“No, he’s not.”
“I need to send him a thank-you card,” she said, and started rummaging in the drawer on the side table, pulling out a pen, pushing around the papers and paper clips and coupons. “You hurt William,” she said, her hand still shuffling things in the drawer—a bottle of aspirin, throat lozenges, a few playing cards. “Always fighting him, always pushing him away. I know he isn’t your father, but he tries. We both try.”
The pitch of his voice rose. “He’s dead, Mom.” He wasn’t going to get any answers, and he wasn’t allowed the relief of forgetting. “Both of your husbands are.”
She blinked.
“Look at me,” he said, taking her face in his hands. “I know I was a pain-in-the-ass kid, but didn’t you know what Coach Wakeland was?” She tried to wiggle her head away, but he held it between his palms. “I was just a kid. I was scared.”
She stared at his eyes, confusion and recognition swimming across them. She was there for a moment, her pupils registering the starkness of the question, but then she was gone again, clouds across the irises.
“You’re hurting my ears,” she said, brushing aside his hands. “And take a shower; you stink.”
—
BEN WAS ON the Santa Ana Freeway, on his way back from his mother’s, idling in late-afternoon traffic, when Ken Brady, the desk sergeant, called him on the Motorola.
“Some guy called in, asking for you,” Ken said. “Said he had some information about a case.”
“He leave a name and number?”
“No,” Ken said. “Said he’d leave a voicemail.”
“Another anonymous tip?”
“You got me,” Ken said. “But he sounded freaked out. Like he was coming undone, you know? Figured with this freak running around, I shouldn’t let it sit.”
Ben pulled the cruiser to the emergency lane, the traffic limping by, and dialed the voicemail number.
—
“I NEED YOU to look up a student,” Natasha said to Helen.
She had left Wakeland twenty minutes before, watched him struggle with his key to open the door to his Corvette and drive off.
“Current or past?” Helen asked.
“Current,” Natasha said.
Helen pulled the 1985–’86 attendance binder from the shelf.
“I keep seeing boys’ faces,” Helen said, her voice shaking. “I was up all night thinking about them.”
“It’s not your fault, Helen,” Natasha said.
“I knew something wasn’t right,” she said. “But I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Things like this aren’t supposed to happen here,” Natasha said. “That’s what we want to believe.”
Helen opened the binder. “Name?”
“Only got a first name,” Natasha said. “Freshman, I think.”
—
BEN WAS BACK at the barn by 4:17. He oiled the bolt action on his father’s Browning and disassembled the .45. He bore-brushed the barrel and oiled the firing pin and hammer spring, then reassembled it and locked a full magazine inside. He set both of the firearms on the table, next to the killer’s police file and the pictures of Lucero, and stared at them.
The voicemail had been from Wakeland.
“Benjamin,” he’d said, his voice out of breath on the recording. “We need to talk. Please.”
Ben had hung up immediately and sat on the side of the freeway for ten minutes, until a Caltrans truck came riding up his tail, trying to get to a stall a mile up the road.
Outside the window of the barn now, an owl swooped across the grass and lighted in the eucalyptus on the far side of the drive. Ben watched the bird in the afternoon light, a thumb smudge bending the tree branch, Wakeland’s voice playing in his head. “Please,” Wakeland had said. The man was frightened. Something had happened, something had shaken him up.
Ben unlocked the gun cabinet, pulled out the box, and set it on his desk. He sliced open the first envelope with his penknife and found three photos. He and Wakeland sitting in his Mustang, mugging for the camera with their sunglasses on. Ben’s mother had taken the shot, just before the two of them drove up to L.A. to have Ben swim for the university coaches. There was one shot at regionals, Wakeland grinning while yanking on the three medals hanging from Ben’s neck. Ben stuck his tongue out, pretending to be choked. Then there was another, a Polaroid taken by Wakeland at Laguna Beach. Ben had just climbed out of the surf, salt water dripping down his body. He remembered Wakeland taking the picture, the camera lens pointed at him in front of the sunbathing summer day-trippers. Three teenage girls watched Wakeland take the picture, one of them giggling at Ben, and Ben told himself they thought Wakeland was his father, though he was sure then that they could see the truth. In the shot, his bathing suit hung low on his hips, the wet fabric clinging to his body, the plates of his chest stretching across his swimmer’s shoulders. He hadn’t seen these pictures in nearly two decades. The sixteen-year-old in the shot looked younger than Emma. It was shocking, really, the child that he was. He’d remembered himself as an adult; he’d imagined himself to be one when he was sixteen. But here was the child Ben, newly shaving, his face plump with baby fat, his eyes stupid with miscomprehension.
He turned his attention to the file, flipping pages until he found the picture of the twelve-year-old Martinez, newly pulled from the basement cell and years before killing. There was hope still in the face, in the first picture; he wasn’t gone yet. Order could still be restored; the kid believed the police could do it, believed they could still hurt him or hurt the people who hurt him. There were laws, the police enforced them, and you could be folded back into the order of things in a way that made everything clear and safe. For most people, the threat of the law worked. It kept them in line; it gave them a sense of relief to be ticketed or arrested—it let them know that you could only push things so far into chaos before someone said no.
Ben was the one who was supposed to say no; it was his job to keep things from spinning into chaos. Natasha was right. The day he got his badge, he stood in front of a judge with forty-three shiny new officers and swore never to betray his badge, never to betray his integrity, never to betray the public trust. He swore to have the courage to hold himself and others accountable for their actions, and he meant every goddamned bit of it. He knew what it was to have trust violated. He understood the corrosive effect of a lack of accountability. That was his job—to protect and to serve—even if others hadn’t done it for him. That was his identity, the one he chose; it was how he left the child behind and became a man.
Ben reached into the box and pulled out an envelope with his name scrawled on the front. He opened the letter inside and spread it on the desk in front of him.
You’re a coward. You’ve silenced me, X’d me out. You couldn’t do a more terrible thing. Is this how you treat the people who love you? I’m still prepared to forgive you. That’s what friends do—they forgive, they forget.