Chapter Four

 

When the pager in his pajama pocket sounded a soft buzz and then vibrated, Radhauser groaned. His eyes shot open. The clock on his bedside table read 12:15 a.m. A call from dispatch this late could mean only one thing. Something terrible awaited him.

He turned off the pager and slipped out of bed, careful not to awaken Gracie. He’d stayed up late in the barn, working on his victim impact statement. She and Lizzie were asleep when he came to bed. Even though Gracie was adamant he ignore the clemency hearing, he hoped she would eventually come to understand why he couldn’t.

In the silver glow from the nearly full moon, with her translucent skin and dark hair spread over her pillow, Gracie looked almost ethereal.

He brushed his lips across her forehead. Something moved deep inside him at the touch of her warm skin against his mouth. “I love you,” he whispered, then grabbed his jeans, tiptoed down the hallway and inched open the door to Lizzie’s bedroom. He tucked her purple blanket around her shoulders, swept his fingers across her cheek. How could his baby girl be four-and-a-half years old already?

Once in the kitchen, he phoned dispatch.

“Hate to bother you this late, Wind,” Maggie said. “But we got a 9-1-1 call about an in-home accident. A little kid. The operator said the caller sounded drunk and claimed the accident was his fault. An ambulance has been dispatched. Murph thinks a detective should check it out.”

Captain Felix Murphy knew how much Radhauser dreaded any investigation that involved a child. Add a drunk to the equation and he was ready to become a criminal himself. But he wouldn’t assume the caller’s claim was a real admission of guilt. He’d lived long enough to understand the tightrope humans walked and how the smallest mistake could lead to a fatal plunge. Radhauser was nowhere near the accident that killed his family, but he made the same claim. It was his fault.

He dressed in the laundry room where he kept a change of clothing for nights like this one. Removing the belt buckle Lucas won, he pulled his belt from his dirty jeans, threaded it through the loops of a pair of clean ones and replaced the buckle.

After locking the back door knob, he stepped out into the night. Stars peppered the sky above their ranch in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. He jogged toward the barn overhang where he parked the Crown Vic. The outside air still smelled of sawdust and cedar chips.

Mercedes, Gracie’s mare, heard him and nickered—a friendly sound of expectation. “Settle down, girl,” he said. “Way too early for breakfast.” He sucked in a grateful breath. Marrying Gracie and moving to Oregon had been a good thing. And despite the recent letter from the clemency board, he’d found a peace he never believed possible after losing Laura and Lucas.

The streets were empty and Radhauser arrived at the scene on Pine Street in less than ten minutes. He straightened his steel-gray Stetson, opened the screen and knocked on the oak door of a beautifully restored and well-kept, older Craftsman in Ashland—a small town near the California border, proud of its mountainous landscape, its diversity and the Shakespeare Festival that kept it alive.

“It’s the police,” he said. “Open up.” He waited a moment, then knocked again. It rained earlier and all around him the air smelled like earth and the slight decay of molted leaves. As if on command, four yellow, big leaf maple leaves fell onto the narrow porch. Autumn—that colorful season of death.

When he got no response, he tried the door. It opened into darkness. Radhauser groped for the switch and the room flooded with light. He quickly scanned the scene.

An overturned coffee table. The shattered globe of an oil lamp littered the blue, ceramic floor tiles with small pieces of glass that caught the ceiling light and sparkled. Water from a spilled vase had formed a puddle on the floor. Tarot cards and daffodils were strewn about. A trail of blood drops led out of the room. What the hell is going on here? Instinctively, Radhauser moved his fingers to unsnap his leather holster. He placed his hand on his Glock.

Wedged into a corner at the back of the living room, a large cardboard box, the kind a refrigerator might be delivered in, had been made into a playhouse. Someone had cut out windows and a door and painted shutters on either side of them. Above the door opening, painted in the same Wedgewood blue as the shutters, were the words, Cockroach’s House. The air around him hummed. What kind of parent calls his kid a cockroach?

Radhauser followed the blood drops to a doorway leading to what he assumed was the kitchen.

A man, his back to Radhauser, was attempting to give CPR to a child lying on the kitchen table. He used only his left hand. The other seemed to rest on the child’s cheek, the index finger inside his mouth.

Is he trying to clear an airway? The child, barely more than a baby, was as blue as his footed sleeper. His mouth dripped blood.

Radhauser removed his right hand from his Glock. “You’re pushing too hard.”

The man, seemingly focused on what he was doing, neither responded nor turned around.

“Police,” Radhauser said again.

Still no response.

Radhauser touched the man’s shoulder.

He spun around, his dark eyes fixed on Radhauser. “Did you bring an ambulance?” His voice sounded like he had mud in his mouth.

Or maybe the 9-1-1 operator was right. Maybe this man was drunk. Radhauser’s gaze darted around the kitchen. No empty beer or liquor bottles on the counters. He had a keen nose and could usually smell alcohol from five feet away.

The man was a little shorter than Radhauser, maybe six feet two inches, and looked as if he knew his way around a Nautilus machine. His black hair curled over the collar of his blue denim shirt. He appeared to be in his mid-thirties and stood with most of his weight on his left leg as if his right leg was injured. With that quick glance into his bottomless brown eyes, Radhauser saw a flash of something unexpected. Hidden deep beneath the compassion, fear, and obvious intelligence was an unreachable sadness.

“What’s your name?”

The man had returned his attention to the toddler and didn’t respond. “Oh my God,” he cried. “Why is blood coming out of his mouth?”

Radhauser flipped him around. “Let me take over,” he said, then unsnapped the toddler’s pajama top and used three fingers to gently press down in the center of his chest, just below his nipples. As he worked, Radhauser tried to remember the manual—how to do CPR with an infant or small child. Little by little it came back to him.

A series of thirty compressions at the rate of 100-120 a minute. He needed to lift the toddler’s chin, place his mouth over his mouth and nose and blow. It wasn’t easy with a man’s finger inside the child’s mouth. Two gentle breaths, each one second in duration.

“The blood is yours,” Radhauser finally said. The toddler had clamped down on the man’s finger with so much force his teeth exposed the bone.

When he found his rhythm, the right speed and depth for his compressions, Radhauser retrieved his badge with his free hand, opened the leather case to show the man, and introduced himself. “Do you have a name?”

“Everyone calls me Bryce.” He stared at Radhauser’s mouth as he spoke. “The baby. Skyler. He…he…had a seizure. When I tried to stop him from swallowing his tongue, he latched onto my finger.”

The man’s speech was garbled, but Radhauser was able to understand him. “Have you been drinking, Mr. Bryce?”

“No, no sir,” he said. “I don’t touch alcohol. My mother was an alcoholic. I’m hearing impaired from a...” He paused as if trying to choose the right words. “A childhood illness. But I’m pretty good at reading lips. I also sign. My speech defect might make it sound like I’m drunk.”

Radhauser counted the seconds between the compressions as he pushed on the toddler’s small chest. There was an egg-sized knot on Skyler’s forehead that had turned shades of blue, yellow and purple. There were no other visible injuries. Where the hell is that ambulance? He glanced at his watch. Though it seemed like an hour since he arrived at the scene, only a few minutes had passed. As if on command, the sound of a siren wailed in the near distance.

“How old is Skyler, Mr. Bryce?”

“Nineteen months.”

As Radhauser continued his compressions, Radhauser spotted the gadget to amplify sound on the wall above the kitchen phone. Bryce spoke more clearly than most deaf people Radhauser encountered, probably because he wasn’t born deaf. “How old were you when you lost your hearing?”

“Six,” he said.

Two paramedics in dark blue trousers and shirts with circular emblems on their sleeves burst through the open door and rushed into the kitchen.

Bryce tried to move out of their way, but his trapped finger kept him connected to Skyler.

The younger paramedic gripped the toddler’s jaw with one hand and his cheekbones with the other, releasing Bryce’s bloody finger. He introduced himself. “I’m Robert and this is my partner, Frank. Sorry for the delay. Bad accident blocked traffic on Main.”

While Frank focused his attention on getting Skyler hooked up to an IV and oxygen, Robert cleaned and wrapped Bryce’s finger.

Not needed anymore, Radhauser stepped back into the living room. Knowing how fast a routine accident could turn into a crime scene, he went outside and removed his briefcase and camera from his car. Radhauser wasn’t the kind of detective who trusted things to memory. He snapped pictures of the overturned coffee table from every angle, the broken globe of the oil lamp, the scattering of daffodils and tarot cards, the blood spots on the floor and finally the cardboard playhouse, making sure to get a clear shot of the words painted above the door.

After slipping his small notebook from his inside blazer pocket, he jotted down some notes about the scene, Bryce, and what he discovered when he arrived. They’d be useful in filling out his report.

When he finished, he returned to the kitchen.

“Have a physician take a look at that wound,” Robert said to Bryce. “You may need a prescription for antibiotics. Maybe even a stitch or two.”

Bryce stood, his arms folded tightly across his chest, hands tucked into his armpits, while the paramedics loaded Skyler, now hooked up to an oxygen mask and IV line, onto the stretcher. It was then Radhauser noticed the thick, red rubber band around the toddler’s left wrist. Probably a medical alert bracelet of some sort.

The paramedics pushed the gurney through the living room and down the front steps. Bryce limped after them.

Radhauser followed.

The swirling red light flashed across Skyler’s tiny body as he was loaded into the ambulance.

Radhauser pushed Bryce closer. “Go ahead. You can accompany him to the hospital.” There was no way he would stand around and watch paramedics load Lizzie into an ambulance. He would be inside that rig with her, kneeling on the floor beside her stretcher, holding her hand. Seizing Bryce by the shoulders, he turned him so they were facing. Bryce’s eyes were red and filled with so much pain that Radhauser looked away. “Ride with your son. The hospital may require your consent to treat him.”

“Skyler’s not my son. He belongs to my girlfriend, Dana Sterling. I take care of him while she’s at work.”

“Do you have medical power of attorney?”

“No,” Bryce said, a new flash of fear in his eyes. “Nothing like that.”

Radhauser gripped Bryce’s arm. “You need to get in touch with her. Tell her to call Ashland Hospital immediately, then head directly over there.”

* * *

Dread seeped from his pores as Bryce picked up the receiver to dial Dana at work. All the what ifs darted through his mind. What if he made Scott go to bed and kept Skyler in the living room with him? What if he set the alarm clock every fifteen minutes to check on the toddler? What if he nestled Skyler on the sofa pillow next to him?

If only he could begin this day over and withdraw the furious words he hurled at Dana and Scott. No matter how angry he was, he hadn’t meant for any of this to happen. He loved Skyler as much as a man could love a child. As much as he’d once loved his own daughter.

The heel of his hand had gone numb from clenching the phone. His right index finger continued to sting and throb. He dialed and waited for the hostess to answer.

“I need to speak with Dana.” His voice was even thicker than usual. “It’s an emergency.” He clamped his eyes shut, willed her to be there, and to his relief she answered.

“What is it, Bryce?” A slight irritation lifted her voice. “Why are you calling me here? You know how I—”

“I...I had to,” he stammered. “It’s Skyler. He stopped breathing. I called 9-1-1. They took him to Ashland Hospital, I—”

“Oh my God,” she said, her voice thin with fear.

“I’ll be there to pick you up in five minutes.”

“No,” she said quickly. “Reggie is here. He can drive me to the hospital. You stay there with Scott. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

Before Bryce could respond, Dana hung up.