The Quiet People, page 15
It’s Day Three, and the media and the folks online are eager to remind everybody that Day Three is where the investigation moves into recovery mode. Today is the official start of the police no longer looking for a boy, but for a body, and maybe that’s been the case since they found blood on Zach’s T-shirt. I go out to the lounge and peek outside. I don’t know if it’s the fact it’s Day Three, or Lockwood’s report from last night, but something has brought far greater numbers into the orbit of our house. There are bigger signs and angrier messages, but at the moment everybody is calm, eating breakfast and drinking coffee and chatting among themselves, most of the signs not even being held up. A young guy who lives diagonally across from us has staked a sign into his front lawn, saying people can use his bathroom for two dollars a visit. There’s already a queue to his door. He also has a barbecue set up and is selling hotdogs, and there’s a queue there too. The media vans have doubled in number, and the newer ones have doubled in size. There is a group of young men dressed up as priests and nuns. They’re all drinking. I ring Kent. She doesn’t answer. I leave a message.
Lisa comes out of Zach’s bedroom. She’s wearing her clothes from yesterday, having slept in them. I’m still in mine too, having done the same. I make coffee and neither of us say a word. The morning is made up of slow movements. The kettle boiling, stirring the coffee, carrying the cups to the table, all of it arthritic. Even walking across the kitchen floor is slow, the air syrupy and dragging over us, the floor boggy. We sit at the table and sip our coffees, possibly the worst I’ve ever tasted, even though I’ve made them no different from any other. At eight o’clock the crowd outside grows lively, and a few moments later the doorbell rings.
I let Kent in. She is followed by Thompson. We sit in the lounge like we did on Day One, only this time Lisa is next to me and we hold hands. Kent puts a folder on the table. It’s closed. She has a thing for folders.
“We have some more questions for you,” she says. Her tone is flat and unpleasant.
“All that stuff Lockwood said on TV is bullshit,” I say.
“There’s no denying he pointed out some serious coincidences,” she says.
“No, he didn’t,” I say. “You can’t judge writers by what they write. The books—that’s a different universe for us. Just because we can write about serial killers doesn’t mean we are those people. Otherwise every crime writer in the world would be in jail.”
Thompson leans forward. He’s resting his elbows on his knees. “That being said, it must take a seriously sick mind to come up with the things you write about.”
“I can say the same thing about you,” I say. “About both of you. After all, it must take a certain kind of personality to surround yourself with people’s pain and misery and death. I mean, at least ours is only fiction, but you have a job where every day you see the worst. What does that say about your mind? That you get off on it?”
The answer isn’t spontaneous, but something our crime writer character said to police in our book years ago. Thompson looks like he’s about to stand up when Kent puts her hand on his knee. “We take your point,” she says.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” she says. “But tell me, do you believe what you’ve been saying at these festivals? Do you really think you can get away with murder?”
“No,” I say, but truthfully, I don’t know. I think I could. Or at the very least I think I’d have a much better chance than most.
“It doesn’t sound that way,” Thompson says. “I mean, how difficult could it be? After all, the police are stupid and narrow-minded and unable to look beyond the obvious.”
“Come on,” I say, “that’s just something one of my characters said.”
“But you thought of it.”
“I thought of it because there are always stories of people being freed from jail after DNA has cleared them. Every other occupation in the world if you make a mistake you’re held accountable. If a doctor amputates the wrong limb they’ll never be a doctor again. Crash a plane and you’ll lose your licence. Cost a client thousands of dollars at an accounting firm and you’ll get fired. But what happens to cops who arrest the wrong person? Nothing. And yet we’re meant to trust people who have proven themselves to have made wrong decisions in a way we would never trust that doctor, or pilot, or accountant.”
“You have an extremely low opinion of police officers,” Thompson says.
“Only the ones who make mistakes.”
Kent cuts in. “Tell us about Jonas Jones. Why would people who look down on psychics invite a psychic into their house for help?”
“Lockwood was wrong about that. It wasn’t for show. Jonas is harmless enough. We’ve met a few times, but no, I don’t believe he talks with the dead. I don’t believe in any of that stuff.”
“And yet you still had him come here,” Thompson says.
“I was hopeful.”
“Hopeful in something you don’t believe in,” Kent says.
“Why not? Why not try everything to bring Zach home, whether I believe in it or not?”
“Okay,” Kent says.
“Good,” I say.
“But Jonas Jones isn’t the reason we’re here,” she says.
“And nor is Dallas Lockwood,” Thompson says.
Kent picks up the folder. “I have something I want to show you.”
Forty-two
They form a semicircle in Zach’s bedroom with their backs to the door and a view of the window opposite. Outside, a beach ball is being batted around in the crowd. Dallas Lockwood’s piece on TV, and his subsequent blogposts since then, have brought more people into the street. She’s regretting not making the arrest last night when the crowds were smaller.
“You said Zach’s window was closed on Sunday night,” she says.
“It’s always closed,” Cameron says.
“You don’t open it on hot nights?”
“No. If it gets too hot we’ll put a fan in his room and leave his bedroom door open, but we always keep his window closed.”
“Let’s put your author imagination to the test,” Kent says.
“This isn’t a game,” Cameron says.
“And I’m not kidding around. This is important, Mr Murdoch. I want you to tell me how you think Zach climbed out his window.”
“Okay. Okay, sure,” he says, and he looks around the room. “Well, there was a toybox,” he says, and he points to the corner where there is a pile of toys. “He emptied all that out of it, turned it over, carried it to the window, and climbed on it. Is this where you tell me there’s no box? Because there sure as hell was one two days ago.”
Kent opens the folder. “This box,” she says, and the photograph of the box has been taken while it was still in front of the window. It’s a wide shot of the room. She holds it so the perspective is the same. “Makes sense what you say,” she says. “It’s the same way we pieced it together. Zach isn’t tall enough to jump up and drag himself over the windowsill without climbing on something, and if he had tried it, we’d see scuff marks all down the front from his shoes. So Zach empties the box, tips it upside down, and steps onto it. Kids love to climb. Is Zach a climber?”
“He is,” Cameron says.
“The first time he started climbing one of the trees in the backyard, I almost had a heart attack,” Lisa says. “He’ll climb anything. We’re in constant fear that a broken arm or a broken leg is just around the corner.”
“Has he done it before? Climbed out the window?”
The two parents look at each other, then Cameron says, “Not that I know of.”
Lisa shakes her head. “I’ve never seen it.”
The window has two latches, one at the top, one at the bottom. You flick them out, and the window swings sideways on two pivot points. Easy for an adult. Not so easy for a kid. “How does he get the window open?” Kent asks.
“Easy,” Cameron says.
“How does he reach the top latch?”
“He . . .” Cameron says, then stops. He’s seeing the problem. Even standing on top of the plastic box, Zach wouldn’t be able to reach it. “Maybe he reached up with another toy and banged at the handle until it opened. Then he tosses whatever toy he used back into the heap.”
“Tidying up after himself,” Kent says.
“Exactly.”
Kent nods. It makes sense. And it’s what they first thought too. Only it didn’t happen. “This box,” she says, and she taps the box in the photograph, “we took that box with us. And then we went out and bought a dozen identical boxes,” she says, but it wasn’t we, it was Mason Clark who figured this out. “See, our forensic guys are looking at the toybox and they’re thinking it doesn’t really look that strong. The plastic is thin, but it’s designed for holding bits and pieces, not for supporting the weight of a seven-year-old boy.”
Lisa lets go of Cameron’s hand and lets her arms fall to her sides.
Kent carries on. “So our guys, they see Zach’s last trip to the doctor three months ago has him weighing in at twenty-five kilograms. They start placing twenty-five-kilogram weights in the centre of the box where a young boy might stand, and the weight breaks through and leaves jagged edges of plastic in its wake. So they figure somebody as young as seven would know the box is stronger on its edges, so they choose another box and shift the weight, and though the plastic doesn’t cave in, it cracks. They have ten more boxes, and they take ten more shots at it, and no matter how they place the weight the box breaks or cracks.”
Cameron shakes his head. “Twelve isn’t many boxes.”
“You’re right. That’s what I said. And I’m going to tell you what they said to me. They said they went out and got hold of another dozen, and what they got was another dozen breakages. See, the plastic isn’t strong at all. Doesn’t need to be. Which means Zach didn’t tip it upside down and use it to climb out his window. We know he didn’t climb out, because we’d have found his fingerprints along the windowsill.”
Lisa is crying. Cameron reaches out for her and she takes a step away.
“The scene was staged so it looks like Zach climbed out his window, and right into the wrong place at the wrong time as somebody walked by. Now, I believe in coincidences and will never rule them out, but this one . . . this one bothered me.”
“We didn’t do this.”
“It was impossible for Zach to get out that window by himself.”
“What did you do?” Thompson asks. “Carry him out the front door, or drive him out through the garage?”
Cameron takes a step back. He looks like a trapped animal. She can hear his breathing quicken. He looks like he’s struggling to stay balanced. “We didn’t do this,” he says, and his words are so weak she has to strain to hear him, especially over the noise from the crowd outside. “I know how it looks, but we didn’t . . . we didn’t do this. Somebody is doing this to us.”
Thompson steps forward. A set of zip-tie cuffs have appeared in his hand.
“No,” Cameron says. “Don’t do this. Please don’t do this.”
But they’re doing it.
They place Cameron and Lisa Murdoch under arrest.
Forty-three
Thompson tells me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. Instead I turn to Kent, and I say, “You lied. You said you weren’t narrow-minded. You said we were a united front.”
“Is this where you tell us how useless the police are?” Thompson asks.
“You’ve got this all wrong.” I put my hands out in front of me, trying to ward off what’s coming. Kent has no emotion on her face. To her I’m not the first child killer she’s locked up, and I won’t be the last. Thompson looks like he wants to speed the process along by shooting me. I can’t let him put the cuffs on me. If he does, it’s all over. If he does, then they can never be convinced they’re wrong.
Lisa is shaking her head. She has a hand covering her mouth to hold on to a scream. She has backed into the wall.
Thompson turns me around. He wrenches my hands behind my back and secures them, the notches on the zip-tie cuffs clicking loudly. Then he turns me around and I get to watch Kent doing the same thing to Lisa.
We’re escorted out of the room, Kent with her hand on Lisa’s elbow, and Thompson with his hand on my shoulder. Lisa looks unsteady on her feet, and I feel the same way. We reach the front door. Kent opens it. There are more officers out there than yesterday, but the crowd has grown too since Kent and Thompson showed up. There are four, maybe five hundred people out there. There’s a patrol car in the driveway parked on the other side of Mum’s car. I don’t fancy our chances of getting there in one piece.
Kent comes to the same conclusion, because she closes the door, turns back towards us, and says, “I’ll bring the patrol car into the garage. We can load them into it in there, then wait for an escort.”
“No,” Thompson says. “Let’s take them straight out.”
“The crowd wants to kill us,” I say.
“You’re suddenly shy of the media?” Thompson asks.
“You’ve seen the death threats.”
“We have it under control,” he says.
“Let’s—” Kent says.
“It’ll be fine,” Thompson says.
“It won’t be,” I say. “Come on, they’re—”
“Shut up,” he says. He opens the door then shoves me through it. The crowd starts booing. Signs are raised. Chanting quickly spreads.
“They will, they will, molest you.”
“They will, they will, molest you.”
There’s a small step down from the porch to the path. I almost trip on it. Last thing I see before stepping down to ground level is the group of priests and nuns. They’ve formed a human pyramid, four on the base, three on them, then two, then one. They’re chanting loudly. Maybe that’s where it started.
Thompson says something to me, but I can’t hear what. Reporters are yelling questions at us, but I can’t make them out. “They will, they will, molest you” drowns out the rest of the world. We have to go back, but Thompson keeps pushing me forward.
The media moves to intercept us. The officers try to hold them back, but they’re outnumbered. Cameras and microphones are in our faces. Many of the reporters are from the conference on Monday night, but they look different, their faces have taken on a manic desperation for a story. I see Rolled Sleeves. His feet get tangled and he goes down, one knee crashing into the ground, an elbow from another reporter catching him in the face before he can get back up, his glasses hanging from one ear. We reach Mum’s car and have to go around it.
Seeing the media move forward convinces the crowd to do the same. The chanting breaks down, replaced by yelling. An egg explodes into my shoulder. I don’t see where it comes from until the second one is launched—Mrs Hathaway, Zach’s primary school teacher, only it’s not her, but a facsimile of her, same face, same clothes, but hate-filled eyes I’ve never seen before. Her voice—when she screams at me to “Die, motherfucker, die!”—sounds like her too. For some reason I remember the report card she wrote: “Zach is a well-liked student who is a pleasure to have in class, even though he does tend to disrupt it.” Mr Knowles, the principal who always wears the bow-ties and suspenders, is next to her, shouting, “Justice for Zach, Justice for Zach!” Another egg comes from Zach’s teacher, this one hitting Thompson. She fires off two more that sail by. Alarms are going off up and down the street as people clamber on top of cars to get a better view. Rolled Sleeves has fallen again, and this time the crowd swallows him before he can get to his feet. Somebody screams from the direction of the priest/nun pyramid, and somebody shouts for help.
“We have to go back,” Kent yells.
“Keep going,” Thompson says. We’re halfway to the car. An officer is getting the back door open while the others are telling the crowd to back off. A Justice for Ivy placard sails through the air and bounces off the back of Mum’s car. An officer points a Taser into the crowd and yells for people to “Get back, get back, get the fuck back!”
They don’t.
When somebody goes to launch another placard, he fires his Taser, only he gets knocked at the same time, the two thin lines fly through the air and into the groin of a cameraman, who doubles over so fast he slams the camera into the pavement, plastic and glass smashing. The officer points the now-fired Taser back into the crowd, warning again for people to get back, only they don’t, because they know as well as he does he’s had his one shot.
We’re two-thirds of the way to the car.
“We have to go back,” Kent shouts again.
She’s right. We’re not going to make it to the car. A brick comes hurtling through the air. Thompson ducks, and I duck, and Lisa and Kent duck, and it clears us even if we hadn’t. It crashes through the lounge window. An officer—the wrestler with the inside-out ears—wrestles the brick-thrower to the ground. Somebody with a placard swings it against the wrestler, who turns around and grabs it on the second swing, then pulls that person down, the placard seesawing between them. A man with tattoos all over his arms and neck bends down and picks up our broken letterbox. Thompson turns me back towards the house.
It’s too late. Several of the reporters have already circled behind us, blocking our retreat. In the centre of them is Dallas Lockwood. He has a sneer on his face, and he’s holding his camera ahead of his body, going for a closeup. There’s the sound of breaking glass behind us. Warm bodies prod against me from all directions. We turn back towards the car. I can no longer see it. I have a vision of the crowd falling away, and all that’s left is the chassis; the wheels and windows and seats and electrics all stripped away. Part of the crowd tries to get the chant up and running again, but it doesn’t catch. A guy carrying a baseball bat comes at us. He yells that God’s plan for Zach didn’t include me killing him, and he swings it, but at the same time somebody falls in front of him, knocking him off balance, the bat hitting somebody else. A figure makes his way forward, and I recognise him, it’s the guy from the fair on Sunday who punched me.
