AT LAST, AS ALL IS IN PLACE AND DULAC CHECKS HIS WATCH—to shift gears—he sees that it is 0220. Okay, he thinks. If they haven’t spooked him in the meantime, if he should dare to return here—in spite of the prevailing opinion that he is already long gone to Boston or New York or attempting to slip into Canada—they are ready for him. They will take him.
The appearance of the outside of the cottage, barely disturbed as they took occupation, is normal. The cars driven by Dulac and Mizener remain a couple hundred yards away, out along the long gravel driveway and across two-lane Route 125, in the shadows next to a small closed diner. It is where they parked to make their initial approach to the cottage.
A stakeout is in place. Four cars and ten men are being used. Two cars are positioned at the two entrances to the cottage; another is at the traffic circle half a mile away, through which intersection, the state police commander has suggested, most anyone coming or going, innocent or aware, is likely to pass, and another, already manned like the others, is backed in beside an unoccupied cottage fifty yards away, allowing a view of the target cottage should a car somehow slip unseen past one of the other positions, or should the suspect approach by foot. Inside the cottage itself, two detectives are prepared to take up positions in the dark, to wait out the balance of the night, or until relieved, and to serve as the command post for purposes of communication from without and to the other positions.
Dulac is anxious to be gone from the cottage, to have the lights turned out, even though the roommates have assured him that it would not appear unusual for lights to be on at this hour. For the moment, with the suspect’s bedroom and all in the bathroom but the toilet taped off, in case they may wish to call in the state police lab people tomorrow, all present are in the dining room–kitchen area, sipping instant coffee, smoking, sitting and standing, and there exists something of a party atmosphere.
Dulac’s position concerning the whereabouts of the suspect and in justification of the stakeout is that the suspect was there that evening, that he had been there on at least two other occasions during the time that Eric Wells had been missing, that something, presumably the boy, kept him from resuming his regular life at the cottage, at the same time that something else—who knew what exactly?—had him making these periodic return visits. Maybe he comes back to change clothes, Dulac has said. To shave, although the report from the roommate had it that as of that evening he had not shaved in two days or more. Maybe he will come back again, Dulac keeps thinking. In response to the argument put forth by the state police district commander—returned by now to Concord—and by Mizener and others, that the suspect, aware that he has been made, would be on the run, Dulac has argued that nothing the suspect had done so far was very rational, that all that they knew indicated an individual entirely new to what he is doing, one who is apparently rattled and confused and who is reported by an eyewitness to have been that very evening in an erratic emotional state. Besides, Dulac has added, alerts are out to block all those more rational and conventional avenues of escape.
They have yet to locate a photograph. In the suspect’s bedroom, using the blunt end of a ballpoint, Dulac has picked briefly through his possessions, has discovered a hard-core porn magazine depicting prepubescent boys but nothing which appears otherwise revealing or incriminating, and no photograph.
At last, they are ready to leave. Mizener will be transporting the three roommates to places in town, where they have agreed to stay with friends, leaving their cars in place as part of the decoy and Dulac will be returning to the station in Portsmouth, to check in, to send Shirley home if she is still there, and to be sure that the task force night shift is on top of all that is happening.
“Just a couple more questions,” Dulac says then, as the roommates have laundry bags and books and are ready to leave, drawing an expression from Mizener.
“Where do you think he is?” Dulac says. “What’s your gut feeling? Your immediate reaction?”
“Gone,” the larger boy, Leon, says at once. “Boston. The Combat Zone. There’s where I see him.”
“I have a feeling he’s on his way to Miami, Florida,” the boy named Wayne says as Dulac turns to him. “That’s what I think,” the boy adds, as if to apologize.
“I don’t know,” Duncan says in his turn. “I just don’t know. He’s an idealistic person, in spite of this. I see him huddled up somewhere. I could see him in the woods, both of them, in a cave, making shelter, something like that.”
“Weaving baskets?” Mizener says.
“No, no, let them talk,” Dulac snaps at him.
Turning to the three, Dulac says, “Okay, tell me this. Do you think he would hurt the boy?”
“No way,” Duncan says. “No way. He may be messed up sexually and so on, but I don’t see him doing something violent.”
“And so on,” Dulac says. “What do you mean by that? Did he make advances to you, any of you, or disclosures?”
“No,” Duncan says. “He didn’t—”
“Come on, Dunc, you can tell us,” the bigger student says, drawing a brief snicker from a couple of those present.
“Nothing like that,” Duncan says. “Not to me anyway.”
To the other two then, Dulac says, “Do you think he would hurt the boy?”
Only the larger one answers. “I have no idea,” he says.
“You don’t know anyone named Tony?” Dulac says, drawing nothing but stares from the three, for it is a question he has already put to them, separately and jointly, half a dozen times.
“Okay, let’s go,” he says then, giving a nod.
An hour later, when it is close to four a.m. and Shirley is still there, in the squad room with the night shift crew of three, Dulac is on the telephone in his cubicle speaking to the state police lieutenant in Concord. The suspect’s mother did not return home until one ten, the man has told him, as she remained at the restaurant after going off duty and imbibed two mixed drinks. She was up then for twenty-two minutes before turning off the lights. In turn, Dulac has reported the stakeout to be in place at the cottage and has said that he probably will be asking for the state police lab people to check over the cottage tomorrow afternoon, to see if there are any hairs or fibers which might tie things even more positively to the boy.
“I’ll tell you what my guess is,” the state police lieutenant says. “My guess is this Vernon Fischer is trying to slip into Canada right now, if he’s half as smart as his roommates seem to think he is. Or he’s up in Montreal already, speaking French for all he’s worth.”
“You think he’d get in?” Dulac says. “With all the alerts we have out?”
“Not in, but around. If he’s desperate,”
“What about the boy?” Dulac says.
“I’d say a shallow grave,” the state police lieutenant says. “Close by. Which may or may not be easy to find. Listen, these things are happening from one end of the country to the other. It used to be drugs. Now it’s children. Don’t ask me why.”
“It’s a new pathology,” Dulac says.
“Is it?” the man says.
“So I’m told,” Dulac says. “Everyone said it was okay and it turns out it isn’t.”
The state police lieutenant’s response is silence; it is a response.
Dulac wishes he had not opened the door he just opened. “We are going to need a photograph,” he says.
“Right,” the other man says.
“If nothing breaks in the meantime, could your people enter the house there in Laconia? In the early morning, say, at daybreak.”
“Of course,” the man says.
“Use an unmarked car, say whatever has to be said.”
“Of course,” the state police lieutenant says.
Moments later, pausing over the replaced receiver to gather his thoughts, and walking out into the squad room, Dulac sees Shirley working at the nearest table with what appear to be tip sheets, and he says to her, “Shirley, what are you doing? You don’t have to be here.”
“Just checking these tip sheets, to see if anything else might have been a true sighting.”
“You don’t trust the computer?”
“It’s fed by people.”
“It’s four o’clock in the morning,” he says.
“I know.”
“I want you to go home,” he says. “It’s okay if I’m dead around here tomorrow—not you. Good lord, you want everything to go to hell?”
“I need a ride,” she says.
“A ride?”
“I’m not going to call Bill at four o’clock in the morning, but that’s not the reason.”
“What reason?”
“You don’t want to know,” she says. “It has to do with something called a flywheel.”
“I’ll drop you off,” Dulac says, holding up a hand to say no, he has no interest in the flywheel. “I’m leaving right away. Six thirty’s going to come early.”
“Lieutenant,” Officer Benedict says then, holding a hand over the mouthpiece of the phone he is using. “They just had their second false alarm out there. It looks like that one roadway is something of a lover’s lane.”
Dulac smiles, nods in turn, however faintly. Going on to his cubicle, giving things a last-minute check and seeing from his desk clock that the time is five minutes to four, he takes up his jacket and slips it on, turns out his office light, thinking over the day’s endlessness, and goes on his way along the hall to where Shirley always hangs her coat. She appears, coming from a side office, doing small arrangements with her coat and purse.
For the first time ever, then, they walk from the police station together. An odd contentment occurs in Dulac as they do this. Contentment, casual happiness, are things you forget, he thinks. Of course he is exhausted and this is all innocent, but a feeling of pleasure, the vaguest tingle, continues in him as they walk to his car in the silence, under a sky reflecting only sparsely now the lights still on throughout the small city.
As he drives to where she lives, on a residential side street perhaps a mile from the station, their small talk is also sparse and relaxed, given largely to the depletion and exhaustion, the caffeine tension that afflicts them working in such a situation. “I get too exhausted to sleep well,” he says. “Too strung out.” As he pulls up before her house then, pulls over to stop and there is a moment of silence, she says, just as casually, as easily, “Go on down another block,” and he does as he is told as if he had merely pulled over a block before he should have, even as some other new or lost dimension is opening up in him.
“Why don’t you turn right,” she says.
He does this, too, turning onto a side street which is smaller and darker than her street, an unlighted street without curbs, and as he follows his headlights to the side without instruction, and parks and turns off the motor and lights, there is depletion in his center, but a falling away, too, of the shutters which have long covered his old heart—for moments of the kind have not been his to know, as a heavy man, which isn’t to say that he has been without response—and as she moves in under his arm, and he takes her to him, leans his head to her hair and shoulder and neck, it is with a fondness, with surrender he had forgotten in his life. He does nothing else, however, nor does he speak as they sit and press against each other, and take from the touching what comfort and reassurance and confusion there is to take.
“Gil, I want you so much,” she says. “My life is so awful.”
He still doesn’t say anything and at last he lifts away. Perhaps three minutes have passed. He could turn his face and mouth to her hair, but he lifts away. And at last he speaks. “We better go,” he says. Both know—he knows too well—that some patrolman is altogether likely to pull up and shine a flashlight in their faces, and he restarts the car’s motor, turns on the headlights, pulls away.
He wants her. He desires her. He circles the block, however, and pulls up once more before her house. “Good night,” he says. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Good night, Gil,” she says. She leaves the car, closes the door.
He waits a moment, to give her time to be safely inside. He wishes that, like a teenaged girl kept out late, she would blink a porch light, but she doesn’t. His life, he can see, was just as limited when he was a teenager as it is now. Here in a world no longer the same. He is, after all, what he is. He had always wanted to change, it seems; now he wishes to remain the same.
Not much later, into the partial sleep he has managed, a sensation comes into his chest of another Portsmouth child disappearing, of the telephone ringing and ringing, of the entry being made again and again in the log, of all eyes being on him, Shirley’s eyes among them, of charges pending against him—incompetence, dereliction of duty, evasion, duplicity, inattention as a father—of finding himself unable to stand up against the charges, unable to articulate words in his defense, unable to fashion truth or logic, stricken throughout with an awareness of failure, Shirley under his arm, of not being ready, Your Honor, of not being up to it at all when his turn at the plate came around at last.
Then he is quite awake. The digital clock on the dresser shows five eighteen; hardly an hour has passed since he was sitting in the car with Shirley.
Beatrice is piled on her side, a mountain range of covers, breathing steadily. He wishes she were awake, so they might through a few words be together, but he gives no thought to waking her.
All is wrong and it seems he will never sleep again. He lies with his eyes open, thinking how unfair is the night with its unanswerable exaggeration. If he could only sleep, could drift away from himself and from the inflexible night. He isn’t a father, he thinks. He never will be. Nor did he cheat, whatever may be said of his wanting to. He is what he is. His life has been what it has been, neither grand, perhaps, nor frivolous. Things have changed so much, and he has tried to stay apace and alert. And he has done, hasn’t he? all that any good policeman might do, if he held Shirley Moss under his arm or not, knows love for her or not; he has only been what he has been, has only undertaken this modest role of policeman, hasn’t he? Need he be charged, Your Honor, with all failures in life, all misfortunes in the world, if he has only undertaken this modest role, if he has attempted at last merely to be true to what he sees, to what he believes? Is that why sleep eludes him now?