The Dark Circle, page 8
The name sounded familiar, and I remembered why. He had headed up the disciplinary review panel that upheld Fab’s firing from the police, saying at the time that his conduct was disgraceful. Fab told me he was bought and paid for by somebody.
“Thanks, but I don’t think I need it at this point,” I said.
“No problem,” said Deci’s tired voice. “Good luck.”
I called Lauren to tell her what I had learned. She warned me to be careful. Going to the fireplace, I removed the shoulder holster rig and a spare clip of .45 ammunition. The rig fit comfortably under my loose-fitting field jacket over a flannel shirt, jeans, and hiking boots.
Before leaving, I made sure the food bowls were full. I also made a mental note to buy cat litter. For now, the cat seemed comfortable just doing her business outside. I still needed to come up with a name for her.
According to the cell phone GPS, it would be a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Fort Norris, most of it on the thruway. I stopped at the Glenwood Pines minimart, picked up a sixteen-ounce cup of coffee, and headed west.
16
Like most of upstate New York, it was another place that had seen better days. Even its best days probably hadn’t been much. What remained of the main street was a handful of derelict buildings and a gas station that sold nonbrand gas and kerosene.
What it did have was a billboard advertising the Stoneberry Casino. In the tableau, a beautiful blonde in a skintight dress was heaving a basket full of fifty-dollar bills in the air and laughing hysterically while her friends applauded. Everyone was a winner at Stoneberry.
I arrived at the address Fab gave me at almost six that evening. It turned out to be a trailer park, and it had been there a long time. Surrounding it was an automobile graveyard, maybe ten acres of cars and trucks lying together, with their hoods sprung and tires missing, on sloping ground that led up from the road.
Most of the trailer homes sat in lots sprinkled with second-growth trees that didn’t hide the shabbiness of the occupants. A two-lane gravel road wended its way through the park in a figure eight, and I followed it past about thirty trailers flanking the road until I was almost at the end.
I found the number I was looking for on a mailbox that shared a wooden post with its neighbor trailer. I kept on going until I reached a weed- and junk-filled open lot that was waiting for new tenants. I parked by the chain link fence separating the trailer park from the automobile cemetery.
Locking the cab, I walked back down the gravel road until I reached George’s trailer. In the neighboring yard, two small children were fighting over a tricycle, and their mother came out to order them inside. When the door slammed, the only sound came from birds calling one another from the stunted trees.
The single parking space in front of George Washington’s trailer was empty. In front of the parking space, an overstuffed, plastic garbage barrel sat next to the road, waiting for the trash hauler.
There was a short path leading to the side of the trailer. Up close, it looked just like its neighbor, with a badly repainted orange finish and its window screens torn or missing. Two concrete blocks provided a step up to the door from the ground. The trailer was canted forward at a sloping angle.
I knocked on the door. There was no sound from inside. I waited thirty seconds and tried again. After another minute, I heard a thin, high-pitched voice coming from behind the door.
“Please go away,” it said.
“Open the door,” I said sternly. “This is official.”
The trailer door squeaked loudly as it came open on its warped floor. Standing there was a small, slim girl wearing a pale blue sundress. No more than five feet tall. I figured she was somewhere between fourteen and eighteen. I leaned toward older after I saw the tattoos on both elbows and her neck.
“What’s this about?” she asked timidly.
“We’ve received a complaint,” I said, opening my wallet and closing it again as if there were official identification inside instead of my driver’s license. “I’ll need to come in to make sure there’s no violation.”
She stood aside to let me enter. Inside, I looked down the length of the trailer. The accordion door at the end was open, and the bedroom beyond was empty. Glancing in the other direction, I saw the kitchen was spotlessly clean, the sink empty, and everything put away. A set of pots and pans had been hung by their relative size on a wall rack over the stove.
Because of the trailer’s canted angle, I walked uphill to the bedroom. The sagging double bed had been made with the same precision as my own at Fort Bragg. There was no one hiding under the bed or in the closet. The well-scrubbed bathroom was empty too. As depressing as the place was, she was doing the best she could to make it a home.
“Who complained about what?” she asked as I came back down the length of the trailer.
“The same one as last time,” I said.
Her dark hair was boyishly cut and she was actually quite pretty, with a gamin quality to her heart-shaped face, upturned nose, and milk-white complexion. A vinyl purse was resting on the table of the eating nook. When I picked it up, she said, “You can’t look in there.”
Ignoring her, I unsnapped the cover clip and dumped the contents on the table. There was a tube of sunscreen, assorted small bills and coins, some paper receipts, loose cough lozenges, a cellophane sandwich bag, and a metal-clasped credit card holder.
There were no credit cards inside the holder, just a few photographs and a learner’s driving permit issued to Janice Mears, sixteen years of age and residing at another address.
I sifted through the photographs. They were all of the same young man, mostly headshots. In one of them, he and the girl were together, face to face, noses just touching.
The sandwich bag contained several smaller packets of white powder.
“Those aren’t mine,” said the girl, her voice rising loudly. “I don’t know how they got in there.”
I opened one of the packets, dipped my finger into the powder, and put it on my tongue.
“Cocaine,” I said.
“I swear I don’t know where it came from,” she said.
“Who else lives here?” I said.
“Nobody,” she came back. “I live alone.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” I said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you.”
She started crying and I felt a twinge of guilt at lying to her.
“Are you arresting me?” she asked.
“I don’t want to arrest you, Janice,” I said, “but you’ll have to cooperate with me.”
“My name is Lannie,” she said fiercely. “I hate Janice.”
“All right, Lannie, where’s George?”
“George who?” she said, staring fiercely at me.
“George you-know-who,” I said. “I need to talk to him, and this is where he lives.”
“Go ahead and arrest me,” she said defiantly.
“Let’s start with the fact you’re underage. The first thing I need to do is call your parents and tell them the situation. They can come and bring you home.”
“That’s funny. That’s really funny,” she said, laughing through tears. “My mother ran away ten years ago. I couldn’t. My father started fooling with me when I was eleven … that was just the start. So yeah, give the bastard a call.”
“What about George?”
“We’ve been together three months. It’s good. He treats me good. I love him.”
“You’re sixteen.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Where is he?”
“Georgie had to go away on a job. He won’t be coming back for a few weeks.”
“What kind of job?”
“He didn’t tell me,” she said, gaining confidence from my failure to pressure her. “You want me to call you when he gets back?”
With my brilliant deductive powers, I knew she was lying, but I wasn’t about to employ the same methods I had used with Rasputin to extract the truth. And somehow the girl knew it.
“Sure, that would be great,” I said. “Tell him I stopped by.”
I scribbled my name and cell number on the back of one of the photographs.
“I’m not a cop,” I said, handing her the picture, “but Georgie is in a lot of trouble. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”
“You’re not so tough,” she said, suddenly grinning at me. “I like you.” That was the first time she smiled, and it lit up her gamin face. I guess I still had it, at least with sixteen-year-olds.
I let myself out of the trailer, walked back to my truck, and started the engine. I glanced at my watch. It was six thirty. The sky was clouding over, and I checked the weather forecast for my current location. Showers expected. There would be full darkness in about an hour. I engaged the clutch and headed back out the gravel road.
17
I drove out to the highway and the ten miles back to the Thruway. At the interchange, I pulled into the service station/food mart and filled up on gas. After calling Lauren to tell her where I was and what I planned to do, I bought two large coffees inside, along with a foot-long turkey-and-ham sub sandwich.
I was back at the trailer park at seven-fifteen. This time I left my truck in the small lot by the manager’s office just off the highway. I walked in as darkness fell and watched the interior lights of the trailers come on around the park. Every fifty feet along the gravel road, there was a telephone pole with an exterior bulb attached to the top. One was close to George’s trailer and gave off a small cone of light.
The trailer was still unlit when I reached that section of the park carrying a canvas bag holding my provisions. I needed to find a place that had a full view of the single door into George’s trailer and where I couldn’t be seen by either Lannie or the closest neighbors.
I found it behind a fiberglass storage unit at the edge of her neighbor’s yard, about fifty feet from George’s trailer. It was masked by second-growth trees and wild shrubs. I settled in on the ground.
At around eight, a light came on in the kitchen area. The curtains were drawn in every window, but I could see Lannie’s shadow as she moved around. Over the next hour, I finished the second cup of coffee and wolfed down the sandwich.
The light went out in the kitchen area, and another one came on in the bathroom at the other end. It remained on for ten minutes before going out and being replaced by a lamp in the bedroom.
I was trying to find a more comfortable place to rest my butt on the hard ground when something ran into me from the darkness. It took several seconds to realize it was a dog, a large one, and thankfully friendly. He began licking my face and making snorting noises, which would have been fine except that the dog’s owner was coming along, searching for him with a flashlight.
“Ollie! Here, Ollie,” he kept calling out.
A sympathetic neighbor shouted, “Shut the fuck up,” and the searcher responded in kind.
I found some crusts of my sandwich in the wrapper and balled them up in my fist before throwing them toward the man with the flashlight. He was now about twenty feet away. The dog followed the crust ball and burst into the owner’s flashlight funnel.
“Ollie,” said the owner, and snapped a leash on his collar.
When I turned back to George’s trailer, all the lights were out. I checked my watch. Ten thirty. It was hard to believe Lannie was already going to bed, but I had no knowledge of her personal habits, especially when George wasn’t there.
I had led plenty of stakeouts in Afghanistan, some of them lasting through a night, usually abetted by amphetamines. This time, I had more than thirty ounces of coffee inside me, and I hoped it would be enough.
Light rain began to fall, and I placed the canvas bag I’d brought the sandwich in over my head. Sitting there got me thinking about other long nights on stakeouts in the mountains near the Khyber Pass.
I remembered a group of us talking one night about the potential joys of married life. Doug Maynard was married and had told us his life would be always happy … a wife who adored him, two beautiful kids, friends and close family that nothing could destroy.
“Call no man happy until he is dead,” said my top sergeant, Bill Newcott. “You may be happy now, but tomorrow you could wake up and find it all gone in a heartbeat.”
Newcott’s wife had left him a few months before we deployed to Afghanistan.
Doug never got the chance to test out his theory and prove Newcott wrong. He was killed two days later.
A cold wind arrived and the rain came harder. I kept awake by making a mental list of all the things that made me happy. It was a short list … watching Bug eat a full bowl, the first sip of George Dickel sour mash on a cold night like this, and maybe what was happening with Lauren, and … I fell asleep while staring up at the light patterns of an airliner flying through the rain-filled sky.
A sudden noise jolted me awake. Completely soaked, I looked around and saw nothing moving. The lights were still out in Lannie’s trailer. I glanced at my watch. It was two forty-five in the morning. I had been asleep for about four hours.
I stretched my muscles and tried to settle back into a more comfortable position. The squeaking noise repeated itself, and I knew it was the warped door to the trailer. I watched Lannie emerge from the door and step down onto the concrete block beneath it.
In the faint illumination from the light on the telephone pole, I could see she was carrying a backpack and wearing a white baseball cap over dark coveralls. She waited almost a minute and looked long in both directions before moving off into the night.
When I stood up to follow her, my knees cracked so loudly I was sure they could be heard in Buffalo. My first steps were stiff and awkward. Then again, my only job was to trail a sixteen-year-old girl. That couldn’t be beyond me. When I emerged onto the gravel road, I saw her disappearing into the weed-filled vacant lot that led to the auto graveyard.
18
Moving as silently as I could, I followed her for about a hundred yards as she went deeper into the vacant lot area. The wind came stronger now. I was glad she had worn a white cap. It stood out as a daub in the darkness. Then it disappeared.
I was about twenty yards behind her and sped up to the last place I had seen the white daub. It was near the chain link fence that separated the two properties, and when I drew close to the spot, I saw there was a break in the fence where someone had cut out a four-foot-square hole in the lower half.
Rusted-out trucks were lying on the other side of the fence, but where the hole had been cut, there was a narrow passageway between them. Slipping through the fence, I made my way along a two-foot corridor between the wrecks and emerged onto a wider path, more like a lane, allowing two vehicles to pass between.
Through the driving rain, I saw the white daub well ahead of me again, and Lannie was moving fast. We had gone past several hundred wrecks before she turned onto another track that intersected with the one we were on.
This one led to a ramshackle building sitting in a clear patch of field where all the lanes seemed to intersect. All roads lead to Rome. A single-lane macadam road presumably led out to the highway. A big sign was mounted on top of the wooden building. It rocked back and forth in the wind.
“Proskey’s Auto Parts …You Find It and We’ll Sell It to You.”
Proskey hadn’t been there in a long time. The portico by the front door was hanging loose from the building, and the electrical lines attached to the closest pole were lying on the ground.
Lannie could not have gone in the front door. Therefore, there had to be another entrance. I found it on the other side of the building. The back door. More brilliant detective work.
There wasn’t a hint of light coming from inside the building, although I knew it had to have more than one room. I pulled my Colt .45 from the shoulder holster and injected a bullet into the chamber.
Below the back door was a wooden sill. I stepped on it as gently as I could. It creaked a bit, but I was sure the noise was covered by the wind and rain. The door itself was slightly ajar, and I stepped through.
The first room was all blackness except for an inch-high ribbon of light that seeped out from the base of the closed door leading into the next one. Dripping wet, I edged across the space, careful to make sure I didn’t trip over anything in the darkness.
Reaching the door, I turned the knob and shoved it open.
Lannie had her back to me and was holding a pane of window glass like a serving tray in front of her. George Washington was looking down as he snorted a line of the cocaine. They were both sitting on hard stools with a wooden crate between them. A kerosene hurricane lamp lit the room.
When he looked up and saw me, George stopped snorting the powder. I saw the stark fear in his watery eyes as he took in my .45 pointed at him. Seeing his startled look, Lannie turned and saw me standing there.
Grinning, she said, “He’s okay, Georgie. I know him.”
“What do you mean ‘He’s okay,’ you stupid bitch?” he said. “He obviously followed you.”
I could see why she found him handsome. He was almost pretty with the freckles on his cherubic cheeks, a pug nose, long eyelashes, and Cupid’s bow lips. His kinky black hair was sculpted like a carefully trimmed garden hedge into an Elvis pompadour.
“Georgie, you’re going back to Binghamton with me,” I said.
He slapped her hand away, and the glass pane shattered against the wall.
“Get away from me,” he shouted. “You’re gonna get me killed.”
“For what?” I said.
“Don’t matter what.”
He stood up as I came across the room.
“I’m not going back.”
He was about five feet eight inches, with a compact wrestler’s frame. A sleeveless tank top revealed his well-muscled shoulders and extremely large hands. I imagined those hands carrying Deborah Chapman.
