Amanda could hear the impatience in her husband’s voice, and noted the way he cradled the receiver a little too roughly at the end of the conversation.
“He went by Ben’s apartment with Renee,” said Flynn. “She’s got a key. Ben’s stuff is intact. Doesn’t look like he packed up anything or took a trip.”
“Chris is worried,” said Amanda.
“Yeah, he’s worried. But he doesn’t want to call the police. It’s partly because he doesn’t know what Ben is into. Could be, you involve the law, you’re gonna get the young man in trouble. But there’s that other thing, too. These guys, with their histories, they’ve got that code. They don’t like to give up information, and the last person they want to talk to is a police officer.”
“Do you think Ben’s done something wrong?”
“I don’t think of him as a guy who holes up in a motel room with an eight-ball and a couple of whores, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t think of him that way, either.”
“So I should probably call the police myself. Report him as a missing person.”
“That means they’re going to come here and take a statement. His past might come up in the course of the conversation. Chris’s, too.”
“It might. If they’ve done nothing wrong, then it’s not a problem, right?”
“Right,” said Amanda, without conviction.
“Look, Ben is my responsibility. More than anyone else who works for me, this company is his only family. Do you get that?”
“Yes.”
“Do me a favor and go down to the office and pull his file, okay? I’m gonna need the information at hand.”
Flynn punched a number into the phone as she left the room.
Monday had brought tension, but Tuesday was worse. Renee called in sick to the nail salon, and Chris’s installations were completed in a satisfactory but perfunctory manner. Even Hector, for a change, was subdued.
Flynn had reported Ben as a missing person to the MPD, but he knew from his brief experience that they would be busy with crimes of the here-and-now and would not actively investigate his disappearance, which, after all, could be nothing more than a young man gone out of town. Ben would be just another name added to a database, the daily sheets, and eventually the missing persons Web site.
From Chris, Flynn learned that Ben often haunted the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery. Because he had been in Brookland doing an estimate on his last call of the day, Flynn decided to stop by the cemetery grounds on his way home on the chance that he might speak to someone who was on duty Sunday or find something of importance.
In the main office, near the front gate, he was directed to the office of security, where he found a middle- aged man who had been on patrol Sunday evening past. This man, a Mr. Mallory, said that he knew Ben as described by sight but not to name, and that he had seen him sitting on the retaining wall near the pond, reading, and that he had indicated by signal that the cemetery would be closing and that Ben should prepare to leave. Mr. Mallory had not seen him go and could recall no suspicious visitors or unlawful activity for the remainder of the night.
Flynn thanked him and drove down to the pond. There he found a copy of a book called Blood on the Forge, still wet from a late-afternoon thunderstorm typical to Washington summers, face-up on the stone wall. Inside the cover, Ben had printed his full name.
Flynn called the police, used the case number as reference, and reported his discovery to a nameless listener with an uninterested voice. He then phoned Chris and told him what he had found. Chris agreed that Ben would not have left his book behind, even if he were done with it. Chris did not tell his father that he was certain now that something bad had come to Ben.
That night, Chris drove the streets, looking for his friend.
On Wednesday morning, three brothers, Yohance, Ade, and Baba Brown, residents of the neighborhood of Trinidad and all under twelve years old, were walking south from their row house with a bat, one mitt, and a tennis ball, looking for someplace to play, when they came upon the old Hayes School at 6th and K, Northeast, now fenced in and shuttered. They saw the possibilities in the broad north face of the building and its weeded blacktop, and went to the gate to see if they could find a way to dismantle its Master padlock. To their delight they found that the chain had been severed and by unthreading it through the links of the fence, they could simply walk onto the school grounds.
They played stickball against a wall where a rusted sign reading “No Ball Playing” was anchored into brick. They commented on the putrid smell of the area around the school, accusing one another of incomplete wipes and dirty asses, but played on because they had found a spot where they could throw hard, swing freely, and enjoy a summer day.
Around eleven o’clock, the youngest of the brothers, Yohance Brown, noticed that the white-painted square of plywood covering the middle window of the first floor was fitted poorly and askew. He used the bat to push the plywood and watched it fall into the dark of the room beyond. Immediately the awful smell that they had been commenting on hit them full force. Because they were boys, the three of them had to know, and they stepped into the space, now faintly illuminated by sunlight, and, holding the bat as a club, the oldest brother, Baba, led them to where hundreds of flies buzzed deeply and furry rodents scrambled back into the shadows, leaving a thing that had once been a man lying in the center of the concrete floor. What they saw would trouble them into adulthood and haunt the youngest for the rest of his life.
Five minutes later, a 1D patrolman named Jack Harris drove his cruiser east on K and saw a boy run into the street, his arms waving, horror and excitement in his eyes.
Sergeant Sondra Bryant, a homicide detective in her midforties with almost twenty in, was on the bubble when the body was found, and caught the case. She did not jump up from the seat behind her desk, located in the offices of the Violent Crime Branch behind a shopping center in Southeast. She was a slow, deliberate mover anyway, what with the extra weight she was carrying these days in her hips, belly, and behind. Sondra Bryant was known as a good detective, intuitive and conscientious, as she liked to put down cases for the white shirts and her own pride. But she was in no hurry to get to the crime scene. The victim had been dead for a couple of days. Her thought was to let the techs do their scene work, and meet them on the tail end of their task.
After speaking to two of her children on the phone and attending to a personal item, she got up out of her chair and headed out to find a car in the back lot that she could use. She went by a medium-size detective with a black mustache and a good chest, who was standing in his cubicle, a dead telephone receiver in his hand, staring down at his desk.
“Your kids again?” said Bryant.
“My son,” said the detective. “My wife found some marijuana in his bedroom. A package of Black and Milds, too.”
“No stroke mags?”
“Those are under my bed.”
“Could be worse. She could have found a gun or a kilo of somethin white.”
“I know that. I’m just disappointed, I guess.”
“It’ll pass.”
The detective looked at Bryant, carrying her oversize purse, her badge on a chain around her neck. “You caught one?”
“I’m the primary. Kids came up on a body in the old Hayes School. Wanna ride along?”
“No, thanks. I’ll send DeSchlong down when he comes back.”
“You busy with something?”
“I’m gonna go to the boys’ room and practice looking hard in the mirror, so I’m ready to talk to my son when I get home.”
