Murphy walked the line and, as he did, handed each girl a piece of paper. The girls didn’t hesitate to read what they could. Widening eyes and dropping jaws made it clear to Tom that their imaginations were filling in what the black marks had taken out.
Vern moved in close to stand a whisper’s distance from Tom. His assistant coach made little effort to conceal his deep concern. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.
“Vern, have you heard any of the girls talking about me?”
“Talking? About what?”
“Any of them angry? Did I offend one of them? Are any of them upset about something I did or said?”
“Nothing I heard about. Why? What’s this all about?”
“Either somebody is going to step forward now, or I think you’re about to witness the end of my coaching career at Shilo.”
Tom’s mind raced to ID a suspect. He’d been tough on Lindsey Wells for sure, but he didn’t think he’d crossed any lines with her. She was upset about her playing time, but not enough to make him a target. McAndrews? Grass? Vern’s twins? It could have been any of them, but Tom doubted it. What were they after? A new coach? They had a record number of wins. State championships. Was he too hard? Too demanding? The feedback at team meetings had only been positive. The girls made it a point to tell him what a good job he’d been doing. All of them, except for Jill.
“I realize you girls have already been through a lot these past couple of days. But Sergeant Murphy is right about consequences,” Powers said. “This sort of thing is not only illegal, but it can very well cost you the season. It’s an embarrassment to Coach Hawkins as well as to your school. I don’t know if one of you is angry with Coach about playing time, coaching style, or the drinks he gives you at halftime. No matter what it is that led to these posts, they are way—and I mean way—out of line. It won’t be tolerated. Now, I’ve worked out a deal with Coach Hawkins and Sergeant Murphy intended to save your season.”
Vern nudged Tom, but Tom hadn’t a clue about any deal. Murphy walked the line and collected the handouts. The girls seemed relieved to give them back.
“As long as the girl who created the account comes forward, or one of you anonymously tells us who did it, and we can verify it’s true, there won’t be any repercussions at all. Not for the person who wrote it or the rest of the team. If this sounds like I’m pressuring you to rat out your friend, well, damn straight I am. This is a very serious matter that I intend to take very seriously.”
Silence. All Tom heard was their silence. Come forward, dammit! End this now. Soon, he knew the girls would be back home with their parents. Parents would be calling parents, and the news would spread. Emails about him would clog up Shilo’s notoriously spotty Internet service. The superintendent would demand a meeting. Powers seemed oblivious. Murphy seemed to be gloating.
“Coach, do you have anything to add?” Powers asked.
Tom glared at the athletic director. “No, Craig. I think you’ve done quite enough already.”
“So, is anybody ready to come forward and take ownership?”
Not a single hand rose. Not a single girl spoke or took a step forward, until Jill’s cheeks flushed a bright shade of red. Without saying a word, she took off across the practice field, running faster than Tom had ever seen her run before.
Murphy went to his car and came back holding a clipboard with a paper attached. He handed the clipboard to Tom.
“Coach, we’re going to want to take a look at your laptop computer.”
“My school-issued computer?”
“That’s the one,” Murphy said.
“What’s this?” Tom asked.
“A consent form. You’re agreeing to let me take possession of your work computer.”
Tom didn’t say anything. He just started filling out the form.
Chapter 15
Tom paced around the kitchen. It was almost seven o’clock. Jill should have been home hours ago.
He texted her again.
Again she texted back: Green.
Where are you? I want your location, not status.
No answer.
He texted her again.
This time she responded.
Green!!!
At least he knew she wasn’t in any danger. Kip Lange hadn’t gotten to her. Jill was following their established communication plan in case they ever got separated. Tom would text her the question, “How are you doing?” If she was fine, her required response back to him was the word green. Any other reply, or no reply at all, and Tom would know something was wrong. Jill’s responding only with the word green was also her way of saying, “Leave me alone.”
Tom wanted to know where his daughter was and, more important, who she was with. He called every player on the team to ask if they’d seen or heard from Jill since practice. Shilo had two proper ways to exist: married with kids or retired with visiting grandchildren. Tom didn’t fit the Shilo mold. With news of the blog post spreading like a virus around town, Tom not only broke the mold, but he’d taken a bat and damn well shattered it.
Somewhat to Tom’s surprise, many of the girls and their parents hadn’t turned against him. At least for the moment, they were willing to believe Tom wasn’t a sexual predator. That he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Unfortunately, cooperative as some of them were, nobody could help him locate Jill.
Tom’s anxiousness increased to the point of making him physically ill. Headache. Upset stomach. His only relief came when Jill responded to his last three text messages.
Green.
Green.
Green.
Nine o’clock came and went. Tom put his jacket on. He had his car keys in hand, ready to drive the streets of Shilo, when a fire red Mustang pulled up to the curb and Jill jumped out of the passenger-side door. Tom watched Jill through the front-door sidelight windows. She bounced her way along the brick walkway, as though her world was void of worry. Tom retreated up the short carpeted staircase, and he stood in the kitchen entranceway, his arms folded tight across his chest.
Jill closed the front door quietly behind her.
“Where have you been?” Tom asked. Jill marched up the front stairs, passing within a foot of Tom without acknowledging his presence, let alone answering his question.
“Jill, I asked you a question. Please answer me. I’ve been worried sick. Where have you been?”
Jill took off her jacket as she walked the carpeted corridor toward her bedroom door, which was the first room on the right. She closed the door to her room quickly, barely giving Tom a glimpse inside. Pressing his body up against the pinewood, he understood perfectly well that the door wasn’t the real barrier between them. Tom silently cursed Craig Powers and Sergeant Brendan Murphy.
We were getting closer. I know we were, he thought.
“Jilly-bean, please talk to me. Who was that who drove you home?” Tom used her nickname, though he hadn’t done so in years. It came out because she would always be his Jilly-bean.
“I don’t want to talk right now,” came a muffled reply.
“Well, that isn’t really an option. I’m your father, Jill. I have a right to know where you were. You didn’t answer my calls, and I want to know who drove you home.”
Again no answer.
Tom continued, undeterred. “Look, I know today was really rough on you. I’m beyond angry about how it was handled, and I plan on speaking with Mr. Powers about it first thing tomorrow. I know it was embarrassing for you, too.”
Nothing.
“Dammit, Jill, I’ll stand here all night and talk to this door until I get an answer. Do you hear me?”
Tom pressed his open palm against her door. He heard the doorknob turn and felt the door open just a crack.
Jill placed her bright and beautiful moon-shaped face into the opening. “Did you do it?”
“No, sweetie, I didn’t do anything like that. They thought peer pressure would get the person who made up that stuff to come forward.”
�
�I talked to a bunch of the girls afterward. Nobody wrote it. They think it’s true.”
“Jilly, come out. Let’s talk about this.”
Jill opened the door. Whipped it open would be more accurate.
“What are you trying to do to me?” she shouted. “Ruin my life? Because that’s what you’re doing!” In that instant his daughter, who had been simmering with anger, broke into a boil.
“I moved here so you didn’t have to move away. I did this for you.”
“Well, next time don’t do me any favors, okay!” Jill tried to slam the door shut, but Tom’s foot got in the way. “Move your foot. I’m tired and I want to go to bed.”
“Not until you talk to me. Who drove you home tonight?”
Jill slammed the door against her father’s foot again and again, hard as her momentum would allow. Sharp jolts of pain shot up Tom’s leg each time the door slammed into his foot, but his face didn’t show the hurt.
Jill opened her bedroom door with an exasperated sigh and slipped past Tom before he could stop her. She went straight into her mother’s bedroom, where she once again closed the door behind her. Jill slept in her mother’s bed some nights, but Tom never let on that he knew. If she wanted to open up about her feelings, he figured she’d do so in her own time.
Tom knocked. “I’m not giving up until you talk to me.”
When Jill didn’t respond, Tom pressed his ear against the door and could hear the shower running. Tom trotted downstairs. With a few turns of a knob, he shut off the hot water. It took a few minutes for the water in the pipes to go completely cold. Once it did, Tom heard Jill shriek, curse, and finally open the bedroom door. She had on her mother’s green terry-cloth bathrobe, the one Tom had bought for Kelly a year before the divorce. Jill’s hair looked a tangled, wet mess, with soapy remains throughout.
“That’s not fair.”
“Neither is ignoring me.”
“Turn the hot water back on.” Jill tried to pass him, but this time, Tom blocked her way. Jill sighed loudly. “Fine,” she said. “What is it you want to know?”
“Where were you and who drove you home?”
“At a friend’s house and a friend. There. Happy?”
“No. Which friend’s house, and who’s the guy with the Mustang? I sure as heck hope he’s young enough to still have a curfew.”
“Why? You afraid of another old guy competing with you for all the young girls?” Jill saw the hurt in his eyes and gave a slight smile of victory.
“Craig Powers thought you might have started all this,” Tom said.
Jill’s face turned a bright shade of red before her color drained. Tom hadn’t meant to say it, but Jill made it impossible not to become confrontational. Tom watched as she shook with rage.
“That’s disgusting! Why did he even say that?”
“He was thinking you did it to get me in trouble. I told them they were wrong. You’d never do anything like that. Even if you hate me.”
“I do hate you,” Jill said, but quietly, without much emotion.
“I don’t believe that’s true,” Tom replied. “But I need your help, Jill. I’m going to go on the offensive and find out who posted that garbage. But you have to believe me. I would never do such a thing, and I would never do anything to hurt you. I love you more than anything in the world. You are my world.” If Tom could have one dying wish, at that moment it would be for Jill to let him embrace her. He knew better than to ask. He lifted her chin.
“Mitchell Boyd,” Jill said, pulling her chin away.
“What?”
“You asked where I was and who drove me home. I was with Mitchell Boyd.”
“Roland Boyd’s son?” Tom wanted desperately for it to be another Mitchell Boyd from another town, though that was more than unlikely.
“Yeah. But we’re just friends, so don’t worry.”
Tom was worried. Very worried, in fact. Mitchell’s reputation made it impossible for a father not to worry. He cursed himself, because he was the one who had brought Jill to Boyd’s house. “I don’t approve.”
“I don’t care,” Jill said.
An hour later, Tom and Jill had come to a truce of sorts. After their big blowout, he’d gone to the basement and returned carrying a large whiteboard that he used to map out different plays for the team. On that whiteboard, Tom had drawn a soccer goal. In front of the goal he drew a large square, creating an obstacle in the way of two stick figures that he’d also drawn. Tom drew a bow behind the head of the smaller of the two stick figures.
Jill realized that bow was meant to signify her. “I’m not a ten-year-old girl,” she said, but not angrily.
“Humor me for a second. When we can’t figure out something going wrong on the pitch, we always draw it out. It helps us to visualize the challenge and search out solutions.”
“So you want to draw out our issues?” Jill asked.
Tom nodded. “And together we’ll look for ways to get around them.”
Jill went silent.
Tom smiled, undeterred. “I think trust is our number one challenge.” He wrote the word trust in the center of the square. “On the field you’ve got to trust your teammates. You’ve got to believe that they’ll be in position to receive your pass. If you don’t have trust, you don’t have a team. What’s it going to take to get you to trust me, Jill?”
Jill thought awhile before answering. “Time,” she said.
Tom nodded and wrote the word time on the whiteboard. He drew an arrow from the word to the stick figure representing himself. “That’s on me, Jill,” he said. “Over time I’ve got to earn your trust. I accept that. But you also have to earn mine. I didn’t know where you were. I didn’t know if you were hurt. Or worse. I had no idea who you were with. To make this work, we need to trust each other. So I’m just asking, what could you have done that would have helped me?”
“Call, I guess,” Jill said. “I should have told you where I was. But I was upset.”
Tom wrote call under Jill’s stick figure.
With his hand, he erased a small corner of the square with the word trust in it. “Even if you’re upset, we’re still on the same team. Shutting me out won’t change that fact. We’ve got a long way to go to get past this obstacle.” Tom dotted the square with the point of his dry-erase marker to emphasize his point. “But I think this is a start.”
“Tell me again you had nothing to do with what happened to Mom.”
“Honey, I had nothing to do with it,” Tom said. “And I need you to trust me on that.” He tapped the marker against the written word trust on the whiteboard and forced a hug out of her. It was a brief, strained embrace, but it lasted long enough to give him hope.
Chapter 16
Rainy felt whole-body tired. Lately, she’d been working way too much OT. She’d put a bug in Clarence Stern’s ear about needing help with some imaging work. She didn’t mention the images were from a series Tomlinson told her not to bother Stern about.
“No can help,” Stern had said during one of their passing hallway conversations. “These days I’ve got to schedule time to take a piss.”
Rainy remained convinced that one or more of these images would eventually leave the closed circles of the child porn trade for wider distribution across the Internet. It was only a matter of time before there was another Melanie Smyth, she had warned Tomlinson. But Tomlinson didn’t share her sense of urgency. If the pictures had been of a bomb, no doubt her boss would have made Stern pee in a cup until he tracked down the source.
But this was terrorism of a different kind.
When Rainy’s cell phone rang, she answered it without checking the number or thinking about who might be calling.
“Rainy, it’s Clarence. I’ve got a trade to offer.”
Rainy’s heart skipped a beat.
“Talk,” she said.
“Do you have any plans tonight?”
“No,” Rainy lied. She had a blind date that would need to be canceled.
&n
bsp; “Then come up to my office, and let’s make a deal.”
Stern’s office was a spacious, refurbished conference room on the sixth floor of their new building. The agency might have preached fiscal responsibility, but such frugality was not on display in Stern’s world. The Lair looked like an Atari 2600 to Stern’s Xbox 360. Stern sat on his swivel chair with his back to Rainy. His head bobbed to whatever beat thumped in his headphones. The array of computer monitors cast his body’s heavyset outline in a bright blue glow.
In Stern’s case, Rainy figured the Bureau decided to ignore their physical fitness requirement in exchange for his boundless talent. The man’s round physique suggested he would struggle to pull a cumulative score above a six on the physical fitness test. Rainy’s last score of thirty, by contrast, was reported to be among the highest of all female agents.
Rainy tapped Stern on the shoulder. Stern slowly pulled the headphones off his head. Even though he’d invited her up, Stern looked irritated by her intrusion, but he looked irritated by just about everything.
“What’s the trade?” Rainy asked.
“I’ve got four arms’ worth of work here and two arms to do it all.”
“You want my arms?” Rainy asked.
Stern nodded. “Not in a physical sense. Do you know how to log surveillance video?”
“It’s not rocket science,” said Rainy.
“It’s six hours of tape.”
Rainy groaned. “Six hours? That’s torture.”
“You do six hours of logging for me, and I’ll ID as many of the girls in that new series you found.”
“You’re that tired of my bugging you?”
“I’m that tired of logging surveillance video,” Stern replied.
“Deal,” said Rainy.
Rainy returned to Stern’s office twenty minutes later and handed him a thumb drive. The Lair offered a protective environment for safeguarding her evidence. She preferred not to take evidence out of the Lair, but saw no alternative. If she wanted Stern’s help, she had to take the risk.
Helpless Page 9
