I’m on the way out. They can all tell, which is why the crime scene technicians hardly acknowledge my presence, and my own colleagues do a double take whenever I speak. Like they’re surprised to find me still here.
But I am here, staring down into the waxy face of a man who, with a change of wardrobe, could pass for a martyred saint.
It’s all in the eyes. Rolling heavenward in agony, brows arched in acute pain. A pencil mustache clinging to the vaulted upper lip, blood seeping through the cracks between the teeth. The ink on his biceps. Blessed Virgins and barb-wired hearts and a haloed man with a cleft beard.
But instead of a volley of arrows or a vat of boiling oil, this one took a shotgun blast point-blank just under the rib cage, flaying his wife-beater and the chest cavity beneath. He fell backward onto the bed, arms out, bleeding out onto the dingy sheets.
Lorenz stands next to me, holding the victim’s wallet. He slips the license out and whistles. “Our boy here is Octavio Morales.”
He’s speaking to the room, not me personally, but I answer anyway. “The money guy?”
“ La Tercera Crips,” he says, shuffling away.
I’ve never come across Morales before now, but his reputation precedes him. If you’re short of cash in southwest Houston, and you don’t mind the crippling interest rates or getting mixed up with the gangs, he’s the man to see. Or was, anyway. Guys like him go hand in hand with the drug trade, greasing the skids of the underground economy.
“If this is Morales, then I guess the victims in the living room are his muscle?”
Nobody answers my question. Nobody even looks up.
Morales lies on the bed just inside the door, now blasted off its hinges by multiple shotgun volleys.
Down the hallway, another body is twisted across the bathroom threshold, clutching an empty chrome 9mm with the slide locked back. I step around him, avoiding the numbered evidence tags tented over his shell casings.
It’s a hot day in Houston, with no air-conditioning in the house.
The hall opens into a living room packed with mismatched furniture – a green couch, a wooden rocker, two brown, pockmarked folding chairs – all oriented around a flat-screen television on a blond particleboard credenza against the far wall. Beer bottles lying in the corners. Boxes on the coffee table from Domino’s and KFC.
This is where the shooting started. The couch cushions blossom white with gunshots, exposed foam bursting from the wounds. The floor is jigsawed with blackening stains. We’ve left our traces, too. Evidence markers, chalk lines. Imposing scientific regularity over the shell casings, the dropped firearms, the fallen bodies.
One on the couch, his underbelly chewed full of entry wounds. Another against the wall. His hand still clutching the automatic he never managed to jerk free of his waistband.
This was a one-sided fight. Whoever came through the front door polished these two pretty quick, then traded shots with the victim in the bathroom before advancing down the hall. Octavio Morales must have been the target. Maybe he’d tried to collect a debt from the wrong person. Only guys like this tend to be the perpetrators, not the victims.
“What do you think, March?”
I turn to find Captain Hedges at the front door, his white dress shirt translucent with sweat underneath his gray suit. He slips his Aviators off and tucks them into his breast pocket, leaving one of the curled earpieces to dangle free.
“You asking me?”
He looks around. “Is there another March in the room?”
So I’m the designated tour guide. I can’t recall the last time Hedges spoke to me directly, so I’d better not complain. After soaking up some ambiance up front, I lead him down the hallway, back across the body hanging out of the bathroom.
“Looks like a hit on a local loan shark,” I say. “A guy by the name of Octavio Morales. His body’s in here.”
When we enter the bedroom, activity halts. Lorenz and the other detectives perk up like hunting dogs, while the technicians pause over their spatter marks and surface dusting. Hedges acknowledges them all with a nod, then motions for me to continue. Before I can oblige, though, Lorenz is already cutting between us.
“I’m the lead on this,” he says, ushering the captain toward the bed.
And just like that, I’m forgotten. According to my wife, when a woman reaches a certain age, she disappears. People stop noticing she’s in the room. Not that this has ever happened to Charlotte, quite the reverse. But I’m beginning to understand the feeling. Beginning? Who am I kidding? I’ve been invisible for a long time.
I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t such a big event. An ordinary murder doesn’t pull the crowds, but call in a houseful of dead gang-bangers and every warm body on the sixth floor turns up. The call came in during a lull in my special duties, and I couldn’t resist the itch. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten to work a fresh murder scene.
“Looks like he was trying to hold the door shut,” Lorenz is saying, miming the actions as he describes them. “They put some rounds on the door – blam, blam – and he goes reeling back. Drops his gun over there.” He points out the Taurus 9mm on the carpet, a pimp special complete with gold trigger. “Then they kick the door in and light him up.”
Lorenz stands over the corpse of Octavio Morales, wielding his air shotgun. He even works the pump, leaving out the sound effects this time. The gesture reminds me just how young this guy is to be in Homicide, how inexperienced.
While he’s talking, I edge my way alongside the bed, putting some distance between myself and the group converging around the captain. This saves them the trouble of having to shove me aside.
The house is basically a squat. The property belongs to the bank, another foreclosure. There’s no telling when Morales and his crew decided to move in, but they didn’t exactly improve the place over time. The shiny brass headboard seems brand new, but the lumpy mattress is too big, drooping over the sides. And the bedding must have been salvaged from the dump. The sheets were rigid with filth long before Morales died there. My skin itches just looking at them.
I kneel and lift the sheets off the floor, peering underneath the bed. There’s no point, really. The technicians have already been here. But I feel the need to look busy.
The window on the front wall casts sunlight under the far side of the bed. My eye goes to a dark line of filament silhouetted against the light, a length of cord hanging from the mattress frame. Probably nothing. But I circle around for a closer look, jostling Lorenz and a craggy-faced detective named Aguilar, who’s busy explaining to the uninterested captain the significance of Morales’s tats.
I crouch by the headboard, sunlight to my back, and start feeling underneath the frame for the hanging line. Once I find it – it feels like parachute cord – I trace the line back to the knot, then duck my head down for a look.
What I see stops my heart for a couple of beats. Maybe it’s just the angle of my head. But the knot is secured around the mattress frame, and the end looks neatly severed with barely a hint of fraying. A fresh cut, made while the cord was drawn taut.
“Did anyone see this?” I ask.
When I glance up, nobody’s looking my way. If they heard me, they’re giving no sign. I scoot to the foot of the bed, running my hand over the frame. Sure enough, another knot. This time it’s sliced close, leaving no dangling end. Returning to the other side, I push the sheets up and continue the search. My pulse hammering away so hard I can’t believe no one else hears it. Two more knots, one at the foot of the bed, and another at the head.
I rise slowly, examining the mattress with new eyes.
Morales lies sprawled at the foot of the bed, legs off the side, arms thrown back. From above, the blood rises like a cloud, ascending several feet above his head. The pattern in the sticky sheets is not quite right.
“Sir.”
I glance toward Hedges, who’s nodding impatiently at Aguilar.
“Sir.”
He turns to me, relieved at the interruption.
“What is it, Detective?”
Lorenz and Aguilar both turn with him, and so do the others. They blink at me, like I’ve just appeared out of nowhere. Even the technicians look up from their work.
“Come and see.”
I get down on my knees, motioning him to follow. After a moment’s hesitation, he does, careful not to get his pants dirty. I guide his hands to the knots, watching realization dawn on his face. We both cross to the opposite side of the bed, all eyes on us. He kneels without waiting for my encouragement. When his hand touches the dangling cord, he lets out a long sigh.
“Good work,” he says.
Lorenz pushes his way forward. “What is it? What’s under there?”
Hedges doesn’t answer, and neither do I. As the detectives take turns under the bed, we exchange a glance. He looks at me in a way he hasn’t for at least a year. Not since Wilcox left the unit. Even longer than that.
“When you’re done here,” he says under his breath, “I want you to swing by my office.” Then, to the room at large: “I want a briefing in two hours. Lorenz, you better get on top of this. We’ll need a blood expert to look at all this – assuming he hasn’t already. And Lord help him if he already has and he missed this, that’s all I can say.”
And then he’s gone, leaving the room deathly still in his wake.
The next moment, Lorenz has me by the sleeve, dragging me over to the corner. His voice barely a whisper. I half expect him to chew me out, so his real motive comes as a shock.
“I don’t get it.” He casts a glance over his shoulder, making sure no one’s listening. “What’s the deal with the rope?”
It takes me a second to find my voice. “They’re restraints, J One at each corner, like somebody was tied spread-eagle to the bed. The blood on those sheets, it’s probably from two victims. Morales and somebody the shooters took with them, after cutting her loose.”
“Her?”
“Just a guess.”
He takes all this onboard, then backs away, patting me on the front of the shoulder. But the pat feels like a push, too. As if he’s distancing himself from me. Or from his own ignorance.
“All right,” he says to the room. “Here’s the situation.”
Before he can launch into his speech, I’m out the door. One of the advantages of invisibility.
Outside, layers of garbage tamp down the knee-high grass out front, some bagged but most of it not: sun-bleached fast food packets, thirty-two ounce cups, empty twelve-pack beer boxes, all of it teeming with flies. The house is broad, one of the street’s larger residences, complete with a double-wide carport and a driveway full of cracked concrete, rust stains, and a shiny black Escalade. The keys are probably still in Morales’s pocket.
The perimeter line is being held by one Sergeant Nixon – Nix to his friends – a cop who can remember back far enough to the time when Texas produced lawmen instead of peace officers.
“Look who it is.” He gives my shoulder a pat, but it’s nothing like the heave-ho from Lorenz. “What are you doing at an honest-to-God murder scene? I thought you were putting in time with the cars-for-criminals team.”
“I came out for old times’ sake.”
“Roland March,” he says, looking me over. “The suicide cop.”
“Don’t remind me. Anybody talking around here? Neighbors witness anything?”
He glances up and down the street, like he’s worried the nearby uniforms will overhear. “The lady down the way might be worth a talk. See the yellow house?”
“I think it’s supposed to be white.”
Nix isn’t a fat man, but whenever he shrugs, his head retracts turtle-like, giving him a double chin. “We got a statement off her already, but she sure was talkative. If you’re looking for the full canvassing experience, you might give her a try.”
Ducking under the tape, I head for the yellow-white house. The neighborhood must have been nice once, before it was sandwiched in by apartment complexes. In southwest Houston, the complexes serve the same purpose as inner-city housing projects in other parts of the country. They’re easy to secure, so gangs move in and start doing business. Colombian heroin and coke, Mexican meth, crack – it all comes through along the I-10 corridor, and the complexes serve as weigh stations.
A decade ago, there were places along here a patrol cruiser couldn’t go without taking fire from one gang or another. We cracked down, and the dealers got the message. Now they stick to doing business. Everybody gets along, more or less, except for the ones in neighborhoods like this, where the trouble can’t help but leak over. But there’s a tension out on the streets, a lot of rumors about the Mexican cartels and the kind of trouble that might be around the corner.
I adjust the badge around my neck. Give the door a good knock.
When it opens, I’m greeted by a ripe young thing in her early twenties, bursting out of a tank top and pink shorts, pushing the door open with her foot. Glitter polish on the toenails, a flip-flop dangling. Her features are two sizes too big for her face. Huge eyes, a terrifyingly wide mouth marked out in brown liner.
I glance back at Nix, who’s smiling at a cloud pattern overhead.
“Excuse me, but… I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions?”
“About that over there? I didn’t see nothing.”
“What about earlier?” I ask. “You notice them driving up in that SUV?”
“Last night you mean? I was out there in the yard. Octavio pulled up, and he had some others with him. Little Hector, I think, and someone else. They rolled down the window and whistled.” If she was flattered by the attention, she gives no sign now. “They don’t stay there or nothing like that. It’s just their party pad.”
“Did they have a woman with them?”
“People’s always coming and going. I told the other policeman already.”
“Well, thanks.”
On the way to my car, I give Nix my best Clint Eastwood glare.
He smiles back at me. “Anytime, Detective.”
I don’t know which I prefer more, being ignored or jerked around.
In spite of my reptilian tolerance for heat, the air-conditioning back on the sixth floor feels great, especially given the white Freon my car’s been spitting out in lieu of cool air. This is Homicide, the nerve center, humming as always with quiet intensity. The clack of keyboards is a constant, the hum of conversation. For the most part, though, the cubicles stand empty. Only a few detectives have trickled back in, filling mugs with coffee, combing the break room for anything not too stale, reviewing notes in anticipation of the big briefing.
We aren’t what you’d expect. Watching television, you might think we’re all scientists with guns, working our cases with calibrated precision. But we make mistakes just like anyone, and all that technical jargon can be a coping mechanism, an alternative to dark humor. Some guys like to crack jokes over the corpse, and others like to talk about castoff and trajectories and residue. We’re only human, after all, and the job gets to us sometimes.
We aren’t like the cops on cable, either. We aren’t crooked. We aren’t pushing drugs on the side, or even taking them. We’re not functioning alcoholics. We don’t take backhanders or use racial epithets or delight in parading our ignorance, even ironically. If anything, we pride ourselves on a certain professionalism, which means we won’t beat you with a phone book or a rolled newspaper. We won’t frame you, even if we know you did it.
We don’t have our own reality show – a sore spot ever since the Dallas unit made its debut on The First 48 – but if we did, they wouldn’t have to edit out the violence, or even bleep that much of the language. For the most part, we’re middle-aged and male, split pretty much down the middle between married and divorced. We dress like there’s still a standard to keep up. And no matter who you are – a shirtless banger with enough ink on your skin to write a circuit court appeal or a corner skank in a skintight halter – we’ll address you politely as sir or ma’am.
We are polite not because we are polite, but because we want to send you to Huntsville for the balance of your natural life, or even stick you with that needle of fate. And respect works. It’s as good a way as any to send you down.
All of this is true about us. Except when it isn’t. And when it isn’t, all bets are off.
Don’t mind my bluster, though. Like the sick jokes and the pseudo-science, it’s just another way of coping. Because I’m on my way out, and realizing too late I don’t want to go.
The man with all the power is Captain Drew Hedges, who sits behind glass walls and metal blinds, his door resolutely shut. In a department that’s seen its share of shake-ups, Hedges has shown a knack for hanging on and, in spite of his better judgment, has a soft spot in his heart for others with the same knack, myself included. He doesn’t just run the Homicide Division, he leads it, which means earning the respect of some notoriously independent-minded detectives.
I rap a knuckle against the wood, then wait. No sound from the other side. I try again. This time the door swings open.
Just inside, Lieutenant Bascombe stands with his hand on the knob, still listening to the captain’s final instructions. I wait my turn. Bascombe is black, bald, and six foot four, an object lesson in intimidation. His eyes have as many signs for fury as the Eskimos have words for snow, and I’ve grown fluent over the years, having so often been on the receiving end of these glares. Now, fortunately, he doesn’t even look my way.
“I’m not asking for perfection,” the captain is saying, “but it wouldn’t hurt to get some dictionaries in here. It may not seem like much, but I’m telling you, this is an embarrassment. We look like a bunch of illiterates here. Is that really the impression we want to make?”
Bascombe’s nodding the whole time, trying to cut off the flow of words. I can tell he’s heard enough, and if I’ve walked in on another lecture about the standard of spelling on reports coming out of Homicide, I can sympathize. Hedges can go from stone-cold cop one second to high school English teacher the next, and the latter incarnation is by far the more frightening.
“I’ll take care of it,” Bascombe says. Then, noticing me, he seizes on my presence as an excuse. “March’s here to see you, sir. Let me get out of your way.”
He pushes past, disappearing in the direction of his own, much smaller, office.
“Come on in,” Hedges says. “Take a seat.”
His jacket hangs on a rack in the corner, the sweat stains on his shirt all but dry. He’s rolled his sleeves up like a man with hard labor on the agenda. I sink into one of the guest chairs, crossing my leg in an effort to look relaxed. His leathery, nut-brown face is so weatherworn that even a decade under the fluorescents hasn’t raised a hint of pallor.
To look at him, you’d imagine that squint could see through any persona, plumb the depth of any lie. When I first joined the squad, I was in awe of those narrow-lidded, all-knowing eyes. But I’ve worked for him long enough now to realize that it’s just an expression, no more indicative of insight than his starched shirts or his square, gunmetal glasses.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
Instead of answering, he reaches behind him, pulling a book from a shelf bursting with color-coded ring binders. He slides it across the desk so I can see the cover. The Kingwood Killing. Brad Templeton’s true-crime thriller. I feel a twitch under my eye.
He taps the book. “You ought to read it sometime.”
“I don’t have to read it. I lived it. Remember?”
“I remember. The question is, do you? The reason I wanted to talk to you is, that was good police work today.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that out of you.”
How am I supposed to reply to that? Instead of answering, I give a noncommittal squirm. If I had my way, every copy of that book would be rounded up for incineration. It’s like a yearbook photo, only worse. A reminder of someone I’d rather forget I ever was.
He sees me looking at the book and clears his throat. “Now, the fact of the matter is, you got lucky. Eventually somebody would have noticed those restraints. It just happened to be you. But I recall you used to be very lucky. You used to make your own luck. Question is, can you do it again?”
I’m getting tired of his rhetorical questions, but I don’t show it. Instead, I force myself to nod. It isn’t easy. My neck’s as stiff as a corpse’s in rigor.
“Sir, if you’d give me a chance, I think I could.”
He shows me his open palms. “What did you have in mind?”
“Stop loaning me out for these special assignments. Put me back on the regular rotation. Let me work cases again. Hand the suicide cop mantle over to one of the younger guys.”
His head shakes the whole time I’m talking. “You don’t get it, Roland. I didn’t give you these assignments. You earned them. You haven’t been pulling your weight, so it was either that or cut you loose. And to be honest, that’s what a lot of people have wanted me to do.” His eyes flick toward the door, where Bascombe was standing a few moments before. I know the lieutenant doesn’t have much love for me, but it’s still a blow to realize he wants me out.
“I have a lot of experience, sir. I didn’t discover those restraints by accident.” His squint tightens, but I press on. “You’ve got Lorenz heading up that investigation, and you know it’s too big a job. Coordinating something like that, it’s a little more complicated than filling out a few reports and interviewing a couple of witnesses.”
“You don’t think he’s up to it? That’s too bad.”
My throat dries out all the sudden. “Why’s that?”
“Because I was thinking of putting you on the case with him.”
“With him?” I ask. “How about putting me in charge?”
Hedges laughs. “I admire your nerve, March. But you’ve gotta be kidding. I mean, take a look out there.” He jabs a finger at the blinds. “If I pulled a guy like Lorenz off the case and replaced him with you, I’d have a mutiny on my hands. In case you haven’t noticed, your approval ratings in the bullpen are at an all-time low. Ever since Wilcox bailed – ”
“But if I get results, people will have to respect that.”
Whenever he has something to think over, Hedges temples his fingertips, resting his bottom lip on the steeple, bouncing his head slowly until a decision comes to him. He pauses, goes through the motions, and then sits up straight in his chair.
“Take it or leave it,” he says. “You can work the case alongside Lorenz, with him as the lead, or you can keep doing what you’ve always done and see where it gets you. I’m sorry, Roland, but you’re not in any position to bargain here. I’m throwing you a bone. You want it or not?”
I used to love this job, and there’s a part of me that wants to love it again. That will take work, though. After a free fall like mine, you don’t expect to summit all at once. This is a good offer. I’d be a fool not to take it.
“Well?” he asks.
Two things are holding me back. The first is Lorenz. Not his inexperience, which could be an advantage for me, but the fact that, in spite of his inexperience, he’s made it so far up the ladder. The man is connected. He has friends everywhere. If he wants to, he can make my life difficult.
“I’d be working for Lorenz?”
“More or less,” he says. “On this one case.”
Then there’s the second thing. “Would this mean I’m off the cars-for-criminals detail?”
“Well,” he says, drawing the word out, widening his hands to show just how much distance he’d have to cross to pull something like that off. “When’s your next show?”
“Tomorrow morning. The big Labor Day weekend haul. But to be honest, they’re overstaffed as it is. They don’t need me.”
The hope in my voice must embarrass him, because suddenly he won’t look me in the eye. “Listen, March. I can’t get you out of it before tomorrow, but… let me have a talk with Rick Villanueva and see what I can do. You’ll be off the hook by Monday morning, all right? Just one more thankless task and you can start working murders again.”
“Just one more?”
He nods. “But keep in mind, this is something of a probation. If you don’t pull your weight on the investigation, if Lorenz comes to me with a problem, well… my hands will be tied.”
“I understand, sir. There won’t be a problem.”
“Make sure there isn’t.”
Outside, the detectives are gathering. The buzz of conversation dips as I open the door, then resumes once they realize it’s just me. I pick my way through the crowd, looking for a spot on the periphery. As I walk, I feel eyes on me. Looking up, I see Lieutenant Bascombe sending one of his eloquent glares my way. Next to him, Lorenz practices his scowl. The lieutenant’s lips move and Lorenz nods in reply. Whatever they’re saying about me, I don’t want to know.
But at least they can’t ignore me anymore.
Houston rain comes down like a jungle storm, hammering the windshield and the pavement all around. When the sky darkens and the black clouds pour out their wrath on the city, there’s always this hope at the back of my mind that the temperature will drop. But the effect is closer to emptying water onto sauna rocks. The air thickens. An insinuating heat radiates from the ground, creeping between clothes and skin.
I wait the weather out, crouching behind the wheel. At the parking lot’s edge, the George R. Brown Convention Center looms gray and ridiculous. Gray because its bright white walls suck up the surrounding gloom. Ridiculous because the building could pass for a grounded cruise ship, with red exhaust pipes trumpeting out of the roof. Blue metal latticework buttresses the eyesore.
Even my wife, Charlotte, who feels duty-bound to defend the city’s architecture in all its particulars, throws the George R. Brown under the bus, calling it a cut-rate version of a really classy building in Paris whose name I can’t pronounce.
Most weekends, the George R. Brown plays host to an assortment of gun shows and boat shows, bridal extravaganzas and expos, but today, in spite of the Labor Day weekend crush, a modest corner is set aside for the Houston Police Department, specifically Lieutenant Rick Villanueva and his intrepid band of media hounds. Of which I am one, for the time being.
Once the rain dies down to a drizzle, I shape a copy of the Chronicle into a makeshift umbrella and venture inside. No gun show today – we schedule our events so there’s no overlap – but the off-roaders of Harris County have turned up in force to ogle a glistening assortment of all-terrain vehicles. We’ll have a competing spectacle for them soon.
Our room is tucked into the far side of the building, down an escalator and through a wall of glass doors. I make my way through the roped stanchions, past a half-dozen signs flashing slogans like Green Power and Hybrid Houston, complete with a little icon marrying the old Rockets logo with a recycling triangle. A matching symbol adorns the knitted golf shirt I donned this morning for the final time. Burning it in my fire pit tonight will be a particular pleasure.
As soon as I enter, Rick Villanueva makes a beeline for me.
“You finally showed up,” he says, flashing his superbly white and insincere grill. “After that call from Hedges, I was afraid you were going to ditch me.”
“I am after today.”
He glances around, making sure the other officers on the team are keeping busy. By my watch, we have half an hour before the doors open, but there’s always a chance someone will arrive early. The prospect of a free car will motivate people like that, even if they’re accustomed to waking up at the crack of noon most Saturdays.
“Are you sure this is what you want to do, Roland?”
“I’m a homicide detective. All this” – I gesture toward the stage up front, the revolving platform with the mint green Toyota Prius, the television cameras setting up in back – “it’s not what I’m about.”
The expression on Rick’s face is boyish and grave. “We do important work on this detail, brother. We put bad guys back behind bars. If it wasn’t succeeding, do you think they’d keep it going like this?”
The last thing I want to do is argue the point. Unlike most of my friends from the old days, Rick’s still talking to me. But I’m not in the mood to hear about how essential our little charade is to the city’s well-being.
“Do we have to get into this now, Rick?”
“When else are we gonna talk? You’re unhappy, and the first I hear about it is from Hedges. You were drowning and I threw you a lifeline, buddy. This is the thanks I get?”
“It’s not like that – ”
“You’re swimming with the sharks over there, Roland. Don’t you see that? The best thing you can do for yourself is get out of Homicide, and instead you’re putting both feet back in. You really think you’re ready for that, after all you’ve been through?” He shakes his head, answering the question for me. “If you do it, I guarantee they’ll bounce you out in six months. No, sooner than that.”
“Rick -”
He raises his hands in surrender. “But hey, it’s your call, man. Just don’t say I never warned you. And don’t come crawling back.”
I have something to say, but he’s not interested. Before I can get out a word, he’s already backpedaling, already turning toward the stage. He has sound checks to run, cues to go over, warrants to review. The fact that he took time out to chastise me is a testament to how hurt he must feel. These things get him plenty of press, but not much respect within the department. If there’s one thing he’s touchy about, it’s that.
And here I am, his rehab project, throwing his kindness back in his face. I don’t feel proud or anything. But it had to be done.
Commensurate with the diminished expectations I came in under, my role in the unfolding drama consists of watching. Rick dubbed the job “troubleshooting,” but a better description would be “trying to look busy.” I’m pretty good at it. Plenty of experience. Before our guests start to arrive, I take up a position near the media pit, chatting with a couple of cameramen who’ve already been briefed on the need for discretion. In theory I’d run interference if anyone actually approached the crews, but in the five shows I’ve done, that’s never happened. Hardened criminals are as docile as anyone when there’s a freebie at stake.
“This is my last one,” I say to the cameramen.
“What’s next for you, then?”
“Homicide. I’m back on murder.”
They nod, clearly impressed. But why am I showing off for a couple of strangers like this? Why the need to distance myself from what’s about to happen? It looks desperate. I wander away from them, hoping to minimize the temptation, and run straight into Sonia Decker.
I can’t stand the woman, but she took a shine to me right from the start, spotting a fellow mid-forties burnout. Unlike me, Sonia’s happy with how her career is going. She’s the ideal government employee, content just punching the clock at day’s end. Her wispy hair might be brown, might be blond. Under all that makeup, her skin might be good, might be bad. She touches too readily, knows nothing of personal space, and has a three-pack-a-day laugh.
“When I started with all this,” she confides with a cynical sneer as close to a smile as I’ve ever seen on her, “it was all sweepstakes prizes and missing inheritances. You gotta hand it to Lieutenant Rick, he’s got a sense of humor. I mean, all this green hybrid rubbish? It’s priceless. So politically correct.”
I give her a vague nod, hoping she’ll go away.
“Just look at those suckers.”
The first guests now shuffle inside, their dreamy eyes glued to the revolving Prius. Imagining themselves behind the wheel, or maybe driving the hybrid over to the nearest chop shop and cashing out. Either way, they’re hooked.
“Something for nothing.” She rubs her hands together. I’ve heard sandpaper that was smoother. “Not in this lifetime, my friends. Greed goeth before a fall.”
I’m tempted to correct her quotation, but that sort of thing just encourages Sonia. Afraid of a five-minute digression on the precise wording of the King James Bible, I keep my mouth shut. Anyway, she may be wrong about the quote, but she’s right about greed. That’s the one lesson of my cars-for-criminals experience.
If they weren’t blinded by greed, at least some of these baggy pants playas and buttoned-up cholos would take a look around. They’d start asking when random selection started favoring the predominantly male and predominantly minority population. When did chance suddenly take a turn in their favor?
They might wonder why so many of the giveaway program’s green-shirted minions sport crew cuts and ex-military stares, why they look kind of familiar, a lot like the cops who busted them in the first place. They might even recognize a few of their fellow winners as former cellmates or street competitors. They might realize that what they have in common isn’t that they’re lucky but that they all have outstanding warrants.
But they don’t. All they see – all they ever see – is the car.
“So I hear you’re leaving us,” Sonia says, and now I know why we accidentally crossed paths. I guess I was blinded, too.
“This is my last day. I’m back on the job now, working a real case. You hear about that house off West Bellfort full of dead ltc bangers?”
“Big loss,” she sniffs. “That’s yours, huh?”
“I’m working it.”
She can’t help noticing the way I hedged, which draws a sound from her lungs that might be a cough, might be a laugh. Pats me on the shoulder blade, nodding her head in an exaggerated way. “All I can say is, I wish you the best.”
“Thanks,” I say to her departing back.
The room starts filling up, then the lights dim. Onstage, a projection screen comes to life. A silver convertible – not a hybrid, but who’s counting? – threads a series of alpine turns, then an artificially enhanced blonde in a sequined sheath prances around the parked vehicle, running her hands all over its curves.
Offstage to the right, a four-piece metal band lays down a thumping beat. They’re off-duty vice cops who jam together on weekends, only too happy to provide entertainment at one of Lieutenant Rick’s gigs. The crowd gets into it, clapping their hands, shouting encouragement to the on-screen blonde. Even in the dark room, a spotlight lingers on the Prius, a concrete image of the promise that brought them here.
As a testament to human gullibility, this show’s tops. Watching it long enough could turn the right sort of man into a philosopher. Not me, though. All I get is depressed. I’d rather pluck these guys off the street one by one. Fair and square, without any subterfuge. Out there, I wouldn’t pity them. I wouldn’t feel sorry for the family members they dragged along, either.
Once we’ve checked everyone through, the video stops and Rick jogs out onstage like a motivational speaker, cupping a hand to his ear for more applause. His speech changes every time, depending on what we’re supposedly giving away, but the essence is the same.
“It’s time for Houston to get moving again,” he says, “and you’re gonna be part of the solution. On behalf of all my colleagues, I want to thank you for coming out. It’s our pleasure to serve you in this way.”
From the back of the room, a group of burly, mustached men in green polos let out a cheer, clapping their hands above their heads.
“Our pleasure!” someone hoots. The crowd applauds once more.
Part of the game for Rick is to work as many ironic digs into the speech as possible. Afterward, the team will celebrate each one with a clink of beer bottles. The joke hasn’t been funny to me in a while.
It seems a couple of our guests feel the same way.
I spot their silhouettes against the stage lights, two men working their way toward the aisle, then navigating the darkness in search of an exit. A regular odd couple. One tall and broad, the other slight enough to pass for a kid. Maybe the impossibility of the giveaway suddenly dawned on them. More likely, they’re heading for the restroom. Planning to snort one moment-heightening substance or another.
As they pass me, I follow. Time for some troubleshooting.
The side exit sign is illuminated by code. Once they find it, a ray of light shines in back of the room. By the time my hand touches the door I can see other officers heading my way, alerted by the flash. But I’m first in line.
Out in the corridor, there are two options. They can turn left and head toward the escalator, or take a right to the restrooms. I emerge into the brightness, blink my eyes a few times, then spot them huddled halfway to the exit, deep in conversation. As I approach, it’s clear they’re arguing about something.
“I told you – I seen him,” the smaller one says. There’s a sharp, panicked entreaty in his voice. He’s in a black T-shirt and skinny black jeans, accentuating his diminutive stature. Olive-skinned. Unnaturally jet-black hair.
But it’s the other guy I fixate on, because there’s something familiar about him. A white tank clings to his lean, prison-built torso, hidden by the square overshirt hanging unbuttoned from his shoulders. Crisp denim and unlaced Timberlands. It’s the face, though, the way he nods in comprehension as the smaller guy talks, pushing out his bottom lip. The white of teeth and eyes against his dark skin.
I know this man.
He looks up as I approach. The smaller one sputters into silence.
“Anything I can do to help, gentlemen?” I ask in my best approximation of a customer-service voice. “You’re missing the best part.”
“We’re just about to leave,” the smaller one says, jabbing his thumb toward the exit. “There’s this dude I don’t wanna run into – and anyway, this ain’t my thing. I’m just here for the moral support.”
The big guy holds him back. “Come on, man. Don’t bail on me like this.”
“Sir, you don’t want to miss your turn. They’ll be handing out keys in a minute.”
He’s clearly torn between his buddy and the free car, looking one way, then the other, rubbing a hand over his prickly face. Then his eyes fix on me. His expression starts to change. He raises an index finger, trying to place me.
Coleman, that’s his name.
His eyes flare. “You’re – ”
A half-dozen officers suddenly file through the door, taking up positions all around us.
“Wait a second, here,” he says, edging toward his companion and the faraway exit. His eyes dart around, looking for an opening.
Over my shoulder, the door swings shut with a whoosh. That’s the signal. We converge on him all at once, the way we do, swarming a potential threat before it can develop. Coleman’s still at the verbal stage, protesting as the illusion crashes down. No free car. No run of luck. No going home after this. By the time he gets physical, we’ve already cranked him around and pushed his face against the wall, pinning his arms back, securing his wrists with zip ties.
“This ain’t right, now,” he keeps saying. “This ain’t right.”
Meanwhile, his friend starts backing down the corridor, leaving Coleman to fend for himself. He turns to run, then sees another set of officers at the exit, cutting off his escape. That stops him. He leans against the wall, burying his face in his hands.
“It’s me, Detective,” Coleman says. “You know me.”
My mental filing cabinet rattles, then the details flood back. Serving time for robbery up at Huntsville, Coleman found Jesus and started testifying against his former friends, including a trigger man I’d been trying to build a case against for months. My usual skepticism about jailhouse conversion was suspended, since for once the born-again felon followed up with some action. Last I’d heard, he’d gotten early release after a prosecutor and one of the prison chaplains went to bat for him with the parole board.
“I do know you,” I tell him. “What are you doing here?”
He tries to gesture with his pinioned hands. “They said they givin’ away cars in there!”
“Yeah, but not to just anyone. You don’t get one of those invitations unless there’s a warrant on you, Coleman.”
His head droops, eyes closing in defeat. The officers around him exchange a look. Then he glances up with a pleading smile. “But, Mr. March, you gotta help me. It’s true I messed up – ”
“I thought you found Jesus, Coleman.” I get a chuckle from the other cops, which is more gratifying than it should be.
“I found him,” he says, “then I kinda lost him again. But I’m on the path now, sir, and this was just the thing I needed. This car, I mean. So I can drive myself to a job.”
It’s getting hard for the other cops not to laugh.
“There aren’t any cars, boy,” one of them says.
When this sinks in, Coleman’s head drops again. He makes a keening sound and starts struggling to get free. We all press in, squeezing the fight out of him. The whole time I keep shushing him like a mother comforting her child. The less noise we make out here, the better.
The officers at the end of the corridor troop the smaller guy over to us, hands behind his back. He glares at me through wet-rimmed eyes. He can’t be much older than twenty.
“What’s your story?” I ask him.
“I ain’t done nothing. I told you I just tagged along.”
“He my ride,” Coleman says, calm again.
One of the officers hands me the kid’s wallet.
“Your name’s Francisco Rios?”
“Frank,” he says. “Can’t you just let me go?”
“Anybody have the list?”
Almost before the words are out, someone hands me a copy of the guest list. There’s a rugby scrimmage of officers in the corridor, and somehow I’ve taken the lead. It feels nice, I have to admit. I flip through the list. Francisco Rios isn’t on it.
Checking my watch, I figure they’re already processing people inside, calling manageable groups backstage while the loud music and the flashing video screen keep the rest entertained. Behind the curtain, we have a well-oiled assembly line that ends in a series of burglar-barred school buses out back. Until they’re done, we don’t want any distractions. It’s probably best to sit on Coleman and Rios for the time being.
“Let’s head down there,” I say, pointing toward the restrooms.
Coleman follows passively – not that there’s much choice the way we’re frog-marching him – but Rios digs in his heels.
“I haven’t done anything! You can’t do this!”
I leave Coleman to help grapple with the kid. In spite of his size, he’s got some fight in him. Somebody gets hold of his bound wrists, though, turning them into a rudder. Rios squeals and tries to twist free, but for all intents and purposes the struggle is over.
“Listen to me,” he whispers. “Hey, man. Listen!”
“Will you shut up?”
“I gotta show you something, all right? Just let me show you.”
He’s nothing if not amusing. I signal a halt so we can hear what he’s got to say.
“Look in my wallet,” he tells me. “In the part with the money.”
I break into a smile. “You trying to bribe me, Mr. Rios?”
“Just look. There’s a card in there. Call that number, okay? Call it and he’ll tell you to let me go.”
We’ve got nothing better to do. I take a look, and sure enough there’s a business card tucked behind a wad of crinkled Washingtons.
“Call him,” Rios says.
The card is one of ours. I run my finger over the raised emblem.
The name reads ANTONIO SALAZAR, a detective formerly assigned to the gang murder unit. Now he works on a bogus Homeland Security task force headed up by an old rival of mine. The less said about him, the better. But Salazar is all right. He’s passed a few tips my way over the years, and I’ve returned the favor once or twice. There’s a cellular number inked on the back.
I tap the card against my finger. “This is legit?”
Rios looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Just call.”
“Give him to me,” I say, grabbing his wrists. I pilot him down the hallway to the restroom door, kicking it open and shoving him through. I park him against the sink, tell him to stay there. Then I flip my phone open and make the call.
It rings a couple of times, and then a groggy Salazar picks up.
“What time is it?”
I check my watch. “Noonish. I didn’t wake you up, did I?”
“Long night.” He runs a tap, then makes a jowly sound like a dog shaking itself dry. “Anyway, March, to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“I’ve got a Hispanic male here, about a hundred and fifty soaking wet. Age – ” I consult the license – “twenty-one. Name of Francisco Rios, goes by Frank. That ring any bells on your end?”
I hear a cigarette lighter flick to life, then a long exhale.
“Yeah,” he says. “Frank’s one of my irregulars.”
In the old days, people used to say that whenever a trigger was pulled between the Loop and Beltway 8, Tony Salazar knew who was guilty before the bullet even struck. He had a knack for recruiting informants. Instead of investigating murders, he’d work the phones for half an hour and come back with a name. Usually the right one.
“So what do you want me to do? We rounded him up at the George R. Brown – ”
“Cars-for-criminals?” He chuckles in a way I don’t like. “I thought he was clean.”
“I haven’t run him, but he’s not on our list.”
Salazar starts making so much sound he could work as a foley artist for the movies. Bare feet slapping tile, newspaper wrinkling, even what I’m guessing is a half-empty coffee carafe being slotted back onto the burner. All the while he hums a frenetic tune, like he’s sorting something out in his head, and having a hard time.
“Tony, you still there?”
“I’m thinking,” he says. “The thing is, I need to talk to this guy.”
“I can hold on to him.” I glance at Rios, who’s hanging on every word. An involuntary shiver runs through him.
“Really? I could be down there in, like, fifteen maybe thirty.”
“Just meet us downtown,” I say. “I’ll have him transported and you can spring him when – ”
“No, no, no. Don’t worry about it.”
“You sure? It’s no trouble.”
He rubs the stubble on his chin for me, so I can hear the friction. “Do me a favor, okay? Cut him loose and tell him to call me as soon as he’s out. Put a scare in him, too. If my phone doesn’t ring, I’m gonna look him up. You tell him that.”
I palm the phone and repeat the message to Rios, whose relief quickly dissipates.
“Matter of fact,” Salazar says into my hand, “go ahead and put him on the line.”
I put the phone against the kid’s ear. After a minute or so, the tinny rumble of Salazar’s voice comes to a halt, and Rios lets out a subservient grunt. Remembering the fight he showed out in the corridor, though, I imagine this attitude won’t last once the zip ties come off his wrists. If Salazar gets his call back, I’ll be surprised.
Not my problem. I take the phone back, get through some final chitchat, then end the call.
“Turn around,” I tell Rios, then I fish a lockback knife out of my pocket and slice the restraints off. “Next time, just so you know, don’t flash the card in front of anybody. Pulling it out like that in front of Coleman, you basically blew your cover.”
I slip Salazar’s card back, then hand him the wallet.
As soon as we emerge into the corridor, Coleman proves the wisdom of my advice. He gets a funny look, seeing I’ve freed his buddy’s hands, then his eyes follow the kid’s progress, crazier with each step. When Rios passes him, he springs for the kid. It takes six men to hold him back.
“Frank!” he shouts. “Frank! Why they lettin’ you go, man? Why? ’Cause you workin’ for ’em, that it?”
Rios keeps walking, shows a little swagger.
“I’m tellin’! You hear me? I’m tellin’, man! Everybody gonna know. You dead! You hear me? Frank! You dead!”
Sonia pops through the side door, a finger over her lips. “You wanna keep it quiet down there? We’re trying to arrest some folks in here.”
“You heard the lady,” I tell Coleman. “Anyway, you’ve got your own problems to worry about.”
The big man deflates as my reminder takes effect. He hangs between the officers, letting his weight drag him down. Finally they release him to the floor, where he curls up, ducking his head between his knees. From the jerk of his shoulders I think he’s starting to cry.
That’s the last thing I want to see. I head back to the door, where Sonia’s waiting, and pause before going inside.
“It’s just getting good in here,” she whispers.
With a glance back at Coleman, I pull at my golf shirt, stripping it over my head while straightening the white tee underneath.
“You know what? I’m done.”
I hand Sonia the shirt.
She hisses my name a few times, but like Rios I just keep walking.
With a swagger in my step. It’s nice to have some for a change.
This is not my beautiful house. And this is not my beautiful wife. But with apologies to David Byrne, it is. And she is. But things aren’t always what they seem.
The house is in the Heights, a creaky old thing from the late Victorian, lovingly restored over the course of the past fifteen years. I’ve forgotten more about dentil molding than I ever wanted to know, and can disassemble and oil a mortise lock blindfolded.
The wife, Charlotte, is in the wholly anachronistic kitchen, perched on a Carrera marble countertop, staring hard at her foggy reflection in the stainless refrigerator door. Like she’s expecting it to wave.
“What’s wrong now?” I ask.
Five minutes through the door and already I’m putting things badly. Adding that “now” like a barbed hook at the end of the question. Implying there’s always something. But this time of year there is. Every September we become strangers again, Charlotte taking refuge in her prescriptions and me in the company of unfamiliar faces, blank canvasses of skin, out after dark, testing myself in a city that sweats all night. This distance is predictable. We anticipate its ebb and flow. But somehow knowing it will come never quite prepares us.
So I’m short with her, but the fact that she doesn’t rise to the challenge – no flush on the ivory cheeks, no fire in her coal black gaze – means there really is something wrong. I go up to her, putting my hand on her denim-clad thigh.
“Charlotte? What’s wrong, baby?”
She wipes her dry eyes with the back of her hand. Her way of letting me know that, while she isn’t crying, she’s considered the possibility.
“You have to talk to him.” Her voice comes out in the quiet, measured flow characteristic of her ultimatums. A reasonable tone, but brittle as a sheet of ice over a running river. “If you don’t do it, then I will.” The surface cracks. “But it ought to be you, Roland, because you’re the man here.”
Charlotte walked down the aisle with an unspoken list of male responsibilities – pumping gas, putting out the garbage, going to the door when someone knocks – which has only expanded over time. The one thing not on the list, because she does it so much better than I do, is bringing home the bacon. She’s so valuable to her law firm, she works the hours she wants, from wherever she wants, redlining contracts phrased in language so obscure that reading over her shoulder gives me headaches.
I flick a lock of chestnut hair behind her ear, letting my finger brush her cheekbone. She recoils ever so slightly.
“It’s Tommy you’re talking about?”
“Who else? This whole thing has gotten way out of hand.”
My big plan for the evening looks hopeless all the sudden. Sharing my good news, dragging her to Bedford, the new restaurant she’s been talking about, where I’ve already managed to secure last-minute reservations. Bringing her home, leading her upstairs and lighting a candle or two. After that, who knows? Ending up in bed these days requires ever-longer campaigns, and this one isn’t off to the best of starts.
“Let’s not talk about him,” I say. “There’s something I want to tell you.”
She raises her eyebrows, incredulous. “You haven’t even heard what happened today. I can’t believe you’re shutting me down like this, Roland. You’ve got to do something.”
I sigh, then slink over to one of the matching barstools, hoisting myself into a listening posture. But Charlotte doesn’t want a grudging audience. My gesture gets nothing out of her but a roll of the eyes.
“So what happened today?”
No response. She gives her rarely used mixer a pointed glance, anything not to make eye contact.
“I’m listening, baby. Tell me what happened.”
Taking a deep breath, she launches in. “So I’m sipping my coffee out on the deck this morning, going over my mental checklist, all the things I had to get done today. And as I’m sitting there I notice a beer bottle on the ground. I start looking, and there’s bottles all over – under the bushes, sitting next to the grill, tucked inside the planters. And cigarette butts, too. Everywhere.”
“Tommy had a party, in other words.”
“It must have been some kind of blowout, too.”
“So you went up and talked to him?”
An imperceptible headshake. “That’s your job. He won’t listen to me. We already know that. But I will not be cleaning up after him.”
I consult my watch. “I have something to – ”
“I’m not finished,” Charlotte says, blocking my words with a lazy swing of the arm. “So I’m about to come back inside, and I hear somebody on the garage stairs. His car wasn’t in the driveway, but I thought maybe one of his friends had taken it. Hearing him coming, I decided to say something. How could I not?”
“Right.”
“But it wasn’t Tommy. It was this… girl. This half-dressed, sobbing, heartbreaking girl. She was clutching her purse to her chest, and the rest of her clothes…”
“Did she look – had she been abused?”
“I don’t know what she’d been. I asked, and she said she couldn’t remember. She just woke up on the couch, all alone. He left her.”
“Is this his girlfriend, date at the party, something like that?”
“She wasn’t in the mood for talking,” she says. “I called him, obviously, and according to him, she’s just some girl who came to the party and crashed afterwards. So I ask him what he’s gonna do about it, and he says why would he do a thing? She can call someone for a ride. He acted like it was no big deal.”
If we were talking about a normal person, I’d have a hard time believing this. But Tommy isn’t normal by a long shot. During our early renovation work, we’d put in the garage apartment so we could redo the bathrooms without disrupting our lives. Then a couple of years ago, when Charlotte left her old firm, we decided to rent it out. Since Tommy was a grad student at Rice with his dad in the oil business, he seemed like a safe bet. That’s not how it turned out, though.
“Tommy’s in a tough spot,” I say.
“You’re defending him?”
“Not at all. I just think… Look, the boy’s trying to find himself. Maybe he isn’t doing a very good job, but deep down he’s a decent kid.”
“You didn’t have to give that girl a ride back to her dorm, Roland. She didn’t have any friends to come get her. Or she was too ashamed. So it was me, I took her home. She wouldn’t even let me drop her at the building. I had to leave her in the parking lot outside.” She grows silent, remembering the scene. “Anyway, I won’t accept that kind of thing happening under our roof. I’m tired of it.”
“I’ll have a talk with him,” I say. There’s not going to be a romantic evening ahead. I’ve resigned myself to that.
“Talk? You’re gonna talk to him? I don’t want you to talk to him.”
“I thought you did.”
“I want him out of here, that’s what I want. He packs his bags and goes. That’s final. Tell him that.”
“I’m not gonna tell him that,” I say. “The boy pays his rent – ”
“You mean his daddy does.”
“Sure. Whoever. I’ll have a talk with him and tell him to tone it down. No parties, no loud music, nobody coming and going.”
“Roland, that girl could have been raped. I mean, she was really disoriented, like she’d been drugged or something. We can’t do nothing.”
The drug reference gets me thinking, but not about Rohypnol. I remember the sleeping pill prescription on Charlotte’s nightstand. I wish she’d get rid of them, but it’s a sensitive topic. Last night I was out past three trying to catch up with known associates of Octavio Morales. By the time I got home, the driveway was empty apart from Tommy’s Audi coupe, and Charlotte was fast asleep. Could he really have thrown a party in the backyard without her knowing until the next morning? Even a couple of friends swilling beer in the moonlight?
“Those pills you’ve been taking – ”
“I don’t want to talk about that again.” She jumps down from the counter, starts walking in her bouncy, equine way. Hair streaming in tendrils. Leaving me behind in disgust.
“Maybe we need to,” I say, going after her. “Because if there really was a party” – she turns, shocked at my doubt – “and you slept through it, then I’m wondering if the pills are such a good idea.”
“Why shouldn’t I sleep?” She jabs her finger at my chest. “What would I have to be awake for in the first place? You weren’t here. You never are. We’re barely even a part of each other’s lives anymore. And I ask you to do one little thing, just one thing, and you blow up on me like I’m some kind of drug addict.”
“That’s not what I said, baby.”
“You think there’s something wrong with me?” she says. “That I’m not right in the head?”
I start to reply, but we can’t go there. We really can’t. Not with our history. Not in September.
She’s breathing heavily, nostrils flared, waiting for me to punch back, but when I don’t she decides to keep going. “Don’t you think you’re missing the point? That girl this morning, she could have been a victim of sexual assault. Here. On our property. And all you care about is lecturing me about my pills? Have you ever stopped to ask yourself why I need pills to sleep at night? I bet you haven’t, Roland, because there are some places you just don’t want to go – you’d have to admit some things to yourself that wouldn’t be too flattering.”
She’s right.
“What was her name, this girl?” I ask.
“I don’t remember… I don’t think she said.”
“Did you take her to the hospital, Charlotte? Did you report the incident? Get a rape kit done? Anything?”
“Why are you being like this?”
“Why am I being like this? Baby, listen to yourself. You think there are things I don’t want to admit to myself? Have you looked in the mirror lately?”
We’re not yelling at each other. Not quite. But it’s a hissing little knife fight of a conversation, no dodging or parrying, just attack, attack, attack. The kind of fight that makes her sick of the sight of me. The kind that leaves me baffled, wondering how we ended up like this. She’s talking, saying something nasty, and I start watching the way her hands move, the way her eyes widen and narrow, the fine lines that bracket her mouth.
In a movie, I would take her in my arms, press my lips to hers, and after struggling a second she’d give in, flinging her limbs around me, running her fingers through my hair. And maybe I’d carry her upstairs and throw her onto the bed, and she’d pull at my tie and my shirt buttons like the whole argument was nothing but foreplay.
But that’s not how it happens in the March household. She goes upstairs all right, but nobody carries her. I want to hit rewind, do the evening over, say all the right things. I want things to be easy between us again, open and natural, the way I remember us being. But I don’t know how to get there, so I end up on the living room couch, basking in the light of the flat-screen television she’s tastefully concealed in an antiqued armoire. Flipping channels, defiant, settling on the station most likely to irritate if she hears the sound through the ceiling.
Cable news. Charlotte watches Fox. I flip over to CNN.
Tommy needs dealing with, I know that. This is just the latest in a string of stunts. He seems to gravitate toward offenses I’ll take lightly but Charlotte won’t, though I doubt there’s any calculation behind it. Just instinct.
But this is September so it’s not about him anyway. It was that girl, whatever her name was. One of Charlotte’s triggers. About the right age, too. Her protective instincts must have kicked in, and without any outlet she’d just stewed all day in her rage.
On the television screen, after a look at what the Gulf Coast is doing to gear up for hurricane season, there’s a piece about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary. Already there’s an underlying anxiety, a need to play up the never forget angle, but unlike the Holocaust, which gets similar treatment even though its absurd to think the deniers will ever get the upper hand, here the shrill solemnity seems almost necessary. As if we just might forget, or at least might stop talking about the tragedy for fear of being accused of using or politicizing it. Still, I don’t want to watch. My finger trails to the channel selector.
But then a new segment begins, and a familiar face looks back at me.
She’s cut her white hair short, and the camera flashes accentuate the pruning around her lips, but otherwise Lieutenant Wanda Mosser is unchanged since the days I worked Missing Persons under her tutelage. It was a brief stint, not my kind of thing, but I always respected the lady. She was straight out of the Ann Richards school of toughness, rising through the ranks at a time when, to hold her own, a woman had to be able to convince everyone she was the best man in the room.
“We’re taking the case very seriously,” she’s saying to a press conference audience, obviously prerecorded. “We are following a number of leads at this time, and we encourage members of the public with any information that might help to please get in touch.”
Boilerplate stuff, but Wanda delivers the lines with conviction. Curious, I watch a couple of former prosecutors-turned-commentators long enough to figure out why my old boss is on the tube. A teenage girl named Hannah Mayhew disappeared in northwest Houston. She left classes midday yesterday at Klein High and no one has seen her since. Early this morning her abandoned car was discovered in the Willow-brook Mall parking lot, and now a major search is under way.
But why is this national news? The girl’s only been gone a day and a half. Last week’s big headline, the vanishing financial advisor Chad Macneil, a former Arthur Andersen accountant who’d gone out on his own after the Enron debacle, had consumed the local outlets without getting even a hint of national traction. The man absconded to Cancun and points southward, supposedly with a suitcase full of his clients’ money. Macneil, one of those guys who sits on everybody’s board, has a finger in everybody’s pie, put a dent in some prominent bank accounts, but outside the Loop, nobody cared.
Now a missing Houston teen is big news? Kids run away all the time in this town. Finding the car might put a sinister spin on things, but as far as I can tell from the commentary, no one saw her being abducted or anything.
Then they flash a headshot of Hannah Mayhew on the screen. Everything becomes clear.
She’s a beauty, haloed in golden hair with a dimpled smile that’s gotten plenty of use. Her eyes are that crystalline ice-blue that catches light like a prism. The picture looks professional, the background tastefully blurred, like it came straight out of a modeling portfolio. Which is no surprise. She has the kind of face that gets photographed a lot.
You can’t call yourself a jaded cop if you’re not cynical about the different treatment an attractive white suburban blonde gets when she runs into trouble. Her story makes the front page, beams out into millions of living rooms, and strangers everywhere look upon her as their own. They worry, they agonize – and above all they love, projecting all their frustrated hopes onto this inscrutably attractive teen.
By losing track of their daughter, her parents have donated her to the public at large, and now she’s everybody’s missing kid.
I shake my head at it all. In my house off West Bellfort, sharing her deathbed with Octavio Morales, there’d been another girl. No one’s interested in her. Not even the lab. When I called to request a rush on the blood work, hoping to get an id on my absent victim, I got the usual answer. We’ll get to it when we get to it. No cutting to the front of the line.
But Hannah Mayhew won’t have to wait. They’ll bump her right to the front. Because girls like her aren’t supposed to disappear.
I can’t watch anymore. I turn the television off and go upstairs to change, not even bothering to keep the noise down. By now, her pills downed with a glass of water, Charlotte’s long past hearing.
There are closer bars and probably cooler ones, but the place I end up is the Paragon, where the waitresses wear layered tanks with plaid miniskirts and the crowd would rather drink than dance. Even on a Saturday night, even as Labor Day weekend kicks off, I can find a table in the back corner, far enough away from the speakers that the ice doesn’t shake in my glass.
I cast a glance over the room, confirming Tommy’s absence. Pearl Bar is his haunt these days, but I’ve caught him at the Paragon once or twice and had to leave. Nobody knows me here and I’d like to keep it that way.
A waitress named Marta flounces up, showing an inconceivable amount of tanned thigh. Acts like she’s never seen me before, not realizing she actually has. She jots down my whiskey sour, which I have no intention of drinking, then shuffles bar-ward through the crowd, shaking schoolgirl pigtails that look anything but innocent. I watch her move even though I shouldn’t.
She’s a cute enough little thing, but she couldn’t get famous just by vanishing.
“Excuse me. Are you using these?”
I turn to the table next to me, where a couple of women in low-cut tops are busy arranging extra chairs. One of them looms over me, a pink-skinned blonde with glitter on her eyelids, of indeterminate age, motioning to the unused seats around my table.
“Take them.”
They all descend, dragging the chairs off just in time for another wave of girlfriends, who arrive with many air kisses and group hugs.
When Marta returns with my drink, she nods toward the packed table and asks if I want to move. I think about it, but decide to stay put. I don’t plan on being here all that long. She gives me a suit-yourself shrug, then takes a deep breath before retrieving orders from the newcomers. I’m thinking girls’ night doesn’t generate the kind of tips for the leggy Marta that a table of men would.
I stare into the whiskey sour like it’s a crystal ball, but it doesn’t reveal anything. The glass sweats and eventually the ice shifts. My finger traces patterns in the condensation.
I’ve been coming to this place for years, going through the same ritual. The first time was October 6, 2001, and that night I made a big enough scene I had to wait awhile before showing my face again. Now I keep it discreet. Nobody needs to know why I’m here.
People stream past the table, some heading to the restrooms, others hunting the shadows for likely targets. As the crowd expands and contracts, the bartenders move with practiced grace. There’s a guy at the bar I’ve seen before – not here, but out in the real world. He cranes his head subtly, taking in the room without seeming to. A white male, my age or a bit younger, with a hedge of black hair jutting forward like the figure on the prow of a ship. Probably someone I know from the job, another cop, judging from the never-off-duty vibe he’s giving off. I lean sideways for a better look, but the crowd closes in.
For the rest of the night, the party at the next table bleeds girls. They peel off in packs of two or three, heading home or to other locations. As they go, their places are filled by empty shot glasses and slumped-over bodies. The glitter-eyed blonde starts scooting her chair closer to my side of the gap, sending sideways looks in my direction, keeping me here longer than I’d planned.
“Are you gonna drink that?” Marta says, appearing suddenly between the tables.
She gives off a self-assured vibe, but it’s the kind of brittle hardness you always see in women who keep choosing the abusive boyfriends, or can’t keep off the bottle or the needle. Deceptive strength, more protective coloring than character.
I glance at the melting lowball at my elbow, but don’t answer. Reaching into my pocket, I peel off a twenty and toss it onto the table. It’s a stupid gesture, the sort of thing that gets remembered. But I’m sympathetic to her type.
“All righty then,” she says, swiping the twenty and running a towel over the place where it landed. She gives the girls next door a reproving glance. “Sorry, ladies, but I think I’m gonna have to cut you off.”
The trio who remain howl in mock protest, then start giggling, proud to have downed enough liquor to warrant intervention. I slip away to the men’s room, where I check the time and feel slightly appalled at the company I’ve kept.
In the mirror I find a hollow-cheeked man in need of a shave, wearing jeans too young for him and a T-shirt too tight, with a rumpled cotton blazer that might as well have been slept in. His nose is off-center, no upper lip to speak of, and his jaw is far from square. In fact, to my eyes, there’s almost a rodent aspect to the face. I’m not sure even a daddy complex and a quart of tequila can explain the drunk girl’s apparent interest.
As I’m drying my hands, the door swings open. Somebody stops on the threshold and does a one-eighty, disappearing from view. I only get a faint glimpse, but I think it’s the familiar-looking cop from the bar. When I emerge, he’s gone.
The table of party girls is empty, too, sparing me the indignity of having to slink past. At the bar, Marta tracks my departure. Leaving the twenty was a mistake.
Out in the parking lot, sweat rises on my forehead and in the small of my back. But I don’t sweat in the heat all that much. This perspiration is psychological. Time to get home to my dead-to-the-world wife.
The pink-skinned blonde leans against the side of a red Jeep, stabbing at the lock with her keys. While I pause to watch, she gets down on one knee, eyeball to eyeball with the lock, slotting the key in with the care of a surgeon.
Later tonight, sitting in my driveway with the ignition off, I’ll try to remember how I crossed the distance between us. Try to recreate the steps, and envision my hand seizing her bicep, jerking her up from the ground. I’ll try to recall the instant before I pushed her, wondering what I was thinking to put so much force behind it.
And I’ll try to forget, too. The sound of her body thumping against the Jeep, her choked-off yelping. The sight of the tears.
But now it all happens in a blur, and the next thing I know she’s screaming and flailing blindly with her bangled arms.
“Are you crazy?” my voice is shouting. “I’m doing you a favor!” My hands shake her silly, leaving marks on the skin. “What’s wrong with you, getting behind the wheel in your condition?”
She’s not listening. She can’t even hear me over her moaning. And then her face changes, her mouth forming an O, her veiny throat jutting like the neck of a teapot. I realize too late what’s coming, and step back just as the first ropey torrent pours out, splashing down my pants leg and all over my shoes. She twists free, staggering toward the bar’s door, her hand over her mouth. Another wave hits, bubbling through her clamped fingers. That image, caught in slow motion by the amber glare of a streetlight, sears me.
What have I done?
She disappears into the bar, and I head off shaking my damp leg. Disgusted with her and with myself. My car is parked on the other side of the lot. I get the door open just as the first patrons stream out of the Paragon, glancing left and right for the man who accosted the glitter-eyed girl.
I don’t bother explaining. I couldn’t if I tried. I just leave, knowing one thing for certain.
They won’t let her drive home like that.
About the paperwork. You spend the first hours and days waiting on reports – crime scene, autopsy, results of various tests both standard and specially requested – then suddenly, it all comes flooding in. And you go from not having enough information, building theories on hunches and the thinnest observations, to positively drowning in the stuff. Sifting the data for what’s important, that’s a skill not everyone possesses.
Take Lorenz, for instance. He sits in his cubicle, scanning an index finger back and forth over the page. I’ve been watching him for a solid minute. Every couple of seconds he licks his fingertip, turns the page, then nods slowly, as if he’s assimilating an important bit of info. Problem is, assuming our boy Octavio died from the shotgun wounds to his gut, there’s nothing in the standard tox screen that warrants assimilation.
“Something interesting?” I ask.
The funny thing is, he looks up in surprise. Like he didn’t even realize I was watching. So the whole act was for no one’s benefit, unless it’s himself he’s trying to convince.
I reach for the stack of paper at his elbow. “Mind if I – ”
His forearm drops like a gate, blocking my reach. Nice. Lorenz had some muscle on him when he joined HPD, but somewhere along the line he reversed the balance between workouts and red-meat consumption. Now his blue blazer, which he keeps buttoned even when sitting, pulls at the belly and his shoulder pads ride up around his ears. On his lapel there are series of discolorations, spilled milk allowed to encrust, then brushed away without being cleaned. For a homicide detective, this verges on the slovenly.
“I’m kind of busy here, March. If you want to make yourself useful, why don’t you start on those call-backs? A couple of tips came in over the weekend.”
“I already looked. Nothing there. Can I just get the blood report? I want to see if there’s an id on the missing victim.”
“If there even was one,” he says, not budging. “Those ties could have been there forever, you know. There’s nothing linking them to this particular incident, is there?”
“You mean it’s just a big coincidence?” I stroke my chin in consideration. “That’s a fascinating theory. Why don’t you pursue that, and meanwhile I’m gonna stick to the more obvious explanations. Maybe we’ll meet in the middle.”
I’m baiting him, I admit. But to his credit Lorenz doesn’t react. He just gives another of his slow, assimilating nods. Then he flips through his stack of reports, apparently hunting for the blood work. After reaching the bottom, he shrugs.
“Not here yet, I guess.”
“Fine. Thanks for checking. I’m gonna call and see what the delay is.”
As I turn, he grabs me by the sleeve. “Hold up a second. Have a seat.”
I try leaning against the cubicle wall, but he shoves a chair my way and I finally relent. Once I’m seated, he leans forward and starts talking in a quiet, reasonable tone.
“Listen,” he says. “I’m not an idiot. I know what’s at stake here for you. You’re thinking if you can make me look bad, the captain’s gonna keep you around – ”
“It’s not about that.”
“Let me finish. This is a big break for you, I get that. But I’ve been on Homicide for – what, a year? – so this is a big break for me, too. You’re not the only one with something to prove. So we can do this one of two ways. You can back my play, in which case I’ll be sure to throw some bones your way. Or you can turn this into a head-to-head match.” He gives me his best psych-out stare. “In which case you’ll lose.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Trust me. You won’t even finish the game.”
I vacate the chair, giving his oversized shoulder a friendly pat. “All right, then. Why don’t we both just focus on the case? You do your thing and I’ll do mine.”
“That’s not what I’m offering, March,” he calls after me. “The deal is, we both do my thing. This is my investigation. Either we’re clear on that, or we have a problem.”
Halfway to my desk I offer an insincere wave. Reading you loud and clear. My brain says I should try keeping this idiot happy, but my gut wants to throw down. The thing about threats is, people make them out of fear. Either they don’t have the power to follow through, or they don’t want to use it. In this case, Lorenz probably could pull some strings, but he’s smart enough to realize his position is only slightly less precarious than mine. At least I hope he is.
When I reach my desk, I notice Lieutenant Bascombe standing at his office door, peering over the cubicle walls. While I was watching my new partner, the lieutenant must have been keeping an eye on me. Having Lorenz for an adversary doesn’t bother me – I’m not sure I’d want it any other way. But Bascombe’s another story. Once he’s sunk his teeth in, the man doesn’t let go.
When your crime lab has had as much trouble as ours, popping in and out of the news, subject to independent investigation, with the DNA section being shut down, opened, and shut down again, nothing is ever easy. I’m not surprised Lorenz doesn’t have the blood report back yet. We send so much of the work out these days, it’s hard to keep track of where it’s gone, or what the status is.
But listen, this crime lab scandal has only been in the headlines for the past seven years or so. They’re bound to get it sorted any day now. This is the fourth largest city in America we’re talking about, not some backwater jurisdiction without two quarters to rub together.
So instead of making another pointless call to the hpd crime lab, I go to my work-around, dialing the county medical examiner’s office. The music on the other end of the line is quite soothing. I could close my eyes and imagine I’m on an elevator.
“I’m sorry,” a female voice cuts in. “Who were you holding for?”
“Bridger.”
“He’s in the lab, I’m afraid. Could I take a message?”
“I know he’s in the lab. That’s why I’m waiting. Tell him it’s Roland March. He’ll want to talk to me.”
She thinks it over. “Please hold.”
I might have stretched the truth a little saying Dr. Alan Bridger will want to talk to me. I’m pretty sure he won’t. In the history of our friendship, I’ve done him exactly one favor, which he’s returned a thousand times and counting. But it was a pretty big favor, introducing him to Charlotte’s sister Ann. Plus I was the best man at the wedding.
When he comes on the line, eternal gratitude doesn’t seem to be in the forefront of his mind.
“I’m not even going to say this had better be important, because I know it’s not. So can you at least make it quick? The bodies don’t autopsy themselves, you know.”
“You’re in a good mood,” I say.
“That’s why you called, to talk about my mood? I gotta go – ”
“Hold on a second, Alan. I need a favor.”
He coughs into my ear. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that? It almost sounded like you said you need a favor, and I know we already had this conversation.”
“It’s about some blood.”
“You have your own people for that.”
“Yeah, in theory we have our own people, but you’re my workaround. And this is serious, Alan. I wouldn’t have dragged you away from your thoracic cavities otherwise.”
“What is it?” he asks, sounding unconvinced.
“That houseful of bodies from Friday. Octavio Morales, Hector Diaz -”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I cut ’em for you. What more do you want?
The reports are already out the door.” He coughs again. “Wait a second. Are you working that?”
“Yes.”
“An actual murder? I thought they only sent you out when a brother officer eats his gun.”
“I’m off the odd jobs for now, and I’d like to keep it that way, all right? So you wanna help me out on this or not?”
He gives a theatrical sigh. “Not really. But go ahead anyway.”
So I tell him about the bloodstained sheets underneath Octavio Morales, the ligatures tied to the mattress frame, and the obvious conclusion that someone was tied to that bed. If the second victim’s blood can be distinguished, I need to know everything the sample can tell me, from type and gender to a possible identification.
“You’re not asking for much,” he says. “Seriously, though, can’t your own people handle this?”
“Oh, they’ll get to it just as soon as they can. But we’re sending our dna work out, and that’s what this is going to take. We’ve got blood, but no body, and I think the whole key to this killing was that person tied to the bed. If I can identify her, that’s the ball game.”
“Her?”
“I’m assuming.”
“Well, listen, I can’t promise same-day service on the dna front, but if you want me to expedite the basics, I can do that. That would tell you if you have another victim, give you gender and so on. Running the profile through codis, though, that’ll take longer. But provided you can rush a sample over, I’ll make sure it happens. All right?”
“Perfect, Alan. I’ll bring it myself.”
I thought taking Main the whole way would be clever, avoiding freeway traffic, but by the time I finally reach Holcombe I’m having second and third thoughts. The Harris County medical examiner is just a stone’s throw from the Astrodome – assuming you have a good arm – but I can’t seem to get there in the bumper-to-bumper.
If you’d told me at age twenty-one I’d spend a good portion of the next quarter century sitting in traffic listening to talk radio, I’m not sure I’d have had the strength of character not to drown myself in the toilet bowl. One of those phrases from Rick Villanueva’s speech comes back to me. It’s time for Houston to get moving again. When Bill White entered the mayor’s office promising to do just that, I voted for the guy – and have twice more since then – never thinking this was more than a campaign promise. Nothing could get this city moving, unless you count a slow crawl.
During the news break, I turn up the radio volume.
“In the disappearance of northwest Houston teen Hannah Mayhew,” the announcer says, “hpd officials announced today the formation of a new multi-agency task force to continue the search. A spokesman for the department refused to comment on rumors surfacing over the weekend that reported video footage of the teen’s abduction in the parking lot of Willowbrook Mall.”
Even though I work for HPD, just a couple of floors away from the center of gravity on the Mayhew case, this is the first I’ve heard about a task force. That’s media pressure for you. Wanda’s people, the ones with experience in these matters, haven’t found the girl yet, so the powers that be decide to throw more manpower at the problem, confusing an already Byzantine jurisdictional map. A task force might sound good, but it just means more people to keep in the loop, more warm bodies without Missing Persons experience.
All the sudden I’m feeling grateful that my own missing female – assuming there is one, and that she’s in fact a she – doesn’t merit as much public interest as the girl on the cable news. It’s bad enough having to deal with Lorenz. And possibly Bascombe.
By the time I reach the ME’s office, Rush Limbaugh is off the air and a new guy’s repeating everything he just said. I switch the radio off, grab my sample, and hustle inside.
Bridger’s lab is a lot nicer than the one I’ve just come from downtown, which always reminds me of a high school science classroom being run by student teachers. Here, everything is bright white and gleaming, an exemplar of sterile technology. None of the encrusted surfaces you see in our own lab, and none of the sexy mood lighting from tv. Every time I cross the threshold, a tremor of sci-fi excitement goes through me.
“You wait here,” he says, pointing me into his office. He relieves me of the sample as we pass.
“You’re gonna do it this minute? I want to watch if you are.”
He pauses. “What part of ‘wait here’ didn’t you get?”
Although he’s my brother-in-law and I impose on him at will, Bridger can’t help being intimidating. In his mid-fifties, handsome, with rimless eyeglasses and hair as white as his lab coat, there’s something downright objective about the man, like whatever he says must be so. Which is why, when the district attorney’s office has to put an expert on the stand, they always want it to be him. He speaks with the authority of science, even one-on-one.
So I kill some time flipping through this morning’s Chronicle, the only piece of paper on Bridger’s desk accessible to the layman. Not surprisingly, Hannah Mayhew’s on the front cover, bottom fold, looking as blond and wholesome as she did on the flat screen. I dig for the sports section only to find it’s missing. Someone must have snatched it, because Bridger’s never taken much of an interest. I’ve had to explain to him twice who Yao Ming is.
As I’m shuffling through the pages, Sheryl Green pokes her head in. She stares at me like I’m a lab specimen, then she frowns.
“Where is he?” she asks, answering her own question by glancing back into the lab. “What is this, then, your break time?”
“He told me to wait.”
I’m not sure if Dr. Green is Bridger’s protégée these days or his chief rival, but I do know she’s never cared much for me. Before my fall from grace, I camped out on Bridger’s doorstep all the time, cadging for one favor or another. Sheryl reacted pretty much the way Jesus must have, arriving at the temple only to find money changers setting up shop. Lucky for me there were no whips handy.
With a sigh of resignation she drops a thin folder on Bridger’s desk, taking the opportunity to glance over whatever paperwork happens to be faceup. Then she sees the Chronicle in my hand, her eyes tracking the headlines.
“Can you believe all that?”
I glance at the front, making sure it’s Hannah Mayhew she means, then treat her to a commiserative headshake. “Yeah, I know.”
“If that girl was black like me,” she says, “or just ugly like you…”
“Tell me about it. That’s why I’m here.” I jab my thumb in Bridger’s general direction. “I’ve got a bloodstain I’m pretty sure belongs to a female victim, from that shoot house off of West Bellfort? I can’t even get anybody to look at it.”
Not precisely true, but I don’t often find common ground with this woman, so I’d like to make the most of it.
“That houseful of bodies?” she asks. “Four victims?”
“Possibly five. I think the guys who did the shooting took her with them.”
Her eyes narrow. On the phone, Bridger hadn’t seemed too impressed by the possibility, but Green is intrigued. I explain what I’m after from the test: confirmation of my hypothetical victim for starters, and eventually an id.
“That’s a long shot,” she says. “Running a profile through codis would get you hits for known homicide victims, offenders, military, unidentified samples from other crime scenes, that kind of thing – ”
“I know how it works.”
“Then you know how unlikely it is you’re gonna identify someone from the blood on those sheets. Unless you have something to compare it with.”
What can I say? I answer with a shrug. “I’ve only got what I got.”
“Then you don’t have much.”
Just as she turns to go, Bridger appears in the doorway. “You’ve got something, anyway.”
He hands me a printout, which I spend all of two seconds examining. “How about an executive summary, Doc?”
“You have blood from a second victim on the sheets,” he says, ticking the points off on his fingers. “Type O-positive, as opposed to Morales’s much rarer B-neg. Your second victim is also female, as you suspected.”
I feel like hugging the man, or at least pumping my fist in the air, but Green’s presence coupled with Bridger’s usual reserve precludes most anything beyond a smile.
“And there’s more.”
“More?”
“I told you not to expect same-day service, but – ”
“You ran it through codis?”
He shrugs. “I got curious. Bad news is, you didn’t get a hit. Whoever she is, she doesn’t have a dna sample in the system.”
Green nods her head and gives me a told-you-so smile.
“You find something to match it against, Detective, and then you come back.”
“Thanks,” I say, and I really mean it. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
Back in the parking lot, results in hand, I have no idea how to proceed. My initial hunch is confirmed, but then I never doubted there’d been a woman tied to that bed. All I know now that I didn’t before is that I’m right. This will help me with Hedges, but it won’t break the case, which is what I really need.
Instead of waiting until I get back downtown, I call in the results. Lorenz’s number goes straight to voicemail, which is fine with me. I dial Bascombe and report directly to him.
“So that’s that,” he says.
“I guess so. It’s more than we had this morning, anyway.”
On the radio, a local call-in show is discussing nothing but Hannah Mayhew, alternating “oh, what a tragedy” with “why can’t the police do more?” in perpetual rotation. A woman whose daughters attend Klein High calls in to let everyone know how devastated the students are. She’s dismayed the kids are returning to class after the Labor Day holiday.
Then an anonymous caller who claims he’s from the Harris County Sheriff ’s Department says this task force thing is only going to make matters worse. My sentiment exactly, but the rivalries being what they are, I find myself doubting when they come from a county deputy’s lips.
“At this point,” the host says, “Hannah’s been missing for more than seventy-two hours. Since noon on Thursday. How likely is it now that she’s gonna turn up safe?”
The supposed deputy clears his throat. “Well, I mean, stranger things have happened, but… If you ask me, it sure doesn’t look hopeful.”
I turn it off. Not because I disagree with his prognosis, which is only common sense, but because a light just went on in my head. Everyone’s up in arms about this missing girl. And I’ve got a missing girl I’m looking for, too. With O-positive blood. Hannah Mayhew disappeared at midday Thursday. My shooting went down later that night.
Has the solution been staring me in the face? It’s crazy, I know, but like the deputy said, stranger things have happened. And in a way, it’s so obvious. How many girls go missing in one day, even in a city of millions? No one has reported my victim’s disappearance, and that only strengthens the tie.
I’m afraid to say it aloud. Afraid to think it. But I’m going to have to when I get back to the office, because I’m starting to believe it’s true. The girl tied to the bed, the one the shooters took after lighting up Morales and his crew.
It was Hannah Mayhew.
It had to be.
I should know better. But listening with such rapt intensity, Lorenz fools me at first. As I show him the printout from Bridger, explaining the significance just in case, he nods in that odd way of his, like there’s a neck spasm synchronized to his pulse.
“I know it’s a stretch,” I say, “but there are no coincidences.”
Not that I believe this. My work is full of coincidences – people in the wrong place at the wrong time – but my need to persuade him overcomes all nuance. To pursue this line of inquiry without any hindrance, I have to convince him it’s worth checking. At the same time, he needs to think it’s a fool’s errand, the perfect time-waster to keep me out of his way.
He examines a little chart on the page, bringing it close to his nose, then sets the printout to one side. The stacks of paper from this morning are neatly sorted into a series of piles, a sort that must have taken him all morning.
“Well?”
“Take a look at this,” he says, handing me a folder from the top of the nearest mound. “I need you to follow up on it – ” he consults his watch – “by the end of the shift today.”
Inside the folder, there are several muddy faxes, half-page incident reports typed in capital letters.
“What about my lead?”
“The guy to talk to in Narcotics is Mitch Geiger. He’s a friend of mine, does a lot of street-level intel. Rumor is, there’s a crew that’s been jacking stash houses on the southwest side. They don’t report it, obviously, but we’ve been hearing things. I want you to follow up on the prior incidents, see if you can substantiate anything. Maybe there’s a connection to the guys who hit our house.”
I toss the folder on his desk. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“What question?”
“I’m going to follow up on the blood trail. Running the dna profile turned up nothing, but if we can get a sample to compare with – from Hannah Mayhew’s parents, for example – that will tell us whether there’s a connection to pursue or not.”
He nods, then hands back the folder. “That’s what I want you working on, March. Geiger’s expecting you. If you have a problem, take it up with Bascombe.”
“What about the missing girl?”
“This is Homicide, not Missing Persons.”
“We have a missing female victim, and they’re missing a juvenile female. Her disappearance and our shooting took place on the same day. It’s reasonable to assume – ”
“Are you even listening to yourself, March? You think this girl from the news really ditched her classes, drove down to the ghetto, got herself tied down to a bed, then vanished after a crew came in and wiped out everybody else in the house? That’s your theory? Trust me, I’m saving you a world of embarrassment here.” He chuckles at the thought of this favor he’s doing me. “You’d be a laughingstock, man. Just talk to Geiger, all right? I think all that time on the cars-for-criminals detail warped your instincts. The point here is to clear some murders, not get yourself on TV.”
An hour ago I’d have put down money on the fact that nothing Lorenz could say had the power to sting. I would have been wrong. Problem is, he’s only saying what everyone else will be thinking. The lesson I learned putting in time with Villanueva is that the right kind of media attention makes careers. Hitching my wagon to Hannah Mayhew would represent the perfect application of the principle, assuming my hunch proved out. That’s not my motive, but Lorenz won’t be the last colleague to see it that way.
“I have to pursue this.”
Again with the insufferable nod. “March, you gotta do what you gotta do. But so do I. You’re either with me on this thing, or you’re against me. And if you’re against me, you’re out. I’m not just blowing smoke here. Go ask Bascombe and you’ll see.”
“Fine.”
I reach across him for the blood work, whipping the sheet within an inch of his nose. Just to be on the safe side, though, I keep the folder, too.
Bascombe’s office, just a fraction of the size of Hedges’s, is slotted into a row of glassed-in cubes along the back of the bullpen. On my way, I sense more than a few pairs of eyes tracking my progress. No one butted in on my conversation with Lorenz, but they all know what’s going on. I can only guess where their sympathies lie. Lorenz has made a lot of buddies on the squad, but he’s still pretty raw. My guess is, underneath the superficial bonhomie, my fellow detectives wouldn’t be too sad to see him taken down a notch.
Plus, a few of them have been around long enough to remember what I was like in my prime. Their respect might not be what it once was, but all those years on top have to count for something.
Passing by a cubicle opening, I catch a flash of movement. I turn to find Mack Ordway beckoning me over. Before I teamed up with my ex-partner Wilcox, he and Ordway were the dynamic duo. Now, thanks to some health issues, Mack’s mostly holding down a desk until retirement. Apart from a little water-cooler banter about the old days, we haven’t had much contact since Wilcox left the fold.
“What are you trying to prove?” he whispers.
“Meaning what, Mack?”
He scratches his double chin. “I will lift up mine eyes to the lieutenant’s office, from whence cometh his strength. The lieutenant is his shepherd, he shall not want.”
“What is this, Sunday school?”
“Word of advice? You’re not gonna score any points trying to make that kid look bad. He’s on the fast track, no matter what. All you’ll do is hurt yourself in the process.”
“I’m just trying to do my job.”
He shrugs. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
I thank him with a nod, then keep moving. He’s not telling me anything I don’t already know, but I guess his heart is in the right place.
Bascombe’s door hangs open, as always. He never shuts it, never even lowers the blinds. Unlike the captain, he takes a hands-on approach, which means his office is a hive of activity. He’s on the phone when I tap on the doorframe.
“One sec,” he says.
I settle into a chair, using the time to flip through the incident reports in Lorenz’s folder. They’re mostly recaps of street intelligence. An informant complaining about supply problems driving up retail cost on the corners. Latin Kings issuing warnings after one of their packages gets jacked. A couple of Southwest cholos gunned down, supposedly in the aftermath of a rip-off. It’s all pretty vague, which is to be expected. If there was anything solid, Lorenz wouldn’t have passed all this paper my way.
Bascombe ends his call, prompting me with a palms-up shrug. “Now, what can I do for you?”
I slide the folder across the desk. “You seen this?”
“I’m the one who gave it to Lorenz in the first place,” he says, not bothering to look inside. “But don’t come to me about it – you need to talk to Geiger. He’s got some kind of angle on this.”
“I can do that,” I say.
“Thank you, Detective. I appreciate your willingness to do your job. If there’s nothing else I can help you with…” Bridger’s printout shuts him up a second. He scrutinizes the results with a little smile. “What do you want from me? Congratulations? Here you go, March. You were right. Good job, man. Way to deliver.” An ironic handclap, one-two. “Now, was that good for you?”
“What I want is your permission to follow up a lead.”
“My permission? You don’t need it. I’m not gonna hold your hand on this thing.”
“Lorenz wants me to follow up with Geiger, which comes from you. But I’d like to pursue something else in addition.”
He hoists his eyebrows in mock surprise. “And what’s that?”
Taking a deep breath, I launch into it, making my case as strongly as I can. Once he sees where I’m going, though, Bascombe starts shaking his head and shuts me up with a throat-slicing gesture.
“You wanna be assigned to the Mayhew task force, is that it? ’Cause I can make that happen right now.” He reaches for the phone, then pauses. “Or, maybe you’d prefer to stay in Homicide instead? If that’s your choice, then you better go talk to Geiger this minute. And if there are any headlines to grab in this case, believe me, you better not be the one I catch reaching for them.”
“Is that what Hedges will say?”
“You wanna go ask him?” He smiles like he’s starving and I’m his favorite dish.
The fact is, I don’t. If Bascombe really wants me off the squad, I’m already pushing my luck too far. By giving me a shot, the captain put a wrench in the works, but he won’t back me up the way Bascombe is backing Lorenz. So either I play their game or I’m out. Simple as that.
I can’t bring myself to meet his eyes. “I’ll go talk to Geiger.”
But in the elevator I decide Geiger can wait a half hour. There’s a stop to make on the way.
Missing Persons turns out to be a ghost town. I corner one of the civilian aides, asking to be pointed in Wanda Mosser’s direction. She tells me the task force is operating out of the Northwest station, then starts rubbing her temples like they’ll explode any moment. I thank her and turn to go.
“Hold on a second,” she calls after me. “Cavallo’s still here. You can talk to her.”
I follow the direction indicated by her red fingernail, heading down a row of cubicles a bit more shabby and threadbare than our Homicide digs, though identical in principle. At the end of the row I discover a slender, dark-haired woman of about thirty, one long, pinstriped leg crossed over the other. The sleeves of her white blouse are rolled up, revealing sun-browned forearms and a diminutive silver diving watch on the left wrist. An engagement ring on the left hand, but no wedding band.
“I’m Roland March,” I say, holding out a hand. “Homicide.”
She looks up. “Theresa Cavallo.” Her skin is cool to the touch.
I’ve never laid eyes on her before, or even heard the name, a testament to how out of touch I am. Because a woman like this gets talked about. I’m probably the last to find out about her. Large brown eyes, a sharp nose dusted with freckles, just a hint of makeup, and a slight dishevelment to her limply thick black hair. Letting the world know she can look like this without trying.
“You’re working for Wanda?” I ask.
“Obviously.” She motions lazily at the surroundings.
A knot forms in my throat. “I mean, on the task force.”
“What have you got?” she asks. “I was just on my way out.” She nods toward a black purse and a canvas messenger bag stacked side by side on her desk, a striped jacket nestled between them.
I’m not usually tongue-tied, but getting my hunch out proves surprisingly difficult. If I’d gotten Wanda face-to-face, there would have been no problem. If she laughed, I could take it in stride. But I don’t want to look ridiculous in front of Cavallo, and the more I struggle for words, the more ridiculous I feel.
“What is it?” she asks with an impatient frown.
“Take a look at this,” I manage, thrusting the printout from Bridger under her nose. “It’s from the medical examiner’s office.”
“I can see that. So what?”
“This is going to take some explaining…”
She checks her watch. “I’ll give you two minutes.”
“Fine.” I pull up a nearby chair, setting it just inside her cubicle. “That’s a blood sample recovered from a house off West Bellfort. We got a call early Friday morning and found the house full of bodies. A Crip named Octavio Morales, if that name means anything to you.”
She shakes her head.
“Anyway, under the bed we found parachute cord still attached. Somebody had sliced through the restraints, leaving the knots behind. Whoever was on that bed, the shooters took her with them.”
“There was a woman tied to the bed?” Her eyebrows rise. “Was she sexually assaulted?”
I shrug. “Like I said, they took the body. Based on the amount of blood, I’d say she was seriously injured, or even deceased. But I’m just speculating about that.”
Cavallo runs her fingers through her hair, shaking out the wavy mane. She has my attention. At her clavicle, a tiny silver cross catches the light.
“And you’re telling me this why?”
“I’m looking for her. We didn’t get a hit in the system, so her dna’s not on file.”
For a moment she smiles with incomprehension. Then the bloom fades from her lips. “I see. And you think – what? That your missing body could be Hannah Mayhew?”
“It’s worth a shot.”
Cavallo laughs, showing off a pair of sharpish canines. “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
“I realize it’s a stretch – ”
“A stretch? It’s a hyperextension.”
“I was hoping we could check our sample against one from your girl, or maybe the parents?”
“There’s only the mother,” she says. “Don’t you watch the news? Her father died when she was a baby. Peter Mayhew? You don’t remember him?”
“Should I?”
She shrugs. “Anyway, what am I supposed to do? Ask Donna if we can swab her mouth on the off chance her daughter was tied to a bed and gang-raped by a bunch of dead bangers? I’d just as soon not.”
“I can appreciate that.” I lean forward. “But before you say no, consider this. Your girl disappeared midday Thursday, right? Our shooting went down late Thursday, early Friday give or take.”
“On the other side of town.”
“Yes, but does that mean anything here? I can think of a thousand scenarios that would land a nice girl from the suburbs in a situation like this.”
“But not this girl,” she says. “You don’t know her.”
“Do you?”
“Not personally, no. But I’ve gotten to know Donna, the mother. She’s quite a woman, I’ll tell you that. If her daughter was mixed up in the kind of thing you’re talking about, I think she’d know. And anyway, she’s dealing with enough stress without putting something like this on her.”
As she speaks, my eyes fix on the shape of her lips. This kind of sudden infatuation isn’t common for me, but I’m having a hard time shaking off the feeling. Cavallo’s my type, trim and striking and faintly exotic. A younger, taller version of Charlotte, without all the shared baggage. I inhale her perfume discreetly, then sit back, gazing at the sheerness of her blouse.
“I need your help,” I say. “Call it a favor. I’ll owe you. I can’t do justice to my investigation without following up this lead. If it doesn’t pan out, fine. At least we’ve ticked off that box. But if you don’t help, I’ll be honest, I won’t be able to sleep at night. This is… important to me.”
I shouldn’t be pleading like this, exposing myself, but something about her seems to invite it.
“This is important to you,” she repeats, glancing away. “What’s important to me is not burdening this woman with more fear. She’s living with the unthinkable as it is. I don’t want to make her nightmares any worse than they already are.”
“You don’t have to tell her what it’s for.”
She thinks this over for a moment, resting her elbows on her knees, her mouth covered behind her long fingers. The engagement ring sparkles in my face.
“Look, here’s the thing,” she says finally. “The last couple of weeks, Hannah was getting calls from a certain number. And she called back a lot. The day she disappeared, she got a call at half past eleven. The problem is, the number belongs to a prepaid phone.”
I nod in sympathy. Working murder, plenty of our leads dead-end at a prepaid number, enough to inspire legislation requiring IDs and tracking – not that it would help, given the ease with which a fake driver’s license can be obtained. The things ought to be illegal.
“You know who uses those things?” I say. “Dealers, gang members, people who want to keep off the radar. If you ask me, that strengthens my case.”
“Well, we already have a line on someone at her high school we think was making those calls. But you could be right. The point is, we’ve hit a wall. We’re canvassing and re-canvassing neighborhoods, pulling in anybody who might have information, going over the Willowbrook Mall surveillance tapes with a fine-tooth comb. But I’m not sure it’s getting us anywhere. Hence the task force. They’re hoping to get a result by throwing more money and manpower at the problem.”
“The same old story,” I say. “Look, it sounds to me like you can justify pursuing something like this, whether it’s a long shot or not. I used to work for Wanda. I know she won’t stand in the way. She’s played a few hunches in her time, too.”
Again, she plunges into thought, knitting her eyebrows together in concentration. I’m tempted to say more, but I keep my mouth shut, letting her argue both sides in her head. It’s not every day a stranger shows up trying to enlist you on his quixotic quest. The fact she’s even halfway receptive bodes well.
“One condition,” she says.
“Anything.”
“You come with me. I’ll introduce you to Donna, and if you still have the guts, I’ll ask her for the swab. That way, no matter what happens, she’ll know it’s not coming from me.”
Not what I was expecting. Not at all. But the prospect intrigues me. I’m not anxious to spend time with the frantic mother, but driving out to the suburbs in the presence of Theresa Cavallo seems like a worthwhile way to spend the rest of the afternoon. There’s just one little problem.
“I need to make a phone call first,” I say. Using her desk phone, I dial Narcotics and ask for Mitch Geiger. His number rings, then goes through to voicemail. I leave my name and my mobile number, asking him to call when he gets a chance.
When I hang up, Cavallo is already standing, slipping her jacket on. She’s about five foot nine. Lean, but not skinny. She clips a holstered sig Sauer just ahead of her hip. It disturbs the line of her jacket, but there’s something about an attractive woman packing a gun. I’ve made the right call on this one.
“Are you driving?” I ask.
In answer, she dangles a set of keys.
We battle the outbound traffic stacking up on I-45, then cut over on the Sam Houston Tollway to Stuebner Airline, crossing FM-1960 into a wooded, suburban terra incognita. My mental map of Houston grows sketchy this side of the tollway, but Cavallo navigates like a veteran, one hand on the wheel, the other perpetually in motion, punctuating her words. I like the way she talks, putting her whole body into it, like a sentence isn’t really a sentence until it’s acted out.
In forty-five minutes she’s given me an overview of the entire case, and if I’d paid attention I’m sure it would have been edifying. But the way her watch slides down her wrist distracts me, and so does the movement of her leg as she accelerates and brakes. The shape of her ear, visible as she flicks her hair back. The vein in her throat that grows taut as she cuts off yet another inattentive soccer mom.
I let out a sigh.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
She eyeballs me a moment, then digs her phone out. After making a call, she tells me that instead of meeting Donna Mayhew at her home, we have to intercept her at church.
“Donna’s camped out at her office there,” she says. “It’s easier to stay out of the media spotlight that way than going home.”
“Why would she want to keep a low profile?” I ask, thinking the more attention her missing daughter’s case gets, the better.
“She doesn’t want to feed the frenzy. I’m not saying I agree with that decision, but the woman’s had some experience in the public eye, so I have to respect it.”
“What kind of experience?”
She looks at me with wide-eyed incredulity, like I’ve just admitted never having heard of the Rolling Stones or something. “Seriously? With her husband.” Her voice jumps an octave. “The whole thing when he died? You really have no idea?”
“None.”
So she tells me about Peter Mayhew, a local celebrity preacher from the early 1990s. After some kind of charismatic awakening, he abandoned his Baptist upbringing and founded a nondenominational church out in the Houston suburbs. It kept growing, along with his national status. In his early forties he married a woman half his age, fathered Hannah, and booked speaking engagements around the country.
“I heard him once,” Cavallo says, “at a conference for teens my parents sent me to. He was really good. Very inspirational.”
I’m not sure what to say to this, so I just nod.
Mayhew left for a South American tour, boarding a private plane chartered by his supporters. He never arrived. The plane’s wreckage was recovered in the Gulf, but no bodies were found. Suddenly the story starts sounding familiar.
“So she’s at this church?”
“She works there. In the women’s ministry.”
The familiar way she uses terms like that – women’s ministry – and her teenage memory of hearing Peter Mayhew’s inspirational message make me think that cross around her neck is more than decorative.
When she first mentioned the church, chalk white fluted columns came to mind, along with a needle-sharp steeple, stained glass and stone, like the one my mother dragged me to as a kid. Or maybe white clapboard. Cypress Community Church turns out to be nothing like that. We pull into the parking lot of what could pass for a junior college campus, a sea of blacktop with a ground-hugging brick and glass structure floating in the center. The electronic sign at the entrance alerts passing cars of next weekend’s sermon series and an upcoming concert. Scrolling across the bottom is a reminder: PRAY FOR HANNAH’S SAFE RETURN.
“This is a church?” Along with the question, a dismissive laugh escapes my lips.
Cavallo tenses, but ignores my remark.
As we roll up, a red van with the church’s name painted in white letters along the side pulls to a stop, the window sliding down. Behind the wheel, a heavyset man in sunglasses gives us his made-for-television smile. Cavallo asks about Donna Mayhew, and he directs her inside.
“Who was that guy?” I ask.
Cavallo shrugs. “Never seen him before. One of the staff, I guess. They have a lot of people working up here, and now a bunch of volunteers, too. The church is coordinating its own search, putting out flyers, going door to door. It’s pretty impressive.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes,” she says. “It is.”
Living in a city where the professional basketball team’s former venue is now a megachurch, it shouldn’t surprise me to find one of our many suburban congregations sprawling on such a massive scale. As we pass through one of a dozen glass double doors into the sub-zero entry, a vaulted shopping mall-style atrium hung with vibrantly colored banners, I’m slightly in awe. We pause at an unmanned information desk so Cavallo can conduct a quick orientation.
“The auditorium is through there,” she says, pointing to the far side of the entry, where a dozen more double doors – made of wood this time – crouch under the dim mood lights. To reach them, you’d have to hike across a vast open space lit from above by skylights. “Off to the right, they have the classrooms and family life center.” I nod appreciatively in the direction of a corridor wide enough to accommodate four lanes of traffic. “The offices are to the left, which is where we’re going.” A smaller hallway, barely big enough for a city bus, stretches off into the distance.
I start in that direction, but Cavallo puts a hand on my sleeve.
“Before we go any further,” she says, “I want you to promise to be on your best behavior.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That crack you made earlier. The attitude. Whatever it might look like to you, this is a house of worship. You need to respect that. Or at least pretend like you do.”
My enthusiasm for this woman is starting to wane, and I don’t much appreciate the lecture. “I made one little remark. Don’t you think you’re blowing it out of proportion?”
“Just try and be sensitive, okay? This is a very… emotional situation, and you don’t seem like you’re in tune with that. You’re a very detached sort of person.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing.” I crack a futile smile. “And besides, you barely know me.”
“All I’m asking for is a little understanding.”
My hands fly up in surrender. “Fine, you do all the talking. I’ll work on my choirboy routine.”
Satisfied, she leads the way down the left-hand corridor, heels clacking on the floor. I’m so disillusioned with her, I almost pass up the opportunity to study her from behind.
Almost.
Informing the loved ones of a homicide victim is hard enough, but at least there’s a format to follow. People react in different ways, from unsettling stoicism to rage to something much worse, the kind of outright wailing despair that precludes all consolation. Still, the detective’s script remains constant. We offer our condolences, even a shoulder to cry on, but make no mistake. We’re here for information. We have a job to do.
In Cavallo’s role, the dynamic is utterly different, because her appearance offers something a homicide detective’s never does. Hope. It’s no wonder she pauses at Donna Mayhew’s door, working up the courage to knock.
“Come on in,” a voice says from inside.
We enter a vanilla-scented, lamp-lit room with sponge-painted walls and fancy oversized couches upholstered in microsuede. The chair behind the desk is empty. Instead, Donna Mayhew sits in an armchair near the door, a mug of tea steaming in her hands.
“This is Roland March,” Cavallo says. “He’s another one of our 69 detectives.”
Not a homicide detective, because that would get things off on exactly the wrong foot.
She rises to greet us, her hands still simmering from the warm mug. If a police artist aged Hannah Mayhew’s photo to show the most flattering outcome of an additional twenty years of life, the result would be standing before me. A compact, radiant woman, maybe five foot three, her beauty undimmed by her obvious stress, dressed in jeans and a frilly, netted top. Her thick blond hair pulled back into a ponytail, her face looking sober and scrubbed.
“Has something happened?” she asks.
Cavallo shakes her head. “Nothing like that.”
Mrs. Mayhew presses a hand to her chest, deflating with relief. “You scared me on the phone. I’ve been trying to stay strong.”
“I’m sorry.” Cavallo touches the woman’s elbow lightly. “Do you mind if we have a seat?”
“Not at all.”
She motions us onto a nearby couch, resuming her place. On the coffee table between us, next to her tea, a fat Bible lies open, its crinkled pages bright from highlighting. A block of pink. A section of yellow. Tiny handwritten notes creeping into the margins.
That book, it gives a physical form to the woman’s hopes. I can imagine her, stifling back the swirl of fear, forcing herself to focus on the words, reading and underlining anything significant, any stray phrase that can be interpreted as a message. I want to look away, but I can’t. Leaving the book open, it’s like she’s left herself sadly exposed. An image of my wife, Charlotte, flashes, one I long ago weighted and cast into the deepest waters of memory, only now it’s slipped the chain and come back.
“Tell me what’s happened?”
“I already have.”
“I don’t remember. Tell me again.”
“I can’t. I really can’t.”
Donna Mayhew notices me looking at her Bible. “I thought about canceling the study today, but to be honest I really needed it. Ironically, we’re in the book of Job. ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’ I’m trying to live that way, but you know, it isn’t easy.”
“No, it isn’t,” Cavallo says, giving her ring a nervous twist.
The two women share a look.
“You’re doing everything you can,” Mrs. Mayhew says.
Cavallo leans forward. “That’s why I’m here. There’s something I’d like to ask – ”
Before she can finish, there’s a knock at the half-open door. A man in his mid-twenties enters, stopping as soon as he catches sight of us. He mumbles an apology and turns to go, but Mrs. Mayhew calls him back.
“What is it, Carter?”
He looks like he’s stepped out of a clothing catalog for the terminally hip. A line of fuzz under his bottom lip, his hair lovingly spiked, wearing expensively demolished black jeans and a brown Starbucks T-shirt stretched tight across Bally Fitness pecs. Only on closer inspection, as he advances tentatively into the room, the coffee-shill mermaid turns out to be a thorn-crowned Christ, extending his pierced hands, bracketed by the motto sacrificed for ME.
A piece of paper hangs limply from his hand.
“Is that the new one?” Mrs. Mayhew asks, taking it from him.
She inspects the page, then passes it to Cavallo. The familiar photo of Hannah, a toll-free tip number, a reward offer for information leading to her return. I wave away my opportunity for a closer look, so Cavallo hands the flyer back to the man. Before he can go, Mrs. Mayhew stops him again.
“Where are my manners? Detective Cavallo, this is our youth pastor, Carter Robb. He and Hannah are really close. Carter, this is the detective leading the investigation.” She turns to me. “And I’m sorry but I’ve already forgotten your name.”
“Roland March.”
I stand, moving around the coffee table to shake the guy’s hand. As strong as he looks, he has a weak handshake. I can feel him trembling. He won’t make eye contact, either. The moment I let go of his hand, he backs out the door saying he has more copies to make.
I give Cavallo a quizzical look. “He seemed a little on edge.”
Mrs. Mayhew smiles wanly. “We all are, Detective. This is especially hard on Carter because of their friendship. Hannah has been a real ally of his in the youth group since he first came here.” The words are sympathetic, but there’s something stiff about the delivery, running through the lines, not putting much feeling behind them. “It’s hard on everyone, of course.” She leans Cavallo’s way. “Have you heard? They’re trying to get me to go on TV.”
“You should,” I say. “It can’t hurt.”
Cavallo gives me a vigorous sandpapering with her glare, but I ignore her. Whether she wants to be in the public eye or not, what mother faced with the prospect of never seeing her daughter again raises scruples like this? She should be desperate to cooperate. Anything that helps the cause, no matter how peripherally, is worth a shot. I’m not about to say all this, but hopefully the way I’m looming over them, hands on hips, gets the gist across.
“Do you have children, Detective?” she asks.
I glance down. “No.”
“My daughter, she grew up without her father. He died when she was still just a baby, so she only knows him through videotapes and other people’s stories.” Her eyes shine in the lamplight. “There was this thing she used to do. She’d come to me and say, ‘Mama, I remembered something about Daddy.’ And she’d tell some elaborate story about how she and her dad went to the park together, or ate their favorite ice cream, things like that. She’d remember the time he brought home a puppy. The most fanciful things – she has such an imagination – and then she’d say, ‘You remember that, don’t you, Mama?’ or ‘That really happened, didn’t it?’ Always wanting me to confirm the stories she made up, so they’d feel real.”
“And did you?”
“Sometimes. The thing is, I was always afraid of what she might hear. When her daddy died, people told all kinds of stories. He was kind of famous in certain circles; he’d touched a lot of lives. Since his body was never found, there were people who said he wasn’t really dead. Either he’d faked it to get out of some kind of financial trouble, or he’d gone undercover as part of his ministry.”
“Undercover.”
“Silly, I know. But there was a missionary to Bolivia, a really sweet man, a friend of Peter’s from way back, and he came home on furlough and told me people down there had reported seeing Peter. He would turn up at evangelistic rallies, they said, and lay hands on people, healing them.”
“Did you believe that?” I ask.
“My husband died. All the stories never changed that. But I lived in fear that Hannah would get hold of them somehow, and convince herself they were true.”
“And this is why you don’t want to do a press conference?”
“Not only this,” she says. “But yes. I’ll do anything to bring her back safely, Detective, but I won’t turn her life into entertainment for strangers. Hannah has a right to privacy, don’t you think? I don’t want to give them more things to talk about on the news. I just want her back.”
A woman after my own heart, I have to confess. Keep the media vultures on a starvation diet. But there’s always a chance the added publicity will make a difference. Someone will remember seeing something. A witness will come forward. It happens all the time. In the same circumstances, I’d have to hold my nose and cooperate with the news cycle. Give it what it wants in hope that what I want will follow. Not that the world works that way.
As she listens, Cavallo’s expression turns beatific with sympathy, only hardening when she accidently looks my way. There’s more than just a feminine bond at work, but I can’t quite put my finger on what’s going on.
“Donna,” she begins softly, “I have a favor to ask.”
“What is it?”
“I’d like to get a dna swab from you,” Cavallo explains in her most soothing bedside manner. “It’s not entirely routine” – a glance my way – “but in this case, it could help us with a particular line of inquiry.”
Mrs. Mayhew stares down at her open Bible. “This line of inquiry. Is it something I don’t want to know about?”
“I’ll tell you if you do.”
“But is it…?”
“A very remote possibility,” Cavallo says. “Just something we’d like to check off the list.”
Donna Mayhew reaches forward, easing the book shut. “What do you need me to do?”
While Cavallo explains the process, producing the buccal swab kit from her bag, I wander back into the corridor to allow them some privacy. This woman still dreams of her daughter returning home safely, while I’m trying to establish the girl’s a homicide victim. I’d rather not witness what I’m putting her through.
Across the hall, another door stands open. Glancing inside, I find Carter Robb sorting through boxed reams of paper, shifting the stacks on his desk, his back to the door. Unlike Mrs. Mayhew, he occupies a tiny, spartan office, almost entirely devoid of decoration apart from the cheap particleboard bookcases lining the walls, the shelves bowing from the weight of ragged, stringy hardcovers and creased paperbacks. The books seem at odds with his carefully ungroomed appearance. I wouldn’t have figured him for a reader.
“Tell me something,” I say, hoping he’ll jump. He turns, holding his hands slightly out, like I’ve caught him in the act. “What exactly is a youth pastor?”
A slight smile. “Most days? A glorified baby-sitter.”
He seems to expect me to laugh, but I make a point of keeping a straight face. “You want to elaborate on that a little?”
“Well, what I do is, I oversee the youth group. The teens, I mean. We have a service for them on Sunday nights, and some activities during the week, mostly after school.”
“And Hannah’s part of that?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, yes.”
To his credit, he looks me straight in the eye. Set deep in that uncomplicated face, its perfect symmetry exuding all-American innocence, his gaze seems incongruous, darkened by an unearned seriousness, the sort brought on by books and too many grave conversations. This man, who has never killed and probably never even had to fight, whose only suffering up to now has been the failure to live up fully to all his grandiose teenage ambitions, somehow manages to project an old man’s world-weariness, an acquaintance with pain that contradicts his unlined skin. The stress could do that, agonizing over the fate of his missing charge, but I get the feeling it’s a preexisting condition.
“You two are pretty close, her mother says. Is that right? I was wondering if she ever said anything to you about gangs.”
“About what?”
“ La Tercera Crips,” I say, flashing my best approximation of the appropriate sign. “A dude named Octavio Morales maybe?”
His mouth gapes open, but he doesn’t answer. I might as well be speaking Greek. Or Sanskrit in his case, assuming they still teach Greek in seminary.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says finally. “Hannah never mentioned anything like that, not to me.”
“What did she talk about?”
Before he can answer, Cavallo’s voice booms in my ear. “March, what’s going on?” She dangles the bagged swab in the air, motioning for me to come along quietly, then gives the glorified baby-sitter a high-wattage smile. “Hi, Carter. We’ve got to get going. The flyers look great. You’re doing a wonderful job. Just keep it up, okay?”
Robb looks from me to her in mild confusion, nodding in a bemused if baffled way. Before I can fire off another question, she starts pulling me down the corridor, a forced smile on her lips.
“What was that all about?” she whispers.
“There’s something not right about that guy.”
“The way you were eyeballing him, I’m not surprised. You can’t run roughshod over these people. They’re doing everything they can to help.”
“You’re telling me you didn’t see that? The way he tensed up? I swear he was about to break into a sweat. And the mother, the way she talked about him, there was something she wasn’t saying.”
“Just keep walking,” she says.
Once we get outside, basking in the orange sunset, she finally slows her pace. Unlike me, she’s not impervious to the heat. She shucks off her jacket and pulls her blouse away from the small of her back. The way her heels snap out the cadence, I know she’s telling me off in her head.
“At least you got what you wanted,” she says.
Before I can answer, a couple of city cars roll up. In the passenger seat of the lead car, I recognize Wanda Mosser’s snowy dome. She hops out, spry as ever, fixing me with her pearl gray smile.
“What’s this man doing here?” she demands.
Cavallo rests a hand on her pistol’s jutting handle. “Causing trouble, boss.”
“I’m surprised he still knows how,” Wanda says, pulling me to one side. Then, lowering her voice: “What’s the deal, Roland? You looking for work or something?”
“Not me.” I explain about the dna swab and how Cavallo invited me along.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
I glance at Cavallo, who dabs at her damp forehead with the back of her hand. “Not really.”
“Ah.” Wanda smiles shrewdly. “You did notice the engagement ring, didn’t you?”
I nod.
“And the cross?”
I nod again.
“Roland,” she says, shaking her head. “I never figured you for something like this. Aren’t you happily married?”
Suddenly I do feel the heat. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s all right, Roland.” She gives me a knowing smile. “We’re all entitled to make fools of ourselves from time to time. But I have to tell you, you couldn’t have picked a less likely candidate. Cavallo’s straight as an arrow.” She leans closer. “And to be honest, a little uptight.”
I peel away. “Thanks for the warning.”
We rejoin Cavallo and the other detectives milling around the newly arrived vehicles.
“What up?” Cavallo asks. “You need me to stay?”
Wanda shakes her head. “You better get this one back to the office. I’m just here for a chat with the mother. If I can, I’m going to get her on TV.”
“Good luck.”
The drive back into town proves awkward. Maybe Cavallo overheard some of what Wanda said, or at least picked up on the body language. If I could think of anything to say, I would. But my old boss was right. I’ve made a big fool of myself. In addition to pursuing this long shot of a hunch, ditching a perfectly reasonable assignment from my lieutenant, I’ve been as transparent about this newfound attraction as a fifteen-year-old boy.
I can sense a load of bad karma coming my way. To balance the accounts, I call Mitch Geiger again. I leave another message.
The moment I put my phone away, it starts to ring. The caller id displays Lorenz’s name.
“You’re not going to answer that?” Cavallo asks.
“I better not. It could only mean trouble.”
She sniffs. “Then I’m sorry for dragging you out here.”
“What do you mean? I wanted to come. And listen, you can just give me the swab and I’ll take it from here. I have a contact at the ME’s office who can process it for me – ”
“This isn’t your case,” she says quietly. “It’s mine. I’ll handle it from here.”
I try arguing the point, but she’s solid, and not going to be worn down. Whatever she heard or inferred, whatever thought process my interaction with Wanda set off, Cavallo’s determined to have her way.
“I can get it done fast,” I say.
She laughs. “Believe me, nobody has more priority right now than we do.”
“So you’ll follow up quick? I need the result as soon as possible.”
She gives me a cloudy look, so cloudy I’m afraid to ask what’s going on behind it. My phone starts ringing again.
I switch the ringer off.
The back wall of Mitch Geiger’s office features a network of stick-pinned mug shots and surveillance photos, some of them labeled and connected by lines but most marked with circles and question marks. Layered over them, frayed adhesive notes covered in ink. The display could be the work of an enterprising narcotics sergeant trying to map the local landscape. Then again, it could pass for evidence of a psychotic break, the kind of thing you find in the retrofitted garage of a perfectly average neighbor, along with the butcher knives and the stack of severed limbs.
Either way, it sparks my interest in Geiger. Unfortunately, he’s not at home. Eight in the morning isn’t the best time to find the narcs up and at it.
“You know where your sergeant is?” I ask a nearby stoner in a denim vest. If it weren’t for the badge around his neck, I’d assume he escaped from lockup. He scratches his head something furious, then smiles behind his brush-like mustache. Even if he did know, he might not share. In my jacket and tie I’m obviously Homicide. We might as well be wearing gang colors. When you work murder, you assume everybody who doesn’t wishes they could. We’re the first string, and murder is the big show. But a certain type of police sees Narcotics in the same light. There’s no accounting for taste.
For good measure I give Geiger’s mobile number a ring before leaving. By now I could recite the man’s recorded greeting from memory. No point in leaving another message. I’ve done what I can on this one for now.
En route to my desk I’m intercepted by a sullen twenty-year-old in tactical cargo pants and an hpd polo shirt, who waylays me just outside the elevator. He introduces himself as Edgar Castro from the crime lab, claiming to recognize me from the Morales scene, though I don’t remember him.
“I’ve been trying to get through to Detective Lorenz,” he says, “but he’s not returning my calls.”
As much as I sympathize after this morning’s fruitless errand, there’s a tribal imperative to observe. Crime-scene technicians can’t expect to have homicide detectives at their beck and call. The food chain runs in the reverse direction.
“He’s got his hands full at the moment,” I say.
He brandishes a shiny-covered report. “So can I leave this with you, then?”
“You wanna tell me what it is?”
So he starts explaining, turning the pages as he goes. “It’s actually pretty interesting. The victim in the hallway, the one sticking halfway out the bathroom? Hector Diaz -?”
“Little Hector,” I say, remembering what the girl across the street had called him.
“Originally, we thought he must have been leaning through the door pretty far, because he was hit three times in the side. Right here.” He uses his fingertips to indicate holes above his left kidney and between the ribs. “But I had a hard time making sense of that. I mean, if somebody’s taking a shot at you, and you’re returning fire, do you turn your flank toward them like that? For a right-hander like him, that’s not the best use of cover.”
I wonder if Castro’s ever been in a firefight, or for that matter any kind of fight. Making best use of cover, that’s a lesson they don’t teach on the streets.
“So I went back to the scene,” he says, “and took a harder look. The bathroom window is busted open – that’s on the original report – but it looks like it happened a while back. No loose glass on the floor or anything like that. So nobody paid much mind. But when I went outside and started looking through the shrubs, I recovered a 9mm shell casing.”
“Just the one?”
“Maybe the shooter collected the rest of his brass.”
“So you’re saying Little Hector was shot from outside?”
He nods. “What must have happened is, he was holding them off from the bathroom door, so they sent someone outside to… you know, flank his position.” He makes a gun out of his fingers and jams it through an imaginary window. “That would make sense of the angles. He was crouched in the doorway, firing down the hall, when suddenly he starts taking fire from the window.”
The report includes a three-dimensional computer rendering of the action, one stick figure outside the window with red lines streaming out of his stick pistol, intersecting the torso of another stick figure in the wire-frame doorway.
“That’s a pretty sophisticated move, don’t you think? For gang-bangers? The guy with the shotgun must have kept Diaz engaged while they sent the other one outside. That’s fire and maneuver, isn’t it? Basic tactics.”
The cynic in me wants to squash Castro’s enthusiasm, but the kid has a point. In a standoff like this, I’d expect the players to empty their clips and get out of there. Under fire, tunnel vision kicks in. Most people don’t think much beyond the immediate threat. So if this crew managed to improvise on the go, I’m impressed.
Then again, they might have left a driver on the street, and maybe he noticed flashes in the bathroom window and went up to investigate, pumping a couple of rounds through the conveniently busted glass.
“I’ll look this over,” I tell him, tucking the report under my arm. “Good work, Castro.”
He grins ear to ear, making me wonder how long ago his braces came off.
I catch up to Lorenz in Bascombe’s office, and all at once I realize I’ve been outplayed. The two of them sit listening to a third man, hardly acknowledging my arrival. Ginger-haired, with deeply furrowed cheeks and a handlebar mustache, I’m betting this is the elusive Mitch Geiger. His voice trails off when he notices me. Bascombe snaps his head my way, hawkishly predatory.
“Just sit down and listen.” He points with a talon-like finger.
I sink into a chair in the corner.
“Should I recap?” Geiger asks in a scratchy rumble of a voice.
After a nod from Bascombe, the narcotics sergeant repeats what I already know from the folder Lorenz passed along yesterday. There are rumors on the street about an independent crew hitting stash houses, disrupting the flow of product. Some of the gangs are using the hits as an excuse for drive-bys – not that they’ve ever needed one.
“But it’s not about one gang putting pressure on another,” Geiger says. “I’ve been mapping it all out, trying to connect the various dots. This crew is no respecter of persons. They’re hitting everybody in Southwest, and not just the low-hanging fruit, either.”
Lorenz leans forward, looking very serious. “Is there some kind of modus operandi with these guys? Something their jobs have in common?”
“Well…” Geiger draws the word out, glancing at Bascombe.
“Without examining the scenes,” Bascombe says, “that’s probably tough to determine. One question we need to ask, though, is whether they’ve killed anybody before now.”
“From what I’m hearing out there, I’d have to say no. These sound like clean operations to me. In and out, just like that. Of course, assuming the same guys hit your scene, they might have run into unexpected trouble.”
If Bascombe wants me to sit down and shut up, that’s probably what I should do. But I just can’t help jumping in. “There’s a problem with what I’m hearing. Morales wasn’t sitting on a stash. As far as I know, Morales handled the money, not the product.”
“So maybe there was a brick of cash,” Lorenz says.
“In that case, we should be hearing about it on the street.” I look to Geiger. “Is that the story you’re picking up out there?”
He glances sideways, gives me half a shrug. “Right now, we’re not hearing much of anything.” The words come reluctantly, like he’s been warned in advance not to interact with me too much. The question is, was it Lorenz who gave the instructions or Bascombe? And did the orders include not returning my calls? Because this is feeling a lot like a setup.
“This isn’t about a drug stash,” I say, “and it’s not about money. The girl on that bed, she’s what it’s about. She’s why they were there.”
“March,” Bascombe snaps. “You wanna shut up a second?”
“Somebody has to say it.”
“Well, you lost your chance. This was your job to do, but you didn’t. So now I’m having to do it myself. Why don’t you just sit there looking clueless. It’s what you do best.”
I should let it go, but I don’t. “Either we can sit here trying to make a square peg fit a round hole, or we can start looking for a match to our female victim’s blood sample. That’s the lead we should be following.”
Lorenz glares at me, bloated with contempt, while Geiger takes a sudden interest in the carpet. Bascombe, though, he’s smiling, an unspoken thank-you on his face. He turns to the other two.
“Will you gentlemen excuse us a moment?”
They don’t have to be asked twice. Once they’re gone, Bascombe hops off the desk and pushes the door shut.
“You can’t help shooting your mouth off.”
“Hedges put me on the case,” I say. “I’m going to work it. The politics mean nothing to me. I don’t care if Lorenz likes me, or even if you do. There’s a lead to follow and I’m going to follow it, no matter what you drop on my lap. You have to respect that.”
“Respect?” he says, circling around the desk, slipping into his chair. “Oh, I do respect it, March. Now, I happen to know that after we talked yesterday, you went straight to Missing Persons, ignoring everything I said. I had to ask myself, Why would he do something like that? And all I could come up with was this: He really must believe in that connection. Crazy as it sounds, you’re convinced the woman in that house is the girl from tv. You’re so sure, you don’t need any instructions from me, isn’t that right?”
I shrug, not sure where he’s going with this.
“So I give the whole situation some thought. And you know what I see? There’s an opportunity here for a win-win.”
“Meaning what?”
Nothing good, judging by all the teeth he’s showing. After shuffling through the paper on his desk, he slides a document my way. The first thing I see is the captain’s initials in the margin.
“Wanda Mosser has requested more manpower for her task force, March. First thing this morning I discussed it with the boss, and together we decided you’d be a good fit for her team. You’ve already shown such an interest in the case. And clearly” – he gestures toward the chair recently vacated by Lorenz – “you still haven’t learned how to play well with others. You’re an anchor as far as your partner’s concerned, but Mosser will be happy to get an experienced homicide man such as yourself.”
You have to admire the move. The lieutenant understands how the game is played. He wants to unload me, and by ditching Lorenz in favor of Theresa Cavallo yesterday afternoon, defying his instructions, I’ve given him the perfect opportunity. Such a little thing, but it was all he needed.
“I want to talk to the captain,” I say.
He’s so quick to agree I know there’s no hope. Still, we troop over to Hedges’s door, rapping softly until he invites us inside.
“It’s you,” he says, rising to his feet. “Off to your new assignment?”
“Sir, you told me I could work the case. That’s what I’ve been doing. I don’t want another special assignment. I’m tired of being farmed out like this. If you’d just let me get on with the job, like you said you would – ”
“Listen, March. I have given you a shot, and from what Lieutenant Bascombe tells me, you haven’t made the most of it. I told you to get along with Lorenz, but you can’t seem to do that.”
“What’s more important, getting along or getting a result?”
He ignores the jab. “I’m also very concerned with your cavalier attitude toward the lieutenant’s direction. He and Lorenz were relying on you to follow up with Narcotics – isn’t that right, Lieutenant? – and instead you disappeared all day. I need my people to pull their own weight, March.”
“Please,” I say. “Reassign me, put me on another case, whatever. But don’t loan me out again. That’s all I ask.”
Hedges glances down, embarrassed, and Bascombe shuffles his feet behind me, no doubt worried the captain will cave in.
“You did good work at the scene,” Hedges concedes, “and I was really hoping it wouldn’t be a fluke. But this idea of yours about Hannah Mayhew? That’s guesswork, not police work.”
“They’re comparing the samples as we speak. If they don’t match, fine. We can cross that one off. But if you get rid of me now and the samples do match, how’s that gonna look?”
Hedges chuckles. “In that case, I’d feel pretty stupid. And if it happens, you can come on back. I’ll owe you a big apology, and so will the lieutenant here – isn’t that right?”
“That’s right, sir,” Bascombe says. I hear the smile in his voice.
“In the meantime,” the captain says, “if this is the angle you’ve decided to pursue, I think it would be best to do it on Wanda Mosser’s time, not mine.”
“And she’s agreed to that?” I ask, grasping at straws.
He answers me with a smile. “Everybody’s off-loading their dead weight on Wanda. She’ll be happy to see a familiar face. Especially one as motivated as you are. And I tell you what, if things work out over there, and you find at the end of her investigation that you’re still feeling repentant, you come back to me and we’ll talk.”
“Let’s talk now.”
Coming around the desk, he starts patting me on the shoulder, easing me toward the door, where Bascombe, noticing my free side, starts patting that, too. The captain’s happy to have one less problem to deal with, while the lieutenant can take pride in a well-executed maneuver. While Lorenz kept me pinned down, he went around the side and flanked me. But no, who am I kidding? I flanked myself.
So now I’m on the threshold, feeling like a paratrooper about to jump, knowing my chute was packed by people who don’t care how hard I land.
So that’s that.
I’m out.
Free fall. There’s something exciting about it, like finding out you have cancer and you’ll be dead in six months. It’s a bummer, sure, but liberating, too. All the things you were afraid to do back when there was too much to live for, suddenly they’re fair game. I think about that scenario often, usually at night, with Charlotte sleeping at the far edge of the bed and the ceiling fan crawling through its circuit.
If you knew you were going to die, what would you do? Fight to hang on a few more months, or throw yourself into a task that really means something?
I dial Charlotte’s number, expecting to find her at the computer in her home office, doing whatever it is corporate attorneys do. Instead, I hear footsteps on pavement and road noise in the background.
“Where are you?”
“Rice Village,” she says. “I decided to do a little shopping.”
“Good therapy, huh?” I glance at my watch. “Can we do lunch?”
“Is something wrong, Roland?” she asks with a note of concern.
“Kind of. I’ll tell you when we meet.”
She goes through her mental list of restaurants, cross-referencing whatever’s nearest, finally suggesting Prego. The drive takes me fifteen minutes, then I burn another five navigating the warren of streets around Rice Village, trying to remember the exact location. By the time I park and walk inside, Charlotte’s already secured a table and started scrutinizing the menu. She’s always taken her food quite seriously. A couple of shopping bags are stacked at her feet.
“So why the midday rendezvous?” she asks. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done something like this.”
“You know about the missing girl, the one on television? Hannah Mayhew?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, they’ve put me on the task force.”
She swishes the ice in her water glass. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It’s definitely not good.”
The waiter comes and we order. I don’t feel much like eating, but I get the lentil soup. Charlotte changes her mind a couple of times, finally landing on the grilled red snapper, joking that if I’m taking her to lunch for a change, she’s going to get something expensive.
If we’d had this conversation the other night, instead of arguing over our tenant, the tone would have been quite different. That seems like a decade ago, but it was just Friday night. I blew my big break almost as soon as I got it, and over the stupidest thing. All I had to do was go to Geiger’s office immediately, but instead I’d tagged along with Cavallo for no better reason than that she was easy on the eyes.
Not that I can tell Charlotte that. My account of the events is selective, but by the time I’m done she gets the point.
“So you’ve screwed up your last chance?”
“Pretty much.”
She takes a bite of snapper, and I honestly can’t tell if the contemplative look on her face has to do with my predicament or the taste of the food. I stare into my soup, moving the spoon in tiny circles.
“Roland,” she says, “have you thought about chucking it in?”
“Retirement? I don’t have the time in.”
“No, not retirement. Just quitting. If they’re not going to let you work Homicide, why don’t you find something else? I mean, it’s not like we’re living off your salary or anything. Maybe it’s time to make a course correction.”
“Can we not talk about me quitting?”
“But if you’re miserable with the job, I don’t see why – ”
“There’s still a possibility,” I say. “If I can connect the murders with this girl…”
“Roland, you know what I’d like? Just listen for a second. You’ve been thrashing around for a long time, like you’ve got some kind of clichéd inner demon. And we both know why. What I’d like is for you to let go. Leave the department. In fact, we could both get a fresh start. We could move somewhere else. We could sell the house and do some traveling – we always said we would someday. Why not do it now? What’s the point of being unhappy? We have the money, Roland, so let’s – ”
It’s a good thing I’m not hooked up to an EKG, or the whole restaurant would be deafened by the shrill, beeping pulse. As it is, my fist puts a decent bend in the handle of my spoon.
“We’re not going to sell that house,” I say, trying hard to keep my voice calm. “Never. And I’m not leaving the job. That’s not why I wanted to talk.”
“Then why did you?”
I drop the spoon in the bowl and sit back. Honestly, I don’t have an answer. There was a reason, some deep and primal instinct that pushed me at a moment of crisis to reach out. But Charlotte and I, we don’t function that way, not anymore. Especially not now.
“I just thought… I wanted to let you know what’s going on.”
“Great,” she says. “Now I know.”
She keeps eating, using her fork like a trident on the helpless fish, all joy in the process now gone. When the waiter swings by with offers of espresso and dessert, I shake my head and ask for the bill. Charlotte and I part ways on the sidewalk after a desultory kiss.
An hour later, on the far side of town, the wind blows Cavallo’s twisted locks across her eyes. While she grapples with her hair, I flip through photos of Hannah Mayhew’s abandoned car, a white Ford Focus hatchback. I match the painted lines in the photographs with the parking space divisions at my feet, working out the car’s exact placement. A makeshift shrine by the nearest lamppost, wilting flowers, candles, and sun-baked greeting cards, helps to mark the spot.
As far as crime statistics are concerned, Willowbrook Mall ranks second in the city behind the notorious Greenspoint, mainly people breaking into parked cars or simply stealing them. Fortunately Hannah’s Focus wasn’t one of them, or we’d have even less to work with than we do. Along with the shots of the car, I have grainy stills from the video surveillance footage.
“Those haven’t been released to the media,” Cavallo says.
According to the time stamps, the Focus arrived at 12:58 p.m. Twelve minutes later, a gray shadow emerged from the driver’s side – presumably Hannah, but the action transpired too far from the camera for decent coverage.
“While she was sitting there, she made a call from her mobile to the prepaid number. The connection lasted about thirty seconds. She was probably calling to say she’d arrived.”
“And then the van pulls up?”
I flip to the next still, in which a white panel van blocks the view.
“One theory is, she got in the van. It was moving slow, and kind of stops right there, but you can’t tell from the footage if she got in. A group of people passes by right then. She might have blended in with them and gone inside the mall.” Cavallo fingers through my stack, sliding out another photo. “As they get closer, you can see one of the girls kind of looks like her. So that’s another theory.”
“Any footage from inside the mall?”
“Nothing we can confirm as her, no. You’d be surprised how many five-foot-four teenage blondes there are in the mall at any given time, and how hard it is to tell them apart on surveillance tape. She had a shiny pink purse, pretty distinctive, and we haven’t spotted anything like that.”
“No witnesses have come forward?”
She laughs. “Over fifty have. She was spotted in the parking lot, inside Macy’s, Sephora, and Williams-Sonoma. She was all over the food court. Sometimes with other girls, sometimes alone. She was arguing with a boy – sometimes a white boy, sometimes Latino – and she was holding hands with at least two different guys.”
“She got around.”
“Yeah, you could say that. There was even a witness in the Abercrombie changing room who heard a girl crying in the next stall. She couldn’t see this girl, but she’s pretty sure it had to be Hannah Mayhew. They’re all sure.”
“And they just want to help. I know how it works.”
Go to a neighborhood like the Third Ward, and no matter what happens – somebody can walk up to a dude in broad daylight and put a gun to his head – nobody sees anything. But out in the suburbs, everyone sees something. As they say, the crazies come out of the woodwork – only the crazies are normal enough. They’re just starved for attention, captivated by their proximity to the girl on tv.
Not that they’re making things up. I’ve interviewed witnesses before with impossible stories, the details obviously culled from news coverage, yet they were convinced what they said was true. Most could probably have passed a lie-detector test. No doubt at this very moment a young woman sits in front of the television in her Abercrombie T-shirt, convinced she was close enough to Hannah Mayhew to hear her weep.
“So you see where the manpower’s going,” Cavallo says. “We’ve got a small army checking out every delivery van and contractor in a ten-mile radius, and another one following up on every sighting that’s been reported.”
“What about her friends at school? Her church?”
“We got surveillance going on a kid at the school. Deals a little weed. Depending on who you ask, Hannah was either dating the boy or trying to convert him. His name is James Fontaine, and so far he’s the likeliest suspect.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Honestly? I don’t have a feeling one way or the other. Usually I do.”
I hand the photos back, then walk a circle around the empty parking space, studying the pavement for I don’t know what. The wind ripples my pant leg. Overhead, the clouds are black-rimmed and foreboding.
“Can I level with you?” I say. “There’s only one thing I’m concerned about, and it’s the dna sample. If we get a match back on that, it blows this case wide open and puts me back where I belong – ”
“And if it doesn’t match?”
“It will. You may not have a feeling one way or the other, but I do. The girl on that bed was Hannah Mayhew. I don’t know how she got there, but she did.”
“You’re convinced.”
“Absolutely. So just tell me when to expect the answer.”
She shrugs. “Maybe a day, maybe a week. How am I supposed to know?”
“You said you had juice.”
“That doesn’t mean your hunch goes to the top of my list. Like I said, I’m not convinced, so you can’t expect me to put resources behind it, no matter how badly you want there to be a link.”
My collar tightens around my neck. “If that’s how you feel, I can go back to the me myself and get it done. You should have let me do that in the first place.”
“It’s not your case.”
“It’s as much mine as yours now.”
She crosses her arms. “No. It’s not.”
We head back to her car, neither of us very interested in continuing the conversation. Teaming us up was Wanda’s idea. Maybe it was a favor to me – or maybe it was punishment, the hair of the dog, her way of teaching me a lesson.
She starts the engine, letting the air-conditioning blow, then turns in her seat.
“March, let’s get something clear.”
“All right,” I say, not liking her tone or the intensity of her gaze.
“You see this?” She makes a fist of her left hand and brandishes the engagement ring. “You appreciate the significance?”
“Uh… yeah.”
“It means that no matter what you and Wanda have cooked up between you, nothing’s gonna happen. You understand that?”
“I’m a happily married man,” I say.
Her eyes narrow in contempt.
“Look,” I say. “You don’t know me. All I care about is getting those results back. If you’d just make that happen, you could get rid of me a lot sooner.”
She puts the car in gear. “Anyway. You’re old enough to be my dad.”
“What? No, I’m not.” I punch the window button, then lean my head out to yell. “Thank you, Wanda, wherever you are.”
Cavallo smiles, but just barely. When we hit FM-1960, I point right and she turns left.
“I need to get back,” she says.
“Fine, but there’s a lead I want to follow up while we’re out here.”
She sighs. “What?”
“That youth pastor from yesterday. I want to swing by and rattle his cage.”
“There’s no point.”
“Just turn around, all right? Pretty please? You can drop me off. I’ll hitch a ride back with some uniforms.”
She glides into the left-turn lane, tapping her fingers on the wheel. When the light changes, she whips the front around late, giving the tires a squeal, then pours on the gas. The woman always drives like she’s chasing someone. Or being chased.
Finding Carter Robb is easier said than done. His office at the church proves empty, and the number I worm out of the secretary goes straight to voicemail. According to Cavallo, who’s decided to stick with me for the moment, he runs after-school programs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, trading slices of pizza for a captive audience to evangelize. But Hannah’s disappearance trumps the usual schedule.
“All he does anymore is make copies of the flyer,” the secretary says. “Then he posts them all over the place. Sometimes the youth group kids go with him.”
“You have any idea where I could intercept him?”
She fingers the beads around her neck in thought. “His wife teaches at Cypress Christian School – no relation to the church. There’s a coffee place across from there, Seattle Coffee. His home away from home, I think.”
“I know where it is,” Cavallo says.
This turns out to be only partly true, as she proves by hunting around for twenty minutes while I dig through the Key Map and try to navigate. When we finally locate the coffee shop, there’s no sign of Robb, so I persuade Cavallo to take me to the school where his wife teaches. We page her from the office, then wait.
After a few minutes I check my watch.
“You’re not like the other homicide detectives,” Cavallo says.
“So you know a lot of them?”
She gives me a look like I’m an idiot. “They’re mostly big talkers. Gift of the gab. But not you. You’re more of a brooder, aren’t you?”
“Maybe I’ve got more to brood about.”
“I always expect them to be depressed,” she says. “Doing that kind of work, seeing what they see. But I guess you develop an immunity. I don’t think I could.”
“You might surprise yourself someday.”
Cavallo starts to reply, then looks past me. “Here she is.”
Gina Robb can’t be a day over twenty-five, but in her cardigan and cat-eye glasses she’s serious enough for an elderly librarian. She’s pinned a swag of dishwater blond hair back with a tortoiseshell barrette, exposing a swath of pale forehead. Under the cardigan, she wears a flower-print dress that flares at the hips, a self-consciously vintage look.
“You wanted to see me?” she asks, looking from one of us to the other, uncertain whom to address. “Are you from the police?”
I glance at my dangling shield. “How can you tell?”
She parries my attempt at humor with a grave frown. “Has something happened?”
“No, nothing like that,” Cavallo says.
I would never have picked this girl as Robb’s type. Proof, I suppose, that opposites attract, bookworms pairing off with jocks and vice versa. For some reason it makes him more interesting.
“We’re trying to find your husband,” I say. “Any idea where he might be?”
Her gray eyes flick toward the wall clock. “At church?”
“We checked. They said he might be out distributing flyers.”
“I guess that’s where he is then.”
“We checked the coffee shop,” Cavallo says. “They told us he hangs out there sometimes.”
She nods. “Sometimes.”
Either she’s trying to make this hard, or she’s genuinely baffled by our questions. “Would you mind giving him a call? Maybe he’ll pick up if he sees it’s you.”
Her hands fret the hem of her cardigan. “We haven’t dismissed class yet. I should really – ”
“Please,” Cavallo says. “Just humor him, ma’am.”
She moves slower than a reluctant snail, but she does move, her hand sliding into the drooping cardigan pocket, returning with a tiny sliver of a phone, which she thumbs open without glancing down. She punches a speed-dial button and puts the phone to her ear.
“Baby?” she says. “I’m still at the school. Yeah. Listen, the police are here looking for you. I don’t know… All right, here you go.”
She hands me the phone.
“It’s Roland March,” I say. “We met yesterday. I was wondering if we could have a chat.”
“Right.” He sounds wary. “You want to meet at the church?”
For some reason I don’t, and I tell him so. “How about I drop in wherever you are?”
“All right.”
“You’ll have to tell me where that is.”
A long time passes. His wife looks up anxiously while Cavallo consults her watch.
“Mr. Robb?”
“I’m… I’m sitting in the van. Outside James Fontaine’s house. Trying to work up enough nerve to go knock on the door.”
I walk alongside the red church van, giving the roof a nice tap, then climb into the passenger seat. Robb doesn’t even glance over. His eyes are fixed on the house across the street, a rather palatial brick mansion dating from the late seventies or early eighties with concrete lions on either side of the front steps. Not the crib I’d have expected for a Klein High weed dealer, but I can’t think why not. Where else is he going to live? We’re in the suburbs, after all.
I rap the plastic dash with my knuckle. “You really shouldn’t be doing this. For one thing, you’re not exactly keeping a low profile.”
“I’m not really trying.”
“For another thing – and I shouldn’t even be mentioning this – we’re already keeping an eye on this kid.” I crank the rearview around, glancing back at Cavallo, who’s still behind the wheel, leaving this one to me. “Putting up flyers is one thing. That’s great. But conducting your own stakeout? Not so much.”
“I’m not here to spy on him,” he says. “I wanted to confront him.”
“Won’t he still be in school?”
He looks at me for the first time. “He’s on suspension.”
“Didn’t the school year just begin? He didn’t waste any time.”
Robb wears cargo shorts today, along with Converse sneakers. His black T-shirt imitates the popular milk advertisements, but says got JESUS? instead. After meeting the wife, something tells me he chooses his wardrobe for ironic effect.
“Let me level with you,” I say. “When I saw you yesterday, something didn’t seem right. You were squirrelly. Like our being there made you nervous. So I started wondering what you’d have to be nervous about. Why don’t you save me the trouble and just tell me?”
“I’m not nervous about anything.”
“Really? ’Cause let me tell you something. What you’re doing right here, it’s abnormal. This is not how people react to situations like yours, not when they’re on the level.”
He runs a hand through his spiky hair. “How do they react?”
“Not like they’re guilty.”
“That’s how you think I’m acting?”
“Am I wrong?”
He reaches out and straightens the rearview mirror, reclaiming the territory. “How am I supposed to answer a question like that?”
“You have a guilty conscience, Mr. Robb. I want to know why.”
Human physiology is a funny thing. No matter how cool we think we’re playing it, most of us don’t have poker faces. Our tells can be ludicrously on target. Robb’s a perfect example. His top lip clamps down over the bottom, forcing the tuft of hair on his chin to pop out like porcupine quills. He’s literally biting down the words, and he has no idea.
“Come on,” I say, jabbing his arm. “Just tell me what you’re holding back. You’ll feel better.”
He turns toward the window, head shaking imperceptibly.
“You want to find this girl, right? So help me out. Don’t hold anything back. It’s not fair to Hannah.”
He lets out a breath. “Hannah? You don’t even know her.”
“Then tell me about her, Carter. Fill me in.”
His breathing comes hard and heavy, the muscles in his forearms flexing, struggling to hold himself together.
“Come on.”
Then I hear it, the sound I love. The gasp of capitulation, a long exhale that leaves him smaller than before, hunched over and broken. In the interview room, this would be the moment the guys on the far side of the glass slap each other’s backs. When they give that sigh, it means everything is about to come out all at once.
“This,” he says, his voice quiet, “this is all my fault.”
“Meaning what?”
“I encouraged her. I thought I was doing the right thing.” There’s a plea in his eyes. “You have to understand, when I first came to the church, nobody was on my side. What I found here wasn’t at all what I expected. You’ve got this big, famous church – all my seminary friends, when they heard I was coming here, said I’d hit the big time. But what I discovered… It was all so comfortable. So complacent. The kids go to nice schools, they drive nice cars, they have nice lives to look forward to. It was all so nice.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I say.
“Christianity, it’s not about being nice. It’s about sacrifice. All they wanted, though, was an ordained baby-sitter, like I said before.”
“I thought you were trying to be funny.”
“I was, but it’s still true. The parents… The church, what they all wanted was some help with keeping the kids in line. Keeping them insulated. Sheltered and safe. ‘You’re young,’ they’d tell me. ‘The kids relate to you. They look up to you.’ And they wanted me to use that to help them out, you know? Or they’d get me to lay down the law, then behind my back the parents and kids could bond by talking about how unreasonable I was. That kind of shocked me, but it happens.”
As interesting as all this is, I don’t need a lecture on how hard being a youth pastor is. “Can we steer this back to Hannah?”
“Like I said, Hannah was different. Her mom was, too, at first. They understood God didn’t put us on this planet to be cozy and quiet. We have to be outward-focused. We have to be missional.”
Cavallo would know what that means, but I don’t – and I’d just as soon not find out. “Again, could we stick to the matter at hand?”
He stops me with a raised finger. “It’s relevant. There was a sermon I did – I speak to the youth group on Sunday nights, I think I mentioned that. Anyway, you know the Narnia movies started coming out, and all the kids were eating that stuff up, so I did a talk about that line from C. S. Lewis – you know, about Aslan? ‘He’s not a safe lion, but he’s a good one’?”
My eyes glaze over.
“Anyway,” he says, realizing I’m not tracking, “the point is, God doesn’t want us to be safe. He wants us to do good. There’s a big difference.”
“Right.”
“So Hannah hears this, and it’s like a light bulb goes on in her head. This was – what? Three years ago? She would have been, like, fourteen. But she really woke up and started living her faith.”
I’m not looking for ancient history, but sometimes there’s no choice. You have to let them tell the story in their own way.
“There was this girl,” he says, “named Evey, short for Evangeline. She and her mom relocated here from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the kid was really messed up. Evey ran away from home, got into drugs and who knows what else. She was Hannah’s age – but that’s all they had in common. I don’t know the whole history, but I think there’d been some kind of abuse, she’d been sexualized way too young and had this weird, kind of creepy maturity. The other kids in the youth group, they wouldn’t go near her. I think they were afraid, and to be honest I was, too.”
“But not Hannah?”
He shakes his head. “She befriended Evey, the way she did everyone. The same way she did him.” He jabs his thumb at James Fontaine’s house. “She didn’t judge. She tried to show Christ’s love to everyone, no matter how hard it was.”
“So she struggled with this love thing? And confided in you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She grew up without a dad, you know, and I think I came along at a certain time in her life when she really needed one. A youth pastor’s always acting in loco parentis, but it was more than that.”
“You have any kids of your own?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
I’m not surprised. Telling other people’s kids it’s better to be good than safe is one thing. No matter how much you like them, or even feel responsible for them, they aren’t yours. Losing them isn’t always at the back of your mind. If Robb had a child, he might understand the attraction of keeping her “sheltered and safe.” Parents want to raise future doctors and lawyers – above all, future candidates for happiness. They do not want to nurture martyrs, whatever the cause.
“You can ask a lot of people,” I say, “but you can’t expect them to sacrifice their own kid. You’ll understand that when you have kids of your own.”
“But that’s exactly what Christianity is,” he says, “a father sacrificing his son.”
There’s a flash of passion in his voice, transforming him for a moment, giving me a glimpse of what he might be like in action. I can see how the teens in his charge might be inspired, and why their parents might get a little nervous. It’s one thing to talk the talk, but when you put your kid into someone else’s hands, you’ve got to believe that underneath all the radical rhetoric, there’s a check in place, some restraining impulse or inner voice to rein him in: All this is great, and you need to hear it, but in real life, in the everyday world, you’ve got to look out for yourself. Carter Robb doesn’t seem to have that restraint, or if he does, he thinks rooting it out is an obligation of faith.
“And Donna,” I ask, “did she encourage this bond between you and her daughter?”
“She thought it was great. Just like Hannah, she really got behind me. Considering what a great man her husband was, she could have let people at the church put her on a pedestal, but that’s not her way. She works hard. She mentors women at the church. She’s written books, you know. Quite a few of them. And speaks at women’s conferences, that kind of thing. So when I came along, she said it was just what ccc needed.”
“CCC?”
“Cypress Community Church.” He smirks. “Sometimes we speak evangelicalese instead of English. Sorry about that… Where was I?”
“Donna supported you.”
“Right. When I first got there, the youth group would have these annual retreats every summer. They’d pack up the vans and go to this adventure camp in Tennessee. Bungee jumping all day and preaching all night. It was a tradition. But I went to Pastor Mike – that’s my boss, the associate pastor – and said, ‘Hey, look. Instead of driving all the way to Tennessee, let’s stay right here. There are ministry opportunities all over town, places where the kids can volunteer for a week and really advance the Kingdom.’ He looked at me like I was crazy, but Donna got behind it. Without her, we’d still be wasting that week. Now we do inner-city mission work, help at shelters, that kind of thing.”
“That’s really great. But why did you say Hannah’s disappearance was your fault?”
He takes a deep breath. “Because. She took it so seriously. I mean, she really got into the mission work. She’d take an interest in people, you know? Not safe people – and not necessarily good ones, either. Not that any of us are good, but you know what I mean. At school she started having some trouble. She was making friends with the wrong people – ”
“Like the Fontaine kid?”
He nods. “And at the same time, she’s a normal seventeen-year-old girl. She likes boys, she wants to date, and she has the usual confusing mix of adolescent emotions. Her mom had a hard time coping, and Hannah reacted by getting really secretive. Even with me.”
“So she liked Fontaine?”
“I think so. And she also wanted to be a good witness, to be Christ in his life. I tried steering her away, tried to… you know, give her a reality check or something. But she couldn’t understand what I was saying. All this time I’d been telling her one thing and suddenly I’m contradicting it all.”
“Tell me about the relationship with him.”
“I didn’t know a thing about it until she got suspended last spring, that’s how secretive she was.”
This is the first I’ve heard of her suspension, but I try not to let on. “So what happened?”
He gives a disconsolate shrug. “All she’d tell me was they’d had an argument and he got really mad. The next day, there’s a drug search at the school and they find a bag of pot in her locker.”
So nice little Hannah Mayhew, the churchgoing wide-eyed innocent, was caught holding weed in her locker? That must have been awkward at home. Not that I’m surprised or anything. It’s the sheltered kids who go wild.
“You’re certain it wasn’t hers?” I ask.
The question irritates him. “It wasn’t. She said so and I believed her. Her mom, I don’t know. After that, she had doubts about everything. About Hannah, about me, the whole direction of my ministry.”
“What did she say?”
“She hasn’t said anything.” He rubs his eyes like he’s suddenly tired. “But she doesn’t have to. I know she blames me. And hey, maybe she’s right. I came here so certain, so self-righteous, and now… I don’t know what to think anymore.”
His voice dies, his fervor ebbs away. He glances at the Fontaine house, shaking his head like he’s not sure how he got here or what he intended to do. The conviction of a few moments ago is utterly gone now.
“That’s all I’ve got,” he says.
Everything he’s said has the ring of truth about it, but as far as I can see, none of it advances the case. All he can give me is history. His awkwardness yesterday stemmed not from real guilt but from a false sense of responsibility, a dubious connection he’s made between his Sunday school lectures and Hannah’s ultimate fate. I’m disappointed, not because I expected a smoking gun from this guy but because I expected something and my instincts were off the mark. And I’m putting so much faith into those instincts right now that I don’t like to see them fail.
I pat his shoulder. “Thanks for your cooperation.” I should leave it there and go, but I get the urge to pass along some wisdom. “You know something? The one thing you can’t control in life is the outcome. You do what seems right at the moment, and if it turns out wrong… well, that’s out of your hands.”
“It’s in God’s hands,” he says.
“The point is, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this. And you shouldn’t get in the way of the investigation, either. Leave Fontaine to us, okay? Put up all the flyers you want. Spend time with those students of yours – they probably need it right now. But let us take care of the rest.”
“I have to do something,” he says, running a palm along his leg. “I can’t do nothing.”
Sure, I can sympathize. I respect his urge. And I don’t exactly agree with the platitudes I’ve just uttered, the boilerplate about letting the police handle everything. People expect too much from us sometimes. I’m not endorsing vigilantes or anything, but a little vigilance wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In his position, I’d want to do something, too. But in my position, I’m expected to toe the line. And really, what can he do apart from posting his flyers and leading yet another fruitless search? I open the door and slip to the curb, turning to speak before slamming it shut.
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” I tell him. “Say a prayer.”
The door snaps shut before he can get out a reply.
Public is where you go to be alone. After my shift, instead of heading home to Charlotte for a reprise of our lunchtime grapple, the Paragon beckons with its promise of anonymity and thumping music. Though it’s earlier than usual and a weekday to boot, the parking lot is filling up already. As the door flaps shut behind me, an icehouse chill descends, along with the soothing darkness. My eyes take forever to adjust.
When they do, I see Tommy threading his way between the tables, holding a longneck beer at shoulder level to avoid clipping the heads of any seated patrons.
“Hey, Mr. March, how’s it going, man? Why don’t you come join us at our table?”
He’s filled a table with what I assume are students from one of the undergraduate courses he teaches while toiling away on his dissertation. A couple of guys in thick-rimmed glasses wearing fitted Western shirts, a girl in a long, crinkly skirt and engineer boots.
“You and me,” I say, “we need to have a little talk. My wife told me about this girl who was up at your place, seemed kind of messed up. I didn’t like hearing that.”
“It was a one-time thing. You sure you won’t join us?”
“No, thanks.”
Instead of my usual table in back, which would put me in sight of Tommy’s group, I slip around the front of the bar into a side room added in the most recent renovation to accommodate the Paragon’s growing clientele. The ratio of speakers to square footage means the music is that much louder, but given a choice between deafness and another run-in with my tenant, I’ll take the hearing loss.
The new location has an added advantage. No Marta. After the scene I made in the parking lot last time, I’d just as soon not run into the one person likely to remember me, thanks to that overgenerous tip. An unfamiliar plaid-skirted waitress comes by, taking my order without a glimmer of recognition.
So I’ve had my talk with Tommy. Maybe that brief exchange will suffice for Charlotte, if I can spin it right. But she’ll want details, of course, which will mean explaining why I’m at the Paragon when the two of us have long since agreed I won’t come here anymore. It’s no good dwelling on things, she told me, back when she still had sympathy for my morbid obsession with the place.
When the waitress returns with my whiskey sour – I always order the same thing, and always do the same thing with it – I dig for my wallet, planning to settle up right away. With Tommy on the scene, I won’t be nursing this one all night.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says, pointing across the bar to the main room. “A guy in there took care of it.”
“You sure?”
She nods.
“All right then.”
That idiot Tommy. Thanks to his father’s deep pockets, he’s never learned the value of money. I don’t know if he’s trying to impress me, or the kids at his table. Either way, it takes the shine off my evening. I push the drink away.
He’s about the same age as Carter Robb. On the surface, they might not have much in common, but they both have kids looking to them for guidance. The burden seems to weigh more heavily on Robb than Tommy, though. It would be interesting to get the two of them in the same room. I imagine the tenant bending over backwards to deliver veiled insults, while the youth pastor, recognizing them for what they are, does his best to seem unruffled.
Staring into my drink, I recall Robb’s wife. With her mannered wardrobe, Gina Robb wouldn’t look out of place over at Tommy’s table. I wonder what she would make of the guilt her husband’s carrying. Maybe she feels it, too, the shipwreck of their shared idealism. What would have to happen for Tommy to feel that kind of guilt? Not a girl leaving his garage apartment the morning after, not very certain of what had happened to her. I’m not sure whether anything would.
I drop a couple of dollars on the table, about to get up.
Coming toward me, the man from the other night, the cop I couldn’t quite place. The horn-like projection of black hair crowning his forehead, a more youthful style than his lined face will support. We make eye contact and he nods without smiling, pulling out a chair right across from me. He glances at my untouched drink.
“You don’t remember me,” he says.
“Should I?” I don’t like the way he’s drilling me with those eyes. I don’t like that I can’t see his hands under the table.
“We have some friends in common,” he says, putting enough spin on the word that I know not to take it at face value.
Instead of facing me head-on, he cocks his chair, sitting sideways with his back to the wall so nobody can come up behind him. Keeping track of the other patrons from the corner of his eye. I was right the other night. This guy’s one of us. A cop.
“You got a name?” I ask.
He nods. “Maybe it’ll come to you.”
My right hand leaves the table, resting on my thigh. Between the staring contest and his tight-lipped way of speaking, this is starting to feel like a high-noon standoff. Maybe that’s what it is. He’s got an advantage, thanks to the angle, since my gun side is facing him. In a draw I’d need to be quick.
The thing is, I am.
“If you’re not going to introduce yourself, then I was just getting ready to go.”
“You’re not gonna say thanks?” he asks, nodding toward the drink. “Looks like you hardly touched it. Knowing your story, I think I can guess why.”
“Knock yourself out. I’m going.”
I rise quickly, giving the table a tap with my hip, the same way you’d finesse a pinball machine. The drink shakes, ice clinking on the glass, and the man grabs the table with both hands to steady it. He looks at me, then at his hands.
“Oh, I get it.” He flattens them out. “You can sit back down. I don’t have a problem with you, March. I’m here to do you a favor if you’d only let me.”
“What kind of favor?”
“Have a seat,” he says, tilting his chin. “I’ll tell you all about it.”
I turn my chair, sitting with my right hip away from him, my hand still resting on my thigh. “You can start with your name.”
“Fine, fine.” He reaches across the table. “Joe Thomson.” I ignore the outstretched hand, so he pulls it back. “If you’re not gonna drink this, mind if I do? You kind of stopped my heart for a minute there.”
“Help yourself.”
He sips the drink and makes a face. Down in the basement of my mental archive, I’m looking for a folder with Joe Thomson’s name on it, coming up empty. The face is so familiar. He’s one of those guys who was handsome once, but didn’t age so well. Jet-black hair, blue eyes, and a kind of pucker to his mouth, like he’s sucking an invisible cigar. The parchment lines on his skin look premature, due more to hard living than age.
When he puts the drink down, Thomson hunches forward and clasps his hands together like he has something to confide. He glances over his shoulder before speaking.
“I’m in a position to help you,” he says. “Only you’re gonna have to help me first.”
“Don’t take this wrong, Joe, but can I see some ID?”
“If that’s what it takes.” He smirks. “I’ll reach slow so you don’t jump to any conclusions.”
True to his word, he edges a wallet out of his back pocket, sliding it across the table. I flip it open, a sergeant’s badge catching the light, and match the photo to the face in front of me.
“You’re looking a little beat down these days,” I observe.
“Yeah, well.” He takes the wallet back. “You would be, too.”
“What are you offering me?”
“It’s a two-way street. I need something from you first.”
“What’s that?”
His mouth opens, but he can’t seem to form the words. He tries again, fails, then rubs his lips with the back of his hand, glancing away. A cough rumbles in his lungs. His cheeks color. The signs are pretty unmistakable. Thomson’s embarrassed.
“Spit it out,” I say.
He clears his throat, takes another sip. “What I’m looking for – and it’s not negotiable – is a blanket immunity. The information I share, I want it in writing that nothing will come back to bite me. You understand? No prosecution, but on top of that, no trouble at work, either. I come out looking like a hero, or I don’t take another step.”
A tremor runs up my spine, but I try to look indifferent. “You’ve lost me, Joe. Are you saying you want to confess to a crime?”
His mouth twitches. “This isn’t a confession, no.”
“Why don’t you give me an idea what we’re talking about then.”
“When I have something in writing, something I can take to an attorney and double-check, then we’ll talk. Not before.”
“You’re a cop, Joe. You know it doesn’t work that way.”
“What I know is that sometimes, for the right people, that’s exactly how it works.”
“Let me put it another way. You’re asking me to pull strings I don’t have the juice to pull. If there’s somebody in this department who can deliver what you’re demanding, it isn’t me.”
“Wrong,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re the only one. You’ll fight for it in a way nobody else will, because of who’s involved.”
My tremor turns into a vertebral earthquake. “Who is involved?”
He smiles. “Not yet, March. Here’s what you need to do. Your ex-partner Wilcox, the one who’s in Internal Affairs? He can deliver what I need. You go to him and explain, and he’ll smooth the path. Those guys have a magic wand they wave to get the prosecutors to see things their way. Why are you laughing?”
I cover my mouth with my hand, shaking my head slowly. “You don’t know Wilcox, do you? If it’s a favor from him you want, then you’ve really come knocking on the wrong door.”
“It’s not me who wants it,” he says. “It’s you.”
“That’s my point. Wilcox is my ex-partner, the operative word being ex. That’s Latin for ‘no longer on speaking terms,’ in case you didn’t know.”
“Whatever. Don’t sell yourself short, March. You’ll make it happen. Besides, this will work to his benefit, too. Tell him that. If he gives me what I want, he won’t be working in Internal Affairs anymore. He’ll be running it.”
“That’s a big promise,” I say, wiping my damp palm on my thigh.
“And I can deliver.”
He sounds confident, but as soon as the words are out, he turns to scan the room again, like he’s expecting a knife in the ribs. When he looks back at me, there’s a hunted look in his eyes, maybe a haunted one, too. I start wondering how much of this premature age he put on over the last few days.
“You make it hard for me to say no,” I tell him. “But unless you’re prepared to give me something, I can promise you I won’t lift a finger. In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m not real big on career advancement.”
“All right,” he says, leaning forward, sliding the drink aside. “I’m not giving you any names. This isn’t even a preview. But that case you’re working on, the Morales hit…?”
“What about it?”
“What I have for you is gonna blow it wide open. I mean wide.”
He pushes away from the table, takes another look around.
“As in what?” I ask.
He taps the table with his index finger. “As in shooters, March. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
And then he turns to go.
“How do I get in touch?” I call after him, trying to be heard over the music.
He pivots, putting a hand to his ear. I stick out my thumb and pinkie, jamming them phone-like to my head.
“You don’t,” he says. “I’ll call you.”
Nothing sinks in for the first minute or so. Then I feel a stupid grin on my lips. I wipe it with the back of my hand, but can’t get rid of the smile. A blur of faces swirl around me. I want to kiss them all. I’m happy as a drunk, in love with the world, all the sappy clichés rolled up into one.
Cavallo can sit on that dna test as long as she wants. Joe Thomson just threw me another lifeline. Last time this happened I screwed it up. But I won’t make the same mistake twice.
I’m back in this thing.
Back to stay.
I put a few more dollars on the table for luck, then head for the door, still dizzy from the turn of events, gazing at life through a gauzy adrenaline-induced tunnel. Circling the bar, paying no attention to my surroundings, thanks to the thoughts blaring in my head, I come face-to-face with the waitress Marta. She stops short, almost ditching the tray of drinks in her hand. Her eyes light up with recognition.
I step around her, but not quickly enough.
“You,” she says, grabbing my sleeve with her free hand.
I twist away. “Excuse me – ”
“Wait just a second,” she hisses, loud enough for people at the bar to turn.
Not wanting a scene, I’m torn. I can brave whatever she’s about to say, or I can make a dash for the door. As tempting as retreat is, I’m in no mood to run.
She slides her tray onto the bar, then gets right up in my face. “I know what you did.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You want me to say it in front of everybody?”
A couple of young men in striped, tall-collared shirts are watching, trying to decide whether they should take an interest or not. I’ve had crisis resolution drilled so deep into my psyche that my automatic impulse is to diffuse the tension. But I don’t want to diffuse anything. There’s a part of me that would like nothing better right now than a fight. I couldn’t be beaten, not by anyone.
They step forward, shoulder to shoulder for support. To my surprise, Marta turns on them, freezing the men with her glare.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” she says, ticktocking her finger at them.
They shrug their way back to their drinks, pretending nothing’s happened.
“And you,” she says, back to me. “What gives you the right -?”
I whisk my jacket back just far enough for her to get a glimpse of badge and maybe a little gun just behind. It’s a well-practiced gesture, perfect for shutting people up mid-sentence. On Marta it has a curious effect.
“You’re a cop?” she asks, shaking her head. “And you think that means you can do anything you want? You can go up to random women and start pushing them around? For what?” She jabs her finger at my chest. “Because she wouldn’t go home with you?”
“What’s the problem, Marta?”
I find Tommy at my elbow. He takes her by the arm, nudging her back.
He’s acting friendly, but Marta shuts down at the touch, suddenly petulant. “This is my problem.”
“He’s cool, though,” Tommy says. “Hey, you don’t want to make any trouble for him.”
She pulls free, eyes on the floor. “That’s exactly what I want.”
“No, really, I’m serious. He’s one of the good guys.”
The men from the bar pause. One of the bartenders holds a mobile phone in his hand, his finger poised over the call button like he’s going to detonate a bomb any second. I start going into resolution mode, flashing the badge, motioning for everybody to calm down.
Tommy’s big smile starts working its magic, too. He puts an arm around Marta, easing her back, and sends some kind of invisible signal to the bartender, who takes his finger off the detonator button. The waitress tries to shrug free, but he holds her tight.
“Everything’s cool, everybody,” he says. “Hey, it’s all right.”
I owe him one, but instead of staying to chat about it, I take the opportunity to slip outside. The sun is gone without a trace, mosquitoes circling the lampposts overhead. Before I can make my escape, I hear footsteps behind me. Turning, I find Tommy and Marta, his restraining arm still around her.
She steps clear of him, standing halfway between us. “Why’d you rough that woman up? What kind of man thinks he can do that, badge or no badge?”
“You poured enough tequila down that woman’s gullet to sink a whale. When I came out here, she was just about to get behind the wheel. She was going to drive in that condition. You understand what I’m saying? I didn’t rough her up – I saved her life, and probably somebody else’s, too. At the very least, she would have lost her license, spent some quality time behind bars.”
“Oh,” she says. “So you did her a favor. Now I get it.” She plunges a hand into her tiny apron, pulling out a crushed twenty, waving it between her fingers. She balls the twenty in her fist and throws it to the ground, then turns on her heel to go.
Tommy stands there, eyes wide. “She’s kinda loco, that girl. I think when she calms down, she’ll be more understanding.”
I take out my keys and unlock my car. “You really think I care?”
He laughs. “Deep down? Yeah, I think you really do.”
By the time I show up, the briefing’s reached standing-room-only status, with plainclothes officers and uniforms from four or five different agencies shifting for elbow space along the back wall. Near the front, Cavallo motions for me, but I shake my head and find a hospitable notch between a couple of county constables and a Sheriff ’s Department detective with a tobacco-stained brush of a mustache. He wears a nickel-plated Government Model.45 on his hip, what we call a “barbeque gun” around here, for wearing to fancy shindigs. He looks lonesome without his Stetson.
There’s a strange energy in the room, something I can’t put my finger on. A lot of hard stares shooting back and forth. Something’s happened, but I don’t know what. I turn to ask the detective, but he just shrugs, mystified as me.
Scanning the brass at the far end of the room, I get a surprise. Next to Wanda, who stands out in any crowd on account of her snow white hair, Rick Villanueva sits reviewing a stack of documents in his lap, whispering the occasional question, like he’s trying to get up to speed and only has half a minute to do it. This can’t be good.
Wanda goes to the podium, tapping the mic a couple of times to get everyone’s attention. Upwards of a hundred officers are packed into the cramped space, and it takes awhile for everyone to settle in.
“Before we get started,” she says, “I’m sure you all saw the piece on Channel 13 last night.”
A collective sigh goes up, along with some random profanity and a few choice words about Wayne Dolcefino, the investigative reporter.
“You see it?” I ask the sheriff ’s detective.
“At my watering hole of choice,” he says, his breath smelling of stale coffee, “there are better things to look at than the idiot tube.”
Wanda gives the microphone another series of taps, and Rick Villanueva eases out of his chair, standing at her elbow.
“The first thing I want to make clear,” Wanda says, “is that whoever made those statements to the press, I’m going to find out. What we say in here has to remain confidential. Am I clear? There’s a girl’s life at stake, people. Never forget that. Secondly, Lieutenant Villanueva here is joining the task force as of now. From this moment forward, all information to the press – and I mean every single detail – will be going through him. No one talks to the media without his say-so. Understood?” A few heads nod. “Come on, people, I know it’s early, but if you understand what I’m saying, raise your hand.”
Hands go up across the room. I glance at my new buddy before hoisting mine. He shakes his head and does likewise. Everybody’s craning around, like they expect to sniff out the leak here and now by spotting a telltale unraised hand.
“Okay, okay. You can put your hands down. Lieutenant, you have a few words you’d like to say?”
Rick, never at a loss for words, spends the next five minutes talking about his satisfaction in being asked to join the task force, and his determination to do everything in his power to turn this negative into a positive. While he’s speechmaking, I quiz the constables for details about the news report. One of them, a thick-necked bulldog with a tight military crew cut, cups a hand to my ear and fills me in. The lead story on the Channel 13 news last night was about trouble inside the task force. No progress is being made in the hunt for Hannah Mayhew because of interagency rivalries and a general lack of organization. “Sources inside the investigation” were credited with the scoop.
After Rick starts repeating himself, Wanda squeezes back to the mic and starts going round robin through the room, soliciting verbal reports from the team checking out white vans, the canvass of Willow-brook witnesses, and the head of the surveillance squad keeping tabs on James Fontaine. He’s a body-builder type in dark fatigues, more like a swat sniper than a binocular boy.
“Fontaine’s movements are pretty regular,” he says. “He hasn’t led us anywhere.”
No mention of Carter Robb’s stakeout of the Fontaine house, or my curbside visit with him. I try to catch Cavallo’s eye, making sure she picked up on that, but she’s busy taking down notes. Though I’m tempted to raise my hand and ask a question, I decide to wait.
After the rest of the reports are made and new assignments handed out, Wanda wraps things up and dismisses everyone. The sheriff ’s detective shoulders past me.
“That was a whole lot of nothing,” he says.
I decide to stay put, letting the room empty ahead of me. Rick Villanueva skirts the side wall. No one stops him to talk, so he makes good time. Before I can slip away, we’re face-to-face.
“Funny seeing you here,” he says. “I thought your days of exile had come to an end.”
My smirk just amuses him more. “I could say the same thing about you, Rick. Are you, like, the new press secretary or something?”
“Not by choice.” He leans in, lowering his voice. “To be honest, I’d rather be anywhere but here. In case you don’t know it yet, this is a sinking ship. But the chief himself called me. He wants me on this thing to try and turn it around.”
“With what, your winning smile?”
“Something like that,” he says.
“Any idea who talked to Channel 13?”
He chuckles. “Between you and me? I’m thinking somebody at the Sheriff ’s Department. They’re not too happy about hpd taking the lead on this.”
“Aren’t these jurisdictional things settled up front, though?”
“Sure,” he says. “But that was before this was all over Fox and TruTV. Now people are thinking this case could make a few careers – and probably end some, too. If you want my advice, get out while you can.”
I pat him on the arm. “Too late for me, pal.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
After Villanueva pushes on, Cavallo comes down the center aisle with a file box balanced on her hip. I offer to take it, expecting her to put up a fight. Instead, she hands it over. It’s heavy as bricks.
“All yours.”
“What’s in here?” I ask, peering through the gap in the lid.
“Witness interviews. All the kids we talked to at Klein High, all the kids from the Cypress youth group. That’s our project for today, looking for new leads.”
“Where do we start?”
She suppresses a yawn. “The nearest coffeepot.”
Two styrofoam cups of scalding black brew later, we clear off space at the end of a long folding table, pull some chairs up, and divvy up the interview reports. I feel a little guilty for having slept last night, since Cavallo’s bloodshot eyes and involuntary yawning fits make it clear she didn’t.
“You okay?” I ask.
She moves a paper back and forth in front of her nose. “I can barely get my eyes to focus.”
“You notice the surveillance report didn’t mention anything about Robb, or us meeting him out in front of the Fontaine house?”
She silently peruses the form.
“You hear me?”
“I heard you,” she says. “That was my doing, March. He asked if it was significant and I said no.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It wasn’t significant, was it?” She puts the report down and fingers the cross at her throat. “And anyway, I didn’t want Wanda to start asking why we’d re-interviewed Robb. I figured the less said the better.”
“For my benefit?” I ask. “Or his?”
“His? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” It was a stupid thing to say. I just thought that, she being one of them, a co-religionist, maybe she’d decided to cut the young minister some slack. “The thing we need to talk about is that dna test. When are we going to get a result?”
She sighs. “You’re a one-note, you know that? Do you have any idea the kind of grief I’d get if Wanda or anyone else found out we’re pursuing this? I had to tap-dance around the whole swab thing already, and now she’s giving me funny looks.”
“Why keep it a secret?”
“I’m not,” she says. “I’m just being discreet.”
“But the test is being done, right? You took care of it? Cavallo, look me in the eye. You did take care of it, right?”
She looks at me, then blinks. “You know Sheryl Green at the medical examiner’s office? She’s doing it.”
“Yeah, I know her.”
Remembering Green’s interest in the case, I’m somewhat reassured, but I’d still rather have Bridger involved. Maybe I’ll call him and see if there’s anything he can do to rush things along.
“By the way,” I say, “I need to take a couple of hours today. Another angle to pursue.”
She taps a finger on her stack of interviews. “This is the angle we’re pursuing.”
“I know that. How about one hour?”
“How about lunch, then. You can do whatever you want on your break, all right? Now, can we please get to it?”
Just twenty minutes into the reading, I find myself underlining typos. I guess serving under Captain Hedges has had an effect. The minutes drag by, which is fine with me. I’m in no hurry to talk to Wilcox. No hurry at all.
Stephen Wilcox is an Anglophile at heart, one of those guys who’s traced his lineage back to some countryside castle, who can list a few centuries’ worth of sovereigns in the order that they reigned, and wears tattersall and waxed cotton whenever the inhospitable Houston climate will allow. He tells me I’m paying, then says he’ll meet me at the Black Labrador, our old stomping ground.
Given the distance, my lunch break is going to be a long one, meaning I’ll have to face Cavallo’s wrath. So be it.
Back in the day, Wilcox and I spent hours at the Black Lab, a Tudor-style pub on Montrose near Richmond, at the far end of a cobbled courtyard anchored by the ivy-clad Montrose Library, drinking in front of the unlit fireplace and watching the knee-socked waitresses scoot by. Once he even tried to coax me onto the giant chessboard they have on the front lawn to push the pieces around, but I drew the line at that. A cheeky snap of Charles and Di, severed down the middle, used to hang prominently up front, though it’s been long since replaced by a reverential portrait of the dead princess.
I haven’t been back since our split and I’m not looking forward to it. He’s already installed at one of the creaky tables, his checked jacket draped over the back of his chair. Seeing him again in the flesh, a rush of feeling floods back. The long, thin Easter Island face with the jutting jaw and heavy-lidded eyes. The childhood scar bisecting the left eyebrow, the thinning blond hair buzzed short in an effort to conceal how much is gone. This was the one guy I could always trust. What happened with us?
“I ordered the mussels,” he says.
An involuntary smile. “Thanks. I’ll pass.”
What happened was simple. Wilcox got tired of covering for my lapses. He got fed up with my indifference to the job. He cut me slack at first, saying he understood, saying he knew the kind of pain I must be in. But that sympathy could only last so long. When I was sloppy he’d tidy up, when I was indifferent, he’d make the extra effort. When I started making up my own rules, though, he drew the line. I remember him standing over me, one of my fictitious reports balled in his fist. “What is this? What are you trying to do to me?” And I remember staring back at him, unfazed: “Do what you want. I don’t care anymore.”
So what changed? It’s hard to say. Was it as simple as seeing those severed cords hanging from the bed frame?
I don’t need to look at the menu, but I do anyway just to have a prop in hand. The waitress comes over in a black tee and khaki skirt, her ribbed black socks pulled halfway over her knee. She tells me what’s good, then shrugs when I order the unadventurous fish and chips.
“When in Rome,” I say, glancing up at the timbered ceiling.
Wilcox doesn’t smile. “You want to tell me what I’m doing here?”
“You chose the place.”
“What I mean is, why is it that you can call out of the blue and I drop everything? That’s what I don’t understand. Does it make me a masochist?”
“You’re getting a free meal out of it.”
“We both know you owe me more than that.”
There’s a crack in the wooden table that suddenly takes on a fascinating aspect. I scratch at it with my nail, not wanting to see the expression on his face. “Listen, I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.”
“Important to you, you mean.”
“And you.”
He coughs into his hand. “Why do I doubt that?”
Driving over, I tried to tell myself his voice sounded pleasantly surprised over the phone. Maybe he’d even be happy to see me again. Wrong. I have no choice but to spit it out.
“What do you know about a guy named Joe Thomson?”
He ponders the question awhile. “Why are you asking?”
“He came to me with an offer.”
I tell him the whole story, only leaving out the setting. He knows about the Paragon, and the last thing I need is a lecture. The further I get into the story, the more interested he becomes. His mussels arrive and he leaves them untouched, his eyes fixed on me.
“I said the odds were slim, but Thomson told me to come to you specifically. He said you’d be interested in what he had to tell. Was he right?”
Wilcox sniffs. “He wasn’t wrong. I can’t make any promises, Roland, but this is something my people would be very interested in. I’m not sure having you involved is going to work for us, though.”
“It was me he came to. Take it or leave it.”
“Setting that aside for a moment, are you telling me you don’t know who this guy is?”
“He looked familiar.”
“For a detective, you don’t pay much attention, you know that?” He shakes his head, like he’s remembering what it was about me he never liked. “Joe Thomson used to be one of the worst guys in the department, the kind the psych evaluations are supposed to weed out. We’ve got a thick file on him in IAD, full of excessive-force complaints going all the way back to his rookie days. Before I transferred, Internal Affairs was looking at him in connection with a couple of different cases. Planting evidence, making threats against fellow officers, we’re talking a seriously bad dude.”
“I got that vibe off him. But you said he ‘used to be’ bad?”
“Well,” he says, dragging the word out. “About a year ago, he requested therapy. Of his own volition apparently. He patched things up with his ex-wife. They ended up getting remarried. As part of the therapy he started taking art classes – ”
“Art classes?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, I know. But I guess he really got into it. Does some kind of sculpting I guess. Anyway, we’re talking about a pretty significant change in the guy.”
I imagine a pottery wheel spinning a lump of wet clay in endless revolutions, my uninvited table guest of the night before hunched over, applying gritty fingers to the task of shaping. Or maybe taking a hammer and chisel to a block of marble, I don’t know. For someone like me, a skeptic when it comes to the power of therapy, it’s hard to credit the kind of transformation Wilcox describes. Cleaning up his act, reconciling with his estranged wife, and now coming clean about whatever corruption he’s witnessed on the job. If only it were that easy to change course, to hit the reset button and become a good man again.
“What prompted this change of his?” I ask, suddenly thinking of Coleman, the supposed prison convert we rearrested at the George R. Brown. “Let me guess. Did he find Jesus?”
“You’re not going to like this,” he says, cracking a smile. “What changed Thomson was finding himself a new role model. Thomson left the gang unit and started working for Reg Keller.”
Keller. Some messiah.
If I have a nemesis at HPD, it’s Keller, the man who’s been dogging my steps for the past fifteen years or more. I tried to bring him down once and failed miserably.
“The Homeland Security thing?” I ask, keeping my voice even.
He nods. “The Golden Parachute Brigade.”
“So that’s how he knew I’d be hooked: Keller’s involved. You know, I was talking to one of Keller’s guys the other day. Remember Tony Salazar?”
“Sure.”
“One of his CIS wandered into our cars-for-criminals net.”
“Salazar’s on our radar screen, too. He paid cash for a nice boat a while back, and since he jumped to Keller’s camp, he’s been living way above his means.”
“Well, I respect the guy personally. He’s a sharp detective.”
“Maybe,” Wilcox says, meaning not so much. “But getting back to Thomson, I think Keller had a talk with the man. Told him to get his ducks in a row, that kind of thing. If you look at Keller’s roster, you’d think he was running some kind of halfway house. He recruits the worst disciplinary cases, then turns them into model detectives.”
“By pointing them to the real money?”
“Yes,” he says. “That’s my theory anyway. If I could prove it, I wouldn’t be sitting here.” He pauses. “I’ll be right back, okay?”
He slides around the table and heads upstairs to the restroom. As soon as he goes, the waitress comes by to refill my water glass. I take a bite of fish, surprised that it’s gone cold.
I met Reg Keller a long time ago, when we were both still in uniform. I was on patrol and he was an up-and-coming sergeant about to make the jump to plainclothes. We rode a shift together one night and something happened. He put me in a bad spot. It took a long time for me to work out the truth, not until I made detective myself. Once I did, though, I was at his throat, and for a while it looked like I’d nail him.
But I missed my chance.
My career rocketed into the stratosphere, burned bright a little while, then tumbled back to earth. My life in general went off the rails. Meanwhile, Keller racked up promotion after promotion, storing favors away for a rainy day, until he was too far up the line for a rank and filer like me to so much as touch.
Sometime after the Dubai Ports World scandal back in early 2006, when the administration tried to hand over American ports to foreign control, including stevedore operations at the Port of Houston, Keller somehow managed to get the green light on a special unit whose official remit was to assess security threats related to the port and Bush Intercontinental Airport. Even a longtime opponent like me had to admire his cunning. There were already a number of agencies doing the work, so Keller’s team was superfluous from the start, but the assignment would look great on a résumé and no doubt lead to lucrative security work once he retired. Hence the nickname Golden Parachute Brigade. Nice work if you can get it.
“You look angry,” Wilcox says, resuming his seat.
“I am angry. It’s all coming back to me, the whole thing with Keller. You’re telling me you can’t touch a guy like that in IAD? Are they even trying?”
“I’m not going to comment on any ongoing investigations. But let me make something clear. For Thomson to get what he wants, this blanket immunity, we’re going to need more from him than the shooters from your multiple murder. If he can give us something on Keller, on the other officers in the unit, then we can talk. You have a problem with that?”
Oh, I don’t have a problem with that. I wouldn’t have it any other way. Wilcox should know better than to even ask. Finding those shooters might be my lifeline back into Homicide, but bringing Keller down, that would be personal. Like I said, I have my reasons.
“You take care of things with the district attorney,” I tell him, “and I’ll make sure Thomson’s ready to talk. And, Steve, we should move fast on this, all right?”
“I’ll start making the calls the minute I leave.”
I reach my hand across the table. “It’s good to be working with you again.”
He just looks at my hand, not wanting to take it. At the last second he changes his mind. We shake, and afterward we both look away in embarrassment.
“This doesn’t change anything,” he says.
“I know.” I lay some cash on the table and get up. “But it will.”
“March, wait.”
I stop, but I don’t sit back down.
“How’s Charlotte doing?”
“Charlotte? She’s fine.”
“Things between you two, they’re all right?”
“What is this, a counseling session? If I want therapy, I’ll sign up for an art class, okay?”
He holds his hands up in surrender. “I’m just asking, man. I know it’s tough, this time of year. Tell her I said hello.”
But he’s not just asking. I know Wilcox. I understand the way his mind works. He’s sensed something in me, but can’t put his finger on exactly what, so he’s rooting around a little to see if he can work it out. Judging from the look on his face, he thinks he has.
Apologies for my late lunch turn out to be unnecessary by the time I catch up to Cavallo, who’s packed the witness statements up tight and transferred the box to the trunk of her city car. I reach her in the parking lot just as she’s about to leave the station without me. If it were directed at me, the look in her eye would give me pause, but she hardly acknowledges my arrival.
“What’s up?” I ask.
She gazes into the sky, brushing the hair back from her face. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just that as of this morning, we had no developments on the Fontaine front, and now all the sudden the order comes down to snatch him. Apparently he just made a buy.”
“Stupid kid,” I say. “We’re making the arrest?”
“The Sheriff ’s Department’s going to do the heavy lifting, leaving us to ask the questions. Are you up to it? Only it’s not like we have anything on him. The kid deals some weed, he knows our missing juvenile – that’s about it.”
“If we catch him dirty, that’ll give us some leverage.”
She shakes her head. “Not enough. All this investigation needs him to do is lead us to Hannah. If he can’t do that, he’s a waste of time. But if he can, do you really think he’ll cop to a kidnapping charge to get out of possession with intent?”
“You have a point,” I say. “But still, how else would you expect them to play it? If surveillance really caught the kid making a buy, it’s not like we can pass up the chance to apply the thumbscrews, is it?”
“We could play that card anytime. Doing it now reeks of desperation, if you ask me. But Wanda won’t listen. After this morning, she’s operating on the news cycle.”
We climb into the car, slamming doors and snapping seat belts into place, then she reverses out of the parking space, cranking the wheel sharply. The tires kick up loose gravel as we bounce onto the road, cutting in front of oncoming traffic. Next time I’ll volunteer to drive. Cavallo has a knack for channeling emotion into the gears, and as often as I dream about it and wake up sweating, I’d just as soon not die in a car crash.
“It’s all spinning out of control,” she says.
“The case or the car?”
She ignores my attempt at humor. Frustration comes off her in waves. I suspect that what isn’t released through her cathartic high-wire driving can only come out by talking. She’s not the type to hit or break things, which is too bad considering how calming violence can be.
“Once a case gets traction in the media,” I say, hoping to get her talking, “you can only work it the right way as long as you keep getting results. As soon as you hit a wall, the daily pressure from upstairs to provide new sound bites overrules everything else. It’s not Wanda’s fault – ”
“So have you heard the latest?” She wrenches the steering wheel with white-knuckled intensity, like she’s thinking about snapping it off. “They’re trying to persuade Donna Mayhew to go on TV alongside the chief. They want to get her on Larry King Live.”
“How does she feel about that?”
“I’d ask her, March, if I could get her to pick up the phone.”
“Ah,” I say.
“Ah, what?”
“That’s why you’re so worked up. You have a special bond with that woman, and you don’t like anybody interfering.”
She stomps the accelerator like it’s my face. “Of course I have a bond with her. Who wouldn’t? Doesn’t your heart go out to her in a situation like this, with her daughter gone and – ”
“Of course.” I cut her off, not wanting to dig too deeply into my heart and what it goes out to. “But you’ve been very protective of her.” I tighten my grip on the door handle. “Of them.”
“Them? Who do you mean by them?”
“The church people. The mother, yes, but Carter Robb, too. You know. Your fellow travelers, so to speak.”
She makes no reply at first, letting her lead foot do the talking. I hunker down into my seat, trying not to think about air bags and side impacts and trauma to the head. I was lucky to avoid a chewing out for my late return. I should have left well enough alone.
“March,” she says.
The silence was too good to last.
“Do you have some kind of issue with me?”
“Issue?” I ask. “What kind of issue would I have?”
“You keep needling me all the time, like I’ve done something to you. But apart from bending over backwards to do you a favor, and then taking responsibility for you when your friends in Homicide gave you the boot, I can’t think of what you’re holding against me.”
She drifts in and out of the lane as she talks, while I do my best not to flinch.
“Seriously? Listen, Cavallo, I think you might be projecting your frustrations about the case onto me – ”
“What was that quip about my ‘fellow travelers’ then?”
“I just meant… you know. That cross you wear.”
She fingers the necklace, then lets it drop. “What do you believe, March? About God, the universe and everything?”
“You’re asking me this for real?” I should keep my mouth shut. “All right, I’ll play along. About God, I guess it depends on what kind of mood I’m in. Sometimes he exists, sometimes he doesn’t, and when he does sometimes I’m all right with that, and sometimes I want to give him a good kicking.”
She flinches and I know I should really stop. But I’m on a roll.
“The universe? It’s pretty screwed up, if you ask me. The world is on its last legs, people are pretty much rotten, and happiness is just an illusion, a kind of opiate – but it’s not actual happiness that keeps us going, it’s the promise of getting a fix later on in the soon-to-be perfect future, which makes it that much more desperate when you think about it… Not that I often do.”
There’s more. Something underneath the words, unspoken, for me unspeakable, an article of faith I can never doubt. What I believe in is evil. Its existence and power, the way it grows like mold on every surface, teeming beneath the walls, as insinuating as the Gulf Coast heat. It has a grip on all of us. It has its claws in me.
“Fascinating,” she says. “And what do I believe?”
“You?” I shrug, exhausted from my bout of self-expression. “How should I know? Why don’t you tell me?”
“Don’t you know already?”
“I can guess.”
“Well if you don’t know, and you haven’t asked, then why don’t you stop making assumptions? And while you’re at it, you can stop with the little digs you’re always making, because I’ve had it up to here and the last thing I need on top of everything else is your constant annoying buzz in my ear. All right?”
“Sure thing.”
Now I’m the one who needs to hit something. As much as I’d like to, at least with words, all the lines that come to mind are variations on the same bitter theme: it’s your fault I’m here in the first place. And why is it her fault? Because given the choice, I decided to spend the afternoon with her rather than do my job. What can I say? It made sense at the time.
But I can already hear her retort – how is that my fault? – and of course she’d be right. Not only that, but in making the argument I’d reveal something more pathetic about myself than my half-baked views on God and the universe.
My loneliness.
“That’s all you have to say?” she asks.
I nod. “That’s it. Or do you want me to apologize? I’m sorry for goading you. Won’t let it happen again.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“I’m just trying not to annoy you.”
“Well,” she says, “you could sure use the practice.”
The drunk girl at the Paragon comes back to me, the one with the glittering eyelids. Marta said she had bruises all over, like she’d been slapped around. But I didn’t do that, did I? The truth is, I can’t remember exactly what I did, or most of what I said. It was like someone else was doing it through me. I don’t know what happened. Like one of our notorious inner-city witnesses, I didn’t see nothing.
My first glimpse of James Fontaine inspires some hope. He looks ready to crack. The Harris County Sheriff ’s Department team, a bunch of armed linebackers with shaved heads and mirrored sunglasses, nudges his black BMW X3 to the curb near the intersection of West Little York and Antoine, maybe a mile away from the Northwest Freeway. Our car is near the back of the convoy, tagging behind the surveillance truck.
They drag him out of the driver’s seat, bend him over the hood, then do a quick search of the vehicle, going straight for the back compartment, where they find a vinyl flight bag with a Puma logo, right where they knew it would be. A squat surveillance officer in baggy jeans records everything with a handheld video camera.
We thread our way through the flashing lights, coming alongside the X3. When he sees us, one of the deputies hands the bag to Cavallo, who’s just pulled on a pair of gloves. She plops it on the hood across from Fontaine, slowly fingering the zipper.
James Fontaine is a lanky black kid of about seventeen, handsome in a boyish way, wearing a G-Unit polo that’s actually been pressed – the creases are still visible down the length of the sleeves. He looks about as thug as a clean-cut suburbanite whose knowledge of the street comes mainly from the media can. Now that he’s in custody, he makes no pretense to being a hard man. His eyes alternate between watching Cavallo unzip the bag and clamping tight in prayer, like he’s trying to make the contents miraculously disappear.
Watching him sweat, a thought occurs to me. If he’s just made a buy, then he had no idea he was under surveillance, which means he hasn’t intentionally been avoiding the secret location where he’s stashed Hannah Mayhew. The odds that this kid has her locked up somewhere are thin to none. But maybe he knows something that can help. Cavallo peers inside the bag. “Wow, James. I guess you just re-upped, huh? You must have quite a little operation going.”
I lean over for a look. Inside, a one-pound brick of what I’m guessing is Mexican schwag. Not the finest herb, but given the quantity there’s going to be no trouble calling this possession with intent to distribute.
I lean over the hood to get him eye level. “Partner, you just stepped in it.”
“That’s not mine,” he says halfheartedly.
“So your fingerprints aren’t going to be all over it?” I point to the cameraman, who waves at Fontaine. “This gentleman here with the camera has been watching your every move. That means we’ve got every step of the process, from the time you picked up the bag and put it in your hatchback to right now.”
He drops his head and starts sniffling. When he lifts it, sure enough there are tears streaking his cheeks. “Aw, come on, man,” he says, begging with his eyes. “You gotta be kidding me. It’s just weed, that’s all it is. It’s like, what, a misdemeanor, right? You don’t gotta call out the swat team and everything on account of something like this.”
Cavallo dumps the brick onto the hood. “We’re talking about a pound here, James, not a gram. That’s possession with intent. You divide this up into ounces and hand it out to your little dealin’ friends, is that it?”
“Look at that brown brick weed,” I say, nudging the plastic-wrapped packages. “I wouldn’t make brownies out of that. It’s a shame to go down for such low-quality product.”
The insult dries his tears a little. He’s about to protest when one of the Sheriff ’s Department men takes his arm. “Come on, G-Unit. Let’s read you your rights.”
They Mirandize the kid, then put him in the back of a cruiser to sweat. Once he’s stowed away, we all gather for an impromptu powwow around the BMW’s hood, everybody looking to Cavallo for direction.
“This isn’t about building a case,” she says. “The clock is ticking, and if that boy knows anything we need to get it out of him fast. If that means he walks on the drug charge, are any of us going to lose sleep over that?”
Headshaking all around. If there are any qualms in the group, they go unexpressed. Cavallo notices the surveillance guy’s camera.
“That thing’s not on, is it?” she asks.
Everybody laughs.
“Okay, so let’s get him into an interview room and see what happens.”
As the team packs up, I wander over to the unit where Fontaine sits. He leans his shoulder against the rolled-down window, sipping air through an inch-wide gap in the glass.
“You all right back there?”
“It’s pretty hot.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’ll only get worse.”
The Northwest interview room is surprisingly spacious and well appointed. The table has all four legs, the chairs match, and the stains on the floor look dry and non-toxic. There’s even cold air blowing from the registers overhead. Fontaine slumps forward, his head resting on the table. We observe from the room next door, where the video feed is channeled onto a monitor. Lieutenant Mosser sits just to the side, where she can study the image closely, while Villanueva stands in the back corner, arms folded, signaling his unwillingness to get in the way.
“He’s not sleeping, is he?” Wanda asks.
Cavallo leans closer. “Sounds like he’s crying.”
There’s an old saw about the interview room: Whoever sleeps while he’s waiting for the detectives is obviously guilty; only the innocent are plagued by fears. I don’t put much stock in that kind of thing. Leave people in a bare room for long enough and they’ll do all kinds of strange things.
“What do you think this kid can give us?” I ask.
Wanda studies me a moment. “That’s what you’re going to find out, Roland. You think you can handle that?”
“Never mind him,” Cavallo says, taking my arm. “Come on.”
When we pop open the interview room door, Fontaine gives us an apprehensive smile. Cavallo takes the seat across from him, and I sit on the corner, cheating my chair over a bit so that I’m technically on his side. He isn’t sure which one of us to face, so he splits the difference.
We begin with small talk, Cavallo asking about his nice car, what his parents do for a living, how he likes school and what he thinks about his classes. His recent suspension for drug possession is glossed over – only happy or neutral topics for now. Hannah Mayhew isn’t mentioned. His answers are tentative at first, but the more questions she pitches across the plate, the more he loosens up and enjoys hitting them. This isn’t so bad, he’s probably thinking. He might just get through this.
“You seem like a smart guy,” Cavallo says, getting him to nod along in agreement. “You’ve got a lot going for you. It’s a shame to see you in a situation like this, James. We’d rather be going after the real baddies, you know. Not giving guys like you a hard time.”
“That’s all right,” he says, perversely apologetic. “You gotta do your job. I understand.”
“Maybe you could help us, James. And maybe we could then help you. Are you nervous, James?”
He nods.
“I’d be worried, too, if I was in your shoes. Buying bricks like that, you know what it tells me? You’ve got more money than sense. And you know something, Texas is not exactly lenient when it comes to drug sentencing.”
Fontaine mumbles something.
“What was that?”
“I’m a minor.”
“In the eyes of the Penal Code, you’re an adult.”
“Welcome to Texas,” I say.
Cavallo smiles. “Problem is, if you’re slinging that stuff at Klein, you’re probably looking at a penalty enhancement, too, for distributing near a school.”
“To actual minors,” I add.
“Exactly. This is bad news, James. For one thing, say goodbye to that nice Beemer of yours.”
I nod in agreement. “That’ll be seized for sure.”
“You can do that?” he asks.
“Sure we can. Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or we can work together on something,” she says. “Like I told you, if you help us, maybe we can help you, too. How does that sound?”
His eyes widen. “Help you with what?”
Cavallo leans forward, ready to make her pitch. “The thing is, James, we’re willing to deal, but first we need to know if you have anything worthwhile. If there are any open cases you can help us with.”
And just like that, he rolls over. I wish I could credit our interrogation skills, but James Fontaine would have cracked for anyone.
“You want the names?” he asks. “ ’Cause I can give you some names. The dude I bought it off of, my connection, I can give you him. And the ones at school that actually do the dealin’? I can give you those, too. Me, I’m more like what you’d call a middleman, you know? The real bad guys, like what you want, I can give you some of those.”
Cavallo takes everything down, the various names and nicknames, the way he breaks the brick down, who it goes to, the number he calls when he wants some more. He knows other dealers, too, and where they get their supply. By the time he’s done, he’s leaning over the table helping with the spelling of names, saying who to underline and who to cross out. He’s almost exhilarated, working with the cops, thinking his problems are about to go away.
I can’t help feeling sorry for the kid.
“All of this, James,” Cavallo says, tearing the page off her notepad. “It’s worthless. It’s nothing.” She balls the page up and tosses it over her shoulder.
Fontaine’s jaw drops in shock. He glances to me for help as if to say, Look what she just did. I shrug. You asked for it, son.
“There’s something else I want you to help us with,” she continues, ignoring his devastated look. “You know that girl who disappeared, the one from your school?”
His right eyelid starts to flutter. Cavallo and I exchange a look. This kind of nervous tick is what we’re after. Now that we’ve chatted awhile, getting a baseline feel for how Fontaine behaves normally, the signs of stress that erupt under questioning will serve us as guides.
“What’s that girl’s name?” I ask, as if I can’t quite think of it.
Fontaine blinks harder, then wipes his hand over his face.
“Come on, James,” Cavallo says. “You know her, don’t you?”
“You mean Hannah?”
“That’s right. Tell me about Hannah.”
He shrugs. “Tell you what?”
“For one thing, how do you know her?”
“From school.”
“Are you two friends?”
“No, we ain’t friends.” He expels a puff of air. “Not hardly, not no more.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“On account of what she done to my car, her and that other girl.”
Not the answer I was expecting. “And what was that?” I ask.
“Busted the windows out,” he says, swinging an imaginary bat through the air. “Keyed up the side.”
“When did this happen?”
He hears the skepticism in my voice and rolls his eyes. “You the police, man. Look it up.”
Cavallo jumps in. “You reported it?”
“Of course we reported it,” he snaps. “You gotta report it for the insurance. And we told them who done it, too, but that didn’t matter obviously. They didn’t do nothing about it, did they?”
Cavallo scribbles a note, then tears the sheet off her notepad, walking it out the door. While she’s gone, I give Fontaine a stern but paternal look.
“Hannah seems like a nice girl,” I say. “Why would she do something like that to your ride?”
The question makes him thoughtful. Sometimes a pause is strategic, buying time to invent an answer, but the way he starts rubbing his neck and studying the suspended ceiling tiles, I’m guessing he’s never stopped to wonder about this.
“She is a nice girl,” he admits with a nod. “In her own way. I liked her at first. I mean, she’s pretty fine looking, right? And underneath all that Jesus talk, she could be pretty cool sometimes.”
“You liked her.”
He shrugs. “She was all right. But all that religion and stuff – it’s fine for some people, don’t get me wrong, I’m not judgin’ or nothing – but it gets old, you know what I mean? Feeling like you the pet project, always needin’ to be dragged into church. And then she got all, like, clingy, you know?”
Cavallo reenters, pausing on the threshold. She has a new stack of papers in her hand. When she sits, she starts shuffling through them. “James, I have a question about your phone. The one we found you with, that’s with Cingular, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But you have another phone, don’t you?”
“I got my home phone.”
“Another mobile phone, I mean. What’s the number to that?”
He glances at me, confused. “What she talking about?”
“Your other phone,” I say.
“You already got my phone. I don’t got another one.”
Cavallo shakes her head. “You don’t conduct business on that phone, do you? The one your parents pay the bill for?”
“I’m seventeen,” he says. “I don’t conduct no business.”
She reaches down to the floor and starts unfolding the pile of notes he gave her a few minutes ago. “This looks like a business to me. What were you doing last Thursday?”
“I don’t remember. Why?”
She sits back. “You’re not being very cooperative, James.”
“What you want me to say? I don’t remember what I was doing. Probably nothing, since they suspended me from school.”
“Let’s talk about the car,” I say, breaking up the rhythm. “You never did tell me why she’d do something like that.”
He turns his chair so he’s facing me, ignoring Cavallo across the table. “Prob’ly ’cause of the weed they found in her locker.”
“So that was yours?”
“I didn’t put it there, if that’s what you mean.”
Cavallo taps her pen on the table. “Why’d she think you did?”
He turns toward her. “Like I said, she was interfering with my game. I was, like, ‘you need to back off,’ and she was all uppity about it, you know, so we ended up having some words. That’s it, just words. And she was all crying and everything, and saying how she cared about me.” When he says cared, his shoulders tighten. “She was living some kind of fantasy in her head, I guess, thinking there was something more between us than there was.”
“Did you ever go out on a date?”
He laughs. “Man, she wears one of them rings – what’s it called? A promise ring?” He shakes his head. “Shawty’s saving herself, you know? Why would I take a girl like that out? Nothing in it for me.”
“You’re a class act,” Cavallo says.
He smiles her way. I liked him better when he was crying.
“So you told her to back off,” I say, “and suddenly some dope turns up in her locker. She assumes you put it there to get her in trouble, so she trashes your car?”
“Her and that other one. The Katrina girl.”
“Katrina who?” Cavallo asks, making a note.
He scrunches his face up in contempt. “No, not Katrina who. That New Orleans girl that was Hannah’s friend.” He edges toward me, man to man. “Talk about messed up. It’s that girl you need to be talking to, if you wanna know what happened. She was the instigator.”
Cavallo’s pen is still poised. “This girl have a name?”
He shrugs. “She got one. Don’t mean I remember it.”
“Evey?” I ask.
His eyes light up. “That’s the one. Talk to her. She’s one of those people seems normal, then all the sudden they just freak out on you. I told Hannah she needed to get clear of that one, but the girl don’t listen to me.”
Cavallo stands. “Let’s take a break.”
When it came to ratting out his friends, Fontaine seemed only too helpful, but on the subject of Hannah Mayhew, his answers strike me as evasive and confused. Not that I think he strangled her and buried her in his backyard, or has her locked up in his bedroom closet. Now more than ever, I’m convinced she ended up in that West Bellfort house, bleeding out on the dirty bed. Only I don’t know how she got there. If Fontaine had picked up his brick from some Crips, we’d have a direct link, but he went to the wrong neighborhood, Latin King territory if it was anyone’s at all.
And what was really between them? He speaks so cavalierly about her, denying any attraction on his part, but then he turns around and warns her about the people she hangs with? I can’t help thinking there was more to their relationship than he wants to let on. Out of pride, maybe, assuming it’s not plain fear. Not wanting to get mixed up any deeper than he already is.
In the monitoring room, Wanda Mosser sits watching him on the screen. She looks up at us, clearly disappointed. Villanueva’s corner now stands empty.
“We need to call the question,” she says. “Ask him point-blank where Hannah Mayhew is.”
I shake my head. “It’s not him. He wouldn’t be talking if it was.”
“Do it anyway.”
Cavallo gives her the nod, then turns to me. “Who’s the Katrina girl he’s talking about?”
“Someone Robb mentioned. Evey something, short for Evangeline, like in the poem.” She looks at me blankly, but I decide now’s not the time to astonish her with my knowledge of Longfellow. “We’ll need to follow that up.”
She hands me some printouts on the vandalism. Sure enough, the incident was reported. Fontaine’s father, a Hewlett-Packard employee, even retained a lawyer and managed to get a restraining order against Hannah Mayhew, preventing her from approaching either the family home or James personally.
“So not only have we failed to recover our victim,” Cavallo says, “or seize her kidnapper for that matter, but we’ve turned up a little dirt to tarnish her name.”
“You think this might be why Donna’s reluctant to go on television? The drug suspension, the restraining order, that’s a lot of dirty laundry to put out there.”
Wanda interrupts with a long sigh. “Mama’s tired, boys and girls. And if that kid walks out of here without giving us our missing girl, that means our only real lead isn’t a lead anymore. Then I’ll be real tired, and when I’m tired I get irritable.”
“Should we beat him with a hose until he talks?”
“Don’t put ideas in my head, March. Just go in there and ride him until he either coughs something up or has a nervous breakdown.”
“He’s just a kid,” I say.
“A kid who slings dope. I couldn’t care less about his feelings.”
“It’s not his feelings I’m worried about. It’s his rights.”
“Look, he’s not going to jail for dealing, so he’s in no position to complain. If he knew he was walking on that one, I’m sure he’d thank us. I just want to find this girl and get the chief off my back, okay?”
“Where is Hannah Mayhew?”
“You gonna keep asking, and I’m gonna keep telling you I don’t know where she is. How many times I gotta say it? I. Don’t. Know.”
“James,” Cavallo says. “Where is she?”
His eyes roll for the hundredth time. I feel like rolling mine, too.
“Did you kill her?”
“No.” All trace of shock or indignation long since gone.
“Did you have someone kill her?”
He smiles wearily. “One of my posse?” He makes air quotes with his fingers. “No.”
“Is she still alive, James?”
“How. Should. I. Know?”
The door opens and Wanda signals for us to come outside. As soon as it shuts, she starts shaking her head.
“What?” Cavallo asks.
“It’s on the news.”
“What is?”
“That we have him,” Wanda says. “They’re reporting right now that we have a juvenile suspect in custody.”
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“No,” she says. “I just got off the phone with Villanueva, who’s been trying to get them to stall the story. Too late. They’re talking about it right now on TruTV.”
I shake my head. “Beautiful. So we haven’t fixed our leak.”
“What’s the plan?” Cavallo asks.
“The plan?” Wanda presses her fingertips to her temples. “I’m gonna start by shooting myself, and if that doesn’t work, I’m gonna shoot myself again.”
The two women head down the hallway, conferring on strategy, leaving me to wander back into the monitoring room. On the screen, Fontaine wipes his palms on his jeans, then scrutinizes his fingers, peeling at some loose skin around the nails.
I need to talk to Carter Robb again so I can track down this girl Evey and see what she has to say. And it’s time to call Bridger, too. I’ve waited long enough for my dna results.
Fontaine looks up at the camera. He shakes his head, then rests it on the table again, settling in for another long wait.
As the elder sister, Charlotte grew up with competing and possibly counterbalancing senses of both entitlement and obligation, feeling she had a place in the world but also a set of duties, often unpleasant, to go along with it. Her younger sister, Ann, inherited a finely tuned sense of proportional justice, probably stemming from a childhood concern that everyone, herself in particular, receive a fair share. It’s probably too simplistic to trace their many differences in temperament and politics back to birth order, but I find myself doing it anyway.
Both sisters went into law, but Charlotte gravitated toward high-paying corporate work, scratching her civic itch with occasional involvement in the Harris County Republican Party. Ann, on the other hand, works mainly on death-row appeals, believing that while there might be guilty people behind bars, it’s a safe bet none of them received fair trials.
Even over dinner, the types persist. Charlotte, the gracious hostess, reigns over a plentiful table, while Ann subtly annoys her, double-checking that each of us gets the same amount of food and drink. Afterward, when Charlotte takes charge of clearing the dishes, Ann tries to press all of us into duty. Failing that, she insists on helping her sister in the kitchen, leaving Bridger with me.
“So I hear you got pulled into that task force,” he says. “How’s that going?”
“It would be better if you expedited those test results I’ve been waiting on.”
His eyebrows rise. “What results?”
“You said I’d need a sample to compare, so I found one – Hannah Mayhew’s mother. I think she’s the girl missing from the Morales scene. Now we’re waiting on you guys to say whether I’m right. Sheryl Green has the samples in her lab apparently.”
“Really,” he says. “That’s news to me.”
“If you could light a fire under her, I’d appreciate it.”
He gives a noncommittal nod. “I’ll look into it.”
I’d like to get more out of him, but Ann saunters into the dining room with coffee, followed by Charlotte, who looks lovely in a white linen blouse and mustard tan trousers, her lipstick freshly reapplied. I pause to admire her.
To say the years have been kind to my wife, at least physically, is an understatement. As time passes and her contemporaries either go to seed or under the knife, she only improves, still as thin and leggy as the day we married, the patina of fine lines on her face never detracting from its essentially placid symmetry. Looking at her now, the thought that my eyes could stray even for a moment seems ridiculous. A show of ingratitude toward God or the cosmos, whoever arranges such things.
In contrast, Ann sips her coffee with a harried, squinched look, like she’s worried or anticipating a blow. I wonder if this is general agitation, or the result of words that passed between the sisters while they were busy in the kitchen.
“So,” Ann says, adding more cream to her cup. “Alan says you’re assigned to the Hannah Mayhew task force. Is that right, Roland?”
I nod.
To my left, I see Charlotte tense up. Her unspoken rule about no work at the dinner table is being violated by a longtime offender.
“How are you dealing with it?” Ann asks.
“I’ve been trying to get a little help from the ME’s office.”
Alan smiles distantly. “I told you I’d check into it.”
“That’s not what I mean, though,” Ann says. “How are you dealing? I mean, a case like that, and you of all people…”
Charlotte’s spoon hits her saucer. “What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know -”
“No, I don’t know. Why should Roland have to deal with anything? He’s a professional, Ann. This is what he does. You don’t ask Alan how he deals with having to cut people up.”
“That’s not what I’m saying – ” Ann begins.
“It’s all right,” I say, holding up my hands. “I’m doing fine. I’d rather be back in Homicide, and if some tests come through, I should be back there soon. In the meantime, I’m just keeping my nose clean and trying to avoid the cameras.”
“I can’t believe all the interest in this thing,” Alan says.
“They’re trying to get the mother to go on Larry King.”
A little shiver runs through Charlotte, who folds her arms tightly. “That’s awful. The way they make such a spectacle of people’s pain.”
“But if it helps find the girl,” Ann says.
I shake my head. “It won’t. That’s not what it’s about. There’s always the chance, I guess, but the real motive is to get in front of the story, so it’s not about Channel 13 raking the department over the coals again. But maybe I’m just cynical.”
Charlotte pushes away from the table. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
She slips through the kitchen and keeps going. Ann gives me a guilty look, then goes after her, leaving me and Bridger to stare into our coffee.
“Let’s go out back,” I suggest.
The balmy night envelops us, the stars hidden behind muddy clouds that give even the moon a soft-focus halo. I cast a glance toward the detached garage and the side stairs ascending to Tommy’s apartment, then lead Bridger off the deck and across the yard. We stand just outside the pillars of light shining through the back windows, where he can smoke his obligatory postprandial cigarette without Ann telling him off.
“I’m thinking about quitting,” he says, fitting the cigarette between his lips, firing the tip with a shiny Zippo.
“You should.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” He exhales into the darkness. “You’re an all or nothing kind of guy when it comes to vice. No moderation.”
“Are you moderating your smoking?” I ask.
“Considering it, anyway.”
Unseen in the surrounding bushes, cicadas chirp and mosquitoes buzz, forcing us to occasionally shrug them off. Across the fence, the neighbors are grilling outside, scenting the air with barbeque.
“Are you ‘dealing’ all right?” he asks.
“I’m better than all right.” I tell him about the approach from Joe Thomson, with its promise not only to shed light on the Morales killing but also to shovel some dirt over what will hopefully turn out to be Reg Keller’s professional coffin.
“You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. Hope you don’t get burned.”
“Yeah, yeah. If you could come through on that victim identification and Thomson gives up the names of the shooters, then everything will turn around for me.”
“Everything?” he asks, jabbing his cigarette toward the house. “You and Charlotte seem a little on edge. Are things okay with you two?”
I sniff the air. “They’ve been better, I admit. But I’m working on that, too.”
He gives me a sideways look. “You mean you’re considering it.”
“More or less. It’s that time of year.”
He nods. “You’ve got something special, Roland. I mean that. After all you’ve been through together, I’d hate to see it go off the rails.”
“It won’t.”
“You don’t sound too sure.”
“It won’t,” I repeat.
He rubs out his cigarette, half-smoked, and we head back inside. At the doorway he gives me a pat on the back, a gesture of solidarity, maybe sympathy. We find Ann sitting on the couch with the television on, volume low. A yearbook photo of James Fontaine is on-screen, cutting quickly to a mid-forties African-American couple standing in the driveway of what turns out to be the Fontaine home. I can see one of the concrete lions at the edge of the frame. The man is talking about how outraged he is by the behavior of the local police.
“Where’s Charlotte?” I ask.
Ann clicks the tube off. “She had a headache, so I gave her some aspirin and put her to bed.”
Bridger gives me a second pat. I could go the rest of my life without another one.
I see them out on my own, then climb the stairs, finding Charlotte in front of the bathroom mirror in a camisole and socks, brushing her teeth with excessive vigor. Her eyes follow my reflection a moment before drifting away.
Gina Robb comes to the door in a T-shirt and shorts, the cat-eye glasses the only reminder of her eccentric appearance the first time we met. Behind her, blue light flickers across an overstuffed couch and a shadowy hallway leads deeper into the apartment.
“I’m sorry it’s so late. With a job like mine, you work odd hours.”
She ushers me inside, frets over the best place for me to sit, then decides the vinyl armchair is the only choice. Once I’m settled, she goes to the kitchenette to pour coffee, which I don’t have the heart to refuse.
“It’s hazelnut,” she says, handing me the mug.
They live on the second floor of a gated apartment complex across from Willowbrook Mall. The spot where Hannah Mayhew’s car was found is just about visible from their tiny balcony. The furniture has a haphazard hand-me-down quality, and apart from a clock over the breakfast nook, the walls are unadorned. The television is flanked by bookshelves filled with crimped paperbacks and DVDs.
Robb appears at the mouth of the hallway, also in shorts and T-shirt, toweling his hair dry. He pours himself coffee and sits on the big couch, then changes his mind and scoots closer toward me.
“Just taking a quick shower,” he says.
Gina flips on a lamp, then feels along the cushions until she finds the TV remote, switching the set off. She sits on the edge of the couch, hands clasped over white knees that seem never to have been touched by sun.
“Is it all right if I stay?” she asks.
I shrug. “Fine with me. You heard we pulled in James Fontaine today? He mentioned an incident we hadn’t heard anything about. Did you know he accused Hannah of vandalizing his car back in late February?”
They exchange looks, then Robb gives an awkward nod. “Donna didn’t mention that?”
“Nobody did. You want to clue me in?”
He takes a deep breath. “After the drugs were found in Hannah’s locker, she told everyone they weren’t hers. But she wouldn’t point the finger at anyone, either.”
“Why not?”
“She’d told Fontaine how Jesus suffered unjustly for the sins of others, so how does she turn around and complain for suffering unjustly herself?”
“She said that?”
“Not in so many words. But I think that’s what she thought. Because she wouldn’t talk, Donna felt like she had no choice but to ground her. It would have looked strange otherwise, nothing happening when her daughter’s suspended for marijuana possession.”
I can’t help smiling at the irony. If Hannah really kept her mouth shut for Fontaine’s sake, she showed him more loyalty than he’d extended to any of his friends in the interview room.
“It looked strange anyway,” Gina says. “Punishing her made her look guilty.”
He nods. “But I can understand how Donna felt. Hannah did, too. But there was one thing Donna didn’t consider, which was that Evey was leaving to go back to New Orleans. Her mom had tried making a go of things here, but ultimately she missed her home. So we’d planned this big goodbye party, which Hannah now couldn’t attend. It was a big deal, because like I told you before, Hannah was pretty much the only friend Evey had.”
His wife nods. “She was a tough girl to love.”
“So what happened?” I ask.
“Evey left the party and drove to Hannah’s house, talked her into going out, and somehow the two of them ended up at James Fontaine’s.”
“They keyed his car up?”
“Well,” he says. “There are two versions of the story.”
Gina puts her coffee mug on the low table in front of the couch. “I talked to Hannah the next morning, and she wouldn’t say what exactly went down. The impression I got, though, was that Evey did all the damage. She was paying the boy back.”
“For planting the drugs?”
“Yes, that,” she says. “Also for breaking Hannah’s heart.”
Next to her, Robb shifts nervously.
“It’s true,” she insists.
“I know,” he says, “but – ”
“But nothing. Hannah had a crush on that boy.” She looks to me for support. “You don’t always choose which direction your heart goes. She knew he was bad news, and I don’t think she ever would have compromised herself…”
“Of course not,” he says.
“Even so, as smart as she is, she’s just seventeen. I told her, ‘You know you can’t save his soul just to make him safe to date,’ and she said she realized that. But in her heart, I don’t think she did. So when he pushed her away – and I mean really pushed – it hurt her. And that’s why Evey did what she did, because Hannah was the one person who understood her.”
Robb nods the whole time, but I can tell there’s something in this he doesn’t agree with, not entirely. “What you have to understand about Hannah is, she’s friendly with everybody, but only made friends with a few. And when she makes a friend, she holds on tenaciously, whether it’s good for her or not. She’s very open emotionally, like a child almost. And Evey responded to that, in a protective sort of way.”
“You said there were two versions of what happened?”
“Evey left before anyone could get her side,” Robb says. “But some of the girls in the youth group told me Evey liked Fontaine, too, and it was her not him who put the drugs in Hannah’s locker. According to them, Evey was going to run away with the drug dealer, and to stop her, Hannah busted up his car.”
Gina shakes her head. “Those girls are thirteen. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“There could be a kernel of truth, though – ”
She dismisses the idea with a wave of the hand. “They’re in my class,” she explains, “so I have a pretty good idea how reliable they are. I guess the point is, rumors were flying, and the only person who could have told us what happened was Evey, who’d already gone.”
“Where exactly?” I ask.
“Back to New Orleans,” Robb says. “I’m not sure where. They were trying to buy a house, I think, but I don’t know whether they did. The insurance payout from the old one wasn’t much, but Mrs. Dyer was a nurse, so she might have saved something while they were here.”
Gina frowns. “Nurses don’t make that much.”
“You have a number where I can reach them?”
Robb’s cheeks color. “I don’t know that we do.”
“We haven’t heard from them in ages,” Gina says.
Robb gives me a pained look, then shrugs. He’d been so proud of Hannah for befriending the girl, prompted by his encouragement, but he hadn’t bothered to keep in touch himself. Reading my mind, he nods slowly.
“I feel bad about it,” he says. “Hypocritical. But with everything going on, I have to be honest, the Dyers leaving was a bit of a relief. I kept telling myself to follow up, but I never did.”
“Would anybody at the church have a contact number?”
“I don’t know. I could check around.”
“I’d appreciate that. One more thing. Fontaine said Evey – it’s Evey Dyer, right? – he said she would kind of explode on people. Is that right?”
Gina nods. “She did it with me once.” She takes a sip of coffee, gulps hard. “It was kind of scary to be honest. The girl had a mouth on her, but it was more than that. I don’t know if Carter told you, but she’s had a tough life. Spent time on the street as a runaway, did things I don’t even like to think about. I found her in the women’s restroom up at the church one Sunday and she was just bawling. I don’t know why, or what had happened, but I went to put an arm around her and she just flipped out. She started pushing me back and screaming and her hair was flying everywhere. And the things she was saying…” She shudders. “Finally she pushed me so hard I fell back into one of the toilet stalls.”
Robb listens silently, hands over his mouth.
“Then, as quick as it started, it all went away. She helped me up and kept apologizing and she was begging me not to tell anyone.” She glances at her husband. “Besides him, I didn’t.”
“Was she ever like that with Hannah?” I ask.
She shrugs.
“They had a strange bond,” Robb says. “Evey told Hannah a lot of things about herself she wouldn’t share with anyone else. Most of what we know, really, comes secondhand from Hannah. Like I said, when she and her mom moved back, I was relieved. After Gina told me what had happened in the restroom, I was always afraid of a repeat.”
According to the breakfast nook clock, it’s edging close to midnight. I’ve imposed long enough, especially considering how easily this could have been handled by phone. Still, in person there are nuances you miss over the line. And it’s not like I was going to get any sleep.
“Last thing,” I say. “You don’t happen to have a photograph of Evangeline Dyer, do you? Maybe the two of them together?”
They glance at each other, then shrug.
“No problem. I’ll check the computer. Sounds like this girl might have a record.”
As I descend the stairs outside, Robb comes out of the apartment alone, trailing after me, calling in a hushed voice.
“What’s the problem?” I ask.
“What I said the other day? I was serious. I need to do something. There has to be some way I can help.”
“You’re doing plenty. I don’t know what more to tell you.”
“I could track the Dyers down for you,” he says. “Or that picture you wanted? I could ask around and find one. Maybe I could talk to people again, see if they’d open up to me in a way they wouldn’t with the police.”
He looks to me for agreement, with a desperate eagerness that’s a little appalling, unaware that not only is he asking me for something I don’t have the power to grant but he’s also conforming to a stereotype well known to law enforcement: the guilty helper. When a civilian suddenly offers up his services, you always take a harder look at him, because more than likely he’s involved – or so the thinking goes. I think I know what motivates Robb, though. Not his involvement, but his lack of it, for he’s convinced if only he’d invested more of himself before the fact, none of this would have happened.
“I appreciate your feelings, Mr. Robb, but – ”
“Anything,” he says.
I stroke my chin, buying time, wracking my brain for a non-binding exit strategy. “If you can track down a number for the Dyers in New Orleans, that would be fine. And if you want to talk to the kids in your youth group, see if anything else comes up, go right ahead. But beyond that – ”
“Thank you.” He grips my hand and gives it a shake. “I’m grateful, really. I’ll do whatever I can and get back to you. And if you think of anything else, just let me know.”
“I’ll do that,” I say, slipping away, making a beeline for my parked car before he can offer up additional thanks.
The next morning I roll over to find Charlotte’s side of the bed empty. The slight dimple in the mattress is still warm. I throw on some clothes and pad down the stairs. She’s in the kitchen, fully dressed, gazing out the window over the sink.
I kiss her warm cheek, then brush the hair from her neck. “You all right? You’re up early.”
“Just thinking,” she says.
I open the refrigerator, pour out the last of the orange juice, splashing half of it into a second cup, which I place in her waiting hand.
“I’d like things to be how they were,” she says. “No, that’s not right. I want them to be how they should be. In the future, I mean.”
“Okay.” I’m a little baffled.
“Ann said something last night. When we were doing the dishes. She said we didn’t seem happy anymore. Do you think that’s true?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re lying. I can tell, you know. My husband’s a detective.”
“Things can be like they were – ”
“They’ll never be like they were,” she says. “I know that. I’m not naive. But I want them to be good again. All right?”
I down the orange juice, lower the glass. “I want that, too.”
Upstairs, my mobile phone starts to ring. I should honor the moment by letting it go, but the moment’s already as good as it can get. I kiss her on the juice-dampened lips and rush the stairs two at a time. The phone flashes on the nightstand charger.
“Hello?”
“March, it’s Wilcox. Good news.”
“I have the go-ahead to approach Thomson?”
“So long as he’s willing to give us everything, we’re prepared to work with him on the rest.”
“He wants it in writing.”
“Should I fax it over, or do you want to swing by?”
“I’d better come by. The fewer people who know, the better.”
When I head back downstairs to tell Charlotte, she’s standing in the open back door, arms crossed, glaring up at the apartment over the garage. I come up behind her, resting my cheek against her neck. At the top of the stairs, I catch sight of a girl in a crop top and tight jeans just disappearing into the apartment.
“You’ve got to take care of that, too,” she says.
“I did have a talk with him.”
“A talk’s not enough.” She turns, puts her hands around my waist. “He’s got to go. It’s past the point of talking. Just get him out.”
My hand rests on the small of her back and I inhale the scent of her hair.
“I’ll do what I can,” I say. “Whatever you want.”
Instead of heading straight out to the Northwest, business as usual, waiting for Thomson to get back in touch, I make an unscheduled visit downtown, breezing through Homicide on the pretense of having left some files in my desk. Lorenz gives me the cold shoulder, as expected, but Bascombe proves surprisingly cordial, stopping me outside his office to ask how the task force is going and whether I’m fitting in all right. Now that I’m no longer his problem, I guess the lieutenant wants me to see he’s not carrying any grudges. Neither should I, the implication seems to be.
“Any breaks on the Morales case?” I ask.
He gives his head a wary shake, like he suspects a trick question. “There’s a cool breeze blowing over that one, I’m afraid.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
We stand there a moment, pondering the way a live case can suddenly flash-freeze, all the leads going cold at once. In this instance, with so many bodies and so much physical evidence, it’s hard to believe the line’s already gone dead, even for Lorenz. Strangely, I feel no satisfaction. If my test results come back positive and Thomson really can put the shooters in the frame, the fact that Lorenz got nowhere will only make my victory that much sweeter. Still, there are so many contingencies, so much that could go wrong. I can’t gloat for fear of jinxing my chance.
“You hear anything about your dna test?” he asks.
“Not yet.”
He rubs his chin thoughtfully. “You still think there’s a connection?” He doesn’t sound quite as skeptical as when they gave me the boot. Maybe he’s realizing he backed the wrong detective.
“It’s hard to say.” I turn to go. “We should know soon enough.”
The files are in my desk drawer. I tuck them under my arm, aware of Bascombe hovering nearby, watching my every move.
“If you do get back a positive match,” he calls after me, “I’d appreciate a heads-up.”
“Sure thing.” I slip down the aisle toward the exit, giving a little over-the-shoulder wave of acknowledgment. When I glance back, he’s still watching, and I notice Lorenz’s head poking above the cubicle wall.
The sign next to the door reads COMPREHENSIVE RISK ASSESSMENT, not Golden Parachute Brigade, but the matching, nick-free furniture and the glossy new computer screens let me know I have arrived in the right place. The suite is compact, just a bullpen flanked by half a dozen enclosed offices, quiet enough that I can hear the rush of air through the registers overhead. A civilian secretary seated near the entrance behind a low-walled cubicle motions for me to halt.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m here to see Tony Salazar.”
She unclips her telephone earpiece and saunters over to one of the offices, tapping lightly on the closed door. After a pause, she opens it and leans inside. My story is simple: since I did Salazar a favor over the weekend, cutting loose one of his confidential informants, he now owes me one. I’ve come to see whether his ears on the street have heard anything about the Morales shooting. If in the course of this errand I happen to run across Joe Thomson, so be it. The meeting will have occurred by chance, and he’ll know without my having to say anything that the arrangements he requested have been made.
After a hushed conversation, the secretary returns to her desk, nodding for me to advance. Salazar meets me at the door, enclosing my offered hand in his thick boxing glove of a fist. He’s short but powerfully built, with tight dark curls and a nose that either came out flat or was beaten into that shape long ago. To accommodate his broad shoulders, he’s had to buy a white button-down that billows out around the waist, making his legs look disproportionately small.
He pulls me over the threshold, snapping the door shut behind me. My disappointment must show, but he misinterprets the reason.
“The boss is in,” he says with a shrug. “You two aren’t exactly the best of friends.”
It’s flattering to know that after all these years, Keller still keeps our rivalry alive on his end, long after it has stopped making sense for him to perceive me as a threat. The closed door means Thomson won’t be able to pass by and notice me, but in a small way Salazar’s reason for shutting it makes up for that. Once I’m done, I will just have to make a point of lingering.
“So to what do I owe the pleasure?” he asks, hoisting himself up onto the edge of his desk. Like the area outside, the office is nicely furnished, though a bit on the bare side. Apart from a couple of photos on the credenza, the contents are impersonal to the point of being generic. Whatever work the team actually does, it seems to leave little trace.
“I’m here for a favor.”
He points to his head, then shrugs. “Well, duh. I guess I now owe you one, don’t I? You know that Rios kid never called me.”
“I had a feeling he might not. Trouble there?”
“Nothing I can’t handle,” he says. “What can I do for you?”
“You know Octavio Morales got himself killed? I was wondering whether, with all your gangland connections, you’d heard any rumors about that.”
“Lorenz caught that one, I heard.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was working it, too, then they pulled me off.”
He smiles. “And you want to show him up, is that it?”
“Pretty much.”
He drums his fingers on the desk in thought. “I do owe you,” he concedes. “The fact is, I haven’t heard anything, and now that I’m on this detail, I haven’t really kept up with my network, apart from the odd informant like that guy the other day. Obviously, I haven’t even kept up with him. But if you want, I guess I could make a couple of calls and see what comes up.”
“I’d appreciate it.”
“All right then.” He smacks his hands together, rubbing the palms, then hops off the desk. “Anything drops, I’ll let you know.”
He’s anxious for me to go, and since I can’t think of any excuse that would stall him awhile longer, I oblige. The moment I’m out the door, though, the office next to his opens. Thinking it might be Thomson’s, I pause. Salazar puts a hand on my back, urging me along, but I slip his grasp, pretending something’s just occurred to me.
“What?” he says under his breath.
I smack my forehead, buying a few seconds.
From the open door, Reg Keller emerges. He takes one step outside, then freezes, drawing in breath like he’s just stepped on something. His flame-blue glare zeroes in on my shoes, as if he somehow recognizes them as mine, then slowly works its way upward, taking me in inch by inch.
“Sorry, boss,” Salazar says.
Keller makes no reply. He’s an inch or so taller than me, menacingly fit, with a shaved head and a tight row of clenched teeth. He wears his stiff navy suit like a uniform, shirt crisp with starch, tie knotted just so, knife-edge creases everywhere you look. As much as I hate the man, there was a time I admired him, and coming face-to-face like this it’s hard to keep myself from reflexively cowering. In a dream, now would be the time to throw my punch, but in the flesh I find there’s more flight in me than fight.
He plants his hands on his hips, leaning forward aggressively, a vein going rigid in his neck. “You want to tell me what he’s doing here?”
Salazar sputters, hands spread.
“Instead of just standing there, maybe you should do something about it.”
With surprising power, Salazar takes me by the elbow, pulling me back. I dig in at first, but he shoulders me along.
“Come on, man,” he whispers.
The secretary stands, one hand to her chest, shrugging emphatically in Keller’s direction, her chin ducked as though worried he might be able to hit her from across the room.
As Salazar bunches me through the door, I glance back at Keller, who still hasn’t budged an inch. His cheeks flush with outrage, nostrils flaring, and at that moment it wouldn’t surprise me if he charged. A note of protest sounds at the back of my mind. What have I ever done to him? What’s he got to complain about? He should be the one they’re afraid of. They should pack him out the door.
Then I’m in the hallway and the door swings shut. The last thing I see is the apologetic wince on Salazar’s lips.
The whole exercise was pointless. If Thomson was there, I didn’t see him and he didn’t see me. I shouldn’t have wasted my time. All the old feelings come rushing back, the vengeful drives I surrendered back when it seemed there was no hope of ever fulfilling them. My leg rears back of its own accord, and it’s all I can do to keep from kicking the shut door.
But I don’t. That would only make a bad situation worse. And besides, the visit isn’t a total loss. They’re going to be talking about it for a while in there. Maybe Thomson, if he wasn’t already lurking behind a closed door, will hear about the incident, and realize it’s time to get in touch.
Sergeant Nixon settles behind the wheel of his cruiser, giving me a sideways glance. “Don’t get the wrong idea, Detective. It’s not a taxi service I’m running here. But you used to be one of my boys, so that entitles you to some special treatment.”
“Thanks, Nix,” I say. “I appreciate this.”
The last time I saw him was at the Morales scene, when he sent me on the wild goose chase across the street, interviewing the hot Latina who’d witnessed nothing much. Before that, we’ve bumped into each other a few times, him always making a point of addressing me by my rank, the way a proud father would. I started out under Nix, driving one of his patrol cars, and while we hadn’t formed anything like a special bond, I have a few fond memories of his sarcastic lectures and crass practical jokes.
Seeing him in the car pool, already feeling a bit nostalgic after my run-in with Keller, I decided to hitch a ride. Northwest was far out of his way, but he told me to hop in regardless.
“You remember Reg Keller?” I ask.
He snorts. “He always thought he was something, didn’t he?”
“Still does.”
“I take it you two haven’t made peace yet? That’s what I figured. I wish you could have brought him down, Detective. He was ripe for it back then, but I’m afraid you done missed your chance.”
I’m tempted to contradict him, but I don’t.
Nix is one of the few people who knows the story about my beef with Keller. When Big Reg showed up in Central, he was already larger than life, with a ready-made entourage of corner-cutting patrol officers fawning on his every utterance. I was one of them, or at least I wanted to be. For the longest time, Keller shut me out, treating me like the unimaginative, by-the-book stuffed shirt I was afraid I really was. I’d see the guys he took under his wing, strutting around like they were God’s gift to law enforcement, and I wanted nothing more than to be one of them.
Noticing this, Nix took me aside for a heart-to-heart, telling me I was lucky Keller hadn’t taken a shine to me. The guys he groomed had one thing in common: a moral flaw. The way Nix put it, they’d rather have the gun than the badge.
“You warned me about him,” I say. “All those years ago.”
“Did I?” He rubs his mustache, a little pleased with himself. “Did it do any good?”
“Not really.”
Everybody knew Keller was moving up the chain, sloughing off the uniform to get a shiny new detective’s shield. Rumors circulated, as they always do. He’d be taking some cronies along with him. This was the time to get yourself on Big Reg’s radar screen. So one night as we’re tooling up for patrol, I go up and tell him he can ride shotgun with me, assuming he wants to. I can’t remember the exact words, but it came out like a challenge and that kind of bravado appealed to Big Reg. Before I knew it, we were on the street. I finally had my chance to prove myself.
Nix must be remembering, too, because he sighs against the driver’s side window. We’re taking I-10 through the middle of town, hooking up to the Loop and then heading up the Northwest Freeway.
“I should have listened,” I say.
He just grunts.
Near the end of the shift, desperate to impress, I floored it over to a convenience store robbery in progress called in by an employee hidden in the back room. As we rolled up, Keller press-checked his grandfathered Government Model in the passenger seat, confirming the round in the chamber. I popped the thumb break on my sig Sauer, leaving it holstered for the moment.
Two men burst through the glass doors. The one up front saw us and stopped short, but the second one ducked around him, breaking off to the right. Keller went after him, shouting. The first guy, meanwhile, leveled his pistol right at me.
The distance was about thirty feet, but I recognized his weapon. I’d worked all through school at my uncle’s gun shop off of Richmond, selling handguns and hustling on the indoor range, priding myself on the knowledge thus acquired. He was pointing a nickel-plated Browning bda at me, or possibly a Beretta Model 84 – essentially the same thing, though they tended to be blued. The fact I had time to register this is a testament to how everything slows down under stress. I noticed the gun, then a split-second later noticed the plume of fire coming from the muzzle.
I didn’t take evasive action. I didn’t move for cover. I just stood there flatfooted and let the bullets whiz by. When he ran, I was still standing there, my hand on my holstered side arm.
It was the first time anyone had ever shot at me. I couldn’t quite believe it.
Keller’s kid had bolted, but I could still hear him shouting around the side of the building. I started off after mine.
He skimmed his way along a chain-link fence, then ducked down a driveway running parallel to a self-storage unit whose bright lights made him impossible to miss. I had my gun out now, but without closing the distance there wasn’t much hope of actually hitting him. So I poured on some speed. By the time he reached the end of the road, where the light suddenly dropped off, he was winded and staggering. I brought my pistol up and started yelling for him to freeze.
Instead, he turned on me.
I thought I saw the gun barrel shining through the shadows. I put two rounds into him, my gun bucking in my hands.
He stood on tiptoes a moment, then sank to one knee. By the time I reached him, he was facedown on the cracked concrete, breathing hard, moaning.
Keller drove up with the second kid in the back of the cruiser. He told me to holster my gun, then rolled my perp over to check on him. I’d have sworn both rounds hit center of mass, but in fact he’d only been hit once, the projectile ripping a superficial channel through the fleshy part of his side, then smashing into his bicep just above the elbow.
“He’s gonna be fine,” Big Reg said. “But, son, we seem to have a problem.”
Namely, there was a wounded perp on the ground, but no nickel-plated automatic. Stand-up guy that he was, Big Reg doubled back along the route we’d just run, searching the uncut grass along the chain-link fence for any sign of a discarded piece. He came back shaking his head, telling me not to worry, though, because he’d back my story. The guy had taken a couple of shots at me, there was no disputing that. Later, it turned out Keller didn’t have to back me: the video-surveillance cameras took care of that.
Still, I was grateful.
Six months later, once Big Reg had disappeared into the detective bureau, word trickled down that he’d had to gun down a dealer who came after him off duty. Feeling a bond after the way he’d helped me through my own shooting, I made a point of dropping in as a show of support. Talking to the other narcotics detectives, I learned something significant. The thug who’d stepped up to Keller was brandishing a nickel-plated Browning BDA.
He hadn’t missed the discarded weapon. He’d pocketed it for use later on. Which meant his latest shooting was dirty.
“You know,” I tell Nix as we emerge onto 290, “if you’d helped me out a little when Keller planted that piece, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“Right,” he says. “Because we wouldn’t be with the department anymore. I’m all in favor of settling scores, but not at the expense of the job.” He gives his badge a pat, reassuring himself it’s still in place.
He’s probably right. I could’ve made trouble for Keller, but not enough for it to matter. People would have closed ranks, because that’s what you do when a brother officer is challenged. None of us knows when he’ll be forced into the same situation, making a mistake that needs covering.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. “If you’re gonna slip a knife into somebody’s back – whether they deserve it or not – you gotta make sure you sneak up on them first. Get my drift?”
Yeah, I do. And showing up in Keller’s office, putting myself front and center like that, it probably wasn’t the best move. Maybe Nix already heard the news and is letting me know. If he’s just spouting random advice, it’s pretty good advice.
From now on, I’d better start listening.
For the second time I show up at task force headquarters late, with no explanation, and for the second time Cavallo chooses not to call me on it. She eyes me silently as I approach, then slides a stack of interview forms across the table, picking up where we left off before. I recap my late-night visit to the Robbs’, giving her the various accounts of the vandalism incident.
Yawning, she digs through her box of files, pulling a couple of sheets out. I skim them quickly. The thirteen-year-old youth group girls Gina Robb said were in her class gave statements to the police early on, including the accusation that Hannah had bashed up the car of an unnamed boyfriend of Evangeline Dyer.
“How does stuff like this get missed?” I slap the pages down.
She shrugs. “Information overload. Nobody knows it’s important at the time. And anyway, is it important? If it’s true Hannah keyed his car, then I guess that gives him some kind of motive – but I thought you’d already ruled Fontaine out.”
“Maybe. But we should at least follow up on Evey Dyer, get her side of things. If she was such a good friend of Hannah’s, no matter how they left things, she might be able to tell us something useful.”
“Anything’s worth a try.” She throws her hands up in frustration.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She brushes her hair back. “Everything.”
I remember Bascombe’s words about the Morales case. A cool breeze blowing. The same thing’s happening here, and Cavallo’s not taking it well. The reason professionals don’t invest too much of themselves in a case like this is that it’s almost certain to end badly. But of course professionals do it all the time, because they’re human like anyone else. Cavallo lets out a sigh, then rubs her eyes until she can’t rub anymore. She starts back on the interview forms, making me wonder if she’s more human than most.
“So you want me to follow up on the Dyer girl?” I ask.
“Knock yourself out.”
After an hour of hunting and pecking on the computer keyboard, I decide to take a shortcut around my technological limitations, placing a long distance call to Detective Eugene Fontenot, a New Orleans homicide detective who helped me out years ago on my most celebrated case, the Fauk stabbing, which was the basis for Brad Templeton’s book The Kingwood Killing. We had a good laugh about that, Gene and I, when he stayed at my place after Hurricane Katrina blew his house down. Like Evangeline Dyer’s mother, he’d toyed with the idea of a new life in Texas before nopd reeled him back.
“Don’t you people have such a thing as databases out there in Texas?” he asks. “I’m lucky you didn’t talk me into staying.”
“There’s nothing like the human touch, Gene. Besides, I heard you’d gotten fat and could use some exercise.”
Over the line I hear him patting his belly. “My ex-wife been talkin’ again?”
He asks about Charlotte, then gives me an update on his leisure time, which seems mainly to be taken up by fishing. Finally, I get his attention by explaining the link between the favor I’m asking for and the case that’s on every television screen.
“This is connected to that girl?” he says, wonder in his voice.
“The one you’d be locating is supposed to be her best friend.”
Fontenot hums a tune, thinking things over. “For you, I wouldn’t lift a finger. You’ve never brought me anything but trouble. Still, I’ve got kids of my own, and if one of them went missing, I’d want anybody who could lift a finger to do it.”
“That’s noble of you, Gene.”
“I’m a noble sort of man.”
“Not according to your ex-wife, you’re not.”
He laughs with me a little, then at me, and then hangs up the phone. Cavallo, who’s been making an effort not to pay attention – or at least, not to seem to be – can’t help looking up with an inquisitive lift of the eyebrows.
“Gene Fontenot,” I explain.
“That name sounds familiar,” she says. Reaching under the table, she digs through her shoulder bag for a couple of seconds, then produces a dog-eared copy of The Kingwood Killing. “I’ve been reading up on you, March.”
I snatch the book away, flipping absently through the pages. “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Not everybody around here has a book written about them.”
“It’s not about me.” I hand it back to her. “Trust me, when you’re at your prime, the last thing you want is for someone to capture it like that. You’ll always be reminded of what you used to be.”
She fingers the book contemplatively, then stashes it away. She has questions to ask, I can tell, but I’m not in the mood to answer them. With Evey Dyer taken care of for the moment, I still have Thomson to worry about. I excuse myself from the table and go in search of a telephone directory.
I wait until the shift ends, then call from behind the wheel of my car. A woman’s voice answers.
“Is Joe there?”
“No, I’m sorry. Can I take a message?”
“Is this his wife?”
A pause. “Yes, it is.”
So what Wilcox said is true. He really has put his marriage back together. The same woman who divorced him is now waiting at home by the phone. I can’t quite fathom how a life so shattered can be put back together like that, but remembering Charlotte’s words this morning, the idea gives me hope.
“Do you know where I can reach him?” I ask.
“Ah… can I ask who’s calling?”
“Just a friend.”
She’s about to hang up, and for some reason I don’t want her to. I have this crazy notion all the sudden that she can tell me something.
“I didn’t catch your name,” I say.
“Stephanie.”
“Hi, Stephanie. Listen. I heard Joe’s taken up sculpting?”
She clears her throat. “Yeah…”
I can tell from her tone that she’s a little perplexed by my call. Nix’s words about sneaking up come to mind. Time to end this.
“Never mind,” I say. “I was just thinking… Anyway, it’s great that you two are back together. It’s great about the… art.”
“Thanks.”
After I hang up, a strange laugh echoes in the car. It’s me, only I can’t think what’s so funny all the sudden. Maybe it’s the desperation of my phone call, trying the guy at home instead of waiting for him to touch base. Now that I’ve put in an appearance at the office and chatted with his wife, Thomson’s bound to come out of the woodwork. When he does, I’ll tell him what Wilcox said. Putting the Morales case down is all well and good, but there are bigger fish to fry. If he wants the written assurances I collected from Internal Affairs, he’s got to give me nothing less than Reg Keller.
Perhaps the reason I’m laughing is because, for the first time, I’m starting to believe Thomson will actually be able to deliver.
Working cases from behind a desk, while some might consider it an art form, requiring as it does the carefully orchestrated ferrying of witnesses back and forth, the adept use of fax and phone – not to mention a comfortable chair with adjustable lumbar support – has never been my style. Task force headquarters is starting to resemble a teenager’s bedroom, paperwork and debris stacking up on every available surface, including a tower of mostly empty pizza boxes from I don’t know when. Cavallo and I have staked out a corner, but even here the chairs aren’t comfortable and the white noise of nonstop conversation grows increasingly difficult to tune out.
I’m ready to get out on the street, to go anywhere for almost any reason, but my partner seems glued to the interviews. She hunches over her dwindling stack, head propped on hand, her face veiled behind a curtain of hair. She stares at the page, but I’m pretty sure her eyes don’t move.
“Cavallo,” I say. “Are you even reading those things?”
She flips the page, ignoring me.
“Let’s get out of here.”
“And go where?”
“How about the school?” I throw it out there, a random suggestion, the first thing that comes to mind. “We could re-interview some of these people. Instead of just rereading the original notes.”
“Something’s here,” she says. “We just need to keep looking.”
“No, what we need is to shake things up.”
She leans back in her chair, throwing her arms into a leonine stretch. “What we need,” she says, “is more coffee. It’s your turn.”
At the far end of what we’re jokingly calling the catering table, two chrome vats of lukewarm coffee beckon, the constantly diminishing regular and the untouched decaf. While decanting the leaded version into Cavallo’s styrofoam cup, I glance through the open door of Wanda Mosser’s temporary office, a converted conference room. She and Villanueva watch Nancy Grace on a portable television, volume muted, while a series of angry voices on the other side of the speakerphone carry on an indecipherable argument.
Noticing me, Wanda slips out for a refill, not mentioning her departure to the superiors downtown. Behind her, Villanueva mimes a cup with one hand, pointing with the other for emphasis. I give him a nod and pull a fresh foam vessel from the nearby stack.
“How’s it going, cowboy?” Wanda asks.
“I’m gonna hang myself if I don’t get out of here soon. My new partner thinks they’re handing out toy surprises for whoever gets through the most paperwork.”
She laughs. “I told you she was uptight. And those interviews aren’t the only thing she’s been reading.”
“You mean The Kingwood Killing? I already know.”
“She was asking me all kinds of questions this morning.”
“Spare me,” I say. “Though come to think of it, I’d rather she ask you than me.”
I refill her cup, then hand it over along with the one for Villanueva, who still listens silently to the squawking phone. Before I can make good my escape, though, she steps closer.
“You know something, Roland? It’s nice to see you putting your heart into the work again.”
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“Looks that way to me.”
She goes back to her crisis management meeting, leaving me to ponder her words. If this is my heart in the work, I have to admit it doesn’t feel much different. Rather than an increase of passion, or a single-minded focus, what I’m left with is more frustration spread thin along a wider front. The Morales killing, Hannah Mayhew, Thomson’s pending defection, all of it promising enough, but so far nothing has actually delivered. Charlotte’s unexpected announcement yesterday morning, her declared aims for our future relationship, pending apparently on a solution to the tenant crisis – a problem which, after Tommy’s assist at the Paragon the other night, I’m reluctant to even address. No, if this is my heart in the work, I’d just as soon keep it out.
Cavallo accepts her coffee in both hands, as if they need warming in spite of the temperature outside, which is threatening to creep into the lower nineties, with a heaping side order of humidity. She sips while giving me an interested look, like her off-duty reading is coming back to her.
“March,” she says, “can I ask you something?”
I fumble for a response, but then the ringing in my pocket saves me. With an apologetic shrug, I flip the phone open and press it to my ear.
“Detective March,” I say.
“You the one assigned to Octavio Morales?” The words are precise, though heavily accented, a male speaker probably in his twenties, I’m guessing.
“That’s right.”
“I got some information for you, okay?”
“May I ask who’s speaking?”
My tone arouses Cavallo’s interest. She puts her cup down and leans forward, eyebrows raised. I motion for a pen.
“You want the information or not?” he asks.
“Go ahead. I’m just getting something to write with.”
He gives me an address on Fondren not far from the Sharpstown Plaza shopping center. “I’ll be on the side of the road with a red bandanna. You pick me up. And come alone or I’ll just walk, okay?”
“When?” I ask.
“Now, dude.” Then he abruptly hangs up.
Cavallo asks for the incoming number, then walks it over to one of the support staffers to run a computer search, which comes back with the news that my caller used a public phone at Sharpstown Mall.
“The phones still work there?”
She smirks. “Anyway, this sounds kind of cloak-and-dagger.”
“I called in a favor yesterday hoping for some street-level intel, and I guess it paid off.”
Frankly, I wasn’t expecting Salazar to follow through on his promise, not after the awkward confrontation with his boss. Wilcox hadn’t seemed very impressed with him, but it looks like Salazar is a stand-up guy after all.
“Are you really going to meet this informant alone?” Cavallo asks. “Don’t you have protocols for this kind of thing in Homicide?”
“I’m not in Homicide,” I say.
“Maybe I should tag along.”
Eager as she sounds, the last thing I want is Cavallo’s company on this errand. The drive to Sharpstown would give her plenty of time to ask whatever questions her reading The Kingwood Killing has raised. I hate that book. I’d only agreed to be interviewed as a favor to Brad Templeton, a former Houston Post reporter turned true-crime writer, never realizing he’d turn the case into a lurid movie-of-the-week thriller, complete with me in the role of hero, something I’ve been trying to live down ever since.
“You know, I think those interviews need another going over.”
“What, I’m not good enough backup for you?” She frowns. “Should I mention this to Wanda, considering it has absolutely nothing to do with the case?”
“I think it does,” I say. “And when those test results come back, you’ll think so, too. In the meantime, I have a friend down there who can lend me a hand. Ever heard of Sergeant Ed Nixon?”
As I gather my things and prepare to go, Cavallo stands there, arms crossed, like a disappointed mother watching as her teen gets ready to run away. But to her credit, she doesn’t tattle to Wanda or even wag a finger at me as I leave. Pulling out of the parking lot, I check the rearview to be sure she’s not following. She isn’t. Cavallo knows better. She’s probably back at her interviews, hoping that on the next read-through the words on the page will change.
Sharpstown Plaza, just across Bellaire from Sharpstown Mall, boasts a strip of mostly vacated retail spaces and an empty swath of yellow-lined parking reminiscent of the oil bust back in the eighties, which left so much real estate unoccupied. They used to say back then that the difference between a Texas oilman and a pigeon was that one of them could still put a deposit on a Mercedes.
Although the signs are now gone, I can still tell from the color-coded facades which chains used to operate here – pretty much the same ones that operate everywhere else. I pass by on the Southwest Freeway feeder, taking a right on Fondren as directed.
I caught Nix at the end of his shift, after he’d changed into street clothes and squirted on cologne. He was happy enough to check out an unmarked car and tag along, and now he’s keeping way back, just in case.
Coasting by the Wendy’s on the right, I spot my red bandanna. Five foot seven or eight, in wide black shorts with white stitching and a loose-fitting Rockets jersey, the bandanna cinched tight over his forehead, covering his eyebrows but leaving his scalp exposed. He sees me rolling up and snaps his phone shut, slipping it into a bottomless pants pocket.
He opens the passenger door, slips inside. “Keep driving, homes.”
“Yo, ese, you got a name or what?”
He brushes me forward, not looking too impressed by my mastery of the lingo. “Just move, okay? We can’t be talking right here.”
I let my foot off the brake and coast back onto Fondren. He smells of fast food and stale cigarettes. A hairline goatee rims his mouth, and he has an ominous teardrop tattoo under his eye. I get a strange vibe off the guy, but people who can name names in a murder are a different breed, and strange is the only vibe they give off. At Bellaire he motions for a left, and then another left onto Osage, into a shady residential block full of low-slung ranch houses, their backyards divided by pickets of sun-grayed fencing.
“Park under one of these trees,” he says, pointing to a row of oaks overhanging the street.
I slide the gearshift into park, then turn in my seat. “So what do you know about Octavio Morales?”
He answers with the flash of a hand, his half-formed fist snapping against my jaw, knocking me back against the driver’s side door. I wince, my teeth rattled. His other hand comes up, and I see a glint of metal. The notched round cylinder of a J-frame revolver. He punches forward with the muzzle at my belly.
I go for his wrist, seizing the bone just in time to push the muzzle wide. The hammer drops and the cabin fills with smoke, like a bomb’s gone off. All I can hear is silence, but my eardrums throb.
I jerk his gun hand forward, blading my body to get my right arm between him and the revolver. He buries his hand in my hair, ripping backward.
Another concussion and this time the driver’s window shatters. Glass everywhere, and I’m choking on the cordite-filled air.
I trap his gun hand against the steering wheel, setting the horn off. It blares, but I hear the sound as if it’s coming from over the horizon. I cock my right arm back, smashing my elbow into his face. His chin snaps back, so I pound him again. And again.
His fist tightens around my hair, pulling hard, but I barely feel the pain. My elbow rams back at him over and over, until I feel his grip on the revolver loosen. He shrinks back, letting the gun drop, then fumbles for the door handle.
I catch a handful of jersey as he goes, but he twists free and starts running down the sidewalk.
Then I’m outside, leaning into the crook of the open door, the front sight of my pistol lining up over his shrinking silhouette. I’m breathing too hard to take the shot.
My hearing fades back in with a distant screech of tires somewhere behind me. I turn, ready to unload on Nix, who should have rolled up with lights flashing at the first shot.
Instead, a massive red Ford pickup speeds down Osage, the tinted passenger window sliding down. I can’t make out the driver until he’s on top of me, at which point his face is hidden behind a sawn-off double-barrel shotgun.
I drop to the pavement. A hurricane of buckshot blasts through the half-open window, showering me with glass.
The truck screeches off, accelerating toward my would-be assassin, who crouches winded on the sidewalk. Looking down at my pistol, I find the hammer back and smoke rising from the muzzle. On the ground around me, a half-dozen silver shell casings, even though I don’t remember pulling the trigger.
When I try to stand, a knife-like burn runs through my left thigh. My pant leg is damp with blood, but I can’t find a hole, just black wetness and the smoky char of a contact wound. Up ahead, the truck’s passenger door opens and the man climbs in. I raise my pistol one-handed, take a breath, and almost pull the trigger. But I don’t, not wanting to miss and send a stray round flying.
As the truck moves away, laying down more rubber, I slump halfway into the driver’s seat, dropping the cocked hammer with the thumb release. On the floor beneath the brake, the shiny revolver lies smoking, flecks of blood on the metal.
Sergeant Nixon’s unmarked car pulls alongside.
“Did something just go down?” he calls out.
“Yeah,” I say, holding my sticky fingers up for inspection. “I just got shot in the leg. But don’t worry, the shooter got away.”
Nix looks at me like I haven’t answered him. Maybe I haven’t. All the sudden I have this incredible urge to lie down. I set my pistol on the floor mat and stretch out, staring up at the car’s ceiling. Somebody’s in the vehicle with me, making this high-pitched animal whimper. I glance between the seats, but there’s no one in back. It must be me.
In the back of the ambulance I inspect my new wool cutoffs, the left leg shorn to reveal a crisscross of white bandages. The paramedic, looking pleased with his work, gives my knee a slap. Thanks to the pain medication, I barely feel it.
“You’re lucky it caught the meaty part,” he says, talking loudly in deference to my temporary hearing loss.
“I feel lucky.” I lift my leg to inspect the underside. “Are you saying I have fat thighs?”
He chuckles, climbing out of the ambulance. Down on the pavement, Nix looks haggard under questioning from Captain Hedges, who, in spite of having farmed me out, responded with admirable speed when the news reached downtown. We don’t take an officer-related shooting lightly around here, even when it happens to an officer we’ve thought about shooting a couple of times ourselves. Mosser is out there, too, and so is Cavallo, who keeps sending told-you-so glares in my direction.
Bascombe hops up onto the fender, then slides alongside the stretcher for a look.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“Come again?”
He repeats himself, dialing up the volume.
“What I really want,” I tell him, “is to eat. I’m starving.”
“You can eat at the hospital. But seriously, if this guy drew down on you without no warning, then – ”
“No hospitals,” I say, shaking my head. “Look, you’ve got his description and his prints will be all over that revolver. I didn’t get the license plate of the truck, but I’m thinking you’ll be able to recognize it from the bullet holes. When you catch the guy, you can ask him what he was thinking. Me, I don’t know.”
“We are gonna find him,” he says. “That’s a promise.”
“I know we are.”
He looks at the bandages awhile, shaking his head. “And that’s everything?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“All right,” he says, scooting his way back to the ground.
In fact, it’s almost everything. I left out only the part about my visit yesterday to Tony Salazar. That is one angle I intend to follow up personally.
Despite my protests, the paramedics insist on transporting me to Herman, where Charlotte turns up in an understandably apoplectic state. Cavallo, perhaps motivated by some instinctive revenge impulse, takes her aside, and instead of glossing over the details, fleshes them out one by one, making sure no aspect of the life-or-death struggle escapes Charlotte’s notice. From my bed I can hear them out in the hallway, and every so often one or the other will glance inside, Charlotte’s nose and mouth hidden behind her hands, Cavallo shaking her head at me.
The doctors troop in and out, displaying about as much sensitivity as homicide detectives hovering over a headless corpse. One of them, a youngish Indian with a posh English accent, assures me that in spite of the superficial nature of the wound, it’ll make for a nasty scar, as if he can already imagine me showing it off years from now, telling the story to my nonexistent grandkids.
“Can I please just go?”
Half a dozen different medical personnel answer in the affirmative over the course of a couple of hours, but there’s always another doctor to see, another bout of bedside manner to endure, until I start to feel like an animal in a zoo. Finally, a thick-waisted nurse comes in, her every movement calibrated to communicate how unimpressed she is by my suffering – after all, her frown seems to say, they get plenty of real gunshot wounds here. I’ll have to do better next time if I want to be taken seriously.
“You’re ready to go,” she says, and this time she really means it.
Charlotte, who’s been sitting quietly at the foot of the bed most of this time, rises to her feet. As I put weight on my injured leg, she rushes forward.
“Are you all right to walk?”
“Of course,” I say, trying not to wince at the jab of pain.
Out in the hallway, Cavallo leans against a wall checking messages on her phone.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Your next appointment’s waiting.” She nods down the corridor toward a couple of guys in nice suits. IAD and the District Attorney’s office. Standard procedure after a shooting. “And when they’re done with you, you’ve got a few days off, March. Don’t even think of coming back.”
Charlotte coils her arm around mine. “He won’t.”
On the way home, Charlotte swings by Whole Foods, leaving me in the car while she picks up all my favorites, which means nothing but ice cream and white chocolate until the weekend, possibly fried chicken and barbeque, too. She makes me wait in the car with the engine running.
“Keep the doors locked,” she says, like she’s afraid someone might come along and snatch me.
I sit fiddling with the radio for a while, avoiding anything that promises to develop into a news update. Two meteorologists are arguing on an AM call-in show about the severity of a hurricane building out in the Caribbean, so I let them talk. My hearing seems back to normal, but I snap my fingers a few times just to be sure.
As I’m waiting, a squeaky shopping cart rumbles past. I crane my neck around to watch. Last time I found myself sitting in a car, somebody tried to kill me. It seems like a long time ago, but it was only a few hours. The sun is just now setting on the near-fatal day.
My phone rings. Checking the display, I see it’s Bridger.
“You heard, huh?”
“Everything’s all right?”
“Don’t worry,” I say, “I won’t need you to do my autopsy for a while yet.”
“Actually, I think Dr. Green has first dibs.”
“That’s comforting.”
“Listen,” he says. “Are you sitting down? I have the results of that dna test for you.”
My back straightens and I press the phone tight against my ear. “Go ahead.”
“Sheryl did the comparison, but I went in and double-checked, just to be certain. We worked up the swab from the mother, got a profile, then made the comparison with the samples taken from the sheets at your crime scene.”
“I understand the process, Alan. What did you get back?”
“The results are pretty conclusive…”
“You’re killing me here, man, and I was already in some pain. Just tell me. Is the girl missing from my scene a match for Hannah Mayhew?”
He lets out a long sigh. “No, Roland. It’s not a match. Not even close, I’m afraid.”
The driver’s door opens and Charlotte leans in, asking me to reach over and pop the hatchback button. She turns, then does a double take, leaning further into the car.
“Roland, what’s wrong? What are you doing?”
Her eyes are wide with alarm. I glance down. My free hand is clutched around my bandaged thigh, squeezing hard enough to make the blood seep. I don’t feel pain, though.
“Bridger,” I say into the phone, “I’ve gotta go now. Thanks for letting me know.”
I close the phone and toss it onto the dashboard while Charlotte leans over my leg, clamping a hand over her mouth.
So that’s it. My long shot proved too long. Of course it did. A coincidence like that, how did I ever convince myself it might pan out? I’m a fool. They all knew it. Hedges and Bascombe with their convulsive back-patting, the long-suffering Cavallo indulging my idiotic whim. It would have made for such a neat, simple conclusion, but then there are no simple conclusions or neat ones, either. I want to hit something, even shoot something – only I’ve done that already today, and it didn’t seem to help.
Charlotte loads the groceries, then studies me for signs of collapse.
“You are all right, aren’t you, Roland?”
“I’m fine.”
If I were the sort of man to learn from his mistakes, I would be fine. I could go home with my beautiful wife and let her prop my leg up and proceed to baby me, passing the next couple of days in a well-earned anesthetized haze. Then I’d go back to the job practically a hero, having fought off single-handed a pair of stone-cold killers, no doubt gang muscle, hardcore enforcers.
Instead, as Charlotte drives quietly toward our neighborhood, as the sun’s orange hues deepen and the first fat drops of rain break across the windshield, I steel myself for a nighttime errand. Once she’s satisfied that I’ve been squared away in front of the television, confident enough for a glass of water and a couple of sleeping pills, I’ll dress quickly and limp out to the car, keeping a rendezvous with my last hope.
Joe Thomson, if he’s going to drop in on me, won’t do it at my house. He’ll be waiting at the Paragon for me to show. And after today, there’s not a chance I’ll disappoint him.
The girl tied to the bed and Hannah Mayhew are not one and the same. But Thomson’s still dangling the names of the shooters. My path back into Homicide just contracted into the tightest of crawl spaces, but it’s still there. And no matter what it takes, I intend to squeeze through.
I wait, alone at a table, quite still in spite of the movement all around. For ten minutes. For sixty. For half as much again, until the ice in my untouched glass is down to a pair of floating lozenges, murkily transparent. I wait as the crowd ebbs and wanes, as the music changes and the lights dim. The second hand on my watch crawls by, but I’m done with checking it.
Either he’ll come or he won’t.
If he doesn’t, then I’ll make it my business first thing in the morning to track him down. Regardless of my enforced leave, ignoring all the hoops still left to jump through after a good shooting, I will make Joe Thomson my focus, my case, my mission in life. If he doesn’t come to me, then I will go to him.
The bartender’s playing one trance anthem after another, the rapid pulse insinuating itself into my leg, which doesn’t seem to know the difference between superficial and serious wounds, judging by the throb no quantity of prescription tablets seems to dissolve. No sign tonight of the waitress Marta, sparing me any potential drama. There’s only so much I can take in the space of a single day.
All the televisions overhead are showing silent baseball highlights, except for the small flat-screen just over the bar, where the close- captioned news is running. My eye, drawn to the screen, anticipates the familiar images of Hannah Mayhew, her Ford Focus, the seventies Greenwood Forest mock-Tudor she and her mother call home. Or a clip from one of the local interviews Donna Mayhew finally submitted to – not Larry King, not yet, but she’s finally doing her duty to the public, to all those strangers out there acting, as Carter Robb said, in loco parentis, at least as far as the grieving is concerned.
But they don’t appear. Instead, the usual montage of men in dark suits lit by camera flashes making carefully worded statements to the press, interspersed with the occasional defendant trying to shield his face from the lens as he’s hustled up the courthouse steps. Maybe people have grown tired of Hannah, or at least need a break.
I think about her mother, remembering clenched hands over the crinkly, highlighted pages of her Bible. The physical manifestation of her hopes. Then I ponder my own recently dashed hope, the link between her daughter and the girl tied to Octavio Morales’s bed. Given the nature of my work, it’s not the first time my hopes have run perversely counter to the dictates of human decency. Donna Mayhew wants more than anything to see a living, breathing girl walk through the door – a miracle, more or less, under the circumstances – while I wanted nothing less than to establish Hannah’s death, to match her up to the unknown woman who suffered and probably died in our West Bellfort kill house.
She wants her daughter back, and what I wanted was essentially to take Hannah from her. To make her fit into my rubric, the missing puzzle piece. In that sense I’m no better than the rubbernecking voyeurs tuning in for the latest Hannah updates. Probably worse.
“You of all people” – that’s what Ann said at the dinner table. The words take on a special potency, imposing themselves like a mantra onto the haze of music, the noise of the people all around. You of all people, she’d said, as if they – the powers that be – ought to know better than to put me, me of all people, in a spot like this.
Me of all people. They should know better. Or maybe I should know better.
The sudden buzzing in my leg, which I first interpret as an alarming new symptom of the gunshot wound, turns out to be my ringing phone. Even next to my ear I can barely hear it, so I tell the caller to hold on, flick a couple of bills on the table, and head outside.
“Thomson?” I ask.
The caller fumbles his words. “Is this Roland March?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, good, I thought I got the wrong number there for a second. Hey, Roland, it’s just me. I heard about what happened today, man, and I just wanted to check you were all right.”
I struggle to place the voice, then it comes to me. Brad Templeton. I haven’t heard from him in more than a year, not since he realized my string of special assignments weren’t going to yield new book ideas.
“Brad,” I say, “it was nothing.”
“Getting shot is not nothing.”
Standing outside the Paragon weighing the relative seriousness of gunshot wounds is not my idea of a good time.
“You’ve caught me at an awkward moment,” I tell him. “But I appreciate the concern.”
“Listen, I was wondering… they’ll have you riding the desk now, right? Taking a few days off? It’s just, I was kind of hoping you and me could have a talk about this thing you’ve been working on, the Hannah Mayhew case.”
“Why, are you planning to write another book?”
“The thought had occurred to me. So when I heard what happened today, then found out you’d been assigned to the task force, it seemed like a natural – ”
“The thing is, I’ve spent the last five years living down The Kingwood Killing. Not to mention I haven’t exactly solved this thing. As far as Hannah Mayhew is concerned, there may never be a solution, though don’t quote me on that.”
“I hear you, but look… could we at least talk? There is some interest in this thing. I’ve already spoken to my editor about it, and her ears definitely perked up.”
It’s hard to say no to Brad, mainly because of the relationship that developed during the book research. He was part of the family for a while, back when there was a gap to be filled, awkward silences that needed exactly his brand of unselfconscious banter to alleviate the strain. Even the things I take issue with in his book resulted from a kind of hero worship that, at the moment I was its focus, was profoundly gratifying. He’d reacted to our time together the way reflexively leftist journalists in the Iraqi desert responded to being embedded with troops, sloughing off whatever preconceived notions he’d had about law enforcement – and as a result “holding his manhood cheap,” a quote from Shakespeare he kept repeating until I asked him please not to anymore.
I had no idea what the result of that idolization would look like on the page. The Roland March who dominates The Kingwood Killing goes through all the usual routines, but they’re described as if he invented them personally, and had mastered every one. Especially the one chapter, which I’ve never been able to reread, in which the intrepid March, cruising at high speed along the Atchafalaya River Basin, induces the confession of wife-murderer Donald Fauk, using his own tears of grief as a pry bar into the killer’s soul. Distorted by his awe, Brad got all the details right, and at the same time utterly wrong.
“Look,” he says, probing my long silence for an opening. “I know you had mixed feelings about the book. I can respect that. But let’s at least talk, all right? For old times’ sake, if nothing else?”
“This isn’t the right moment.”
“Sure, I understand. I just wanted to see if you were okay. But maybe tomorrow I could give you a call? I could swing by your place, or maybe we could meet up for coffee…?”
Maybe I’m just getting rid of him, or maybe I really will answer his call tomorrow and meet him somewhere. Right now, I really don’t know. I just want to get him off the phone. So I say fine, give me a ring, I’ll look forward to it, then hang up before he has a chance to form an opinion one way or another on my sincerity.
The biggest issue is Thomson, who hasn’t put in an appearance. I don’t know where the man lives, and even if I did, I’ve already done enough on that front. He’ll make contact when he’s ready, and so long as he doesn’t wait too long, I can be patient. At least that’s what I’m telling myself. We’ll see whether it turns out to be true. In the meantime, a thought occurs to me, a little visit I need to make, paid best at the dead of night.
In addition to the nice boat Wilcox told me about, which must be housed on the water somewhere since I see no signs of it now, Tony Salazar owns a quaint mid-century ranch house in Bellaire, with a close-cropped yard edged in solar-powered night-lights. Behind the picture window, a silver arc lamp illuminates a small swath of interior space, a tulip table and some glowing plastic chairs, everything precisely arranged as if for a photo shoot.
From my position down the street, the more telling details are only visible through my field glasses. Motion-sensitive area lights. Discreet video cameras mounted under the roof on one end of the house and the carport on the other. The fastidious little show house is not exactly a fortress, but Salazar has taken the usual precautions to ensure any guests, though uninvited, can never arrive unexpected.
“Is this really such a good idea?” Cavallo asks.
“You keep saying that. It’s almost like you don’t trust me.”
“Bingo.”
She didn’t appreciate the one o’clock wake-up call. But after some coaxing she emerged from her apartment complex near Alabama and Kirby, dressed head to toe in black and gray, like she couldn’t see a way for the evening to end apart from breaking and entering.
Wilcox, equally unimpressed by the late hour, nevertheless coughed up the necessary information. In addition to the address, he volunteered the fact that Salazar lived alone, had paid cash for extensive remodeling to his pad, and owned a restored Chevy Corvair – presumably the tarp-draped form under the carport – and an extended-cab Ford pickup, of which there is currently no sign. I didn’t ask Wilcox why he had these details handy, and he didn’t ask why I wanted them.
“So the plan is what?” Cavallo asks. “To knock on his front door and punch him in the nose?”
“No, Detective. I’m guessing from the absence of light inside and the empty stall under the carport that nobody’s home.”
“People turn off the lights when they go to bed,” she says. “You’d know that if you ever gave it a try.”
“You’re welcome to knock on the door if you want.”
The fact is, I don’t have a plan. I just want to see where the man lives, and to let him know that I know. I’ve already played the voicemail from Salazar to Cavallo. He must have left it while I was still at the hospital, though I didn’t think to check until I left the Paragon, already determined to reach out and touch him.
“I heard what happened, man, and I just wanted you to know, whoever this dude was you met with, he was no informant of mine. In case you’re thinking I might know him or something. Yeah, I know I said I’d help you out and all, but after you left… I don’t know, it just kinda slipped my mind. So I never even… Well, anyway, I hope you’re doing okay, man. You can call me if you need to, but… Anyway.”
Funny thing is, if he hadn’t called, I might have given him the benefit of the doubt. As bad as it looked, as much as it looked like a setup, me getting a call from a would-be informant the day after I request an assist from Salazar, coincidences do happen. But for him to phone in with an alibi first thing, covering himself in case I shot my mouth off, all that does is solidify my suspicion. Wilcox tipped me that the guy was dirty. I should have believed him.
“With guys like this,” I can hear myself telling Cavallo, “you can’t let things go unanswered. You have to look them in the eye, let them know that you know.”
“Is that really smart?”
“Maybe not, but you still have to do it. They have to realize that coming after you is gonna cost them something.”
She processes the information, nodding slowly. “So what’s this going to cost Salazar? You can’t beat him down if he’s not at home.”
“I’m not so sure I could beat him down if he was. He’s built like a welterweight and looks like he can take a few punches. And anyway, when a man tries to have you killed, you don’t put up your dukes and slug it out. This problem requires some lateral thinking.”
I lift the field glasses again. They’re nothing fancy – my budget doesn’t stretch to night-vision gear – just a pair of beat-up binoculars I keep in my scene bag just in case. Looking the property over, I run a few scenarios through my head. That picture window is crying out for a rock through the center, but minor vandalism won’t make my point. Something major would. He’s bound to have a grill out back, some accelerants handy, and I’ll bet his house, having been built in the heyday, is chock-full of asbestos. The idea of Salazar coming home to a bonfire. That starts to feel like retributive justice.
“Just so you know,” Cavallo says, “I’m not going to sit here and be a party to anything illegal. If that’s what you’re thinking, you don’t know me too well.”
“The man did try to have me killed. An eye for an eye, doesn’t the Bible say something like that?”
Her smirk, glimpsed in the golden streetlight, mingles frustration and amusement. “Well, if you want me to hold him down while you put a round through his leg, okay. But I draw the line at damage to property.”
I consider this. “Maybe he has a cherished pet in there.”
“March.”
I hand her the binoculars. “Any ideas?”
She studies the scene awhile, then lowers the glasses. Her head cocks slightly. “You know, if Hannah were here, I think I know what she’d do.”
“Or her friend,” I say, cracking a smile.
The nice thing about being a cop for so long – or, depending on your perspective, the unfortunate, morally dubious, unconscionable thing – is that not only do you get to meet the worst sort of people but some of them end up being, if not friends, at least fond acquaintances. If Salazar can send a couple of gangbangers out with instructions to punch my ticket, I have to know somebody who could even the score up a little.
“I’ll bet that car over there means a lot to him,” I say.
“Well, I was joking about smashing up the car.”
“There’s a guy I know…”
“March, really. I’m not going to sit here and be a party to anything – ”
“Why’d you come if you’re not going to help?”
“I am here to help, to help prevent you from doing something stupid. If you really think Salazar tried to put a hit out on you, then a little property damage isn’t going to make any difference. You have to report it, that’s all you can do. This isn’t some macho high school testosterone contest. It’s serious.”
“So I do nothing? I don’t think I can just do nothing.”
“Here’s what you do,” she says, turning in her seat. “Look at me, March. This is the plan. If you want to get him, then wait for those test results, and if they link Hannah to that house – ”
I open the door, easing my leg out. “I already have the results.”
“And?” She rattles her hands in the air, like she’s shaking a tightlipped kid. “And?”
“And nothing.” I step outside, pushing the door shut.
Cavallo jumps out after me, rounding the hood, and we stomp off in the general direction of Salazar’s house. Moving down the sidewalk, we set off one motion detector after another, lighting our way in stages.
“Whatever you’re thinking of doing, it won’t solve anything,” she says. “I understand now. This is your anger talking. You wanted there to be a connection and there isn’t. But taking it out on a house or a car, that’s not the way to cope. You’ll make trouble for yourself, and it won’t help anyone.”
“It’ll help me.”
“Will it really? March, look at me. Will it really help?”
She grabs my arm and pulls. I could twist free. I could whip my arm away and start running – limping, anyway – but I know she’s right about this.
“I want to hurt him,” I say. “I want to hurt them all.”
She stares at me, breathing hard, moving her hand in a calming but tentative way, as if she’s working herself up to touch something that might scald.
“Let’s get out of here,” she says.
“Not yet.”
I walk up the driveway, bending over to catch the bottom of the tarp, pulling it free to reveal a shiny patch of red metal. I hike the crackling fabric all the way to the windshield, then flick the wiper up.
“What are you doing?”
From my wallet I slip out a business card, tucking it under the wiper. Then I slide the tarp back in place, giving the hood a tap. I pause to eyeball the video camera. I don’t know whether the feed goes to tape, but if it does, I want there to be no mistake.
After dropping Cavallo off, I head home, pulling up the driveway at a little past three. On the way to the back door, my foot hits something round and glassy, sending it spinning across the concrete. A beer bottle by the sound. I glance up at the garage apartment entrance, but there’s no crack of light under the door.
Charlotte’s asleep in bed, the covers pooled at her knees as if, feeling warm, she’s unconsciously kicked them down. I undress quietly and slip beside her. Overhead, the fan turns, lulling me to sleep.
I dream about Hannah Mayhew. She’s younger than her picture, a little girl, walking around our kitchen like she owns the place. Charlotte pours a glass of milk, makes her sit at the breakfast table, ruffling her hair with exaggerated tenderness. I pause in the doorway, frozen by the pretty scene.
“You’re here,” I say. They both look up at me in surprise. “They told me… never mind what they told me.”
And she gets up, bouncing toward me, bare feet slapping the tile. “What did they tell you about me, Daddy? What did they say?”
The phone starts ringing. I open my eyes. The nightstand clock says four hours have passed and there’s a faint brightness behind the closed window shades. I reach for the sound, miss, then try again. I can’t quite find the handset. The next ring prompts Charlotte to vault over me, elbow digging into my side. She grabs the phone and presses it into my hand before remembering my injuries.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
I push a bunch of buttons but with no effect, then open my eyes wider to locate the right one. Is this Templeton calling at this hour? If so, I’ll wring his neck. On the other end of the line, though, a serious-sounding Captain Hedges starts asking questions about my fitness.
“You looked all right yesterday, all things considered.”
“I’m fine, sir.”
“The thing is, something’s come up. I know I shouldn’t be doing this, and you’re entitled to a little time after what happened yesterday – not to mention the strings I’d have to pull to get you cleared for work this soon. But under the circumstances, and knowing how the task force assignment wasn’t what you wanted… I know you’re looking for a way back into the squad, so – ”
“Yes,” I say, sitting up straight. “Whatever it is, yes.”
“You haven’t even heard what I’d like you to do.”
“I don’t need to, sir. I want back in.”
“It’s not exactly what you’re looking for,” he says. “I know you’re tired of these peripheral assignments, but – ”
How much clearer can I be? “I’ll do it, sir.”
He exhales long and hard, either relieved or despondent, I can’t tell which. “Before you say yes, I need you to know it’s a suicide, March.”
“Ah.”
“I know you don’t like the nickname, and I can’t argue with you that the assignment was originally not, well, not very complimentary. But if you’re serious about getting back in…”
“I am serious. And no I don’t like the name, but I realize somebody’s got to do it. We owe something to our people, even when they…”
My voice trails off. When somebody takes a shot at one of us, like what happened yesterday, it doesn’t matter if you like the guy or not, if you think he’s a solid officer or a lightweight, crooked or straight.
When they come after one of us, they come after us all. We hit back quick, and we hit back hard. Because that kind of thing, it could happen to any of us.
When one of us tops himself, though, when a sworn officer sticks a service piece under his chin and lets off a live round, then suddenly we’re all tongue-tied and bashful. It has to be handled, and as with the other, quick and hard is the only way. But woe to the detective who pulls the duty. He’ll get no sympathy or slack. Because this kind of thing, we have to believe, it could never happen to us. We could never sink so low as to eat a bullet. Nobody wants to get close to that.
So it falls to one man, typically the lowest, which over the past few years, ever since I fell off the captain’s good books, has been me. Roland March, the suicide cop. If you wear a badge in the city of Houston and decide to put a gun to your head, the first face you’d see, assuming you could ever open your eyes again, would be mine.
I ease my legs onto the floor, running my hand over the now-familiar bandage. My holstered pistol sits inside the half-open nightstand drawer.
“Where do you need me?” I ask.
“Good,” he says. “Thanks. I really mean it. The body’s in a truck parked over on Wayside, close to where it crosses Harrisburg.”
“Near Buffalo Bayou?”
“Sort of. There’s a bunch of warehouses. Looks like he just pulled over to the side of the road and did it right there. There happens to be a fairly decent golf course not far down the road – I don’t know if you play, but…”
I’m not sure what to say to that, so I don’t say a word.
“I could send a car by for you, if that would be easier.”
“No, just give me the address and I’ll find it.”
I jot down the specifics on the pad next to the phone stand, then go over the obvious details. Patrol has already sealed off the road, redirecting traffic, and the crime scene unit is en route. Even an obvious suicide gets the full treatment. This one sounds pretty straightforward. Officers on the scene say gunshot wound to the head, he’s holding what appears to be his duty weapon, empty bottles kicking around in the foot well.
“All right,” I tell him. “I’m on my way. Just one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Who is it? Anybody I know?”
It never has been. I’ve shepherded half a dozen of these things through the process, never anybody I’d worked with or even knew by sight. We’re a big department, so there’s nothing strange in that.
“You might know this guy,” Hedges says. “A narcotics detective, or used to be. Guy by the name of Joseph Thomson – ring any bells?”
“Joe Thomson?”
A pause. “So you did know him. I’m sorry to hear that. Does it change anything?” He listens for an answer, but on my end nothing comes. “March?”
“I’ll handle it, sir. This one’s mine.”