plotted the approximate location of each house, and they appeared in a symmetrical, half-moon pattern around Justin’s home.
“Goddamn,” he said under an exhale. The presence of the flyers themselves in such numbers was enough for him to draw a horrible conclusion. But he was struck by the discipline, by the mathematical, purposeful way in which the boy must have abducted these animals. Davis wondered why precision was so much more frightening than chaos.
“Dr. Moore?” Ellen crackled through the intercom. “Justin is in with Dr. Burton now.”
Justin sat on the examining table in white briefs, his thin upper torso arched grotesquely forward so his face could stare down at his dangling bare feet. He was tall and pale, and his wavy blond hair was long for an eight- year-old, a look that, in Davis’s experience, betrayed hippie parents, the premature onset of adolescent independence, or possibly in this case, a single parent with more than she could handle.
“Hello, Justin,” Davis said as he and the boy shook hands. “You don’t mind if I sit here while Dr. Burton gives you your checkup, do you?”
“Nuh-uh,” Justin said cheerfully. He straightened when Joan approached him with a stethoscope and Davis noted he possessed the sort of awareness around doctors that older sick people have. When Joan reached for an otoscope, he turned his left ear toward her. When she wheeled herself back to grab the black cuff of the blood- pressure monitor, Justin crooked his elbow and readied his biceps. He welcomed the tongue depressor without gagging and appeared unembarrassed when Joan hooked a finger inside his waistband and made a quick survey of his privates.
“How have you been feeling?” Joan asked, settling in to a wheeled stool at a tiny white desk.
“Fine,” Justin said.
“No sniffles, no headaches?”
“Nope, nope.”
“Are you seeing everything okay at school? Can you read the blackboard when your teacher writes on it?”
“Yes.”
Joan shook the pen she was writing with. “Dr. Moore, do you have a pen I could borrow?”
Davis’s hand went instinctively to his breast. “Actually, no.”
“Really?” Joan smirked. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without that silver Waterman in your pocket.”
“I set it down somewhere on Monday,” he said. “I haven’t the nerve to replace it. Thing never leaked. I’m skittish about putting some old Bic in my shirt, you know?”
Justin stretched his neck to look up at the ceiling. Davis followed his line of sight to the ugly, cheap tiles that disguised the even uglier ductwork and conduit and other guts of the clinic. Justin’s mouth opened, became almost unhinged, it seemed, as he stretched farther back and back and back. To Davis, the boy looked like a duckling, newborn and featherless, his pale skin untouched by age and stress and bad diet and hormones, his bones growing even as they sat there, his mind expanding, soaking, remembering, learning without effort. A growing boy is a mutating thing, and Davis thought if he could stare at him long enough and in just the right place he could see a change occur right here in the exam room.
“I lose things, sometimes,” Justin said, head back.
“Really?” Joan said. “What things?”
“Just things,” he said. Davis watched as the heels of the boy’s bare feet began to kick against the examining table. “Sometimes I’ll have a thing in my hands and I’ll – I’ll just lose it. It’s there and then it’s lost.”
“Sometimes, do you find your things later? The things that you’ve lost?” Joan was making conversation in an absent dialect, still scribbling across Justin’s file with a new pen.
“Nope,” he said. “Lost forever.”
Davis felt his arms go cold and his face became hot. Joan’s head was still buried in her notes. To Davis, it seemed like he was watching the conversation from behind two-way glass, picking up subtleties in tone and expression, attaching a subtext to every phrase. This boy is not AK’s killer, he reminded himself, but he couldn’t help imagining Justin alone somewhere, in the narrow woods that partition his neighborhood, cradling a neighbor’s cat in his arms, his fingers lightly around its neck, and then an older, crueler version of him behind the counter at the Gap, straddling Davis’s daughter, watching her struggle, thrilled by her fear.
– 39 -
A police station is a lousy place to primp for a night on the town, Big Rob thought. It’s loud and the lighting’s bad (all fluorescents) and the mirrors are cracked and warped and marred with capillaries of water damage. Big Rob was a good-looking fat man, according to just over a dozen women in the last twenty years. Looking at himself in a mirror, not this one, a good one, Rob wistfully imagined what he’d look like if he were thin. He had dense, dark hair and his chin, the top one, was strong and square. His teeth were white and original. Although he carried excess weight in his face and around his belly, he was six and a half feet tall and his frame was proportionately large. God had given him the fat, he joked, because he was strong enough to carry it.
The squad room of the Brixton police station was small and communal. The chief had a cluttered and claustrophobic office, but the half dozen other employees and officers shared desks and made do. There were big windows on three walls, and the spaces between them were painted yellow – very different from the enclosed, whitewashed workrooms Big Rob was used to from his days with the Chicago PD. The break room was clean and the refrigerator, which seemed to hold little besides condiments and freshly packed lunches for that day’s shift, didn’t smell.
Civilians needed little more from this place than advice or a Samaritan’s hand. The Brixton cops helped people get keys out of parked cars and collared loose pets. Occasionally they took congenial statements from opposite sides of a fender bender, and Brixton had its share of drunk-and-disorderlies, as well as vandalism and domestic squabbles. Working out of the Brixton police station seemed to Big Rob like working in an ad agency or a bank.
“You all set?” Crippen’s delighted grin appeared in the mirror. Biggie gave him a thumbs-up. “This is exciting shit,” Crippen said. “Be careful, and don’t push it too far. Just try to get her loosened up with the margaritas and then let her talk.”
Big Rob nodded. “You know how you get to be a success with the ladies, even with a body like mine?” He tugged on an earlobe. “Be a good listener.”
At a bar called Hounds, Biggie easily found Peg at a square table with four friends. Peg had secured a fifth chair from another part of the bar and made camp on a corner that, due to a pair of lost screws underneath, tilted awkwardly toward her. In the center of the table, downed drinks left their fingerprints in thin pink films on the insides of the glasses, which were grouped together like the small woods that separated property lines in suburban subdivisions. It had been so long since a waitress had cleared the table that the ladies had only its perilous, slanting fringe on which to place their current beverages, although in the waitress’s defense, the women were emptying the glasses so quickly their drinking could have been mistaken for sleight of hand.
The bar was decorated with a half-assed British theme. Store-bought posters of green countryside, ruined castles, and ocean cliffs hung on the walls at angles in cheap black frames. A few kitschy Sherlock Holmes items – ceramics, toys, books – were scattered about on shelves. A reproduction movie poster was tacked next to the door. Displayed randomly were some Irish and Scottish items, as well. They poured Guinness at the tap, which made Big Rob hopeful for a pint of Tennent’s, but he should have known better. He backed away from the bar with his Harp and casually maneuvered through the crowd until his giant torso was only a few feet from their table, like a cruise ship anchored off a port of call. All five women turned.
“Good evening, ladies,” Big Rob said. “Do you mind if I buy the next round?”
– 40 -
When Sam Coyne was fifteen, a hornet stung him during cross-country practice.
