less than fifteen minutes.
Lori had given me Justin Fowler’s address, and informed his mother that I’d be coming by. The house was blue, vinyl sided, with a small screened-in porch, and a tiny, nicely tended lawn.
Mary Fowler answered the door practically before I rang. She must have been watching through the front window and seen me drive up, because I was still smoothing out my coat when the door opened.
She looked tired. Having a son with Asperger’s will wear anyone out, and she’d begun the task ten years before Ethan was born. Having a son accused of murder greatly compounded the burden. Still, she offered a warm hand, and I took it.
“Mr. Tucker, I presume,” she said. “Lori told me you’d be here soon.”
“Lori never lies,” I answered, establishing our common bond. “And she never lets a parent down. May I come in?”
Mary looked embarrassed and opened the screen door a little wider. “Sorry,” she said. “Where are my manners?”
I walked into the living room, which was dominated by the kind of grandfather clock obviously handed down from generation to generation. Unfortunately, the room surrounding it wasn’t quite as grand or regal, so the clock looked like a king visiting the commoners for the annual tournaments. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Fowler,” I said. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”
“It’s Mary, Mr. Tucker. And may I get you something to drink?”
“No, I’m fine. And call me Aaron. Is Justin here?”
Mary looked embarrassed, and stared past me for a moment, not wanting to make eye contact. “No,” she said. “They’re holding him on $200,000 bail, and I don’t have that kind of money.”
Abby had thought the Middlesex County prosecutor might want bigtime bail. While Justin had been charged with aggravated manslaughter and not pre-meditated murder, the bail was still set high, with no option for putting up just ten percent in cash. Mary would have to mortgage her house to a bail bondsman if she wanted to get her son out of county jail.
She thought I should see Justin’s room. Like many young Asperger adults, Justin was not ready to live on his own, even though he had graduated with an associate’s degree from Middlesex County College and had a full-time job. The pressure of living in a world populated with other people, and having to maintain a household of some kind on his own, would have been too much for him to handle.
His room, which was smaller than Ethan’s, couldn’t have changed much since high school. But instead of the posters of bands or basketball players you might have expected, the walls were covered with pictures of guns. Rifles, automatics, pistols, revolvers. Guns, preferably by themselves, but sometimes in the hands of their owners, were clearly Justin’s heroes.
“When did he develop his interest in guns?” I asked.
“It doesn’t help his case, does it?” she said. “I think it started in high school. He had gotten hold of some gun magazine or another, and that was it. It’s all he talks about. But I never let him own one.”
“He doesn’t own the gun they found?” In Justin’s room, the police had discovered an antique gun, described as a single-shot de-ringer replica of the handgun John Wilkes Booth used on Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, he hadn’t tried to hide it—it was sitting right there on his desk. Ballistic tests confirmed it as the weapon used to kill Michael Huston.
“No, it wasn’t registered to him. I frankly was shocked when they told me they’d found it there, and I thought the police had planted the gun in Justin’s room. But Justin said it was his.”
The murder had been four days earlier, so the room was no longer considered a crime scene, although a few tiny remnants of yellow police tape dotted the doorjamb. Crime scene investigators had been through and taken anything they considered of interest, so I didn’t expect to find any evidence that Justin was or wasn’t involved in the killing. I sat on the edge of his single bed and looked at his mother.
“What led the police to Justin in the first place?” I asked.
“I guess it was the gun,” Mary said. “Once they found out what kind of gun it was, they started looking for area enthusiasts. It didn’t seem to take long. They were here with a search warrant two days ago.”
“Mary, I’m going to have to ask some questions that aren’t easy to answer. I want you to know, I have a son with Asperger’s, and I understand, okay?