Free Impact by James Dekker Page A

the restaurant and two blocks from the bus stop, right in front of a nearly empty parking lot, he saw flashing lights. They turned out to be from an ambulance and a couple of police cars. There were a few other cars there too, which turned out to belong to some detectives.
    My father said it never occurred to him that all those flashing lights could have anything to do with him. He drove two more blocks to the restaurant, which by then was closed. There was no sign of Mark. So he turned the car around and started to go back the way he had come. This time, he said, heturned his head when he passed all those police cars. He saw now that there was a body in the parking lot. It was covered up, and there was something lying nearby. He couldn’t see who it was or even if it was a man or a woman. He just saw it was a body. He drove right by and kept driving.
    He said he was maybe ten blocks away before he suddenly realized what it was that he had seen lying near the body. It was a paper bag from a sandwich place. He said he recognized it because it was the sandwich place that Mark always liked to go to. He said everything moved in slow motion after that, like when you’re having a nightmare and you’re running as fast as you can, but it seems like you’re hardly moving at all and whatever is after you is gaining on you until you know it’s going to catch you. That’s when you scream. That’s when you wake up.
    But my father didn’t wake up. He couldn’t. He wasn’t asleep. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t having a nightmare.
    He drove back to where he had seen the flashing lights.
    He parked the car.
    He went up to a uniformed police officer who was guarding the area where the body was, in a body bag now.
    He said that as he approached that cop, he thought Mark would have a good laugh if he knew what his old man was about to do. But he did it anyway. He said to the cop, “Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Drew Spencer. My son is late coming home. He works right over there.” He pointed across the street to the fast-food restaurant. “He’s seventeen years old, brown hair, brown eyes. His name is Mark Spencer.”
    He said he saw something in the cop’s eyes as soon as he said Mark’s name.
    He said the cop told him, “Wait here, please, sir.” The cop went over to a man in a suit and an overcoat. He said something to the man, and the man came over to where my father was waiting.
    The man said, “Mr. Spencer? I’m Detective Carlin.” Detective Carlin paused for a second before he added, “Homicide.”

Chapter Two
    â€œMark was my firstborn son,” my father says, reading the words he has written. “He was a good boy and a hard worker. His mother and I were so proud of him.”
    But that didn’t stop someone from killing him.
    The police said Mark had been beaten to death. My parents saw him afterward, after they took his body away. They saw what had been done to him. I only heard about it.
    The way the police pieced it together, it happened something like this:
    Mark called my mother almost exactly at midnight to tell her that he was just leaving the fast-food place where he worked. Mark had been on shift with two other people that night—an eighteen-year-old guy who handled all the cooking, and a nineteen-year-old girl who was the shift manager for the night.
    The way it was supposed to work, at least two people had to be in the restaurant until the place was locked for the night. The cook left first, at a quarter to twelve, after the last of everything had been cooked and the kitchen cleaned. There were no customers in the place when he left, just Mark and the shift manager.
    The shift manager’s boyfriend was waiting for her, so she asked Mark if he would mind locking up, even though it was against company policy for her to leave him there alone. Mark said, “No problem.”
    The shift