Every Crooked Path Read online

  It was hard to know.

  Still, that was what came to mind.

  Tobin watched me quietly, waiting for a reply.

  “Honestly, I’m not sure what got me interested in the first place, but what keeps me going is the belief that what we do makes a difference.”

  “You have to, right?”

  “I have to?”

  “Believe it makes a difference.”

  “Yeah. I think we do.”

  “My sergeant, back when I was a rookie, he used to say, ‘Without hope, the only thing that keeps you going is either momentum or fear.’”

  He paused to let that sink in, then elaborated, “I always took that to mean that as soon as you stop believing things can get better, you’ll lose your motivation. So, instead, maybe you keep plugging forward because that’s just what you do. You go to work. You come home. You spend a little time with the people you love. Maybe you watch TV or read a novel, whatever, then you go to bed. On the weekends you do your best to get out and hit a few golf balls around, or you spend some time at the beach house or the cabin, and then you do it all over again.”

  “Momentum.”

  “Right.” He nodded. “So it’s either that or you keep going because you’re afraid of stopping and what that would mean: pausing long enough to look at the darkness that lies before you and the infinitesimally small and insignificant role you play in the sprawling script of the universe.”

  His words were striking, poetic, and I wondered if he’d read them somewhere or if he was just making them up on the spot, but he didn’t specify and I didn’t ask.

  “What about you?” I said. “What’s your story?”

  “Divorced. I had a daughter; she was taken when she was five. Killed. A jogger found her body two years later.”

  “Tobin . . .” Words failed me. “I’m sorry. Man, I can’t even imagine what that would be like, having to go through that.”

  “Yeah, it was hell. For a long time I thought it was the not knowing that was the hardest. There were days when I found myself thinking, ‘Even if she’s dead, okay, I just want to know, I just need to know the truth.’ It seemed like it was closure, some sort of closure, that I wanted.”

  “But it wasn’t?”

  “No. I mean, of course I wanted a happy ending, to find her safe and sound—I wanted that more than anything in the world—but as time went by I realized that it probably wasn’t going to play out like that. Eventually, you start to forget what your life was like beforehand. And when you’re honest, you’re a little frightened of what things would be like if they were different.”

  I was a little confused. “You mean, if she were alive and back with you?”

  “Or dead. The uncertainty becomes a place to retreat to, almost like solid ground when life becomes unmanageable. It’s hard to really put into words, and I suppose it’s impossible for people who’ve never been through it to understand, but vacillating between hope and despair just takes too much of a toll on everyone involved.”

  I knew the stats, knew about the devastating toll that losing a child can have on a marriage. He’d mentioned he was divorced, but he still wore his wedding ring and now I found myself glancing at it.

  He noticed. “Yeah. We were still together when it happened. Misty kept telling me that she knew Adrienne was alive, that a mother knows those things. And honestly, at first it helped. It did. It was almost like she had enough hope and faith for both of us. But then, as time wore on, it drove something between us. Her belief, my doubt—there wasn’t room for them both. I knew too much about these kinds of cases and about what guys who take little girls do to them. I stopped believing Adrienne would be alright, and maybe that’s what happened to Misty too, in the end. I don’t know.”

  He let out a slow breath, then told me about the depression his wife had spiraled into, her suicide attempts, the razor blades and the blood in the bathtub and the stay in the psychiatric hospital. And he told me about how she left him and about her final suicide attempt two weeks after the paperwork for their divorce went through.

  Completed, not successful.

  Tessa was right: “successful” was not the right term to use when you were referring to someone’s suicide.

  “But the thing is,” Tobin said, “Adrienne had been alive all that time. Misty had been right. All those months when she was struggling with depression before she finally took her own life, our daughter was alive. When they found her body, even though she’d been gone for two years, the forensic anthropologists confirmed that she’d been dead for less than six months.”

  He drained his beer and then stared at the glass as if it might somehow hold some answers to the tragic riddle of his past. But, finding none, he slid it aside and looked out across the pub instead.

  I realized I hadn’t had any of my beer since he’d started his story, and now I found that I wasn’t in the mood to finish it.

  Hearing what he’d been through, I understood his somewhat severe countenance. He was a survivor, a battered warrior of a man who’d been through a parent’s worst nightmare and come out the other side, scarred in places most of us don’t even know exist.

  But maybe he hadn’t really emerged from the other side yet.

  Maybe he was still trying to claw his way back to a normal life.

  Johnny Cash sang on. Another track on the playlist. The dark, gritty mood of Cash’s voice seemed appropriate as the sound track for Tobin’s story.

  “You know,” he said, “for those two years I prayed for Adrienne every day, but only when it was over, only after that man finally found her body, did I wish she’d died right away. We discovered evidence of severe physical and sexual abuse. Patrick, if I’d known what she was going to have to endure, if I’d known that she was going to have to suffer like that, I would have killed her myself the night she was taken to protect her from having to experience what she did in those eighteen months before she was strangled and dumped naked in that park.”

  I had no idea what to say.

  Not being a dad, I found it impossible to imagine what it would be like to be in his shoes, yet when I thought of the things that might have happened to Adrienne while she was held captive, I at least understood how Tobin could come to the point of saying that.

  “So, anyway . . .” He brushed his hand across the table as if he were trying to erase something. “That was all six years ago—I mean, when they actually found her body. You try to move on, you know? You try to put the pain behind you.” He fingered his wedding band. “It’s not easy, though.”

  “Did they ever find the person who did it?”

  “No. We never did.”

  Sometimes I think that in this job we know too much, that there are some things that would be best left unknown.

  I read once that the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa said, “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.”

  I think it’s true of people in law enforcement as well.

  We must never avert our eyes.

  Yes, there are some things people aren’t meant to see. In this job we see those things. We’re forced to look at them, to look past them, to see who is behind them and to recognize that they are human just like us.

  The victims are.

  The offenders are too.

  All, so desperately, extravagantly, wickedly human.

  Just like us.

  +++

  We settled our bill and walked into the night. A slight breeze was feeling its way through the city streets, but it was too hot to be refreshing. It just felt corrosive on my skin.

  “So I’ll see you in the morning, Pat.”

  “Yeah. You okay?”

  “I am. I just haven’t spoken about all that in a long time. It’s tough to walk back through those memories. It was tougher than I thought it would be.”

  +++

&n
bsp; Only when I was on my way home did I realize I’d forgotten to buy any toffee for Christie and Tessa, but I didn’t want to be reminded of Tobin’s story, so I didn’t go back to the pub where he’d told it to me.

  Instead I just aimed my car toward my apartment and thought of how, if Adrienne had never been taken, she would be just a couple of years younger than Tessa.

  They might’ve become friends, might have complained about their parents together or gone to the movies or talked about boys or snuck out for a smoke or let each other in on their dreams or done whatever it was teenage girls did these days.

  It might have turned out like that.

  If Adrienne hadn’t been taken.

  Hadn’t been killed.

  But she had been.

  I wondered how long Tobin had looked for his daughter’s killer. I imagined that if I were in his shoes I would have been obsessed with the search, and just knowing what I did about him, I assumed he would have been too, for a long time.

  And since I didn’t believe in coincidences, I didn’t believe that the daughter of a detective who worked cases involving sex crimes against children was just randomly abducted.

  Unlikely things happen every day, so it was possible, yes, but I couldn’t shake the thought that his family was targeted for a reason.

  20

  Francis had worked late at the ICSC, but hadn’t found anything specifically related to the Final Territory. He’d located a few references to FT—which might have stood for Final Territory or just about anything else—and a video that had four simple, white, mime-style masks sitting on a couch, but there were no children in that video and because of that it hadn’t shown up on most of the searches.

  If there really was a site called the Final Territory, it was as well hidden on the web as anything he’d ever looked into before.

  He would call the detective in the morning, tell him what little he knew.

  Now he was at his apartment, and though he wanted to do all he could to help the NYPD, he didn’t have his image-filtering software here and he didn’t want to chance encountering illegal images while searching for the Final Territory or going on Tor on his personal computer.

  He tried watching a little TV, but his computer in the corner of the room kept drawing his attention.

  Things had started small, just a faint, barely discernible voice that whispered to him, What would it be like?

  At first he was able to quiet the voice, to still it, to make it go away.

  But he hadn’t been able to make it go away for good.

  And there it was: that line he didn’t want to cross.

  That net he couldn’t seem to avoid.

  What would it be like? Think about it, Francis.

  No! Stop it! I’m a good person, I—

  No, you’re not. What about the things you’ve been tempted to do? The things you’ve considered. Remember? Remember what you—

  No! I would never do something like that. I can say no. I can resist. It takes self-control, like Dr. Perrior was talking about, and I’m a self-controlled person. They gave me this job because they know I can handle it. Not everybody could, but I can. They trust me!

  He needed to clear his head.

  Maybe exercise would help.

  He slipped out of his apartment to go for a walk.

  +++

  Interior decorating has never been my thing, and the walls of my one-bedroom apartment were empty except for a few photos of my friends and me rock climbing in Yosemite and a painting that I’d bought at an art exhibit from an ex-con who was trying to get on his feet after being released from prison.

  It wasn’t very good, but it pictured a V of geese flying over a northern marsh and it reminded me of growing up near Horicon Marsh, a thirty-mile-square wildlife refuge in Wisconsin, where millions of Canada geese stop by every autumn on their southern migration.

  That was where I found the body in the tree house, right on the edge of that marsh.

  Normally, the painting reminded me of my childhood home. Now, because of the connection to the dead girl, it made me think of Tobin’s devastating story.

  I used to wonder what it would be like for parents who lost a child, what it would be like to come home one day and find that your son or daughter was gone. Just like that. No explanation, no clues, nothing, just missing. Or maybe, one moment she was right there, right behind you at the store, or the park, or the beach, and now she wasn’t.

  You turn around and everything has changed.

  Everything is different.

  Forever.

  Having heard Tobin share about Adrienne and Misty tonight, I’d at least gotten a glimpse at the pain parents go through when their child is killed.

  I tried not to think about that as I put my things away.

  I hardly spent any time here in my apartment. If I wasn’t at the Field Office or at a crime scene somewhere, I was usually at a coffee shop, at Christie’s place, or slipping in a workout at the Hangout, my favorite local climbing gym.

  As I’d told the OPR lawyer, Ms. Aguirre, I was a little thin in the hobby department.

  Bookshelves covered one bedroom wall, but they couldn’t hold all my books, so there were three precarious stacks of criminology textbooks beside my bed. I had a Metolius hangboard for doing pull-ups in the living room. I got my news online and didn’t have much time or interest in television and I just never got around to buying one after I moved in here.

  Actually, come to think of it, I didn’t have one before that either.

  No easy chairs. No love seat.

  The only furniture in the living room was a stout table and two somewhat wobbly wooden chairs I’d picked up cheap from an estate sale. I ate and worked there at that table, often at the same time.

  Retiring to my bedroom, I called Christie and told her good night. Then I sat in bed with my back against the wall, flipped open my laptop, and went to Jamaal Stewart’s site to read through the real estate investment material the parents of those missing children subscribed to.

  +++

  The charcoal Mercedes-Benz SLK 55AMG crawled to a stop on Lily Keating’s street corner and she sashayed up to it, making the most of every step.

  She knew her cars.

  Came with the gig.

  And this one spoke of impeccable taste.

  By the time she got to the driver’s door, the guy had lowered his window. She leaned close. “Looking for a little companionship?”

  She might have said, “Looking for a good time?” or “Do you want someone to party with?” but she’d learned to gauge these things based on appearances and someone driving a car in this price range would likely be more open to her services if she offered him “companionship.”

  Semantics.

  It’s all about semantics.

  He didn’t answer, but rather let his gaze travel down her neck, pause at her chest, and then move slowly back up to her face. There was a time when men looking at her that way had bothered her. Not anymore. Now she was used to it, expected it.

  Finally, he said, “May I ask how old you are?”

  “How young do you want me to be?”

  She was careful how she phrased that.

  Semantics.

  “You could pass for sixteen.”

  “Sixteen it is, then.”

  Shifting his attention forward, he stared out the windshield for a moment as if he were debating things, then scratched absently at his chin and motioned toward the passenger door. “Climb in.”

  +++

  She told him how much she usually got for her services and he didn’t argue or try to negotiate. “That’ll be fine.”

  In truth, her rates were adjustable. She was an entrepreneur and looked at her fee structure kind of like airlines’ fare pricing—there were peak hours and peak seasons when the prices
would go up, and of course you could always pay for first-class service if you wanted to.

  Tonight, being a Thursday, was not exactly a peak night.

  Usually, she was good at reading how much a guy would be willing to spend, taking into account his car, his clothes, and how nervous he seemed to be. Now, however, based on how quickly he agreed to what she quoted him, she wondered if maybe she’d way undershot things.

  She waited in the seat beside him as he let the car idle.

  Sometimes men would talk dirty as soon as she was alone in the car with them—sometimes they wanted her to, other times they would promise her how much she was going to enjoy things—which seemed a bit ironic to her, almost as if they’d forgotten what kind of transaction this was.

  “What’s your name?” he asked her.

  “Lily.”

  “Okay.”

  She could tell he didn’t believe her and for some reason tonight she felt like she wanted him to. Shooting for a teenager’s word choice and speaking rhythm, she said, “It is. It’s actually my real name. Some girls make up the names they use, you know? But I didn’t have to. I got a cool name right off the bat. My dad always brought my mom a flower whenever he saw her for their first twelve dates. Every date, another flower. That’s it. She loves flowers. That’s why she named me Lily.”

  “I see.”

  Lily knew how these things worked, so she didn’t ask for his name, but instead said, “What would you like me to call you?”

  “Shane will be fine.”

  “Okay, Shane.”

  A pause. “I’m a little new at this.”

  She almost said, “Well, sweetie, I’m not,” but then remembered he liked the idea of her being young, so she opted for “Me too” instead, and said it as naively and innocently as possible.

  He still didn’t pull away from the curb, which might’ve meant that he was going to change his mind.

  “Lily, as long as we’re being forthright with each other, that’s not my real name; Shane, I mean.”

  “That’s fine.” She put her hand on his knee. “There’s a place I know. It’s close.”

  “I had somewhere in mind.”