by Andrew Grant
“The university set up the volunteering.” Helen crossed her arms. “The one where he works.”
“Right.” Ian put his hand on his wife’s leg. “So Joe gave up his free time to come out and help us clear up. There was a hell of a mess. And not just our things. You wouldn’t believe the kind of stuff that landed up in our yard. Files from a lawyer’s office in Tuscaloosa. Kids’ clothes. Pieces of cars. A fish—”
“So you became friends, bonding over sweeping up all this junk?”
“Right.” Ian smiled. “We hit it off from minute one. Same wavelength, you know? So when the inspectors came out and condemned our place, rather than rebuild we started looking in Mountain Brook. And guess what? This house hit the market that same week. Right next door to the Cranes. Talk about a stroke of luck.”
Devereaux noticed Helen turn her head away and stare at her foot.
“And Mary Lynne?” Devereaux asked. “Are you guys as close with her?”
“Absolutely. We couldn’t ask for better friends or neighbors.”
“How are the Cranes as parents?”
“I’d say excellent.” Ian nodded. “They just love those boys. They’d do anything for them. And they treat the two just the same, you know. It was ages before we found out Ethan was adopted.”
Helen’s foot started to tap.
“Do they bring the boys ’round here often?”
“No, not really.” Ian paused for a second. “We don’t have kids, so there wouldn’t be much for them to do.”
“What kind of kid is Ethan, would you say?”
“He’s a good boy. We don’t see him much, except at church, but I hear he’s doing well in school. Doesn’t like football much, apparently. Probably because of where his dad works. Wait a minute. Don’t tell me you pull for The Tide as well?”
“Oh, no.” Devereaux shook his head. “You’re not dragging me down that street. Let’s try this, instead. Have you ever heard of the Cranes getting into fights with anyone? At work? With other neighbors? Or anyone ever threatening them?”
“Hell, no. They’re just not the kind of people to get into fights. And I certainly haven’t heard about any threats.”
“Disputes with contractors?”
“Nope.”
“Have they fired any housekeepers? Or nannies?”
“I don’t think so. Do you know, honey?”
“They haven’t.” Helen shook her head.
“Detective, is there much else you need?” Ian looked at his Rolex. “Only I’m running late for a match…”
“No, I think we’ve got enough. Just promise me you’ll call if anything comes to mind that could help us. And if you’re not sure if it would help us, call anyway. A little boy’s life could be at stake. OK?”
—
Devereaux and Loflin loitered outside the front door making small talk with Helen Ketterbaugh until Ian had disappeared behind the trees in his convertible Mercedes.
“You know, maybe we do have a few more questions.” Devereaux turned back toward the house. “Mind if we get your take on a couple things, Mrs. Ketterbaugh?”
“Like what?”
“Seemed to me you weren’t quite as enthusiastic as your husband back there, when he was talking about the Cranes.”
Helen shrugged.
“Ian and Joe hit it off real well, I guess.” Devereaux paused for a moment. “But maybe it’s not the same for you and Mary Lynne?”
“No, that’s not it. I like Mary Lynne just fine.”
“But…?”
“Look, Ian works all the time. Joe works all the time. Aside from church, they see each other once a month. Maybe twice. They drink beer. They talk football. They eat ’cue. What do they know?”
“And you?”
“I’m around more. I see more.”
“Such as?”
“Ethan, for one thing. I’m sure the poor kid had a tough time in whatever hellhole he was stuck in before Mary Lynne brought him home, and I feel sympathy for that, but he’s sure not the little angel everyone’s making him out to be now that he’s missing.”
“How so?”
“Well, for a start there are the fights. With other kids in the neighborhood. Every time a little one winds up with a cut or a bruise, Ethan’s behind it. You can be sure.”
“How do you know?”
“Their moms tell me. They’re always complaining about him.”
Loflin took out her notebook, turned to a blank page, and handed it to Helen. “Could you write down their details? These other moms? We’ll need to talk to them. But we’ll be discreet. Your name won’t be mentioned, I promise.”
Helen hesitated, then took the book and scrawled down a couple of names and numbers.
“Thanks.” Devereaux took the book, glanced at the page, and handed it to Loflin. “But why don’t the teachers do something about it?”
“I’m not talking about at school.” A hint of annoyance had crept into Helen’s voice. “I mean around here. Ethan’s always out, wandering about. Sneaking into people’s yards. Getting into trouble.”
“Where’s his mother when all this is happening?”
“At the hospital. She works crazy hours. She has a whole network of tutors and babysitters and music teachers and such like. For a seven-year-old! And a four-year-old! I don’t know why she had those kids if she’s not prepared to look after them.”
“So Mary Lynne pays all these people to watch both kids, but Ethan skips out?”
“Right. And what are they going to do? Tell Mary Lynne? They might as well say Hey, Mrs. Crane, please fire me, and trash my Yelp score at the same time so I can’t get any other work.”
“Good point. But why don’t the other parents complain?”
“They try, but Mary Lynne refuses to listen. And Ethan has a ready-made alibi.”
—
Back in the car Loflin paused with her hand on the ignition key and turned to Devereaux.
“Interesting, what Mrs. Ketterbaugh had to say.”
“Very.”
“Puts a different complexion on things.”
“It does.” Devereaux was picturing a vulnerable little boy wandering the neighborhood, craving his real home, getting taunted by the other kids for being an orphan, being forced to defend himself…
“Regularly sneaking out of the house. Trespassing. Getting in fights. You’ve got to admit, it makes Ethan sound like a proper little terror.”
“Not to me. I was hearing neglect. Sounds like the parents have no clue where Ethan even is most of the time. I want to know more about them. ’Specially Mary Lynne, if she’s Ethan’s primary caregiver.”
“Want to go back and talk to her some more?”
“No. Not yet. Who knows? Maybe Helen Ketterbaugh’s full of shit. I want more data. Let’s call the other parents she told us about. Get their side of the story.”
Loflin checked her notebook then called the first number, making sure her phone was on speaker. The harsh ringtone reverberated through the car’s interior, then the call tripped to voicemail. Loflin left a message asking for her call to be returned without delay, then tried the other numbers Helen had given them. And met with the same result.
“Damn the weekend.” Devereaux pulled out his own phone and checked his email. “No word on Ethan’s teachers, either. Or the previous foster parents. So let’s do this: Head for the hospital. It won’t matter that it’s Saturday, there. Some of Mary Lynne’s co-workers will be around. They’ll have no choice but to talk to us.”
BPD Internal Affairs Division. Extract from Investigation into the Homicide Death of Alexander Parker.
Alexander Parker came to the Division’s attention when he contacted BPD with a proposal to provide evidence of the previous and ongoing involvement of an active BPD Detective in criminal acts, including larceny, extortion, and grand theft auto. The Detective named in these allegations was Cooper Devereaux.
The investigation was closed, unsolved, upon the homicide of the informa
nt, Alexander Parker. He was shot from distance with a high-power rifle. No weapon was recovered. Detective Devereaux had no alibi for the time the homicide occurred, but no solid evidence could be found against him. No other viable suspects were developed.
A guy threatening to rat on Devereaux gets his head blown off? Fool me once…
Devereaux had no alibi? No one else was ever in the frame? Fool me twice…
What’s Devereaux like on the range? Pretty good, I hear, Jan…!
Chapter Fifteen
Saturday. Late Morning.
Ethan missing for sixteen and a half hours
Traffic was backed up on the Red Mountain Expressway, as locals like Loflin still called it, so she took an alternative, twisting back route via the Cahaba Valley.
A giant billboard at the side of the road a little before the crest of the final peak showed a sweet, smiling angel. Standing next to her was an over-enthusiastic, trident-wielding devil. And sandwiched between them, there was a “handwritten” checklist like the kind kids pass around in grade school:
Where will you be spending the Afterlife?
Heaven
Hell
A dented silver food truck with a flat tire was parked in the shade thrown by the billboard. It had a sign of its own. It showed a fat, happy chicken. Next to it was a skinny, miserable rooster. And between the cartoon poultry, another checklist:
How will you be spending the Afternoon?
Happy
Hungry
“You’ve got to love that guy.” Loflin pointed to the truck. “What a nerve. And the food’s great. He only serves one thing. Chicken with white barbeque sauce. People drive out here specially to get it.”
Devereaux wasn’t impressed. He was very particular about his barbeque, and on principle he couldn’t get behind a place that didn’t serve pork. Or at least brisket. He thought about setting Loflin straight, but before he could speak he was interrupted by his phone.
“Cooper?” It was Lieutenant Hale. “Where are you?”
“Heading to UAB Hospital. A follow-up from an interview with the Cranes’ neighbors.”
“Good. Perfect. Listen. Big news. Two things. First, Find-a-Child has come up with a lead. There was a minivan parked on the Cranes’ street Friday night. A white Honda Odyssey. Two of their neighbors reported it. The information was filtered out at first because the van was seen between ten and eleven pm. Until your conversation with the Cranes, we thought Ethan didn’t go missing until after half-past midnight.”
“Anything on the plates?”
“No. We’re not that lucky. But listen to the second thing. The lab found a medicine bottle. It was wrapped in used coffee-filter papers and jammed into an empty dishwasher detergent box in the Cranes’ trash. It had been rinsed out, and its label had been removed. But the technicians still recovered enough of its contents to run an analysis. They found traces of triazolam. Do you know what that is?”
“It’s a tranquilizer. Relatively mild.”
“Right. Perfect for subduing a seven-year-old.”
“You’re thinking someone could have drugged Ethan, to make him easier to control?” Devereaux switched the phone to his other ear and signaled for Loflin to speed up.
“Right.”
“What about the other kid? Dillon? He seemed pretty dopey, back at the house, I thought.”
“I put two and two together, and came up with the same thing. We need a sample of his blood. An ADA’s applying for a warrant as we speak.”
“Hold on. What about Mary Lynne Crane? She’s a nurse. She could be the one who doped the kids. If they were doped.”
“Why would a mother do something like that?”
“To keep them docile while she’s out partying with her husband.”
There was silence on the line for a good twenty seconds, and Devereaux watched the tips of the exotic trees from the Birmingham Botanical Gardens peek into view in the distance.
“You’re playing with fire here, Cooper. An accusation like that…remember the media.”
“Remember the missing kid.”
“Did either of them say anything that could possibly give you cause to believe they’d drugged those kids?”
“No. Of course not. But they didn’t say anything about leaving the door unlocked till I leaned on them. Or about not checking on the kids properly. If Mrs. Crane drugged the kids, and gave Ethan too much? We can’t rule it out.”
“Maybe not. But let’s put it on the back burner, OK? Keep our focus on finding the kid alive.”
“I disagree. If these people murdered Ethan—even if they killed him by accident—we need to know right away. What if they run? If someone gets in their way? What about Dillon? You couldn’t just leave him with them. And what if they go on TV and give some teary-eyed heartbroken parent act, then it turns out they’re guilty? No one will listen the next time a kid needs help. It’s irresponsible, not following it up.”
Hale was silent again, this time for half a minute.
“How about this?” Devereaux couldn’t bear to wait any longer. “We’re en route to the hospital. We’re going to talk to Mary Lynne’s co-workers anyway, to dig into what kind of mother she is. Why don’t we do that, and also find out if she has access to triazolam?”
“OK. Check on her access. And focus on her state of mind. See if she’s been depressed recently. I’ll get back to the FBI. Feed in the drug angle. See if it unlocks any doors at their end.”
Chapter Sixteen
She was a woman of her word.
Except, of course, when she was forced to use deception to further her cause. That was different. Ruse de guerre had been acceptable for centuries. The one thing she’d never do was break a promise. Although when she saw the zoo of people in the hotel foyer, for the first time in her life she was tempted…
There were no clear lines. No signs of organization. Rowdy children were running everywhere. She was glad she’d left the boy outside in the Mercedes. She’d done it because he was still drowsy, and she hadn’t wanted to draw attention to him—though she immediately saw that was an unnecessary concern, given the bedlam she was facing. But either way, the place didn’t set a good example for a kid.
Any kid.
And enduring it would certainly be no way for this little boy to begin his treat.
Chapter Seventeen
Saturday. Early Afternoon.
Ethan missing for seventeen hours
A helicopter was touching down on the roof of the Children’s Center as Loflin approached the hospital’s main campus. Devereaux watched it land and wondered if his father would have pulled through if he’d been airlifted to the Emergency Room forty years earlier, rather than being left to bleed out on a filthy wooden floor.
Loflin dropped the Charger in a no-parking zone and the two detectives made their way past the fountain and the gently rippling reflecting pool, and hurried into the chessboard-fronted main building. Devereaux recognized the receptionist who was peering out from a forest of indoor ferns at the counter—she’d helped him a couple of times before, when he’d been visiting injured colleagues—and she directed them to the trauma and burn center, where Mary Lynne Crane worked.
—
The room the detectives requisitioned to hold their interviews had started life as a closet. Then it spent time as an office, though the only sign of that period was a line of framed photographs on one wall, showing old scenes of Birmingham—grimy workers lined up outside their foundry before the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company closed its doors; Vulcan fresh from his cast in 1903, before his triumphant visit to St. Louis; the Heaviest Corner on Earth at 1st and 20th, right after the Trust and Savings building was completed in 1912. But these days the room was mostly used for storing the flowers that any friends or relatives who didn’t know better tried to send patients in the closely controlled environment of the trauma center. The bouquets that ended up there were supposed to be distributed to lonely souls without any, elsewhere in the hosp
ital, but more often than not they were left to rot in their vases. As a result, the room stank of decay. It didn’t strike Devereaux as an auspicious place to search for clues that might save a little boy’s life.
The five nurses on that day’s early shift each took their turn on the least decrepit of the chairs Devereaux and Loflin had scrounged up to furnish the otherwise empty, windowless room. Some of the staff brimmed with confidence, looking the detectives in the eye and relishing the hint of adventure in this departure from their everyday routine. Others were more hesitant, focusing on the marks on the walls or the stains on the ragged carpet tiles rather than the people asking the questions. But regardless of their style, each of them told a variation on the same story: Mary Lynne wasn’t the best nurse in the world. She wasn’t the worst. She was good at interacting with patients—especially younger ones. She was bad at keeping records, occasionally dropping the ball toward the end of busy shifts. Good at staying on top of new clinical research. Bad at accommodating last-minute shift changes. And so on.
Two of Mary Lynne’s co-workers embellished the picture with a few less-flattering details. She was a poor timekeeper who took more than her share of sick days, according to one woman, though Loflin soon led her to admit that her own recent attempt to adopt a child had been unsuccessful. Mary Lynne sucked up to management and stabbed her peers in the back, said a guy who Loflin quickly pegged as a rival who’d lost out to her for a promotion.
The door clicked shut behind the last of the early-shift nurses, and without a specific task to focus on, Devereaux felt the familiar catch in his chest at being cooped up in a relatively small space. He turned to Loflin, who was studying the old photographs. Neither detective spoke. The seconds became a minute. The minute became two. All the while the silence seemed to grow in intensity, bearing down on Devereaux until he could feel his head starting to swim. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to focus, eager for a distraction to latch onto.
“Are you OK?” Loflin reached out and touched his arm.