Chapter 11
At home, Mike started a pot of coffee and shepherded Steve towards the family room. He put the phone next to him. "Here, you give Jeannie a ring; she wants to know how you were getting on today. While you two have a good long chat, I'll see about dinner."
Both Mike and Steve had been updating Jean on the on-going events and had found it hard to convince her not to come to the funeral in the middle of her exams.
Mike disappeared into the kitchen and quickly put on a pot of readymade Chili to reheat, while he sat down to read the file. His expression grew grimmer with every page he read.
The brake lines in a reasonably well maintained car broke and the driver didn't stand a chance on the serpentine mountain road. As well as the widow, who was three months pregnant at the time, the oldest son Richard was shortly under investigation. Richard was ruled out early in the investigation when a timing inconsistency failed to place him at the scene of the accident.
Although he had stayed with his father and the family in their holiday home in the mountains, he had left the location days before the tragedy had struck. The widow was cleared eventually, too. A witness saw her driving the car shortly before her husband got in and was killed. How must the young woman have felt about being suspected of killing her husband? What concerned Mike even more was the pregnancy. Did Steve know at all that his mother had lost a baby?
Mike jumped up when he heard the hissing sound of boiling coffee hitting the hot plate. While he was at the cooker he gave the chilli a stir before it burned, muttering under his breath and then he hid the file under a pile of old newspapers.
He went back into the family room and took the phone off Steve to have a few words with his daughter, while Steve wandered off to the kitchen to set the table.
"Well, Jeannie told me to take good care of you and make sure you eat up all your dinner!" Mike quipped.
"She did not! She told me that you never go through with your threats about clearing the plate!" Steve exclaimed indignantly.
Mike filled Steve's plate with about half the amount the young man would normally eat before going for seconds.
"Please, try and eat this. You're not helping anyone by starving yourself. Unlike me…"Mike patted his belly "You can't really afford to lose weight."
"I know, I know. I'm just not hungry."
"You needn't be hungry to eat my delicious chilli - you know, Chief Ironside's secret recipe - and when you've cleared the plate there's chocolate chip ice cream."
"Another thing Jeannie warned me about. Your bribery is nothing but an empty threat!"
After a few minutes of silence Steve started again.
"Will you tell me what you found in the file?"
"Sure thing. It was ruled as a freak accident. The brake lines broke on a mountain road and there was no evidence of it being cut. The police followed up some suspects first, but it was more or less just routine procedure. You know it yourself, everybody gets interviewed. They probably even interrogated you in your play pen." Mike told no lies, but he omitted a few facts.
"Can I read it for myself?"
"Of course, but trust me on this, not tonight. You've had enough for one day; you don't need a report on your father's death as bedtime reading."
Steve reluctantly agreed. He knew Mike only wanted to protect him, but he also felt he needed to know all the facts and not just the ones that Mike felt he ought to know. Though maybe Mike was right that he didn't necessarily have to be inundated with everything tonight.
After lying awake for hours he got up and went to the kitchen, where he assumed Mike had left the file. It didn't take him long to locate it and he sat down in the family room with just a reading light on. "At least he's not sleeping with the file under his pillow." he muttered.
He settled on the sofa and started reading...
Mike appeared about half an hour later after waking up in a quiet house with no sounds coming from Steve's room. No pacing, no tossing and turning. When he got up to investigate, he had noticed that the dim line of light came from under the door of the family room, not the spare bedroom. He quietly opened the door. "Buddy boy, are you alright?" he asked gently.
Steve turned around startled and looked at him with an almost guilty expression on his face.
"No, Steve, I'm not going to say anything. It's your right to read the file and I must apologise, I should have given it to you straight away. I sometimes treat you like a kid. I'm sorry." He sat down next to his friend.
"I couldn't sleep." Steve mumbled. "Mike, I know you want to protect me, but sometimes you can't. I have to deal with all this whether I want to or not." He leaned back a fraction, so that his shoulders made contact with Mike's solid body.
"What bothers you?" Mike probed carefully. "The hit on you? Further revelations in the case? Dealing with your past?"
"What's going on in me, that's what frightens the hell out of me." He admitted finally.
"Steve, very few people can deal with what you are dealing with at the moment. I'm not sure if I could, to be honest, at least not without some help. So please, talk to me and let me know how I can help you."
"Can we try to discuss this file and pretend the people in question have nothing to do with me?"
"Okay, we can try. Are you happy with the way the investigation was handled, on a purely professional level?"
Steve thought for a moment. "Yeah, I guess so."
"Would you have done something differently?"
Steve tried a weak grin. "I would have questioned the toddler in the play pen. He might have seen something. Seriously, I think it was a thorough and fair investigation."
"That was my impression, too." added Mike. "So why does it leave us both with this sinking feeling that something isn't all that it appears to be?"
"Because…" Steve sighed before starting again, "It doesn't help to prove the identity of the guy who claims to be Richard Keller. He knows something, probably more than what newspaper clippings would tell him, so where could he have got the information from? A family member? Did he know somebody? Maybe even my real brother?"
"That's an idea, Steve; he must have gotten his inside information from somewhere. Let's see if we can get a lead on this. Maybe there were two runaway American boys in Mexico..."
The two detectives went over different interviews in the file.
"You know what? Some details of the interview the police conducted with your brother might show this so-called Richard Keller up as an impostor." Mike concluded. "Maybe, instead of throwing you off the scent altogether, he has handed us the tool to crack him with. First thing tomorrow we'll go through the other missing teens of the right age and description if someone has been posing as Richard Keller, there must be some likeness there."
Steve nodded in agreement to Mike's suggestions, eyes half closed.
"Buddy boy, you are dead on your feet. You really must try and get some sleep."
Like a sleepwalker, Steve followed his mentor's instruction to the spare room where sheer exhaustion took over. He was asleep the moment his head touched the pillow.
The following morning saw Steve in higher spirits than he had been in a long time. Though he accepted that nothing could be achieved in one day, the wheels were in motion and little did he know that a lead would present itself two days later….