The Woods (4 page)

A FEW HOURS LATER I TUCKED MY DAUGHTER INTO BED. Cara never gives me trouble at bedtime. We have a wonderful routine. I read to her. I do not do it because all the parenting magazines tell me to. I do it because she adores it. It never puts her to sleep. I read to her every night and not once has she done as much as doze. I have. Some of the books are awful. I fall asleep right in her bed. She lets me.

I couldn't keep up with her voracious desire for books to be read to her, so I started getting books on audio. I read to her and then she can listen to one side of a tape, usually forty-five minutes, before it is time to close her eyes and go to sleep. Cara understands and likes this rule.

I am reading Ronald Dahl to her right now. Her eyes are wide. Last year, when I took her to see the stage production of The Lion King, I bought her a terribly overpriced Timon doll. She has it gripped in her right arm. Timon is a pretty avid listener too.

I finished reading and gave Cara a kiss on the cheek. She smelled like baby shampoo. "Good night, Daddy," she said.

"Good night, Pumpkin."

Kids. One moment they're like Medea having a bad mood swing, the next they are God-kissed angels.

I snapped on the tape player and snapped off her light. I headed down to my home office and turned on the computer. I have a hook-up to my work files. I opened up the rape case of Chamique Johnson and started poring over it.

Cal and Jim.

My victim wasn't what we call jury-pool sympathetic. Chamique was sixteen and had a child out of wedlock. She had been arrested twice for solicitation, once for possession of marijuana. She worked parties as an exotic dancer, and yes, that is an euphemism for stripper. People would wonder what she was doing at that party. That sort of thing did not discourage me. It makes me fight harder. Not because I care about political correctness, but because I am into, very into, justice. If Chamique had been a blond student council vice-president from lily-white Livingston and the boys were black, I mean, come on.

Chamique was a person, a human being. She did not deserve what Barry Marantz and Edward Jenrette did to her.

And I was going to nail their asses to the wall.

I went back to the beginning of the case and sifted through it again. The frat house was a ritzy affair with marble columns and Greek letters and fresh paint and carpeting. I checked telephone records. There was a massive amount of them, each kid having his own private line, not to mention cell phones, text messaging, e-mails, Blackberry’s. One of Muses investigators had backtracked every outgoing phone number from that night. There were more than a hundred, but nothing that stuck out. The rest of the bills were ordinary-electric, water, their account at the local liquor store, janitorial services, cable TV, online services, Netflix, pizza delivered via the Internet…

Hold up.

I thought about that. I thought about my victim's statement, I didn't have to read it again. It was disgusting and rather specific. The two boys had made Chamique do things, had put her in different positions, had talked the whole time. But something about it all, the way they moved her around, positioned her…

My phone rang. It was Loren Muse.

"Good news?" I asked.

"Only if the expression 'No news is good news' is really true."

"It's not," I said.

"Damn."

"Anything on your end?" she asked.

Cal and Jim. What the hell was I missing? It was there, just out of reach. You know that feeling, when something you know is right around the corner, like the name of the dog on Petticoat Junction or what was the name of the boxer Mr. T played in Rocky III. It was like that. Right out of reach.

Cal and Jim.

The answer was here somewhere, just hiding, just around that mental corner. Damned if I wasn't going to keep running until I caught that sumbitch and nailed him to the wall.

"Not yet," I said. "But let's keep working on it."

Early the next morning, Detective York sat across from Mr. and Mrs. Perez.

"Thank you for coming in," he said.

Twenty years ago, Mrs. Perez had worked in the camp's laundry, but I'd only seen her once since the tragedy. There had been a meeting of the victims' families, the wealthy Greens, the wealthier Billinghams, the poor Copelands, the poorer Perezes, in a big fancy law office not far from where we now were. The case had gone class action with the four families against the camp owner. The Perezes had barely spoken that day. They'd sat and listened and let the others rant and take the lead. I remember Mrs. Perez had kept her purse on her lap and clutched it. Now she had it on the table, but both hands were still bolted to its sides.

They were in an interrogation room. At the suggestion of Detective York, I watched from behind one-way glass. He didn't want them to see me yet. That made sense.

"Why are we here?" Mr. Perez asked.

Perez was heavyset, his button-down shirt a size too small so that his gut strained the buttons.

"This isn't easy to say." Detective York glanced at the mirror and while his gaze was off, I knew that he was seeking me out. "So I'm just going to come out with it."

Mr. Perez's eyes narrowed. Mrs. Perez tightened her grip on the purse. I wondered idly if it was the same purse from fifteen years ago.

Weird where the mind goes at times like this.

"There was a murder yesterday in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan," York said. "We found the body in an alley near 157th Street."

I kept my eyes on their faces. The Perezes gave away nothing.

"The victim is male and appears to be between the ages of thirty-five and forty years old. He is five-ten and weighs one hundred seventy pounds." Detective York's voice had fallen into a professional rhythm. "The man was using an alias, so we are having trouble identifying him."

York stopped. Classic technique. See if they end up saying some thing. Mr. Perez did. "I don't understand what that has to do with us." Mrs. Perez's eyes slid toward her husband, but the rest of her did not move.

"I'm getting to that."

I could almost see York's wheels spinning, wondering what approach to take, start talking about the clippings in the pocket, the ring, what. I could almost imagine him rehearsing the words in his head and realizing how idiotic they sounded. Clippings, rings, they don't really prove anything. Suddenly even I had my doubts. Here we were, at the moment when the Perezes' world was about to be gut-torn open like a slaughtered calf. I was glad that I was behind glass.

"We brought in a witness to identify the body," York went on. "This witness seems to feel that the victim could be your son Gil."

Mrs. Perez closed her eyes. Mr. Perez stiffened. For a few moments no one spoke, no one moved. Perez did not look at his wife. She did not look at him. They just stood there, frozen, the words still hanging in the air.

"Our son was killed twenty years ago," Mr. Perez said at last.

York nodded, not sure what to say.

"Are you saying that you've finally found his body?"

"No, I don't think so. Your son was eighteen when he vanished, correct?" "Almost nineteen," Mr. Perez said. "This man, the victim, as I mentioned before, he was probably in his late thirties."

Perez's father sat back. The mother still hadn't moved.

York dove in. "Your son's body was never found, isn't that correct?"

"Are you trying to tell us…?"

Mr. Perez's voice died off there. No one jumped in and said, "Yes, that's exactly what we are suggesting, that your son Gil has been alive this whole time, twenty years, and didn't tell you or anyone else, and now, when you finally have the chance to be reunited with your missing child, he's been murdered. Life's a gas, ain't it?"

Mr. Perez said, "This is crazy."

"I know what it must sound like-"

"Why do you think it's our son?"

"Like I said before. We have a witness."

"Who?"

It was the first time that I had heard Mrs. Perez speak. I almost ducked. York tried to sound reassuring. "Look, I understand you're upset-" "Upset?" The father again.

"Do you know what it's like… can you imagine…?"

His voice died off again. His wife put her hand on his forearm. She sat up a little straighter, for a second she turned to the window and I was sure she could see me through it. Then she met York's eye and said,

"I assume you have a body."

Yes, maam.

"And that's why you brought us here. You want us to look at it and see if it's our son."

"Yes."

Mrs. Perez stood. Her husband watched her, looking small and helpless.

"Okay," she said. "Why don't we do that?"

Mr. and Mrs. Perez started down the corridor.

I followed at a discreet distance. Dillon was with me. York stayed with the parents. Mrs. Perez held her head high. She still gripped the purse tight against her as though she feared a snatcher. She stayed a step ahead of her husband. So sexist to think it should be the other way around, that the mother should collapse while the father pushed on. Mr. Perez had been the strong one for the "show" part. Now that the grenade had exploded, Mrs. Perez took the lead while her husband seemed to shrink farther back with every step.

With its worn floor of linoleum and walls of scrape-the-skin concrete, the corridor couldn't have looked more institutional without a bored bureaucrat leaning against it on a coffee break. I could hear the echo of the footsteps. Mrs. Perez wore heavy gold bracelets. I could hear them clank in rhythm with the walking.

When they turned right at the same window I had stood in front of yesterday, Dillon stuck out his hand in front of me, almost in a protective way, as if I were a kid in the front seat and he'd just stopped short. We stayed a good ten yards back, maneuvering so that we stayed out of their line of vision.

It was hard to see their faces. Mr. and Mrs. Perez stood next to each other. They did not touch. I could see Mr. Perez lower his head. He was wearing a blue blazer. Mrs. Perez had on a dark blouse almost the color of dried blood. She wore a lot of gold. I watched a different person, a tall man with a beard this time, wheel the gurney toward the window. The sheet covered the body.

When it was in place, the man with the beard glanced toward York. York nodded. The man carefully lifted the sheet, as if there were some thing fragile underneath. I was afraid to make a sound, but I still tilted my body a little to the left. I wanted to see some of Mrs. Perez's face, at least a sliver of profile.

I remember reading about torture victims who want to control something, anything, and so they fight hard not to cry out, not to twist up their face, not to show anything, not to give their tormenters any satisfaction whatsoever. Something in Mrs. Perez's face reminded me of that. She had braced herself. She took the blow with a small shudder, nothing more.

She stared a little while. Nobody spoke. I realized that I was holding my breath. I turned my attention toward Mr. Perez. His eyes were on the floor. They were wet. I could see the quake cross his lips.

Without looking away, Mrs. Perez said, "That's not our son."

Silence. I had not expected that.

York said, "Are you sure, Mrs. Perez?"

She did not reply.

"He was a teenager when you last saw him," York continued. "I understand he had long hair."

"He did."

"This man's head is shaven. And he has a beard. It's been a lot of years, Mrs. Perez. Please take your time."

Mrs. Perez finally wrested her eyes from the body. She turned her gaze toward York. York stopped speaking.

"That's not Gil," she said again.

York swallowed, looked toward the father. "Mr. Perez?"

He managed a nod, cleared his throat. "There's not even much of a resemblance." His eyes closed and another quake ran across his face. "It’s just…"

"It’s the right age," Mrs. Perez finished for him.

York said, "I'm not sure I follow."

"When you lose a son like that, you always wonder. For us, he'll be forever a teenager. But if he had lived, he would be, yes, the same age as this husky man. So you wonder what he'd be like. Would he be married? Have children? What would he look like?"

"And you're certain this man isn't your son?"

She smiled the saddest smile I had ever seen. "Yes, Detective, I am certain." York nodded. "I'm sorry to bring you out here." They began to turn away when I said, "Show them the arm." Everyone turned in my direction. Mrs. Perez's laser gaze zeroed in on me. There was something there, a strange sense of cunning, a challenge maybe. Mr. Perez spoke first.

"Who are you?" he asked.

I had my eyes on Mrs. Perez. Her sad smile returned. "You're the Copeland boy, aren't you?"

Yes, maam.

"Camille Copeland's brother."

"Yes."

"Are you the one who made the identification?"

I wanted to explain about the clippings and the ring, but it felt as though I was running out of time. "The arm," I said. "Gil had that awful scar on his arm."

She nodded. "One of our neighbors kept llamas. He had a barbed-wire fence. Gil was always a good climber. He tried to get into the pen when he was eight years old. He slipped and the wire dug deep into his shoulder." She turned to her husband. "How many stitches did he need, Jorge?"

Jorge Perez had the sad smile now too. "Twenty-two."

That was not the story Gil had told us. He had weaved a tale about a knife fight that sounded like something out of a bad production of West Side Story. I hadn't believed him then, even as a kid, so this inconsistency hardly surprised me.

"I remembered it from camp," I said. I gestured with my chin back toward the glass. "Look at his arm."

Mr. Perez shook his head. "But we already said-"

His wife put a hand up, quieting him. No question about it. She was the leader here. She nodded in my direction before turning back to the glass. "Show me," she said.

Her husband looked confused, but he joined her at the window. This time she took his hand and held it. The bearded man had already wheeled the gurney away. York knocked on the glass. The bearded man startled upright. York beckoned him to bring the gurney back toward the window. He did.