of his mind had known he could do nothing.
The next thing he remembered the police had arrived.
He didn’t remember calling, but, according to the 9-1-1 recording, he had. Even now, a decade and a half later, the sound of his own voice haunted him.
Carson slumped against the door frame.
. . . I didn’t do it.
If Stokes hadn’t done this . . . hadn’t killed Carson’s family . . . then who?