The Paediatrician's Personal Protector

A twinge under her breastbone gave her the answer to that. She had known something was wrong. Known it and ignored it. She’d chalked up his monotone answers and disinterest to mild situational depression, and had encouraged him to get out more, see his friends, get back to playing golf. She’d told him he should talk to someone and suggested that he ask the pastor of his church about a grief-counseling class or a therapist.

She thought about the one time she had visited her dad in the past five years. She’d attended a seminar in New Orleans. She’d met her dad at a restaurant for a hurried dinner before kissing him on the cheek and rushing back to her hotel room to prepare for a talk she was giving the next day.

Now here she was. Too late. Her family home had become the home of a killer.

She shuddered, swallowing hard. Shock and revulsion and fear had dogged her steps ever since she’d received the phone call telling her that her father had been arrested. The call had come less than twelve hours after she’d talked to her dad. When she put the times together, she realized that within an hour of their conversation, he’d shot two people, a policeman and a restaurant owner, and had tried to kill a third.

He’d done it with the misguided notion that he could force the police to reopen Autumn’s case.

Guilt washed over Christy like a blast of hot summer wind, stealing her breath and leaving her back and neck prickling with sudden sweat. The certainty that this was her fault sat like a dead weight on her chest. She’d gone off and left him to deal with Autumn, knowing her younger sister was in trouble with drugs.

If she’d stayed in Louisiana, would her little sister still be alive? Would her father be an active, vibrant man in his early sixties, rather than a deranged murderer?

Rationally, she recognized that her decision probably wouldn’t have changed what happened, but rationality and guilt were like matter and antimatter. They couldn’t occupy the same space. And the guilt was stronger.

Christy realized she’d become exactly what she’d sworn she’d never be, a workaholic career woman with no time for family, like her mother. Deborah Moser had been a tenured professor at Loyola until the day she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Christy glanced around the neighborhood where she and Autumn had played as children. None of the neighbors were outside, and there were no cars on the street. She’d once known many of the people who lived here. Where were they now? Resentment burned deep within her. Why hadn’t they known something was wrong with her dad?

Why hadn’t she?

She looked down at the key in her hand. Suddenly, she needed to go inside and look at her father’s things. See her sister’s room. Wallow in some more guilt.

She slipped the key into the lock and turned it. The door opened easily, silently.

Christy ducked under the crime-scene tape. She pushed the door wide. The first thing that struck her was how dark the inside of the house was. The second, that it had been that way ever since their mother had been killed when Christy was sixteen and Autumn was twelve.

Leaving the front door open for light, she stepped over to her father’s recliner and turned on the lamp on the side table. The glow was feeble. After a couple of seconds, her eyes adapted to the dark and she could see a little bit.

Smudged gray dust outlined a large square on the side table.

She wiped a fingertip across it. Fingerprint dust. It had to be. The peculiar color distinguished it from household dust.

Looking at the table, Christy knew immediately what had lain there. Dad’s scrapbook. More pain gnawed at her heart. Ever since she could remember, he’d kept it. How many times had she sat in his lap as he’d pasted pictures of her and baby Autumn in the leather-bound book and carefully, in neat, precise printing, labeled each one with their name, the date and a sweet or funny comment?

But that image quickly morphed into the memory of Detective Ryker Delancey showing her the pages in the back of that beloved book, behind the family pictures. Pages containing baby photos of girls she didn’t know, with comments written beside them in a shaky hand she hardly recognized as her father’s.

Those were her father’s victims, and Detective Ryker Delancey had made her look at them, made her read her father’s careful notes about where they lived, when their birthdays were and when he planned to kill them. Then the detective had demanded to know if she’d seen them before.

Of course she’d never seen them. Angrily she swiped her hand across the table’s surface, obliterating the dust outline of the book. Did the detective know he’d destroyed every last good memory from her childhood? Did he care?

She dusted her hands together. She should leave. She knew she wasn’t supposed to cross crime-scene tape. But this was her home, or it had been. Didn’t she have a right?

She glanced desperately around the dimly lit room, hoping to find something—anything—that would give her an explanation for why her father had done what he had. Something rational that she could take to the police and say, “Here, look. This is what he was doing. Now it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

But she knew there was nothing to find. No rational explanation, no sane reason.

She blinked and realized her gaze had settled on a framed picture Autumn had drawn of their mother. It hung on the wall above the television. Christy’s eyes filled with tears. Their mother had been beautiful and smart. Autumn had looked just like her. She stepped over and touched the glass. More dust. She sneezed.

Guilt and embarrassment tightened her chest, making it difficult to breathe. Anyone coming into this sad house would immediately see how badly she’d neglected her father.

She reached into her purse for a tissue.

“Freeze!” a harsh voice barked.

Shocked, she turned. The unmistakable silhouette of a uniformed police officer darkened the doorway.

“Wait!” she called out, her hand still inside her purse. “I’m—”

“I said freeze!”

She froze.

The harsh beam of a flashlight swept her, blinding her as it passed over her face. Finally, the beam stopped on her hands.

“Hold it!” he barked when she started to pull her hand out of her purse. “Don’t move that hand.”

“Oh, no. It’s okay. I was just—”

“Stop! Now I want you to lift your hand out of your purse, thumb up.”

Christy frowned, but tried to comply. She raised her hand until her thumb was visible over the edge of the purse’s clasp.

“Okay,” the officer said, his gun still pointed at her, his eyes bright in the dimness of the doorway. “Now—slowly, lift your hand all the way out, and if I see anything in it, I’ll shoot.” Numb with fear, she did what he said, spreading her shaky fingers to demonstrate that they were empty.

The officer’s stance relaxed a bit. “Drop your purse. Do it!”

She dropped it.

“How’d you get in here?”

“Please,” she said. “I’m—”

“How?”

“My key. It’s in my purse.”

The officer shone the beam of the flashlight in her face again. “Are you alone?” he asked.

“Yes. Of course.”

“Step outside,” he continued, backing across the threshold. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

She complied, following him until she was on the porch and he had backed down the steps to the sidewalk. She saw the police car parked behind her rental car.

“Who are you?” he snapped, once he got a look at her in the afternoon sunlight.

“Chr-Christmas Leigh Moser. Albert Moser is my father.”