by Mike Doogan
Except on the road. The sun suddenly broke through the clouds and, as low as it was, shone directly into Kane’s eyes. He pulled over and put on his sunglasses. I wish the same thing would happen in this case, he thought, and drove on. He pulled into the Rejoice community center just before noon and went inside.
He’d almost finished his cheeseburger when Ruth Hunt came out of the kitchen and sat across from him. She looked drawn and tired, although even like that she looked good to Kane.
“I’m happy to see you,” she said.
“I’m happy to see you, too,” he said. “I think this case is picking up speed, so I don’t know how much time I’ll have for the pleasure of your company for a while.”
She looked at him and smiled.
“Something’s changed, hasn’t it?” she asked.
“What do you mean?” Kane said.
“You seem different,” she said. “More alive somehow.”
“Must be the coffee I get to drink when I’m not here,” he said.
“That must be it,” she said, “the coffee.”
After a silence, she said, “Do you think you will find Faith soon?”
“I don’t know, but I think I know some places to look. What’s going on with you?”
“I’m not really sure,” she said, reaching out to put her hand over his. “Things with Gregory seem to have reached a critical mass. He came home from Anchorage with the basketball teams late yesterday, and we talked for most of the night. Neither one of us is happy with our marriage, and neither one of us wants to do what the other thinks it would take to make things work.”
They were silent for several minutes.
“There’s an old joke about the definition of mixed feelings,” Kane said at last. “They’re what you have when you find out your mother-in-law has driven off a cliff in your new Cadillac. I have mixed feelings about your news. I’ve been left myself, so I know something about how Gregory feels. But mostly I’m happy and hopeful that this means you and I will be spending more time together.”
“I hope so, too,” she said. “Maybe when you finish your case and I wrap up my obligations here, we can go someplace together.”
She looked around the room, withdrew her hand, and stood up.
“I have to get back to work,” she said, “and we don’t want to start any gossip. The community’s reaction will be bad enough when people learn I’m leaving.”
“I’ve got to get going, too,” Kane said. “I’m sleeping over at the trooper office if you need to find me.”
She waved and went back into the kitchen. Kane finished his lunch and started for the door. As he passed the community meeting room, he saw Moses Wright sitting in his office. Matthew Pinchon was sitting in the chair opposite him and seemed to be crying. Wright looked up from the boy’s face and glared at Kane, who kept walking.
As he drove back to Devil’s Toe, he pondered his options. None of the ones involving law enforcement officers looked promising. Too damn many rights and warnings. Without them, though, he was limited to scooping Johnny Starship up at school, taking him somewhere, and scaring the shit out of him to make him talk. Or he could grab the boy’s father somehow and sweat him. But either of those approaches were far too close to breaking the law. I didn’t get into this to become a thug, he thought.
So instead he drove to the trooper office and carried the tapes upstairs. He shed his outdoor gear and made a pot of coffee. When he had a cup, he sat down to look at tape. He’d planned to fast-forward through the tapes, looking for he didn’t really know what. But he quickly realized that watching the tapes whiz by made him feel jumpy. So he rewound the tape, put the tapes in chronological order, and began watching at regular speed.
Slade came in as he was taking the fifth tape out of the player.
“What are you doing here?” Kane asked.
Slade looked at him quizzically.
“It’s after five o’clock,” he said, “where else should I be?”
“No kidding?” Kane said. “I guess I got caught up in what I’m watching.”
“Learn anything?” the trooper asked, tossing his coat on a chair and taking a bottle of water out of the refrigerator.
“Yeah,” Kane said, “this Tony Soprano is one sick puppy.”
Slade laughed.
“So I’ve heard,” he said.
“Where are Sam and Harry?” Kane asked.
“They’re damn tired of having mine workers tell them nothing,” Slade said, “so they decided to get a few beers and then dinner at the roadhouse. You want to join them?”
Kane shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I really need to know if there’s anything on these tapes.”
He put tape number six in the player.
“And if there’s not?” Slade asked, sitting down beside him.
“If there’s not, we’re going to have to lean on Little John pretty hard about that post office box and hope he cracks,” Kane said, “although we still don’t have anything he can’t explain his way out of.”
He hit the Play button.
“Besides,” he said, “I need to see what Tony Soprano is going to do next.”
Two tapes later, Slade got up from the couch.
“That’s a good show,” he said, “but I’ve got to have something to eat. Think I’ll go see if my fellow troopers have progressed to food yet.”
Kane pulled the tape from the player and inserted another one.
“Okay, go ahead,” he said. “I’ve only got a couple more tapes to go. Think I’ll finish.”
Slade walked into the bathroom and closed the door. Kane hit the Play button.
A poorly lit and somewhat blurry image came up on the screen. A young woman with long black hair that had beads woven into the ends walked into the picture. She was wearing a black ribbon around her neck, a black garter belt, long black stockings, black high-heeled shoes, and nothing else.
“Charlie, you devil,” Kane said, smiling, “this isn’t The Sopranos.”
The woman was followed by a naked man, an older guy with his gut sucked in and a considerable erection. Kane’s smile faded from his lips. The man was Charlie Simms. The woman knelt on the carpet. The man walked up and stood in front of her. Her head began to bob. As she continued, her hands on his flanks worked him around so that his face would be clear to the camera.
“Aw, hell, Charlie,” Kane said aloud.
The woman got up and lay on the bed. The man lay down on top of her. He began moving. There was no sound on the tape, but he could see the woman’s mouth moving, encouraging the man in his efforts. As he watched Charlie Simms’s ass rise and fall with increasing speed, Kane felt sad and a little dirty.
The activity on the screen stopped abruptly. The man lay there for a few moments, then rolled off the woman. She got up and walked out of the camera’s view, returning in a matter of moments with a towel. She handed it to the man and, turning slightly, winked at the camera.
The scene jumped to another encounter, then another. Always Charlie and the young woman. She wore different wigs, different outfits, and they engaged in slightly different acts, but it was the same pair and the same result and the same, sassy wink at the camera. At the end of the sixth encounter, the screen went blank. Kane sat there, his brain spinning and a pain growing in his stomach.
“Jesus Christ,” Slade said. “I guess we know what Simms was doing with that Viagra.”
Kane looked up. The trooper was standing beside the couch, his Smokey Bear hat crumpled in his hand. Kane hadn’t heard him come out of the bathroom or noticed him while the tape was rolling.
“Yeah, we do,” Kane said. “Better than that, or maybe worse, we know what Faith Wright was doing during her afternoons. Look.”
He rewound the tape, ran it forward until the woman winked at the camera, and paused it. At the corner of her winking eye, the two men could just make out a small scar, the kind a dog’s claw might make.
20
> For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that
increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.
ECCLESIASTES 1:18
KANE THUMBED THE REMOTE CONTROL TO REWIND the tape. Slade walked over and set his hat on the breakfast bar, took two bottles of beer from the refrigerator, opened them, and walked back into the living room. He offered a bottle to Kane, who shook his head. Now was no time to start drinking. Slade sat down in one of the armchairs. The whir of the tape rewinding stopped, leaving only silence. The silence continued as Slade drank his beer slowly, pausing between swallows to stare into space.
Finally, Kane broke the silence.
“Shit,” he said. “Shitshitshitshitshit. And fuck.” He sighed. “What could Charlie have been thinking of? That girl was young enough to be his granddaughter. What could he have been thinking?”
Slade said nothing.
“And what about Faith?” Kane continued. “What would make a Christian girl, one living in a religious community, for Christ’s sake, take to whoring? It can’t have been the money.”
That’s the trouble with detecting, Kane thought. A lot of what you uncovered you didn’t want to know, and most of the time answers just led to more questions.
“Well,” he said, “we’re going to have to find out where that tape was made, where Faith was working. Although it’s pretty much got to be the roadhouse, doesn’t it?”
“I know where the tape was made,” Slade said in a small voice.
Kane went on as if he hadn’t heard the other man.
“God damn it, this news will kill her father. Who is going to tell him? I don’t want to do it. Maybe we’re better off just dropping the whole thing.”
“I said,” Slade said, “I know where the tape was made.”
Kane stopped talking and looked at Slade. The younger man had pain, and what might have been fear, in his eyes. As Kane opened his mouth to speak, he heard Harry and Sam coming up the stairs. He jumped to his feet, ejected the tape, and put it on top of the pile. The trooper investigators came into the room.
“A wasted day,” Sam said, tossing his coat on the floor. “You guys get anywhere on the girl?”
“Not really,” Kane said. He looked at his watch. “It’s early, but I think I’ll turn in anyway. Get an early start.”
Harry held up the tape of Charlie Simms and the girl.
“What you guys watching?” he asked.
“The Sopranos,” Kane said. “Charlie Simms taped them, and I’d never seen the show.”
“What did you think, huh?” Harry said. “That Tony Soprano’s as fucked up as a real bad guy, isn’t he?” He put the tape back on the stack. “I’ve been watching that show since it started. You should get cable.”
Kane put the tapes back into their boxes and picked them up.
“I’ll return these tomorrow,” he said. “I guess they’re still Charlie’s property.”
Harry and Sam looked at each other, then at Kane.
“The mine manager got a call just before we left,” Sam said. “Simms didn’t make it.”
“Aw,” Kane said, “that’s too bad. Did he say anything before he died?”
“Never came out of the coma,” Harry said.
Kane took the tapes and walked downstairs to the cell. He put the tape of Charlie, and the three he hadn’t watched yet, into his duffel. He set the others on the edge of Slade’s desk. Then he took a Clif bar from his bag and sat on the bed. He tried to think of nothing while he forced himself to eat. Each bite was like a mouthful of sand; it took a whole bottle of water to wash the bar down. His mind kept jumping to the images of Faith Wright and Charlie Simms, screwing their futures away. His life, in Charlie’s case. Maybe hers, in Faith’s.
Kane could feel depression clawing at him, and he set his jaw against it. He concentrated on trying to figure out what he’d just seen and heard.
He could understand Charlie being there, he supposed. Few old men would pass up a chance to get next to a young woman, especially a man like Charlie, who’d always followed his dick wherever it led him, even though that was mostly into trouble. Charlie had to know the risks to his job, his marriage, and his reputation, but the chance to get a good-looking young woman into the sack would drive everything else from his mind.
Out in the office, the fax machine started up.
Charlie is easy to figure, Kane thought, because he’s not all that different from me. But Faith’s motives are much harder for me to fathom. I’ve never been a teenage girl.
Kane was not naive. If he’d run across a teenage hooker on the streets of Anchorage, he wouldn’t have thought twice. The culture spat out rootless children in an unending stream—runaways, throwaways, druggies, adrenaline junkies—and some of them washed up in cities, even cities the size of Anchorage.
But he hadn’t expected this here, even though he knew that the trailers and cabins and slapped-together homes at the ends of the dirt roads of Alaska housed plenty of the cruelty and depravity that were epidemic in the world. Somehow, he’d been seduced by the idea of Faith Wright as the dutiful Christian girl, not entirely religious perhaps, but with the moral compass that a religious, small-town upbringing had given her. What was it the psalm said? He picked up his Bible and leafed through it until he found the passage he wanted: “God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.”
Despite a life spent looking all too often into the abyss of human behavior, Kane had retained a belief in the saving grace of religion. Even though he couldn’t make himself take what theologians called the leap of faith, he admired those who had and stood safely on the other side. It wasn’t the aggressive and hostile religiosity of Moses Wright that he yearned for, or the superstition-ridden faith of his parents, but the quiet and constant right behavior he had projected onto Faith Wright. He wanted it so much for himself that he had imagined it in her.
Well, the videotape was the end of that. Probably the end of Charlie Simms’s reputation, too. And he wondered what it would do to Slade, who seemed to know more about it than he should have.
Footsteps came down the stairs, and Slade walked into the office. He picked up the fax, read it, and carried it into the jail cell. Kane straightened up and made room on the bed. Slade handed him the fax and sat, leaning his arms on his knees and folding his hands.
“Looks like Harry was wrong about how long the lab tests would take,” he said. “The fax says no gunshot residue on Simms’s clothing, so whatever he did he didn’t shoot Lester Logan.”
“Thank God for that,” Kane said. “Where are Sam and Harry?”
“Upstairs watching Fear Factor,” Slade said. “So they’re good for a while. I’ve got some things I need to tell you, but we have to keep them between us.”
Kane shook his head.
“I can try to keep you out of it,” he said, “but we both know if you’re involved in a serious crime, it’s got to come out.”
Slade was silent for a few moments.
“Yeah, I can see that,” he said, “but if there’s any way you can help me, I’d appreciate it.”
Kane sat and waited.
“I’d only been out here a couple of months,” Slade said. “I’d had the academy and the on-the-job training, but this was my first solo assignment. I guess I wasn’t really ready for it. They tell you all about procedures and precautions, but they never tell you what it’s like to be the only cop for hundreds of miles, to never really be off duty.”
Slade was quiet again, then shook his head.
“Listen to me, making excuses like some perp,” he said. “It was a Friday night and I was tired of my own cooking, so I went over to the roadhouse for dinner. I guess I wanted to look over the action, too, maybe get some of it. The waitress seemed friendly, and we got to talking. I ended up waiting for her in the bar. Maybe me being there put a damper on things, because the bar emptied out about eleven. The waitress showed up a few minutes later with another woman. We had a couple of drin
ks, and one thing led to another. I suggested we go back to my place, but the waitress said she had a key to one of the rooms. I thought, what the hell. The three of us spent a couple of very pleasant hours in that room, and that was that.”
Slade was silent again.
“Only, that wasn’t that,” Kane said to prime the pump.
Slade shook his head.
“No, it wasn’t. A couple of days later, this old guy with a beard and earring comes in here with a videotape under his arm. Says his name is John Wesley Harding and he wants to welcome me to the community. Says the videotape is a gift. ‘It’s only a copy,’ he says, ‘but I thought you’d want to see it. In fact, I think you should watch it right now.’
“By now, I’ve already got an idea what’s coming. So I bring the tape upstairs here and put it into the VCR, and there we are, the three of us, doing what comes naturally.
“The old guy has followed me upstairs, so I don’t have to go far to get my hands around his neck. ‘What are you showing this to me for?’ I ask him. ‘There’s no law against consenting adults doing what they want.’
“The old guy kind of cackles and says, ‘Consenting adults? That Tracy there, she’s a working girl. And the other one? She’s married. You don’t want your bosses to see this, especially when you think about the story that can be told around this tape.’
“So I let go of the old bastard and start thinking, and the more thinking I do, the worse it gets. ‘What do you want from me?’ I ask.
“ ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘except for you to remember that I’m providing a necessary service over at the roadhouse and it would be a shame to disrupt it.’ ”
Slade unfolded his hands and held them up, looking at them like he’d never seen them before.
“Of course, that wasn’t all,” Kane said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Slade said. “I figured the odds were good it wouldn’t be. So I didn’t intervene in the whorehouse part of the operation, but I kept a close eye on it.”
