City of the Sun (3 page)

“He was doing fine. Really well,” the teacher says slowly, and gives a pained smile, as if to invest the empty words with hidden meaning. “A few problems with fractions, nothing out of the ordinary. I wish there was something more.” Preston’s face searches hers.

Carol realizes how young the teacher is and that she is shattered, too. She feels she should try to comfort the woman, but how? “Can I get those things out of his locker?”

The teacher nods.

What passes for lawn in front of the seedy house is purple gray with Thursday-morning frost. Tad sits behind the wheel of a van, an aging Econoline with covered rear windows, listening to wacky morning radio. He’s been keeping his distance from Rooster, who’s up on the porch walking back and forth and smoking a cigarette.

An immaculate black Cutlass Supreme with smoked windows and custom t-top rolls up to the house. Out steps a stout man in a slightly shiny, several-hundred-dollar suit. He wears gold and sunglasses and has a bald head. He’s Oscar Riggi. He’s the man.

Rooster stops pacing.

Tad jumps out of the van and crosses through a cloud of Econoline exhaust. “Mr. Riggi, how you doin’?”

Tad kisses ass, but Rooster doesn’t go for that. He knows he’s not so easily replaced.

“Rooster. Tad. How are things? How’s our package?”

“Everything’s all fine and loaded, sir,” Tad answers, looking involuntarily at the van and thinking instinctively of the carpet-lined cut in the floor. He pats the van’s side.

Riggi looks through Tad as if
he’s
an exhaust cloud. “Things went well, I trust, huh, Rooster?”

“Yeah, you can trust, Captain.” Rooster flicks his cigarette butt in Tad’s direction. Not at him, but in his direction. It’s just far enough off so that Tad can’t say anything.

Riggi climbs the few steps up to the porch and flips Rooster a fairly thick roll of small and medium bills rubberbanded together. Rooster thumbs it nonchalantly and tucks it away. Riggi cuffs him behind the head, not without affection.

“Hey, I can count on you, huh?”

“That’s right, Oscar.”

Tad comes up to join them, much larger than both men, yet feeble and intimidated in their presence. Without taking his eyes off Rooster, Riggi reaches into his jacket pocket and produces a packet of papers that he hands to Tad.

“There’s the address of the other pickup. Instructions on what roads to take. Your destination is in there, too. Memorize it, write it in code, whatever, then destroy it. There’s travel money in there also.”

Tad stays with it, endeavors to look keen, on top of things. “Okay, okay.”

“Call me every eight hours regardless of where you are. Got it? I want my phone ringing every eight hours.”

“Got it.”

“Where you gonna call me?”

“Wherever I’m at, eight hours.”

Riggi gives a pinched smile, like he’s tasting bad jelly. “You get the rest of your money when you’re back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Riggi nods and turns to him. “You’re still here?”

Tad hustles into the van and drives off. Riggi turns back to Rooster. “You have breakfast yet?”

PAUL GABRIEL POURS
a second bowl of cereal. He reaches in and fishes out the prize. It’s a rubber astronaut that dropped in water grows to eight and a half times its original size. He puts it with the rest of the prizes he’s been saving for his son. There are more than a dozen now. Paul rubs a circle at his temple with his fingertips. He’s graying there. He’s pale. Tired looking, too.

Paul lowers his spoon. “Carol? Carol? Are you ready? We should get going.” A moment later she enters the kitchen. Her outfit doesn’t do much for her. No makeup; dark circles under her eyes. She crosses the kitchen, which is looking shabby. She pushes a sponge around the countertop and tosses it into a sink full of dishes. Carol stands next to Paul as he changes his mind about the cereal and pours it in the garbage. He has the sensation that he sees the two of them there, as if from above. They look shitty together, the house looks shitty, everything is shitty.

“Okay, let’s go.” He sweeps up his keys. She takes a thin folder with Jamie’s picture stapled to it, reports and forms protruding slightly from the bottom, and they leave.

The station bustles around them as the Gabriels sit stonelike on their bench outside of Captain Pomeroy’s office. Across the room the concerned patrolman who took their statement so long ago looks over at them. He snaps off the sad look and turns away guiltily. Paul and Carol sit inches apart, but it may as well be light-years. They dwell in private capsules now, each alone, unable to reach out for the other. The only thing they share now is great failure.

They can see Pomeroy in his office, feet up on his desk, conversing with a colleague. The colleague is not a cop, at least he wears no gun, and when he notices the time, he gets up. Pomeroy shows him to the door, and as it opens, his hearty laugh escapes into the waiting area. The Gabriels eye him accusatorily; they haven’t laughed like that in some time. Upon seeing the Gabriels, Pomeroy claps up.

“Okay, Jase, we’ll finish this later. Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel, how are you? Come on in, let’s review.”

They enter his office. Paul and Carol take seats and Pomeroy plunks himself down, wearily now, behind his desk, sighing deeply. “I tell you, things are not quiet around here. Never too quiet.”

He riffles through several manila folders and comes up with his copy of the file with a picture of Jamie Gabriel stapled to the cover. Pomeroy dons a pair of plastic-rimmed reading glasses and skims the case much like a merchant reviewing an account. His lips skip and mumble along with his eyes, his volume low. “Case estab’d Oct. 24 … Fourteen months … Last seen, night before … No evidence struggle. Area disappearance: Auburn Manor neighborhood, Wayne T’ship. Exact unknown. Listed: Miss Pers Bureau, Nat Cent of Missing and Exploited … Children of Night … Proj Shelter … Runaway Hotline … Angel Find … Cross-listed with State Police, Sheriff’s Dept., and Federal Bureau—”

“Do you have any new information? Anything?”

Pomeroy doesn’t acknowledge hearing the question and continues to scan for another moment. He pushes up his glasses and gives a finger massage to the bridge of his nose. “As you can see by your copy of the report, we haven’t been able to develop any hard leads yet.”

“What are you people doing about it currently?”

“I want to assure you, the case is still active. In these situations, missing youths, runaways …”

“He’s not a runaway.” Carol’s words come out weak, nearly exhausted. Only thin anger fuels them along. “Can’t you just understand that? All you’ve done is send his picture to shelters. He knows his way home if he had run away. But he can’t get home, because somebody took him. He’s been taken.” The last word still cuts through Paul like a dentist’s drill finding a nerve.

“We haven’t found evidence to suggest that. Neither has the Federal Bureau. Yes, it is a possibility. A probability. These things happen, but often these youths don’t want to be found.”

“Bullshit,” Paul says. He can’t believe he’s said it aloud to a policeman.

Pomeroy looks at him in surprise. Behind Carol’s pain-glazed eyes there is a stirring as she looks at her husband, a spark. She glimpses what she’s been missing for so long. But it fades too quickly.

“Look, Captain Pomeroy, I’m sorry. … I know you’ve been working on it, it’s just …” Paul runs out of what to say.

Pomeroy’s mouth spreads into a sickly crescent as his customary control drifts back across the desk to his side.

“I understand what you’re going through. We’re using best efforts to—” He is cut off by a female detective poking her head in.

“Scuse me, Captain, A-2 task force needs you to sign off on this watch so they can go home.”

Pomeroy leaps up, grateful for the interruption. “I’m sorry, folks, this will just take a minute.” He follows the detective out into the main squad room.

As he exits, Carol looks after him and then gets up and goes behind his desk. This makes Paul nervous.

“What are you doing?”

She opens Pomeroy’s file on Jamie and starts looking through it.

“Carol, honey, what if he sees you?”

“I don’t care. I want to know what they’re really doing.”

“Carol—”

She looks up, raw. “He’s our son. Do you remember him?”

He doesn’t respond to this, anger freezing his face.

Her head drops down as she reads the file. Then she looks up again. “Oh, god.”

“What is it?” he asks, glancing out to see if Pomeroy is on his way back.

She doesn’t answer, but as she reads her face contorts, as if she’s suffering deep internal bleeding.

“There’s some kind of man-hour log in his file. Work hasn’t been done on the case in weeks — weeks. Oh, god …” Her finger scans the page. The door swings open and Captain Pomeroy steps back into the office. Moving hurriedly behind his desk, he takes the file out of Carol’s hands.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Gabriel, but this is department property. And confidential.”

She holds up her own version of the Jamie file. “What the hell is this, then?” She slams it down on the desk. “A joke apparently—”

“That’s a copy of certain information that you requested, a request that we granted, although we didn’t have to. It’s not our policy to do so.”

Paul moves in his seat. He feels the weakness of his position. If this man harbors ill will against them, then nothing will be done. He attempts to defuse the situation.

“Car, you know we have to be patient. An investigation like this is difficult.”

“Exactly,” Pomeroy says, retaking his seat in a territorial manner. “You know that from your private efforts. And we know it because the FBI’s skunked, too.”

“Time? Time?” Carol shouts, starting to unravel. “There have been twenty-two and a half man-hours logged on the case, total. Not even two hours for every month he’s been gone.”

This stops Paul cold. “What?” he bleats.

Pomeroy looks embarrassed.

All the calculations start to add up for them: Jamie’s age when he disappeared. How old he would be now. How little time has been spent looking for him.

“Read it for yourself,” she croaks. Carol grabs the folder out of Pomeroy’s hands and flings it across the office to her husband.

Papers fill the air and then settle.

Pomeroy pulls himself up. “Mrs. Gabriel, you may not want to accept it, but there are other cases that this department is dealing with. Right now, for instance, I have—”

At this, Carol loses her composure and rushes out of the office, slamming the door loudly behind her and running through the squad room.

The men look at each other. Pomeroy shrugs.
If the guy didn’t have a gun on to show he was a cop, he couldn’t sell you on the idea
, Paul thinks.

Paul takes his copy of the Jamie file and exits after his wife.

Patrolman Carriero glanced up at the sound of the door slamming. His heavy brows knit in concern at the sight of a slight, bent woman rushing from Captain Pomeroy’s office. He recognized her but couldn’t grab her name. A moment later the husband came out. Tall guy. Worried looking. Gabriel. He’d taken their statement … a long damn time ago. Missing kid. He sat on their house the first night and remembered it was a nonevent, no ransom call, no nothing. He’d hoped, as he always did, that it’d turn out to be a medical. That the boy had fallen and hit his head, been knocked down by a car, or had taken ill and become disoriented. Then he’d turn up in an emergency room days, or even weeks, later and they’d unravel who he was and return him home. That was the best you could hope for, Carriero had learned in his seven years in uniform. He’d done an initial canvass and a followup that hadn’t yielded much, and then he’d been pulled off and put on a string of burglaries.

Carriero was feeling hollow-pitted in the stomach with shame. After the burglaries, he’d moved on to other cases without any further thought of the boy. That never would have happened during his first few years on the job. Now, he knew, the boy’s information rested frozen in the cold case file, only to be pulled out and warmed up when the parents made inquiries or visited. The best they could hope for was a body turning up and ending the waiting. He stood without thinking further and crossed the squad room. He caught the man just as he neared the door.

“Excuse me, Mr. Gabriel?”

“Yes?” The man stopped and regarded him. A low-wattage flicker of recognition came to his face. “Oh, yeah, how are you, Officer?”

“I took your statement a while back. Good while back. I’ve looked into your son’s case …”

“Yes?” A hunger leaped into Gabriel’s eyes. “Have you found out anything about it?”

Carriero chided himself for his careless phrasing. “No, I … I don’t know quite how to say it without seeming disloyal.” He stopped. He knew this wasn’t team play, not good for business, as they say, but he couldn’t help it.

The father looked at him pleadingly.

“There’s a man. He’s an investigator. I used to work with him. It can cost some money, but he’s … I don’t know what good it’ll do, but personal attention to this might be worth the cost.” He held out a worn business card. “He may not even be available,” the young patrolman continued, “but you never know.”

Paul felt himself deflate. He was hoping for some hard information, but a business card just didn’t help right now. His thought was to tell the officer about the two investigators they’d already tried, the sizable piece of their nest egg that they’d gladly spent but which had yielded only monthly meetings at a coffee shop as the investigators tried to pad their lack of results in thickly worded, laser-printed reports. Instead he just took the business card.

“Thanks. I better find my wife.” Paul pocketed the card and went off after her.

Carol sat, nearly catatonic, in the darkened living room. Night descended silently without her even noticing. The only light in the room flickered from the silent television. Her fragility was such that any disappointment at all had a gross weight and power.

The door opened and Paul walked in with Tater on a leash. He unclipped the dog, then walked over and switched off the television.