by Jeff Shelby
“You know him?”
“Just a little bit,” he said. “He didn't last long with me. But I can only tell you what I saw and witnessed. Desmond seemed like a good kid with a good head on his shoulders who'd made a few mistakes. He saw the light, and I think this place gave him what it's designed for. A real second chance. I'm sure he wasn't an angel.” Phil Gentry paused for a moment, thinking. “But I really believe Des had a bright future.”
NINETEEN
The last teacher on Desmond's schedule was Christine Gonzowski and I found her in the last classroom in the same hallway that Phil Gentry was in. She was hunched over her desk, her chin in her hand, studying something laid out in front of her.
I knocked on the doorframe and she glanced in my direction. “Yes?”
“Christine Gonzowski?” I asked.
She nodded.
“My name's Joe Tyler,” I said. “I was hoping I could ask you a few questions about Desmond Locker?”
She blinked once, closed the notebook on her desk, and stood. “Yes. Mr. Locker emailed me and said you might be stopping by.” She walked toward me in the doorway. “I've got a few minutes before I need to leave. Come in.”
She was in her early thirties, with short blonde hair and green eyes. She wore a lime green pantsuit and matching colored heels that looked far too professional for the environment we were in. She reminded me more of an admissions counselor at an expensive private school than a teacher at an alternative school.
She led me to a desk similar to the one I'd sat in in Gentry's room and then slid into the desk next to me. “I heard about Desmond this morning. I was shocked.”
I nodded. “I think most folks who knew him were. You teach history?”
“U.S.,” she said. “I had him in class this year.” She paused. “Can I ask a question?”
“Sure.”
“My understanding was that it was an accident,” she said. “A hit and run. What kind of investigating are you doing?”
“To be honest, I'm not quite sure,” I told her. “The family is a bit rattled, they haven't had a great experience with the police, and I think they need some closure. I'm just trying to get some background on him before I go any further.”
She thought for a moment, then fingered one of the small, golden orbs in her earlobes. “I'm sure they're having a tough time.”
“Very much so.” I glanced around the classroom, noticing the timeline of presidents and the poster-size versions of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. A small bookshelf tucked under one of the windows bulged with books, and the top was littered with statues of famous American symbols: the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, the Liberty Bell. “So this was the first year you had him in class?”
She nodded. “Yes. I think I'd seen him on campus last year, but didn't interact with him.”
“Good student?”
She thought again for a moment. “I think he could've been, but I'm not sure he was...focused.”
“Was he doing okay in your class, grade-wise?”
“I really can't discuss his actual grade,” she answered, a little stiffly. “But I can say he could've done better.”
I nodded. “Understood. Did you have any interaction with him outside of class?”
She looked down at the desktop for a moment, then shook her head. “I don't believe so.”
“No tutoring, nothing like that?”
“No tutoring,” she said. “I don't think he cared much about the grade he received.”
It was the opposite of what Gentry told me, which I found interesting.
“Was it a personal thing?” I asked.
Her cheeks reddened. “What is that supposed to mean?”
I held up a hand. “Sorry. Didn't mean for that to sound offensive. I just mean was there any animosity toward you on his part? Did he just not like the class? Full disclosure. I taught for a little bit, so I know that students sometimes just decide they don't like a teacher and just quit on the class. I don't mean that you did anything. I'm just asking if he disliked the class.”
She twisted one of the earrings, and I noticed her perfectly polished nails. “I'm not sure if he disliked me or the class. I really don't know the answer to that. I know that his performance in the class was not at the level it should've been, and I know that he didn't seek out any help to improve that performance.”
“Did he have friends in the class?”
“Not as far as I could tell,” she said. “He wasn't disruptive or anything like that.” She paused. “A lot of kids come here because it's their last real choice before things go pretty poorly. They put up a good front, but it ends up being not much more than that. They don't magically start caring about school. They get better at hiding the things they got caught for that landed them here. They do just enough to stay off of anyone's radar and get out of here.”
“Are you saying that's what Desmond was doing?”
She tapped a long fingernail against the desktop. “I'm saying I think he was doing enough to not draw attention here, but I'm not sure he'd cleaned up his life entirely.”
“But you told me you didn't really know him outside of class.”
“You were a teacher,” she reminded me. “You’re telling me that you didn't get a sense of your kids just from seeing them every day?”
She wasn't wrong. I did get what I thought was an accurate sense of the students in my room and I knew very few of them outside of the classroom. But I heard things and watched them interact and paid attention to what they wrote. It gave me an idea of who they might be and I did peg the ones I thought were just trying to get by. But I wasn't sure we were talking about the same things.
“Fair point,” I said. “So you're saying those opinions were just from interacting with him in class?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Can you give me an example of what made you think that?”
“A specific one?” She shook her head. “No, not really. But I know that other instructors here thought he was kind of a shining star and that just was never my experience with him.” She shrugged. “Maybe it was the subject matter of my class. I don't know. But my opinion of him was different.”
I nodded. I appreciated both her honesty and her perspective. “Anything else you can share with me about him?”
She stood from the desk. “I'm afraid not. I wish I had more. And I am sorry about what happened to him. I feel terrible for his parents.”
I took her cue and stood as well. “Yeah. Can I ask you one more thing?”
She raised her eyebrows and I took that as a yes.
“Did you know about his girlfriend?” I asked.
She fiddled with the earring again. “Yes. That she was pregnant, I assume you mean?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “I was aware of that situation. I might point to that as evidence that Desmond wasn't the person everyone thought he was.”
“How so?”
She tilted her head, as if I should've known the answer. “I'm not sure getting his girlfriend pregnant made the most sense for either him or her at this point in their lives. They were both here because they'd made mistakes and were getting a chance to learn better decision-making and how to make good choices that would point them in a better direction.” She paused. “I'm not sure that having a baby was an indicator of any of those things.”
TWENTY
I left Seaside and Christine Gonzowski and called Elizabeth to see if she was around for a quick run. She said as long as I didn't mind doing the track at school she was happy to wait for me. I told her I was fifteen minutes away and I'd meet her there.
The lights were already on in the stadium as dusk lit the sky in pinks and oranges. I changed into the shorts and T-shirt I kept in the bag in my trunk and found her stretching on the infield.
“This is a surprise,” she said, leaning back on her hands.
“I was in the neighborhood and needed to clear my head.”
She stood and bounced on her toes. “I was gonna do four hundred repeats. You up for that?”
“Probably not, but I'll hang as long as I can.”
“You should stretch.”
“I'm fine.”
She gave me a side-eye. “Not stretching is how old people get hurt out here.”
“I can't believe you just called me old.”
“If the pulled hamstring fits...”
I did five minutes of perfunctory stretching to pacify her and then we took off.
We did a mile jog to warm up, four slowly paced laps just to wake up the muscles and get the blood pumping. We kept to the outside lanes on the orange, all-weather track, leaving the inside lanes for the runners who were already deep into their speed workouts. Elizabeth's track career at UCSD was over and she wasn't sure what she was going to do with the running going forward, but she'd told me she wanted to stay in shape and maybe attempt some different distances. For her, that meant continuing to run and still hammering away in hard workouts.
And this particular workout was hard. She was going to try and maintain the same race pace for all eight of the four hundreds she was going to run. Eight laps around the track at what was close to a full sprint for her, cooling down with a lap long jog in between each. It was the kind of workout that serious runners did to improve their strength and mental acuity, to work through tough spots when they were actually racing.
I was not a serious runner.
I managed to stay just on her heels for the first lap, but labored halfway through the second and she dropped me fast. She jogged her cool down lap slower than she normally would've so I could catch up, but I told her not to wait and to keep going, I'd do the best I could.
The best I could do was four hard laps, a fifth where the wheels came off, and I barely made it around, and then walking the outside lanes so she didn't run me over as she motored through the laps.
She was a marvel to watch, and it reminded me of the first run we'd taken after I'd found her. I saw how easy it was for her, how she glided over the ground, how the movement was natural for her. I'd always liked running, but it had never been natural. It was work for me. I looked like a guy who wanted to run, but Elizabeth just looked like someone who ran.
I was sitting on the infield, wondering how much I was going to hurt the following morning, when she finished and came over to me.
“You did okay,” she said, dropping down to the grass next to me. Her face was pink and every inch of her was covered in a fine sheen of perspiration.
“I did terrible,” I said, unlacing my shoes. “But I appreciate the lie.”
She laughed. “It's a hard workout, even when you aren't running for time.”
“You made it look easy.”
She took off her shoes and started her stretching routine. “It wasn't. And I was a little slower than I should've been.”
“Couldn't tell.”
She pulled a knee to her chest. “Why were you up here anyway?”
I gave her the rundown on Desmond and what I'd been doing all day.
“That's terrible,” she said. “That he got hit, I mean.”
“Yeah, not fun.”
“Was his girlfriend pretty upset?”
I plucked a blade of grass. “I think she was mostly in shock.”
“No kidding.” She shook her head. “I can't believe someone would do that. Just hit someone and run off.”
“Me, either, but plenty of people do,” I said. “Not sure if that's just about fear or what.”
“So his parents just want you to find the person that did it?”
“I think so. They had a bad experience with the police, so they don't trust them to make it a priority.” I shrugged. “But most families who are going through a trauma don't think that the police or anyone else is doing enough. When you see people not singularly focused like you might be, then you take that as indifference or whatever. Doesn't mean it's true.”
She stretched her legs out in front of her and rolled her shoulders forward several times, then backward. “I guess. Pretty hard to find a needle in a haystack, though. There are a million cars that drive on that road every day. If no one saw anything, I think it would be hard.”
“It would be,” I said. “I don't know. The lead investigator, he seems pretty sold that it's a routine thing. I'm not sure if that means he'll work it pretty hard or let it sit. But the detective who I met at the scene, I ran into her again today and she seems sharp. So we'll see.” I paused. “Have you ever met anyone with the first name Sutton before?”
Elizabeth gave me a weird look. “Uh, no, and that's the most random thing you've asked me in awhile.”
I laughed. “The detective. Her first name is Sutton.”
“Probably a family name?” she suggested. “And first name basis with the detective? That's different.”
“She knew a lot about your case,” I said. “She recognized my name. Then she apologized today for being a little forward in asking about it. She introduced herself. Sutton Swanson. She said if I called her she'd tell me the story behind it.”
My daughter eyed me very carefully. “She told you to call her?”
“She said if I called her,” I corrected her. “And that's because she's interested in hearing more about what happened to you and what I did to find you.”
She pushed herself the grass. “You are so silly.”
I got up, my knees begging to differ. “Silly about what?”
She gathered up her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “She said she'd tell you about her name if you called her. Correct?”
“Yeah.”
She laughed and picked up her shoes. “Dad. She wants you to call her. And not because of me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that's what you do if you want a guy to call you,” she said. “She baited the hook.”
“Baited the hook?”
“She gave you her name,” she said, as we started walking. “It was an interesting name and it sounds like you commented on that.”
I didn't say anything.
Elizabeth laughed again. “You totally did. And then she said she would explain her name to you if you called her.” She tapped me on the arm with one of her shoes. “You were flirting.”
“I was not.”
“You absolutely were,” she said, as we crossed the track. “And so was she.”
“I think that workout may have done something to your head.”
“Okay,” she said. “Tell me this. Is she attractive?”
“I don't know,” I said, even though an image of Sutton Swanson’s long dark hair immediately appeared. “She's a detective. Our interactions were about the case.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Did you have a blindfold on? No. Was she attractive?”
“I don't know,” I said. “I guess.”
“Which means she is and you noticed it,” she said. “She wants you to call her.”
“About your case.”
“If she just wanted you to call her about the case, she would've said so,” Elizabeth said. “She wouldn't have told you to call her about the story behind her name.”
“You're crazy,” I told her.
We crossed under the stadium and out to the parking lot. Her car was parked next to mine and she set her shoes on the trunk. “Fine. I'll make you a bet.”
“I'm not making any bets,” I told her, popping the trunk to my car.
“Why? Are you a chicken? Or are you just admitting I'm right?”
“I'm not admitting a thing,” I told her.
“Then bet me,” she said. “Or go buy a chicken coop to reside in.”
I sighed. “Fine. What is your bet?”
“You call her,” she said. “Ask her to go to lunch or something. If she says yes, I win. If she says no or something about keeping it professional, you win.”
“What exactly are the stakes of your imaginary bet?” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “
If I win, I get dinner at Donovan's after graduation.”
This was not a small thing. She knew how much I hated paying for expensive dinners, and she knew it would kill me to pay for dinner at one of the priciest steakhouses in La Jolla.
“And if I win?” I asked.
“Your call.”
I grinned. “Okay. You have to come home and mow the yard for the next three months. Twice a month.”
This was not a small thing, either. She despised yard work and, particularly, mowing. Where I liked being outside and doing the yard work, she viewed it as a form of punishment.
She wavered. “Seriously?”
“Well, no. We don't have to bet at all,” I told her. “You were acting pretty confident, though.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Fine. It's a bet. Call her.”
“I will.”
“No. Now. I wanna hear the conversation,” she said.
“I'm not calling her now.”
“Why not?”
“Because...”
“Because you're a chicken?”
She really knew how to push my buttons.
I pulled my jeans from the bag in my trunk and fished the card out of the pocket. I grabbed my phone out of the bag and tapped the screen. “I'm not putting her on speaker.”
“Whatever,” she said, smiling smugly.
I typed in the number on her card. I knew I shouldn't let her goad me into doing it, but I also hated it when she challenged me. We were both overly competitive and she knew it would force my hand.
Swanson answered on the third ring.
“Uh, Detective Swanson?” I said.
“Speaking. Who is this?”
“It's Joe. Tyler?”
“Oh,” she said, her voice softening. “Mr. Tyler. How are you?”
“I'm fine,” I said. “And it's Joe.”
Elizabeth leaned against her car, enjoying herself far too much.
“Right. Joe. What can I do for you, Joe?”
“I, uh, well...I wondered if you still wanted to hear about my daughter's case,” I said.
Elizabeth frowned and shook her head vigorously.
“I would love to,” she said. “I just wasn't sure you were agreeable.”
“I am,” I told her. “And I, uh, wanted to hear that story.”