THIRTY-TWO
I got to the Radio Shack in the Shops at Wildflower Glade right as they opened on Friday morning. I had a plan this time, having already learned my lesson about pursuing leads without thinking it through. I wasn’t about to get thrown into a cell for another fifteen hours. I didn’t have time for that. And neither did Veronica Cruz, if she had any time left at all. Either way, I was going to prove that I was right about Derrow. But first I wanted to be able to tell where he was.
After looking around helplessly for a while, I allowed a pimply but enthusiastic kid wearing a tie with a saxophone on it to talk me into a five-hundred-dollar police scanner. Far from the cheapest, it was also not the most expensive one in the store, which I thought showed restraint on his part. But it was the correct tool for the task of listening to the Belmont police radio broadcasts from anywhere within the city’s thirteen square miles.
“A lot of departments are still on the analog systems,” the kid told me excitedly, “but the police here just got a brand-new communications center last year, everything upgraded. Before that, you could have gotten into scanning for way less. And they’ve got apps for it now too, but you can’t listen to all the channels that way. Too bad, huh?”
I thrust my credit card at him, even though I had no one I could bill this expense to. “Bad for me, good for you,” I said. “Maybe don’t rub it in.”
I asked if he could program it for me and he said to give him thirty minutes. Then I went into a sports-apparel store and tried on a series of baseball caps, finally settling on the grey Ohio State hat that made me look the most forgettable.
“You know we have ladies’ hats,” the cashier told me at the register, pointing to a rack of pink ones in the back of the store.
“Ladies’ hats?” I said loudly, slapping my card down on the counter.
I went back to Radio Shack, where Saxophone Tie gave me a brief lesson on straight repeater operation and trunking radio systems and talk groups. Much of it went over my head, but the gist was that the scanner automatically tuned itself to the frequency someone was speaking on within the talk group, but I would have to manually check one talk group at a time. Then I took my overpriced new toy out to Andrew’s car and stretched out in the backseat.
One thing was immediately clear: people in Belmont called the cops a lot.
Even shortly after ten in the morning, there were complaints about noise, about traffic jams at afternoon kindergarten drop-off at the Montessori school, about a suspicious individual entering a neighbor’s house.
(“I advised the caller that the individual was actually the neighbor, wearing a new coat.”)
I heard a few familiar voices, namely Meeks and Pasquale. I didn’t hear Derrow yet. So I lay there and drank some tea and waited, paging through the scant information I had found about him.
On paper, he was conspicuously inconspicuous. John “Jack” Derrow. Fifty-six, born and raised in Belmont, a lifelong resident apart from six years spent in the navy following high school. After a general discharge, he joined the police department. Married early on to Theresa Marr, a fellow Belmontian, divorced four years later. No kids. No social media profiles. No search results at all beyond the occasional police-beat item and, in 2003, the race results from the Capital City Half Marathon. Two hours and six minutes, in the bottom third for his age group. But that told me nothing, of course. None of it did.
It was around eleven when his quiet rumble of a voice came over the radio. He was driving car one-four, the same vehicle he’d driven when I had the pleasure of riding with him. I listened as he responded to a traffic-accident call and then an identity-theft complaint on the far eastern edge of the town. I drove over there and parked a block away from Derrow’s cruiser. Once he emerged from the victim’s house and had radioed in that the call was resolved, I pulled out my phone and called the police dispatcher.
“There’s a woman taking pictures of people in Brayfield Park,” I said in my most concerned tone of voice. “Like from a car. She’s in an old blue Mercedes. I don’t know what she’s doing, but there are children here.”
I described myself—dark brown hair, leather jacket, maybe a black eye?
“Thanks for the tip, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “Can I get your name?”
“Pam Gregorio,” I said.
A minute or two later, I heard the call come across the scanner. “Anybody near Brayfield Park? Got another report of the chick in the blue Mercedes. Sounds like she has a camera this time. Concerned parent called it in.”
Derrow answered immediately. “This is one-four, I’m right around the corner. I’m on it.”
He snapped on his lights and sirens and took off in a flash. I followed. He lost me on Clover Road, going far too fast for me to follow without looking suspicious. But I knew where he was going. And the thing was, he wasn’t right around the corner. He was clear on the other side of town.
So everyone, including the dispatcher, was aware to be on the lookout for me, but Derrow’s interest was a little stronger than most. Strong enough to tear across Belmont, sixty in a thirty-five-miles-per-hour business district, and—as I observed when I caught up to him—to systematically approach every person in the park that afternoon. It was damp and chilly out, so there weren’t that many people in attendance, but he spent close to thirty minutes looking for me or someone who had seen me. I watched from the safety of my brother’s nondescript vehicle for a while and then left him to it before he made his way to the side of the lot I was parked on. Ten minutes later, his voice came through the scanner as he radioed in clear, apparently giving up.
I contemplated calling in again—maybe I could be harassing people at the skate course this time—but decided to reserve the only trick I had for later, when it might count more. I parked at the library and listened to the voices on the radio for a while. Pasquale pursued a kid who’d stolen three cans of spray paint from the art-supply store but lost him; Derrow caught a speeder with expired tags; Meeks followed up on a tip about an individual lurking around the closed-for-the-season pool of the Holiday Inn Express.
There were no mentions of Veronica Cruz, I noted.
Sure, the police were doing everything they could.