Too Close to Home

“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-”