The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets)

by James, Harper

  Chapter 8

  THERE WASN’T ANY MORE sleep for him that night so he was up early the next day. He got to work researching the case, but soon realized he wasn’t going to find out much more than Tom Jacobson had told him the night before. The newspaper archives told a familiar story with the media’s rapidly dwindling interest mirroring the lack of any palpable progress by the police. The only piece of information of any use that he could find was the name of the chief of police ten years ago—Matt Faulkner.

  His personal experience predisposed him to seeing the faults in anything the police did, but even so, he couldn’t help but feel they’d been far too quick to pin the blame for the boy’s disappearance on the father, once he too disappeared. He made up his mind to go to see Faulkner, try to get more information out of him before doing any more digging himself. If Faulkner talked to him he could save himself a lot of unnecessary legwork. He would have liked to talk to Linda Clayton first but she hadn’t made any attempts to contact him.

  It didn’t even cross his mind that he wasn’t actually working for her. Somehow it had turned into a personal crusade.

  His best bet was to drive out and talk to Faulkner immediately. He’d retired some years ago and was now living in a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Evan didn’t bother ringing ahead. He wasn’t sure Faulkner would agree to talk to him, the case not what you’d call his finest hour.

  The man locking the trailer door as Evan walked up certainly didn’t look like Evan expected him to. The trailer park wasn’t the greatest place he’d ever been, but if he thought Faulkner was going to be sitting around his trailer all day in a wife beater and grubby old pants, drinking beer and smoking, he couldn’t have been further from the truth.

  Faulkner was mid-sixties with short, steel gray hair and a flat, square face. He was tall and slim and looked like an advertisement for healthy living. He looked like he was on his way to the gym.

  ‘I’m on my way to the gym,’ he said when he saw Evan approaching. ‘I don’t want to buy whatever it is you’re selling.’

  ‘I’m not selling anything, Mr Faulkner. I’d like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Sorry, I don’t do surveys. I’m in a bit of a hurry actually. Can you come back another time? Maybe four or five years.’

  ‘It’s about one of your past cases.’

  Faulkner clearly wasn’t expecting that reply. He looked at Evan suspiciously.

  ‘What, you want to write my memoirs?’

  ‘No, it’s just one case I’m interested in.’

  Faulkner’s eyes narrowed. Evan had the impression he’d guessed which one it was going to be.

  ‘And which one might that be?’

  ‘Daniel Clayton.’

  Faulkner stiffened momentarily when he heard the name, but it was so fast it would have been easy to miss.

  ‘As I said, I’m in a hurry.’

  He started walking towards his car.

  ‘Linda Clayton hired me to look into the case,’ Evan blurted out.

  He didn’t know what made him say it, but it got Faulkner’s attention. He stopped and looked at Evan, raising his eyebrows.

  ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Why else would I be here?’

  ‘You tell me, son. It’s just that as far as I know, Linda Clayton gave up on that boy years ago. Gone soft in the head too, if you ask me.’

  ‘Losing a son and a husband in the space of a few weeks can do that to a person.’

  Faulkner nodded, a tight expression on his face. Evan had the distinct impression he was being assessed, the eyes weighing him up. Or maybe he was embarrassed by what he’d just said about Linda Clayton.

  ‘Okay, I’ll give you five minutes, for all the good it’ll do you.’

  He walked back to the trailer and unlocked the door.

  ‘Come on in. I don’t want to talk about it out here.’

  Evan was surprised for the second time that morning as he entered the immaculately kept trailer. Obviously, it showed on his face too.

  ‘What did you expect?’ Faulkner said, ‘Empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays all over the place? Isn’t that how trailer trash live?’

  ‘Do you live here alone?’ Evan asked, inadvertently digging himself into the hole even further.

  ‘Yeah, but the maid comes in every morning and tidies up after me.’

  Evan felt a flush creeping up his face. His ears were impossibly hot. He wasn’t sure what to say.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, son,’ Faulkner said. ‘Let’s just hope for Mrs Clayton’s sake—and your career’s—that you don’t bring your ill-informed preconceptions to the rest of your life.’

  He gestured for Evan to sit. ‘Want a beer?’ he said with a laugh.

  Evan laughed too. ‘Why not? I’m Evan Buckley by the way.’

  Faulkner handed him a cold beer. ‘Pleased to meet you Mr. Buckley. Here’s hoping you get further than the rest of us did. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Well, all of it really. If you could talk me through it from the beginning.’

  Faulkner raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Is that all? Okay, here we go. One day, about ten years ago, on his way home from school, Daniel Clayton disappeared off the face of the earth. He left the classroom same as usual and started to walk home. He never took the school bus. His mother thought the exercise was good for him. Plus, he wasn’t a very popular kid and the other kids picked on him a lot. He never made it home and he’s never been seen since.’

  Faulkner leaned back in his chair and rubbed the back of his neck but didn’t say anything more. He took a sip of his beer.

  ‘That’s it?’

  Evan couldn’t decide whether Faulkner was being deliberately obstructive or he just wanted to make Evan work for it.

  ‘That’s all the facts. The school bus driver said that he normally saw Daniel walk past the bus on his way home, but not that day. So, if you believe the bus driver, Daniel disappeared somewhere on the campus. That’s if the bus driver wasn’t picking his nose at the time and missed the boy as he passed. Or that he hung around and left the campus a bit later than normal. Or that any one of a million other things happened.’

  ‘So what did you concentrate on? You must have had some suspicions.’

  ‘You need to realize there were two very distinct time periods here. Before the father disappeared and after. After he disappeared, we pretty much came to the conclusion that he was responsible for the boy disappearing, and he decided to disappear himself before we could prove anything against him.’

  ‘I thought you said the boy never made it home.’

  ‘Sorry, you’re right.’ He took another pull on his beer and looked at Evan over the top of the bottle. ‘I should have said the boy wasn’t home when the mother got home from work. So he could have come home like normal and something happened to him there. The father was out of work at the time, so he could have been home when the kid got back.’

  ‘What do you mean, could have?’

  ‘He said he was in a bar and didn’t get home until after the mother. But nobody could remember seeing him in the bar he claimed to be in. And everybody knows everybody else in that bar, they’re probably all related, it’s that sort of place. None of them remembered him—or anyone—who wasn’t part of the usual crowd.’

  ‘So, on that basis, you assumed it was him. He’s either in the bar drinking or he’s killing his son. No other options.’

  Faulkner ignored the comment.

  ‘It wasn’t just that, but then he disappeared himself. Given the complete lack of any other evidence pointing elsewhere, we reckoned it was the most likely explanation.’

  The more he talked to Faulkner, the more it seemed to Evan that they hadn’t looked very hard for an alternative explanation.

  ‘Convenient.’

  Faulkner glared at him.

  ‘Convenient my ass. Suddenly we’ve got two missing bodies and a new prime suspect who happens to be on
e of those missing bodies. We’d have preferred it if it was the local pervert.’

  ‘That can’t have gone down very well with Linda Clayton.’

  ‘You can say that again. I think it’s fair to say she was adamant there was no way on God’s green earth that her dear husband could have been involved in their son’s disappearance. It rather soured relationships between us.’

  ‘I can see that it would. No doubt made worse by the fact that you promptly gave up on any other avenues you might have been pursuing.’

  ‘You’ve got a nerve. If you put on a wig and a dress, I’d swear you were her come to give me a hard time.’

  Evan held up his hands. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound like I’m judging you.’

  Faulkner didn’t look particularly appeased and went and got another beer. Evan declined the offer.

  ‘This is more like it, eh? Living up to stereotypes.’ Faulkner said, taking a pull. ‘Sorry, sad old cop drinking beer in his trailer, haunted by unsolved cases. But as I remember the story, the next thing you know, the sad old cop gets the bit between his teeth again and gets back out there and solves it.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen this time, son.’

  ‘What about before the father disappeared?’ Evan asked.

  Just because Faulkner had made up his mind, it didn’t mean he had to agree with him. Linda Clayton didn’t.

  ‘What about it? A load of dead ends and time wasters. A whole bunch of people saw a ‘suspicious-looking’ pickup truck’—he did the quotes thing with his fingers—‘some other people saw a suspicious-looking camper van and half the town saw a suspicious-looking dark sedan cruising around that afternoon.’ He gave a short, humorless laugh. ‘They’re always dark sedans. Like a white sedan is always driven by the good guys. And what the hell is a suspicious-looking vehicle for Christ’s sake? One with some legs sticking out the window? I think at least one ‘witness’ saw Elvis that afternoon.’

  Evan laughed. ‘I suppose it brings all the cranks out of the woodwork.’

  ‘You have no idea, and it’s not just the cranks. People have an argument with their neighbor and call us up and say they saw body parts in their trash just to get them back.’ It appeared Evan had set Faulkner off on a favorite diatribe. ‘Some of the guys in the bar who didn’t remember seeing Robbie Clayton were helpful enough to remember seeing all manner of other people. Suspicious-looking people of course. People with shifty eyes, that sort of thing. The barroom wisdom was really running high that day. In fact, I think that’s where Elvis was spotted, having a beer with Hank Williams.’

  Evan smiled and waited for him to go on but he’d run out of steam.

  ‘And . . .’ he prompted.

  ‘And nothing. Absolutely zip. Nada.’

  ‘Who else did you look at? What about the bus driver?’

  Faulkner gave him a long-suffering look. A God-give-me-strength look. He shook his head wearily.

  ‘If you find me a ten-year-old phone directory, I guarantee we talked to most of the people in it. Even though—’

  Evan started to interrupt but Faulkner held up a hand to stop him.

  ‘Even though we didn’t have the benefit of you guiding us along, showing us how to do our jobs. Oh, and the benefit of ten years’ worth of hindsight, of course.’

  Evan ignored Faulkner’s sarcasm. He was surprised Faulkner didn’t ask him to leave. It probably wouldn’t be long, so he needed to keep pressing him.

  ‘You must have had a prime suspect.’

  ‘We did. Based on Carl Hendricks’ statement—’

  ‘Who’s Carl Hendricks?’

  ‘The bus driver. Based on his statement which we believed to be accurate, it appeared that Daniel disappeared on the campus.’

  Evan was struck by the inconsistency of what Faulkner was saying. He was about to say something but Faulkner held up his hand to stop him.

  ‘Don’t worry, it hasn’t escaped me that if we believed the father was responsible, then Hendricks’ statement must be inaccurate. He really was picking his nose and didn’t see the boy walk past. But at the time, and remember, no hindsight allowed’—he wagged his finger in mock admonishment—‘we had no reason to think it wasn’t true. So we concentrated on looking inside the campus. The most likely candidate seemed to be his teacher, Ray Clements. Like I said before, Daniel wasn’t the most popular kid in his class, but he got on well with Clements. It turns out the kid would hang around sometimes and Clements would give him a ride home. He’d drop him off a couple of blocks away so his mother wouldn’t find out. Which also meant nobody else really knew it was going on.’

  ‘Did he have an alibi?’

  ‘Nothing we were able to check. He said he went for a drive that afternoon because it was such a beautiful day. He showed us a receipt for gas, but there’s nothing to say you can’t fill up with a kid hogtied in the trunk.’

  ‘But nothing came of it?’

  ‘No. We leaned on him pretty hard, especially after he admitted giving the kid a ride in his car. We pulled the car apart and searched his house, but there wasn’t anything. His wife was furious. You should have seen her. I bet he really got it in the neck after we’d gone.’ Faulkner smiled to himself at the memory. ‘We also took away his computer and found a load of porn on it.’

  ‘Kiddie porn?’

  ‘No, just the normal stuff. And you don’t have to worry that we missed some secret internet portal. We do have some bright people who know what they’re doing.’

  ‘It doesn’t exactly single him out as public enemy number one.’

  ‘No.’ He smiled again. ‘Mind you, if you were married to his wife, you’d look at a lot of porn.’

  ‘Not what you’d call a looker?’

  ‘Maybe if you’re a male Hippo. Anyway, I feel pretty confident we didn’t miss anything there.’

  ‘What about the bus driver? Did he have an alibi?’

  ‘What, apart from driving a busload of screaming brats home?’

  ‘What about afterwards?’

  Faulkner laughed. There was genuine amusement in it this time.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He went to a strip joint. Different strokes for different folks, eh? The teacher goes for a drive in the summer sunshine, and the bus driver goes to some dingy basement to gawp at saggy tits. It takes all sorts.’

  ‘They remembered him?’

  ‘Apparently he was one of their best perv . . . I mean customers. It must have been payday that day, because he paid for a number of private dances with the same girl. I use the word loosely—she was old enough to be my mother.’

  ‘Could he have paid her to say he was with her?’

  ‘Of course he could. And the FBI killed JFK.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Evan said defensively.

  ‘Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities. Do you know who said that?’

  ‘No.’ It sounded more like a tongue twister than a quotation.

  ‘Look it up on the internet when you get bored with the porn. Now, are we done here, or do you have any more How the hell did I miss that questions for me?’

  They weren’t likely to get any further forward. Evan could see why they’d been happy to pin it on the boy’s father in absentia, but it didn’t make his task any easier. He got up to go and stopped to look at the wall of framed photographs and commendations. Lots of them showed Faulkner with a good looking, dark haired woman.

  ‘That’s me and the wife, God rest her soul,’ Faulkner said, joining him and pointing to one of a younger version of himself and the woman, smiling brightly on vacation somewhere. It looked like Switzerland or Austria. He pointed to another one of an even younger version of the same women standing with an older couple in front of an old, red barn. ‘That’s her and her folks before we got married.’ He stared silently at the photograph as he must have done a thousand times before. ‘She died last year. A blessing really, she’d been ill for a long time.’
/>   ‘I’m sorry,’ Evan said. ‘I know what it’s like to lose someone you love.’

  Chapter 9

  EVAN DIDN’T HAVE ANY choice now but to speak to Linda Clayton. He wasn’t comfortable with the fact that he’d spoken with Faulkner under false pretences. More than that, it was obvious that Faulkner wouldn’t have given him the time of day if he hadn’t told the lie. Other people he wanted to talk to would probably be the same way. Besides, he wanted to meet her and help her. He certainly wasn’t expecting her to pay him. He didn’t have anything else to do with his time after all.

  He drove straight to her house after leaving Faulkner. There wasn’t going to be any fooling around this time, so he parked directly outside the house, walked up the path and knocked on the door. Her car was in the driveway and Tom Jacobson had told him she didn’t like to go out in the daytime, so he was confident she was at home. That didn’t mean she was going to answer the door, though. He knocked a couple more times, and then peered through the window. He couldn’t see anyone moving around inside.

  He didn’t want to draw too much attention to himself after what happened last time, but it looked like he would have to talk to her through the door and try to persuade her to let him in. He looked up and down the street but there wasn’t anyone around.

  He cupped his hands round his mouth and put them to the door.

  ‘Mrs Clayton, my name is Evan Buckley. I’m a private detective. I believe you came to my office the other night. I would very much like to talk to you. Please let me in. I’m not going away until I’ve talked to you.’

  The door remained firmly shut, so he tried again.

  ‘I’ve just spoken to Matt Faulkner—’

  The door was pulled open so fast he almost fell on top of her. She’d been standing right on the other side of it. Obviously, there was some kind of reciprocal arrangement with her and Faulkner’s names. All you had to do was find the right button to push. He managed to keep his balance and stood upright.

  ‘Mrs Clayton—’

  ‘Yes, yes, I heard all that garbage through the door. What are doing talking to that old bastard Faulkner?’

  Faulkner hadn’t been exaggerating about soured relationships. And most of the sourness seemed to be going in one direction, but that was understandable.