Believe No One (28 page)

‘Cat got your tongue?' she says. ‘Or are you wondering which lie you got caught in?' She stares at him for a good ten seconds without saying anything, and Red feels like his soul has been ripped out, sliced up, then put back inside him in a place where it does not fit.

He starts to shake and she sighs. ‘You'd best come inside, take a look at this.'

His face is on the TV screen with a caption and the CNN news logo next to it.

‘Why're the police looking for you, boy?'

He can't tell from looking at the frozen picture on the screen, so he takes a chance she doesn't know the full truth, yet, turns his hands palms up. ‘I stole some money when I ran off from the foster—'

She swipes him hard with the yellow knuckles of her right hand, and his head snaps round so fast he hears the bones in his neck crackle.

‘Go ahead, tell me another lie,' she says, her face bunched up like a fist. ‘See what I'll do if you make me real mad.'

His head clanging from the slap, he tells her everything, right up to how he found his momma tied up, the duct tape on her mouth. He tells her there was a shadow in Momma's room, that it peeled itself off the wall and come at him, and he ran.

‘A shadow? You got to do better than that.'

Standing in her hot living room with sweat soaking his back, a cold wind blows through him. ‘I couldn't see its face – it didn't have no face.'

Waylon shifts uneasily, but she frowns at her son, tells him to stop fidgeting. ‘Make sense now,' she says.

Red sees a shadow face, something shaped out of the dark. A face like a blank slate that you could write whatever horror most scared you on it. But that's kids' stuff, that's fairy tales for dumb kids who don't know that the real scary stuff out there is mostly human.

‘Are you telling me he wore a mask?'

A mask.
Now he feels stupid.

‘Yes, ma'am,' he says. ‘It was a mask.'

‘So, a man wearing a mask came at you.'

He nods, the picture of him on the TV screen smiling out at him like it's in on the joke.

‘Who was it?'

He crinkles his forehead. ‘I don't know.' Then he ducks, expecting another slap. She doesn't hit him, but she looks so fierce he knows he can't leave it at that. He has tried hard not to think about what happened that night, and now she's asking him to remember stuff that makes him want to run away and hide.

‘Well, what came into your head when that shadow peeled off of the wall and came at you?'

‘Boogeyman,' he says, and wishes he had bit off his tongue rather than say it, because Waylon sniggers and makes
woo-ooh
noises.

Mrs Tulk gives him a look and Waylon apologizes, moving to stand a couple steps out of her reach.

‘It's understandable,' she says. ‘But you do know there's no such thing as the Boogeyman, don't you, child?'

‘'Course I know it.' Waylon huffs and Red sends him all the hate in his heart with one angry glance, because
knowing
a thing and
believing
it is not the same thing at all. Sure, he
knows
the Boogeyman was a scary story made up to frighten kids, but last night he
believed
the Boogeyman was in that room with him and his momma, and running through the woods he was certain sure the Boogeyman was after his blood.

She stares at him, frowning like she's trying to puzzle something out. ‘Run the programme, Waylon,' she says, and he presses ‘play' on the TiVo. There are people and police lights, and news cameras. Then a picture of their mobile home comes on the screen. There is crime-scene tape on the front door.

Red looked anxiously up at Mrs Tulk. ‘Yes, I know where you're from, child,' she says. ‘I know a lot about you. Keep that in mind while you tell the rest.'

‘Yes, ma'am.'

‘So, you got home. What is the first thing you did?'

‘I was hungry, so I grabbed a sandwich and a Coke.'

‘Didn't you say your momma expected you home early?'

‘Yes, ma'am, but the place was dark, so I figured they was in bed or had gone without me.'

‘
They?
' she says.

‘Momma and her boyfriend – calls himself Will, but I call him Mullet-head, on account of his hair.'

‘Do you?' she says, her eyes half shut.

‘Not to his face,' he adds.

‘You saying this man with the mullet should've been there with your momma?'

Red nods. He can tell he's said something important, but he can't see what, and before he has time to work it out, she changes the subject.

‘Why'd you run into the woods?' she says. ‘Why didn't you head down to the manager's office?'

‘I tried. But alongside the fence there really
is
a pervert – name of Goodman – keeps asking me to go inside his trailer.' He shoots her a guilty look. ‘He's the one I stole the beer off. He tripped me up and I slashed him and got up and run. Next thing I know I'm in the woods.'

‘What were you thinking?' she says. ‘A bad man's coming after you, you should go where there's people.'

He doesn't know what he was thinking, or if he was thinking at all as he slashed and tore and ran. At one point he had the crazy notion he would lure the faceless man into one of the Tulks' booby traps, then go back and free his mom. But the shaming truth of it was he kept running because he was too scared to stop.

‘I just ran.' He hangs his head.

‘You didn't just
run.
You climbed into the trunk of a stranger's car. What possessed you?'

‘I …' He falters. He will have to tell her that he had seen the pot grow before, and he had lied about that too.

‘Go ahead, boy. I'll find out soon enough – you might as well tell the truth.'

He takes a breath and lets it go. ‘I hitched a ride to Hays in Bryce's pickup one time. So when I saw headlights, I thought I would get in the trunk and when we got to town, I could sneak out, call the Sheriff. I stayed out of sight until Harlan put the tools back in the trunk, and climbed in while he was shutting off the water taps. But he didn't go into town – he just kept on going along the back roads, and I knew we were not going to Hays. I tried to pop the lock but I couldn't get out. And then it stopped and Harlan went off with the other man. They were away all night, and by then it was too late.'

‘What the hell do you
mean,
it was too late?' She scowled at him. ‘Didn't you think of your momma at all? Why didn't you just ask for help instead of sneaking around the place?'

Red looks away, but the picture is on the TV, watching him, so he looks at her again and decides to be honest. ‘I saw what you were growing in that clearing,' he says. ‘I did not think you would want me to call the cops.'

Mrs Tulk scratches her chin. ‘That much is true. But why'd you lie about why you were on the run? Maybe we could've helped your momma.'

He shakes his head. ‘I knew she was dead already.'

‘How could you possibly know that, locked in a car trunk all night?' she says.

He shows her his old battered radio. ‘I heard it on the news – they found Momma – said her name and everything.'

Finally, she turns and flicks off the TV with the remote clicker, and the room seems suddenly much darker. Riley Patterson takes a breath.

‘Mrs Tulk, ma'am,' he says, and he can't stop the quiver in his voice. ‘Are you going to turn me in?'

Incident Command Post, Westfield, Oklahoma

Detective Chief Inspector Kate Simms sat opposite Fennimore at one of the pairs of tables in the function-room-turned-office at the hotel. He was on Skype, talking to Josh Brown, the PhD student who was covering his summer-school classes. She'd had dealings with Josh on a major case she'd investigated the previous winter; Fennimore had brought him on board, and there was no question that his psychology training had proved invaluable. Fennimore had taken the student into his confidence, but Simms preferred to keep him at a distance. Josh Brown had an uncanny ability to draw others out while he shrouded himself in mystery. He – a complete stranger, acting incognito – had persuaded the friends of a victim to give him personal information about the victim, and although it had helped them to crack the case, it left Simms with a lingering sense of unease. She'd done a background check on the student prior to the prosecutions that came out of their investigation, but he had no criminal record. So why had he tried to wriggle out of testifying at the trial? Josh Brown was evasive and shifty around her, and in return she felt an antipathy bordering on dislike.

Right now, he and Fennimore were discussing the medical examiner's findings, and the difficulty of tracking down their killer. The doctoral student asked question after question. Odd, she thought, for such a secretive person to be so inquisitive. She moved away, not wanting to be drawn into the conversation.

Deputy Hicks was standing near the window, sipping iced tea, and Simms drifted over to her. The cicadas had been quiet during the morning, but she'd heard the first tentative calls as a series of creaks and buzzes in mid-afternoon and, as the heat and humidity increased, more and more joined the chorus. Within thirty minutes, the racket would be as loud and piercing as the scream of a circular saw.

‘Here it comes,' Simms said.

Hicks looked over her shoulder. ‘Excuse me?'

Simms lifted her chin towards the window.

‘Oh.' Hicks gazed down on the law-enforcement vehicles shimmering in the car park. The harsh light reflecting off them seemed to match the metallic screech of the insects.

Hicks shrugged. ‘For me, it's the sound of summer.'

Simms took her words as a rebuff and, with a shrug, reached for a jug of iced water, ready to fill her glass and return to her desk, but the younger woman turned to face her and tilted her head, a small smile playing on her face.

‘They have two little drums, right here,' she said, pointing to her abdomen. ‘They pop 'em up and down like you'd pop the top of an empty Coke can – only those bugs do it thousands of times a second.'

‘Let me guess,' Simms said. ‘Encyclopedia Fennimore.'

Hicks grinned, swirling the crushed ice in her glass. ‘He is full of facts, isn't he?'

‘Which he feels compelled to share,' Simms said, with a smile.

‘Can I ask a personal question?' Hicks was watching her, and Simms found her dark-rimmed irises unsettling.

‘You can ask …'

‘Are you and the Professor …?'

‘Are we what?' Simms said, inserting a chill into her tone.

The younger woman's gaze dropped for a moment, then she fixed her she-wolf eyes on Simms's face. ‘Involved,' she said.

‘Now, why would you think that?' Simms asked, avoiding the question.

‘He seems … protective, I guess.'

‘Misplaced chivalry,' Simms said, lightly. ‘I can take care of myself. And besides, I'm not interested.' She held up her left hand to show her wedding ring.

Hicks said, ‘Oh,' but she did not look convinced, and for a moment the two women regarded each other thoughtfully.

A whoop from CSI Roper told them that something good had come in. ‘We just hit the jackpot at the DMV.' He connected his laptop to the computer screen so they could all see the driver's details.

‘The prints we lifted from the trailer? Thomas Holsten,' he said. ‘Commercial drivers' licence.'

Dunlap said, ‘Haulage work ties in with his absences from home.'

‘Trucker,' Ellis said, sourly. ‘I'd put every one of them on CODIS, I had my way.'

Simms studied the man in the picture. He was clean-shaven, his hair cut short – he even wore a shirt and tie. ‘He looks more like an office worker,' she said.

‘He's a chameleon,' Fennimore said, looking over the top of his computer screen. ‘He blends in. A change of clothes and a couple of weeks' beard growth, this could be your redneck suspect.'

‘Missouri licence,' Ellis said.

The CSI nodded. ‘Registered to a mailing address in Joplin, Missouri. That's just over the Oklahoma state line,' he added, for the Brits' benefit. ‘But I wouldn't hold out too much hope on him still being there: this licence is six years old – expiration date, end of July.'

‘Only one way to find out,' Dunlap said.

A team of two detectives set off to check on the address in Joplin. Two more teams began canvassing commercial transport firms in Missouri. The licence endorsements told them that their man drove a ‘semi' – the equivalent of an articulated lorry in the UK. He was licensed to carry non-hazardous materials only. It was a broad field to winnow, but the team was energized by the news. Two detectives searched land records for properties owned or mortgaged in the name of Holsten. Since the FBI behaviourist thought he might have links with the county, they would begin in Williams County. Holsten might have used his driver's licence to gain a credit card, so another two teams began checking card companies, while the Sheriff's deputies toured local gas stations, convenience stores and fast-food restaurants around Hays with a copy of Holsten's licence photograph.

A call came in from the team in Joplin eighty minutes later.

Dunlap took the call, with every pair of eyes in the room turned to him. ‘Yes,' he said, listened for a while, then: ‘Yeah. All right, come on in.' He ended the call and looked into their expectant faces.

‘The mailing address on the driver's licence is a Chinese restaurant. They say they rented a room over the store to the guy, held mail for him on and off, but he never lived there, and he stopped paying rent a few years back.'

They were further disappointed by the Land Records search. Two Thomas Holstens were registered as property owners in Williams County: an eighty-two-year-old farmer, and an office registered to a licensed professional counsellor whose main residence was in Tulsa. No house or apartment was registered in that name. They were now checking Land Records state-wide.