by David Levien
As he left Lynhurst, Behr passed an old Civic hatchback coming from the other direction. A Hispanic man was driving while another, the size of a jockey, was crouching in the back and hurling papers toward houses. The kid’s replacements, Behr thought, as he drove on to the end of the route. The neighborhood yielded nothing; the houses were blank facades. Behr sat in his idling car and ate a ham sandwich, looking down the street he had just driven. He let his mind wander. Someone leaving for work, so early and as such not thinking about traffic, backs out of the driveway and, boom, hits a kid on a bike. No one else is awake at that time, the boy’s down, not moving, so the driver scoops up the kid and the bike and drives out of town to dump him.
Behr shook his head. Chances were that Jamie never even rode his route that day. Any number of things could have distracted him from his usual routine, which would mean that the cops had been looking in the completely wrong place, and he was, too.
Behr flipped through the file he was building on the case. He got to one of the articles he’d printed from the newspaper’s online archive. It was from page two, under the fold, three days after the boy had disappeared. There was no picture. Goddamn toddler goes missing for half an hour they’re running front-page photos and features on the television news. A kid gets old enough to have his own ideas, it raises too much doubt about what could have happened, renders it unnewsworthy. Behr finished the sandwich, crumpled up the wax paper it had been wrapped in, and drove back to the head of the route to start in on the canvass.
The number of people at home on door-to-door canvasses always surprised Behr. Not just housewives, old people, and invalids, but young, working-age men and women — they were usually at home. At first he figured they should all be at work, but much of the time they were not: They worked the late shift, or the early shift, or they had a day off or were between jobs. Eighty percent of the bells he rang in some neighborhoods got answered. Then there was Mount Auburn. These were working people. Even at a quarter to nine in the morning, almost no one was at home, and that meant no information for him. He checked the police report and saw that the cops had swept three times — prework, midday, and evening — and still owed on completion. Behr got a couple of cleaning ladies, none of whom had worked there at the time of the event, and two home owners with fuzzy recollections of the date, it being so far back.
He went off from Richards, retracing the streets he had driven. He collected contacts and had brief interviews with the few people who answered their doors, but he had no real luck until he reached 3 Tibbs, the second house on the block. The home, according to his street listing, belonged to a Mrs. Esther Conyard. The house was ill kept compared with those surrounding it, and as soon as Behr saw her through the Plexiglas outer door, he knew why. She was old, nearing ninety, and not a spry ninety at that. She wore a heavy knit sweater over a housecoat over a robe, the type of elderly woman who felt a draft when it was eighty-five and humid. She was past going outside at all, much less doing house upkeep.
“Are you Mrs. Conyard?” Behr asked when she arrived at the door.
“I am. But I’m not buying anything. See, I’m on a fixed income,” she told him.
“I’m not selling, ma’am,” Behr began. “I’m investigating a boy who went missing around here last year.” He appraised her to see if this rang any bells, but she remained blank. He continued. “Maybe you heard something about it? He was a paperboy … ?” This seemed to register, and she made a show of nodding, but Behr could tell she was acting. Still, the woman was homebound and he knew many senior citizens kept odd hours. Either they couldn’t sleep and stayed up late or they couldn’t sleep late and woke up early. And for a woman like this, myopic though she might have been, what else did she have to do but look out her windows? “I was wondering if I could come in and talk about the case?”
Behr watched her fear of strangers wrestle with her desire for company. “I don’t know if I should.”
He flashed his license, which he kept in a billfold with his old three-quarter shield. Then he took out the school picture of Jamie. “This is him. Maybe you saw him riding his bike?” She looked at the picture of the kid, with his cute little cowlick, and that did it. She swung the door open.
“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about the case,” she said, her voice tremulous with the effort of walking down the hall. “But I’ll answer any questions I can.” She led him into the living room and a stabbing prickle went down Behr’s spine at what he saw there — stacks and stacks of newspapers. The room was filled with them, the Star, years’ worth of them, unread. Many yellowing. Mrs. Conyard saw Behr looking. “I always mean to read the paper at night, but I end up watching television. …” Behr nodded to keep her going. “I like solving the puzzles on Wheel and I end up putting it off to another day.” With the amount of unread papers she had in there, Behr wouldn’t have been surprised if she believed Carter was still in office.
“You know, Mrs. Conyard, I wonder if I could look through your papers, see if you got yours that day?”
“Sure, sure, go ahead,” she told him. Behr was already kneeling and poring over the stacks for the dates close to the day of the disappearance. “I keep meaning to get rid of the old ones. … Maybe they’ll be good for something.”
There was a loose sort of left-to-right organization to the papers. Within ten minutes Behr had found October of the correct year and saw what didn’t completely surprise him. She had all the papers leading up to the day, but no paper from the day Jamie went missing. There was no paper for two days after that, either. Mrs. Conyard remembered the interruption in service. It was disconcerting to her. Then the delivery service resumed, on the third day. “A little brown man. In a car. That’s the way they do it now,” she told him.
“That’s progress,” Behr said, looking not at her but through the nearby stacks of papers to make sure that none were misfiled. None were. Her order was fairly meticulous.
“You know what?” Mrs. Conyard told him, memory’s light breaking across her face. “Now I do remember the police stopping by and asking questions.” Behr nodded his support for her recollection, which unfortunately contained no other hard information. She hadn’t seen any suspicious cars or people then or since. “It’s a very safe neighborhood. That’s why I’ve stayed all these years since my husband died.”
She moved across the room to a portrait of her late husband that rested on the television. “This is Mr. Conyard … my John …” She held it out for Behr’s inspection. He looked it over and planned his exit.
Behr spent the next several hours in his car, parked on Tibbs, on the cell phone with the circulation department of the Star. It took a good while before he got the right person, a Susan Durant, who had been there many years and had a handle on things, and a memory to boot. She recalled them losing their delivery boy. It was a sad day at the paper even though no one remembered ever having met him. And there was a near mutiny in Circ. when the story only got under-the-fold coverage. She checked the logs and saw that the resident at 5 Tibbs had complained and been credited for no delivery on October 24. Several others from later in the route had made the same call. Susan also confirmed that there was no delivery in place for the next two days. All the customers on the route were credited for those days as well.
“Nope, there weren’t any complaints from anyone on the route prior to 5 Tibbs,” Susan Durant said from her downtown office, causing Behr to get that prickle down his spine again, as if he felt he was drawing a bead on where something might have happened to Jamie.
“I owe you an Italian dinner, Susan,” Behr offered for her time and effort on the phone.
“Oh, I don’t do carbs, Frank,” Susan said with regret, then added encouragingly, “but we could make it a rib-eye.”
“A steak it is, Susan.” He promised to call her when things wound down on the case.
Behr turned off his phone and settled in to wait for a Mr. Louis Cranepool, resident of 1 Tibbs Avenue, to return from work. As he waite
d, Behr ran scenarios in his head. In the case of a missing kid, the parents always got a hard, and often the first, look from police. Behr was sure that within the police file — the official one, not the copy — there was a report showing that the Gabriels had been thoroughly investigated, maybe even poly-graphed. There were circumstances in which Behr would’ve begun by looking more deeply into the mother and father as well. Veracity of grief was no indicator of innocence in crimes within a family. But having sat with them, Behr recognized the completely blinding condition of not knowing what had happened to their son from which the couple suffered. This was much harder to fake. He felt the burled walnut of his custom steering wheel flex under his palms. He looked down and noticed his hands were white-knuckled across it. He relaxed his hands and tried to keep them from becoming fists as he considered what Cranepool’s involvement could be.
TEN
IT WAS JUST AFTER 4:00 when a gold Taurus pulled into the short driveway of 1 Tibbs. A squat man in a brown suit wrestled his briefcase from the passenger seat, climbed out of the car, and headed for his door.
Behr strode across the man’s patch of lawn, cutting him off before he had his key out.
“You Louis Cranepool?” Behr snarled. He reared up and used his size on the man. There were many tools of influence at the interrogator’s disposal when conducting an interview. Beatings and chemicals were the most severe, and usually illegal, though chummy manipulation yielded nearly as much in Behr’s estimation. Chances were this guy had nothing to do with anything, but Behr had only this one time to make a first impression. He decided to try to rattle him, to see if anything shook loose.
“I am.” Cranepool swallowed, taking in the huge man standing between him and his door. “What do you want?”
“You know what I’m here about.” Behr let the words settle. “Jamie Gabriel.” If the name did mean anything to Cranepool, then Behr never wanted to sit across a poker table from him. “Your paperboy.”
Cranepool narrowed his eyes in thought. “The one who used to deliver here? Kid who went missing?”
“That’s right.” Behr nodded, beginning to modulate his intimidation, already leaning toward the belief that Cranepool wasn’t involved. Behr shifted into a more neutral policelike tone, hoping for at least a piece of information. “The date was October twenty-fourth last year. I’m assuming you told the police everything you know about it, which was nothing, yes?”
“Uh-huh,” Cranepool said, his fear abating, but only slightly.
“Do you recall if you got your paper on the morning of the twenty-fourth?”
“I did.” Cranepool answered too quickly. “I didn’t mention that to the police. I didn’t think to and they didn’t ask.”
“It was a long time ago. You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” Cranepool nodded.
“How?”
“I trade my own portfolio and I check the stock page every night. I missed the paper the next day and had to buy it at the gas station for two days running while they replaced deliverymen.”
Behr involuntarily glanced toward the street. “Now I’m on the Internet and I get updates throughout the day,” he half heard Cranepool continue in the background. Behr refocused and asked half a dozen followups, to which Cranepool shook his head. Behr nodded his thanks and began backing off across the lawn the way he had come. Cranepool hurried inside with relief while Behr made his way to the street.
Behr walked around the corner and imagined himself on a bike. He saw that the clearest shot at Cranepool’s front door was from where he stood on Perry before making the turn onto Tibbs. Behr brought his right arm across his chest and simulated a cross-body backhanded toss. This is where you would throw it from, he thought. Then he continued around the corner. It was another thirty yards to Mrs. Conyard’s house. Jamie had never made it that distance. This was the place. It slammed Behr in the chest. The familiar blackness that came with the realization that a horrible crime had occurred rushed up and tunneled around him. This was the place.
Behr stood out on Tibbs between the Cranepool and Conyard houses for a long time. He knelt down near the asphalt, even brushed it with his fingertips, and looked into the oil stains like a seer. Had he glanced up, he would have seen Cranepool peering at the huge, threatening man from behind his kitchen curtain. When Behr finally stood, the cartilage in his knees cracked, and he remembered the jogger.
ELEVEN
SOMETIMES THINGS HAPPENED QUICKLY on a case, other times not so at all. Usually it was like banging against a slab of rock with a sledgehammer. Tiny chips flew here and there but seemed to lead nowhere, and then clunk, the whole thing came apart. That moment was a long way off as Behr sat in the dark and steeled himself to search places on the Internet that should not exist, that would not exist in a decent world. He’d gone late into the previous nights checking the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Web sites and others. He’d found Jamie’s picture posted there among thousands, his just one of the awkward-sweet faces of the missing, though no leads were listed. But tonight Behr was going to a far worse place. Like a predator lurking in cyberspace, he began to locate the sites dedicated to child pornography. Though they were relatively few and hard to find, there were still far too many of them. Some offered censored thumbnails, hoping to entice buyers into the elaborate processes of passwords and protected downloads. Revulsion and sweat bathed the back of Behr’s neck as he clicked on sample pictures. They were shot in badly lit rooms, where faceless men penetrated drugged and frail young boys and girls. Black circles and digital buzz-outs did little to mask what was going on. Behr felt his gorge rise but went on as best he could, trying to determine if any of the vacant-eyed youths were Jamie. Cold feverish rage grew within him. It took all of his will to restrain himself from smashing every single thing in his house. He wanted to barehand kill every one of the pale, flabby-bodied men on his computer screen. As a cop he’d encountered all manner of street filth, degenerates, and psychopaths. He’d seen corpses that had suffered grisly fates and living victims who had suffered worse, but none of it had the power to numb him to this. He went later and later into the night, discovering societies that advocated physical love — their word for it — between adults and children, until he went bleary-eyed. As he willed himself on, the unimaginable happened at four A.M. His own son appeared to him like a revenant. Tim’s face began to appear superimposed over those of the young victims. It made his skin crawl, his scalp boil, and his blood surge in his temples. He found himself weak with rage. Sour vomit filled the back of his throat, and he barely reached the bathroom in time.
Behr was back on Tibbs before six A.M. the next morning, looking for the jogger. His hair still wet from the scalding shower he had hoped would disinfect him, he sat in his car swilling Maalox and praying it would quiet his churning stomach. It was Saturday and by ten he believed the runner wasn’t going to show up, but he sat there until five in the afternoon, anyway. He repeated the drill on Sunday, trying to keep from his head the idea that the man could’ve been from a nearby neighborhood and hit Tibbs by coincidence, not custom. The guy could’ve been visiting from out of town. Sunday was a bust, too.
Monday, though, at ten after six in the morning, there he came, chugging up the street. He was in his early forties, barrel-bellied on spindly legs. Behr lumbered out of his car and ran up next to the man.
“Sorry to bother you,” Behr said, no real apology in his voice, as he jogged along with him like a moving brick building. “I’m investigating a disappearance.”
The man stopped his forward progress but kept moving in place, wiping his sweat-soaked sideburns, his breathing coming heavy. “A kid went missing here last October twenty-fourth. You know anything about it?”
“No, I don’t,” the man wheezed.
“Can I get a name?”
“Brad Figgis.”
The man, Figgis, didn’t know anything about it. “Time to time I saw a kid whiz by on his bike,” he did volunteer.
> “Were you ever questioned by the police about this?”
“Nope. I’m not from around here.”
Behr looked the man over. He didn’t look like he could cover that much ground.
“How far you run?”
“My loop is four and a half. This is about halfway.”
“You remember anything unusual back then?”
Figgis sweated and thought, and slowly nodded.
“I remember a big old car out here a few days in a row. Parked right over there so I had to run around it. Then I never saw it again. It was a Pon-tiac or Lincoln. Big and gray.”
“Plates?”
“Nah. Didn’t catch that.”
“Why’d it strike you?”
“There were two guys in it. I couldn’t tell you what they looked like, only that they were eating. I thought they might’ve been landscapers or painters waiting to start work, but the car was wrong. Those types of guys seem to drive pickups or tiny Corollas. This car was huge. Slabs of gray fender. The kind that drinks gas.”
Behr took a number and an address off Figgis, and watched him puff away into the morning. Then Behr went home to hammer away at DMV databases.
TWELVE
MORNINGS WERE THE WORST for the Gabriels, and without coffee Carol was sure she’d have curled into a ball, dried up and blown away. She’d never been the early riser type. In college, she’d worked scrupulously to schedule her classes after ten. Then, when she’d gotten married and Paul had to wake up at quarter to six every day for work, she’d grown to feel so guilty at sleeping past him that she’d forced herself awake to make coffee and breakfast while he took a run. Then she’d sit at the kitchen table and make a pretense at conversation, but all she really wanted was to get back in bed.
