Standing there was an overweight, middle-aged man in a rumpled suit, his shirt collar open and black tie yanked down, holding up a badge for my inspection.
“Mr. Kilbride?” he said. “Our man at the end of the drive there told me you were back. I understand you’ve had quite the few days. You and I, we really didn’t get a chance to finish our chat the other night, on the phone. I’m Detective Barry Duckworth, with the Promise Falls police. It’s a hell of a thing you’ve been through. I’ve heard all about it. But I was wondering if we could still have a word about your father.”
SEVENTY-TWO
“Come in,” I said.
Detective Duckworth and I took seats in the living room. “I can understand that you’ve got a lot to deal with, all that’s happened to you in the last couple of days. How are you doing?”
“Okay, I guess. It was…harrowing.”
“Yeah, that would be the word. Are you up to finishing the conversation we were having the other night?”
“I am,” I said. “It seems like a long time ago.” I rubbed my forehead. “You had been speaking to my father.”
“That’s correct.”
“He’d gotten in touch with you,” I said.
“He had.”
“Tell me about it.”
Duckworth settled in the chair, relaxing his arms at his sides. “Your father contacted me about something that happened to your brother, Thomas, when he was in his teens. But for years, your father didn’t believe it had happened-he didn’t believe your brother. Because he, well, how should I put this…?”
“My brother is not what you’d call a credible witness,” I said.
“There you go.”
“Because he hears voices when there are none to be heard, sees conspiracies where there are none to be seen.” I hesitated. “Most of the time.”
“So when Thomas came to your father many years ago, alleging an assault, your father was reluctant to believe it. In fact, he refused to believe it, because Thomas was pointing the finger at one of your father’s friends. He accused your brother of making it all up, and told him to never talk about it, never to bring it up again.”
“An assault,” I said. “Thomas managed to tell me just a bit about this, before we were kidnapped.”
“A sexual assault,” Duckworth said. “At the very least, an attempted one. An attempted rape.”
I felt anger welling up within me. “Who did Thomas tell my father it was?”
Duckworth held up a hand. “I’m getting to that. Your dad, he did talk to the man, this friend of his, and the man was stunned, shocked by the accusation, denied it completely, and your dad, he believed him. Because he couldn’t believe Thomas. Thomas had lots of crazy tales back then, I gather.”
“It’s always been that way.”
“But then something happened to change your dad’s mind,” Duckworth said.
“What was that?”
Duckworth looked around the room, saw the new TV, the Blu-ray player. “Your dad, he liked the high-tech stuff, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” I said. “He did. He liked his toys, his gadgets. A lot of men, they get to his age, they resist the new technologies, but he thought they were pretty cool. He loved to watch sports on that TV.”
“Your dad was thinking of getting a new phone,” Duckworth said.
That hit me. “How did you know that?”
“He told me. That’s how it happened.”
I gripped the arms of my chair, like I was strapping myself in for a rough ride. “Go on.”
“Your dad wanted a cell phone that would do lots of fancy things, instead of just being a phone. Me, I got a phone that does a lot of things but I don’t know how to do hardly any of them. Had it a year before I could figure out how to take a picture with it. But that was the very thing your dad was interested in having a phone for. To take pictures.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“He told me he’d been looking at a few of them, but getting recommendations from store people, you don’t know whether to trust them. Maybe they’re just trying to sell you the most expensive kind. You want to know what your friends got, what they have to say. Word of mouth, you know?”
“Sure.”
“So your dad happened to be with one of his friends, he told me-this would be the same friend your brother had accused way back when-and he picked up his phone to have a look at it. Just curious. This friend wasn’t in the room at the time, but your dad didn’t think anything of it. Didn’t think he’d mind. He wanted to see how the camera worked on this phone, so he pressed the whaddyacallit, the camera app, and up it came. And then he tapped again, so it brought up the pictures that had already been taken.” Duckworth paused to catch his breath.
“What?” I said.
“He didn’t like what he saw.”
I swallowed. “What were the pictures of?”
“Boys,” Duckworth said. “Pictures of young boys. These weren’t friendly family pictures, if you get my drift. These were young boys-ten, twelve, thirteen years old-in provocative poses and positions. Your dad, he could barely describe them to me, they upset him so.”
“These were pictures his friend had taken.”
Duckworth nodded. “Seems he’d just come back from some trip. A place where a person with those kinds of tastes can find just what he’s looking for. And in that instant, when he saw those pictures, he realized that what your brother had said years ago was the truth. He hadn’t been making it up. A man who would take these kinds of pictures was the sort of man who would have assaulted your brother.”
“Who?” I asked, but I believed I already had the answer.
Duckworth held up his hand again. “Let me tell this. So when this friend of your dad’s came back into the room, your dad confronted him with it. Asked him what the hell it was. Said he now realized it had to be true, what Thomas had told him.”
“What did the man say?”
“Denied it to hell and back, of course.”
“What’d my dad do?” One thing I was pretty sure he must have done was a search on his laptop for child prostitution.
“I guess he stewed about it for a while. Finally, he called me. He said he was just sick about it, that he’d tried to apologize to your brother about it, that they’d had a fight over it. He wanted to know whether the man could still be charged, for what he did to Thomas. I told him it was pretty unlikely. It happened so long ago, and given your brother’s tendencies, it would be pretty hard to get a conviction.”
“What about the pictures on the man’s phone?”
“Your dad knew he’d probably deleted them right away, soon as he left, but even so, he was asking me, could someone go after him, for paying to have sex with kids in some foreign country.”
“Thailand,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“I think we’re probably talking about Thailand. I know it’s not the only country in the world where that sort of thing is available-hell, I’m sure it goes on in this country-but one of Dad’s friends has traveled to Thailand.”
“I haven’t answered your question about who the friend is,” Duckworth said, “because I don’t know. Your dad never told me, because he hadn’t decided what to do about this man.” He sighed. “And then he had that accident. And died.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He had that accident.”
