by C. J. Box
“This is her.”
“She’s the one …”
“Yes.”
He shook his head and looked away. He seemed genuinely moved.
I said, “Yes, she’s the one the mayor’s good friend Judge Moreland plans to take away from us Sunday.”
Doogan took a long pull from his cigarette and blew the smoke out in an endless stream. “Judge Moreland, he’s something else. He’s a type, Jack, a rare type. I see his kind all the time, but he’s a rare specimen.”
I let him go on. “You’re looking at things the wrong way. You’re making wrong assumptions. In my line of work, the politicos who are really going somewhere are never about the here and now. The good ones—and Moreland is a good one—think long-term. They fixate on the prize. Because they do, sometimes it isn’t easy to figure out the moves they’re making right in front of your eyes. You’ve gotta think long-term if you want to figure ’em out, and you haven’t been thinking long-term.”
I said, “What’s he fixated on?”
Doogan said, “The Supreme Court.”
I shook my head. “How can taking our little girl possibly help him get on the Supreme Court?”
“I don’t know, Jack. You need to figure that one out. But I know that’s what he wants.”
I LEFT DOOGAN there by his tree. Sanders was a few feet behind again. As we approached the parking lot, I heard a powerful burbling engine fire up, and I instantly recognized it. The sound was like a straight razor to my throat.
Garrett’s yellow H3 backed out away from us. I couldn’t see inside well because of the dark-tinted windows, but I thought I saw two profiles—Garrett and his father.
“What, do you know who that is?” Sanders asked, noting my reaction.
So Garrett had come to the funeral of the man he’d stomped to death to what, gloat? And why would Judge Moreland have come? To see what?
Angelina squirmed in my arms and pointed toward a squirrel scrambling down a tree. She said, “Cat!”
I started to laugh when something hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled. I looked from my little girl to the departing H3 and back to my little girl. I thought, He came hoping to see her.
Which went back to the beginning, the simple unanswered question: Why did they want her?
And everything seemed to make sudden and terrible sense.
Bulletproof. What could be more bulletproof than a pedophile being a partner in crime with a judge? The judge in whose courtroom the Monster of Desolation Canyon— another participant in the international ring—had gone free?
Angelina cried out, and I realized I was squeezing her too hard. I eased up and looked at her. She was beautiful by all accounts, with her dark flashing eyes, her smile, her manner, and not just proud-parent beautiful.
I felt like I’d had the breath punched out of me.
I carried her toward the back parking lot of the chapel where I’d seen a couple of black-and-whites and Torkleson’s nondescript Crown Victoria. The cops were there, no doubt, to see who came to the funeral because the case was still wide-open. Torkleson leaned against his Crown Vic talking with another detective—they stood out as cops even at a funeral where there were more suits and ties than usual— and a couple of uniforms.
Torkleson must have seen something in my face as I approached because he excused himself from his colleagues and met me on the sidewalk.
“Hello, Jack,” Torkleson said.
“You said Malcolm Harris was connected with Aubrey Coates,” I said. “How did you find that out?”
Torkleson shrugged. “Phone records, e-mails, uploads, downloads. A lot of technical evidence concerning ISPs and proxy servers and other stuff I really don’t understand, but from what I was told, Coates transmitted big files and images overseas from that trailer of his. The Brits traced it back from Harris’s computer. Unfortunately, we don’t have the original files anymore, as you know.” He shot a look over my shoulder to see if Cody was lurking anywhere and could attack.
“I don’t know where Cody is,” I said. “Don’t worry about him.”
“Why are you asking me this?” he said.
I said, “Because I’m pretty sure if you dug into the evidence for the charges, you’ll find communication between Harris and Coates and someone else here in this city.”
Torkleson looked at me closely. “We’ve got a team assigned to that,” he said. “They’re working with the Brits and Interpol. Perverts are getting arrested one by one all over the world. Are you talking about someone in particular?”
“Judge Moreland or his son Garrett,” I said. “Or both.”
Torkleson closed his eyes and took a deep breath and moaned. “Not again,” he said. “You know what happened when I sent officers to his house based on your so-called tip.”
“This is different,” I said. “Of all the places he could relocate, Malcolm Harris chose Denver. He said he was coming here because he would be bulletproof. Somebody assured him it would be fine for him. And what better proof of it than when a child pornographer and molester like Aubrey Coates gets set free in Judge Moreland’s own courtroom?”
Torkleson started to argue, but stopped. I could see wheels turning, things falling into place for him as they did for me.
“How do you know Harris?” Torkleson asked.
“I met with him on behalf of the CVB,” I said. “Before we knew what he was.”
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
“Do you have access to the evidence against Harris?”
He nodded. “I’d have to get with one of our tech guys to interpret it,” he said. “But I think we have all the supporting documentation that’s been compiled. It’s just a matter of cross-referencing phone calls, e-mail addresses, IP stuff—I think.”
“Can you try?” I asked.
Torkleson looked over his shoulder to assure himself we hadn’t been overheard by his colleagues. “I’ll try,” he said softly.
“Thank you,” I said, wanting to kiss him.
“But I don’t think it will pan out,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “If there are electronic trails from Coates and Harris to Moreland or his son, I think we’d already know it. This case has been in the works for a hell of a long time.”
“I understand,” I said. “But won’t it be easier if you’re specifically looking at a particular target—Moreland’s or Garrett’s computers or phones—than cross-referencing a whole city?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
By then Angelina had lost all patience and worked her arms free and was swinging at me, her little fists thumping against my topcoat lapels. “Down! Down!”
“Angelina, no.” The tone of my voice silenced her. She began to cry, and I was sorry I had snapped at her.
THAT NIGHT I ROLLED over in bed and opened my eyes and caught Melissa sitting there in the dark staring at me, a drink in her hand. No doubt wondering why she’d married a man who couldn’t keep her family together.
Saturday, November 24
One Day to Go
TWENTY-TWO
WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at seven thirty in the morning, I rolled over and grabbed it, rubbing my eyes and hoping it was Torkleson or Cody with news. After waking to find Melissa watching me the night before, I hadn’t slept for hours and had just fallen asleep.
“Is everything ready for tomorrow?” Judge John Moreland asked.
I didn’t respond.
Moreland said, “I know this has got to be tough. Please don’t make it any tougher on either one of us than it needs to be.”
I said, “I’m on to you.”
There was a beat of silence. He said, “What?”
“You heard me. You’ll be in prison, where you can never touch a little girl again. And you know what happens to your kind in prison.”
When he spoke again he sounded angry and impatient. “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.” I had hoped he would act guilty and reveal himself. He was a good actor.
“Really?” I said.
“You’ve gone off the deep end. I hate to say it, but getting the baby out of that … environment can’t be soon enough.”
“You’ll be wearing a jumpsuit and shoes without laces, and you’ll spend all your time looking over your shoulder for the next attack,” I said.
A heavy sigh. “I’ve done everything I can to be compassionate,” Moreland said. “I never needed to give you the time, but I did. I’ve offered to help you and your wife with another placement, but you’ve spurned that offer. All I get from you is threats and paranoid rants. You accuse my son of murder and me of something I can’t even say out loud. I would have hoped this entire painful thing could have been accomplished with some kind of maturity for the sake of the child, but I see that’s just not the case.”
Man, he almost convinced me with that one. He was damned good, I’ll give him that.
“I’m on to you,” I said again.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake …”
I punched off and looked up to see Melissa in the doorway, holding Angelina in her arms.
“Was that him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to make sure we were ready.”
“Kind of him,” she said, with a kind of hopeless sarcasm. She closed her eyes. I stood up in case I needed to steady her. Angelina reached out for me, cried, “Da!”
I COULDN’T EVEN EAT the toast I’d made and stuck to cup after cup of coffee. With the mug in hand, I wandered through the rooms in our house as if seeing them for the first time in a while. White winter light filtered through the blinds and curtains. It was a different quality of light than fall or summer, a more dispassionate hue. It was obviously cold outside because the heater clicked on and forced warm air through the registers with regularity. I thought, Maybe this happens all the time, and I’ve just never noticed it before. I tried to remember the last time I’d checked our furnace in the basement and couldn’t recall when I’d done it.
Sanders and Morales were in their usual places. Wisps of exhaust from their running engines dissipated into the air.
I’d not told Melissa of my suspicion regarding Judge Moreland or my conversation with Detective Torkleson. Maybe I should have, but I was banking on the fact that Torkleson would call confirming the judge’s links to the ring, and it would all be over.
MELISSA DECIDED the house was missing something and decided to bake bread. Soon, the smells of baking bread filled the place, taking the edge off the day. Good call, I thought.
In Angelina’s room, there were boxes stacked up in the corner and marked SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, and TOYS AND GIFTS.
It was really happening.
For the fourth time that day, I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Cody’s number and heard, “The number you are calling is out of the ser vice area at this time. Please leave a message …”
THERE WERE SEVERAL more phone calls throughout the day, none of them Torkleson or Cody. Melissa’s mom and dad called from different places and she talked to each of them longer than I could remember her ever doing. Her face flushed as she talked to her father, and I could tell she was getting angry.
“We had a lawyer,” she said, heatedly. “It’s not like we didn’t have a lawyer, Dad. It’s that there wasn’t anything he could do.”
She scowled as he went on, and when she saw me watching, she rolled her eyes.
“Gee, Dad,” she said, “it’s really great you are suddenly so concerned and seem to have all of the answers. But where were you three weeks ago when we could have used some of your wisdom?”
My parents called shortly after, before Melissa had cooled off. She talked to them and told them the situation hadn’t changed. After a while, she handed the phone to me.
My dad said, “Your mom is too busted up to talk anymore, sorry.”
“I understand.”
“I guess this is the kind of thing that can happen when we turn everything over to the government and to the lawyers,” he said. “When a whole society abrogates personal responsibility, these kinds of situations come up.” I’d heard his theory many times before that everything was better back in the pioneer days, when people dealt with each other fair and square, their word backed up personally by their reputations or their guns—without the involvement of third parties like lawyers or politicians.
“Dad, I can’t sit on the front porch with a shotgun on my lap and keep them away.”
“I know you can’t,” he said. “And it’s a damned shame.”
I thought of my grandfather’s Colt .45 upstairs in the closet, and said, “Yes, it is.”
Dad said, “I was joking to your mother that we ought to send somebody like Jeter Hoyt down there to straighten things out. That’d give those big-city types a dose of frontier justice, wouldn’t it?”
I smiled bitterly to myself. Frontier justice hadn’t matched up real well with Sur-13.
“Too bad we can’t do that,” he said.
I PACED. I called Cody’s cell phone again and again, getting angrier with him each time. Same with Torkleson, who wouldn’t answer his cell, either. I called the detective division, and the receptionist said Torkleson was out and she didn’t know when he’d be back. She asked if there was anyone else who could help me, and I said no, I needed to talk to Torkleson.
I stayed away from both Melissa and Angelina because I didn’t want my building anger and fear to affect them. I went upstairs and checked the loads in the .45, and went downstairs and looked at my furnace and wondered how in the hell it worked.
For once, what my father said made some sense. Why couldn’t I sit outside on my porch with a shotgun across my knees and keep the world away from my family?
I couldn’t stay home, but I couldn’t leave Melissa and Angelina, either, so I threw on my parka and went outside. As I approached Sanders, he slid his window down and held out his hand, palm out.
“That’s far enough, Jack.”
“Why?”
“The sheriff didn’t like our Thanksgiving dinner together. He told both of us to stop fraternizing with you and your family. You know what’s happening tomorrow.”
“And what would that be?” I said, angry.
“Jack, just stay back.”
I turned around and stomped back to the house. As I did I whipped out my cell phone and called Cody.
Out of ser vice range.
I called detective division again, and the receptionist said she’d put my message on his desk on top of the pile of my other messages.
DURING ANGELINA’S AFTERNOON NAP, I went into the kitchen as Melissa pulled more loaves of bread from the oven and put them on the counter to cool. I couldn’t even count the number of loaves she’d baked during the day—maybe twenty-five, maybe more. The kitchen was overwhelmed with the smell of yeast and flour and golden crust. There was more dough on the table, and it was obvious she was going to keep baking bread until she ran out of ingredients. I took a cursory look around the hiding places in the kitchen and didn’t see the bottle.
“You don’t have to keep looking,” she said. “I’m not drinking.”
“JACK, IT’S DETECTIVE TORKLESON,” Melissa said, shaking me awake. I’d fallen asleep in my chair in the living room out of exhaustion, and it took me a second to register what she’d said. When it did, my heart revved like a racecar motor, and I grabbed the phone and bounded up the stairs into our bedroom and shut the door.
He said, “I’ve been up all night since we talked. I hijacked our best tech gal and made her stay up all night with me in the basement of the building with her computers. We’ve been going over all of the evidence Scotland Yard and Interpol sent over …”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. “Jack, we can’t make any links at all between either Harris and Moreland or Coates and Moreland. We’ve got nothing to connect them.”
I nearly blacked out and had to reach for the headboard to steady my l
egs.
“Can you keep looking?” I said. My voice was weak. I’d staked everything on this. “Maybe Garrett has a secret computer? Maybe they know how to mask their telephone numbers and IP addresses somehow? Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that there has to be a connection.”
Torkleson sighed. “Jack, I’m not saying there isn’t a remote possibility. I’m not saying that. But the electronic trail between Coates and Harris is like a freeway. There’s nothing like that with the judge—not even an old cow trail, if you know what I’m saying. There are some IP addresses my tech gal can’t isolate, but nothing substantial, and nothing we could go to the DA with. It’s a dry hole, Jack.”
“It’s got to be there,” I said.
“Look, we’ve done all we could. It’s an interesting theory you had that plays into your situation, but nothing we can pursue in any way, shape, or form. Maybe somewhere down the line Harris will say the judge is a known associate, or give up his name for leniency. There’s always that.”
“It will be too late,” I said.
“I know,” Torkleson said.
I found myself looking out the window at Sanders’s cruiser. It was dusk and getting colder. Exhaust puffed from his tailpipe.
I said, “When you lose all hope, what have you got left?”
“I can’t answer that, Jack.”
“Neither can I,” I said, before thanking him and hanging up.
“HAVE WE DONE IT all wrong, honey?” I asked later that afternoon, as the sun dropped behind the mountains.
She stopped and looked at me, her eyes blinking oddly. “What do you mean?”
I shook my head. “Maybe we played it all wrong, because look where we are. Tomorrow they’re coming to take her. Maybe we should have hired a new lawyer, tried to take the judge to court to stall this at least. I know everyone said we’d lose in the end, but at least we’d have had more time. Instead, we tried to get Garrett to sign the papers, and he never signed them.” I didn’t even want to mention all that had happened, all that had gone wrong.