Angel Interrupted (32 page)

The doors opened onto the bustling second floor, where, postmidnight or not, task force headquarters was teeming. Maggie poked her head in, with me right behind her, and it was just as Calvano had said. The mother of Tyler Matthews was sitting at the table, a laptop in front of her, unable to stop watching the footage of her little boy. A distressed friend sat next to her, trying to get her to drink coffee, but the mother was oblivious to all but the images of her son.

All around them, detectives and administrative support staff were sorting through files, searching public records, pulling up more people to interview, and making plans to bring in the few known associates of Howard McGrew for questioning. They knew that all they needed to break the case was the tiniest detail—a name, deed, address, even just a neighborhood—anything that might narrow the search and lead them to Tyler Matthews.

Maggie had her own ideas about that. She ducked back into the elevator just as Gonzales looked up from a file and started toward the door, though clearly he had not seen her. She pressed into a corner and pressed the buttons frantically, not wanting him to catch her disobeying his order. I leaned against the elevator wall next to her, thoroughly enjoying watching her act this way. It was a new side of Maggie. She had gone off the reservation but good.

The elevator doors closed seconds before Gonzales reached them, and I enjoyed the hell out of the startled look on his face. He had not seen Maggie, but he knew someone had not bothered to wait for him, and he was not used to that kind of treatment.

As soon as we reached the fourth floor, she headed for the squad room and retrieved the Fiona Harker file. Its slender width reminded her of how the case had been put on the back burner for Tyler Matthews and would be again—at least for the next few hours, while the man who called himself Cody Wells was in surgery.

She unclipped the child’s drawing and held it up to the light, turning it first one way and then the other, seeking to put it in context. Maggie had grown up in town like me, albeit years later. She’d probably played along the banks of the reservoir like I had as a kid, catching tadpoles and picking cattails she could wave around like swords until the cotton burst from their tips like snow. She’d have been a water rat like me, I knew. The rough-and-tumble kids of the local cops always were. And it was a certainty she’d been a tomboy. She knew the old reservoir; she just had to make the connection.

She turned the drawing several ways before zeroing in on the broad lines drawn along the bottom of it to represent the boulevard that ran across that side of town.

Come on, Mags
, I willed her.
That’s a road. That’s a big, wide honkin’ road. It
is
a map, Mags. It is
.

Her eyes widened. She saw it. I could feel the excitement in her. She recognized the reservoir. Folding the drawing so no one else could see it, she practically ran back to the lobby, forgoing the elevators for the stairs.

“I figured it out,” she said breathlessly.

“Easy,” Calvano warned her. He looked toward the exit doors. “Gonzales just breezed past. He didn’t even look at me. Again.”

“Then come with me,” Maggie said slowly. “Adrian, look at this drawing. This is Fort Mott Boulevard. It has to be. See? Three lanes each way. Which means this is the old reservoir. Look at the dogleg on the eastern side of it. I used to play on its banks constantly as a kid, before they built the subdivision.”

I knew it. Cop kid. Water rat. Tomboy.

“Okay,” Calvano conceded. “Maybe you’re right.”

“No maybe about it. See the road that hugs the lake? That’s exactly how it is. There’s a two-lane road that circles the old reservoir, and every home in the subdivision is accessible from off that road.”

“And we’re going here?” Calvano asked. “To the residence of Mr. Willy Wonka, or maybe Harry Potter, or, I don’t know, Alice in frigging Wonderland?” He pointed to the brown-crayon squares that represented the cedar-shingled house. Giant, colorful flowers and huge bushes had been carefully drawn to fill the yard. They were as tall as the upstairs windows. The stick figure of the little boy tilted crazily to one side, and the blobs on his shirt made him look like he had the measles.

Okay, so I hadn’t had Leonardo da Vinci to work with. What the little girl had lacked in skill, she more than made up for with enthusiasm.

“To the house of ‘a little boy who is lost,’” she reminded him. “That’s what the little girl who drew this said. And do you have any better ideas?”

“I definitely do not,” Calvano admitted.

“If this map is right, then if we’re heading west, we need to take a left turn off the road around the lake, and then we just have to take the first right onto a cul-de-sac to find the house. It’s at the top of the cul-de-sac.”

“There must be twenty or thirty roads like that around the lake. It’s like a wagon wheel of roads.”

“Fine. That’s better than searching an entire town. Come on, let’s go.”

Calvano went. I didn’t think he had it in him. “This is nuts,” he mumbled as he followed her out to her car—but he went.

He was still amazingly self-absorbed, of course. I sat in the backseat and listened to his dire predictions about the future of his career, the only topic in his world at the moment, it seemed, even if there was a four-year-old boy still missing, stuck by himself in the house, in the middle of a massive subdivision, in the middle of a town where it would take weeks for the feds to check every home, which they wouldn’t do anyway because there was no guarantee he’d even been kept in town and people had a pesky habit of not liking it when the government knocked on their doors and wanted to poke around.

But no, Calvano was obsessed with whether he’d get his gun back, what would happen if the guy he’d shot died, what if he got demoted, or—most important of all, apparently—would that hot chick in the property clerk’s office find out about it and cancel their date Saturday night?

If ghosts had to worry about high blood pressure, Calvano would have put me in the hospital long ago. He’d shown flashes of potential, but clearly he still had a long way to go.

Then I realized that Calvano’s self-absorbed whining served the useful purpose of keeping Maggie’s mind off the desperate act they were attempting. “I am never telling Gonzales about this,” she muttered to herself at one point. I realized she had tuned out Calvano before they’d even left the parking lot. She was skeptical, but at least she was still moving ahead with her plan. When Maggie got started, nothing stopped her.

“Okay,” she decided as they drew near Fort Mott Boulevard. “Here’s the plan.” She killed the running lights and slowed to a sane pace, knowing that zooming into a neighborhood with red lights flashing was not the best way to maintain an unobtrusive presence while you conducted a clandestine search. “I’m going to turn into the subdivision right up here, by the CVS. Mark it down on the map.”

“Huh?” Calvano looked at her blankly.

“Oh, for God’s sake, Adrian,” she complained. “We have to keep track of where we’ve checked and where we haven’t. Everything looks the same in this neighborhood. Draw a little square and mark it
CVS
, okay? And every time we drive down a street and check it, I want you to add it to the map and put the name down.”

“I can do that,” Calvano agreed. “I got a badge for mapmaking in Boy Scouts.”

Calvano carefully drew a small square, then sketched a miniature sign next to it and printed
CVS
neatly on it. Well, what do you know? I bet he’d gotten an A in drawing in third grade.

I wanted to be Maggie’s partner. I was not taking this well.

“What’s the name of the street we’re starting with?” he asked Maggie, pen ready.

“Hope Valley,” Maggie told him.

Hope Valley indeed.

For almost two hours, Maggie and Calvano faithfully followed every road that led away from the lake, and then just as faithfully made each right turn, cul-de-sac or not. They checked each house for signs of occupancy, seeking out any that looked deserted. Just to be sure, they even checked the second right turn off each side road. They had to work slowly, to avoid detection and panicking the neighbors. They kept at it.

In the course of those first two hours, they did not find Tyler Matthews—but they did become real partners. Calvano marked down each road on their homemade map, they muttered back and forth to each other with their hopes of each road being the right one, and they reassured each other that the boy was safe and probably sleeping soundly, oblivious to all, and that no one else had been involved in the abduction scheme or they would have known by now. Maggie called the shots, Calvano obeyed without argument, and both seemed content with the arrangement.

This growing cohesiveness kept them going despite one discouraging turn after another. Whatever jealousy I felt at Calvano being Maggie’s partner was overshadowed by my gratitude that they had become a team. I wasn’t worried about Maggie quitting. Maggie would not quit until they had checked every single road that led off the lake. But I was worried Calvano would throw in the towel and distract Maggie from her task.

Calvano surprised me. He hung in there for every turn and every block they searched. Four times he got out of the car and crept around homes that looked like candidates for the hiding spot they were seeking. Each time he announced them as either shut down, without power or heat, or clearly not capable of housing the type of layout they had both seen on the colonel’s video of the boy. Calvano was confident of his architectural prowess, as he had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the spatial sense section of his standard achievement tests as a sixth grader, a fact he only mentioned about three hundred times to Maggie over the course of two hours.

If he was so good at spatial relationships, why the hell had he shot a man running away in the back twice, missed with a third shot, and done this all in a yard clearly illuminated by a raging fire?

Still, he stayed. He did not abandon Maggie. He stayed, and he watched her back, like a partner’s supposed to do. Not every guy on the force would have done that. I had to give him credit.

They finally reached the road that led to the house where Tyler Matthews was being kept. That was when a horrible new fear overcame me. What if Calvano hopped out of the car, confident he could assess the dark house accurately, and missed the fact that a little boy lay sleeping in a back bedroom—sleeping with the unbreakable pull of childhood slumber. I’d had two boys of my own. I knew that sleep. It was almost narcotic. A child could dream through anything. If they pounded on the doors, it would do no good. If they shouted his name, he wouldn’t hear it.

I beat them to the house, determined to do what I could to make sure Calvano did not simply peer in a window and walk away.

The living room was deserted, its interior illuminated by an odd glow. My heart soared as I entered the kitchen and saw the refrigerator door hanging open, drops of chocolate milk leading across the linoleum floor. Tyler Matthews had helped himself to a snack and, with the single-mindedness of a four-year-old, walked away and left chaos behind him. I followed the drops of chocolate milk out to the hall. An empty plastic quart bottle had been dropped on the carpet, a half-eaten doughnut next to it.

Tyler was in the back bedroom, fast asleep on the rug. His cheek was pressed against the carpet and his body was curled up tightly in a ball. He clutched a plastic soldier in one hand. The rest of his toys had been carefully divided into two equal piles, evidence of his willingness to share.

The oddest feeling came over me then:
There’s someone else in the room.

I looked under the bed, remembering when my own boys had asked me to check for monsters. Nothing. I searched in the closet and in every corner, trying to pinpoint the origin of what I felt—it was a pulsing of energy, a thickness of the air. It was an undeniable feeling more than anything else. Or maybe the faint smell of sweat and . . . was it gunpowder? A memory came to me, one from long ago—I was hunched over in a hallway outside my elementary school cafeteria, wrapping dozens of wooden matchstick tips in layers of aluminum foil. I was making a ball I would light and toss inside, filling the massive room with smoke and successfully clearing out the school for an hour, allowing me to avoid a math test I was unprepared for.

How had I ever become a cop?

Perhaps because of the firing range. The same smell reminded me of the firing range where I had once practiced for hours, early in my career, wanting to qualify with the highest possible marksmanship score.

But those were just memories. I saw no one in the room, no one but Tyler Matthews.

Leaving the boy behind temporarily, I checked the other rooms and assured myself that no one else was hiding nearby. Confident we were alone, I returned to the hallway and got down on my hands and knees, not to pray, but to exert all my otherworldly will toward something as inconsequential and yet as monumentally important as blowing a plastic bottle into the view of someone peering through the kitchen window.