Hangman

by Jack Heath

  She’s rubbing her ring finger with her thumb, as though something used to be there. Divorced, probably.

  I wonder what she’s into. Drugs, booze, gambling, frequent flyer miles. Everyone’s addicted to something, especially people in high-stress jobs. If I work out what her thing is I can eventually manipulate her into leaving me alone. The FBI is hopelessly corrupt. Everyone has a price.

  ‘So what’s your deal?’ Thistle asks, as if she can read my mind.

  My heart skips a beat. Was she listening outside Luzhin’s door? ‘My deal?’

  ‘All the other agents are out there looking for this kid,’ Thistle says. ‘I could be helping—I’ve been with the Bureau twelve years—but instead I’m watching you. Want to tell me why?’

  She must be tough. Twelve years ago, life wasn’t easy for young, black, pretty women in the Bureau. I started consulting three years ago, and even then some senior officers still referred to female agents as ‘breast-feds’.

  I say, ‘I’ve helped out on a few missing person cases.’

  She nods. ‘Yes, sir, I heard that. Figured you for a felon who got busted and struck a bargain with Luzhin—trading on your underground connections. But if that’s the case, why are we going to the kid’s house?’

  ‘All police got the same training,’ I say. ‘On any case, every pair of eyes is looking at it in the same way. Sometimes they miss things.’

  ‘Right,’ she says slowly. ‘So you’re, what—a psychic?’

  I smile. ‘No, ma’am. Just good eyesight.’

  ‘And you’re using it to help us out.’

  She doesn’t believe me. I shrug.

  ‘Why not become a cop, then?’

  ‘Never finished high school,’ I say.

  ‘You could be a PI.’

  ‘And spend my time following cheating husbands?’ I watch Houston scroll past outside the window—long stretches of grassy nothing interrupted by warehouses the size of city blocks. My stomach growls. Not even 10 am and I’m already hungry.

  ‘If you bullshit me,’ Thistle says, ‘I can only be so much help.’

  ‘Just take me to the kid’s place. That’s all the help I need.’

  •

  The address turns out to be a gated community with a wrought-iron fence and a lawn you could play golf on. Thistle doesn’t have a key to the front gate, so she pushes a buzzer next to it. After a minute, an old man with a moustache and a stoop emerges from a distant guardhouse. He shuffles up to us, glances at Thistle’s ID, unlocks the gate and waves the car through without saying a word.

  The house itself sits atop a hill right up the end of the drive. It’s sprawling and old, with recently painted boards and lots of big windows. The front garden grows with the kind of precision that requires constant encouragement.

  We park by the kerb and get out. Thistle locks the Crown Vic with a chup-chup and the pea gravel crackles under our shoes as we walk up the path to the porch. I put a foot too far back on one of the steps, resting a little too much weight on my crooked toe, and suck some air through my teeth as the pain zaps up my leg.

  I’m clumsier than I was in my twenties. Someone once told me the poor age in dog years, which would make me almost two hundred and forty.

  I reach for the doorbell. Thistle gets there first. Dingdong. The message is clear—this is an FBI investigation; I’m a civilian, she’s in charge.

  Whatever. I turn to face the other houses. They’re far enough away that it would be tough to spy on the Halls unless you had a telescope or a drone.

  The door opens behind me. ‘Ms Hall,’ Thistle says. ‘I’m Agent Reese Thistle, this is my associate Timothy Blake. Can we come in?’

  I turn around. Annette Hall is a looker; white, five foot four, a hundred and thirty pounds, and approaching thirty-six years of age. Pretty young to be the mother of a fourteen-year-old. She has her son’s full lips and his upturned nose. There’s a ring on every finger except the one that counts.

  Her eyes are red, and her strawberry-blonde hair is a little wet, like she showered half an hour ago. She looks faintly suspicious of Thistle—maybe she doesn’t like cops—but when she turns to me, her expression is scared and hopeful at the same time.

  She looks familiar. We’ve never met in person and I’ve never seen her photograph, so it must be TV. Not the news, not a movie, not a talk show…a soap. That’s it. She had a couple lines in an episode of Days of Our Lives, which I saw in a diner six years back.

  I give her a nod and a polite half-smile that says sorry we had to meet under these circumstances.

  ‘Have you…’ Hall crosses her arms over her chest. ‘Have you found Cam?’

  Not a Texan accent. She sounds like one of the million teen girls who moved to California to be famous actresses, and got too old before they landed major roles.

  ‘Not yet, ma’am,’ Thistle says. ‘But we got the whole force out looking for him.’

  That was the wrong thing to say. ‘No!’ Hall says. ‘They told me not to call the police! If there’s cops everywhere, they’ll—’

  ‘They’re plainclothes agents in unmarked vehicles, ma’am. Not identifiable as police officers in any way. May we come in?’

  Hall stands aside, keen to get us out of sight. We walk into her foyer.

  The inside matches the front—big, neat, expensive. A few paintings on the walls that look original. Floorboards recently oiled. There’s a keypad for an alarm system next to the front door. The ink has partly worn away on the numbers two, five, eight and nine. If she uses her birthday for the code like most people do, she was probably born on either the fifth of September or the ninth of May in 1982.

  ‘Your housekeeper here today?’ I ask.

  ‘I sent her home.’ Hall is staring at my shoes. They’re cheap, even by cop standards. ‘Sorry, who are you?’ she asks.

  ‘Timothy Blake, ma’am,’ I say. I move towards the staircase.

  ‘Uh, mind if we look around, Ms Hall?’ Thistle says quickly.

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Just procedure. In cases like this, the perpetrator typically has met the victim at least once, so—’

  ‘The other agents already searched the house,’ Hall says. ‘What exactly are you looking for?’

  I get to the top of the staircase. Glance back down. ‘Won’t know until I find it.’ Then I walk up the hall to the bedrooms.

  I keep one hand on the wall as I move around, and listen to the echoes of my footsteps. I take deep breaths of the faintly perfumed air. I’ll be able to remember the layout of the house in much more detail later if I make it a multi-sensory experience now. Nine-tenths of memorisation is just about paying attention. People forget where they parked their cars because they were thinking about something else when they did it. I always focus on where I am. This isn’t just about memory. When my mind wanders, I don’t like where it goes.

  The first bedroom is Annette’s. Queen-size bed, unmade. The room hasn’t been tidied, which is good—a woman’s mess says more than her facade. A vase of posies, three or four days old, is on a credenza by the window. A cordless phone on a charger. A Bible next to it, with two pages folded at the corners. One is Leviticus 18—all that stuff about not having sex with animals or with menstruating women. The other is Luke 12. Fear him who, after your body has been killed, has the authority to throw you into hell.

  I find a framed photo of an eighteen- or twenty-year-old boy in clothes that went out of fashion a decade ago. Could be Cameron’s father—Philip Hall, according to the file—as a young man. Looks like a college campus in the background. He’s got a slightly annoyed smile, like whoever took the picture had interrupted him.

  No photos of Cameron himself. Maybe the other agents took them away.

  In the corner of the en suite is the most spacious shower I’ve ever seen. It doesn’t even have a door; just an opening at one end and a long pane of glass to stop the toilet getting splashed. I pull back the mirror to look at Annette’s collection of pills. Xanax,
Tylenol, Valium. Nothing exotic. I could steal some Xanax to sell to my roommate, but he has his own suppliers. It isn’t worth the trouble. I close the mirror.

  Up the other end of the hall, I find Annette and Thistle in the kid’s bedroom. It’s about what you’d expect of a fourteen-year-old boy. The duvet cover is branded with some movie or video game called Uncharted 4. A Batman poster hangs crooked on the wall. A trumpet is perched on a stand in the corner, with a silver mute.

  ‘He never made it home,’ Annette says. ‘Why aren’t you at his school, asking questions there?’

  Thistle is looking under the bed. ‘Did Cameron have problems at school?’

  ‘No. He’s a good boy. But the other kids…Cameron belongs with a better class of people.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Thistle asks casually.

  ‘But he wanted to go there,’ Annette continues, ignoring her, ‘and God help me, I didn’t feel like I could say no.’

  A camera rests on Cameron’s bedside table. Looks expensive. Kids can take pictures with their cell phones, so the fact that he wants something more sophisticated probably means he’s into photography. The bookshelf holds mostly comics, a few novels alphabetised by series title. There’s a small wooden box, in which I find a couple of condoms and some loose change. The kid was sexually active, or expected to be soon.

  ‘You think he fell in with a bad crowd?’ Thistle asks.

  ‘No, no. But the student population is very mixed. The teachers, too. Have you met Mr Crudup? The music teacher?’ Annette doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘Some people got no work ethic. So they steal, or take handouts from the government. It’s a cultural thing. And anyone could see that Cameron came from money.’

  I don’t point out that Annette inherited her fortune and then tried to hide it from the IRS. Instead I hold up one of the condoms.

  Hall turns pink. ‘He’s a good boy,’ she says. ‘Is it really necessary to dig through his things like this?’

  ‘He have a girlfriend?’ I ask.

  ‘No.’ But the answer comes too quick. Her arms are crossed defensively over her chest, her gaze locked onto me like she thinks I’ll doubt her if she looks away.

  Thistle hasn’t missed these cues. ‘You sure? Any girls you see around here regularly?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Boyfriend?’ I ask.

  ‘Absolutely not. At his school they teach sex ed, not abstinence. That’s probably where he got those things.’

  ‘Was there someone he was interested—’ I stop talking. Turn back towards the trumpet. It shouldn’t be here. Not if his music teacher saw him last.

  ‘He wasn’t abducted on his way home,’ I say. ‘He was taken from here.’

  CHAPTER 4

  I’m as big as you are, but I weigh nothing. I follow you around all day, but at night I am invisible. What am I?

  Agent Thistle doesn’t waste time asking how I know. In an instant, her phone is up against her ear.

  ‘This is Thistle, I need a forensic team at the Hall residence asap.’

  ‘What? Forensic—what? What do you mean, here?’ Hall is turning from me to Thistle and back to me again.

  ‘Your boy had music class yesterday,’ I say, ‘but his trumpet is right there. Did he have two trumpets?’

  ‘He could’ve forgotten it,’ Hall says uncertainly.

  I nod. The music teacher probably would have mentioned that, but I’ll have to make sure someone asked. ‘Nice camera. Does Cameron print out his favourite photos?’

  Hall turns around, looking at empty spots all over the walls. The colour drains from her cheeks.

  ‘But…his schoolbag is gone. And…’

  ‘Someone wanted it to look like he didn’t come home,’ I say. ‘Are there security cameras in the house?’

  ‘No. We like our privacy.’

  ‘What about at the front gate?’

  ‘There’s a guard.’

  But no camera. Even if there had been one, the kidnapper could have avoided the gate and climbed over the fence without much trouble.

  Thistle snaps her phone shut. She says, ‘Why take the photos away if they wanted it to look like they were never here?’

  ‘We’ll find out when we see the picture. Maybe he photographed them doing something they shouldn’t have done. Maybe that was the reason they took him. The ransom could be a distraction.’

  If it is, they’ll probably kill Cameron even if Annette pays up. Thistle doesn’t say this, but I can see her thinking it.

  ‘Or maybe they knew him,’ she says, ‘and they’re in one of the pictures.’

  ‘Can you access his social media profiles?’ I ask Hall.

  ‘I gave his laptop to the other FBI agents.’

  ‘They already downloaded his photo stream,’ Thistle says. ‘Nothing unusual.’

  ‘I want to see them,’ I say.

  ‘You think Cameron knew the perp?’

  ‘No forced entry. Nothing broken in the house. The kid might not even know he’s been kidnapped.’

  Thistle turns to Hall. ‘Have you seen Cameron’s father lately?’

  Most kidnappings are the result of a custody battle, although the perp rarely bothers to fake a ransom call.

  Hall shakes her head. ‘Like I told the other agents, he moved to Pennsylvania when I got pregnant. I haven’t seen him since, except…except in Cam.’ Her lip quivers. ‘He looks so much like his daddy.’

  The resemblance between the photos of Philip and Cameron seemed superficial, but I don’t say so.

  ‘Tell me about Cameron’s other friends,’ Thistle says.

  Hall starts naming the kids she’s most suspicious of. The surnames mostly sound Latin or black. I’m starting to realise what she meant by a better class of people, and why she looked uncomfortable at the sight of Thistle on her doorstep.

  I leave them and go back down the corridor towards the stairs.

  If Cameron knows the people he’s with, his phone would be useful. And if he was taken from here, he might have left it behind. According to the file, Maurice Vasquez—the field office tech guru—couldn’t trace it, so it must be switched off or broken.

  I duck into Ms Hall’s bedroom. Take the cordless phone off the charger and scroll through her speed-dial. Cam is number two, after Mom + Dad.

  Note to self: check out the grandparents. Could they have taken Cameron to get him away from his bigoted mother?

  A weak hypothesis without more evidence. Children tend to be less prejudiced than their folks, so the grandparents are probably worse than Hall.

  I select Cam and hit the call button.

  It’s ringing. So, not switched off, not broken. Then where is it?

  A distant chiming from somewhere else in the house. I leave the bedroom and walk downstairs.

  Separating a teen from his phone requires force. Cameron must know he’s been kidnapped.

  There’s a hamper in the shadows of the laundry. A pair of faded jeans is buried under a couple of grey blouses. I pull the phone out of the pocket and hit reject.

  I go back upstairs to the bedroom. Thistle is saying, ‘Was there a teacher, or maybe another parent from the school, who knew Cameron better than the others?’

  Hall stares helplessly at her son’s bed.

  Another theory has been bubbling up to the surface of my mind—that it might be a hoax. Maybe Annette Hall killed her son, buried him in the yard, and faked the ransom demand to divert suspicion.

  But she looks desperate to help. And she wasn’t that good on Days of our Lives. She might be racist, but I don’t think she’s a murderer.

  ‘We’re done here,’ I tell Thistle.

  I walk down the stairs as Thistle feeds Annette some platitudes. Things like We’re doing everything we can, and We’ll call as soon as we know anything.

  On my way to the front door I glance into the kitchen and see the knife.

  It gleams on the granite counter, slivers of onion clinging to the stainless-steel blade. But it wasn’t d
esigned for vegetables. It’s a carving knife, made to strip flesh from bone. The handle is cold and just heavy enough to balance the blade. It’s not until I make these observations that I realise the knife is in my hand.

  I should put it down. But I don’t.

  The edge, shining with potential, curves up to a harsh point. My finger, when it touches the blade, isn’t cut. The knife just dimples my skin.

  Disappointed, I push harder. A droplet of blood grows fat on my fingertip and a tingle rushes up my spine.

  ‘Blake?’

  I slam the knife down on the bench. Thistle is staring at me.

  ‘Ready to go?’ I ask.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she says.

  I put my finger in my mouth. ‘It’s nothing. Let’s go.’

  She doesn’t say anything as we leave the house, walk over to her car and get in.

  When we reach the gate, we have to stop and wait for the old security guard to amble over.

  Thistle flashes her ID again. ‘You see anything unusual over the last few days?’

  ‘Define unusual,’ the guard says. He sounds younger than he looks. His gums have receded, exposing yellow teeth.

  ‘Any people or vehicles you haven’t seen before?’

  ‘Just you guys. But I’m not the only guard.’

  ‘You keep a record?’ Thistle asks. ‘Of who comes and goes?’

  ‘If I have to unlock the gate for someone, I write down their license plate. But anyone who lives here has their own key. They don’t get recorded.’

  ‘You’d see them, though. Right?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ the guard says.

  ‘Any non-residents come through between four and six pm yesterday?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you an ex-cop?’ I ask. Plenty of security guards are. And unlike most civilians, this guy isn’t falling over himself trying to be helpful.

  He nods slowly. ‘Seventeen years with the Houston PD.’

  ‘Do any of the residents look familiar from your time in the force?’