Back on Murder

Chapter 8

Free fall. There’s something exciting about it, like finding out you have cancer and you’ll be dead in six months. It’s a bummer, sure, but liberating, too. All the things you were afraid to do back when there was too much to live for, suddenly they’re fair game. I think about that scenario often, usually at night, with Charlotte sleeping at the far edge of the bed and the ceiling fan crawling through its circuit.
If you knew you were going to die, what would you do? Fight to hang on a few more months, or throw yourself into a task that really means something?
I dial Charlotte’s number, expecting to find her at the computer in her home office, doing whatever it is corporate attorneys do. Instead, I hear footsteps on pavement and road noise in the background.
“Where are you?”
“Rice Village,” she says. “I decided to do a little shopping.”
“Good therapy, huh?” I glance at my watch. “Can we do lunch?”
“Is something wrong, Roland?” she asks with a note of concern.
“Kind of. I’ll tell you when we meet.”
She goes through her mental list of restaurants, cross-referencing whatever’s nearest, finally suggesting Prego. The drive takes me fifteen minutes, then I burn another five navigating the warren of streets around Rice Village, trying to remember the exact location. By the time I park and walk inside, Charlotte’s already secured a table and started scrutinizing the menu. She’s always taken her food quite seriously. A couple of shopping bags are stacked at her feet.
“So why the midday rendezvous?” she asks. “It’s been a long time since we’ve done something like this.”
“You know about the missing girl, the one on television? Hannah Mayhew?”
“Vaguely.”
“Well, they’ve put me on the task force.”
She swishes the ice in her water glass. “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It’s definitely not good.”
The waiter comes and we order. I don’t feel much like eating, but I get the lentil soup. Charlotte changes her mind a couple of times, finally landing on the grilled red snapper, joking that if I’m taking her to lunch for a change, she’s going to get something expensive.
If we’d had this conversation the other night, instead of arguing over our tenant, the tone would have been quite different. That seems like a decade ago, but it was just Friday night. I blew my big break almost as soon as I got it, and over the stupidest thing. All I had to do was go to Geiger’s office immediately, but instead I’d tagged along with Cavallo for no better reason than that she was easy on the eyes.
Not that I can tell Charlotte that. My account of the events is selective, but by the time I’m done she gets the point.
“So you’ve screwed up your last chance?”
“Pretty much.”
She takes a bite of snapper, and I honestly can’t tell if the contemplative look on her face has to do with my predicament or the taste of the food. I stare into my soup, moving the spoon in tiny circles.
“Roland,” she says, “have you thought about chucking it in?”
“Retirement? I don’t have the time in.”
“No, not retirement. Just quitting. If they’re not going to let you work Homicide, why don’t you find something else? I mean, it’s not like we’re living off your salary or anything. Maybe it’s time to make a course correction.”
“Can we not talk about me quitting?”
“But if you’re miserable with the job, I don’t see why – ”
“There’s still a possibility,” I say. “If I can connect the murders with this girl . . .”
“Roland, you know what I’d like? Just listen for a second. You’ve been thrashing around for a long time, like you’ve got some kind of clichéd inner demon. And we both know why. What I’d like is for you to let go. Leave the department. In fact, we could both get a fresh start. We could move somewhere else. We could sell the house and do some traveling – we always said we would someday. Why not do it now? What’s the point of being unhappy? We have the money, Roland, so let’s – ”
It’s a good thing I’m not hooked up to an EKG, or the whole restaurant would be deafened by the shrill, beeping pulse. As it is, my fist puts a decent bend in the handle of my spoon.
“We’re not going to sell that house,” I say, trying hard to keep my voice calm. “Never. And I’m not leaving the job. That’s not why I wanted to talk.”
“Then why did you?”
I drop the spoon in the bowl and sit back. Honestly, I don’t have an answer. There was a reason, some deep and primal instinct that pushed me at a moment of crisis to reach out. But Charlotte and I, we don’t function that way, not anymore. Especially not now.
“I just thought . . . I wanted to let you know what’s going on.”
“Great,” she says. “Now I know.”
She keeps eating, using her fork like a trident on the helpless fish, all joy in the process now gone. When the waiter swings by with offers of espresso and dessert, I shake my head and ask for the bill. Charlotte and I part ways on the sidewalk after a desultory kiss.
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An hour later, on the far side of town, the wind blows Cavallo’s twisted locks across her eyes. While she grapples with her hair, I flip through photos of Hannah Mayhew’s abandoned car, a white Ford Focus hatchback. I match the painted lines in the photographs with the parking space divisions at my feet, working out the car’s exact placement. A makeshift shrine by the nearest lamppost, wilting flowers, candles, and sun-baked greeting cards, helps to mark the spot.
As far as crime statistics are concerned, Willowbrook Mall ranks second in the city behind the notorious Greenspoint, mainly people breaking into parked cars or simply stealing them. Fortunately Hannah’s Focus wasn’t one of them, or we’d have even less to work with than we do. Along with the shots of the car, I have grainy stills from the video surveillance footage.
“Those haven’t been released to the media,” Cavallo says.
According to the time stamps, the Focus arrived at 12:58 p.m. Twelve minutes later, a gray shadow emerged from the driver’s side – presumably Hannah, but the action transpired too far from the camera for decent coverage.
“While she was sitting there, she made a call from her mobile to the prepaid number. The connection lasted about thirty seconds. She was probably calling to say she’d arrived.”
“And then the van pulls up?”
I flip to the next still, in which a white panel van blocks the view.
“One theory is, she got in the van. It was moving slow, and kind of stops right there, but you can’t tell from the footage if she got in. A group of people passes by right then. She might have blended in with them and gone inside the mall.” Cavallo fingers through my stack, sliding out another photo. “As they get closer, you can see one of the girls kind of looks like her. So that’s another theory.”
“Any footage from inside the mall?”
“Nothing we can confirm as her, no. You’d be surprised how many five-foot-four teenage blondes there are in the mall at any given time, and how hard it is to tell them apart on surveillance tape. She had a shiny pink purse, pretty distinctive, and we haven’t spotted anything like that.”
“No witnesses have come forward?”
She laughs. “Over fifty have. She was spotted in the parking lot, inside Macy’s, Sephora, and Williams-Sonoma. She was all over the food court. Sometimes with other girls, sometimes alone. She was arguing with a boy – sometimes a white boy, sometimes Latino – and she was holding hands with at least two different guys.”
“She got around.”
“Yeah, you could say that. There was even a witness in the Abercrombie changing room who heard a girl crying in the next stall. She couldn’t see this girl, but she’s pretty sure it had to be Hannah Mayhew. They’re all sure.”
“And they just want to help. I know how it works.”
Go to a neighborhood like the Third Ward, and no matter what happens – somebody can walk up to a dude in broad daylight and put a gun to his head – nobody sees anything. But out in the suburbs, everyone sees something. As they say, the crazies come out of the woodwork – only the crazies are normal enough. They’re just starved for attention, captivated by their proximity to the girl on tv.
Not that they’re making things up. I’ve interviewed witnesses before with impossible stories, the details obviously culled from news coverage, yet they were convinced what they said was true. Most could probably have passed a lie-detector test. No doubt at this very moment a young woman sits in front of the television in her Abercrombie T-shirt, convinced she was close enough to Hannah Mayhew to hear her weep.
“So you see where the manpower’s going,” Cavallo says. “We’ve got a small army checking out every delivery van and contractor in a ten-mile radius, and another one following up on every sighting that’s been reported.”
“What about her friends at school? Her church?”
“We got surveillance going on a kid at the school. Deals a little weed. Depending on who you ask, Hannah was either dating the boy or trying to convert him. His name is James Fontaine, and so far he’s the likeliest suspect.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Honestly? I don’t have a feeling one way or the other. Usually I do.”
I hand the photos back, then walk a circle around the empty parking space, studying the pavement for I don’t know what. The wind ripples my pant leg. Overhead, the clouds are black-rimmed and foreboding.
“Can I level with you?” I say. “There’s only one thing I’m concerned about, and it’s the dna sample. If we get a match back on that, it blows this case wide open and puts me back where I belong – ”
“And if it doesn’t match?”
“It will. You may not have a feeling one way or the other, but I do. The girl on that bed was Hannah Mayhew. I don’t know how she got there, but she did.”
“You’re convinced.”
“Absolutely. So just tell me when to expect the answer.”
She shrugs. “Maybe a day, maybe a week. How am I supposed to know?”
“You said you had juice.”
“That doesn’t mean your hunch goes to the top of my list. Like I said, I’m not convinced, so you can’t expect me to put resources behind it, no matter how badly you want there to be a link.”
My collar tightens around my neck. “If that’s how you feel, I can go back to the me myself and get it done. You should have let me do that in the first place.”
“It’s not your case.”
“It’s as much mine as yours now.”
She crosses her arms. “No. It’s not.”
We head back to her car, neither of us very interested in continuing the conversation. Teaming us up was Wanda’s idea. Maybe it was a favor to me – or maybe it was punishment, the hair of the dog, her way of teaching me a lesson.
She starts the engine, letting the air-conditioning blow, then turns in her seat.
“March, let’s get something clear.”
“All right,” I say, not liking her tone or the intensity of her gaze.
“You see this?” She makes a fist of her left hand and brandishes the engagement ring. “You appreciate the significance?”
“Uh . . . yeah.”
“It means that no matter what you and Wanda have cooked up between you, nothing’s gonna happen. You understand that?”
“I’m a happily married man,” I say.
Her eyes narrow in contempt.
“Look,” I say. “You don’t know me. All I care about is getting those results back. If you’d just make that happen, you could get rid of me a lot sooner.”
She puts the car in gear. “Anyway. You’re old enough to be my dad.”
“What? No, I’m not.” I punch the window button, then lean my head out to yell. “Thank you, Wanda, wherever you are.”
Cavallo smiles, but just barely. When we hit FM-1960, I point right and she turns left.
“I need to get back,” she says.
“Fine, but there’s a lead I want to follow up while we’re out here.”
She sighs. “What?”
“That youth pastor from yesterday. I want to swing by and rattle his cage.”
“There’s no point.”
“Just turn around, all right? Pretty please? You can drop me off. I’ll hitch a ride back with some uniforms.”
She glides into the left-turn lane, tapping her fingers on the wheel. When the light changes, she whips the front around late, giving the tires a squeal, then pours on the gas. The woman always drives like she’s chasing someone. Or being chased.
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Finding Carter Robb is easier said than done. His office at the church proves empty, and the number I worm out of the secretary goes straight to voicemail. According to Cavallo, who’s decided to stick with me for the moment, he runs after-school programs on Tuesdays and Thursdays, trading slices of pizza for a captive audience to evangelize. But Hannah’s disappearance trumps the usual schedule.
“All he does anymore is make copies of the flyer,” the secretary says. “Then he posts them all over the place. Sometimes the youth group kids go with him.”
“You have any idea where I could intercept him?”
She fingers the beads around her neck in thought. “His wife teaches at Cypress Christian School – no relation to the church. There’s a coffee place across from there, Seattle Coffee. His home away from home, I think.”
“I know where it is,” Cavallo says.
This turns out to be only partly true, as she proves by hunting around for twenty minutes while I dig through the Key Map and try to navigate. When we finally locate the coffee shop, there’s no sign of Robb, so I persuade Cavallo to take me to the school where his wife teaches. We page her from the office, then wait.
After a few minutes I check my watch.
“You’re not like the other homicide detectives,” Cavallo says.
“So you know a lot of them?”
She gives me a look like I’m an idiot. “They’re mostly big talkers. Gift of the gab. But not you. You’re more of a brooder, aren’t you?”
“Maybe I’ve got more to brood about.”
“I always expect them to be depressed,” she says. “Doing that kind of work, seeing what they see. But I guess you develop an immunity. I don’t think I could.”
“You might surprise yourself someday.”
Cavallo starts to reply, then looks past me. “Here she is.”
Gina Robb can’t be a day over twenty-five, but in her cardigan and cat-eye glasses she’s serious enough for an elderly librarian. She’s pinned a swag of dishwater blond hair back with a tortoiseshell barrette, exposing a swath of pale forehead. Under the cardigan, she wears a flower-print dress that flares at the hips, a self-consciously vintage look.
“You wanted to see me?” she asks, looking from one of us to the other, uncertain whom to address. “Are you from the police?”
I glance at my dangling shield. “How can you tell?”
She parries my attempt at humor with a grave frown. “Has something happened?”
“No, nothing like that,” Cavallo says.
I would never have picked this girl as Robb’s type. Proof, I suppose, that opposites attract, bookworms pairing off with jocks and vice versa. For some reason it makes him more interesting.
“We’re trying to find your husband,” I say. “Any idea where he might be?”
Her gray eyes flick toward the wall clock. “At church?”
“We checked. They said he might be out distributing flyers.”
“I guess that’s where he is then.”
“We checked the coffee shop,” Cavallo says. “They told us he hangs out there sometimes.”
She nods. “Sometimes.”
Either she’s trying to make this hard, or she’s genuinely baffled by our questions. “Would you mind giving him a call? Maybe he’ll pick up if he sees it’s you.”
Her hands fret the hem of her cardigan. “We haven’t dismissed class yet. I should really – ”
“Please,” Cavallo says. “Just humor him, ma’am.”
She moves slower than a reluctant snail, but she does move, her hand sliding into the drooping cardigan pocket, returning with a tiny sliver of a phone, which she thumbs open without glancing down. She punches a speed-dial button and puts the phone to her ear.
“Baby?” she says. “I’m still at the school. Yeah. Listen, the police are here looking for you. I don’t know . . . All right, here you go.”
She hands me the phone.
“It’s Roland March,” I say. “We met yesterday. I was wondering if we could have a chat.”
“Right.” He sounds wary. “You want to meet at the church?”
For some reason I don’t, and I tell him so. “How about I drop in wherever you are?”
“All right.”
“You’ll have to tell me where that is.”
A long time passes. His wife looks up anxiously while Cavallo consults her watch.
“Mr. Robb?”
“I’m . . . I’m sitting in the van. Outside James Fontaine’s house. Trying to work up enough nerve to go knock on the door.”
I walk alongside the red church van, giving the roof a nice tap, then climb into the passenger seat. Robb doesn’t even glance over. His eyes are fixed on the house across the street, a rather palatial brick mansion dating from the late seventies or early eighties with concrete lions on either side of the front steps. Not the crib I’d have expected for a Klein High weed dealer, but I can’t think why not. Where else is he going to live? We’re in the suburbs, after all.
I rap the plastic dash with my knuckle. “You really shouldn’t be doing this. For one thing, you’re not exactly keeping a low profile.”
“I’m not really trying.”
“For another thing – and I shouldn’t even be mentioning this – we’re already keeping an eye on this kid.” I crank the rearview around, glancing back at Cavallo, who’s still behind the wheel, leaving this one to me. “Putting up flyers is one thing. That’s great. But conducting your own stakeout? Not so much.”
“I’m not here to spy on him,” he says. “I wanted to confront him.”
“Won’t he still be in school?”
He looks at me for the first time. “He’s on suspension.”
“Didn’t the school year just begin? He didn’t waste any time.”
Robb wears cargo shorts today, along with Converse sneakers. His black T-shirt imitates the popular milk advertisements, but says got JESUS? instead. After meeting the wife, something tells me he chooses his wardrobe for ironic effect.
“Let me level with you,” I say. “When I saw you yesterday, something didn’t seem right. You were squirrelly. Like our being there made you nervous. So I started wondering what you’d have to be nervous about. Why don’t you save me the trouble and just tell me?”
“I’m not nervous about anything.”
“Really? ’Cause let me tell you something. What you’re doing right here, it’s abnormal. This is not how people react to situations like yours, not when they’re on the level.”
He runs a hand through his spiky hair. “How do they react?”
“Not like they’re guilty.”
“That’s how you think I’m acting?”
“Am I wrong?”
He reaches out and straightens the rearview mirror, reclaiming the territory. “How am I supposed to answer a question like that?”
“You have a guilty conscience, Mr. Robb. I want to know why.”
Human physiology is a funny thing. No matter how cool we think we’re playing it, most of us don’t have poker faces. Our tells can be ludicrously on target. Robb’s a perfect example. His top lip clamps down over the bottom, forcing the tuft of hair on his chin to pop out like porcupine quills. He’s literally biting down the words, and he has no idea.
“Come on,” I say, jabbing his arm. “Just tell me what you’re holding back. You’ll feel better.”
He turns toward the window, head shaking imperceptibly.
“You want to find this girl, right? So help me out. Don’t hold anything back. It’s not fair to Hannah.”
He lets out a breath. “Hannah? You don’t even know her.”
“Then tell me about her, Carter. Fill me in.”
His breathing comes hard and heavy, the muscles in his forearms flexing, struggling to hold himself together.
“Come on.”
Then I hear it, the sound I love. The gasp of capitulation, a long exhale that leaves him smaller than before, hunched over and broken. In the interview room, this would be the moment the guys on the far side of the glass slap each other’s backs. When they give that sigh, it means everything is about to come out all at once.
“This,” he says, his voice quiet, “this is all my fault.”
“Meaning what?”
“I encouraged her. I thought I was doing the right thing.” There’s a plea in his eyes. “You have to understand, when I first came to the church, nobody was on my side. What I found here wasn’t at all what I expected. You’ve got this big, famous church – all my seminary friends, when they heard I was coming here, said I’d hit the big time. But what I discovered . . . It was all so comfortable. So complacent. The kids go to nice schools, they drive nice cars, they have nice lives to look forward to. It was all so nice.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” I say.
“Christianity, it’s not about being nice. It’s about sacrifice. All they wanted, though, was an ordained baby-sitter, like I said before.”
“I thought you were trying to be funny.”
“I was, but it’s still true. The parents . . . The church, what they all wanted was some help with keeping the kids in line. Keeping them insulated. Sheltered and safe. ‘You’re young,’ they’d tell me. ‘The kids relate to you. They look up to you.’ And they wanted me to use that to help them out, you know? Or they’d get me to lay down the law, then behind my back the parents and kids could bond by talking about how unreasonable I was. That kind of shocked me, but it happens.”
As interesting as all this is, I don’t need a lecture on how hard being a youth pastor is. “Can we steer this back to Hannah?”
“Like I said, Hannah was different. Her mom was, too, at first. They understood God didn’t put us on this planet to be cozy and quiet. We have to be outward-focused. We have to be missional.”
Cavallo would know what that means, but I don’t – and I’d just as soon not find out. “Again, could we stick to the matter at hand?”
He stops me with a raised finger. “It’s relevant. There was a sermon I did – I speak to the youth group on Sunday nights, I think I mentioned that. Anyway, you know the Narnia movies started coming out, and all the kids were eating that stuff up, so I did a talk about that line from C. S. Lewis – you know, about Aslan? ‘He’s not a safe lion, but he’s a good one’?”
My eyes glaze over.
“Anyway,” he says, realizing I’m not tracking, “the point is, God doesn’t want us to be safe. He wants us to do good. There’s a big difference.”
“Right.”
“So Hannah hears this, and it’s like a light bulb goes on in her head. This was – what? Three years ago? She would have been, like, fourteen. But she really woke up and started living her faith.”
I’m not looking for ancient history, but sometimes there’s no choice. You have to let them tell the story in their own way.
“There was this girl,” he says, “named Evey, short for Evangeline. She and her mom relocated here from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and the kid was really messed up. Evey ran away from home, got into drugs and who knows what else. She was Hannah’s age – but that’s all they had in common. I don’t know the whole history, but I think there’d been some kind of abuse, she’d been sexualized way too young and had this weird, kind of creepy maturity. The other kids in the youth group, they wouldn’t go near her. I think they were afraid, and to be honest I was, too.”
“But not Hannah?”
He shakes his head. “She befriended Evey, the way she did everyone. The same way she did him.” He jabs his thumb at James Fontaine’s house. “She didn’t judge. She tried to show Christ’s love to everyone, no matter how hard it was.”
“So she struggled with this love thing? And confided in you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “She grew up without a dad, you know, and I think I came along at a certain time in her life when she really needed one. A youth pastor’s always acting in loco parentis, but it was more than that.”
“You have any kids of your own?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Not yet.”
I’m not surprised. Telling other people’s kids it’s better to be good than safe is one thing. No matter how much you like them, or even feel responsible for them, they aren’t yours. Losing them isn’t always at the back of your mind. If Robb had a child, he might understand the attraction of keeping her “sheltered and safe.” Parents want to raise future doctors and lawyers – above all, future candidates for happiness. They do not want to nurture martyrs, whatever the cause.
“You can ask a lot of people,” I say, “but you can’t expect them to sacrifice their own kid. You’ll understand that when you have kids of your own.”
“But that’s exactly what Christianity is,” he says, “a father sacrificing his son.”
There’s a flash of passion in his voice, transforming him for a moment, giving me a glimpse of what he might be like in action. I can see how the teens in his charge might be inspired, and why their parents might get a little nervous. It’s one thing to talk the talk, but when you put your kid into someone else’s hands, you’ve got to believe that underneath all the radical rhetoric, there’s a check in place, some restraining impulse or inner voice to rein him in: All this is great, and you need to hear it, but in real life, in the everyday world, you’ve got to look out for yourself. Carter Robb doesn’t seem to have that restraint, or if he does, he thinks rooting it out is an obligation of faith.
“And Donna,” I ask, “did she encourage this bond between you and her daughter?”
“She thought it was great. Just like Hannah, she really got behind me. Considering what a great man her husband was, she could have let people at the church put her on a pedestal, but that’s not her way. She works hard. She mentors women at the church. She’s written books, you know. Quite a few of them. And speaks at women’s conferences, that kind of thing. So when I came along, she said it was just what ccc needed.”
“CCC?”
“Cypress Community Church.” He smirks. “Sometimes we speak evangelicalese instead of English. Sorry about that . . . Where was I?”
“Donna supported you.”
“Right. When I first got there, the youth group would have these annual retreats every summer. They’d pack up the vans and go to this adventure camp in Tennessee. Bungee jumping all day and preaching all night. It was a tradition. But I went to Pastor Mike – that’s my boss, the associate pastor – and said, ‘Hey, look. Instead of driving all the way to Tennessee, let’s stay right here. There are ministry opportunities all over town, places where the kids can volunteer for a week and really advance the Kingdom.’ He looked at me like I was crazy, but Donna got behind it. Without her, we’d still be wasting that week. Now we do inner-city mission work, help at shelters, that kind of thing.”
“That’s really great. But why did you say Hannah’s disappearance was your fault?”
He takes a deep breath. “Because. She took it so seriously. I mean, she really got into the mission work. She’d take an interest in people, you know? Not safe people – and not necessarily good ones, either. Not that any of us are good, but you know what I mean. At school she started having some trouble. She was making friends with the wrong people – ”
“Like the Fontaine kid?”
He nods. “And at the same time, she’s a normal seventeen-year-old girl. She likes boys, she wants to date, and she has the usual confusing mix of adolescent emotions. Her mom had a hard time coping, and Hannah reacted by getting really secretive. Even with me.”
“So she liked Fontaine?”
“I think so. And she also wanted to be a good witness, to be Christ in his life. I tried steering her away, tried to . . . you know, give her a reality check or something. But she couldn’t understand what I was saying. All this time I’d been telling her one thing and suddenly I’m contradicting it all.”
“Tell me about the relationship with him.”
“I didn’t know a thing about it until she got suspended last spring, that’s how secretive she was.”
This is the first I’ve heard of her suspension, but I try not to let on. “So what happened?”
He gives a disconsolate shrug. “All she’d tell me was they’d had an argument and he got really mad. The next day, there’s a drug search at the school and they find a bag of pot in her locker.”
So nice little Hannah Mayhew, the churchgoing wide-eyed innocent, was caught holding weed in her locker? That must have been awkward at home. Not that I’m surprised or anything. It’s the sheltered kids who go wild.
“You’re certain it wasn’t hers?” I ask.
The question irritates him. “It wasn’t. She said so and I believed her. Her mom, I don’t know. After that, she had doubts about everything. About Hannah, about me, the whole direction of my ministry.”
“What did she say?”
“She hasn’t said anything.” He rubs his eyes like he’s suddenly tired. “But she doesn’t have to. I know she blames me. And hey, maybe she’s right. I came here so certain, so self-righteous, and now . . . I don’t know what to think anymore.”
His voice dies, his fervor ebbs away. He glances at the Fontaine house, shaking his head like he’s not sure how he got here or what he intended to do. The conviction of a few moments ago is utterly gone now.
“That’s all I’ve got,” he says.
Everything he’s said has the ring of truth about it, but as far as I can see, none of it advances the case. All he can give me is history. His awkwardness yesterday stemmed not from real guilt but from a false sense of responsibility, a dubious connection he’s made between his Sunday school lectures and Hannah’s ultimate fate. I’m disappointed, not because I expected a smoking gun from this guy but because I expected something and my instincts were off the mark. And I’m putting so much faith into those instincts right now that I don’t like to see them fail.
I pat his shoulder. “Thanks for your cooperation.” I should leave it there and go, but I get the urge to pass along some wisdom. “You know something? The one thing you can’t control in life is the outcome. You do what seems right at the moment, and if it turns out wrong . . . well, that’s out of your hands.”
“It’s in God’s hands,” he says.
“The point is, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this. And you shouldn’t get in the way of the investigation, either. Leave Fontaine to us, okay? Put up all the flyers you want. Spend time with those students of yours – they probably need it right now. But let us take care of the rest.”
“I have to do something,” he says, running a palm along his leg. “I can’t do nothing.”
Sure, I can sympathize. I respect his urge. And I don’t exactly agree with the platitudes I’ve just uttered, the boilerplate about letting the police handle everything. People expect too much from us sometimes. I’m not endorsing vigilantes or anything, but a little vigilance wouldn’t be such a bad thing. In his position, I’d want to do something, too. But in my position, I’m expected to toe the line. And really, what can he do apart from posting his flyers and leading yet another fruitless search? I open the door and slip to the curb, turning to speak before slamming it shut.
“I’ll tell you what you can do,” I tell him. “Say a prayer.”
The door snaps shut before he can get out a reply.