Intent to Kill (16 page)

INSIDE THE DAWES FAMILY CRYPT, BABES HAD LITERALLY RETREATED
into a corner.

He’d barely moved since making the on-air phone call to Ryan. His back hurt, his legs were cramping, and he needed to go to the bathroom. But those discomforts were hardly punishment enough for the secret he’d finally gotten off his chest. It was over. Done.

Now what?

The last vestiges of daylight were streaming through the crypt’s colorful stained-glass window. Darkness was not far off. Sunset would come at 6:58
P.M.
, two minutes sooner than yesterday, and two minutes later than tomorrow. The march toward the winter solstice was not always two minutes per day, however. If he stayed here another month or so, the sun would set at 6:06
P.M.
on October 13, and on the next day it would set at 6:05
P.M.
And if he stayed all the way past Christmas, the sunset would come at the same time, 4:21
P.M.
, on December 26 and 27. It was the kind of statistical trivia that Babes easily committed to memory and could spout off at the drop of a hat.

You have to sleep here. In the dark.

He was strangely okay with the idea—except for the cold. All of New England was experiencing sunny days and increasingly cool nights, a weather pattern that would make for the perfect autumn blaze of color in two weeks’ time. Babes’s hooded sweatshirt had kept him plenty warm during the day, but with nighttime temperatures dipping into the forties, the crypt offered all the warmth and comfort of an unfinished basement with no heat.

Babes climbed to his feet and stood with his back against the wall. The crypt was rectangular in shape, the open area roughly the size of Babes’s bedroom. The stained-glass window was behind and above him in the gabled end of the crypt, and he was looking directly at the wrought-iron gate that was the entrance on the opposite wall. Interment niches lined each of the long side walls, and a white marble bench suitable for two or three visitors was in the center.

His sneakers squeaked on the polished concrete floor as he crossed the crypt and went outside for a quick bathroom break. When he returned, it seemed even darker inside. The lock was broken, but he pulled the gate shut tightly and prepared to spend the night.

Loneliness wasn’t an issue. In middle school and as a teenager, Babes had spent countless hours here alone and content. He was always happiest by himself, as long as he was engaged. Boredom was his enemy. He didn’t have his baseball cards with him now, which was a huge departure from the old days. The crypt hadn’t been part of his routine in quite some time, but it still didn’t feel the same without his cards. Babes didn’t handle any type of disconnect very well, especially when he was tired and hungry. He could feel his anxiety rising, which frightened him far more than the thought of spending the night alone in a cemetery. In the day’s last remaining light, he tried to keep his mind busy memorizing the memorials chiseled onto the stone facades of the niches: Robert Dawes, Leslie Dawes, generations of dead Daweses from another century, probably whom no one had thought about in decades.

Then he noticed something. Several of the niches in the far column closest to the gate had no memorial. In the years since his last visit to the crypt, he had forgotten about his secret hiding spot—the vacant crypt right beside Barbara Dawes. Back in middle school, he used to hide his baseball cards in there.

Maybe they’re still here!

He nearly leaped across the crypt and grabbed the stone facade. It was like a dresser drawer with no handles. With both hands, he jimmied it from side to side, wiggled the facing free, and peered inside.

“Whoa!” he said, a reflex.

Inside was a treasure trove of cool stuff, all kinds of things he needed: a coat, a flashlight, a candle and matches, some plastic bags. There was also food: a half-full box of vanilla wafers. He tried one. Still good! And behind it all, way in back, was an old brown shoebox.

My cards!

Babes had hit the jackpot. And he was starving. He gathered up his loot and carried it over to the marble bench. It was almost too dark to see, so he tried the flashlight. No batteries. He struck a match and lit the candle. It was more than enough light.

He devoured the cookies while sorting through the cards. Then he lined them up on the floor in perfectly straight columns, one for each team. He arranged them first in alphabetical order—Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, and so on—then he rearranged them according to won-loss records for last season, which he knew from memory. He smiled each time he came across one of his old favorites, but seeing them made him realize that it had been much longer than he’d thought since his last visit. He had at least a hundred cards faceup on the floor, and the newest one was five years old.

No way were those vanilla wafers five years old.

He was deep in thought, calculating the team on-base percentage for the 1999 Boston Red Sox, when he heard footsteps outside the crypt.

Babes blew out the candle, gathered up his cards, and hid in a dark corner. Someone was fidgeting with the latch on the iron gate. He seemed to know that the lock was broken, and the gate swung open. Babes held his breath, but it took every ounce of strength not to freak out. He hoped and prayed that the intruder would just go away. The door closed, and in a sliver of moonlight, Babes saw a man’s shadow stretching across the stone floor.

The silhouette stepped forward, found the matches on the marble bench, and struck one.

Babes let out a helpless whimper.

The man looked at Babes and spoke in a voice that chilled him.

“What the hell are you doing in my house?”

RYAN AND HIS IN-LAWS REGROUPED IN THE KITCHEN FOR A LATE
dinner.

Ryan had taken Ainsley out of school early and was in Pawtucket by one o’clock. It was always an emotional jolt for Ryan to visit Paul and Rachel Townsend, to see the old brownstone and the upstairs apartment where he and Chelsea had started their life as husband and wife. It felt even stranger drawing up a search plan, identifying everyone they should call and every place they should look for Babes. Rachel spent the afternoon at home with Ainsley while Ryan and Paul drove around town hitting all the likely spots—near McCoy Stadium, the Modern Diner, the library, even his favorite sports memorabilia store all the way down in Warren. Babes was nowhere to be found, and no one they talked to had seen him.

“I want a cheeseburger,” said Ainsley. She was digging in the sack of food that Ryan had picked up at the drive-through.

“Cheeseburger it is,” said Ryan.

“But no bun,” said Ainsley.

That seemed odd, but Ryan was okay with it. “All right. No bun.”

“And no meat,” she said.

“So…you want a piece of cheese?”

“No! I want a
cheeseburger.
But no bun. And no meat.”

Another lesson in the big picture from Ainsley: life’s a cheeseburger, and some people eat just the cheese. Ryan let her watch
SpongeBob SquarePants
during dinner so that the adults could talk.

After Ryan put Ainsley to bed, he tried Tom Bales on his cell again. He’d been trying to follow up on Dr. Fisch’s accomplice theory all day long, but Tom wasn’t answering—making Ryan all the more suspicious. But the priority now was to find Babes. The plan was for Paul and Ryan to split up and continue to search for Babes tonight, all night if necessary. Ryan had a list of additional places he wanted to check out in south Pawtucket and northern Providence. By eight o’clock Ryan was ready to hit the road again, but Paul stopped him before he could grab his coat.

“Rachel has something to tell you,” said Paul, his wife standing next to him.

If she did have something to say, Rachel didn’t look happy about it.

“Actually, I have something to show you,” she said, and she led Ryan down the hall to Babes’s bedroom. Paul followed them.

She switched on the light, and Ryan was immediately struck by the amount of stuff Babes had collected over the years. But he was even more taken with how organized everything was. Against an entire wall, floor to ceiling, were banker’s boxes stacked on top of one another in perfect columns. Each box was labeled and dated. Ryan stepped closer to read some of them at random:
Baseball Daily News
1995–2000,
Japan Baseball Daily
2004–2006, PawSox Programs 1989–1996,
Red Sox Magazine
2001–2005, and on it went, all in alphabetical order. The other side of the room was like a memorabilia store. Posters of Red Sox players, including an autographed “Fathead” of Ivan Lopez, covered the wall like wallpaper. Shelf after shelf displayed neatly organized collectibles, everything from a Boston Red Sox dog collar—Babes didn’t have a pet—to a PawSox versus RedWings “33 Innings” pin, which commemorated the longest game in baseball history.

On the nightstand, right beside Babes’s pillow, was a baseball signed by Ryan and the rest of his Texas Longhorn teammates from their national championship season, which, for a moment, sent Ryan’s mind drifting in another direction entirely.

“I found this while you and Paul were out,” said Rachel, interrupting his thoughts.

Ryan took a seat beside her on the bed. Paul leaned against the wall, standing near the door. In Rachel’s lap was an old wooden cigar box. On the lid, written in Babes’s distinctively poor handwriting, was just one word:
Chelsea.

Rachel opened the box. Ryan looked inside, and he didn’t know what to make of it at first. It was almost full, but it contained nothing recognizable. He saw little jagged pieces of plastic and broken metal, all mixed together with shards of glass and chips of paint.

Rachel said, “Babes visits the scene of the accident. I don’t know how often, but I think it’s a lot. He’ll stay there for hours if he has to, until he finds something, like a little piece of Chelsea’s car that didn’t get cleaned up. Part of a taillight, a chip off the bumper, a pellet of glass from the shattered windshield—whatever he can spot. He keeps it all in this box.”

“Tom told me about this,” Ryan said, moving his gaze to Rachel. She was gently raking her fingertips over Babes’s precious collection, as if it meant even more to her than to her son. It wasn’t right, a mother burying her daughter.

“What really happened that night?” asked Ryan.

Rachel was still looking down into the box of broken mementos. “You bought Chelsea and Ainsley tickets for the game,” she said. “But you didn’t get one for Babes.”

This was old ground. “It was the right decision,” said Ryan. “In hindsight, it might have saved his life. He could have been killed if he’d been in the front seat next to Chelsea.”

“Yes,” she said, finally looking at Ryan. “Good thing he was in the backseat.”

Ryan wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly, and it took a moment for the words to force their way out of his mouth.

“Are you saying—” He had to stop to catch his breath. “Did you just say Babes was there?”

She lowered her eyes again, toward the box of broken pieces. “It was World War III here when Babes found out he wasn’t going. The thought of missing the last game of the season sent him into a major meltdown. When Chelsea came home from school to pick up Ainsley, I begged her to hold Ainsley in her lap at the game and let Babes use the other ticket.”

Ryan was still incredulous; it just didn’t compute. “So Babes was in the car when it crashed?”

She nodded. “Chelsea put him in the backseat to keep Ainsley entertained.”

Ryan felt everything from betrayal to outrage, making it difficult to think, but one question cut through the emotions: “Did he see the car that ran her off the road?”

“No. He was playing itsy-bitsy spider with Ainsley, and all he saw was Chelsea’s reaction. She swerved, lost control. The next thing Babes knew, the car crashed into an oak tree.”

“Babes looked fine to me at the funeral.”

“He wasn’t hurt. Neither was Ainsley. It was the tree branch through the windshield that killed Chelsea. When Babes saw all the blood in the front seat, he freaked and jumped out of the car. He left Chelsea and Ainsley there and ran all the way home.”

“Why has this been kept secret? Why haven’t I heard this before?”

Rachel’s voice began to quake. “Babes didn’t want anyone to know he was a passenger in the car. He’s ashamed of the way he lost it when he saw Chelsea’s injuries.”

“Well, too bad. We’ve been spinning our wheels for three years trying to find out what happened that night.”

“Don’t be angry. You know how fragile Babes is. He actually considered himself responsible for Chelsea’s death. In his mind, he could have saved her if he had kept his cool and called the ambulance. She might have lived.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

Ryan looked at Paul. It had always been obvious to him that Paul and Rachel treated Babes differently. This revelation didn’t explain everything, but it meant something.

Paul said, “That night he ran home, Babes was hysterical. He was screaming that Chelsea was dead, and I—” his voice broke.

“It’s okay,” said Rachel.

Paul went to his wife, sat beside her on the bed, and pressed her hand into his. It was the most intimate contact Ryan had witnessed between them since Chelsea’s death.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Rachel told Ryan. “Babes had nothing to add to the investigation, other than his own sense of guilt. So I…Paul and I decided to keep Babes out of it. Nobody knew that he was in the car, so we didn’t even let the police talk to him. I know that must sound terrible to you, but we’d already lost a daughter. We didn’t need Babes seeing his name in the newspaper, hearing people call him a coward for running from the scene, and then doing something horrible to himself out of shame.”

Paul lowered his gaze. “Intellectually, at least, that’s where I was. But something in my heart wouldn’t let me forgive Babes for losing his head and not doing everything I would have done to save Chelsea. Until now. Now that we’re in danger of losing him, too, I realize what a fool I’ve been. I love Babes. I really do. It wasn’t his fault that Chelsea died. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the car.”

Rachel started to cry quietly, and Paul put his arm around her.

“You can’t fault Babes for just being Babes,” she said.

“No,” Paul said sadly. “You can’t ever do that.”

Ryan gave them a moment, but then he had to ask: “Do you think this is what Babes’s confession is about? Is that why he called me on the air to tell the world he killed his sister?”

Rachel wiped away a tear.

Paul said, “I’m hard on Babes sometimes, but I know my son. I think that’s exactly what’s going on. It all goes back to him saying ‘it was no accident.’”

Ryan rose. “Rachel, are you going to be okay here alone?”

“Yes,” she said, sniffling. “Where are you going?”

“Where else?” he said, as his gaze shifted to his father-in-law. “Paul and I have to keep looking.”

The Checker was alone in his hotel room.

From his standpoint, the day was a complete success. The long wait in his car had been worth it, and he’d gotten exactly what he’d set out to get. He didn’t fancy himself an expert photographer, but this was a fine piece of work. The fact that everything was now on hold was actually a disappointment.

He got up from the bed, went to the sink, and washed his face. He’d seen enough of the newscasts on television about Ryan’s brother-in-law, Babes. Something told him that this was not going to go as smoothly as some people thought. His photograph might yet be useful. The Checker was most definitely a betting man, and his money was riding on Ryan James needing another jolt of cold reality—one that would make him realize that the search for the truth was not without danger.

He crossed the room and switched off the light. The LCD on his laptop computer glowed in the darkness. He went to his electronic collection of digital photographs and retrieved the best one that he’d taken earlier in the day. He attached it to a draft e-mail, and in the TO box he typed the address for Ryan James’s radio station. It took a moment to come up with the proper subject line—he wanted a real grabber. Then it came to him. He typed it out, but he didn’t hit the Send button. He took another look at the attachment. He’d snapped the photograph from across the street, but the image was unmistakable, especially with the halls of prestigious Brookline Academy in the background.

It was Ainsley James, dressed in her school uniform, caught in one of those rare but inevitable moments in her young life when there seemed to be no adult around.

Accidents Happen, the message read.

He would have loved to send it now, but timing was critical. The Checker was a patient man. This holding pattern was not going to last. The right moment would surely come—and the Checker would know exactly when.

He saved the e-mail to his Drafts folder and switched off the computer. The room fell into darkness.