“Yeah,” she said, pulling into the parking lot. “I know.”
She passed two more police cruisers at the entrance to the high school, parked her car in the lot in front of the swim complex, and cut the engine. They could see the lines of boys through the fence, freestyling down the pool lanes, Wakeland pacing the edge of the water with them, stopwatch in hand. She watched Ben as he stared through the fence, his jaw hard, his eyes narrowed.
“I want you to think about something,” she said. “What if Emma were a boy? Would you be sending her here next year?”
He looked at her, his face darkening.
“Would you?”
“What’s your point?”
“You know my point.”
She reached into the backseat, grabbed the file folder, and tossed it on his lap.
“You need to see something,” she said.
He opened it, glanced at the first shot, and his face collapsed. It was painful to see, painful to be the cause of it. He turned his face away and stared out the passenger-side window, hiding himself for a few seconds, and then looked back down at the Polaroids in his hands.
“There’re more,” she said. “Back at the apartment. In the master bedroom closet.”
“I knew there was something there,” Ben said. “I just couldn’t—”
“Some things can’t be done alone.”
He turned the photos facedown in his lap, the black square of film paper betraying nothing of the ugliness on the other side.
“Any of me?” he said.
“No,” she said. “Only Lucero.”
Wakeland blew the whistle. They both looked up, watched the boys climb out of the water and strut across the pool deck to grab their towels.
“You know why I let go of him the other night?” he said.
“You’re not a killer, that’s why.”
“No,” he said. “I could have killed him.” He turned his face away from her. “Somehow I still cared for the man. I don’t know how, but the feeling was still there.”
She let that sink in for a second, trying to find a place in her mind where it could be understood.
“Four or five years ago,” she said, “this seventeen-year-old girl was rolled into the examination room. She had been kicked to death by her boyfriend—broken ribs, fractured skull, internal bleeding.”
He wasn’t looking at her, his face turned away still, staring into some middle distance of his mind.
“One of the detectives on the case kept coming back, two or three times. First he made a pretense of gathering evidence, but later he just seemed to come by to look at her. It was a pretty straightforward case—I’d already sent my report over to the department—so I asked him about it. He said she had been put in the hospital five times by this man, a dealer in his late twenties. He’d tried to get her to press charges, but she wouldn’t. She fell down the stairs, she’d say, or she got hit in the eye with a ball, stuff like that. She wouldn’t leave him. And then she ended up on an examination table in my office.”
“I’m supposed to be the seventeen-year-old girl?”
“The point is,” she said, “there comes a time when the reasons don’t matter anymore. I can’t explain it and neither can you. It just needs to stop.”
She handed him a photocopy of Phillip’s picture, the one she got from Helen.
“Phillip Lambert,” she said. “Fourteen years old. Wakeland had him alone in the pool the other day.”
Ben stared at the picture, his hands shaking a little.
“Any pictures of him in that box?”
“Not yet,” Natasha said.
The boy had big hazel eyes, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose.
“What happened to you, Ben, isn’t about your body. It wouldn’t show up in an autopsy; there’d be no evidence. What happened to you is in your head. He’s in your head—that’s it. He can’t hurt you anymore.” She nodded to the school picture of Phillip. “That was you,” she said. “That’s how young you were.”
She took the photos from Ben’s hands, slid all of them into the file folder, and handed it back to him. The boys were streaming into the locker room now, a couple stragglers pulling on T-shirts, but Wakeland had stopped Phillip on the pool deck.
“That’s him,” she said, nodding toward the pool.
Ben looked up and stared hard at the pool.
Wakeland was pressing down on the boy’s shoulders, saying something to him that they were too far away to hear. Ben shifted uncomfortably in the passenger seat.
“I can’t do nothing, knowing what I know,” she said, looking at Ben now. “The man you need to catch is right there.” She pointed toward the pool. “So is the boy you need to save. People knew what was happening to you, Ben. Right?”
Water threatened his eyes, and she could see him grind his teeth to hold it back.
“They never said anything,” she said. “Are you going to be one of those people?”
Nothing.
She glanced back at the pool. Phillip was walking toward the locker room, and Wakeland had turned, looking out at the parking lot toward Natasha’s car. He recognized it from the other day, she was sure of it. Yes, she thought. We’re watching you.
“No one’s looking for Wakeland,” Natasha said. “No one’s hunting him down. I’ll give you a couple days, but after that I am going to go talk to Hernandez.”
He looked at her then, his face misshapen with swelling.
“I’ve covered for you,” she said very quietly, “but I can’t do it again.” She took his hand then and he let her, and neither could look at the other. They just watched their fingers intertwined. “I don’t know what we are, Ben. But if you make me do this, I don’t think I can be anything to you anymore. It’s yours to do.”
—
AFTER NATASHA DROPPED him off at the house, Ben sat at the kitchen counter next to the phone, holding the number in his hands. Wakeland’s hands had been on Phillip’s shoulders. “Are you going to be one of those people?” He heard Natasha’s voice ring in his head. Then Wakeland had touched Phillip’s chest, just once, but Ben felt his body leap with panic. He was teaching the boy to breathe. That’s how it started, that was the beginning. Even after all that had happened, even after Ben’s attack, the man was laying the foundation for another boy.
It took Ben the better part of an hour—thinking about the evidence he already had against Wakeland, thinking about all the evidence he didn’t have—before he finally dialed the number.
“Tucker Preston?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Ben Wade,” he said. “I swam for Coach Wakeland.”
The line hissed with silence.
“Can I buy you a beer?” Ben said.
“No,” he said. “You can’t.” Silence. “Meet me at Cordova Park.”
—
THE KID WAS sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, when Ben found him, his feet rolling his skateboard deck back and forth.
“I told the medical examiner I wasn’t going to say anything,” Tucker said.
Ben sat on the farthest edge of the bench, a square of orange trees before them, surrounded by a wooden fence. PRESERVING OUR HERITAGE read a brass plaque.