False Positive (11 page)

Sunday. Afternoon
.

Ethan missing for forty-one and three-quarter hours

“Cooper?” Loflin had returned from the bathroom to find Devereaux slumped in the booth, staring vacantly at the phony industrial memorabilia on the far wall. “You OK? You're awful pale all of a sudden.”

“Me?” Devereaux got to his feet and picked up his phone from the bench. “I'm fine. Come on. Let's get out of here.”

“Hey!” Loflin moved to block his path. “If something's happened, tell me. Don't shut me out.”

“Nothing's happened.” Devereaux stepped around her and started for the exit. “Come on. Stop wasting time.”

Devereaux had left his Charger at the side of Highland Avenue in a wide patch of shadow thrown by the porticoed façade of the Temple Emanu-El. He climbed in, fired up the engine, and waited impatiently for Loflin to catch up. The car was rolling before she even had the chance to fasten her belt, and Devereaux made a fast right onto 20th. Then he accelerated hard and didn't lift off the gas for another mile, until they emerged from the concrete bridge that carried the broad swath of rail lines through the heart of the city.

Loflin had expected it would take them seven or eight minutes to reach headquarters, given the weight of traffic. She revised her estimate to six minutes in light of Devereaux's driving. Then five. Then she began to worry they'd end up in the Emergency Room, instead. She tried to find something to distract herself, but the interior of Devereaux's car was as clean as the day it was delivered. There was no dust on the trim. No fingerprints on the glass. No junk in the foot well. Not a thing out of place, anywhere. The relentless tidiness started to feel oppressive, combined with the excessive speed, so Loflin reached for her phone as the last line of defense.

“Was that Vice?” Devereaux pulled over outside headquarters just as Loflin ended her call. “Any luck?”

“Yes and no.” Loflin was wary, not knowing what had triggered Devereaux's surge of impatience and not certain it had fully passed. “My old partner was tied up. I didn't speak with him. But he's here, in the building. He'll be free in ten minutes. I should be able to catch him then.”

“Good. Let me know the second you finish with him.”

“Why? Aren't you coming in?”

“No.”

Devereaux had been wrestling with his conscience as he drove. He knew the angle with Vice could be critical in finding out who brought the hooker to Birmingham and then dumped her body out of the Honda that was used to kidnap Ethan. He was still absolutely committed to finding the little boy. But there was one person in the world who was even more important to him. “There's someone I have to check on. I won't be far away. Shout if you need me.”

The layout of the streets became less orderly the farther Devereaux drove from the city center. The houses he passed grew smaller, too. They were set back farther from the road, their wooden sides darkened with age and their roof shingles twisted by the years of hot Alabama sun.

Tomcik's house was a similar age to Devereaux's father's. It was in a similar neighborhood, and looked to be the same size and layout. That didn't surprise Devereaux. His father and Tomcik had both
been cops. They'd have had similar incomes. Probably similar values and priorities. It made sense that the two guys would pick the same kind of places to live.

Devereaux tried the front door. It opened easily, and he hesitantly crossed the threshold. Once he'd stepped inside, Devereaux was hit by the smell. It was like being in an alleyway behind a low-rent butcher's shop on a summer's day. He took a shallow breath and started to move through the house, taking it room by room. First up was the dining room. Then the living room. And on to the den. In each of them Tomcik's possessions were strewn everywhere in a tangled, chaotic mess of discarded clothes, broken crockery, and scattered books.

Devereaux found Tomcik's body in the kitchen. The old guy was naked. His corpse was slack and floppy, rigor having long since passed. He was tied to a wooden chair. With wire. It was hard to tell what kind, because his flesh was swollen and had started to absorb everything it touched. His skin was pale and mottled, like grains of rice had been forced beneath the surface. His stomach was bloated, and gray-green slime had oozed onto the floor below him. Ants and beetles were feasting on it. Flies were buzzing around him. Maggots were wriggling in his nose and mouth. His chest was covered with burns. And a blood-encrusted tooth lay discarded on the table.

Devereaux cursed the bitter symmetry of the occasion: It was death that had brought him to Tomcik's house now, just as it had brought Tomcik to Devereaux's years ago, when he was a kid. Because Tomcik was the first guy he'd heard in his father's house, when he was six years old.

The guy who'd found Devereaux hiding under the floor in the closet.

The guy who'd broken the news that his father was dead.

Sunday. Afternoon
.

Ethan missing for forty-two and a quarter hours

Devereaux took out his phone. He dialed a nine. And a one. Then he hit Cancel.

Instead of making the call, he pulled out a chair and moved it around the table to the only clean patch on the floor. And despite the stench, he took a little time to sit in silence with the old guy.

Devereaux hadn't realized it at the time—he was young, and there were plenty of other, more obvious things on his plate—but Hayden Tomcik had kept a close eye on him as he'd passed through his succession of foster homes. The first one, when he was six. The one he'd been moved to, weak with malnutrition, aged nine. The one he'd escaped to at thirteen, after a string of vicious beatings. And the one he'd run away from for good at sixteen, when he'd grown sick of being treated like an unpaid servant.

Tomcik had watched Devereaux stumble through school. He'd seen him graduate, then get cast adrift with no money for college and little prospect of honest work. He'd worried, as Devereaux slid down an increasingly degenerate spiral of friends and acquaintances. And he'd despaired as Devereaux finally, inevitably, sank into a life of crime.

The thing Tomcik hadn't understood right away was that Devereaux's
struggles in class didn't stem from laziness. Or a lack of interest. And certainly not from stupidity. Devereaux's problem was his attitude. His refusal to labor through the endless, tedious steps his teachers laid out when he could see a quicker path to the same result. Or, sometimes, a much better result. So in the years that followed school, when Devereaux found himself surrounded with burglars and muggers and car thieves and extortionists, he didn't adopt any of their methods. He came up with his own approach. A more efficient one. He let the other guys commit the crimes. And when they'd amassed enough to make it worth his while he came after them, knocking them out of the game by any means necessary and taking all their proceeds for himself.

One night the latest pack of thugs Devereaux was targeting had tried to stick up a gas station. It was an impromptu thing—none of them had planned it, and as virtual amateurs they hadn't known another gang was lined up to hit the same place at the same time. In the resulting chaos the gas station clerk was killed, and Devereaux was one of those who got rounded up by the police. It wasn't his first skirmish with the law, but this time things were different. The clerk had died in the commission of a crime, so, even though Devereaux hadn't killed him, he was looking at a homicide charge.

Tomcik had been angry. He'd been frustrated. He'd been tempted to wash his hands of Devereaux altogether. He believed each person was responsible for their own actions, and should take what was coming to them. But he also believed in second chances. Especially when there were such extreme mitigating circumstances. So knowing that this was Devereaux's last chance, Tomcik had thrown him a lifeline. He'd given him the chance to do something right. To testify against the guy who'd actually pulled the trigger during the robbery.

Tomcik hadn't been certain that Devereaux would come through.
Honor among thieves
, and all that bullshit. But the twenty-two-year-old Devereaux had stayed the course, and then some. He played his part in the trial. He made a clean break from the people who'd been dragging him down. And he asked Tomcik to help him stay on the straight and narrow.

Tomcik had a lot of connections. He wasn't afraid to use them, and was able to blur some boundaries and massage the problematic
areas in Devereaux's record sufficiently to get him accepted into the Police Academy. The attitude back then was it didn't matter too much what lines the recruits had crossed before signing up, as long as they used the experience to make them better cops. But it was also made clear: If they crossed those lines again once they pulled on a uniform, their next stop would be the inside of a jail cell.

Devereaux was older than the other recruits in his class. The path he'd taken had involved a lot more twists and turns. And he was a lot better off, thanks to the heap of cash he'd accumulated in his past life. He felt no obligation to return it, since he'd taken it from criminals. Where he could identify the original victims, he made anonymous donations to offset as much of their suffering as possible. The balance he invested—mostly in property, in the soon-to-be-regenerated heart of the city—to reflect his newly respectable position in the community. And to compensate himself for the years he'd spent in foster care without a cent to his name.

Devereaux and Tomcik had kept in close touch during the years following his time in the Academy, but after that the contact between them became more sporadic. Devereaux earned a series of promotions and grew ever busier. Tomcik retired. The two never argued, or formally agreed to stop seeing each other. It was just the way things worked out. And now it was another entry on the long list of regrets in Devereaux's life.

After ten minutes of vigil, Devereaux stood up. He wondered if he could rely on Loflin to cover for him much longer at headquarters. Then he pulled on a pair of latex gloves and started to retrace his steps through the house. The extent of the damage saddened him. Glass from shattered picture frames was scattered across the threadbare carpets in the hallway and the living room. Books and photograph albums had been flung on the floor, some with their pages torn out or crumpled. Furniture was tipped over. Chair legs were broken and splintered. Cushions were ripped open, with white fluffy stuffing spilling out of the tears. Drapes were torn down and left in heaps, tangled around their broken poles.

It was obvious that the mess had been caused by someone who was searching for something. The scale of the destruction and the fact that Tomcik had been tortured so viciously suggested it was
something well hidden. And valuable. The question was, had they found it? Or had the old guy held out until the end, forcing his killer—or killers—to leave empty-handed?

The only room not completely trashed was the bathroom. On his first pass through Devereaux had assumed this was because there was nothing to fling around in there. Tomcik didn't belong to a generation where a man would own a whole bunch of potions and toiletries. But in light of the torture, Devereaux reconsidered. Perhaps the rampaging had stopped because the attacker had found out where to look?

Devereaux examined every detail of the room. There were several cracks in the off-white subway tile that covered the walls, but he put that down to the age of the property. One of the metal legs that supported the basin had been knocked off true, but Devereaux didn't see any way it could have been used to conceal anything. Nothing was tucked away behind the toilet. But finally, at the narrow end of the bath where the horizontal surface had been extended to provide an area for someone to sit, Devereaux spotted a slight scuffing on the linoleum floor.

The bath panel looked like it was attached with screws, but when Devereaux poked its outer edge it pivoted open, dragging gently against the floor. There was a space behind it. In it was a wooden box, like the kind fruit used to be sold in. It was full of files. The marks in the coating of dust suggested that two or three had been disturbed. Devereaux took a photo with his phone, then removed one of the files himself.

It was a police case file. From 1972. It was written in plain English—unlike the ones Devereaux illicitly kept—and it documented how Tomcik and his partner had systematically dismantled a gang of car thieves who broke up the vehicles they stole and passed off the used parts as new to numerous backstreet mechanics.

Devereaux lifted out the crate and took pictures of the cover of each file in turn. He was hoping to identify a pattern, or to work out if anything was missing. In the meantime, he pulled files out at random, sat on the edge of the bath, and continued to read.

The records Tomcik had kept told a fascinating story of life—and crime—in the city over three decades. Some things had changed,
such as the kind of items that were stolen, and the relative prosperity of different neighborhoods. Other things hadn't, such as the greed and desperation that bred so much of the misery. It struck Devereaux that he'd stumbled across a window into his father's world, and at that moment he'd have given anything to be sitting in a bar, swapping war stories, getting to know his old man and the era he'd inhabited before his murder.

Then his phone rang.

“Detective Devereaux?” The civilian aide sounded even more excited than she had that morning. “Lieutenant Hale wants you in the conference room, right now. She says there've been developments.”

Reluctantly, Devereaux replaced the file and slid the crate back into its hiding place. He returned to the kitchen to say a final farewell to his old guardian angel. Then he made his way along the hallway toward the front door.