Hank led Arlen into the parlor, its disuse evident from the vacuum marks in the light brown shag. Arlen edged cautiously into the spindle-legged orange-and-green floral chair toward which Hank had gestured.
“I’m really sorry, ma’am,” Arlen said, looking to Nancy. “Y’all know pretty much where things stand already.” He rolled and unrolled the edge of the dress blazer he kept in his office on a hanger since the day he’d made detective three-and-a-half years and seven pounds earlier. He could feel the fabric pulling apart at the stitches up the back seam and imagined the darker black of that last bit before the seam became visible as he leaned forward. He needed to lose some weight. Or get a bigger suit coat.
“We’re gonna keep at it, keep looking. Of course.” His voice was hushed as he eyed the baby lying prone in Nancy Foster’s lap.
Nancy’s eyes, red-rimmed and wild, veered over to her husband, who moved to sit next to her on the couch.
“When does the ground search start up again in the morning?” Hank rasped, his throat sounding dry.
“At first light, maybe before.”
Arlen looked first into Hank’s then Nancy’s eyes, holding her stare until her breathing regulated.
“I want to go, too,” Hank said.
Danielle whimpered, and Nancy began to stroke the baby’s back soothingly. Pat pat pat. Pat pat pat. Pat pat pat.
Arlen decided sheer exhaustion kept the baby, Danielle, from going into another full-blown wail. The mite sniffled and burrowed in closer to her mother. Hank leaned closer and placed a hand on Nancy’s thigh, down by the knee, as she continued to shudder, her teeth clicking.
“Now, Mr. Foster, I can’t tell you no.”
“That’s right; you can’t. So just tell me where to be.” Hank’s pointed chin thrust out, the sloping ridge of his jaw snapping in, out, up, down.
“Now, I can’t tell you no,” Arlen continued, failing to keep his voice as neutral as intended. “But I can tell you I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Hank stood, a sharp jerk of a motion. Arlen watched as six feet of thick-boned male pantomimed grace. Except fear and despair had eaten at Hank’s joints, muscle, bone.
“Then it’s a good thing I didn’t ask,” Hank said, his voice escalating from a low, almost inaudible drone to a near shout, stepping forward.
A crunch.
A red fire truck was buried in the carpet when Hank lifted his foot. Both men stared at it. The ladder lay broken, the upper part caught in the couch’s stitching. Hank collapsed back onto the couch.
Arlen sighed. “Meet us at the station at dawn,” he mumbled, his gaze stuck on the truck. His son had one like it.
Hank nodded. Arlen lifted his head, opened his mouth, glanced back at the truck and shut it. He tilted his head to Nancy before following Hank to what he assumed was a seldom-used front door. Its intricate leaded glass side panel caught the light.
The door swung closed. The click of metal catching metal jolted out from inside the now-silent house. Arlen drove home that night to sit by his son’s narrow bed, a prayer of thanks looping through his head.
Still a good twenty minutes to full light. The air settled over them in a cold, though sticky aura. Clouds built at the edges of the horizon. Seventy-two people stood in the main room of police headquarters, in a pseudo-line of churning bodies, awaiting their assignments. Half of that number was police personnel, either local or from neighboring areas. The rest was concerned friends, mostly fathers, shaking their heads, stomping their feet, not meeting each other’s eyes and unable to bear the sight of Hank as he slumped against one of the station’s gray walls.
Arlen stood at the front with the chief of police, the county sheriff, and someone in a suit none of the locals knew, but whom the uniformed officers eyed warily. Assignments were divvied and handed down. Groups of six to eight, covering a fifty-square-mile radius. For now.
They bundled into cars, doors slamming, voices low.
“Can’t believe it. Just can’t believe we’re doing this,” Arlen said. He heaved out the faintly sweet breath from the four sugars he took in each cup of coffee. He rubbed his hand over his eyes, removing the crud that gathered near his thick-bridged nose, then swiping his hand absently against his jean-clad leg.
“I spent the night tossing so much my wife got mad a couple of times. I’d go in and watch my kids sleeping for hours, seems like. Go back to the bedroom and get kicked out again. Don’t know how you do it regularly,” he said, facing the man in the suit.
Suit’s answer: a shrug, sip of coffee, eyes creasing and measuring the disbanding group.
“Any live wires in the bunch?” Suit asked. “I want to know where they all were yesterday at the time of the child’s disappearance. Anyone that showed up here today, I want to know.”
Chief stood nearby, sucking in his gut, unable to keep it from spilling over his brass-and-silver belt buckle. He said, “Now see here, it isn’t gonna be one of our own.”
“You don’t know who took that boy. In fact, you’ve got zilch,” Suit said, his voice quiet. “So, we start with what we do have. Thirty-seven people unaffiliated with this or another department showed up today to look for Jonathan Foster. I want to know why they’re here and we’ll start with where they were yesterday.”
Chief mumbled, cursed, then headed back to his desk because “someone’s gotta man the fort whiles you boys are out there.”
Arlen trudged off to join his group, his head hanging low between his shoulder blades. The first gray hairs shot upward from the cowlick at his crown, highlighted by the fluorescent tubes in his bathroom earlier this morning. He’d stared at them, mesmerized.
The helicopter was circling the town, thrumming through the air in lazy, large loops. Mosquitoes buzzed, swarmed and men cursed as they swatted ineffectually.
Arlen shot a quick glance down at his battered, scratched watch when the call came in: 12:23. Thoughts of his kids, the heat edging upward of ninety degrees, and a diet of caffeine and a stale jelly donut turned his intestines into a murky, dank swamp.
“Hardesty, where you at?”
“Southeast edge of my plot, over by Framb’s back pasture.”
“I’m on the other side, by the ditch. You need to head out thisaway. Soon’s you can.”
“On my way.”
Arlen’s stomach lurched in a horrendous exchange of icing and burning. He swiped his neck, wishing he hadn’t drunk a whole pot of coffee. He already knew what he’d find as he stepped up to the edge of the ditch, but knowing still didn’t prepare him for it. He could never have prepared himself for finding Jonathan’s body.
“Damnation and hellfire,” he hissed. “Christ, God Almighty. Suit’s gonna need to see this.”
Arlen backed away, bringing the rest of the group with him. Six gray, damaged faces. Not a scene any of them would be able to forget.
“Where’s the father? Hank?”
“Over by the park.”
“Keep him there,” Arlen said, his voice clogged. He sucked in air, shook his head. “Not a word to him till they can get this boy covered up some. At least. No, we’ll take him to the funeral home to do it properly. Might help. Jesus H. Christ, I hope to hell it does. Not one word about this here. We are not telling that family how horrendous this boy looks. Get me?”
He stared down at the far edge of the four-foot-deep ditch, seeing it again in his mind, swallowing again and again. The coffee had burned its way back up his throat.
Two of the men behind him heaved into the thick underbrush.
Arlen wished he could purge the memory of that little boy’s body from his mind. He couldn’t—instead, he kept seeing it each time he closed his eyes, not just that day but for years.
Nailing the son-of-a-bitch who did that to a child had become Arlen’s goal.
To date, he’d failed.