IT TOOK HER SEVERAL days and some help from Tom Forrest—who apparently had a tight-lipped connection in New Jersey—for Carmen to find the name and phone number of the foster parents with whom Jeff had lived during his senior year of high school.
Only the foster father, Walter Hunt, was still living. Carmen called him one evening from her kitchen. She had decided to downplay who she was and where she was from in order to prevent him from discerning that Robert Blackwell was the rainmaker in southern California. She had to be particularly careful now; the reclusive Valle Rosa rainmaker was becoming national news.
But Walter Hunt wasn’t going to be a threat. He sounded very old, his voice tired and soft. He had some trouble following her as she explained that she was doing a profile on Robert Blackwell. He didn’t seem the least bit interested in her reasons, and she was pleased when he simply began to talk.
“We took in a hundred and twelve kids over the years,” he said, a certain pride in his raspy voice. “But I remember the one you’re talking about. The county told us he was a genius, but the truth is, he was too smart for his own good. He wasn’t a real happy kid, either. Who could blame him? His stepfather was locked up and his mother died a few years earlier having an abortion.”
“An abortion?” Carmen guessed Walter Hunt had Jeff mixed up with one of the other hundred or so kids he’d taken care of. “I thought she died in a car accident.”
“That’s what the kid told everyone. Abortions weren’t legal back then, you know—and they shouldn’t be legal now, if you ask me—so of course he and his stepfather tried to cover it up. The county social worker said it had been done in a back alley somewhere, and the police found her in the parking lot of a church. She’d bled to death.”
“Oh, God.” Carmen closed her eyes, wishing she could block out the image of Beth’s suffering. At some point she was going to have to tell Susan Cabrio what had become of her sister. She wished she didn’t know quite so much.
She drew in a breath. “When did Rob come to you?”
“After they arrested his stepfather. Watts, his name was.”
“And why was he arrested?”
Walter Hunt sounded as though he were yawning. “Well, I think a couple of people got killed during one of his drug deals, even though it was an old case. He’d stopped pushing drugs long before. Not fair, I guess, for a man to go straight and then get put away for something that happened long ago. But that’s the way the law works. Rob was real defensive about him. Amazing the kid never got into drugs himself, ‘cause he really loved that man. He visited him as often as he could, taking off without telling us where he was going. That was typical of him.”
“Where was Mr. Watts incarcerated?”
“Hmm. Good question. I don’t recall, except that Rob used to take a bus to get there. We knew when he’d disappear he was either out seeing his convict stepfather or having sex with some girl.” Walter Hunt laughed. “He was fast. We heard that from the other kids. They said he’d move from girl to girl, that he’d done it with practically every girl in the senior class by the time he graduated.”
“I see.” Carmen wasn’t certain how to respond to that particular piece of information. “What else can you tell me?”
“Well, I remember this friend of his—a boy—who was always hanging around. Felt like we’d taken in two kids, sometimes. He was another brainy type.”
“Was his name Kent?”
“Yes! That’s it. Kent Reed. Real tall. Bad skin. Had a few fingers missing on one hand. He and Rob could scare the living daylights out of you when they got together. One of those brains that was always cooking up something was enough. Put two of them together and you could have a real catastrophe on your hands. You never knew what they were going to do next.” Walter Hunt paused for a moment. “Anyway, Kent gave the other kids at the house the willies. He was always over, always wanting to be with Rob—even Rob would get annoyed with him. So, the wife and I made some rules about when he could come over, how long he could stay, that sort of thing.”
Carmen had written the name Kent Reed down on her notepad and drawn three circles around it.
“Do you have any idea at all where Kent Reed might be now?” she asked.
Mr. Hunt yawned again. “Interesting question. I’d guess either a top secret government agency where they cook up futuristic weapons, or an insane asylum. Take your pick.”
“How about Rob? Do you know where he ended up?”
“Can’t say that I do. When he graduated, though, the schools were falling all over each other to get him. Don’t remember which one he picked. MIT, might have been. One of those technology schools.”
She jotted ‘MIT?’ down on her notepad. “Well, thank you, Mr. Hunt. You’ve been very helpful.”
“Sure.” He didn’t sound ready to say good-bye. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I remember Rob as one of the most difficult kids we had, though that’s odd in a way. We had kids who got high or who didn’t know right from wrong. We had ones who were borderline retarded, others who broke the law. Robbie wasn’t any of those things, but he was sad and angry and hard to reach, and none of our rules mattered to him if he wanted to break them. He wasn’t a mean boy, just single-minded. When he left for college, the wife and I thought, good riddance. We told the county we didn’t want any more kids with genius IQ’s.”
Carmen got off the phone. She poured herself a glass of iced tea, then sat at the table again, tapping the tip of her pen on the notepad. Where the hell was she going with this? She felt like disregarding Tom Forrest’s advice to move slowly. She wanted to call the FBI to see if Jeff was wanted for something. She was tired of working in the dark, tired of trying to decide what was significant and what wasn’t. Lately, she’d found herself studying the wanted posters in the post office, examining the features of the shifty-looking men for some resemblance to the man living on her property.
She thought back to her conversation from the day before with Tom Forrest. He was proud of the way she was handling the Cabrio story, he said. “You’re incredible, Carmen!” he’d told her. “They’re eating it up. Keep those tidbits flowing.”
She had hesitated in her response, not certain how to word it, not certain how it would be received.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m using him,” she said softly. “Exploiting him.”
There was dead silence on the line.
“Tom?”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” Tom’s voice conveyed something like disgust. “This is your job, Carmen, and there was a time you were better at it than anyone else I know.”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
There was no point in trying to explain her feelings to him. Tom’s skin had grown thick and calloused over the years. He didn’t know what it was like to suddenly wake up one morning with your skin full of tender spots. He wouldn’t be able to understand how easily she bruised.
She thought of Mia’s allusions to her cruelty, Jeff’s complete disdain for her. Only Chris seemed to understand.
He always had.