Diamond cutters will tell you that they’ll study some raw gems for hours, even days, looking for the exact right place to break the stone open so all its brilliant facets are revealed. More often than not, I take the same approach: studying, probing, looking for that moment when I can challenge a subject on some point and use that sharp challenge to crack him and get him to confess. But my gut told me I did not have to wait, study, and draw Carney out—I already understood how to break him wide open.
“How’d your biological mother die?” I asked.
“Bicycle accident.”
I shook my head. “Your mother was murdered, Officer Carney.”
You’d have thought I’d slapped him. “What? No, that’s not—”
“Your mother was murdered,” I insisted. “And your father killed her. That’s why he went to the Polk Correctional Institution. That’s why he died there.”
Carney’s head began to retreat. “No, that’s not right.”
“It is right,” I replied calmly. “And the worst thing about it? You saw your father kill your mother. You saw him strangle her when you were three and a half, not a baby, Kenneth.”
Carney stared at me as if I’d become some alien creature who’d come to haunt his nightmares. Seeing him right there on the verge of cracking, I hit him with the heaviest hammer and chisel I had in my bag.
“What else did you see that night?” I asked. “Why did your father kill your mother? Why did he strangle her like that?”
The tics came first this time, followed by beads of sweat that formed on Carney’s naked head before his eyeballs rolled up ever so slightly and fluttered. His body arched as if he were right there on the verge of a convulsion, before it sagged and he slumped down and regarded me with a knowing smirk.
“Officer Goody Two-Shoes can’t face the past,” he said in a gruffer voice. “Never could. Never will, and that’s a fact.”
“But you can, right, Kenny-Two?”
“Course I can,” he replied with that lazy smile I was learning to recognize. “I’m the lone survivor, Detective, the only one who really knows what happened.”
“Kelli and Kevin don’t know?”
“How could they? My baby sister and brother died that night, too.”
Chapter
90
Neuropsychologist Evelyn Owens of Balboa Naval Medical Center had told me much the same thing during our phone discussion. In the wake of the closed-head injury and after Carney had exhibited several short bouts of what appeared to be multiple personality disorder, Owens said she had dug deep into the wounded veteran’s past. What she’d found was beyond disturbing.
According to Florida Child Welfare files, Carney’s mother was named Kerry Ann Johns. On her sixteenth birthday, she had Kenneth. Two months shy of her twentieth birthday, she smoked crystal meth with Kenneth Peters Senior, her boyfriend and Kenneth Junior’s father, walked into the emergency room at Tampa General Hospital, and soon after gave birth to twins: Kelli and Kevin. They were nine weeks premature, habituated to meth, and quickly went into withdrawal. They spent nearly a month in the ICU before being placed in foster care.
After Johns and Peters were released from rehab, they petitioned for and got custody of Kenneth and the twins. Carney’s biological parents managed to stay clean for a year. But caring for any child is difficult, much less three children, with two of them suffering from medical and developmental problems.
The stress became overwhelming, and Johns and Peters fell back into old habits. They began smoking meth again. To support their habits, Carney’s father turned to burglary, and his mother to prostitution.
“She worked in a massage parlor?” I asked Kenny-Two.
“My father hated her for it,” he replied bitterly.
“How about you?”
“Bitch was not exactly mother of the year, was she?”
“That why Kevin likes to shoot up places like the Superior Spa?”
Carney’s eyes barely fluttered before his voice changed into the higher range of the Kevin personality. “Fucking A,” he said. “Does a man good to see filthy whores and their customers begging and dying.”
“So you see your mother in your victims?” I asked.
“Don’t you?” he asked in a scoffing tone.