by Bell, David
“Their life isn’t a bed of roses.”
“No shit.”
“Seriously, though, do you ever think about how we ended up getting Dante in the first place?”
Reynolds stopped chewing. He leveled his gaze at Stynes from across the table. “You mean by investigating?”
Stynes considered dropping it. Reynolds was retired and likely not to be a receptive audience. But if he didn’t ask the guy he respected most in the world, who was he going to ask?
“We had witnesses,” Stynes said. “The kids and the adults in the park. And we had his aunt, and the porn and the clippings about the case. Did we have enough? I mean…talking to Dante Rogers today, hearing what he had to say…And talking to the Mannings, too…There might be something there—”
“Okay.” Reynolds dropped his fork with a loud clatter. It dropped off the table and onto the floor. He made an exaggerated show of picking up his napkin and wiping it across his mouth. “I know what this is,” he said. “I’ve seen it before. You’ve got, what, two years to retire?”
“About that.”
“Okay, and you’re getting old, right? Pushing sixty? And you’re looking back over everything and you’re saying to yourself, ‘Well, what did I do right and what did I do wrong? And does any of it amount to two farts in a windstorm?’ Right?”
Stynes didn’t answer, but Reynolds’s insights struck a chord. Stynes knew he was reassessing, summing up, looking forward to life in retirement. And what waited for him there? Reds games on TV six months a year and Gunsmoke reruns in the winter.
“You know what you need to do? You need to get remarried. Look at you.” Reynolds signaled the waitress and received a new fork. He started eating again. “Look at you. Widowed. No kids. No dog or cat. And you’re looking down retirement like it’s the barrel of a gun. Get outside yourself a little bit. You’re still young. You can still get it up. Find a nice schoolteacher who’s about to retire. Ride off into the sunset together.”
He paused to chew. Stynes thought he was finished with his rant, but Reynolds leveled his butter knife, pointing it right at Stynes’s chest, and said, “This shit ain’t going to fly with me, okay? I’m not digging into the past and thinking about all the shitheads I put away. This Dante, he got what he deserved. Right? Don’t go there.”
Stynes worked on his fries. He nodded, absorbing Reynolds’s words, letting them rattle around in his brain. As expected, Reynolds didn’t want to hear it, and maybe his old partner was right. Why dig into the past just because Dante Rogers looked like a pathetic piece of shit at the Reverend Fred’s church?
“That’s the longest we put anyone away,” Stynes said. “I mean, outside of guys who pled or were obviously guilty.”
“You did good,” Reynolds said. “You were young, but you did good. You worked well with the Mannings and those little kids. It worked. I only wish the asshole had gone away longer. I wish we’d made it first degree. They were still frying bastards back then. He could have ridden the lightning. Zap. Then we’re not having this talk.”
“And you’d be missing me,” Stynes said.
“Bullshit.” Reynolds threw the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth and wiped his hands. “Listen to what I said. Retirement can be a bitch if you don’t have something to do.”
Stynes sipped his drink, drained it down so only ice was left in the glass. “Do you remember something about that case?” Stynes asked. “The testimony of those kids. When we talked to them at the park, they told us two things. Yes, they told us they saw Justin with Dante and all that. But they also told us that Justin had run off into the woods, alone, chasing a dog or something. But that night when we talked to them, neither one of them remembered that part of it. All they wanted to say was that they saw Justin with Dante. Nothing about the woods.”
“So? They’re kids. Remember Elizabeth Smart? Her kid sister sees the guy come into the room and take Elizabeth. Nine months later, she wakes up one day and says, ‘Hey, I know who it is.’ Nine months. They’re kids. Little kids. Who knows how their minds work? And other people—other adults—saw Dante at the park.”
The waitress brought the check, and Reynolds pointed to Stynes. “It’s his turn. I’m on a fixed income.”
Stynes brought out his wallet and put a twenty down with the check. The waitress collected it and brought him change. “Look,” he said. “There were a lot of adults in the park that day. We talked to all of them, but we pretty quickly started looking for a black guy and dropped any other thoughts because of what those kids said at night, how adamant they were that night. Adamant. Right?”
Reynolds didn’t respond, so Stynes counted out the tip and went on, his voice lowered.
“Who commits most crimes against children?” Stynes asked.
“More Trivial Pursuit?”
“You know as well as I do—sixty-eight percent of the time it’s a parent or family member, right? We may not have known that as much back then, but we sure as hell know it now.”
Reynolds made a circular motion with his hand. Go on.
“And who had access to those kids before we talked to them?”
“We talked to them right in the park and they mentioned Dante, right after it happened.”
“There was a lot of heat on us. Hell, there was heat on every cop in America back then. Crime was up all over. If something happened, everybody freaked out. They acted like the world was ending. Maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to what was said in the park because of the chaos that day. The body was found in the woods, and that’s the direction those kids pointed us to initially.”
“We searched there,” Reynolds said. “Hell, we searched those woods multiple times. We dragged that little pond, turned over every rock. We had to wait for Mother Nature to give that kid’s body back to us.”
“Didn’t you think there was something…off about Bill Manning? We talked about it at the time.”
“Yeah, his kid was missing. That’s enough to make anybody off.”
“Are you going to give me another lecture on how I don’t understand what he went through because I never had kids?”
Reynolds almost smiled. “I’ll let it go.”
“Seriously, there was something going on there, right?” Stynes asked.
Reynolds leaned back. “You mean because of what the Mannings said that day?”
“Yes,” Stynes said. “In the morning, right after Justin disappeared, Mrs. Manning, Virginia Manning, told us that her husband didn’t go to work at his usual time that day. She said that he stayed home, which was unusual. But that night, when we went back to the house to talk to them again, she had changed her tune. She said her husband did leave for work at the usual time, that everything was normal in the morning, and he didn’t come home until they found out that Justin was missing. She called him at work and told him.”
“I remember all this, Stynes.” Reynolds pointed to his head. “I’ve still got it together up here.”
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“When someone contradicts themselves, we see it as a red flag. We push harder.”
“It was a red flag,” Reynolds said. “We both saw it that way. We talked about it then, remember?”
“Yes. And you told me to let it go, to back off the Mannings.”
“Damn right.”
“You said they were scared and upset, and it wasn’t unusual for someone like Mrs. Manning to get her facts mixed up.”
“It’s called being compassionate,” Reynolds said. “Good cops do that. They know how to treat the victims of crimes.”
“But didn’t we turn away from them too quickly?” Stynes asked.
“Too quickly?” Reynolds asked.
“Yeah.”
“As I recall, you pulled Mrs. Manning aside for a little heart-to-heart the night her kid disappeared, didn’t you? You asked her all about this, right? As I recall, you did it without my permission. And what happened?”
“She stuck to
the story,” Stynes said. “She said she mixed things up in the morning because she was upset.”
“There you go,” Reynolds said.
“But was it enough? Couldn’t we have pushed them just a little more?”
“Let me ask you something, since you’re so fond of these trivia questions. Who commits most of the violent crimes in Dove Point? And where do most of the violent crimes take place?”
Stynes paused, letting Reynolds’s words sink in. “Jesus, Terry. Are you for real?”
“I’m talking numbers, Stynesie.”
“You’re saying that blacks commit most of the violent crimes, and most of them take place over in East.”
“Amen, brother.”
“So that’s why we looked so hard at Dante Rogers and let the alibi from the Mannings go?”
“We had the witnesses against Dante,” Reynolds said. “Against the Mannings we had what? A woman’s hysterical story about her husband?”
“And the tendency of kids or anyone else to be killed by people they know.”
Reynolds shook his head. “I don’t see it, Stynesie. Take my advice—get a hobby. Become one of those Walmart greeters. Do something. But I have to get out of here—”
“What about Scott Ludwig?” he asked.
Reynolds tightened his jaw, as though biting back on something.
“Ludwig was there,” Stynes pressed. “He was doing that nature walk or whatever for a group of kids. But he left without talking to us. As soon as trouble went down, he was gone. And nobody saw him or could find him.”
“That’s not a crime.”
“It is damn weird if a crime has been committed, and he was at the scene. He’s always been an odd duck—”
“Also not a crime. Look at you.”
“We should have looked at Ludwig harder. We both know that.”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t? I guess Dante made a more vulnerable target, didn’t he? He wasn’t white and from a prominent family—”
“Hey,” Reynolds said. The word came out so loud it seemed to surprise even Reynolds. Other diners turned to look, and Reynolds ducked his head a little, gathered his cool. But he didn’t cool off. He pointed at Stynes and said, “Listen, you want to carry around some bullshit guilt and doubts, that’s fine with me. But you do it alone.” Reynolds looked around. The other diners were back to their own business—or at least pretending to be. He turned back to Stynes. “You can accuse me of a lot of things, but I wouldn’t dump a case because someone has money. You bring me one shred of proof, one piece of evidence that Ludwig or anybody else did anything to that Manning kid, and I’ll change my mind. Otherwise, put it in the win column and let Dante Rogers live out his crappy life over in East like the puke that he is.”
Stynes hated himself for feeling chastened, like a little kid scolded by his dad. Reynolds had that effect on him. Always.
But at some point, everybody leaves home…
“I’m going to talk to Ludwig, Terry,” Stynes said. “And Bill Manning. I have to.”
Disgust dripped off Reynolds’s face as he pushed himself up from the table and left Judy’s without saying good-bye.
Chapter Fifteen
Janet knew she was acting distracted. She didn’t tell Madeline who she had seen—might have seen?—but she abruptly announced her intention to head back to the office, leaving Madeline to hustle to keep up.
In the bright sunlight outside the student center, Janet looked left, then right. She saw scattered people—individuals and groups—but no sign of the man from the porch. No sign of a blue shirt or the short-cropped blond hair. Why was he there if he only wanted to slip away without speaking to her?
“Hon? Is everything all right?”
Madeline came alongside of Janet, a little out of breath. Janet didn’t know what to say. She couldn’t tell her the truth, of course, so she nodded.
“Fine,” Janet said. “I just—I want to get back and get out of this heat.”
“If you keep moving that fast I’m going to faint on the sidewalk.”
“Sorry.”
As they walked, Janet paid more attention to the surroundings, to every figure that passed through her line of sight, every tree or car someone might be hidden behind. Madeline talked—something about her son and his decision to get a tattoo—and Janet interjected some mindless yeses and noes as she saw fit.
But she kept looking for the man, and as she looked, her anxiety level rose.
What if Michael was right? What if the man intended to do her some kind of harm? He’d shown up in the middle of the night and adamantly insisted she not tell the police.
Who would make such a request but someone who was in trouble?
Janet started to reach for her phone, to call home and tell her dad to be careful if a strange man came to the door. She could even call or text Ashleigh and tell her not to leave the house—
But she didn’t.
If the man wanted to hurt someone or do her family harm, wouldn’t he have done that already? He knew where they lived. He knew he’d hooked Janet with his appearance on the porch and the promise of more information to come. And did she need to make Ashleigh any more agitated with her than she already was?
Then Janet saw the man again. He stood on the left side of Wilson Hall as they approached the front of the building. He leaned against the trunk of an old and richly green maple. They locked eyes, but the man made no gesture toward her. He didn’t summon her with a wave or acknowledge her at all.
But he watched her. He didn’t avert his eyes.
Madeline continued to talk. Janet doubted she had even seen the man, or if she had she would figure he was a student or maintenance worker or other campus visitor.
Janet felt a chill, a quick frosting inside her chest. She knew she could just walk into Wilson, sit at her desk, and go about her day. She could call campus security and report the man. She could have done any of those things.
But she didn’t.
She wanted to talk to the man. She wanted to find out what he knew.
She turned to Madeline at the entrance to the building.
“I’ll be right inside,” Janet said. “I have to do something.”
Madeline saw the man then. She looked to the man and then back to Janet, her face full of questions.
“Go on. I’m fine,” Janet said.
Madeline didn’t look like she believed her, but she did—reluctantly—go inside the building.
The man wore his hair short, buzzed almost to his scalp. He didn’t appear to be losing his hair, but he wore it that way. He wore baggy jeans and mud-splattered work boots. His blue T-shirt advertised a local food bank. If he felt scared or nervous about talking to Janet, he managed to keep it hidden.
When Janet reached him, she didn’t know what to say. Her legs felt light and hollow. She wanted—needed—to sit down.
“Hello,” the man said.
“How did you know I worked here?” she asked.
“I read that article in the paper,” he said. “I tried to come by yesterday to talk to you, but couldn’t make it.”
“You came by here?” Janet asked. “To campus?”
The man didn’t answer.
“Did you come to my house? Last night in the dark? Were you there?”
“I’m here to talk to you now,” he said.
“Are you here to tell me what I want to know?” Janet asked. “What do you know about Justin’s death?”
The man looked around a little, as though he thought someone might be listening. “Can we talk somewhere?”
“We can talk here,” Janet said. “Now tell me what you know, or I’ll call the police on you. If you think you can come by my house—”
“I just want to sit down somewhere and talk.” He looked behind him. About fifty feet away sat a shaded bench, a donation in the name of some long-dead alum. “Can we sit over there?” he asked. “For just a few minutes.”
Janet looked over at Wilson Hal
l, to the first-floor windows where the dean’s office was housed. She saw Madeline looking out, not even pretending to be subtle. Janet gave a little wave to her, trying to let her know that, at least for the moment, everything was okay.
But was it?
She didn’t see the harm in staying close. And she knew Madeline was on alert.
“Let’s go,” Janet said. “But I don’t have a lot of time. I’m at work.”
They walked to the bench. Janet looked around before she sat, making sure of her surroundings. She didn’t see anyone else nearby. She took that as a good sign. She felt better thinking the man was alone and not accompanied by others.
They settled on opposite ends of the bench, and Janet studied his face, matching to the memory she carried from that one night on the porch. Her recollections seemed surprisingly accurate. The man did carry the features she remembered, the ones that she associated with Justin. The shape of his eyes—round like her father’s. And like hers. The chin that came to a sharp point—kind of but not exactly like her mother’s. Janet studied his features so long it took her several moments to realize how rapidly her heart was beating. She wiped a drop of sweat off her forehead with a shaking hand.
“Do you need something to eat?” Janet asked. “Do you need help?”
He smiled a little. It made him look young, almost childish.
“Why would you think I needed something to eat, or help?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Janet said. “I don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing. You might be in trouble.”
“Do you remember me, Janet?” he asked.
“I’m trying to figure that out.” She tried to keep her voice level. “Who are you?”
“I lived here in Dove Point when I was a kid. I have to admit I didn’t really like it very much.”
“You didn’t like Dove Point?”
“I guess I didn’t like being a kid,” he said. The man smiled a little, but it looked forced, like some pressure existed behind his lips he was trying to hold in. “People control us when we’re kids. They hold us back. They do things to keep us in line.”
“I wish you’d tell me what you know about Justin.”