The Last Child (8 page)

Johnny’s words came with difficulty. “Falling apart over what?”

Ken gestured with a thick hand. “In. Now.”

Johnny climbed in and slid across the smooth leather seat. Ken put the car in gear, and Johnny thought of the dead man.

I found her.

The house was lit up like Christmas: inside lights, outside lights, cop cars that angled in the drive and painted the yard with slashes of blue. Uniformed cops stood under the darkening sky, and Johnny saw guns and radios and slick, black clubs that hung from metal rings.

“What’s going on?”

Ken opened his door and dropped a hand on Johnny’s neck. Fingers dug into the thin straps of muscle and Johnny rolled his shoulders.

“That hurts.”

“Not as much as it should.” Ken dragged him across the seat and out of the car. His hand came away and he offered the cops a perfect smile. “Found him,” he announced, and they stopped in the drive as Johnny’s mother stepped onto the porch. She wore blue jeans and a brown shirt faded to the color of chocolate milk. Uncle Steve stepped out beside her. Johnny took another step, and his mother flew down the stairs, hair gone wild, eyes wet and crazy. She threw her arms around him, and her words blurred: “Oh my God. Where have you been?”

Johnny didn’t understand. He’d come home after dark many times. Most days, she didn’t know if he was in bed or not. Over his mother’s shoulder, Johnny saw one of the cops lift his radio. “Dispatch. Twenty-seven. Please inform Detective Hunt that we’ve located Johnny Merrimon. He’s at home.”

A static-filled voice acknowledged what the cop had said. Then, some seconds later, the radio hissed again. “Twenty-seven, be advised. Detective Hunt is en route to your location.”

“Ten-four, dispatch.”

Johnny felt his mother’s arms loosen. She pushed him back, and suddenly she was shaking him, screaming: “Don’t you ever do that again! Not ever! Do you hear me? Do you? Say you do! Say it!” Then she grabbed him up again. “God, Johnny. I was so worried.”

Johnny was shaken and squeezed, rattled so hard he could barely speak. The cops moved down the stairs, and Johnny saw his Uncle Steve, who begged with his eyes. Then Johnny understood. “The school called?”

His mother nodded against his neck. “They went into lockdown right after lunch. They called here and said they couldn’t find you, so I called your Uncle Steve; but he said he dropped you off. He swore it. And then you didn’t come home, and I thought…”

Johnny pulled out of her grasp. “Lockdown for what?”

His mother caressed one side of his face. “Oh, Johnny.” Her fingers felt shaky and warm. “It’s happened again.”

“What has?”

His mother broke. “Another girl’s been taken. Right off the school grounds, they think. A seventh-grader. Tiffany Shore.”

Johnny blinked. His words came, automatic. “I know Tiffany.”

“Me, too.”

Her voice trailed off, but Johnny knew what she was thinking. Tiffany Shore was in the seventh grade. Same as Alyssa had been when she vanished. Johnny shook his head. He thought of the dead man’s words. When he’d said,
I found her
, he was talking about Johnny’s sister, about Alyssa. Not Tiffany. Not some other girl. “That can’t be right,” Johnny said; but his mother nodded, crying, and Johnny felt the hope go cold. He felt it crumble to ash. “That can’t be right,” he said again.

She rocked back on her heels, looking for the right words; but one of the cops stepped forward before she could find them. “Son,” he said, and Johnny looked up, “is that blood on your shirt?”

Levi waited with the broken body as the sun sank. The flies bothered him and his finger hurt so bad he wondered if God was testing him. He’d been to church and knew that God did that kind of thing; but Levi was nothing special. He swept floors to make money. The world confused him. But God’s voice had been with Levi for seven days. It came like a whisper and was a comfort when the world seemed dark and tilted left. A week of whisper left a huge hole in a man’s head when the whisper stopped, and Levi had to wonder why God was silent now. He was an escaped convict sitting in the dirt ten feet from a dead man. He’d been wandering loose for seven days.

I made the world in seven days.

The voice gushed into Levi like a flood, but it sounded different. It flickered in, faded out, and the thought felt unfinished. Levi held his breath, turned his head, but the voice didn’t come again. Levi knew that he was not smart—his wife had told him that—but he wasn’t stupid, either. Convicts and dead bodies looked bad together. The road was just above his head. So Levi decided that God would have to wait.

Just this once.

He knelt by the dead man and went through his pockets. He found a wallet and took the cash because he was hungry. He asked God to forgive him, then dropped the wallet in the dirt and straightened the man’s body. He pulled the broken arm from behind his back and crossed his hands on his chest. He dipped a finger in the tacky blood and made a cross on the pale, smooth forehead, then he closed the open eyes. He prayed to God to take the dead man’s soul.

Take it.

Care for it.

He saw the flash of white when he stood.

It was in the dead man’s hand, a scrap of fabric that poked between two fingers. It came out easily when Levi pulled. Pale and ragged, it looked like a piece of shirt that had been cut free or torn. It was as long as a baby’s shoe, faded and dirty, with a name tag sewn into it. Levi couldn’t read, so the letters meant nothing, but the fabric was kind of white and just the right size. He twisted it around his bleeding finger and used his teeth to tie it off, pull it tight.

In the shade of the willow, he stopped beside the heavy package wrapped in plastic. He ran one of his massive hands along the top of it, then hoisted it onto his shoulder. To any other man, it would have felt heavy, and the thought of it might have oppressed. But that’s not how it was for Levi. He was strong, he had a purpose; and when the plastic rustled against his ear, he heard the voice of God. It told Levi he’d done good, and it told him to walk on.

He was fifty minutes gone when the cops showed up.

Detective Hunt’s car rolled to a stop on the bridge. This far out, there were no street lamps, no houses. The sky above was black, with a deep purple line on the horizon to the west. Above them, storm clouds pressed low, and a hard, dry light thumped twice before the thunder came. A line of marked cars, lights flashing, pulled in behind Detective Hunt’s car. Spotlights clicked on and lit the bridge. Hunt turned to Johnny, who sat in the backseat with his mother. Their faces were blacked out, and he saw strands of hair that stood out against the bright light from the cars behind them. “Are you okay?” he asked. No answer. Johnny’s mother pulled him tight. “This the place, Johnny?”

Johnny swallowed. “This is it.” He pointed. “That side of the bridge. Straight down.”

“Tell me one more time what he said. Word for word.”

Johnny’s voice sounded dead. “I found her. The girl that was taken.”

“Nothing else?”

“He told me to run. He was talking about the guy in the car.”

Hunt nodded. They’d been through it six or seven times. Everything that had happened. “Nothing else to make you think he was talking about your sister? He didn’t mention her name or description or anything like that?”

“He was talking about Alyssa.”

“Johnny—”

“He was!”

Johnny’s head tipped in the harsh glare, and Hunt wanted to touch the boy on the shoulder, tell him that it would be okay; but it was not his place to fix every broken thing, no matter how badly he might want to. He glanced at Katherine Merrimon. She sat, small and immobile, and he wanted to touch her, too; but those feelings were complicated. She was beautiful and gentle and damaged, but she was a victim, and there were rules about that. So Hunt stayed focused on the case, and his voice was hard when he spoke. “The odds are against it, Johnny. You should prepare for that. It’s been a year. He was probably talking about Tiffany Shore.”

Johnny shook his head, but remained silent. When his mother spoke, she sounded like a child herself. “I know Tiffany,” she said.

She’d said that twice already, but no one mentioned it. Johnny blinked and saw an image of the missing girl. Tiffany was small and blond, with green eyes, a scar on her left hand, and a stupid joke she’d tell to anyone that would listen. Something about three monkeys, an elephant, and a cork. She was a nice girl. Always had been.

“The man on the bridge,” Hunt began. “Do you remember anything else? Could you identify him?”

“He was just a shape. A sense of movement. I didn’t see his face.”

“What about the car?”

“No. Like I said.”

Hunt peered through the windows as other cops began to exit cars and throw shadows against the stark concrete wall of the bridge. He was unhappy. “Stay here,” he said. “Do not get out of this car.”

He climbed out, shut the door behind him, and absorbed the scene. Heavy, damp air carried the scent of the river. Darkness welled up from beneath the bridge, and Hunt glanced north as if he could see the great swath of rough country that pushed down on Raven County: the stony woods and, at the foot of those hills, the twenty-mile stretch of swamp that vomited out the river. A drop of cold rain touched his cheek, and he gestured at the nearest cop. “Put a light over the side,” he said. “Down there.” He moved to the abutment as the cop pulled a light from the cruiser and shot a spear of light out into the night. It cut ragged patterns as the officer walked to the edge of the bridge, and when he put the light on the riverbank, it pinned the body on the dirt.

Johnny Merrimon’s bicycle lay on the ground five feet away from it.

Jesus.

The kid was right.

Hunt felt his people move around him. He had four uniformed cops and Crime Scene on standby. He heard a staccato burst on the windshield, felt more drops spatter on the top of his head. The rain was coming, and it was coming hard. He gestured with an arm. “Get a tarp over that body. Move. I also want tarps over the railing, right here.” He was thinking of paint scrapings, and of the glass shards that winked on the blacktop. “Somewhere around here, there should be a motorcycle. Find it. And somebody call for a tent.” Thunder crashed and he looked up at the sky. “This is going to get ugly.”

In the car, Johnny felt it when his mother began to shake. It started in her arms, moved to her shoulders.

“Mom?”

She ignored him and dug into her purse. It was dark in the low part of the car, so she held the bag up until headlights struck it. Johnny saw one eye when she tilted her head, then he heard the rattle and click of pills in a plastic bottle. She shook pills into her hand, tossed back her head and swallowed them dry. The bag fell back into darkness and her head hit the headrest hard enough to bounce once. Her voice, when she spoke, was devoid of emotion. “Don’t ever do that again,” she said.

“Ditch school?” Johnny asked.

“No.”

A difficult pause. Ice in Johnny’s chest.

“Don’t make me hope.” She turned her head. “Don’t you ever do that to me again.”

They got the tent up before the bottom fell out of the sky. Hunt squatted next to the body as the tent rattled and shook. The material snapped so loudly that he had to shout to be heard. Two uniformed officers held lights; a CSI tech and the medical examiner knelt on the other side of the body. Over Hunt’s shoulder, one of the uniforms said: “Water will be running under soon.” Hunt agreed. Thunderstorms in late spring rolled in hard and left fast, but they could drop a lot of water. It was a bad break.

Hunt studied the blood-streaked face, then the splinter of bone where the arm bent at right angles. Grime caked the dead man’s clothes; it was black, almost green, ground into the cloth and into the treads of his shoes. A smell lingered, something organic, something that went beyond river water and recent death. “What do we know?” Hunt asked the medical examiner.

“He’s fit. Well muscled. Mid-thirties, I’d say. Wallet’s with one of your men there.”

Hunt looked at Detective Cross, who held a wallet in a clear plastic evidence bag. Cross was a big man whose face looked seamed and heavy behind the bright light. He was thirty-eight and had been a cop for over ten years. He’d made his reputation as a hard-nosed patrol sergeant who showed great courage under fire. He’d been a detective for less than six months. Cross spoke as he handed over the wallet. “Driver’s license says his name is David Wilson. Organ donor. No corrective lenses. He lived on an expensive street, carried a library card and a stack of restaurant receipts: some from Raleigh, some from Wilmington. No sign of a wedding ring. No cash. Two credit cards, still in the wallet.”

Hunt looked at the wallet. “You touched this?”

“Yes.”

“I’m lead detective on this case, Cross. You understand that?” His voice was tight, forcibly controlled.

Cross drew back his shoulders. “Yes, sir.”

“You’re new at this. I understand. But being lead on this case means that I’m responsible. We catch the killer or not. We find the girl or we don’t.” His eyes remained fierce. A finger came up. “However this ends, I have to live with it. Night after night, it’s on me. You understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t ever touch evidence at my crime scene without permission. Do it again and I will fuck you up.”

“I was just trying to help.”

“Get out of my tent.” Hunt shook with anger. If he lost another girl…

Cross left with a guilty step. Hunt forced a deep breath, then returned his attention to the body. The shirt was just a T-shirt, gray and stinking of sweat and blood and green black filth; the belt was plain brown and nondescript, with a brass buckle that showed heavy scarring. His pants were made of tough, worn cotton. One eye was partially open, and it looked flat and dull in the bright light.

“Hot as hell in this tent.” The medical examiner’s name was Trenton Moore. Small and sparely built, he had thick hair, large pores, and a lisp that grew more pronounced the louder he had to speak. He was young, smart, and dynamite on the stand, even with the lisp. “I think he’s a rock climber.”