Blood Ties (36 page)

“Oh, well, I'm not very good at that. Bill, did you come up with anything?”

The answer Lydia wanted was obvious in her eyes, so I said, “No. I don't think there's anything here.”

“I guess we'd better go.” Lydia smiled, headed toward the stairs, no longer interested in Paul's room or anything in it. Phoenix and I followed. I closed the door.

When we'd reached the bottom of the stairs I said, “Can I ask you one more question?”

Phoenix looked expectantly at me.

“Gary Russell can shoot. A gun,” I added, in case the concept was alien in this house. “Can Paul?”

Surprisingly, she nodded. “Teenage boys have an instinct for aggression,” she told us. “It's natural, a gift of evolution. Of course, for social creatures that aggressiveness can be a problem, but Paul's father and I feel it's healthier if you help children redirect their antisocial impulses than to try to repress them. Children have to learn to work through their needs and turn them to positive ends.”

I let most of that go. “Does he have a gun?”

“Paul asked for a rifle last year for Christmas. If we'd forbidden it, it would just have become more desirable. Of course, he only shoots targets and skeet. That's an absolute rule. He understands how wrong it would be to kill living beings. He doesn't hunt.”

As I laced up my boots in the front hall, I thought, that's what you think.

“Is it here?” I asked.

“Is what here?”

“His rifle.”

Phoenix Cooper-Niebuhr cocked her head thoughtfully. “I don't know,” she said. “I'm not sure where he keeps it.”

Paul's mother closed the door behind us as we went down the porch steps. Lydia and I walked back to her car through the long golden light. Perfect for meditating in, I thought. Especially if you sat facing the unplowed fields, your back to the world you lived in.

Lydia and I met each other's eyes as she started the car.

“That was Linus you called?” I said.

She nodded. “Premador has two passwords, a two-layer system. He gave me both of them.”

“And?”

She stared ahead of her, easing the car down the gravel drive, onto the smooth asphalt road. “They worked.”

The fields curved by on one side, the houses on the other, both glowing peacefully in the sunlight. On the right a rabbit, startled by our passage, dashed into tall grass. On the left a woman and a small boy carried groceries through their front door. I pulled a cigarette from the pack, lit it up, dropped the match in the ashtray.

I filled my lungs with smoke, said, “Gary hunts.”

“I know,” said Lydia, and as we drove into town she said nothing else.

I finished the cigarette, then took out my phone, thumbed in a number.

“Sullivan.”

“Smith. Where are you?”

“Where am I? Where a cop belongs: behind my desk. Why?”

“I'm coming to see you. Ten minutes.”

A brief hesitation. “I hope you're coming by helicopter. I hope this doesn't mean you're in Warrenstown now.”

“Arrest me when I get there, Sullivan. This is important.”

Silence; then, “I'll be waiting.”

Lydia dropped me a few blocks from the police station. We saw no point in her talking to Sullivan. There was nothing she knew about Premador that I didn't, but there were things she might be able to get from the kids that I couldn't. She drove off to see.

A young cop I hadn't met before was behind the desk this time. I told him who I was; he nodded toward the door under the Warrenstown Warriors banner. I went through, found Sullivan alone in a three-desk room, papers tacked to boards on the walls, a window behind him that gave onto the parking lot. He stood when I entered, regarded me. “You were in my platoon, you'd be in the brig,” he said.

“I spent some time there. Sullivan, I found Premador.”

Tiny muscles moved under Sullivan's skin, a wolf catching a scent. “Tell me.”

“Not found him,” I corrected myself. “Found out who he is.”

“Tell me.”

I met his eyes. “Not yet. I want to talk to your chief.”

He stared. “What the fuck does that mean? You have a problem with me?”

“God, no. It means I need your help.”

Sullivan walked slowly around his desk, came to stand in front of me. He was as tall as I, muscled and thin. “What game are we playing?”

“No game. I'm asking, Sullivan. You say no, I'll give you what I have anyway. But I have questions for your chief and I don't think he'll answer them unless there's something he wants, too.”

“What questions?”

“About what happened twenty-three years ago, and why it still matters.”

“What makes you think it does?”

“For one thing, Al Macpherson went out to talk to Bethany Victor last night, to see what she remembered.”

A pause. “How the hell did you get her name?”

“Dammit, Sullivan, this is what I do. I found a source. What's the difference?”

“Jesus, Smith, you're a piece of work.” He turned to his desk for a pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, lit it up. I recognized that move: It's partly for the smoke, partly for the time, both to help you think. “Macpherson,” he finally said. “No shit?”

“No.”

Sullivan's steady, pale eyes didn't waver. “The chief's a good cop. You could wreck his career over a dumb mistake he made when he was a kid.”

“That's not what I want. But I need to know.”

He nodded slowly. “And you'll withhold evidence that could aid in the apprehension of a felon—an armed homicidal teenage boy—until your curiosity's satisfied?”

“If you want to look at it that way.”

“You have another way?”

“No.”

A corner of his mouth tugged up. “Goddamn,” he said. Eyes still on me, he reached for his desk phone, punched a button. “Chief? Jim. Got a minute?”

Letourneau's office was at the end of the hall, and from him I got no smile. “You know who this kid is, you don't tell me
now
, I'll lock you up, and not just for withholding evidence.” He stood at his desk, square jaw and square shoulders set. The chief of the Warrenstown PD was a big man, his sandy hair short and thick; his skin was pale and his hands were huge. “It'll be weapons possession for the gun buy, and accessory before the fact if anything else goes down.” His knuckles jabbed his paperwork. His voice was louder and harder than it needed to be, matching the excess in the threat: jail's jail, no matter how many charges you pile up on each other. I wondered how many times in his high school career he'd been called for unnecessary roughness.

“You can do that,” I said from across his desk. Sullivan stood beside me, waiting to see how things fell. “But I have a good lawyer. You might win, but the whole thing will take a lot of time. I don't think you have that kind of time. School starts Monday.”

Letourneau looked at Sullivan. Sullivan shrugged. Letourneau asked me tightly, “What the hell do you want?”

“I want you to answer some questions for me.”

“Questions about what?”

“Al Macpherson and Beth Adams. Victor, excuse me—Bethany Victor.”

Skin as pale as Letourneau's flushes deep, and quickly. “Fuck that. That's ancient history.”

“I'm not so sure. The last person who told me that got the shit beat out of her.”

Letourneau's eyes narrowed. “Stacie Phillips?”

“Friend of mine.”

“What's it got to do with her?”

“Guy who beat her up kept asking what she had, Chief,” Sullivan said in his easy drawl. “And what Tory Wesley had. Stacie has no idea what that meant. Only thing she'd done out of the ordinary lately was fax Smith here background on the Victor rape from the
Gazette
morgue.”

Letourneau said to me, “That's how you got that?”

I nodded. “And you knew I had it because Scott Russell told you. Why?”

“Why'd he tell me? Goddamn embarrassing for me, all that old shit comes out, don't you think?”

“And Scott was just doing you a favor, as an old friend?”

“Friend? Russell? Guy's a jackass, always was.” Letourneau shook his huge head. “But yeah, I suppose that's what he thought. In case he needed a favor himself someday, maybe.”

“Like if you found his son?”

His eyes flared. “That what you think?”

I looked from him to Sullivan. “I think that may be what Scott was thinking. But no, I don't think it would have worked.”

“Damn right it wouldn't.” He snorted, backed down a little. “Anyway, what's this got to do with anything?”

“With what happened to Stacie? I think it does,” I said. “And so did the person who beat her up.”

“Bullshit. They were asking about Tory Wesley, it's about drugs.”

“You knew Tory Wesley was dealing drugs?”

“I heard rumors.”

Sullivan's eyebrows went up, and Letourneau caught the motion. “Rumors,” he said to Sullivan. “I was going to tell you, check it out. When the kids got back from break.”

“And when she died,” I said, “you didn't think that was about drugs?”

“Might be,” Letourneau answered. “We'll find out.”

“After the Hamlin's game.”

Letourneau shrugged.

“Okay,” I said. “I never saw a town with its head so far up its ass, but I don't care. You answer my questions, I'll tell you who Premador is. You agree, I'll even tell you first, so you can get the hunt started. You don't, you can throw me in jail and we can all wait and see what happens.” Letourneau held me with a hard stare. Sullivan was relaxed and still beside me. He knew what I did; that I was blowing smoke. There was no way I was going to keep Premador's identity to myself. School started Monday.

But Letourneau didn't know that, and Letourneau, his voice tight, finally spoke. “What if I say I'll answer your fucking questions, and then after you give it up, I don't?”

“Then the
Tri-Town Gazette
might wonder why.”

“This is bullshit,” Letourneau said. “It's extortion.”

“It's a trade. If it has nothing to do with anything, that'll be the end of it.”

Letourneau shifted his glance to Sullivan, who looked at him steadily. Sullivan had told me Letourneau was a good cop. Letourneau turned to me. “Just what the hell,” he said, “do you want to know?”

twenty-one

I kept my part of the bargain and Letourneau kept his. To start, settled in a chair across the desk from Letourneau, I gave him and Sullivan a condensed version of the visit to the old brick farmhouse. My first instinct was to leave Lydia out of it, to keep a weapon in reserve. But as soon as Sullivan spoke to Phoenix Cooper-Niebuhr—and that was sure to be his next move, when he'd heard me out—he'd find out about her, and there was no point in pissing Sullivan off even more than I already had.

“I went out to Paul Niebuhr's house,” I said. “With my partner.”

Letourneau said, “Your partner?”

“Lydia Chin. Small Chinese woman, you might have seen her around town.”

“I thought she was a reporter,” he said. “One of the New York cable channels.”

I shrugged. Sullivan gave me a level gaze, said nothing.

“Paul wasn't there. We talked to his mother,” I said. “We saw his room.” I told them: the poster, the passwords.

When I ended the story, silence. Then, “Goddamn,” Sullivan breathed. “Paul Niebuhr. God
damn
.”

Letourneau's brow furrowed. “Skinny little nobody, right? I have the right kid?”

“Skateboarder.” Sullivan's voice was noncommittal on the question of whether Paul Niebuhr was a nobody. “Permission, Chief?” Letourneau nodded, and Sullivan reached across the desk and pressed the speakerphone button. “Denise, that Warrenstown yearbook,” he said. “That go to Crossley at the NYPD yet?”

“The messenger's on his way here for it,” a woman's voice crackled into the air.

“Cancel him. I'm in the chief's office; bring it here.”

A few moments later a tall woman, a civilian clerk, came in and handed Sullivan a manila envelope. Sullivan tore it open. He slipped out a maroon leather volume, last year's Warrenstown High yearbook. He flipped the pages; Letourneau and I leaned forward to see. “Bingo,” Sullivan said, finger on a photo in a row of photos. I craned past him to have my first look at Premador, who was on a mission to blow up the world.

I expected a slightly older version of the grinning boy I'd seen in the silver frame on Paul Niebuhr's desk, but this was a different kid: thin, pale, a young-looking high school junior when the photo was taken, which would have been this time last year. He wore aviator glasses; his thick brown hair was combed into submission, but barely. Most of the other boys had dressed in jacket and tie for their yearbook photos. Paul Niebuhr wore a black tee shirt, and he did not smile.

“Denise, have this enlarged,” Sullivan said. “I'll call Crossley right now. Fax him this. This is the guy he's looking for.”

I looked into Paul Niebuhr's expressionless eyes. A chill went through me. “Do you have a photo of Jared Beltran?” I asked Sullivan.

“In the files. What the hell for?”

“Did you know he's a hero to some of these kids?”

“Beltran? Some of what kids?” Letourneau said in disbelief.

“The freaks, the misfits. Because he one-upped the jocks. Raped one of their girls and then gave them the finger, killed himself so they couldn't get at him. I hear when the police came to arrest him a couple of jocks had to be pulled off him.”