Thief of Souls

by Ann Benson

  It was a gift, but not one without cost, for after blessing me with permission, he simply had to finish with a stern directive. “Just do not allow it to consume you,” he said.

  “I will do my best.” I bowed slightly and made to leave, but Jean de Malestroit took gentle hold of my arm and stopped me.

  “God would be pleased to have you worship Him here rather than in your private quarters.”

  God, indeed. It was His bishop who wanted me there. I nodded my assent with as much dignity as I could muster.

  “Good,” Jean de Malestroit said. He took up the tray and started for the door but set it down again and said with a sigh, “Someday God will make me answer for the shortcomings of my memory. There is a letter for you. From Avignon.” He produced a scroll.

  Jean. My heart soared as my hand went out greedily for the parchment. His Eminence had been right. He would never understand my passion.

  chapter 4

  Ellen Leeds had said red, and this jacket looked more like maroon in the thin light, so I tried not to get too excited. I was really glad for the very basic investigative training they put all the patrol cops through, because this one had known better than to pick it up. This turned out to be doubly important in this case; when I got down on my knees and looked closely with my flashlight, I saw a small, crumpled piece of paper resting on top of the jacket.

  A narrow strip—a discarded receipt, maybe. It might have been blown in there, but with so little wind that seemed unlikely. I glanced around again to gauge the breeze; not one leaf stirred anywhere along the sidewalk. The little white paper was balanced precariously on one of the sleeves, near the elbow. If it had blown there, it more likely would have been caught in one of the folds or low points. But there it was, perched on a smooth section of the fabric surface. It had to have landed at that spot after the jacket did, and if it was a receipt, as I suspected, it would have a time printed on it.

  We left them in place. One of the patrols walked the measuring dog and called out the numbers. I pasted myself onto the ground and snapped a couple of pictures, hoping for the best. Something scurried when the flash went off. I drew a rough little map in my notebook, showing the distance from two permanent landmarks—one a fire hydrant, the other a street lamp—neither of which was likely to be moved in the next couple of days. When it was all duly documented, I packed both items in plastic bags and labeled them. Except for a few twigs and leaves that didn’t want to let go when I picked it up, the jacket looked clean and was in excellent condition.

  The piece of paper, as I’d hoped, was a receipt. The printer must have needed a new cartridge, because the print was barely visible. For a moment I wondered if it had been outside for a while and had blown onto the jacket after all. But I could just make out the letters and numbers—it was for the purchase of a carton of milk and a pack of cigarettes at a store not a block away, made that morning at two minutes past eight, by which time the jacket was in all likelihood already on the ground.

  I didn’t find much in the pockets, at least nothing that would identify it as having belonged to Nathan Leeds. There was no name sewn or written in the label—at twelve he would be past the point of allowing his mother to do that, like my own son, Evan, who at that age nearly crucified me when he saw me with a Magic Marker in one hand and his new windbreaker in the other.

  Mom, what the heck, I’m not a baby anymore. . . . Jeff’s mother stopped doing that a couple of years ago. . . .

  I pulled out two empty gum papers and three pennies. But no wallet; that would be in his school bag. While the patrols continued their search of the area, I walked back to the car to stow the evidence and to take another look at the picture that Nathan’s mother had given me. It was an outdoor shot, and I couldn’t remember what he had been wearing. It wasn’t the jacket in question, but a T-shirt. The design showed a toothy, malevolent silhouette of some beast, encircled with the words La Brea Tar Pits. It was very scary-looking.

  He would be very scared by now. If he was still alive.

  More patrols came out and cordoned off the scene. All night long some poor rookie would end up sitting in a unit at one end of the taped area to protect it from the ravaging effects of passersby. First thing in the morning, I would be back there with an evidence team to go over everything in the daylight. I could have had the high-intensity light sets brought in, but true daylight is the best thing in a detailed search, because you just can’t see the same stuff in artificial light. And the abduction, if that was what it was, occurred in daylight, as best I could determine. There is so much more to be learned—maybe sensed is a better word—when the conditions in which a crime takes place can be replicated.

  It was 0100 hours and I knew Nathan’s mother would still be awake, probably sitting by the phone. That’s what I would have been doing in her place. I smelled cigarette smoke when Ellen Leeds opened the door. A thin smoke trail rose up lazily from the glowing tip of the butt that dangled from her left hand. She tucked the hand behind her back right away. Maybe I’d wrinkled up my nose without realizing it.

  “I don’t usually smoke in the apartment.”

  “I’d be smoking like a chimney right about now if I were you.”

  She motioned me in with her free hand and closed the door behind me, with the same click clack of locks as I’d heard before. “I know it’s very late,” I said, a sort of apology, “but I thought you’d want to be contacted immediately if something turned up.”

  She couldn’t see the plastic bag with its contents. It was tucked into a large canvas carryall that I keep in the car. I don’t like parading evidence of a heartbreak in front of the whole world; I try to get it out of sight if that’s possible.

  Hope flooded her face, trimming away years. “Did you find him?”

  “No, I’m sorry to say, we didn’t. But there is some evidence I think you should look at.”

  The years returned with vicious cruelty. “What kind of evidence?” she whispered fearfully.

  “A jacket.”

  She shut her eyes and was quiet for a few seconds. Then she opened them again and asked, “Is there blood on it?”

  “No. At least not that I can see right now. A closer examination might reveal something, and we will do lab work, but it looks quite clean to me. Of course, that’s just a first impression.”

  She reached out for the tote. I held it back and kept the top opening closed. “I’m sorry, I can’t allow you to touch it just yet, because contamination will lessen the evidence value in court later. But I need for you to identify it as being Nathan’s if you can.”

  I undid the plastic zip closure at the top of the bag and exposed a portion of the jacket for her to see. Of course her hand went out, but she caught herself and pulled it back. “I need to see the label,” she said. “Nathan’s jacket was made by a company called Harmony. There should be a black tag with some musical notes and the word Harmony on it. I think the stitching is blue.”

  It was.

  Three hours of sleep is not a lot to go on, but between having kids who kept me up at night sometimes and my job—which either drags me out or keeps me up with annoying regularity—I guess I’ve gotten used to it. Evan was a decent sleeper, and Frannie did okay, but Julia didn’t sleep until she was five. She didn’t cry, but she wanted to play, and she would talk and talk and talk from her crib until everyone in the house was awake. All she really wanted was company, but God forbid her father should actually have gotten up to play with her. It was always me. But the older I get, the harder it is to make up for lost hours of rest. By the time I got back to the station house, filed all the necessary reports, sent out a fresh Teletype, detailed the label on the evidence, I was as wired as if I’d just had a full pot of coffee.

  I was out at the scene the next morning at about 0700, an hour earlier than I usually arrive at the station. The evidence guys hadn’t arrived yet, but the patrol unit was still there. I showed the kid my badge and told him I was the primary. He waved me in, as if he neede
d to.

  Each crime scene has a personality of its own. I like to just stand in the middle of my scenes and take in their nuances. Some of the guys think I’m crazy, but my individual solve rate is better than anyone else’s in the division, so they don’t say too much.

  The street was a quiet mix of small houses and storefronts. Not much activity, even around the roped-off portion. Most of the stores were late-opening types—a gourmet shop, a hair-and-nail salon, a wine store. I was wishing for a donut shop, so someone might have seen something. Opposite where we’d found the jacket, there was a boarded-up old theater with signs saying it was about to undergo renovation. A few people going to early jobs walked by, but only one person actually stopped and asked a question. I told her what had happened and asked her about the neighborhood.

  “Mostly working people in the houses, no troublemakers, and we all mind our own business.”

  “When do most of the residents leave, if you know?”

  She didn’t. But I was there at just about the same time of day that Nathan would have been abducted, and the place was nearly deserted. It was quite likely that no one saw a thing from within the neighborhood itself.

  When I got back to the division it was barely 0800, but I was feeling very tired. It had been a night of spare sleep with my standard nightmare: I’m stranded outside in weather so cold that my snot is frozen. I’m wearing sandals and a tank top but there’s knee-deep snow. I’m plowing through it on foot, to God knows where, I never seem to have a destination, I’m just running, and I can feel the sensation of my legs dragging in the snow. This time I had a horse with a kind of mutant Star Wars quality to it, like the beast that Luke Skywalker eviscerated and hid inside to stay warm while he waited for Han Solo to rescue him. I swear I smelled that putrid stink in the dream.

  Where was George Lucas when you needed him? I could have used some special effects that morning. Bags under my eyes, hair that inspired a self-directed oh, screw it. I was running on adrenaline, and not enough of that. When I stood up and talked about the case at the morning briefing, I was afraid I would throw up right in the middle of it. One of the guys said to me afterward, “You sound beat.”

  “Yeah,” I said to him. “You must be a detective.”

  I went straight from there into Lieutenant Fred Vuska’s office to give him a more detailed report. Fred is a genuinely good man who advocates for all of us in the division with his own superiors, who can be real jerks. But he’s under so much political pressure, the poor guy. He was always the link between the people who do the work—us—and the people who theorize about how we ought to do it, known in regular conversation as “them.” The last thing he needed from me was a request for additional manpower to do a more thorough search for Nathan Leeds.

  “All the patrols were out looking for this kid last night. No one saw him. You don’t know that he got grabbed, anyway. He still might be a runaway.”

  “We found his jacket.”

  “He probably dropped it. Or tossed it because it isn’t cool enough for him. I hate to tell you how many jackets my own kids lose.”

  “I’m just getting a feeling that this kid is not a runaway.”

  “Based on what?”

  I wanted to say, That girl thing you don’t get, the thing we call intuition. But it would have been disrespectful and sexist, and I have had all that bigotry trained out of me. “I saw the home, talked with the mother . . .”

  “You done any other interviews yet?”

  “Just one with a resident of the street, but it was a real quickie and she didn’t really have anything to tell me.”

  He gave me a good long stare of disbelief.

  “Lany, go do your interviews. If you turn up anything more that makes you think he didn’t just run away, then bring it to me. We’ll take another look at it.”

  “The kid’s twelve, for God’s sake.”

  Cynical now. “You want to see some twelve-year-olds? Come on. I’ll take you for a ride down to Venice Beach, and we’ll ask the punks who hang out there how old they are. Get your ass out there and dig something up.”

  The training apparently didn’t take on Fred.

  I was wishing very earnestly for a key to the lobby of Ellen Leeds’s building. I could buzz her and ask to be let in, but she would expect me to come to her apartment for an update and I was just a bit too brittle to deal with her diplomatically at the moment. So I waited until someone came out, flashed my badge, and was let in.

  It took me a few moments of orientation to determine which stack of apartments was the one I wanted. They would all be corner units above the third floor; everything else was too low or incorrectly angled. It made my job easier; I didn’t have to canvass the entire west side of the building.

  I got there at about 0930, so there weren’t going to be too many people at home. I would just have to do the best I could and hope for something to break. The first apartment I tried was empty, so I scribbled Please contact me on one of my cards and stuck it into the door crack. The fourth-floor occupant was home when I rang his bell but mightily peeved, because he worked a midnight-to-eight-A.M. shift and had just climbed back into his casket for the day. He said he hadn’t gotten home until around 0930 yesterday, by which time the deed (if it was indeed a deed) had probably already been done and the doer long gone. I got his name and the number of his employer for verification, then thanked him and apologized for waking him.

  Fifth floor, not home, left a card. On the sixth floor, I was just about through writing contact me on the card when the door was finally opened by a very elderly lady, whose sickly-sweet perfume returned me to the sixties like a flashback. She was nicely dressed and her bluish hair looked as if it had just been done. She had her pearls on already, and lipstick—far more than I ever wore. Little tributaries of red branched out from her upper lip along the wrinkles.

  “Oh, come right in,” she said on seeing my badge. I hadn’t explained the nature of my visit, but I got the sense that it didn’t matter to her. A visitor was a visitor, and I was a cop, therefore safe. Old folks and children think that way.

  “Can I get you some coffee or tea, Officer?”

  “Oh, no, thank you, ma’am.” I hadn’t asked her name yet. She followed me with her eyes as I migrated slowly to the big window. The street I wanted to see was in full view. On a small table next to an overstuffed chair there was a set of binoculars of the sort that one might use for bird-watching.

  “You have a lovely view here,” I said.

  “Yes, I do. That’s why I rented in this building.”

  Ellen Leeds’s reason had been quite different.

  “I was just about the first tenant in here,” she continued. “That was, oh, let’s see, twenty years ago. They keep waiting for me to die so they can rent this apartment out to someone younger for lots more money.”

  I had to smile. “I’ll bet,” I said. I picked up her binocs. “Are you a bird-watcher?”

  “I do a little, but not seriously. I had a gentleman friend—he passed away about ten years ago now—who used to love it. Those are his viewers you’re holding.”

  I replaced them reverently on the table.

  “Now I mostly just watch what goes on in the world out there.”

  Oh please oh please oh please, I prayed silently. “Mrs. . . . I mean, ma’am . . .”

  “Mrs. Paulsen.”

  I scribbled the name in my notebook. “I wonder if you were looking out your window yesterday morning around seven-thirty or a little bit later. A little boy who lives in this building has gone missing, and the last time anyone can place him was on his way to school yesterday morning.”

  She raised her eyebrows just a bit. “So that’s what all the fuss has been about.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll have to think for a moment.” She sat down in her chair quite deliberately. “Let me see, yesterday morning . . . I got up at my usual time, six-fifteen, and I had my shower. Then I had my coffee and took in the paper�
�I have a young boy who brings it right to my welcome mat, you know—and I read that for a little while. I remember I put on the television to watch the Today show at seven—I like that Al Roker so much. . . .”

  She went on to describe the minutiae of her morning routine and it sounded so leisurely, like heaven to me.

  “You know, I was at the window about that time. I remember seeing children on their way to school. There’s this one little girl who always looks so pretty; her mother dresses her so nicely and she skips along on her way—reminds me of how I used to walk to school myself. We always wore dresses, you know, not like these days when they barely wear anything at all . . .”

  “You say you had Today on; do you remember what they were talking about or doing at the time that you were looking out and saw the kids?”

  “Well, yes, I do. The lady who has all those linens and things was on and she was making some kind of decoration.”

  Martha Stewart. I could call the local broadcaster and get the precise timing of that segment. I took the picture of Nathan Leeds and his mother out of my case folder and handed it to her. “Did you happen to see this young boy on his way to school?”

  She regarded the photograph for a moment. “Well, yes, I did. But he didn’t walk all the way down the street like he usually does.”

  Oh please oh please. My heart started beating a little faster. “What do you mean, Mrs. Paulsen?”

  “Well, he got into the car about halfway down the street, in front of the little white house.”

  Precisely where we’d found the jacket. But she had said the car, not a car. “Describe the car, please.”

  “Oh, I won’t need to do that. You can just go right down into the garage and look at it yourself. Of course, you’ll have to wait until later. On days when she goes out, she doesn’t usually get home until suppertime.”