Lost Boy Lost Girl

“That’s when he puked,” Jimbo said. “When he realized he was holding the hair cut off a bunch of women. It was all stuck together with blood.”

“Good God.”

“The police went there, didn’t they? Why did they leave that shit behind? They must have taken a ton of crap out of that house.”

“Good question,” I said, though I thought I knew the answer. In those days, there was no DNA evidence. Maybe they had bagged some of the hair and done what they could with it. The police had almost certainly broken the lock.

“You know who used to live there, don’t you?” I asked.

Jimbo nodded. “I do now.”

“From going around the neighborhood, knocking on doors.”

“That was my job. I took the outside, Mark had the inside.”

“And you wound up talking to Mr. Hillyard.”

“He’s spooky. He wouldn’t let me come into his house until he had that accident, and then I saw why. Boo- ya! That’s some shit in there, yo.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said, having had my own glimpse into Omar Hillyard’s living room. “Let’s go back to Mark.”

“Do I have to do this? You know what that Kalendar guy did, you don’t need me to tell you about it.”

I told him that I had known nothing about all that until shortly before Mark’s disappearance, when Tom Pasmore had filled me in on some of the details.

“They were related, him and Mark. Because his mother had the same name. I found out from Old Man Hillyard! When I told Mark, he couldn’t ask his dad about it since he had hissy fits every time the subject came up. He went on the Internet. And man, was there stuff about Kalendar. These people, they, like, worship serial killers.”

“What did he find on-line about Kalendar?”

“There was a ton of stuff. Then he found a genealogy site put up by a guy in St. Louis, and he clicked on it, and he saw a family tree.”

“He was on it, I suppose.”

“His whole family. That was how he found out his mom’s dad and Joseph Kalendar’s father were brothers. So the two of them, they were cousins. So to Joseph Kalendar, Mark was . . .”

“His first cousin, once removed. Let’s get back to Mark inside the house. I don’t suppose he stopped looking around after he threw up.”

I had already learned from Omar Hillyard that Mark had gone back to the Kalendar house on every one of the days before his disappearance.

“Yeah, he kept looking. He found a lot of weird stuff in the basement, like a big metal table and this, like, chute that came down from the first floor, and all these old bloodstains. But . . .”

Jimbo stabbed the top end of a French fry into the ketchup. His eyes met mine and slid away. About a third of the red-tipped French fry went into his mouth. He looked around, as if aimlessly, at the businessmen devouring steaks and the suburban ladies working on salads at the big polished tables. Across the room at the long bar, an old man in a wrinkled seersucker suit and a guy in a polo shirt were trying not to ogle the barmaid, who had not been born at the time of my first visits to the Fireside Lounge.

“You keep cutting yourself off at the pass,” I said.

The tip of his tongue slipped between his teeth and curled against his upper lip. His eyes went out of focus an instant before they met mine. “Do what?”

“Stop yourself from saying something.”

He stared in the general direction of my chin.

“For Mark’s sake, you should tell me everything you know. That’s why we’re here.”

Jimbo nodded, not very persuasively.

“You said he found a chute and a metal table. The Kalendar websites must have told you that he dismembered some of his victims before putting their bodies into his furnace. He ordered the operating table from a medical supply company.”

“We saw, yeah.”

“Then you started to tell me something else, and you cut yourself off at the pass.”

I watched him considering his options. He flicked a glance at me, and the skin over his cheekbones tightened, and I knew he had cleared an internal hurdle.

“Mark went into all those little rooms. There was an operating room, and another room had three or four hampers that were all empty. He thought they were where he put the women’s clothes and the cops took it all away.”

“The police didn’t search the place nearly as well as Mark did.”

“No, they never found the corridors.” Jimbo chewed the lump of steak in his mouth, swallowed, and took a deep breath. We were about to get closer to the center of what he was hiding from me.

“So he went back upstairs—the normal way. He found the top of the chute in the secret passage between the living room and the dining room. Yo, Kalendar dragged them through the walls and dumped them right onto the table. The first floor was a lot like the other one. From up there, you could take one of the stairs and get everywhere in that house. Mark said before Kalendar killed the women, he tortured them by letting them know he was there, even though they couldn’t see him.” He made a sour face. “In the living room, the opening to the secret corridor was in the coat closet under the regular stairs.” Jimbo hesitated, and now I know exactly why. He had to think about going further.

“A closet,” I said. “Like the one in the bedroom.”

“Yeah. So he looked.”

He was going to tell me, but not until he absolutely had to. I pushed him to the next square. “What did he see—another wooden box, like the one upstairs?”

He blinked. I’d gotten it right.

“What was in it? A diary?” I was looking entirely in the wrong direction.

“No, not a diary,” Jimbo mumbled.

A thought came to me. “Could he open the box up?”

Jimbo nodded. He looked away from me, and his mouth momentarily twitched into something resembling a smile.

“Come on, Jimbo. Stop dancing around. What was in the box? A lot of bones? A skull?”

“Nothing like that.” He was smiling. I was so wide of the mark, it amused him. “When he opened the box, his paper bag was in it. With the photograph album and his hammer and his crowbar. And his dumb little Wonder Bread sandwich.”

On the other side of the dining room, the barmaid burst into silvery peals of laughter. We turned our heads to see the old man, shaking violently in either humor or agitation. At our distance, he looked like a trembling old skeleton in a suit.

Timothy Underhill, if put to the test, could rattle off, in order, the entire hierarchy of military rank from private to commander in chief. Almost any former soldier could do the same, but Tim’s novels had sometimes referred to his experiences in Vietnam, and he had taken pains to get things right. His books also made reference to various police departments here and there, and although every police department in the world acknowledged itself as a paramilitary organization, the meaning of individual rankings varied from place to place. No common standard prevailed.

To take the most immediate case, Tim thought, consider Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus, the grim, authoritative figure at the head of the table around which his audience of six had placed itself. As their little party had proceeded through the station, police officers uniformed and not had visibly deferred to him. Sergeant Pohlhaus was in his early forties, and he wore his handsome blue suit like a supple variety of armor. His biceps filled his sleeves, and his collar met his neck like a tape. Tim supposed that Sergeant Pohlhaus spent a good deal of time at the gym. There were no windows in the room, and the air stank of cigarette smoke. Sergeant Pohlhaus transformed the shabby chamber into a command center.