Chapter 16 Dethroned
Dethroned
One of the Kings of Warsaw Creek had indeed been dethroned.
I pulled up to the Silver Bridge just after sunrise. Mist clung to the river below, and the metallic bridge shone pink in the morning light. It would’ve been pretty if not for the police cars blocking the bridge.
I rocked up with a giant jug of hot coffee and put it down on the hood of a patrol car. Monica appeared and began blearily pouring out a cup.
“You’ve been out here all night?” I asked.
“Not the whole night. I made Detwiler guard the scene and slept in the car for a bit. That fucking radio never shuts up.” Monica walked down to the shore.
The bridge was above us, and a tow truck was parked by the shore.
The tow line extended far into the river while the driver leaned against his truck and watched the line draw out from the winch.
“Not a fan of the new radio system?” I noted that Monica had called me only over her cell phone lately.
Monica made a face. “I’m waiting until I can thoroughly read the manual. I’m anal like that. I want to make sure it’s not scanning our brains.”
“That sounds a little paranoid.”
“I didn’t get to be captain without a healthy dose of paranoia. Which is probably something you could use.” She glanced at me sidelong.
I winced. “There’s going to be hell to pay for this mess, isn’t there?”
“Not saying that I would’ve done anything different. But yeah. Especially now.”
I looked up at the bridge. From this vantage point, I could make out the broken guardrail.
“It’s good you got the girl away from him.” Monica sighed. “But now we gotta fish him out.”
A disembodied hand far away in the river popped up and gave a thumbs-up—probably Jasper’s.
When Jasper had made it to shore, the tow truck driver activated the winch. The river slowly began to churn.
“We haven’t had much rain this summer,” Jasper said somberly. “The wreck wasn’t down very far.”
“What’s it look like?” I asked.
“About how you’d expect. Tons of front-end damage. Guy was strapped into the driver’s seat. I didn’t see any passengers.”
There was a sucking sound from the river, and something large seemed to twirl in the current. Over the hum of the winch, it was slowly dragged to land. It landed wheels down, and the metal of the crushed front end chewed at the flattened tires as the car was hauled up onto the gravel.
That car was expensive and unique. I wondered if it was something Lister had procured for him from the dealership.
Monica signaled for the tow driver to stop pulling the line in, and we approached the car. Water streamed from its crevices and the broken windshield. Monica reached for the driver’s-side door and opened it. Water splashed out in a wave.
The figure in the driver’s seat slumped. I approached, tongue glued to the roof of my mouth.
It was Sims. He was rubbery and dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, likely dead on impact. The whole interior of the car was coated in mud. His glasses were missing.
Wordlessly, we began taking pictures. I started at the car’s exterior, moving toward the interior. I clicked into business mode, moving methodically. I needed to document everything, especially if I was going to cover my own ass.
“Hey, look at this.” I pointed to Sims’s chest. The seat belt was partially cut, and bone glistened through tears in his shirt and skin.
“That’s a weird injury.” Monica bent to take a closer look. “I don’t think safety glass could have done that. Maybe some metal from the engine got ejected? It’s not like this car is the picture of current safety standards.”
“Maybe.” I looked at his left arm, the one closest to the broken driver’s-side window. That arm was completely shredded, as if he’d stuck it into a garbage disposal. His head wobbled on his neck and bowed forward, exposing thick gashes.
“That’s an awful lot of damage,” I muttered. I thought of the scratches on Mason and on Ross. My own leg ached.
“There’s suitcases in the trunk,” Monica observed. “Maybe he was headed out of town and had too much to drink.”
My phone beeped, so I knew someone in the sheriff’s office was playing with the new radio system. I picked it up. “Koray.”
“Hey, El-Tee. It’s Van Wert in Forensics. I’ve got some info for you about the Sumner house.”
“Hit me.”
“So, about that costume you found: we found a few exemplars of long dark hair, but without anyone to match those with, we can’t draw any strong conclusions.”
“Understood.” I was thinking about whether there was a way I could snag a piece of hair from Viv to compare.
“We got a lot of prints that you’d expect—family, friends, and people who worked there. And a whole bunch of unknowns that we don’t have in the system. Most of them are from women, so maybe cleaning crew?”
I chewed my lip. “How can you tell?”
“Ridge density is higher for women than men. We focused on the alarm panel, and got only prints from the husband, the wife, the maid, and the babysitter. Nobody else.”
“Okay. What about the back door?”
“Nothing unusual there. We found the child’s prints on the door handle, and that would have been within his reach. We also found the babysitter’s, but we don’t really have a way to determine whose are most recent.”
“Understood.”
“We did find something interesting on the bathroom windowsill, prints that had been there for a very long time. There was a coating of dust that made them fairly easy to process.”
“How long?” I asked.
“Can’t really tell. But I’m betting a long time, given who they belonged to.”
“Who?”
“Dana Carson, a missing person from twenty-five years ago. That was before my time, but I saw in the departmental records that her case remains unsolved.”
“Interesting.” I told her I liked Sumner and his friends for Dana’s disappearance.
“I’d love to have a warrant to dig further into that house,” Van Wert told me. “It’s an old house, and if there was foul play there, then I’d like to poke around and see what’s going on.”
I agreed that sounded like a good time, and that I’d see what I could do about getting a warrant. “In the meantime, I’ve got a car I’m sending to you after the coroner gets done with it. My gut says it’s related.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“Just beware…it’s soggy.”
“Ugh. Floaters? Tell me there’s not a floater in there.” I didn’t blame her; everyone hated floaters.
“Well…it doesn’t stink yet.”
“Terrific.”
I hung up, and stared at the car Monica was photographing. These cases were connected, but I couldn’t prove it. Not yet.
This could have been an accident. Sims seemed to want to get out of Dodge. Or it could have been suicide, because he felt the net closing in. But neither one of those explanations truly resonated in my gut.
I gazed out at the water, remembering the singing I’d heard last night, right before Sims wrecked. A chill settled over me, and I shuddered.
Did the monster in the river call Sims to his doom?
If not…maybe his death was on my shoulders, and I was the only monster here.
—
I dreaded this part of the job more than any other.
My social-worker friend, Kara, and I climbed the steps to the foster house I’d left Leah in the night before. I’d met Kara here; I’d already briefed her on the situation over the phone.
“This is a mess. But it’s a substantiated mess. Rebecca’s starting to talk. We can at least keep her and Leah safe. Maybe more. But the death of a parent…” She shook her head. “It’s hard, no matter how much your parent sucks.”
“Yeah. I feel terrible that Leah’s going through this.” I knew what it was like to have a father who died, a father who was a monster. I had to be the one to tell her.
Kara knocked on the door, and Margie and Dave answered. From our brief conversation, I could tell that Kara had called them beforehand. We all knew, except for Leah.
Leah was sitting at the kitchen table, eating Froot Loops and watching television. She was dressed in a T-shirt and joggers, looking way too young for this information.
I sat down opposite her, and Kara sat at the end of the table. Margie and Dave took seats flanking Leah.
“Hi, Leah,” I said.
“Hi.” She set her spoon down. “You’ve come to take me back, haven’t you?”
I shook my head. “No. I’ve come to tell you that something has happened. Something I’m really sorry to have to tell you.”
She met my gaze. “What is it?”
“Your stepfather was in an accident late last night.”
Her hand stilled on the spoon, and she stared at me.
“It was a very bad accident. He didn’t make it.”
One eye twitched. Margie put her hand on Leah’s shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Leah looked down at her cereal. Her lips peeled back from her teeth. “Good.”
She took a bite of Froot Loops.
Kara led me away, to the porch. “That isn’t an uncommon reaction,” she said. “She’s likely in shock, and it will hit her in a few days.”
I understood that reaction, though. I understood it all too well. “I’m afraid that the abuse was worse than I thought.”
“Me, too, but I won’t know for some time. Her world has been turned upside down, and we have to work slowly.”
“What’s going to happen to her?”
“She’ll stay here for now. We’ll go through the usual process, see if there are kin who might be permanent-placement candidates.”
I shook my head. “I hope none of those candidates belong to that church.”
Kara exhaled. “She’s safe for now. That’s the best we can do.”
I looked over her shoulder, at the house. Maybe that was all I could do.
But there was so much more I wanted to.
—
I wasn’t getting anywhere with Quentin Sims’s death.
But I could look into the past.
I tracked Dana and Viv’s mother to a state-run mental health facility a couple of counties away.
It was difficult to have someone committed to a mental health facility long term, so Cassandra Carson had been in and out of institutions since the disappearance of her daughter.
Mostly in. I was able to contact the facility’s director, who permitted me to visit… under certain conditions.