by Chaz McGee
Chapter 28
When Maggie is on a case, her determination manifests itself in velocity. Normally I enjoy it when she’s driving like a NASCAR star on methamphetamines. But that night, she was so preoccupied with the thoughts tumbling through her head that she forgot to turn on her running lights. We were passing people at double the speed limit and burning through red lights with no warning whatsoever. I had no fear for myself—I was already dead—but I wasn’t anxious for Maggie to join me. Not yet.
A particularly close call with a truck about five blocks from the hospital woke her from her reverie. She flipped on her lights, and I sat up tall and enjoyed the rush. My old partner and I had loved running with the lights on, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. We had pretty much peeled out for a run whenever the mood struck us, even if we were just going out for burgers and beer. I enjoyed it just as much with Maggie. We were on the move and, quite literally, it made me feel alive.
I wasn’t sure what she was rushing toward, but I knew it had something to do with the drawing I’d had the little girl in the cancer ward make for her. I was exultant. Elements of it had been tumbling through Maggie’s mind ever since she left the hospital: the blue-scribbled lake, the house, the little boy in blue shorts, the carefully outlined streets, even the little girl’s reference to a boy drinking water. Maggie knew it was crazy to be pinning her hopes on something so out-there; I could feel her hesitation. I also knew she had nothing to lose and nothing else to go on for at least four more hours. There was a chance she’d go for it.
The station house lobby was quiet. It was after midnight on a Saturday night, and the reception desk was dark. The sergeant on duty was probably in a back room eating a late-night lunch or taking advantage of the distraction on the floors above, where the Tyler Matthews task force toiled, to watch television. Then I noticed a lone figure draped over a chair in the lobby, his long arms and legs sprawled out to each side as he snored, head back.
It was Adrian Calvano.
Maggie spotted her partner and woke him. He struggled to an upright position, recognized Maggie, and looked vaguely ashamed.
“What the hell are you doing still here?” Maggie asked him. “Where’s IAD?”
“Don’t know,” Calvano mumbled, his New Jersey accent even more pronounced when he was caught in an unguarded state. “I’ve been here for three or four hours.” He looked confused. “What the hell time is it?”
“It’s almost two. Listen, Adrian, if IAD hasn’t shown up by now, they’re not coming until morning. Gonzales is just screwing with your head. He wants you to sweat it out all night. That’s your punishment.”
“I know,” Calvano said. He hunched over, looking miserable. “But he told me to stay here and I am.” He glanced up at Maggie. “I know you think I’m a joke. I know most of the guys on the force think I’m a joke, too, and that I just got my shield because my uncle pulled strings. But I like my job, Gunn. I know I’m a lousy detective. I’m not like you. You always seem to be one step ahead. I’m always running to catch up. But if I hang around with you long enough, maybe I’ll catch up a little. I want to be a detective. I want to be a good detective. I’m sick of being a joke. So if Gonzales says to stay here until IAD arrives, I’m going to do it.”
“Oh, Adrian.” Maggie sat in the chair next to his. “Gonzales would probably respect you a lot more if you didn’t act like his lapdog.”
“What would you do?”
“First tell me what’s going on upstairs,” she asked.
“For starters, I’ve been bounced.” He looked down at his empty holster. “Probably afraid I’d accidentally shoot Tyler Matthews if I did manage to find him. But some of the guys have been stopping by and updating me on their way out. You know what Colonel Vitek’s real name is? Howard McGrew. He’s some lifelong pervert who went off the radar in 1993, right after he got released from serving a stretch for abducting a little boy in Kansas. His DNA lit up CODIS like a Christmas tree, though. He molested enough victims to fill an elementary school.”
“But no one knows where he’s been living since 1993?” Maggie asked.
Calvano nodded. “Only if you follow his string of victims. He’s been moving around constantly. His whole being-in-the-Marines story was bullshit. Should have seen that one coming. But he really was in a car wreck. He didn’t have a wife and son, though, so they weren’t killed like he told everyone.” He shrugged. “About three years ago, him and another male named Cody Wells were part of a ten-car pile-up on a highway down in Florida. The Wells guy was driving and Vitek—or McGrew, or whatever his name is—got thrown from his vehicle because he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt and got hit by another car. That’s how he ended up in the wheelchair.”
“And Cody Wells?” Maggie asked. “The man driving?”
“That’s the same name as one of the KinderWatch volunteers. Martin put him at the top of his list of volunteers to look into. He’s also the one a lot of the other volunteers say was Vitek’s right-hand man. We’ve showed them some photos and they confirm it’s the guy I shot in the back.”
“Except Cody Wells probably isn’t his real name,” Maggie said glumly. “So knowing it isn’t going to do us any good.”
“Probably not, but they’re checking property under that name and running it through the system anyway. What else have we got to go on?”
“Anything come up after looking at the video files again?”
“Only that the mother flipped out when they brought her in to see the footage. She didn’t recognize anything about where her kid was being held, and she didn’t recognize the Wells dude when he was in the shot, but she did flip out when she saw her son and now she won’t leave the room. And I mean she won’t leave. They couldn’t pull her up from the table. She’s just sitting there, watching the video of her son over and over and no one can get her to budge. Everyone’s just working around her.”
“She needs to believe he’s alive,” Maggie explained. “She needs to see him.”
“Yeah, but the most recent video is from yesterday. She acts like it’s a live feed or something.”
“She has to,” Maggie said gently. “It must be terrible to see your child and not be able to go to him.” It was something Calvano would never have thought of, which was the reason he’d never be as good a detective as Maggie.
“She’s lucky he’s alive,” Calvano said. “You and I both know that’s a miracle. And lucky that he looks like he’s unharmed. You don’t want to know what the colonel did to the other little boys he took, at least until he landed in that wheelchair.”
“No, I don’t want to know,” Maggie agreed quickly. “Has Gonzales said anything to you? Asked you to help?”
“I’m dead to him,” Calvano explained. “He’s walked right past me twice without even looking my way.”
“He knows you’re sitting here. That’s the point.”
“Like I said, what other choice do I have?”
I could feel Maggie hesitating, wondering whether she should tell Calvano why she was there.
Come on, Mags, I willed her. Have a little faith in what you can’t see.
“Gonzales ordered me to go home and get some sleep, but I’ve got a lead,” she finally said. I wanted to jig with joy. “More of an idea, really. Or a hunch. I need your help with it.”
She told Calvano about going to the hospital to question staff about Fiona Harker’s murder and about the little girl from the cancer ward who had come up to her and handed her a drawing. “She said she drew it just for me,” Maggie explained. “Then she said something like, ‘A little boy who is lost lives there and drinks from the lake.’”
“So?” Calvano asked. “She’s probably whacked out on drugs.”
“How did she know we were looking for a little boy?” Maggie asked. “She even included him as part of the drawing. He had curly brown hair like Tyler Matthews and was wearing blue shorts.”
Calvano shrugged. “Maybe she saw him on TV?”
“No w
ay,” Maggie said. “They keep a close eye on them. I saw Disney DVDs, but they’re not letting them watch the nightly news.”
“Maybe her parents told her?” Calvano suggested.
“Because when your kid is dying from cancer, it’s so reassuring to talk about other little kids who’ve been kidnapped a few miles away?” Maggie asked incredulously.
“I don’t know, Gunn. Have it your way. Somehow she knew you were looking for the boy. What are you getting at?”
“I think the drawing is a clue.”
“Like what, a clue beamed from outer space?”
“Adrian,” Maggie said. “Have a little faith.”
Bingo.
“What do you mean?” Calvano asked. “You’re telling me that you, Miss Show Me the Money, is actually going to believe in spooky shit like that?”
“Yes,” Maggie said. “I am. I’m going to go upstairs and get the drawing and show you. I’m telling you—it’s a map.”
“A map?” he asked skeptically.
“If I remember it right, it might be a map of the old reservoir. The one they built that neighborhood around about fifteen or twenty years ago. There are a lot of up-scale rental homes in that area. It would be the perfect place to hide Tyler Matthews.”
“How could a little girl who’s been living in a cancer ward on the other side of town know where Tyler Matthews was being held?”
“I don’t know,” Maggie admitted. “But on the KinderWatch webcam footage that Martin brought in, Peggy told me that Tyler Matthews was talking to someone no one else could see, offering him toys and calling him Pawpaw.”
“Which I heard the mother said was the kid’s name for his father, who’s dead as a doorknob, thanks to a roadside ambush in Iraq.”
Oh, that Calvano. Sensitive to the bone.
“Maybe Tyler was talking to his father,” Maggie said. “Maybe the father is the one who told the little girl. She’s dying. Maybe she sees things we don’t.”
Great. Even when Maggie figures out it was a ghost helping, I don’t get the credit—she gives it to another ghost. It was the story of my afterlife.
Calvano and Maggie were staring at each other, letting her words sink in. Then they both burst out laughing. “We sound like idiots,” Calvano said.
“Yeah, I know,” Maggie conceded. “But come on, Adrian—what have we got to lose? Neither one of us is supposed to be on the job right now. No one else is going to listen to us if we tell them this crazy story and, I’m telling you, the drawing looks exactly like a map. Wait here and I’ll show you.”
Calvano, who was too afraid to do anything but wait like Gonzales had told him, shrugged as Maggie raced to the elevator, as if trying to beat herself to the squad room before she changed her mind.
The doors opened onto the bustling second floor, where, postmidnight or not, task force headquarters was teeming. Maggie poked her head in, with me right behind her, and it was just as Calvano had said. The mother of Tyler Matthews was sitting at the table, a laptop in front of her, unable to stop watching the footage of her little boy. A distressed friend sat next to her, trying to get her to drink coffee, but the mother was oblivious to all but the images of her son.
All around them, detectives and administrative support staff were sorting through files, searching public records, pulling up more people to interview, and making plans to bring in the few known associates of Howard McGrew for questioning. They knew that all they needed to break the case was the tiniest detail—a name, deed, address, even just a neighborhood—anything that might narrow the search and lead them to Tyler Matthews.
Maggie had her own ideas about that. She ducked back into the elevator just as Gonzales looked up from a file and started toward the door, though clearly he had not seen her. She pressed into a corner and pressed the buttons frantically, not wanting him to catch her disobeying his order. I leaned against the elevator wall next to her, thoroughly enjoying watching her act this way. It was a new side of Maggie. She had gone off the reservation but good.
The elevator doors closed seconds before Gonzales reached them, and I enjoyed the hell out of the startled look on his face. He had not seen Maggie, but he knew someone had not bothered to wait for him, and he was not used to that kind of treatment.
As soon as we reached the fourth floor, she headed for the squad room and retrieved the Fiona Harker file. Its slender width reminded her of how the case had been put on the back burner for Tyler Matthews and would be again—at least for the next few hours, while the man who called himself Cody Wells was in surgery.
She unclipped the child’s drawing and held it up to the light, turning it first one way and then the other, seeking to put it in context. Maggie had grown up in town like me, albeit years later. She’d probably played along the banks of the reservoir like I had as a kid, catching tadpoles and picking cattails she could wave around like swords until the cotton burst from their tips like snow. She’d have been a water rat like me, I knew. The rough-and-tumble kids of the local cops always were. And it was a certainty she’d been a tomboy. She knew the old reservoir; she just had to make the connection.
She turned the drawing several ways before zeroing in on the broad lines drawn along the bottom of it to represent the boulevard that ran across that side of town.
Come on, Mags, I willed her. That’s a road. That’s a big, wide honkin’ road. It is a map, Mags. It is.
Her eyes widened. She saw it. I could feel the excitement in her. She recognized the reservoir. Folding the drawing so no one else could see it, she practically ran back to the lobby, forgoing the elevators for the stairs.
“I figured it out,” she said breathlessly.
“Easy,” Calvano warned her. He looked toward the exit doors. “Gonzales just breezed past. He didn’t even look at me. Again.”
“Then come with me,” Maggie said slowly. “Adrian, look at this drawing. This is Fort Mott Boulevard. It has to be. See? Three lanes each way. Which means this is the old reservoir. Look at the dogleg on the eastern side of it. I used to play on its banks constantly as a kid, before they built the subdivision.”
I knew it. Cop kid. Water rat. Tomboy.
“Okay,” Calvano conceded. “Maybe you’re right.”
“No maybe about it. See the road that hugs the lake? That’s exactly how it is. There’s a two-lane road that circles the old reservoir, and every home in the subdivision is accessible from off that road.”
“And we’re going here?” Calvano asked. “To the residence of Mr. Willy Wonka, or maybe Harry Potter, or, I don’t know, Alice in frigging Wonderland?” He pointed to the brown-crayon squares that represented the cedar-shingled house. Giant, colorful flowers and huge bushes had been carefully drawn to fill the yard. They were as tall as the upstairs windows. The stick figure of the little boy tilted crazily to one side, and the blobs on his shirt made him look like he had the measles.
Okay, so I hadn’t had Leonardo da Vinci to work with. What the little girl had lacked in skill, she more than made up for with enthusiasm.
“To the house of ‘a little boy who is lost,’” she reminded him. “That’s what the little girl who drew this said. And do you have any better ideas?”
“I definitely do not,” Calvano admitted.
“If this map is right, then if we’re heading west, we need to take a left turn off the road around the lake, and then we just have to take the first right onto a cul-de-sac to find the house. It’s at the top of the cul-de-sac.”
“There must be twenty or thirty roads like that around the lake. It’s like a wagon wheel of roads.”
“Fine. That’s better than searching an entire town. Come on, let’s go.”
Calvano went. I didn’t think he had it in him. “This is nuts,” he mumbled as he followed her out to her car—but he went.
He was still amazingly self-absorbed, of course. I sat in the backseat and listened to his dire predictions about the future of his career, the only topic in his world at the moment, it seem
ed, even if there was a four-year-old boy still missing, stuck by himself in the house, in the middle of a massive subdivision, in the middle of a town where it would take weeks for the feds to check every home, which they wouldn’t do anyway because there was no guarantee he’d even been kept in town and people had a pesky habit of not liking it when the government knocked on their doors and wanted to poke around.
But no, Calvano was obsessed with whether he’d get his gun back, what would happen if the guy he’d shot died, what if he got demoted, or—most important of all, apparently—would that hot chick in the property clerk’s office find out about it and cancel their date Saturday night?
If ghosts had to worry about high blood pressure, Calvano would have put me in the hospital long ago. He’d shown flashes of potential, but clearly he still had a long way to go.
Then I realized that Calvano’s self-absorbed whining served the useful purpose of keeping Maggie’s mind off the desperate act they were attempting. “I am never telling Gonzales about this,” she muttered to herself at one point. I realized she had tuned out Calvano before they’d even left the parking lot. She was skeptical, but at least she was still moving ahead with her plan. When Maggie got started, nothing stopped her.
“Okay,” she decided as they drew near Fort Mott Boulevard. “Here’s the plan.” She killed the running lights and slowed to a sane pace, knowing that zooming into a neighborhood with red lights flashing was not the best way to maintain an unobtrusive presence while you conducted a clandestine search. “I’m going to turn into the subdivision right up here, by the CVS. Mark it down on the map.”
“Huh?” Calvano looked at her blankly.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Adrian,” she complained. “We have to keep track of where we’ve checked and where we haven’t. Everything looks the same in this neighborhood. Draw a little square and mark it CVS, okay? And every time we drive down a street and check it, I want you to add it to the map and put the name down.”
“I can do that,” Calvano agreed. “I got a badge for mapmaking in Boy Scouts.”