by David Levien
Behr cleared his throat and asked his question. “Did either of you have anything to do with Jamie’s disappearance?” He glanced from husband to wife, prepared for tics or protests or answers that were geared to convince him of their innocence rather than just convey information.
“No,” said the father. The mother just shook her head, wept, and then uttered an “Uh-uh” sound.
Behr believed them. He had an inestimably larger amount of work in front of him now. Nonetheless, he felt relief. Later, when he got home, he’d go on the Internet and comb through financial databases. He’d check the family’s assets and TRWs to make sure there were no irregularities, no large withdrawals indicating a gambling or drug problem that could’ve provoked a hideous crime.
“If it’s all right, I’ll look at his room,” he said.
They all stood.
Behr entered the room and paused before turning on the light. Paul and Carol were positioned down the hallway several yards back, afraid to come any closer. Behr slid his hand along the wall and clicked on the light. What he saw hit him low in the gut. He kept his hand against the wall, steadying himself for a long moment. The room belonged to a well-cared-for American boy. A single bed covered by an NFL comforter was built into a tan Formica headboard and nightstand. There were wrapped gifts on the bed, birthday and Christmas presents for a son who wasn’t around to collect them. Two posters dominated the room: Albert Pujols turning on a ball and a red Ferrari F430 Spider. Both were matted on posterboard. A ten-by-twelve photo of a large African American bicycle racer had been torn from a magazine and tacked to the wall near the bed. A basic Compaq desktop computer sat idle on a small desk in a litter of school notebooks. They were next to a large cup from Pizza Pizzazz filled with coins and an old Reggie Miller bobble-head doll. Several Harry Potter books rested on bookshelves next to fairly neatly glued-together plastic model F-15s and battleships.
He turned and opened the closet, pulling a string that switched a light on inside. Jeans hung on hangers next to button-down shirts and several jackets of different weights. A small dark suit was all the way to the left. Along the floor were basketball sneakers, soccer cleats, scuffed penny loafers, Teva sandals, and a pair of winter boots. Behr pulled the light cord and swung the closet shut. He turned to a small dresser, forcing himself to go on. The dresser held T-shirts, socks, underwear. The bottom drawer housed folded dress shirts and two neckties. Beneath them, secreted, was a folded magazine photo of a full-breasted young blond singer wearing a brassiere top and a microphone that fit over her head like an air-traffic controller’s mouthpiece. She was covered in sweat and projected sex, youth, and innocence. There were also three packs of Black Cat firecrackers, but no scribbled notes or other information.
Some light dust was under the bed, Behr saw, his mini Maglite slowly sweeping over it as if it were a lunar surface. There was a small boom box and some pop CDs. Eminem, Green Day, Korn, a strange three-course meal. Between the mattress and box spring he discovered a treasure, a Cal Ripken baseball card from his rookie season tucked inside a plastic sleeve. Finding nothing else, he tried to smooth out the bedding the way it had been.
Behr sat on the small desk chair, testing its strength, and flipped quickly through the school-books on the desk. The notebooks were marked “Return to Jamie Gabriel — Room 102, Johnny Fricking Kennedy Middle School.” Behr pulled at his chin and looked through them. School exercises, personal notes, top-ten lists organizing and reorganizing the best professional athletes in each of their sports and combining them across sports. Kobe Bryant dueled with Dwayne Wade and Derek Jeter; Behr half smiled at Peyton Manning being crossed out two times and moved right to the top, and at what was written in for tenth place: “Tiger Wood.” There was nothing to indicate the boy had met anybody new or had plans to meet someone at the time of his disappearance.
He turned on the computer and searched through documents, which were school papers on plankton, Paul Revere, and the like. He checked the scrap of paper that the parents had given him and signed on to America Online to review Jamie’s account. He found nothing beyond kidlike screen names in the boy’s e-mail address book. His favorite places list was made up of movie, music, sports, and car sites. Behr didn’t find any links to strange, or borderline, Web sites. Besides spam, there were no e-mails new, old, or to be sent, as they had been automatically deleted by the server long ago after so much inactivity. He made a note to himself to try to get access to the service provider archives. Behr signed off, shut down the computer, and sat back. He rubbed his face with his hand and stood.
Carol and Paul still waited in the hall. They’d been standing there, frozen, for the whole forty minutes Behr had been in the boy’s room. As he walked out, they looked up at him, childlike in their anticipation. Behr shook his head and wrote a note in his notebook. They stood uncomfortably for a moment in the close quarters of the hallway.
“Mr. Behr … Frank …” Carol finally said, her voice low but direct in the tortured air of the hall. “I want to explain how we felt … how we feel about our son. How we love him …” Time and her pain couldn’t completely hide her prettiness, Behr noticed, and when she stopped, unable to go on, he felt the urge to help her.
“No need, ma’am,” he began, his voice low and rough. He went on despite himself. “I understand a bit of what you’re going through, having lost a son of my own. He died when he was seven.”
EIGHT
BEHR CLIMBED into his Toronado and turned it over. The engine woke up hoarse then leveled. He drove away from the Gabriel house, surprised at himself for mentioning Tim to this couple he’d only known for a few minutes, his employers. He hadn’t gone into detail when they pursued it, but still, he had brought him up. And now, in the car, he found himself thinking about the events leading up to Tim’s death, trying for the thousandth time to untangle the knot they’d become.
Behr crossed County Line and made a left toward Donohue’s, where he figured on a skirt steak and a Beck’s Dark while he reviewed his new case notes. He hoped the noise and bustle of the low-lit, maroon-boothed, old place would block the path of his memories and focus him on the new task at hand.
Behr arrived at Donohue’s, which was just catching fire for the night, barely a step ahead of his recollections of Linda screaming in the halls of the hospital, of the horror of the funeral home. The casket, closed due to the damage. The empty, helpless silence that followed the funeral, which had strangled his heart and slowly killed everything decent in his life. He slid into the last available booth, the vinyl crunching quietly beneath him.
Arch Currey nodded over his white mustache from behind the bar. Behr waved back with a finger that sent Arch to the tap to draw the first Beck’s Dark. Behr had been a heavy drinker in the past and it had led to problems, especially around the time of Tim’s death, and he’d quit altogether for two years. He was a bit of an oddball now, an ex-abuser who could drink light when he wanted to. It was strange even to him, just another thing he couldn’t figure out about himself and the world.
Behr looked toward the corner booth that was Pal Murphy, the owner’s regular spot. He’d clocked Pal’s Lincoln out back and expected to see him there, thin as a rail, in a crisp white dress shirt and butter-soft leather jacket, tinted shades perched on his nose, hunched over a cup of coffee. But Pal must’ve been down in his office, as the booth was currently empty. Pal and Behr were something like friends. Pal’s age and bearing gave Behr a comfortable feeling, as if all problems and challenges were temporal, that one could ride it out, that time resolved all situations no matter how confusing. The bond had first been struck when Tim passed, and had deepened when things foundered between him and Linda.
Behr flipped open his notebook and began scanning his notes. The words blurred in front of his eyes for all their lack of information. He pulled out pictures of Jamie and studied them, noting the changes in the boy over time. He was a towhead when he was a toddler. Over the years his hair had darkened, but just a bit. S
ome freckling came up across the boy’s cheeks. His baby teeth fell out; his adult teeth gapped and finally filled in over the course of the photos. In the last shots Jamie seemed poised to grow like a reed. He was four foot ten and one hundred and five pounds at his disappearance.
“Family photos?” Kaitlin asked, placing his Beck’s Dark on a paper coaster. She stepped back and stood over him, order pad in hand. Behr slid the pictures under his notebook.
“Not exactly.”
“Regular A or B tonight, or do you want to hear specials?”
“Regular A,” Behr said, ordering his usual steak and baked. Regular B was his second-most usual meal — the broiled chicken and fries. “And keep these coming steady.” He raised the beer and knocked off half of it as Kaitlin walked toward the kitchen.
Donohue’s filled up around him. Behr glanced over to see Pal Murphy sliding into his regular spot. He used his hand to smooth the wispy rust-colored hair pasted across his scalp, then nodded to Behr. Pal was sitting with a younger man Behr didn’t know, which wasn’t a surprise. Ownership of the pub was only the beginning of Pal’s business ventures. Several other people Behr knew nodded to him from the bar; several he didn’t stared over at him, a lone big man taking a booth that seated four. None of them were going to complain though; Arch kept a shillelagh hanging behind the bar in full view and was willing to use it to keep order.
Behr knew how to cook. It was something he’d had to learn when things ended between him and Linda, but some nights he needed the hum and flurry of a place like Donohue’s. The fact was, he needed it more and more lately. Behr worked on his third beer and thought of her. Linda. He hadn’t spoken to her since January 6 three years back. She lived down in Vallonia now, near her folks. Behr had gotten out there several times a month for the first few years after they’d separated, but couldn’t win her back with anything he’d said or tried. Tim’s death was a chasm between them he couldn’t leap, no matter how much of a run-up he took. To do that, both of them needed to jump, to meet in the middle, in the dark space between. He knew that now. Knew it even though he’d failed and it was too late and he’d given up. She’d told him on that January 6 that she’d started seeing a man who owned a quick lube shop and a convenience store nearby. Behr had stopped going then, ceased trying. He’d heard they were living together now.
“He’s not a better man,” she’d told him. “He just doesn’t remind me of things.” This was intended as consolation, Behr supposed, but it felt like the opposite.
After he’d eaten, Behr drank three cups of coffee to blunt the beers’ effect and began to outline a plan of action in his mind.
Step one. After Donohue’s, Behr rolled over to Market Square. He trolled through the darkened streets, coasting slowly in the Toronado like a fisherman trying to catch the big one on the first cast. He hoped to run across the boy on the streets, hungry but fine, ready to go home. He looked out his windows at the city that had been his home for two decades.
Indianapolis, the Circle City, was the twelfth largest in the nation. Because of the convergence of important roads, waterways, and railroads, it had long been known as the “Crossroads of America.” It was the Hoosier capital, host to the national track and field championships, home of the Indy 500 down at the Brickyard. Taxes were manageable, schools were good, real estate was valuable but still gettable. Behr was aware of the Chamber of Commerce patter, and perhaps it had mattered to him twenty years earlier when he had just graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in criminology and had found openings on the Indianapolis police force down at the school’s placement office.
But as he drove, all that fell away and instead he began to see the predators, scumbags, and wasters who populated the city at night. Street cops, if they were going to last at all, quickly developed a sense of what is out there. Where regular people saw a guy in a tight leather jacket, a homeless man panhandling, a nervous woman, a cop saw a monster carrying a gun, a junkie ready to snap, a woman who’d just killed her husband. It was a skill you needed desperately at first, one that didn’t seem to come quickly enough. Thing was, Behr thought, you could never turn it off once it was there, no matter how much you wanted to.
He got into the streets named after states: Maryland, Washington, Georgia. He saw long-coated figures standing and talking, sitting in doorways, huddling, but no one whose age or size allowed them to be the boy he was looking for. He cruised past the Fieldhouse, dark and hulking, with no event tonight. He wound around Delaware and South, parked and walked through the Amtrak/Greyhound terminal and Union Station. The National Guardsmen were there, rifles slung, and some groups of older teenagers heading back to the suburbs. No kids. Behr showed the photos to some of the Reservists, who shook their heads.
He got back in his car and circled the RCA Dome before cutting across West Street. Like most times he’d been fishing, he’d come up empty. Tomorrow he’d have to start a real investigation. It was what the Gabriels were paying him for. It was what the kid deserved.
NINE
BEHR BEGAN EARLY, lowering himself into the blizzardlike maze of details. The Gabriels’ bank accounts came up modest and tidy, as he expected they would. He went in and talked to the teacher, Ms. Preston, combed through newspaper archives for reported stories on the case, and then went to interview the soccer coach. Behr sat in his car a distance away and staked out a practice, checking to see if anyone was hanging around near the kids doing the same. He sat for an hour and a half, as the team moved up and down the field, bunching around the ball occasionally, causing the coach to blow his whistle and wave his arms, which returned them to better spacing. Behr raised his miniature Zeiss 12 × 25 and glassed the streets bordering the field; he saw he was the only one in the watcher category. Parents began showing up, and the kids ran, muddy-cleated, to waiting cars. Behr opened his door, swung his feet out, and started toward the field. The coach oversaw the last of his players leaving and was picking up the orange cones that marked the field when Behr got to him.
Coach Finnegan wore plastic-framed glasses, a fleece top, and a flexible knee brace on his right leg beneath baggy Umbro shorts. The guy had coached the Wayne Hornets for six years after moving there from Colorado Springs. Unlike the teacher, Andrea Preston, who was a pillar of the community, Finnegan, according to Behr’s background check, was divorced, delinquent on six alimony payments, and had once pleaded no contest to a bad check charge. Fines had been paid.
“Must be cold,” Behr said, pointing at the coach’s red legs.
“I always wear ‘em,” Finnegan said of his shorts, “even at the end of the year.”
“You’re Finnegan?” Behr asked as a formality.
“Uhm-hm. You?”
“I’m here about Jamie Gabriel.”
“He used to play for me.” The coach nodded. “Sad thing that happened. He was a striker.” The man’s face didn’t give anything away. “Any news?” he asked as an afterthought.
“I work for the family,” Behr told him by way of a nonanswer. He wasn’t going to tell this guy shit. For many cops and investigators the major obstacle to detecting deception and finding the truth was their own natural tendency to believe people. Behr had no such problem: he’d seen too much ugliness. He couldn’t help his prejudice, either. He reserved a little dose of suspicion for men who worked with children. Female teachers had his baseline trust. Male college professors made sense to him. But adult men who worked with young boys chafed just slightly at the part of him that doubted humanity. He knew this was stupid, and he’d seen countless female criminals prove it so. Behr appraised the soccer coach. Could his emotional or psychological issues have led him to do the unspeakable? The guy seemed like a regular ex-jock; he was probably beyond reproach.
“Ever seen anyone hanging around the field who shouldn’t be?”
“You mean when Jamie—”
“Anytime. Before or since.”
“Haven’t. I’d question anyone like that,” the coach said, a real s
olid citizen.
“Ever have a player mention an adult was bothering him?”
“Only their relatives. Usual stuff. ‘My father won’t let me play because of grades.’ ‘My mother’s boyfriend’s an asshole.’ “
“Gotcha.”
Finnegan toed down a hunk of loose turf. Behr looked over both ends of the field.
“How does transportation work?”
“Parents do drop-offs and pickups. Team van for road games or parents can drive if they want. Anybody who’s not a parent who’s picking up a player has to be prearranged with me by phone. More than a few times I’ve had to refuse an aunt or uncle and drive a kid all the way home because the mother or father forgot to call.” The coach offered this with a half-smile. He was looking for hosannas for his commitment to youth safety. Behr hated like hell to disappoint him.
He looked down at his notebook, closed it. “Well, that’ll do her. Call me if anything occurs.” He handed the coach a card and cut across the field toward his car.
Behr drove the paper route before six, as was Jamie’s custom, rolling slowly down Richards through the neighborhood. He went down Cypress, around Grace, Sixteenth Street, Perry, and then Tibbs. He passed a jogger as he turned onto Tibbs, a large guy in nylon shorts, high athletic socks, and a thick terry-cloth headband, huffing about a twelve-minute mile. Behr checked his notes as he made the next turn, onto Mooresville, then followed it to Lynhurst. The route was an ambitious one mileage-wise. The kid had carried plenty of papers a good distance.
