The Midnight Road (2 page)

There were rules. Too many of them, but he did what he could to make them work to his advantage. You had to be up front. You couldn’t rope anybody into anything. Couldn’t sneak in and snap pictures, no matter what you saw. You had to ask to be allowed to look around the house. They could deny you. They could claim you were an intruder. They could shriek about lawyers. You tried not to shake them up too much for fear they’d take it out on the kid. The child’s welfare always came first.

He told Mrs. Shepard his name and showed his identification. He explained he was with CPS and that an anonymous complaint had been registered. She nodded as if she knew all about it and let him inside. He clarified his position and asked that he be allowed to check the house. While he spoke, he casually surveyed Kelly Shepard. No bruises on her face or arms that he could see. She seemed like a regular, happy kid.

Flynn waited to register Mrs. Shepard’s response. There wasn’t any. The lady just kept smiling and said nothing. The bulldog sat there looking sort of humiliated to still be wearing the booties.

“Mrs. Shepard?” Flynn asked.

Finally the woman said, “Yes? What is it you want? What do you think goes on here?”

“Mrs. Shepard, as I said—”

“I’m Christina.”

“Mrs. Shepard, I—”

“I just told you. I’m Christina.”

She was all riptide intensity. Flynn could sense the conflicting tensions inside the woman but had no idea what they were or how they would affect him. Her smile looked scraped into her face by a fishing knife. This lady’s teeth were drying out, the high gloss fading. The faint aroma of scotch trailed from her. She was maybe thirty, quite attractive, with burnished copper hair that fell in two wide, sweeping currents. The glaze in her eyes kept him from getting any kind of a real bead on her.

Now might come the questions, the defensiveness. She might grab Kelly and hold the kid out in front of her like an offering. Some of them did that. Some parents stripped their children in front of Flynn to prove there were no bruises. Some broke down and dropped to the floor. Some went for a kitchen knife. You never knew what might be coming next.

He’d given the spiel he was supposed to give. He’d amended it a bit to make it sound like he had a little more authority than he actually did. If he snapped the sentences out fast enough, he came off like a cop with a court order. It was good to lay it down on the line as hard as he could. It set the parameters and usually let him know which way things would go. Whether they’d confess or go for the shotgun in the closet.

He waited, feeling the current riding up his back. He knew she’d be different, that she was going to pull something new here.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked.

There it was. That was a first. No one had ever offered him tea before. “No thank you,” he said.

“How do we proceed?”

“Do you have any other children?”

“No, Kelly is our only one.”

“I’d appreciate a tour of your home.”

“And what will that prove? If I’m beating my child to the point that a neighbor—the nearest of whom lives several hundred yards away—can hear her screams, wouldn’t she be battered? Are you looking for pools of blood?” The smile had downshifted into an almost amiable grin, except it was way too wide.

“I’m just doing an on-site evaluation. It’s very standard.”

“Not for me it isn’t.”

“I realize that. I’m very sorry, Christina, but once a complaint has been lodged we have to follow up.”

“This late? It’s almost Kelly’s bedtime.”

“The storm kept me. Again, I apologize for the intrusion.”

Christina Shepard was given to dramatic movements. Swinging herself around and gesturing with her hands like she was scrawling signatures in the air. Kelly and the dog intuited her motions and stepped along with her, keeping just behind her. It was a weird kind of ballet he was watching, the three of them so gracefully maneuvering around in the front hallway.

“All right,” she said, giving him the thousand-watt leer again. “Let’s take a tour of my home.”

She walked him through it, all three floors. She offered to open drawers even though he said it wasn’t necessary. She opened them anyway. Her hostility came off her in waves, the way he expected. But there was something more there. Flynn couldn’t figure out what it might be, and his curiosity was really starting to bang around inside him. He stared at the side of her face as she led him from room to room, propping open armoires and dressers.

She put her hands on him only once, gripping him by the upper arm and steering him toward the master bedroom’s private bathroom. This lady had some serious muscle. He felt her coiled strength and the furnace of her agitation. She opened the medicine cabinet, grabbed a handful of pill bottles and started reading off labels. “Zyrtec, this is for allergies. Flexeril is a muscle relaxant for my husband, Mark, who has a bad back. Zoloft is medication for depression. I suffer from it. Surely that’s not a crime.”

“No, it’s not,” he said.

“Thank God for that. Would you like to speak to my daughter? Ask her questions?” The mask slipped another notch as she called for Kelly. The girl and the dog paraded into the bedroom like Marines landing on a foreign beach. “Foul questions, no doubt. What kind of a man wheedles his way into working with children every day, Mr. Flynn? What thoughts go through your piggy mind?”

He let it slide. She had a head full of serpents herself, he decided. He’d heard a lot worse on the job and Christina Shepard didn’t seem angry with him so much as she appeared flush with clashing forces.

Flynn turned to the girl and said, “Kelly, I work for people who look after children in case someone is hurting them. Maybe even a friend or someone in the family. It happens sometimes. Do you have anything you want to say to me?”

She peered at him like he was a puzzle missing a few pieces. “Are you asking if my mother and father hit me, Mr. Flynn?”

“Yes.”

She let out a titter and covered her mouth, and the bulldog did a little dance in his booties and barked happily. “Of course not! Why would you ask me something like that?”

“There, are you satisfied now?” Christina said.

Her lips were doing something between the freaky leering smile and the too-wide grin. It was an expression of satisfaction, but he saw a lot more in there, a hint of panic. Like she was trying to hold herself together just until he was out the door, and then she would let herself go.

“I’d like you to leave me and my family in peace now,” she told him.

Flynn said, “Thank you for your cooperation, Mrs. Shepard.”

“Fine. Just go.”

She didn’t follow him as he left the upstairs bedroom, but Zero the bulldog did. It got in front of him and dropped a chew toy at his feet. A plastic hamburger. Flynn tossed it down the stairs and Zero shot off after it. The dog waited at the bottom of the stairway until Flynn got there, then dropped the burger at his feet again.

Flynn bent to grab it one last time before he left, and the black nerve twitched inside him again.

He didn’t know why at first. It took a second to figure out. He looked left and right. He glanced back up the stairs. He was leaning over with his face near a heating vent.

He heard humming coming from somewhere deep in the house. A man murmuring a childish tune.

You didn’t expect to hear a man sound like that. It wasn’t a guy singing lullabies to his kids. There was more to it. The man
was
the kid. Flynn’s stomach tightened and his scalp prickled.

He looked back over his shoulder. Christina and Kelly Shepard were still upstairs in the master bedroom. Zero was still waiting for Flynn to toss him the burger. Flynn did so and the dog went scampering. Flynn looked along the length of the walls and tried to track the vents in the direction he thought the sound might be traveling. He walked past the living room to the large kitchen. There were three doors there. One led to the garage. Another was a huge closet that was like a storeroom, full of massive boxes and gigantic cans and enormous jugs, the kind of oversized packages you get at a cost-cutting warehouse. Even though the places were presumably set up for the middle class, only the rich could ever shop there. Only they had the room to store all this shit.

The last door led to a cellar.

Flynn had twenty-seven minutes to live.

He didn’t like the look of it. There were two sets of locks, both open. His bad juju detector was already blaring. He pulled out his pocketknife, worked the hinge pins free and put them in his coat pocket. The way the door hung, it looked exactly the same, but nobody would be able to lock him down there.

He was playing it all wrong but something kept telling him this was the only way to play it.

His dead brother’s presence felt so strong around him now that he could imagine spinning fast enough to catch sight of Danny.

Flynn didn’t have any evidence for the cops or his boss, Sierra, who was already going to read him the riot act for the way he was botching this case. He’d be lucky to stay out of the pokey himself.

But some things couldn’t be helped. You decided on your course, and you saw it through.

Flynn hit one of several light switches and descended the stairs.

The outlandish house had thrown him once more. It wasn’t a cellar, but a damn nice basement that had been turned into a guy pad. It was the kind of room that men without sons spent a lot of money on while awaiting the arrival of their first boy.

A flatscreen high-definition television sat high against one wall. Shelves were packed with DVDs. An ample L-shaped leather sofa made Flynn think this was the place where all Shepard’s friends watched the Super Bowl and the World Series every year. There were sports collectibles in glass cases all around. Signed photos, footballs, catchers’ mitts, boxing gloves. Mark Shepard had invested a good chunk of change and really liked to show off his collection.

It would’ve been a hell of a nice place if not for the guy in the cage in the middle of the room.

Flynn just stared for a second.

Sometimes you needed an extra breath to help you decide where it was you wanted to go next.

The cage was pretty small, the size of a boarding kennel for a German shepherd. Bars were half-inch steel, and the frame had been welded together with precision. The door was padlocked.

Inside sat a naked man with a misshapen head, as if someone had flung him against a cement wall as an infant. His slack lower jaw bent too far to one side and threads of drool slid down his chin. Thick, knotted scars and brandings cross-thatched his entire body, even his inner thighs. His left arm had been broken, poorly set, and now tilted slightly backwards at the elbow. He was still humming, and his gentle brown eyes, which were about an inch too far apart, just kept on watching Flynn.

“Hey, hello there,” Flynn said, trying to make his voice sound as natural as possible. “I’m your friend. I’m Flynn. Can you talk to me? Can you understand me?”

The man grinned, his gaze full of bewilderment and delight. Something started to crack in Flynn’s chest. After all he’d been through, the guy was still glad to see another person, still singing. The nerve throbbed so painfully through Flynn he had to put his hand against the bars of the cage to steady himself.

Zero appeared at Flynn’s ankle with the plastic hamburger in his teeth. The booties did a good job of soundproofing his paws. The cellar door creaked and slipped off one of the hinges. Up there, the girl let out a small cry of surprise. Zero circled the room and Kelly appeared on the stairway. She held a handful of cookies wrapped in a napkin.

She walked down the steps, saw Flynn, but showed no surprise, just a smidgen of irritation. “Did you break the door?”

“Sorry about that,” he said.

“You found Nuddin. He’s my uncle.”

Bending to the cage she handed the cookies through the bars. Nuddin accepted them and chewed them down with joyous noises. He only ate half of each one, then offered each remaining half to Zero, who ate from his hand.

Nuddin?

Nothing?

“How long’s he been here?” Flynn asked calmly.

“Since before my last birthday.”

“Okay. When’s your birthday, Kelly?”

“June. June 15. I was seven. I’m seven and a half now.”

More than six months the man had been down here.

Flynn had seen it twice before. Mentally challenged children locked up in back rooms, imprisoned in chains, but that had been in the south Bronx. In areas that looked like they’d been invaded, blitzed, nuked, where the rules dried up and things got savage, and superstitions burned out of control. Roosters ran wild in the streets, kept on hand for Santeria rituals. Maybe it
was
Santeria. New religions were being born every day in the slums. Flynn had seen a lot in his time, but you just didn’t expect a retarded man to be caged in the basement of a million-dollar house out on the North Shore.

“Kelly, where’s the key?”

“My mother has it.”

“We need to get him out of here.”

“Why?”