Lorilei’s the one who leads the police to Ricky Langley, finally. Early Monday morning, her son still missing, the sheriff calls her up at Melissa’s house and asks her to come down to the station for questioning. He’s kind but firm. They need her to take a lie detector test.
Let’s put her in a small room at the police station for this. From the ceiling hangs an overhead cone light like the one my parents had in their kitchen while I was growing up, the cone light that’s in every interrogation scene in the movies and that must hover over Ricky Langley when he finally gives his videotaped confession. Lorilei’s not a suspect—“No, ma’am, we’re not suggesting anything,” the taller, burlier cop keeps saying to her—but the truth is they don’t have any suspects. Not yet.
The men introduce themselves as Don Dixon, from the FBI field office, and Donald DeLouche, from the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office. “But you can call me ‘Lucky,’” the tall man says, taking off his hat and shaking her hand. “Everyone else does.”
Some kind of luck, she must think. Where’s her boy?
At the table the men’s voices are a mixture of gentle and tense. She can’t tell if they think she had something to do with Jeremy’s disappearance. Likely she’s too tired to care what they think. Just bring her back her boy.
“Now, ma’am, I need you to remember everything as careful as possible.”
She sighs. “I told the investigators already. I went next door, and then second thing I went to the Lawson house. There’s a boy and a girl live over there; Jeremy plays with them sometimes. A man answered the door and he let me use the phone to call my brother.”
“Do you know his name?”
It’s the first time anyone’s asked her that. She didn’t then, but she does now. “Ricky Langley,” she says.
Lucky stands up, picks his hat up off the table, and walks out. Dixon follows him.
A minute or so later, another cop walks into the room. He’s younger than the other two, clean-shaven. He sits down on the chair Lucky left and pulls it up to the table. “Don’t you worry about them,” he says. “They’re just going to check on something. My name’s Officer Roberts. Now. You were telling them about the man who answered the door?”
Roberts keeps her there for hours more, going over the day in detail. Sometimes another cop comes in and joins him. Together they retrace every step she took. Finally, they have her go sit in the sheriff’s office.
That’s where they tell her they’ve found her boy. He’s dead.
*
Twenty-four hours before, that name, Ricky Langley, wouldn’t have meant anything to Lucky and Dixon. But on the morning of Sunday the ninth, as the search continued, the two of them had gone into the woods together to hunt geese. Later, maybe, there’d be hell to pay for their going hunting with a child still missing. Later maybe the whole thing would look a little funny. But the white-fronted geese passed overhead only twice a year, and anyway, the boy was most likely drowned and dead.
Early in the morning, they’d set decoys on flat slab boats they floated slowly forward until they heard the soft squawking of the flock cooing out to the decoys. Then they’d tethered the flats where they were—within good range of where the geese were headed—and dug two chest-high pits into the soft silt on the side of the bank. Now, as they squatted side by side in their pits, both of them with their hands on their rifles, a Thermos of hot coffee set between them, Dixon stared into the blue-gray vacant sky and said to Lucky, “What do you make of that boy still being missing? You going to keep on with the search?”
The pits were bone-cold. The air too quiet. “Through the day at least,” said Lucky. “But they don’t need me there.” He poured coffee into the plastic top of the Thermos, took a sip. “They’re dredging the canal today. The sheriff’s office has got it.”
“I know it ain’t my case,” Dixon said, “but I don’t think he’s in the woods. If he were they’d have found him by now.”
“He drowned, I’ll bet. Lots of kids drown out that way.”
“They’d have found him then, too.”
“Maybe,” Lucky said. He didn’t seem inclined to say more.
Dixon waited a long moment, choosing his words carefully. Then he said, “If y’all don’t find his body by morning, the FBI’s gonna have to get more involved.” Under the Federal Kidnapping Act, adopted after the murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, after twenty-four hours a presumption kicked in that a missing child had been taken across state lines. Jeremy had been missing thirty-six.
Soon, it wouldn’t be Lucky’s case anymore.
“I know that,” Lucky said.
“They’ll take over.”
“I know.” Lucky fiddled with his gun. Flipped the safety, brought it up to his eyes. No geese yet. He sighted on the target not yet there. “All right. I’ll bring the mother in tomorrow.”
That night, after Dixon and Lucky had packed in, the long hours in the pits having yielded them nothing, Lucky stopped off at the sheriff’s building on his way home. He’d finish some paperwork, he thought. Get ready for the mother in the morning. He was seated at his desk, the single light of his desk lamp illuminating the sheets of paper in a warm yellow glow, when the phone rang. On the line was a probation officer. “Heard about your missing boy,” she said. Her voice had a strong twang. “There’s a man you should know about out on parole from child molestation in Georgia. Not my case, really—Georgia never sent the papers—and the last time I saw him was in December. Then he disappeared.”
Plenty of men skipped out on parole. She meant well, he knew, but this was probably nothing. “What’s the last address you have?”
“Let me check,” she said. Lucky heard the sound of papers rustling. “He was living with his parents in Iowa.” She repeated, “Iowa. Y’all pronounce it funny, don’t you? Says here he’s got a preference for boys six years old or so. How old’s your missing boy?”
Lucky’s heart started to pound. “Six.”
“You might try to find him,” she said. “His name is Ricky Langley.”
*
When Lucky and Dixon pull into the Fuel Stop parking lot, it’s a little past ten in the morning Monday, the sky a clear, weightless blue. They’ve got a warrant for Ricky Langley’s arrest for skipping out on parole in Georgia, the judge’s signature barely dry. Dixon gets out of the car. There’s a young man with jug ears riding a tractor, spreading crushed shell across the ground. Dixon waves at him and motions with his arm to shut off the tractor.
“Get down,” he says. He squints at the man. Brown hair, kind of scrawny, glasses. “I’m Agent Dixon and this is Detective DeLouche. Are you Ricky Langley?”
“Yes, sir.”
Lucky hasn’t said anything yet, but now he starts walking straight at Ricky. “You have the right to remain silent,” he says. The dust from the shell kicks up as he walks. “You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford to hire an attorney, one will be provided for you.” Ricky doesn’t respond and Lucky doesn’t stop. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?” He’s next to Ricky now.