Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  I had rearranged the salt and pepper shakers several times and managed to shred a paper napkin into confetti by the time Briggs walked in. He wore jeans and a plaid button-down shirt instead of a khaki uniform, and he looked a bit heavier and had less hair, but he carried himself with the same quiet authority I remembered from a decade earlier. We shook hands, his grip firm and dry, and he sat down across from me, turning his head to order coffee from the lone, bored waitress in the corner before returning his attention to me.

  “Thanks for meeting me, Mr. Glass,” he said.

  “Of course.” I raised my coffee cup and then put it back down on the table with a flat clack. “I have to say I was surprised to get your call.”

  He nodded. “I can imagine,” he said politely. “It was out of the blue. Just to be clear, again, please understand that I don’t have anything to tell you about where your friend might be.”

  I frowned. “You told me that earlier, but then why did you call? Are there any new leads or—” I paused as the waitress brought Briggs his coffee, smiled limply at me, and returned to her corner by the cash register.

  Briggs shifted his weight comfortably, as if settling in. “There aren’t any new leads,” he said. “As far as I know. I retired earlier this fall.”

  “I heard. Sheriff Townsend told me you’d moved to Florida.”

  What might have been the beginning of a smile softened the corner of Briggs’s mouth. “He did? When did he tell you that?”

  “I met him last month to ask him about Fritz, see if there was anything he could tell me. He told me the Davenports . . .” I paused, as if at a speed bump, and then pushed forward. “He said they had him declared legally dead. I saw a notice on a bulletin board about your retirement, and the sheriff said he thought you’d moved down to Florida. Then when I met Deputy Smalls, he told me he was going fishing with you this weekend.”

  Now Briggs did smile, a full, beaming smile. He had a rather plain, stolid face, but the smile transformed it, like a lamp that shone briefly but to great effect. “We did,” he said. “Yesterday. Caught some good trout, too.”

  “Why would the sheriff tell me you lived in Florida?” I asked.

  The smile went out across Briggs’s face. “Because that’s where he’d like me to be,” he said. “Somewhere other than here.” He looked down at his cup and pursed his lips, and then looked back up at me. I was aware that he was sizing me up, weighing what he could tell me. “Do you mind telling me, Mr. Glass, why you’re suddenly interested in Fritz Davenport?”

  My face grew warm, lit by a slow-rising anger that masked a core of guilt. “He was my friend,” I said tersely, and then corrected myself. “He is my friend.”

  “But you haven’t been looking for him. Why now?”

  “What do you know about what I’ve been doing?” I said sharply. Beneath the anger in my voice, I could detect my own fear. Briggs was asking me questions I didn’t want to ask myself.

  He sat there, calm as an ice floe. I couldn’t read his expression. Absently I realized this must have been a useful skill for a cop. When he spoke, it was with the same even tone. “I know you became an author. You wrote a novel. So I wondered if you were doing some sort of research here, for another book.”

  Then I understood. Briggs was checking to see if I was exploiting Fritz’s disappearance as material for a book. The idea was so ludicrous, I had to laugh, more of a short, rueful bark than actual laughter. “I’m sorry,” I said after a moment. “I . . . It just struck me as funny. It’s . . .” I sighed. “I’m sorry I bit your head off. Look, the last thing I’m interested in doing is writing a book about this. I just . . . I’ve spent years avoiding this, and now I’ve . . . come back to the place where it happened. I need to put it to rest.” I briefly thought about telling him what I’d learned from Pelham Greer—that Fritz had come back to our dorm room that night while I was in the library talking with Trip Alexander—but that was my secret, and I was reluctant to give it up just yet, especially to someone I barely knew. Plus, he was a former cop who might not look kindly on how I had kept Fritz’s medal to myself for almost a decade. So I held back even as I leaned forward in my seat toward Briggs. “If you know anything about Fritz, anything that could help find him, or help me understand what happened to him . . . please,” I said, “please tell me.”

  Briggs thought for a moment, looking out the window at the night, and then exhaled sharply through his nose. As he spoke, I felt a growing excitement. This was one of those key moments in life, when everything gets reduced to what is said and what is heard in the next few minutes.

  “The night your roommate disappeared,” he said, “I was the officer on duty. We got a call from Blackburne, from Sam Hodges, saying that a student was missing. I drove out there, thinking that it was probably a homesick boy who was just hiding somewhere, or at most that he’d run away and someone would pick him up in Staunton or Waynesboro. Wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. But after talking with Mr. Hodges, I got the sense that it was more serious than that, and then I met with you and that settled it for me. You all were worried and frightened. I called in and requested a search party.” He paused and quirked his mouth. “I was in CID then, our criminal investigations division, and I wanted to handle this quickly and quietly. Sam Hodges had told me about the boy’s parents. Anytime you have a prominent family involved, you have to be careful about investigations getting too public. But Ricky Townsend—he wasn’t sheriff yet, though he was on his way—he was in charge of my division, and he wanted a press conference and media coverage. He thought Fritz might have been abducted. He wanted this all out on the news to get the public involved in the search.”

  My throat was dry. “You didn’t agree,” I said.

  Briggs shook his head. “Ricky was a good deputy, but he was slick. He is slick. He likes talking to the press, getting on television. Me, I like keeping my head down and doing my job. We’d butted heads more than once, but this was different, with a lot more at stake. Fritz was eighteen, which meant we couldn’t treat this as a child abduction. Heck, we didn’t have any evidence to suggest that a crime of any kind had taken place. I can’t tell you how much I hoped we’d just find him out in the woods somewhere, with maybe a broken leg at worst. But after the search party didn’t find Fritz, Ricky and I argued about what to do next. That ATM receipt in Charlottesville the weekend before, when Fritz had obviously taken a lot of cash out of his account, made me wonder if Fritz had planned this. But Ricky figured someone had taken Fritz, grabbed him off the road, and was holding him in a basement somewhere.” He saw the look on my face and raised a hand as if to ward off my reaction. “I’m sorry the way this sounds. I don’t mean to upset you. But you need to know how we were thinking. Fritz didn’t own a car, and none were missing from Blackburne, or the whole county for that matter, so he must have walked away without anyone seeing him, had a car we didn’t know about, or was picked up by someone, either a stranger or somebody willing to help him run away. Ricky even had a suspect, a guy named Tofer Jones, who worked at Blackburne and had a record.”

  I nodded. “I remember that. He was a cook. But you interviewed him and let him go, right?”

  Briggs snorted. “Tofer couldn’t catch a cow, much less kidnap a rich white kid and keep him hidden somewhere. When he was nineteen, he tried to walk out of a mall in Richmond with some clothes in a backpack, said he wanted to get his mother a Christmas present but didn’t have any money. Few years later, a rape victim in Mechanicsville ID’d Tofer in a photo lineup, but he was visiting family in D.C. at the time and even had a job interview an hour before the rape occurred, so all charges were dropped, and rightfully so. It was a no-brainer that he wasn’t involved in Fritz Davenport’s disappearance. But Tofer got hotheaded when Ricky and I interviewed him, pushed Ricky’s buttons, and Ricky thought Tofer was a good suspect. Ricky and I got kind of heated. Sheriff Baines had to cut both of us off.” Briggs sat back. “Didn’t matter in the end, anyway.”

>   “Why not?”

  “State police got involved, for one thing. Sheriff called them in the day after Fritz went missing. They’ve got more manpower and expertise for this kind of thing than we do. They interviewed Tofer themselves, realized pretty quick that he wasn’t a viable suspect, and cut him loose. Interviewed a few other Blackburne employees, too.”

  Like Pelham Greer, I thought. “Some folks were upset,” I said.

  “You might be, too, if you were being interrogated about something you had nothing to do with,” Briggs said. “Happens a lot. Most folks are cooperative, some are nervous, and then you’ve got the ones full of righteous indignation who take it personally. That’s not unusual. But we had to ask everyone. How did Fritz walk down off that hill in the middle of a rural county, at night, and vanish? We had dogs track him as far as the main entrance, but then the trail went cold. Wind and cold played hell with the scent. Folks figured he had to have gotten in a vehicle. And we needed to know if someone at Blackburne had helped him leave. But then the feds got involved, and that changed everything real quick.”

  I had been thinking of the main entrance to Blackburne, the two lions on their pedestals. Fritz would have passed by them if he had left campus that way. If the lions could talk, what would they report they had seen? Had Fritz walked out confidently, knowing where he was going? Or had he been scared to death of leaving everything behind? Or—and this was the worst thought—had someone abducted him? Then I realized that Briggs was waiting for me to respond, and I recalled with a start what he had said. “Did you say . . . the feds? You mean the FBI?”

  Briggs sighed. For a moment he looked weary, as if the story were tiring to tell. Then he shrugged it off. “A special agent from D.C. He showed up the following week, wanted to go back over the whole investigation. The Davenports had connections.”

  This was new information, but not all that surprising. At Blackburne, we had all thought that the Davenports would call the FBI or a private investigator. Some classmates, like Fletcher Dupree, had said the local cops were too incompetent to handle something like Fritz vanishing into thin air.

  Briggs gestured with his hand as if discarding an unpleasant thought. “I don’t have a problem with the FBI in general. But it just muddied the water when they came in. Who’s in charge? Who has jurisdiction? Who makes decisions, and who carries them out? Those are all the sorts of things you don’t want to have to deal with in the middle of an investigation. The feds wanted to review everything we’d done so far, which slowed us all down. They did their own interviews. They were thinking kidnapping and ransom. Mr. Davenport’s company did a lot of business with the military, which meant money and national security issues.” He paused to sip his coffee.

  Listening to Briggs was surreal, like eavesdropping on a movie set. Kidnapping, ransom, national security. “Are you telling me,” I began, and then lowered my voice. “Are you telling me that Fritz disappearing might have had something to do with national security?”

  Briggs put down his coffee. “No,” he said. “I’m not. I’m saying what some theories were at the time. Thousands of people go missing every year, for all sorts of reasons. They get lost, they run away with someone, maybe from someone. They’re mad at their parents, or at their girlfriends, and want to give them a scare. Someone wants to step out of his life and into another one. A kid running off to the city to make it big, that kind of thing.”

  And this got at the crux of the issue—why Fritz had run away. Guilt flushed through me. At a remove of almost ten years, it seemed ridiculous and even self-centered to think that Fritz had run away solely because I had lied to him, even though at the time I had thought it was true. Yet I still felt guilty. “If the FBI hasn’t found him by now,” I said tentatively, feeling my way around the idea even as I spoke it aloud, “then all those scenarios you just listed don’t make a lot of sense.”

  Briggs looked at me with something like resignation. “The FBI hasn’t found him because they’re not looking for him,” he said.

  I blinked. His words didn’t fully register. “Excuse me?” I said. “What, they—did they find something, or . . . Wait, is this because of the legally dead thing, or—”

  Briggs shook his head. “The feds stopped looking for him a week after they showed up,” he said.

  I stared at him. He looked back at me impassively, patient as a clock. “Why the fuck would they do that?” I said, my voice rising. In her corner, the waitress stirred.

  Briggs didn’t blink. “Somebody had them stop looking,” he said. He wasn’t being playful or coy, just relaying facts. “One morning the special agent in charge went to Sheriff Baines’s office, and after he left, the sheriff told us that the feds were out and it was our case again, along with the state police.”

  I realized that somewhere in the conversation I had taken hold of my coffee spoon and was now gripping it hard enough to leave a welt in my palm. I put it down on the table. “Why—why would they do that? What would make them just stop looking without some sort of . . .” I trailed off, uncertain how to end that thought and not sure I wanted to.

  Briggs hesitated. “It was more like they realized they’d made some sort of mistake and pulled out,” he said. “I don’t know for sure. The official word was that the FBI had found no reason for its involvement. And to be honest, there didn’t seem to be. There wasn’t ever any ransom demand, for one thing, and no real clues about anyone being involved in any sort of kidnapping or abduction or any other federal crime. But once the feds get out of their chairs, they don’t tend to just sit back down and call it a day without having done something first. All they did was get updated on the case, run down a few leads, and then head back to D.C.” Briggs looked at his coffee cup, as if considering whether to take another sip. “Ricky Townsend must’ve been thanking his lucky stars when that happened.”

  Incredulous, I asked, “Why, do you . . . Do you think the sheriff had something to do with Fritz’s disappearance?”

  Briggs frowned, causing an ugly wrinkling of his face. “God, no,” he said with a trace of disgust. “No. He’s a lot of things, but . . . just no.” He ran a hand over his forehead, which was probably his equivalent of extreme agitation. “That’s not what I’m suggesting. I’m talking about perception. Spin. Ricky’s theory about Tofer Jones was shot full of holes by the state police, but all that got forgotten when the feds showed up. And by the time they left, folks half thought the feds had come up with that theory and got egg on their faces. Meanwhile, Ricky was around to talk to the media again, standing beside the state police and nodding at press conferences. He dropped the abduction story and started quoting statistics about runaways.” Briggs stopped abruptly, as if he felt he had said too much.

  I thought I understood. “You’re saying Townsend did some sort of verbal jujitsu and made the FBI look stupid instead of him,” I said. “And then he took your theory about Fritz running away and made it his.”

  Briggs hesitated and then gave me a resigned shrug. “And now he’s sheriff and I’m a retired deputy,” he said. “He didn’t like how I’d argued with him, and Ricky Townsend doesn’t forget. When he got elected sheriff last year, I knew it was just a matter of time before I found myself at a desk job, so I retired early. Got my pension and health benefits, so it’s okay.” He sounded like a man working to convince himself.

  “So why are you telling me all this?” I asked. “You thought I had an agenda. What’s yours? Is this just about some beef you have with Sheriff Townsend?” I was a bit surprised by my own words. A knot tightened in my gut.

  But Briggs just considered the top of the table, as if looking there for an answer. Then he looked back up at me, and his face expressed sorrow and a kind of pain. “It was when I heard about that boy who shot himself,” he said quietly. “For a school to lose two boys . . . Well, it brought up a lot of old memories. I thought you deserved to know.”

  I shook my head. “I appreciate it, honestly. But I’m not sure exactly what you think I
should know.”

  Briggs leaned forward in the booth, his plain brown eyes fixed on me. “When somebody runs away, sometimes the key isn’t where they’re running to, but what they’re running from. I remember you felt bad about having an argument with Fritz the day he vanished. Maybe that upset him, but not enough for him to disappear off the face of the earth. If he took all that money out of the bank the week before, he was planning this long before your argument.” I felt hot tears at the back of my eyes, a curious mix of shame and exoneration. Briggs continued speaking quietly and intently. “Take that along with the FBI dropping the case like a hot pan, and it all points to someone with connections, power. Influence. Someone who frightened Fritz enough for him to run away from everything he had, including his best friend.”

  I looked up at him and spoke in a cracked, harsh whisper. “What are you saying?”

  Briggs leaned back in the booth so the vinyl squeaked. “If you want to find your friend,” he said, “I suggest you start looking at his family.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  With an echoing roar that rose like a wave and swept across the stadium, Blackburne and Manassas students greeted their football teams as they streamed onto the Manassas Prep field, arms raised and spirits high. Crimson-and-gold Blackburne banners were thrust into the sky in defiance of the home team’s blue and white. A concussive noise of air horns and kazoos blasted the air, including the awful beehive sound of vuvuzelas that some students had snuck past the faculty in defiance of a clearly stated ban. Posters belittling each team’s mascot hung on the stadium walls. One showed a Manassas knight cracking a whip at a cowering Blackburne lion, while another showed a nightmarish lion chasing a fleeing Manassas knight who had dropped his sword. “Burn Blackburne” was a popular sign among the Manassas students, as was “Tame the Lions.” For our part, I saw a number of signs that read “Beat ManAsses Prep,” which I thought rather unimaginative until I realized that the overlarge A and the misspelling were calculated, and had to grin at the silly audacity of it. Soon the crowds of students began hurling chants at the other side like catapults unloading onto besieged castles. “We’ve got spirit, yes we do, we’ve got spirit, how ’bout you?” Almost two thousand students, alumni, faculty, and parents were whipped into a frenzy of adulation and glorious hatred.