The Crime Writer

Chapter 29

Kasey Broach's family moved through the open doorway of Apartment 1B to a U-Haul and back again, toting lamps, trash cans, cardboard boxes. Strong family resemblance in the parents and the younger sibling, whom I recognized from the news. They moved in automated silence through the powerful beam of the truck's headlights. Now and then one would halt along the brief path from truck to door and lean against a post, bending over as if catching lost breath.

Frozen meals thawed in a translucent trash bag by the doorway. Kasey's father paused to dump in an armload of toiletries fraying toothbrush, faded razor, half carton of Q-tips while his daughter wound a telephone cord around the base unit before stuffing it into a salad bowl. The logistics of loss. The awesome minutiae.

The 110 rattled along behind a vast concrete barrier a half block away. A group of kids ran around the dark street, waving toy guns that looked real enough to get them shot by worn-down cops. Their laughter seemed to mock the somber procession of surviving Broaches.

To see the apartment, I wouldn't require the harried manager's goodwill after all. What I required was perhaps more nerve than I could muster. This was an opportunity that my trial had robbed me of having with the Bertrands. A chance to speak to the bereaved and offer what little anyone could under such circumstances. For a moment I hated who I was for how it would taint my approach here. And I hated my ulterior motive, a seamy lining to a dark cloud.

The mother, a stout, well-put-together blonde, glanced over at me a few times, and I realized I must be creeping them out, watching behind my car's tinted windows with Kasey's killer still at large.

I approached, keeping a respectful distance. "Mrs. Broach? I'm "

"Yes." She paused, a stack of dresses, still on their hangers, draped over her arm. "Andrew Danner. I recognize you."

"I'm so sorry to intrude. I know it's quite odd, my coming here and… and…" The hallway light over Kasey's door had been broken recently, judging by the bits of glass kicked to the side of the jamb. The coldness of such preparation made me shiver. That's why the Broaches were using headlights for illumination now because the killer had broken the hall light in anticipation of dragging out their daughter's unconscious body.

"Well?" her husband said from behind me. "What are you here for?"

In the distance, the street kids shouted back and forth in prepubescent sopranos. "I got you! I shot you dead!"

A small choke came out of nowhere, seizing my throat, shocking me. I pressed my lips together, trying to find composure.

Mrs. Broach dropped the dresses on the ground, stepped forward, and embraced me. She rubbed my back in vigorous circles, infinitely more effective than I'd been when Lloyd had broken down. She was soft, slightly damp with perspiration, and smelled nicely of conditioner. For a moment she blended into my own mother, April, Fran^oise Bertrand, cooing accented forgiveness.

I pulled back, blinking against the headlights, and said, "I don't even know how to begin. Except to say that I'm so sorry for what happened to Kasey. And I'm sorry this happened to you."

Kasey's sister Jennifer, if memory served stood in the doorway, chewing gum and swiveling a lanky leg on a pointed toe. The news stories had made much of the fact that she was a freshman in high school, which put almost two decades between her and her big sister. Jennifer looked as if she wanted to cry but had no more energy for it. Somehow she summoned it, pressing her hand to her top teeth and hiccupping out something between a moan and a sob.

"Come on inside," Mr. Broach said.

We went in, stepping over half-packed boxes and strewn clothes.

Mr. Broach looked around and said gruffly, to himself, "How do you know what to keep?"

They sat on a couch that had been shoved away from the wall, I on a large overturned earthenware pot. Where to start?

"I was a suspect in your daughter's murder," I said.

Mrs. Broach said, "We know. Bill told us."

Bill Kaden. Right.

"He said you still are a suspect," Mr. Broach said, "but I don't think you did it. I watched your trial. That tape you made showing you sleeping the night our Kasey was killed? Bill thinks it implicates you more. I think the opposite." He looked at his wife. "We understand how you could have gotten to the point of questioning yourself."

Here we were, just a couple of old friends dismissing the notion I'd murdered his daughter.

"I appreciate that," I said.

"I'm simply stating my opinion. We certainly don't presume to judge."

Mrs. Broach sat sideways on a hip, tilted over her daughter, one hand smoothing Jennifer's hair behind her ear. "Kasey's in a better place now. Joshua 23 says God keeps all promises. All promises. One way or another."

"I'm glad you can find some peace in this. I doubt I'd have your strength."

"We have experience," Mr. Broach said. Then his eyes watered, and he coughed into a fist. "We lost our boy, too, five years back."

I must have looked stunned.

Mrs. Broach picked it up. "No, no. Tommy died of leukemia."

Some people get it with both barrels, can barely catch their breath before fate reloads. And others skip through life stepping on the heads of others, swinging the world by its tail.

Jennifer was staring at me. "Did you do it?" she asked.

"No. I did not."

"How about the first? That French girl you dated?"

"I don't know. I don't believe I did." I parted my hair, showed the seam of scar tissue. "But I can't know for sure until I work out what really happened."

"So that's what you're doing?" Mr. Broach asked.

"What I've been through… I think maybe I could help find out more about your daughter's death. I've been looking around, and I've found a few leads."

Mr. Broach said quickly, "Have you told the police?"

"I'm sharing everything with them as I go. But they're working the case day and night and have a lot of leads of their own, too. So I figure I might as well stay involved, see that nothing slips between the cracks."

"How can we help?"

"Well," I said, looking to each of them, "can you tell me about Kasey?"

"Oh," Mrs. Broach said, "we can do that."

She spoke first, detailing Kasey's habits and lifestyle, but soon they were all chiming in with small memories, smiling. A box of tissue circulated. The man in 1A had been out the night of her death, but Trina Patrick had been home in 1C. She'd been watching a game show, volume up loud, augmenting the experience with a table red, and had heard nothing. I asked about Morton Frankel and brown Volvos and recent boyfriends, and we all grew politely frustrated at our inability to get traction.

Mrs. Broach leaned into her husband, and he held her. "She was a wonderful girl. Sunday school. Youth group. Some trouble in her teens, but who didn't have that? Her job worked her hard, but she still found time for outreaches, short-term missions. Always had a hand out for others. Her brother, when he was diagnosed, they run the test on family members, you know? None of us matched." Mrs. Broach waved a hand to encompass the three of them on the couch. "But Kasey did. She was Tommy's angel. She went in time after time, shots in the hip, needle this thick, never complained, not once." Her fingers were trembling, and when she spoke again, her voice cracked. "We had three children. We've still got one. We're blessed." She pressed her face to her daughter's and squeezed her hard around the shoulders. Jennifer wore an expression I'd seen once in a photo of a makeshift raft that had come apart en route to Florida. A Cuban girl bobbed among the flotsam, clinging to a tire, the sole survivor and not sure that she wanted to be.

"Do you mind if I take a look at Kasey's room?" I asked.

Mr. Broach, tending to his wife, waved his assent.

Kasey's furniture had been broken down, and maybe half of her possessions had been boxed, though there was no discernible order to the packing process. A picture of Kasey with her brother, thin and bald, was taped to the inside of her closet door so she'd see it every morning as she dressed. Her mattress leaned against the wall, the unhooked headboard and slats propped against it. I closed my eyes, imagined Morton Frankel approaching the bed through darkness, toting a canister of sevoflurane and a face mask. Kasey's brief, terrified struggle before the gas took effect. The Volvo he could've parked right out front where the U-Haul was now. I walked over and fingered down the blinds, noting the motel-style proximity of parking spaces to doorways. Five steps through darkness and he'd have had her passed-out body in the back of the wagon. It would've been easy to time so no one would notice.

On the windowsill a cluster of key chains the size of a fist pinned down a petite monthly calendar. I flipped through. It was unused, purchased, I guessed, for the cheesecloth-filtered pictures of wildlife at play. In the midst of the key chains and charms, only three keys car, apartment, mailbox.

A silver thimble hooked to the ring caught my eye.

I plucked it from the tangle, letting the other baubles swing.

A recovering alcoholic's reminder that even a thimbleful of booze counts as a slip.

The tiny bathroom had already been packed up. I searched out the box of meds and dug through it, finding little more than Aleve, Tylenol, and various antacids.

No Xanax.

A recovering alcoholic wouldn't want to mess with benzos. Yet the autopsy had revealed Xanax in Kasey's system.

I walked back out. The Broaches were doing their best to get into packing mode again, but clearly our conversation had thrown them off.

"Kasey was a recovering alcoholic?" I asked.

Mrs. Broach flushed not a favorite topic of discussion. "Well. As I said, she had some problems in her teen years, right after Jennifer was born. We got her help."

"Did she ever slip?"

"We just celebrated with a twenty-year cake."

"Do you think she would have ever taken Xanax?"

"Not a prayer of a chance. She wouldn't touch my Black Forest cake, not even with the cherry brandy cooked off."

In the kitchen Mr. Broach dropped a coffeemaker, and the pot shattered. He looked down at it blankly.

A potent three seconds passed before his wife said, "What were we going to do with it anyways?"

"I've put you behind schedule," I said. "Would you mind if I helped?"

Mr. Broach said, "We wouldn't mind that at all."

For the next hour, as the whine of traffic diminished and the kids chased each other around the street, whooping and screaming, I helped pack and load. We made decent progress.

I came out with a halogen floor lamp and a framed Matisse print to find Mrs. Broach sitting on the ground, running her thumb over a white-ribbon barrette that had fallen from a bag.

Mr. Broach paused before her, helped her to her feet.

"I think that's enough for tonight," he said.

We finished loading the stuff by the U-Haul, and he turned to shake my hand.

"Maybe they're wrong about you. With Genevieve Bertrand."

"I hope so," I said back to him.

Mrs. Broach smiled sadly at me. "You take care of yourself, Andrew."

Jennifer offered me a wave from the U-Haul as they pulled out, and I stood and watched until the taillights were two distant eyes in the darkness. The kids circled with their crew cuts and ten-year-old voices, yelling about stickups and screeching imagined injuries. Their toy guns emitted electronic blips and blasts, red lights blinking deep inside the barrels.

I was almost to my car when I noticed that one kid's pistol was deadly silent, nothing inside the bore but a circle of shadow. I jogged a few steps after him.

"Hey," I called out. "Hey."

He pivoted with a crooked grin and said, "Bang bang, you're dead, buddy."

The gun he was pointing at me was real.