Page 16 of A Simple Mistake (Deadly Mistakes #1)

SIXTEEN

Liam

Two years ago

The body is wound in a cloth that time has eaten away at.

“I still can’t believe you found this just like that,” Gabriel says. “What even made you think there was a body here?”

“Because I am all-knowing and powerful,” I declare as I watch the team work to carefully uncover the body that’s in the woods behind Jon Davies’ house. There is still no word on the missing wife and son, so I want to see what information I can gather from the old body before I move on.

“Don’t forget that you’re also cocky and narcissistic,” Gabriel teases.

“Thank you. I like that I finally have someone who gets me. My last partner, you know, the one before the one who cried,” I say just as Chris is walking by—I like making sure he knows that his tears will never be forgotten, “was nothing more than a grumpy grouch.”

“Do you ever feel like it’s because he had to work with you?” Matthew asks, apparently bored enough he has to listen in. Doesn’t he have something else to do? Or is everyone relying on me to snap my fingers and point at the culprit?

“Matthew, I have a fun new spot for you that just had a vacancy,” I say as I eye the grave.

“Do you ever feel like your humor is a tad dark?” Gabriel asks.

“Just a tad?” Honestly, if he thinks it’s just a tad, I’m doing quite well pretending to fit in.

“Just a tad?” Matthew repeats. “The man was literally talking about putting me in the grave of a dead person! Is that a tad? I think you’ve been fooled by him somehow.”

I grin, pleased by this power I have to brainwash the innocent Gabriel. “No, Gabriel is a good boy. Aren’t you, Gabriel?”

“I kind of feel like I’m being treated like a dog,” he says as I head closer to the excavation team to get a better look at the body they’d unearthed from behind Jon Davies’ house. The man himself has been taken in and I’m hoping I get the joy of interviewing him, but weirdly, Sgt. Michaels seems to think that I’m not the best choice to talk to people.

The body has obviously been in the ground a while. A guess would have it at about ten years, so the amount of evidence might be minimal at best. Hopefully they can identify the person by their teeth or, if we’re lucky, something even clearer like an ID.

My phone rings and I see that it’s Michaels calling me, so I step back from the scene and pull out my phone to answer the call.

“You still at Davies’ house?”

“I am.”

“We just got an alert. A body has been found where Harper’s Bridge crosses the river.”

“I’m heading there now. Just one body?”

“So far. We’re going to have a team of divers brought in and get a drone sent out to scan the river.”

“On it,” I say as I finish the phone call and wave to Gabriel. When he gets closer, I tell him, “They found a body.”

“Just one?”

“Sounds like it. But if there’s one, the other is likely not far away. Seems like a risky location, though. I get that the river remains high year-round, but why take the chance?”

“Maybe he thought he sank it but messed up?”

“It was all so rushed, which makes me confident the murder was passion driven. He thinks she’s cheating, rushes home to catch her, starts beating her around, son maybe gets involved. He hits one of them too hard then has no choice but to finish off the other.”

“No choice?” Gabriel says. “I’m pretty sure there are a lot of choices in there.”

“Not when you think the world should bend their knees before you.”

“What’s your excuse? No potentially cheating wife, but I’m pretty confident you think even the sun should bow before you.”

“Oh, you misunderstand. I don’t need anyone to bow before me; I really don’t want that much attention on me.”

“Sure, sure. You would have loved to make Donna grovel for eating some of my slice of cake.”

I scowl. “Don’t remind me. I nearly forgot about her.”

“Nearly? A homicide, a buried body, and another body wasn’t even enough to make you forget?”

“My anger runs deep.”

“Of course it does. Do you want me to drive so you don’t accidentally run over Donna on the way out?”

“Is she out here? Is there a possibility of that?”

He pushes me out of the way and gets into the driver’s seat.

“Come on, Gabriel. Do you really think so little of me? You really think I would chance damaging the car? I like this car.”

“You are a monster.”

“And what if I got a bit of whiplash when I hit her? Or the airbag went off and broke my nose? I have a very nice nose.”

“You have a not-so-nice personality.”

“Yet you seem to like me. Weird…”

“I like how intelligent you are. I like learning from you. And I like seeing how not to act with others,” he says, refusing to give me the driver’s seat, so I get into the passenger side.

Gabriel hesitates. “So… umm… I moved here from about an hour away, and am not going to lie… I have no idea where this bridge is.”

“What if it was an emergency? What if I called you and I was like, ‘Gabriel, I’m beneath Harper’s Bridge. You have five minutes to save my life. You are my final hope.’”

“I’d say, ‘Do you think you could send me a pin or share your location with me?’”

“And I’d be like, ‘Killer, hold please while I share my location. Oh, you’d prefer not? You’d prefer to murder me now while my useless partner rushes to the computer to print out some MapQuest documents?’”

“Okay! I’ll… study maps? Drive around? I don’t know what you want from me!”

“Perfection. My partner must show perfection.”

“Perfection is unobtainable.”

I wave toward myself, which makes him laugh.

His look is playfully vicious. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Besides you, it’s unobtainable.”

“Thank you for apologizing. Now head south, and if you tell me you don’t know which way south is, I’m kicking your ass out of the car and becoming a lone wolf.”

“I know where south is. I just need to find some moss growing on a tree first,” he teases before turning the right way.

“So… how many cold cases of missing women do I have to hunt through to find the body from the woods?”

“You mean you haven’t already figured out who she is?” Gabriel asks.

“No, I was too busy thinking about ways to make Matthew fit in the grave.”

“Matthew’s a nice guy! Chris is nice… basically everyone is nice but you.”

“So it definitely sounds like a them problem,” I say as I direct him where to go.

When we arrive at the bridge, I have him pull off the road and into the grass, since there’s not a good spot to park.

“While this isn’t exactly the road Jon Davies would take back to his conference, it’s not far off. It’s not well traveled, and the current is quick,” I say as I get out and hurry down the slope with Gabriel behind me. There are a few officers surrounding the body, but we’re the first detectives on scene. I don’t even have to get too close to confirm that the woman is the one we’re looking for.

“A farmer saw her. Said his herding dog ran off and he chased after her, only to realize she’d noticed the body in the river. He swam out and grabbed the body, said she was stuck on something with a rope, so he cut her free and pulled her out, but it was clear he was too late,” an officer explains.

“Well, if he sank one with a weight, the other might not be too far away,” Gabriel says.

I kneel down next to the dead woman as I examine the wounds on her head. The flow of water rushing past her did a decent job of washing away the blood, but it doesn’t take much to notice the concaved part of her skull. The position of the wound and size makes me think it was caused by a hammer.

But that wound is not alone; there are many areas where the skin is damaged and bruising had taken place beneath it. Were they all right before she died? Or were some older?

Her shirt has worked up, exposing her bare abdomen covered in damaged skin. The issue now is finding proof her husband did it. No one is going to listen to me just because I’m certain it’s him. It’s weird how my beliefs never stand up in court, no matter how confident I am. They always want proof.

It’s not long before others are on the scene, photographing evidence and documenting what they can before the body will be sent over to the medical examiner who will give us more definite answers. The divers also arrive and verify that she’d been tied down with heavy blocks, but there’s no second body. There’s nothing to even signify there was another body down here. No additional blocks in a different area… nothing.

“If it was Davies, did he drop the son somewhere else?” Gabriel asks.

“Possibly,” I say.

“Is there a chance he’s still alive?” Gabriel seems hopeful about this idea.

“What would the father have to gain by keeping him alive but holding him somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “I just…” He falls quiet, reminding me he has too kind of a heart. Really… what’s he even doing in this field?

Finally, his eyes catch mine and with determination, he says, “We’ll figure it out. If it truly was Jon Davies, we’ll find proof.”

Hmm… maybe having a heart doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have the capability to do this job.

I nod. “Let’s head back to the department. If Michaels will allow it, I’d like to speak to Jon Davies.”

“Allow it?” Gabriel questions.

“One time I got a little… snippy with someone I was investigating, and since then, Michaels has gotten a bit… irrational.”

“He’s the irrational one?” Gabriel asks with a grin.

“Your grin doesn’t get you everything in life,” I grumble.

He laughs and I realize that maybe it does.

We’ve already spent too long here since I was interested in seeing what else they could uncover, but there doesn’t seem to be more here for us, so we head back to the car and drive to the department.

Once up to the third floor, I find the sergeant in his office. “Michaels, I’d like to talk to Jon Davies.”

“I was planning on having Killebrew and Fields speak with him again. They already spoke to him once but haven’t gotten much out of him.”

“Donna can’t even hold a legit conversation with her husband who comes twice a week to bitch to her about something mind-numbingly dumb, and Chris cries too easily.”

“Fields cried once ,” Michaels counters. “Your interpersonal skills are… lacking.”

“I have my golden retriever with me,” I say as I jab a thumb back at Gabriel, who gives me a look.

“Excuse me?” Gabriel acts like I might have said something not one hundred percent accurate.

“It’s weird how you almost one hundred percent verify what I was just saying about interpersonal skills in the same breath,” Michaels says.

“He loves it,” I say as I reach over and rub Gabriel’s head like he really is a dog. Of all the animals I could have compared him to, I really did choose a decent one. It’s nothing like the time I announced that our chief reminded me of a bush baby and the hulking six-foot-five man used those bush baby eyes to glower at me for the next week or so before he realized that I feast on the misery of others.

I inform Michaels, “I’ll be so good that you’re going to question if I was abducted by an alien, probed, and returned a different man.”

“Did you have to say any of that out loud?” he asks.

“If you’re offended by what I say out loud, you’d hate to know what I keep to myself,” I say as I give him two thumbs up of reassurance.

He doesn’t look the least bit reassured, but he does let me go talk to Jon Davies.

I step into the room with Gabriel by my side and take a seat as I stare at the man who immediately meets my gaze.

“Did you find my wife and son?” he asks.

“Your wife has been found,” I say, watching for anything that could give him away.

A slip of the mask, a flinch. He’s playing a good game, but I see the way his body turns rigid for a split second before he goes, “Is she alive?”

“I’m sorry to say that your wife didn’t make it,” Gabriel says, jumping up to deliver the news before I can remind Davies that she wasn’t alive when he tied weights to her legs and chucked her off the bridge.

“No! No… no… my son? Did they find William?” He’s looking between both of us now, playing his part to the best of his abilities.

“Not yet, but we will,” I tell him. It’s not a reassurance. It’s a threat.

“Are you sure it’s her?” he asks.

“I identified her, but she’s been taken to the medical examiner who will find answers. I noticed some of the bruises on her appeared older. Where did those come from?”

“I don’t know… maybe work? She didn’t show me anything. I really don’t know.”

“You were asked to record everywhere you drove your car from Thursday evening until Sunday when you called us. Did you do that?”

“Yeah, of course,” he says as he slides the paper over to me. I lay it down on my notebook as he watches me closely. “I just… how heartless do you have to be to see me grieving and still focus on me? I could be out there looking for my son right now. You two could be out there looking for him. And instead, you’re fixated on me? It’s fucking sick.”

I just ignore him as I use my phone to get accurate mileage jotted down.

“Why was your son staying at your house with your wife?” Gabriel asks.

“He drove up to spend time with her.”

“Did you know he was coming up?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Wrong,” I say.

“What the fuck do you mean wrong? We talked about it in a phone call. Can you now wind back time and listen to our phone calls?”

“No, but I can tell you the last time you called William was a week ago. You also gave us permission to search Eleanor’s phone records which show that she asked your son to come over Saturday afternoon, but never said a thing to you. Neither your wife nor your son called you after that. Weird, right? You shouldn’t have given us permission so easily if you wanted to try your hand at lying. Now I love the list. I’m sure it’ll line up quite nicely with credit card transactions. But I’m really struggling to understand where those extra—what? Five hundred miles are from.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your oil. You had it changed right before your trip. Probably kept putting it off before you realized you shouldn’t put nearly five hundred miles on a car that’s needed its oil changed for months. So you took it in, and they wrote down the miles on a nice little sticker in the corner of your windshield. Now what you’ve given me here adds up to the number of miles you should have driven, so where did the extra five hundred miles come into play? That’s weirdly the same distance from the conference center to your house and back again. Go on now, I’d love to hear the reason. This is going to be good.”

Davies hesitates. “This is fucking bullshit. I didn’t kill my wife and son! I would never hurt them! Why don’t you put this effort into finding my son?”

“I am,” I assure him. “I’m going to put all of my effort into it.”

“I want a fucking lawyer, and I want someone else to be looking for William. He could still be alive.”

“Only you would know,” I say.

“Fuck you.”

I get up, leaving him to his rage as Gabriel trails after me. I muse, “I need to find the son…”

“I’m just confused; if someone thinks a place is solid enough to dump one body, why choose a different location to dump another?” Gabriel asks.

“We’ll find the son. And we’ll find proof Davies did it. We’ll make him pay for what he did.”

“I just…” Gabriel catches my arm. “You’ve been in this a lot longer than I have, though I’ve worked as a cop long enough to understand that people can be really fucking horrible. But I just struggle to wrap my mind around someone bashing in the skulls of two loved ones with what we’re thinking could be a fucking hammer and then… playing the part of a victim. How can you even claim to love someone and do something like that? And then not feel any remorse after the fact?”

My mind flashes back to the basement. The sound when her head hit the wall… the blood… I remember thinking that there was so much blood.

“I’m not saying I don’t believe someone could do that. I’ve seen people do horrible things,” Gabriel says, seeming to take my silence as me not understanding him. “I just… I don’t know. It’s so fucked up.”

“You have a kind heart. But no matter how long you’re in this field, no matter how many cases you come across, you will always find situations where you question why someone has done something. There’s nothing wrong with questioning it. That’s what makes you better than me. I’m a cynic. I distrust everyone. I look for the worst in people. But you still try to hope for the best. Don’t lose that.”

“I don’t want to.”

Whatever you do… don’t become like me.