Detective Anthony McCaffrey paced impatiently, listening to his partner argue on the phone with his girlfriend. Finally, Gavin covered the receiver with one meaty hand and pointed at the door with the other. "Go wait somewhere else, Tony," he hissed menacingly, "you're buggin me". Throwing up his hands, Tony retreated to the break room to wait. After grabbing a coke from the machine, he crossed to the window and stared out over the little lake behind the station. Something about this case really nagged his subconscious and he couldn’t put his finger on it. They were missing something. In fact, he figured they'd missed it nine years before when Calvin Walsh died, and it had bothered him since.
They could hear keening coming from inside the house when they got out of the car. Tony's detective shield was shiny and new; he'd been promoted just a few months before. His partner, Jim Sachs, had been on the force for 25 years and was contemplating a nice desk job to finish out his career. Recurring bouts with sciatica were making the physical activity of field work more difficult by the day. If he could stick it out five more years, he could afford to retire. He was ready to take a desk and watch the clock tick as he filed paperwork.
They knocked on the door and no one answered. The keening never broke, it just went on and on like a recording on a loop. Guns unholstered and ready, they turned the knob and quietly entered the house. The noise was coming from a room ahead and to the right. Light spilled into the short hall from the open door, and shadows moved in rhythm with the sound. Jim gestured to spread out and check the rest of the house, while he checked the other rooms off the hall and kept an eye on the unseen keener. Tony crept first to the left, though the living and dining room, the kitchen and laundry room, and tried the back door. It was locked from the inside, with the deadbolt firmly in place. Passing the hall where his partner was flattened against the wall next to the room where the keener waited, Tony pointed upstairs.
Cautiously, he made his way up, back to the wall, leading with his gun. At the top of the stairs, he found himself in a darkened hallway with several doors leading off. Door one was a boy's bedroom with a jumble of clothes on the floor and poster on the wall. The second door was another bedroom, decorated in white and lavender with a wheelchair parked next to the bed. In the bed, a small girl in braided pigtails looked at him with wide, terrified eyes. Tony crossed swiftly to reassure her in low tones. "Don't worry, I'm a policeman. Do you know who's crying?" he whispered. She nodded. "I think it's my mom." "Is anyone else in the house?" She shook her head. "What's your name?" Her lower lip trembled as she tried to look brave. "Jillian. Everyone calls me Jilly." He patted her cheek gently and told her he'd be back in a minute. After making a cursory check of the last room in the hall, a bathroom, he went back down to join his partner. Silently, they entered the scene of the crime.
Blood was everywhere. The bed where the man lay was saturated. The walls, the ceiling, pooled on the floor under the spot where the man's head was thrown back over the edge. He'd nearly been decapitated. The keening woman knelt in the blood with her hands covering her face. The front of her retro "Cheerios" tee shirt and denim shorts were covered with it. She rocked back and forth on her knees, making that awful sound.
Gavin burst into the breakroom with his characteristic energy, shaking Tony back to the present. "Hey, partner, I thought you were hungry. Let's roll."
--
Jilly flipped languidly through the channels until she found a rerun of Hell's Kitchen. Chef Ramsey was screaming at a motley collection of people who thought they were chefs but couldn't get an appetizer on a plate given 30 minutes…as usual. She chuckled to herself. Where do they find these people? Being a chef would be so awesome. She flexed her hands. She was a good cook, but tended to drop things. She just didn't have enough strength in her fingers. Maybe one day they'll have cooking shows for handicapped people, she thought. I could do definitely do that. Jilly had already won a certain amount of fame with her youtube cooking channel. She had a lot of followers. At first she figured it was freak factor – hey look at wheelchair girl cooking – but the retention factor had to come down to the fact that she was really a good cook. At least she hoped so. She didn't want a pity audience.
She started at the sound of a key in the lock. Even after all these years, an unknown presence on the other side of the door always made her heart pound and her blood pressure rise. Her doctors had warned about her blood pressure repeatedly. Just another factor in the joy of paralysis.
The door swung inward and Jilly's helper came in, awkwardly carrying two armloads of grocery bags with a bunch of flowers tucked under one arm. "Sorry, Jilly. I know you want me to tap out the code before I use the key, but my hands were full. You ok?" Jilly nodded, unable to speak. It would be a few minutes before the terror subsided, and she'd have to take pills to get any kind of sleep for the next few nights. But at least she hadn't screamed or turned over her chair trying to get away this time. It was always so embarrassing.
--
Over thick, greasy cheeseburgers at Hobie's Famous Burger, they discussed the case. Tony described the scene in lurid detail as the tables around them slowly emptied. Eventually Hobie wandered over and told them to pipe down before they scared away all his customers. Tony invited him to join the conversation. Hobie had once been a cop, then a private investigator, and finally had bought a restaurant next to the station. The puckered scar on his right shoulder from the bullet that ended his police career was hidden under the pink flamingos of a screaming Hawaiian style shirt. For a short order cook, he had one of the finest analytical minds in the city.
"Ok. So as I understand it, you found this guy Walsh dead in his ex-wife's house. The ex-wife is covered in the guy's blood, screaming her head off. One kid is at football practice a couple of blocks away and the other is in bed upstairs. She's 12 and paralyzed. Sounds like the ex-wife did it, most likely in self-defense. What's the problem?" Hobie had a way of getting right to the heart of the matter.
Tony thought for a moment before answering. "First, there's a matter of the weapon. We never found it, and it wasn't one of the knives from the house. Those were all accounted for. The coroner said it had to be something like a hunting knife, with a curved blade and a sharp tip. Second, there's the timing. Eileen had arrived home with Jilly about twenty-five minutes before we got there. They'd both been at a physical therapy session two miles away. Nobody was exactly watching Eileen, so technically she could have slipped away, but given her later reaction it doesn't seem likely. Nobody's that good an actor. She would have had to carry Jilly upstairs, help her change clothes, locate the remote control and turn the TV on, chat for a minute about dinner, and then go downstairs, cover herself with blood and scream for more than 10 minutes. What's more, she was wearing the same clothes she wore to therapy, and Jilly swore that there wasn't a speck of blood on them when they got home. Nobody could have done that much damage and walked away clean. Jilly said the screaming started about 5 minutes or so after her mother left her room."
"Who called the cops?" Gavin took another enormous bite and talked around it. "Neighbors?" He washed the cheeseburger down with a swig of milk. Hobie kept the milk at a temperature just above freezing and delivered it to the tables in graceful pewter jugs that had been kept in the freezer along with matching pewter mugs. He said it kept the customers happy and the heartburn complaints to a minimum.
"Jilly called the 911. The tape of the call is chilling. Her shaky little voice, whispering into the phone that she's paralyzed from the chest down and her mother is screaming downstairs. She was terrified that something was happening right then…and she was completely helpless. She might have been able to get into her chair, but there was no way she could get down the steps…and was afraid to in any case. She thought her mother was being killed and she might be next." Tony swirled a couple of steak fries in a puddle of barbecue sauce, but didn't put them in his mouth. His gaze was distant, as if he was seeing it all over again for the first time. "All that blood. You don't see that often. Walsh was stabbed 26 times. The first one, in the neck, would have been fatal in minutes, maybe seconds. Blood pumped out like a hydrant. But the killer kept stabbing until the guy was drained. Whoever it was hated him real bad. When we got there, he'd been dead just over an hour."
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