“Let’s go around the table and make sure we know each other’s names.”
He looked at the couple nearest him on the left side of the table. A well-padded, pink-faced guy sitting next to a nervous blonde jumped as though he had been jabbed with a pin.
“Uh, we’re Flip and Marty Auslander, Shane’s parents,” he said. “Nice to meet you all.”
“Bill Wilk. Trey’s dad.”
“Hello, everybody. I’m Jennie Dell, Dewey’s mother.”
Bill Wilk’s boiled-egg eyes glared out from the close-shaven, bowling-ball head set atop his squat body. Jennie Dell hitched her chair a few more inches away from his.
“I’m Philip Underhill, Mark’s father, and this is my brother, Tim. He’s from out of town.”
“For starters, I don’t think your brother belongs here,” said Wilk, “but that’s the sergeant’s call. This was supposed to be just family members, though.”
“I am a family member,” Tim said.
Bill Wilk scowled at him for a moment, then swung his head on his nonexistent neck to glare at the Auslanders. “One question: which one’s Flip and which one’s Marty?”
The pink face broke into an embarrassed smile. “I’m Flip. Marty’s my wife.”
“You two ought to switch names, in my opinion.”
Pohlhaus slapped the table with his palm. “Mr. Wilk, cease and desist!”
“I lost my son. What more can you do to me?”
The sergeant smiled at him. It was an extremely disconcerting smile, evoking bolts of lightning and screams of pain. “Do you want to find out?”
Wilk seemed to lose an inch or two in height. “Sorry, boss.”
“I want to remind you and everyone else at this table that we are here because of your sons.” The flat blue eyes moved to Tim. “Or nephew, in your case.” Pohlhaus let everyone inhabit a moment of silence that seemed to increase his own gravity. “And what I have to tell you represents our first significant break on this case. I wanted to share it with you before it is made public.”
Even Bill Wilk remained silent. Unconsciously, Jennie Dell took in a deep breath and held it.
“You will be pleased to learn that we have a new eyewitness, a Professor Ruth Bellinger, of Madison, Wisconsin. Professor Bellinger is in the Astronomy-Physics Department at the University of Wisconsin. Three weeks ago, Professor Bellinger was in town visiting her sister, and she happened to be seated on a bench near the fountain in Sherman Park when something caught her attention.”
“She saw him?” Marty Auslander leaned past her husband to peer at Pohlhaus. “She saw the guy?”
“Three weeks ago, the guy hadn’t even started yet,” said Bill Wilk.
“This will go faster if you let me proceed without further interruption,” said Pohlhaus. “Any questions you might have, ask them when I’m done talking.”
Marty Auslander wilted back into her chair.
Pohlhaus swept his gaze around the table, including everyone. “What caught Professor Bellinger’s attention was a conversation between a teenage boy and an adult male, probably in his late thirties. According to the professor, he was an unusually large man, probably six-four or six-five, and solidly built, running to something like two hundred and thirty, two hundred and fifty pounds, black hair. For personal reasons, the professor is very sensitive to the presence of sexual predators. It seemed to her that something of that sort was going on here. The man seemed a little too ingratiating. He kept, in the professor’s words, ‘moving in on the boy,’ and she thought the boy was resisting without wanting to appear rude.
“Professor Bellinger was beginning to wonder if her civic duty—again, I am quoting her—obliged her to interfere when an odd thing happened. The adult male visibly scanned the immediate area. The professor thought he was ascertaining if his actions might be observed. She said that he looked ‘feral.’ Now comes the part we really like. In the same second, Professor Bellinger stood up and the man spotted her. When she took a step forward, the man said something to the boy and walked off at a rapid rate.”
“She saw his face,” Flip said.
“So did the boy,” said Marty.
“Three weeks ago?” bellowed Bill Wilk. “Why are we just hearing about this now?”
“Wait your turn, Mr. Wilk.” Pohlhaus froze him with a stare. “Professor Bellinger asked the boy if he knew the name of the man who had been talking to him. All he knew was that his first name was Ronnie, the boy said, and he had upgraded his sound system and wanted to get rid of his old equipment, along with a lot of CDs he didn’t play anymore. His first question to the boy had been about the kind of music he liked, and after he heard the answer, he said, ‘Great! My car’s right over there, and my place is only five minutes away.’ Ronnie seemed to want to give away all that stuff a little too much, the kid told her, and he’d been trying to figure out a way to get away from the guy when Ronnie spotted her getting off her bench.”
“Lucky boy,” said Flip Auslander.
“Have you talked to this boy?” his wife asked.
“I’d love to talk to him, but we don’t know where he lives, and he never told Professor Bellinger his name.”
“Why did it take so long for her to come forward?” Philip asked.
“Astronomer-physicists don’t pay much attention to what’s on the news,” Pohlhaus said. “And the Madison paper didn’t give much space to the Sherman Park story. Professor Bellinger became aware of our situation here two days ago, and she called us instantly. The next day, she drove here from Madison. Most of yesterday afternoon, she spent working with our sketch artist. I gather that astronomers are unusually observant, on the whole. The professor remembered many, many more details than the conventional witness.”
Bill Wilk started to stay something, but Pohlhaus shushed him and went around the table to the door. He leaned out and said, “Stafford, we’re ready in here.”
When he turned around, he was holding a small stack of papers. He handed two of them to Philip Underhill, then went to the other side of the table to give papers to the Auslanders, Bill Wilk, and Jennie Dell. He still had two or three pages in his hand when he returned to the head of the table.
“So we are assuming that this is a fairly accurate portrait of Ronnie.” Like the rest of them, Pohlhaus stared down at the picture. “We think Ronnie is a bad, bad man. We also think that he’s been at work here at least five years.”
The man whose face had been drawn by the sketch artist might have been one of those actors like Murray Hamilton or Tim Matheson, actors who appear in one film or television program after another, and whose names you can never remember and probably never knew. His almost-handsome features suggested a salesman’s instantaneous affability. That his eyes may have been a fraction of an inch too close together and his nose a millimeter too short only added to his approachability. His minor flaws made him look friendlier. He probably had some kind of job that put him in contact with people. He was the guy standing next to you at the bar who says, “So a rabbi, a priest, and a minister walk into a bar.” This man would have little trouble talking gullible teenage boys into his car.
“What do you mean, at least five years?” said Bill Wilk.
“Yes, what makes you say that?” asked Philip.
“When Professor Bellinger pushed our time frame backward, I started to look at other jurisdictions, just to see what turned up. Here’s what I found.”
He pulled out the sheet at the bottom of his little stack of papers. It was a typed list.
“August 1998. James Thorn, a sixteen-year-old boy reported missing in Auburn.” Auburn was a little town just south of Millhaven. “Thorn was a good student who until his disappearance had never so much as stayed out all night.”
He moved his finger down the list. “Another sixteen-year-old boy, Luther Hardcastle, living with his grandparents in Footeville.” This was an old farming community, now a small town surrounded by suburbs, located about five minutes west of Millhaven. “He goes missing in July of 1999 and is never seen again. According to his grandmother, Luther was mildly retarded and very obedient.” He looked up. “Here’s the interesting part. The last person reported to have seen Luther Hardcastle was a friend of his, Robert Whittle, who told an officer in Footeville that he ran into Luther on Main Street that afternoon and invited him to listen to some CDs at his house. Luther was a big Billy Joel fan. He told Whittle he’d come by later, but first he was going to Ronnie’s house because Ronnie was going to give him a lot of Billy Joel CDs. From the way he said it, Whittle assumed that Ronnie was a friend of
