“You thought right. Good job, Mason.”
His chin lifts and he pats my shoulder.
This case is one believed to have been committed in a drug and alcohol-fueled rage. Once you commit murder on this scale involving children, you rattle the badges of a lot of officers and detectives. Finding this son of a bitch should be celebrated. Our in-house profiler warned us he might go on to commit other murders now he had a taste for it.
I enter the adjoining mirrored room to the interview room, joining a few of my colleagues looking through the glass at the scum. He looks clean and well fed. “Has he said anything?” I ask Pierce and Donovan.
“Nope, hasn’t asked for a lawyer, nothing.”
I smirk up at my friend. “A lawyer can’t help him. We have the bastard.”
I tap at the file holding the hard evidence.
I make my way into the interview room and take the seat opposite him. I slap the file down on the table and open it, lifting a piece of paper as if reading it and then let out a low whistle.
“You really did a number on your family, Joey.” I slide a few of the photos of his massacred children towards him.
He glances briefly at them and then back at me. “Who said I did it?”
I laugh, pointing down at the picture. “The evidence. Your daughter had your skin under her nails from where she clawed at you to stop attacking her brother. Your wife had your semen on her legs from you raping her, and your brother had your blood on his hands from walking in and trying to stop you by taking his small switch blade and stabbing you with it.” I look him over for injury. “You seem fine, though. I assume it didn’t go very deep.”
His hand instinctively rubs at his arm but he doesn’t speak.
“You were clumsy,” I continue. “Left your footprints in the blood and tracked it all through the house. The front door was closed with no sign of forced entry and you left one of the murder weapons in your brother’s head with your fingerprints on it.”
He grins and shakes his head. “Couldn’t get the axe out. Our papa always said my brother was thick-skulled.” He sneers.
That’s as good as a full-fledged confession.
Two hours later and all the little sick bastard could say in his defense was, “Bitch deserved it. So did that cunt brother.”
Turns out his wife was partial to the kid brother and Joey was questioning who fathered which kids in a drunken rage. When he convinced himself they were all laughing at him behind his back, he killed them. It started with an argument with his wife who refused his sexual advances. He raped her then killed her. His brother, who was staying with them, heard the commotion and came to her aid, but he failed and was killed with an axe Joey kept under his bed. He then went to the kids’ room with a kitchen knife. Case closed. What a waste. Those three kids were aged between two and eight, and innocent. Another case of the kids paying for the sins of a parent.
I pull out the letter from Ryan’s Doctor and dial the number given. The answer machine beeps and informs me of office hours and an emergency number if I need it. I leave a message letting him know I’ll be there tomorrow then make my way home to my family.
THE WALLS ARE TALL AND daunting, the metal gates loud and heavy, locking me inside. I could have ended up here in Bluewater if my sins were discovered but they never have been. I was good at covering my tracks and exceptional at the job I once used as an outlet for the anger inside me. After witnessing Mel’s soul incinerate in front of me when she found her murdered parents, it changed everything for me. She was so fragile; if I breathed too hard in her direction she would have crumbled into ash in that moment when she discovered the blood bath my brother had left for her. Watching someone else fracture changes a man. I spent eighteen years trying to make up for the absence of the people who brought her into this world, nurtured and raised her into a magnificent woman. Fate can be a cruel bitch but I always felt it was fate that made our worlds collide. Mel was my redemption; she taught me how to live again. My dark side still lingers but I have enough light in my life now that the dark remains as shadows. Mel opened me up to love and once I felt how powerful it can be there was no going back. Numbing the pain and hate doesn’t help when you finally open up and start letting yourself feel, it just makes you realize what a waste it was living frozen all those years.
The guards manning this place remind me of those at a maximum-security prison. I suppose Bluewater is more dangerous than a prison and it’s comforting to know they guard it so well. The building is huge and segregated so the higher risk patients are separated from the less crazy patients. The guy escorting me gestures with his hand to a desk inside the main entrance and says, “Sign in please.”