Disclaimer: I don't own Psych or To Kill a Mockingbird.
A/N: Thanks for the reviews for the last chapter! :) If you are an anonymous reviewer and you didn't realize that I'd added chapter 9 on Friday, you'll want to go back and read chapter 9 before you read this one. Warning: there is a bit more gore in this chapter. While still not M-rated, I think it's definitely cringe-worthy... :) Enjoy, and please review! :D
The Finch and the Mockingbird
Chapter Ten: A Not-So-Simple Case of Trial and Terror
They had reconvened at the station. The results of their attempts to track the unavailable phone call from Henry's phone had not been encouraging, or even helpful in the slightest. Even with all of the department's best equipment and people, there was simply no way to track a call made on a prepaid, untraceable cell phone.
"Has anyone been able to contact any of Stevens' family?" Lassiter asked the chief, his eyes and voice hard. This was quickly getting worse than any of them could have imagined. This guy had covered all of his bases. The only advantage was that he almost certainly didn't know that they knew who he was and that they had been following their very slim and ultimately fruitless leads... which, of course, led to the fac that their leads were slim and ultimately fruitless, so it really wasn't much of a one-up after all.
They had been trying to reach Aaron Stevens' closest kin, hoping to glean more information from his family about where he could be squirreled away. The man's childhood home had turned out to be only about fifteen minutes away from the station, secluded in a large patch of woods.
As soon as they'd found the old address, the chief had sent several officers to the location, hoping that even if he hadn't taken Shawn and Henry there (which he hadn't), that there might be some clue to his whereabouts (which there hadn't). The home had been abandoned, falling apart, obviously untouched for years. So he probably wasn't terribly interested in connecting with his past, despite the fact that the meeting place he'd set for Henry had been an old truck stop once owned by his dead ex-girlfriend's father. It was more likely that he'd chosen the spot because it was secluded and hardly anyone knew about it.
"No," Chief Vick said, her normally stoic face clouded with worry. And no wonder. Her psychic consultant and his retired cop father were both missing, targeting by a craze parolee with a whacked-out urge for revenge. "We were able to track down his father, a Mr. Jordan Stevens, but unfortunately, he is proving quite difficult to reach."
"Evading the law," Lassiter guessed.
"Actually, in an important meeting that apparently cannot be interrupted," the chief snapped irritably. "Jordan Stevens is a prolific businessman in New York. His wife, Katherine, passed away two years ago from lung cancer. He's been in meetings all morning, and no card I try to pull is working. I finally convinced his secretary to give him your number, Detective Lassiter, so that he can contact you as soon as he's out. Normally, I'd give him the station's number, but I'm counting on you to jump on this the moment he contacts you, no matter where you're at."
"Got it, Chief. Though we may be stuck here for a while anyway, because we have nothing to go on."
Juliet's face was pinched with worry and irritation, but she managed to hold her indignation back better than Gus, who gaped open-mouthed at the chief and detectives. "Seriously? This guy's out kidnapping my best friend, and his father won't talk to you? Can't you make him do something? You're the law, dammit! Make him listen!"
"Don't you think I'm doing everything I can, Mr. Guster?" Chief Vick said, eyes flashing dangerously. "But Mr. Stevens has his rights, he's way out of our jurisdiction, and like it or not, we're on his time now." Her eyes softened slightly. "I want to find Shawn and Henry, too. But there's only so much we can do right now. I'll have the detectives follow up on any other potential leads we might have, scour the—"
Lassiter's phone rang. He all but pounced on it.
"Lassiter." A pause. "Mr. Stevens. Thank you for taking a moment of your precious time to help us with this highly sensitive kidnapping case." Juliet shot him a look that clearly said, Insensitive. Rude. Calm it down, Partner.
He scowled, but tried to be a bit less caustic. "Yes, Mr. Stevens, I'm here. And I have some questions for you about your son..."
Henry Spencer had never been as helpless as he was now. Both hands wrists handcuffed to the narrow but strong support beams holding up the row of seats behind him, he had absolutely no means of escape, no matter how much he pulled and struggled and shouted and cursed, no matter how deeply the metal dug into his skin, no matter how much blood seeped from the cuts in the wrists.
He was helpless as his son dangled from the ceiling by his wrists like some grotesque piñata, bone protruding from ashen skin, knee shattered beyond recognition, disoriented and shivering like he was about to fly apart. So much blood had now pooled from the gaping wound in his arm, and there was so much blood on his knee...
Henry was beginning to get very anxious about blood loss, because although at first glance it had seemed that it wouldn't be too much of an issue, the small stream of blood hadn't seemed to let up very much, if any, and Shawn was so pale and shaking like a leaf.
Henry had been forced to watch as Stevens had spun his own demented version of the story, making himself out to be the victim and Henry the villain, and while in many ways the younger man had been a victim all those years ago, he hadn't been entirely innocent. And Henry hadn't been the villain. O'Dell had been; many people, including Henry had long thought that O'Dell had not only killed Alicia and the former lead witness, but everything was covered up squeaky-clean and nothing had ever been proved. He was reeling a bit from the suggestion that Jim Morton, who had been a friend of his on the force, had also been killed by O'Dell because he'd never really stopped looking into Alicia's death, off-the-record, at least.
But he had more important things to worry about right now, like the fact that Stevens had started physically abusing his son again, this time right in front of Henry, punching him soundly in the gut and then backhanding him ruthlessly across the already bruised face. All this because Shawn had started drifting off because of his injuries in the middle of Stevens' grand tale. Henry had struggled and cursed and fought against his bonds, desperate to get free even if it meant losing a hand or two in the process, but it was hopeless. The way his handcuffs were positioned against the wooden slats of the row of bleachers behind him, he couldn't even manage maneuver his hands around enough to break his thumbs and slip through the cuffs, which was something he would have done in a heartbeat if it meant getting that animal Stevens away from his son.
Greater fear and exasperation had flooded his being at Shawn's telling off his attacker for nearly knocking him out to keep him awake, wishing that his big-mouthed son wouldn't do anything else to further anger their captor. But Aaron Stevens hadn't lashed out at the fake psychic again.
What he did was far, far worse.
He jumped off the platform, strode purposefully over to his backpack, rummaged around in it a bit, and then pulled out a thick, coarse rope from the bag. As Henry watched, horrified beyond words, the man quickly and skillfully tied a noose into one end of the rope, adeptly checking his knots with surprisingly nimble fingers for such big, rough hands. Henry's heart was lodged somewhere around the region of his esophagus when Stevens jumped back up onto the platform to stand beside Shawn, fitting the noose snugly around his neck, but still leaving a little bit of room. From what Henry could tell, Shawn had passed out again, and he was grateful for that at the very least, because he didn't want his son to have to be awake for this, whatever was going to come next.
Stevens tossed the other end of the rope skillfully over the support beam that Shawn was hanging from, and brought the rope over to the large, sturdy hook that the other rope was secured to, tying off the cord with the same amount of slack as the rope around Shawn's wrists – hardly any slack at all. He then fiddled with the first rope, the one Shawn was hanging from by his arms, untying it but keeping it firmly in his hands, grunting slightly as the job of holding Shawn's weight up fell from the hook on the wall to himself solely.
He eyed Henry maliciously. "I've got to make the line a little more taut," he explained darkly. "When his arm broke, it actually caused all of his weight to fall on his right arm, when the left one went limp and I think the rope has sagged a bit, as you've probably already seen. I need to fix that so he doesn't end up choking to death preemptively with only one arm holding him up." Already, Shawn's breathing was sounding a bit labored, but Henry realized with sudden clarity what Stevens was planning on doing.
"Don't do this," he rasped, a pleading tone in his voice. He sounded nothing like himself, nothing like everything he had always tried to be, and nothing like everything he'd always tried to get Shawn to be. "Just let him go, Stevens. You've made your point. Cut him down and kill me instead."
Stevens, his muscles bulging under the strain of holding up a full-grown man, simply smiled wickedly in anticipation and yanked on the rope, hard, causing the rope wrapped around and over the beam above Shawn to pull tighter. There was a sickening crack as the bones in Shawn's arm were forced to straighten at the pressure, no longer limp. Even in unconsciousness, a pain-filled cry wrenched itself from Shawn's throat as the bone protruding from his flesh cracked and snapped into a forced straightened position, sliding back into the flesh and tearing the gaping would anew.
Fresh blood spilled from the wound and down Shawn's upper arm, soaking into the already splattered shoulders and collar of his shirt. The man pulled ruthlessly until Shawn's feet were dangling about an inch from the floor of the platform, now being fully supported by both arms, broken bones and dislocated shoulder and all. Stevens tied the rope off tightly and backed off, satisfied, and then moved to the floor of the platform Shawn was hanging above, removing a section of the flooring and setting it off to the side.
Henry realized with a fresh bout of terror Shawn was now at least five or six inches from the ground with the removal of the trapdoor. If the rope around his hands were snapped, he'd fall down, feet inches away from the ground, with only the rope around his neck to catch him. And that was exactly the plan, Henry realized dully. No way Stevens would go through all of the trouble of building this raised witness stand a-la trap door if he didn't plan on ultimately ending his plan this way. Henry wanted nothing more than to wring this lunatic's head from his thick neck and buff shoulders. His heart broke for his son.
Shawn whimpered, and Henry saw red, not for the first time since he'd arrived at the multi-purpose storage building-panic room-hell house. He couldn't find the words or the vocal capacity to protest anymore – maybe his voice had left him after all of his former yelling and threatening, or maybe the horrendous sight of his only son hanging like a bloody slab of meat from the ceiling of a butcher's shop had finally managed to glue his vocal cords together in horror.
"Now," said Stevens. "Let's get down to business. I need you to understand, Henry, that I'm making a point. I'm not just some nut-job who's decided to base a revenge plot off a book for the hell of it. My point is that my twenty-five years in prison did this to me, and it was your testimony and O'Dell's treachery that put me there."
Henry finally found his voice, hoarse and broken as it was. "You've already told me this," he rasped, not taking his eyes off of his son.
"So I have. But here's my point: You said that there was nothing you could do. No matter what you personally believed, you did what you had to do and testified what you knew would get me convicted, even if it was circumstantial, even if it was a setup. So here's the deal: Herman O'Dell is dead. Murdered, a shot to the head." He inclined his head toward his "judge's podium," where a yellow file folder and the other shiny black pistol, not the one that he'd jammed in Henry's back earlier, lay. "I'm going to present you with the evidence. Fingerprints, although a real ballistics report and fingerprint scan wasn't possible given the circumstances, but we'll have to make do with what we have."
He took a deep breath as if collecting his thoughts and pressed forward, voice gaining slightly in pitch as he spoke, further attesting to his mental instability which he claimed didn't exist. "You're going to examine the evidence like a good juror is supposed to do. You're going to make your decision about whether your son is guilty or not based on the physical evidence presented to you, not what you think you know.
"If I see you're relying on feelings and emotions, if you're leaning toward innocence because you believe he is and not because the evidence points that way... I'll shoot him in his good kneecap. Any time you veer away from judging the evidence, I'll shoot something else. Maybe a toe off next time. And I'll keep on shooting until you play by my rules. So maybe you should make it easier on yourself and him, and just do this the right way from the beginning, because he will suffer exponentially more if you turn into a hypocrite and start basing your judgment on feelings and what you think you know instead of what the papers and evidence in front of you say. You claim that you did your duty when you gave a testimony that falsely implicated me. So do your duty now, examine the evidence, tell me what it says, and then as the judge, I'll pass the sentence.
"Let me remind you: I can promise you that whatever his sentence will be, it will be ten times more painful if you don't do this my way. Got it?"
Henry struggled to comprehend how his world had fallen to pieces in such a short amount of time, all because of a case he hadn't even investigated over twenty-five years ago. The game that Stevens was playing was even more twisted and terrifying than Henry could have imagined. The whole courtroom scene had been meticulously constructed to contribute to the environment of this stand-off. The decision he'd made to uphold the law and to give his testimony even with the knowledge that it could potentially lead to the incarceration of who he believed to be an innocent man had come back to haunt him with a vengeance.
Henry was going to be forced to condemn his own son to death.
He didn't say anything, only stared at the madman before him in horror, no words coming to his mind to adequately express the helplessness and terror he was feeling. He hoped with every ounce of his being that someone had found his note and managed to put the pieces together – not that there were many pieces to put together in the first place, but that note was his only hope. Shawn's only hope.
Stevens was speaking again. Yelling. "I said, got it?"
Henry growled, "Got it."
He couldn't stand to look at his son's strung-up body anymore, and despite how much of a betrayal it felt like when he looked away, he did just that, glaring at the judge's podium blankly as Stevens made his way over to it, sliding latex gloves onto his hands as he walked, presumably so he wouldn't contaminate the "evidence."
Evidence that would only lead to one thing – his son's death. And for the first time in a long time, Henry Spencer had absolutely no idea what to do.
When Detective Lassiter informed Mr. Stevens that his son was wanted for the alleged kidnapping of a police consultant – the son of one of the lead witnesses in his case, along with said lead witness himself, the man's response was, "I can't say I'm entirely surprised, Mr. Lassiter."
Immediately disliking the man, Lassiter corrected edgily, "Detective Lassiter."
"Regardless," said the businessman. "What can I say about Aaron? We raised him right. He made great grades in school, was a bit eccentric and didn't have many friends, but he graduated high school at the age of 16 and college at 19. He started teaching the next year, dating a sophomore he'd met his last year of college. She worked for Mr. O'Dell, he found out she'd been sleeping with her boss, and something in his mind snapped. I've heard many a psychologist say that the human mind, especially one of high-level intelligence, can be socially impaired and when a betrayal of that magnitude occurs, they can break mentally and do something terrible."
Lassiter raised his eyebrows at the man's to-the-point speech. It almost sounded as if it had been rehearsed. Maybe it had. "Are you saying that you believe that your son did kill Alicia Tyler?" he demanded.
He could almost hear the shrug in the elder Stevens' voice. "The court declared him guilty and he went to jail. As far as I'm concerned, he strangled that girl." His voice was filled with distaste. "It was a dreadful blow to my reputation as a businessman. I went to the trials, of course, but after he was sentenced and taken to prison, I made the decision to completely detach myself from him."
Lassiter, who was quite disconnected with his feelings and the warm, cozy ideals of family life, was actually quite taken aback by the man's noncommittal words. "You didn't see your son once in prison?"
"Of course not. It was bad enough that he got all that negative publicity through the murder and the trials. But imagine if I were to be seen entering that prison to see him; if the public were to think I was supporting him!" He laughed harshly. "It would have ruined my career and my reputation would have died with my pride in my son and everything else that went down the drain during that trial."
"No offense, Mr. Stevens, but that's pretty damn cold," Lassiter said dryly, not caring at all if he offended the man.
"Some might see it that way, but I had to protect my business, my wife, and the life I'd worked so hard for from my son. My wife wanted to see him when she found out she had cancer, but she declined too quickly and passed away only a few months after discovering it. It was probably for the best, though. Seeing him and being reminded of his failure would have only made her worse in the long run."
Lassiter had come to the conclusion very early on in the conversation that Jordan Stevens was a terrible person, and that he hated him very much. No wonder his kid had turned out so messed up with a father like that, not necessarily because he was socially impaired, but because his father was so callous, cold, and selfish. He didn't vocalize any of this, however, because he knew that this horrible man was their only lead at this point, and they needed to find the Spencers as soon as possible. "Let me be frank," Lassiter said through gritted teeth. "I really don't care about your family history, Mr. Stevens. All I want to know is anything, any bit of information you might have regarding where your son might have gone or is hiding our consultant and his about him or his habits or hiding places that you can think of can help."
There was a pause. "He loved literature and was teaching at a high school when he was arrested," Mr. Stevens said slowly.
"We know that. Anything else?"
"I remember him going on about some novel he thought he'd explicated in some new way that was going to get him published in major journals someday."
"To Kill a Mockingbird, yes, we knew that, too. He's using the book as inspiration for his little revenge plot."
"Did you check the house?"
"His place hadn't been touched in several days, and the only lead we did find turned out to be a dead end."
"I meant our house. Where he grew up. It's big, in a large spread of woods that we owned. Would be empty."
Lassiter sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose with the long fingers of the hand not holding his phone. "It's more than empty. It's falling apart; it's been empty for twenty-five years."
"What about the shelter?"
Lassiter felt a tiny bit of hope stir inside of him. "What shelter?"
"Well, of course you didn't know. No one did. It's about two and a half miles from the house. The old dirt road leading from the house to it is probably grown over by now. I used it as a safety measure. An all-purpose safe-house, if you will. Originally it was built as a sturdy storage building for my most valuable possessions, but I had it modified pretty early on so that it could be used as a tornado shelter, storm shelter, hideout, anything I needed it for. No windows, one door that can only be opened from either side with a special key. When we moved to New York, we took everything in it with us, but we just left the building standing. I'm sure it's still impenetrable today. It's made of imported Ironwood, the hardest and most durable wood on the planet, found in the desert. When I built it, I built it to last forever." He chuckled humorlessly. "Or at least several lifetimes."
With no time to contemplate the level of the man's paranoia, Lassiter said, "Thank you for your time, Mr. Stevens."
"Good, yes. Well—"
The detective quickly cut off what was sure to be a quick, brush-off of a farewell. "Just one moment, Mr. Stevens. I want to make sure that I impress the importance of this situation to you. Your son has taken a police consultant and his former cop father, with plans to kill them for revenge. It took us far too long to get through to you in the first place. Several lives are at stake here, and you'd better hope that these men make it out of this alive. And I want you to make sure you pick up your damn phone the second I call you again, because now that you know what's going on, if you don't cooperate and they die, we can bring you up on charges of accessory to murder. I don't think you want to contemplate what that would do to your precious reputation."
Carlton's voice was ice cold and hard, hushed and deadly calm, filled with warning and fury.
He was pleased to hear a tiny bit of fear in the man's voice when he responded. Stevens cleared his throat. "Um," he said softly, his voice gaining a bit more confidence as he spoke, but it was evident that the detective had unnerved him. "Right. I'll make sure that any calls made by you or the Santa Barbara Police Station are patched through directly to me."
"Good,"Lassiter said threateningly. "Thank you for your cooperation, Mr. Stevens."
He hung up, jammed his phone into his back pocket, and spun around to face the chief, his partner and Guster, all looking at him anxiously. "We've got a possible location."
"How possible?" the chief asked, raising her eyebrows, even as she nodded to indicate that they needed to take it no matter how slim of a possibility it might be.
"Actually, I'd say that it's more probable than anything," Lassiter said. "We need to get SWAT and some black and whites, and get over to Stevens' childhood home again. Apparently there's an overgrown trail there we missed that leads to some kind of shelter, and from everything that slime-ball told me, I'd almost bet my Crown Vic that he's got the Spencers there."
The chief nodded. "All right, good. Let's move."
A/N: Enormous thank-yous to everyone who reviewed chapter 9: Liberty Hoffman, Leahelisabeth, ShamrockNinny, Polaris'05, Comma to the Top, Clara Brighet, ChutneyMarie and Said The Liar 13, as well as to everyone who has read, favorited and followed! Also, thank you to ChutneyMarie for leaving a review for chapter 8 as well, and big thank-you hugs to ChutneyMarie and Clara Brighet for spotting and pointing out some typographical errors in chapters 8 and 9! They have been fixed! :D
Okay, as I was writing this chapter a few months ago, I came to the realization that I think I hate Jordan Stevens more than his son. Worst. Dad. Ever. Anyway...
Poor Shawn! Yeah, you thought the broken arm was the worst of his bone problems, but now the bone's back in his arm, and the wound is worse than ever. *shudders* I had a hard time writing that bit. And still more whump to come!
Lassie and Jules are on the move! Go, team, go! (But not too fast; we aren't quite finished whumping our dear Shawn yet... wow, I'm evil. XD)
Thanks again so much for your support, and I hope this chapter, too, was to your liking! Please review! See you Tuesday! ;) Love you guys to bits!
~Emachinescat ^..^