The Silent Hour

25

__________

Where his life ended, the police weren’t sure. They knew only where the body had been found, and at four o’clock in the morning, long after I’d widened their eyes with my list of possible suspects, I stood there alone in the dark.

Ken Merriman’s corpse had been discovered on a short but steep hill near the edge of the tree line in Mill Stream Run Reservation, snagged in a thicket of undergrowth that was full and green with late-spring enthusiasm. There was honeysuckle nearby, the sweet cloying scent pushed at me by a breeze that rose and fell like long rollers breaking on an empty beach. The breeze was warmer than the still air, and damp, a messenger sent ahead with promises of rain.

At the top of the hill and beyond the tree line, a small field ran across a parking lot. A walking and bike path snaked away from the lot, a silver thread in the darkness. No cars were in the lot but mine, and no traces of police activity remained. The body had been found at eight that evening, and the Metroparks Rangers who interviewed me said they thought it was found soon after it was dumped. Twenty, thirty minutes earlier and they might’ve had an eyewitness.

Instead, there’d been only the discovery, made by two brothers from Berea who’d ridden their bikes down past the YMCA camp with a glow-in-the-dark football. The police had the football now, because one end of its neon green body carried a crimson smear. The kids had tossed it into the woods, where it took one good bounce into the thicket and landed directly on Ken’s body. Throw got away from him, the older brother, who was fourteen, told the police. Then he started to cry.

Maybe I’d come down here to cry myself. Or maybe to rage and swear. Maybe I thought Ken Merriman would speak to me somehow, that alone in the dark in the place where his blood had drained into the earth and then gone dry under the wind I’d be able to feel his presence, understand something about his end and find direction for the justice this required.

None of that happened. I didn’t scream, I didn’t weep, I didn’t hear any voices of dead men. Instead I smelled the honeysuckle and felt that warm, ebbing breeze and wished that I’d turned Ken away the night he arrived from Pennsylvania.

Where had he gone, what had he done, who had he provoked? Why was his body out here in the brambles instead of mine? We’d worked side by side on this since he’d arrived in Cleveland, right up until those last twenty-four hours when I sat at the office waiting on him to show up and he’d gone out and gotten killed.

What did you do, Ken? What button did you push, what thread did you pull?

There would be no answers here, nothing but wind sounds and sorrow, but I stayed anyhow. When my legs got tired I sat on the top of the hill and stared into the shadows and did not turn when the occasional car passed, disrupting the silence and throwing harsh white light into the trees.

We’re going to see this thing to the end, Lincoln. Twelve years I’ve been waiting for that.

That’s what he’d told me at the start, sitting in my truck with one hand on the door handle, ready to go up to the hotel room where he would spend his last night alive, sleeping alone with a too-loud air conditioner blasting away beside him. I’d responded by telling him . . . what had I said? That we might not get there. Something to that effect, some warning that all the effort might yield no result. He’d shaken his head.

Not this time. No, I’ve got a feeling about it.

My anger rose with the dawn. As the shadows around me changed from shades of dark to patterns of gray and then golden light, I noticed my jaw had begun to ache from the force of my clenched, grinding teeth. I’d had thoughts of Ken earlier in the night, but now he was gone, and Dominic Sanabria and Parker Harrison filled my mind in his stead.

They had done this. I didn’t know who had put the bullets through Ken’s heart and forehead, didn’t know whose hands had carried him from the trunk of a car and released him at the top of this hill, but I knew who’d put it all in motion. I’d seen them personally, looked into their faces and heard their words, and now the intimacy of that filled me with anger that spread like steam. They had left me alive. They had killed Ken Merriman and yet they had left me alive, and in that action their regard for me was clear—they viewed me as impotent. Of course I would accuse them, of course I would come at them with all the resources I could muster. They knew this, and they did not care.

Harrison had told me to step aside before harm was done. That had not been a wild notion, clearly. He’d warned me, and then he’d reached for the phone and called Dominic Sanabria, and a day later Ken—who had not gone home, who had not heeded the warning—was dead.

Harrison had answers.

It was time to get them.

I was close to Old Brooklyn, and that was important, because Harrison left early for work. I didn’t know what cemetery employed him, and I didn’t want to take the time to find out. The MetroParks Rangers who’d drawn Ken’s homicide would surely be looking for Harrison this morning, and I didn’t want to follow in on their heels. By then it would probably be too late. The good fortune I had was that they’d been alarmed by all of the information I’d shared. The stories about Sanabria and Harrison and Bertoli had overwhelmed them, and I knew when they finally released me that they’d take a few hours to talk to Graham and others, working to confirm my claims, before they moved in on people with mob ties and murder convictions. I had a window this morning. It was going to be small and closing fast, but I had a window.

By the time I got to Harrison’s apartment it was nearly six, and the soft predawn light was giving way to a deep red sunrise, the sort of that age-old sailor’s caution. I’d cut it close—almost too close. I was pulling into the parking lot when the door to Harrison’s apartment opened and he stepped out. He was wearing jeans and one of those tan work coats favored by farmers, with a thin knit cap pulled over his head. He wouldn’t need the jacket and the cap—the day was dawning hot and humid—but he was probably used to chill early morning hours, and he wouldn’t yet know of the weather change. He hadn’t spent the night sitting in the woods above a body-dump scene.

Harrison didn’t look up at my truck as he shut the door and turned to lock it. I pulled in at an angle a few doors down from him, leaving the truck across three parking spaces as I threw it in park and stepped out without bothering to cut the engine. Only then, as he put his key back in his pocket and turned from the door, did he look toward the headlights of my truck. When he saw me his face registered first surprise, then concern, and he said, “What happened?” just as I reached him, grabbed fistfuls of his coat, and pushed him against his own door.

When I left the truck I’d intended to say something immediately, shout in his face, but when I caught him and slammed him against the door I didn’t speak at all, wanting instead to just stare into his eyes and see what I saw there. It was only a few seconds of silence as I held him pinned by his shoulders, but what I saw added coal to those fires of anger. His face held secrets. I could no longer tolerate the secrets.

“He’s dead, you piece of shit.”

“Ken?” he said, and the sound of the name leaving his lips, the way he wanted confirmation of it, was too much for me. I lifted him off the door and then slammed him back into it, maybe three times, maybe four, and when he finally made a move to resist I stepped sideways and sent him spinning off the sidewalk and into the hood of the closest car.

He hit it hard, his ribs catching the bulk of the fall, and when he righted himself and turned back to me I saw a new Parker Harrison. He stood with a wide stance, balanced and ready to move in any direction, and took two steps toward me with his hands raised and no hint of fear or uncertainty in his eyes. He was coming to do harm, coming with violence and confidence, and as I stepped off the sidewalk to meet him I wasn’t at all sure that I could win this encounter, knew in a flash of recognition that he had been places and seen things that I had not, and that it was the sort of experience that might well make my advantage in size irrelevant.

That new Harrison lasted only those two steps, though. He brought himself up short as I approached, and there was a moment of hesitation before he moved backward. To a spectator it might have appeared he was giving way to me, but I knew it wasn’t that. He didn’t fear me at all. Not physically. For a few seconds he’d been sure he could take me and ready to do it. The latter aspect had passed. The former had not.

“What happened?” he said, circling away from me as I continued to pursue him, back on the sidewalk now.

“Somebody killed him, and you know who, you son of a bitch.”

“I don’t.”

“Harrison—”

“I didn’t want this,” he said. “Lincoln, I did not want this. When I told you to leave it alone, this is what I wanted to avoid.”

“What do you know?” I shouted it and was dimly aware of a light going on in the apartment beside Harrison’s.

He didn’t answer, moving backward in short, shuffling steps.

“This is what you wanted to avoid? How did you know it would happen? Stop lying and say what you know!”

We were beside his apartment now, and I punctuated the last shout by pounding my first into his door.

“You called Sanabria,” I said. “You told me to quit, and then you called him. Didn’t even wait until I was out of the parking lot. Why?”

“How do you know that?”

“Answer the question!”

“You’ll have to ask him.”

I almost went for him again. Almost gave up the questions and came at him swinging. It was close for a second, but I held back. My hands were trembling at my sides.

“Did Sanabria have you kill him, or did somebody else do it this time?”

“I haven’t killed anyone.”

“Did fifteen years in prison for shoplifting?”

“That’s got nothing to do—”

“It doesn’t? You’re a murderer.”

The muscles in his jaw flexed, his eyes going flat.

“You killed Joshua Cantrell,” I said. “Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Bullshit. Somebody else gave him a Shawnee burial?”

“I didn’t kill—”

“Bullshit!” As I moved toward him, the door to the apartment next door opened and a young woman in a pink robe stepped out and pointed a gun at me.

“Stop it,” she said. The voice was weak, but the gun was strong. A compact Kahr 9mm, and though her voice shook, the gun didn’t do much bouncing, just stayed trained on my chest.

“I called the police,” she said. “You can wait for them, or you can leave.”

Parker Harrison said, “Kelly, go inside. I’m sorry.”

She didn’t move. Behind her, the door was open, and somewhere in the apartment a child was crying. This woman, who looked maybe twenty-five, was wearing a pink robe and standing barefoot on the sidewalk and was pointing a gun at me while her child cried in their home.

I said, “There’s going to be a lot of police here in the next few days, ma’am. They’re coming for him, not me.”

Neither she nor Harrison responded.

“Do you know he’s a murderer?” I said. “Do you know that he killed a man with a knife?”

She said, “Please leave,” and now the gun had started to tremble.

I nodded. “I’m going to. I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . . but he . . .” The words left me then, and my strength seemed to go with them, and suddenly standing seemed difficult.

“I’ll burn your lies down,” I said to Harrison. “All of them. Every lie you’ve told and every secret you have. Understand that. Tell Sanabria.”

I could hear the sirens when I drove out of the parking lot.