coats in his closet. “He’s a hunter.”
“The tree house. Goose hunting?”
“Possibly.”
Radar was quiet.
“Never anything to do with law enforcement, though?” I asked. “Did he enter and drop out of any police academies?”
“Nothing’s listed. Nope.”
“Man, we gotta find out how he’s trafficking stuff that ought to be in police evidence rooms.”
“No kidding.”
“What else?”
“He’s lived in Fort Atkinson since June 1996. Mallory moved in with him about a month later on the day she turned eighteen.”
“Which means-”
“He had a relationship with her before that, when she was still a minor.”
I felt my hands tighten around the steering wheel. “How do we know when she moved in?”
“She changed the address on her driver’s license.”
After Radar finished reading the files, we were silent and I was thinking about the case of Jenna Natara, the investigation that wouldn’t leave me alone, even when I slept.
“Pat, I know you’re angry.”
“Don’t tell me not to be, don’t-”
“No, I get it. It’s okay. It’s a good thing.”
“It’s good that I’m angry?”
“It shows you care. As my dad used to say, anger is the cousin of love.”
I looked at him quizzically. “What does that mean?”
“The more you love something, the more angry you’ll be when that thing is threatened or attacked. If you love children, you’ll be incensed at pedophiles; if you love your wife, you’ll get angry when someone insults her; if you love endangered species, you’ll be furious when they’re hunted to the point of extinction; if you love unborn children, you’ll be outraged about abortion. Anger always, and only, runs as deep as love.”
I’d never thought of it like that. “Your dad was a smart man.”
“Yes, he was.”
A thought:
Anger is the cousin of love…
I said, “You know how psychologists will tell you that no one can make you angry, that you only choose to become angry?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t remember a time ever in my life when I’ve chosen to be angry. And I’ve never met anyone who’s said to me, ‘This guy cut me off on the interstate and I decided to get angry.’”
“Anger’s a response”-Radar was right with me-“not a choice.”
“Right. Nobody ever chooses to become angry, we can only choose not to respond with anger. If we want to.”
“Okay.” He could tell there was more. “And?”
“And I’m not going to do that with Griffin.”
“You’re going to remain angry.”
“Yeah, and respond that way.”
“So am I.”
“I guess we’ll see where that leads.”
He was quiet. “Yes, we will.”
The trip went by fast and before I knew it I was pulling up to the side of the road in front of Timothy Griffin’s dilapidated house on the outskirts of Fort Atkinson.
59
Two cars from the Fort Atkinson Police Department were already at the house when we arrived.
A sergeant whose name tag read J. CARVER met us at the porch.
“Do you have him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “House was empty when we got here, but since we had the search warrant…well…” He pointed to the door. “We accessed the property.”
There was a shattered lock on the door and I liked this guy already.
“What else?”
“We found a false cabinet under the basement stairs. There’s a box. A bunch of toys and some children’s clothing.”
“Show me.”
While we were descending the steps, I could feel my heart twisting in my chest. Radar and I pulled on latex gloves.
“They haven’t disturbed anything,” I asked Carver, “have they? The other officers?”
“No. I made sure they didn’t touch anything until you got here.” Carver seemed like a pro and I was glad he was the one calling the shots for his team.
We reached the basement and he led us around the back of the stairs to the place where the officers had dismantled the cabinet. The basement itself was cluttered with unfinished woodworking projects, stacks of cardboard boxes, a shotgun on the workbench where Griffin may have been working on it, an old, warped pool table.
The square cardboard box they’d found was about half a meter tall, deep, and wide. It held a clutch of toys, some children’s clothes beneath them, and, apparently, something bulky that I couldn’t make out beneath the toys and clothing.
The toys in the box that caught my attention right off the bat were a plastic horse about the right size for a Barbie doll to ride on and a stuffed goat. As well as two small plastic pushcarts.
Beside them, tucked into the side of the box, was a carefully folded-up page torn from a coloring book with a sketchily colored-in bull.
Fire rose inside me.
I wondered if Griffin had colored in the picture himself or if an abducted child had done so.
Despite myself, I felt something inside of me slipping, something that’d been rooted firmly for a long time in what I believed about right and wrong, about justice and mercy: I wanted Timothy Griffin out of the way for good and I wanted to be the one to take him out. And if things played out like that, I knew that afterward I wouldn’t regret it at all.
But honestly, thinking those things frightened me.
Yeah, well maybe not this time.
As I removed the toys and then the children’s clothes-outfits that looked like they would’ve fit someone Jenna’s size-I saw what was bunched up beneath them.
A jacket.
Even though the arms of the coat weren’t visible, I said quietly, “There’s a small rip on the left sleeve, about halfway down.”
Radar was on one knee beside me, looking into the box as well. “How do you know that?”
“Because it used to be mine.”
