the plate number-sure enough, it was the one. He called in to let everybody know that he had just found the car that had been searched for in seven counties. The one that might reveal what had happened to the missing family members. He manipulated the spotlight so that its bright beam shone into the interior of the car. He was disheartened to notice that the driver was slumped over the wheel and not responding to the sudden light. Tadeo quickly became more concerned-Jesus, on a damp night when it was barely forty degrees out and the temperature was dropping, was the kid naked? Tadeo, still in radio contact, let them know there might be need of medical assistance; the dispatcher verified that paramedics were on the way. He hoped the kid wasn’t hurt badly-they’d never be able to send a chopper with this fog.
Cautiously but quickly, he approached the vehicle, coming at it from behind the passenger side. It was a little difficult getting to it, since it was resting at an angle in the ditch.
The kid was wearing nothing but white boxers and socks. He didn’t move. Tadeo let his flashlight play over the interior of the car. No one else in it. A bottle of expensive scotch lay on the floor on the passenger’s side, open and mostly empty.
The doors were unlocked; he moved around to the driver’s-side door and opened it. He was immediately struck by the smell of alcohol. The kid reeked of it. Tadeo remembered the names from the bulletin-Mason and Jenny. He called “Mason?” several times, but the young man was unresponsive. Tadeo touched a bare shoulder. Mason’s skin was ice cold. Dead? No-he touched the boy’s neck and found a pulse, and could see now that he was breathing, but neither sign of life seemed likely to last. Tadeo sent in a second call, confirming the need for an ambulance. The dispatcher connected him with the desk sergeant, who quickly passed him along to a captain, for God’s sake, who asked him a few quick questions about where he was and what he was seeing, then told him to get a blanket for the kid and then start looking for the little girl.
Tadeo kept calling, “Jenny?” in a loud voice as he made his way back to the cruiser. He hurried back with a blanket and wrapped it around the kid as best he could. Mason didn’t even moan. He thought of starting the car up and turning on the heater, and reached for the keys, but they weren’t in the ignition.
He played the flashlight around again but didn’t see them. A horrible thought occurred to Tadeo. He felt a renewed sense of urgency now and found a button on the dash that released the trunk.
He rushed back, half afraid he’d find the little girl’s body there. Instead, he saw an odd and disturbing set of objects. Bloodstained shoes and clothing, fitting the description of what Mason Fletcher had last been seen wearing. A metal object of some kind-a trophy?-that looked as if it was matted with tissue, blood, and hair. He hadn’t seen any blood on the young man when he wrapped him in the blanket.
What he saw confused him. He closed the trunk. He noticed, for the first time, that footprints other than his own were in the soft, damp earth. They were near the trunk and led up from the ditch and on to the dirt drive. He saw a cigarette stub there. He didn’t touch it.
He went back and looked at the boy’s socks. They were clean, even on the underside.
He shook himself. He wasn’t a detective. This was not his job. And when the detectives arrived, they’d be pissed off at him if he started spouting theories. He’d already learned that lesson the hard way. “This is what put you up here in the cold, zurramato,” he muttered to himself. He cheered up a little at the thought that even the captain of homicide wouldn’t handle this one. The crime began in Las Piernas’s jurisdiction, which meant the LPPD would be in charge of the investigation.
So Tadeo tried to keep his mind from forming theories and began calling the girl’s name again, and looking in the nearby brush for any sign of her. The more he thought about what he’d seen so far, the less optimistic he felt about her fate, and the louder he shouted in defiance of his own fears for her. Someone opened a window in a nearby cabin and yelled, “Shut the fuck up, asshole! People are trying to sleep!”
Cabron. He considered going up there and making sure that stupid ass didn’t get any sleep, just to vent some of his own frustration, but he was distracted by the sound of approaching vehicles and the red flashing beacon of the ambulance.
I found one of them, he thought fiercely. At least I found one of them. He wondered if anyone would care about that, or if they would feel-just as he did-too worried about the little girl to find it much of a victory.
Three months and seventeen days.
CHAPTER 6
Fourteen Months Later
Tuesday, July 16
3:20 P.M.
LAS PIERNAS
CALEB had learned to stop asking himself if it could get any worse. It could. It did.
In just a moment, it would get worse again.
The jury had reached a verdict, they had been told, and now everyone but the jury had crowded back into the courtroom. His brother-Mason Delacroix Fletcher, the defendant-and the attorneys and the judge had taken their places. The jury would come in soon, and this nightmare would enter its next phase.
Caleb sat to the left of his mother in the hot and stuffy courtroom. She swayed against him, leaned her head against his shoulder. He was easily a head taller than her. He worried that she might feel faint, and put an arm around her shoulders to steady her. She trembled. He felt her quiver, grow still, quiver again, felt the fear course through her in strange, arrhythmic waves. He reached across with his left hand and took her right, as if somehow he could shield her from the watching eyes, the cameras. Her hand was ice cold. She held so tightly to him, he thought she might break his fingers.
She was not a weak woman. Elisa Delacroix Fletcher had surprised those who had seemingly watched her every move over the last year. Maybe they didn’t understand what it took for a teenaged mother to raise a child alone, as she had Mason until she met Caleb’s dad. No one who was weak could survive what she did before she turned twenty-one.
Maybe the television commentators had expected his mother to be unable to go on after losing a husband and daughter under such horrible circumstances. Perhaps her appearance had fooled them-she was pale and almost waiflike-but anyone in her family could have told them there was determination and courage to be seen on a closer look. Trouble was, there were too few members of her family left. Her parents didn’t count, Caleb decided, refusing to acknowledge Grandmother Delacroix’s attempt to catch his eye. Unforgivably, they sat on the other side of the courtroom. They had never looked upon Mason as anything but a source of shame, which in turn made Caleb feel ashamed of being related to them.
Nelson Fletcher sat there, too, behind the Delacroixes and next to Caleb’s other grandfather, Graydon Fletcher. A dozen of Richard Fletcher’s other foster siblings were in attendance as well, “aunts” and “uncles” Caleb barely knew. A few of them had attended throughout the trial.
What a jumbled-up family they all were, anyway, he thought. Caleb’s father hadn’t been related by blood to Uncle Nelson or any of the others. Richard and Nelson had grown up together in a foster home, two of twenty-one children taken under the wing of the famously selfless Fletchers.
Caleb stole a glance at Grandfather Fletcher. The old man was impeccably dressed, as always. Caleb was not especially close to him, but he still felt admiration for him.
Caleb’s family hadn’t visited Grandfather Fletcher more than once or twice after his grandmother died, and not at all in recent years. Although he thought he understood the reasons his dad had wanted to be independent of the family’s influence-his dad thought they got into one another’s business way too much, and were kind of like a cult-Caleb felt bad about that distance now. They didn’t know Mason, so why should they doubt his guilt?
As if he had felt Caleb’s attention, Grandfather Fletcher turned and looked at him, and gave a little nod in his direction.
Caleb nodded back, wishing that somehow there had been no need for people to feel that they must take sides. If Grandfather Fletcher believed whatever Uncle Nelson told him about Mason, Caleb couldn’t blame him for that.
The press loved to talk about the “tragic irony,” of course. A man who was an orphan gets a lucky break and
