Believe No One (10 page)

The front door stood open, and Hicks could see all the way through the house and out the back door to a patch of green in the backyard. Hicks caught a movement in the shadows near the back door and raised her voice over the dog's frantic barking.

‘Mr Dawalt – sir – we need to talk with you.'

The shadow lurched down the hallway and, a moment later, Thomas Dawalt appeared. A rangy man with a pronounced beer belly, he wore a grey T-shirt, stained under the arms, bile-coloured pants and a couple of days' beard growth. He looked like he hadn't washed in a month.

Dawalt slouched against the front door frame, a sardonic look on his face, a sweating beer bottle held loose in one hand.

‘Help you, Officer?'

The animal worked itself into a frenzy at the sound of its master's voice. It leaped at Hicks, front paws outstretched, but its bark was choked off by the snap of the chain.

‘It's Deputy,' she said. ‘And yes, sir, you can call off your dog – that would be real helpful.'

Dawalt looked at the Adair County deputy; he hadn't moved or said a word, but his hand closed on the grip of his pistol and, after a moment, Dawalt shrugged, put the beer bottle to his lips and tipped his head back, swallowing the last of it. Then he straightened up and sent the empty bottle spinning through the air. It hit the dog square on the back of the skull. The dog yelped, tucked its tail between its legs and dropped flat on its belly.

‘Well c'mon,' Dawalt said, ‘he won't touch you.'

Hicks glanced at the deputy. He stuck his hands in his pockets, said, ‘Hell, no.'

She opened the gate slowly, alert for any sign of movement from the dog, but it stayed down, nervously licking its lips and eyeing the newcomers. As Hicks walked past, her heart thundering, the animal threw an uncertain look over its shoulder at Dawalt.

The roof of the house sagged and the paint had long ago peeled off the boards. A car was parked nose-in under the window. One pane of glass had been smashed and was covered with cardboard. On the porch, a pile of broken wood panels and planking had been stacked.

Dawalt checked her badge and ID, then gave her a long look over. ‘You lost, girly-girl?'

The feel of his mud-coloured eyes on her made her skin crawl, but she held his gaze. ‘Like I said, it's Deputy. And I'm here with the Sheriff's permission, sir,' she said, trying to be polite, even if he was an asshole, knowing that she was bringing him bad news.

Dawalt squinted past her to the Adair County deputy who had his right hand on his gun, his left hand holding the gate closed. ‘I guess he's watching your back then, huh?'

The deputy looked away, and Dawalt laughed.

‘What brings you all the way from Williams County, Deputy?' he said.

‘Your daughter, Laney,' she said, and watched for his reaction.

‘She don't live here no more,' he said, his eyes guarded.

‘No, sir.'

He waited, but Hicks wasn't about to talk about his daughter's murder on his front stoop. She raised her chin and looked him in the eye, and, finally, she could see his brain begin to work through the afternoon beer fuzz.

He sighed and turned back into the house. ‘You better come in.'

Hicks braced herself and walked into the dark house. The door to the front room was firmly shut; the bedroom, which she glanced into as they passed, a tumble of rancid bedclothes and black plastic bags. The house smelled of stale beer, takeouts, sweat and cat pee. Old food containers were stacked up in the kitchen – on the small yellow-top table, in the sink and in, on and all around the trashcan. There was no sign of a cat, but working at the hard end of rural policing for three years, Hicks knew the fishy reek of a methamphetamine addict – Dawalt must be sweating pure ammonia.

He kept on walking, out into the bright sunshine at the back of the house, where he lowered himself into an old camper chair in a tiny patch of shade and waved her to the lounger next to it. She set that to one side and rescued a plastic chair from the tumble of salvage and garbage on the lawn, placed it opposite him. He shrugged and reached into a cooler box next to his chair, took out two ice-cold bottles of Bud, offered one to her.

‘I'm good,' she said.

‘That may be.' His lips twitched. ‘But are you thirsty?'

She was, and the sun beating down on the back of her neck only made it worse, but she had a job to do, and tiptoeing around Laney Dawalt's drunk, meth-addicted daddy was not getting it done.

‘Sir,' she said, ‘I have some bad news.'

He took a pull of beer and looked at her, his eyes muddy. ‘She's dead, isn't she?'

‘Yes, sir.'

A pause, while he swallowed more beer.

‘You don't want to know how?' It was the first question most people asked.

‘Drugs, or suicide – take your pick,' he said. ‘She tried both.'

He sucked on his beer again and Hicks had to work real hard not to knock the damn bottle out of his hand.

‘She didn't “pick” this one, Mr Dawalt,' Hicks said. ‘Laney was murdered.'

The bottle clinked against his teeth and he spilled beer down his chin. He looked down at the new stain on his T-shirt, brushed at it as he said, ‘That girl made some bad choices. Living the way she did, was only a matter of time.'

‘Living the way she did …' Hicks looked around her and let the words hang.

He looked at her, his head loose on his neck, and she thought,
Don't piss him off – he'll just tell you to leave.
So she swallowed her anger and asked like she really wanted his opinion, ‘What kind of choices, sir?'

His brows drew down and his face darkened. ‘She run off.'

‘When was this?'

He waved his hand. ‘After the—' He seemed to check himself. ‘I don't know. A few years back. DHS took her and the boy away after that.'

The Department of Human Services. ‘Laney was in foster care?'

He looked at her as if to say,
So what?

‘Autopsy found she'd had a complete hysterectomy. The ME said internal scarring looked like she'd had a botched abortion.'

He shrugged.

‘You said the first time she ran away
after
something. Did you mean after the abortion?'

‘Yeah, it would be about then. Where'd you find her?'

‘Up in Williams County, in a farm pond.'

He sucked his teeth and sat shaking his head and nodding now and then, as if he was having a conversation with himself.

‘But before she went missing, Laney was living with a man on a trailer park just outside of Fairfield.'

Jerked out of his dark thoughts, he stared at her. Fairfield wasn't more than five miles from where he sat. ‘I thought you said you found her in Williams County.'

‘Yes, sir. But before she disappeared, she was living right here in Adair County.'

He snuffed, took a swallow of beer. ‘Figures.'

‘There was a boy with her, aged about nine years old.'

He nodded. ‘My son, Billy.'

‘She never made contact?'

‘What
d'you
think?' he snarled.

Hicks leaned forward. ‘I think it's odd that we've been talking five minutes and you didn't once ask about your son, Mr Dawalt,' she said softly.

He dropped his gaze and his chest heaved a couple of times, then he said, ‘Well, are you gonna tell me, or have you just come to torment me?'

‘We don't know what happened to him, sir.'

His eyes teared up suddenly and he tightened his grip on the beer bottle. After a few moments he wiped his nose with the heel of his hand and sat up in his chair, his eyes fixed on the bottle. She waited. Sometimes the best a law officer could do was just give a man time to talk.

‘We were a real family, once,' he said. ‘But after the cancer took my wife, I got sick – depressed. Billy was so like her, I couldn't bear to look at him, I just couldn't.'

It was the sort of sob story Hicks had heard many times: parents too doped up to give a damn, leaving older children to look after the younger ones.

‘So Laney took care of Billy,' she said.

Dawalt raised his head, fixing his muddy eyes on her, suddenly angry and self-justifying.

‘She was
fifteen
– old enough.'

Something in his words jarred, but Hicks was here to seek out clues to the boy's whereabouts, so she let it pass.

‘Sir, I need to know about Laney – friends she might confide in, she might've told someone about the man she was seeing.'

He snorted. ‘You think
I
would know?'

In truth, she didn't, but she had got nowhere talking to the residents up at the trailer park, and she was desperate. She tried a different angle.

‘Is there a place Billy might go if he was scared, somewhere he might hide?'

‘What're you
talking
about? It's
four years
since I saw that boy,' he said.

‘Maybe some place you would take him fishing when he was little, or—'

He cut her off with a wave of the hand. ‘I look like a fisherman to you?'

She wanted to say,
No sir, you look like a self-pitying doper.
But she didn't; she waited again, and hoped that he would say something that might help her to find his little boy. But it seemed Mr Dawalt was done talking. He jammed his empty bottle head down in the cooler and took out a fresh Bud, opening it with a bottle opener on his key ring.

He chugged down half the bottle before he came up for air.

‘Sir,' she said. ‘I'm just looking for leads.'

After another swallow of beer he seemed in a better frame of mind to talk.

‘That girl poisoned Billy and got him took away from me, and when she was done with foster care she went and took him for herself.'

‘And you haven't seen him since then?'

‘Have you been
listening
?' He was suddenly angry and irritable again.

Hicks decided to ask her next question before his mood turned entirely against her. ‘Do you have anything of Billy's in the house? Anything we might get DNA off of?'

His eyes teared up again. ‘You think he's dead.'

‘I don't know, sir – and I'm sorry to ask – but it would help us to find him if we had his DNA. There's a database for missing children; if I could get Billy's DNA on there—'

‘I can't help you.'

For a second, Hicks was too shocked to say anything. ‘Can't, or won't?'

‘Can't. I sold what was worth selling, burned the rest.'

She stared at him.

‘What else could I do with all that
stuff
?' he said, a hard, righteous look on his face. ‘Wasn't like he was coming back.'

She covered her mouth with her hand because the words bubbling up at the back of her throat would not help to find Billy.

‘Well, sir,' she said, when she had full control of herself, ‘if I could get a DNA swab from you – you being Billy's daddy and all – it would be the second-best thing.'

His face closed; all expression left it – the offended self-pity, the righteousness, even the suspicion, all gone. He was still, his eyes dull and hooded. Hicks recognized it as the look of a criminal in self-preservation mode.

‘Sir?' she said, hoping against all hope that she was wrong, that she had misread him. ‘It would only take a swab of your mouth – you wouldn't feel a thing.'

‘Oh, now, that would be an invasion of my privacy, Deputy,' he said.

‘Mr Dawalt,' she said carefully, ‘this would be what we call a Family Reference Sample; it will get compared to the Unidentified DNA on file and nothing else.'

‘So
you
say.'

‘Sir, I'm asking you to help find your son.'

‘If he's alive, he can tell you himself. He's dead …' Dawalt shrugged. ‘Well … it won't matter to him no more.'

She'd had all she could stomach. Deputy Hicks left Dawalt huddled in his chair in his festering backyard, sucking on a bottle of beer like it was a comforter.

The dog leapt to its feet as she walked out through the front door.

‘Stay down,' she commanded, and it dropped to the hot concrete.

The Adair County deputy eyed her with new respect; he held the gate for her, grinning. ‘That told him.'

The dog got to its feet and the deputy hastily closed the gate.

‘That animal has been chained up in the hot sun without water,' Hicks said. ‘Are you going to do something about it?'

‘Really? You want me to write Dawalt up on a code violation?'

‘Never mind,' she said. ‘I'll call the Humane Society myself – after we've dropped by the Department of Human Services. I want to know why those kids were taken into foster care.'

He looked at the house and back to her. ‘You need a social worker to tell you that?'

She flashed him a chilly smile. ‘You know what they say – the devil is in the detail.'

Method Exchange Team Headquarters,
St Louis, Missouri

‘Does this sound familiar?' Detective Dunlap said. ‘Mother and child vanish from home; mother found in water, child gone.'

Simms looked up from the file she was reading. ‘How old was the child?'

‘Eight years,' Dunlap said. ‘A boy.'

‘It sounds a lot like our swamp victim, Fallon Kestler,' she said. ‘Her little girl was nine.'

‘But they found the kid in the water with Fallon,' Detective Ellis said. ‘Like I said before, a body found in water means no DNA, added to which they had no primary scene, no witnesses, no suspects.' He spread his hands. ‘And do I need to point out she was a
girl
?'

Simms didn't respond, unwilling to let this one go, so she held out her hand and Dunlap passed her the file. ‘Just to satisfy my curiosity,' she said.