suffered. If you press the wrong button, touch the wrong nerve, he and Shelly will clam up fast. And the Dispatch will be on top of this as fast as Paulina Cole can get up to
Hobbs County.'
'I'd die before Paulina scoops us,' I said.
'Don't make it come to that, Henry. The Linwoods are expecting you tomorrow at two. Get there at noon, spend a few hours checking out the neighborhood for local color.
But if Daniel wants to talk to you at one-forty-five, twofifteen or three o'clock in the morning, you'll have your tape recorder ready to go.'
'You got it.'
'That means going home right now and sobering up.'
'I'm on my way.' This included a hot shower, a fresh set of clothes, suit and tie. I prayed these were all at the ready, otherwise an all-night Laundromat would soon be graced by my clothes' aromatic presence.
'Call me before you leave tomorrow,' Wallace said.
'And I mean that. Call me. I don't want to come into the office tomorrow and see you asleep and drooling on your keyboard. You have a home. Go there.'
I said nothing. Telling Wallace that my apartment didn't feel like a home was neither his business nor concern. All he cared about, and rightfully so, was this story. I'd been granted leeway the past few years most young reporters never got. Many in my position would have been shown the door, either landing in the safety net of a small-town paper or spewing angry blogs about the dumbing-down of
American media. I had no desire to do either, and preferred to help from the inside. Big-time news was in my blood.
A while ago Jack O'Donnell had told me that to truly become a legend in your field, you had to lead a life with one purpose. You had to devote yourself to your calling.
Splitting your passions between that and other pursuits- hobbies, family-would only make each endeavor suffer.
The past few months I'd whittled down my extracurriculars to nothing. All for stories like this.
'You'll hear from me first thing tomorrow morning,' I said. 'And, Wallace?'
'Yeah, kid?'
'Thanks for the opportunity.'
'Don't thank me, thank Shelly Linwood. I'm not the only one counting on you to do the right thing.'
The call ended. I stood there in the warm night, the sounds of the bar and the street fading away. This night held nothing else for me, but tomorrow presented a golden opportunity. So many circumstances surrounding Daniel
Linwood's disappearance were a mystery, and because the boy himself couldn't remember, I wondered how much, if any of it, would ever come to light. I wondered if never getting that closure would bother the Linwood family. Or if they were just thankful to have their son back.
I put the phone in my pocket, went to the corner and hailed a cab back to my apartment. For a moment I wondered if, like Daniel Linwood, I was returning to a place both strangely familiar, yet terribly foreign at the same time.
3
The Lincoln Town Car pulled up at 10:00 a.m. on the dot, shiny and black and idling in front of my apartment as inconspicuous as a black rhinoceros. I'd heeded Wallace's advice and gone home, sleeping in my own bed for the first time in weeks. I stripped the sheets, used a few clean towels in their place, and got my winks under an old sleeping bag.
I woke up at eight-thirty, figured it'd be plenty of time, but it took forty-five minutes to clean the crud out of my coffee machine and brew a new pot, so by the time the driver buzzed my cell phone I was tucking my shirt in, making sure my suit jacket was devoid of any lint. Unfortunately I missed the open fly until we'd merged off the
West Side Highway onto I-87 North. My driver was a
Greek fellow named Stavros. Stavros was big, bald and had a pair of snake-eyed dice tattooed on the back of his neck that just peeked out over the headrest.
I sipped my Thermos of coffee, grimaced and doublechecked my briefcase. Pens, paper, tape recorder, business cards, digital camera in case I had a chance to take some shots of the neighborhood surrounding the Linwood residence in Hobbs County. Perhaps we'd use them in the article, give the reader a sense of local color recorded words could not.
Hobbs County was located about thirty miles north of
New York City, nestled in between Tarrytown and the snuggly, wealthy confines of Chappaqua. Just a few years ago Hobbs County was an ingrown toenail between the two other towns, but recently a tremendous influx of state funds and pricey renovations had things moving in the right direction. Good thing, too, because statistically,
Hobbs County had crime rates that would have made
Detroit and Baltimore shake their heads.
According to the FBI Report of Offenses Known to
Law Enforcement, the year before Daniel Linwood disappeared, Tarrytown, with 11,466 residents, had zero reported murders, zero rapes, one case of arson (a seventeen-year-old girl setting fire to her ex-boyfriend's baseball card collection), zero kidnappings and ten car thefts. Each of these numbers were microscopic compared to the national average.
That same year, Hobbs County, with 10,372 residents, had sixteen reported murders, five rapes, nine cases of arson, twenty-two car thefts and two kidnappings. If
Hobbs County had the population of New York City, it would be on pace for more than twelve thousand murders a year.
Hobbs County was literally killing itself.
One of those two reported kidnappings was Daniel
Linwood. The other was a nine-year-old girl whose body was later found in a drainage ditch. Since then, those crime rates had dropped like a rock. This past year, Hobbs had four murders. One rape. Eleven car thefts. And no kidnappings.
There was still a lot of work to be done, but something had lit a fire under Hobbs County. It was righting itself.
And then Daniel Linwood reappeared, hopefully speeding the cleansing process even more.
The rebuilding had naturally raised property values, and between the drop in crime and influx of new money,
Hobbs County found itself awash with wealthy carpetbaggers interested in the refurbished schools, reseeded parks and investment opportunities. Five years ago you could have bought a three-bedroom house for less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Today, if you scoured the real estate pages and found one for less than three quarters of a million, you'd be an idiot not to snap it up.
While there was no getting back Daniel Linwood's lost years, his family could at least be thankful he had come back to a town far safer than the one he'd left.
'Only been to Hobbs once,' Stavros piped in from the front seat. 'Few years ago. Pro football player going to visit his aunt just diagnosed with Hodgkins. She lived in the same house for thirty years, give or take. Guy told me he'd tried to buy her a new place, get her out of the life, but you know how old folks are. Rather die at the roots than reach for a vine. You know, even if the client's only booked for a one-way trip, I'll usually offer to hang around in case they decide they need a ride back to wherever.
Hobbs, though, man, you could offer me double the rate and I would have jetted faster than one of them Kenyan marathon runners. Not the kind of place you want to be sitting in a car alone at night. Or anytime, really.'
