A framed photo of Tucker and a girl who must have been his older sister sat on the fireplace mantel behind the piano. It was a studio shot, at least ten years old, Natasha thought, Tucker’s elbow resting on his sister’s knee, both of them forcing smiles for the camera.
“My father used to play,” Natasha said. “We had a baby grand in the living room. I miss it.”
Natasha glanced at the photo again. Something about Tucker looked like Ben—the green eyes, the tanned skin, the depth of the eye sockets.
“I like it quiet.” Mrs. Preston lifted the hand from the fallboard and brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. “My husband won’t like that you’re here.”
“I don’t blame him.”
The slam of the phone and the swish of Mr. Preston’s suit slacks preceded his arrival in the living room.
“Mary Kay? Tupperware?” the man said, flashing the disingenuous smile of a man used to being in control. Sure, Natasha thought, I’m driving a pink Cadillac. She disliked him immediately. “You get me my fifty thousand back and I might buy what you’re selling.”
Natasha extended her hand.
“Sorry about the heat,” he said, taking only her fingers in his. “Not taking any chances with that maniac running around. Always said we should get central air.”
“Detective Betencourt,” she lied, squeezing his hand as hard as she could.
“Did he hit around here?”
“No,” Natasha said. “I’m down from Santa Elena.”
Mr. Preston glanced at his wife, blame in his eyes. She studied a spot on the carpet.
“What do you want?” he said.
Natasha told him about Lucero’s suicide, about the information she’d gotten from Helen at the high school. She started to ask about Wakeland, but Preston cut her off.
“Don’t say that name in this house,” he said.
“I understand,” she said gently.
“Do you?” Preston said. Sweat that had beaded on his forehead ran down the edge of his nose. “You come here unannounced, barge into my house, and utter that man’s name while standing in my living room.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she was. She had no right, no subpoena, no legal justification to be here. She was an intruder climbing unwanted into their lives. “It’s just—I think what happened to your son happened to this boy.”
Mrs. Preston turned her head and stared at the closed lid of the black piano. “It’s what I was afraid of, Mark,” she said. “We should have—”
Preston put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and squeezed the bone there.
“I am sorry to hear that.” He wiped the sweat from his nose with his free hand. “But it has nothing to do with us.”
But it does, she wanted to say. It does.
“This man,” Natasha said, “is still a teacher.”
“Please,” Mrs. Preston said, her palm turned upward as though begging for food. “It’s taken years of therapy, years of medication. He’s doing better—”
“Don’t,” Mr. Preston said.
“—now he has a job, he’s in college, he’s got a girlfriend.”
“I know there was a confidentiality agreement,” Natasha said. “But there are ways around—”
Mr. Preston hammered the top of the piano with the heel of his hand, knocking the strings into a discordant thrumming.
“We cannot talk about it,” he said, glaring at his wife. He turned to Natasha, his eyes like rock. “Now get out of my house.”
—
NATASHA HAD SLIPPED her 280Z into gear when Mrs. Preston pushed open the gate to the yard and jogged across the street.
“How old was the boy?” Mrs. Preston said, when she sat down in the passenger seat.
“Seventeen.”
She glanced at Natasha’s cigarette curling smoke into the car. “Can you put that out, please?”
Natasha flicked it out the driver’s side window, and Mrs. Preston sat there picking at a hangnail on her right thumb.
“Tucker has a class at five fifteen,” she said.
The curtains were pulled aside in the front window of the Preston house and Mr. Preston stood there framed by the sill, his face exploded by a sunburst on the spotless glass. Mrs. Preston was watching him through the open window of the car.
“Men don’t want to talk about these things,” Mrs. Preston said. She put her hand on the handle and cracked the door. “Advanced Poetry Workshop,” she said, before swinging her legs onto the street, “at Saddleback Community College.”
—
HERNANDEZ HAD CALLED in cops from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Mounted Enforcement Unit. The MEU guys rode the backcountry north of L.A., in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Padres, looking for plots of marijuana, busting kids with illegal campfires, occasionally tracking fugitives into the scrub pine higher elevations.
“You know the canyons around here as well as anybody,” Hernandez had said to Ben. That was his special assignment: heading up the mounted team to flush out the killer. The horses were in trailers doing 55 down the 101 as they spoke. “You’ll brief them tonight and then get up there.”
After the morning briefing, Ben drove up to the Norwalk Police Department and asked to check the files on the decade-old case. The twelve-year-old Martinez had been found locked in the basement at 3562 Grayland Street. Father charged with sexual assault, sexual abuse, willful harming and endangering of a child, severe neglect. The father—if you could call him that—had been sent up to Folsom, twenty-five years to life. Didn’t last long there, though: shanked in the liver with a filed-down toothbrush just two years into the sentence. In that respect, Ben appreciated the harsh law of the convict.
The house sat abandoned on a leafy street of 1930s bungalows, a desert grapevine devouring the left side wall, a chain-link fence cordoning it off. It wasn’t a wealthy neighborhood, but the rest of the homes were well kept, green postage-stamp yards behind cinder-block fences, trimmed hedges. There was a faded FOR SALE sign out front, but apparently no one wanted to buy a house with that kind of history.
Ben grabbed a flashlight from the trunk and then bent through a hole in the fence. The front door was knocked off its hinges. Inside smelled of cat piss and mold. A torn-open couch was pushed up against one of the walls, littered with empty beer cans. Leaves bunched in the corner. He found the steps at the back of the kitchen, three of them missing, the others tilted and rotting. He flipped on the flashlight and went down into the darkness.