Page 14 of Hunting the Crossbow Killer

“She told me.”

“I thought she had a ventilator. Doesn’t that prevent you from speaking?”

“Her ventilator was connected to her trachea. Her mouth wasn’t covered. And it had this…valve, a…Passy Muir Valve. That’s what it was called. It helped her speak. She could write a little, too, with her right hand. But it was really difficult. She preferred the valve.”

“I didn’t read about that in the reports in your file.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know that it matters either way. Why do you keep asking these—”

“Let’s skip to the last day of her life, seven months after the accident.”

“Surely those details are in the police reports.”

“Not as much as I’d expect. The investigative file is surprisingly sparse. Even though it was several months after her death before you were brought to court, there doesn’t seem to have been much of an investigation.”

“Why would there be? I told the police what happened. When the day nurse who watched over Elly whenever I was at work left, I unplugged my wife’s ventilator. I let her go.” He swallowed, his throat tight as he struggled to keep his composure.

Rather than accept his confession, Malone frowned as if she was weighing it for the truth. “From what I’ve read, there are alarms on the machine that was keeping your wife alive. If you unplugged it, the backup battery—as long as it was charged and working correctly—would have kicked in to keep the machine going until it was plugged in again or the battery died. The particular model your wife used has ten minutes of battery life. Alarms would have been going off that whole time.”

He hesitated. “Right. They were. I knew all about the alarms. I was trained to use her equipment, to suction, clean, keep it going if any alarms went off during the night while there weren’t any nurses there watching over her. Again, why do you feel you need to—”

“Aidan. You ran into the woods this morning with no way to defend yourself against a man with a lethal weapon. You risked your life because you didn’t want him to shoot an arrow near strangers, people who weren’t your loved ones. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you unplugged your wife’s machine, your son’s mother, and sat there for the ten minutes for thebattery to run down with all those alarms going off, then several more minutes watching her struggle until she died, before finally calling 911?”

His face flushed with heat. His pulse raced and he could feel a bead of sweat running down his back.

“Aidan?”

“I don’t expect you to believe anything. And I don’t care whether you do or not. I confessed to my crime, went to prison. Why does it even matter at this point?”

“Your son was in the house at the time?”

Good grief, she was tenacious. And getting far too close to the truth. He needed her to stop digging. That was the only reason he hung on, continued answering her questions as he desperately tried to assuage her curiosity and convince her, somehow, to let it go. To move on to something else, to someone else, in her investigation.

“Yes,” he finally said. “He was in his room, playing.”

“Did he come into his mother’s room when he heard the alarms?”

Another bead of sweat raced down his back. “He… No, he stayed in his room.” At her look of disbelief, he quickly added, “He’d gone on a field trip that day with his kindergarten class, to the zoo. He was worn-out, fell asleep as soon as I got him home. His door was shut, and…Elly’s door was shut.”

“I see. How far away was your son’s room from Elly’s?”

His throat ached with the urge to shout at her.Stop. Please. Just, stop.

“Far enough that he didn’t hear anything. And I… Right, I silenced the machine. I forgot about that. I turned off the alarms.”

“You just said the alarms were going off. Now you’re saying you turned them off.”

He stood. “I’ve answered your questions, far more than I should have to, given that none of this even remotely touches on your investigation into the serial killer you’re looking for. It’s time for you to go.”

She stood and looked up at him. “I know this has been difficult. But I appreciate your cooperation. There is one more thing, though. It’s not about your wife. Earlier today, you told me that you use a bow and arrows to hunt. Can you show them to me?”

He swore beneath his breath. “I always keep a bow and quiver of arrows in my truck. You can look at those on your way out. It’s parked beside the cabin. My other equipment is in here.” He headed to the first bedroom under the stairs. He flung open the door and headed into the closet to grab his bow and one of the quivers of arrows to give her. But when he turned around, she was standing in the closet doorway.

“I need to verify for myself,” she said unapologetically.

He tossed the bow and arrows down and left the room.

A few minutes later, she joined him by the front door. “I don’t see anything remotely resembling a crossbow anywhere. And as you said earlier, your arrows are longer, without any white feathers for fletching. Oh, wait, that was another question I had, about the fletching.”

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