Chapter 20
Robert Michael Martin was waiting for Calvano and Maggie on his front porch early the next morning, looking anxious and eager to please. His hair was still damp from the shower and he wore a clean shirt with his baggy jeans. His slick lawyer was nowhere in sight, but Noni Bates sat on the porch swing near him, an enigmatic smile on her face. I caught a whiff of fatigue from her and realized that she might be older than I thought. For the first time, I acknowledged that perhaps the simplicity of her life had not only made her serene nature possible, it might have been all she could manage with what little energy she had. Trying to keep Robert Michael Martin out of trouble was taking its toll on my elderly Aphrodite.
“Where’s your lawyer?” Maggie asked before she’d even reached the top step.
“He couldn’t be here,” Martin explained. “He’s out of town for the weekend. He sent Mrs. Bates instead.”
“He needs to be here,” Maggie said firmly. Calvano looked a bit panicked at that, like maybe he was going to pee in his tailored pants.
“It’s okay,” Noni said calmly. “I am perfectly capable of looking out for him. I will insist you keep to your word and ask him only about other volunteers.”
“Deal,” Calvano interrupted, unwilling to risk losing the interview.
Maggie looked annoyed, but walked through the front door when Martin opened it after suggesting they go into the living room. I saw why he was so anxious to install his guests there. He was playing at being the host. The room was cleaner than it had been a few days ago, so either the cops searching it had done Martin a favor, or he was getting used to the idea of actually having people in his house and had decided to clear out the pizza cartons and empty beer bottles. There was even a vase of flowers on the coffee table, a touch I suspected had been suggested by Noni.
“Would anyone like lemonade?” Noni asked. “I’ve made some fresh, and Robert has prepared Italian wedding cookies.”
“Sweet,” Calvano declared as he folded himself into the overstuffed couch. I hoped he didn’t expect to be welcomed with such open arms by all the people he interviewed using Maggie’s nonthreatening technique.
“That would be lovely,” Maggie said. She sat in an armchair across from Martin and put him at ease with small talk about the restaurant where he worked. It had been a neighborhood institution for decades and, in fact, Maggie’s parents had had their first date there. By the time Noni arrived with refreshments, they were all the best of friends, even Calvano, who managed to remain on Martin’s good side by saying absolutely nothing. But Noni moved more slowly than she usually did when she brought in the lemonade and cookies, and I found myself annoyed at Martin for just sitting there—he was a grown man and he should not be letting that lovely old lady wait on him hand and foot. He needed to stand up, dust himself off, quit being such a mamma’s boy, and be a man. He was going to wear her out if he kept it up.
Calvano cleared his throat like he was the chairman of the board about to call the meeting to order. I realized he was lost without his tried-and-true bullying approach, so I cut him some slack. “As Detective Gunn has mentioned, we are here to talk to you about the other volunteers for KinderWatch,” Calvano explained. “One reason we came down so hard on you is because the type of person who commits crimes like abducting a child frequently insinuates himself into the investigation as a way to keep tabs on how close law enforcement is to catching him. We feel the same may be true about KinderWatch and whoever took Tyler Matthews.”
Calvano unconsciously parroted Maggie’s very words to him as he launched into a deeper explanation of the type of person they were looking for. Noni probably knew Calvano was a horse’s ass, but Martin ate it up. He liked being treated as if he were a peer, never mind that the guy had wanted to throw him in prison for life just a couple of days ago. He listened eagerly, his eyes leaving Calvano’s face only long enough to admire his stupid Italian loafers and gun. I knew he’d spill his guts about the other volunteers. Maggie could bat her eyelashes all she wanted, but what Martin was really interested in was playing cops and robbers.
“So you’re looking for someone who was just pretending to be concerned about stopping online predators?” Martin asked eagerly when Calvano was done.
“It’s a little more specific than that,” Maggie said. “And you must be careful not to let your personal feelings about other volunteers color your judgment.” I felt this comment was a zinger meant for Calvano. So did Noni, who hid her smile.
“What do you mean?” Martin asked, anxious to get it right.
Maggie searched for a way to explain, but knew Martin’s limited social skills would make it difficult. “Let’s say, hypothetically speaking, that there are some volunteers who are aloof, standoffish. Snobby. Who act like they are too good to talk to you.” Martin’s face finally signaled understanding, though that description probably applied to just about everyone at KinderWatch. Martin was a natural scapegoat, and he’d probably spent a lifetime being ignored or taunted by others. “Naturally, you would not like them,” Maggie explained. “No one would. But that doesn’t mean they’re the kind of person we’re looking for. We are looking for a very specific type of individual.”
“Perhaps if you told him exactly what you were looking for?” said Noni, knowing Martin’s imagination was a few seconds from exploding in wild accusations aimed at most of the other KinderWatch volunteers. It is a rare man who can resist retaliation.
“All right,” Maggie agreed. “I’ll start. Adrian, you know more than me about the profile. You add what you need to.”
Right. Maggie would remember more from her standard training on child abusers undergone a decade ago than Calvano probably retained from earlier that day.
“This person would be a loner,” Maggie explained. “He would likely give lots of their time to KinderWatch and volunteer to go the extra mile, maybe taking care of the mainframe or overall computer files in some way. He would not want to simply pose as a child online. He’d want to play a larger role, so he could see what other volunteers had picked up on.”
Noni, sensing that Martin was realizing this description fit him to a T, intervened again. “You can see why Detective Calvano and the colonel might have suspected you,” she said cheerfully. “But that’s actually good, because it means you are in an excellent position to know who else might have done the same things you did.” Maggie nodded gratefully.
Martin thought hard, both self-conscious and proud that so many people were waiting on him to speak. We waited in silence, and I was beginning to think it was useless, that the pressure was too much for him, when Martin finally spoke. “Most of the hardcore volunteers are women,” he said. “They can get pretty intense. You’re looking for men, right?”
“Yes,” Maggie said firmly. “This was a man.”
“There’s the colonel,” Martin said hopefully. “I heard that he all but accused me. Maybe I ought to return the favor.” The rare note of belligerence in his voice told me he felt betrayed by the man who ran KinderWatch. I wondered if he would ever return as a volunteer, knowing what the colonel had said about him.
“He’s in a wheelchair, dude,” Calvano pointed out. “But, yeah, he did point the finger pretty hard at you. That’s why I came at you so hard.”
It was bullshit. He’d come at Martin hard because he was lazy and unimaginative, but it was as close as Calvano was going to come to an apology. Martin was angry enough at the colonel to accept Calvano’s excuse with a nod.
“This person would have his own car,” Maggie prompted him. “He’d be alone every time you saw him. Probably a little timid, especially around the female volunteers. He’d ask you questions, though, he’d likely approach you, wanting to know what you were up to, what you’d discovered online, if you had any new screen names of predators to track, if you’d discovered any new sites.”
Martin only looked more confused.
“Why don’t you just give them the names of all the other male volunteers who are local?” Noni suggested. She turned to Maggie. “What if they’re married?” she asked.
Maggie shrugged. “The guy might be married, but he’d need a private place to take the boy. But I think Mrs. Bates is right. Maybe you should just give us all the names you know of for the local male volunteers, starting with the ones who are not married. I’m not asking you to accuse anyone, just use your gut feelings and tell us who among that group you think best fits the profile we gave you.”
“Okay,” Martin agreed, relieved he was not being asked to accuse someone and put them through what he had been subjected to. “There are three guys it could be, and about four more it might be, but they’re all married.”
As he provided the names, Calvano wrote them down in his notebook, occasionally referring to the information he’d gleaned from the license plate check but not finding a hit. His cockiness was returning, I realized, now that he had some leads. His kind of leads, too—all he had to do was intimidate the men Martin had named.
“What are you going to do to them?” Martin asked warily. “They’re good people. Look what they volunteer their time for.”
“We’re not going to hassle them,” Maggie said firmly, with a warning glance at Calvano. “We’re going to start by finding out where they were on Thursday morning when the boy was taken. Most of them were probably at work, and that will rule out a lot. Don’t worry, we’ll be careful. No one will know their names came from you.”
“It isn’t that,” Martin explained. “I’ll probably never see them again. I’m not going back. Not after what the colonel said about me.” He glanced at Noni Bates. “Not after what the colonel thought about me.”
“I knew it wasn’t you, dear,” Noni said firmly. “I did not doubt you for an instant.”
“After all I did for him,” Martin added, his ire growing. “I was his best volunteer.”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Maggie advised. “You work in that field long enough and you start to develop a very dark view of human nature. It can change you. He just wanted to help find the boy.”
“I never want to be that way,” Martin declared, and I was unclear whether he meant like the colonel or like the predators the colonel tracked.
“You won’t be that way,” Noni said simply. “You aren’t and you won’t.”
“Well, I think that will do for us,” Maggie said, rising. She smiled at Martin. “You know, this area has a very active neighborhood watch organization. We train civilians for it. They get uniforms and ride around in cars, keeping an eye on things for us. They call in any problems they see. It’s a lot like what you’ve been doing, only on wheels. I think you’d be good at it.”
“Really?” Martin’s face lit up. “I’ll look into it.”
Calvano followed Maggie out the door, but did not wait until they were far from the house to make his opinion known. “Alfredo is going to kill you for sending that guy to him for neighborhood watch. He’s going to be one of those gung ho, fake-cop, live-for-the-job kind of guys who wear their uniforms all day, every day and scare the other volunteers away.”
“We all have our uses, Adrian,” Maggie told him with a smile. “We all have our uses.”