“Are you telling me that Thomas did have a vasectomy?”
“They had a barbecue that night. As stiff and sore as he was afterward, he insisted on making steaks for us. Ed teased him unmercifully.”
Her voice was quivering now, growing weak and hoarse.
“Thank you,” he told her. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
“It is?”
“Yes, it is. And I’m sorry I had to call. I know how painful this is for you.”
“Do you?” she said. “How can you really?”
He said, “I lost my own boy when he was just a baby. His name was Ryan too. Ryan DeMarco Jr.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”
“So I have a sense, you know, of what you’re going through now.”
“It’s all so terrible,” she said. “How did it happen?”
“A car accident.”
“Oh no.”
“He was in his safety seat and everything. All buckled in. But even so.”
“Oh my good Lord, Ryan. And your wife? Was she hurt?”
“Not visibly. But she left me not long afterward.”
“It’s all just too much,” she said, sobbing now. He could feel her shoulders shaking, could feel the heavy, black ache in her chest. His left eye started to water. He put a finger to the moisture and dragged it away.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to add to your troubles. I just wanted you to know that…I do understand how you’re feeling right now. I really do.”
“It never leaves you, does it?” she said. “Ed keeps telling me it will get better, but I know it won’t. We can expect to feel like this for the rest of our lives, can’t we, Ryan?”
What should I tell her? he wondered. He searched his mind for the right words, but his mind was a blank, empty of everything except the heart-emptying truth. “I suspect we can,” he said.
? ? ?
“Okay,” DeMarco asked himself, “what do you know?”
He stood in front of the whiteboard in his office, black marker in hand. Under Bonnie’s name he wrote abortion. Under Thomas Huston, vasectomy. “So Thomas took her to Cleveland for the abortion,” DeMarco said. “He probably even paid for the abortion, but it wasn’t his baby. He knew it wasn’t his baby. So why the fuck would he do it?”
He wrote The other man? and underlined it twice.
DeMarco was still staring at the whiteboard when Trooper Morgan appeared in his doorway. “You better have what I need,” DeMarco told him and snatched the packet of printouts from the trooper’s hand. On each page was a photocopy of a driver’s license, owners of the vehicles parked at Whispers the previous night. One was registered to Bonnie, four to dancers, and four more to men who bore no resemblance to Tex, the bouncer.
“That’s it?” DeMarco said. “This is all of them?”
“All but your car and mine.”
“And these four guys?”
“No priors for any of them. I checked with Carmichael and he confirmed that these were the four customers inside with us that night.”
DeMarco shoved the papers against Morgan’s chest. “I told you to get what I need. This isn’t what I fucking need.”
The trooper remained calm. “What do you want me to do?”
“Go away and let me think.”
Morgan turned toward the door. Then DeMarco said, “Wait a minute. Get a car and meet me out front.”
“Squad car?”
“Fuck no.”
Alone again in his office, DeMarco studied the board. “So no car for Moby. No car for Tex. Moby, I know…” he said, then stepped within a foot of the board, stared so hard at the other name that the letters blurred, “but who the fuck are you? And who gave you a ride to Whispers?”
Forty-Six
Bonnie Marie Harris’s home was a small brick ranch in a seventies subdivision in the town of Linesville, twelve miles east of Whispers. DeMarco, dressed in the wrinkled chinos and OSU sweatshirt he kept in his office, scanned the windows.
Morgan had parked the undercover car on the opposite side of the street. “Looks like nobody’s home,” he said.
“Unless she’s sleeping.” DeMarco reached for his cell phone. “Where’s that number?”
Morgan handed him the notepad.
“You’re sure this is the landline?” DeMarco asked.
“I’m sure.”
DeMarco punched in the digits. The number rang four times, then went to Bonnie’s voice mail.
“Just what I thought,” Morgan said.
“Tell you what,” DeMarco said and popped open the passenger door. “Stop thinking. Just sit here and keep your eyes open.”