No Woods So Dark as These Read online

  He promised he would do his very best. And hoped he could keep that promise.

  Jayme and Flores were forced to stand on the threshold while DeMarco leaned close to the young woman, his cell phone in hand to record the interview. He spoke in a voice as soft and gentle and clear as he could muster.

  “Amber, I need to ask you about Luthor Reddick. I know that he’s responsible for everything that happened to Choo Choo and Suzi and Lady D. I just need to hear you say it. Tell me why he killed them.”

  Her eyes were glassy and damp, but she held his gaze. She blinked but did not look away. The oxygen tube hissed each time it released another puff of air.

  “I did it,” she said. Her lips barely moved when she spoke.

  “No,” he told her. “You didn’t. I’ve read your poetry, and it’s beautiful. Poets don’t kill people.”

  She blinked. Nodded. “I did it. Just me.”

  “You drove Choo Choo’s car into the woods?”

  “Made D drive.”

  “And how did you accomplish that?”

  “Threatened her.”

  “With what?”

  “A gun.”

  “Whose gun?”

  “Mine.”

  “Where is that gun now?”

  “Threw it away.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “What kind of gun was it, Amber? What caliber?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “Okay,” he said. “And how did you get Choo Choo into that car? We know that he was drugged first. So how did you get him into the car?”

  Another blink. “Carried him,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “With Suzi and D.”

  “I don’t think so,” he told her. “Because they were drugged too, weren’t they?”

  She blinked. Said nothing.

  “Okay,” he said. “Who drove the rebar into Choo Choo?”

  This time she held her blink closed for five full seconds. Then opened her eyes sleepily and said, “I did.”

  “Who held Choo Choo up while you nailed him to the tree?”

  Pause. “Nobody.”

  “Amber, we know that Choo Choo was drugged. He was unconscious. He weighed close to two hundred pounds. Somebody had to hold him up while somebody else nailed him to the tree. Was it Sonny? Is that why you don’t want to tell me the truth?”

  Weakly, she shook her head. “I did it all.”

  He wasn’t going to push her. Her eyes told him that she knew she was going to die, and he had no desire to hasten her death with more questioning. He had never felt love for an absolute stranger before that moment but he felt it now and it was anything but pleasant.

  Outside the room he bent close to Amber’s mother and told her, “She’s a beautiful girl. I am so sorry this happened.”

  With Flores and Jayme following, he went down the hall to the elevator and punched the Down button. When the door opened he stepped into the corner and stared at the floor. Jayme entered next, pressed the Lobby button and stood facing DeMarco. Flores came in and said to him, “Did you get anything?”

  He shook his head no; looked down at the cell phone in his hand, still recording. He tapped the Stop icon, then Delete. “We’ll get it from Sonny,” he said.

  Sixty

  The town of Saegertown, Pennsylvania, with a population of approximately one thousand, sits in the northwestern corner of the state, one county shy of Lake Erie. It is known for two things: the birthplace of actress Sharon Stone and the Crawford County Correctional Facility, a medium security jail located, ironically, on Independence Drive, housing inmates awaiting trial or sentencing. According to IMDb, Stone, named one of Men’s Health’s “Hottest Women of All Time” and one of People’s “50 Most Beautiful People,” has an IQ of 154. It is unlikely that any of the 280 or so residents of the correctional facility could match her beauty or intelligence, but, if any could, it would not be Timothy “Sonny” Jakiella.

  When DeMarco caught up with Jakiella in a small windowless room at the facility, Sonny, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, looked small and weak and twenty years older than his forty-six years. DeMarco set a cardboard cup of coffee in front of Jakiella and took a seat across from him. Flores stood near the door while Jayme and one of the facility’s three sergeants watched behind a one-way mirror.

  Jakiella wrapped both hands around the cup, bent close to it and took a birdlike sip. Then asked, “How’s she doin’?”

  “She’s probably going to die, Sonny.”

  “No, man, no. Don’t even say that.”

  “Her heart is ruined.”

  “Can’t they get her a new one? I’ll give her mine. Tell them I don’t even care, they can cut it out of me right now and give it to her.”

  “Yours? You’ve been a junkie even longer than she has.”

  “They gotta do something for her. They can’t just let her die.”

  “They’re doing their best to keep her alive. Probably won’t be enough, though.”

  He waited and watched. Saw Jakiella’s body shrink even more, saw him caving into himself. Then said, “I know you cared about her, Sonny. You too were close, right?”

  “Yeah. But not the way you’re probably thinking.”

  “How then?”

  “I love her. I do. But she didn’t want to ruin our friendship with that. With, you know…”

  “With sex?”

  “She only did it when she needed the money. She tried quitting dope but just couldn’t. She was always trying to quit.”

  “You didn’t help her much with that, did you?”

  “I couldn’t stand to see her sick!”

  “And now you’ve killed her.”

  “Don’t you say that to me, you son of a bitch.”

  “Face the facts, Sonny. You picked her up, you took her to your place, you supplied her with the alcohol and heroin. And now her life is hanging by a thread.”

  “The cop told me she had pills on her too. I didn’t know anything about the pills. That’s what did it to her, not me.”

  “Ah, Sonny, you’re living in a delusion. You know that, right? She called you for help and you killed her. Period.”

  “She’s not dead, man. You said so yourself.”

  “She knows she’s going to die.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “She told me.” With her eyes, DeMarco thought. “She told me everything.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the truth about what happened to Choo Choo and Suzi and Lady D. All the truth you are too cowardly to tell.”

  “I don’t believe that. She wouldn’t tell you nothing.”

  “She told me all about Reddick. All about how it went down in those woods. About you holding up Choo Choo while the rebar went into his throat.”

  Sonny shook his head no, breathed loudly through his nose as his head jerked back and forth in short, quick movements. His eyes looked crazy, pupils wide with panic. He was squeezing the cardboard cup so hard, thin arms shaking, that coffee squirted out of the hole in the plastic lid. “If she told you that, she was just making it up to get rid of you. Reddick wasn’t even there. He didn’t know a thing about it till it was all over with.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense to me,” DeMarco said. “A scrawny guy like you?”

  “It’s the truth, goddammit! I hated that black bastard.”

  “Hey hey hey, pardner. Let’s not get racial here, shall we? You have the God-given right to hate anybody you want to, but keep it on an individual basis, all right? Not an accident of birth. Would it be fair for me to hate you just because you were born stupid?”

  Sonny drew himself up a bit straighter. “I wasn’t born stupid.”

  “You got there honestly, is that what you’re
saying? Because you have to admit, Sonny, you’re looking fairly stupid now, aren’t you?”

  He sagged again. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  “Here we go. You’re going to whine like a little baby and play the victim, blame the big bad drugs for forcing themselves inside you. And yet you’re willing to take the fall for a guy like Reddick? What’s that all about?”

  “I had plenty of reasons to hate Choo Choo.”

  “Such as?”

  “He was a bully. Always shoving me around, telling me to do this, do that. And putting his hands on Sully where he shouldn’t have.”

  “Is that why you killed him? If you really did.”

  “I caught him and those girls stealing from the cache, that’s why. Reddick would’ve blamed me for it. So I did it, okay? Just me. Sully didn’t have any part in it.”

  “Sonny,” DeMarco told him, “you’re a junkie and a liar. You’re sitting there twitching like a dying bug and you expect me to believe that you stood a big man like Choo Choo up against a tree and drove three pieces of rebar into him? And watched Lady D and Suzi burn? I don’t believe you.”

  “Then fuck you, okay? Fuck you. I want a lawyer.” He turned and shouted at the mirror. “Get me outta here and get me a lawyer!”

  Sixty-One

  The night was dark and had turned cold and the air smelled like winter. The lights blazing in the correctional facility’s parking lot wiped out every star and rendered the sky a uniform black. A thick stand of trees far behind the facility and partially lit by the sodium vapor lights formed an uneven colonnade that made the low white building seem set in the middle of a vast wilderness.

  Flores leaned against the door of her red Subaru, with DeMarco and Jayme facing her. He said, “You logged a lot of miles for a day off.”

  “Better than logging them on my butt watching television,” she said. “So how do you figure their stories? Sully says she did it, Sonny says he did it. Both say Reddick wasn’t involved.”

  “Maybe he isn’t,” Jayme said. “Maybe we’re guessing wrong. Maybe because of Joe, and how adamant he’s been.”

  DeMarco said, “Forget about Joe for a minute. Just stand here and ask yourself, what makes the most sense? Knowing what we know for certain—that Reddick met Choo Choo and the female vics down in Washington County. That they wanted in on Reddick’s business. That Sonny and maybe Sully spent last Saturday night at Reddick’s place. That Choo Choo was drugged, carried, and stood up against a tree, and that Sonny and Sully combined probably couldn’t lift a heavy bag of groceries. Knowing all that, who’s the most logical suspect?”

  “Reddick,” Jayme said.

  “Reddick,” said Flores.

  “And now ask yourself,” DeMarco continued, “why would Sonny and Sully both be so adamant that Reddick wasn’t involved?”

  “Fear,” Jayme said.

  Flores nodded. “They saw what Reddick did to the victims, and he promised them some of the same if they didn’t keep quiet about it. No doubt he threatened their families too.”

  “Sonny and Sully aren’t killers,” Jayme added. “Sonny holds down a job and pays child support like a good father despite being a junkie. Sully is sensitive, artistic, probably loves her mother, at least enough that she wouldn’t want to see her hurt. And I think Sully and Sonny really care about each other.”

  “Reddick, on the other hand, was discharged from the military for what?” DeMarco asked.

  Jayme nodded. “Homicidal tendencies.”

  DeMarco addressed Flores. “There’s this thing called an evolution of skills that I learned from a friend of mine. A writer. The more you practice something, even if you only practice it inside your head, the better you get. Reddick got booted from the army in his early twenties. What would you say is the natural evolution of violent tendencies?”

  “Depends,” said Flores. “For somebody intelligent, who doesn’t want to get punished again, I’d say it would be to become more circumspect about where and when the violence happens.”

  “You and I talked to him,” DeMarco continued. “Did he strike you as intelligent? Do you remember what you wrote in your notes about him?”

  She nodded. “He was smooth. Too smooth. Too confident. Like a bald Ted Bundy.”

  “You said he seemed skeevy. Tell Jayme what you meant by that.”

  “I understand skeevy,” Jayme said.

  Flores told her, “He literally left me with a bad taste in my mouth. Not from anything he said, just…like I’d taken a mouthful of something disgusting.”

  “So Joe Loughner is probably right after all,” Jayme said. “We come back to that. Question is, how do we prove it? How do we nail Reddick?” Hearing her own words, she winced. “Sorry. No pun intended.”

  DeMarco gave her a smile. Turned to Flores. “We might need you again tomorrow. Is that okay?”

  “Sweetest thing anybody has ever said to me,” she answered.

  “Watch out for deer on your way home.”

  “Hey, I grew up on these roads, remember? The deer need to watch out for me.”

  Sixty-Two

  It had been a long, full day and DeMarco was surprised when he slid into bed beside Jayme and found her naked. She snapped the waistband of his boxers and said, “Skin to skin, babe. I need to feel you against me.”

  He peeled off his boxers and T-shirt and they rolled against one another and made love that was gentle and slow until the last two minutes, which were desperate and dizzying. She kept her body pressed hard to him afterward and said nothing for so long that he thought she was falling asleep. But then she asked, “Do you ever look at another woman and wish you could be with her?”

  “What? No, I never do,” he said. “Why would you think that?”

  “Not even for just an hour together?”

  “Not even for just a minute.”

  “A minute would do neither of you much good.”

  “Nor would an hour,” he told her. “Only with you.”

  “I know that women look at you that way, though. I’ve seen it.”

  “I think maybe you imagine you see it.”

  “Don’t say that you’ve never noticed it.”

  “Only when it’s obvious,” he said. “But that hasn’t happened in a long time now. And only then with the old grannies. One of those eighty-year-old grannies in yoga pants.”

  “I don’t care how old she is,” Jayme said. “If she tries to steal you from me, I’ll cut her.”

  “When did you start carrying a knife?”

  “There’s always a knife nearby somewhere. I will cut her and I won’t care how many grandchildren she has.”

  “What about in the woods?” he asked. “You would have to carry your own knife to have one in the woods.”

  “I’ll break off a twig and sharpen it with my teeth and then I’ll cut her. I’ll slice her like a block of soft cheese.”

  “Hard cheese is easier to slice than soft cheese,” he said.

  “Then I’ll slice her in all the hard places.”

  “What about in a clothing store?”

  “I’ll break off a mannequin’s arm and slice her up with that.”

  “What about in a library?”

  “Have you forgotten how much a paper cut hurts? Imagine getting a thousand of them. That’s what I will do to her in a library.”

  “It’s comforting to know that you are so protective of me,” he said.

  “I’m not protecting you, I’m protecting me from losing you.”

  “Either way I feel safer.”

  “What would you do to protect yourself from losing me to another man?” she asked. “Would you cut him?”

  “No,” he said. “I would drive his head through the wall. Then I would shove the rest of his body in through the hole his head made. Then I would patch up the wall and
paint it and hang a picture of a dead man over the patch. As a warning to every other man.”

  “That’s so romantic of you,” she teased. “You make me feel safer too. But I think a picture of flowers would be even more romantic, don’t you? Not to mention ironic. A picture of a bouquet of roses.”

  “Van Gogh did one with a vase of pink roses. Would that be okay?”

  “Yes but get a reproduction. I don’t need the original painting.”

  “That’s good. I would have to rob several banks in order to afford it.”

  “A good reproduction in a nice frame will be more than sufficient.”

  He said, “I love it that you’re so frugal.”

  She kissed his chest and closed her eyes. “Thank you for the way you touch me and the way you love me. You really do make me feel safe. I’m going to dream about pink roses now, okay?”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Sweet dreams, my love.”

  Twenty minutes later he was asleep too, but he did not dream of pink roses or of any kind of flowers. It was not a nightmare nor even a bad dream really but it made him sad when he was dreaming it and again when he awakened and remembered the dream. In this dream he had died in his sleep, not in any spectacular or important way, not even in old age but as the man he was then. He had simply awakened, in his dream, to a place of total darkness that felt soft and temperate and nonthreatening and knew that he was dead. He was inside this place that he suddenly understood to be the womb of God and then a voice that was also soft and warm and nonthreatening inside his head and all around him asked if he wanted to go back or not. His first thought was no way am I going back to that place, but then immediately he thought that maybe he would. If I can go back without losing what I’ve learned, he thought, and the voice inside and around him said without hesitation, you know that’s not how the game is played. He thought, I want to have Jayme if I go back, and my son and daughter too and everything I lost this last time, and the voice replied, don’t play games with me. So then he thought, in that case this place isn’t so bad, I’ll just stay here, but the voice chuckled and answered, nothing ever works out the way you expect it to. Let’s get that straight. Then suddenly the voice retreated from him in a kind of silent whoosh and he awoke and was left with a ringing in one ear and a bottomless sadness that was all the worse because he could not distinguish it as sadness for something he had lost or for something he would never have.