The city's pulse was throbbing, edgy, on a hot, festering afternoon, and as the beer and heat took hold, the swing shift promised to turn from a steady stream of assorted calls for service straight into Code 3 runs. Assigned to the Bench Division, I got a missing persons call in the Boise Valley and U-turned my cruiser.
Upon arrival, I met with the caller, Sandra, a thirty-something, petite, fit, and striking. This girl knew how to dress. The few lines of age that the antiwrinkle cream couldn't conceal were enhanced with worry. Her husband, Derrick, Sandra stated, was missing. She showed me a photo of an older man, very handsome, with a full head of hair. He was a little overweight but still appeared athletic and powerful.
"He's never done anything like this, never!" Sandra assured me. She introduced her two daughters, ages nine and thirteen, from a previous marriage, and their concern appeared genuine. She and Derrick had been married for ten months, this being his fourth marriage.
Rapid-fire information included that her soul mate Derrick had gotten up at 0430 hours to run his paper route. Even though there was absolutely no response from me, Sandra was quick to defend her husband's choice of jobs. She assured me this was just temporary, to get them through until he secured other employment. Derrick was skilled with his hands and could repair anything from lawn mowers to guns.
Around 0830 hours that morning, Sandra had received a phone call from Derrick's boss asking if she knew where her husband was. The morning newspaper bundles had been picked up but never delivered.
After that call, Sandra and her daughters went looking for Derrick, certain they would find him broken down by the side of the road somewhere, smiling, with a wrench in his hands. But it now seemed as though Derrick had vanished without any logical explanation.
Gently, I asked Sandra about any troubles and explored the financial problems she had hinted at earlier. Hesitation and uncertainty crossed Sandra's face, and she seemed to shrink into herself. Patiently, I waited while Sandra collected her thoughts. She knew that Derrick had been a bit down lately and had been to a doctor, but she didn't know the doctor's name or even what the appointment was for. Sandra showed me sample medication for depression that had been given to her newlywed husband, but there was no name of a doctor or actual prescription. Also, no pills were missing from the bubble pack. There were no other medications in the home for Derrick. Not one single bottle of anything.
It appeared that Sandra's husband could be hiding something. I tried questioning her again, asking if there were any weapons in the home that she knew of. With a bit of a laugh, Sandra stated that there were lots of guns in the home. The garage was full of them.
Derrick had been a gunsmith before his third divorce forced him to shut down his business and move into their home. Various gunsmithing tools and numerous guns had all been stored in disorganized piles in the junked-up garage. The door was never locked, but no one but Derrick ever ventured into that area of the home.
It was time to ask the wild-card question. "Has there been any kind of weird stuff, you know, surprising things that maybe have scared or frightened you since you married Derrick?"
Immediately and firmly, Sandra answered. Her response raised my alarm and I felt chilly psychic waters begin to part. Derrick would sometimes retreat into himself; he could be in the same room and might as well be a thousand miles away. He seemed not to be able to hear, respond, or even comprehend that his wife and stepdaughters were there, asking if he would come to the dinner table. At other times, this mystery man would go into the garage and, as if by stepping across the threshold, he seemed to pass into another world. Derrick would stand still, seemingly unaware of the passage of time, unmoving. If Sandra or, heaven forbid, the girls, dared to intrude into this area of his life, they would be firmly rebuked and ordered to leave. Sometimes he even physically removed them. There were things about Derrick he carefully guarded.
Furthermore, there was an incident that had occurred approximately two months prior. While coming home from church, she and Derrick had begun to argue over something stupid. Derrick, against all reason, became belligerent. Punctuating his talk with profanity, Derrick began to drive recklessly, swerving wildly, driving onto the sidewalk and through parking lost, while degrading her with sexually graphic and crude statements.
The girls were crying and Sandra begged Derrick to stop. No man she had ever known, under and circumstances, had been this dangerous and threatening. Most unsettling was the fact that the behavior had no reasonable explanation or trigger that should have caused such a reaction.
When Derrick slid to a stop for a red light, Sandra and both girls simultaneously bolted from the car, literally running for their lives. Then it was over. Derrick did not try to follow them as he spun the tires. They were alone in their Sunday school clothes on the street. Just like that, from rage to solitude. As best she could, Sandra tried to reassure her daughters. Holding onto one another, they walked home, each seeking comfort in their mutual misery and uncertain of what had just happened.
The traumatized trio heard Derrick and his car before they saw him.
"He had a gun, "Sandra said." A little black gun with a really short barrel. I had never seen that one before. I didn't know he had it. Derrick held it out the car window and stuck it right in my face! I just stood there. I didn't know what to do. I kept thinking that if he looked at me, if he would just see it was me, he would snap out of it. He was talking crazy stuff, calm and quiet like. Spooky. It wasn't his voice…The girls …the girls were so scared, they were crying and begging for him to just leave me alone."
"I'll…see…you…in… hell!" Derrick deliberately spoke in staccato as he rhythmically pulled the trigger on empty chambers with each word. He slammed the accelerator to the floor and the car leaped forward, screeching, smoking and fishtailing.
"I've never seen that gun again. I don't know where it is and I don't know where he put it or where he keeps it," Sandra stated flatly. "It ," her voice broke. "It …was …like nothing had ever happened when we got home. Nothing. I mean it was like absolutely nothing at all had happened! He was smiling and happy. Derrick was singing and grilling hamburgers for our Sunday dinner. It was never mentioned or talked about again. I never told anyone else about it. The girls the girls and I don't talk about it. I don't know who that man with the gun was, but he is not my Derrick. He is not the man I married."
After making absolutely sure that Derrick wasn't lying dead in the garage, bathtub, crawl space, or someplace else, I gave Sandra instructions that she was to contact me ASAP if she learned anything more or actually heard from Derrick. I secured family information and left. At the station, I placed a call to Tony, Derrick's younger brother.
I did not want to speak in front of Sandra, as I needed Derrick's sibling to be completely honest and candid. My trepidation increased as Tony filled in blanks that Sandra appeared to know nothing about. There were five kids in Derrick's family, Derrick being the oldest. Depression, with a fifty-year history, ran in both sides of the family and affected both their mother and father.
Their father was the worst of the two parents. He had eventually committed suicide with a gun. Tony revealed that three out of the five brothers and sisters had attempted suicide, while never admitting or denying which group he held membership in. Further, Tony had spoken to Derrick's three ex-wives and learned that depression was a constant factor with him.
Tony believed that his brother deliberately hid his depression and dysfunction from the rest of the family. It had fallen upon Derrick, as the oldest of the kids, right or wrong, to hold the family together. Derrick's lot in life was to keep his brothers, sisters, and mother safe after their dad was gone. It was a burden that no sixteen-year-old boy should ever bear.
I began to probe for the details of the father's suicide. "What kind of gun was it, What did your dad …the gun, Tony, what was it? What happened?"
Their dad had a shop that was built on top of a detached garage. It was there that he would spend his time, sometimes building things or repairing guns as a part-time job to bring in extra cash. Other times their father remained secluded and alone, escaping his demons in his own way. It was in this shop that he had taken a two-inch. 38 caliber blued revolver, placed it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. No one heard the shot, and it was Derrick who eventually found their dad when he was late for dinner.
"Where's the gun now? Do you know?" Sandra's description of the revolver and the suicide-shop pistol were too similar not to ask the question.
"Yeah, I know, Derrick had to have it. The son of a bitch was obsessed with getting that gun back. He kept at it until he was eighteen, and the police eventually gave him the damn thing. He just wouldn't give it up. None of the rest of us wanted it around, but he had to have it.
"Where would he go? Tony, where would he go?"
Keenly aware of exactly what I was asking, Tony answered quickly and decisively. "One of two places. The first I would try is a little campground where we went as kids. It was the only time we really could just be kids, playing and having fun. It was good times for all of us when we went camping there. The second place would be that house we grew up in, not the house, but the shop, the shop built above the garage. If I was you, and I'm not, that's where I would be looking. The shop."
"Give me a call if you hear from him, night or day. Call me, call the police, and I will call you when I know anything."
After arranging for the County Sheriff to do a security check for my suicidal missing person, I put myself on the road to Derrick's childhood home. Upon arrival there, where this tormented and tragic family once lived, I spoke with the current owner, a friendly sort who told me he had a little jewelry shop in the upstairs of the garage. "Really a nice little place. You can see out. The trees cool it down and it is quite relaxing. Go on and have yourself a look around. It's not locked up, I haven't been there in about a week. You'll find the stairs alright."
As I entered the dusty garage, the heat of the day seemed to double. Sweat beaded on my temples and ran down my collar. My ballistics vest was stuck to my T-shirt, soaked with sweat that ran in droplets down the center of my spine and soaked the back of my gun belt. The stairs were surprisingly steep. The wooden handrail was worn perfectly smooth, polished by many hands over the decades. As I ascended, the heat increased proportionally and the air became suffocating.
With each step I wondered how many times members of Derrick's family had walked these stairs, holding this same rail. In the dim light I grasped the antique doorknob and flashed on the legacy of depression, suicide, fixation, hidden lies, a family's failure, and a bullet from a snub-nosed. 38-caliber revolver. I wondered if the crippling bouts of twisted despair this room had borne witness to would continue to carve out its wretched path of self-destruction and misery, just another chapter, another secret sealed in blood. I could nearly smell the fear and horror of a boy, now a missing suicidal man, bolting down the stairs, his life forever altered by what had occurred in this shop I was about to enter.
Uncertain if danger had been silenced by deliberate choice, I stepped out of the funnel of the doorway and announced, "Police officer!" silence. I entered the shop, built so many years ago, above the garage.
What was behind the door? The monstrous depression that is passed from generation to generation, father to son, and sucks everything human from a man, will not be ignored. Perhaps it is just enough to know that there is always on officer, 24/7/365, who is on duty, in harm's way, standing ready to open the door to the shop above the garage, just as I did on that hot, festering afternoon on a swing shift.