Isolated Judgment Page 10

  * * *

  “Susie Roth called, Chief,” Casper shouted from across the operations room when Chief Fish appeared.

  Fish set his hat down on the desk in his office and walked down toward the bathrooms, where there was a watercooler in the hallway. He came back with a paper cone of water in one hand and his pills in the other. Casper was loitering outside his office door, and the chief brushed past him without looking up.

  “Gimmee a second, for Pete’s sake,” he huffed.

  He took the pills and drank the water. He sat behind his desk, drummed his fingers along it and knew he had nothing to do that could be done with Casper lurking around him. He nudged his glasses up and fixed the young officer with a dyspeptic frown.

  “So? Yes?”

  “She wanted to thank you for bringing the boat back,” Casper said in a nervous rush. He was the newest officer on the little force, and the only one who still became jumpy when Chief Fish got perturbed. Fish knew it was a matter of only a few more months before the young man would make the transition and realize he was not the new guy on a high-volume urban department. He was the new guy on a sleepy, tourist-town police force and there wasn’t a reason in the world to get nervous about anything—especially the chief’s peevishness.

  “Okay. Great. Any other vital relays?” the chief drawled, enjoying his effect on the officer while it lasted.

  “I could hear Ben in the background, whining about how civil servants don’t require thanks for doing their job. That guy never misses a chance to speechify, you know? But she said she’d send a tin of cookies down, all the same.”

  “Cookies.”

  “Yessir. Chocolate chip and macadamias.”

  Chief Fish folded his hands together and regarded the young man in judgmental silence for a second.

  “Casper, did I assign the blood-borne pathogen training module to you yet?”

  “Ah, no. I don’t think so—”

  “It’s in the gray cabinet, top drawer. Have it on my desk by noon.”

  Casper slouched away, and Chief Fish slumped in his chair. He let his eyes close and did an inventory of his concerns. Issabella Bright, he decided, was already mentally on her way back to Detroit and whatever her life was about back there. She’d been pleasant and, as far as he could tell, utterly unsuspicious of him. He wasn’t worried about her.

  Darren Fletcher worried him.

  Darren had been mostly silent during the entire conversation in the hotel room. Chief Fish had been careful to watch the unshaven lawyer throughout the encounter, and noted that Darren had made a show of being more interested in his coffee and bagel than in anything that had been said.

  A cool customer, he thought. But not cool enough. He asked how I knew when they’d gotten back from the Judge’s. And the boat. He remembered the boat and made a point of asking about it.

  Chief Fish opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling of his office.

  “Okay,” he whispered to himself. “What do you know?”

  I know somebody got hurt on Wailing Isle. Somebody bled a lot. And I know the Judge is hiding it. He’s got two slick city lawyers rushed out here to put a lid on things. I don’t know why. Somebody took that boat out there, violence happened and the boat came back with a tackle box full of...

  He looked at his computer. The monitor was black, but if he nudged the mouse or hit a key, it would spring to life.

  You can stop. If you want to, you can still go back.

  Of course, that was out of the question. He’d scoured the boat. The blood was gone. He’d taken the Bass Tackler back to the Roths and convinced them some joyriding kid must have taken it for a drunken spin. His official report said as much. He’d stashed the tackle box he found in the boat in the trunk of his cruiser, then transferred it to the basement of his house—the one his great-grandfather had built with his own hands on the eastern shore of the island. The one that had two mortgages and was worth half what it had been five years ago. The one that was sinking him.

  All of the actions he’d taken since first opening the tackle box were what even the most bungling and inept prosecutor would label with terms like obstruction of justice, larceny and falsifying a police report.

  So, no, there was no going back. He’d closed off any possibility of properly investigating whatever had happened out on the Wailing Isle. All that remained were his options on how to move forward.

  Chief Fish tapped the mouse, and the monitor came to life.

  Just go slow. Be slow and deliberate.

  While he typed, he tried to think of every way what he was doing could go wrong.

  Casper dashed into his office and gasped, “Chief, we got a kidnapping!”

  Chief Fish darted a hand out to hit the Power button on the monitor, and he stared boggle-eyed at the excited officer.

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Roy Conner, Chief,” Casper said in a frantic rush. “Just called. Some guy held him at knifepoint in his house yesterday. Guy tied him up and stole his car. Says he just now got free.”

  Chief Fish glanced at the black monitor screen, then back to Casper’s animated, excited face. This was not good. This was a very bad complication.

  Chief Fish stood and kept his fear out of his eyes.

  “Call him back,” he said, and plucked his cap up off the chair. “Tell him I’m on my way.”

  Casper’s bright enthusiasm drained away, replaced with confusion.

  “You’re going to take the call? Alone?”

  “You heard me. Stay on dispatch and call him like I said. I’m going to go out and see him.”

  “I could—”

  “You can follow orders,” he snapped, and rounded past the exasperated officer, marching out the door and down toward the exit.

  When he was in his cruiser and driving to Roy’s, he brooded over his predicament.

  Roy Conner lived directly above the area of beach where Chief Fish had dragged the Bass Tackler up onto the shore. This “kidnapper” was the person who had stolen the boat. He’d found his way into Roy’s home for who knew what reason—shelter? Phone access? A car? It didn’t matter. Whoever he was, he’d left the tackle box behind. The tackle box...and a witness who could describe him. A witness who had heard anything the guy might have said. Had they watched him bring the boat to shore? Had they seen him remove the tackle box and walk away with it? A sick knot of fear tightened in Chief Fish’s stomach as he took the turn on to Whiskey River Lane.

  You can still walk away from this.

  As Roy’s brown, cedar-shingled beach house came into view ahead, he suspected that was a lie.

  Roy greeted him at the door with a “Co-come i-in, Chief,” and they both wound up seated on the couch while the trembling Roy haltingly explained what had happened to him. Chief Fish jotted it all down in his notebook, filling several pages. He asked the questions he should ask, even though he didn’t want to hear the answers. He got a thorough description of the man with the bizarre beard and the bloodstained hoodie.

  “He sa-said you to-took some...something outta the boat. Muh...made him panic.”

  Fish stopped writing and stared at Roy.

  “Took? Panic? What? Took some...took something? That’s...well. Well. Huh. Is that what he said?”

  “What was...” Roy stopped and swallowed. He spoke slower. “What...was in...it?”

  Fish’s mind ran in several directions, a gaggle of different possible answers racing about, tripping over one another, finally tangling together in incoherency.

  “Hmm?” he managed.

  “I-in the boat.”

  He tapped his pen tip against the pad. He pushed his glasses up with his thumb. A brilliant lie didn’t leap to the fore.

  “Chief?”

  “Oh. I’m sorry
,” he said, seizing on the one thing that seemed reasonable. “I don’t know what this guy might have thought he saw, Roy. But I didn’t find anything out of the ordinary in the boat. If I had, I wouldn’t have returned it to the Roths so quick. That, ah, that would have stood out, I think. If there was something there. I would remember that.”

  Roy was silent, and Chief Fish couldn’t tell if it was because the thin, frail-seeming man believed him or not. Roy was an “on the fringes” kind of guy for Chief Fish. He was very new to the island, and seemed solitary by nature. Chief Fish was only aware of him as a man who was most often a silhouette on the lake, plucking fish and drinking beer while the sun either rose or set. He was the sort of islander Fish would wave to if they passed each other on the street, but not a man he had ever had a real conversation with.

  “Chi...Chief.”

  “I’m afraid this guy is likely already off the island.”

  “Chief.”

  “I’ll forward everything stateside, though.”

  “Shu...shut up a second, Chief.”

  Roy stood up and walked across the room to the dining room table. He leaned across and with one arm drew the drapes aside. The morning sun filled Chief Fish’s glasses and he had to raise a hand over them, squinting against the sudden glare.

  “He ca...came from the juh...juh...”

  Fish drew in a sharp breath, and he knew nothing was going to be easy. He wasn’t getting out of his mistake. His terrible, impulsive mistake. He saw himself down on the beach. He saw the lid of the tackle box yawning open. The treasure inside. The idea blooming bright in his mind, as bright as the flashing gold and silver things inside that box.

  No more constant worries. No more mortgages. Security. A lifetime’s worth of security. Maybe early retirement and leisurely boating. Maybe gossiping freely over coffee with Gail while people I no longer knew puttered around in their police cruisers. Maybe even the Higgins Gala, eventually, once it was clear that Timothy Fish had come into his own. Who knew? Who knew?

  “From the Judge’s island,” Chief Fish finished for Roy, loud enough to fill the whole room. He slumped back in the cushions of the couch, all of his poise and bearing slipping away. He tossed the notepad on the coffee table and closed his eyes.

  He heard Roy crossing back through the room.

  “Ch...Chief?”

  Stop it now. Stop it before it turns into something more. You took it. You kept it out of the report. That’s already bad. But it can get worse. Unless you stop. Turn around. Don’t say another lie. If you say another, you’ll keep lying. You’ll be buried in lies.

  “Chief.”

  Chief Fish made up his mind.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said. “And I want to tell you about it, Roy.”

  As soon as he said the words aloud, he felt better. Relieved. He suspected that perhaps this was the moment he would later look back upon as the point in time when he righted his course and avoided an awful outcome. He was going to walk back his mistake and face whatever consequences followed.

  There was a silence in the room, and then he felt Roy’s weight sinking down beside him. He kept his eyes closed, and plucked his glasses off his face. While he massaged the bridge of his nose with one finger and a thumb, he marveled at how unbelievably quickly his sense of himself had become inverted.

  Before opening the tackle box and seeing the fortune inside it, Chief Fish knew with a certainty that was deep in his bones that he was a forthright and upstanding man. Did the officers under him resent his lectures and his reminders about professionalism? Yes. Surely, without a doubt, they did. They wanted to be “real” cops, and he was the one presence constantly reminding them that being visible, friendly and clean-shaven were the most important parts of their jobs. He accepted what they wouldn’t—they were little more than customer service for an island of rich people. Yes, his tall, broad-shouldered coworkers resented the slight, bespectacled man who refused to let them charge around with silly notions of stopping crime on an island that didn’t have any.

  But none of them had ever had cause to call his word into question. None of them would have ever entertained the notion that he was two-faced.

  A thief.

  “What...do you...you want to...to tell me, Chief?”

  He opened his eyes then, and squinted at the blurry outline that was Roy Conner. He decided to keep his glasses off. It would be easier, he thought, to make a confession to an indistinct blur than to a man whose eyes he had to meet.

  “I did something very stupid,” he said. “Very impulsive. I didn’t plan anything. I just...I just said ‘yes’ when I should have said ‘no’. Part of me wants to keep saying yes and lying about it and just see where it goes.”

  “Pro...probably somewhere bad.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I figured, too.”

  “How lo...long you been...?”

  “Carrying this around with me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Fish let out a rueful laugh.

  “Less than a day. I couldn’t even stand the pressure for a full twenty-four hours. Didn’t sleep a wink last night.”

  “So you’d be a ba...bad criminal. Good. That’s go...good, Chief.”

  Chief Fish sighed and put his glasses back on. He looked at Roy and said, “Do you want to hear about it?”

  Roy made no sound, so Fish kept talking.

  Chapter Six

  An abbreviated charting of Ruth Mallory’s life would have read something like this: born in south Dublin to a low-level bank executive and his alcoholic homemaker wife; excelled at school more from a desperation to escape her house than from any real academic talent; rushed off to America to study psychology at Ohio State University; didn’t find a degree but discovered a boy who gave her a baby; then to Sandusky for a job on the line at the Dunhowth Pressing Plant; followed by several exhausting single-mom years; developing a growing cynicism about the world and her place in it; drinking alone like her mother had done and she had always sworn she would never do; and finally now, right now, with her eight-year-old daughter, Sabrina, likely wondering if Ruth had maybe decided to drive away to a new life and skip picking her up from after school care—when in reality she was racing up US-23 into Michigan, held prisoner in her own car by a maniac wearing his hoodie inside-out who talked like he’d just stepped out of a surfer movie.

  Well, who the devil calls a girl “bro”? Surfers say that, don’t they? Do they? He doesn’t look like a surfer.

  “Oh, shit,” he exclaimed with a sudden grin, and reached for the volume knob on the Camry’s radio. “I love this jam.”

  Fast guitar shredding erupted through the interior of the car, and Ruth slunk lower in the passenger seat, as if she could make herself small enough to somehow disappear out of the situation altogether.

  “You dig Soundgarden?” he shouted over the noise, and Ruth managed a nervous, dishonest nod of her head. No, she didn’t dig Soundgarden. She had no idea who Soundgarden was, besides assuming they must be the perpetrators of the screeching assault against the concept of melody currently thrumming all around her.

  He began rocking along with the song, moving his body forward and backward in the driver’s seat. His head bobbed up and down, the strange, blunt braids of his beard jangling against each other. The dagger he’d pointed at her at the gas station in Sandusky—just before shoving her in the car and climbing in after her—was resting across one of his thighs, the point touching the fabric of the seat between his legs.

  You could grab it, she thought, not for the first time. Stab him in his penis.

  As appealing as the image of her kidnapper howling in shock as his dick was run through with that knife was, Ruth knew she wouldn’t do it. Physical confrontation terrified her. Since the idea had first popped into her head as they passed through Toledo, Ruth
had conceded to herself that the only way she could manage to stab a man in his genitals was if her daughter was being threatened. Any fear could be overcome to protect your child, she reasoned. At least, she hoped that was true. She didn’t like to imagine that the same fear paralyzing her now would also hold her back if her daughter’s safety were at issue. She didn’t want to believe she was a coward.

  It wasn’t just the idea of stabbing metal into another human being, though. It was that this particular human being was a man who looked very strong. He wasn’t tall, but his shoulders were very wide and he had the physique of a bodybuilder. When he’d shoved her into her car back at the gas station, it had been an easy thing for him, like loading a small bag. Assaulting him would bring that strength to bear on her, and she didn’t want to think about that.

  So far, he had repeatedly assured her that he wouldn’t hurt her. He’d said it again and again, as if her terror actually made him feel bad. Like he was sympathetic, somehow. And in the two hours they’d been together, he hadn’t looked at her once in a way that would ring the alarm bells of rape.

  That terrible suspicion had been foremost on her mind when they had first set out on the road. What woman wouldn’t immediately leap to that conclusion?

  He isn’t going to, she’d decided. He won’t. He won’t. Stop thinking about it, Ruth. He won’t.

  The jolting, incoherent song came to an abrupt end, and he thumbed the volume down before the commercial could start. Ahead of them, the flat expanse of southeastern Michigan rolled along, a rural vista of harvested fields divided by lines of marching pine and cottonwood.

  “Shit!”

  She flinched like a gunshot had gone off inside the car. He thumped his fist against the steering wheel.

  “I’m no good at this,” he exclaimed, shaking his head. “Man, I’ll tell you what, if I ever decided to be a criminal, it’d all fall apart real fast. I mean, I’m carrying you to where I live? What the hell kind of plan is that? ‘Ma’am, did he say anything about where he was going?’ ‘Well, no, Officer. But he did take me to his home. Is that helpful?’ ‘Why, as a matter of fact, ma’am, that’s so fucking helpful we can’t believe what a giant asshole this guy is.’ Then it’s cops all over the yard and I’m...I’m...”