Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  "Listen, we—" Gascoyne began.

  "I'm not trying to be the star of my own movie here," Brice fired back at him. "Are you?"

  Still no expression. Nakamura must have been a killer poker player.

  "All right, Sheriff McGreggor. We'll play this one your way. I'll ride with you … so you can fill me in on what you know about this man that you haven't shared with me."

  The address that'd been provided by an anonymous caller turned out to be a double-wide trailer snuggled into a wide spot beside the road. The grass in the small patch of front yard was neatly mowed and a tidy flower garden bloomed beside the porch steps. Set in the woods behind the house was a tin building with two bay doors and a single small door. There were several cars parked around the building — not Appalachian-lawn-art wrecks but late-model cars. One was a pickup truck with the hood up. The bay doors on the building were closed.

  Brice stopped so his cruiser was out of sight from the trailer. A swing set was visible behind the trailer and a plastic Big Wheel lay overturned in the driveway.

  Once Brice had confirmed that his deputies were in place, he and Nakamura got out of the car, exchanging a glance at the toys. The two FBI agents, Gascoyne and Hardesty, parked and advanced only as far as Brice's cruiser. Brice crossed the small yard alone and stepped up onto the concrete slab porch. A handprint was visible on the edge, made by a little hand in wet cement beside the date June, 2013. He knocked on the door.

  The woman who opened the door was about forty and carried an infant on her hip. A little girl, maybe four or five years old, played with toys on the floor behind her. The woman looked tired, sick maybe, and when she saw Brice, her face registered surprise and fear, which she quickly covered with a tenuous smile.

  "Sheriff McGreggor, what brings you way out here?"

  "Hello, Mrs. Kent." Brice recognized her. She'd even checked out his groceries a couple of times. "I'm looking for your husband, Samuel Kent. Is he home?"

  "No," she said, but it didn't appear to be an answer to his question. More denial. She shook her head and said again, "No … please, no. He …"

  "Where is your husband, ma'am? I just need to talk to him, that's all."

  She scrambled to regain her composure, feigned confusion. "What's this about? Sam's not in some kind of trouble, is he?"

  Brice put steel into his tone. "You need to tell me where he is — now."

  "Out back. Working on a car."

  Brice turned and headed down the steps, speaking quietly into the mic at his shoulder. "Subject is in the garage. Cover the rear exit."

  Quickly crossing the distance between the house and the garage, Brice drew his duty weapon, a Glock 22 pistol. Facing the wall beside the door, he moved slowly along it until he was close enough to reach out to the knob. It flashed through his mind that movies and cop shows always depicted officers clearing doorways by placing their backs against the wall beside the door and then suddenly spinning around into the room. Presenting their full body as a target, with no reconnaissance and an unsteady weapon. The only explanation he'd ever been able to come up with for such an absurd distortion of police procedure was that it looked cool, and directors likely placed Tom Cruise with his back to the wall so he would be facing the camera.

  Before Brice had a chance to reach for the knob, open the door a crack and peek around the jamb, a voice called out from inside.

  "Come on in, Sheriff." The voice sounded worn out. "I knew you'd show up eventually."

  Brice opened the door and pushed it inward, then looked carefully around the door frame. A man in greasy coveralls, with a mop of shaggy black hair and a full beard was standing in the middle of a small office. He had his hands up.

  "You know perfectly well I'm not Samuel Kent. Marcy's brother called you, didn't he?"

  Brice said nothing to the man, but spoke into his shoulder mic and Deputy Fletcher came running out of the woods and joined him outside the garage door. Then the two of them stepped inside the building, both with weapons drawn but pointed at the floor.

  "Mr. Kent, you—" Brice began.

  "Drop the Mr. Kent, okay? You know I'm Joe Goddard or you wouldn't have come." The man held his arms out in front of him, offering his wrists for handcuffs. "I know why you're here."

  The deputy holstered his weapon, moved forward and cuffed the man as Brice put his own gun away.

  "Mr. Goddard, you are under arrest for violating the state sex offender registration law," Brice said. "You have the right to remain silent …"

  Brice took the man by the elbow and walked him out the door as he continued to intone his rights. Nakamura and the other agents came out from behind Brice's cruiser. Brice caught Fletch's eye and nodded toward the garage where Goddard had been working and the deputy stepped to the door and scanned the inside of the building — a second set of eyes. Brice had already seen for himself that there was nothing inside the workshop big enough to hold a child.

  Goddard's wife was standing on the back porch. She still carried the baby. The little girl was beside her, watching with wide, frightened eyes. When she saw her husband, the woman rushed down the steps and hurried toward him, leaving the little girl on the porch, looking lost and confused. Deputy Tackett intercepted her, "I'm sorry, ma'am, but you have to stay back."

  "I'll call Walter," she said. "He'll help—"

  "You know he won't," the man said as Brice led him past her. "Not when he finds out." He looked back over his shoulder. "You need to take the girls and go to your grandmother's."

  "No! I'm staying right here." She was following along as Brice escorted the man to the cruiser. "I'll be waiting for you. You'll be home soon and I'll be right here, waiting for you."

  Agent Hardesty approached the woman then, and asked politely for her permission to search the house, pointing out that if she refused, the agent would wait while another agent secured a court-ordered search warrant. Brice didn't hear what the woman said, if she said anything at all, just saw her nod and gesture toward the house while she remained where she was in the front yard watching Brice load her husband into the back seat of his cruiser. The little girl ran to her and buried her face in her mother's skirt.

  Nakamura got back into the car on the passenger side and when Brice got in behind the wheel, the FBI agent turned in his seat to look at the handcuffed man behind him.

  "I'm Special Agent Haruto Nakamura with the FBI and we're taking you to the sheriff's office to ask you a few questions."

  "Fine. Ask away. It won't matter what I say to you, you're not going to believe me. You people never do."

  They rode back into town in silence and parked behind the courthouse. The deputy escorted the prisoner into the building and into what passed for an interrogation room, small with a table and four chairs, the requisite straight-backed kind. No two-way mirror, though. But there was a surveillance camera in the corner.

  Nakamura turned to Brice at the door.

  "I'd like you to sit in on the questioning, Sheriff McGreggor. Sit in. I'll be conducting the interrogation. I want you there to watch for inconsistencies in his story — you know the geography, how long it'd take to get from point A to point B. Listen for anything you know's bogus."

  Brice nodded and he accompanied the two FBI agents into the room where Goddard was seated in one of the chairs facing the door. The sheriff picked up one of the other chairs and moved it over by the door, swung it around and straddled it, resting his arms on the back.

  The two agents remained standing.

  "This is Special Agent Elijah Gascoyne, Mr. Goddard — so you do admit that you are Joe Goddard?" Nakamura said.

  "That'd be me, Mr. Joseph Alexander Goddard, registered sex offender."

  "But you didn't register, Mr. Goddard, and that's why you're here today. The law requires—"

  "You think I don't know what the law requires? That I show up and get my picture taken, fingerprinted — like my fingerprints are going to change from one visit to the next for crying out loud! Let you perfo
rm a strip search to make sure I haven't gotten any new 'identifying marks' or gotten rid of any old ones, give you my address, my employer's address, and …"

  He'd been on a roll, but the air suddenly whooshed out of him.

  "And a pound of flesh. Every six months. Yeah, I know what the law requires."

  Chapter Nine

  Joe Goddard sat with his head in his hands, shaking it slowly back and forth. He was a big man, made more intimidating by the full head of hair and the long beard, which Brice suspected he'd grown when he'd decided to become Samuel Kent, so his picture as a sex offender wouldn't match his current face.

  "Mr. Goddard, you have been advised of your rights, have you not?" Nakamura said.

  "I know what rights I have — none. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. As soon as I was convicted of a sex crime I lost my rights as an American."

  "How do you figure that?"

  "Oh, come on, don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. There are the rights granted by the First Amendment of the Constitution to all American citizens and then there are the limited array of rights granted to sex offenders. The first list is very long. The second is very short."

  The man sounded much more intelligent and articulate than his dress and demeanor would indicate.

  "Tell me what you mean."

  "Can we just stop this." He looked up, both disgusted and resigned. "This little game. You know that I am a registered sex offender who has not reported as required by — well, in Kentucky it's Kentucky Revised Statute 402.205, Section 5A, but I don't know the exact statute number in West Virginia. And you know that puts me in violation of some other unnamed West Virginia statute, which is punishable by I-guess-I'll-find-out-what real soon. Can we all just agree to that and move on?"

  "I'd like to ask you some questions about where you were and what you were doing yesterday afternoon. You were working on the construction of the bandstands for the Cottonwood Festival, is that correct?"

  "You know it is." He cast a glance at Brice. "Your deputy took down my name, phone number and address just like he did everybody else's, probably fifty people in the area where I was. But did you haul the other forty-nine people in here in handcuffs to talk to them or did you just single me out because you figure I must be responsible for that little boy's disappearance, given what a living pond scum of a human being I am?"

  "So you know there was a child missing from that school on the day you were working there?"

  "Of course I know there was a kid missing."

  "Mr. Goddard, would you mind walking us through what you did on that day? Start at the beginning."

  He sighed, and sat back in the chair.

  "Well, my day started at about three o'clock in the morning when Emily woke up crying. My wife and I take turns with night duty. We both work so it's not fair for one of us to be tired all the time and Emily is … let's just say she's not the most good-natured five-month-old in the world. Colic."

  "So you got up at three o'clock?"

  "… and I walked the floor with the baby until about four-thirty when she finally nodded back off. But I was afraid to lay her down in her crib because if she woke up again I wouldn't get a wink of sleep and I had to go to work at six. So I just sat up in the recliner with her and dozed until her mother got up for work."

  "Where does your wife work?"

  "That's none of your business! You leave her out of this. And my kids, too. This is all on me. I violated the registration rules, they didn't. They're innocent bystanders and you have no right to drag them into it." The emotion in his voice was two parts anger and three parts anguish. Add water and stir.

  "I can find out without asking you, and it'd be a whole lot easier—"

  "Okay, okay, she works as a checker at Best Buy. Has a Masters in accounting and she rings up people's groceries."

  "Why would she be—?"

  "Oh, come on. She can't claim her education because the diplomas are all in her real name, not the particular alias we happen to be currently using. Just the cost of doing business when you're dodging the law."

  "So go on, Mr. Goddard, what did you do when your wife got up?"

  "We both got ready to go to work, took the kids to the daycare center and I dropped her off and got to work — Peterson Lumber Company, but you knew that — about seven. We loaded up the truck and went to the school."

  "Did you remain on the worksite all day? Did you leave at any time?"

  "Yes … and no. Let's cut to the chase. You want to know if I had anything to do with the disappearance of that little boy. There's absolutely no reason for you to think such a thing except — drum roll, please — I am a registered sex offender. So whenever you need somebody to blame for some heinous crime — bingo, there's my name, right there on the list. Why do you think I changed my name?"

  "Why did you change your name?"

  "Oh, come on! I couldn't get a job, couldn't pass a background check. I couldn't find anywhere to live, the neighborhoods all had regulations about people with records in sex offenses. I'm looking at Jenny starting kindergarten next year and do you know how far we'd have to drive her — because I can't live within five miles of an elementary school — or of a public park, or a church or …"

  He took a breath.

  "My wife and my family are suffering for something they didn't do. Well, Marcy did it, but hey, she was the victim, not the perpetrator."

  "What does that mean?"

  "You read my record, didn't you?"

  "Why don't you tell us about it anyway?"

  Goddard let out a long breath.

  "It's all in the record. I was a history teacher." He fingered his beard and looked at Brice, seated quietly by the door. "Look a lot like a history teacher now, don't I? So I was hot out of college, my first teaching job in an urban high school in Louisville. I was twenty-one years old, on fire to make a difference in the lives of my students. Yeah, right. I made a difference alright. At least in the life of one of them."

  He stopped again, continued in a quieter voice.

  "Marcy was in my first period class. She was a senior, but she had skipped a grade" — he smiled — "because she was so smart! So she wouldn't turn eighteen until right before graduation. Her mother died when she was nine and she'd been looking after three younger brothers — cooked, cleaned, took them to the doctor, made sure the older ones got their homework. She wasn't your typical seventeen-year-old girl."

  He looked almost wistful.

  "And there she was every day, sitting in the back row. And … I was twenty-one years old and should have known better but I was an idiot, okay, just fell for her hook, line and … ankle bracelet. I tried to keep my feelings to myself, but one day after school, several students and I were working on a history project … they left and we were alone … and I found out she felt the same way I did.

  "Oh, come on, you know how the story goes. We started sneaking around to see each other. We were in love. Yeah, sounds trite, but it was true. I loved her and she loved me. But then … enter her father on the scene. He found out about us and went to the authorities and I was arrested, charged with statutory rape, convicted and sentenced to …"

  He took a swallow.

  "Eight years in prison." He shook his head. "Eight years."

  He glanced back at Nakamura's expressionless face and continued.

  "So there went my life. And her life, too. I served five of those years. Five years in prison as a 'kiddie-fiddler.' The other inmates … those were hard years. Then I was paroled. While I was in prison, Marcy went to college, got a graduate degree and was teaching in a junior college. When I got out, we got married. That was seven years ago."

  He shook his head.

  "If I had it to do over again, I would have refused to answer a single one of her letters while I was in prison. I meant to, intended to, told her to go on with her life and to forget about me. But …"

  He stopped and looked at the men, one at a time.

  "When you were seventeen years
old, did you believe in love? Did you maybe fall in love? Well, she did. And it was real. Her father was a monster."

  His voice took on a hard edge.

  "It was such a cosmic joke. After we were married, she admitted to me that he had started sexually abusing her when she was five years old. That's why he went off like a rocket when she and I got together. She was a senior in high school and he had never allowed her to go on a single date! Not to the movies, or the prom. He kept her at home, under his thumb because he was …"

  Brice watched him grab hold of his emotions, lower his rising voice. When he continued, he ground the words out through clenched teeth.

  "When I found out, I went crazy. I had loved Marcy, wanted to marry her. He had raped her — how many times in more than a decade? But I went to prison for five years and he lived a normal life as an upstanding and upright citizen of the community, on the elder board of the church and …"

  The momentum his anger had granted him failed and he continued in a flat, emotionless voice.

  "You don't care about any of this. You probably don't even believe it, but you can check out the facts … even if you believe I put my own spin on them."

  He grew quiet for a moment.

  "If I could have, I'd have been guilty of a far more heinous crime than falling in love with a seventeen-year-old girl. I'd have been guilty of murder. When she finally admitted to me what that monster had done to her, I'd have killed him. Wanted to kill him. Ached to put a bullet in his brain. But by that time there was nothing left of his brain. He was in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s. Didn't even know who Marcy was."

  He stopped again, looked at Nakamura.

  "I didn't have anything to do with the disappearance of that child. Why on earth would I do a thing like that? He's only a couple of years older than my own daughter. I don't have 'a thing for little boys.' I fell in love with an underage girl who had a monster father and I paid for that with five years of my life behind bars at the mercy of the other inmates who … And Marcy's paying for it now with me.