Chapter 28
The next morning, Benjamin climbed into the car, silent as usual.
“Buckle up,” I said, gratified when he complied quickly, then annoyed at myself for being appeased by so little.
The whole morning was reserved for another of Benjamin’s extra-long therapy sessions.
I had a lot that I needed to tell Curtis—about last night’s hostile outburst for starters.
But when we arrived and tried his office door, it was locked.
I walked to a side window that looked into the dim waiting room area, tapping on it with a key.
Curtis’s car was missing from the gravel drive in front of the main house.
I peeked in a window covered with a gauzy white drape, rang the bell, and listened for the sound of footsteps.
I was heading to the mother-in-law apartment, in case he was in there packing or storing boxes, when I heard the crunch of wheels on gravel.
I looked in time to see the white blur of his SUV speeding past the far side of the main house, where he generally parked it, to some place in the back, out of sight.
A minute later, Curtis advanced toward me, looking haggard.
He was wearing jeans and a blue chambray shirt rolled up at the sleeves.
His hair fell heavily over his forehead, uncombed and a little greasy.
He raised a hand in greeting and strode at a diagonal, toward the office door. Key in lock. Door open.
From inside, he finally turned back, fastening a smile onto his shiny face.
“Apologies,” he called out too loudly, the way you do when you’re shouting across the lawn to a neighbor and don’t want them to come any closer. “Emergency with my father. I drove as quickly as I could. Didn’t want to keep you waiting.”
Fond du Lac was two hours away. I hated to think of him speeding the whole time, just because we’d clogged up his schedule.
Benjamin said the first appropriate thing. “We can come back later, Dr. C.”
“Nonsense. Come in.” He gestured with a beckoning finger to Benjamin, then held up his hand, stopping me from stepping forward.
“If I could just speak with you first,” I said. “Last night. Benj and I. We had a—”
“I’ll ask him about it,” Curtis said.
Benjamin had already slipped into the inner office, leaving Curtis standing at the half-open door, facing me.
“Please,” I said. “Just a moment.”
Curtis ran a hand down his shirt, smoothing it. He looked up, his smile a tense rictus.
“All right. What is it?”
“We had a conversation. The subject of my brother came up. I said some things. And then suddenly, Benjamin got very angry.”
Curtis was frowning now. “Suddenly?”
“Yes, he threw his plate and stalked after me. I thought . . .”
But there I stopped, trying to be as truthful with Curtis as possible. It wasn’t so much that I thought Benjamin would physically attack me. Not at that moment. Not exactly. But someday.
“Is this a new behavior?”
“No. He used to lash out when he was younger. Thirteen, fourteen. I chalked it up to hormones.” When Benj was younger and smaller, it had seemed like a pathetic temper tantrum.
Now that he had the body of a nearly grown man, it was much more frightening.
“In the last two years, he’d gotten his temper under control—until last night. ”
“It won’t happen again,” Curtis said.
Won’t happen again? It was an odd thing to say. No therapist could make a promise like that.
“I hope not, but of course—”
“It won’t. Put it out of your mind.”
Maybe Curtis realized how illogical and overconfident he sounded because he adjusted his tone.
“I’ll talk to him about it, Abby. Now, if you don’t mind.” He gestured toward the closed office door, behind which Benjamin was waiting. “We’ll cover all of it, and if you have any other concerns, I’ll be ready to listen. Come back in three hours.”
I studied him again—the sweaty, floppy hair and rumpled shirt.
The atypical jeans, one leg marked with a black grease stain.
He looked like a man pulled in too many directions.
I was responsible for that, as one of the people pulling.
Thank goodness we’d already dispensed with the idea of him spending a full day out with Benjamin.
“Can’t I help you with anything? Walk your dog, at least?”
Curtis looked baffled.
I reminded him. “Sammy. Your dog?”
“Oh,” he sighed. “I made the tough decision to turn him over to my ex-wife and my daughter, as long as I was within hailing distance of Green Bay.”
Green Bay? I thought he’d only driven to Fond du Lac. No wonder he was exhausted.
“Is that where she lives now, your ex-wife?”
He sidestepped the question. “I’ll be traveling too much this year and next. Father. Book tour. Sammy’s better off.”
He nodded—subject closed—but the fatigue on his face was plain.
“I hope you get some leisure time soon,” I said.
“Yes, but I never like to leave things unfinished. I’ll make the most of the time Benjamin and I have left.”
He closed the door.
I’d just pulled into the Starbucks nearest Curtis’s office, to pass the time before I was due to pick up Benjamin again, when my phone rang.
I half expected to see Curtis’s name on the caller ID, asking me to return early to retrieve my son.
Maybe he’d come to the conclusion that he was too busy and tired for such a long session, after all.
Instead, it was Willa.
“Hi,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Did you hear the news?”
“No,” I said, my mind going to the darkest place. Another victim. But Willa’s tone was too bubbly for that.
“They’ve found the killer.”
“They’ve arrested him?”
“They don’t have to.” She squealed with barely contained excitement. “He’s already dead. He crashed his car, and police found stuff inside. Zip ties and blindfolds, his phone, with compromising photos of Isabella and Sidney. Wait, I’ll hold the phone up to the radio.”
The voices were too garbled to be decipherable. I waited for Willa to come back.
“He wasn’t a high school student, was he?” I asked her.
“No. Twenties.”
“Local?”
“No. Out of state.”
The older man. Not from Pleasant Park, not even from Illinois.
“Any mention of the kind of car he was driving?”
“An MG.”
Vintage car. Tappets.
Willa added, “Crumpled like a cheap little tin can. Any normal car would demolish a little two-seater like that.”
By normal, Willa meant something big. She’d been begging me to buy a giant gas-guzzling SUV for years now, for “safety’s sake.”
“Get your radio on,” she said. “They’re still talking about him.”
“That’s okay, I’m looking up the details online. We should get off and I’ll call you back tonight.”
But she was too hyped to hang up. “They found more of the drug that Izzy had an allergic reaction to. Tablets of something. Cata-something.”
My blood froze.
“Catapres?”
“Maybe.”
That was a brand of antihypertensive. I took the generic version. Clonidine. Catapres. Practically identical.
“It’s common. Are they saying Sidney was dosed with the same drug?”
“They mentioned a ‘benzo’ something and opioids, not much but enough to do the job, ground into powder and dissolved in a bottle of prosecco.”
“Geneva’s sleeping pills and pain pills. But they didn’t mention clonidine, in Sidney’s case?”
“What am I, a pharmacist?”
“No. Sorry. I’m just trying to understand.”
I pulled out the laptop I’d brought in order to look at the Grove summer contract. From the parking lot, the Wi-Fi recognized I’d been here before and connected automatically.
As Willa talked, I opened a window and located photos of the scene.
None of the big outlets near us—the Chicago Tribune, or even the Lake County News-Sun—had run anything yet.
But there was a Madison, Wisconsin, news article with a photo of a crashed car, an open trunk with duct tape, zip ties, garbage bags, several dark green fleece blankets, and a close-up of pills.
I enlarged the photo on my screen. They weren’t the same as mine.
Different color, different letters on the tiny tablets.
I googled quickly and without satisfaction. At home, I could look up the drugs in my Physician’s Desk Reference.
“Anyway, the sicko’s dead now,” Willa said. “Skidded off the road and rolled over. Good thing the evidence was in his car.”
“Good thing,” I said, still taking it all in. Evidence. Phone. Photos. Pills. And of course, they’d have no trouble matching his DNA, especially in the case of Sidney, if he’d been the one to have intercourse with her, as the news reports suggested.
I looked back at the article. The accident had taken place in Janesville, south of Madison—a hit-and-run, tire tracks clearly showed.
A drunk driver possibly; the common tire brand and paint color left at the site of impact were both unfortunate, in terms of pursuing leads, although the police pledged to try.
What did it matter? He was a bad man. The killer had been found—and not just found but stopped, forever.
I re-skimmed the Wisconsin article. The driver was a former resident of a juvenile facility near Madison.
I googled those last four words, and several facilities showed up. One of them had Menkoka in the title. The name rang a bell.
“I should get off,” I said to Willa.
“Okay. Have a good one.”
The first article had provided the driver’s name—Christopher Weber.
I searched and found another short item from a Wisconsin news outlet.
Weber was twenty-two. He had aged out of a juvenile correctional facility for the mentally ill and was supposedly rehabilitated, but as a commentator noted, Most of these kids are never fully rehabilitated.
Ewan had been placed in a psychiatric treatment center at the age of eighteen, but he was moved to a regular prison at the age of nineteen.
That’s why Menkoka sounded familiar. It was the only facility of its kind in our area that worked with extremely difficult youth offenders.
It was the place Ewan had spent some portion of a year—barely six months—prior to aging out.
I had twenty minutes left until I needed to get back to Curtis’s office and pick up Benjamin.
Still, I kept searching. Weber. Born in Milwaukee.
One website already had his photo up. Handsome, clean-cut, sharp nose, small mouth, dark close-set eyes.
Like they always said: normal. And a little too young to be a likely suspect in other crimes, like the murder of Harper McKibben.
All the proof of Weber’s involvement was there, even zip ties and blindfolds—not that he’d used those things on Sidney or Izzy. But maybe he planned to use them on another victim, his next time.
Now there would be no next time. A more ideal resolution couldn’t be imagined, and yet I didn’t feel satisfied. I felt confused—by everything that made no sense, by everything that made too much sense.
And what about the missing girl, Veronica Lovell? She was never mentioned in any of the news stories. What about the possibility of other girls, other women?
I texted Robert: Check the news. Police think they’ve found the killer. His name is Christopher Weber.
I hit Send and then stared at my own text. Think they’ve found.
I wanted to take it back. To delete that word think.