This Dark Road to Mercy: A Novel

by Cash, Wiley

  He handed me the cutter across the desk, and I reached into my pocket for my lighter. “Why am I sitting here?”

  “Because it’s time somebody talked some damn sense into your head,” he said. “And it looks like nobody else is willing to do it. So here you are. With me.”

  I looked at him and took a puff off my cigar, and then I picked a piece of tobacco off my tongue.

  “You’ve been off the job for six months,” he said. “What have you been doing?”

  “Giving money to lawyers,” I said. “You know what happened.”

  “Hell, everybody in this town knows what happened. But that don’t mean you need to plan on living your life like every day is the day after. That’s not going to do anybody any good, especially not you. You’re half my age, son. What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

  I took another puff off my cigar, and then I held it up and looked at the glowing end. “My sister’s husband needed somebody to lend him a hand.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Installing security systems,” I said. “A company called Safe-at-Home.”

  The judge tossed his cigar into an ashtray on his desk and wiped his face with both hands. “Good God,” he said. “What the hell? You’re used to being the one who gets called to chase down the bad guys, and now you’re spending your time answering the phone when babysitters and cleaning ladies get the police called on them by accident.”

  “What should I be doing?”

  “The first thing you should do is stop feeling so damn sorry for yourself and start looking at how you can bring as much good out of this shitty situation as possible.” He stubbed his cigar out in the ashtray, and I thought that meant our meeting was over, but I was wrong. “Hear me out,” he said, leaning forward, his elbows on his desk, his fingers interlaced like he was fixing to pray. “You probably know that our guardian ad litem program is made up of attorneys and volunteers, and on the volunteer side we could use somebody who needs another chance to do the right thing, especially somebody who knows the law and who’s seen the things you’ve seen. Most of our volunteers are country-club housewives, and these kids deserve more than that.”

  “Nothing wrong with country-club housewives,” I said.

  “Not until you drop them down into the middle of a couple of these shit situations. Then they break apart like china dolls. They love the kids, but they can’t take seeing them get hurt.”

  I cleared my throat and sat up straighter in my chair. “Who’s going to want me around their kids after what happened?”

  “People who don’t have a choice,” he said. “People who have lost their rights to lay claim to their children, people who may not have deserved that claim in the first place.” He stood up from his chair and walked around to the front of the desk and leaned against it, staring down at me the whole time. “Listen, Detective; that boy is gone, it was an accident, and nothing you can do or no prayer his momma and daddy can pray is going to bring him back. You can’t live for him and you can’t speak for him; but there are a lot of kids out there who need somebody to speak for them, and I think you’re just the man to do it.”

  I said yes to Judge Shelburne mostly because it was the easiest thing to say at that time, and it took me a while to see myself as someone who could ever speak on a child’s behalf unless it was my own daughter’s. But I got used to it, and the years passed and it became easier and easier, seemed more and more natural. And then I was asked to speak for Easter and Ruby Quillby, two little girls, sisters, who didn’t have anybody else in this world to listen to them and give them a voice. And now they’d gone missing, and their voices were even harder to hear.

  Helen Crawford, the woman who managed the home where the girls lived, had already called the police before getting ahold of me, and when I got there that morning I saw a young officer filling out paperwork in a patrol car in the driveway and a couple unmarkeds sitting half in the grass out at the curb. I parked behind Sandy’s old, beat-up Taurus, the same one we’d once shared back when we were partners.

  He was coming up through the yard, carrying a cardboard evidence box with both hands, and when he saw me he raised it like he was bringing me a present and I’d gotten there too soon and ruined the surprise. At forty-three, he was three years younger than me and was just as tall and skinny as he’d ever been, and he wore the same kind of dark dress shirt and the same dark tie—loosened at the neck—he’d always worn. I climbed out of my car and watched him set the box inside his trunk and slam it shut. He turned around and stared for a second at the Safe-at-Home emblem on the breast pocket of my red golf shirt. “I hate to tell you this,” he finally said, “but if you’re here to install an alarm you’re too late for it to do any good.” He smiled and put his hands in his pockets.

  “Don’t think I haven’t already tried.” I nodded toward Miss Crawford where she stood at the front door, staring out at the road like she wanted to ask one of us what happened next. “She said she didn’t want the kids feeling like prisoners.”

  “It’s better than feeling kidnapped.”

  “She also said there wasn’t enough money.”

  “It’s state government,” he said. “There’s never enough money. You know that as well as anybody.” He sighed. “She told me they’re your kids.”

  “They are,” I said. “Since May.”

  “Well, come on, then.” He turned, and I followed him down through the yard around to the left side of the house. We’d been partners for a few years before I left the force. I’ve heard detectives say that having a partner is like having a second wife or a second husband, and I think I’d have to agree with that. Just like any other married couple, me and Sandy both got the same phone call in the middle of the night and met up at a place where something terrible might’ve just happened, bleary-eyed and frustrated, hoping that what we found wouldn’t be half as bad as the responding officer had made it sound. And, just like a real marriage, if a partnership goes to shit it can feel like a rocky divorce, and sometimes I saw myself as the spouse who’d been left behind, keeping tabs on the ex to see if he’d met anyone new and hoping there was a chance that it could all work out and everything would go back to how it used to be.

  Sandy had moved up to detective faster than I had, and I knew he’d dreamed of being in the FBI or at least making the State Bureau. I figured he wouldn’t be a detective for too much longer.

  We crossed the driveway of the one-story brick ranch and stopped and stared up at an open window covered in black fingerprint dust: Easter and Ruby’s bedroom. A plainclothes detective walked by inside. “All the doors were still locked this morning,” Sandy said. “And none of the kids have a key, so this is the only way they could’ve gotten out. We pulled some prints: most of them small, but some of them big enough to belong to an adult.”

  “Easter wouldn’t have unlocked that window unless it was somebody she knew,” I said.

  “Is that the oldest one?”

  “Yep. She’s twelve.”

  “They got any family around here?”

  “Their mama died in May,” I said. “And their daddy gave them up years ago, but that don’t mean nothing.”

  “Is he a good guy or a bad guy?”

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s probably somewhere in between. Most of them are. He showed up at their school a week and a half ago, and he was over here on Saturday morning, trying to see them.”

  “That’s what I heard,” Sandy said. I started to walk around to the front of the house. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Inside.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “This is a crime scene.”

  “But they’re my kids.”

  “And you’ll see any reports you care to see as soon as we’re done writing them.”

  I looked toward the front of the house, where I figured Miss Crawford was still standing right inside the door. “She’s inside there.”

  “She’ll listen to me when I
tell her not to touch anything; she’s too scared to touch anything anyway,” he said. “You don’t listen, and you ain’t scared of shit.”

  I stared at him for a second, waiting for him to flinch, but he wouldn’t. I dug one of my cards out of my wallet and handed it to him. “Just fax over whatever you’ve got as soon as you can. Today.”

  He took the card and looked at it. “You know that’s not the rules,” he said, smiling.

  “When did you start following the rules?” I turned to walk back to the car, and Sandy followed me. I’d been right; Miss Crawford still stood by the front door. I could see the fear on her face. She looked up at me and tried to smile. I waved. “It’ll be okay, Miss Crawford. This kind of thing happens all the time.”

  “It ain’t never happened to me,” she said.

  “Well, I know, but it’s happened to other folks, and they . . .” My voice trailed off because I didn’t know what else to say. I pointed toward the patrol car in the driveway, where the officer was still filling out paperwork. “It’ll be all right,” I said. “You’re in good hands.”

  “That went well,” Sandy said. He crossed his arms and leaned against the back of his car

  “She looks pretty rattled.”

  “She is. What about you?”

  “I’ve been through worse than this,” I said. “And you know all about that.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re not missing anything,” he said.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Worse than you can imagine,” he said. “Unless, of course, you’ve seen a guy running around town with a sack full of money, about fourteen and a half million. If you have, I’m ready for his description.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out an ink pen and clicked it open like he was ready to write something down.

  “You’ve still got nothing?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “What’s it been, ten months?”

  “Almost eleven.”

  “That’s got to be killing you.”

  “It is,” he said. “But only because everybody, including the FBI and the Charlotte guys, thinks it should be solved by now.” He dropped the pen into his pocket. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Two guys spend all day driving around Charlotte in an armored car, taking pickups, making deliveries. The last drop of the day, one guy gets out, the other doesn’t, and then he drives off and disappears—dumps the truck right on the Gastonia side of the bridge.” He held a finger to his head like it was a gun. “Thanks, asshole.”

  “But that can’t be the only reason the Feds are all over you,” I said.

  “It’s not,” he said. “Some of the money’s been passed here in town. Here and up at the casino in Cherokee, but you can’t see anything on the security cameras. The FBI brought in NASA, and they still can’t see anything. It’s not like we know who we’re looking for anyway. The driver definitely had help, but he’s probably long gone by now, if he’s even still alive.”

  “Nobody’s passing big bills?”

  “No,” he said. “They knew what they were doing, and they’re way ahead of us. It’s kicking our ass.”

  I nodded toward the house. “That’s why you should let me lend you a hand on this case. I could take this one off your hands—one less on the books. Just help me out with what you can.”

  “I don’t think so, Brady.”

  “Come on, Sandy,” I said. “I help you; you help me. That’s how we work it.”

  “When, Brady?” he asked. “When do you help me? When do we ‘work it’ like that? You’ve never worked anything for me.” He jingled his keys in his pocket and turned and looked at the house, and then he looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry. It’s just these Feds,” he said. “They’ve got everybody paranoid. They come rolling into town, kicking down doors, asking all kinds of questions, getting up in your face to make sure you don’t touch anything. A few days later, they’re like, ‘Why hasn’t anybody done anything? Who’s in charge here?’ I’m telling you, man, it should make you happy you’re out.” He caught himself as soon as he’d said it. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  He sighed. “All right. Look, I should be able to send you a few things today. I shouldn’t be doing it, but today’s probably not the best day to start following the rules, right?”

  C H A P T E R 9

  I spent the rest of the morning back at the office, filling out invoices on new systems and answering phone calls about installation appointments, but the whole time I kept picturing the black fingerprint dust on the window ledge and thinking about what kind of promises or threats somebody would have to make to get Easter Quillby to open that window and crawl out into the night.

  If twenty years as a cop taught me anything it’s that when folks disappear it usually means, one, they’re dead, or two, they don’t want to be found. Most of the time, when kids go missing, it’s the first, especially after they’ve been gone for forty-eight hours. After that, the chances of ever finding them, much less finding them alive, grow slimmer and slimmer with each day.

  But Easter and Ruby’s case seemed like one of the easier ones: two little girls with a dead mother and a deadbeat father, who suddenly reappears out of nowhere, go missing from a foster home. I was about 99 percent sure the girls were with their father, and I was about 99 percent sure that after two days the amount of trouble he’d gotten himself into would start to sink in, and he’d end up trying to bring them back like nothing had happened.

  While I worked, my eyes kept drifting to the framed picture of my daughter, Jessica, and me that sat on the corner of my desk. She was eleven in the photograph, about the same age as Easter Quillby. Somebody’d taken the picture on a Saturday morning one fall when her Indian Princess tribe had spent the weekend at Camp Thunderbird out on Lake Wylie, which meant that a handful of little girls had spent the weekend together in one cabin, cutting out vests from huge rolls of felt and earning colored feathers for arts and crafts and horseback riding while their fathers stood around trying to find things to talk about besides their kids and their wives.

  In the photo, Jessica sat on one of the camp’s horses, and I stood beside her, my hand reaching up and holding the saddle horn like I was guiding her, even though a camp hand was holding the reins off-camera, clearly aware that I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing. I’m just standing there, squinting into the sun, smiling for the camera. The night before one of the dads and I had left the camp after the girls had all gone to sleep, the rest of the guys staying behind to sit around and play cards. We’d driven over to a convenience store across the street from the camp and bought a case of beer. Then we went back and sat in the amphitheater by the lake, chugging beers and tossing the empties into the dark near the edge of the water. Jessica was just a little girl in the picture, and now she was sixteen, beginning her junior year of high school, starting to think about college.

  She lived with my ex-wife, Tina, and her husband, Dean, in an old, wooded neighborhood where most of the houses were protected by alarm systems I’d either installed or serviced, but I’d never stepped a foot inside Dean’s house, but that’s not to say he was a bad guy. He was a blue-collar, hardworking family man who’d made his money after opening a construction firm with his brother. Hell, he could’ve even been me, but he wasn’t. He and my ex-wife had been married for five years, and Jessica had been living in that house almost half as long as she’d lived in mine.

  Back before the accident, we used to have lunch on Sundays after church at the Cracker Barrel, and then we’d ride through the rich neighborhoods, talking about which house we’d buy once we had the money, even though we knew we never would. I don’t know if he lived there then or not, but I know we probably drove past Dean’s house a million times.

  I haven’t gone to church in years, and now I never drive past houses like Dean’s unless I have to.

  When I came back from lunch, papers were waiting for me in the fax machine’
s tray. I sat down at my desk and leafed through the pages: a police report with handwriting so sloppy I couldn’t hardly read it.

  In the report, Miss Crawford said she’d gone in to check on Easter and Ruby that morning because they were late for breakfast; she’d found two empty beds and no girls. Then she saw the open window and called the police. She said both girls had on nightgowns when they went to bed, but she couldn’t remember the colors. A pair of sneakers belonging to each of them was missing, but nothing else had been taken. She mentioned their father, Wade Chesterfield, showing up at school and later at the home, describing him as tall and thin, maybe six feet and 175 pounds, with strawberry-blond hair just like Easter’s.

  But I was surprised by what I found on the last page of the report. I laid the rest of the pages down by the fax machine and stood up and walked out to the reception area, where the sunlight came in through the glass door and front windows. I held the paper under the light to get a good look at it. It was a front and back photocopy of Wade Chesterfield’s baseball card with the Gastonia Rangers.

  The card looked like something the Rangers might’ve created for a promotional night at the beginning of a season when hopes were still high. It might’ve even been a vanity card that Chesterfield had designed, ordered, and paid for himself. The photo was him in his pitcher’s windup: a lefty. The Gastonia Rangers, who’d left town and moved to Hickory at the end of the ’92 season, were a farm team for the Texas Rangers, and their uniforms were almost identical. Chesterfield was wearing the white home jersey, and even though the photocopy was black and white, his hat was probably blue and the cursive Rangers on his shirt was blue with red trimming. The other side of the card listed Chesterfield’s stats and his description. He was six-one and, at the time, weighed in at only 162 pounds. It was all there; the only thing I couldn’t tell from Wade Chesterfield’s card was what he looked like: somebody’d come along and scratched out his face with an ink pen.