Indelible (42 page)

Gently, apologetically, she pressed Trevor’s features into a mound. She stared at it, wondering, did she have a gift, or had sculpting been an exorcism, driving visions from her brain into the clay like demons into pigs?

Jonah pulled out of the station that was starting to feel like a jail cell. The case was taking a toll, eloquently expressed by Tia this morning with,
“You need help.”

Natalie’s description corroborated Michaela’s. Someone role-playing a dark fantasy?

“Chief.” Sue’s voice came over the radio.

“Officer Donnelly.”

“I’m following up on last night’s domestic, thought you might want a heads-up.”

“Go ahead.”

“Beatty and McCarthy responded, neutralized the situation. But come to find out, one of the kids didn’t come back after flying the coop. Rolanda Pitman called in this morning wondering if the officers had her son.”

“Age?”

“Four.”

“Took her all night to miss him?”

“I’m thinking a two-by-four to the head.”

“Make sure there are no witnesses.” Too late he recalled they were on the radio.

Sue laughed grimly. “I’m en route. He’s probably hiding out, but with this other stuff, I thought you’d want to know.”

“I’ll back you up.” He knew the address. Turk and Rolanda Pitman were regular combatants. Their sons were hellions. Go figure.

Sue brushed her hands down her uniform top and straightened her belt as he got out of the Bronco. She had waited outside without specific instructions to do so. Getting him shot when they took down that meth lab had made her a maniacally attentive officer.

“Let’s do this.”

The house smelled of stale pizza boxes. Rolanda smelled of gin, and Jonah was twisted enough to want a hit from her bottle. Turk had passed out with an ice pack that was now a water-filled baggie on his cheek. He’d tended his bruised face, but not realized his child was missing? Jonah’s hands clenched.

He’d be calling Connie Wong, the county’s overburdened social worker, but he didn’t mention that to Sue. Connie had removed Sue’s son
from her home before the family realized he had a mild form of fragile bone syndrome. Even catching him from falling could have caused the hairline fractures on her little boy’s arms. These Pitman boys were sturdy. But one of them was lost.

Sue conducted the interview. They’d run out the back when their fighting put Turk in a rage. He and Rolanda pounded it out until the neighbors called the cops. The older boy came back. Rolanda must have been seeing double because she could have sworn it was both of them.

“No sign of him this morning?” Jonah cut to the chase.

“He’d be trashing the kitchen.”

“Yeah, kids like to eat.” With his ears on fire and his jaw a vise, Jonah moved through to the backyard. It opened onto a greenbelt that dipped down in the middle to a runoff. Swathed in thin gray cloud, it was tree lined and waist high with brushy growth. This time of year no water flowed, except in flash-flood conditions.

He pressed into the brush. Good place for a four-year-old to hide, but why not come back when the coast was clear, when the night got cold, when everything got dark and scary? Maybe it was scarier inside. He’d known by that age.

Sue stayed in the house to get the kid’s statistics, search the home, talk to the family. He moved down into the undergrowth. The fog had moved in with the dawn, the temperature dropping even as he searched. He braced himself with all he had when he saw the child hanging like a bat—right side up, thank God—from a cottonwood tree.

He took in the child’s location, close enough to the house that responsible parents would have found him. Nor was he in extreme or imminent danger, though his lips were blue, his face a little dewy. The sleeves of the batlike cape had swaddled him, a cord suspending him over the gully. A frantic child could have broken loose. This one hadn’t tried too hard.

“Hi there, Brody.”

“Devil’s gonna get you.”

“I’m not worried.” He caught the bundle with one arm and loosened the knotted cord. A good tug pulled it free. He could have unwrapped and set the boy on his feet, but carried him up the gully through the tangled stems and branches.

“Devil’s gonna drink your blood.”

“Devil tell you that?”

“Gordy.”

“Your brother tied you up there?”

“He watched. Told me if I didn’t stay, Devil come back and drink my blood.”

Jonah stepped into the yard. “Devil tied you up?”

“Tied me up in his wings.”

Jonah swallowed. “Did he hurt you?”

Brody shook his head.

“Touch you?”

Another shake.

“Do you know what I mean?”

A nod.

“You sure?”

“He said he’d put me where my dad wouldn’t look.”

Jonah considered that. “Then went away?”

“And Gordy said I had to stay.”

“Did Gordy see the devil?”

A nod. “He ran, then he came back. Then ran off again.”

All night the older boy had known his brother hung from a tree. That apple wasn’t falling far—or else he was terrified.

Controlling the rage, Jonah called for EMTs to come check Brody out, then carried him into the kitchen, unwrapped him from the batlike cape, and set him down. “I’ll keep these wings.” He wadded the thick cape that had a sort of piping, which gave it a scalloped edge.

Brody looked disappointed, but didn’t argue. He was more shaken than he’d pretended with all his tough talk.

Rolanda rushed her son, feeling his face and cursing. “What happened to you? Why’d you stay out in the cold? Turk! Get in here and see what happened to your boy.”

They heard the sound of sliding furniture, then Turk lumbered in. “Whatchu bellowing?”

He ought to arrest them for criminal negligence, but his own officers had failed to account for the kids during the incident last night. A defense
attorney could muddy the waters with that—and should. He’d write them up himself.

Looking from one parent to the other, Brody clammed up. From across the table, Gordy stared with sullen eyes over his cereal bowl. Sue shook her head to indicate the amount of information she’d gotten from him.

Jonah fixed his stare on Gordy. “Want to tell me what you saw?”

Gordy shook his head.

Rolanda cuffed him. “If you know something, say it.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Jonah narrowed his eyes. “Devil tell you not to?”

Gordy scowled. “Didn’t have to.”

“How come?”

“His face did.”

Bingo.

Meanwhile the Adversary of God and Man,
Satan, with thoughts inflamed of highest design,
Puts on swift wings, and toward the gates of Hell
Explores his solitary flight.

S
acrifice engenders loss. Loss begets the offspring grief. Grief vomits bitterness. Bitterness spews rage. Each one ravaged him as he watched through lenses from far off through the window of her home.

For there, amid irrelevant ones, this blind one stirred desire, a tender yearning he had long forgone—that blessed solace love.

Foreign, it found a barren berth, no nurturing warmth in which to grow. Death had dwelt there far too long to yield an inch of room. And yet he watched with aching heart, the fair and fallen maid, his own Persephone?

Pitiful to think it, even worse imagining. He knew what he had come for, and in it was no place for nursing starved emotions that never would be filled. It would rather drain from him in parasitic drafts the will to see his mission through.

Alone he’d come and single-minded. So he must remain. Yet he bathed his dry and desolate eyes in this sweet and stolen sight of her.

Twenty-Five

J
onah left Sue’s cruiser at the station, but kept her. From his Bronco, he called Trevor. This latest episode strengthened the link between his photos and the events here in Redford, yet it hadn’t directly involved MacDaniel—that he knew of. Reaching Trevor’s, he said, “We need to talk.”

“Okay. Come by the store.”

Surprised that he wasn’t with Natalie, Jonah switched the turn signal and headed for the business next to his former crime scene. He didn’t know that much about either guy. Tia had interacted with them and didn’t consider Trevor an egotist, despite his former celebrity. In her opinion, he’d been knocked down a few times. She called Paul Whitman a regular guy who might stand out apart from Trevor.

So they were two active guys, whose business model fit the community, who gave back by helping people who got lost or in trouble in this rugged place. How did that make one of them a target? Jonah looked at the folder wedged between the seat and console. Having been a battered kid himself, those pictures incensed him. But he still had no context.

“So what are we doing?” Sue finally said.

“Retracing our steps. You haven’t talked to Trevor MacDaniel. I want your impressions. Anything that strikes you.”

She’d keep to the background, watch, listen. Her cynical eye didn’t miss much. They went in and saw Trevor, belaying a kid on the climbing wall. At the same time, he instructed the boy beside him on the proper technique to lower what looked like a younger sister. A man who might be their dad hollered encouragement, moving his arms as though he were the instructor.

“I’ll need a minute to finish here,” Trevor said.

As Sue stayed to watch, Jonah walked around their operation, trying to see what might have drawn a predator’s attention to Trevor MacDaniel.

Fame? Olympic medals, the publicized rescue of a toddler from a cougar? He didn’t blend well into the background, but was that enough?

Trevor joined him beneath the wall-sized poster of a gold medal run. “Thanks for waiting. We can talk in my office.”

Jonah glanced at the young female employee checking him out. Married, over thirty, with a kid on the way, didn’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm.

Trevor’s office was large enough for two desks, files, the usual computer, fax, printer setup. When Sue joined them, he introduced her. “Or maybe you’ve met?”

“I don’t think so.” Trevor extended his hand.

Sue took it silently, observing, measuring.

“How’s Natalie?” Jonah said.

Trevor sighed. “It’ll take a while.”

He hated to pile on but had to ask, “Have you received any new photos?”

Trevor tensed. “Why?”

“Found a little boy hanging from a tree—”

The blood drained from Trevor’s face.

“He’s fine. Sorry. Didn’t realize how that sounded.” Or maybe he’d needed to see a reaction. “The child hung there all night, could have frozen if this storm had moved in sooner.”

“Who was it?”

“Brody Pitman. Parents are Turk and Rolanda. Know them?”

“No.”

“Both their boys think they’ve seen the devil.”

“They have.”

Jonah ran a hand through his hair. “Michaela thought he might be wearing a mask. The boys said maybe.”

Shaking his head, Trevor sat against one of the two desks. “Nattie would have realized. No way her eye missed that.”

“Through a window with the sun glaring? She told Tia she thought she’d hallucinated.”

“It was no hallucination that fractured her skull.” Trevor’s tone darkened.

At the beeping Jonah reached down and silenced his page. “Let’s go back to the photos. The first arrived …”