Chapter 37
Officer Fenton had two suitcases lying open on the bed.
Each one had two or three thick file folders on the bottom and a couple of flash drives in the inner pockets, and the smaller suitcase held his laptop computer.
Now he was rolling his clothes up and packing them the way they’d taught him in boot camp.
He had compiled an itinerary of stops for himself to begin as soon as he arrived in Albany, New York.
He had already made contact with the law enforcement departments in charge of runaways and delinquents because she was still sixteen, so he’d start there.
He’d also made contact with the departments that dealt with the Iroquois nations, because she was a Seneca Indian.
He would go there second. After that, there was the education department.
State governments at least had the names of all students in their states, and they could find the names of the ones who had just entered the state and were registered for the school year about to begin.
All these people would be very interested in helping him find a teenager wanted for stabbing a man to death.
As he packed, his wife, Michelle, watched.
He was completely absorbed in what he was doing.
He was never really unaware of her, but his mind was somewhere else right now.
He was making sure that he had all the information he had collected on Clare Markham, and all the results of the inquiries he had been doing through these weeks, mostly in the evenings and on his days off.
There were probably people in the law enforcement community of Oklahoma who would have heard what he was doing and thought he was overconfident.
How could one lone cop do a successful hunt for a murder suspect across the whole country all by himself?
Michelle knew better. Fenton had decided it was now his job to take it on himself to find the girl who had killed his brother. She was as good as caught.
It had finally come to this. His plane would leave tomorrow morning. “Dave,” she said.
“What?” he said, but he didn’t look up from what he was doing.
“I really need to talk to you.”
There was something in her voice that he sensed wasn’t routine. He put a rolled shirt into a suitcase and turned to face her. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Is this about my using vacation time to go after the girl?”
“Sort of. No.” She stood there looking in his eyes. “This is hard for me. I want you to look at me.”
He nodded.
“I’ve been trying to bring myself to this since Gerry died, but I thought something would happen if I waited. Somebody else would do it, or something. But that was stupid. You and I have been together for a long time, and I love you very much, and I always will until I die.”
“I feel the same about you,” he said. “You know that.”
“You and I also know that Gerry did some wild things, some of them things that made us worry about how he was ever going to keep from having his record spoil his chances to have a decent life or a career.”
“I could hardly forget.”
“I’ve been thinking that there might be more to what the girl said happened than the DA believes. Than you believe.”
Dave said, “Well, I understand that. You’re a woman, and you see this kind of thing a little differently than the DA or a cop sees it. But we’ve seen some things in the years in our jobs that nice women haven’t seen. We’ve also seen the evidence in this case.”
“Dave, I know that what I’m going to say is going to put a terrible strain on you. It may even be the end of everything. But I know something that you have to know too, and right now. I know that Gerry was capable of raping that girl. I know it because he did it to me.”
“What? When?”
“It was right after we got married. You were in Quantico taking a class from the FBI. I was home alone for about a month. He called and said he wanted to come over, said he had something for me to welcome me to the family. He came in, and we made some small talk, and I could tell there was something up, but I had no idea what it was. I went to the kitchen and got him a beer, and when I brought it into the living room, he was waiting for me. He dragged me into the bedroom and… did it. I was trying to fight him off, and when I screamed, he hit me so hard I saw a flash.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was pretty sure you would kill him. Your life would be over. You would go to prison forever. He wouldn’t have hurt just me, he would have ended the bright new life we had just started. I thought about it a long time, and decided I was not going to let him do that.”
“Oh my God,” he said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m not done yet. I need you to know this part too.
I cried for days. After a week went by, he called me up again and said he was coming over because we needed to talk about what had happened.
I said I was willing to talk. When he walked in the door, he saw that I was aiming your .
44 Magnum at him with both hands. I told him that if he ever came within three feet of me again, I would kill him, and that the only reason I didn’t do it right then was that I would have to tell you and it would break your heart.
For the rest of our marriage, I’ve had to see his smirk when he looked at me, like we had a secret.
It wasn’t like he had some crush on me, he was just mean.
You and the other cops know a lot of things I don’t know.
But I know for certain that Gerry got stabbed because he was raping that girl and she had a chance to stop him. I didn’t.
“I’m going downstairs now, to get started making dinner.
When you’ve had time alone to think about it, you can either come down and tell me that you and I are done, and I’ll come up and pack myself and the kids, or we’ll all sit down together like we always have.
Either way, the kids have to eat.” She walked out of the bedroom, and he heard her going down the stairs.
He found himself sitting on the bed and realized his knees had buckled.
He wondered if he had suspected his brother was capable of molesting anybody.
Maybe he had years ago, but he had told himself that Gerry had matured into a fairly solid guy.
His mind had never traveled into this territory, that his own brother would do this to his wife, or that he himself had put her in the position where she’d thought she had to cover up this ordeal for all these years.
He realized that he was being a fool again, that he was just sitting up here when there was something he had to do right now.
He stood and hurried to the staircase. In a moment he was down the stairs, and he could see her in the kitchen standing over the stove, just starting to cook.
It took a dozen quick strides to reach her.
“I’m sorry, Michelle. I’m so sorry.” He put his arms around her and held her gently.
It was a long hug, and after a minute or two she could tell he was crying, something she’d never seen before, even when his parents died.
Finally, he let her go, facing away, not letting her see he had tears on his face.
“If I could dig him up and kill him again I would.”
“I’m glad that isn’t possible,” she said. “I want it to be over. I don’t want you to leave, and I don’t want you to be the one to hunt down that girl.”
“I’ll cancel my flight tonight. Tomorrow I’ll see if I can change my vacation days back to August.”