Knife Edge (A Dead Cold Mystery Book 27) by Blake Banner (most inspirational books of all time .TXT) 📗

He didn’t look at us. He seemed to gaze in the direction of the wardrobe, but without seeing it.

Dehan turned to the nurse.

“Thelma, we will be very gentle with Marcus. There is no need for you to worry or even to be here. In fact, you had better go and telephone the Doctors Mitchell. They’ll want to be here.” She paused a moment then continued and asked the question I had been turning over in my own mind. “Thelma, before you go, when you said you could not let us see Marcus without Dr. Mitchell’s consent, which doctor were you referring to, Brad or Emma?”

Nurse Thelma lifted her chin. “Dr. Emma Mitchell. She is the Mama, the one who cares for her boy. Dr. Brad Mitchell has nothing to do with him.”

Dehan nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. OK, you can run along now, and call the doctors.”

The nurse left and Dehan closed the door. Under the window there was a straight-backed chair. I went, pulled it over beside the bed and sat. Dehan dragged over the armchair on the other side and placed herself close beside him, directly in his line of vision.

I said, “Hello, Marcus, my name is John, and that lady over there is Carmen. We are police officers, and we have some news for you.”

I paused a moment to allow those facts to sink in. I noticed Dehan looking at me curiously.

“We are here to find out who killed your sister, Lea.”

It was almost imperceptible, but there was a hardening of his face, like all the muscles had contracted at the same time. I had been wondering how long it had been since anybody had spoken to him about his sister. I figured it had been a long time, years maybe, and what I’d said had been a shock. I went on.

“It has been a long time now, hasn’t it? Six years, but it’s a crime that just won’t go away, right? It’s always down there, in the shed, with your sister, and Lee, and you. Alone.”

I waited. I counted fifteen slow seconds in my mind and saw the smallest flicker in his eyes as he focused on Dehan. She smiled.

“You were alone,” I said. “The three of you. It’s important that there are no mistakes. You were alone. And then there was somebody there, and Lea was screaming. Lea was screaming a lot.” I saw the bright reflection of tears in his eyes and felt a hot jolt of excitement in my gut. I said, quietly, “And you can remember how you felt in that moment.”

The tears spilled down his cheeks. Dehan glanced at me. His bottom lip curled in and his face creased up. He made an agonizing, guttural sound and Dehan was on her feet. She knelt by his side, holding his hand and stroking his face. His eyes found hers and held them as he wept. She whispered to him, “What happened, Marcus? What happened?”

He screwed up his eyes and sobbed. Dehan stroked his hair and he clung to her arm, curling up against the pain in his gut and in his heart. I rose and walked around to the far side of the bed, hunkered down beside him and Dehan. She gave me a look that said, Don’t talk.

Slowly his sobs settled down and I spoke again.

“Marcus, I know how much this is hurting you. I know it hurts you every day, and you don’t want to talk, and you don’t want to hear. But I also know that somewhere deep inside you, you need to talk. You need somebody to hear about all the pain you felt when you saw what happened to Lea. I know that you need somebody to share and understand what you are feeling.”

He was still clinging hard to Dehan’s arm, and again the tears spilled from his eyes as he squeezed them tight.

“That’s why Carmen and I are here. We have come to hear your story, Marcus.”

Now his sobs were convulsive, but silent. A couple of times they subsided, but then welled up again and he curled on his belly, like there was a vacuum there, of pain, that was sucking him in.

After about five minutes his breathing slowed and he opened his eyes. He still had a hold of Dehan’s arm. His sight drifted from an empty place in space, to focus on Dehan’s eyes, and then on me.

“John…” It was barely a whisper. I smiled at him and his face creased into something like an expression, an echo of a smile remembered from six years before.

“Dad,” he said, and the smile faded from his face. “Dad is coming.”

Dehan frowned, shot me a look and looked back at Marcus. She stroked his hair and asked, “Your dad is coming?”

His eyes were starting to glaze and the lids were drooping. “Dad,” he said again. “Dad is coming,” and his eyes closed him into sleep.

We sat like that for a while, Dehan and I staring at each other, thinking in silence. Outside the room we heard the tramp of feet coming up the stairs. The door opened and Brad Mitchell stepped in. He stared for a long moment at his son, who was still clinging to Dehan’s arm. He stared at her a moment and then stared at me.

His voice was a rasp. “What the hell do you think you are you doing?”

I stood. “Our jobs, Dr. Mitchell. Maybe it’s time you started thinking about doing yours.”

His face flushed with anger. “Why, you…! How dare you…!”

“I’m not talking about your job at the university, Dr. Mitchell. I’m talking about your job here, at home, with your son, as his father. He still calls you dad. Did you know that?”

“What? He spoke…? What the hell has been going on here?”

I crossed the room so that I was standing barely a couple of inches from him. “He just told us, ‘Dad is coming.’”

His eyes went wide. “He said that?”

“He’s been six years in this state, and it took