The Drowning Child

by Alex Barclay

  But there’s the small matter of who was supplying Merrifield and what they may have thought of John Veir stumbling on to their little enterprise.

  Jesus. Christ.

  60

  Ren went back to Tate PD and told everyone about Seth Fuller and the fentanyl story.

  ‘I believe Seth,’ said Ren. ‘But what I don’t get is why John Veir didn’t say it to us the night of the fire – it would have bolstered his case.’ She turned to Ruddock. ‘Have you heard anything about dealing in BRCI? I mean, they must be doing a thorough investigation, considering Merrifield is out there.’

  ‘No,’ said Ruddock. ‘But I can make inquiries.’

  ‘He’s been gone ten days,’ said Ren. ‘There’s no way he hasn’t had help somewhere along the way. Someone is harboring him.’

  They all nodded.

  I think I’m stating the obvious …

  ‘Let’s call John Veir in again,’ said Gary. ‘To rattle him. We won’t mention the video from Lister Creek until we have more, and until we can get Alice Veir in here too, face to face.’

  Half an hour later, John Veir was sitting in the interview room, his fingers linked, his head bowed. Ren and Ruddock walked in. He looked up at them, tolerance and challenge flickering in his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ said Ruddock, sitting down, ‘looks like there are a couple of things here that you neglected to mention to us, John.’ His manner was warm, non-threatening. He made John go through everything about the day Caleb went missing, about the night Aaron Fuller died, about the day he dropped Caleb off at Rose Dennehy’s. He repeated the facts as he had first given them, then collapsed back in his seat.

  ‘Is that OK?’ he said, raising his hands up. ‘Everyone happy with that? Can I go?’

  ‘Can you go?’ said Ren. Not before I punch you in the face. ‘I’m sorry, but we’re here to try to find your son, and we’re doing everything we can. Is this tedious for you? Does it sound like a terrible thing? I can’t understand this. It’s like you’re angry with us, when we’re here to help you—’

  ‘You’re accusing me!’ he said, rising from his seat.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Veir,’ said Ren.

  ‘Don’t patronize me—’

  ‘We’re not accusing you of anything,’ said Ren. Yet.

  Deep breaths. ‘Why don’t we all just take a moment?’ said Ruddock.

  There was a knock on the door. Gary stuck his head in. ‘Chief – I’m sorry to interrupt. If I could have a word with you, please?’

  Ruddock stood up. ‘Excuse me.’ He nodded to John and Ren, and left the room.

  Oh, John, you have no idea what’s about to go down here.

  Ren sat in silence, watching John Veir staring at his fingernails. Instead of Ruddock, Gary walked back in, stood beside Ren, right in front of John Veir, then slammed his good fist down hard on the table.

  John jumped.

  Ding, ding. Round One.

  ‘You need to start telling us the truth,’ said Gary, his voice booming. ‘We know you know the truth, and you need to start talking or things are going to get a whole lot worse for you.’

  Jesus Christ, Gary is scary.

  I may want to fuck him.

  Eye on the prize.

  ‘I told you,’ said John. ‘I’ve gone through – over and over – what happened that Monday morning. Nothing has changed since the statement I made. It’s all there.’ He had lowered his voice, taken the edge off the tone.

  ‘Well, I need you to go through it again,’ said Gary. He sat down.

  ‘I know you’re looking for inconsistencies,’ said John, ‘but there are none. I’ve told this a million times now.’

  ‘And we’re ready to hear it again,’ said Gary.

  John Veir looked like he was about to blow. But he went through the details again, and they were the same. Gary cut in at the point where John Veir ran up the stairs to get Caleb to hurry up.

  ‘You walked in on your son in his bedroom,’ said Gary. ‘You had called up to him several times, he had ignored you, you were late for work, he didn’t care, he was disrespecting you, something he was increasingly doing, something you had called him out on many times. And it infuriated you. You grabbed him—’

  ‘I did not lay a finger on him,’ said John.

  Steely. Calm.

  ‘You didn’t mean to hurt him,’ said Gary. ‘You shook him, he lost his balance, he fell …’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘He struck his head against the wardrobe, or against the bed, he fell back on the floor—’

  ‘No, sir. That is not what happened.’

  ‘You knew it was too late,’ said Gary. ‘You’d gone too far. You panicked. You knew you couldn’t tell your wife what you’d done. You took your son’s cell phone and you called your sister. You asked for her help. You asked her to talk you through what you should do—’

  ‘There’s no way my sister would—’

  ‘Then you went up into the attic, you took down your sleeping bag, you placed your son’s body inside, carried him down the stairs, into the garage …’

  Tears welled in John Veir’s eyes.

  Tears of … what? Guilt?

  ‘No!’ said John. He wiped away the tears. ‘That is not what happened. My son walked out of our house on his own two feet. He—’

  ‘You opened the trunk of your car and placed your son’s body inside,’ said Gary. ‘You closed the trunk. You were now late for work. Your only option was to show up at three p.m. and say that you got the shift time wrong. You could have called in sick, but that would have set off alarm bells.’

  John shook his head. They all sat in silence. Moments passed.

  ‘And that’s it,’ said John. ‘You don’t know any more. Where did I put the body? Where is that sleeping bag now?’

  In the landfill site?

  ‘In fact, where is there any evidence for what you’re saying?’ said John. ‘You talk about my sister? Well, you better watch out for her. You better watch out. That’s all I’m going to say.’

  ‘You tell me where the body is,’ said Gary. ‘And where that sleeping bag is.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the sleeping bag,’ said John. ‘I have no idea why that’s not there.’

  And the body?!

  ‘And I hope to God there’s no body,’ said John, his eyes boring through Ren as if he had read her mind. ‘You think I want to think about that? Are you that fucking cruel?’

  Gary recalibrated. ‘I can see that you’re a good person, John. You’re an honorable man, you fought for your country, your boss respects you a lot. Apparently, you’re a disciplined and fair corrections officer. You like to be in control. I understand that. But I also understand what happens when things get out of control, when the pressure gets too much, or just when someone doesn’t have respect for the things you value. Caleb was twelve years old – it’s a difficult age.’

  ‘I agree with you,’ said John. ‘But that doesn’t mean I did anything to my son.’

  61

  ‘John, we need your help on this,’ said Ren. ‘We need you to give us everything you got. You see all the people we have here coming together to help find your son. We care deeply about this. We need the truth. I believe you can tell us the truth.’

  ‘I am telling you the truth,’ said John.

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t believe that you are,’ said Ren.

  He looked at her, his eyes suddenly black with anger. ‘I did not harm my son. If you hooked me up to a polygraph—’

  Hello? ‘You declined a polygraph,’ said Ren.

  He held eye contact with her. ‘I know. What I’m saying is, I’m telling the truth. And separate to that, I don’t trust polygraphs.’

  ‘That doesn’t make a whole lot of sense,’ said Ren. ‘You either believe that the polygraph would prove you’re truthful, or, as per your original reason for refusing, you believe that it wouldn’t.’

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ said John. ‘I’m just … so exhausted.
I am so goddamned stressed that I don’t know how my body’s going to react: my heartbeat, my sweat glands, whatever the hell else you measure. You know who my sister is. There is no way she would ever recommend anyone taking a polygraph, guilty or innocent. I know how these things work.’

  ‘Taking a polygraph means that, if you pass,’ said Gary, ‘we can eliminate you, and focus on—’

  ‘You won’t eliminate me,’ said John. ‘Do you think I’m an idiot? Not after the way you’re talking. At the very most, you might set me aside, until you can come up with a new fairy tale about how I hurt my own son.’

  ‘Of course we’ll eliminate you if new evidence arises pointing to someone else,’ said Gary.

  John threw up his hands. ‘See what I mean? Now you’re thinking, “Oh, hold on – why would he think we won’t eliminate him if he’s innocent? He must know that no evidence will point to someone else!”’

  ‘We’ve been in this job a long time,’ said Gary. ‘You can’t be part of the CARD team without having logged the hours on child abduction cases. We don’t walk in, pick one of the parents, and go from there. We look at the evidence. And some of this evidence, I won’t lie to you, is not looking good for you right now, John.’

  John looked away, sullen and dark-eyed. ‘What evidence? I had nothing to do with this. I’ll keep answering your questions, if you think that will help, but I’d rather you were spending your time focusing on finding my son.’

  Ren and Gary left John and went back into the office. Paul Louderback was putting down the phone.

  ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I finally got a hold of Paula Leon. She apologized for not getting back in touch. She was in lockdown, preparing a case. Ren, you were right – she loaned her rental car to Alice Veir, who told her her own car wouldn’t start and that she had to run an errand. Alice brought it back with a full tank, so Leon couldn’t tell how far she’d traveled.’

  ‘And why would she give a shit, either way?’ said Ren.

  Paul nodded. ‘She said Alice Veir was definitely back in the hotel by six p.m., and that she left right away. Her own car seemed to have come back to life. Alice Veir missed the dinner that night. She went straight home to Spokane.’

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Ren. ‘Was she transporting a body in that? We need to get on to AVIS – get that rental car in.’

  ‘I’m on it,’ said Paul.

  Sylvie looked up from her desk. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m just not buying the idea that in a matter of ten minutes on a Monday morning, Alice Veir gets involved in such a heinous crime.’

  ‘I know,’ said Ren. ‘The only rationale is that she owes her brother big time. The question is: what for? I mean, could she have taken away the body of his son and dumped it? And where? And how would she even manage that – she doesn’t seem like a very strong woman.’

  ‘She went home,’ said Paul, ‘she could have dumped him somewhere that was familiar to her.’

  ‘We can call in video from the conference hotel,’ said Ren, ‘but I doubt she would be stupid enough to have done this where she could be seen.’

  ‘I don’t need to stress how carefully we need to tread here with Alice Veir,’ said Gary. ‘That woman is ready to pounce on anything she can use to justify her war against law enforcement. We can call in Paula Leon’s rental car, send it to the lab, no problem. Getting a search warrant for Alice Veir’s property is not going to happen. She is going to resist every move we make. We need more evidence.’

  Ruddock walked into the office, just as Ren’s cell phone rang. ‘Oh, shit: that’s Alice Veir,’ she said. ‘What are the chances?’

  ‘Pretty high, after what Gary just did to her brother,’ said Paul.

  Ren picked up.

  ‘Agent Bryce?’ said Alice. ‘I just got off the phone with my brother. It is scandalous what you’re doing to him. His son is missing, he’s heartbroken, and he has to be subjected to what you’ve just subjected him to? It’s despicable. He’s under incredible strain right now, as you can imagine. This does not give you and your colleagues an excuse to take him into a room and attack him the way you did. He’s made himself available to you at all times, he hasn’t called in a lawyer because he feels he has nothing to hide, and he trusts in the system, which, to be honest, amazes me.

  ‘What this entire investigation should be about is finding out facts that will help us find Caleb.’

  ‘That’s exactly what we’re trying to do,’ said Ren. ‘Is there anything else you can think of that might help us in that regard?’ Like your visit to Lister Creek, you lying-ass bitch!

  Ren allowed a silence to open up. Alice Veir didn’t close it.

  What the fuck are you two hiding?

  Ren looked up at Gary and Paul, and mouthed. ‘Can I call her in?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Alice – where are you right now?’ said Ren.

  ‘In Spokane – why?’

  ‘We’d like you to come in to Tate PD, please.’

  ‘What?’ said Alice. ‘Why?’

  ‘For a chat,’ said Ren.

  Pause. ‘A chat?’ said Alice. ‘About what? I’m very busy. It’s going to be hard for me to travel. I can tell you anything you want to know right now.’

  ‘There are a couple of things we’d like you to take a look at,’ said Ren. ‘It won’t take too long. I know you’re very eager to do anything you can to help us find Caleb, and, clearly, to help your brother too.’ She smiled sweetly at Gary and Paul. Paul smiled back.

  Ren ended the call. ‘She can’t not come in, because if she’s hiding anything, the last thing she’s going to want to do is come across as uncooperative.’

  Ruddock’s cell phone rang. He picked up, listened.

  ‘It’s CVIP,’ said Ruddock to the others.

  Child Victim Identification Program? What?

  ‘Let me put you on speaker,’ said Ruddock, punching the button, holding the phone out to the others. ‘I’m with SSA Gary Dettling, SA Paul Louderback, and SA Ren Bryce.’

  ‘Hello, everyone – Bob Freeborn here, CVIP. I’m calling to let you know we got a hit on that sleeping bag image that you guys released to the media from the Caleb Veir disappearance.’

  What the fuck? ‘What kind of hit?’ said Ren.

  ‘There’s a distinctive black ink stain on it. We’ve picked it up across a series of over a thousand images and videos of abused children.’

  62

  Ren’s heart started to pound.

  ‘It was an unusual find,’ said Bob. ‘Boxes of photos and videos in a dumpster beside a strip mall toy store called the Toy Box in Redding, California on Friday. That’s just off I-5, which is obviously a route out of Salem. We’re still scanning them. By my estimates, so far, though, they look like they’re from the seventies/eighties/nineties.’

  ‘So, before Caleb Veir was born,’ said Gary.

  ‘Yes – so far,’ said Bob. ‘The kids look to be anywhere between four and eleven – boys and girls.’

  ‘What kind of abuse are you seeing?’ said Gary.

  ‘It’s almost exclusively near-drowning,’ said Bob.

  Ren’s stomach lurched. ‘And is there sexual abuse?’

  ‘In some cases, yes,’ said Bob. ‘I’m aware of your drowning deaths in Tate. Is that the route you’re going down?’

  ‘Yes.’ The log flume to hell.

  ‘It looks like the same abuser throughout,’ said Bob. ‘You’re likely looking at someone who’s minimum mid-sixties now.’

  ‘Definitely?’ said Ren. ‘Could it be John Veir, the father? Have you seen a photo of him? He’s fifty-seven.’

  ‘Can I say definitely sixties?’ said Bob. ‘Well, no – but thereabouts. I can say, though, that it’s definitely not John Veir. I saw him on the news. This man has darker skin and very dark hair, lots of it. We can really only see an arm, a knee, and …’

  We all know where the camera is aimed in those videos.

  ‘I’m presuming the sleeping bag wasn’t with the porn,�
� said Ren.

  ‘No.’

  ‘How often is the garbage collected at the store?’ said Ren.

  ‘Those boxes could have been dumped there any time from the Thursday before,’ said Bob.

  ‘No CCTV, I presume …’

  ‘No,’ said Bob. ‘We’ll keep inputting the images, and I’ll send everything on as I get it.’

  ‘We can’t presume whoever dumped them shopped at the store,’ said Ren, ‘but what pedophile could resist a toy store?’

  That was grim.

  ‘Yup,’ said Bob, ‘they go where their needs are met. And I’ve got one hundred and fifty-five million unique images to prove it.’

  Jesus. Christ.

  ‘And these guys are getting more and more tech-savvy,’ said Bob. ‘They’re editing out anything identifiable that might be in the background, anything that we can pick up on our system.’

  Imagine sitting at your desk, using editing software for that. It’s beyond depressing.

  ‘Well, thanks for the call,’ said Ruddock.

  ‘What the fuck?’ said Ren. She put a call into the Toy Box to email her their video files for the previous week, and a list of all the purchases made.

  ‘And we can at least get a list of men in that age group from around Tate,’ said Ruddock. ‘Not that the abuser necessarily has to be from the town, but it’s a start.’

  ‘Really looking forward to Bob’s email,’ said Ren. Ugh.

  Like a juggernaut, the images and videos from the fetish sites moved in.

  Ugh.

  Jesus.

  Ren’s heart rate accelerated.

  ‘People go where their needs are likely to be met.’

  ‘You won’t find a pedophile hanging around a retirement home.’

  Oh my God … the suicide at the retirement home. Wasn’t that guy a swim coach? He taught kids for years. He killed himself last Friday. That was the day it got out that Aaron Fuller had been drowned.

  She looked reflexively at Ruddock. This will crush him.

  ‘Ruddock, maybe you could check with the Veirs about that sleeping bag – find out where it came from and how long they had it,’ said Ren. ‘If there are images from the seventies, and it’s an older man … who could that be? A sibling? Uncle? Family friend?’