The True Detective (48 page)

“Not yet. She is in the building right now, but she doesn’t know anything. There’s no actual identification yet.”

“Can you keep her there? Tell the chief, too, so he’ll know what’s going on. I don’t want to ask her to do the identification.”

“There’s the brother.”

“He’s too young. I’ll get back to you. Call Neil. He should know better, and he’ll be offended, but call him anyway. Tell him I said to rope off the entire area. Call Concord, too. Tell
them we’ll need their lab people there right away, probably for several hours.”

Pulling out, entering the street, Dulac reaches to flip a switch to activate the car’s siren—it seems to come up as always like a cyclone from within—and accelerates to slip past one car and then another edging to the side to grant him room.

At the intersection with Main Street, as the siren howls, he interrupts the traffic; he nurses, pumps, nurses the accelerator as he passes more cars shying away to give him room.

Nor is it easy to talk within the howling sound, and this gives Dulac a chance to let something settle within himself.

The man has said nothing, has acknowledged what is happening, it seems, by remaining silent. On the highway, pressing on, Dulac calls out, “I’ll let you off in town. If you don’t mind.”

“No problem,” the man calls back.

Keeping both hands on the steering wheel, Dulac presses on. He has nothing more to say. The news keeps moving through him, and it is new every time, and it is his job to press on and not to give in. He presses on.

H
E WONDERS IF THEY
’
VE FOUND THE BOY YET
. I
T SHOULDN
’
T
take long. Walking along, approaching a corner where he might turn back in the direction of where he left the boy, he
experiences an urge to do so. He could walk by on the other side of the street, he thinks. He could walk by and take a glance to see if anything was happening. The pull to return is appealing and he can’t quite resist it. At the corner, he makes the turn as if casually and walks along. It is the best he has felt all morning, or in several mornings, although he doesn’t know why. Does he feel safe now? he wonders. Is that what it is? Is it freedom he feels? Or is it because he has finally done the right thing?

Seeing a police car pass up ahead with its blue light flashing, he fears that nothing has changed. A thought comes up in him, too, to turn back. He doesn’t. He keeps walking. He wants to see. He isn’t sure what it is, but he wants to see, wants to feel something.

W
ITHIN THE BARRICADES
,
IN THE MIDST OF CONFUSED
activity and on his way to the heart of things, Dulac feels late, wrinkled with exhaustion, responsible for everything. His car might still be rocking, it seems, its siren still sighing in its illegally parked position back on the street, half over the curb. He stops. All these uniforms. Chaos. Cars. It’s his case and he won’t have this, he decides. He won’t have this.

People are lined up, and lining up, to watch. Citizens. Gawkers. Jokers. Ahead is a concentration of state troopers in leather
boots, city policemen, plainclothesmen, Mizener, DeMarcus, sheriff’s deputies. He turns back to the entrance. Out in the street an officer is trying to keep traffic moving as people are slowing down in their cars to rubberneck. To the uniformed officer within the barricades, Dulac says, “Step over here,” to draw him some steps away from the dozens of people on the other side of the tape.

“Has anyone come or gone other than all these cops?” Dulac asks him.

“One guy went out, sir.”

“Who was that?”

“He worked here or something. Was parked here. Said it was important business, so I let him go.”

“You got his name?”

“Yes sir, and his license plate.”

“Okay, good. You get a chance, call it in, have them run it. Don’t let anyone else leave. No one. But get the names of anyone belonging to these cars. Have them wait right here. Tell them we’ll have to talk to them. And keep those people back.”

Dulac glances over the gathering crowd. The person he is drawn to, Eric Wells, is back along the parking lot somewhere. He walks that way. There is the need to establish some control here. And there are all those faces back on the other side of the rope, even across the street; a number of them, many of them, are young men. Checking them out seems nearly impossible, at the same time that he doesn’t believe anyway, in his gut, that the suspect would show up here now. Still, driving hard in his car, he had been barking at himself,
he’s here, he’s been here all along, he’s here and all those who were so certain he was on the run were wrong, everyone has been wrong
.

He is moving now, at last, in the direction of the center of attention toward the rear of the parking lot. The boy. All the
others are here, standing in groups of three and four, talking, smoking, gesturing; he cannot, does not believe quite yet that in their midst, somewhere, is the body of twelve-year-old Eric Wells. He notices yellow tape then, to the left, reaching around the backs of four cars, containing an area including the cars and the space before the cars, where no one is trespassing. To his surprise, he feels an urge to have them all gone from here, to have their voices silenced, so he might look alone upon the child whose life had been taken, so he might see whatever there was to see, so he might know at last. Where but in his own heart, Your Honor, can a true detective look for evidence?

Mizener is in a near group, and Dulac says to him, to say something, “The lab people aren’t here?”

He doesn’t note or listen for an answer; perhaps none was given. His attention has already shifted to the area in front of the taped-in cars, although nothing is visible from where he is standing. Somehow, he doesn’t want to appear too anxious. Perhaps he fears his own reaction, that he might break something or wail like an elephant gone loco.

To Detective DeMarcus then, turning to duty, he says, “Listen. Line up three more people. Besides yourself. Go in pairs. Cover all directions from here. See if anybody saw anything. I can’t understand this car thing. Maybe he’s stolen a car. Knock on every door, get into every office, for a block or so. Somebody had to see this.”

Once more then, Dulac looks over the taped-in cars, which nose up to a curb. Going on, looking between two cars, he sees the boy’s blue-jeaned legs lying on an old crust of winter-dampened weeds, sees that which has occupied most of his thoughts these past several days. Eric Wells. There he is at last. He’s here.

The drivers of the two cars before which the body lies have to have seen the body, he thinks. He thinks this as he stands
looking. The drivers could not have pulled in and parked and left their cars and not seen the body lying there. So the body wasn’t there. It wasn’t there until after they were there. That’s simple. It means he was dropped this morning, that’s what it means. Still, it doesn’t say anything about when the boy died. Only the medical examiner will be able to tell them that. Thinking this, Dulac sees, too, again, that the killer, the college boy killer, Vernon Fischer, could be out there in the crowd of bystanders. Now that he had dropped off the secret witness, Dulac thinks, the one person who knew him on sight. Dropped him off, really, because he wanted to be alone, if only for a couple minutes. Stepping back toward Mizener, he says, “Neil, we need the owners of these two cars. Soon as possible. There’s no way they could have parked here and not seen the body.”

“Someone’s inside looking for them,” Mizener says.

“Where’s the car of the person who discovered the body? Is it here?”

Mizener points to the rear of the lot. “It’s that white Olds,” he says.

“He saw the body
between
these two cars?”

“That’s right.”

“He stepped between the cars to look?”

“Right, that’s what he said.”

Dulac steps over, to look again. He still has not seen the boy’s face, and even as he knows it is so, knows it is Eric Wells, he is not entirely convinced, not yet. He is, and he isn’t.

He returns toward Mizener.

“Any pictures taken yet?” he asks him.

“Just Polaroids,” Mizener says.

Dulac steps back. He circles the four cars then, to take a closer look from the other side. He approaches carefully and
stops at the yellow tape where it is strung on an angle to the corner of the building.

There is the small boy, lying on the ground, less than a dozen feet away. On his side; the boy could be asleep. A boy would use his arm as a pillow, though, Dulac thinks. And he thinks how simple death is in its way. A mechanism, full of thoughts and feelings, fears and hopes. Walking. Seeing things. Then a mechanism full of nothing. Life gone, carried away on a breeze.

The killer is here
, he thinks and feels.

Crouching, he gazes on the body from under the tape. He touches some fingers to the ground, to feel the damp cold there. He’s been here all along, he thinks.

Straightening, he calls back to Mizener, “Neil, whose footprint is that?”

Mizener steps closer. “The guy who discovered the body says it’s not his,” he says. “He’s absolutely certain he didn’t leave the pavement.”

“Listen, remind me to have the state police do a helicopter shot,” Dulac says. “We’ll see what kind of trails and paths there are around here.”

“You think he walked in?” Mizener says.

“Oh, I think he drove in. But the car thing is bothering me. Why in the hell hasn’t his car been spotted? Maybe he’s driving another car. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“You think he’s around?”

“He sure was; all the time everybody said he was in Canada, he was here.”

“I guess so,” Mizener says.

“It looks like he just placed the body, more or less in the open, so it would be found quickly. We get the owners of these two cars, we should be able to narrow down the time.”

Mizener stays in place but doesn’t respond.

Dulac is looking once more at the boy. He lights a cigarette. We lost it, he is thinking. There’s something in the air for him, as he looks, of a game of childhood. Hiding. Chasing. Raiding a fort and playing dead. He thinks to ask Mizener if anyone has put forth an idea of how long ago the boy died and decides not to.

For the moment, he doesn’t want to know.

“Lieutenant, there are a lot of reporters and TV people gathering down there,” someone says to him.

Dulac looks over. “Tell them I’ll give a statement as soon as I can. No one’s coming in here until the body’s removed, and that won’t happen until the lab people have done what they have to do. Tell them that. That it’ll be a while.”

“They want to know if we know when the body was dropped, or if we know the time of death,” the officer says to him.

“Not yet,” Dulac says. “We’re working on it. Tell them that. It’s exactly what we’re working on.”

Dulac looks back over the ground and over the young boy lying there. The young boy hasn’t moved. It isn’t a game of childhood. Dulac looks again. He has to go back around the cars and stand with the others, he realizes, not to appear attached to anything. He has no wish to stand with the others, to hear what they have to say. Yet he does so. He has always done so. As if to show his strength, he returns around the cars, while at his back the child’s death keeps talking to him.

H
ER TIME TO MEET
B
ETTY IS HERE
—
IT
’
S NEARLY ELEVEN
thirty—and the lieutenant still isn’t back. Thinking she will return after lunch, Claire approaches a cadet on duty at the front desk, near where she has been waiting almost an hour now. She can be back about one o’clock, she tries to explain. She’s supposed to meet a friend for lunch. The cadet says he will pass on the message.

Claire starts away, fixing her coat and scarf. She is just a step from the door when not a cadet but a police officer near the gate calls, “Mrs. Wells.”

As she looks back, the man says, “I guess the chief wants to see you.”

“I have this friend waiting,” Claire says.

“Maybe it’ll only take a minute,” the officer says, swinging the gate open.

She walks to the opening, where the policeman, who has several powder-blue stripes on the sleeves of his shirt, adds, following her, “It’s right along here.”

Claire feels self-conscious here again about her clothes, as she has since she cleaned up to come into town. She’s forgotten how to dress—if she ever knew—and her clothes, her light beige gloves, the scarf she is wearing, the couple of combs in her hair, seem old-fashioned in comparison with the way other women in town are dressed. She has a fear, in fact, that Betty will laugh at her, and this thought is on her mind as she is directed into
the chief’s waiting room. The first clue she has of anything—although it hardly registers—occurs when the secretary gets to her feet at once and comes around her desk to meet her, even to touch her. There is the chief in his doorway, saying, “Mrs. Wells, come on in here. There’s been a call about something.”

Perhaps she knows by now, although following into his office, she says, “A call about what?”

“Here, Claire, why don’t you sit down,” the man is saying to her.

The secretary has followed at her side. “A call about what?” Claire says.

“Claire, please have a seat,” the chief says.

“A call about what?” she says.

“Now, Claire, I don’t want you to get upset,” the chief is saying. “A little boy has been found. Near Islington Street. He looks about twelve. Well, I have to tell you, he’s not alive.”

Claire sits there; a flash lifts from her scalp.

“Are you okay?” the chief says.

There is the secretary at her side; Claire feels numb. She says, almost foolishly, “Eric is twelve.”

“Claire, it may be Eric,” the chief says. “The clothing matches.”

Claire doesn’t say anything to this. Then she says, “He’s not alive?”

“No, he’s not,” the chief says. “We’re not entirely certain it’s him, Claire. It doesn’t look good. We need positive identification. I’m terribly sorry.