Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (22 page)

“You did it on church property,” Elias repeated. “They really could sue us. That’s just fucking terrific.”

Lulu glared at Elias and said, “Why Joe? You didn’t even like Joe.”

“He was always, like, being all show-offy with everything. His parents didn’t just go on vacation to the White Mountains, they went elephant trekking in Thailand or something weird like that. Everything was, like, oh, I’ve got a media room. I’ve got a personal gym. I’ve got a pool with a slide. Shit like that. He never stopped. Not like he ever invited us over.”

“At the church,” Elias repeated.

“Pete liked to dare him to do stuff, told him like hey if you can ride an elephant into the jungle you should be able to do this. Then Pete would make fun of Joe without Joe even noticing. So Pete tells us about something his dad showed him, something called carotid control that cops use on bad guys. And we watched some videos. And he asks if Joe would do that and Joe says sure he could do that.”

“What videos?” I asked.

Ken sighed. “It’s all on YouTube.”

“Did you post Joey on YouTube?” Elias asked. His face grew red again.

Ken looked so low he’d have to reach up to tie his shoe.

“Show us,” I said.

Ken heaved his body off the couch and led us into the alcove where his computer sat, open to view from most of the house. At least these parents were careful about that, but you couldn’t control what happens in other houses. I had worked enough child pornography cases to know that real well.

Still sniffling, Ken booted up his computer while the three of us stood behind him watching. There was a wall nearby for me to lean against, my hands in my pockets to hide their trembling. The spaniel kept working on Lulu’s sneaker, creating a dark wet patch on the toe. Lulu remembered herself. “Can I get you something? Water?”

“No thanks. I’m fine.” We didn’t look at each other during this exchange, like we were afraid we’d miss something if we looked away from the screen.

Ken brought up his search engine and keyed in “youtube choking game.” There were over four thousand results. On the first page it was mostly news items and public service announcements warning about the dangers. Ken paused, reluctant to go on.

“Do it,” Elias said.

“Dear,” Lulu said. I was unsure who she was speaking to.

Ken keyed in a code and pressed
ENTER.

“Are you on this video?” Elias asked.

“No!” Ken said as loudly as Elias and then in a quieter voice, “I was filming. My phone.”

The video came up and with a tap of Ken’s finger started to play. The camera panned over a bookcase. Elias leaned closer to the screen to study the spines of the books. “Tillich. Bonhoeffer. Yep, that’s the fucking church library, all right.”

“Shut. Up!” Lulu said.

The camera slipped to the left to show the boy I knew from the photograph his mother had given me, standing in front of the books. He was thin and gawky, short, and like most teenagers hiding his insecurity behind bravado. As an adult I could see this, while Ken and Pete would have no idea of the pain behind the face. Joe laughed, a laugh that would have annoyed me even more if he was still alive, then started speaking in what he would imagine was a solemn tone. “Astronaut Joseph M. Neilsen reporting in. First launch for Space Monkey. One small step for man, one—”

A voice, presumably Peter Salazar’s, interrupted, “You are such a stupid jerk.”

Joe laughed again, either thinking the boys talked to each other this way, or craving the attention so much he didn’t care what form it came in. “Commander Peter Salazar, are you ready?”

The boy belonging to that name moved into place in front of Joe. I could only see his back, but it looked enough like Gemma-Kate’s buddy. Peter was considerably taller than Joe, but otherwise similar, dressed in the same adolescent uniform, blue jeans and T-shirt.

Ken’s voice said, “You gotta move to the side or I don’t have him.”

Peter moved slightly to the right and reached up his hands to Joe’s neck. Paused. “Do I really have to touch him?” he asked.

“Wait,” Ken’s voice said again. “Better get in front of that chair so when he goes down—”

“Oh man,” Peter said, and grabbed Joe by his shirt to move him over by an armchair. “Happy now?”

“I’ll be okay,” Joe said, though not looking so cocky anymore, maybe a little nervous at the thought of actually falling down. “Go for it.”

Peter reached up again.

“Little to the right,” Ken said.

Peter moved one step to the right. “This good?”

The camera moved a little more as Ken stepped to the left. Peter brought his hands up again, and with the heels of the palms pressed against the sides of Joe’s neck. “This look right?”

“I guess,” Ken said.

Joe said nothing. He closed his eyes. I felt the three of us standing before the computer hold our collective breath. It took longer than I would have imagined. Then his knees buckled and he fell into the chair. His head lolled on the cushion.

“Whoo!” Peter yelled and jumped back, and Ken gave a corresponding “Whoo!”

Joe was still.

“Wasn’t he supposed to come to right away?” Peter asked, looking straight into the camera, at Ken.

Joe’s body started to jerk. Both hands wrenched up and hit his own face like a berserk puppet. His feet bent backward, curling under the bottom of the chair, and his back arched in what could have been a grand mal seizure.

The phone dropped so that all we could see were some cabinets at the bottom of the bookcases.

“Call nine-one-one.”

“No! Joe? Hey, Joe.”

“Wait, pull him off the chair! Get him flat!”

We heard a tussle, things hitting, maybe Joe’s head on the wooden floor. I watched the seconds of the video tick, one, two, three, four, and—

“Aw, fuck man! We thought we lost you! That was so cool!”

“Shh, somebody might hear.”

“Man, that was awe-some!” That was Joe’s voice. “Let’s do it again.” The day he didn’t die.

Video ended, the rest of us stood frozen in front of the computer. I heard Lulu whisper, “Oh my God.”

Ken started sobbing again. “I killed Joe,” he said.

“What makes you think you killed Joe?” Lulu asked, putting both her hands on his shoulders.

“If I hadn’t agreed to do that with Pete, Joe wouldn’t have gotten the idea and tried to do it to himself. Because we wouldn’t do it again. I bet that’s what happened, he went underwater and held his breath. Or something.”

“Not even Joey Neilsen would do something that stupid.” Elias repented of the hasty words and put his arm around the kid, suddenly losing the harsh tone. “Just because you can think of something doesn’t make it so.”

“Or maybe something happened to his brain and that’s why he drowned,” Ken said.

Obviously Ken wasn’t paying attention to his father’s wisdom, and Elias wasn’t long on patience. “You didn’t kill Joe,” he said. “Did he, Brigid?”

“Nah, he didn’t kill Joe,” I said, as if I was the expert Elias made me out to be. I figured being Father Elias Manwaring’s son and all, he had enough on his shoulders. “Do you have Peter Salazar’s address?”

“In my office. This office,” Elias said, sounding a little shaken. He wandered off and returned shortly with a small stapled booklet that said
St. Martin’s Church Directory
on the front. He carried it into the kitchen; I followed and watched him page through to the alphabetized directory and write down the address on a pad for me.

“You flipped past some pictures. Is his family in there?”

“I think they had their picture taken.” He flipped to the back of the booklet and paged through photo after photo of full-color families all with Sunday clothes and the same smile. I recognized some people from the times I’d attended services with Carlo, but didn’t spot Mallory as he paged past the
H
’s and into the
S
’s, where Peter Salazar appeared with his younger sister, mom, and dad. There was Ruth, and there was Peter, the boy who had made friends with Gemma-Kate. And there was the father, with a bulldog face and barrel chest, puffed out aggressively even at the photographer.

“Son of a gun,” I said, cleaning up my language a bit even though it wouldn’t be appreciated.

“What?” Lulu asked, coming up behind us.

“I know that guy.”

“You’ve probably seen them at church. Good churchgoers, that family,” Elias said. “Decent pledge, too.”

But no, I hadn’t noticed him at St. Martin’s. I was staring at the man who had interrupted me when I was talking to Sam Humphries. The man, identified as Anthony Salazar under the photograph, was Sam’s boss, the sergeant. I bet he would shit if he saw this video. Or maybe he already had, and that was why he assigned Sam the Rookie to investigate Joe Neilsen’s death. Maybe Ken had a point.

*   *   *

I left the Manwaring family sorting out their issues and walked back to the church, intending to stop off at the columbarium Elias had told me about to see where Joey was laid to rest, as long as I was there. As I walked I called the Tucson Police Department, said I was helping to investigate a case for Anthony Salazar, and asked for his e-mail address at the office. Then I called up YouTube, entered Ken’s user name, and sent Salazar the link to the video of his son choking the kid I identified as Joseph Neilsen, now deceased. I wrote that I wanted to see him. Salazar would have my phone number from the message but I added my e-mail address for good measure. This evening at the Salazar house should be interesting, I thought.

I was thinking about this when I reached the columbarium, found the black wrought-iron gate in the middle of the high white adobe wall, and walked through. The first thing I noticed was four crosses made up of individual polished marble tiles, each about seven inches square, many engraved. Presumably urns containing ashes lay under each tile.

The second thing I noticed, sprawled in front of a tiled concrete bench tucked against the wall nearest to the gate, an empty cup next to him, the coffee forming a pool for a number of dead ants, was Adrian Franklin. It seemed the emergency services had forgotten to check the columbarium.

Poor, cute, friendly Adrian. We wouldn’t see his blazing, bad-boy smile again. All he wanted to do was find a change of scene where he could mourn his wife and make a few friends who wouldn’t constantly remind him of her. Moved all the way to Arizona. Came to St. Martin’s for peace. And found the afterlife instead.

Thirty–three

I had made a nine-one-one call, followed by one to Elias, followed by one to Carlo letting him know I’d be home a little late. I was glad Gemma-Kate hadn’t picked up the phone. I wasn’t ready to hear her voice just yet.

Manriquez was there, joined by the man I had only an hour ago come to know as Tony Salazar, father of Peter, husband of Ruth. Elias was there, too, nearly hysterical, and very distracting.

“Oh my God, it’s that man,” Elias said.

I had decided to keep my mouth shut unless I was asked a direct question. Elias provided the name of the deceased. Adrian Franklin. “I remember his name because he asked me to make him a name tag.”

Salazar had told them to go back home rather than tramp around and possibly spoil some footwear-impression evidence. But he and Lulu stood outside the columbarium, hanging on to the wall surrounding it like they dared not let go.

“What is going on here?” Elias asked no one in particular. “Accidents. Somebody poisons my congregation. Now this.” His gesture indicated that
this
was the potential new pledging unit dead on his property. “Is it a hate crime? Who hates Episcopalians? We’re one hymn shy of Unitarian, for Christ’s sake!”

Tony Salazar must not have received the YouTube link of his son choking Joey Neilsen. He just glanced at me, acknowledging we’d seen each other before. And if he didn’t know who I was when he saw me with Humphries a few days ago, he knew now when I told him my name.

“Ah, the mighty Quinn,” he said with a wink.

“Heard that one,” I said.

He asked me to please calm Elias down while he and Manriquez did a death scene assessment.

“Good thing you can identify him,” Salazar said, “because he doesn’t have any ID on him.”

“You have to find where he’s staying,” I said. “He told me he has a dog, and it may have been locked inside for more than a day.”

We could have all guessed that the body was collateral damage from the poisoning the day before, and it didn’t take the ant crawling out of one of the nostrils to confirm that he had been dead nearly twenty-four hours, but it was Manriquez’s job and he did it. “I don’t see any other signs of violence. We’ll take him back to the lab and run the test for ethylene glycol. I wonder why he was the only one to get a fatal dose.”

“He comes out here to enjoy his coffee in peace, passes out, gets missed by the paramedics?” Salazar said.

Manriquez nodded. “Not a bad scenario. With half an ounce and no treatment it would have taken just a couple hours to succumb. Maybe I’ll find something else.”

I still kept my mouth shut through all this. I hadn’t even called Manriquez this morning because I didn’t want to be asking too many questions given that I suspected my niece might have …

*   *   *

What do I do now, Marylin?

Maybe the spirit of Marylin had my back just then, because I thought about the video I had seen at the Manwarings’. Then I thought about the way Peter Salazar had stared at Gemma-Kate in the church the day before. What was that look? Was it
I can do more than poison a dog
? Maybe it was a false hope, or maybe I had locked on to Gemma-Kate too soon. What if?

I took Manriquez aside while Adrian Franklin’s body was being zipped into a body bag and loaded into an ambulance. I wanted not only to get some answers but to begin the process of casting suspicion on Peter if it was warranted.

“Do you know about the Choking Game?” I started.

“A.k.a. the Fainting Game? Space Monkey? Sure.”

“What do you know?”

“Epidemiology, mechanism, what?”

“Just talk to me. I’ll figure out if it’s worth it.”

“There was a poster session at the NAME conference in Baltimore last year. They figure maybe a thousand kids die every year as a result of the game, but the figures could be higher because if they do it alone it can be mistaken for suicide. I had one case last year that was definitive because there was another kid involved who did the maneuver and confessed.”