I reached the street just as the wheels spun back to life, slithering wildly for a grip on the snow-clad surface of the road. The truck slid past me, just missing its former driver. Without thought or plan, I threw my gun into the bed and grabbed the tailgate with both hands, hoping to vault gracefully into the truck and put an end to this frantic idiocy. Instead, I was instantly pulled off my feet, and ended up hanging on for dear life, watching the road speed by below my nose.
Slowly, fighting the pain in my left arm and the lurching motion of the truck, I chinned myself up to the gate and after several attempts managed to get a knee onto the rear bumper. There, hanging on grimly, I paused, gasping for breath.
Chambers was speeding west along Elliot, away from downtown and parallel to the Whetstone Brook. Elliot is only a half mile long before it becomes Williams beyond a four way intersection, and it was only here, where Chambers had to slow briefly, that I was able to hook my leg over the tailgate and begin to work my way forward.
This, however, was still not easy. Chambers had seen me hitch on, and began jerking the steering wheel back and forth, trying to throw me off. Clutching on to the side-rails, my feet wedged against the wheel wells, I impotently watched my gun as it careened around the truck bed like a gravity-resistant pinball.
Such maneuvering, however, was ill-suited to the road conditions, and eventually Chambers overdid it. The truck began sliding sideways down the street, the spinning of its wheels now only exacerbating the loss of control. All thought of catching this man was overwhelmed by the desire to simply survive.
The end of our madcap journey came with merciful grace. Bypassing all guardrails, utility poles, parked cars, and trees, we plowed into a thick, soft, energy-absorbing snowbank. The impact sent me flying through the air like a basketball, but even in mid flight, I was glad to be free of the truck. I landed half in the freezing water amid a thick cluster of dead reeds.
My anger overwhelming any remnants of caution, I scrambled up the stream bank, vaulted over the half-buried hood, and wrenched open the door. Ben Chambers, small and frail, his eyes wide and his sooty forehead smeared with blood, stared at me plaintively.
“Please-don’t hurt me.”
I looked at him in stunned silence, torn between responding and tearing his head off, and finally managed instead, “You’re under arrest.”
28
I emerged from the interrogation room after an hour and a half with Ben Chambers, my adrenaline pumping, the end of the case in sight, finally having heard the answer I’d been hoping for since the night Mary Wallis disappeared.
J.P. Tyler met me in the tiny hallway outside the viewing room, where he’d been videotaping the interrogation. “Get it all?”
“Yup.”
“Do me two favors. Round up Smith, Lavoie, and Stennis for SRT duty, and call Gail at home and have her meet me here. Tell her Mary is still alive and that we’re about to launch an operation to free her.”
I saw Ron sitting at his desk, phone in hand. He swung around at the sound of my voice and pointed at the receiver, “I’m lining up a no-knock warrant for the trailer right now.”
I gave him a thumbs-up and took Dr. Andrews by the elbow as he followed Tyler out of the viewing room. I had asked him to observe the interrogation to give us what insight he could. “Doctor, would you walk with me down to the basement? I’m assembling the Special Reaction Team, and we’ve got to change into our gear downstairs. I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about Junior on the way.”
Andrews looked slightly startled at all the sudden activity. “Of course.”
I steered him out of the squad room and toward the stairs leading down. “Why did he do all this? It made more sense when we thought NeverTom was the crook.”
Andrews smiled slightly. “Don’t sell NeverTom short. He got where he is through a combination of blackmail, corruption, and intimidation that he’s practiced his entire adult life. That and the ghost of their father’s influence was what Ben was reacting against. People thought that after Ben Senior rejected Junior and turned his attention to Tom, Junior happily sought refuge in his books and philanthropy and making more money. In fact, he went into a slow simmer of rejection and envy, building up steam over the years until he finally blew. It was less obvious than NeverTom’s sociopathic personality, which found a therapeutic way to vent itself against political enemies, and in the end, as with anything that’s been penned up for too long, it was much more destructive.
“The classic love-hate twist to it all,” he continued, as I opened the door at the bottom of the stairs for him, “is that Ben set out to get his revenge on his brother by becoming his ally-he’s the one who recognized that more could be made from the convention center than just a little political mileage. To him, it was a way to make a fortune, and ride his brother’s coattails as high up the social ladder as possible, all the while knowing that it was he, and not Tom, who was responsible for that success.”
“But by saying Ben blew his cork, how do you explain the care and time he took in killing Shawna and Milo?” I asked.
Andrews shook his head apologetically. “For Ben, it was a sudden release of sorts, even if it was meticulously planned. He basically took his father’s and brother’s behavior and exaggerated it to make it his own. Where the other two plotted and planned and killed people figuratively, Ben did it in fact. As he said during the interrogation, his killing of Shawna was an experiment. It was a maiden voyage into a new lifestyle. Look at all the complexities of that crime-the Satanist overtones, in case the body was discovered before it totally disintegrated; the fact that he kept Shawna alive for a week so he could show her to Mary Wallis and prove his absolute power. That worked so well, Mary didn’t know Shawna wasn’t still alive until the skeleton was positively identified. And even then, Ben had a plan in place. He not only triggered the Satanist diversion by making an anonymous phone call, but when he grabbed Mary, he threw suspicion onto her by planting Shawna’s wallet in her house, even forcing Mary to put her fingerprints on it.”
“This signature pattern is repeated with the Milo killing. During the interrogation, Ben simply said Milo tried to blackmail Hennessy and him and therefore was taken care of. What he didn’t dwell on was the complex methodology, which again was less appropriate to the task than to satisfying his own psychological needs. Why use rabies? Because it’s arcane, experimental, takes brains to pull off. Anyone could’ve knocked Milo over the head and dumped him in a ditch. He would’ve been frozen solid by morning. But to use rabies was a sign of genius. A genius who needed recognition, of course, which is again why he made another anonymous phone call.
“The same pattern of camouflage and deflection is evident even while he was ostensibly helping NeverTom’s cause,” Andrews continued. “He used his brother’s phenobarbital on Shawna, cut up the rabid raccoon using his brother’s worktable and tools, and made it appear Tom was Eddy Knox’s sponsor at the Keene country club. Not only would all that get Tom into trouble if everything fell apart, but it imbued Ben with a secret power over the very person who had mentally tortured him his entire life.”
I paused near the end of the high, dark, basement hallway we’d been traveling. “Let’s back up a bit. Why did he grab Mary Wallis and put her under lock and key? Why not kill her?”