Patrick Bowers 08 - Every Crooked Path

by Steven James

  Honesty is the best policy.

  As they began the meal, they talked casually about the hassles of their day the way people familiar with each other might do, and eventually Francis said, “I need to tell you something, Skylar. I mean, if we’re going to be friends.”

  “We’re already friends, Francis, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, but there are some things you should know about me.”

  “What are those?”

  “Well, in my job—I told you I work with file analysis—well, what I do is, I have to . . .”

  She picked up on his hesitancy. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. It’s alright.”

  “No, I do. I analyze files, but they’re not just computer files.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, I help sort through files that people report to the place I work for—the International Child Safety Consortium—photos that might involve children being molested.”

  “Oh.”

  “I try to help the children, you know?”

  “How do you help them?”

  “By working to identify them so the police can try to rescue them.” He went through the acronym SICR explaining each step to her: “So I screen the files, then try to identify if the images have appeared somewhere else online. Then I catalog them for law enforcement to use, and report them to the authorities.”

  “How do you do it?”

  “How do I do it?”

  “Look at those things.”

  “I just tell myself I’m doing something good. That I’m making a difference. They’ve made a lot of arrests because of my work. A lot of bad people are in jail because of it.”

  Hundreds of molesters, he thought, serving almost ten thousand years in prison.

  “I’m glad you told me, Francis. That you felt like you could share that with me.”

  “There’s one other thing . . .”

  No, don’t tell her! She’ll hate you. You couldn’t even tell Dr. Perrior about what you think sometimes. You can’t tell—

  “What is it?”

  “There was a girl I was chatting with, I mean, a woman. So, she said she was eighteen, but she wasn’t a woman at all.”

  “I don’t understand. You have a girlfriend?”

  “No, I—”

  Don’t!

  I have to now that I started telling her. I have to!

  “I wanted to meet her,” he told Skylar.

  “So you were chatting with a teenager and you wanted to meet her?”

  “To see how old she was.”

  “But you said she was eighteen?”

  That’s not all! You wanted to—

  Francis could sense that even though Skylar hadn’t leaned backward, the distance between them was widening. “She might’ve . . .” he began. “I mean, well . . .”

  He kept thinking that he wanted to be honest, but if he was, he might turn Skylar off from wanting to spend time with him.

  “So what happened?” she asked.

  “She wasn’t who I thought she would be.”

  “What does that mean? You met her?”

  “Sort of.”

  Skylar looked at him quizzically. “Francis, you’re not making a lot of sense. You said she wasn’t a woman after all. Was she a girl? Were you chatting with a girl?” Now her tone had moved from simple curiosity to something else, something Francis didn’t want to name.

  “It was a man,” he said, “pretending to be an eighteen-year-old woman.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just wanted to tell you. I didn’t want there to be any secrets between us.”

  “But why did you want to meet her?”

  “Why did I . . . ?”

  “I mean, if you thought she was eighteen. That’s pretty young. I mean—unless, how old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-eight.”

  “Okay. But you wanted to? And you weren’t sure she was even that old?”

  “I guess, I mean . . .”

  This was going badly and he didn’t know how to fix things. “It’s always been hard for me to talk to women,” he said, but sensed that all this honesty was only driving a wedge deeper and deeper between him and Skylar.

  Maybe honesty wasn’t the best policy after all.

  Maybe secrecy was.

  “Is it hard to talk to me?” she asked.

  “No. It’s different with you.”

  “You said sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “A minute ago you said that you ‘sort of’ met this person, this man. What did you mean?”

  “I did something I shouldn’t have.”

  A pause. “What’s that?”

  “I went online and back-traced to the IP address. Then I turned on the computer’s camera so I could see her—well, as it turned out, him.”

  “You were spying on her?”

  “I mean, it was just to see who she was.”

  “Oh.” She slid her chair back. “I think maybe I should go.”

  “I just wanted to tell you the truth.”

  “Okay.”

  “I would never do anything to hurt you.”

  “Why would you even say that, Francis?” There might have been a hint of fear in her words. “Why would you even think you needed to tell me that you would never hurt me?”

  “Please, just.” He took a deep breath. “I need to—”

  But she stood and went for her purse, which she’d left near the door.

  “Skylar, I’m sorry.”

  “I should . . .” she mumbled. “This wasn’t a good idea.” He couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself or to him. “I mean, we barely know each other, right? We should have spent more time together before I came over here.”

  “Please. I’m really sorry.”

  She stopped at the door, and just before reaching out for the doorknob she turned and faced him. “For what, Francis? What are you sorry for?”

  It wasn’t that he was sorry for telling her all that. He was sorry for being weak, for giving in, for chatting with someone who he thought was too young for him, even if she had been an eighteen-year-old woman.

  It didn’t feel right to him.

  And so it wasn’t right for him.

  “What are you sorry for, Francis?” Skylar asked again.

  Tell her about the cabin and what happened to you. Tell her about—

  No!

  “I’m sorry for not saying no,” he said softly, “for not stopping when I should have.”

  She didn’t come any closer to him, but she didn’t leave either. “Go on.”

  “I was lonely.”

  “Francis, that’s—”

  And before she could finish her sentence, he interrupted to tell her the things that he hadn’t even been able to tell Dr. Perrior.

  “It was my uncle,” he began.

  “Your uncle?”

  “He would take us to his cabin. He lived in Vermont. Out near the mountains. He would take my brother and me there when we were kids. We lived in Texas, but he would fly us up there in the summers.”

  The images came back all at once, flooding their way through his mind, a series of pictures that he had not threaded together—not like that—not for a long time.

  “What happened at the cabin, Francis?”

  He remembered it vividly now: summer and how green everything got up there, but also how the temperature would drop in the evenings and then his uncle would start the fireplace. “Gonna be a cold one,” he’d say.

  And Francis remembered the rough sounds, the frightening sounds, that his uncle would make when it happened, and then how dirty and lonely and scared he felt afterward.

  He remembered waking up in bed with his uncle beside him, touching him in places where he
didn’t want to be touched, and then making him do things he didn’t want to do.

  No, don’t tell her!

  But I have to be honest with her. People who care about each other tell each other the truth, don’t they? They find someone they can tell their secrets to. Honesty is the best policy.

  “Francis, what happened up there in Vermont?”

  “My uncle was a bad man.” He saw that his hands were trembling and he felt dizzy, like he needed to sit down, but he stood there instead and stuffed his hands into his pockets so Skylar wouldn’t see them shaking. “He shouldn’t have done those things he did to me and my brother.”

  A long moment passed. Neither of them said anything.

  His uncle was dead now.

  Seventeen years gone.

  His brother too. They’d both died in that car accident on the way to the airport. Francis had survived.

  Well, not at first. He’d died, then they brought him back.

  A second chance.

  Just like those tortoises in the Galápagos Islands.

  It’d never seemed fair to him, never seemed right to him. His uncle should have died, yes, that would have made sense, but his brother should have lived.

  He wanted to say more, to explain more to Skylar. He wanted to tell her that he wasn’t bad, he wasn’t sick, he was just hurting and he wanted to be loved, but he didn’t know how to find that, how to find someone to love him in the right way, but in the end he said nothing except, “I’m sorry. This was a mistake. Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “For listening.”

  She was still standing by the door.

  He didn’t know if she was going to leave or stay.

  “And that’s why you do what you do, isn’t it, Francis? To protect other kids from having those things happen to them.”

  “Yes.”

  She set her purse on the counter. “Remember when I gave that bracelet to Derek?”

  “Yes. That was nice of you.”

  “I made one for you too.” She took it out of her purse. It was similar to Derek’s but a little more rugged-looking. “I hope it doesn’t get in the way when you’re typing at work.”

  “No. It’ll be okay. I know it will.”

  She came close enough for him to smell her perfume, sweet and touched with a hint of vanilla. He’d smelled it briefly earlier when she came in, but now it was more evident, now that she was so close to him.

  She wrapped the bracelet around his wrist and then tied it off. It didn’t seem like she hurried. She wanted to get it right. When she was done, she didn’t back up right away but peered into his eyes.

  “You’re a good man, Francis.”

  “I’m—”

  She put a finger to his lips. “You are.”

  Then she took him in her arms and he could feel her heart beating right beside his.

  She leaned back slightly and tilted his head so that he was looking directly into her eyes. “You can kiss me. If you want to, I mean. It’s okay.”

  The only other time he’d ever kissed a girl was when he was in primary school and he’d kissed Megan Pepaj on the cheek because his friend Bruce Smythe had dared him to do it and he didn’t want to lose the dare. Megan had cried afterward and told the teacher and he’d gotten in trouble.

  Skylar closed her eyes. Francis didn’t close his, but watched her carefully as he kissed her, afraid that she would back away. At first he couldn’t quite figure out what to do, but then she opened her mouth and she was touching her tongue to his and it was as if he suddenly did know what to do.

  He closed his eyes then, and everything was new and exciting and terrifying at the same time. It felt like all of his life had led up to this moment and even if this was his last moment, it would have all been worth it just to live long enough to kiss this woman who had heard his secrets and had not walked out the door.

  PART IV

  The Piper

  74

  I knocked on the door to Tessa’s room.

  “What?”

  “It’s Patrick.”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  “Okay, but can I open the door for a second?”

  “Why? I told you, I’m not talking to you.”

  I didn’t point out the inconsistency in her statement. It probably wouldn’t have helped matters at the moment.

  “I want to give you a logic problem I came up with.”

  Silence.

  “Well?” I asked.

  Nothing.

  “If you can solve it, I’ll give up meat for a week.”

  A pause, and then, “A month.”

  “Two weeks.”

  “Three.”

  “Alright,” I agreed. “If you can solve it, I’ll give up meat for three weeks.”

  “Tell it to me through the door.”

  “Four brothers live at the crossroads of a well-traveled intersection. Lots of people stop and ask them for directions since the beach lies in one direction and the mall in another. But not all the boys tell the truth.”

  I paused.

  “Go on.”

  “The thirteen-year-old tells the truth exactly half of the time, the fifteen-year-old tells a lie exactly half of the time, the twelve-year-old always lies, and the fourteen-year-old always tells the truth. From the following three clues, can you figure out which direction it is to the mall, and the age of each of the boys?”

  When she didn’t answer right away, I wasn’t sure if she was going to let me keep going.

  Then, at last, her voice came from the room: “Give me my clues.”

  “One: when you ask which way the beach is, Eric is the only one to point to the right. Two: when you ask which way the mall is, John is the only one to point to the right. Three: John is older than Paul, but younger than Matt.”

  “Read them one more time.”

  I did.

  Even for Tessa that was a lot to process.

  “And am I facing them?” she asked. “So their left would be my right?”

  “Let’s say it’s the same, so their left is yours and your right is theirs. Do you want me to copy this down for you? Slip the clues under the door?”

  “No. I got it. I’ll get back to you. But I’m still not talking to you.”

  “Okay. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  +++

  Back in the living room, Christie asked me, “So, how did it go?”

  “Not too bad. She told me she isn’t talking to me, though.”

  “She does that.”

  I checked the time.

  A couple minutes after eight.

  That gave me just shy of one hour before nine o’clock rolled around. I still didn’t know what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to be when it arrived, but I figured Blake would contact me again, so I kept my phone handy.

  In the meantime, I told Christie that I’d been put on administrative leave and that she might hear about it on the news.

  “Is this because of what happened last week?”

  “I can’t go into the details—and I should tell you that it’s just temporary—but my schedule might be a little, well, unpredictable for the next few days.”

  “Fair enough. When I got involved with an FBI agent, I knew things would be a bit crazy, but . . .”

  “You had no idea they would be like this.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Don’t say ‘bingo’ around Tessa or she’ll call you old.”

  “Gotcha.”

  I slipped into Christie’s bedroom where my suitcase was, ostensibly just to change clothes, but while I was in there and out of earshot of Christie, I called Jodie on the burner phone to tell her what was going on. I caught her as she was leaving the Y, where she’d just finished swimming.


  I filled her in.

  “Thanks for the heads-up,” she said. “By the way, as you know, DeYoung has had me looking for Romanoff. It looks like his files were never backed up on the server before he deleted them, so that’s no good. Also, I checked the case files just before I started my laps: the doorman at Romanoff’s condo building remembered him but not Shane, which is awfully convenient. And I should mention, at this point I don’t think Romanoff was the shooter in the house.”

  “You mean the guy who killed Higgs?”

  “Right.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “From where he had to have been standing, based on the house’s floor plan and your account of the shooting, someone doesn’t make a shot like that without practice and there’s no record in Romanoff’s credit card statements of any gun purchases or visits to shooting ranges. There are no firearms registered to his name. He doesn’t have a carry permit from any state.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “We’re looking for someone who’s an expert marksman with a handgun.”

  “So, quite possibly someone in law enforcement or the military.”

  “I know you’re not one to work off assumptions, but . . .”

  “No, it’s a good place to start, given all that we know about this case.”

  I mentally sorted through things.

  “Alright,” I said, “this is all intertwined and the only people who knew I was going to that house were the ones on the task force. Tomorrow I want you to take a look at the task force members. Do it under the radar, but see if anything comes up. Check if any of them are on Stewart’s mailing list or have reprimands for downloading porn at work, anything.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. And qualification scores on the firing range.”

  “Some of that information will be confidential. Only someone from the Office of Professional Responsibility would have access to their personnel files.”

  “Call Maria Aguirre in the morning.”

  “Is this really a can of worms you want to open?”

  “No, but it might be one we need to peer into. Also, have Tobin take a closer look at Hal Lloyd, see if he can find any connection between him and Higgs, Stewart, or Wooford.”