Viggo's Break - Chapter 19.2 - Until next time (seven years ago)

Seven years ago.

The story of the infamous Defoe murders.

To know more, read Chapter 19.1.

The house was quiet, every window dark, open, like gaping mouths silently screaming in horror. Viggo parked behind the Defoe’s minivan and thought about those two kids. He wished he could turn around and drive away.

Trying to break the curse, he growled, “Don’t be a wuss.”

Years and years on the job. Whatever awaited, it would be nothing new. He shook off the fear and stepped out of his car. The tablet was on his passenger’s seat. In the dark, the red dot blinked like the eye of a monstrous creature. It was still on the move. Rubbing the ache in his chest, he locked the door behind him.

The front door wasn’t shut all the way. He drew his gun, pulled out his pencil flashlight. He held them together in one hand, and his cell in the other. He called in a possible break-in before entering the house. His fine-tuned homicide detective nose immediately identified the smell of gun-powder, guts and blood.

He found Helen in the living room. She was wearing a robe over her PJs. Her hand rested on the first step of the stairs, like she had been desperately trying to reach them. Half-dry blood pooled under her. Her hair was truly red now. Her husband was in the kitchen. He had been shot from behind too. Brain-matter and blood splattered an otherwise immaculate counter. Glass creaked under Viggo’s feet. Brian had broken a container of some kind on his way down.

The fifth step of the stairs creaked. Had the boys heard the killer coming? Had they heard him kill their parents?

Maybe. The youngest kid was in the corridor. He had been shot at close range and there wasn’t much left of his skull. The elder boy had hidden in a cupboard, where the killer had found him, eventually. The bullet had left the smallest wound in the middle of his forearm. He looked oddly peaceful. He still had a teddy-bear in his lap.

The killer’s gun rested by his side, incongruously.

Viggo took note of it. It was a Glock, smaller and lighter than the Sig he carried. He knew it well: it was his off-duty piece, the one he kept locked in the drawer of his nightstand. How…?

He glitched.

His gun.

His gun.

His gun next to a dead kid.

The voice of the 911 operator echoed through his skull but he didn’t process her words. It was a fitting soundtrack for this nightmare. God…

His gun.

He reached for it, stopped. He didn’t dare touch it. It was his gun – his fingerprints were probably all over it – but this ‘probably’ was all he had going in his favor. If, by some miracle, the proverbial smoking gun didn’t bear his prints, the last thing he needed was to leave some.

His gun.

Frame job. Someone was trying to frame him. His first instinct surprised him. He considered himself to be an upstanding citizen and, yet, his first instinct was to protect himself from the law. He wanted to grab the gun and stash it somewhere. He stifled the impulse. It was registered, anyway. There would be uniforms crawling all over the place soon. They were bound to find the gun in whichever piss-poor hiding place he managed to think up. It would look even worse.

Helen dead, him framed. If the killer was getting rid of everyone in the know…God, Nyssa! She knew as much as he did. No, it couldn’t be! He ran out of the house in defiance of every guideline in the book. He wasn’t done clearing the scene, but who cared?

He grabbed the tablet. The red dot was still on the move, about two blocks away from his house. Angela! Why…? But, of course, the mole would assume he had shared his suspicions with his fiancée. What kind of moron went to bed with an ADA every night and kept that kind of stuff from her?

He told the 911 operator to send units to his house and he hung up on her, ignoring any question she might have gabbled. He dialed Angela.

Thankfully, she picked up the call immediately. On screen, the dot was stopping in the street right before their house. She sounded sleepy and confused, “Peter? Why are you…? Where are you? Why? Wh…”

“Listen to me!” he interrupted, frantically. “You’re in danger. Get up and go down to the basement. Lock yourself in and grab your father’s gun from the safe.”

“But…”

“Do it, Angela! Now! Run like hell!”

He heard her move. The bed rustled. She did run down the stairs. He could hear her breathing hard and the fast thump-thump of her feet. Then, the heavy basement door slammed closed. Angela fumbled with the safe – she always fumbled with the safe. It opened with a pneumatic sound. She swore. Something clanked.

“Relax, honey. You know how to load it. Breathe in, breathe out. Press the button.” Click. “There, honey, you’ve got the charger. Now insert the bullets. One after the other. Breathe. Take your time. One bullet. Two. That’s right, Angie, take your time.”

Her breathing hitched. “I’ve got it.”

“Of course, you do. You’re a champ. Now slide the magazine back inside.” Click. “Very good, baby.”

“I took the safety off,” she said in a very thin voice.

“Very good. Now chamber a round.”

“Done.”

“Good,” he told her.

She gasped. Her terror sank like lead in his guts.

“What is it?” he asked. “What’s happening, hon?”

It was amazing how calm he sounded when he was running every light and blowing every stop sign he came across. Normally, Defoe and he lived a good half an hour apart. He was about to set a new record.

“Someone’s breaking in,” she whispered. “I can hear…I hear…Someone’s upstairs.”

“Calm down, baby. You’re safe. The door can withstand a fucking earthquake. It’ll hold up just fine. Just don’t open it. Keep it locked, alright? You don’t open for anyone but me.”

“Pete, I can’t. I…I…”

She was panicking, hyperventilating. Angela wasn’t the type to sit quietly through a crisis. Some people were like that – they reminded Peter of what Nyssa always said about sharks, that they couldn’t breathe unless they swam. Angela needed to swim.

“Honey? Can you see our old fridge? It should be by the door. Can you move it or is it too heavy?”

“Why?”

“Because I need you to push it in front of the door. I need you to put everything you can find in front of the door.”

“I can’t. I can’t do that with the phone in…”

Yeah, he had kind of expected that hurdle. “That’s okay, honey. You’re going to put down the phone anyway. I need to hang up.”

“But…!”

Her exclamation was pure terror and no small amount of denial. It physically hurt to hang up, but he had to. She needed to call 911. He needed to hang up. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to call someone else. You’re going to be okay, honey. I swear everything’s going to be alright. Hang up and dial 911. Tell them what’s going on.”

“But I don’t know what’s…!”

Yes, she really didn’t know what was going on and it was entirely his fault. He didn’t have time to get into it right then, though.

“I’ve got to hang up, honey. I’ll be home in five minutes, top! Hang on.”

“But, Peter…”

He hung up, feeling like a jerk. He would never have done it if he had given her any kind of opportunity to talk him out of it. A slight tremble went through his fingers. He balled his fist, opened it and dialed Nyssa. It rang, again, again, again, again. In vain. She didn’t pick up. He almost didn’t try again but, no, the least he owed her was a warning. She called back before he could dial her number again.

As he picked up the call, he tried to organize his thoughts, to plan, to strategize. He tried to…Nothing came.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The sound of Nyssa’s quiet, serious voice threw him. There was something immediately normal in talking with her. It didn’t feel like a midnight call, made in a life and death situation. He was quite sure that she had been sleeping – no other reason why she wouldn’t have picked up her phone – but damn if he could hear it! She sounded sharp, clear-headed. It was a relief.

And because he was calming down, he spouted the first thing in his mind, “The mole has broken into my house.”

“What about Angela?”

Instant response and, in the same rapid-fire tone, he went on, “Locked in the basement with her father’s nine millimeters. I’m driving back there now.”

“Good. Keep me posted.” She sounded as calm as he did. Nyssa was no shark. She didn’t need to be on the move to breathe. And he had never been happier about that. “I’m getting dressed as we speak. Where do I go? Not to the station?”

No, the station was out.

“There’s a motel a block down from your place. What’s its name? Dollhouse?”

“The Candyhouse Inn?” she asked. “Rents by the hour?”

“Yeah. If you’re lucky, an hour is about what you’re going to spend there. And I don’t have time to deb…!”

“I’m not complaining. Brief me. Who is it? What’s going on?”

He could hear her moving around. She would be long gone before anyone got to her place and, knowing Nyssa would be safely tucked away, his heartbeat slowed down, his breathing evened out.

“I don’t know who it is.” Except that this person had somehow gotten his or her hands on his off-duty piece. Who could have? Only one person had spare keys to his house and could have gotten the gun behind his back. “But, Nyssa, listen…” His throat closed up. “Helen is dead. Helen and…”

A sob erupted from his lips. It surprised him. His composure was pretty much unshakable. In the Academy, they had nicknamed him the Iceberg after their first autopsy. Two guys in his class had passed out. Most had been a little bothered by the smell. Pretty much everyone had been a little excited, titillated at the idea. Peter had been hungry, mostly. He had snuck out for a few burgers afterward, then he had spent the rest of the afternoon passionlessly cramming for his exams.

Of course, it had caught up with him a week later. As he had stepped out of the shower-stall, he had found himself facing his reflection in the mirror. He had been struck by how easily his living body could become a dead body. It was such a slight change, really. He had thrown up.

Somehow, the night of the Defoe murders, the delay in his reactions didn’t come to pass. He hadn’t broken down with Angela but, now, he had to fight back his anguish.

“Brian?” Nyssa asked, her voice breaking.

He choked on his “yes” and could only nod. Although she couldn’t see him, she seemed to hear his answer.

“Jason and Gabe?” she asked.

“They are…”

“Oh, my God…”

There was no way he could hold on to his cool – not with Nyssa’s grief playing out in all its musicality in his ear.

“I’m arriving on the scene. Home. I’m arriving home!”

He hung up without further notice. It was not ‘the scene’! It was not the scene of anything! It was his house, their house and it would be for a long time. He had to believe it.

It came within sight. On the tablet, the dot now sat unmoving. There was no car parked in front of the building, where he had expected to see one. A black and white turned the corner just as he was jumping out of his vehicle. He didn’t stop. He rushed to the front door. No sign of forced entry.

He paid no mind to the shouts coming from the police car. Neither did he really notice anything about the house as he ran down the stairs to the basement door. He pounded on it, shouting, “Angela! Angela! It’s me! Open the door!”

There was some loud scrapping. Two uniforms appeared up the stairs, guns held up and ready to fire.

“Sir,” one of them began.

He flashed them his badge. “Detective Carlsen. I called you. It’s my place. Look around for the intruder.”

Angela finally popped out of the basement. She threw herself in his arms.

“Oh, thank God! Oh, thank God, you’re alright! Oh, baby…”

She was crying. “I thought,” she hiccupped. “I thought…I really thought…”

He kissed her on top of her head. “Angie, love, it’s okay. You’re okay.”

“He tried to get in. The handle turned and turned. He was there for ages. I thought he’d break in, but he didn’t. I was so afraid.”

“I’m sorry, honey.”

If he hadn’t called her…If she hadn’t locked herself…If…She could have…

He tightened his hold on her. Just in time too, because his arrival had finally sapped the remainder of Angela’s strength. She fainted. Only for a blink, but he felt her go completely limp in his arms. Those mist-gray eyes closed and, when they opened again, they were unfocused.

“Peter, I feel really weird.”

He looked up to the uniforms. “Call the paramedics.”

“Already done, sir. Maybe the lady should eat and drink something.”

“Good idea. Run up to the kitchen and pour her a cup of coffee. Three sugars and some milk. It’ll do her good.”

He would forever remember the smell of coffee and the sight of Angela clutching her cup, wrapped up in a sky-blue comforter he had grabbed from their sofa. Her eyes were huge. Her gun spent most of that night sitting next to her on a gurney before she had to hand it over to a cop when the paramedics decided to transfer her to the hospital.

Coffee and the trust of the woman he had loved with all his soul.

Peter wanted to ride in the ambulance with her, but a plain-clothed detective had arrived on the scene and was making noise about him coming to the station to give a statement. After that, there were endless questions, their tone growing markedly colder, sharper as the night wore on and gave way to early morning.

He tried explaining himself at first, cop to cop. How stupid did they think he was? What kind of idiot used his own registered firearm to kill a colleague, then called in the scene and left the gun there in plain sight? Seriously?!

But, around seven, he realized he had to play hard ball and he lawyered up, at last. It was too late – a good six hours too late. Somewhere along the way, he learned that the mole had dumped the burner in his house. And then, he learned what he couldn’t have anticipated – the contents of the phone.

Detective Flores barged in his interrogation room around eleven, waving a bundle of papers.

“How long did the affair last?” he asked.

Viggo couldn’t help himself. He said, “I’ve never had an affair.”

“Don’t bother denying it.”

The other detective threw the printouts on the table before him. Viggo barely glanced at them. His lawyer had been making an important point about him calling 911, and he wasn’t – hadn’t ever been – having an affair.

Flores, disappointed not to have ruffled his feathers, probed, “Does Angela know about Helen?”

It was like electricity ran through Viggo’s body. “Helen?” His lawyer spouted some nonsense about him shutting his mouth. He didn’t listen. “I was not…I never had…For Heaven’s sake, I’ve never cheated on Angela, much less with Helen Defoe!”

“Yeah? Well, those were on your phone.”

“For the last time, it’s not my phone.”

But he grabbed the pages. Texts, going back and forth. They were…lewd.

“Impossible,” he muttered. “Helen was sleeping with Russ.”

“Not anymore.”

He looked up in surprise. He hadn’t meant to say that aloud. He had never snitched on Russ and had never had any intention to. “What?” he growled.

“They broke up last month. Pierce told us – had proof. You thought we didn’t know?”

Hell, Viggo hadn’t known himself. He focused on the printouts.

The first dozen pages told the story of a steamy love affair. The lovers never used names, but the rather graphic descriptions identified them clearly as a man and a woman, and the woman appeared to be married. As the messages went back and forth, their tone changed. She got cold feet, she wanted out. He wasn’t letting her escape.

Peter squinted as he deciphered this sexting gibberish, You aren’t getting off that easy! I’ll spill the beans to Brian, if that’s what it takes. Remember how you creamed yourself once I started filming?

He winced, feeling like the slime was polluting him. He carefully put the papers down, making two piles and moving the sheets from one to the other with only the tip of his fingers.

Helen’s lover became more and more forceful. Weeks of coercion followed. What had been a consensual affair became nothing more than blackmail and sexual abuse. It was God-awful. It made him sick to think of Helen going through hell alone, and him just not knowing. And she was dead. She was fucking dead! There was no making that better.

But he had never cared that much for Helen Defoe, had he? He had admired her as another professional, but not as a human being. He had often found her a little vain. He had been uncomfortable with the way she looked at other women, automatically dividing them in two categories: the competition, which she had been all syrupy sweet venom with, and those beneath her, who had been well beneath her notice.

And then, there had been Russ. He wasn’t surprised to learn that his partner hadn’t been Helen’s only indiscretion. It had been in the way she acted around the guys. She had teased, and she had flirted. Peter had been on the receiving end of it all. It hadn’t been pleasant. She had taken it personally that she couldn’t add him to her pile of spoils. She had alternatively sulked and stroked his ego, but he’d had the sense, from the very beginning, that she would have lost interest the moment he reciprocated it.

In short and in not so PC terms, Helen Defoe had been a bit of a bitch. But nobody deserved to die in that way, neither Helen, nor her husband and certainly not their kids. Peter was reeling from the wastefulness of all that gore and tragedy.

“You really believe that, don’t you?” he said, his voice eerily normal. “You really believe that I’d do such a thing. Murder a colleague, two innocent children? No. No, I didn’t do it. No. I’d never do it. Do that.”

“The affa…”

“I’ve never had an affair. There was no affair!” he screamed. “I’m engaged to be married to a woman I love and respect too much to step out on her!”

“And I get that you didn’t want her to know about the affair.”

That’s when he stopped talking. He had already given them his version of events. They clearly weren’t ready to hear it. Two hours later, the DA office – not Angela – came up with a deal so they could make him go away. When his lawyer suggested he took them up on it, Peter knew the man didn’t believe him either.

He turned down the offer. He was sure someone would see the light, at some point. He was a cop – a good one. He would have had to be crazy stupid to not only have an affair with a married colleague, but to abuse her and, then, to kill her with his own registered firearm. Why would he have killed her entire family along with her? Why would he have left the gun out there after calling for reinforcements? Why would he have rushed back home? Why would he have sent the cops there when he left his burner back home? Why would he have launched an in-depths investigation in the mole if he was the mole? Why?!

But the prosecution came up with an endless series of shaky explanations and the jury gobbled them all. Nobody ever caught on. The text messages made them sick to their stomach. The gun seemed to clinch it. The rest of his life would have been a quick trip down death-row if not for Brian’s mother. As the last living Defoe, she asked the jury for mercy, in the name of Christian compassion. They listened and sentenced him to life, instead of death.

Viggo has just deserted Nyssa, just as Russ is on his way to murder them.

To know more, read Chapter 20.1.