“But you gave her your number.”
“Yeah,” he said, turning to look at Ben. “I did. Wanted to see what you looked like, I guess.” Tucker’s gaze unnerved him. “You’re the cop that shot the Night Prowler, right?”
“I am.”
“But he got away.”
“For now.”
“Shit, man,” Tucker said, shaking his head. “Wakeland loved you. Talked about you all the time, about how special you were, about how you understood things. When I pissed him off, he always compared me to you. I was so jealous.” Tucker laughed ironically. “I could never live up.”
“I could never live up, either,” Ben said.
“There was someone before you?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t good enough, then I was special, and then I wasn’t good enough again. That was part of his deal.”
Tucker nodded and blew smoke, and they both watched three crows attack the fallen oranges in the grove. “We had a peach tree in our backyard,” Tucker said. “At the Santa Elena house. When the fruit was ripe, my mom would give them to the neighbors. She baked a pie once with the last of the fruit and gave it to Wakeland after state finals. He and I ate it together, the whole damn thing in one sitting. I think my mother had a crush on him.”
“He’s a con man,” Ben said. “The best kind make you believe anything.”
“I want to blame you,” Tucker said.
“I know.”
“Let me finish,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Ben. “I want to blame you, but then—then I guess that makes me responsible for this kid, Lucero, too.”
“I can’t help you with that,” Ben said. “I haven’t sorted that out myself.”
Tucker looked away. “What do you want from me?”
What he wanted was to find a kid in better shape than this one, one who wasn’t screwed up and jittery with nicotine shakes, a kid who didn’t have deep sleepless circles under his eyes, a kid who wasn’t bitter with anger and blame, someone who had come out the other side of this unscathed.
“There’s another kid,” Ben said.
“Jesus.”
“A freshman.”
“How do you know?”
“Wakeland’s getting him alone in the pool,” Ben said. “After practice.”
Tucker looked at the ground.
“That’s how it started for you too, right?” Ben said.
Tucker nodded slowly, less an answer to the question than the unspoken recognition that Ben was right. This new kid, Phillip, was in trouble.
“People like this don’t stop,” Ben said. “If it’s not this kid, it’ll be another. I can’t tell you if I’m responsible for what happened to you. But I can’t let this happen again. We can’t let this happen again.”
“You’re just going to drag me into this, aren’t you?” Tucker said. “That’s what you’re here to tell me, right?”
“You almost stopped him once,” Ben said. “You spoke up. You did more than I could do at the time.”
“I don’t know, man,” Tucker said, shaking his head. “The statute—”
“Is up, I know.” He did know. Six years. Penal code, section 800. He’d used the law as an excuse for years to pretend he was fine about the past. “We come forward, maybe others will. One accusation sounds like a personal grudge, two—or more—starts to sound like the truth. Even if he can’t be prosecuted, people will know what he is.”
“I don’t think I can go there with you.”
“That fear you feel,” Ben said. “That panic you have right now…that’s Wakeland. Wakeland’s still got you. Don’t let him.”
“It’s not just Wakeland,” Tucker said, disdain in his voice. “It’s my mom, my dad, it’s my girlfriend. I mean, she doesn’t even know and I don’t want her to. The fear…it’s everyone, you know?”
Ben nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
“It’s everyone.”
Silence.
“Look, this is just about out of the bag,” Ben said, “and I can’t put it back in, even if I want to.” Ben stood and watched a crow struggle into the air. “I won’t expose you. I won’t do that to you. But I don’t know what others are going to do. I think you should be ready.”
Tucker squinted up at him and then looked back out over the orange grove, shaking his head.
“You know the best thing about this serial killer?” Tucker said.
Ben just looked at him.
“Seeing everyone else scared. It’s been kind of nice for a change.”
—
HE WAS HOME by six, alone in the barn, reading and rereading Wakeland’s letters from all those years ago. You’re a coward, Wakeland had written, and, damn, he’d been right. He was a coward, had been for years. Even choking Wakeland was the act of a coward, the desperate act of a man who still felt powerless. Why would Wakeland stop then, if Ben wouldn’t arrest him, wouldn’t use the power he did have?
He struggled through the photographs of Lucero, stared at the picture Natasha had given him of this new boy, Phillip, thinking about the evidence again—the birthday card to Lucero back at his mother’s makeshift home, Neil’s story about being caught holding hands in the apartment, the photographs Natasha said were hiding in the master bedroom closet of that apartment—trying to piece together some half measure he could live with to fix all this. It’s everyone, you know? Tucker had said. Yeah, and everyone would know about him, if he did this. Everyone. Rachel. Emma.
Ben pulled the photos of him and Wakeland from the box he kept in his rifle cabinet, glanced through them again, him smiling, him showing off his county freestyle championship medal. He won regionals a few weeks later, and then it was states.
He was the favorite to win the 200 free, nearly seventeen years ago. He’d been ahead of the pack, his body torpedoing down the lane, the silence of the water and then the roar of the crowd when he turned for a breath of air. Rachel was there, in the stands; his mother and Voorhees, too. Scouts were on the side of the pool—UCLA, USC, Stanford, UC San Diego. Coach Dixon, the USC coach who had timed, weighed, and measured him up in L.A. a few weeks before, was ready, Ben knew (or at least Wakeland had said), to offer him a scholarship. Before the race, Dixon and Wakeland shook hands, a fraternal swagger between them. Ben wondered then if Dixon knew about Wakeland, if this was a secret that handshakes secured; the two swam together back in the old days, bound forever by their triumph over bodily pain. If Ben took the scholarship, Wakeland would be there with him, too, in his friendship with the USC coach, in the reason Ben was at USC at all, in every breath Ben took above the flat surface of the chlorinated water.