“I don’t need to open any drawers or touch his computer.” That will come later, he thought with ugly satisfaction. “This is my job. I might see something you can’t. If you really think something’s happened to him.”
Darlene stared at him. She looked like she was going to cry—for a moment he actually felt for her. She didn’t know what to do, whether to trust him. Ray might have been her fault; her mistake unleashed on the world, on people like the Halls. But he was still her son, and Rice couldn’t help pity her for that.
He used the pity to soften his face. “I give you my word,” he said. “I’m not playing you.”
Raymond Walker’s mother walked Rice through the house. The first floor was largely an open space that kept going back: the kitchen flowed into a living room with a small dining area, which stretched on into a room that looked like a sunroom that had been opened up and better insulated. There was a bathroom, a spare bedroom, and a couple closets on the first floor as well. All was clean and orderly; there were no signs of an altercation, or an abrupt departure.
Darlene took Rice up the stairs to the master bedroom and bathroom. The second floor was smaller than the first, but the suite was quite large. It occupied the whole floor. All appeared quiet here as well.
At Rice’s request, Darlene opened the closet to show him her son’s suitcase. Rice also noted what looked like a gym bag in the corner of the room, next to the hamper.
“He have any other bags?”
“No, I got him the suitcase for his birthday two years ago. He wanted to get rid of his old one—it had a broken wheel, or it was squeaky or something. I think it wouldn’t roll. So this is the only one—it’s the one I bought him.” Not quite what he’d asked, and way more detail than he needed, but it was hard to say whether it was suspicious. It seemed to be how the woman talked in general.
She stood next to her son’s bed with her arms crossed, rocking heel to toe. “So now do you believe me?” Her face was oddly smug. Was it because she thought she was pulling one over on him, or because she was the kind of person who would take some satisfaction in being proven right about anything, including her son’s disappearance?
Rice stepped into the bathroom. Toothbrush on the sink. Darlene was in the doorway behind him with her eyebrows raised up, as though she were asking, Well?
“He say anything to you about going away?”
“He’s followed all your little rules.”
“Anyone else who might know where he is? His lawyer?”
Darlene expelled a laugh like a cough. “He wouldn’t tell her.”
“Why not?”
“She’s part of the whole racket. She’s in on it as much as you are. At least you don’t pretend to be on his side.”
He thought of Britny Cressey’s phone call. Walker was fighting with his lawyer, unhappy with how she was handling things. Maybe he’d skipped town. If he had, Rice needed to move. He needed to freeze the house and have a crew come in—and Darlene needed to go. “Let’s head downstairs, I need to call the station.”
He motioned for Darlene to take the stairs first.
“What are you going to do?”
“Try to find your son.” He motioned again.
“And you’ll be looking into all the people who’ve been threatening him online and in the papers and on the radio, and all the real sex offenders who live around here, and that boy who lied about the rape in the first place?”
“Yes, we’ll look into all those things. But you need to leave now.”
“I’m going to wait here in case he comes home.”
Rice took a step toward her, and he towered over her. She stunk of stale smoke. “No, Ms. Walker. You need to leave the house.”
“Actually, Detective, you can go to hell.” She’d inexplicably held up her fingers in air quotes as she’d said Detective. Her body jerked strangely as she pounded over to her son’s bed and sat. “You’re just using this as an excuse to search the house. It’s illegal, and I will be calling your supervisor.”
“You’re more than welcome, but you need to get up from that bed and leave this house immediately, or I’ll arrest you for obstructing.” There was no time to do this gently. If Walker had run, every minute was going to count. And if he hadn’t . . .
Darlene stared at him, her eyes brimming with hatred.
“You want to wait for Ray, that’s fine. You pick: do it from your house or a jail cell.”
She jerked up from the bed and blew past him with a flurry of threats of getting a lawyer and suing his department and taking his badge, her voice hoarse with tears.
Rice reached the ground floor just as Darlene was making her exit. She held her coat in one hand and her purse in the other. She waived the purse at Rice and shouted, “You’re treating my son like a goddamn criminal!” She slammed the door behind her.
Rice strode to the door and locked it. From the kitchen window, he could see Darlene walking down the driveway, doing something with her hands. At the base of the driveway she turned, a fresh cigarette between her lips. She frowned at the house bitterly, said something, then began to peck at her phone as she walked up the road. He’d forgotten she needed to wait for a ride. Well, there was a gas station and a coffee place out on the main drag, she could wait there. He felt sick to his stomach. Was it Darlene? No. It was this house. Something had happened here. Ray could have made a run for it, but he was too arrogant to do that, wasn’t he? Not to mention that he seemed to have left everything behind.
And of course, there was the trouble of the threat. Someone with every reason to hate Walker had been to this house and threatened to kill him. Tony Hall didn’t seem the type, but when it really came down to it, no one ever did.
64
Julia Hall, 2016
Detective Rice came unannounced this time. He’d done that before, Julia supposed as she welcomed him in, but this felt different. The police must have known Walker was missing. He didn’t want to give them time to get their stories straight.
The detective arrived after breakfast on Sunday. Julia and Tony hadn’t slept at all on Friday, and she’d spent Saturday obsessively watching her phone and starting violently each time it buzzed. Tony begged her to try to relax, but it was pointless. Then Sunday morning came, and their detective was at the door.
He rejected Julia’s offer of coffee as he pulled off his heavy winter boots. Tony took his coat and sent the kids upstairs to read in their rooms. The three of them sat in the living room—Julia and Tony together on the couch, Detective Rice in a chair beside them.
He sat, apparently thinking for a moment, then reached into his pants pocket and produced his silver tape recorder.
“Ray Walker is missing.”
The bluntness of his approach startled Julia, and she hoped it showed on her face. She looked at Tony, who looked back at her. “What?” she asked, as Tony said, “Missing how?”
“Missing like missing.” He studied them overtly. “I need to ask you some questions, and I’d like to record it.”
“All right,” Tony said.
Detective Rice fingered the recorder and set it down on the coffee table.
“Like I said, Ray Walker is missing. I’d like you to account for your whereabouts Friday and Saturday of this week. Yesterday and the day before.”
Julia looked to her husband. All three of them knew that Tony was the “you” he’d addressed.
“Um,” Tony said with a shake of his head, “Friday I left work early and went to see Nick up at Goodspring, and yesterday we were home all day. Besides the library for a bit in the afternoon.”
“What time were you at work Friday?”
“From about eight to two.” Tony looked at Julia, and she nodded. A jolt of adrenaline rocketed through her—did he see her nod? Did they look rehearsed?
“And Goodspring?”
Her ve
ins hummed as Tony answered. “Four to eight. A little after eight, actually. Maybe eight ten or something.”
“And then?”
“Then home.” Tony nodded at Julia. “I was here a little after ten, right?”
She cleared her throat. Her face was numb. “Yes, a little after ten.”
Detective Rice looked her in the eye, and miraculously she held fast. He nodded and wrote on his pad.
“As for yesterday,” Tony started, but the detective interrupted him.
“Make any stops on the way home?”
“No,” Tony said. “No, I left a little after eight and came straight home. It’s like a two-hour drive back from Belfast.”
“Goodspring make you sign in for visits?”
Tony paused. “Yeah, they do.”
“And work?”
Tony said nothing. He was staring at the coffee table.
Julia rested a hand on his thigh. “Honey?”
“Sorry,” Tony said. “What?”
“You have a way to confirm when you were at work?”
“I don’t, like, punch in or anything,” Tony said, “but I’m sure the receptionist can vouch I was there until two. She tracks our calendars.”
“And yesterday it was just you two and the kids all day?” The detective’s eyes flicked up at the ceiling, and Julia wondered if he was going to ask to speak to them.
“They went to my mom’s for a sleepover on Friday,” Julia said. “She dropped them off Saturday morning, I can’t remember when.”
“Maybe nine or ten,” Tony said.
They both knew it had been 9:17 a.m.—they’d been watching the clock obsessively that morning. But knowing anything too specific would sound bad.
“We can’t get everything perfect,” Julia had whispered in the hazy hours between Friday and Saturday. They laid in bed, Tony’s head on her chest, her shirt wet with his tears. Her voice had been so calm then. “They’ll have to question us because they know you threatened him. You have Goodspring, though.”
Tony had nodded against her chest.
“It will take time for them to decide you must have been with Nick. Before that, they’ll question us. We can’t look like we knew this was coming. We need to act unsure of things, but only in the smallest ways.”
Detective Rice was circling something on his notepad. Maybe he’d call Marjorie to confirm that Tony was home when she dropped off the kids Saturday morning. Maybe the police didn’t know yet that Walker was long gone by morning. Julia straightened her posture to mask the shudder that had wormed up her spine.
It would be okay. It would be okay. The sign-in sheet at Goodspring would place Tony there from 2:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. The drive back down south was two hours. For now, that left Julia as the only witness to Tony’s late Friday night and early Saturday morning hours. It was far from airtight—she’d lie for him, anyone had to assume that. But the police would figure it out eventually: that Tony had an alibi for the time that mattered.
“Julia.” Detective Rice turned his body with his attention. “You were home when Tony got in Friday night?”
“Yes,” she said. And she had been. She’d sat in the dining room, television blaring in the next room, and waited. Even now her stomach tightened, remembering how near she’d felt to vomiting as she waited for him to come home.
“And when do you remember him home?”
“Just a few minutes after ten.” He held her eye for a beat. Should she say more? “I only know that because I was watching normal cable. And a new show had just started, so it was probably, like, ten oh three? I was waiting for him to come home. So I could hear about how it went with Nick.” Tony took her hand and squeezed it. She was talking too much.
“And from when he got home to the kids getting in, did either of you leave the house at any point?”
“No,” she said. “We just talked about his visit with Nick and went to bed.”
Detective Rice retrieved the recorder from the coffee table and stopped it. He pocketed the silver bar, along with his little notebook and pen.
She walked him to the door, where he pulled on his boots and coat. As she watched him trudge down the front walk, it occurred to her that he hadn’t separated them, like she would have expected. He’d asked his questions of both of them at once, allowing her to hear Tony’s answers and simply confirm them. He hadn’t asked questions about her at all.
He thought they were innocent. Or maybe he just wanted them to be.
65
Tony Hall, 2016
Julia walked the detective to the door. From the couch, Tony could see Detective Rice pulling on his boots, tying the laces in silence.
Leave leave leave leave LEAVE—it was filling Tony’s mouth, straining against his teeth he was so close to screaming it.
The door shut.
Tony stood. “Jesus Christ. Oh, Christ.”
“Shh,” Julia hissed from the hallway. “Keep your voice down.”
“I don’t think it matters. I don’t think anything matters.”
Now she was in the doorway to the living room. “What are you talking about?”
Tony’s mouth was running, tripping over hot breath. “I fucked it all up.”
“You didn’t fuck anything up, you did fine. You’re just upset. Take a breath.”
“No, not today. I fucked up that day.”
“How?”
Tony walked through the dining room, bumping against a chair. “If they think he’s dead, that’s it. I’m it. They’ll be after me.”
Julia followed him into the kitchen. “Take a breath, I can barely understand you.”
He groaned, ran his hands through his hair. “What good is an alibi if there’s no time attached to it?”
Someone was pounding down the stairs. The kids were yelling over each other about movies they wanted to watch.
Julia’s voice was low but laser-focused. “What are you saying?”
“At Goodspring,” Tony whispered as the kids rushed down the hall. “I forgot to fill in the sign-out time.”
66
John Rice, 2016
As Rice drove away from the Hall home late Sunday morning, he called the unit’s head evidence technician, Tanya Smith, for an update on Walker’s house.
Smith’s voice betrayed her tendency to polish off a pack of Marlboro Lights over the course of a single shift. “We’ve got a cell phone,” she said. “O’Malley’s getting a warrant, but I doubt it’ll matter. It’s an iPhone. It’ll have a passcode. Unless it’s his mother’s birthday I doubt we’ll get in.”
Rice grunted. With the advent of the smartphone came a whole universe of juicy evidence, but only if you could get to it. Nothing would convince Apple to let law enforcement past a passcode, warrant or not. You could probably have someone producing child porn with the phone itself and they wouldn’t budge. The phone was a dead end.
“We’ve covered the ground floor of the house at this point. Williams collected some prints; so far I’ve come up dry on fluids.” She chuckled at the joke he’d heard her make at least twice before.
Rice started to sign off. He wanted to call Goodspring. “Thanks, Tanya.”
Down the line he heard the scrape of a lighter. Smith talked around a cigarette. “I say I was finished?”
“You smoking all over my crime scene?”
Smith laughed her witch’s cackle. “Fuck the fuck off.” He knew she’d be out in the street, far away from the scene.
“Might be nothing,” she said, her tone cautious. “Basak canvassed the street, and the lady next door says she saw two men walking down the street on Friday night.”
“Really,” Rice breathed.
“Yeah, around seven thirty. Going down the street, away from the direction of her house and Walker’s.”
“She make out any details?”
“Average height and build, maybe one a bit bulkier. Couldn’t make out skin tone or hair color or anything like that. It was already dark, and I don’t think she paid them too much attention.”
“But she thinks it was seven thirty?”
“That’s what she said.”
By the time they hung up, Rice had parked himself at a Dunkin’ Donuts. He called O’Malley, and she forwarded him to voice mail. A minute later his phone buzzed: she’d texted,
Call you soon.
He pulled through the drive-through and ordered a small: two creams, two sugars.
A night ago, O’Malley meticulously sent out Walker’s identifying information and mug shot to all the cab companies, bus depots, train stations, and airports in New England, and now she was following up by phone. That Walker had gotten antsy and skipped town was the simplest explanation, but Walker seemed incapable of seeing how guilty he looked. He’d spewed confidence everywhere he could—to the newspaper, the radio, social media. In the last article Rice read on the case, sometime in the last couple of weeks, his lawyer sounded like she was armed for bear. But then, Britny Cressey said Walker was panicking. Someone who did what Walker did to Nick Hall—that kind of person was good at hiding his true intentions, wasn’t he? Come to think of it, Walker’s incessant chatter about his innocence could have been a distraction. A long-term plan to take off could even explain why he’d reported the incident with Tony Hall but didn’t press charges—to muddy the waters of his planned disappearance.
A lanky boy passed Rice his coffee through the window. He drove around the building, back into the lot and parked.
Two men, one a bit bigger and bulkier. That could be two brothers.
But the men were seen at seven thirty. Tony Hall couldn’t have been walking down a street in Salisbury then if he really was at Goodspring from four to eight. Even if the neighbor was a bit off on the time, it was something like a two-hour drive from Nick’s program back to Salisbury. Rice found the number for Goodspring Psychiatric Center online, and his stomach fluttered as he pressed to call.
The Damage Page 26