The Murder House Read online

  My training comes to me by instinct, legs spread, knees bent, weight evenly balanced, fists raised. Noah makes a move toward me, but I jab with my left, connecting with his nose, straightening him up for a moment, then follow with my right hand, my knuckles catching on his teeth. His head snaps to the right, but he recovers quickly—more quickly than I would have thought—and lunges toward me, this time with his head down, not making the same mistake twice. My left leg shoots up for a kick, but I’m off my game, disoriented myself, and he’s too fast, too athletic. His shoulder plunges into my midsection and sends me spiraling backward, he along with me. We land hard and I lose my wind.

  “Who are you?” he spits, straddling me now, his palms pinning my shoulders. “What the hell are—wait—you’re—you’re that cop—”

  In the moments it takes me to recover my breath, I bring up my right knee and find my backup piece on the ankle holster. I remove it and shove it into his rib cage.

  “Get off me now,” I say.

  The pressure eases off my shoulders. My left arm free, I shove my palm against his chest and knock him backward, until I’m out from under him. I get to my feet with some effort, my gun trained on him, a tidal wave of adrenaline coursing through me.

  “I didn’t know you were a cop,” Noah says, panting, touching the cuts on his face. “Aren’t you supposed to announce who you are?”

  But I’m not a cop tonight. Tonight, I’m a niece. The niece of a dear, sweet man who was shot five times in the extremities and speared with a hot poker.

  “You okay?” he says to me. “I’ve never hit a woman in my—”

  “Shut up!” I hiss. I move a step closer to him. “You killed all of them. Say it. Say it right this second, right this second, or I’ll shoot.”

  As my eyes adjust in the semidarkness, I see Noah more clearly, a man in his boxers, crouched at the knees; I see the whites of his eyes.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.

  I drive my shoe into him like I’m kicking a field goal, catching arms and knees and maybe his chin. I see him fall to the floor. I see other things, too. Uncle Lang, bobbing me up and down on his leg when I was a child. Tearing up at my cadet graduation, telling me how proud my father would have been—

  Tears fill my eyes, screams fill my head, adrenaline fills my chest. I struggle to keep control of my weapon. “Admit you attacked him,” I say, “or die right now.”

  I want him to defy me. I want to kill him. I want to shoot him the same way he shot my uncle, in all the places it hurts, maximizing his suffering, making him beg for his life, before driving a red-hot stake through his kidney—

  “I’m not going to admit something I didn’t do,” Noah says with control, with calm. “You can shoot me if you want. But I don’t think you will. Because you’re a fair person. And deep down, I think you know—”

  “Shut up! You…you took him from me…you took him…”

  My entire body quivering, my voice choking off, tears rolling down my face, my breath coming in tight gasps, I lower the gun, then raise it back up, the screams in my head drowning out everything else.

  “What are you talking about?” he asks.

  I shuffle toward him, only steps away from him, both hands desperately clutching my gun. “Say it!” I scream.

  But it doesn’t matter what he says anymore. I’m going to do it. I’m going to pull this trigger.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” he says.

  My breath held tight in my lungs, I pull the trigger once, a single bullet, and then drop the weapon to my side.

  21

  I STAND over the grave, the outlines of the freshly dug earth a tangible reminder of the funeral yesterday. It was a nice affair, with the police force in formal dress, a gun salute, the works. It was the very opposite of a private family ceremony, in part because Lang didn’t have any family besides me, but appropriate, too, because Lang was such a public figure, a giant in this community, the chief law enforcement officer for almost two decades.

  Lang died in surgery that night at the hospital. The hemorrhaging was too massive, the doctor said. Too many wounds. Too much blood lost for too long.

  Chloe Danchisin—Aunt Chloe—slides her arm inside mine and perches her chin on my shoulder. “He always loved this cemetery,” she says. “He bought these plots for us when we were first married.”

  I blow my nose and take a breath. My throat aches from all the crying I’ve done over the past several days. “I…still can’t believe he’s gone.”

  Chloe rubs her hand on my back, tiny circles. “It’s not fair to you, honey. It seems like just yesterday that Lydia died.”

  Almost three years to the day, actually, that my mother gave in to the cancer.

  “You know how much Lang loved you, don’t you?”

  I nod but don’t speak. My throat is so strained that I don’t even sound like myself. My head is filled with a constant ringing.

  “Oh, when he hired you to work here—he was so excited. He called me. We hadn’t spoken in over a year, but he called me to give me the news. He was like a giddy schoolboy.”

  Despite the fact that I’ve shed enough tears over the last few days to fill a small lake, my eyes well up again. “I questioned his judgment,” I say. “I doubted his investigation of the Ocean Drive murders. I actually—I actually suggested that Noah Walker might be innocent.” I scoff at the notion in hindsight. It’s so clear to me now. Noah killed Lang so he couldn’t testify, and in much the same way he killed Zach and Melanie, and the prostitute in the woods. Different methods, but the same sociopathic brutality—maximizing their suffering, making sure they would bleed out in painful deaths.

  Chloe directs my shoulders away from the grave, south toward the beach, and moves me along. “You were doing your job. I’m sure he was proud of you. Don’t confuse his stubbornness with disappointment.”

  We walk toward the beach. Chloe looks good, notwithstanding the circumstances. Now single again for two years, she has lost about twenty pounds, cut her hair in a stylish bob, and dresses like she doesn’t mind being noticed. Sixty is the new forty, and all that.

  My head is finally clearing of the hangover, from the extra bottle of wine after I left Chloe last night and went home. The nightly drinking is weighing me down, leaving me off balance and foggy. But right now, foggy feels like the best I can do.

  Ocean Drive is teeming with joggers and bicyclists and people heading, like us, toward the beach. The activity, the smell of the ocean—this is precisely what I remember as a kid.

  “Chloe,” I say, “why did we stop coming here when I was a kid?”

  She keeps her head down, strolling along with me.

  “Lang said there was a story.”

  “You don’t know?” she asks.

  “No.”

  “If you don’t know, I don’t know.” She looks up at our surroundings, half-built structures and carved-out foundations. “That’s the house, isn’t it?”

  I focus my eyes and realize that we’re passing 7 Ocean Drive, the Murder House. The crime-scene tape has been removed, but the Gothic monstrosity has no trouble looking creepy all by itself. It brings back everything in a rush, my meddling at the crime scene, my argument with Lang, resulting in my thirty-day suspension.

  We were never the same after he dinged me. I was sent off to the narcotics task force assignment, and I saw him only sparingly after that. I turned down several offers to get together, for dinner or drinks or an afternoon at the beach. I was resentful. I wanted to punish him. And now he’s gone, and I’d do anything to have those weeks back. I’d tell him how much I love him, how he saved my life so many times, in so many different ways.

  We arrive at the beach. Chloe lets out a satisfied sigh. Behind her, the beachfront homes stand in marked contrast to the cedar-shingled houses along Ocean Drive. They are gigantic, modern, concrete structures with oversize windows and sharp angles.

  “Can I say something to you, sweetheart?”

  I ta
ke her hand. “Anything.”

  The breeze plays with the bangs on Chloe’s forehead. “Have you thought about going back to Manhattan now?”

  I squat down, scoop up a handful of sand, weigh it in my hand. There is an inch-long scar on the palm of my hand that I got—according to my mother—trying to chop a tomato when I was a little girl.

  Little things like that, small memories that sting the most.

  “Lang called me a couple of weeks ago,” she continues. “He said you were having nightmares every night. That you were drinking a lot, too, probably as a coping mechanism.”

  I look up at her. “He said that?”

  “He did. He was concerned. He was glad to have you close, of course. But he wasn’t sure this was the right thing for you anymore, working here.”

  I pick up a shell and send it flying into the ocean. I squint into the wind, the wet mist.

  Chloe squats down next to me. “All your life, you’ve taken care of everyone else,” she says. “When your father and Ryan died, your mother…Lydia was devastated. I know you were, too, but it always seemed like you were the one doing the consoling. And you were so young. You were, what, twelve?”

  “Yes.” It was less than a month before my thirteenth birthday.

  “I remember just a couple of days after they died, you were supposed to be in bed, and Lydia was crying and Lang was holding her. We were all on the couch. And you walked in. You’d been sleeping. Your hair was all matted and your eyes were sleepy and you were in your pajamas. You opened your arms as wide as they could go and you said, ‘Don’t worry, Mommy, I have enough love for all of them.’ Do you remember that?”

  I wipe away a tear. I remember. I remember my mother looking like there was nothing left in the world for her.

  “Well.” Chloe rubs my arm. “Maybe it’s time you took better care of yourself. Go home, Jenna. Your best friends are there. Matty’s there. What’s left here?”

  I stand straight as the wind off the ocean kicks up. I look back at the oceanfront housing, at the endless stretch of beach. This isn’t my home. It never will be. But it holds one thing for me that no other place in the world does.

  “This is the only place I can be a cop,” I say.

  22

  THE ROOM looks more like a maximum-security prison than a court of law. The number of sheriff’s deputies has doubled, virtually lining the walls of the courtroom, beefy security guards with jumpy eyes, armed with handguns and cuffs and Tasers. The tension in the room has raised the temperature to something between stuffy and downright unbearable.

  As we wait for the judge, I scroll through photos on my iPhone. Nearly all of the recent ones include Lang: in his ridiculous polka-dot swimsuit at the beach; flipping burgers on his Smokey Joe in his backyard, chomping on a cigar; asleep on his lawn chair, his wife-beater T-shirt creeping up to reveal his added poundage (a photo I often used when arguing about his diet). Silly shots, all of them, but so dear to me now, those little things, those frivolous moments that mean so much in hindsight.

  And then, amid these pictures, the one from the lawn on 7 Ocean Drive, that crest with that hook-beaked bird, that insipid creature that has taken up permanent residence in my daily nightmares. What’s with that stupid bird?

  We all rise; then a collective hush falls over the room as the Honorable Robert Barnett, a handsome and deadly serious judge, assumes the bench. “We are back on the record in People versus Noah Lee Walker,” he says dryly. “For the record, the court has stood in recess for the last week. Six days ago, the next witness scheduled to testify, Southampton Town Police Department chief Langdon James, was attacked in his home and later died of his injuries. The court granted a recess at the prosecution’s request.”

  I shift in the courtroom pew, a front-row seat granted me by the prosecution. Noah Walker denied any involvement in Lang’s murder, but Judge Barnett revoked his bond anyway, out of an abundance of caution, so he’s locked up again in Riverhead when he’s not here in court.

  “For the record, Mr. Akers is present today for the State, and Mr. Brody is present for the defense.” The judge removes his glasses. “And of course, Mr. Walker, the defendant, is present as well.”

  My eyes move to Noah, sitting at the defense table with his hands folded and his eyes cast downward. His feet are crossed, raising the cuffs of his jeans slightly and revealing bare ankles. He didn’t even bother to wear socks to the trial. He looks like a hippie islander.

  I let you live, you little shit. You could at least show a little respect.

  I replay that moment in his attic bedroom, feel the surge of adrenaline returning. How close I came to doing it. How close I came to putting that bullet between his eyes, instead of firing it over his head.

  As if he senses me, Noah turns his head ninety degrees and catches my eyes. He still has the shiner I gave him that night, though it’s now a dull-yellow bruise. The split lip has healed and the swelling dissipated. His jaw probably still hurts, but nothing was broken.

  As far as I know, Noah hasn’t publicly complained about how I treated him that night, sneaking into his house, punching and kicking him, not to mention firing a bullet within inches of his scalp. That should be coming any time now, a police brutality lawsuit, probably a request for ten million dollars for his pain and suffering.

  But for now, it’s just his eyes locked on mine. Something flutters through my chest as I stare back at him, that nagging feeling that I can’t read him, that I don’t know him. He is neither antagonistic nor smug in his stare. He is neither enjoying himself nor resentful. He just stares at me as if somehow, in some way, we are discovering each other, we are connecting with each other, something is happening between us.

  I snap my head away, breaking eye contact, sweat popping at my hairline. I take a deep breath and brush the hair off my face.

  He is the worst kind of creep. He’s the kind who can suck you in, the sociopath who can smile at you tenderly while he’s devising monstrous ways to torture you. Well, not me, pal. Not anymore. You may have fooled me initially, but no longer.

  I turn back, looking in his direction again. He hasn’t moved. His eyes are still on me, his long dark hair hanging over his unshaven face. My heartbeat kicks into a higher gear. I uncross my legs and play with my hands. I shake my head slowly, discreetly, unsure of the meaning of what I’m doing, answering no to a question that has not been asked. His eyes narrow to a squint. His jaw rises slightly and his lips part, as if he’s going to speak, but surely he won’t, not in the middle of a court session while the judge is talking.

  He will never speak to me again. And I will never speak to him.

  I get to my feet and walk down the courtroom aisle toward the exit, which is guarded by two sheriff’s deputies. I’m done with Noah Walker. The next time I see him, it will be at his sentencing, after the judge informs him he’ll spend the rest of his life behind bars. Yeah, let’s make eye contact then, pal. Let’s see the look on your face then.

  “Mr. Brody,” says the judge, “you have a motion?”

  “Yes, Judge, I do.”

  Defense lawyers always have motions. They always have bullshit arguments, smoke and mirrors, misdirection. But the next words coming from the mouth of Noah Walker’s lawyer freeze me in my tracks, only a few paces from the courtroom door.

  “Your Honor,” he says, “the defense moves for a dismissal of all charges.”

  23

  THE COURTROOM, already respectfully silent, is sucked dry of all sound as Joshua Brody, Noah Walker’s lawyer, makes his pitch for his client’s release.

  “There is no competent evidence tying the murder weapon to my client,” he says. “There was never a fingerprint on the weapon. And the only evidence that the knife was found at my client’s house would have come from Chief James—who obviously cannot testify now.”

  “Your Honor!” Sebastian Akers jumps to his feet, his perfect-cool persona shaken for the first time. “We will call Detective Isaac Marks—I’m sorry, Ac
ting Chief Isaac Marks—who will testify that the chief showed him the knife after he discovered it under the heating duct in the defendant’s kitchen.”

  “But Mr. Marks didn’t see it under the heating duct. Only the chief did, allegedly,” says Noah’s lawyer. “The defense’s theory is that Chief James planted that knife. But now we can’t cross-examine him to establish that. The prosecution shouldn’t be allowed to suggest that the knife was found in my client’s house when we can’t cross-examine the person who supposedly ‘found’ it.”

  The judge looks at the prosecutor. “Mr. Akers, the defense makes a valid point here. If the defense can’t cross-examine the chief about a frame-up, how can I let you put the knife in the defendant’s house?”

  “Everyone in this courtroom knows the reason why Chief James isn’t here to testify,” says Akers, his voice wobbling. “Everyone knows who made that happen.” He turns and looks at Noah Walker.

  “If the State believes my client killed Chief James, they are free to charge him,” says the defense lawyer, Brody. “The last I heard, they found no physical evidence at that crime scene. They have no leads on the chief’s death, just supposition. And more importantly, Judge, this trial is not about Chief James’s murder. This trial is about Zach Stern and Melanie Phillips, and there is no evidence tying my client to the murder weapon, with the chief’s untimely passing. And the chief obviously can’t testify that my client confessed to him, either.” He opens his hands. “So what do they have, without the murder weapon and without a confession to the chief of police? Without any physical evidence whatsoever? They have evidence that my client argued with Melanie Phillips at Tasty’s Diner, and they have this ridiculous testimony from a jailhouse snitch that my client confessed to him.”