by Jack Heath
The photos themselves are in an evidence bag on the backseat. But I don’t think the forensics team at the field office will find anything useful. We already know who took the pictures, and where.
I wonder why Luxford kept printouts of the photos in his office. Seems risky. I’d like to examine them right now. But with so much flesh on display, Thistle might notice how it affects me. She could misinterpret my interest. Or, worse, interpret it correctly.
“This is why you don’t open a suspect’s desk without a search warrant,” Thistle says through gritted teeth. “We can’t use any of the photos you found. I can get some agents watching his house, but I can’t get authorization to search it. Without other evidence, we can’t charge him. Another predator goes free. Nice work, Blake.”
“He would have gone free either way,” I say. “No one suspected him.”
“One of those women would have come forward eventually,” Thistle says. “And then so would the others.”
“How many more women would he have exploited in the meantime?”
Thistle squeezes the steering wheel like she’s trying to crush it. “There’s no point solving crimes if you can’t charge the perps, Blake.”
For me there is. I take cases not because the bad guy gets punished, but because I get so wrapped up in the puzzles that my hunger disappears. When I was searching Luxford’s desk, I completely forgot that I was supposed to be sabotaging this case rather than solving it.
I remember the enthusiasm in Luxford’s voice when he talked about the wheel cipher. It was the only time in the conversation when he didn’t seem like a narcissistic asshole. Maybe, like me, he’s a monster except when he’s focused on something that really interests him.
“We can leave one of the photos out in the open,” I say. “Let them be discovered by Liz. She’d recognize his office.”
“Now you’re talking about evidence tampering.”
“But he couldn’t prove we did it.”
“You don’t get it, do you? I am law enforcement,” Thistle says. “I don’t get to make up my own rules, and nor do you.”
Maybe something has happened since then, something that made her more strict.
Maybe that something was me.
“You didn’t bring me in to catch a sleazy TA,” I say. “I’m here to find a missing math professor. Now we have some leverage over Luxford. We can use it to find out what he knows, even if we can’t charge him.”
“For all we know, Luxford has nothing to do with Biggs’s disappearance.”
“You think it’s a coincidence that there was a sexual predator in his department?”
“It’s college. There’s probably a sexual predator in every department,” Thistle says. “If you’re so sure Luxford is involved, we should be going to his house, not driving to Biggs’s apartment.”
We should—except I don’t want Thistle with me when I find Luxford.
“He’ll turn up,” I say. “But Biggs is my priority. I want to meet his wife and daughter.”
“Fine. But so help me, if you touch a single thing in their apartment without asking for permission, I’ll arrest you.”
“That might not inspire much confidence with Biggs’s family.”
“I mean it, Blake. To hell with the director.”
“Okay, okay.” I turn to the window, and watch the crummy parts of Houston disappear as we drive toward Southampton. The houses get bigger, the lawns greener, the cars shinier. Most of them even have four wheels, which is a nice change from where I live. Apartments on the horizon.
“I want to know if Biggs’s prints are on any of those photos,” I say.
“You think he and Luxford might have worked together?”
“I’d like to rule it out.”
Thistle nods. “So would I. But Biggs doesn’t have a criminal record, so we don’t have his prints on file. No DNA, either.”
“Can’t we get both those things from his house? Prints off his keyboard, DNA off his toothbrush?”
“Toothbrush DNA is hit and miss. Hairbrush, too, unless you get a follicle. It would be more reliable to get a cheek swab from his wife and his daughter, compare the two samples and extrapolate Biggs’s genome from that. But we don’t have much of a budget for this, and there’s a huge backlog at the field office. It’ll take us a day or two to get someone to analyze the prints, and DNA will take even longer. Remember, this isn’t a homicide investigation.”
“Yet,” I say.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Three people fall out of a boat. Only two get their hair wet. Why?
Mrs. Radfield never told us that potential parents were coming to visit, but I always knew. She’d ask more questions than usual. “Have you brushed your teeth? Change that shirt. Where are your shoes?” Things she didn’t care about, most days. And she always fiddled with my hair, trying to push down that bit at the side, and sometimes snipping off the hairs she’d missed last time she sheared me.
Reese—or Arty, as I knew her then—always sensed it, too. She looked amazing on those days. Clean clothes, with jewelry she’d found somewhere and hidden from the other kids. Hair pulled back into a neat bun, exposing her bare neck, like she was trying to seduce a vampire. No wonder she got out.
I would sit on my bunk, taking deep breaths, while the other kids played outside. I didn’t want to risk joining them, because I might trip over something. If the parents didn’t take me, and I had muddy knees, Mrs. Radfield would assume that was why they’d turned me down. She’d hit me. Only once, and only with her hand—but she was bigger than me, and it was scary.
After hours of waiting I heard voices downstairs. “Come on up,” Mrs. Radfield said. “I’ll introduce you to Timothy. He’s quiet, but he’s a sweet kid. I think you’ll get on well.”
“Timothy?” a woman’s voice said uncertainly.
“Timothy,” a man’s voice repeated.
“You could always change the name if you wanted to,” Mrs. Radfield said. She was pretty desperate to get rid of me, and wasn’t doing a good job of hiding it.
The government was paying her to feed and clothe us, and she was making quite a lot of money, because she never bought any food or clothing. Our outfits came from donation bins, and the food was thrown out by supermarkets when it reached its sell-by. But now I was stretching the limits of Mrs. Radfield’s scam. I ate too much. And the taller I got, the harder it was to find free clothes that fit me.
The door creaked open. “Timothy?” Mrs. Radfield said. “Are you in here?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, standing up from my bunk and smoothing down my shirt. I suddenly wished I had been pretending to do something. Reading Charlotte Brontë, maybe. Now I looked like a weird kid who sat around doing nothing.
“Can I introduce you to someone?”
“Of course. I like meeting new people.”
Tone it down, I told myself. For Christ’s sake, act normal.
“This is Mr. and Mrs. Veerhuis,” Mrs. Radfield said. “They’re visiting today.”
“Call me Bob,” the man said. He was a big guy with thinning hair and a neat little mustache. “And this is Lillian.”
His wife, a narrow-waisted brunette in a yellow sundress, nodded to me, but said nothing.
“Really nice to meet you.” I shook Bob’s hand. His grip was limp, like he was afraid of breaking my fingers.
I wanted to wipe my sweaty palm on my pants before shaking hands with Lillian, but it would have looked like I thought Bob’s skin had been unclean. I held my hand out for Lillian, and she took it.
“Hello, Timothy,” she said. Her smile didn’t reach her eyes.
She’s scared, I thought. She can tell there’s something wrong with me.
We all stood in awkward silence for a moment. I wondered what to say. What were the magic words which would convince them to adopt me?
“What do you do, sir?” I asked, not really caring. But I knew that people liked talking about themselves.
Mrs. Radfield winced, and I knew I’d misstepped. Bob and Lillian would think I was choosy. Looking for a rich couple. But I wasn’t. I’d take anyone who would get me out of there.
“I’m in landscape architecture,” Bob said. “Do you know what that means?”
I nodded.
“And I’m a police officer,” Lillian said. “We might have talked before. Have you ever called 911, Timothy?”
“No.”
A beat.
“Timothy solves puzzles,” Mrs. Radfield said finally. “Don’t you, Timothy?”
The couple looked at me expectantly.
“I love puzzles,” I said, which was an exaggeration. I was just good at them. “Want to see?”
“Sure,” Bob said. He followed me over to my bunk, and Lillian reluctantly fell into step behind.
I showed them one of the puzzles I had been working on—a loop of thick wire threaded through two holes in a piece of polished wood. I had found it among the donations. None of the other kids had been interested.
There were no instructions. I assumed the goal was to remove the piece of wood without breaking the wire. It was a hard puzzle—much harder than jigsaws, Rubik’s Cubes or riddles—and so I thought it would impress Bob and Lillian.
Except that I hadn’t solved it yet. Suddenly my cheeks flushed. What if the solution was obvious to Bob and Lillian? What if they thought I was stupid for not seeing it? They wouldn’t adopt a stupid child.
I jiggled the wood back and forth against the wire. The rattling echoed around the big, cold bedroom. I could feel them watching me as I struggled to figure out the puzzle. Tears stung the corners of my eyes.
“It’s okay, Timothy,” Bob said. “You don’t have to—”
“No! I can do it.”
I fiddled for another frantic minute—then at last, the answer became clear. As with all good puzzles, once you saw the solution, you realized it couldn’t be any other way. I tipped the puzzle upside down and bent the wire just enough that two loops fit through one hole. Then I slid the wooden piece the whole way around, and watched as it came loose, just like a magic trick.
I brandished the pieces at my future parents. Love me, I thought. Please.
But they weren’t impressed. Their eyes were wide with alarm. Clutching the puzzle like a weapon, red-faced and sweating, I must have looked obsessive. Maybe dangerous.
“Perhaps you’d like to take Timothy out for a hot chocolate?” Mrs. Radfield suggested. “There’s a lovely little café just—”
“Maybe another time,” Lillian said. She worked in law enforcement. She had probably seen dangerous obsessives before.
They were leaving. My stomach churned. “How about tomorrow? We could—”
“Tomorrow’s not good for us,” Bob said, picking up on his wife’s unease. “Some other time.”
Mrs. Radfield shot me a glare—You fucked up again!—and then led them to the door.
“Nice to meet you, Timothy,” Lillian lied as they walked out.
As soon as they were gone, I pressed my ear to the door. Maybe I would hear them saying that they secretly liked me. Or that they might come back to see me in a different setting.
Instead, I heard Bob say, “We’re still thinking. In fact, we were wondering if a daughter might suit us better.”
A few days later, Thistle was gone. She even got to keep her name.
Mrs. Radfield didn’t hit me in the end. But I agonized for weeks, convincing myself that Bob and Lillian had been the perfect parents—rich, smart, kind—and I had screwed up my chance.
Now I’m looking up at Kenneth Biggs’s apartment building. Modern, with four stories of polished glass. A doorman. Probably a pool on the roof and a gym somewhere inside. A roller shutter protects the underground parking lot, but there are a few empty visitor spaces out front. It’s the sort of place the wealthy live if they’re afraid of the poor. If an uprising happens, they’re ready to wait it out in style.
It’s exactly the sort of place I used to imagine Bob and Lillian lived in.
“How are your folks?” I ask Thistle. “Bob and Lillian?”
“I don’t talk to them much,” Thistle says. “My divorce pissed them off.” She looks at me. “How did you know their names?”
“They almost adopted me.”
“Really? Jesus, that’s weird to think about.”
“A Sliding Doors moment,” I say.
“We were nearly siblings.”
“Or I was nearly you.”
She gives me a withering look, as if I couldn’t possibly have been her.
All the windows have open curtains except for one. I bet that’s Biggs’s apartment. A home in mourning.
Thistle pulls into one of the visitor spaces. “Let me start, okay?” she says. “They’re hurting. They think Biggs abandoned them or he’s dead in a ditch somewhere.”
I wonder if my freezer would be considered nicer than a ditch. “Okay.”
We get out of the car. To get to the front entrance of the apartment building, we have to walk along a winding path through a well-manicured garden. Yellow roses everywhere, the bushes carefully pruned. A discreet steel box where frost-blankets are probably kept. We pass a fountain carved into the shape of a child, a handful of seeds in his outstretched palm. No water.
The doorman is a hulking guy in a puffy black windbreaker. Plenty of meat on him to shield him from the cold. He doesn’t look like he’s feeling it.
“Which number?” he asks, reaching for a buzzer. Like he’s here to push buttons for people instead of keeping them out.
“One-two-one,” Thistle says, and flashes her FBI badge for good measure.
The guy looks more closely at us both. He seems particularly interested in me. A man used to staring. Big enough that no one would pick a fight with him.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
“No, sir,” he says, and pushes the button.
As we wait, I check his shoes. Cheaper than the rest of his uniform. Probably the only part he paid for. When the poor eventually rise up, I wonder if the people who live here are dumb enough to think he’ll be on their side.
“You see Kenneth Biggs last Friday?” I say.
“Left at eight o’clock,” the doorman says. “Didn’t come back. Like I told you.”
He says this last part to Thistle. Her resigned look tells me that it wasn’t her he talked to last time. Probably another black police officer of about the same age—I make a mental note to find out who.
“Anything unusual about his demeanor?” I ask. “He seem worried?”
“No. If anything, he seemed happier than usual.”
“Like, happy excited?”
The doorman thinks about it. “Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure.”
So Biggs didn’t expect to wind up dead and naked in a remote forest that day.
“He say anything to you?” I ask.
“Left me a tip, which was unusual. Most people don’t, unless it’s Christmas. He told me to have a nice day. That’s it.”
The intercom says, “Hello?” A female voice, young-ish. I’m guessing the daughter, Hope.
“The FBI is here,” the doorman says.
“Okay. Send them up.”
The doorman opens the door. I can sense him watching me as we walk through the faux-marble lobby toward the elevator.
* * *
Apartment 121 has a heavy wooden door. That makes three layers of security—I’ve been counting. If someone wanted to abduct Biggs, they wouldn’t have chosen this location. Thistle knocks. A young woman in a gray turtleneck and sweatpants opens the door. Looks like pajamas, even though it’s ten-thirty a.m. Her eyes are wide with fear. She’s five fo
ot nothing, with darker skin than Biggs. She mostly got her mother’s genes, I guess.
“We haven’t found your dad yet,” Thistle says quickly. “I’m sorry, Hope.”
The young woman deflates. She looks both relieved and miserable. “Oh. Okay.”
“My associate, Timothy Blake, would like to ask some follow-up questions,” Thistle says. “If that’s all right with you.”
“Sure, I guess. Come in.” As Hope turns away, I notice a small bald patch on the back of her head. Maybe she’s been pulling her hair out.
The apartment is larger than you’d think, but dark. Two levels. Smells faintly of air freshener. Plenty of framed photos on the walls—not just Hope, Biggs and a Latina woman who must be Gabriela, but extended family, too. Cousins, uncles, grandmas. Mostly on Gabriela’s side, going by skin color. I wonder if Thistle has called all these people already.
Around the corner to the living room. Gabriela is sitting on an expensive leather sofa, like she’s in therapy. In place of a therapist there’s an ultra-HD TV with the sound turned down. The news comes out as a faint muttering through surround-sound speakers built into the walls, as though the apartment is haunted.
Gabriela stands up when we enter. She wouldn’t make much of a meal. Four foot five at the most, even in her polished heels. Possibly Guatemalan—after centuries of poverty and war at the hands of US-backed dictators, the average height in Guatemala is much lower than Mexico, or anywhere else in Central America.
Unlike her daughter, Gabriela is dressed formally in tailored pants and a silk blouse. A crucifix hangs from a gold chain around her neck. She has the hollow-eyed look people get after a flood, or a terrorist attack.
“Agent Thistle,” she says in slightly accented English. “Any news?”
Thistle shakes her head. “Nothing yet, I’m sorry. Do you have a moment to answer some questions?”
“Of course. I will do anything to help. Can I make for you tea or coffee?”
“No, thank you.” Thistle shoots me a warning glance.