Snowblind (17 page)

It sure as hell hadn’t been funny.

In his years on the Coventry Police Department, Joe Keenan had seen the ugliest facets of human behavior—rape and murder and addiction, suicide pacts, parents prostituting their kids in exchange for drugs—but every once in a while he was reminded of the basic decency of his community. As dawn gave way to morning, the sunlight making the frozen hardpack glisten like diamonds, he paused and leaned against a tree, exhausted and out of breath, and watched people moving through the woods around him. There were police officers, on duty and off, and there were also firefighters and EMTs and city workers and ordinary volunteers who had responded to a summons in the middle of the night and gone without sleep to beat the bushes in search of a little lost boy who’d become an orphan overnight.

None of them wanted to believe that Zachary Stroud had drowned in the river. For hours, as the storm wound down from snow to sleet to rain to a morning of dissipating clouds, they had searched behind and in the branches of every tree, checked every depression in the ground, and followed the riverbank looking for footprints in the wet soil there. Police cars cruised the neighborhoods just inland from the river. Now that dawn had arrived, some officers had begun canvassing door-to-door on the nearest streets.

“Falling down on the job, Detective?” a deep voice said.

Keenan glanced to his right, toward the deep, rushing whisper of the river, and saw Harley Talbot approaching. Officer Talbot must have been off duty because he was out of uniform, clad instead in a blue cable-knit collared sweater, jeans, and boots.

“I know you’re screwing with me, Harley, but today’s not the day,” Detective Keenan said.

“I’ve got you, man,” Harley said. “You’ve been out here all night and we haven’t found a damn thing. Gotta be demoralizing. But don’t lose hope, Detective. Nobody’s giving up yet.”

Detective Keenan nodded. “Why is that, do you think? I mean … if we haven’t found the kid by now…”

He let the words trail off but the question was clear. The search would continue all day long. Dogs had been brought in overnight but with all the new-fallen snow they had not been able to get a scent to follow.

“Not that big a riddle,” Harley said, veiled in the golden early-morning light, almost ghostly. “They don’t want to believe the worst. Holding on to hope when most people would give up … that’s faith, man. Everyone knows how this is gonna end, but they hold on because giving up the search means giving up hope, and nobody’s ready for that.”

Keenan inhaled, cold morning air filling his lungs. His eyes burned with exhaustion and his limbs felt leaden from slogging along a mile or more of wooded riverside, but he could go on. They had to keep looking.

“I’m with you, Harley,” Detective Keenan said. “Though I have to tell you, it takes more than hope to keep going. It takes coffee. If I don’t get a massive caffeine injection I’m not going to be any good to anybody.”

Harley grinned. “Shit, Detective, that’s easy. Head out to the corner of Riverside and Harrison. Got a food truck there. The owner’s giving away free coffee to all the searchers. It’s no Starbucks, but it’ll pick you up.”

Detective Keenan thanked him and headed west. The stretch of woods he had found himself in was maybe four hundred yards from river to road, not far at all, but it took him nearly fifteen minutes of moving through underbrush and around trees to reach the pavement. As he did, his cell phone rang.

The food truck was parked as promised. Lights were on inside the truck, though the sun had come out. Half-a-dozen people were standing or sitting near the big open window on the side of the truck, including two women who sat cross-legged on the snow, too tired to care if the dampness soaked through their clothes.

“Joe Keenan,” he said, phone to his ear.

“It’s Sam.”

“Lieutenant Duquette,” Keenan said. “I hope you’re calling with good news.”

“I’m afraid not,” the lieutenant replied. “We’ve got more searchers coming in, but just no sign of the boy.”

Keenan eyed the food truck longingly, craving the coffee so powerfully that his need for it unnerved him. But this conversation could not be avoided.

“You sound defeated,” Detective Keenan said. “This isn’t over, Lieutenant.”

“We’ve scoured the river’s edge and the woods,” Duquette replied. “If the Stroud boy was out there, we’d have found him. He’s in the river, Joe. You know it and I know it.”

Keenan’s heart turned to ice. He flashed back to Charlie Newell dying in his arms.

“I know nothing of the kind.”

“Detective—”

“You’re not abandoning the search,” Keenan said quickly.

“Don’t be an idiot,” the lieutenant said. “The media would be so far up the mayor’s ass that they’d be camped out in his colon. He’d take it out on the chief and we’d all pay the price. We’ve got to keep it going a couple of days, but I’m telling you we’re not going to find anything. You’re not a rookie, Joe. You know this. Unless the kid was snatched—”

“I’m not saying he was snatched. But if he wandered away, could be somebody picked him up—”

“In the middle of that storm?”

“There were people out in it. The Strouds were out in it.”

“And they’re dead.”

“Not everyone who was driving in the storm finished the night upside down in the river, Lieutenant. All due respect.”

Seconds ticked by. Detective Keenan felt the sun warming him, heard the wet snow slipping off branches and footsteps clomping through the snowy woods. Voices called to one another hopefully, just as Harley Talbot had said. There were so many people in Coventry who were hurting, just like the rest of the country, people who were still weathering years of a struggling economy. But the people out searching didn’t care about their own troubles this morning.

“My search for this kid isn’t for show,” Keenan said quietly, the phone tight against his ear. “We’ve got people searching the banks downstream for miles. I’m not discounting the idea that Zachary Stroud ended up drowning, but I’m not going to just assume it either, not when the only evidence we have indicates that he got out of the car on dry land, or near enough to it.”

He heard the lieutenant sigh on the other end of the line. “We’re both tired, Joe. I’m not asking you to stop searching. But we’ve known each other a long time and I know you take things like this pretty hard. I’m just trying to prepare you, that’s all.”

Keenan froze. Lieutenant Duquette trying to protect the feelings of one of his detectives?
Wonders never cease,
he thought. But then he realized that the sympathy might not be so benevolent.

“Yeah, I do take it hard if a child dies on our watch,” Keenan said. “I don’t think you can be human and not be affected by something like that. But if you’re questioning my ability to do the job—”

“What are you talking about?”

“I just want to assure you that I’m fine. I’m up to it. All I need is caffeine. We’re going to find this kid, Sam.”

“I hope like hell that we do, Detective. But you can’t spend the next two days out there looking for him. You have other work to do.”

“I’m not chasing down ghost stories,” Keenan snapped, heart racing. “You want to spend time on nutjobs who saw UFOs or fairies, you can send uniforms to take their statements. I’ve got a few open robberies that you and I both know we’re never going to solve with the evidence I’ve got, and that assault case from yesterday, which turned out to be the woman’s ex ransacking her place for drugs. That guy’s already in custody, as of yesterday afternoon. Given that, do you really want to pull me off the search for a kid who escaped the car his parents died in?”

“I’m not pulling you off the search,” Lieutenant Duquette said. “But you need to be practical. I can keep you out of the detectives’ rotation today and maybe tomorrow. But if something else comes up that I need you for, you’re going to have to do your job.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

The lieutenant sighed loudly again.

“Word’s going on to the media about the Strouds. There’ll be pictures of Zachary on TV and online all day. If someone picked him up, even if the kid can’t remember his own name, they’ll know it by dinnertime for sure. But I’ll tell you what’s worrying me.”

“What’s that?”

“If someone picked the kid up, why haven’t they called us already? If he’s injured, why haven’t they shown up at the hospital?”

Detective Keenan had no answer for that. The same questions had been gnawing at his gut all night and had only grown worse as morning arrived.

“If Zachary Stroud’s alive,” the lieutenant went on, “chances are he’s still out there somewhere. I hope you find him, Joe. And I sure as hell hope you find him hiding in some bushes somewhere instead of at the bottom of the river.”

“So do I.”

“Call me the minute you find anything,” Lieutenant Duquette said. “I’m keeping the chief informed.”

The call ended before Keenan could reply. Not that he had anything more to say. Sam Duquette was a good man and a good cop, though he could be one hell of a ballbuster at times. Like everyone, his nerves were frayed. Bad enough this family had to suffer such a crushing tragedy, but if the boy was alive and they couldn’t find him, the Coventry police would look completely inept. Detective Keenan wasn’t much worried about the city’s reputation, but his higher-ups had to be.

Slipping his cell phone into his pocket, he crossed the street and headed for the food truck. His craving for coffee—for anything other than finding Zachary Stroud alive—had vanished, but if he didn’t get some caffeine into his body, his addiction would punish him with a splitting headache, and he couldn’t afford that. He needed to be awake and alert, not just to search for the boy but to figure out what to do if the search became a mystery. He didn’t believe the boy had gone into the river, but if he wasn’t in the woods and hadn’t wandered into one of the surrounding neighborhoods, then where had he gone? People didn’t just vanish.

The thought made him freeze, standing in front of the food truck, drawing curious glances.

Sometimes people do vanish,
he thought, remembering Carl Wexler.
Sometimes they do.

Jake Schapiro dreams of his dead brother. They’re watching TV in the living room, some ancient episode of SpongeBob that they’ve seen a thousand times before. Their mom sits in her chair in the corner, correcting school papers and telling them stories about the crazy kids in her class. She never names the kids, always starts her tales with “one of the girls” or “one of the boys,” but Jake and Isaac can usually figure out whom she’s talking about.

Mom looks tired tonight. Even more so than usual, and that’s saying something considering how little sleep she gets during the school year. Summers aren’t really vacations so much as opportunities for Allie Schapiro to catch up on her sleep. Teachers and the children of teachers understand the dynamic better than other people, understand how much work it is to go in and face the kids every day, keep them thinking and keep them entertained and try to inspire them to give a damn about their futures. She earns those bags under her eyes. Truth is, Jake doesn’t mind those bags. A couple of the boys in his class have told him they think his mom is hot, so anything that makes her look older and less attractive is okay with him. Even as he thinks this, he knows it’s unkind, but he can’t help it.

A commercial comes on. Isaac jumps up and zooms around the room in that irritating way he’s been doing since he could walk. He sings a song he knows only because it’s on Jake’s iPod.

“Isaac, is all of your homework done?” Mom asks.

Jake smiles. He has math practice questions to do but intends to dash them off in homeroom. He relishes the knowledge that Mom won’t ask him—he never gives her reason to worry about his schoolwork—but Isaac is a little ADHD and when he starts acting like a little spaz, she worries.

The little goofball rushes from the room, arms out like he’s an airplane, totally lost in his own brain. Isaac-world, they sometimes call it.

“Isaac?” Mom calls.

Jake rolls his eyes. He doesn’t much care about SpongeBob these days, but he just wants them both to chill.

“Ike!” he shouts.

There’s a pause, like his little brother has skipped a beat. Like the way the TV sometimes seems to freeze and become pixilated and then catch up with the sound and image of whatever Jake might be watching.

Out of the corner of his eye, Jake sees Isaac come back into the room. He continues to make his airplane buzz for a couple of seconds and then interrupts himself. “Yes?”

“Did you do your homework?” Jake asks, not looking at him.

Wake up, Jakey.

Isaac’s voice sounds strange, suddenly. Like it’s a whisper in his ear instead of coming from across the room. Jake frowns.

“I’m not asleep, dumbass.”

“Hey!” Mom snaps. “Watch that. You know I don’t like when you two speak that way to—”

Wake up, Jakey. Please, wake up.

“My homework’s all done,” Isaac says, in a whiny sort of why-don’t-you-leave-me-alone voice.

“I wish mine was,” Mom mutters.

Reluctantly, because it’s easier to think of himself instead of someone else—even his mother—Jake turns to his brother, thinking that he’ll make nice with Isaac and the two of them can go upstairs and watch TV or read comics or something in order to give their mother some quiet time to work.

Jake cannot breathe. His heart races and a scream begins to build in his chest, right in the middle where he thinks his heart must be.

“What?” Isaac demands, pouting angrily and crossing his arms. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

The scream bursts from his lips in a wordless babble of terror. Jake scrambles, falls from his chair, and then lurches to the other side of the room, taking cover beside his mother’s chair. He’s screaming and crying at the same time, shouting out words that his mother doesn’t even realize he knows, calling out to God in the same breath as he mutters ohfuck ohfuck ohfuck.