by Ann Benson
There would be reprisals, and they would be swift. I tried for a short while to convince his Eminence that caution ought to be exercised until we had more information on the matter—we had only the first reports, and surely when all sides were heard, a less dastardly picture would be painted of the entire affair. Or so I hoped.
Jean de Malestroit entertained no such ideas of forbearance. “I am certain of the truth of the report and absolutely outraged that such horrors should be done to an unarmed brother in Christ, a man who was only performing his expected filial duty.”
“You have but one report.”
“A reliable one.”
“Still, if you see for yourself, your mind will rest easier on the matter,” I said.
“I think perhaps it is your mind that will rest.”
I begged and pleaded, and finally he acquiesced. It was decided that we should depart in the early morn of the next day. For the rest of the day, as we made hasty preparations, the Bishop railed against Milord Gilles, cursing him for his sinful excesses. The man knows no limits at all—none! He throws away gold as if he could pluck it off a tree. And when the fruit of that tree is gone, he simply steals another one. He makes traffic with the devil and takes pleasure in the company of alchemists.
“Eminence!” I cried when I heard this. “These are grave accusations indeed—you are speaking of blasphemy.”
“Yes,” he said calmly.
“Surely you have not stooped to believing . . . hearsay.”
“I have reason to think it is not hearsay but simply the despicable truth. I have heard it told by reliable witnesses that the man engages in the darkest sort of worship. I am coming to believe that it is true.”
His expression became tender, almost sympathetic, for he knew the effect such news would have upon me. “I have had questions asked in the village of Machecoul,” he said, “carefully and discreetly. Many of the day servants live there, some in the very shadows of the castle. There are no secrets that can be kept from these people—their lives are so plain and brutal that they must find their enjoyment in observing those who rule them. And there is plenty of talk. Plenty. It is said over and over again that Milord keeps constant company with this Italian Prelati and that together they practice the black arts.”
I crossed myself in defense of the unthinkable. “But . . . it is forbidden completely.”
“All forbidden things are practiced in secret, Guillemette. They are forbidden because they are too sweet for the weak to resist and because they draw those who are otherwise innocent to their ruin. We forbid them as a means of protecting those who cannot protect themselves. Lord de Rais has been harboring this shaman Prelati since Eustache Blanchet brought him here.”
He had been investigating Milord in depth without telling me his findings. Though this was his right—indeed, his responsibility—I felt hurt by having been left out of it. Even so, I must admit that I did not wish to hear what he was telling me. I squeezed my eyes shut, forgetting somehow that it is the ears, not the eyes, that do the task of hearing, as though if I could not see the speaker, the speech might by some miracle prove untrue.
“Blanchet himself almost never leaves Milord’s company,” he went on. “But not because he is so cherished. Rather, Milord will not permit it because he is afraid Blanchet will run away and speak of what he knows to one of his enemies.” Then his tone went very hushed. “There is even talk of sodomy among the lot.”
“Enough!” I nearly shouted. “You who hate gossip so, how can you say these things, especially to me?”
“You of all people know that I honor the truth,” he said softly. “I would not make these assertions without some confidence in their authenticity. My inquiries have been very careful. I have learned many disturbing things.”
Woe overtook me; tears poured down my cheeks, and with his free hand, Jean de Malestroit reached out and brushed them away, very tenderly.
“Guillemette,” he whispered, “please do not weep.”
I disobeyed him.
“Please,” he said again. He put his hand on my chin and raised up my face. “Open your eyes. You must see the truth. I tell you these things because I know that you love this man like a son. It would be terrible for you to hear them from a stranger. I know you have already lost a son and do not want to lose another. But he has gone bad, Guillemette. He is not worthy to be your son. Not worthy of your tears.”
“You do not understand . . . you cannot . . .”
“You are right,” he soothed, “I cannot. I do not understand how such a vile beast can deserve your regard. When you wanted to undertake this task, I tried to discourage you, to protect you so your pain would not be revisited.” He sighed, and took his hand from my face.
“You are a strong and determined woman, Sister, qualities I have long admired in you. You inspire me to be the same ofttimes when I cannot find inspiration in myself. When I feel I have nothing left within myself to give to my obligations, I remember that you have suffered greatly and yet you still give so much. You wanted to help these people who have lost sons. You could not have known where it would lead. . . .”
Of course he was wrong; deep within my heart, I had known all along, somehow. But the deeper implications of this knowledge had the power to take me to a dark place I did not think I could bear to go and would resist with all my soul.
Jean de Malestroit mistook the true meaning of the pained look on my face and tried desperately to console me. “I am sorry,” he said with agonized sympathy. “So terribly sorry.”
I reached out and took his hand in mine. “I know. And it comforts my tortured heart to hear it said. But there is much torture yet to come for me. Promise me,” I begged, “that as this progresses, you will keep me by your side and fully informed.”
“It may turn out that these are matters not suitable for a woman’s ears—there is much I have not told you yet.”
“There is little more I can see or hear that will shock me.”
“Guillemette,” he pleaded quietly, “do not ask this.”
“I am owed it, and much more.”
Finally, he agreed.
chapter 12
Larry Wilder’s mother had every right to be just as much of a snarling doggie as Mrs. McKenzie had been, but instead she was pleasant and gracious about my request to see her at 1430. On the way to their home in a neighborhood just south of Brentwood, I stopped at the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica to pick up some lunch. I used to really like to come here with my kids because there’s only foot traffic and it seemed pretty safe—that is, until one of the narcs took me on a short cruise and pointed out the ne’er-do-wells, the vast majority of whom were camouflaged as law-abiding citizens. While my order was made up at a taco stand, I watched the young kids who frequented the area. There was one group of boys who all looked to be in the same age group as my victims—knowing what I know now, I’m of the opinion that they’re too young to be here without their parents. They evinced that pack behavior so typical of young teenagers. When the leader moved, the rest followed in the choreographed manner of a flock of starlings. I always thought that being the prime mover in a group like that was an indication of real leadership qualities in a kid. But how would you state that on an employment application? I ran a gang, kept everyone in line, so give me a fucking job already.
No one had disappeared from the Promenade, at least not that I could recall, a surprising fact in view of the degenerate multitudes. The pack leaders weren’t the ones who were going to get grabbed—it would be one of the less visible followers. If I were an abductor, what would I look for in a victim? I watched the group for a few moments, then focused my observation on one boy in particular, because my gut told me he would be the most vulnerable in the group.
I imagined him separating off from the pack for a few moments and myself sidling closer to him. Hey, kid, what are you looking for? Smoke? Blow? Ecstasy? Then I could draw him further from the rest of the group and voilà. He would be mine.
That was an exaggeration; it wouldn’t be that easy. But it wouldn’t be impossible either.
I enjoyed the chili on a bench as I watched more passersby, many of whom were burdened with shopping bags. Their leisure was enviable. Then it was a short ride to the Wilder home. Mrs. Wilder answered the door almost immediately. She had a very pleasant face with a friendly expression, but such sad eyes. Larry’s mother looked older than I expected she would be, but an ordeal like the one she’d been through and was still experiencing can really age a person. We’ve all seen it too many times.
I was shoving out the badge when she said, “Detective Dunbar? Please come in.”
What if I hadn’t been Detective Dunbar? People are too loose about security. I didn’t say anything—it would have been like salt in a wound. “Yes. Mrs. Wilder?”
“Come in, please.” She offered a hand. “I’m glad to meet you,” she said pleasantly. So gracious and polite. Once I was in the living room, my eyes went straight to a family photograph on the small grand piano tucked into one corner. Mother and father, and four kids. The blond one, Larry, was the smallest, probably the youngest.
This mother, like all the others, would be heaping tons of guilt on herself for this—Larry was her baby, and we’re all a lot looser on discipline and vigilance with our youngest children than with our oldest. Of course we mess up our oldest children with overkill, but by the time the youngest comes along, we’re relaxed pros with all the right answers. She’d probably been more inclined to let Larry do things unsupervised than when she was a new parent.
I eased toward the piano and pointed at the photograph. “May I?”
“Please,” she said.
My finger came to rest on Larry’s chest. “He looks a little different here than in the photo you gave us.”
“I know. That one was more accurate, though. He hates to have his picture taken, so he never looks quite like himself when we pose. That’s why I gave Detective Donnolly the candid. It looks more like the real Larry.”
“Ah. Typical of the age, I think.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “And these are my other kids.”
Her surviving kids, I thought. I berated myself for that negativity as she identified two boys and a girl, whose names I promptly forgot because I would never need to know them again. But their ages were of interest and potential value to me.
“Twenty, eighteen, and fifteen,” she told me as she indicated each child.
We sat down; I reviewed the particulars of the case aloud as I had read them in Donnolly’s file. The uncle was seen and identified by witnesses, but he had been at the firehouse at the time, in the presence of six other firefighters, all of whom gave trial-worthy testimony on his behalf. Mrs. Wilder had nothing new to add to the information Donnolly had dug up. It was time to take out my own shovel.
“Did Larry have his own room?”
“Yes, he did.”
“I wonder if it would be possible for me to take a look at it.”
I saw her face sag; the room was probably a kind of shrine to her. She didn’t even bother to answer, just sighed deeply, then motioned with her head for me to follow her.
We climbed the stairs and turned right down a long, well-lit hallway. The house was bright and open, with lots of windows. It didn’t have the look of a home mired in mourning. The floor was carpeted with salmon plush so thick that I couldn’t hear my own footsteps, and the walls were decorated with all sorts of photos of wild animals, each one framed in a different primary color. Kids would like the way it looked.
Larry’s room, in contrast, was cluttered and messy. There were clothes strewn on the bed and shoes tossed casually on the floor. It looked as if she hadn’t touched anything at all. I pretended to need balance as I worked my way through the piles of videotapes and comic books and put my palm down flat on the desk as if to support myself. What I really wanted to do was to check for dust without her seeing me. I snuck a look at my fingertips when Mrs. Wilder was looking away—they were clean. The disarray appeared to be of the genuine boy-sort. She had apparently just picked it all up, dusted the surfaces, and then put it back in place again.
According to what was strewn all over the room, I would guess that Larry Wilder had to have been something of a nerd. There was a lot of computer stuff, including a joystick.
“Did your son play a lot of video games?”
“On the computer, yes. But we don’t have one of those—oh, devices, I guess, I don’t know what else to call them—that you can use to play on the TV.”
She said that with a lot of triumph. I thought, Good for you.
“We limited the amount of time he could be on the Internet too. The modem goes through a timer. We were always afraid—”
She couldn’t seem to finish the sentence, but I knew pretty much what she was going to say. Larry’s parents had been afraid that some electronic mutant, some pedophile presenting himself as another teenager, would seduce their son into that unthinkable void. A prudent fear—we were constantly on the alert in our division for deviants employing the pedophile community’s new favorite method of enticement, that being the on-line masquerade.
It was beginning to look like I had a masquerader on my hands, but he didn’t seem to be contacting his victims through an Internet chat room. It was something of a relief to be thinking that way, because these guys are among the worst of the deliberate predators—they do so much damage to the kids they work over, not the least of which is to keep them away from other more beneficial activities during the seduction attempt, even if the kids don’t bite fully.
But it was also something of a disappointment, because we have our own equal-and-opposite predators, cops who pose as young kids and play along with these creeps. We had a case in our division recently—one of those times when Escobar did have a bran muffin and was out of the head long enough to take a phone call—where a kid’s father got suspicious when his ISP usage climbed sky-high one month. Before he said anything to the kid, though, the father went to the ISP and started talking about lawyers because the boy was a minor. For a few days after that, when the kid tried to sign into that chat room, he got a SITE UNDER REPAIR message, so he didn’t realize he was actually being blocked. The father got the info to Escobar, who assumed the kid’s on-line identity and managed to set up a meet with the perp inside a week. We took him down in the parking lot of a local fast-food restaurant. He screamed entrapment, but the judge laughed and held him over. Almost made me a believer again.
“A timer,” I mused. “On the line itself?”
“Yes. Breaks the connection if he stays on the same site for more than a certain amount of time. Only his father and I know how to override it.”
“That’s a unique way of keeping control,” I said. “I never heard of that before. But what a good idea.”
“It worked beautifully. It was becoming such a problem. But after we set that up he knew just how much time he would have to do that stuff and planned his homework and other activities so we didn’t have to fight about it.”
“I’d love to try that with my own son. I think he spends way too much time on the computer.”
She seemed very pleased. “I’ll have my husband call you—he’s really the one who knows the details. I got to be the main enforcer, though.”
I smiled and said, “Isn’t that always the way.”
“It was tough at first,” she told me, “but when everyone got used to the routine and the limits, we didn’t have too many problems. We also had a site blocker on there, which we specifically set to keep him out of chat rooms. There was one his school sponsored, but you had to have a password to get in and it was randomly monitored.”
Mrs. Wilder automatically wiped a bit of detritus from the tabletop in her son’s room, but the determination in the sweep of her hand confirmed what I suspected, that the room had become sacred to her. It was so sad—this fastidious, well-groomed, educated woman on the verge of matronhood was trying to let me know
that she had been a good and vigilant parent, an effort in which she would be hopelessly entangled for the rest of her life. She would unconsciously plead her case with just about anyone who knew that her son had disappeared. If she could just convince herself, the rest of us probably wouldn’t matter so much to her.
“From what I could see in Detective Donnolly’s notes, he thought the probability of an Internet abduction was pretty slim. I take it that you agreed it shouldn’t be a priority in the investigation.”
“We did.”
“Has your thinking on that matter changed at all?”
“No.”
I pointed to Larry’s bed. “May I sit down?”
“Please. Go ahead.”
I lowered myself onto the edge of the mattress and looked all around the wood floor. There was a carpet in the center of the room with vacuum strokes all through it and only one set of transgressing footprints: mine—she would vacuum up her own footsteps as she retreated out of the room. Then I let my gaze drift upward and examined the walls. They were a lighter shade of green than the carpet, a color that used to be called hospital green because it was theorized to be restful and calming. There was a bulletin board with dozens of small notes pinned to it and a calendar from the year before with the month of Larry’s disappearance still visible. There was a practice schedule for soccer and a card for a dental appointment and a couple of birthday cards with that telltale grandmother look. There was a math test with a big A in a circle. Nothing beyond the expected norm.
But if the walls themselves were supposed to be restful, the things he’d hung on them were not. There were two giant posters for Star Trek movies, one of Bruce Willis all cut and bleeding from one of his Die Hard things, and then an assortment of smaller posters with dinosaurs on them. A couple of WrestleMania ads had been torn out of magazines and taped up rather haphazardly, definitely not by a parent.
No Farrahs or Britneys just yet.
But the poster that really caught my eye was for an Animatronic exhibit of prehistoric beasts at the La Brea Tar Pits Museum that had closed down the year before after a very long run. The big dark rectangle was positioned in the place of honor opposite the foot of the bed, where he could see it easily. Evan had gone to see that show with Jeff—I forget whose parents were with them—and he raved about the thing for weeks afterward. All sorts of special effects, he told me, with these incredible beasts from ten thousand years ago. The thing Evan liked best about it was that there were knights and warriors, like those in some of his fantasy games, he said, and they were riding the beasts. Science purists created this huge vicious controversy over the chronological inaccuracy; I remember being amused over that because I used to watch The Flintstones all the time when I was a kid. Hey, they rode dinosaurs! The important thing to me was that it piqued Evan’s curiosity about what was really true.