“And how is it you two come to be involved with David Vicente?” the sheriff asked.
“Well,” Jayme began, but DeMarco found he had small patience for charm.
“I’m guessing you were already filled in on that,” he said. “Vicente wouldn’t have given us your contact information if he hadn’t talked to you first.”
The sheriff laid the business cards aside, then rubbed his finger and thumb together. His smile reminded DeMarco of a cat his wife, Laraine, had adopted many years ago. It had a habit of bringing chipmunks into the living room, then setting them free, and watching, smiling, until a dazed and saliva-soaked rodent mustered the nerve to flee, at which instant the cat would pounce and seize it again.
The sheriff said, “You’re in a hurry to get at it, are you?”
“Not particularly,” DeMarco said. “We’re doing this as a favor. Mr. Vicente is hoping we might be able to see things from a fresh angle. Personally, I doubt we’ll have anything new to contribute. I fully expect we’ll be treated like a couple of Yankee carpetbaggers nosing around where we don’t belong.”
Jayme flinched at the word carpetbaggers. But she held her gaze and her smile on the sheriff. “Anything interesting we learn, we’ll pass it on to you ASAP.”
The sheriff picked up the cards again, tapped them against the top of his desk. “I’ll be counting on that,” he said.
DeMarco said, “Vicente’s file seems fairly comprehensive. Except for any disclosures about him or Dr. Hoyle or Mrs. Toomey.”
“What kind of disclosures are you looking for? They’re good people,” the sheriff said.
Jayme did not fail to notice the subtle change in the sheriff’s expression. It had been fleeting, too brief to say if it occurred at the corner of the man’s eyes or in a momentary dip of his smile, but she recognized it and knew DeMarco did too, had seen it happen a hundred times in others, that moment when a question strikes a nerve, just before a lie or half-truth is offered as deflection.
“I’m sure they are,” DeMarco answered. “But you know that feeling you get when you suspect somebody is setting you up? I’ve been getting that feeling lately.”
The sheriff shrugged, smiled. “What can I say? Everybody plays everybody. That’s life, isn’t it?”
“There’s nothing about their agendas, their motives, that might help me understand why they want us looking at this case?”
“The way I see it, Sergeant, we all have the same motives. Truth, justice, and the American way. Am I right?”
“Sounds like a job for Superman,” DeMarco said.
“If you run into him,” the sheriff said, and held out his hand, “tell him to come by. I’ll put him to work.”
Minutes later, on their walk back to the car, Jayme said, “What is it with you and authority figures? Why can’t you just get along?”
“I didn’t like his smile,” DeMarco said.
She knew it was more than that; it was always more with DeMarco. He reduced complex emotions to glib statements. What he had not liked was the sheriff’s supercilious attitude, as if he were the gatekeeper and arbiter of all countywide justice, and the way he had looked Jayme up and down. DeMarco saw himself as an instrument of justice, and he took umbrage at any concealment of information, any response short of full, enthusiastic disclosure. What puzzled and intrigued her was why he felt that way yet was so guarded himself, and why he cloaked his own raging need for justice beneath a sarcastic demeanor. He was an intelligent and keenly observant man who, in an instant, could relegate an individual to friend or foe, a response she had learned to read especially in his eyes. People he liked and trusted were met with what she called his smiling eyes—a relaxed, open gaze. The sheriff of Carlisle County had been regarded with a tight squint throughout the entire conversation.
DeMarco’s past was a mystery to her. He was more literate than most people she dealt with, sometimes startlingly so, as the time nine days earlier when he had quoted her favorite writer from high school. They had been waiting for a table at a restaurant in North Carolina rated by Zagat’s as best in the state for barbecue. The lobby was crowded and loud, the vinyl bench seats packed with talkative adults and raucous children. After twenty minutes he asked if she would mind finding another place for dinner, and outside on the sidewalk, she asked what was wrong with the place. He gave her a look that seemed to say How could you even ask that question? but answered only with, “Hell is other people.”
She said, “Do you know where that line comes from?” And he had answered, almost blithely, “No Exit. Jean-Paul Sartre.”
She had been delighted by the prospect of a literary discussion. “And do you also know what he really meant by that quote?” To which DeMarco had said, ending the discussion, “I know what I meant by it.”
Most times when she asked about his family, his vocabulary shrank even further. Strangers who made the mistake of trying to engage him in desultory conversation were often answered with silence and a narrowing of his eyes. She knew from her own experience as well as through her study in psychology that people are born with certain proclivities, but that the real catalyst for personality development is environment. She tried to envision him as a boy. When, and why, had he become so insular? She longed to find the key that would throw open the doors and fill him with light.
She said, “There’s a history in the South that makes some people more than a little sensitive at times. You understand that, right?”
He said, grinning, “You think ‘carpetbaggers’ was a bad choice of words?”
“I think it was a deliberately bad choice. Wasn’t I supposed to be doing the talking?”
He laid a hand against the small of her back. “You can drive if it makes you feel any better.”
“Don’t patronize me, DeMarco, or you’ll be riding in the trunk.”
Their visit to the local Kentucky State Police barracks went, as expected, more smoothly. Nobody reminded DeMarco of his estranged wife’s cat. A young trooper named Warner confirmed the contact information for all the suspects on Vicente’s list and cautioned, politely, to tread lightly around Eli Royce unless they wished to appear in his next televised sermon as the latest perpetrators of “white folks’ smear campaign against this century’s Elijah.”
“To be honest,” DeMarco told him, “Royce is at the bottom of my list as a suspect. There’s not a single bit of hard evidence to implicate him.”
“I agree,” said the trooper.
“Just between us, I sense a strong personal enmity between Vicente and Royce. Would you know anything about that?”
“You mean the defamation suit?”
“Come again?” DeMarco said.
“It’s been working its way through the courts for several years now. Royce is suing for thirty million dollars or some such figure. He alleges Vicente publicly defamed him on several occasions. That’s why Vicente lost his position at Vanderbilt, you know.”
“We were told he retired.”
“I guess that’s the polite way of saying it.”
Back at the parking lot, DeMarco and Jayme waited outside the car while the air conditioner ran full blast, gradually diminishing the greenhouse effect inside the car. DeMarco looked across the simmering roof at her and shook his head.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Run,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
“That a man like you would never run from anything.”
He gritted his teeth and snarled. “I hate you,” he told her, and popped open his door.
She opened the other door and climbed inside. “You disgust me,” she said.
FORTY-FOUR
In the deep woods just outside the confines of the Columbus-Belmont State Park, a narrow washboard road twisted northeast from the Mississippi River, then suddenly west again, then made a final turn north before ending at a rusty pip
e gate covered with hand-lettered signs.
PRIVATE PROPERTY!
Keep OUT or be SHOT!
If the PIT BULLS don’t get you, SMITH & WESSON will!
A hundred yards beyond the gate, two battered mobile homes sat side by side, both with empty lawn chairs alongside satellite dishes atop the roofs. The clearing also held two pickup trucks, one bile green, the newer one neon blue, plus one compact black sedan, one wheelless convertible Jeep Wrangler mounted on cement blocks, one capsized and doorless refrigerator, sundry plastic barrels, and three large dogs, all brown and tan, each chained to its own stake, each animal now stretching its chain taut and raising a chorus of saliva-spewing barks.
DeMarco, in the passenger seat, popped open the glove compartment. “Looks like Anarchy Central to me,” he said. From the compartment he retrieved his gold Pennsylvania State Police badge, which he affixed to his belt.
“That’s not going to do any good,” Jayme told him.
He handed her the other shield. “Not up close it won’t. But first we have to get up close.”
“Isn’t that, uh…”
“Misrepresentation?” He slid the Glock into his pocket holster, then popped open the door. “Not until we misrepresent.”
“Oy,” Jayme said, and reached for her own weapon.
They stood behind their open car doors. Jayme hit the horn with three long blasts. The dogs went crazy.
Thirty seconds later a trailer door swung open and a man in jeans and a wifebeater peered out, squinting. Then he disappeared for just a moment and returned with a pair of binoculars, which he raised to his eyes.
DeMarco pulled the hem of his knit shirt away from the shield.
Again the man disappeared from the doorway, then emerged wearing a pair of flip-flops. He came striding down into the scraggly yard. “Sit!” he screamed at the dogs, and they sat.
“Ah, sweet silence,” DeMarco said.
Jayme smiled. As much as she adored him in his gentle mode, she loved this mode of DeMarco too. Fearless, ready to rattle some cages.
The man came to within ten yards of the gate and said, louder than necessary, “What?” He stood maybe five foot eight, close to two hundred pounds, most of it in his chest and belly. His head was shaved, face scruffy. His eyes were bloodshot, his fists clenched.
“I’m Sergeant Ryan DeMarco and this is Trooper Matson. We’d like to ask a few questions of Mr. McGintey, please.”
“Which one?”
“Mr. Chad McGintey.”
“In that case you’re shit out of luck. He ain’t home. And don’t bother asking me where he is. Even if I knew I wouldn’t tell you.”
“It would be in everybody’s best interests, Mr. McGintey, if we didn’t have to come onto your property and conduct a search.”
“A search for what? You got a warrant?”
“We don’t need a warrant to fly a chopper over your property to do a scan. You do grow your own weed, I assume.”
McGintey flinched. “That’s what this is all about? You’ve come all the way out here to hassle us about a little weed?”
“Your brother is a registered sex offender. We’re here to see how that’s been working out for him.”
McGintey stood motionless for a few moments. Then he said, “Fuck you sideways,” turned and spit on the ground and strode away.
Jayme waited until McGintey was out of earshot. “As smooth as ever,” she told DeMarco.
He looked at her and grinned. “We’ve tried sideways, right?”
He climbed into the car and shut the door. When she was inside and delicately turning the vehicle in the narrow space available, he told her, “When we get back to where the road makes that last sharp turn before the highway, slow down and let me jump out. You go on ahead a ways, find a place to pull over, and wait for my call.”
“What are you expecting?”
“Fun and games,” he said.
FORTY-FIVE
DeMarco hunched down behind a thick oak, his head weed-high. The bumpty-bump drone of Grandma’s car was fading. But a similar sound was fast approaching from the opposite direction.
The bile-green pickup truck. DeMarco pressed himself to the tree and lifted his head a few inches higher. The truck came speeding past, trailing a cloud of road dust. But before the dust engulfed DeMarco, he had a brief but telling look into the truck’s cab. The driver was a McGintey but not the older one. Beside him sat a female approximately nineteen or twenty years old. Crowded in beside her, up close to the passenger window, was another female, noticeably younger. He held up his phone and said, “Call Jayme.”
She answered with, “A green truck just now blew past me. One male, one female.”
“Were you visible from the road?” he asked.
“If they had their eyes open, yep.”
“Then two females and a male,” he told her. “One was scrunched down. Follow them and see where they go. I’ll call Warner and report what I saw. Take note of who gets out of the truck when it stops, and let Warner know where to find them. Then come back and get me.”
“And what will I find you doing?” Jayme asked.
“Swatting mosquitoes,” he told her, and slapped the one sucking from his neck.
FORTY-SIX
On their way to Bardwell to make an unannounced call on Aaron Henry, the disgraced, divorced, and reclusive predator of eighth-grade girls, Jayme and DeMarco discussed how they would handle their conversation with him.
“How come you always get to be the bad cop?” Jayme said. “The bad cop gets all the good lines.”
“I’m a better actor than you are,” DeMarco said.
“Except that you’re not acting. You’re nasty by nature.”
“All the more reason, then.”
“Maybe we should both be the bad cops.”
“You have to give a cornered rat a place to run,” he reminded her. “Otherwise he fights back.”
“Fine. He can run to you.”
“Jayme,” he told her, “think about it. He’s a heterosexual. A perverted one, but still…”
“Nope,” she said, and shook her head. “I’m taking this one.”
DeMarco scowled at the windshield, but only so as to conceal his smile. None of the other troopers back in Pennsylvania had ever talked to him the way Jayme did. Nor did he want them too. But with Jayme it had always been different. She was his equal, and they both knew it. More than his equal. Intellectually, emotionally, psychologically…in every way except experience, she beat him by a furlong. And he liked that. But hoped to keep her from knowing it.
They were coming into Bardwell when his cell phone rang. The screen lit up with Call from Bowen. He held it up for Jayme to glance at while she drove. She pursed her lips and wrinkled her nose.
DeMarco grinned and answered the call. “Hey there, junior,” he said. “You calling to brag that your pubic hair finally came in?”
“I’m calling to ask what the hell you’re up to down there in Who-knows-where, Kentucky. I just had a call from the sheriff of Carlisle County.”
“I hope you told him your command is in shambles without me there to hold your hand.”
“I told him you’re borderline insane and I hope you never come back. What’s this about you and Matson taking part in some kind of investigation?”
“Do I question what you do for fun? By the way, how is that mama sheep you keep in the closet? What do you call her—Brenda?”
Jayme snickered and slowed to read a street sign.
“Listen,” Bowen said. “Don’t forget you’re on medical leave. If you’re receiving compensation of any kind—”
“Pro bono,” DeMarco told him.
Jayme’s phone rang then. She slipped it from her shirt pocket, looked at the number, and wheeled the car into a Food Lion parking lot. She punched the answer bu
tton and said, “One second, please.” She shut off the engine, climbed out of the car, shut the door, and said, “Trooper Warner, how’d it turn out?”
“She was underage, all right. Two months shy of fifteen. She’s not saying much at the moment, but we’re hopeful to get McGintey with at least sexual abuse in the second, and the older girl for unlawful transaction in the third. At the very least we’ve got McGintey for supplying alcohol to a minor.”
“So it was Chad and not the older brother?”
“It was Chad all right. We’re waiting now for their lawyer to show up.”
“Sergeant DeMarco and I would sure like a few minutes with Chad if we could.”
“Give me a call in an hour or so. We’ll do what we can for you. Personally, I don’t think he’s the guy you’re looking for, but you never know, do you?”
When she finished the call she climbed back into the car. DeMarco was waiting, his own phone pocketed. “Bowen says hello,” he told her.
“Warner picked up Chad McGintey, the girl he did time for, plus a fourteen-year-old.”
“Hot diggity. They were at the motel where you last saw them? In flagrante delicto, I hope.”
“Don’t know about that,” she said. “He said they—” Her phone, still in her hand, beeped and vibrated again. She glanced at the screen, which read Call from Capt B. She silenced the phone and quickly pocketed it.
DeMarco said, “Boyfriend?” and she told him, “Mom, asshole.”
She started the engine and moved out onto the highway again. “Anyway, about McGintey. Warner’s going to get us a few minutes with him. We’ll know in an hour or so. But he doesn’t think he’s our guy.”
“And why’s that?”
“Didn’t say. Maybe because the older girl is still alive. And Caucasian. Both are Caucasian. Plus it sounds like the fourteen-year-old was there of her own free will.”
“Fourteen-year-olds don’t have free will,” DeMarco said. “Or they do, I guess. Just shitty judgment. That’s why we have laws to protect them.”
Walking the Bones Page 13
