Sometimes even if you’re convinced something isn’t going to happen, that there’s no chance of it, you still take precautions. That’s what they sell insurance for.
After I left Gutierrez, with a phone call to make sure she was at home, would give me her address, and didn’t despise me for my connection to Laura Coleman, I headed back over to an older part of Fort Lauderdale, just east of Dixie Highway and north of Commercial Boulevard, one of the few areas that was old enough so that the houses didn’t all look the same.
The stone driveway crunched under my wheels as I pulled up to a carport with a tarpaper-and-gravel roof that sagged a little. A battered jeep was pulled up onto the lawn down by the street because there was no room in the carport. It was filled with metal filing cabinets, pushed up against the wall it shared with the house, presumably so they wouldn’t get wet when the rains came. For extra protection the cabinets were covered with tarps.
Alison Samuels’s job may have been saving children, but you could tell it didn’t pay well.
She was out the front door before I had my seat belt off. She held on to my door while I gathered my tote bag and climbed out. In every other instance I’d seen her, she’d been only a spokesperson, and cold. Now she had shed the spokesperson suit and was dressed instead in jogging pants and a neon yellow T-shirt. Without Laura, or Will, without her professional persona, she was sweeter somehow, almost shy. She greeted me as if she had been the one to suggest this meeting.
“It’s so great of you to come over,” she said, trying not to gush, as she led me into her less-than-modest concrete-block home. Larry, asleep on a round braided rug in the middle of the wooden floor, alerted when the screen door banged shut. He came to where I’d stopped just inside the front door, stepped on my foot with his own.
“Hello, Larry,” I said, remembering him from the interview. I reached out my hand tentatively, palm up, for him to check me out. He ignored the hand, and instead gave a growl that must have started at his butt and worked its way up. I just as tentatively pulled my hand back to my side.
“Larry, down,” Alison said, and Larry obeyed, backing off but still watching me.
“That’s some therapy dog you got there,” I said.
“Larry and I meet with victimized children all the time, and he’s a doll with them, but with me he’s very protective. Wine?”
“Sounds lovely,” I said.
Alison gestured at the couch and said, “Sit. You’ll be less of a threat.”
I remained standing because I’d be damned if I was going to let Larry intimidate me into cowering on the couch. While he studied me, Alison went off into the kitchen after promising to bring him something, too.
From where I stood I could see that the interior of the house had the same northern style in a petite format. Recessed bookshelves and even a little fireplace, though it had a potted plant stuck in it. The plant needed water. I heard a small curse, a cork pop, some glasses tinkling gently against each other.
Alison had a work area off to one side, a desk that only looked like Laura’s in that it had sides and a flat top. The top was littered with papers and the gloss of photographs an inch thick. Her computer sat on a little table to the side, turned on. With a cautious glance at Larry, whose whole soul was glued to my presence, I looked.
It was a Web site she was on. I’m not going to describe here what I saw. All I’ll say is that it appeared she was trying to match the photographs of children on her desk to the photographs on the screen.
“Spend too long doing this and it breaks you,” Alison said behind me. “After just a few years I tell myself it’s time to get out.” She said, extending one of the glasses she held, “Sorry I took so long. Dry cork. I don’t think I got any in your glass.”
I turned to take the wine she offered, served in a little etched glass, clear on dark red, old-fashioned. “The glass matches the rest of the house,” I said.
“Thrift shop stuff. I didn’t ask whether you wanted red or white,” she said. “I don’t have people over much.” She handed what looked like a leg-of-lamb jerky to Larry, who pulled his lips back and took it in his teeth with exaggerated delicacy.
“I’m so sorry we had to meet this way,” she said. She clinked her glass against mine and took a sip. “You have no idea how much respect and admiration I’ve always had for you, and you must think I’m a real bitch.”
I’d wondered how I was going to get to that. “Laura Coleman at … the prison, you mean. That was pretty nasty.”
Alison nodded an acknowledgment, and at the end her chin was a little lower. “I’m sorry,” she said, and without sarcasm, “Now I feel like I should punch myself in the face.”
She again motioned me to the couch where Larry had wanted me to sit, and plopped herself down in an overstuffed armchair next to it, crossways, popped off her running shoes and socks with the opposite toes, and pointed her bare feet unapologetically in my direction. They were runner’s feet, well calloused. She sipped her wine, then held the glass on her stomach. “That’s better,” she said.
I dipped my head in the direction of her computer. “I’m glad I interrupted your work,” I said gently. And even more gently, “Would you like to ask me what I know about the Creighton children?”
“Were you there?”
“When they found the bodies. I was.”
Alison’s eyes filled and her nose went pink, but she didn’t cry. She didn’t cry. It seemed as if she was so in control she could even force her tears to run down the inside of her face.
“I know enough,” she said. “I talked to Henry Aggrawal.” She shook her head, regretting that she could say she knew a forensic anthropologist. “I guess I know everybody in the state who looks for children whether they’re alive or dead.”
Her phone went off, and she went over to the desk, answered it, and wandered back into what I assumed was a bedroom. When she came back out, she didn’t bother to explain who it was, but when she sat down again, this time facing out from the chair with her feet tucked up under her, she kept her hand on the phone.
“It’s an occupational hazard,” she answered, her eyes getting hard. “You can work twenty-four hours a day and it’s never enough. Sorry. How’s Laura doing?” she asked.
“Angry. Depressed. She’ll be all right. How are you?”
“Angry. Depressed. But that’s kind of been me for as long as I can remember. And tired. I’m tired a lot. Why are you here?”
I told her about Shayna Murry. I told her about the possibility that it was a revenge killing, and that there was a fear of more.
“I had you put on the list for security,” I said. “But you know how that goes, maybe a patrol car driving by a couple of times a night if you’re lucky. I think you should watch out. Maybe no running after dark.”
“You think I haven’t had angry parents after me? Death threats from pimps? Menacing e-mails from pedophiles?” She put her glass on the table next to her chair, then swung one foot down and rubbed Larry’s back with it. “You see how he protects me. He won’t let anyone hurt me, will you, Larry?”
There are certain times when we, the best way I can put it, seem to be actors playing the part of ourselves. As she spoke Alison fumbled her lines and dropped her character, the one that was so well rehearsed for so many years. She swung her legs off the chair and fell down beside Larry, hugging him around the neck and burying her face in his fur.
“Alison, why the obsession with this particular man, with a family you never knew?”
“That’s the only one you know about,” she said, and then paused. “But that’s not the whole truth. Marcus Creighton was different from the rest. I did find the photo that looked like his son, but it was more. Of all the guys I hunted, all the ones I put away, Marcus Creighton was the only one who would talk to me. I could sit there and say things and watch him suffer. It was like he came to stand for all the men who hurt children. And now he’s dead and my only feeling is frustration that I can’t make him suffer anymore. Marcus Creighton is gone. The children are gone. Everyone is gone. I feel like I’m hardly here. What else do you feel when the sole reason for your existence is all gone? When everyone is gone and you don’t have your meaning anymore?”
I had thought Alison Samuels was tough like me, like Laura. I didn’t expect her to bleed this way, and to a near-stranger. She looked up at me. From that vantage point, sitting on the floor next to her dog, she looked like a little girl, as lost and alone as she had ever been.
Then her face sorted its features back into the kind you show company. She reached up to the end table for her wineglass, drained it, and picked a bit of cork off her tongue. Alison said, “The thing I don’t get is finding you on the other side of the fence.”
I said, “I keep hearing that. I’m not, really, more like on it. I’m on nobody’s side. I’ve seen too much corruption at worst and stupidity at best by the guys who are supposed to stand for justice. So I can see the objection to the death penalty, because unless you see the smoking gun in the killer’s hand and find a bullet that matches it in the victim, you really never know, and even then…”
Her face clouded, and I didn’t want to take her back to Creighton again. “On the other hand, I hate the same fuckers you hate, and you could talk about chemical castration and I wouldn’t blink. But that’s the big picture. Mainly I’m trying to make sure no one else gets hurt.”
Now for the hard part. I said, “I also wanted to advise you to steer clear of Laura Coleman for a while. She’s angry. She might want to pick a fight, and it could get ugly. Don’t agree to meet her for coffee. She doesn’t really like coffee.”
“What about you, can’t you convince her this is all over?” Alison rubbed her fingers on both temples like a headache was starting. “Can’t it be all over?”
“You and I both know it’s not over.”
She looked at her hand, and I realized she’d brought her phone to the floor with her, continuing to clutch it while we were talking. The hand reacted as if to a vibration. She looked at the screen. “Oh Jesus, it’s an Amber Alert. I gotta go,” Alison said.
“But you’re hearing what I said about Laura Coleman, right?”
“I hear you. And thanks for coming to see me. Talking actually made me feel a little better.”
We left together, me heading over to the Howard Johnson’s, and Alison God knew where. She didn’t bother to change out of her running clothes and was loading Larry into her jeep as I pulled away from the house. I guess she intended to keep going for now.
On the way back to the hotel I wondered what family Alison might have run away from, what kind of abuse might have been happening at home that drove her. I had not run away, and I reluctantly admitted one could do worse than the mother I was given.