Impulse (19 page)
“Gutierrez,” Phelps shouted through the open door, “where are you?” He looked at his watch—a little after five. It would be past eight on the east coast. Ledezma said Smith went east for a meeting or something. Phelps told Ledezma to find him and get him back.
“You wanted me, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah, I want you to do a little detective work for me.” Gutierrez’ eyes lit up. “You see these two reports here?” She nodded and tried to read them upside-down on his desk. “I want you to check out this Ms. or Mrs. Kindernecht. I want you to go over to her house and ask her to repeat what she told the uniforms that worked the INS raid in this other report. Then I want you to find them, the uniforms, that is, and ask them the same questions.”
“What questions?”
“You find out from Ms. Kindernecht what she remembers about the raid and then you confirm what she said to the officers on the scene.”
“Should I talk to the INS agents, too?”
Phelps thought a moment. “Only if our guys develop a case of amnesia and can’t remember anything, which, when I think about it, they just might.”
“That’s it?” Officer Gutierrez looked disappointed.
“That is all of it. Detective work, Officer Gutierrez, is about asking questions, looking for discontinuities, and then chasing down leads.” He noticed Gutierrez frowned at
discontinuities
. “It’s not about patrolling and collaring bad guys in the act. How did your ride go, by the way?” Gutierrez’ expression changed as quickly as the sun coming out from behind a cloud.
“Like awesome,” she gushed. Phelps winced. He’d once entertained thoughts of becoming an English teacher, and “awesome” sat squarely at the top of the list of words he wanted to be declared a felony offense if uttered in public.
“Okay,” he said. “If you want to ride again, you get on this program tomorrow, pronto.”
***
“What were you playing at this afternoon?” Brad Stark’s voice shook. His wife’s interference in the interview had nearly ruined everything. “That man is a potential major donor and you sat there, were rude to him, and if that wasn’t bad enough, you practically became an extortionist. What chance do you think I have now of prying a gift from him?”
“This may come as a flash, Brad, honey, but that man isn’t going to give Scott Academy squat. He has not attended a reunion in fifty years. He never answers mail, returns questionnaires, or sends in news for the alumni bulletin. He has serious issues with the school. You and Darnell are so star struck by his celebrity status, the big TV series he used to have, you aren’t thinking straight.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I read your files. You should, too. The man is moderately well off, that’s all. In addition, his wife has been missing, presumed dead, and the possibility exists that he’s responsible. He is ‘a person of interest,’ as they say in the papers. But whether he is or isn’t guilty, he’s got more things on his mind than coughing up a gift to Scott—now or ever.”
Brad collapsed on the sofa and held his head in his hands. What did she know about…anything?
“What made you ask for money for a release? You think he’d pay for a release?”
“I figure we could use the money. Face it, your tenure here is about to end. Darnell isn’t happy with you, the board is asking questions, and somehow, in spite of that, you get involved with this mystery thing. It is the last, the absolute last thing the board, Darnell, or any sensible person wants dragged up again, and there you are. Let’s face it; we’re on our way back to Pittsburgh. I made Daddy promise to give you your old job back.”
“Daddy? Who said anything about Pittsburgh or your father? Not now. Not after what you’ve done. Attacking Smith was the worst thing you could have done. It only made him suspicious of me, like I might have something to do with those kids disappearance.”
“Didn’t you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Well, they don’t know that.”
***
“Thanks for the talk. I think it will help…well, I hope it will.” Robert drove carefully, his eyes fixed on the road.
“I hope so, too, but you never know. The trouble with people my age is we are never certain about things. There are two kinds of old men, Robert, those who impart wisdom, and those who impart information. The problem is that the men in the second group don’t know the difference.” Robert nodded absently, and Frank realized he’d just wasted a perfectly good aphorism on his son-in-law, who seemed lost in a world of his own.
Frank stared out the window trying to picture a stream that ran through Old Oak Woods. Fifty years ago—a very long time. How much did he really remember? Robert dropped Frank off at the front of his hotel. Back in his room, he switched on the desk lamp and glanced at the array of papers strewn across every available flat surface. Somewhere among them he knew were United States Geographical Survey maps of the campus, one old one and one more recent. Maybe those would help. The face on his cell phone announced in block letters that his battery was charged and that he had missed a call or some calls. That would be Rosemary from earlier, he thought, and put the phone aside. He spread the maps across the bed and studied first one and then the other.
***
Dexter Light’s hands shook. This is not the DTs, he said to himself. If I were going to have
delirium tremens
they would have kicked in yesterday. But his hands still shook. A drink would help. Two drinks, ten. Smith, the arrogant bastard, who did he think he was bossing people around like that? He didn’t have to go. Smith couldn’t make him and he wouldn’t. That decision made, he turned his attention back to his conversation with Harlan Mosley. He removed the bottle of scotch from beneath the sink and set it on the table beside the bed. The springs squealed as he sat down heavily. He’d never noticed the sound before. Benefit of being drunk every night. He stared at the bottle as if he could levitate it if he concentrated hard enough. It sat exactly where he put it, refusing to move.
“This is the end, you know,” he said to the bottle. The bottle remained silent. “The lawyer just took away the last of your excuses. She’s dead and now I know all I will ever know. And I blew the best years of my life away because of that, because of her.” He lowered his head and buried his face in his hands.
***
“Whatcha got, Gutierrez?” Dominic Pastorella leaned over her shoulder, a little too close. By three-thirty in the afternoon, Pastorella’s deodorant deserted him, and he had the symptoms of early gum disease as well. She also knew that he came up behind her that way so he could cop a peek down her blouse.
“Step away, Detective.” He seemed genuinely shocked at her reaction, but he stepped back. “This is for the lieutenant. He wants me to check out some woman named Kindernecht.”
“Well, I can help you with that,” he said, still keeping his distance. “She’s a screwball. Calls in reports all the time. Missing this’s, noisy that’s, suspicious characters in her backyard or on her roof.”
“Her roof?”
“Yeah, even on the roof—screwy.”
“So okay, the boss wants her checked out, so that’s what I’m doing.”
“Hah, he’s giving you the rookie runaround. Turn you loose on a nut case and watch you go in circles. Be a big joke back at the station. My first time up here—they had me tracking down a serial killer in the department. But spelled differently, only I’m a rookie and I don’t know they mean the cereal killer—that was O’Rourke, who ate cereal for lunch. Serial—cereal, get it?”
She got it. “These reports have your name on the check-out tab, Pastorella. So what did you get out of the old lady’s report?”
“Get? What’s to get? I told you, she’s an old bat. She just went on about some other broad she saw get in a van a couple of weeks before. She thought there was a weapon but when the uniform asked her if she saw one, she says ‘No, but they might have had one.’ Might have had one—jeez. They get old and there’s no telling what they’ll think up.”
“Thanks, I guess. No need bothering with this, then. I’ll just tell the lieutenant, there’s nothing here.”
“Wouldn’t do that, Gutierrez,” Pastorella said. “If the boss is playing with you, you bet he will know if you slacked off. Better work it like it meant something.”
She sighed, let him take his quick peep, and gathered her folders together and rose. She’d get back to this in the morning.
Frank sipped his coffee and waited until seven-thirty. Light did not appear. He assumed that meant he’d be a no-show. It didn’t matter that much. He was pretty sure he knew what Light might have said. He hoped his call the night before put the fear of God into him so when he received the next summons, he wouldn’t hesitate. Of course, that would depend on whether Rosemary could persuade her friend the judge to do her a favor.
He ordered breakfast and skimmed the
Baltimore Sun
. Frank had given up reading newspapers a few years back. He found himself criticizing the editorial pages and grousing at the poor writing and the shallowness of the reporting. He had a brief fling at journalism right out of college. He remembered all the blue-penciled copy his editor dropped on his desk nearly every night with a terse “Do over” scrawled across the top. Bylines were earned and only after a year at least. And then they did not accompany everything you wrote—only the good stuff. Now reporters who couldn’t recognize the difference between an allegation and an accusation, between the issuance of a memo and an action taken because of it, filled the papers with their poorly constructed prose and badly researched stories. He’d grown tired of being a curmudgeon and so cancelled his subscription to the
Arizona Republic.
He did enjoy reading out of town papers or, when he traveled, the locals. He didn’t think they were remarkably better, but some of the writing caught his eye. He folded the paper and left it for the next occupant of his booth, paid, and walked the short distance back to his hotel.
There were several new messages on his home answering machine but none relating to any new developments. He wondered about that. He expected some sort of follow-up by now, but nothing. The optometrist had called to say his new glasses were ready, the Phoenix Symphony wanted to know if he’d consider renewing his season ticket. He’d cancelled after Sandy….The woman next door called to tell him the police had stopped by and wished to speak to him—he bet they did—and, she added, they had dragged the lake on Monday looking for something, which is what she wanted to tell him before. She wondered if it would have anything to do with his problem? A very delicate way of putting it, he thought,
his problem
. Frank hung up and stared at the phone. So now they had his gun. Well, it took them long enough to go after it. Why were they taking him seriously now? He told them where to look years ago. Now that they had it, what would they do with it? It would be too far gone to do ballistics tests on it, or would it? He needed to update his forensics if wanted to keep writing about crime. There were too many new things in police labs for him to coast along on what he knew ten years ago. As for the gun, it didn’t matter to him one way or the other. They would try to connect it to Sandy, but they wouldn’t.
He changed into some blue jeans, pulled on a sweater, and laced up the heavy boots he’d brought because he’d planned to take the boys for a hike. They preferred video games, so the hike never happened. As it turned out, he had a use for them after all. He made a pot of coffee and sat down to wait for Rosemary.
He didn’t have long to wait. He heard the lock grind open and she stepped in carrying a small gym bag.
“Oh,” she said, startled. “I thought you’d still be with Mr. Light. I was going to change while I waited for you.”
“Light didn’t show.”
“Oh dear, is that bad?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think we can piece his story together from what we know already. We’ll catch up with him later.”
She stood in the middle of the room holding her bag in front of her with both hands. A cloud crossed her face. “I suppose I could use the bathroom,” she said and glanced anxiously at him.
“I will go down to the lobby and wait for you,” he said, a little too loudly. “Be sure to dress comfortably and bring a jacket or sweater. The weather could change.” With that, he stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him. He’d made it as far as the lobby when he realized he’d left his cell phone on the desk. He shrugged. Probably wouldn’t need it, just one more thing to have to lug around. He patted his pockets to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything else and, reassured, dropped into an overstuffed chair that gave him an unobstructed view of the elevators.
Ten minutes later Rosemary stepped out of one of them. Some people, he thought, look good irrespective of how they dressed. She qualified as one of those people. She wore faded blue jeans rolled up at the cuff, a muted plaid shirt over a darker forest green shell. Her shoes were sensible and, he guessed, probably cost over one hundred dollars. She had a sweater tied around her waist and her hair tucked up in a ball cap. A platinum pony tail poked through the gap above its sizing strap.
“How do I look?” she asked, her smile tentative, as if, if he were to say not good, she’d reverse her field and try on some other outfit.
“Terrific.” She smiled and gathered her purse, a rather large and bulky leather one, adjusted its strap over her shoulder, and waited. He heaved himself up from the sofa and they headed out the door.
“May I ask where we are hiking to?”
“You may,” he said. “We are going to Old Oak Woods. If my memory does not fail me, we are going to find the boys, in a manner of speaking.”
“Frank, do you think you know?”
“I think I might.”
“What are we looking for?” she asked. Frank led her deeper into the woods and then paused, trying to establish his bearings. Fifty years had passed since he’d walked this way. Trees had grown to maturity, died, and been replaced by new ones in that time span. It startled him to realize that some of the larger trees had been saplings the last time he passed this way. What made him think he’d ever be able to find it again?
“I’ve got to find it first. If I can’t, then we’re done here and we will have needlessly raised too many people’s hopes and wasted a lot of their time.” He paused a moment and looked around. He thought he could smell the new growth pushing up under the leaves that blanketed the forest floor.
“Tooth and Jesse wanted me to build them a tree house and, of course, their mother said no. So I began to tell them about how Jack and I used to come into these woods and make forts and hiding places and so on. It got me to thinking….Ah, we go this way first.”
They walked a hundred yards north of their entry point to a mound of honeysuckle. He pointed at the growth.
“You see this bank of honeysuckle and forsythia? Well, Jack and I would get into the middle and trample it down to make a hiding place.” He pushed through the brittle stems, treading them down with his feet. “Well, well, it looks like someone has been here before us, and recently. See, this area here is collapsed. Come on.” He took her hand and led her into the center. “It’s not as big as I remember it,” he said.
Rosemary high-stepped her way to a fallen tree that cut the clearing into two unequal halves.
“You’re right about someone being here,” she said. She leaned down and retrieved some scraps of paper.
“Probably an alumnus,” he said. “The possibility that no one stumbled onto this hideaway in fifty years are pretty remote. Students, campus kids, spent hours in these woods. Someone was bound to find it.”
“It looks like a photograph,” she said. She picked up some more bits and laid them on the tree trunk like puzzle pieces. “An old photograph at that. Come look at this, Frank.” She searched the thicket for more scraps. Frank leaned over the picture and studied it. A face emerged as she arranged and rearranged the pieces.
“Unless I am off my rocker, that is our friend and
femme fatale,
the lovely Luella Mae Parker. Now what or who do you suppose brought this picture here and shredded it?”
“I don’t know, but I can guess.”
“Are you going to share, or is this something you don’t think fitting for a lady’s ears?”
“In a minute, I promise. I need the whole of it first. Okay, now we head the other direction, downstream.”
“This isn’t what you wanted to show me?”
“Only part of a larger picture, in a way. I’m not sure. I could be wrong and I want to check out one other thing before I commit.”
“That’s the trouble with men,” she said. “Always afraid of commitment.” He checked to make sure she said that with a smile. She had.
“This way.” They picked up the stream and followed its course. “Look for an old beech tree with an X carved into the bark. Jack and I marked the place with an X. Original, huh?” He scanned the trees on the way.
“An X carved into the bark of a tree? You’re kidding. That would have been fifty years ago, Frank. The mark would be overgrown by now.”
“Not on a beech. They have this smooth grey bark and the marks last as long as the tree. They look like they’ve been painted. No, the problem we will have is whether the tree is still standing. It might have fallen, or the school may have logged out the older hardwoods. They do that from time to time, I hear. There’s a substantial profit in it and it will thin the forest, which some people think is a good thing for the ecology.” They walked slowly along the stream bank looking for beech trees.
“It would help if I knew what we were looking for—besides X marks the spot.”
“It’ll be somewhere along this stream.”
“Frank, I don’t know much about geology. I took a course in college. I had to have one science, and freshman geology was a snap course. We all took it. Anyway, if I remember correctly, this is a meandering stream. It could have changed its banks and course a dozen times in the past five decades. We may be twenty yards away from where whatever we’re looking for used to be.”
“Yes and no,” he said, his eyes still searching. “Can’t see the trees for the forest. How much a stream meanders depends on the fall—the rate of descent to its mouth. This stream flows into Chinquapin Run about a mile and a half from here. The drop is nearly four feet. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to make this branch flow at a nice clip most of the time. The greater the fall, the straighter the course. When Jack and I were here, the stream bent to the right and then back to the left. In fifty years, I’m betting it is running straight past that point, and what we’re looking for can’t be, at the most, more than five or ten yards from this side of the stream.”
They picked their way through the underbrush. Frank shook his head.
“You know the trouble with people,” he said, squinting at a beech he knew had to be too young to carry his mark, “is that we rely too much on our memories. Scientific evidence points to the fact that of the many mental faculties God gifts us, memory is the least reliable. You have four people witness an automobile accident and you get four different stories. The longer you wait to collect the stories the greater the variation. Half the time they can’t even agree on the color of the cars. I don’t know why, at our age, we worry so much about losing our memory. It was never that good in the first place. Old people should rejoice in their memory loss. If you have to lose something, why not dump the least reliable?”
“Thus spake the voice of the ‘experienced’ minority. Say, do you think there might be a benefit in it for us?” she asked.
“A benefit? How so?”
“Well, our gray cells are being logged out, so to speak. Maybe there’s a neurological benefit for our brains like logging out creates an ecological one for the forest.”
Frank laughed. “It’s a happy thought, but I feel like I’ve been clear-cut. Nothing left but stumps.” He caught sight of the small rise.
“There,” he said, “you see that low ridge running parallel to the stream? That’s the old bank. When I last saw it, it was almost eight feet high, but the stream has straightened out its course and natural erosion over the years has smoothed it out. In another twenty years, you won’t be able to see it at all.”
Then he saw the tree. In the forest with its high canopy, the beech had grown straight up, reaching for its share of the sun. Its trunk bore the evidence of hundreds of boys with pocket knives—an allowable possession in years past, contraband nowadays. Initials and semi-obscene phrases covered the surface six feet up the trunk—and in the center, Frank’s X. He looked around and his mind drifted backward fifty years. It was cool in the forest’s shade, but Frank sweated. He walked to the old bank, stepped over the ridge, and stared at the depression.
“This is the place,” he said.