Willard breathes in, out, in, out. His heart races.
Houses line one side of the street with woods on the other. Gabriel leaps like a startled deer over a dry ditch, making a break for the tree-line.
Willard grabs scissors and rope, then forces his body out of the car. Blood pounds in his ears as he stumbles down the steep ditch through dry grass and struggles up the other side. When he reaches the top, his foot breaks through the canvas of a painting the boy dropped.
As he catches his breath, Willard readies the rope for the boy’s abandoned dog. “Here, doggy,” he says.
The animal freezes. Its eyes are black dots in circles of white. The lips pull back and a warning growl rumbles in the animal’s chest.
Willard wipes at sweat blurring his vision. The dog rears back, escaping the blow to the head it deserves. A boot to the ribs hits home and the animal lowers its body into a submissive crouch, allowing Willard to tie on the rope.
“Go on,” Willard says, “find the traitor.”
«73»
Spiders lurk in the fallen tree Gabriel hides behind. He shrinks away from the largest one dangling above his face and dislodges a snake that slithers away through the fallen leaves. He was only a few houses away from Miss Granger’s where he would have been safe and it makes him want to cry.
Willard’s crashing gets closer. “Come on out, boy,” he demands. “I know you’re in there.”
The hair on the back of Gabriel’s head prickles. He clenches his bum cheeks and pushes his hand against an awful diarrhea cramp.
“I’ve got your doggy,” Willard says. “Come out and you can have it back.”
A long stick is on the ground near Gabriel’s leg. He reaches down to pull it closer. He has to save Radar. There’s the sound of a struggle, Radar yelps, and Gabriel scrambles out from under the tree.
Willard is straddling the frightened dog. A squirrel scolds from a high branch as Willard cuts Radar’s ear with a small pair of scissors, making the terrified dog cry. “Come with me or else,” he threatens.
Gabriel charges. “Go away,” he shouts as he whacks Willard’s arm.
Willard stumbles backwards, his beady eyes wide with surprise. He sways for a moment. “Little bugger.”
Gabriel snatches Radar’s rope. “Come!” he says. “Please, Radar, come boy.” Despite his fear, the old dog can’t run fast enough to get away. But Gabriel must.
¤
Gabriel’s feet don’t slow until they splash into the cold water of a river. It’s too deep to cross and stretches as far as he can see. He crouches down, scooping water into his mouth as fast as his hands can move. When his stomach can’t hold another drop, he backs out of the water.
His own breathing is loud as he concentrates on listening. Leaves rustle in the trees. Birds sing. He doesn’t hear footsteps or Radar crying. Willard hasn’t followed.
Water squelches in Gabriel’s runners as he takes one step, and then another. Even if Willard kills him or puts him back in the cell, he has to go back. He has to try his best to rescue Radar. It doesn’t take long to find the fallen tree. From there he walks through the ditch to the road.
Willard is gone in his car. And so is Radar.
«74»
Harvey and Sergeant Janice Barrie stand together near Willard Crawley’s cabin watching the forensic team leader at work. As per protocol, he has authorized Before photographs of every inch of the potential crime site. Each authorized person has signed off and provided fingerprints so their presence will be excluded from examination. The chain of custody necessary to ensure the safety and integrity of the evidence is in place. Over the next few days, during a careful grid search and sifting, biological material potentially pertinent to the case will be gathered.
Janice somehow had time for a trip to a hairdresser before her flight north. The day is hot, and she pushes back a lock of magenta hair from her sweaty brow. “I for one am in need of a cold Pabst and a twelve-ounce porterhouse steak, medium-rare, at that little roadside pub I saw on the way in,” she says to Harvey. “Care to join me? We can talk strategy between mouthfuls.”
A transport vehicle that will cart away carefully packaged and labeled bones, teeth and blood to the lab for DNA testing arrives on scene. Someone bled here and someone died. And sometime in the distant future science might prove useful in a criminal trial, but it won’t help Gabriel Wheeler today.
“I’ll take a pass,” Harvey says. He needs to follow up on a hunch.
“Even heroes need to re-fuel.”
Harvey waves her off, then heads to his car. He’s no hero. He’s only a mediocre cop with empty hands and a gut feeling that something is waiting for him in Fenny.
«75»
When Chase reaches the outskirts of Fenny, she slows her speed, looking for places to duck in with the van if a cop car appears. A manhunt is on. If things go sideways before she finds Gabriel, she’ll need somewhere to escape a high-speed chase.
It’s crazy how many rural properties have gates or Beware of Dog signs with man-eating dogs kicking up a stink along fence lines. After a long stretch of fences, Chase spies an unprotected property she’ll keep in mind. The mobile home looks abandoned.
Chase slams on the brakes. She recognizes the car in the driveway. She passed its mottled paint daily for a few years. If the car of her murdered neighbor is here then so is Creepy Crawley.
She parks the van off the road, obstructed from view by a hedge overrun with blackberry brambles. Armed with a switchblade, she approaches the trailer along the edge of the property.
Chase doesn’t have courage or strength, so she’ll use surprise instead. If Gabriel is trapped inside, she’ll take Crawley down. She’ll attack his weakest spot, the surgical site.
And, even if he begs, she won’t show mercy.
¤
Chase decides it’s too bad force wasn’t necessary to subdue the enemy. She’d like to do full-on battle with Willard Crawley, now reduced to the status of a zombie on sedatives. Instead of explaining to Chase how he got Radar and where Gabriel is, he roots through the food bags and rambles to himself, saying things like “separate the plastic,” “chips” and “Terrance.” He’s aware enough, however, to clutch a pillow to his stomach with his free hand: he’s right to think Chase will keep poking the surgical site until he gives answers.
“Where is Gabriel?” Chase says for the hundredth time.
Willard turns to look around as if they’ve both somehow overlooked the presence of an eight-year-old boy in the room. He nods like the bobblehead on the dash of the murdered woman’s car. “Thirsty,” he says, then zombies back into the room where there’s a sleeping bag on a filthy air mattress that stinks of urine.
The trailer doesn’t have running water, so Chase fills one of Willard’s empty pop cans from a slimy pond out back. When she returns inside, Willard is lying on a mattress, mumbling. Chase squats to place the can in front of his glazed eyes so he can’t miss it. “You want this?” she says. “Then tell me what you did with the kid.”
Willard reaches for the can and Chase swipes it away. She slowly pours out the water. “What did you do to him? Where did you put him?”
The creep smacks his lips as though the dirty water has touched them.
“Fuck you,” Chase says, dumping the last of the water onto his infected incision. Her attempt to leave is stopped by Willard’s hot grasp.
“I never meant,” he says.
Chase crumples the can. “Do the world a favor,” she says. “If you’re not going to talk, just die.”
«76»
Harvey decelerates as he reaches the outskirts of Fenny, to put off the moment of homecoming. As always, he dreads seeing Effie’s half-made bed, the toys he bought her lined up on the dresser, and the pair of abandoned pink runners left by the back door.
Harvey’s about to clear the Gabriel Wheeler case. He can feel a solve deep in his bones. After he retires the file, he’ll reward himself by packing up what remains of Effie’s b
elongings and sending them east. He’ll change the child’s bed and dresser for office furniture and repaint the living room to hide the spots where Effie’s pictures hung.
Hair rises on the back of Harvey’s neck. Just like in his own home, there were picture hooks on Willard Crawley’s kitchen walls. Pictures hung there. Pictures someone removed.
Harvey speed dials Janice Barrie. She’s chewing something crunchy. “Speak to me,” she says.
“Do prints in Willard Crawley’s house match anyone in the system?”
“Not sure. It’s on the slate for my team to check.”
“They need to do it right now.”
“Why?”
Harvey resists the urge to shout. It was always there for him to see, the one clue that might have saved Gabriel Wheeler. How many times had he read the notes of his interview with Romy? Ten. Twenty. And each time he skimmed over the description of Helena running through the kitchen with her little girlfriend who wasn’t Effie. To avoid pain, he’d blocked out the moment Helena said the one thing that could have changed the course of the investigation.
“ELP,” he says. The letters of Willard Crawley’s license plate.
¤
The mug of hot chocolate Verna Quail sets on Harvey’s desk speaks for her: she wants him to sleep. Harvey takes in the sagging, wrinkled skin and thinning hair, and realizes his favorite staffer is due for retirement. She looks thin and frail inside the nubby fabric of a mauve double-sweater set.
Harvey picks up the mug and takes a sip.
Verna gives a weary smile as her hand skims the fax that came through from Trenton. “So that’s Mr. Willard Crawley. Doesn’t look like a mastermind criminal. More like someone who got off the short bus.”
Harvey stands, already feeling the chocolate working its magic. He considers a composite drawing of Willard Crawley done by an artist based upon a description provided by Willard’s employer at a recycling depot. Harvey feels extreme antipathy toward the heavyset man with his round face, small eyes and high bald forehead, the same man Gabriel’s classmate, Mary, disguised as Santa.
Verna takes the image of Willard Crawley to the photocopier. Each copy as it comes out of the machine tells Harvey the same truth—his adversary is weak, an insignificant nobody. And he, Detective Harvey Sam, is even weaker.
«77»
It’s a relief to Willard he doesn’t need to pee anymore. The effort it would take to get up and walk to the door would be more than he’s capable of. He’s sleepy like when he was a very young boy and his father had to carry him into the house when they came home from visiting the old man out in the country. It’s a new-old memory; one from so long ago his brain had squirreled it away. He remembers how strange home looked as he jostled along in his father’s arms, across the rough driveway, up the three steps and through the house until he was set down gently in the crib, which was his until Terrance came home from the hospital. He wasn’t afraid back then. He didn’t know fathers could be mean.
There isn’t enough air in the trailer. What there is doesn’t slip into Willard’s lungs like it should; he has to drag each breath in. He’s so hot and prickly he’d like to ask his mother to bring the pond to him. It would feel good to lie down in the water.
Terrance is gone now, but he’ll come back soon and that’s what matters. He’s a quiet boy, a good boy. Nothing like the skinny baby he used to be, the one who cried all the time and couldn’t stand lights on or the touch of anyone except Willard.
Willard needs to remind Terrance of those days. How he was the big brother and Terrance was his baby. It takes an effort to pull his tongue off the roof of his mouth to speak. “Blue,” he says.
Terrance’s little body had gone hard with screaming and the diaper Willard had tried to pin on wouldn’t stay. Willard picked him up and tried to show him the stuffed clown and the red car, but Terrance wouldn’t look.
He hears it now, just like he heard it then, his new stepfather shouting, “Shut that fucking thing up.”
It was overkill, his grandfather said. Five-year-old Willard didn’t deserve the wounds he got from the five days of beatings his stepfather laid on him after the funeral with its tiny white coffin. He didn’t deserve the terrible lies his mother shouted in his face. Willard’s granddad didn’t believe Willard was a baby killer. He said there was no harm in trying to hush a crying baby.
Terrance had soft hair and tiny hands that grabbed Willard’s T-shirt and wouldn’t let go when he was afraid. Willard only meant to shake him a little bit, but Willard was afraid too. They were fighting in the other room, breaking things, screaming. Then his stepfather was coming down the hall in his big work boots. “Hush,” Willard begged, “hush baby, hush baby, hush.”
Terrance quit crying. The boots went in the other direction. The truck squealed out of the yard. Willard’s mom stayed in the kitchen bawling her eyes out, begging him to come back.
Willard laid his baby back in the crib. He patted the soft, sweet head and covered the little body with a blanket. He never meant to hurt Terrance. Until they slapped him awake to tell him what he’d done, he hadn’t known he had.
«78»
Chase closes her fog-free compact. After she badgered Crawley for hours to reveal Gabriel’s location, the man had the nerve to up and die without confessing. Earlier she searched every inch of the property. Now she’s exhausted and needs to get as far away from Fenny and Detective Harvey Sam as possible, but she can’t leave just yet. She has a pen and paper. She needs to get a few things off her chest.
First of all, she hadn’t wanted to rescue Gabriel; her bleeding-heart dog forced her hand. And, right from the start, Gabriel refused to leave Chase, not the other way around. So Detective Harvey Sam can stop slandering Chase to the press: she’s no childless psychotic. She never had children because she never wanted any.
She doubts Gabriel’s alive, but she adds things people should know about the boy if he’s found. After his months in captivity the child has weird needs and weirder habits. He hides leftover food under beds. Otherwise, he’s tidy, but for all the wrong reasons. He wears Superman sunglasses because he lived in a dark cell for too long, not to look cool. He avoids loud noises for the same reason.
People should also know Gabriel likes soft pajamas, flowered wallpaper, nature, dogs, and asking awkward questions. He’s bright and shouldn’t miss any more school.
He needs a new mother—his is a delusional whore.
Chase can’t write her letter with Willard Crawley’s glazed eyes still open. She’s unwilling to hold down his eyelids until they stick, so she takes Radar with her to find what she needs near the pond: two flat, round rocks. The rocks alone don’t feel sufficiently final. Taking inspiration from a face drawn on a rubber glove she found in Gabriel’s cell, she draws a cartoon X in the center of each.
Chase arranges the rocks on Crawley’s face. Then she sits back down beside her dog and sets the record straight.
«79»
Harvey pretends calm he doesn’t feel as he enters the same abandoned trailer he’d cased out months before. It’s the place every teen in town sees as their private domain. He makes his way past a case of beer, an abandoned rainbow-striped sleeping bag, and three terrified young girls clutching onto an equal number of traumatized males.
Harvey notes what looks like a swath of blood on a wall, before passing into the room where the kids are pointing. One of the girls shrieks loud enough to wake the dead while a boy repeats, “Holy fuck, holy fuck, holy fuck.”
The teen who called 911 gave the general location and said, “There’s a corpse. No shitting, man. You’ve got to send someone here quick.” When the dispatcher instructed the caller not to disturb the scene, he replied, “Too late, man. It’s already seriously fucking disturbed.”
Harvey considers the corpse, which isn’t that of Gabriel Wheeler as he’d feared. He’s not sure if he should chant holy fuck along with the kids or read Willard Crawley his rights a few hours too late.
Instead he reaches for a piece of folded paper propped on the dead man’s chest, one that is addressed to him.
¤
Hours after the crime scene is secured and the traumatized teens taken away by their parents, Harvey takes a moment to wolf down a chicken and celery sandwich offered by a thoughtful colleague.
Harvey prays his team doesn’t dig up Gabriel Wheeler’s body, but if they do, Harvey will request his outstanding vacation time and drive north. He’ll pick wildflowers for Romy and deliver them to her at the rehabilitation hospital to which she was moved.
He’ll look into her half-stunning, half-hideous face and tell her that scars don’t matter. He’ll tell her he doesn’t want to live the remainder of his life alone. That he wants to be a father to her children. Then he’ll return each day with fresh wildflowers until they both believe his lies. It’s the one thing Harvey can do to make amends for his mistakes.
Harvey’s cell rings. “You’re not going to believe who I’m eating sugar cookies with,” Verna Quail says.
“Try me.”
“Gabriel Wheeler,” Verna says. “He’s lost his dog and is wondering if we can help look. I told him it will be our pleasure.”
«80»
Chase switches off the motel room’s TV. She’s no longer Harvey’s Sam’s suspect, but that’s not what’s triggered her tears. The kid finally turned himself in. Gabriel’s safe. Radar picks up on her relief and sways over, tail wagging.
Chase grabs her keys and purse on the way out the door. Check out’s in five minutes. She’s done with the States. She’ll head south, and won’t stop until she’s in a dusty Mexican town if she can lie her way across the border. She likes tequila, Coronas and enchiladas, so why not? Maybe she’ll even find a Mexican hunk sexy enough to make her want a gaggle of brown-eyed babies. Or maybe she’ll just toast in the sun and rest up.
All That Remains (A Missing and Exploited Suspense Novel Book 1) Page 18