The year She Fell (64 page)

“Come over here,” I told him, and sullenly he moved towards me. In a second I had him against the railing of the deck and gave him a quick pat down, with maybe a little bit more neck-grab than was recommended back at the training academy. He squirmed, his breath coming fast and scared. I let him go, though I kept his pocketknife.

“Is that really necessary?” Theresa said.

“Sure is. Get one chance in this town, and he’s already used it up.” I watched him walk back to the steps, sulky and disarmed, and turned to see Laura’s smile. She hid it quickly, but I saw her mouth curve in the candlelight. I guessed she didn’t like him all that much either.

Or maybe it was just that macho displays made her hot.

No reaction from Ellen. Maybe she’d run through her patience with the boy. Or maybe she was wondering about her husband.

Anyway, I asked Laura, “You filled them in yet?”

“As much as I know. But Mother said you’d explain.”

And so I did. I told them about their mother’s suspicions, and about her conversation with Cathy just before the accident out on the bridge. At first, they didn’t ask any questions. Stunned, I guess. Then Theresa made a noise—very quiet, almost too quiet to hear over the calls of the crickets in the grass. And finally she said, “You’re trying to say that I’m the product of statutory rape?”

“That’s what we suspect.”

“And that he m—”

She couldn’t go on. I couldn’t blame her.

“Look, nothing’s certain. But it’s not just your mother’s suspicions. The police had questions at the time, and I do now. Someone left a footprint—a Bass moccasin shoeprint—there at the scene. And it never made any sense that she’d be climbing that time of day, and make an amateur’s mistake.”

Laura said slowly, “You think she met him there. By the bridge. To confront him.” After a pause, she added, “She always kept her climbing equipment in her truck. Just in case she got a chance to climb.”

“Yeah.” I leaned against the railing, chose my words carefully. “She wasn’t climbing that day, I don’t think. I think she probably just wanted to talk to him. And —”

“He knew how to climb.” Ellen spoke for the first time. “That first summer camp, he took us all to search for lichen on the cliffs. He showed off, rappelling down and climbing back up.” She added, “But Cathy was better even then. He called her his best student.”

Theresa had her hands in her lap, and stared down at them. “I always knew . . . that I was the child of sin.”

Ellen was there in an instant, kneeling at her side. “That’s not true. You know that God doesn’t visit the sins of the father on the child. You were innocent. Nothing about this means anything about you.”

Laura came closer, put her hand on Theresa’s arm. “Besides, you’re good. You’ve done nothing but good things in your life. No sins to speak of.”

“You don’t know,” Theresa whispered.

“I do know,” Laura said firmly. “The only reason you think you’re a sinner is that you have such high standards for yourself. You’re way better than average.”

Brian finally spoke up. “You are good. You helped me, even though I was lying to you.”

He huddled into himself, and I could imagine what he was thinking, that he’d brought this all down on the family . . . well, maybe he wasn’t thinking anything like that. I wasn’t sure the kid had that sort of self-awareness. And anyway, I was the one who kept saying the truth should come out, so if his lies led to this revelation, I should be thanking him.

He probably shouldn’t hold his breath waiting.

Theresa accepted her sisters’ embrace, and she put her head down on Ellen’s shoulder. After a moment, Laura rose and came to stand by me. “Do you have to?”

“You know I do.”

Theresa looked up. Even if the flickering candlelight, I could see the anguish on her face. “I was—was
sired
by a child molester, you’re saying. And when she went to him to make him face what he’d done, he pushed my birthmother into a ravine.”

That was a pretty concise summary, so I just nodded.

Theresa pushed Ellen’s arms away and stood up. Her face was hard now. “Then get him. Get him for her sake. And mine.”

A quarter-hour later,
Laura was still arguing temperance and caution and all that good
Wakefield
stuff. “Can’t you just . . . ruin him? Like you—”

She broke off, but I knew she was thinking about the number I’d done on the man in
New York
. That wasn’t murder, however. “If I got enough evidence for murder, I’d have to take it to the prosecutor. But—” I shrugged. “After seventeen years, I don’t know whether we can find much evidence. The shoeprint is intriguing, sure. But those shoes are long gone.”

“What do you need?” Ellen asked.

“A confession would be good. On tape. But I don’t think I’m going to get that.” I thought with some longing about my former force—a half-dozen detectives and cutting-edge wiretap equipment. “My best chance is trying to trap him. Your mother was trying to do that, pretending she was a teenage girl, trying to entice him in a chatroom.”

Ellen and Laura exchanged glances. “So that was what all that laptop interest was about,” Ellen said. “And she wanted help in figuring chat software out. And finding
Loudon
College
chatrooms. And all that time I just thought she was trying to keep up with the times.”

“Well, she cottoned on pretty quick.” I tried to think through the angles. “I’ll have a tech look at her laptop, but I don’t think we’re going to find anything. She didn’t keep logs, and somehow I doubt he did either.”

“He doesn’t know that she didn’t keep logs.”

It was the boy—his first contribution. I looked down at him, sitting hunched on the porch step. “What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know. I mean—” he floundered for a moment. But he was in the generation that grew up with Instant Messenger, and it didn’t take him long to figure something out. “If he thinks that the police are investigating his chats with girls, well, maybe he’ll do something stupid.”

“I can’t just forge logs.” Unfortunately.

“Yeah, well, maybe just implying you got them? And implying you can track down the other PC used in the chats? I mean, you know. Every computer’s got a unique IP number, right?”

“Right,” I said slowly. “So you’re saying, if he thinks we can trace it to his computer . . .”

“Maybe he’ll confess to something,” Ellen said. “Something not so bad. Like he might try to say that he did have a chat, but he didn’t know she was underage. And once you get him in an interrogation room, well, he’ll be looking at the end of his career.”

“He might say something incriminating,” Theresa said. She was still shaken, but she sat ramrod straight in her low chair. I wondered what it was like, to want vengeance on the man who sired you. She was tougher than I’d be, after so many revelations coming so fast, and none of them good.

I pushed away from the railing. “Well, let me see what I can come up with tomorrow. I’ll keep you informed.”

Laura followed me around the house to my car. I held out my arms, but she kept her distance. “Jack, if you can get him on some Internet predator count, then maybe that’ll be all you need.”

“I can’t get him on that,” I told her wearily. It had been a long day, and it looked like it was going to be a long, lonely night. “He probably didn’t break any laws with your mother. It’s not like she’s actually a teenager. So we just have to hope he screws up somehow. And he’s a college president. He should be smart enough not to screw up much.”

Laura’s eyes narrowed, and she said coolly, “Well, he decided to mess with my sister, and I think he screwed up then.”

Decades ago—but I didn’t say it out loud. I had to believe there was a chance to catch him, even though this was about as cold as a case got. I might have to settle, as Mrs. Wakefield thought, and Laura wanted, for just ruining him. Could ruin myself in the process, of course.

I thought briefly that I should take this to the prosecutor, get a go-ahead on what amounted to a sting operation. But this wasn’t the bold, risk-taking sort of prosecutor you got in big cities. This was a good old boy with a thirty-five-year-old law degree and a big mortgage, who spent a lot of time worrying that actually prosecuting anyone might cut into the private practice he had on the side.

 
The college president was an important man in town, and he would have some powerful allies. If I started going after him, and couldn’t finish, well, I wouldn’t be
Wakefield
police chief much longer.

As I got in my squad car, Laura was still regarding me warily. In some ways, she had the most to lose from a trial. Outside of this little town, no one cared about me or Mrs. Wakefield or even the college president. But Laura was out there in the public eye every day. And for a semi-famous person, she kept a fierce hold of her privacy. If this investigation developed into a trial, she’d be a featured player in tabloid stories. The spotlight would be on her, but for all the wrong reasons.

I couldn’t let that stop me. But maybe I’d find a way.

She was still standing there, silhouetted in the driveway, as I drove off.

It took the morning and half of the afternoon to set everything up—calling in the off-duty cops, assigning them to quadrants, recruiting my fake computer techs. Getting an appointment with the big man on campus.

The college spread out on the north side of town, a small tidy campus grouped around a central red-brick quadrangle. It was all quiet and lush in the afternoon sun, the lawns almost empty now with most of the students gone.

I’d actually gone to college back when, gotten a degree in criminal justice. But my college was a barren stretch of concrete low-rises on the edge of downtown
Bristol
. Tuition was cheap enough that the department paid for it, and classes were held at night and on weekends, because most of the students worked. There weren’t any dances or football games or marching bands. Just the grind of adults and their cheerless career-driven studies.

Loudon, on the other hand, was a real college, with dormitories and bearded professors and sororities. Weird that every time I set foot on this campus, I felt like I was on a movie set. It just seemed a world apart from the real
West Virginia
, where a lot of kids didn’t have textbooks or toothbrushes, and working men didn’t have work. But the college was the only thing that kept
Wakefield
’s economy relatively stable. So I made sure my department worked well with the administration and the tiny college security force whenever there was a football game or some fraternity had an extra-wild party.

Ridell, the security chief, a frail man with a bad cough, was waiting for me in the administration antechamber. He tried to get more details as we walked into the office, but I didn’t say much until we were sitting there in front of the desk, with President Urich there, his hands clasped on his blotter.

I did my best not to gaze at the framed sketch drawn by Edward Wakefield. But I could see it there, in my peripheral vision, just over the president’s shoulder. It was right underneath a photo of him with some governor or senator.

Could he have kept it, if he’d killed the girl who gave it to him?

Well, hell, that was a stupid question for a cop to ask. There were men who didn’t worry about such contradictions. That’s how they went on, achieving their goals, succeeding at whatever criminality they chose. They didn’t look back at the damage they’d caused.