Believe No One (6 page)

Lambert Woods Mobile Home Park, Williams County, Oklahoma

Seven-fifteen in the morning and Jake Owen was singing ‘Summer Jam' on Cougar-108. The red-headed boy cranked up the volume on his old Sony pocket radio and dreamed of the coming vacation. Momma's new boyfriend was home for a few days; they were making noises in her bedroom, and he cranked it up all the way so he could fix himself a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich at the kitchen counter without barfing. It was hot and getting hotter, but there was pop in the fridge and he knew a cool spot in the woods.

Their trailer was jacked up at one end on account of the slope, so he felt the vibrations of her footsteps through the floor seconds before his momma slammed the bedroom door open. The boy snagged a Coke and stuffed it in his schoolbag without turning around.

‘Turn down the goddamn noise,' she yelled.

‘I will if you will.'

‘What in the
hell
do you mean by that?' She took a step into the kitchen. ‘You're too damn young for that kind of talk.'

Experience had taught him that Momma was apt to throw things when she was mad – and cracks in the grey plastic casing were witness to the fact his ancient pocket radio did not bounce well – so he swept that into the bag alongside his Coke and scooped up his sandwich with his free hand.

Then he turned, gave her the dead eye. ‘Not too young to listen to you and him going at it, though, huh?'

She lunged, but the boyfriend appeared in the doorway and snapped her back like a dog on a chain. ‘C'mon, honey,' he said, scratching his butt lazily, still holding onto her skinny wrist. ‘Boy's got a point.'

The big redneck had a knack for making the boy feel he was in the wrong by saying he was right.

‘“Boy's” going out,' he told his momma, imitating the man's voice. ‘You and mullet-head can make all the noise you want.'

‘You better show some goddamn respect,' she yelled. ‘He's got a name.'

‘They all do, Momma,' the boy said. ‘They just never stay long enough for it to stick.' He tapped the side of his head.

‘Oh, I don't mind.' Boyfriend number fifty-kazillion dropped Momma's hand and combed the fingers of both hands through the longer hair at his neck. ‘I
am
a mullet-head: all business at the front and party at the back.'

His brow creased and the boy could see the dumb redneck's brain cogs working, going over what he'd just said.

‘Going
out
?' he said. ‘Now, son, you know it's a school day …'

‘It is,' the boy said, thinking,
I ain't your goddamn son.
‘Which is why I'm headed out to the bus.'

‘You know I will check on you?'

‘I do.'
And who made you my truant officer?

‘Because your momma got a call from the school last time you didn't show up, and we do not need that kind of hassle.'

‘I
know
,' he said, feeling hot behind the eyes.

‘Well, that's just fine.' He smiled, relaxing. ‘Did you eat breakfast, Red?' Like he was his dad or something, like he even cared.

The boy held up the sandwich and headed out the door. The boyfriend whispered something, Momma giggled and they tumbled back into the bedroom before the boy even slammed the back door shut.

Red was nine years old; he could not remember living anywhere else in his life except trailer parks, nor his momma ever being without a man. ‘Woman needs a man to look after her,' she would say. But looking after usually meant taking what they could get, and they always ended up using their fists on her and him both. The one good thing was they never stayed long. Except for this one – he broke two records in one, sticking around at a hair under six months without ever raising a finger to either of them. Momma liked him 'cos of that, and because a month ago, he moved them out of that shitty trailer they rented in Avant, Osage County, and found them this nice two-bedroom home in Williams County. He bought her things and they always had enough food – sometimes he even took them to the McDonald's in Hays, which maybe should have been enough to make the boy like him, too. The boy had his own room and a roof over him didn't leak when it rained, both of which he liked. As a bonus, the boyfriend was away a lot, so it was mostly peaceful. Red liked the country and the quiet, shady lot where the trailer was parked, but he did not like losing his old friends. Momma and her new man also made the boy go to school, which no one ever did before, and the boy did not like that one bit.

The kids in his new school were mostly from Durell, a suburb of Hays, which Momma said was ‘up-and-coming'. They called him ‘Trailer Trash' and ‘Welfare': ‘Hey, Trailer Trash, where d'you think you're goin'?' and ‘You better sit up front by the door, Welfare, so you don't stink up the bus.' He'd got into more than one fist fight on the schoolyard, and mostly they left him alone now, but it was tiresome, and when the school called to say he'd skipped out, the boyfriend got good and mad.

The new man said, ‘Call me Will,' which he never had. In turn, the boy got called ‘Red', which he liked, and ‘Son', which he did not. And that more or less summed up how he felt about Momma's mullet-headed boyfriend – kind of twisted up inside, so he didn't know how to feel.

Red stared into the solid green of the woods and wished he could go there, but the boyfriend was a man of his word – he would nag Momma to call the school to find out if he had made roll-call. So he shrugged and sighed, turning his back on the woods, and trod the twenty yards along the rutted track, feeling the sun on his head, where it shone through the leaves of the oaks. At the end of the track a concrete access road had been laid for the main park: fifty mobile homes on a cleared section of land that looked down all the way to the crappy two-lane blacktop into town. He should've taken the road, being the quickest way – he could see a few other kids waiting for the bus in the lay-by – but he liked to walk through the park, look at the people.

He passed the man with new modular-type home who most days sat in a rocking chair on his porch with a 92FS Beretta at his hip and a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver in his lap. A few yards in, a lady was hanging out washing. He smiled at her and she scowled, said, ‘Move on.' He grinned wider, said a jaunty, ‘Good morning!' just to piss her off. Two homes down the slope a fat man in a Metallica T-shirt sat drinking beer next to a Fat Boy Harley. The legs of his plastic chair splayed out like a whitetail fawn just finding its feet. The boy walked on, chewing on his sandwich, watching the guy out the corner of his eye – he had been known to pitch an empty can at the back of a person's head, and that man could throw like Steven Okert of the Sooners.

Off to his left, a trailer boomed out Chicano rap. The boy could feel the bass rhythm in his chest. Over the racket he could hear the hard machine-gun rattle of voices: a man and woman arguing in Mexican. He turned his head to look, but whipped back, catching a movement to his right – a flash of brown and white rushed at him from under a trailer. He jumped back and the dog's claws got him in the side. It came up short on its chain, a mean-looking pit bull, slavering and drooling, its eyes wild with rage. He heard the fat man's laughter at his back. The boy lifted his T-shirt to check for damage: the claws had raked three red scratches across his bony ribcage. Suddenly he was furious.

Glaring at the dog, he scuffed a stone that stood proud of the mud by the side of the concrete pavement, digging heel and toe, working it out of the baked dry mud. He picked up the stone and took a bead on the dog, which by now was rattling the whole trailer, spit and froth flying out its mouth as it lunged and strained on its chain. Before he could let fly, the door opened and a bearded guy with a bald head stood watching him. He was six foot four and about three feet across. After a second or two, he squeezed sideways out the door and came down the steps and kicked the dog, which yelped and then lay down quiet.

‘You sure you wanna do that, kid?' the man said.

‘He went for me,' the boy said, his blood still up.

‘He's on a chain.'

‘He still got me.'

‘I don't see blood.'

‘So what if there's no blood – he fucking went for me.'

The bald man's eyes widened. ‘Now don't you cuss me out, you ginger bag of bones. You don't have no call to walk through here – you should stay on the road. Now you can get going, or I can let this dog off his chain, see whicha you can run fastest.'

The boy's chest went up and down, up and down. He wanted to kill that goddamn piece of crap dog. His hand closed over the rock, and the man bent to the dog's collar.

The boy dropped the rock and spun, running, kicking up dust, flying past the trailers and beat-up cars, knocking over chairs, setting up a racket of shouting and barking in his wake. He heard – or imagined he could hear – the pit bull panting and growling, getting madder and madder and closer and closer as it tripped and dodged and worked its way around the obstacles. He kept running, made it to the park fence and climbed it, falling down the other side, praying the dog was not so agile he could follow after. Trembling and sweating and panting, holding onto a fence rail to keep from falling down, the boy stared wide-eyed as the pit bull, frustrated to have been outrun, went for a mastiff tied to a trailer nearby. It took the beast by the hindquarters while it screamed and howled, squirming right and left, trying to grab the pit bull by the neck.

Two Hispanic men piled out of the mastiff's trailer swinging baseball bats.

Blood, spit and fur flew and the other kids gathered round for the show. The pit bull finally let go, but the men kept whaling on it. The bald man lumbered slowly towards the two men, who kept on beating and kicking the pit bull. He grabbed the bat out of the hand of one of them, felled him with a headbutt, whacked the other one with the bat, catching him across the temple as he turned to see what had happened to his friend. He bent, lifting his dog by the collar, then hoisting him up in his arms. The animal's head lolled and the mastiff, still on its chain, made a feint towards them. The man bared his teeth and the dog backed off.

He shifted his weight, rearranging the unconscious pit bull's limbs and turned to the knot of kids at the fence. Red tried to worm his way to the back, but the other kids pressed forward.

Someone said, ‘Oh-oh.'

The bald man stared hard at Red. Didn't say a word – didn't need to – the look on his face said he knew exactly who to blame for his dog's injuries, and he was not the kind of man to forgive and forget.

Method Exchange Team Headquarters, St Louis, Missouri

The lab found a small amount of blood between the skirting board and the wall of Elleesha Tate's apartment. It gave them a full DNA profile of a drifter named Jordan Driver. It didn't take them long to track him down: he was in Cook County Jail, Chicago, awaiting trial on charges of sexual assault and battery on a seventeen-year-old girl.

Jordan Driver was five foot four, scrawny. ‘Just smart enough to know better than to pick a fair fight with someone who can hit back,' Detective Keith Valance said. ‘First words out of his mouth? “I did it”. He chose death row in Missouri over fifteen to twenty in Cook County jail – how about that?'

Detective Ellis said, ‘Can't say I blame him.'

Simms looked to Detective Dunlap for an explanation. ‘Cook County has quite the reputation,' he said.

Valance would collate the evidence and compile the police report; for the rest, it was back to the selection process.

Simms had been working through case files since eight thirty that morning. She was in shirtsleeves, a tall pile of documents on her left, a smaller pile on her right, in the conference room at Brentwood Police Department. The building was a single storey on an industrial estate about eight miles from the centre of St Louis. The small, obscured-glass windows gave little natural light and the low hum of the air conditioning sounded like a child blowing over the open mouth of a milk bottle. Occasionally, someone would shuffle paperwork or she would hear the creak of upholstery as one of her colleagues adjusted their posture or reached for a new file. The glass-fronted room had been allocated to the Method Exchange Team by the department's police chief; it was theirs for the duration.

‘Has anyone else picked up on Fallon Kestler?'

‘Picked up on?' Detective Ellis said. ‘I swear, you Brits talk a foreign language.'

‘Does anyone else feel we should look into it further,' Simms said, with a twitch of her eyebrows.

They were looking at a selection of thirty cases – cold and recent. Working through the list that turned up Elleesha Tate, there had been a lot of negative comparisons between UK and US protocols, but now they were beginning to work as a team, trying to identify best practice with no regard for where it originated.

‘Mother and child,' Simms said. ‘Found dead three and a half years ago, in a marshy tract off I-44—'

‘A
what
tract?' Ellis again.

Ellis could be very grumpy about English as spoken by the English.

‘For simplicity, let's just call it a bog,' she said.

‘I'll just call it a swamp, you don't mind.' Working as a team did not always mean complete harmony. Detective Ellis checked back through his notes. ‘We're grading the cases same way as before, right?' he said.

‘We are,' she said dryly.

‘Okay, let's see … You got water, a long time from dump to discovery, unreliable witnesses …' He glanced up. ‘This one's dead in the water.' From the look on his face he hadn't intended the pun.

‘A child was murdered – surely that would make it a public-interest crime?' Simms argued.

‘You're learning,' Ellis said. ‘But it was investigated, and they got zip.' He ticked off a few more negatives on the fingers of one hand. ‘We got no primary scene, no physical evidence, no suspects, no family looking for justice …'