The Prophet (6 page)

“You’re sure of the road?”

“Shadow Wood. Yes.”

One of the detectives left then, and it was just Stan Salter and Adam.

“Do you think she was killed there?” Adam said.

“We’re going to find out. Did you see the place?”

“No.”

“Just gave her the address?”

Adam wasn’t sure if Salter’s tone was really loaded with contempt or if he was imagining it. He couldn’t have blamed the man either way. He was remembering that while the girl had teeth that were straight and white, she’d smiled in an odd, careful way, lips-only most of the time, as if she’d worn braces until recently and was still trained by muscle memory and teenage insecurity to hide those now-perfect teeth…

No, she didn’t. She didn’t have that smile at all. That was a different girl. You cannot think of them together, Adam, you cannot do that.

“Yes. I gave her the address in a phone message. Said she could let me know if it didn’t pan out, and then we’d try again. I never heard back. She told me her name was April Harper. She told me she was a college student.”

“You make no habit of checking identification?” Salter asked, and Adam had to make an effort to focus on the question. He kept losing himself to that nail polish, that plastic folder, that smell of coconut that told him she’d been to a tanning bed.

“On my clients?” he said. “No. Who does? I wasn’t letting her board a plane or even drink a beer, I was agreeing to do a job. Checking her age, that’s not my responsibility.”

But he was thinking—
seventeen, seventeen, seven-fucking-teen—
and the liquor was stirring in his belly like acid.

She’d looked it, too. He couldn’t pretend otherwise, couldn’t even grasp at the pathetic shield of claiming she’d been one of those girls who looked older than her age. If anything, she maybe looked a little younger. Would’ve been carded for cigarettes by any gas station clerk. Went out of her way to tell him she was a senior at Baldwin-Wallace, and while his eyes had said
No,
his brain had said
Who gives a shit
and her money had said
Just do the job, Adam.

“You didn’t think,” Salter asked, “that she might be lying to you?”

“Everyone lies to me, Salter. All the time. Did I think she might be lying? Sure. But caring about
why
she was lying, that’s just… look, she said what she wanted me to do and she had a reason for it and she had the letters.”

“And the cash,” Salter said.

Adam felt like breaking the smug prick’s nose, Salter sitting there with his bristling military crew cut and hooded eyes and his badge, looking at Adam as if he were one of the dancers back at Haslem’s, empty of dignity and hungry for a dollar.

“You don’t need a paycheck?” Adam said. “You don’t need to keep the mortgage paid?”

Salter’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not interested in the idea that you wanted work. I’m interested in the idea that she paid cash.”

Right. Because cash suggested her age, at least to Salter, who expected an adult would have written a check or asked if Adam accepted credit cards.

“In my business,” Adam said, “cash transactions aren’t unusual.”

This was true. A lot of people came to him with higher IQs than credit scores, and that wasn’t to say they were bright.

“I see.” Salter made a notation on his pad, and then said, “Let’s talk about the letters she had. You read them?”

“Yeah.”
Seventeen. A child. A corpse.

“Did you make copies?”

“No. She’d already done that. What she had, they were copies. I never saw the originals. And I saw only one of the letters. But there were others.”

“What did that letter say?”

“It was from her dad. He was—he’d been—in prison. Got out and then I guess he didn’t write anymore for a while. She was upset about that. Then he started back up, but he wouldn’t say where he was, wouldn’t give a return address or anything. So
it was just, you know, a one-way street. She wanted to be able to respond. Asked me to find him. An address, I mean.”

“You’re qualified for this sort of work?”

“I’m a licensed PI, you know that.”

Salter didn’t respond.

“It’s what I do,” Adam said. “Same thing I do every day. People skip out on bond, and I go find them. I bring them back. You know this.”

“Nobody had skipped out on a bond here.”

“Skill set,” Adam said. “Same skill set.”

“I see. So you used that skill set, and you found an address?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you remember it?”

“No.”

“But you have records?”

“Yeah. Yes.”

“She didn’t give you a physical address? Just the phone number?”

“Just the phone number. She said she was a student at—”

“Baldwin-Wallace,” Salter said. “Yes. She say how she picked you for the job?”

“She said she had a referral.” Adam wished he’d stopped for a mint or some gum. He was breathing beer out with every word, and it made them seem flimsy, pathetic.

“We understand this part,” Salter said. “Her boyfriend told us. The referral, if we can call it that, came from him. He plays football for your brother.”

“Plays?” Adam said. “Like, right now? On this team?”

“Like right now,” Salter said, nodding. “Colin Mears? I gather he and his family are pretty close to your brother. There was some conversation about you, and I guess Colin understood you to be a detective.”

Adam let that glide by.
Understood you to be,
not
understands
that you are.
Who cared? Who cared what Salter thought? What mattered here was a girl with glitter nail polish. What mattered was finding the sick son of a bitch who’d killed her, finding him and ending him. Because if you didn’t… if he just stayed out there…

“It’s a shame she lied to you,” Salter said, “and a shame you didn’t ask for any sort of identification. Because if you’d been operating with her real name, you’d have found her father easily. At Mansfield Correctional.”

Adam stared at him. “He never left?”

“Never left. He’s been there seven years. We’ve got people interviewing him right now. He says he wrote his last letter in August. So whoever kept writing? Whoever it is you found for her? We need to find
him.
Fast.”

“Makes no sense,” Adam said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Salter. I saw the letter, okay? The guy who wrote it was trying
not
to see her.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I read the damn—”

“You’ve told me that. But it seems like he was tossing a lot of breadcrumbs out for someone who didn’t want anyone following the trail. Telling her he was in town, then giving her his landlord’s name? This to a girl who was actively seeking contact with him? That doesn’t strike you as contradictory?”

These were fair points, but still Adam shook his head.

“He knew where to find her, clearly. So what’s the point in that kind of a game?”

“I’m not sure,” Salter said. “But games aren’t uncommon with stalking. Not at all.”

“It’s so patient, though,” Adam said. “Waiting to see if she’d respond? If she’d look for him? It’s too damn patient.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so patient. Maybe when she showed up at his door, it rushed him.”

Adam remembered the numbers then. They floated toward him on a black breeze: 7330. On Shadow Wood Lane, yes. That was the address, that was the door at which she’d arrived.

That was where he’d sent her.

W
HEN BETH CAME DOWNSTAIRS
to greet Kent, it was past two in the morning but she didn’t show any surprise. During the season, hours like this were no cause for alarm for a coach’s wife, and in the years before they’d had children, hours like this had been Beth’s norm. She’d been an ER nurse and intended to return to it once Lisa and Andrew were old enough. The night shift had never ebbed away from her; Kent sometimes found her making coffee at four in the morning simply because she knew better than to fight for a return to sleep.

Tonight, though, she’d been asleep. He could tell that from her foggy smile and the way her long blond hair was fuzzed out from the pillow. “Still perfect,” she said. “Nice work, babe.”

He’d opened the refrigerator to get a bottle of water and in the shaft of white light she saw something that made her say, “Hon?” in a concerned voice.

He took the water out and let the door swing shut and they were standing in darkness when he told her that Rachel Bond was dead.

“Someone killed that poor girl? Murdered her?” she said, her
reflex response to bad news, stating the facts and considering them, the practiced reaction of someone who had been required to show poise in the face of crisis. Tonight it chafed.
Scream,
he wanted to say,
cry, shout, break down,
because no quality was so annoying in someone else as the very one you didn’t like in yourself. He’d spent the whole night trying to offer calm and strength and to repress emotion. He was tired of that.

Beth crossed the kitchen and took him in her arms then and the irritable edge that sorrow and fatigue had given him melted into her warmth. He held her while he told her about the police station, all that had been said, Stan Salter and Colin Mears and the news about Adam.

“Adam sent her to him?” Beth leaned back, searching his eyes.
“Adam?”

He nodded. “You remember the night that Colin asked me about him? Saw him in the team photo from the championship year and asked where he’d gone? Well, I told him he was still here, and I said… I said he was a private detective. He remembered that, apparently. And when Rachel decided to try and find her father…”

“She went to Adam.”

“Yes.”

They were silent. Kent finished his water. Neither of them turned on the lights.

“She was such a beautiful girl,” Beth whispered. “In every way. Too mature. You know I used to tell you that. Like she’d never been a
girl,
always had to be an adult.”

“I know.”

Beth wiped tears from her eyes with her fingertips. “She was going to do so much, Kent. She was one of those… you could just tell that she was going to do so much.”

Her voice trailed off and he reached out and stroked her hair as she took a shaking breath, folded her arms tightly around
herself, and said, “By tomorrow morning, people will have heard what happened. Maybe before practice.”

“We won’t practice. I’ll say a few words, send them home.” He leaned against the counter and removed his baseball cap and ran a hand through his hair. “They’ll try to connect it to football. Make her a symbol, start dedicating games to her. I wish they wouldn’t.”

“They’re just boys.”

“It’s not going to be only the boys. It’ll be the parents, the fans, the guys on the radio. It’ll be the cheerleaders and the teachers and the janitors and even the police. All of a sudden a bunch of kids playing a game are going to represent something they should not.”

“Maybe that won’t happen.”

“Trust me,” he said. “It will.”

The police had finished with him before three, but Adam didn’t make it home until the sun was up. He went to his office—a convenient trip from the police station—and then he drove north to the lake. There, on the tumbled slabs of rocks that formed the breakwater, in the shadow of an empty mill that had once produced steel and now stood as a tired symbol of an age that had been gone for generations but that people still mourned as if it had just ended, he sat in the cold and drank from the bottle of whiskey he’d removed from his office. It was very good whiskey. Auchentoshan Three Wood, a fine Scotch. He kept only good stuff around his home and office. You didn’t drink the good stuff as fast, couldn’t afford to.

He drank it fast now.

Didn’t get much of it down.

As the moon went pale and then faded beneath the dawn’s
lead light, Adam Austin vomited fine Scotch into Lake Erie and then he let himself weep, slipping down until one arm and one foot were in the frigid water, the wind heedless and unforgiving. This would make him sick, being both unprepared for the cold and unwilling to step out of it. It would infect him in time.

Why again?
he thought.
Why wasn’t bearing it once enough? How can it
not
be?
He crawled back up the rocks and stared out at this lake that touched three other states and one other country in places he couldn’t see, this lake that was always cold, when you needed it to be and when you didn’t. Watched the horizon take shape and then, when it was bright enough or as close to bright as this day seemed inclined to get, he returned to his car and drove home. It was the only home he’d ever known, the home his parents had brought him to from the hospital, their firstborn son, firstborn child, eldest of three. He’d remodeled when he could afford to, replaced what he cared to. Other than the basics of the structure, there wasn’t much left to the house that recalled what it had once been. He’d changed almost everything.

Except for one room.

He walked to it now, stood in the dim upstairs hallway, and reached for the knob. Laid his hand on the chill metal and read the handwritten sign:
MARIE LYNN AUSTIN LIVES HERE—KNOCKS REQUIRED, TRESPASSING FORBIDDEN! THANKS, BOYS!
He shook his head. Not yet. He couldn’t enter like this, nothing more to show her than a drunk man with wet shoes and bile on his shirtsleeve and blood on his hands. More blood.

Instead, he went down the hall and peeled off his clothes and turned on the shower, looking into the mirror as the old water heater took its time limbering up and preparing for action. His eyes were dry now. They’d stay that way. He knew that.

“I’m coming for you,” he whispered, and then he thought that was a strange thing to tell your own reflection, and turned away.

W
ORD SPREADS FAST IN
Chambers, Ohio. There was nothing in the morning newspaper, but his kids already knew, anyhow, and Kent was not surprised. It is a small town, close-knit. Or invasive. You picked the word depending on your role in it, the way it impacted you. The familiarity, the way everyone knew everyone else, either wrapped warm arms around you or pried with cold, cruel fingers. One of the boys on his team had a father with the police. Another had an uncle with the coroner’s office, a third had a mother who worked as an emergency dispatcher. It would have started with one of the three. Or maybe one with a connection he didn’t even know about, and it ultimately didn’t matter; somewhere, somehow, one of them would have heard, would have issued a late-night call or text message or e-mail, and that would have spawned a dozen like it, and most of the town probably woke to the news.