Huston was looking up at him now. “Do you know where he is?”
“Not at the moment. But we will. We’ll find him.”
Huston shook his head. “I never thought,” he said. “I never would’ve imagined.”
DeMarco said, “We never can.”
More minutes passed. DeMarco was beginning to feel chilled now, a bone-deep shiver. “We need to get down from here, Tom. Get you a place to rest. Some decent food.”
After a few seconds, Huston leaned onto one hand and gradually pushed himself to his feet. But instead of moving toward the stairs, he slid away from DeMarco, four feet away against the curving rail.
“Thomas,” DeMarco said. “C’mon.”
Huston shook his head. “You go. Just leave me be.”
“To do what?” He took a step toward Huston but stopped when the man backed away and leaned his upper body over the rail. “Thomas, think. Forget Poe. There’s no Eden by the lake. And your Annabel isn’t here.”
“Then leave. Or else I’ll have to find out if that’s true.”
“Does that mean that if I leave you here, you won’t try to find out?”
Huston looked down at the rocks.
DeMarco said, “We’ll catch him, Thomas. We will.”
“Then that’s when I’ll come back.”
DeMarco considered his options. He could lunge for Huston, one long stride and grab, but would it be quick enough to stop him from going over the rail? Probably not. Was it really possible that Huston might take the plunge? His family has been butchered, DeMarco thought. What would you do?
He could call for backup, surround the lighthouse with men and safety nets. And they’ll get here just in time, he told himself, to scrape Huston off the rocks.
Or he could take the man at his word. He wasn’t a criminal; he wasn’t a murderer.
“Okay, I’m going to trust you,” DeMarco told him, “on one condition.” He reached inside his jacket and took a business card from the pocket. He held it out toward Huston. “My number is on here. You can get to a phone, right? So you check in with me every…six or so hours, okay? Agreed?”
“Lay the card down. Don’t come any closer.”
“It’s going to blow away.”
“Then put it inside somewhere.”
DeMarco lowered his hand. “Will you give me your word? Because I know you’re an honest man, Thomas. I know you’re a man of honor.”
Huston blew out a puff of breath. “I’m not the man I used to be.”
“We are who we are,” DeMarco answered. “And I believe in you. Deal?”
A few seconds passed. Then, “Leave the card inside.”
DeMarco placed the card and three twenties at the top of the stairs. At the last moment, he decided to lay his cell phone atop them.
The instant he got back to his car, he used his police radio to call the telephone company and instruct them to track the movements of his phone at all times. Then he began to question his own judgment. Had he made the right decision? Was he letting his identification with Huston influence him?
Of course he was. It’s what a friend would do.
He grabbed the police radio again and notified the Ohio State Highway Patrol that a potential suicide was at the top of the Perry Point lighthouse. “Bring a psychologist and rescue equipment,” he said. “No lights or sirens. I’ll meet you at the lighthouse.”
He climbed out of the car and made his way back to the security fence. Up and over again, as quietly as possible. He crept low to the open lighthouse door. Sneaked to the top of the stairs, wincing with every creak. At the top he found his cell phone, nothing else. He knew that the rocks too would be empty of everything but spindrift. In Eden, who needed money or Sergeant Ryan DeMarco’s number?
He called off the trace on his phone, canceled the rescue unit, waded back through the darkness to his car, his flashlight beam swinging like a sickle.
Fifty-Three
Before the morning debriefing, DeMarco met with his supervisor in Bowen’s office. The BOLOs on Inman, Bonnie, and Huston had already been updated. Huston, if spotted, was to be approached with caution and if possible picked up and held in protective custody. Bonnie was to be considered a possible hostage of Inman, a possible accomplice. Inman was to be apprehended by any means necessary.
Bowen said, “I’m going to be honest with you, Ryan. This part about you just leaving Huston at the rail and going back to your car, I’m more than a little uncomfortable with that.”
“That’s because you weren’t there,” DeMarco said. “Another step toward him and he would have jumped. Would you be more comfortable with that?”
“You shouldn’t have been there on your own in the first place.”
“I was following a lead. Like I said, you can’t know because you weren’t there.”
“So why didn’t you just back away from him for a minute, out of sight, and use your cell phone?”
“Did you read the report?”
“It’s six pages long. I skimmed.”
“Then skim it again. And this time read the fucking thing.”
“You going to get testy with me?”
“It’s eight o’clock in the fucking morning, I didn’t sleep all fucking night, and the fucking report is right there on your fucking desk. Judgment call. Quit busting my fucking balls, why don’t ya?”
“You think because you used to be my supervisor you can talk to me like that?”
“Yeah I do. So drink your fucking cappuccino mocha latte grande and leave me the fuck alone for a while. I’ve got a debriefing to conduct.” With that, DeMarco turned and strode out of Bowen’s office.
Four seconds later, he stepped onto the threshold again. “By the way, I apologize for swearing.”
Bowen licked the foam off his lips. “Apology accepted.”
• • •
After the debriefing, DeMarco stood at his office window for a while and stared at the abandoned cardinal nest. So maybe you saved his life, he told himself. Think of it that way.
Yeah and maybe you didn’t.
He imagined himself in Huston’s place, imagined himself doing the thinking for Huston, feeling Huston’s emotions. You’ve just now found out the name of the man who forced you to stab your own baby and who slaughtered your family. You found out that the woman you trusted and helped—for no other reason than because your innate compassion told you to help her, despite your own misgivings—later betrayed you to her troglodyte boyfriend. Maybe she was coerced into it, beaten, threatened, who knows. Does that matter? No, what matters now is that you know the man’s name. So you don’t jump off the lighthouse. Your previously depleted body now swells with purpose. Fuck compassion, you’re through with that. You can maybe spare an ounce or two of compassion for Bonnie, for what she might have gone through, but not a drop for Inman. Him, you want to make suffer. Him, you want to punish with extreme prejudice. Your own life is over, you know that. You accept it as an irreconcilable fact. But before it officially ends, you want to see Inman suffer. You need it. Fuck food, fuck sleep, fuck oxygen. Your heart pumps lava now. Your pulse pounds revenge.
DeMarco felt the heat in his own veins and was uncertain whose thoughts were fanning that fire, Huston’s or his own. Not that it mattered. He wanted Inman as much as Huston did. Huston’s chances of finding the man were slim to none. No vehicle, no weapon, no knowledge of Inman’s whereabouts, no means of locating him. DeMarco’s chances, with the nation’s finest law enforcement units all backing him up, were better.
Fifty-Four
A long, gray day filled with long, dark thoughts. DeMarco quietly seethed through the first two hours of the morning, waiting for the telephone to ring. When he thought himself capable of conducting an interrogation that did not involve strangulation or similar means of persuasion, he drove north to a small mobile home on the p
eriphery of a sand quarry and hammered on the metal door until Bonnie’s brother, Moby, appeared, blinking behind the filmy glass. He was wearing a wife-beater and gray sweatpants cut off at the knees, a two-day beard, and the look of a scrawny rat terrier that had recently been kicked in the balls by a Siamese cat.
DeMarco didn’t wait for an invitation to go inside. Moby’s empty hands were all the invitation he required. He pushed past the startled man and strode through the compact kitchen/dining/living room. “Where’s your sister?” he asked.
Moby rubbed his crust of beard. “I wish to fuck I knew.”
“How about Carl Inman? Seen him lately?”
“What the fuck is an Inman?”
“Tex. The bouncer.”
“Far as I know Tex’s last name is Snyder.”
“Uh-huh,” DeMarco said. He poked his head into the first bedroom. A tangle of sheets and a green wool blanket on the mattress, the thick scent of farts and old sweat. Dirty clothes on the floor, a soup bowl filled with and surrounded by broken peanut shells and dust, an open bottle of Lake Erie Rhine wine beside the bowl, four inches of wine remaining.
Unless that’s his piss jar, DeMarco thought. He was careful not to touch the bottle when he knelt beside the bed to look underneath. Three balled-up socks and what appeared to be the twentieth-year reunion of a large class of dust bunnies.
“There’s nobody else here if that’s what you’re looking for.”
The other bedroom was filled wall to wall with cardboard boxes and white garbage bags crammed with empty wine bottles. Moby said, “Those are all going to the recycler when I can get somebody to haul them away for me.”
“Good to see you’re living green,” DeMarco said. He took a quick glance in the bathroom, winced, and turned back toward Moby, who backed into the living room as DeMarco approached.
Moby said, “Aren’t you supposed to have a warrant or something before you can look around in a fella’s place?”
“I just came for the pleasant conversation,” DeMarco answered. “And to admire your talent for interior design.” He put two fingers against Moby’s shoulder and pushed him down onto the sofa. DeMarco sat across from him on the edge of the orange vinyl banquette bench. He felt the little mobile home shiver on its foundation. He felt the fragility of Moby’s life.
When DeMarco leaned forward, Moby leaned back. DeMarco said, “So as far as you know, the guy your sister has been banging for the past, what, seventeen years or so if you count the conjugal visits, is a guy named Snyder?”
Moby looked at him and blinked.
“Don’t even try to fucking bullshit me,” DeMarco told him. “She’s your sister and she’s been taking care of you most of your life. I understand that. I also understand that a guy who looks and smells the way you do has a liver that’s only going to last a couple more years if he’s lucky. A couple more years you’d probably rather not spend in a little concrete room where the only wine you’ll get to drink is what comes squirting out of some fat prison guard’s dick.”
“Prison for what? I didn’t do anything.”
“How about as an accomplice to murder? Multiple homicides, to be specific.”
“Bullshit.”
The man’s surprise seemed genuine to DeMarco. “Maybe you’re not in the loop on those, but you know what? Tough shit. You withhold knowledge of your sister’s whereabouts, you’re still going to spend your last days sipping golden wine through a hairy straw.”
“Look, she told me to call him Snyder if anybody asked. And that’s all she told me.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Moby scratched beneath his chin. “What day is this?”
“It’s Saturday, the original Sabbath. I should be sitting in a church pew singing praises to the Almighty, but thanks to you, I’m sitting in this tin shithole instead, and I don’t much feel like singing. So I swear to God, I’m going to drag your scrawny ass out to my car in about five seconds if you don’t stop scratching and tell me what I want to know.”
“She brought me home after we closed up Thursday. Then yesterday morning, her and Fuckhead come by to tell me they had to go somewhere for a couple days.”
“They came in Bonnie’s car?”
“I was in bed, man. Barely awake. They let themselves in and came to my room and told me.”
“A couple of days.”
“That’s what she said. Said she’d be back in a couple fucking days. At most.”
“And what did Fuckhead have to say?”
“Told me to keep my mouth shut or he’d twist my balls off with a pair of pliers.”
“And yet here we are, chatting like this.”
“Hey, nobody said nothing about there being murders involved. I don’t believe in hurting people.”
“But you know that Fuckhead believes in it, don’t you?”
“I know how he treats my sister.”
“And you too, I bet.”
“I couldn’t care less how he treats me.”
“Still, you probably wouldn’t mind much if I were to give him a nice room of his own far away from here for the next hundred years or so.”
“All I care about is that you fix it so Bonnie can’t hear from him or know where he is. When it comes to fucking up your life, I don’t have much room to talk, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out why a woman ever lets herself be suckered by a piece of shit like him.”
“It’s a mystery, no question about it.”
“That place where I work?” Moby said. “Why do those girls do that to themselves? I mean some of those girls are so fucking sweet.”
“They do it for the money, I guess.”
“Hell, man. Women could own this whole planet if they wanted to. They lock up their pussies long enough, every red-blooded man alive would be on his knees within a couple months.”
“Maybe so. Or maybe human nature is a little more complicated than that.”
“There’s no complication to it. Men want pussy and they’ll do whatever they have to, to get it.”
DeMarco thought, This from a man whose pecker probably hasn’t worked for years. On the other hand, maybe that’s why he’s so smart.
“I mean, I just don’t understand it,” Moby said. “Women should be treated special, you know? Yet they let themselves be treated like crap.”
“Happens every day, Moby. All over the world.”
“Which only makes it an even bigger fucking mystery, don’t it?”
Fifty-Five
Monday dawned like a mile-long freight train filled with radioactive sewage. DeMarco trudged through it. All he could do now was to wait for a tip, a sighting of Inman or Bonnie. He felt as heavy and hollow as a gut-shot dog dragging its ass uphill. He wondered where Huston had spent the night, wondered if he was still alive. You never should have let Huston go, he told himself. Should have taken him into protective custody, tricked him, told him a lie, whatever was necessary. You should have recognized Inman that night you saw him at Whispers, should have looked back through the fog of all those years, instantly recognized Inman, instantly fit all the pieces together, instantly shot the beast on sight. You should have never become a cop. A teacher, maybe, like Laraine. Social studies and history, that’s what you would be good at. Lesson plans and field trips.
He busied himself with paperwork and chastised himself and second-guessed the way he had handled things. The mistakes went years into the past. If he had made better choices on a rainy night twelve years ago, little Ryan might still be alive. His house might not be a stinking, sunless cave. His soul might not be a dead leaf, empty shell, dried-up turd, whatever it had become.
“You look like crap,” Bowen told him in the afternoon.
“You are crap,” DeMarco said from the threshold.
“What is this, like your twelfth trip to the coffeepot?”
<
br /> “Go back to your Internet porn and mind your own business.”
“Get in here,” Bowen said.
“I’m busy.”
“Get in here now. And close the damn door.”
DeMarco stepped over the threshold and pulled the door shut. He stood with his left buttock pressed to the doorknob.
Bowen told him, “You look like a junkie, you know that?”
DeMarco slurped his coffee because he knew Bowen hated the sound.
Bowen opened a desk drawer, rummaged around inside, brought out an amber prescription bottle, shook two white tablets into his hand, laid them on the far edge of the desk. “Pick those up, get your ass home, swallow those pills, and go to bed. And don’t give me any shit about it.”
“I don’t take medications,” DeMarco said.
“Right. Caffeine all day, Jack all night, no food, no sleep. You’re destroying yourself. You realize that, don’t you?”
DeMarco smiled, then took a longer, louder slurp.
“Here’s the deal, Ryan, and it’s the only deal you’re going to get. You take those pills, go home, and get some sleep. Or else I’m taking you off the case.”
“You wouldn’t fucking dare.”
“You’re supposed to be heading this investigation, but look at you; you’re a mess. I don’t know what it is about Huston, but you’re taking this case way too personally. It was probably a mistake for me to let you head the investigation in the first place. But just because we’re friends doesn’t mean I’m going to keep looking the other way while you rip yourself to pieces over this guy.”
DeMarco remained with his back pressed to the door. He tried to still the caffeine jitters streaming through him, watched the ripples in his coffee cup.
Bowen’s voice softened. “Or maybe this isn’t about Huston at all. Maybe it’s about Laraine somehow? Or Ryan Jr. maybe?”
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