A Matter of Trust

Chapter 42





Charlie was just opening a big manila envelope holding an accident report he had ordered when his phone rang.

“Detective Carlson.”

“It’s Mia. I just finished questioning the two boys about Darin’s death in front of the grand jury. Reece Jones took the Fifth, but Brandon Shiller answered all my questions. He admitted to harassing and physically abusing Darin, and he also implicated Reece.”

“That all sounds good.” So why did her voice sound so shaky?

“There’s one problem, Charlie. He says neither he nor Brandon hacked Darin’s Facebook. He said it was Jeremy Donaldson.”

“Jeremy?” Even as he phrased it as a question, Charlie knew in his bones that it was really a statement.

“I want to reinterview him.”

“In front of the grand jury?”

“If I send him a target letter, he might lawyer up—pull a Reece and never admit to anything,” Mia said. “But I felt like you and I made a connection with Jeremy. He might still be willing to talk to us.”

He wondered if she was right. “I’ll call his mom and see if we can go over there as soon as school lets out. I also think I’ve managed to locate Seth Mercer, Willy Mercer’s dad. The last report is that he’s living in a trailer park between here and Tacoma.”

Less than an hour later Charlie and Mia were in Jeremy’s living room. On the coffee table was a tray of chocolate chip cookies. But today not even Mia was eating them.

“So did you get those guys?” Jeremy asked. “Brandon and Reece and the rest of them?” He ran his thumbs up and down the outside seams of his pants.

“Actually, Jeremy,” Charlie said, “we’re here because we’re wondering if you’ve told us the whole truth.” He didn’t say anything more. Silence could be a more powerful weapon than any accusation. To someone who was feeling guilty, it could be nearly unbearable.

“I don’t know what you mean.” The kid’s legs began to jig up and down. “I told you what I know. About how those guys beat Darin up and stuff.”

Charlie and Mia didn’t move, didn’t speak. They hadn’t planned this tactic in advance, but Charlie could feel Mia settling into the silence along with him.

The kid bit his thumbnail, scrubbed his hands across his face, raked his fingers through his hair. “Is this about Darin’s Facebook page?”

Again they gave him no answer, just kept their eyes fixed on his face. And it was their calm expressions that broke him.

When he spoke next, his voice was high and hesitant. “Look, I just wanted to teach him a lesson. That’s all. I didn’t think it would go as far as it did. And I never, ever, ever thought he would kill himself.” His voice broke.

“Tell us what happened,” Mia said in a soft voice.

“See, Darin came over to my house this summer. I guess he thought we were still friends. But we really don’t have anything in common anymore. I tried to tell him that he needed to change the way he acted. Maybe in middle school everybody accepted it if he wore blue sequined pants that he got at the thrift store, you know, ’cause people said, well, that’s just Darin. But I knew high school was going to be different. Kids from four different middle schools go there, and not everyone was going to be so understanding. I told Darin he had to try to be more normal. Even if he was acting.” His eyes swung from Mia’s face to Charlie’s. “You can do it, you know? You just watch how other people do things, and you do what they do. You don’t stand out. You don’t make a fool of yourself. And you don’t get beat up.”

Old memories bubbled up in Charlie, but he tried to ignore them. His high school years were long behind him now, but there were times the memories were as fresh as newly spilled blood.

Jeremy twisted his hands together. “But Darin wouldn’t listen to me. I mean, he wore that rainbow-striped scarf the very first day of school. And a few days later, when he saw me in the hall, he threw his arms around me and gave me this big hug.” At the memory, color rose in his cheeks. “Everybody stared. Guys don’t hug. Darin should have known that! So I decided to teach him a lesson. See, when he was here that one day over the summer, my mom said I had to take the garbage and recycling out to the curb before the truck showed up. So I said Darin could use my computer to check his Facebook. Later I realized that it saved his password.”

“So what did you do to his Facebook?” Mia asked.

“I posted some stuff. You know, like I was really Darin. I thought I could show him the way things were going. I thought he would notice and change how he was acting. But he didn’t. So the next day I made it worse. I know I shouldn’t have.” His hands twisted on his lap. “But then some other kids found out about it and started talking about it at school. Everyone was looking at his page and commenting on it and sharing it on other people’s pages. But you have to believe me, I didn’t know Darin would kill himself.” Jeremy’s voice cracked. “He always seemed so happy and clueless.”

“But wasn’t there a reason that Darin didn’t know?” Mia’s blue eyes were flinty. “Why wasn’t he notified when people posted on his wall?”

In a small voice Jeremy said, “Because I turned off notifications.”

“And you unfriended his close friends, like Shiloh and Rainy.”

He nodded and hung his head.

How was Darin supposed to learn his lesson if Jeremy had systematically eliminated any way that he might?

“Of course I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known what was going to happen. And I feel terrible.” He raised his head. “But it’s not all my fault. Darin just wouldn’t play along. He wouldn’t even try to fit in. And all those other things that happened to him—I didn’t do them. I never hit him. I never pushed him down. I never threatened him. I never called him names. All I tried to do was to give him some advice about how he needed to change. But he just wouldn’t—”

“You mean he wouldn’t be the same as everyone else,” Mia said flatly.

“Isn’t that the definition of normal?”

She sighed. “Look, Jeremy, there’s one more thing I’m going to need you to do for me. I need you to go before the grand jury and talk about what you know. That would be about the assaults the other boys made on Darin. It would also be about what happened with his Facebook page.”

Charlie noticed that she had switched to using the passive voice, as if the Facebook account had somehow managed to hack itself.

“Will they understand that I didn’t know he would kill himself?”

“You can tell them that yourself, Jeremy. You can explain it to them just like you did to us.”

On their way out, Mia told Jeremy’s mother that her son would need to go before the grand jury. Charlie waited for her to object or say she wanted to get a lawyer, but she kept on chopping vegetables for some kind of stew and nodded.

How much did she know about what her son had done? Charlie wondered as he drove them to the trailer park that was Seth Mercer’s last known address. How much did she want to know? His eyes focused on the road in front of him, but his mind was still back in the cheerful blue-and-green living room with the cowering kid at its center. Jeremy had done what he thought he had to do. When you were afraid of being bullied, sometimes the best thing to do was to become a bully yourself.

Mia’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Charlie, every time we talk to these kids about what happened to Darin, I can see it on your face.”

His shoulders tensed and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. “What?” There was no way she could see anything, guess anything, tell anything. That part of Charlie had been buried long ago. “Did something happen to you when you were in school?” Her voice was soft, coaxing, nearly maternal. “Were you picked on?”

Charlie knew Mia wouldn’t stop asking questions until he told her the truth. And he found himself wanting to give it to her. To prove to her that she hadn’t been wrong about him. His lips twisted into a bitter smile. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re right that Darin’s case brings back bad memories. But you’re wrong about what they’re of.” He took a deep breath. “The truth is, Mia, that in high school I was the bully. I was my high school’s Reece Jones.”

Her eyes went wide. “What—what do you mean?”

“When I was in high school, things happened.” Charlie heard himself minimizing, using the passive voice himself, and forced out the truth. “I made them happen. I didn’t get my growth spurt until I was a senior. So what do you do when you’re six inches shorter than everyone and you dress in clothes from the thrift store? I had already been jumped a couple of times. I decided that the best way to protect myself was by hurting other people first. I figured if I hurt them, they would be too scared to hurt me.” His voice roughened. “And you know what? It worked.”

The rest of the drive to the trailer park was completely in silence. Charlie told himself it didn’t matter if Mia had lost every shred of respect she had ever had for him. He was sure it hadn’t been a lot to begin with.

Twenty minutes later he checked the address again to make sure that this trailer was the one where Seth Mercer lived. If these homes in the Lonely Pines Park had ever been mobile, that had been years in the past. The one Mercer lived in was baby blue, about twenty feet long, with four tiny windows. Topping the flat white roof was a rusting TV antenna. Living in the trailer would be like living in a tin box.

They got out of the car, still not speaking. Charlie knocked on the front door. It sounded hollow and flimsy, barely protection from the elements, let alone from anyone who really wanted to get inside. Mia stood behind him on the cement slab porch, which was set off by a six-foot-long wrought-iron railing painted white.

“Who is it?” a man’s voice growled.

“Seattle Police. We’re looking for Seth Mercer.”

After a pause the man said, “Okay. Just give me a minute.”

Time stretched out. Surely longer than a minute. Charlie was just turning toward Mia when the door began to creak open.

“Took you guys long enough.” The man had three days’ growth of silvery beard and was dressed in jeans and a red-plaid flannel shirt. But it wasn’t his words or his appearance that drew Charlie’s attention.

It was the rifle in his hands. The rifle leveled right at Charlie’s chest.

Charlie shouted, “Gun!” He pushed Mia sideways with one hand as he drew his Glock with the other. “Take cover!”