by Shane Lusher
He put his hands on the console, tracing a pattern with his finger on the plastic. “I’d just get the hell out,” he said.
“Get the hell out?” I asked, looking over at him as we passed Pekin Lumberyard. “What, just leave? Christ. It’s not what you did.”
“I got my sister, remember?” Rassi said. “And what evidence would I take? A Polaroid of myself, tied up, with no trace on it? They didn’t even send it through the postal service. Somebody just stuck it in my mailbox.”
I thought about everything he’d said. What did I have, indeed? I had Kelly and Erin, and if I cared about the both of them, there was Casey, too. The fear that rose out of my stomach just then made me understand Rassi for the first time.
“All right,” I said. I took out my phone.
“What are you going to do?” he asked.
“Just be quiet,” I said. “It’s out of your hands, anyway.”
The phone rang, then voice mail picked up, and as I was about to speak, Percy cut in.
“What? Where are you?”
It had become his mantra that evening.
“Just drove past Scotty Mart,” I said.
“Good for you,” Percy said. “Nguyen’s lawyer just arrived.”
“We’ll be there in five minutes,” I said. “Listen, I need something from you.”
“Wonderful,” Percy said. “You and about seven million other people.”
“It’s for Rassi, actually,” I said. I glanced over at him. He was looking out the passenger window.
“I’m even less enthusiastic about that,” Percy said.
“Great. Anyway, we need someone to watch Rassi’s parents’ house, and we don’t want you to ask why.”
Percy paused for a moment. “We?” he asked.
“Me,” I said. “I only mentioned Rassi because of that blue line shit you said earlier.”
Percy chuckled, under his breath. It was not a pleasant sound. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“You don’t get to ask,” I said.
He waited for a moment longer than I thought he would. I thought I heard a faint clicking sound, like the pulse of the electricity running through the fiber optics.
“Percy?” I said, finally.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
“Whatever what?”
“I’ll send a car over there,” he said.
“When?”
“Right now,” he said. “This better be good.”
“Another thing,” I said.
“What?”
“You need to issue a BOLO for Dubois.”
“And why, might I ask, should we be on the lookout for Dubois?” Percy asked. It sounded like he spit into something just then, but I couldn’t be sure. “Other than the shit you fed me earlier?”
“Kidnapping,” I said. “Of a police officer.”
Percy was silent for a moment. “Do I even want to ask who?” he said.
“Not really,” I said, glancing over at Rassi once again as we passed by the Lagoon and Mineral Springs Park. “But you put a car on Rassi’s parents’ house, and you have all the testimony you’ll need to back it up.”
When I walked into the station with Rassi, Percy was sitting at his desk drinking black coffee and steaming.
“I’m here,” I said.
Percy looked at Rassi for a moment, sizing him up. He looked away.
“It’s about time,” he said finally. His eyes were bloodshot. It occurred to me that he probably hadn’t slept the night before.
I waited a moment and then said, “What have you got? Is Nguyen still here?”
Percy looked at Rassi again and then back to me.
“We worked on Ngyuen for about four hours,” he said. “Then his lawyer showed up and now we don’t talk to him.”
“I thought his lawyer was on vacation.”
“The assistant editor at the paper got him a new one,” Percy said. “A better one.”
I nodded. “Where is he now?” I asked.
“Holding cell in the back,” Percy said. “Last I checked, the motherfucker was sleeping.”
“Maybe that’s a sign,” I said.
“Of what?”
“That he’s not guilty,” I said.
Percy gave me an indecipherable look and then turned to Rassi.
“So, what’s up with you, hoss?” he asked. “I got a car on your house. You want to tell me why?”
Rassi walked over to a cubicle twenty feet away and sank down into the chair. I could just see the top of his head over the dividing wall.
“Hey!” Percy called out. “I asked you a question.”
“Go to hell,” Rassi said.
“Go to hell? You show up after going AWOL for forty-eight hours, and that’s all you have to say for yourself?”
“Percy,” I said. I put my hand down on the table and looked at him. “This isn’t going to go anywhere,” I said quietly, for lack of anything else to say.
He looked at me for a moment, opened his mouth to say something, and then closed it. He nodded at me.
“Come with me,” he said.
We walked out of the room and around Dubois' corner office, where Percy unlocked a door. We went through it into a conference room. There was a large oval table surrounded by chairs, and carpeting on the floor.
A laptop was sitting on the table hooked into a docking station. Attached to it via USB was an external hard drive.
“Get to it,” Percy said.
“So, now you’re giving commands?” I asked. “You know, you’re a bigger dickhead now that you’re acting Sheriff.”
“Sorry,” Percy said. “I haven’t slept since Thursday.”
He nodded and then stepped outside. I had the feeling it was the first time he’d ever apologized to anyone.
The laptop was already turned on. The screen saver was not password protected. I opened it up and went into the hard drive. I flipped through a mess of old correspondence for about five minutes before going back into the main folder.
There was a folder labeled “Erin.” I’d already thought about asking Percy which files were password protected, but instead I double-clicked on that folder and found what I was looking for.
Trueblood. Quiverfull. Dubois. Anderson. An Excel file, sitting out there in the open.
I clicked open the Dubois folder, and discovered a series of twenty or thirty jpeg files. These were locked.
I tried a few, beginning with Erin’s birthday, then Tad’s, then the day of his election to Sheriff, and then clicked out of it. The Excel file seemed to stand out on its own. I figured that one might be more important.
That was the only file I’d found that wasn’t protected, but it was merely a series of random dates, with links to files in the other folders. Each link I clicked on requested a password.
I closed the Excel sheet and opened the Anderson folder.
I tried the same series of passwords I knew to be most likely, and then sat back in the conference room chair.
It would be something important, something known only to Tad, and, I hoped, something only I would know as well.
I didn’t have a clue.
I looked around the room. On the walls were the kinds of corporate inspiration posters you could find around the world, anywhere: a man, climbing a sheer rock face, the print entitled “Perseverance,” a woman on a cell phone, the background a blur, the words “Anytime, Anywhere” printed below the poster.
A wall chart with indecipherable figures written in green felt-tipped marker.
I got up and opened the door. Then I walked down the hallway, away from the outer office. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Security gates, metal detectors, someone standing guard maybe.
Instead I found what I’d been picturing: just a cell at the end of the hall, with benches on either side, the entrance a full wall of bars.
There was enough space for perhaps twenty people, but Nguyen was the only occupant.
“Hi, Tuan,” I said. “You
want to talk now?”
He pulled his bulk up into a sitting position and looked at me and then lay back down.
“Maybe I can help, Tuan,” I said.
“Got all the help I can use, thanks,” Ngyuen said.
I nodded, though he wasn’t looking at me. “I heard that,” I said. “One thing I’m wondering, though: what’s next? You going to go back to what you were doing before?”
Nguyen continued his silence, and after a moment I said, “I know what’s been going down. You don’t have to hide it anymore. I know about what they’ve been doing to those kids.”
And though I really couldn’t be sure of anything, I said, “I know what they did to you.”
There was a slight jerk, and Tuan reached up to rub his eyes, but otherwise he didn’t react.
“I also know about Madeleine,” I said.
There was a slight blink in the armor, but Nguyen was still just staring at the concrete wall in front of him, his eyes sunken into the jowls of his cheeks.
“What’s on the hard drive, Tuan?” I asked, changing the subject. “If it’s something that could help you out, it would be in your best interest to tell me now.”
Nguyen snorted. “Christ,” he said, and shook his head. “Fucking cops.”
“I’m not a cop, Tuan,” I said. “I’m just a guy.”
“Yeah, you’ve said that enough,” he said. “Now go away. I need to sleep.”
“What’s on there, Tuan?” I tried again. “You have to know. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have stolen it. I know there’s going to be nothing on your hard drives,” I continued. “You’re too smart for that.
“So tell me, what did my brother have on you, that you were so interested in getting to?”
Tuan listened to Hartman ramble on and on, flattering him in order to get him to talk. He was expecting Hartman to start in about the good of the community, the innocence of the children involved, but he kept hammering on about technology. Tuan could tell he was much more of an amateur than the others. You didn’t get someone to crack without getting personal, or throwing in some human interest. Tuan could listen to tech stuff all day and never crack.
But he was tired, and he wanted to be left alone. His stomach was growling, and if the lawyer—Roddy Cox, one of Kara’s cousins—were true to his word, the judge was going to come in and set bail shortly.
“Hartman,” he called out from the cot. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”
I walked back to the conference room and sat there for another five minutes, trying various passwords. Erin’s name, plus her birth date. Erin, with the E capitalized. Erin, with the E capitalized and her birth date. Tad’s wedding day, his wife’s birthday. The day she died of cancer.
Something just around the corner, and I was missing it. I got up and went back out into Percy’s office.
“What next?” I asked.
“You crack it yet?” he asked.
I shook my head.
He sighed. “I don’t know. I’m headed over to the courthouse in a few minutes. The ASA I called is going to claim Nguyen’s a flight risk, but that won’t work. The guy hasn’t left the state since he got here back in the seventies.”
He shook his head. “I just don’t know. I need to go home, get some sleep, and figure everything out. Kelly didn’t find anything. Maybe it would just be better to hand him over to State come Monday.”
There was another way, but I didn’t know how much legal wrangling would be involved. “Let him go,” I said.
“Let him go?” Percy asked. He looked around and stood up, stretched his back and rubbed a hand over his face.
“Okay,” he said. He shrugged broadly. “Fine. Great idea. I’ll just go and unlock the cell and tell him he can leave now.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Do you have anything on him? I mean, State didn’t tell you anything, right? You have no evidence from them?”
Percy shook his head. “No, and that’s my problem,” he said. “I figured we would just hold him, win some time, and the State guys figured the same, I guess, because last they knew his lawyer was in Missouri and not coming back until Monday.”
“And you don’t have anything on the murder except for circumstantial evidence?”
Percy shook his head. “No,” he said. “No witnesses of the crime, other than seeing him knock on the door Thursday morning, look in the window, and then walk away.
“I mentioned his daughter right after you told me about her,” he said.
“So you did talk to him?” I asked. “Because when I just mentioned it to him, he seemed a bit surprised to hear her name.”
“He was surprised to hear it when I said it, too,” Percy said. “And then that came back and bit me in the ass: his lawyer is now claiming that we know someone else committed the crime, and that holding him is now moot.
“Shit, I can probably put the guy together with Stevens; build a case, but not tonight. Tonight I’m screwed, and if it turns out that all we get is circumstantial—association does not a killer make—then we can forget any future investigations into this guy.”
“Then let him go,” I said again. “Call the judge, tell him State pulled out on you, apologize, buy him a beer next time you see him.”
“So what, I just tell him it was a mistake?” Percy asked.
“Exactly.”
“I’ll look like an idiot,” he said.
“Not if you make it out to sound like it was State’s idea,” I said. “Nobody likes the government, right? Not even judges.”
He nodded, but he only looked partially convinced. Just then, his phone rang, and when he hung up he came around from behind the desk and walked slowly toward the front entrance.
“Lawyer,” he said. “Don’t say anything when he comes in.”
I waited a few minutes, thinking about passwords. Tad’s had always been dates, even back when we’d gotten our first computer at our dad’s house and he and I had separate accounts. Then it had been juvenile things: first kiss, last day of school, the start of state basketball finals.
I had the feeling, though, that what was on the hard drive was something much more significant than teenage romance.
The lawyer, who’d introduced himself as Roderick Cox, looked impeccable in an expensive suit that may or may not have been of designer origin. He had a certain grace that made one believe that he wore it all the time and sat around waiting for moments just like these, not to mention that he’d always been able to afford clothing of such quality.
Percy had already returned with Nguyen from the holding cell, and Cox was murmuring quietly to Percy about illegal arrest, habeas corpus, police brutality and search and seizure.
I was surprised at how Percy was taking it, nodding, his lips held together, his smirk nearly gone. As I moved up to stand next to Percy, Cox finished talking.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll be seeing each other soon.”
He motioned to Nguyen, who followed him. Before leaving through the security door, Cox turned.
“And gentlemen,” he said, indicating Nguyen. “I suggest you leave my client alone.”
Percy cursed under his breath, but kept silent.
After he left, I said to him, “Are we going to do as he says?” I asked.
“No we’re not,” Percy said. “We most certainly are not.”
Fifty-One
Percy put in a call to a deputy named Alan Conover and sent him over to Nguyen’s house.
“Get an unmarked car,” he said into the phone. Then, after a minute, he added, “Well, then, take your own car. Yeah, I’ll sign off on it.”
He rang off and cursed under his breath. Then he craned his neck to look over at Rassi.
I was standing, so I could still see him there. He hadn’t moved during the entire process: Nguyen’s lawyer arriving, Nguyen’s lawyer picking up Nguyen and telling us we were to leave him alone, Nguyen leaving with his lawyer.
“Hey, Dave,” I said. “What’s up?”
R
assi roused himself from his slumber.
“You got somebody on my house, Percy?” he called out over the top of the dividing wall.
Percy smirked at me. “Yeah,” he said.
“Who?”
Percy waited a moment before answering.
“John Behrends,” he said.
Rassi didn’t respond. He nodded a moment, but didn’t speak.
“You’re welcome,” Percy said and stood up to look over at him. “I’m glad that meets with your approval. You feel like talking about it?”
Rassi didn’t answer. Percy slouched back down in his chair and looked at me.
“You going back in there?” he asked. He jerked his head toward the conference room.
I nodded and left.
I’d tried fifteen or twenty passwords, staring up at the blank white walls and the inspirational posters, and had just resigned myself to downloading something iffy from the internet to try cracking it for what I knew would take hours, when it occurred to me.
I’d just turned seven. My mother, whom I barely remembered, had shown up with Tad. My father had been out in the field, and she’d left me with him, on the porch, a baby, really, just having learned to walk.
May 20, 1981. The day my mother abandoned him.
He kept falling down. I remember that much. He’d stand up, take a few steps, and fall. He hit his face on the railing and then he was coming up, crying, and I took him in my arms and held him, because I didn’t know what else you were supposed to do.
I remember the rich blackness of the earth and the rows of tiny green plants, the corn less than an inch high, and my father and mother coming across toward the house, my father with a red face and my mother speaking to him, her face full of life, and energetic, waving her arms around as if she were telling him about the most profound thing she’d ever heard.
An hour later she was gone, a crib and a bag full of bottles and diapers and baby clothes deposited in our front room, my father with a pinched look on his face.
She’d kissed me, said “Goodbye, Dana,” and then she’d left, driven off in a rented car en route to the airplane that would take her back to San Francisco.
