The Abortionist's Daughter (22 page)

Too stunned to reply at first, Huck merely stared at his boss, who obviously knew the value of waiting out a silence. He did some fast calculations and figured out that Stan didn’t know Megan had been at his house all day; just as quickly he decided not to correct his boss. He shook his head in disbelief. “
This
is why Branson came in here?”

Stan steepled his fingers together and rested his chin at the apex and waited.

“Do you know who Bill Branson is?” Huck demanded. “He’s Megan’s former boyfriend, that’s who.”

“He mentioned that, yes.”

“Did he also mention that he was the one who took the photos?”

“No,” said Stan, “he didn’t mention that.”

“I didn’t sleep with her, Stan.”

“What was she doing at your house last night, then?”

“She had a fight with her father. I don’t know why she came to me, but she did. And then she left. She didn’t spend the night.”

“Oh, Huck,” said the chief. “Please.”

“She didn’t!” Huck exclaimed. He started to tell the chief to ask Megan, but he stopped himself, because number one he didn’t know where Megan was, and number two he didn’t want any more light shined upon Megan, and number three she might mention the kiss—and one kiss certainly did not mean they’d slept together.

Immediately he felt as low and slimy as an old frog, giving himself this kind of wiggle room.

Nonetheless he reiterated his position. “I’m not sleeping with her, Stan. Ask Ernie, if you have to ask someone.”

“And he’d know?”

“My best friend? My partner? Please. Ask him. Or not,” he said. “Fine. What are you going to do, though? You’re not thinking of taking me off the case, are you? You’re kidding!” he exclaimed. “On the basis of one allegation by a jealous stalker, you’re taking me off the case?”

“Oh come on, Huck, don’t make this hard for me,” Stan said. “We’ve got to solve this case, and we’ve got to solve it without any side issues. The whole damn country’s watching. You think I want a concurrent side investigation about members of my police force fucking the victim’s daughter? I don’t have any choice.”

“I don’t believe this!”

“Two weeks,” said Stan. “We’ll see where we are then. I’m sorry, Huck.”

“Stan, you gotta know about this guy. He’s wacko. He’s stalking the girl. He’s a lying scumbag who took pictures of his girlfriend and sold them on the Net! Come on, Stan!” His boss said nothing, and Huck decided a different tack was in order. “What good’s it going to do to take me off the case, anyway? People are going to think what they want to think. I’m not going to give in to this. By the way, you wouldn’t believe what we found out this morning. You know of a Jack Fries?”

“Ernie can tell me,” said Stan. “I don’t want to hear it from you.”

“Oh my god,” said Huck. “I can’t believe this.”

“Go home. Go to Minnesota. Help Carolyn out.”

“But we’ve—”

“Ernie’ll tell me,” said Stan. “Go home, Huck. Oh, and do me a favor, huh? Stay away from Megan?”

Huck knew at that point it was futile to argue anymore. He unpinned his badge and dropped it on the chief’s desk.

“Have it your way,” he said.

—————

He left the office and drove aimlessly for a while, out past the reservoir, up one of the canyons, back down into town. He stopped at the liquor store and picked up a six-pack of beer. He drove by the Thompson-Duprey house. The yellow tape was still up, but there were no signs of activity. A dog darted out in front of his car, and he had to slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid it. (The town had a leash law but hey: who was off duty?)

He kept driving. Part of him figured he should simply give in and cruise around town until he spotted the yellow Volkswagen, find Megan, and take her back to his place and do the things with her he’d thought of doing all along. What did he have to lose? What difference would it make? When he was very young, the line between a kiss and something more seemed dark and clearly drawn, and each step you took redefined the whole relationship. Now it seemed that the line was much farther back, that you crossed into that other world simply by holding a certain kind of glance one second too long. By this standard he and Megan were already in deep. And in terms of the public eye, if everyone was going to think he was sleeping with her, then he might just as well.

But Huck drove home. Because the other part of him knew that he had everything to lose, not the least of which included Carolyn. Megan was nineteen. There were seven years between the two of them. She was in a vulnerable state. It wasn’t right, and he knew it.

By the time he got home, it was dark. The firemen were outside in the front parking lot, just back from a call. He waved to them and drove down his driveway and cut the engine. Inside he found the heat blasting out of every single duct, so the first thing he did was go around opening windows. He got a beer and propped open the back door to the kitchen, which led out to his small backyard. And as he did so, he heard the rustle of clothing.

Megan stepped from the shadow of the shed into the porch light. She was wearing a dark sweater that hung on her unattractively, with a long ropy scarf that dangled to her knees. Her hair was pinned up, and she wore a pair of glasses.

“I was thinking,” she said.

Huck waited, unable to form any words.

“About how you kissed me last night,” she said. “And whether it meant anything or whether it was just one of those moments.”

“Come out of the cold,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to come in until I understand what it all meant. I haven’t been the best person for a guy to get involved with,” she said. “For instance, if you asked Bill, he might tell you that I used him. And maybe he’d be right. And maybe I used others too. I don’t know what all this says about me, but I want you to know that last night, when I kissed you back, I didn’t feel like I was using anybody. That sounds corny, doesn’t it? But there wasn’t any other reason for my kissing you back, except that I wanted to.”

Huck’s mouth was so dry his tongue felt like a washcloth.

“Where did you park your car?” was all he could manage.

“Are you worried?”

“I’m worried about a lot of things,” he said.

“Like what?”

He managed to tell her, then, what had happened that afternoon, about his being sent home.

“As in kicked off the case?”

“For now,” said Huck.

“Because he thinks we’re sleeping together?”

“That’s right.”

Megan glanced down.

“Come out of the cold,” he said again.

She edged past him, into the yellow light of his kitchen. He closed the door and drew the blinds.

“By the way, he kicked me out,” she told him.

“Who?”

“The dorm guy. That’s where I went last night.”

“So you still need to find a place to stay.”

Megan nodded. She went and stood over a floor duct, huddling into herself. “I hope you’re not mad that I came here,” she said.

In the bright light, he saw a spattering of freckles across her nose that he’d not noticed before. “I’m not mad.”

“And I’ll leave, if you want,” she added.

“No,” he said hoarsely. “Don’t leave.”

Megan unwrapped her scarf and draped it carefully over the one kitchen chair. He stepped forward and removed her glasses. Her eyes were green on the inside and brown on the outside—again, something he’d not noticed until now. He reached back and unclipped her hair and it fell over her shoulders in unruly curls. He caught his breath as she reached down and lifted her sweater over her head. She wore no bra and her breasts were small and round, the skin very white, like little moons. They were very clearly on the other side of things now, but they had been, he reminded himself, for a long time.

And from that moment on he could think of nothing but being with her, and in her, in a place that up until now he’d dared not allow himself to imagine.

PART THREE

——————

FEBRUARY

CHAPTER TWELVE

——————

LATE IN JANUARY
the warm winds began to blow. They raced down over the mountains, rattling windows, prying off shingles, tossing lawn furniture from one yard to the next. They yanked car doors off their hinges and sent eighteen-wheelers wobbling to the side of the highway. They snapped tree limbs, which in turn downed power lines; and they whisked up the waves on the lake near Frank and Diana’s house, a lake that served as combination dog loop, athletic track, birdwatcher’s haven, fishing hole, and inflationary factor for the surrounding real estate.

According to the local newspaper, the winds were stronger than usual this year, which led to a collective snappiness about town. People were tired of lying awake at night waiting for their roofs to blow off; they were tired of getting up the next morning to find trash cans overturned and litter strewn about the street. Insurance companies were tired of car doors getting ripped off. Doctors were tired of people coming in with grit in their eyes. Lawyers were tired of neighbors blaming each other for acts of God. And the fire department was tired of living in dread of the winds fanning any small fire into an inferno.

As if the winds weren’t enough to put people on edge, the Duprey investigation remained stalled. Everyone was waiting for Frank to step forward and either confess or offer an alibi, but he remained silent; and neither the DA’s office nor the police were willing to step forward themselves with an indictment or arrest until they were sure they had enough evidence to secure a conviction, which they didn’t.

One good thing for Megan was that her classes were in full swing; the dorm was open, and she no longer was compelled, economically, to stay with her father in the hotel suite. Her second semester of biology was living up to its tyrannical reputation, and she had little time for parties or movies or the controlled substances that appeared more and more frequently in Natalie’s possession. The frenetic pace did not bother her, however. Though not quite a pariah, she nevertheless felt like she was in a glass box, with everyone wondering what secret knowledge she might possess about intimate family circumstances. She was glad to hole up in the lab.

But as much as her schedule permitted her to avoid the general public, it did not keep her from thinking about what had happened with Huck. There hadn’t been a second time, so she tried to write off the incident as just a hookup. After all, he had a girlfriend. But she found herself waking up in the middle of the night, deeply troubled by something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Not her mother’s death; that was too obvious. This was something different, something that left a fidgety fear in her stomach. Although maybe it had nothing to do with Huck, she told herself. She didn’t know.

For his part, Huck went around trying to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. He was allowed back at work (though reassigned to Records) when, two days after they slept together, Megan went to the chief on her own and assured him that nothing was going on between them. This she did unbeknownst to Huck, though he found out about it later, when he returned to work. Although he knew that nonfeasance could be just as bad as an out-and-out lie, he did not correct the chief, something he justified by allowing that what had been, had been only once, and was no more, which was not a lie.

The third week of January Carolyn finally returned home—this time for the rest of the winter, she assured Huck. She found her house full of dust, her cats thin, and her plants drooping, but she was glad to see Huck, and he was glad to see her. They made love twice a night. Whenever the image of Megan’s face popped up, he cleared his throat and it vanished. Just like that. It was a new trick, and it worked so well he was surprised it wasn’t common knowledge.

Frank himself spent the latter part of the month looking for a new place to live. The hotel bill was mounting on his credit card, and it was clear he was never going to be able to go back to his and Diana’s house. Not only was it still a crime scene, but the memories were something he’d never be able to live with. He concentrated on finding a small house in town and was shocked to learn the asking price of a “cozy, turn-of-the-century bungalow” with outdated wiring and rusty plumbing. He kept at it, though, using a realtor who became a kind of confidante for him as they motored from one property to the next.
What do I do with all of her stuff?
he asked, bewildered at the thought of a move.
If the house has two good-size bedrooms, do you think my daughter will live with me?
The realtor had no answers for these questions; she merely listened, and pointed out the proximity of the bike path.

For now, however, Frank remained at the hotel. During the day he went into work, although there wasn’t much for him to do. In the evening he drank a couple of scotches and nuked a Stouffer’s. He surfed the news programs and tried to stay abreast of current cases. Megan, who had finally shown up three days after disappearing, was cordial with him, sometimes warm even; but he could tell from her eyes that there was still a seed of doubt in her mind. Sometimes they went out to dinner, but this was difficult because the press was always there. More often than not they ordered takeout.

He kept himself busy enough. It was only late at night, alone in the king-size hotel bed, that he could no longer avoid thinking about the growing case against him. He was no fool. Sooner or later he was going to have to divulge his whereabouts the night Diana died. He imagined how he would tell the story, and wondered if it would make sense; he even wrote it down on paper, to test its credibility. He read it over and over, and the more he read it, the less sense it made, and the less convinced he was that it had done any good at all.

—————

The man’s name was Edgar Love, and he lived ten miles out of town. Edgar Love was the registered owner of a pornographic Web site called ThePearl.com—a name Frank had thought totally without meaning until some English major on his staff brought in a lurid nineteenth-century novel of the same name. The material on Edgar Love’s Web site, however, was purely twenty-first century: high quality, digital, and about as graphic as any medical textbook. There would probably have been no case—it was
Penthouse
-level stuff, within the bounds of the First Amendment—until someone’s search turned up pictures of children.

Frank’s office had begun investigating the matter a year ago, and when records showed the photos had been sent across state lines, the federal authorities got involved. Normally this would have led to months of squabbling between the two offices, but by some political miracle that probably had more to do with their mutually visceral disgust for the crime in question than with anyone’s sudden relinquishment of professional ego, the two offices had cooperated. Working together, they’d seized hard drives—not those of Edgar Love but those of his underlings, full of damning links and out-of-state e-mails. By early December of this year, they were on the verge of an arrest.

Then Frank saw the pictures, and made a mess of things.

Frank was no prude; over the course of the Pearl investigation he’d seen things that sickened and jolted him, images that haunted his dreams at night and sometimes made it impossible to do the things with Diana that a husband and wife are supposed to do. Yet most of the time, as a prosecutor, he was able to maintain a professional attitude about things. He did this by treating the pictures like the pictures he dealt with all the time, as part of his job. These pictures weren’t of real-life girls, he told himself; they were simply evidentiary pieces of a huge criminal jigsaw with which they were going to nail this guy.

Then he saw the pictures of Megan, and every drop of professionalism evaporated in the cold December air.

Although he’d never met Edgar Love face to face, he knew everything he needed to know about the man. He knew his address and his Social Security number, the numbers of his bank accounts and what he’d claimed on his tax returns for the past five years. He knew the man’s aliases; he knew the names of his wife and son, his sisters, his parents in Massachusetts. He knew where most of his material came from—the Ukraine, Romania. He knew how many hits the site had received since its inception, broken down by hour, day, month, and e-mail address. Based on all this, he estimated that some ten thousand viewers had possibly clicked on his daughter’s pictures.

Thinking back on it, he wished he could say that he had acted out of a sense of duty. He wished he could say that he simply wanted to preserve his daughter’s honor. But that wasn’t really the case, because his duty was to let the wheels of justice take care of men like Edgar Love, and his daughter’s honor was a quaint but irrelevant concept in this day and age—something he had no control over whatsoever. Besides, the pictures of his daughter remained out there in cyberspace.

No. What motivated him after the argument with Diana was merely this: one man’s wish to snap his fingers and have another man vanish.

Twenty-four years in Cañon City, or the rest of your life on an unnamed island. You choose.

In early January the federal authorities had gone to arrest Edgar Love at his house in the mountains. There was nobody at home. There were dirty dishes in the sink and a basket of laundry at the base of the stairs, as though the family had just run into town for a doctor’s appointment. But the plants were drooping and the fountain was dry and a quick peek in the refrigerator released the putrid smell of bad meat. Edgar Love and his family were gone, and no one knew where.

Except Frank.

—————

The strong Chinooks that hit the town in January melted most of the snow that had fallen during December’s blizzard; by the beginning of February, the lawns in town lay bare, brown, and matted down with November’s grass. Tiny weeds sprouted, along with the nubby tips of crocuses and tender green lettuce curls in garden beds throughout this homegrown town.

At Susan Beekman’s house, the melted snow exposed a moonscape of pocked holes and booty. This was the work of their dog, Rudy, a Siberian husky who roamed the neighborhood in search of anything he could get his teeth on, which he then carried back to their yard for leaner times in dogville.

On the first Sunday in February, Susan Beekman woke up in a bad mood. Her house was a mess, groceries sat in bags, toys were scattered, and her husband’s dirty socks lay
on the kitchen counter for chrissake.
She felt a little overwhelmed by it all. Then she looked out and saw the litter in her yard, and it struck her that here, at least, was a manageable project. At the very minimum, she could accomplish
something
that day.

And so she locked Rudy in the garage and, armed with a shovel and a large trash bag, went out to work in the yard. Within half an hour she had unearthed a headless Barbie, a rocky loaf of rye, a bag of candy canes, a half-dozen split tennis balls, a stiffened black sock, a ham hock, and a chewed-up Tupperware container. Nothing seemed salvageable, except for the yellow and green sprinkler head lying close to the fence separating her property from Frank’s. Without giving it much thought, she figured it was Frank’s and tossed it over the crime tape. Close by was a brown leather glove; figuring it was also Frank’s, she tossed that too over the tape.

At ten o’clock, noticing her husband and son in the kitchen window, she put down the bag and took off her gloves. She surveyed her yard. No longer did it look like white trash. Not bad, for an hour’s work.

—————

One brown leather glove, soft and pebbly, cashmere lined, size medium: by noon on Monday Ernie had it tagged, labeled, and Ziplocked into evidence. He sat at his desk pondering its significance. Where had it come from? How had they missed it? Which is not to say that he wasn’t delighted to have something new. The cashmere lining would yield skin cells, which the lab could test for DNA. Of course, if it turned out to be Frank’s, it wouldn’t add much to their case; a husband’s glove provided no new link to the death itself. But if it was not Frank’s, then they would have their first lead in a month.

Wishful thinking, he cautioned himself.

That Monday morning Ernie leaned back in his chair and stared out his window. Water poured from a gutter, and sun glinted off the puddles in the parking lot. He needed Huck and cursed his friend for putting himself in a position where Stan had had to stick him down in Records. Ernie never asked Huck what had gone on with Megan, and he didn’t want to know; still, he was angry with Huck for making things look bad at the very least. Now, because of Huck’s possible indiscretions, he, Ernie, was having to work with Detective Marcus Stoner instead. This was a bad thing, not just because Marcus was new and told off-color jokes but because he didn’t have a whole lot going on up there. He always focused on the wrong thing. When first reviewing Diana’s file, he focused on her medical history (“Was she ever suicidal?”), her use of swim goggles (“Maybe she couldn’t see where she was going”), whether she’d eaten in the last hour (“You can get a cramp swimming is what my mother always said. Did anyone think of that?”).

“Yowsers,” Marcus had said at the end of his first day. “This could go on forever, couldn’t it?”

With Marcus on the case, Ernie might as well be working alone.

He spent the rest of that Monday in early February conducting more interviews. Already three people had verified that Jack Fries had indeed been playing squash at his health club from five to six-thirty on December 17. And several nurses vouched that he’d been at the hospital from six-forty-five until nine, with his daughter, Rose. It looked like Jack Fries was off the hook. Piper McMahon too; she had been at her daughter’s second-grade holiday concert.

Which left Frank.

Ernie went home early that evening and made love to his wife, wondering how all this was going to affect his midyear review. Over dinner he picked at his food and argued with his daughter over whether the shadowy area four inches below her navel constituted the beginning of her pubis or not. He ended up falling asleep in front of the television.