by Chaz McGee
Me? I knew Danny wallowed in seediness and embraced his misery, that he had long felt it was his due. And I also knew Danny had been there recently. A familiar strand of fear hovered around the apartment’s front door. I followed it inside like a dog on a scent trail, leaving Maggie behind in her car, waiting for a sign that he was home.
My heart sank at what I saw. It was a hovel, even for Danny. What little furniture there was had long since been buried beneath old newspapers, fast-food wrappers, and dirty clothing. Unwashed dishes were scattered over every surface of the kitchen, the bits of food unrecognizable as anything more than dark clumps clinging to plastic. The refrigerator held nothing but an outdated carton of milk, now soured, and an open can of beans encrusted with a moldy surface as deeply grooved as a brain. Unwashed dishes filled a sink half filled with gray water and the air reeked of rotting food, filth, sweat, and a rubbery odor from the tire store next door.
If ever there was a place where a man who had given up on life could crawl inside and die—this was it. How had Danny ever let it get this bad? Why had he let it get this bad? No wonder he’d been ripe for the picking by Alan Hayes.
I found a copy of our old case file on the Alissa Hayes murder scattered haphazardly over the living floor, as if he had swept it off the cluttered coffee table in frustration. An upended cardboard box next to his bed yielded copies of more case files, mostly drug murders we had failed to solve and some drug cases I remembered solely because they had started out as big busts and ended up as black marks on our records, thrown out or lost in court because Danny had failed to follow some procedure or I’d been trapped by a defense attorney unable to recall something in our notes. It had happened more than once. I could have done without the reminder.
The bed was stripped of all linen, exposing the stained mattress beneath, and the sheets lay tumbled in a wad on the floor. The smell in the bedroom was even worse than the rest of the apartment: the bathroom that adjoined it had not been cleaned in months. Did he crawl drunkenly into bed like a dog each night, pull a sheet over him, and sleep drenched in sweat, breathing in the odors of urine and vomit? Why bother to get up in the morning if things were this bad?
And then I saw a framed photograph on a cheap table by his bed that almost broke my heart. At first I thought it was a photograph of his son. It showed a young man dressed in too-big swim trunks caught in mid-leap as he hurled himself off the cliff of an abandoned rock quarry toward the teal blue water below. It had been taken with a telephoto lens by a doting parent and the young boy’s face was caught perfectly in an expression halfway between ecstasy and terror—a combination, I thought, that perfectly captured what courage was all about. And that’s when I realized it was Danny in the photograph. He had told me about that moment many times, about the first time he’d been able to take his older brother up on his frequent dare to make the leap off the quarry’s highest cliff. How proud he had been to take that jump at last, and in front of his parents and sisters, too. It was the best moment of his entire life, I realized, as I stared at the expression on a face I had never truly known, because that face had already grown weary with disappointment and self-sabotage by the time we met in the academy.
It scared me. How could he sleep in this hovel with the proof of what he had squandered so close at hand? It reminded me of how capricious life could be.
But what I found inside Danny’s closet scared me even more—because it was all about me. There, thrown haphazardly on a cheap folding TV table, I discovered myself in a dozen different poses, through all stages of adult life, my fall from youth to middle age and, finally, death, chron icled in color and black-and-white. There were photographs of me aligned across every inch of its surface, as a man might align his cards when playing solitaire. There I was with Danny, clinking beers in toast, surrounded by the tiny patch of verdant grass of his old yard. There I was with my kids at a local pool. One photo showed Connie and me on our wedding day, Danny among the groomsmen, looking uncomfortable but cheery in his tuxedo. Newspaper clippings of my death were neatly stacked in one corner of the table, near a red candle placed inside a tall glass tube decorated with a painting of the Virgin Mary. The candle had burned halfway down before the flame had flickered out. It was the kind of candle now sold in every corner store in America, a tradition brought up from Mexico to honor the dead and ward off evil spirits.
The closet was a shrine—an altar to my memory.
Why? Danny and I had been partners for most of our careers only because we’d had to be. Our friendship had been the first things to go when we’d embraced alcohol and hangovers and weariness and shame in our lives, neither one of us much caring, both of us knowing that there was no real friendship to lose anyway. Tethered together as partners, we’d endured our last years with little emotion and no devotion. Certainly nothing to warrant this kind of display.
What could it all mean—and what would Maggie think if she saw it? I could not see it with a stranger’s eyes. It was impossible to shake my certainty that Danny had been indifferent to me in life or my skepticism that he had mourned me after death. But would she see it as a sign of his loyalty instead? Would she feel more kindly toward him?
Or would she see what I now saw, as clearly as I could see the disintegration of my life in the photos before me: either Danny’s mind was going or Danny felt guilty about something.
Chapter 28
Maggie was still sitting outside Danny’s apartment in her car, watching for a sign that he might be inside. She was using the time to make phone calls and had worked her way up to Gonzales, judging by the tone of her voice.
“No, sir. He’s not at home and he didn’t show up for work yet.” She was silent. “I am well aware of that.” She hesitated. “Sir, we have a problem. He may be interfering with the Hayes case. I think he’s trying to prove I’m wrong about Daniels being innocent.” She flushed and took a deep breath. Was she actually going to lie to Gonzales? She did: “Nothing major. But he’s been contacting witnesses. It worries me.” She never told him about the Double Deuce, but she was thinking about the night before. “By the way, sir, I thought Bobby Daniels was getting out today. They tell me he was released yesterday afternoon . . . Yes, I understand. But was there anyone there to lend him support? I would have been glad to be there.” She frowned. “I’m well aware of the consequences. That’s why I keep out of the limelight.”
I don’t think Gonzales got the jab. She sighed and filled him in on Alan Hayes. “He’s not come home, either. The wife claims she has no idea where he is. We may need to keep teams on his house around the clock. I don’t think he will come home, though.” She hesitated. “I think he has another place somewhere else. We’re processing the evidence now. We may find something that leads us to him.”
Gonzales was obviously issuing a string of commands on what to do about Alan Hayes next, but he had angered Maggie with his excuses for not letting her know when Daniels would be released—the clipped way she promised to keep tracking Hayes showed it. As soon as she hung up, she called Peggy in the crime lab.
“Peggy? It’s Maggie. I’ve got a heads-up for you. Gonzales may come poking around. He wants a smoking gun so he can stage the press conference to end all press conferences.” She laughed at something Peggy said, then asked, “Any luck?” She looked disappointed. “I know. Sorry to add to the pressure. Did Danny show up for work yet?” She paused. “Didn’t think he would. I can’t just sit around. I’m going to go question the daughter again. She may know something and not realize it. Call me if you find anything.”
As she drove toward the foster home where she had dropped Sarah Hayes off the night before, I could tell Maggie felt her window of opportunity to find Alan Hayes slipping away from her. She was determined to use every waking moment to locate him. And as dangerous as he was, I wondered if Maggie wasn’t equally as dangerous in her own way—at least to him.
Hayes wondered, too. Within a few miles, I spotted his car. It was not yet noon. With most of th
e town still in church, the roads were relatively empty. Hayes was hanging back a block and trying to hide behind a red truck headed in our direction, but it was impossible for him to conceal himself completely. When we hit a straightaway, the road widened, then curved, giving me an unmistakable view of his SUV as he sped up to keep pace with Maggie. I could not see inside the SUV, but it was the same model and the same shiny black finish. It darted from lane to lane, clearing other cars like a shark slicing through a school of smaller fish.
It could have been someone else, of course, but when I saw it again, turning into the road ahead of us, after taking a parallel road to pass us first, I knew it was Hayes. He turned right soon after, away from us, but before long he had pulled back in behind us. Maggie was being careful. She checked the rearview mirrors frequently, but Hayes knew how to follow without being detected. You’d have to really be looking to spot him.
I guess he’d had a lot of practice.
Maggie led him straight to the house where his daughter was staying.
My only consolation was that the daylight revealed what I had missed the night before: this was more than a foster home. This was a safe house for kids whose parents had been deemed a danger to their children. An eight-foot-tall link fence of commercial-grade chain enclosed the backyard. Hayes would not be able to spy on Sarah from the rear of the house, at least not without risking being seen by someone as he climbed over that fence.
Maggie rang the doorbell. A redheaded boy who looked to be about eight years old opened it immediately. He was breathing hard and his face was creased with a smile—we had interrupted his fun.
“Ask who it is first!” a voice reminded the boy from another room.
The little redheaded guy, with the door wide open, inquired, “May I ask who you are before I unlock the door?”
Maggie suppressed her smile and showed him her badge.
“Maggie.” Sarah Hayes stepped out from behind a doorway, face flushed. Four smaller children, all of them under age five, were hanging off her arms and legs. “Sandy went to the grocery store to get more milk. I’m babysitting.”
She was a new girl. One day and she was becoming a whole new person. The resilience of children is breathtaking, I thought to myself. Would that we could keep that ability as adults. I could tell Sarah was proud of being able to help out. The expression on her face finally fit her age.
“Again!” one of the smaller children squealed and began tugging on her arm. Sarah was pulled under by a sea of squirming bodies. She was wrestling four little children at once—and giving them a run for their money.
Maggie watched, smiling, until the kids had pinned Sarah to the floor. They jumped around the room in triumph as she scrambled to her feet, face flushed, and adjusted her long ponytail. “They’re hard to beat,” she told Maggie.
“I can tell. But you hold your own.”
Sarah smiled at this, but it reminded her of something else far less happy. Her eyes lingered on the front door, then she walked over to it and locked the four deadbolts that ran up and down its edge. One more than she’d on her old bedroom door. I guess they got a lot of kids like Sarah in the house, kids who understood the need for multiple locks and felt better seeing them there.
“Sandy has a key,” she explained to Maggie. “She should be home in about fifteen minutes. Want to go out back?”
Maggie nodded and Sarah popped in a video from a huge collection stacked in piles on the floor in a corner of what seemed to be one of many playrooms. “No one answer the door this time,” Sarah admonished them. “Especially you, Tyler. First you ask who it is and then you unlock it and only if you know them.”
The redheaded boy was nonplussed. He shrugged and turned his concentration to an animated movie my boys had always loved, one about bugs that maintain their own community and band together to save their winter food supply from locusts. I had hated that movie when I was alive; it had epitomized the buzzing and crashing that exacerbated my Saturday morning hangovers, when Connie would go to the grocery store and I would lie on our couch, perpetrating the illusion that I was babysitting our boys, instead of the other way around. I’d always fallen back into a fitful sleep, clinging to unconsciousness because I knew the price I’d have to pay once I woke up.
Had I really squandered those hours with my sons in such a sour, useless manner? It made me want to stay with the little redheaded boy and enjoy the movie for a change, to embrace the opposite of what I’d done in life, but Maggie and Sarah were already deep in conversation in the backyard, sitting side by side atop a rickety picnic table.
“She’s really nice,” Sarah was telling Maggie. “Her husband split after she took in the sixth or seventh kid, she can’t remember which, and she doesn’t even care. She says taking care of us does the world a whole lot more good than taking care of his sorry ass.” She clapped her hand over her mouth as if afraid she might have just gotten her foster mother into trouble.
Maggie laughed. “She’s probably right about that.” She looked Sarah over more closely. “You look different already. More relaxed.”
Sarah turned her head. She didn’t want to talk about herself yet. “Sandy says I’ll be going to a different school from now on.” Her face looked sad for a second, before she hid it, but Maggie saw it anyway.
“What is it? Your friends?” Maggie’s voice softened. “In cases like yours, Sarah, we have to practically hide you. That’s why you can’t make calls out, and I guess you noticed the fence?”
“I like the fence. A lot,” Sarah said with conviction.
So did I. I was scanning the empty fields that stretched behind the house, beyond the perimeter of the fence, as well as what I could see of the yards on either side. It wasn’t quite a rural area, but it was close, and each house had several acres of green surrounding it. Small groves of trees dotted sweeping lawns and the shrubs grew thick and wild, thanks to all the room and sunshine. Alan Hayes could be hiding in any of the groves. He could be anywhere, just watching and waiting.
“We’ll let the school know,” Maggie promised. “The social worker will make sure you get your books and anything in your locker and that you’re placed in a school and classes where you can pick up right where you left off.”
“I know.” Sarah tried to sound grateful. “She explained it to me last night.”
“Then what is it?” Maggie asked.
“My friend,” Sarah said. “I really only had one friend, but I can’t just disappear on her. She needs me.”
Maggie drew the details out of her: that the girl was a few years older, lived in Sarah’s neighborhood, rode the school bus with her, had lost her mother a year before, and was getting ready to have a stepmother forced on her. “I know she’ll need me,” Sarah said.
“I’ll go by and tell her what happened,” Maggie promised. “We’ll find a way for you to keep in touch. I’ll ask Sandy if she can call you here.”
Sarah’s face brightened. “Cool,” she said, drawing her knees to her chest. “She’s really nice and she cares about me.”
“I’m sure she does,” Maggie said.
Sarah looked up at the sky. Her voice dropped. “Have they found him yet?”
Maggie shook her head.
“Is that why you’re here?” the girl asked.
Maggie was honest. “Partly. But mostly because I wanted to know how you were doing.”
Sarah nodded. “Are you the one trying to find him?”
“Me and others,” Maggie said. “Mostly me right now. Until we process the evidence, we don’t really have anything on him yet. But once we do get evidence, a lot of people will be after him. We’ll find him then for sure.”
“You don’t know my father,” Sarah said. She pulled her knees tightly to her body like she always did when she was trying to disappear inside herself.
“What do you mean?” Maggie asked.
“He always gets what he wants,” she whispered.
“Can you help me stop him?” Maggie asked. “C
an you think of anything that might tell me where he is?”
And in that endlessly ironic way of the universe, it was at that very instant—as Maggie asked where Alan Hayes was—that I saw him. The lawn next door was enormous and dwarfed the brick ranch house in its center. The occupants were obviously not home, there was no car in the driveway, but I distinctly saw a figure step out from behind one of the corners of the house and walk briskly toward a stand of overgrown bushes that anchored the center of the yard. The bushes were over six feet tall and grew entangled across an overhead trellis, so there was plenty of room for a man like Hayes to hide inside. He would have a perfect view of the backyard next door.
I did not know what to do: to go or to stay.
“Can you remember anything about what he was like when he would return from being away at night?” Maggie was asking Sarah.
The young girl thought about it. “He was always sweating,” she offered. “And he seemed tired, as if he had been exercising.”
Maggie’s face did not move. She did not want Sarah to guess at the thoughts that I could quite clearly read: torture was hard work.
As Maggie asked more probing questions, a familiar feeling of impending doom crept over me, an insistent breeze of evil that sprang forth from the tangled copse of bushes next door. I imagined Hayes, hidden in the cool shadows beneath the hanging branches, watching as Maggie took his daughter from him just as Bobby Daniels had dared to take Alissa from him. I imagined the hate he would feel for Maggie, and I needed to know where that hate might lead him. I had to know what he was planning.
And then I did not have to imagine his fury. I was there, along the edges of his hiding place, peering inside—and I could feel it. The hatred that emanated from him had the power of scalding water. I did not want it on me. He sat completely immobile, almost in a parody of his daughter, his legs bent and his knees folded precisely up against his chest, his hands clutching his legs to him as he simmered in his hatred for Maggie and all she represented to him.
