The Exiled (17 page)

He tapped the recorder.

“You can't have too much insurance,” he said.

“I suppose that's true,” Raney said.

He stopped short of invoking Ferguson's name.

Outside, he felt the benzos, the blow, the caffeine swirling in his head and turning in his gut. He vomited into a trash can, made it back to his car, sat waiting for his blood to settle. By the time he reached the Triborough Bridge his clothes were soaked through. He flipped the air conditioner to high, mopped his forehead with each sleeve. He promised himself, promised Sophia, that he'd get clean once Meno and Dunham were gone.

Sophia
. How much did she know? How much would he have to tell her?

B
ay's judge came through. By late afternoon they were standing outside Grant's home, watching SWAT surround the house, then take the door. Men and women dressed in combat helmets and body armor filed inside. A volley of shouting jumped from room to room. Then quiet.

“He's alive if they got him,” Bay said.

“He wouldn't come alive,” Raney said.

The street was nondescript, not unlike the one Vignola had lived on: semidetached bungalows, the upkeep varying from yard to yard—manicured beds of cactuses beside mounds of used car parts. No people on the porches, no faces in the windows.

SWAT came back out, guns at their sides, chin straps unbuttoned. The major addressed Raney and Bay.

“The house is empty,” he said.

“Any sign of him?” Bay asked.

“When I say empty, I mean empty. Everything's gone. Furniture, appliances. There's nothing. You want to go in and take a look?”

“I guess we better,” Bay said. “We should have forensics do their thing, too.”

“Thanks for your help,” Raney said.

“Want us to stick around?”

“No,” Raney said. “He won't be back.”

The rooms were barren, but the home appeared lived in. There were holes in the walls where pictures had hung. The linoleum was peeling back in the kitchen, the concrete cracking in the basement. Anything that grew had been ripped out of the backyard and replaced with gravel and a chin-up bar. Bay found a dead mouse in the attic.

They were sitting on the curb, Bay smoking, Raney drinking the remains of a coffee he'd bought that morning, when the forensics van pulled up. Bay stepped forward to greet them, spoke with a thin, gray-haired man in a blue jumpsuit.

“There ain't much in there,” Bay said. “But give it all you got. This guy is a special kind of dangerous.”

Raney watched them lug their supplies inside.

“They look like a cleaning crew,” he said.

“I could use a goddamn nap,” Bay said.

“We should talk to the neighbors. Find out how long it's been since they've seen him.”

“If we can find any neighbors. No one's come or gone all day.”

“They're here,” Raney said. “They're laying low.”

“Why, if they know Grant's gone?”

“Doesn't mean they stopped being afraid of him.”

“They can relax. He's gone for good. Cleaning out the house was a final ‘fuck you.'”

“Nothing's final until we find that supply,” Raney said.

“Seems less and less likely, don't it?”

They canvassed the opposite side of the street first, targeting houses with empty mailboxes and cars parked in the driveway. The few people who responded claimed not to know Grant.

“Maybe he kept a low profile,” Bay said.

“Maybe,” Raney said. “But this isn't a neighborhood built for privacy.”

They crossed back to Grant's side of the street, started with the house to the east of his, a small bungalow with a second-floor add-on, an A-frame loft that made Raney think of his cabin. A flowerless trellis hung over the walkway. The house had sight lines into Grant's kitchen and master bedroom.

“Seventh time's the charm,” Bay said.

An elderly man in a walker came to the door, looked hard at Bay's uniform, then Raney's badge.

“This'd be about Grant?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” Bay said. “We'd like to ask you a few questions, if you have a moment.”

“You might have asked before you sent in the Delta Force. Grant cleared out weeks ago.”

The man was ninety, maybe older, voice clear but dim, spine badly curved, eyes alert behind thick glasses. He wore hearing aids that looked like tiny megaphones.

“Want us to come in?” Bay asked. “Might be easier to talk sitting down.”

“We can talk here. I'm supposed to stand ten minutes out of every hour. That's my exercise. I used to climb the fourteeners in Colorado. Now I wouldn't make it from the car to the trailhead. My two-year-old great-granddaughter falls less than I do.”

“This will work fine,” Raney said. “What can you tell us about Grant?”

“I can tell you what you already know—he had the whole block shitting their pants. I've been watching you knock on doors. You didn't get more than two or three people who answered, and my guess is they didn't say a thing worth hearing.”

“Good guess,” Bay said. “What'd he do to frighten everyone?”

“The man's a scowl come to life. You couldn't squeeze a drop of friendliness out of him. He used to sit out on his stoop cleaning his guns. There'd be kids playing stickball in the street. If the ball got loose and rolled over to him he wouldn't toss it back. He'd just sit there, daring them to come get it. There was always something with him. Once someone blocked his driveway and Grant slashed the guy's tires. Now that don't make sense to me, cause how is the guy who's in his way supposed to move after his tires are slashed?”

“Did you have any personal dealings with him?” Raney asked.

“With Oscar? No, never. Molly did, though. Get her in the right frame of mind and she ain't afraid of no one.”

“Molly?”

“My live-in nurse. Caretaker, I think she calls herself. I'm not just old, I'm riddled with cancer. That's how my doctor put it: ‘riddled with cancer.' Hell of a bedside manner. So my daughter dumped that triangle on top of my house and hired Molly to live in it. She's a godsend, really. Feeds me, gives me my meds, runs me through my physical therapy. Sometimes she sits and watches TV with me. It'll be her who finds me. I hate knowing that.”

“You say she talked to Grant?” Raney asked.

“A few times. She was close with his boy.”

“Jonathan?”

“Yeah. That's one apple landed miles from the tree. Real sweet kid. Life keeps making less sense the older you get. Me living to my age, him dying at his.”

“I know the feeling,” Bay said.

“Molly wouldn't happen to be home now, would she?” Raney asked.

“She's up in her triangle, taking a nap. If I want her this time of day I'm supposed to ring a buzzer.”

“Would you mind if we talked to her?” Bay asked.

“No, sir. My ten minutes are about up anyway. And I feel it, too. You know what they say: getting old ain't for the faint of heart. And I've been old for a long time.”

They followed him into a well-lit and sparsely furnished living room—armchair and couch against one wall, television against the other, no sharp edges, ample room for a walker to pass through. The old man stood at the bottom of the stairs, pressed a button on an intercom, shouted into the receiver.

“Lund to angel of death,” he said. “You have gentlemen callers.”

He took his finger off the button.

“She'll think I'm hallucinating. Sometimes if I skip my meds I see little robots chewing on the baseboards.”

Molly came hustling down the stairs, stopped short when she saw Raney and Bay standing there.

“Told you,” Lund said.

He turned, started off, then turned back.

“I don't know what he did, but I hope you get him.”

“Thank you for your help,” Bay said.

They watched him navigate a doorway leading to the back of the house, heard the legs of his walker clicking against linoleum.

“What can I do for you?” Molly asked.

She was flushed, not from running down the stairs, Raney thought, but because her hair appeared slept on and she was dressed in sweatpants and a flannel shirt.

“Would you like some tea?”

“No, thank you,” Raney said. “We won't need much of your time.”

“At least have a seat,” she said.

Raney and Bay took the sofa. Molly pulled the armchair to the center of the room.

“What is this about?” she asked.

“We're looking for Oscar Grant,” Bay said.

“No surprise there. The man ran off in the dead of night. I watched him load up the rental truck. Seeing him carry away Jonathan's things broke my heart all over again.”

“Mr. Lund told us you were close with Grant's son,” Bay said.

“I loved that boy. He was gentle, kind. The opposite of his father in every way. He used to come and sit with Tommy…Mr. Lund. He'd play checkers with him when Tommy's mind was still up for it. No one asked him to—he just did it. That was when I first started working here. Jonathan was fourteen. How many fourteen-year-olds would give up their time like that?”

“Not many I know,” Bay said.

“Is it possible he came here to get away from his father?” Raney asked.

“There were other places he could have gone, but maybe that was part of it. Jonathan was sensitive. Oscar tried to beat it out of him.”

“Literally?”

“Literally and figuratively. Jonathan was always turning up here with scrapes and bruises he tried to explain away. One day he came over with a huge lump on his forehead. I told him enough was enough, I was going to talk to his father, but Jonathan threw himself in front of the door. He was right, of course. I'd only have made matters worse. A woman coming to fight his battles—Oscar would never have let up.”

“What about figuratively?” Raney asked.

“Oscar tried to make Jonathan into someone he wasn't. He'd drag him on these weekend-long hunting trips. If Jonathan failed to kill something, Oscar would spend the week inventing ways to punish him. Once he made him get up at two in the morning and wax the car. Another time, he pulled Jonathan out of bed at four a.m., drove him up to Carlsbad, and made him run five miles with a sack of rocks on his back. He had Jonathan out on that chin-up bar every night. He'd blow his idiotic whistle and count down at the top of his lungs. He'd call Jonathan names when his arms gave out. It was horrible to watch, because that just wasn't Jonathan. No matter how hard Oscar pushed, that was never going to be Jonathan. And when Oscar finally did realize it, he cut his son off altogether, treated him like he was already dead.”

“You mean when he learned that Jonathan was gay?” Raney said.

She nodded.

“And how did Oscar react when Jonathan died?” Raney asked.

“Like he'd lost the world. I'd hear him wailing at all hours. He put himself through every kind of self-flagellation imaginable, treated himself worse than he'd ever treated Jonathan. I came down before sunup one morning to check on Tommy because I thought I'd heard him moaning. But it wasn't Tommy—it was Oscar running up and down the street, barefoot, carrying an enormous rifle across his back. It scared me senseless. I almost called the police.”

“What about the drugs?” Raney asked. “Did you ever know Jonathan to have a problem?”

“No, never. That was so out of character.”

“Can you say more about his character? What kind of things did Jonathan like to do? Who did he want to be?”

“He was an artist. A brilliant artist, I think. He loved cameras the way his father loves guns. He knew how to take them apart and put them back together. He knew what lens to use when. He wanted to be a photojournalist. Possibly a filmmaker. And it's not just me saying he was talented. More than one school offered him a full ride.”

“Do you have any of his photos here?” Raney asked.

The question seemed to startle her.

“I do,” she said. “He took a whole series of me and Tommy.”

“Would you mind showing them to us?”

“It would be easier if you came upstairs. They're hanging on a wall in my room. Just don't mind the mess.”

The loft, a hundred years younger than the rest of the house, featured glowing bamboo floors and double-insulated windows. There was a large, unmade bed facing the stairs, a drafting table littered with magazines in one corner, an ornate harp in another. Bay seemed taken with the harp.

“You play?” he asked.

“Ever since I was little. It's an heirloom from my great-grandmother. I play as a hobby, but it's also more than that.”

“Are these Jonathan's photos here?” Raney asked, pointing to the wall beside the stairs.

“Yes. Jonathan made a little installation for me. That included painting the wall. He thought the black and white showed up nicely against blue-gray.”

“He was thorough,” Bay said.

“He cared about his work,” she said.

The photos were candid, visceral. Raney wondered if Lund had seen them. There was one of the old man in a bathtub, eyes shut, lather covering his torso. He looked very much like a man at peace with his age and fate, as though he enjoyed this sensual pleasure
because
he knew death was coming. Other photos featured Molly as caretaker: giving Mr. Lund a massage, wiping drool from his chin with a napkin, combing his slim ring of hair. Collectively, the photos revealed her heroism. It was as though Molly absorbed Lund's fear so that the old man could live his final moments more fully. There was a sense, too, that something of Lund would live on in her after he had died. Almost every photo seemed to foreshadow her grief. Raney had no doubt: this was the same photographer who took the portrait hanging in Vignola's bedroom.

“Do you see now what I mean?” Molly asked. “He was seventeen when he shot those. How many seventeen-year-olds see the world with that kind of maturity?”

“None,” Raney said. “And not many adults.”

“He was extraordinary.”

Extraordinary enough, Raney thought, to have captured the affection of a fifty-year-old art teacher. Oscar knew. The relationship was part of the boy's revelation. Molly seemed to read Raney's mind.

“Oscar killed Mr. Vignola, didn't he?”

Bay stepped closer to her, made slow and deliberate eye contact.

“Jonathan was damn lucky to find you,” he said. “Mr. Lund, too.”

She nodded, pressed her palms to her eyes. It was what she needed to hear—the kind of thing Raney would never have thought to say.