Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) Page 5

  I answered for her. “We’re not driving at anything, Dr. Mitchell. We are just trying to get a clear understanding of what happened that day. What we would like to know is how your husband knew to run for the shed.”

  She blinked a few times, gave her head a small shake. “I have no idea. What a bizarre thing to focus on. Perhaps he saw that there was nothing happening anywhere else in the garden and decided it had to come from the shed. Or when he was at the window…” She shrugged. “You’ll have to ask him.”

  I nodded. “I know this must be painful, Dr. Mitchell, but it would be very helpful if you could walk us through what happened next.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. After a second or two she released it, like she was blowing smoke from a cigarette. She crossed the floor to the kitchen door and unlocked it. Dehan stood and we followed Emma Mitchell out onto the patio. The sun was dropping toward the horizon behind the house and the breeze had turned icy. I shuddered and Dehan thrust her hands deep into her pockets. Dr. Mitchell hugged herself and stamped her feet, looking everywhere in the backyard except at the shed. I said:

  “You followed your husband across the lawn.”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  She made her way across the lawn to the shed and we followed after her. The door was closed. She reached for the handle but withdrew her hand before touching it.

  “The door was open,” she said. “A couple of inches. Brad grabbed it and yanked it. I remember he just stood there, immobile, staring down at the floor. I began to shout at him, asking him what it was, what had happened. He wouldn’t answer. He didn’t say anything. I came up beside him…”

  She looked up at me. It was a kind of appeal, as though her face were begging me to tell her it had all been some crazy mistake.

  “When I was beside him, I could see past…” She gestured with her arm, holding it straight out in front of her. “I could see past him, what was on the floor inside the shed. Lea…”

  She squeezed her eyes and her lips closed tight and she covered her mouth with the fingertips of one hand again. “Lea was lying on her back. Her throat looked black. And then I realized it was blood. Her eyes… Oh, Lord! Her eyes were open, and her head was thrown back so she was staring at me. And Lee, Lee was at her feet. He was facedown, with…” She made a strange stabbing, pointing gesture at her back. “With the knife poking out of his back. There was no sign of Marcus. I’m sorry…”

  She stopped talking and covered her face with her hands. I stepped inside the shed, recalling the photographs I had seen in the file. It was as she had said. Lea had been flat on her back, with her arms by her side, her head toward the door and a big, ugly gash across her throat. Lee was lying a couple of feet from her, kind of crumpled and twisted, with a knife protruding from his back.

  Outside I heard a shuddering breath, then Dehan’s voice.

  “What happened then?”

  My memory is shaky at that point. I think I went hysterical for a bit. So did Brad. But he had at least enough presence of mind to call nine-one-one. Then there was a mad few minutes while we waited, both of us sobbing and wanting to go to them, but Brad kept saying, ‘No, we mustn’t disturb anything,’ and we were both calling out for Marcus, but there was no sign of him.”

  I turned to look at them, from the blackness of the shed, framed brilliant against the green lawn. Dehan was asking, “When did you eventually find Marcus?”

  She fiddled with her nails for a bit, with her eyes darting about the yard. Eventually she said, “I think I fell on the lawn. I remember sitting here,” she pointed to the grass at her feet, “and calling to Lea to please…” She bit her lip and a tear welled in her eye and rolled down to the corner of her mouth. “And Brad was running around the yard, looking at the trees and the flowerbeds, calling to Marcus. Finally he came, just before the police arrived, and just kind of blundered into the shed, saying, ‘This is the only place he can be!’ And there was a tarpaulin over at the back.” She pointed into the shadows where I was standing. “He went to it and pulled it back, and there was Marcus.”

  Dehan asked, “Did he say anything?”

  She shook her head. “No, not a word. He was huddled in the fetal position, with his arms covering his face and his eyes tightly closed. He didn’t move, or say anything.”

  “What happened?”

  “The police arrived, with the ME and an ambulance. They tried to get him to talk but the medical examiner said he was in a catatonic state which would probably pass in a few days. But it never did.”

  I asked, “Where is he now?”

  Suddenly her face was hard as rock. “In his room, with his nurse, and you cannot see him!”

  Six

  Dehan screwed up her eyes and sucked her teeth. She also hunched her shoulders and went up on her toes. When she came down she said, “What is it, about our seeing Marcus, that you want to avoid?”

  Emma Mitchell turned and stared at her with furious eyes. When she spoke I noticed that her hands were trembling, but she spoke quietly.

  “He is my son, he is all I have, he is hurt, damaged, and I am not going to allow you—or anyone else—to go barging in, dragging up that trauma…”

  I interrupted her: “So he is not seeing a therapist.”

  She stopped dead. Her mouth kept working but no sound came out. Dehan sighed.

  “Dr. Mitchell, we are not here to cause you or your family problems. We want to catch the person who murdered your children and bring him to justice.”

  She emitted an ugly bark that should have been a laugh but had all the wrong ingredients. “Oh, please! Don’t give me that New York’s finest bull, Detective. I happen to have a PhD in Sociology and I know very well how the New York Police Department works. Priority number one: close the case. It really doesn’t matter if you get the right guy or not. The objective is to make up the numbers so that your political masters look good!” Her voice was becoming shrill. “Priority number two: close the case! And it really doesn’t matter if you put an innocent person away—especially if he happens to be black! Because it is not about people! It’s about numbers! Numbers that make the mayor look good! Numbers that make the senator look good! Numbers that make your damned career look good!” Now she was shouting, stabbing with her finger, her eyes bright with angry tears. “But the last thing you give a damn about is the devastated lives you leave behind!”

  Dehan stepped up to her and took hold of her shoulders in her hands. She spoke softly, kindly. “Hey, Dr. Mitchell. You want to get your head out of your books and come down on the streets from time to time. You haven’t got a monopoly on humanity. We’re all people, the victims, the criminals and the cops.” She jabbed a thumb at me. “This dinosaur is working cold cases precisely because he doesn’t give a damn whose toes he treads on or what politicians, red, white or blue, he upsets or even puts away. You don’t need to be an academic to have a conscience. Cops are like everybody else, good and bad, bent and straight, clean and dirty. Most of us are just doing a job, just like you.

  “Now it just so happens you have, right here, two cops who are straight and clean, and our priority number one is to catch the bastard who killed your kids. But we can only do that if you work with us. So do yourself a favor, cut the crap and get with the program.”

  Dr. Emma Mitchell stared at Dehan for a long moment with wild eyes. Then she jerked her shoulders free from Dehan’s hands, turned and ran back across the lawn to the house. I watched her disappear through the kitchen door and then she was gone. I turned to look at Dehan, who shrugged.

  “She didn’t tell us to leave.”

  I shrugged back at her and made my way past the shed to the wall of trees that formed the end of the yard. I examined them and walked the length of the row, from left to right, with Dehan beside me. They were dense, closely packed and entwined. Finally Dehan spoke my own thoughts: “It’s impossible. They are impenetrable. The killer did not get into the yard through these trees.”

  “I
agree.”

  “That leaves the walls either side of the yard.” She turned, with her hands on her hips, and squinted at them. “What height would you say they are?”

  I had already gauged them from the kitchen window. I said, “Nine feet, maybe a little more. And, see?” I pointed. “They’re topped with broken glass. Not impossible, but difficult, very difficult. You’d need skills.”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “You’re looking at using a ladder, putting some kind of blanket on the wall, and then using another ladder to get down. Unless it was one of the neighbors, I can’t see anyone pulling that off in broad daylight on a Sunday morning without being seen.”

  I shook my head. “We’ll talk to them, but you’re right, it’s just not a realistic scenario.”

  “Agreed. Which leaves us the front.” She began to walk back toward the house, pointing as she went and talking over her shoulder. “There’s a driveway down the side, that leads to a double garage. From the garage there is a path that leads to the kitchen door and the backyard. It’s the only viable access.”

  We reached the kitchen door. I glanced in and saw Emma Mitchell sitting at the kitchen table with a mug in front of her. She was staring into it like a gypsy trying to read her tea leaves.

  We moved on and followed a narrow path through a gate in a picket fence, and out onto a concrete driveway. On our right was the double garage. To the left the drive led down to the sidewalk and the road.

  “Easy,” I said, “but the killer would have had to pass right in front of the kitchen door and the kitchen window. And—” I frowned and shrugged. “What’s driving him? What’s his motivation? I mean, does he arrive by car or on foot? What makes him stop and come up the drive?” I walked down as far as the sidewalk and looked up and down the road.

  Dehan walked down as far as the blacktop, looked both ways and then stood staring at me. She said, “He hasn’t seen the kids. He can’t see them from here. And either he doesn’t know the Mitchells are at home, in which case he’s taking a huge risk on a Sunday morning, or he knows they are home and doesn’t care. He goes in anyway, which makes no sense.”

  “Also…”

  She interrupted me. “Also, how does he know the kids are in the shed? Like you said, he can’t see them. So what makes him go to the shed? He goes, bold as brass, right past the open kitchen door and windows, and goes straight for the shed. What made him do that? It makes you wonder, were the kids actually the intended target?”

  I nodded. “That’s a good question. I have to say, Dehan,” I turned and started walking back up the drive, toward the garage, “I am not crazy about this theory. He comes up here to the gate…”

  I stopped at the gate and looked into the backyard. The shed was not visible from where I stood.

  “All I can see is the back of the house, the open kitchen and the open windows. But I open the gate, and instead of going to the house, I cross the lawn to the shed, which we know was not open, but just a couple of inches ajar.” I shook my head. “I cannot grasp what motivation he must have had to do that.”

  Dehan leaned her forearm on the fence and her head on her forearm. “Unless, as we said before, this was either an accomplice of Lee’s in his blackmail scheme, or someone who had made friends with one or more of the kids and knew where they would be by some kind of prior arrangement.”

  I spoke half to myself: “Or the killer was already in the house. And round and round in circles we go…”

  “Nah.” I looked at Dehan and smiled. She had her lips pressed together and was shaking her head. “I just don’t buy that. It doesn’t make sense.”

  I opened the gate and we went back into the yard and through the kitchen door. Emma Mitchell did not look up. I sat with my back to the sink and Dehan took the seat opposite me. There was a moment of awkward silence. Finally I said:

  “Dr. Mitchell, you have to cooperate with us. The law requires it. But I don’t want to approach this that way. If Marcus is ill…” She raised her eyes to meet mine, expressionless but somehow also menacing. I repeated, “If Marcus is ill, then there is absolutely nothing we will do without the authorization of a judge, or a doctor. But at the very least we need to know how he is. We need to know what happened to him, and we need to know who is caring for him.”

  Her answer was immediate. “I am,” and then, “me, and he has a professional nurse twenty-four hours a day.”

  Dehan frowned. “What about a doctor, or a psychiatrist? His father…”

  “No!” She cut her dead. “I am his mother.”

  Dehan glanced at me. I said, “You said he was diagnosed with catatonic depression.”

  “He was. We employed several therapists, but they all had this same, stupid idea that the way to get him talking and responding again was to force him to go back and deal with what happened. It was the damn event that traumatized him! Why would we want him to experience it again, for Christ’s sake? I will not have it! He has suffered enough and I will not have some quack torturing him and forcing him to go through that hell again. I am looking after him, I am his mother, for God’s sake. And I know what’s best for my child!”

  “Has he ever said anything, anything about…”

  “No.”

  “Has he spoken at all?”

  “No!”

  Dehan leaned forward with her forearms on the table. “He knows who killed his sister.”

  Emma stared at Dehan with something close to loathing. “Well I hope he forgets! And then maybe my baby can come back to us. I wish we could all just forget! And I wish you would go away, and leave us in peace! We have been through enough and frankly, Detective, I don’t want the killer found. I don’t want the trauma and the horror of a trial. I don’t want to look my little girl’s killer in the face and relive the madness and the pain—the sheer agony—of seeing her lying there, dead! I just want to forget!” Her eyes were suddenly wild and she stabbed at her chest with her finger. “I relive that horror every day! And it hasn’t healed me! So why should it heal him?”

  We sat in silence for a while. Dehan and I exchanged a look and I nodded.

  “Dr. Mitchell…”

  She cut across me, speaking like an automaton. “Please, just go.”

  I glanced at Dehan again and we stood. I took a card from my wallet and placed it on the table in front of her.

  “Any time, day or night. For your daughter.”

  “Go away, and please, don’t come back.”

  At the door I stopped and turned back to her. She was still staring at her mug.

  “I can’t promise you that, Dr. Mitchell. We will be back, and we’ll keep coming back until we catch the person who killed Lee and Lea. We are relentless, and you would be wise to cooperate with us.”

  We followed the path to the gate in the picket fence and the double garage, then walked down the driveway to my old Jaguar. We climbed in and I sat for a while staring at the key before I slipped it in the ignition. Then I sat staring down the street at the plane trees and the ugly redbrick building on the corner. After that I stared at Dehan as she tied her long, black hair in a knot behind her head.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “Yeah?” I smiled. “I wish you’d tell me. All I have is a blank.”

  “You’re thinking, it’s impossible for a sixth person to have entered the house to kill Leroy and Lea by the back or sides of the house. So any sixth person must have come from the front, but that is so improbable as to be virtually impossible. Therefore we are left with two possibilities.”

  “Therefore?”

  “Indeed. Those two possibilities are, one, the Mitchells are shielding a sixth person who was there and killed the kids, which is also wildly unlikely, or two, it was one or both of the Mitchells.”

  I sighed and drummed my fingers on the walnut steering wheel. “I’ll give you nine out of ten.”

  “It was not either of the Mitchells, Stone. There is no way either of those two killed their own daughter. I rese
rve judgment on Leroy, but there is no way they killed Lea.”

  “Based on what evidence, Dehan?”

  She sagged, raised her hands and let them flop into her lap. “Well, for a start, they alibi each other. Also, the way she told her story, she was reliving that event, Stone. You can’t fake that kind of thing. That was genuine.”

  “That is a very dangerous way to investigate a murder, Dehan, and you know it. Basically you’re saying she’s not guilty because you believe her.”

  Irritation contracted her face. “Come on, Stone! You know me better than that! This isn’t a court of law. It’s you and me exchanging impressions.”

  “OK, but as things stand, Dehan, you yourself have said that the only people who can feasibly have killed those children were the Mitchells. So, I have to ask you, in terms of hard evidence—something we can give the DA—what makes it impossible for the Mitchells to have killed their daughter?” She looked away, out of the window, chewing her lip. I added, “Or, for that matter, provide each other with a false alibi. You have to admit that her unwillingness to have anyone see, or even help, Marcus is suggestive to say the least. What did Marcus witness that she doesn’t want him to talk about?”

  She didn’t look at me but just shook her head. “I don’t buy it, Stone.” Now she turned to face me. “I can’t tell you why. I can’t give you hard evidence. But I know, and so do you, that neither Emma nor Brad Mitchell killed those kids.”

  I turned the key in the ignition and the big old cat growled into life. As I pulled away from the curb she was watching me, with the dappled light from the trees touching her face. “You don’t? Are you telling me you think one of them might have done it?”

  “Not exactly, Dehan. I don’t know, for a fact, with the same certainty that you have, that one or both of the Mitchells did not kill those kids. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I suspect that they did, but I am far from certain they didn’t.”

  “But with what motive, Stone?”

  “Blackmail?”

  “But Emma Mitchell already dismissed that possibility…”