by Jack Heath
‘We’ll need to speak with Jim,’ Thistle says.
‘Can’t help you. Talk to reception, that’s their thing.’
I’m picking up an anxious vibe off Crudup, but not anxious enough for him to be the kidnapper. Most people get nervous talking to cops. Maybe he has some pot stashed in his desk.
‘Mr Crudup?’ There’s a girl in the doorway.
‘You’ll have to wait a minute, Pam,’ Crudup says.
‘I need another copy of the permission slip for next week.’
‘What happened to the one you got?’
She shrugs.
Crudup sighs and digs through a pile of papers. He puts a sheet in her outstretched hand.
‘That’s the original,’ he says. ‘Xerox it and bring it back.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ she says, and leaves.
Crudup sighs. ‘She’s not coming back.’
‘You ever notice anyone making fun of Cameron?’ Thistle says. ‘Pushing him around?’
‘No. Don’t see a lot of that these days. The kids don’t give wedgies or steal lunch money anymore—too busy staring at their phones. He might have been getting a hard time online, I guess.’
I ask, ‘Any girlfriend that you know of?’
‘I never saw him with any girls. But he came to school with a hickey one time.’
Hall wasn’t telling the truth. I knew it. But why?
‘How about a boyfriend?’ Thistle suggests.
‘I don’t think so. Like I said, he was always on his own.’
There’s a pause. I get the feeling Crudup has outlived his usefulness, and not just in this interview.
Thistle feels it too. She stands up, hands him a business card. ‘Call us if you remember anything else.’
Crudup digs out his phone. He snaps a photo of the card, scribbles his cell number on the back and hands it back. ‘Call me,’ he says, ‘when you know he’s okay.’
‘Will do.’
Thistle walks out. I stop in the doorway.
Crudup is staring out the window at the footballers. His gaze doesn’t move when they do, so I don’t think he’s seeing them. Maybe he’s remembering the days when folks looked up to him. Ex-presidents keep their titles, their security teams, their pensions. Ex-rock stars get nothing.
‘One more thing,’ I ask. ‘Did Cameron have his trumpet with him when you saw him last?’
Crudup nods. ‘Some kids forget their instruments a lot—or pretend to, when they don’t know their parts. But he pretty much always had his horn.’
‘Thanks.’ I leave him to his thoughts.
As we walk up the corridor, Thistle holds up the card with Crudup’s number on it. ‘That strike you as a performance?’ she asks.
‘With guys like that, everything’s a performance.’
On our way back to reception, the bell rings, and suddenly we’re surrounded by laughing, yelling kids. One of them is Pam, who’s sharing a soda with a friend and has no obvious intention of returning the permission slip to the music staffroom.
I saw a timetable on Crudup’s wall—the bell goes at two o’clock.
We have four hours left, and we’re still nowhere.
•
We wait for Jim Epps in the sick bay. It smells of iodine and disinfectant. The CPR posters are ten years out of date—they still have the mouth-to-mouth instructions on them.
‘You know they don’t teach it that way these days,’ I say, pointing.
‘What way?’
‘The mouth-to-mouth stuff. It’s not necessary. It’s better to keep doing the chest compressions.’
Thistle frowns. ‘You’re shitting me.’
‘Nope.’
‘Don’t people need to breathe?’
‘Not as much as they need a pulse, I guess,’ I say.
‘Well, thanks, Dr Blake,’ she says. ‘I’ll just forget everything they taught me at Quantico, shall I? I’m sure you know best.’
‘Quantico was more than twelve years ago.’
‘The human body hasn’t changed.’
I look down at my stiff knees and the shrunken muscles in my arms. ‘Mine has,’ I grumble.
She stifles a laugh.
Something about her is distracting me. It’s not just the uneasy feeling I always get from cops. Nor is it my usual painful fascination with pretty women. She feels like a puzzle piece. Or one of those internet cables under the ocean—an invisible connection between two distant things.
‘So,’ she says, ‘your magic powers telling you anything?’
I rub my eyes. ‘Lots about Cameron. Not much about his kidnapper.’
‘Kidnapper? You think there’s only one?’
‘Twenty grand isn’t much split two or three ways,’ I say. ‘But that doesn’t narrow down our suspect pool. Anyone who’s been to his house would know his mom has money.’
‘Only close friends would have been to his house. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of kid to have big parties.’
‘Someone could have followed him back to the gated community.’
‘Why would they,’ Thistle asks, ‘if they didn’t already know about the money?’
I keep coming back to the house. If Cameron went willingly, how did the kidnapper steal the photos and get Cameron to leave his phone behind? And if he went unwillingly, why weren’t there signs of a struggle?
I close my eyes and do a mental walk-through of Cameron’s house. But just like last time, I see nothing out of the ordinary. Which means…
‘He came back,’ I say.
‘What?’
‘The kidnapper. He came back. Cameron went with him willingly, he was taken to the hideout, and then the kidnapper returned to Cameron’s house with his keys and his alarm code, so he could take the schoolbag and the photos, and leave the phone in the laundry. And then he went somewhere else to make the ransom call.’
‘How’d the kidnapper get through the gate?’
‘I’m guessing he climbed the fence to get in the first time, and got Cameron to let him out when they left together. Then he came back with Cameron’s gate key.’
Thistle nods slowly. ‘Makes sense. So Cameron definitely knows the kidnapper.’
‘Not just that,’ I say. ‘Where was the ransom call made from?’
‘Payphone on Wood Bayou Drive.’
‘That’s, what, fifteen minutes from the house?’
‘More like ten,’ Thistle says.
‘And when did Hall get home?’
‘Five forty, so she said.’
‘Then we just narrowed our search radius,’ I say. ‘The kid finished school at four. We know he made it home, probably around four thirty. Whoever picked up the schoolbag was gone by the time Hall arrived…’
‘So there was only an hour and ten minutes to grab the kid, take him to the hideout, go back to the house, dump Cameron’s phone, grab the photos and get out again,’ Thistle says. ‘Meaning that the hideout has to be within about thirty minutes’ drive of the house.’
‘And probably much closer.’
Thistle gets out her phone and starts dialling a colleague. Eighty percent of the force is searching outside the zone. The quicker she fixes this, the better our chances of finding Cameron.
But that still leaves the FBI with five thousand square miles to search, and less than four hours to do it.
There’s a knock at the door. Thistle’s busy, so I call out, ‘Come in.’
A boy opens the door—he’s white, acne-scarred, and has a quiff that tries to make him look taller, and fails. But his shoe size suggests that he’s still growing. His school file says he’s just turned fourteen and shares three classes with Cameron.
He looks at us, sees we’re neither teachers nor his parents, and says, ‘Um…’
‘Jim Epps?’ I ask.
‘Yeah.’
‘Take a seat.’
We’re sitting in the only chairs, so he sits down on the bed.
‘You know Cameron Hall?’
The colour fades
from his face. He looks at Thistle’s pantsuit and her phone, then back at me. ‘What’s happened?’ he demands. ‘Did his mom hurt him?’
He thinks we work for children’s services. Or he thinks Thistle does—I probably look more like a children’s psychologist. Using her tactic, I say, ‘You got any reason to believe she might have?’
He looks confused now. ‘Um,’ he says again, ‘I don’t know. Why else would you be here?’
My original thought was that Hall had killed her son and buried him in the garden. I might have to revisit the idea. She does, after all, live within a thirty-minute drive of her own house.
‘We’re with the FBI,’ I say. ‘We’d like to ask Cameron a few questions, but we can’t find him.’
Thistle has finished her phone conversation and seems slightly nervous, probably worried I’ll reveal too much. But I don’t. I just look expectantly at Epps and, after a moment, so does she.
‘He’s not at school?’
The kid looks honestly surprised. He’s not as close to Cameron as we expected.
‘No,’ Thistle says. ‘Who does he hang out with when he’s here?’
‘I don’t know. I only have music with him. We sometimes see each other at lunch, but he’s not the kind of guy you want to be seen with, you know?’
The last statement stinks of teen bravado. ‘We heard you were close,’ Thistle says.
Epps blanches. ‘Really? Well, you know how sometimes somebody just latches on to you, like, starts calling you a friend, telling you their secrets, and they just won’t take a hint?’
‘What kind of secrets?’
Epps is looking at the floor, the door, the posters on the wall—anywhere but at us.
I ask, ‘He have a girlfriend?’
The kid’s Adam’s apple bobs. ‘Uh, I don’t think so. I’m not sure.’
He’s lying, just like Hall was—and he looks scared. Lots of boys Cameron’s age have girlfriends. What’s so special about this one?
‘Sure he does,’ I say. ‘He came to school with hickeys on his neck.’
Epps’s hands are bunching up the bedsheets. ‘I never saw nothing like that.’
‘You know what the penalty is for lying to the FBI, Jim?’
‘I don’t know anything about any girlfriend!’ His voice has risen to a terrified squeak.
Thistle says, ‘Cameron could be in trouble, Jim. We can’t help him if we don’t know all the facts.’
‘I want an attorney,’ Epps says.
Thistle and I look at each other.
‘You don’t need an attorney,’ she says. ‘You’re not accused of anything.’
He points at me. ‘He just said I was lying.’
‘He asked if you knew the penalties for lying.’ Thistle’s lips are drawn back over clenched teeth. ‘He didn’t say you were.’
‘I want an attorney and you can’t stop me. That’s the law.’
If I had two minutes alone with this kid, I could make him tell me everything he knows. Nothing is so secret that the right amount of pain and fear won’t tease it out. But Thistle won’t give me that chance. That’s why Luzhin put her here.
No point asking Epps more questions. By the time his lawyer gets called, shows up, tells him his rights and then lets us talk to him again, it’ll be so close to six that it won’t matter what we know.
‘Fine,’ says Thistle. ‘You’re free to go.’
Epps blinks. ‘What?’
‘Get your ass back to class,’ she says. ‘And hope you haven’t just killed your friend.’
•
Annette Hall is wearing a strapless full-cup bra and some black elastic panties. Plenty of skin is on display. I can see straight through it to the soft muscles, the tangled veins, the smooth shafts of bone. She looks delicious.
‘Remember,’ the special agent in charge is saying as she tapes a tiny microphone to Hall’s sternum, ‘Cameron’s safe as long as you have the money. So don’t let go of it until you can see him, got it?’
Hall nods, eyes shut.
The SAC is on loan from the Critical Incident Response Group in Virginia. They always send a few agents in kidnapping cases. The other agents call them rent-a-goons. The goons themselves don’t seem to mind. This one has half-closed eyes, shiny black hair and one hand which always seems to be a fist. Her voice echoes around the concrete floor of the storeroom.
Boxes of juicers, kettles and microwaves are stacked on pallets in the corners. I came in through the roller door out the back, so I don’t know what the SAC told the store manager to get us in and to get the staff out. But she seems confident that we won’t be interrupted. It’s a good spot—about a ten-minute walk from the Walmart where Hall is supposed to drop the money.
Thistle is outside, phoning in our progress to Luzhin. Probably getting yelled at: first for not having solved the case, second for leaving me alone. Not that she’s given me enough freedom to enjoy, given that she’s right outside the door. She probably didn’t want Hall to overhear her saying we know basically nothing.
‘They’ll want you to put the money in the dumpster and walk away,’ the SAC continues. She sticks another piece of tape to Hall’s belly, pinning down the cord. ‘They want you to trust them. But you won’t. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ Hall says. Her fear-chewed lips are starting to scab.
‘So when you get to the dumpster, just stand there. They’ll call you. They’ll be angry. They’ll make threats. Don’t listen. Just tell them they’ll get their money when you can see Cameron.’
‘Okay.’ She’s practically crying.
‘You’re not alone,’ says the SAC. ‘We’ll hear every word you say, and every word they say to you. Here.’
She holds out a pink lump of rubber. Hall shifts so both her breasts are covered by one arm before taking it with her free hand. I watch.
Call me a monster if you want. You’ll find plenty of evidence to back you up. But I haven’t seen a naked woman in a long time.
When I was seventeen I spent a lot of time at Houston Community College. It was a place where would-be actors staged plays attended only by other would-be actors, and where fist-fights regularly erupted over whether rap counted as poetry. I wasn’t enrolled; I hung out there because the large meatball pizza was only three bucks. The real students were living without their folks’ money for the first time in their lives, so I fit right in. Most were too busy or too high to notice I never had a textbook or went to a lecture.
One afternoon I was sleeping on a bench when something tickled my hand. A husky had trotted up and was slurping at my fingers. There was no one else around, so I said, ‘Get lost,’ and shooed it away.
It sniffed at the bushes for a few seconds and then came back, staring at me with tar-black eyes. I got up and walked to another bench, but it followed me.
I checked the tags and led it to the owner, who turned out to be a grateful nineteen-year-old geology major with a thing for quiet, scruffy boys. She hugged her dog first, then me. Her hair was dyed brown and smelled like watermelon.
She bought me the best dinner of my life. She did the talking while my mouth was full of burrito—how she’d just moved here from St Louis, how her only brother was eight years older but still lived with her folks, how she used to have a boyfriend but she ditched him after he made her try meth. ‘I felt itchy,’ she said, nose wrinkled. ‘Like, itchy inside my head.’
After, she led me back to her room—I was better-looking than I am now. She mixed me a drink with some of her roommate’s whiskey. When she kissed me, some new urges got mixed up with some I’d had all my life. And when she took off her clothes, instinct took over. My pulse was too loud in my ears, sweat erupted all over me, and my body moved like someone else was driving it.
What I did scared me almost as much as it scared her.
Since then, I’m afraid to be alone with a woman—with almost anyone, in fact. I don’t date, not that anyone ever asks. I don’t go to strip clubs or brothels, because somewhere out th
ere is a woman with a scar that proves I can’t control myself.
The only reason I’m here, staring at Hall’s quivering flesh, is that I have less than three hours to find her son, and I still need to ask her some questions. She’s safe from me as long as the SAC is here. I think.
When I can’t sleep, I fantasise about meeting that girl again—the geology major. I imagine getting served by her at the welfare office, or sitting next to her on the bus. I look at her, nod, offer an apologetic half-smile. And she looks back at me without a trace of recognition.
Forgotten isn’t forgiven. But it’s the closest I’ll ever get.
Hall is staring at the rubber lump like a teenager looking at her first tax return—confused, frightened, sinking into despair.
‘For your ear,’ the SAC explains. ‘Narrow end first, pinhole facing the front.’
Hall pushes it in, squirming like a cornered cat.
‘We’ll only talk to you if we have to. But if we do, don’t touch the plug. It’ll feel weird, it’ll sound weird, but it’s important that you pretend it’s not there.’
‘They’ll see it,’ Hall says.
‘No, they won’t. It’s invisible from about five feet. And no one will get closer than that—we have snipers in the windows of several surrounding buildings. The second this guy comes into sight, we’ll drop him.’
‘No! You’ll hit Cam!’
‘The snipers are damn good, ma’am. They won’t fire without a clear shot.’
I say, ‘Ms Hall, can you tell me about the ransom call?’
The SAC glares at me—she wants Hall focused—but lets her answer.
‘I already told the other agents,’ she whimpers. ‘It was distorted.’
Luzhin hadn’t mentioned that. ‘Tell me anyhow. Did the guy have an accent?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about the choice of words? Did he sound educated?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know if he sounded educated, or you don’t remember what he said?’
Hall shoots me a venomous glance. I’m starting to feel unwelcome. ‘I remember every word of what he said.’
‘So tell me. You be the kidnapper, I’ll be you. Ring ring.’ I mime reaching for a phone.