Chapter 7
If ever I am sent back to the world of the living, I want a friend like Noni Bates to be with me. She beat the cops to Robert Michael Martin’s house, having correctly surmised that Calvano would set his sights on him. But it was more than that, I realized, when I found her on his front porch. A vein of anxiety ran through her, a fear he might turn out to be the most evil of beings her schoolteacher’s heart could imagine. I realized it took courage for her to be there at his house in pursuit of the truth. She was sturdy, but she was small, and she was no match for a man Martin’s size.
I wanted to search his house before anyone else arrived and polluted it with their own agendas. I didn’t think Martin was connected to the boy’s disappearance, not after feeling the residual emotions the kidnapper had left behind. But I’d racked up a lifetime of being wrong. So I felt it was prudent to check, just in case.
I lingered in the front hallway, soaking in the loneliness of the dusty old house, while Noni rang the bell outside. Martin appeared promptly, shambling along like a bear awoken from hibernation. I get to see the things people do when they think no one is looking, and sometimes it’s not pretty. Martin was sleepily scratching his belly and blinking as if surprised to find it was still daylight outside.
“Mrs. Bates?” he said when he opened the door—without checking to see who it was first, I might add. He was lucky he’d not been swept off his feet by a sea of cops and flattened against the hallway walls. “What are you doing here?”
“Get dressed,” she said firmly. “And call a lawyer now. I am certain that detective is on his way to arrest you.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.” He sounded so dumbfounded, I almost felt sorry for the poor slob. He actually thought being innocent might protect him. That only told me he’d never run into cops like Calvano before.
“May I come in?” Noni asked. He stepped aside and she entered his front hall as if it were Buckingham Palace. If she noticed the musty air, the dust on the furniture, or the lingering smell of fried meat, she gave no sign that she found it in the least important.
But she did eye his attire. He’d ditched the flour-dusted jeans and was wearing a dingy T-shirt and boxer shorts. “Really, dear. I taught men like that detective when they were still boys and pushing other children around on the playground. He will be here soon. You get dressed and call a lawyer.”
“I don’t need a lawyer,” Martin said again, affronted at the implication that he might.
“Then at least get dressed.” The steel was back in her voice, and he blinked once, then obeyed, climbing the stairs to the upper chaos of his second floor. I followed.
It was as uncared for as the rest of the house. I moved from room to room, picking up on the vague fear that had driven his mother’s existence. It permeated every room, including the one where she had died: a hospital bed still dominated the interior and pill bottles still littered the bureau surface. Only the bed, stripped clean of its linens, had been touched since the body had been removed—what had he said? A year ago? The dude seriously needed to move on.
I felt sorry for the guy. He was just some schlep who’d never been loved enough as a kid because his mother had been too overwhelmed and afraid of sliding into poverty to spare the time. He didn’t have friends because he didn’t know how to make them.
I searched the rooms, all the while expecting to hear Calvano and his men entering below. There was no trace of a small boy anywhere, not in any of the two empty bedrooms or the chaotic one Robert Michael Martin clearly occupied and used, it appeared, for sitting in bed and eating pizza while he watched television. I even searched the attic. It was filled with the detritus of his mother’s life. She had apparently saved everything she ever owned, just in case she might need it again. The basement was dark and dirt-floored in that way of old houses that have never been updated. The boy had never been there. No one had ever been there. Martin lived in isolation. The rooms were half dead, as devoid of energy as his life.
I returned to the first floor just as Calvano arrived. If he was surprised to have Noni Bates answer the door, he did not show it.
“We’re here to search the house,” Calvano said, and I realized, appalled, that he did not recognize her from earlier. “We would like permission to search, but we can get a warrant, if necessary.”
“Wait here,” Noni told him, and shut the door firmly in his face, locking the dead bolt. I enjoyed that immensely. She called upstairs to Martin, who promptly appeared, attired in a short-sleeve checked shirt and chinos he had obviously not worn for several years. His belly spilled over the waistband like bread dough, but he did look far more respectable, like an actual taxpaying citizen, for example. For some of the cops waiting to search his house, that might make a difference.
“The police are here,” she told him with her usual conciseness. “They want permission to search your house.”
“Let them in,” he said at once. “Of course they can search. I have nothing to hide.”
Noni visibly relaxed. He had passed the test. She was back to believing him to be the innocent she hoped he was. “You be the one to let them in,” she advised him.
Martin opened the door. When he saw the rows of officers waiting to invade his life, words failed him. He simply stepped aside and let them enter.
“This constitutes your official permission to search the house,” Calvano said to him. “Please state so for the record.”
“It does,” Martin said in a weak voice. I caught a whiff of anxiety rising from him, a distress I could not pinpoint until I realized that this dark cave of a house was where he was safe from a world in which he felt off-kilter and, like all creatures, he did not like his lair disturbed. Noni sensed his anxiety and stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder as six men swept past them, fanning out to their assigned rooms.
“I expect you to put things back where they were,” Noni called after them, but only her forgiving eyes could have missed the obvious—this particular house could look no worse after a search than it had looked going in. How could anyone tell the difference?
I had not been able to check out the entire first floor before Calvano arrived, so I was anxious to continue my own brand of searching. Martin and the old lady were still in the front hall, where both seemed unable to decide whether it was okay for them to sit down or if they should remain standing the entire time. Dredging up a flash of gallantry, Martin fetched a kitchen chair for Noni, who sat in it numbly. Some of her courage was a fa?ade. Six cops could be intimidating.
As they tore Martin’s house apart looking for signs of the missing boy or evidence of nasty habits, I checked out a kitchen that seemed oddly unused for someone who was a chef. The refrigerator held dozens of take-out cartons in varying stages of decay, coffee creamer, and two six-packs of Dr Pepper. Pizza boxes lined the counters, paper plates smeared with tomato and grease filled the sink, and a couple crusty frying pans that smelled of old hamburger sat, unwashed, on the stove.
The guy definitely needed to get a life, but I found myself thinking that maybe he ought to get himself a maid first.
There was nothing that stamped the house as his until I discovered an office at the back of the first-floor hallway. A plainclothes officer was methodically flipping through a shelf of videos and books along one wall. He was soon joined by a colleague who had completed the search of his assigned room. He went right to a large-screen computer that dominated the room. A few spiral-bound notebooks and a row of pens were lined up next to its keyboard, but otherwise the counter was uncluttered, which was pretty remarkable given the old soda and fast-food wrappers filling every other surface.
“This is it,” the first cop predicted. “We’ve got him now.”
“Bingo,” the other said. He’d pulled up Martin’s browser history on the computer. “I’m no expert, but name a kiddie porn site or chat room and I’m betting it’s here. It’s all the guy ever went to.”
“Of course I went to those sites,” a voice said from the doorway. Martin had followed the extra man to his office. It was the only room in the house he really cared about. “I volunteer for an organization that tracks child abusers and sex offenders. I go online and pretend to be a kid. That’s how we know who to track online.”
The men stared at him blankly.
“It’s called KinderWatch,” Martin said proudly. “We have members up and down the East Coast, even a few in the Midwest. The founder lives right here, about a mile away. Ask him. He’ll tell you. I’m one of his best volunteers.”
Had he been better able to read the mood in the room, Martin’s sense of pride would have deflated in favor of fear. They’d seen the sites he had visited. Their judgment was swift and it was final.
“What’s going on?” Calvano asked from the doorway. Noni stood behind him, craning her neck, trying to see into the room.
“Kiddie porn sites,” one of the men said loudly. “I’m checking his hard drive next.”
“Looks like I need you to come to the station,” Calvano told Martin, a petty note of triumph in his voice.
“But I’m not one of them, I watch them. For you guys,” Martin protested.
“You need to come with me,” Calvano answered, pushing him toward the hall. That was Calvano for you. Why use persuasion when a little bullying would do?
“He’s not answering any questions without a lawyer present,” Noni announced, inserting her small frame between Martin and Calvano.
“Who are you?” Calvano asked rudely and, focusing on her for the first time, realized he had seen her earlier, but was unable to make the leap from the sweet, little old lady before him to any connection to a kidnapped boy. “What’s it to you?”
“I was a friend of his mother’s. I promised to look after him,” she said firmly. Martin gave her a look of gratitude so raw I felt as if I had invaded his privacy just seeing it.
“I will not permit you to ask him questions without a lawyer present,” Noni said. She turned to Robert Michael Martin. “You go with the detective but you sit there and you do not say a word until I bring a lawyer to you. Do you understand?”
Martin nodded mutely. Calvano still had a hand clamped on his shoulder, and the poor bastard was starting to get seriously scared.
“Furthermore,” Noni added. “He withdraws permission for you to search his house. You’ll have to get a warrant.”
“It’s way too late for that, lady,” the man at the computer said. “Way too late.”
Calvano pushed Martin forward and he began to shuffle toward the front door as awkwardly as if he were wearing leg irons. “Don’t handcuff me,” he said. “I don’t want the neighbors to see.”
Calvano was mean enough to laugh. “You need to lay off watching so much television. You’re doing this voluntarily. No one’s arresting you. Yet.” He pushed him out the front door. A handful of neighbors had already gathered, drawn by the cars parked outside. Regardless of what happened to Martin now, neighbors were drawing their own conclusions. His name would be repeated all up and down the blocks of his neighborhood. God knows what people would say. By sundown, he’d have murdered the nurse and taken the boy and eaten him alive.
Noni lingered behind. As soon as Calvano’s car drove away, she walked through the house, evaluating the men searching through Martin’s belongings, trying to decide which one she wanted. She finally selected a young officer who’d been pulled from his beat because of the manpower shortage—Denny, the young cop who had disturbed the nurse’s crime scene earlier in the day.
“You,” Noni said, pointing at him. He was peering under Martin’s bed and he froze, startled.
“Ma’am?” he asked weakly.
“Come here, young man. I want to have a word with you.”