The Boy Must Die (25 page)

“This half-ton’s been out in the country, in some mud. Dents and scoring on the panel here. The driver’s door is locked.”

“And there are a couple of whiskey bottles on the floor of the cab. A red baseball cap. Looks like a crow feather pinned or sewn on the front.”

“This door is locked, too.”

“He doesn’t keep his truck bed very clean. What do you make of the stains on the blanket there?”

Billy leapt over the side of the truck bed and picked up the crumpled blanket. “Old paint, maybe, or dried blood. Smeared and spotted. Like someone was bleeding and then wiped blood from his hands or mouth.” Billy folded the blanket and hesitated. He knew he couldn’t take it away without a warrant. But was this evidence that might be linked to the Riegert boy? Quickly, he placed it under the tarp that spread over the back end of the truck bed.

“You knock on some back doors, Johnson. I’ll try to wake Hill up again. His neighbours can fill us in on how long this truck has been here. The mud on the back wheels tells me Perry was out near my part of the country. Same topsoil mixed with clay and blue stone. It’s heavy on the axle as well. Remember that bad rain last Wednesday or Thursday? It’s safe to assume Perry’s been out joyriding in the past three or four days.”

“A few things,” said Sergeant Dodd, pulling up a chair to the desk. Billy glanced at his watch: 2:45. Both Dodd and Johnson had come to report
on their findings. Johnson was leaning against the filing cabinet. Billy sat forward in his chair and put his elbows on his knees. He took one sip of his fresh coffee and put the cup back on the table. “No wonder our schools have problems these days. It’s the parents not minding their kids. The schools should clamp down on them.”

“You want bars on the windows, too, Ricky?” said Johnson.

“Hey, Johns. I was only. . . .”

“Dodd. Carry on, please.”

“Yes, Inspector.” Dodd threw a disgruntled glance at Johnson, who grinned back at him. Dodd flipped the page of his notebook. “Mrs. Childs gave permission to talk to her class at the junior high. Some of the girls started to cry when I told the story. I asked if anyone knew Darren. Did he have any enemies? No response. I waited after class, but no one came up to me. Mrs. Childs said if she heard anything in the halls, or if later a student came to her, she’d call here. Seems Darren had no girlfriend.”

“Was anyone absent this morning, Dodd?”

“No, sir. I put up the posters of Darren. The writing on the note Hawkes found in the kid’s mouth matched the handwriting on a couple of his essays. I asked Childs about Blayne Morton. She says she doesn’t know him well. She did confirm, however, that he is a bully. She’s seen him arguing with and hitting other students in the cafeteria. Once she caught him handing in another kid’s assignment as his own.” Dodd finished by flipping back through his notes, checking for anything he might have missed. “The school nurse told me she’d seen rope marks on Darren’s back once and reported it to social services.”

Dodd looked at Billy and then at Johnson. Johnson grinned and raised her thumb.

“So where does that leave us?” Billy sat up in his chair and massaged his knee.

Dodd and Johnson remained silent.

“These boys were loners,” Billy went on. “Outsiders. No one seems to know them well. We’ve got marginally suspicious actions on the part of
the boyfriend, Woody, and one other student, Blayne Morton, and that’s all. What did Hill’s neighbours tell you, Johnson?” Billy was now pacing.

“I talked to a Mr. Hamer. Said he saw the truck come in early Saturday morning around eight. He noticed fresh mud on the wheels. He and Perry didn’t talk much, claims Perry is quiet, lives alone, except for his mother, who goes over to visit on occasion. The truck was there till about nine on Friday night, he said, then Perry drove off, wearing a pair of jeans and a straw cowboy hat.”

“Anybody else notice what Hamer saw?”

“A Miss Rhodes. Two doors down. She was jogging early when she saw the truck turn into the alley about quarter to eight on Saturday. Later that same day, she spoke to him briefly. She said she asked him if he’d been out of town. She described him as tired looking and unwilling to say much. After lunch, he drove out and came back with a box. She couldn’t tell what he was carrying. A similar box was lying by the garbage cans, sir. He may have used it to carry in his vodka.”

“Get a warrant to search the truck. I want that blanket seized. As soon as we can. Also, Johnson, take backup, another house warrant, and get Hill out of bed. Break in the door and drag him out if you have to.”

Dodd and Johnson nodded and seemed to Billy a little stunned by his sudden anger.

“Don’t look at me, Johnson. We’ve got evidence, maybe, and a lead — albeit a chancy one — and we can’t wait around.”

“Yes, Billy.”

“Dodd, you get Marilyn Black on the phone. She worked with Sheree Lynn Bird. Tell her I want to see her.”

“You got it.” Dodd rose.

“Remember, we have a mutilated body, no prints, no
firm
leads, only one possible motive.”

“You really think this Hill will lead us anywhere?” Johnson’s voice was full of concern.

“In circles. But sooner or later we’ll bump into something worthwhile.”

Billy watched the two officers leave, his mind returning to the image of Darren Riegert’s body on the morgue’s steel table, boots splattered with blood. He then picked up his empty coffee cup and neatly pressed the Styrofoam sides together before dropping it into the metal garbage can by the desk.

Mrs. Morton held the door open and in her obedient manner welcomed Billy into her apartment. When he asked her if he could look around, and when he presented her first with a consent-to-search form, she blushed with embarrassment and signed the sheet without reading it. The official search warrant, folded in Billy’s pants pocket, would not be necessary unless she put up resistance. But Billy explained what he needed to search out, and Mrs. Morton kept agreeing. “Yes, Inspector. He’s a good boy, my Blayne.”

Once she’d left him alone, Billy looked around the living room. Not much was there. A couple of old chairs and a
TV
. There were no pictures on the walls, no evidence of a newspaper or a magazine. It reminded Billy of a storage space, a spare room where people put unwanted furniture.

In Blayne’s bedroom, three of the walls were covered in posters of heavy metal bands. Taped on the wall above the single bed and printed on a banner made of newsprint were the words
Mene Mene Tekel
. Out came the notebook. Billy sat on a low stool by the door and scanned the room, first describing the cupboard full of Blayne’s huge boots and jeans, then the unmade bed and the chest of drawers, open and spilling T-shirts and underwear. The carpet was stained with patches of what looked like tomato juice and coffee. The curtain on the window was the kind of orange plastic netting found on construction sites as a barrier fence. The air felt brown; it reeked of unwashed socks and stale cigarette smoke.

Billy pulled the stool closer to the unmade bed. The top sheet had been pulled up as if Blayne had wanted to make the bed and then had stopped. The pillow was plumped into a tight ball; the blankets were a creased roll and shoved to one end. Billy leaned closer and examined the crumpled, dirty sheet lying at the foot of the bed. Small pieces of dried
mud lay like coarse powder. Billy noticed the mud was also on the blanket just above the soiled sheet. Blayne must have lain down with dirty shoes. Lifting the corner of the blanket, Billy found more chunks of dried mud. In amongst them were smaller, darker pieces. Taking a Ziploc from his pocket, Billy folded it over his right hand and picked up one of the darker pieces. It looked like grapeshot. In the light of the window, he confirmed it was a dried mouse turd. Billy gathered up more, along with the powdery dust, and folded the Ziploc back over his hand to capture the pieces inside the plastic. This was a break: if the mud matched the consistency and type of that found in Satan House and the garden, it could stand as circumstantial evidence in court, as would the mouse faeces. Neither was enough, though, for a conviction. What was needed was hard evidence placing Blayne at the murder site at the right time on Friday night.

Billy next rummaged through Blayne’s jeans and dirty laundry. He was hoping to find a T-shirt or a pair of pants Darren’s size, his hunch being that Blayne had gone to the site, either as a witness or as a perpetrator, and then taken the naked boy’s clothes as souvenirs. All the drawers were searched; under the bed amongst huge dustballs, there was only a leftover film cartridge for the Polaroid. The camera itself sat perched on the bedside table. Billy felt let down. He stood alone, thinking, wondering if the room would reveal any other secret to him.
If you wanted to hide something in this room, where would it be safe?

Billy lifted the mattress. The box spring had been cut open. Billy shoved the mattress off the bed and plunged his hand into the slit in the box spring. He pulled out a small square book with a white cover. THE CENTINAL was written in green letters. Below it the words HAMILTON JUNIOR HIGH. The date was May, the paper smelled new, recently printed. Billy flipped through the yearbook, its glossy pages full of one-inch-square colour portraits of the students. It was the same book Dodd had brought to the station, the school’s year-end graduation book. In the back were black-and-white six-by-sixes of the basketball teams, the chess club, plus random shots of students cheering from bleachers or mugging
over plates of food. On page 20 were the rows of individual student photos and captions. Here was Mrs. Childs’s class, the names at least familiar to Billy from his interviews. In Blayne’s copy, the face of Cody Schow had been crossed over with black lines in the shape of a pentacle. In the space under the portrait was a line of handwriting. The letters were small and precise: “Death is Life.” Could the
RCMP
handwriting expert match this lettering to the crude printing on the Polaroids now kept in the station files? Darren Riegert’s picture was not marked.

Billy flipped back to the portraits of the principal and the teaching staff. Each one of the photos had a red X through it, thick lines drawn diagonally from corner to corner and ending in a neatly drawn imitation of a drop of blood about to ooze down the page. Over the title of the page in thin red letters was written “Death to All.” Billy stared at the book in the silence of the dim room; in his mind’s eye, he saw Blayne Morton crouched on the bed, his huge frame bent over the yearbook, cursing his teachers, his thick hand methodically drawing out each simulated drop of blood. Billy slipped the yearbook into a large Ziploc.

He then pulled apart the cut in the box spring, the coils wrapped in grey muslin. He pressed down on the spring to see if any resistance or noise might reveal another hidden object. Crouching, Billy again looked under the bed. His eye caught a thin white edge of cardboard between the box spring and the support slats. Billy propped up the box spring momentarily and slid out a narrow, flattened tie box.

It had been taped at the corners. Billy pried off the cover. Inside on the bottom were pasted six faded Polaroid snapshots of Darren Riegert. In one, Darren was standing wearing a leather jacket similar to the one in the Polaroid filed at the station. In another, Darren was talking to two figures whose faces had turned away from the sudden glare of the Polaroid’s flash. Two others showed Darren on the street, and the rest were snaps of him staring blankly at the lens as if he’d reluctantly agreed to pose. The inside of the lid had been stapled with a red cloth. A red magic marker outlined Darren’s name. In the upper and lower corners were miniature Valentines. Billy noticed two staples were loose, as if
they’d been pulled out and then pressed back onto the cardboard. Under the red cloth, Billy felt the outline of another Polaroid. He gently pulled the cloth away. The Polaroid was facedown. Turning it over, Billy saw first the naked body, then the book and the knife just at the edge of the frame. Darren’s bony arms were held forward, his hands cupped over his exposed genitals as if he’d been suddenly surprised. His boots were still on. In the background stood the sink in the basement of Satan House.

Billy put in a call to the station and found Butch at his desk. The afternoon was still bright, and Billy was elated.

“Butch, I found evidence. I’m at the Morton apartment building.”

“You old dog.”

“I’ve bagged the items; I suggest we send a constable up to the hospital with an arraignment order. Keep Blayne under observation. His mother will go there soon and will probably tell him of my visit, if he’s conscious. I’ll bring the items down for Johnson to look at. One is a photo that places Blayne at the site near or before the time of the hanging. It’s our best bit yet. Also, I found some . . . well, you’ll see. What we need is a witness, anyone who might have seen Blayne out and about on Friday to establish some time frame.”

“You think we’ve got enough for a conviction?”

“We have a start. Sheree Lynn Bird can testify to Blayne’s history of behaviour with Darren. I know it’s hearsay, but it can help dispel reasonable doubt. The picture I have is the clincher. If we can confirm the time, and get Blayne to confess to how and why he was there, we can begin proceedings.”

Tuesday afternoon had become very warm and windless, and as Justin cleared surface stone and worked the shovel blade into softer layers of soil, he wondered about the spirits of long-dead shamans and Blackfoot warriors, if this despoiled holy ground might conjure up vengeful curses. Would he and the others find themselves suddenly paralyzed or struck blind by the disturbed anger of an animal god? Soon his hands
would be sifting soil through a metal screen and perhaps recovering a long-buried arrowhead, a sacred piece of worked bone, or a skull. Even though the dry heat was burning Justin’s skin, it felt comforting and oddly refreshing. He was sweating, and his back and arms felt revitalized by the digging and lifting. The morning’s fatigue had dissipated. When he and the others had stopped for lunch at 2:00, their roast beef sandwiches and sliced carrots had tasted as never before.