“Damn!” exclaimed Bogart, gazing around. “I guess I expected to see walls covered in index cards with strings attached, running to other cards, like a manual version of an air traffic control system.”
But there was nothing like that down here. In fact, there was nothing but what one would expect to see in a basement: junk.
“I was hoping for the same thing,” said Decker. He looked all around, taking everything in, and started nodding as though the answer had occurred to him.
“Ironically, I overlooked one obvious but significant point. Wyatt has hyperthymesia. She doesn’t need a wall of index cards. It’s all in her head, every detail. And we don’t know what Leopold is yet, except strange and a hell of an actor. He plays a clueless idiot better than anyone I’ve ever seen. But there’s something else about him that I can’t pinpoint.”
Bogart said, “You told us he was inexplicable.”
“He is inexplicable. Everyone has an agenda, whether altruistic or self-serving. So he has one too. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
Bogart said, “Should we call in the locals?”
Decker shook his head. “No.”
“Why not? They get ticked when we don’t at least inform them of what we’re doing.”
“Because it could be that the ‘locals’ are the reason behind this whole thing. So we’re going to process what little there is down here.”
He started poking around a plastic shelf with a few boxes of junk on them. Jamison started going through stuff in another corner. Lancaster and Bogart exchanged a glance and then did likewise.
* * *
Two hours later, Bogart said, “Okay, there is nothing here. Nothing!”
“No, there is,” said Jamison. She held up a newspaper clipping.
“Where’d you get that?” asked Lancaster.
“It was stuffed in a box and under that table over there with rags on top.”
“So what?” said Bogart. “It’s junk, just like everything else here.”
“No. When people save newspapers, they always save a stack of them. This was the only newspaper in this entire room. To a mind like Wyatt’s I bet it was a particle of disorder. Which made me wonder why it was here. There had to be a reason.”
Decker studied her curiously. “That’s a good deduction, Jamison.”
“Hey, I may not be a hyper-whatsis, but I have my moments. And I can smell newsprint from a mile away.”
“What does it say?” asked Lancaster.
She held up the front page of the newspaper and pointed to the large headline.
Lancaster read, “‘Giles Evers Gone Missing.’”
“Who the hell is Giles Evers?” said Bogart.
Jamison said, “He was a police officer. The news story also said he was the son of Mercy’s most prominent citizen, Clyde Evers. Former mayor, made a lot of money in mining, gave a lot of it to his hometown. Typical big fish in a small pond.”
“Why would Wyatt keep that clipping?” asked Bogart.
Decker answered. “Because Giles Evers raped her. And she made him disappear.”
“Whoa, that’s a helluva leap of logic, Amos,” said Lancaster.
“No it’s not. It would be the only reason this article would be here.”
“When was the article from?” asked Lancaster.
Jamison said, “Nineteen months ago. Right about the time the house was sold to the company we think Wyatt is behind.”
Bogart and Lancaster stared at Decker. “Okay, you’re saying she was attacked by a police officer?” said Bogart in a skeptical tone.
“By police officers,” said Decker. “It was a gang rape. And they did it because of her intersex condition, and Evers’s old man paid off the Wyatts to keep it hush-hush. He got his son in the clear and saved the police department a ton of embarrassment and the rolling of heads. I can’t imagine the Mercy Police Department is all that big. It might be that all the street cops were part of the rape. Hell of a hit for the men in blue to take. And the town. A town that maybe had no sympathy for someone like Belinda Wyatt.”
“But we can’t be sure of that,” said Lancaster. “You’re just speculating.”
“We can confirm it,” said Decker. “Let’s go talk to some folks who were around back then.”
Chapter
59
THE POLICE CHIEF from two decades ago had died six years before of a heart attack. There were two officers from that time who were still with the department. Neither of them knew anything about the Wyatt case, they had told Bogart when he and the others showed up at the single police station in town. The group was rapidly shown the door.
As they drove away Lancaster said, “They’re lying. I could see it in their faces.”
“Small town, small enough that everyone knows everyone else’s business,” said Decker. “I say we go to the top of the list.”
“You mean Giles Evers’s father?” said Jamison. “Clyde Evers?”
“If he’s still alive.”
Bogart was looking at his smartphone, on which he had been doing a search. “Apparently he is. And it looks like he still lives here.”
* * *
The address they drove to turned out to be a small house on the edge of town. As they pulled up they could see lights on in the front windows. A porch ran along the front of the plank-sided house. Smoke curled upward from a chimneystack. The snow had started to fall once more.
The house was run-down. The lawn was lumpy, the trees and bushes diseased and mangled, and the single car in the driveway was an ancient Ford truck.
Lancaster muttered, “The town’s patriarch, huh? Must’ve fallen on hard times.”
“There might be a good reason for that,” said Decker.
At their knock the front door opened and an old man, bloated and bent, stood there. His white beard reached to his chest, and his frayed pants were held up by knotted rope suspenders.
Bogart identified himself, flashed his badge, and said they needed to speak to him about his son. Evers nodded dumbly and led the four of them into a tiny room where a fire crackled in a soot-smeared stone-faced fireplace.
The inside of the house was dark and smelled both of mildew and mothballs and of whatever meal the man had microwaved that night.
Decker’s gaze shot everywhere before coming to rest on the old man, who fell back into a recliner, his shoeless feet off the floor. He scratched his cheek and looked at each of them in turn before his gaze returned to Decker.
“You don’t look like FBI.”
“That’s because I’m not.”
“Uh-huh,” Evers said absently, as his gaze settled onto the fire. “So you’re here to find my boy?” he said to the flames. “Didn’t think they’d get the Federals involved. But so be it. All I got left is that boy. Not much, but that’s it.”
“You sacrificed a lot for him, didn’t you?” said Decker. He looked around again. “Pretty much everything, right?”
Evers shot him a glance before looking back at the fire. “What the hell do you know about anything?”
“So you don’t know where he is?” said Decker.
Evers turned a fierce gaze on him. “What are you saying? That I took my own damn son? Are you simple or what?”
“I’m saying that Belinda Wyatt took him. But you already knew that.”
For a moment Evers looked like he might collapse to the floor. But then he regained his composure and even flung his flabby hand out dismissively. “Belinda Wyatt! Ghosts-of-the-past bullshit. What’s she got to do with anything?”