“You okay to talk now, Mrs. Lowe?” Sully asked and she nodded again but it wasn’t her who talked.
“We found that,” Norm announced, dipping his head toward the medium-sized box on the table beside two untouched Styrofoam cups of coffee, “in the house.”
“And what is that, Mr. Lowe?” Sully asked and Evelyn made a noise that sounded painful, a choked sob, a sob Norm ignored.
“Dennis asked his mother to hold some things at the house. She did. Never told me. I knew about that, well…” he let that hang and Colt watched Evelyn’s face blank so much it was void. One second, she was tearful, the next, her face was a clear slate. She was so good, it only took a second. A defense mechanism, a practiced one. It was then Colt knew Evelyn Lowe lived under a tyrant.
As had Denny.
“I never looked in the box either,” she said quietly. “I just thought it was stuff he and Marie couldn’t hold in their house.”
This earned her another shoulder squeeze from her husband as he reminded her at the same time telling Sully that his wife was an idiot and he himself had not one thing to do with that box or what was going on with his son. “They got five bedrooms in that house, Ehv.”
“Yes, yes, I didn’t think. Stupid of me,” she said quickly.
“After we heard of the goings-on, Evelyn remembered the box,” Norm stated and Colt thought his choice of the words “goings-on” to describe a killing spree was both interesting and sickening, more the last than the first, far more. “She pulled it out, opened it up and showed it to me. That was less than an hour ago. We brought it right here.”
In other words, my son is a psychopathic killer but I’m a decent citizen here to help.
“May I look in the box?” Sully asked and Evelyn pressed her lips together. Norm nodded curtly.
Sully got up and pulled back the flaps to the box. The room went wired as he looked inside. He dipped in his hand and it didn’t have to go very far. Colt could see from his vantage point the box was filled with photos and he knew what they showed. Colt had no reaction to this. It wasn’t surprising and he was finding it was better to store up his reactions for shit that was worth it.
Sully pulled out only a handful. He managed to keep his expression neutral as he flipped through them. Then he put them down on the table and turned to the Lowes.
“That’s a lotta pictures of Feb Owens and Alec Colton,” he remarked.
“Box’s full of ‘em,” Norm agreed amicably.
“Denny take these?” Sully asked.
“I’ve no idea,” Norm answered.
Sully looked down at the box, dug his hand in and pulled out more from the middle, flipping through them he said, “Looks like someone’s been takin’ pictures of Feb and Colt for years.”
“Looks like,” Norm replied.
“You have any idea why Denny would have these?”
Evelyn Lowe made a high-pitched sound in the back of her throat but Norm talked over her, saying, “No idea.”
Sully looked to the woman. “Mrs. Lowe?”
She got another squeeze from her husband, therefore she repeated, “No idea.”
Sully’s face got tight and his eyes rested on Norm’s hand on Evelyn’s shoulder a brief moment before he looked at Denny’s father.
“You think I could talk to your wife in private?”
“No. I. Do. Not,” Norm answered, enunciating each word clearly, helpful citizen a memory in a flash.
“Norm,” Evelyn whispered.
“We’re not suspects in this situation,” Norm told his wife.
“No one said you were,” Sully put in.
It was then Norm drew the line in the sand, showing directly where he and his wife stood and the fact that their son stood on the other side and that was exactly how everyone, including the police, should view it.
He did this by saying, “And we won’t be treated as such.”
“I’m sorry if you feel I’m treatin’ you that way,” Sully sat back down, letting Norm have the dominant position. “Not my intention at all. Just tryin’ to get to the bottom of things.”
“We have no involvement in this,” Norm stated firmly. “Dennis brought the box to the house. We kept it there for him not knowing what it contained. Evelyn says she thinks he brought it over just over a year ago.”
When Feb was back in town. It could be he brought it over because Marie could discover the box and run into Feb or, for that matter, Colt. It was more likely he brought it over because he was making plans to set up even more thorough surveillance of Colt and Feb. With video, he didn’t have to flip through photos nor did he have to court getting caught taking them.
“Can we keep the contents of this box for the investigation?” Sully asked politely.
“Why would we need it?” Norm asked back, happy to be rid of it.
“Thank you, we appreciate you bringing it down,” Sully’s tone had a finality to it.
“Shit,” Sean, one of the newer detectives, said from beside Colt, “he’s lettin’ the mother off the hook.”
“She’s got somethin’,” Mike Haines, another more experienced detective in the unit, muttered from the other side of Sean. “Sul won’t let it go.”
Norm helped his wife out of her seat and Sully rose from his.
As they turned to the door, Sully used a conversational tone that smacked so contradictorily against the words he said that they struck the room with a force that couldn’t be ignored. “You have heard, of course, that Denny attacked another one of Feb Owens’s friends last night. Blade of a hatchet cut into his shoulder, it took forty stitches to close him,” Sully was looking in the box, the Lowes were silent because, of course, they hadn’t heard, and Sully continued as if in afterthought. “Oh, and two unidentified bodies have been found, one man killed early this mornin’ in Oklahoma, appears to be in a rage, not much left of him. The other’s been dead awhile, just discovered this mornin’ in Pueblo, Colorado. He’s got a face left so they’re siftin’ through missing persons.”
“What?” Colt whispered, not having heard this.
“News just came in ‘bout ten minutes before the Lowes showed,” Garrett “Merry” Merrick, another veteran detective, murmured.
Evelyn had frozen, Norm’s face turned from rock to ice.
“‘Course, odds are, we’ll catch him as he’s told us he’s comin’ up here to do the same to Colt. Still, we reckon he’s pretty angry, seein’ as he didn’t get to dispatch his intended victim in Texas. So, we don’t get hold of him beforehand, we suspect the bodies’ll pile up from Oklahoma to here. Takes a coupla days to make that ride, you take time out to murder people. We figure couple more bodies at least. Maybe fathers, maybe brothers, maybe husbands.” Sully shrugged like it didn’t matter much to him. “You see it all in this job, gotta find a way to shut it down.”
“Ehv, let’s get you home,” Norm said to his wife with false courtesy but he didn’t take his glacial gaze from Sully. He knew the game Sully was playing.
Sully was throwing the photos back into the box and flipping back the flaps, muttering, “Helps, sometimes, knowin’ what drives ‘em. Not all the time, mind, but sometimes.”
Colt’s eyes went to Evelyn. She was cracking, plain to see.
Norm’s hand was firm on his frozen wife’s arm. He’d slipped up, bringing her to the Station. She’d either demanded to come, which was unlikely, or she’d been so undone by the news, and thus so fragile, Norm didn’t know what to do with her and he’d made the mistake of allowing her to come, thinking he could keep her under control.
Then again, a mother’s love, even if her son had gone bad, was hard to control. Colt’d seen it over and over. Pete Hollister’s mother was a prime example. That woman knew what her son did to Feb, putting Feb in the hospital, and she stood by Pete, badmouthing Feb along the way.