After a quick stop at the drive through at Dunkin’ Donuts, Ben stumbled into the auction room just before the doors were supposed to open for the preview. The bidding wouldn’t start for another hour yet, but the potential buyers had this hour to inspect the merchandise more closely and make notes on what they wanted to bid on.
Ben took up his position next to the valuables case where he could assist anyone who wanted a closer look at any of the particular items. Steve drifted by at around a quarter after eight and tutted at Ben’s appearance but didn’t say anything. Instead, he made his way through the attendees, occasionally greeting people whom he seemed to know passingly well.
“Excuse me, honey, does that radio work?” A gray-haired lady had laid her hand on Ben’s arm and was pointing to an older-style radio next to the valuables cabinet.
Ben frowned, trying to decide if the auctioneers had established that yesterday. “I think it does.”
“I want to be sure before I bid on it. Can you plug it in for me?”
Ben waved Larry over and briefly explained what was needed.
Larry smiled at the older woman and gave her an abbreviated bow. “Sure thing, ma’am. I’ll take over your post, Ben. You know where the outlets are better than I do.”
“Ha, right, after less than a month. Come on, miss, let’s see if we can figure out if this thing still works.”
Ben wandered along the edge of the room until he found an outlet and plugged the radio in. It turned on with a pop, blasting static into the room. The volume control seemed to be stuck, so he rapidly spun the tuning dial until the sounds of a news radio program filled the room. “It seems to work alright, though the volume control is shot.”
“That’s okay; I like it loud. That way I can listen without my hearing aids.”
“Well, then, this is just fine for you.”
The woman made some reply, but Ben was now ignoring her. His entire attention was focused on the news report currently blasting through the room.
“The police just released his name. Leonard Moscovich is considered a suspect in eleven kidnapping and ten murder cases involving young boys. The police have barricaded his entire farm and are now digging up various areas in an effort to determine whether they have found all of the bodies.”
Ben finally looked up at the old lady as she shook him. “I said that’s enough, young man. You can turn the damnable thing off now. People are staring.”
“I’m sorry.” Ben switched off the radio and hurried to place it back by its lot placard. He started back to his post, changed his mind, and left the auction room, going straight to his desk. Eleven boys. Was that even possible? It was a horrifically high number of young lives cut short. But at least he now had a name.
His hands shook a little as he called up the advanced version of the white pages that he had access to, which included all addresses that the post office received for mail forwarding, etc. After searching for Leonard Moscovichs in Georgia, he was left with ten possibilities, only one of which lived near Savannah. In fact, his address was about equidistant between the two cities. Leonard had apparently lived with a Lena Moscovich, now deceased.
Sitting back in his chair, he ran his hands through his hair a few times, and left his hands on top of his head. He stared at the screen wondering what this man, the last face his son had probably seen, looked like. There was no indication in this database so he minimized the window and opened several of the other databases. The Department of Transportation confirmed that this Leonard’s mother did indeed own a green truck. A ’95 Ford F-150 to be precise. However, none of the other databases yielded any results, so he turned to the ultimate researcher’s friend: Google.
Now that the name was public knowledge, news agencies were scurrying to gather material on the man. The only pictures that accompanied the articles, however, were blurry distance photos taken as Moscovich was taken into the police station or excised from his school yearbook. They didn’t help Ben; he wanted to see the bastard’s face.
He closed the browser window in disgust and sat staring at his cursor. Should he do it or not? Skip out on work to go to the farm crawling with officers, where his son had probably been killed, see what there was to see, maybe talk to the investigators? Or stay here and play auctioneer to little old ladies and used book salesmen.
In the end, he decided he didn’t really have a choice. He copied Moscovich’s address onto a Post-it and shut down his computer. It didn’t matter that his first auction continued on without him. There was nothing for him to do now except to figure out who this guy was. He had to know what kind of a monster could have killed his five-year-old son.
He was halfway down the highway before he realized that he hadn’t told anyone he was leaving. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference anyway as he really didn’t have any idea what happened at these auctions except that Larry and Steve would take care of everything. So what did they need him for?
The driveway to the farm would have been invisible on any regular day; there wasn’t even a mailbox on the little two-lane highway. But today it had a police car parked on the highway’s shoulder with an officer standing at the end of it. Ben pulled over onto the shoulder and parked. It took a couple minutes before his breathing was under control and he felt his legs would support him when he got out of the car.
The officer’s full attention was on him as he walked the ten feet back to the driveway. “Excuse me, sir, this is a restricted area. You’ll have to go back to your car and leave.”
“This is the Moscovich farm, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir, it is, but I’ll have to ask you to leave. This is an active crime scene.” The officer’s hand was now on his radio.
Ben took a step forward but stopped when the officer held up his hand. “I know, I just have to…is Detective O’Connor here? He knows who I am, please.”
“Hold on.” He switched his attention to his radio. “Is there a Detective O’Connor on the premises?” He listened to the squawking that resulted from his query. “There’s a guy here asking for him.”
“Benjamin Grant,” Ben supplied before the officer could ask.
“Says his name is Benjamin Grant.” The radio squawked again and the officer frowned. “Ten-four.” His attention came back to Ben. “He’ll be right out.”
“Thank you, thank you so much.”
Ben waited impatiently, pacing back and forth across the tar-coated gravel at the end of the driveway. Images of possible torture and murder scenes filled his head as he paced, each one more gruesome than the last. The officer alternated between watching him carefully and scanning the surrounding area. After about ten minutes, Detective O’Connor appeared from around the bend.
“O’Connor!” Ben called, waving. The officer glared at him, so he quickly amended himself. “Detective!”
“Ben, what are you doing here? How are you here?” The detective patted the officer on his shoulder, and the man walked off a few feet to continue watching the road and the sparse traffic along it.
“I heard it on the radio and…” He made a vague gesture in the air. “Well, I just had to come take a look for myself. I couldn’t not.”
O’Connor frowned and squinted at Ben. “I thought we were doing a better job keeping this location from the media.”
Ben shifted uncomfortably, well aware of the fact that he had probably broken a few laws to get his information. “You know the media; they always show up eventually.”
“But they’re not here yet. You are.” The detective placed himself firmly between Ben and the farm driveway.
“I, uh, whitepaged it.” Ben hoped this excuse would satisfy the detective and he would start talking about something important, like if Benny was buried somewhere up that gravel driveway.
“I see.” The detective wiped sweat off of his forehead and came off the defensive.
“This is an active crime scene, Ben. I can’t let you past here.”
“You have to! I mean, you at least have to tell me, my Benny—”
“May not be one of the boys here.” The detective placed himself more firmly in Ben’s path, as if he expected him to make a run for it and start digging for himself.
Ben’s frustration was difficult to keep in control. The man simply refused to give him any information, even though it was Ben’s tip about the green truck that had led them to Moscovich. Well, maybe not led, but certainly reinforced the discovery. “But the truck fits the description, and they said there were eleven bodies. Eleven!”
“And there are over one hundred missing boys of the age range that we’re finding. You have to be patient and let us do our jobs! Go home and do yours. Unless I’m mistaken, this is a work day and last you told me you had a government job.” Detective O’Connor turned and started back down the driveway.
“Wait!” Ben reached out and grabbed the detective’s shoulder, trying to get him to listen.
The detective rounded on him, knocking Ben’s arm aside, finally getting angry. “Look, Ben. I can’t tell you anything. Do you get that? It’s part of my job. Do I wish I could? Sometimes. But I have been looking at little skeletons being unearthed all day, and unless you want me to charge you with obstructing an investigation, tampering with evidence, assaulting a police officer, and whatever else I can come up with to keep you out of here, go home.”
Ben stood dumbfounded while Detective O’Connor rubbed his face roughly. For the first time, Ben could see just how tired the detective was. There were bags under his eyes and lines that hadn’t been there the last time they spoke. “Is it that bad?”
The detective didn’t raise his eyes from the gravel when he answered. “Yeah. It’s that bad.”
It took Ben a moment to get the words out around the sudden constriction of his throat. “I’m sorry. I’ll go home. Can you just keep me updated?” All those little skeletons in the ground. Ben thought he could almost see it himself.
“If I ever learn anything.” This time when the detective turned around and started walking away, Ben didn’t try to stop him. Instead, he went back to his car and baked under his windshield for another ten minutes before he thought to turn on the car so at least he’d have air conditioning. He still wished he could go down that driveway, but he wasn’t willing to push his one connection to the case any further than he already had. He was afraid it would break entirely.
That being said, he also didn’t think he could go back to work and face the crowd, so instead, he drove back to his apartment. All the way home he couldn’t stop thinking about tiny skeletons in shallow graves. They danced in his head, and every one of them had a broken right arm and was just the right height to walk into the kitchen counter corners.
He swerved into the liquor store and bought the cheapest bottle of whiskey they had; there wasn’t much left in his debit account. As soon as he was through the door, he opened the bottle and sat at his desk. He automatically reached for his cell phone to put it on its charger and realized that he’d left it at work. Cursing himself because that was the number Detective O’Connor had to get in touch with him, he rummaged under the papers on his desk until he found the landline phone that he hadn’t yet bothered to activate and reached for his wallet. He still had the emergency phone card Jeannie had insisted he carry at all times. It was wedged behind all of his other cards, and he’d forgotten about it until now.
After taking five minutes to figure out exactly what order he had to dial the various numbers in, he was ringing through to Sylvia’s phone. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Ben.”
“Where in the hell are you?”
He cringed at the fury in her tone, but he pushed on. “I had to do something.”
“You should be here. We don’t have enough people here. We had to pull Byron from the bullpen, and he’s pissed.”
Ben didn’t particularly care about what Byron thought, but he needed his phone for when Detective O’Connor would call. “It was important. Look, I left my cell phone at work. Could you bring it by?”
“Have you started drinking today?”
He glanced at the bottle of amber liquid in front of him. “Not yet.”
“Then come get it your own damn self.” And she hung up on him.
Ben slammed down the receiver and fumed for a moment before grabbing his keys again and heading out the door.
Live Animals and Other Contraband
I cannot understand how people think they can send things through the mail that are blatantly dangerous. Ammunition, poisonous snakes, firecrackers going off in the back of postal trucks. You name it, we’ve had it. They put our lives at risk for a little fun, and that’s not right. More often than not, it just turns into a damned mess, if you ask me.
~ Gertrude Biun, Property Office Manual
Ben made it back to the Center just as Larry and Steve finished pushing the last table into place and Sylvia had picked up a broom to get the worst of the debris off the floor.
“It’s over already?”
Sylvia glared over her shoulder before she resumed stabbing at the floor with the broom. “Yes, it’s over. You just took off, Ben. This is your job. Where the hell did you go?”
“I had to go find out…you know what, never mind.” Ben was still seething from the phone call and didn’t much feel like justifying himself. “I don’t have to explain myself to you. I had a personal emergency.”
She stopped sweeping and gave him a level stare. “We all heard the radio broadcast, Ben.”
He hunched his shoulders and tried to get around Sylvia and into the warehouse. “So what?”
Sylvia planted herself in front of him, broom propped upright against her shoulder. “You heard a broadcast about a man and a kidnapped boy and you go tearing out of here. I know what you were thinking. At least, I know what I was thinking, and I have less of a response to such stimulating information than you do.”
Larry and Steve until this point had been trying to not eavesdrop over by the coffee machine, but Larry could no longer contain himself. “What, what were you thinking? A dick move there, Benjamin, leaving us here.” He turned his attention back to the coffee, trying to pretend he hadn’t just busted in on the conversation.
Sylvia glared at Larry and turned back to her boss. “Well, Ben, was he there?”
Ben sighed and slumped into a chair still in the middle of the room, burying his face in his hands. “They don’t know; there’s too many boys, god, there’s too many.”
Sylvia regarded him for a moment, her anger starting to subside at the sight of his collapsed frame. “How many?”
“More than ten. Including the one they found alive in the guy’s truck. But they’re still looking. God, so many boys.” He was starting to wonder himself why he’d gone out to the farm. It was torture, plain and simple, to make himself confront all those lost boys, but if he hadn’t, he’d never have forgiven himself for not trying to get to Benny, wherever he was.
Larry piped up again, “And what is your relationship to the radio broadcast and kidnapped boys?”
Steve finally broke into the conversation. “You really don’t know? I keep telling you, you need to read the newspaper we get, but no, all you want are the comics.”
“Apparently, yes, you were right. I should read the papers. But what’s with him, it looks like someone killed his puppy.”
“It’s more likely someone killed my son.” Ben stood and stormed out of the break room and slammed his way into the warehouse.
At his desk, Ben paced back and forth fuming, wondering how anyone could be so calloused, so self-absorbed, to have missed the radio broadcasts, the television news, and the newspaper articles from the last year, particularly i
f they lived around Savannah. It was only a year ago, and a man who had interacted with him before, who knew his face, couldn’t remember that his son was missing. If not him, who would remember? Who would remember the face on the poster? If they had known about it when it happened, would they have known something, seen something, that would have Benny back home already?
He wrenched open his desk drawer, grabbed the cell phone, and then stopped, staring at his computer, which was patiently waiting for him, the USPS logo twirling back and forth across the screen.
Leonard Moscovich. Ben was here, he might as well take advantage of the reasons he signed up to be there in the first place. He woke up the computer by slamming the space bar. Starting up the most basic of his search programs, he entered the son-of-a-bitch’s name. Leonard Moscovich, Lenny, Mosy. What nicknames did your friends have for you?
The search just covered known address, any forwarding requirements, other names at the household, any incidents. The only other name at that address was a Lena Moscovich. Wife? Mother? Daughter?
He pulled up the DMV database, but before he could start snooping, Sylvia slammed a stack of ledgers on the desk. Obviously not all her anger had been dissipated by the news.
“If you’re here, you better go take care of the credit slip for Larry and Steve. They need your signature to get paid. And if you’re too busy wallowing to do your job, you can at least make sure they get paid for doing theirs.” She turned to his computer screen. “Is that work? Or pleasure?”
“Neither.” Ben minimized the window before Sylvia could get a good look and crossed his arms, leaning back in his chair. If she was going to continue to be angry, so could he. She had no right to judge him for going after information about his son, regardless of who he discommoded to do so.
“Masochism is a form of pleasure, you know. And that new auditor is going to show up any moment and catch you with your pants down wanking away on this machine.”
He was appalled at her use of language, but more so over the image of him taking gratification from the search for his son. This wasn’t pleasure, it was torture, and he wished to God he didn’t have to keep going, that his son would appear and he could be done. “Sylvia!”
Undeliverable Page 19
