The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  I’d have to like it.

  The chief raised his eyebrows.

  “Maybe you should let me handle the profiling.” He picked Nate’s statement off his desk. “What about the boy she was with? You say you didn’t get a good look at him.”

  “He was tall. Taller than me, but all arms and legs. At least it seemed that way. They were both wearing baggy raincoats.” In his official statement, Nate had downplayed the physical elements of his confrontation with the teens.

  “Boys grow like weeds. Remember when you shot up that one winter?”

  Nate grinned. This could have been the casual remembrance it appeared to be, but was more likely just another halftime substitution for Bad Cop. Either way, a smile was the smart response.

  The chief looked at Nate and chewed the side of his cheek. “You think you could identify him?”

  “From a picture? I don’t know. Maybe in person.”

  The chief pulled a photo from the folder and slid it across his desk.

  Like the portrait of the Jeffers girl, it looked like a yearbook photo. The boy in the image had an aquiline nose that seemed familiar. His smile had a mischievous twist to it, and his cheeks were ripe with baby fat. It was hard to imagine a teen as skinny as the one Nate had tussled with owning such a cherubic face. Nate tried to imagine the boy in profile.

  “I don’t know,” Nate said.

  “Mother says he’s grown about a foot since it was taken. She’s bringing over something more recent. Maybe that’ll ring a bell.”

  “Are you saying he’s also—?”

  “Only missing for now.” The chief said this casually, as if adolescents were objects routinely mislaid.

  Nate’s memories from last night were disjointed. Not surprising, considering the blow to the head. Still, he sifted through every image and sensation he’d retained. His hands had been wet as he pulled back the raincoat’s hood to reveal the girl’s face. Then he’d turned away from the girl and seen the stepladder swinging toward him and—

  “Let’s get back to Lucy.” The chief held up one of the Moleskine notebooks. The abrupt transition confirmed that this wasn’t just a cozy chat. “Considering recent developments, would you like to make any addendums to the statements you made fourteen years ago? Fresh impressions are the most reliable, but time can shake some details loose.”

  The chief was offering him a purportedly no-strings-attached chance to revise the record.

  Nate sighed. “It’s been such a long time. And how many times did you talk to all of us back then?” A subtle reminder that Nate was hardly the only suspect. “I keep thinking, if only that note hadn’t shown up. If we hadn’t thought she’d run away, maybe we’d have found her body sooner and had more evidence to work with.” In point of fact, the chief still hadn’t given him the slightest clue about what Lucy’s remains had revealed, but Nate hoped he was getting closer.

  “In Lucy’s case, homicide was always on the table, even with that note left behind,” the chief said. “And don’t forget that she still might have run away, just like the note said. Maybe she just didn’t make it very far.” He took a sip from his mug and looked at Nate over its rim.

  “But now we know someone hid her body in the foothills,” Chief Buck continued. “Now we know it was murder, so we’re taking a fresh look at statements, witnesses, everything.”

  “You must have learned something from her body,” Nate said, trying again. This is what he most burned to know.

  “Fourteen years is a long time. Fourteen years, Nate.” This was nearly verbatim what Tom had told him the day before. It was suspiciously similar. And something about this warned Nate away, nudging him to change the topic.

  “So do you want to talk more about Lucy, or about this Jeffers girl? And this other kid.” He pointed at the boy’s photo. “What’s his name?”

  “Peter Corso. Pete.” The chief squinted at Nate. “But they’re connected, aren’t they? Lucy, Maura, and Pete. The names in these old notebooks are the same that are showing up at the top of the damage reports from two weeks ago and last night. You might be surprised how many overlaps there are. You saw Maura and Pete about to deface Bea’s house, so they’re likely with the group causing the trouble now. Whatever you boys did years ago is happening again, only this time it’s happening to you.”

  In a way, Nate was proud of him.

  “Have you talked to Tom about this theory?” The chief was clearly convinced of the journals’ accuracy, but there was zero chance of Nate conceding this.

  “Tom.” The chief’s eyes clouded and he leaned back in his chair. He was quiet for several long moments. “Some things become hard to talk about. You’ll understand when your little one gets older.”

  Unlike everything else, these lines didn’t seem like a tactic or stratagem on the part of the chief.

  “He doesn’t know,” Nate realized. “You didn’t tell him you’ve had her notebooks this whole time.” Tom would have warned Nate if he’d known.

  “He wouldn’t understand. And I didn’t want to—” he broke off.

  Nate followed Chief Buck’s gaze to the framed photograph hanging on the wall, a picture of Tom at maybe age seven or eight, towheaded, gap-toothed, and holding a fishing rod.

  “He wouldn’t understand that you deliberately withheld evidence? Or that you did it because you thought you were protecting him?”

  The chief looked weary, and Nate didn’t think it was an act, either. They’d unwittingly put him in an impossible spot, and the man had been treading water there for a very long time.

  “He’s my son, Nate.” The chief held his gaze, then touched the topmost of the Moleskine notebooks. “I love Tom more than anything. More than my life. And the truth is, I wish I’d never found these things. They have him as a cruel and needy and weak boy. And reading them it’s hard—” He paused, trying to find the right words. “It’s hard for me not to question everything I thought I knew about him. Sometime I look at him and have to wonder who he is. Who he really is.”

  “Lucy didn’t like Tom,” Nate said. “They never got along, so I’m not surprised she made him look bad. You can’t trust a single thing that’s written in there. It’s fiction. Besides, you know who Tom really is. How can a teenage girl’s scribblings change that?”

  The chief looked at him with a new expression, one that lifted Nate’s own spirits. Because the look on the man’s face was hope. Distrust was hard and suspicion was tough, but hope was something Nate could work with.

  Chief Buck’s private line rang three times before he answered it.

  “Be right there,” he told the person on the other end. He returned the receiver to its cradle. “They need me out front.” He got up and walked toward the door. “Stay here.”

  Nate pulled out his phone. The display failed to light up, though it didn’t seem to be completely inert. Somehow its digital assistant still worked and was able to tell Nate it was almost eight A.M. Its stilted voice sounded as if it was being filtered through Auto-Tune then broadcast from a distant star system.

  Lucy’s funeral would be starting in a few hours, but with the chief out of sight, Grams returned to the forefront of Nate’s mind.

  Through the office’s glass partition, Nate saw the hall was empty. He walked around to the computer, and was unsurprised to find it password protected. From the chief’s landline, he dialed nine for an outside line then 4-1-1 for directory assistance.

  He was quickly connected to the hospital in Gracefield, where they said that Grams’s condition was unchanged. He asked again about transport to a burn center, and he was again told that the weather was too poor to move anyone anywhere.

  Nate ended the call, feeling worse than before he’d made it. He thought he was finally close to learning something useful from the chief, but Grams needed him, too. Without a car, he didn’t even know how he’d return to her side. He realized he was lucky the chief hadn’t called his earlier bluff about walking out of the interrogation room. One of the per
ils of being a good liar was the threat of outsmarting yourself along with everyone else.

  The rancid coffee had left him restless.

  With an eye on the hallway, he started paging through the papers on the desk and checking its drawers. Most of them were locked, and the ones that weren’t held nothing of interest. No matter what the chief claimed, the discovery of Lucy’s body must have revealed something. But of course, he wouldn’t have left Nate alone in his office if there’d been anything here worth finding.

  Nate had been avoiding them, but when he ran out of places to snoop, he turned to the pile of battered Moleskine notebooks. He picked up the one on top, handling it as he might an egg from which any manner of creature might hatch.

  He opened it to the bookmarked page and immediately confirmed that it was filled with Lucy’s handwriting. His gaze was naturally drawn to his own name penned in her slanting script.

  …regret telling Nate about Sarah Hernandez laughing at me because of that newspaper column. He thinks he’s being protective, but he takes things too far. Always too far. I wish he could see his own face when it goes blank with anger.

  Nate shut the journal and dropped it back with the others. He hadn’t talked to Lucy in fourteen years, and now this had become the last thing she’d said about him.

  He scanned the room, desperate to distract himself from her words.

  That’s when he noticed something that shouldn’t have been there. A security keypad was attached to the handle of the closet that the chief said had been added as part of the station’s renovations. An odd precaution for a coat closet, even in a police station.

  The chief had already been gone for a few minutes, but the hall beyond the office was still empty. Nate quickly went through the desk drawers again, searching for any scrap of paper that might contain the pass code. Employing a sophisticated security system while storing the key to its deactivation nearby was a classic mistake. He checked the bottoms, tops, and sides of the drawers. When he didn’t find anything, he checked under the desk’s blotter, the monthly calendar, and the computer’s tower and keyboard.

  Nate turned back to the keypad. There was no way to tell how many digits it wanted from him. On the upside, it looked willing to give him an unlimited number of attempts.

  Using significant dates as a password was another error people regularly made. He pulled the monthly calendar from under the desk blotter and scoured its pages. He plugged in the four digits that represented Mrs. Buck’s birthday, their anniversary, and Tom’s birthday with no luck.

  He’d really been counting on Tom’s birthday. His friend’s checkered smile grinned at him from the photo framed on the wall.

  I love Tom more than anything, the chief had said.

  Nate again plugged Tom’s birthday and month into the keypad but this time followed them with all four digits of the year he’d been born—the same year of Nate’s own birth.

  The lock disengaged with a click, and Nate pulled the door open to reveal a space larger that he’d expected. A walk-in storage area about eight feet deep.

  In a crime thriller or police procedural, he would have flicked the light switch to be confronted with a mosaic of horrors. Crime scene photos. Stern mugs shots of suspects. Collages of video footage stills and blood splatter diagrams and grisly autopsy photos.

  Instead, all that greeted Nate were clothes. Winter gear, hunting jackets, and extra uniforms hung from flanking rods. Above these, a miscellany of hats and sweaters were stacked to the ceiling. Male shoes of every variety lined the floor space two by two.

  Nate swore to himself as he walked in, shucking apparel aside so his hands could verify what his eyes saw. He was sure he’d find something here, but the only thing he’d learned was that closet space was at a premium in the Buck household.

  He was on his way out of the little room, thinking about what to do next, when he knocked a pair of galoshes out of their military alignment with the other sets of footwear. He stooped to nudge them back into order when he saw a squat filing cabinet pushed against the wall behind the coats.

  Finally. Nate swept the clothes out of the way. This was what he’d returned home to discover. Finally, he would have every scrap of information the police had gathered. But when he got a closer look at what he’d found, his excitement sank.

  His own name typed in all-caps Courier stared back at him from the cabinet’s drawer.

  TOM MARVELED AT how easy it was to roll the car into position.

  Even packed with three girls’ luggage, it took only a stretch of the muscles to bring Lindsay Stone’s brand-new silver Jetta to the edge of her patio.

  Tom had worried that this Thunder Run relied too much on luck and timing, but, as usual, Nate had been right about everything.

  The friends had spent the evening with the rest of their class on a boat the high school had chartered for its newest graduates. The school administration hoped a wholesome night cruise around the lake would curtail the anticipated debauchery, but bags of vodka-soaked gummi bears made their appearance even before the first brassy strains of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

  As Nate predicted, Lindsay Stone hadn’t abstained from these revelries. She’d been tottering by the time they disembarked. Johnny had the nimble fingers of a Dickensian street urchin, which he used to snatch the car key from Lindsay’s purse, but the truth was he probably could have asked her for the fob and she’d have handed it to him with no memory of the event. Still, Nate had praised Johnny up and down as they got into position for the Thunder Run.

  After the boat docked, they donned their black raincoats and leapt from shadow to shadow until they got to the Stones’ colossal Tudor on the Strand. In silence, they watched the looming house from a hedgerow across the street.

  Lindsay’s car had remained parked here because it was already crammed to capacity with luggage. She and the Sarahs planned to spend the rest of June and all of July on a road trip across the country. This sounded like fun to Tom, but Nate thought it terribly cliché.

  “How much will they actually see, hopping from one five-star hotel to the next?”

  “Obviously they’re not doing it right, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing,” Tom told him. “I’d like to see the desert, and the mountains. Real mountains.”

  “We should do it,” Nate said, after thinking about it. “Maybe next summer. When we get to California we could drive up the Pacific coast. That’d be cool.”

  It would be cool.

  Tom and the others hid in the shrubbery for half an hour before Sarah Carlisle pulled up to the Stones’ mansion and punctuated the night with three blasts of her Audi’s horn.

  Lindsay soon appeared, still wobbly but more casually dressed. After a tense moment with a slippery flagstone, she was in the car and off to Jim Tatum’s house, where the rest of their class was assembling.

  They waited another five minutes. When the Stones’ residence remained dark and the Strand stayed empty, they crept along the perimeter of exterior lights to the car park in the back.

  Nate handed Johnny the key fob and smiled. Lindsay wasn’t at the top of Johnny’s list, but she was on it. The key was a gift from the Storm King.

  Johnny unlocked the door, and Tom cringed at the accompanying tone and flare of lights. The engine was started, the gear set to neutral, but Nate insisted that they push and not drive the car down the grassy embankment. He didn’t want to risk the uneven tire treads on wet ground that might come with putting the car into drive.

  Had she really left the car on with the key in the ignition, Lindsay would wonder. Was the wind from the lake matched with the incline of the driveway really enough to propel the Jetta such a distance? These were the kinds of questions that plagued the target of a Thunder Run.

  “The speed at the end here is important, gentlemen,” Nate said. “Don’t let up until she goes over. I don’t want her to get stuck on the edge.”

  Tom was steaming inside his black raincoat. There’d been a brief downpou
r, but he hadn’t felt a drop since they’d been on the water. Still, they couldn’t risk being seen. Especially now that these adventures were finally coming to an end.

  Nate counted off, and they leaned into the car.

  Of course, Nate was right, and they needed to coax every spark of momentum from the Jetta. The car still caught on the lip of the pool for a moment before plunging nose-first into the deep end. Water erupted in fantastic quantities, surging across the patio and drenching them to their knees. The rear of the car swayed uncertainly before settling, its taillights glaring just above the churning water. It remained in that position, vertical in the pool like a piece of modern art. Tom glanced at Nate and was relieved to see his friend found this hilarious.

  “Away! Away!” Nate whispered to them. A Thunder Run quickly exited was a Thunder Run well done.

  They slid among the trees, through lawns, and over fences until they reached Johnny’s BMW, parked several streets away. Even then, they didn’t utter a word until their raincoats were out of sight in the trunk and they were all safely inside. The Storm King had rules no one dared break.

  “That was good, guys,” Nate said. It was important that he be the first to speak. “You killed it, Johnny, from beginning to end. A thing of beauty. Now we know what a summer’s worth of sunk plans look like. Might have even cracked the bottom of the pool.”

  “We’re lucky Dr. Stone didn’t buy his daughter a Hummer for graduation,” Johnny said as he fastened his seatbelt.

  Tom was relieved to hear some lightness in Johnny’s voice. He’d been in a wretched mood for most of the day, and Tom couldn’t blame him. A high schooler finding out he wasn’t graduating hours before the ceremony: Now that was cliché. Nate had been great to him, though. Promising that he’d help Johnny break the news to Mr. Vanhouten. Swearing to help Johnny get through the summer session.

  Of course, what Johnny really wanted was to nail Mr. Kritzler with a Thunder Run instead of hassling Lindsay for the thousandth time. But Lucy always got her way.