What Strange Creatures (18 page)

I’m a bit of a compulsive picker. Not like scab picking or nose picking, thankfully. Knitted things, mostly. Anything with little knots or ties—I have to untie them. Particularly when I’ve got some stress going on. And those chunky hippie gloves—they’re full of tight little knots on the inside. Brendan had given me the pair at our first Christmas. I’d lost the right one years ago but kept the left around for picking. The thumb and palm were full of holes that I’d untied and retied last winter.

So now I set to work picking at the middle finger—a couple of tight knots right at the tip. I listened to two undergrad girls chatting two seats away. Both of them were pretty in a button-nose sort of way. Both of them had their hair done up in beautifully messy ponytail buns of the sort I’ve never been able to pull off without looking like Bertha Rochester.

“I LOVE pizza. I mean, REAL pizza,” the smaller of the two girls was saying. “But I can’t eat that dining hall stuff. Not AGAIN. And I’m SO sick of SALAD bar. I’m NOT doing it tonight. Not TONIGHT. I can’t WAIT to go down to Annie’s and get a bagel with TONS of cuuuh-RE
AM
cheese.”

“Oh, choke on it,” I muttered, then bit at the stubborn middle-finger knot.

I heard a chuckle behind me. I turned and saw Zach Wagner. At least I remembered to remove the glove from my mouth before greeting him.

“Hi,” he said. “How are you holding up?”

“With respect to what?” I asked. I wondered how much he knew.

“With respect to what’s been happening.” Sinking into the chair across from mine, he lowered his voice. “I heard about them putting off setting your brother’s bail.”

So he knew everything. Of course. He read the newspapers.

“I’m surprised you showed up, then.” I tried not to mumble the words.

“What makes you say that?”

All I could do was shake my head.

Zach leaned forward, clutching his hands together and still speaking softly. “I haven’t made a judgment on your brother—I hope you know that. I’m just surprised you still care about Kim’s project . . . under the circumstances?”

“I don’t think the circumstances and Kim’s project are unconnected.”

Zach touched one of his bushy eyebrows, looking embarrassed for me. “How’s that?” he asked.

“I think Kim walked into something more dangerous than she realized, and it maybe got her killed.”

Zach nodded slowly, letting this sink in as he leaned back in his chair.

“I have to be honest with you, Theresa. I’ll help you in any way I can, but I don’t want to get your hopes up. I don’t think anyone cared much about Kim’s project. Besides Kim.”

“Would you be surprised to hear, then, that Dustin Halliday was sending her threatening texts the day she disappeared?” I asked.

Zach’s expression changed from pitying to surprised. “Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“Like, ‘I’m gonna kill you’ kinds of threats? Or more in the manner of ‘Girl, I’m gonna unfollow you on Twitter’? What are we talking about here?”

“He was definitely angry at her about something. Swearing. He seemed . . . insulted. Maybe she’d asked him something that offended him. Or that made him feel threatened. And there was a reference to some kind of footage.”

“How do you know this?” Zach asked.

I explained about Kim’s phone.

“Does she have e-mail on her phone? Was he e-mailing her, too?”

“It’s not a smartphone, so I don’t know.”

Zach frowned. “I hadn’t realized she’d tracked him down. I knew she wanted to, but I thought she’d have trouble.”

“Because?”

“Well, when I was interviewing him for the book . . . he didn’t seem stable to me. I’d felt pretty strongly he might have some trouble adjusting once he got out. He didn’t seem like someone who’d get a nine-to-five and a listed home phone number.”

“Unstable? How unstable? Like . . . violent? Remind me why he was in juvenile detention?”

“Drug distribution. Habitual. I think it was, like, his fifth offense. Violent? Not in my brief encounter with him. Troubled for sure. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’d be violent.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. I was vaguely disappointed by this answer. “Now, why was Kim so interested in Dustin? Just because he’d been involved in a Donald Wallace case, too?”

“And because he thought his mother was unjustly convicted.” Zach shrugged. “That was my impression.”

“It seems like he talked about that when you interviewed him for the book. His belief that his mother was innocent.”

Zach nodded. “A little. I tried to put in enough about that to show the source of some of Dustin’s emotional difficulties, without letting the murder case overshadow that whole chapter. When Dustin would talk about it, he was very convincing. But then when I followed up on a couple of things—like this idea that there were a black guy and a white guy partnered up and going on a crime spree in his neighborhood, robbing a convenience store that week or whatever . . . it’s not true. Yes, there was a holdup in town that week, but it was committed by a white kid acting alone, strung out on drugs.”

“Did you mention this to Kim?”

“Yeah, we talked about it. She said she wanted to talk to Dustin herself.” Zach pulled an opened bag of peanut M&M’s out of his coat pocket. “Have you let the police know? About Dustin harassing Kim?”

“No, not yet,” I said. “Did she mention to you some ‘special footage’ she had?”

“
Special
footage?” Zach repeated.

“She mentioned to some other journalist that she had special footage. Did she mention that to you?”

Zach reached two fingers into the M&M’s bag and drew out one orange candy. He bit off half of the M&M, leaving the bottom half—with peanut attached—still sitting delicately between his fingers, like a tiny hatched egg. He stared at it for a moment, then ate it.

“Actually . . .
yes.
By then I was trying to distance myself from the project, but yes. She was going on about some old VHS tapes she got or something. It sounded a little wacky. I have to admit I . . . told her I had a meeting to get to, the last time we spoke.”

Zach offered me the bag of candy. I shook my head.

“I kicked her out of my office,” he continued. “Pulled the snooty-professor card, I’m sorry to say. I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, with my book’s deadline approaching. And I was just tired of her coming to me with this weird shit. Is the other journalist you’re talking about Janice Obermeier?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Because I gave her Janice’s name and number. It was a sort of passing of the buck, to be honest. I wasn’t really sure Janice would be interested, but she
does
do more political stuff than me.
And
more sensationalistic material sometimes.”

“Did Kim tell you anything about these old tapes?”

“Something about when she was a kid. Footage of herself as a kid, I think? It didn’t sound like anything important.” Zach began to probe his M&M’s bag again—maybe looking for a particular color.

I took a breath. “What if she had footage of herself and one other underage witness being questioned by Donald Wallace and his assistant in 1992?”

Zach’s hand froze in his M&M’s bag. “What’re you saying?”

“What if Donald Wallace’s assistant had this footage in her private possession and gave it to Kim recently?”

“Really?”
To my satisfaction, Zach looked genuinely intrigued.

“Yes. You would consider
that
important, right?”

Zach returned a brown M&M to the bag and looked thoughtful.

“Don’t worry about getting my hopes up,” I added. “Just say what you think.”

Zach leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. “Well, it would depend on a couple of things.”

“Like what?”

“Like if this footage was used in Andrew Abbott’s trial, for one.”

“I don’t know that yet.”

“And if there’s anything in it that would make Donald Wallace look bad.”

“I don’t know that either. I don’t have the footage. I only know that Kim had it.”

“Now,
that’s
interesting. How do you know this? Did Jeff tell you this?”

“No,” I said. “Someone else did.”

“Maybe you ought to tell Jeff’s lawyer. Does Jeff
have
a lawyer yet?”

“Yeah. So now, when you say you don’t think anyone cared about what Kim was doing . . .”

“Yeah. You got me. I didn’t realize she had anything like
that.
”

“Right. So with that in mind . . .”

“I’m not gonna suddenly say someone cared, Theresa. I’m not gonna say it was tied to her death. But it makes it a hell of a lot more complicated, for sure. I wonder how far Kim went with this. If she got Donald Wallace’s assistant to take her seriously, then she got further than I thought.”

“I think Donald Wallace may have known about her,” I offered. “Or at least some of Donald Wallace’s people did.”

Zach looked puzzled. “What makes you think so?”

I was too embarrassed to mention my conversation with Kyle at Carpet World. “Just conjecture,” I murmured. “Listen, I wanted to ask you a couple more things about contacting Dustin.”

Zach twisted his M&M’s bag closed. “Do you think he’s somehow connected to this business with the assistant?”

“Oh. Well, no. I hadn’t thought of that. Whatever else was happening, it looks like Dustin was angry with Kim. Everything else aside, it seems worthwhile to get to the bottom of that. How do you think Kim tracked her down?”

Zach shrugged. “She came to me for contact information, but I didn’t have it. The best I could do was give her some fairly recent information about the brother. Trenton Halliday.”

“How recent?”

“Well, I had a bit of contact with him when the book came out. He wrote me to thank me for portraying his brother in a fair way. It surprised him, I guess. Anyhow, we ended up having a couple of beers. But that was a few years ago now. I told her I thought he still worked at the same cable company, and I guess she found him through that. But it turned out to be a dead end, she said—that Trenton hadn’t seen his brother in more than a year. So I have to assume she found Dustin some other way.”

“Wasn’t there also a teacher that Dustin was close to?”

“Sharon Silverstein?” Zach nodded. “You could try her, too, yes. I think I might still have her e-mail address. So I could send that to you. Doesn’t seem likely, though, that he’d keep in touch with an old teacher but not his brother.”

“Well, you never know. Maybe there’s bad blood between the brothers. And how about Dustin’s little friend?”

“His little friend?” Zach raised an eyebrow.

“I forget his name. I’m grabbing at straws here anyway, but he had this friend in juvenile detention that was mentioned in your book.”

“Oh. Right. Anthony. You know, often those relationships don’t last after the kids get out. That was my experience anyway. I didn’t stay friends with any of the kids I met when I was . . .” Zach trailed off and shrugged.

I decided not to make him finish his sentence, since it was clearly an awkward subject. “Anthony wasn’t his real name, was it?”

“No. Only two kids used their real names. Dustin and one other kid.”

“Why didn’t you simply change all their names?”

“I left it up to them. Dustin was a special situation, because his mother’s case was so well known anyway. The details would’ve been recognizable to a lot of readers.”

“And therefore he didn’t want his name changed?”

“He was an odd one. He said he’d
only
participate if I used his real name. Isn’t that weird?”

“I guess.”

Zach opened his bag of candy again. “Dustin had an interesting spirit. He was articulate, in his own frenetic way.”

He pulled out a brown M&M and followed the same procedure as before—carefully bit off the top half of the chocolate, leaving a peanut with a cap, examining it, eating it. Was he inspecting each peanut for quality? It was cute, in a woodland-creature sort of way.

“I got some flak for putting a kid with such a sensationalistic story in the book,” Zach added with a shrug, “because it supposedly detracted from the main issue. But it made for good variety in the book. You don’t want everyone’s story to sound the same.”

“No,” I said. “No, I suppose you don’t.”

I wondered how
my
stories would sound, were I a student in Zach’s class. Would they sound exactly like my brother’s? A dozen variations on,
We’re Battles. What chance did we have?

“Anyway, did you tell Jeff’s lawyer yet? What you’ve been up to? What you’ve found so far?”

“I have yet to determine if he’ll think this line of inquiry will be useful.”

“I see,” Zach said. “Well, I’m sure he’ll find it interesting. Particularly the stuff you’re telling me about the assistant and the footage. You really ought to tell him that.”

I nodded. We were both quiet for a moment.

“Listen, can I buy you a coffee or something?” Zach offered.

“No thanks. I’m fine. Too upset for caffeine, actually.”

“Now, can I ask . . . how’s your brother holding up?”

“Hard to say,” I answered. I didn’t feel like talking much about Jeff. Even if Zach had spent a little time in a correctional facility himself. “He’s kind of quiet when I visit him.”

Zach was distracted by my hands. “What’re you knitting?” he wanted to know.

I shoved the glove between my thigh and the chair.

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m not knitting.”

His eyebrows crinkled inward as he nudged at the bridge of his glasses. Probably it was difficult to make appropriate small talk with the sister of an accused murderer.

“Um. Do you still have Kim’s dog? Does her family know you have him?”

Well played,
I thought. Relevant but not too painful.

“Maybe. I saw them at the arraignment. What, was I going to go up to them in the courtroom and be like, ‘Listen, folks—I know this is kinda weird, but can you come pick up the dog?’”

“Right.”

I hesitated. “I had a couple more questions for you about Kim’s project, actually.”

“Sure. Don’t know how much I can answer, though.”

“Okay. Well, did Kim ever mention Kyle to you? Kyle Spicer?”

“Kyle Spicer? No. A relation to Jenny, I assume?”