City of the Sun (8 page)

IT WAS JUST AFTER
4:00 when a gold Taurus pulled into the short driveway of 1 Tibbs. A squat man in a brown suit wrestled his briefcase from the passenger seat, climbed out of the car, and headed for his door.

Behr strode across the man’s patch of lawn, cutting him off before he had his key out.

“You Louis Cranepool?” Behr snarled. He reared up and used his size on the man. There were many tools of influence at the interrogator’s disposal when conducting an interview. Beatings and chemicals were the most severe, and usually illegal, though chummy manipulation yielded nearly as much in Behr’s estimation. Chances were this guy had nothing to do with anything, but Behr had only this one time to make a first impression. He decided to try to rattle him, to see if anything shook loose.

“I am.” Cranepool swallowed, taking in the huge man standing between him and his door. “What do you want?”

“You know what I’m here about.” Behr let the words settle. “Jamie Gabriel.” If the name
did
mean anything to Cranepool, then Behr never wanted to sit across a poker table from him. “Your paperboy.”

Cranepool narrowed his eyes in thought. “The one who used to deliver here? Kid who went missing?”

“That’s right.” Behr nodded, beginning to modulate his intimidation, already leaning toward the belief that Cranepool wasn’t involved. Behr shifted into a more neutral policelike tone, hoping for at least a piece of information. “The date was October twenty-fourth last year. I’m assuming you told the police everything you know about it, which was nothing, yes?”

“Uh-huh,” Cranepool said, his fear abating, but only slightly.

“Do you recall if you got your paper on the morning of the twenty-fourth?”

“I did.” Cranepool answered too quickly. “I didn’t mention that to the police. I didn’t think to and they didn’t ask.”

“It was a long time ago. You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.” Cranepool nodded.

“How?”

“I trade my own portfolio and I check the stock page every night. I missed the paper the next day and had to buy it at the gas station for two days running while they replaced deliverymen.”

Behr involuntarily glanced toward the street. “Now I’m on the Internet and I get updates throughout the day,” he half heard Cranepool continue in the background. Behr refocused and asked half a dozen followups, to which Cranepool shook his head. Behr nodded his thanks and began backing off across the lawn the way he had come. Cranepool hurried inside with relief while Behr made his way to the street.

Behr walked around the corner and imagined himself on a bike. He saw that the clearest shot at Cranepool’s front door was from where he stood on Perry
before
making the turn onto Tibbs. Behr brought his right arm across his chest and simulated a cross-body backhanded toss.
This is where you would throw it from
, he thought. Then he continued around the corner. It was another thirty yards to Mrs. Conyard’s house. Jamie had never made it that distance. This was the place. It slammed Behr in the chest. The familiar blackness that came with the realization that a horrible crime had occurred rushed up and tunneled around him.
This was the place
.

Behr stood out on Tibbs between the Cranepool and Conyard houses for a long time. He knelt down near the asphalt, even brushed it with his fingertips, and looked into the oil stains like a seer. Had he glanced up, he would have seen Cranepool peering at the huge, threatening man from behind his kitchen curtain. When Behr finally stood, the cartilage in his knees cracked, and he remembered the jogger.

SOMETIMES THINGS HAPPENED QUICKLY
on a case, other times not so at all. Usually it was like banging against a slab of rock with a sledgehammer. Tiny chips flew here and there but seemed to lead nowhere, and then
clunk
, the whole thing came apart. That moment was a long way off as Behr sat in the dark and steeled himself to search places on the Internet that should not exist, that would not exist in a decent world. He’d gone late into the previous nights checking the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web sites and others. He’d found Jamie’s picture posted there among thousands, his just one of the awkward-sweet faces of the missing, though no leads were listed. But tonight Behr was going to a far worse place. Like a predator lurking in cyberspace, he began to locate the sites dedicated to child pornography. Though they were relatively few and hard to find, there were still far too many of them. Some offered censored thumbnails, hoping to entice buyers into the elaborate processes of passwords and protected downloads. Revulsion and sweat bathed the back of Behr’s neck as he clicked on sample pictures. They were shot in badly lit rooms, where faceless men penetrated drugged and frail young boys and girls. Black circles and digital buzz-outs did little to mask what was going on. Behr felt his gorge rise but went on as best he could, trying to determine if any of the vacant-eyed youths were Jamie. Cold feverish rage grew within him. It took all of his will to restrain himself from smashing every single thing in his house. He wanted to barehand kill every one of the pale, flabby-bodied men on his computer screen. As a cop he’d encountered all manner of street filth, degenerates, and psychopaths. He’d seen corpses that had suffered grisly fates and living victims who had suffered worse, but none of it had the power to numb him to this. He went later and later into the night, discovering societies that advocated physical
love
— their word for it — between adults and children, until he went bleary-eyed. As he willed himself on, the unimaginable happened at four A.M. His own son appeared to him like a revenant. Tim’s face began to appear superimposed over those of the young victims. It made his skin crawl, his scalp boil, and his blood surge in his temples. He found himself weak with rage. Sour vomit filled the back of his throat, and he barely reached the bathroom in time.

Behr was back on Tibbs before six A.M. the next morning, looking for the jogger. His hair still wet from the scalding shower he had hoped would disinfect him, he sat in his car swilling Maalox and praying it would quiet his churning stomach. It was Saturday and by ten he believed the runner wasn’t going to show up, but he sat there until five in the afternoon, anyway. He repeated the drill on Sunday, trying to keep from his head the idea that the man could’ve been from a nearby neighborhood and hit Tibbs by coincidence, not custom. The guy could’ve been visiting from out of town. Sunday was a bust, too.

Monday, though, at ten after six in the morning, there he came, chugging up the street. He was in his early forties, barrel-bellied on spindly legs. Behr lumbered out of his car and ran up next to the man.

“Sorry to bother you,” Behr said, no real apology in his voice, as he jogged along with him like a moving brick building. “I’m investigating a disappearance.”

The man stopped his forward progress but kept moving in place, wiping his sweat-soaked sideburns, his breathing coming heavy. “A kid went missing here last October twenty-fourth. You know anything about it?”

“No, I don’t,” the man wheezed.

“Can I get a name?”

“Brad Figgis.”

The man, Figgis, didn’t know anything about it. “Time to time I saw a kid whiz by on his bike,” he did volunteer.

“Were you ever questioned by the police about this?”

“Nope. I’m not from around here.”

Behr looked the man over. He didn’t look like he could cover that much ground.

“How far you run?”

“My loop is four and a half. This is about halfway.”

“You remember anything unusual back then?”

Figgis sweated and thought, and slowly nodded.

“I remember a big old car out here a few days in a row. Parked right over there so I had to run around it. Then I never saw it again. It was a Pon-tiac or Lincoln. Big and gray.”

“Plates?”

“Nah. Didn’t catch that.”

“Why’d it strike you?”

“There were two guys in it. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like, only that they were eating. I thought they might’ve been landscapers or painters waiting to start work, but the car was wrong. Those types of guys seem to drive pickups or tiny Corollas. This car was huge. Slabs of gray fender. The kind that drinks gas.”

Behr took a number and an address off Figgis, and watched him puff away into the morning. Then Behr went home to hammer away at DMV databases.

MORNINGS WERE THE WORST
for the Gabriels, and without coffee Carol was sure she’d have curled into a ball, dried up and blown away. She’d never been the early riser type. In college, she’d worked scrupulously to schedule her classes after ten. Then, when she’d gotten married and Paul had to wake up at quarter to six every day for work, she’d grown to feel so guilty at sleeping past him that she’d forced herself awake to make coffee and breakfast while he took a run. Then she’d sit at the kitchen table and make a pretense at conversation, but all she really wanted was to get back in bed.

That all changed with Jamie. The moment he was born she was filled with energy, a purpose, for which she had never known to even hope. When he was a baby and his crying filled their apartment, and later their first small house, she would get up to attend to him. There was no bitterness, no black exhaustion in her step as she walked to his crib. When he got older and could sleep through the night before popping up to play at six or so in the morning, Carol felt that she barely needed sleep anymore. And by the time Jamie reached school age, Carol was getting up before he was. She faced the morning like a drill instructor, with energy and gusto, with near aggression. She’d rouse Jamie, corral him into the bathroom for a face washing and teeth brushing, get him into appropriate clothes, hustle him down for breakfast and take his lunch order, then putting it together and snapping it into his lunchbox, before he had finished his orange juice. She walked him to school with a bounce in her step. Rain or shine, each day felt like a gift.

But now … Now Carol suspected the truth — that the energy had really been all Jamie’s. His youth, the relentless brand of spirit unique to young boys, was what had given her her power. Because now that he was gone, she sat at the kitchen table unable to do anything but wrap her fingers around her mug of inky coffee. There was a sense of stagnancy to her life worse than any hangover she’d endured during her partying days. The mornings were a nettlesome chore just to get through these days, a wall she didn’t know if she’d be able to climb. Waiting for Paul to leave for work set her teeth on edge.

Carol kicked herself for her irritation at Paul this morning. He was pottering around endlessly, looking for something. She knew, on a rational level, that she should have more patience. Paul had found a way to keep going to work, to keep selling policies so that they could continue paying for the house. For several months she believed that that was the most important thing, because if Jamie ever returned he would know where to find them. If it had been left to her, they’d be living on the streets behind a Dumpster due to her inactivity. But all that didn’t matter anymore, because he wasn’t ever coming back. And this morning her nerves were unraveling like badly done knitting.

“What is it you’re looking for?” she asked, recognizing the overtired timbre to her voice.

Paul stopped and looked at her in surprise that she’d spoken to him before he’d been to work and back and it was dark outside.

“For those cereal-box toys. I had a dozen of them. I was saving them.” He stood there holding the latest toy — a small spinning top — in one hand, a bowl of sugared flakes in the other.

“Oh, those. I threw them away when I was cleaning out the drawers the other day,” she said, and got the strangest impression that her husband was going to cry.

“Why? Why’d you do that, goddamnit?” he said, as angry as she’d ever seen him. It made her remember: He’d been saving the prizes for their son. Their son, who was never going to return. She’d had something on her mind for several weeks, and now seemed like as good a time as any to mention it.

“Paul?” she said. “Paul, forget about the tops and things.” He looked to her. “Paul, I want to talk. There’s something I want to do.” He was expectant but said nothing. “I want to buy … I want us to get a plot. To put up a headstone for Jamie. I want to have a funeral and a place we can go to mourn. To remember him.” Everything in her married life told her that her husband would nod and acquiesce to her wish, so she looked on in shock when he slammed the cereal bowl he was holding against the countertop. It exploded in a shower of ceramic and sugared cereal flakes.

“No,” he said. “No. No. No. No.” Then his face came apart in tearless sobs.

It was pounding rain outside and the gutters were overflowing as Behr banged coffee and scoured DMV databases. Reading the numbers and addresses — dry, desiccated information — was a reprieve from his recent computer use. The sound of the rain brought him back to where he’d grown up, outside Everett, where this wouldn’t even be considered a drizzle but more of a light mist. After he’d gotten a criminology degree on a football scholarship, he’d learned that the Indianapolis P.D. was hiring and that the city had only fifty days of rain per year, which was about two hundred less than he was used to. The odd thing now was that he missed the rain most of the time.

What he’d learned from Figgis, the jogger, had increased his dread about the mission he was on, and Behr buried himself in the minutiae of the task in order to avoid it. A lone degenerate out to grab a kid would be bad enough. But the presence of two men, if that’s what they’d been there for, hinted at a more dark-hued thing: organization. Most likely the car that his jogger had mentioned was stolen, and Behr hoped to stumble across a report of a matching model on a motor-vehicle theft list. His hopes remained at low ebb as he covered the databases for Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and western Ohio. No old Lincolns and only one Pontiac — an ‘84 Sunfire outside of Chicago — were reported stolen in the days leading up to the event. The Sunfire was a small, two-door model, Behr knew. There were dozens of reports of stolen license plates during the same time period. This led him to believe it much more likely that the car had been purchased, not stolen, and then had stolen plates put on it. Even if a witness like Figgis had written down the plate number, it would lead nowhere. In the name of thoroughness Behr checked all the title transfers closely preceding October 24. It was a banner sales week for large used sedans. And the pink slips registered at the DMVs were only a fraction of the cars that had changed hands for cash, he knew.