Dark Web (4 page)
Deputy Alan Cohen pointed down Route 9N at a small white house in the distance. “Looks like Mrs. Hamilton is already up,” he said.
Swift turned and saw a woman standing on her porch, a tiny figure from this distance. One of his troopers had already headed over and was nearing her driveway, trudging through the powdery snow.
“I’ll be back.” Swift started walking towards the house. It looked like there was no more postponing the inevitable.
He’d planned on questioning the Hamiltons as soon as possible — they were really the only neighbors close enough to have seen anything — but waking people up in the middle of the night to ask them what they knew about a dead kid lying in the middle of the road? He didn’t think the kid had come from their house — he knew the Hamilton family and their kids and grandkids, and the dead body in the road didn’t fit the profile of anyone there. And there was little chance they could help identify the vehicle that had fled the scene, or its driver. An older couple, in their eighties, they had surely been sound asleep. Only now had all the lights and commotion disturbed one of them, half an hour after Lenny Duso had called Dispatch.
The woman and the trooper both watched him approach. He tried on a smile and climbed up the two steps onto the porch. He kept his voice low, almost to a whisper.
“Hello, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“Is there someone out there?”
Swift glanced at the trooper, a man with the uncommon name of Koby Bronze. Bronze was young, twenty-five years old. His open expression communicated to Swift that he hadn’t said much to the woman yet.
“Yes,” Swift said, turning his gaze back to Mrs. Hamilton. “There’s a young man. Unfortunately, he’s passed away.”
She put a hand to her mouth, and her eyes widened. “Oh no. Oh dear,” she said through her fingers. Swift got a look at her. She wore a long winter bathrobe, pale pink, and slippers on her feet.
“It’s very cold out here, Mrs. Hamilton.”
“Lorraine.”
“Lorraine. We can come back later in the morning and talk to you. No need to alarm yourself with this. Everything is safe; we’re here now and we’re going to make sure we get to the bottom of what’s going on.”
“I see...”
He gave her another smile. “Did you hear anything that woke you up? Any voices out there, or maybe a car, something like that?”
She still had her hand to her face. “I don’t sleep very well. My husband snores. I woke up and saw the lights coming through my window.” She took her hand away from her mouth and pointed with a knobby finger at the police lights. “Those.”
“That’s fine. Thank you, Lorraine.” Swift glanced at Trooper Bronze, conveying with a look and a slight jerk of his head that the trooper should help the woman back inside and calm her down. He started to turn and leave the porch.
“It’s a young man?”
He paused, and faced her again. “Yes, ma’am. About thirteen years old.”
Her hand returned to her mouth. Swift saw that it was shaking a little, the fingers quivering, patting against her lips. “Oh no,” she said again.
“You think you know who it might be?”
She nodded, almost imperceptibly.
Now he was all attention, his nerves taut. “Who?”
“Only thirteen-year-old lives around here is from the new family.”
“The new family?”
“They moved into the Getty place.” She’d been looking past Swift at the scene further up the road, but Lorraine Hamilton now turned in the other direction. She pointed shakily. “Next house down.”
The Getty place
. He knew the name. An older couple, same generation as the Hamiltons, had owned the house, and both had passed within a year of each other. If he remembered correctly, their place had sat unlived in for a time. It wasn’t far away. He’d mentioned to Brittney Silas that there were a handful of homes nearby, but he’d thought the Getty place was still vacant.
He peered into the darkness for a moment. He could see a single light in the distance, vague, obscured by the falling snow. A porch or walkway light, perhaps. He looked back at Lorraine Hamilton. “Are they home, do you know?”
“I’m not sure. I think so. They’re a nice family. Came over and introduced themselves — the woman brought cookies.”
“When was that?”
Swift took out his notepad and clicked a pen.
“Oh, a month ago, I guess. Maybe two. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s okay. This is very helpful. I’m sorry this is the middle of the night.”
“I don’t sleep very well. It was after Christmas, though.”
“So they’ve been living there for maybe two months. Got it.” Swift looked over his shoulder back at the scene in the road. The figures there were small in the distance, but he thought he could see Hal Woodruff at the center of the activity, and Brittney moving around, carefully examining every detail. The on-call mortuary service had been notified. It would arrive in the next half hour and would transport the body to the forensic pathologist in Plattsburgh. As soon as the high and mighty Ms. Silas felt ready, anyway.
Swift didn’t know whether he should immediately go on to the decedent’s possible family home, or back to properly take control of the investigation. The body had been found on a New York State Highway, which made it a State concern, though the first-responder had been Alan Cohen, from the Sheriff’s Department. The nature of the call, however —
body in the middle of the road, possibly teenager . . . witness says he saw a car speed away, not a hit-and-run though, body was already there
— had been sufficient for the State Police to alert BCI Investigator Swift about a possible homicide. Swift had arrived minutes later. Now he was lead investigator and had to coordinate all those involved. He and Silas had done the walk-through, and had reassessed scene boundaries — she was willing to redirect traffic for miles; he had to do something to mitigate that. Hal Woodruff, the coroner, had checked for pulse, respiration, reflexes, and pronounced the teenager deceased, but beyond that, Woodruff was out of his depth. A homicide investigation needed to move quickly and be light on its feet. He would have to cut Hal loose and extend medico-legal jurisdiction to Brittney for now, entrust her with the chain of evidence custody.
She would need support — documenting, photographing, collecting evidence and being responsible for it — to ensure it wasn’t tampered with, lost, stolen, or anything else. In this case, that it wasn’t swallowed up by all the damned snow. It was a lot to ask of one person. Swift knew what it was like to carry such a burden.
Crime Scene Investigators like Brittney, who worked for the State troopers, were a relatively new addition to the proliferating law enforcement departments. When Swift had started as a State Police Detective twenty years earlier, detectives did all the leg work. He could still feel that stress, that sense of being torn apart, needing to be in all places at once. It had never really gone away.
He felt a gnawing grow in the pit of his stomach. Soon he would have to confront a family with the death of their child.
Swift returned his attention to the elderly woman. “Mrs. Hamilton, thank you. Please let Trooper Bronze escort you back inside. Stay warm. We’ll be in touch.”
He turned and stepped off the porch and back out into the snow. He turned in the direction of the Getty place.
Something woke her up.
Callie sat up in bed, rubbing at the skin beneath her eyes. It had taken her forever to fall asleep, fitfully, beset by strange dreams. She turned and checked the time on her phone on the bedside table. It was quarter of four in the morning. She listened for Hannah, who now shared a room with Reno and was still prone to waking up in the night. Hannah had slept in the same bed with Callie and Mike until she was almost two. Reno had spent less time co-sleeping; she was in her own bed by the time she was barely a year old. Callie and Mike had agreed, over months of often emotional dialogue, that this would be their last child. Since then, there had been an unspoken reluctance to transition her to another room. They were savoring every moment. But while co-sleeping might have its developmental advantages, it could be a strain on the marriage. While Callie and Mike had gotten somewhat inventive with ways to share crucial marital one-on-one time together, more often than not simply sleeping peacefully beside one another was all they needed. Hannah would rotate around in the bed throughout the night like the hour hand on a clock, her little pudgy feet winding up in Mike’s face, or sticking through Callie’s ribs. It was disruptive for both of them.
Callie swung her legs out of the bed. Mike was still asleep. He was the deeper sleeper, and while he didn’t have her ability to nap and drift in and out of sleep, he had the enviable ability to sleep through all the Florida storms and hurricanes.
Her feet touched the cold floor. The small woodstove that had been alive with roiling, dark orange flames was now a dim red glow.
She listened intently. She heard nothing, but left the room nonetheless, her bare feet whispering across the hardwood floor.
It was chilly — and quiet.
Callie had forgotten about the dark and cold, and the profound silence of the North Country. Outside at night, the wind moaned, and there was a sense of empty space, but also of things living out there in the snow and trees, keeping to their own. A deep, hushed thrum of life in the crisp, unvarnished landscape of the night forest. She remembered it from her childhood. When the other girls were penned up inside talking to one another on the telephone, she would slip on her coat, slip outside and take in the air. She somehow understood that the Adirondacks were a special place, removed from the rest of the bustling, packed-together world.
She passed through the kitchen and turned down the hallway towards the kids’ rooms. There was no sound, but she felt uneasy. Something was leading her, drawing her forward with invisible pulleys that cinched around her, like her skin, dry in the cold mountain air.
She suddenly had an overwhelming urge to stop walking, turn around and go back to bed, slip under the covers, pull them up over her head, and sleep. To escape. But she went on.
She stopped at the girls’ room, which was first on the left. The door was ajar, as per usual, and she pushed it open further. She leaned in and listened to the girls breathing. Reno was a deep sleeper like her father; her breath whistled softly through her small nose. Hannah was more difficult to hear, and Callie tip-toed further into the room, where the baby was sleeping soundly, her breathing coming through her mouth in little
haa
exhalations. She’d been stuffy-nosed lately.
But Callie was still tense. Back in the hallway she turned and, heart beating, walked the few paces to Braxton’s bedroom. His door was closed.
She turned the knob and swung the door in. There she saw the cool, blue glow of the computer screen on his desk. He had probably snuck out of bed and been doing something on his laptop, and that was what had awakened her. Her heartbeat slowing, she was already preparing a short, whispery lecture in her mind when she saw that he wasn’t in his bed.
He wasn’t in the room.
She glanced at his desk again. His MacBook had some sort of character on the screen, a cartoonish figure that looked like someone from a mob movie. There was a caption next to the character which read,
What’re You, Sleeping with the Fishes? Get Back In There!
Braxton’s chair was pushed away from the desk, and there were a few papers lying beside the computer.
She wheeled around and left the room. She walked back down the hallway. The bathroom was off from the kitchen. She had passed it on her way to the girls’ room but couldn’t remember whether it had been open or closed. She usually kept it closed so Hannah, if awakened, wouldn’t wander in and start splashing around in the toilet bowl.
The door was shut. She raised a hand and rapped softly. She whispered, “Brax? You in there?”
There was no light emanating from the space beneath the door, so she opened it and looked in. The bathroom was dark except for a night light plugged into the wall.
She walked into the living room and looked on the couch, but he wasn’t there.
She didn’t know what to do. She was stumped. She was a little angry, and she was scared. She turned and walked quickly back to his room, not so lightly this time; her footfalls pounded the wood as she advanced down the hallway. Maybe he had just been burrowed under the covers and she hadn’t seen.
Or,
she thought,
he’s out smoking.
Just the one time she’d detected the scent of cigarettes on his clothes, but she’d also smelled something else; the unexpected, rather bright scent of fabric softener. She didn’t think many kids came home from school smelling like their clothes had just been exhumed from the washing machine, and when she went through the pantry and discovered among the fusty bundles of dirty clothes a missing spray bottle of the stuff, she’d realized he’d been covering up. This had been over two months ago, though, before they’d moved, and since then she hadn’t noticed anything, despite sniffing his jackets and shirts on a regular basis. Still, she could have missed it.
Back in his room, she saw for certain that he wasn’t there. She stood in the center, and debated whether or not to put on clothes, go outside and catch him in the act, or stay here in his room, like some mob boss from the game he played online, and wait for his return. Mike would go ballistic if he knew Braxton was smoking, but Callie had smoked on and off for years, and knew how hard it was to stop. Mike didn’t smoke because Mike never
had
smoked. It was simple — if you didn’t start, you didn’t get hooked. And if Braxton was sneaking one here or there, maybe she could ward off the demon nicotine before it really sank its teeth in.
Even as she thought this, a nameless fear crept over her. It took a moment for her to become aware of the faint red pulse that seemed to live in the room. She looked closely at the wall beside her and saw that it was flashing red; very faint, but unmistakable. Now the fear welled up into her throat, and she spun around, went to the window above his desk and pushed back the short curtain.
She stopped breathing. Outside, quite a distance away but close enough to be visible, what looked like half a dozen police cars were all out, parked in the middle of the road, their lights flashing.
Callie drew a sudden, trembling breath. She left the room in a frenzied rush, displacing as she passed the papers on Braxton’s desk.
Oh God, oh no, oh God, keep him safe, tell me he’s safe, that he went outside to look at the lights, that’s all, he went outside to look.
She jogged down the hallway and back into the living room, turning towards the bedroom to wake Mike. She was almost at the kitchen door when there was a soft knock behind her.
She stopped in her tracks, frozen. Her thoughts vanished like things shot out of the sky. Far away a voice told her a deep truth. It was connected to the knowledge that our birth, our life, our death are what they are, all inevitable and impermanent. What would follow was only a drama arising out of attachment. The storm and tantrum of the ego.
Callie turned around slowly, and faced the door on the other side of the living room. The one that led to the cold, dark outside.
The soft rapping came again, perhaps a little more urgently.
She stood still. The moment drew out like a blade, until the knocking resumed more forcefully.
She found herself drifting towards the door, as if propelled by some unseen force. But she knew. Death was on the other side.