My world ended when the police slipped the photos across the table to me.
There was no way my son, my boy, could have committed the terrible, atrocious scenes they were showing me. The ones forever scarred into my mind. These crimes had to have been committed by someone else, anyone else, just not my son.
The photographs deafened me to the questions the even-toned investigator asked. All I could hear were a thousand voices screaming this had to be a sick, cruel joke from my fantasy football league. Wasn't Dave a detective at this branch?
"Sir?" The investigator leaned forward, her eyes soft, but her voice firm.
She set a styrofoam cup of black coffee beside the photographs for me. Its bitter steam drew me away from the screams.
Hands before me reached for it. My hands? My hands. It's mad, isn't it? The details, the minutia we pick on in crisis. It's as if reality itself is morphed to fit through the barricades of our minds, desperate to shield us from trauma.
The other investigator's lips moved. I knew he'd asked me a question, but I couldn't hear him over the construction site that burst to life inside me. I could feel the workers building bridges, moving moats, and destroying drywall to spare me from these invading images laying siege to my subconscious.
"My son?" my voice started. With a shaking extended finger, I slid the corner of a photo toward me.
As my eyes soaked in the details of the body's shredded skin, I heard the investigator on the left say, "Sir, we know your son did this. He confessed. We need you to tell us if there are any things that happened in his past that might have suggested he would do something like this?"
"Like this? No." I shook my head so hard my glasses slipped down my nose. "No, no. Not my son." I shoved the photo away, losing it in the bottom of other similarly gruesome scenes. "W-what do you mean suggest? Do you mean to say that did we, his parents, see something horrible and not report it? No, God no. He was always a good boy, I mean, he didn't have stellar grades, but he was always really smart. He's starting his own business now, and when he was growing up, he was never into anything weird, like weird-weird, you know? Like, just normal boy stuff, like learning about how to make fires for survival..."
The investigator on the left scribbled in his spiral notebook while the other on the right asked the questions. "Was he ever in any kind of trouble growing up?" Her thin shoulders lifted as she said, "Like was he ever caught shoplifting or caught being a voyeur?"
She might as well have dropped my car on my head. "A voyeur? A petty thief?" I scoffed so hard, I'm certain my spit rained upon the photographs of those poor people. Sucking in my quivering lip, I felt worse than I had all night after spitting on victims.
God, I'm the monster.
I picked up the coffee and took a quick sip. My tongue stung from its hot, bitter bite. "No," I answered. "Nothing like that..." I tapped my fingers on the table as a faint memory rose to the top of my mind. "The neighbors did blame him for years for their lab's death, but, there's just no way. We always thought it was a bully in the neighborhood, someone the other kids on our street talked about, but never told us who it was."
The inspectors exchanged a look that made my blood as hot as that black coffee.
My hands curled into fists. "That was the only time, the only real time he was so much as suspected of anything."
