Silent Justice (7 page)

Christina shrugged off his hand. “Jones, why are you getting so worked up? It’s just another case.”

“Yeah, just another case,” he echoed grimly. “But it could well be our last.”

Half an hour later, Ben had scanned all the papers the woman had brought with her, and worse, had seen all the photographs. He’d heard the woman’s story, at least in miniature. It had been one of the most emotionally wrenching half-hours of his life.

“I’m beginning to understand why my office manager didn’t want me to talk to you.”

“I understand the difficulties,” Cecily said. “But I think it’s important. We can’t let something like this happen.”

“I agree,” Ben said, “but you have to realize that the odds against us are staggering.”

“I’m not going to back off just because it won’t be easy.”

“There are other concerns as well. Important ones. I’ve spent most of my career working in the criminal courts. Sure, I’ve done some civil work along the way, but with a case of this magnitude … you might be better off with a different firm. A bigger firm.”

“I’ve been to all the big firms,” she explained. “In Tulsa and in Oklahoma City. They all said no, because—”

“I know why they said no.” Ben gingerly laid the photos down on his desk

“If you’ll agree to take us on, I’ll help in any way I can. I’ll do anything you want.”

“I know.”

“So?” She leaned forward eagerly. “Will you do it?”

Ben drew in a deep breath, then slowly released it. It seemed like an eternity before he answered, both to Cecily and to Ben himself. “I want to meet the other parents.”

He had waited long enough. The lights in the house had been out for more than an hour now. There had been no sounds, no movement, not the slightest indication that anyone was awake. True, it might be safer to wait another hour or so; it was only eleven o"clock. But he was ready now, and when he was ready, he was ready. It was difficult to explain. It was a tingling at the base of his spine, an itching at the back of his eyeballs. A sixth sense, if you will. It was like that passage in the Bible, in Ecclesiastes: There was a time for everything.

This was the time to kill.

Quietly, using maximum stealth, he crept out of the alleyway between houses toward the front door of a large two-story Tudor-style home. He kept to the shadows; only his piercing green eyes shone in the darkness. He tiptoed up the steps to the front door.

Which was locked. As he had known it would be. He had learned some time ago that the key to success in this world was advance research. He had planned this outing well, well enough to know that the door would be locked. He also knew how to get around that.

From an inside coat pocket he withdrew a palm-size glass cutter. He attached the suction cup to the window panel on the left side of the door, close to the lock. He extended the string to its full length, then carefully drew a circle with the diamond stylus. He repeated the motion, again and again, cutting a smooth, round section of glass. When that was finished, he grasped the handle on the suction cup and removed the circular section of glass.

Voilà!
Smooth as a baby’s bottom.

He reached through the new opening in the glass and slid out the chain lock. He gave the doorknob a little twist, popping open the lock.

There was still the matter of the dead bolt. Reaching inside his coat once more, he removed a stainless steel lock pick. He had acquired this baby during his last trip to D.C. He loved it. It resembled a Swiss army knife, except the various blades were all picks designed for a variety of different locks. He chose the two most appropriate for this door and started to work.

Two minutes later, he was inside. The lights were out, but moonlight streamed through the bay windows, making it easy to find his way around. He located the staircase almost immediately. As he knew, all the bedrooms were upstairs.

There were three people in the house, not counting himself: Harvey, Harvey’s wife, and their fifteen-year-old son, the junior high track star. At the top of the stairs, he quietly crossed over to the first bedroom, carefully creeping, to use Sandburg’s phrase, on tiny cat feet. He soundlessly pushed open the door.

The boy was asleep in bed, on top of the covers, wearing nothing but a ratty pair of gym shorts. He had no grudge against this boy, and there was nothing the boy could tell him. Unfortunately, the kid was young and strong, and if he awoke during the subsequent proceedings, there was a tremendous possibility that he could create problems. It was an unacceptable risk.

The man reached into his overcoat pocket and this time withdrew a Sig Sauer .357. He walked to the edge of the bed, aimed it at the boy’s head, and fired.

Bang-bang,
he thought, adding the sounds his silencer-equipped gun did not. You’re dead.

The boy twitched spasmodically as the bullet hit his skull, like a laboratory frog touched by an electrode. After that, he settled down, never to move again.

The man stood for a moment, admiring his handiwork. There was very little blood, since the boy had died immediately. The only suggestion of how he had met his demise came from the almost perfectly round red circle in the center of his forehead. It was a rather attractive addition, in its own way. Ornamental. Like something that might be required by an Eastern religion or something.

But enough ruminating. He had more work to do. He turned and moved rapidly out of the boy’s bedroom.

Too rapidly, as it happened. His right leg caught on a metal trash can, knocking it over. It clattered down on the hardwood floor. Not a huge noise, but in this absolutely tranquil house, it seemed deafening.

He heard a rustling sound at the other end of the hallway, in the other bedroom. Someone was awake, which was unfortunate.

He raced down the hallway, caution to the wind. It didn’t matter whether they heard him now; they knew he was coming. He flung open the bedroom door, his gun raised and poised, ready to go.

There was a woman sitting in the bed, slightly upright, her head resting against several large pillows. She had dark hair and a hard set to her jaw. Her eyes were open.

The man knew that she was Harvey’s wife. He also knew that she was an invalid, that she could only move slowly, and barely that. She wasn’t going anywhere.

He approached the bed, keeping his gun pointed at her brain. He didn’t stop until he stood directly in front of her at the foot of the bed.

“Where’s Harvey?” he said, gun still at the ready.

The woman stared back at him with cold eyes. “He’s out of town.”

He could still see the slight depression on the other side of the bed. A hand to the sheets told him they were still warm. “Tell me where he is.”

“Cincinnati,” she replied. “He’s staying at a hotel. I can’t think of the name. Saint Something or other.”

He shot her in the kneecap. After the initial shock subsided and her cries of pain diminished enough that he could be heard, he aimed his gun at her other kneecap and asked her again. “Where’s Harvey?”

Needless to say, she told him.

T
HE OTHER PARENTS GATHERED
in Ben Kincaid’s office shortly after noon. Their hometown, Blackwood, was in Tulsa County, a thirty-minute drive from downtown Tulsa, and they all agreed to come when Cecily called them.

“There were eleven?” Ben said, as he studied the faces before him. Cecily had told him there were others, but he never dreamed there could be so many. “Eleven.”

It was true. Eleven sets of parents, all of whom had recently lost a child between the ages of eight and fifteen to leukemia. For more than two hours, Ben listened to their stories, all told simply and undramatically, and all of them heart-wrenching just the same.

Cecily told Ben about her son, Billy, how he had been diagnosed with leukemia when he was twelve, how they’d fought it with drugs and radiation and chemotherapy, twice pushing the cancer into remission, only to lose finally at the end of a struggle that took more than two years. She told him about her last frenzied race to the hospital, how Billy had died during the drive, how she had attempted to revive him, crying and pleading, all to no avail.

“I tried everything I knew to bring him back. Everything. I would have gladly changed places with him, given my life for his. But it didn’t help. My baby boy was gone. And there was nothing I could do about it.”

Margaret Swanson told Ben about her son Donald, who was a star soccer player at Will Rogers Elementary. When the bruises first began to appear, Margaret assumed they were sports injuries; after all, soccer was a rough-and-tumble sport. When they didn’t go away, she began to suspect other causes. Their ordeal lasted almost three years. Donald endured more than a hundred blood tests, more than two dozen bone marrow aspirations. He spent the entire last year of his life in the hospital. But the end result was the same.

“Donald begged me to let him go home, to let him play soccer again, but I always said no. I still held out hope, you see. I still pretended to myself that he might recover. So I made him stay in the hospital, where he was miserable. Now I’d give anything to turn the hands of the clock back, to let him go out and kick the ball, even just once. To give him one tiny moment of happiness before he was gone.”

Ralph Foley had a simpler tale to tell. He and his wife hadn’t been put through the protracted series of treatments and therapies, advances and setbacks that the other parents had endured. The first warning sign they received that Jim was in danger came when he developed a persistent cough. Three months later, Jim was dead.

“People kept telling me I was lucky—lucky that the inevitable end had come so mercifully fast. I don’t feel lucky. Even now, I can’t believe Jimmy is gone. It was all too quick, too unreal. One day, you have a healthy ten-year-old boy, and the next, he’s buried in a hole in Meadowland Cemetery. Things don’t really happen like that, do they?” There was a tremble in his voice, the advance guard for the tears that began streaming down his face. “It can’t be over so fast, can it? They can’t take the most precious thing in your life and just … and just …”

He never managed to finish his sentence.

Ben listened to those stories and all the others. Each time he thought he had heard the worst, he found out he was wrong. Rarely in his life had he sat in a room in which the sense of tragedy was so palpable. These were grieving parents, mothers and fathers who had poured their hearts and souls into raising their children, only to lose them due to something entirely outside their control. There could be nothing worse than that, Ben thought. Nothing at all.

When the stories were done, Ben asked a few simple questions. “How did you all come together?”

Cecily answered first. Ben gathered she was their unofficial leader. “I got some names from Billy’s pediatrician, after his first relapse. He wanted us to form a support group, but I never called the others. I was too busy trying to save my boy’s life. After Billy was gone, I met a priest from the local Episcopal church. Father Richard Daniels. I wasn’t Episcopalian, or even particularly religious. In fact, at that point in time I probably felt less religious than at any time in my life. But he was a comfort. He knew what I needed to hear—in part because he had been through this before. He told me about some of the other parents in town who had lost their children. Before long, we started getting together regularly to talk about what had happened—and what we were going to do about it.”

“Cecily’s been the ramrod behind this since day one,” Ralph Foley explained. “She’s the one who refused to just take it. She kept saying all these leukemia deaths in the same area couldn’t be a coincidence. Something had to be causing it.”

“What do your doctors say caused it?” Ben asked.

“They all say the same thing,” Jim answered. “That no one knows what causes leukemia.”

“But I wasn’t prepared to accept that,” Cecily said. “It was just too coincidental. Look at this.”

She unfolded a map of the small city of Blackwood. On the map, she had penciled an
X
where each of the deceased children had lived. They were all congregated at the north end of the city, all within about five square miles of one another.

“Leukemia is a very rare disease,” Cecily continued. “And yet here were eleven cases, all clustered together at the north end of a small town. And you want to tell me that’s just a coincidence? A statistical anomaly? No way.”

“Then what caused it?”

“That’s what I didn’t know. At first, I thought maybe there was some kind of virus going around. I had read that there was a type of leukemia cats got that was transmitted by a virus. But that wasn’t the kind of leukemia Billy had. So then I tried to think of something all the boys and girls who died shared. Most of them went to the same school—but not all. Most of them played sports—but not all. Then I tried to think of things that were universal that everyone shared. Like the air.” She paused significantly. “Or water.”

“Did you share your theories with the rest of the group?”

Margaret Swanson answered that one. “She certainly did. We all thought she was crackers.” She glanced quickly at Cecily. “Nothing personal. But we did. We knew she was struggling to accept her son’s death. We all were. But this seemed a strange way to go about it. She was talking about hiring scientists, suing the city. We didn’t want any part of it.”

Christina leaned forward. “What changed your mind?”

“This.” Cecily reached into her oversized purse and retrieved a folded newspaper. “This is the front page of the
Blackwood Gazette
from about four months ago. See for yourself.”

Ben took the paper from her. The headline story, in bold black letters, proclaimed:
POISON POOL FOUND IN BLACKWOOD AQUIFER
.

Ben quickly scanned the article. A reporter named David Daugherty had discovered a half-buried pool, half an acre in size and about four feet deep, of contaminated water. The pool was connected to a ravine, which in turn fed the Blackwood water aquifer. In the water, the reporter found traces of arsenic, chromium, lead, and other heavy metals. The pool was uncovered by a construction crew in the process of laying the foundation for a new apartment complex. Ben also saw a line toward the end of the article that Cecily had underlined in red.
Arsenic is believed to be a carcinogen,
it said,
even in small doses.