LENA TRIED not to make it too obvious that she was listening to Jeffrey’s telephone conversation with Sara Linton. This was incredibly difficult to do, as they were both in the front seat of Jeffrey’s car. Lena looked out the window, feigning a casualness she did not feel. Part of her was still struck by what had happened with Mark only hours before. Time would only tell if he would make it. Oxygen had been cut off to his brain for some time, and until he woke up from the coma, there was no way to predict how much damage had been done.
Lena glanced at Jeffrey as he told Sara what Mark had said about his relationship with Grace Patterson. Whatever Sara said in response was brief and to the point, because Jeffrey agreed with her immediately.
“I’ll see you tonight,” Jeffrey said, then replaced the phone in the cradle. He started in on Lena immediately. “I told you not to be alone with Mark,” he said.
“I know,” Lena responded, and started to tell him again why she had let Brad leave the trailer. He stopped her, holding up his hand.
“I’m only going to say this once, Lena,” Jeffrey began, and it seemed like he had been wanting to say this for a while. “You’re not the boss here.”
“I know that.”
“Don’t interrupt me,” he ordered, cutting his eyes at her. “I’ve been doing this job a hell of a lot longer than you, and I tell you to do things a certain way because I know what I’m doing.”
She opened her mouth to agree, but then thought better of it.
“Being a detective gives you some autonomy, but at the end of the day you take your orders from me.” He looked at her, as if anticipating she’d argue. “If I can’t trust you to follow simple orders, why should I keep you working for me?”
Obviously, it was her turn to speak, but she couldn’t come up with anything to say.
“I want you to think about this, Lena. I know you like your job and I know you’re good at it when you decide to be, but after what happened…” He shook his head, as if that wasn’t right. “Even before what happened. You’ve got a problem taking orders, and that makes you more dangerous to me than the crooks.”
Lena felt the sting from his words and rushed to defend herself. “Mark wouldn’t have confided in me if Brad had been there.”
“He might not have tried to take his life, either,” Jeffrey said. He was quiet, staring out at the road as he drove. He sighed, then said, “That wasn’t fair.”
Lena was silent.
“Mark probably would’ve found a way to do something like this. He’s a very troubled kid. It wasn’t your fault.”
She nodded, not knowing whether what he was saying was true or not. At least he was trying to comfort her, which is a hell of a lot more than she had done with him when they had talked about his shooting Jenny Weaver.
“And it’s not just Mark. Have you made an appointment with a therapist yet?”
She shook her head.
Jeffrey said, “Lena, I hate to say this now, but there never seems to be a good time.” He paused, as if making sure to word this carefully. “You need to think about whether or not you want to be a cop anymore.”
She nodded, biting the tip of her tongue so that she wouldn’t start crying. How could she not be a cop? If she wasn’t a police detective, what was she? Certainly not a sister; barely a woman. Lena wasn’t even sure some days if she was a human being.
“You’re a good cop,” he said.
She nodded again, resting her head against her hand, staring out the side window so he wouldn’t see her face. Her throat felt like it was closing up as she strained not to cry. She hated herself for being so weak, and the thought of breaking down in front of Jeffrey was enough to keep her from sobbing like a girl.
“We’ll talk when this case is over,” Jeffrey told her, and his voice was reassuring, but it didn’t help. “I want to help you, Lena, but I can’t help you if you don’t want to be helped.”
It sounded like Hank’s A.A. bullshit, and Lena had had enough of that to last her a lifetime. She cleared her throat and said, “Okay,” still staring out the window.
Jeffrey was silent as he drove, and she didn’t speak again until she noticed that he missed the turnoff heading back into town and the station.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Dottie Weaver’s house,” he said. “She hasn’t picked up the body at the morgue.”
“It’s been a while,” Lena said, surreptitiously wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “Do you think something’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” Jeffrey told her, his jaw working.
“Do you think she’s done something?” Lena asked. “Like Mark?”
He gave her a curt nod, and she did not push it.
Jeffrey pointed up the road, saying, “Randolph Street is up here, right?”
“Yes,” Lena confirmed, and Jeffrey took the turn onto Randolph. The driveways were few and far between, most of the houses set back from the road and resting on three to four acres each. They were in an older section of Grant, built back before people started throwing cheap houses on top of each other. Jeffrey braked the car in front of a gray mailbox that was open in the front, mail stacked so tight someone would have to use a crowbar to get it out.
“This is it,” he said. He backed up the car and turned into a tree-lined driveway. If he noticed the four copies of the Grant Observer wrapped in plastic bags at the head of the drive, he did not say.
The Weaver home was farther back from the road than Lena would have guessed, and a few seconds passed before a small ranch house came into view. A second level had been added at some point, and the bottom of the house did not really match the top.
“Do you see a car?” Jeffrey asked, stopping in front of an open carport.
Lena looked around, wondering why he had asked a question with such an obvious answer. “No.”
They both got out of the car, and Lena walked around the perimeter of the house, checking every window on the first floor. Either the curtains or the blinds were drawn on each one, and she could not see inside. There was a double door leading to what was probably the basement, but it was locked tight. The small windows around the foundation had been painted black from the inside.
As she circled back around the house, she could hear Jeffrey knocking on the front door, calling, “Mrs. Weaver?”
Lena stood at the bottom of the porch steps, wiping the sweat off her forehead with the back of her arm. “I couldn’t see anything. All the curtains are drawn.” She told him about the basement and the blackened windows.
Jeffrey glanced around the yard, and she could sense how anxious he was. Dottie Weaver had not bothered to get her newspapers or mail for a while. She was divorced and her daughter had just been killed. Maybe she had felt there wasn’t a lot to go on living for.
Jeffrey asked, “Did you check the windows?”
“They’re all locked tight,” she reported.
“Even that broken one?”
Lena got his meaning. As law officers, they needed a damn good reason to go into Weaver’s house without a warrant. A bad feeling was not good enough to go on. A broken window was.
She asked, “You mean the broken one in the basement?”
He gave her a curt nod.
“What if an alarm goes off?”
“Then we’ll call the police,” he said, walking down the steps.
Lena would have broken the window herself, but she appreciated that Jeffrey was trying to keep her out of this gray area of the law as much as he could. She leaned against the porch railing, waiting for the sound of broken glass. It came about a minute later, and then several more minutes passed with nothing further from Jeffrey. She was about to go around to the back of the house when she heard his footsteps inside.
He stood in the doorway, one hand on the knob, the other holding a bright yellow raincoat.
“Lacey’s?” Lena asked, taking the coat. It was small enough for a child, but the label in the back took away all doubt. Someone had sewn the child’s name onto it in case it was lost.
“Jesus,” Lena mumbled, then looked back up at Jeffrey. He shook his head no, meaning he had not found her in the house.
He stepped aside so that she could walk in. Heat enveloped her, and the house felt hotter inside than it was outside. The first room was large, and probably was used as a living room. It was hard to tell, though, because all the furniture was gone. Even the carpet had been pulled up from the floor, and the tacking around the perimeter stood out like teeth.
“What the…?” Lena said, walking through the room. She noticed that Jeffrey had his weapon drawn, the muzzle pointed toward the floor. Lena followed suit, kicking herself for being so stupid. She had been so shocked to see Lacey’s coat and the state of the house that she had forgotten that someone might still be in the house. With all the noise they had made outside, whoever might be inside was certainly aware there was company.
Jeffrey nodded for her to follow him into the kitchen, which was in the same state as the main room. All the cabinet doors were open, showing empty shelves. Lena walked through the dining room, a den, and a small office, all of them empty, all of them missing carpeting.
The house had a bad feeling to it, and she let herself think what Jeffrey had probably thought when he had found the yellow raincoat. Lacey had been here. She could still be here. At least, her body could.
“Smell that?” Jeffrey whispered.
Lena sniffed the air, and realized that she had been smelling fresh paint with something sharper underneath. “Clorox,” she whispered back. “Something else I can’t place.”
“Those pictures of Mark you took when you arrested him,” Jeffrey began. “He had paint on his clothes, right?”
Lena nodded, turning around in the room. She looked around the corner, finding the stairs. “Have you been up yet?” she asked, just as a tapping noise came from upstairs.
They both raised their weapons at the same time, and Lena took point before Jeffrey could. She walked sideways up the stairs, keeping her gun directed up toward the ceiling. She tested her foot on each stair, noting that they, too, had been stripped. Every muscle in her body tensed as adrenaline pumped through her system.
At the top of the stairs, Lena paused before looking down a long hallway. A wall was to her left, a small window that she had not noticed from the outside mounted up high. It was cracked open, and Lena saw some leaves and debris on the floor. Black curtains hung from a rod with weights sewn into the bottom edges. The paint under the window was marked where the weights had hit it, and fresh white paint lined the edge of the material. Lena pointed this out to Jeffrey, thinking it might have caused the noise they heard, and Jeffrey shrugged, as if to say maybe, maybe not.
Lean started to go down the hall, but Jeffrey walked ahead of her, peering into the open doorways of each room. She followed, seeing that the bathroom and two bedrooms had been cleaned out just like the downstairs. She wondered if Jeffrey’s gut clenched each time he looked into a room, thinking Lacey Patterson might be in there. Lena had an eerie reminder of this morning with Mark as Jeffrey stopped in front of the only closed door at the end of the hall.
He stood in front of the door, both hands cupping his gun. For some reason, he wasn’t moving, and Lena thought to take over, but something about the look on his face stopped her. Was he scared of what he would find? Lena knew she was.
He leaned toward the door, like he heard something.
She mouthed, “What?”
He shook his head, as if to tell her to give him a minute to think. Lena stood beside him, her shoulder to the wall by the door, sweating as she waited for him to make a decision. She hoped he would not wait too long, because stopping to think was taking away some of her resolve.
Finally, he motioned her back behind him, then even farther back. He kept waving her down the hall, then into the stairway. When she was standing on the stair second from the top, her neck craned so she could look around the corner, he seemed satisfied. Lena braced herself for action as he raised his foot and kicked in the door. A flash of light came a split-second later, and somehow the door blew back, pushing Jeffrey down the hallway. A roar came a couple of beats later, and Lena ducked into the stairs as a ball of fire flashed up the hallway.
“Jesus,” she whispered, covering herself with her arms as she knelt on the stairs. Lena waited for the heat to envelop her, or flames to eat her alive, but nothing happened. She stood from her crouch and peered around the corner into the hallway. Jeffrey was underneath the door, but he was moving. The top of the door was charred to a crisp. There were black soot marks along the walls, but there was no fire. The heat must have been so intense that it burned itself out.
She heard a crackling to her left and turned quickly. The black curtains were on fire. Lena took off her jacket and beat them until they fell from the rod. She stamped the last embers out on the floor just as Jeffrey pushed the door off of him.
“What the hell happened?” he demanded, touching his face and body, probably to see if he had been burned. He seemed okay from what Lena could tell. Somehow, the door had protected him from the blast.
“I have no idea,” she said, dropping her coat and walking over to help him stand.
“I thought I smelled something outside the door,” he told her, leaning heavily on her shoulder. “What the hell was that?”
She asked, “What did you smell?”
“Gasoline, I guess. I wasn’t sure. It was hard to tell with the paint.” He brushed his slacks off, but there was really no point. They both looked at his shoes. The soles had melted from the heat.
“Dammit,” he muttered. “I just bought these last week.”
Lena stared at him, wondering if he had hit his head.
“Are you all right?” he asked, brushing something off her shoulder.
“I’m fine,” she told him, and she was, but only because Jeffrey had made her stand in the stairwell.
“Is that out?” he asked, pointing to the window. The heat from the blast had knocked out the panes and busted the sash. There were dark gashes in the wall where the curtains had ignited.
“I think so,” Lena said, brushing back her hair. Dust fell out, and she guessed the ends might have been burned.
Jeffrey walked down the hall, stopping just outside the doorway of the room. He was being careful, looking for a second device. Finally, he stepped into the room and turned around. “There was a trigger over the door,” he said, his hand over his chest. Lena wondered just for a second how he could be thinking so clearly. He could have easily been killed by the blast.
Jeffrey pointed over the jamb, saying, “There’s a wire here that goes…” He followed something with his eyes, turning slowly around the room. “Here.”
Lena peeked in to see what he was talking about. Three cans of gasoline were stacked in the corner. On top of them was a scorched bath towel and something that looked like it had been a clock radio at one time. The plastic was blown apart, and wires spewed out. The walls and ceiling were scorched and the plastic slats of the blinds in the window looked melted together, but remarkably nothing had ignited.
Lena looked at the device, wondering who could have built something so rudimentary. The metal cans were sealed tight, and the clock had not even been connected to them, as far as she could tell. She touched the towel, then sniffed it. Whoever had arranged the bomb had not even doused the towel in gasoline to help it ignite.
She said, “This was stupid.”
“Yeah,” Jeffrey agreed. “What exploded, though?”
“I have no idea,” she said, looking around the room. For the first time, she noticed that this was the only room in the house that was still furnished. Carpet was on the floor, and posters of boy bands were stuck on the wall. There was a little-girl feel to the room, with its once pink walls, white wicker furniture, and shelves full of stuffed animals. A full-sized bed with a pink blanket over it was against the wall opposite the door. The material was stiff-looking, as if it had been saturated at one point, then air-dried in the heat. Lena touched the blanket, then sniffed her fingers.
She said, “Gasoline.”
Jeffrey was looking around the room, too. “Everything looks like it was soaked in gas,” he said. “The windows are locked tight. Maybe the fumes built up, and when the door triggered the clock, the fumes caught fire?” Jeffrey looked down the hallway. “Fire needs oxygen to burn. Maybe the open window at the end of the hall sucked it out?”
“It sure looked that way from where I was standing,” Lena told him. “The bomb guys can figure that out.”
“Right,” he said, and pulled his cell phone out of his breast pocket. He made two calls, one to Frank at the station to get the bomb squad moving, the other to Nick Shelton at the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He requested that a crime scene team come out to the house and search it with a fine-tooth comb.
“We’ve got some time before they show up,” Jeffrey said, closing the phone.
“Great,” Lena mumbled, thinking between the heat and the odor in the house, they might asphyxiate before reinforcements came.
“Why didn’t she strip this room, too?” Jeffrey asked.
Lena shrugged. “Maybe it was too hard for her to come in here after Jenny died.”
“I guess,” he mumbled, wiping something out of his eyes. “But why go to the trouble to strip the house if they thought the bomb would burn it down?”
“Arson inspectors can find just about anything,” Lena told him. “You can watch the Discovery channel and know that.”
“It’s like she hated her,” Jeffrey said, not letting it go. “I can understand not stripping the room, but this…”—he indicated the gas tanks—“this doesn’t make sense.”
Lena thought about Mark, and how he might have purposefully rigged the bomb not to explode.
“Who would do this?” he asked. “Grace? Dottie? Was it Mark? None of this makes any sense.”
To give herself something to do, she looked around the room. A set of cat figurines was on the dresser alongside some makeup that could only belong to a little girl.
“Maybe she didn’t want to be reminded of Jenny?” Lena suggested, and even as she said the words, she got a bad taste in her mouth. “The bomb would have taken out everything.”
“Maybe Dottie was abducted,” Jeffrey guessed.
“By whom?” Lena asked. “That doesn’t jibe. And if she was, how did Lacey’s coat get in here? Are you saying that whoever snatched Lacey came after Dottie, too? Then took the time to strip and clean the house?”
Jeffrey asked, “You think Dottie planted the bomb?”
Lena shrugged, even though she was sure in her heart that Mark had planted the bomb. The paint on his clothes, the chemical smell on his body, all pointed to him at the very least being in this house during the last few days. There was no telling what he had been doing.
Jeffrey was obviously thinking the same things as Lena. He said, “Mark had paint on his clothes. We can have the lab check it against the paint on the walls.”
“It looked fresh,” Lena reluctantly provided.
“Why would Dottie Weaver strip the house this way? Why would she leave without at least burying her daughter?”
Lena wondered again if he’d hit his head. He was repeating the same questions over and over again, as if she might suddenly come up with the answer. She was about to ask him if he wanted to sit down when he turned around and looked at the bed in the middle of the room as if it might start talking to him. After a couple of moments of this, he took his foot and kicked the mattress over.
“What’s that?” Lena asked, but she could see well enough for herself. About twenty cheap-looking magazines had been stowed between the mattress and the boxspring. All of them had children on the covers doing the kinds of things that children should never be made to do. They all had the same title, too, Child-Lovers in a fancy script with a familiar heart drawing inserted where the “o” in lover should be.
Lena put her hand on the wall, trying to steady herself.
“You okay?” Jeffrey asked, cupping her elbow as if she might faint.
“The design.”
“It’s the same one Mark has on his hand,” he said, pushing through the stack of magazines. He mumbled, “I used to hide shit under my bed, too.”
“Why would Mark do that?” Lena asked, not able to move past this point. “Why would he put that on his hand?”
Jeffrey turned back to the bed. “Maybe it’s his way of saying he likes younger girls. Maybe that’s how those guys operate so they know each other,” he suggested, picking up one of the magazines. He leafed through it, then picked up another. His jaw worked as he stopped on a particular page.
“What?” Lena asked, looking over his shoulder. A picture of Mark, probably taken a few years ago, served as the centerfold.
Lena picked up a magazine and skimmed through it until she found another picture of Mark. Jenny was in this one, and they were doing something Lena could not describe. Worse, in the back pages there were photos of Mark with older men and some women. The adults’ faces were not shown, but Mark was revealed from head to toe. His expression was pained, and it brought tears to Lena’s eyes to see him compromised like this. Seeing what Mark had done and what he had obviously been made to do hurt Lena more than she wanted to admit. She finally understood why he had wanted to know what it felt like for her to be raped. He wanted to compare notes.
Jeffrey examined the magazines, his jaw clenched so tight she had trouble understanding him when he spoke. “These aren’t exactly sophisticated. I guess a small press could handle it.”
“Probably,” she agreed.
“Christ,” Jeffrey hissed, scowling at the magazine he was holding. “This guy has on his wedding ring.” The disgust in his voice would have peeled paint off the walls. “That’s Jenny,” he said.
Lena looked at the photograph. Jenny Weaver was pictured, a man’s hand firm on the back of her neck as he guided her down. The gold of the man’s wedding ring caught the light, and Lena wondered if that was part of the thrill for the perverts who looked at these pictures, thinking that the guy was married and having sex with little girls.
She said, “That’s disgusting.”
“Here’s the same ring in another one,” Jeffrey said, but he didn’t show her the photo. He continued to flip the pages. “And another one.”
Lena asked, “Are you sure it’s the same—?”
“Fucking pervert,” Jeffrey yelled, then twisted the magazine in his hands and threw it against the wall. “What the fuck is happening here?” he screamed. She could see a vein in his neck throbbing. “How many kids were involved in this thing?”
Lena tucked her hands into her pockets, letting him get it out.
Jeffrey turned, looking out the window at the backyard. His voice was softer, but she could still hear the anger when he asked, “Do you recognize any of the other kids?”
Lena picked up a magazine, but he stopped her. “I don’t want you looking at this shit,” he said. “We’ll get Nick’s people on it.” He put his hand to his forehead, like a bad headache was about to strike. “How many kids are involved in this thing?” he repeated. “How many Grant kids were wrapped up in this?”
She didn’t have the answer, but he knew that.
He flipped open his phone again. “I’m going to get Nick here to look at this,” he said. “I want you to go to the hospital and try to get something out of Grace Patterson.”
She shook her head, not understanding.
“She’s connected to Mark and Jenny. She has to know something,” he told her. “I’d do it myself, but I’d probably rip her fucking throat out.” She saw his grip tighten around the phone. “Voice mail.” He waited a couple of beats, then said, “Nick, Jeff Tolliver. I need you to call me as soon as possible. We’ve got something new on the Lacey Patterson case.” He ended the call, saying to Lena, “There’s no way this isn’t a priority now.”
Lena nodded, thinking she had never seen him this angry, not even at her.
He dialed another number into the phone. While he was waiting for someone to answer, he instructed Lena, “I want you to confront Grace on what you know. I want you to tell her exactly what Mark told you, and I want you to find out what the fuck has been going on.”
“Do you think she’ll tell me anything?”
“Her daughter is missing,” he reminded her. “We found her coat here.”
Lena looked down at her hands. “Considering what she was doing to Mark, do you think she cares?”
He flipped the phone closed again, looking her in the eye. “Tell you the truth, Lena, I don’t know what the hell to think about anybody involved in this case.”
He was about to open his phone again when it rang. Before he answered it, he gave Lena his keys and nodded toward the door, telling her, “Go.”