“And how close was it to the vacant house?”
“She’s not sure, exactly. There’s that spot right in there, kind of a dirt area, no curb, she thinks it was there. I’m checking if anyone in that neighborhood owns a vehicle like that. Between that and calling these guys from the league, I’m pretty tied up here. What are you doing?”
“You find out who posted Fuller’s bail?”
“Yes. John Chapman. From the other night.”
“No shit. Well, guess what we know about Chapman? He’s a chemist. Worked for North Country Labs, ’91 to 2004.”
“I saw the email from Stephanie.”
“Fuckin’ A,” Mike said. “These guys are working on something; I’m ready to call in the DEA. Fuller, Chapman, Caruthers – Fuller’s already got the meth charge from your bust back when, Chapman’s a freaking chemist, and Caruthers has got the biker-gang-white-nationalist thing going; a perfect group of couriers or heavies or whatever.”
Lena was glib. “It’s a party.”
“Anyone on the league so far say they couldn’t account for Caruthers?”
“Bob Hurley says Dodd actually disappeared for a little while. Had his alternate play a few frames for him.”
“Fuck. There you have it. Who’s the alternate?”
“Harland Pelky. You okay? You sound keyed up…”
“I’m fine. You talked to Pelky?”
“Yeah,” she said, “by phone. Either he didn’t know what Dodd was doing or he wouldn’t say.”
“Any of these guys, these league guys, drive an old Caprice or a Cutlass or something? I mean, we’re close.”
“I’m going to start checking.”
Mike felt a twist of fear cut through the anger and ambition. “You’re just making calls, you mean…”
“Are you worried about me?”
Busted. Now she was going to tell him she could take care of herself – it seemed to be a theme in his life.
“If so,” she said, “I like it. But yes, just riding the desk for now. I’ll let you know if I feel the need to put myself in harm’s way.”
Mike stepped harder on the gas, plotting a new course in his mind.
“Listen, can you do one more thing?”
“Spin another plate, you mean?”
“You’re our illustrious case manager. Can you go back through the files, see who drives what again? Same thing we did for the white four-door; let’s look at DSS staff, plus go through the construction crew that worked the addition, the survey team, and any subcontractors.”
“Looking for a blue Chevy Caprice or Buick LeSabre.”
“Exactly.”
“I’m on it.” Lena asked, “What’re you thinking?”
“I met with Bobbi Noelle this morning, asked her about the quality of record-keeping going back. I want to follow this line with Caruthers as far as it takes us because it’s possible Lennox Palmer was on the case involving him back then, too. But I’m also thinking about your drug sweep, so I’m going to the high school.”
“The school? Why?”
“I was thinking about a kid I knew from Brooklyn, Neil Johnson.”
“Um, okay…”
“Tell you about it later. Probably nothing.”
* * *
Lake Haven’s schools were divided – there was an elementary and a middle school in one place, the high school further out, on the edge of town. The high school was where they kept all records for the district. He asked the woman in the office if he could get into the enrollment data. “I’d like to look back into the mid-2000s.”
“Well, our electronic records don’t go back that far.”
He was getting used to it.
She brought him to a room with a big table where it looked like teachers held conference. Her name was Barb and Barb left the room with a large, jangling ring of keys, promising to be right back. Mike sat by a window viewing the track. No one out there today; the school year had ended a month before.
Barb returned with several boxes, dropped them on the table, and left him alone to go through it all; left him thinking about kids. Kids like Victor Fogarty, who’d been at Lake Haven until his family moved to Placid in 2005. Or Dodd Caruthers’ kid, Tommy. Charles Morrissey’s daughter. Or any kids from the big drug bust in ’04.
The first box was general enrollment data by year. Lake Haven was not a diverse school; the past year was eighty-three percent white, eight percent black, six percent Asian, two percent Latino, one percent multiracial. Over half the students enrolled were considered “economically disadvantaged.”
He dug back through to 2005, had a look, and it was about the same. For 2004, the year Dodd’s son had been removed from his home, there had been just over five hundred students enrolled. But Tom Caruthers hadn’t been in high school then – he’d been in the first grade. Mike moved to another box, went through the elementary school stuff, including class pictures, and found little Tommy, smiling with a couple of missing teeth.
Tom Caruthers was a young man now. He worked as a roofer in Schroon Lake, an hour from Lake Haven. Amazingly, he had no record. Nothing criminal anyway, just medical stuff pertaining to the burn he’d sustained while in foster care. There had been a chance at an elective plastic surgery when he was old enough, but his parents had forgone it. Dodd was in prison by then, Tom’s mother getting by as a single mother on a shoestring budget. She’d found a religious man in Schroon Lake and apparently managed to turn her life around. Maybe Tommy’s too. Just kept his scars.
If Dodd Caruthers was angry with the system that had taken his son, or because his son had suffered, he was a sore sport, because Tom Caruthers seemed to have turned out just fine.
Mike unzipped his valise, pulled out the list of persons of interest from the Lavoie / Fogarty shared cases: along with Caruthers was Charles Morrissey, Scott Earnshaw, and Susan Gann. In the school records, he found a third-grader from 2004 named Jason Gann. Then Morrissey’s daughter, Lexie, in eighth grade. But it was a small town with some big families – the children weren’t necessarily offspring; he had to cross-reference with the case files and found out that Jason Gann was actually Susan Gann’s nephew, not her son. He could find no children named Earnshaw.
Mike rolled his shoulders. Cracked his knuckles.
He set out the list of names from the big drug sweep in Lake Haven the same year, Lena’s first big case, with basic information on the arrests. She’d emailed it all to him that morning:
Twenty arrests made, but once he’d eliminated the arrestees not old enough to have kids in school, and ones who lived in another district, he’d narrowed it to six. He cross-referenced the names with the Fogarty / Lavoie case file summaries.
Two kids shared last names with arrestees among the Fogarty / Lavoie cases. Jayden Price in first grade and John Durie, ten years old, in fifth. Mike didn’t have the warrant yet to get into Lennox’s cases, but DSS didn’t keep records arranged by caseworker anyway – they went by year, alphabetized by client. He could look, he just couldn’t directly use anything he’d found.
Jayden Price had a single mother who’d been arrested in the drug sweep. He’d been temporarily placed in foster care while his mother served thirty days. John Durie was the child whose meth-addicted parents had inadvertently poisoned him by storing precursors in the fridge. Mike found a picture in the school records. The kid sort of looked familiar, too. Like an actor from years ago, and now he’s in some new movie, but you can’t be sure if it’s him.
Mike went back to the Lena’s drug sweep info: John Durie Sr. and his wife Melissa were the parents, arrested and charged with criminal possession of meth precursors, seventh-degree criminal possession of a controlled substance, third-degree unlawful manufacture of meth. They were both remanded to the county jail in lieu of $10,000 cash bail or $20,000 bond each.
He grabbed his phone and called Lena. “What happened to the Duries?”
She hesitated. “Mike… tell me, really – what are you doing? The DEA is a phone call away.”
“Humor me.”