There was a sharp knock at the front door that made us both jump. We hadn’t heard a car come down the lane, but we had the house shut up tight and the air-conditioning on.
We both got up from the table, went from the kitchen and through the living room to the front door. Through the sheer curtain at the window I could make out Barry, and it looked as though he was holding something in his hand.
I opened the door. Standing behind Barry were three other police officers, all wearing those surgical-type gloves. “What is it, Barry? What the hell is going on?”
He held up the paper. “It’s a warrant, Jim. To search the house.”
“What?” said Ellen. “What are you talking about?”
“Get Derek,” Barry said, his voice no-nonsense.
“What do you want Derek for?” I asked.
“Jim, please, don’t make this any harder than it has to be,” Barry said. “Just call him down here.”
I hesitated a moment, then shouted, so that I could be heard upstairs: “Derek!”
“What?” Muffled, from behind his bedroom door a flight up.
“Down here! Now!”
A moment later, his footsteps thundering down the stairs. When he got to the bottom, he met the cops, heading up. “Oh shit,” he said, with less surprise than I might have expected.
I thought of the phone call he’d received from Penny. Maybe now it was happening.
“Kitchen,” Barry said, leading the rest of us out of the living room. Once we were in the kitchen, no one sat down.
“Derek,” Barry said, “I wonder if you’d like to change your story any about what happened on Friday night.”
He looked baffled, but there was something in his eyes, the way they danced.
“No,” he said. “Nothing.”
“So you want to stick with what you told us. That you left the Langleys about eight, wandered about, went to see Penny, came back here around nine-thirty.”
“Yeah,” Derek said hesitantly. “Although I didn’t really see her, just talked on the phone, walked around some on my own.”
Then Barry turned to me. “How about you? You want to stick with what you told me? About hearing Derek come in around that time, before ten?”
“Barry,” I said, “why don’t you just tell us what the hell’s going on here.”
Upstairs, we could hear things getting tossed about. It sounded like it was all happening in Derek’s room.
“I want to know if anyone wants to rethink what happened that night,” Barry said.
“I’m pretty sure that’s what happened,” Derek said, but his voice lacked conviction.
“Then maybe you can explain something to me,” Barry said to Derek.
“What?”
“You talked to your girlfriend, Penelope Tucker, a couple of times that night on the phone.”
“Penny, yeah,” he said. “Sure, I talk to her all the time. Well, until, like, lately. Her parents are being all weird.”
“You can blame me for that,” Barry said. “I was speaking to them early Sunday. I advised them not to allow any communication between you and their daughter.”
“That’s fucking great. So you’re the reason—”
“Derek,” I cautioned, trying to stay calm, “just take it easy.”
“Take it easy?” To Barry, he said, “You had no right to do that. Why did you have to—”
“Derek,” Barry said, getting close to him, almost in his face, “tell me about the calls you made to Penny that night.”
“I don’t know. I called her a couple of times, I guess.”
“From your cell?”
“Sure.”
“Always from your cell?”
It was like something clicked in Derek’s brain at that point. Some sort of realization dawned on him. “I think,” he said.
“Penny says you called her from the Langley house.”
“Uh, sure, maybe. I mean, I was there, earlier.”
“No,” Barry said. “Later.”
“She must be wrong,” Derek said.
“Derek,” Ellen said, “what’s going on here?”
Upstairs, more rummaging.
“If you don’t mind,” Barry said to my wife, as politely as the circumstances allowed, “I’d like to ask the questions for the moment. Derek, I don’t think she’s wrong. The phone, in the basement of the Langley house, it’s one of those phones that keeps a record of numbers dialed out. Saves the police a lot of time asking the phone company to give us a list of calls.”
This didn’t sound good.
“And what’s interesting is, just before ten, that phone was used to call Penny Tucker. How do you explain that? A couple of hours after you supposedly left, nearly an hour and a half after the Langleys had left, someone makes a call from inside that house to your girlfriend. And you know what she told me? She told me she was talking to you.”
Derek said nothing.
“And Albert Langley, he phoned his secretary on his cell just around that time, said they were nearly home. So guess what? It looks like you were in that house, after the Langleys left, and very likely still in that house when they got home.”
Derek shook his head.
I said, “Barry, what you’re suggesting here, this is crazy. You know me, you know Derek. I mean, you know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t . . .”
“Maybe,” Derek said, his voice weak, “maybe the phone was wrong or something.”
“You think Penny’s phone was wrong, too? Because it shows a call coming in at the exact same time as the Langley phone shows a call going out. She said your cell was breaking up, so you had to use a land line.”
“You don’t understand,” Derek said. “Okay, maybe I was there but—”
“Derek,” I said, “don’t say anything.”
“What do you mean,” Ellen snapped at me, “telling him not to say anything? He didn’t have anything to do with this!”
“That’s right,” he said, his eyes beginning to water. “I didn’t. I swear.”
“But you were in the house, weren’t you, Derek?” Barry said, his voice taking a more conciliatory tone. “It started out innocently enough, am I right? Go ahead and tell us. Penny filled me in a bit.”
“It was just, it was . . .” A look of hopelessness came over his face. “Okay, the thing was, I had this idea, because the Langleys were going to be away for a week, if the house was empty, it would be this great spot for me and Penny, you know, a place for us . . .”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Ellen said. “What the hell were you thinking? What did you do? Did Adam give you a key?”
The tears were coming down his face now. “We just wanted a place we could go. When I was leaving, I said goodbye to Adam, I made like I was going out the back door, but then I snuck downstairs and hid in the crawlspace until they were gone. That’s all. And after they left, I came out, and I called Penny a couple of times, but she had been grounded. She was in trouble with her dad because she dented their car, you know? That’s all.”
“Okay,” Barry said, almost friendly, like he understood. “I can see all that. It sort of makes sense. So that’s where you were the whole time, hiding in the basement?”
“That’s right.”
“You weren’t anyplace else in the house?”
“Well, I wandered through. The kitchen and stuff. And I was in Adam’s room before they went away.”
“Anyplace else?” Barry persisted.
Derek shook his head in frustration. “No!”
Barry nodded, then, almost offhandedly, pointed to Derek’s left ear and said, “Did you used to have a stud or an earring there? I can see the little hole.”
Derek held his ear briefly between his thumb and forefinger, just as he had in the truck a few days earlier when I’d noticed the peace sign stud he used to wear was gone.
“I don’t know what happened to it,” he said.
“Okay,” said Barry, again adopting a softer
tone, “but then, when the Langleys came home, unexpectedly, because Mrs. Langley got sick, they must have been pretty pissed to find you in the house. More than pissed, I’ll bet. Pretty goddamn furious, is my guess. And then something happened, I can totally see how a situation like that could spiral out of control. Did Mr. Langley threaten you, come at you or something? He had a bit of a temper, am I right?”
“No,” Derek said. “No.”
“It’d be pretty embarrassing, getting caught hiding out in your best friend’s house. They must have felt pretty betrayed, Mr. and Mrs. Langley. Maybe even Adam. Or was Adam in on the idea? Did he know what you were going to do?”
“No, Jesus, no, he didn’t know.”
“So he must have felt pretty pissed, too,” Barry surmised. “You didn’t just go behind his parents’ backs, you went behind his, too.”
“Okay! Fuck! I know!” Derek said, his cheeks flushed. “It was a stupid, shitty thing to do. I’m really, really sorry.”
You dumb kid, I was thinking, you dumbass kid.
But I said, to Barry, “There, you see? He did a stupid thing, and he’s admitted it, but that’s where it ends.”
“No,” said Barry, still looking at Derek, ignoring me, “there’s more, right? They came home, found you, and you panicked. You had access to a gun, maybe a gun that was in the house—”
“No!” Derek shouted. “No! I didn’t do anything! Someone else did it! Not me!”
“Then who was it, Derek?” Barry said. “You know who it was?”
“No!”
“Barry,” I said, “can’t you see he’s upset? Ease off a little.”
He turned and looked at me. “I don’t like this any more than you do, Jim.”
Derek was almost sobbing now and Ellen had taken him into her arms. “Look what you’ve done,” she said to Barry.
The detective ignored her. “Okay, Derek, you say you didn’t do it, but we’ve got you placed at the house right around the time the whole thing went down. But you didn’t see who did it. You can’t have it both ways.”
“I never saw anybody,” he said. “I was hiding.”
Barry was shaking his head sadly when one of the tech guys who’d been upstairs appeared in the kitchen. He was using just a finger and a thumb to hold a shoe. One of Derek’s many pairs of sneakers.
“Detective Duckworth,” the cop said, and turned the shoe around, displaying the sole. He pointed to a dark smudge near the heel. “Bingo,” he said.
Barry leaned in for a closer look. “You sure it’s blood?” he asked.
“Pretty sure,” said the cop. “And once we get a DNA test done, we’ll know a hell of a lot more.”
Neither Ellen nor I seemed to be breathing at that moment. But Derek was sobbing, muttering under his breath, “No, no, no . . .”
“Barry,” I said.
Then Derek said, “I didn’t see anything. But I heard it! I heard them come in! I heard the shots! I heard all of them die! I swear to God!”
Barry appeared unmoved.
He said, “Derek Cutter, I’m arresting you for the murders of Albert Langley, Donna Langley, and Adam Langley. You—”
“Barry, Jesus,” I said. “He admits he was there. Listen to him for Christ’s—”
“Jim, please,” Barry said, holding up his hand. He continued. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and you can have that attorney present during any questioning. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you.”
He took a set of handcuffs from his belt, turned our son around, and cuffed him.
It seemed to me that our world, at that moment, more or less ended.
TWENTY-ONE
DEREK WAS ARRAIGNED the following morning. Ellen and I had been up all night, first just dealing with the shock of his arrest, then scrambling to find our son legal representation. Under other circumstances, of course, we would have gone straight to Albert Langley. We knew him, we trusted his reputation, we knew he knew his stuff.
Not exactly an option at the moment.
Nor did we feel we could call on anyone else in Langley’s firm. Who would want to defend the person charged with the murder of a colleague and his family? And besides, even if someone Langley had worked with agreed to represent Derek, we didn’t want to take any chances there might be underlying animosity. So Ellen put in a call to some people she knew from Thackeray, asking for recommendations, and came up with the name Natalie Bondurant. Eight years working as a criminal defense lawyer in Promise Falls, and according to at least one person Ellen talked to, a “smart cookie.” We put in a call to her service sometime around nine, and she called us back before ten.
I laid it out for her over the phone, my voice shaking at times. Then she had a number of questions for me, which I tried to answer as succinctly as possible. Her questions were clear and direct. She managed to cut through the emotions that were overwhelming us, got us to focus on the facts, to try as best we could to view the situation rationally, even if it was impossible for us to see it very objectively.
“So the police have no weapon,” she said. “That’s a problem for them. Unless they find it, in which case that could change things.”
“They won’t find it,” I said. “He didn’t do it.”
Natalie Bondurant chose not to argue. “It weakens their case. Your son had opportunity, he was there, that’s bad, but he has no record of violence—”
“He was in a bit of trouble once. He went joyriding with a friend, who’d taken his dad’s car without permission, and the car got smashed up. Another time, he was caught with some friends playing on the roof of the school and—”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about those things. They’re a far cry from killing three people in cold blood. But I think there’s more to this than meets the eye. The police are saying your son killed the Langleys because they discovered he’d hidden out in their house, but I don’t know. That doesn’t strike me as much of a motive. I’m worried they haven’t played all their cards yet. We’ll have to see. I’m going to want to talk to this Penny Tucker, find out exactly what Derek’s state of mind was when he talked to her on the phone from the house. I’ll have a chance to speak with him tomorrow morning before he goes before the judge, but I don’t think you should expect he’s going to get bail. He’s a suspect in a triple homicide. The state’s case may seem weak, but until we knock it down, I don’t think he’s going to be allowed out.”
Ellen, on the bedroom extension, said, “What’s going to happen to him? In jail? Is he going to be safe there?”
“I’ll talk to some people. Given the nature of the charges, I think it’s more likely he’ll be put in a separate cell, rather than with the general population.”
I knew Ellen was thinking what I was thinking. Our seventeen-year-old boy sharing a cell with grown men being held for God knows what. I didn’t want to think about it, but all I could do was think about it.
“There’s going to be a lot of media attention, too,” Natalie warned us.
“What do you mean?” Ellen asked.
“An arrest in a case this big, it’ll be a mini-circus outside the court. All the Albany media will be here. Probably a contingent from New York, as well. It’s going to be bad.”
“Oh God,” Ellen said.
“You have cell phones?” We gave her the numbers. “Because if I need to get in touch, I’ll call one of those. Your house phone, you’re going to reach a point where you’re not going to want to answer it. You may want to unplug it altogether. Media, crank calls, threats, the whole gamut. Don’t watch the news. The cops still have someone on the Langley house, it’s still a crime scene, they may keep the media from your door. I’ll talk to Barry and see if that’s possible.”
Barry. Like he was going to do us any favors.
As though reading my mind through the phone line, Natalie said, “He’s an okay guy. I’ll see what
I can do. Also, there’s the matter of money. I don’t come cheap.” She outlined her fees. “It could go on for a while.”
Ellen, who looked after the finances in our house, said, “Okay. We’ve got some IRAs we could cash in, but not that much.” I could feel her desperation and hopelessness coming through the line from our upstairs bedroom. “I’ll start looking into that tomorrow.”
“Okay,” said Natalie. “We’ll talk then.”
NATALIE BONDURANT WAS RIGHT. Derek didn’t get bail. She gave it her best shot, said Derek had no prior charges or convictions, came from a good home, was not a flight risk, but the judge would have none of it. He acceded to the prosecution’s request that Derek be held without bail. He was charged, said prosecutor Dwayne Hillman with much fanfare, in the most horrific murder case in the history of Promise Falls. Surely, if ever there was a case where bail should be denied, this was it.
In court, Ellen wept. I did my best to be stoic.
Derek, standing next to Natalie in the high-ceilinged prestigious courtroom, seemed smaller, almost childlike compared to the day before. In beltless jeans and a T-shirt, his hair an oily mess, he stared down at the floor, his shoulders hunched forward, as though he’d caved in on himself. If this was how he looked after only a few hours in jail, how would he look after a week or, God forbid, after—
I couldn’t let my mind go there.
He tried to give us a small wave, with his wrists cuffed together in front of him, as he was led to a door near the front of the courtroom.
“Derek . . .” Ellen said. “Derek . . .”
Neither Ellen nor I had slept, and we looked it. Ellen had aged ten years since Friday, before any of this madness had begun. And I was running on empty.
Natalie met us in the courthouse hallway. It was our first face-to-face meeting. She was black, mid to late thirties, tall, maybe six feet, short black hair, dressed in a conservative blue suit. Her solemn expression gave us no reason for optimism.
“Okay,” she said. “There was no way they were going to let him post bond, no matter what the amount was. No surprise there. They’ve got him in a cell of his own so he’s away from the other prisoners most of the time.”
I looked at Ellen. She was dying inside.