The visit from Jim Wainwright, the talk with the Hathornes, picking up his daughter from the principal’s office . . . amid all that he forgot to call the trucking company. “They’ve been a problem for a while–their drivers speed through Pleasantville as a shortcut to the port. They pick up goods coming off those ships and move ’em out onto the highways, the rail yards to the south.”
“Well, back in ’94, it wasn’t a truck driving, but rather idling on Guinevere, on the back side of Gethsemane Baptist Church, the very day Deanne went missing. And it wasn’t an eighteen-wheeler, but a van with a white guy, midthirties, sitting at the wheel. Same thing last year, a white van, idling on the edges of the neighborhood the day Tina Wells disappeared. At least six people reported seeing a van just like it before. One of the local pastors, he’d made note of the van’s number, the one painted on the side, identifying it as one of Sterling’s fleet. The guy was planning to call the company to complain. He never did, but when Res and his partner came knocking, he showed them the number, which he’d written on a napkin. It was still sitting on the front seat of his car. That van was assigned to a driver by the name of Alonzo Hollis. He had shit for an alibi, other than he was at home, sleeping one off between shifts. He gave the same story last year. He has at least one prior, for sexual battery back in the eighties. But the kicker, the thing that raised the hair on the back of my neck,” she says, pausing. “There was another girl. A might-have-been, I should say. It was in the early part of last year. It never made any of my stories. Res and his partner asked us to hold it. But there was a guy matching Hollis’s description hanging around that truck stop on Market, at the northeast entrance to the neighborhood. He was messing with a teenage girl in the parking lot. Don’t ask me what she was doing at a truck stop at eleven o’clock at night. But the guy tried to jump her, an eyewitness said in a report that got filed away in the Northeast Division. Apparently, the guy tried to pull her into the van before the witness scared him off. The witness said Hollis got in his van and took off.”
Jay glances again at the notes from the autopsy report. “So, what, he takes them somewhere and then dumps them back in Pleasantville when he’s done?”
“That was the working theory. The van, that makes him mobile.”
“So why didn’t they arrest him back then?”
“There was a problem with their case, a big one.”
“What?”
“It wasn’t his semen.” She reaches for the pack of Parliaments, lighting another. “From the D.A.’s point of view, there just wasn’t enough there.”
“Which was Wolcott?”
“Her office, at least,” she says, exhaling smoke. “I can tell you what else. The police department, they’re going to protect her on this. Tobin, the current chief, he hates Axel, but publicly the department has to support one of their own. But according to Resner, they’re hoping for a Wolcott win. I guess they don’t want ol’ Axe looking over their shoulder for the next two years.”
“What do you think of their suspect?”
“I think Alonzo Hollis was the best, and only, lead they ever had.”
“And you trust this Resner?”
“As much as I would any cop,” she says.
“He would have passed all this on to Detective Moore, right?”
“Can’t see a reason why he wouldn’t.”
Jay taps the tabletop. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“Day five,” Lonnie says.
They both know Alicia Nowell is running out of time.
Lon stays for ice cream with the kids, Blue Bell peppermint, Ellie’s favorite. She comes out of her room and seems genuinely happy to see an old family friend. She doesn’t mention the headline story in her life, the pregnancy of her best friend, but she’s surprisingly chatty about other things–a sewing class she and Lori are thinking about taking, and whether her dad will let her see Set It Off with her friends this weekend–and Jay is struck by the energy of having another person in the house, the veil it lifts. Maybe Lonnie can come for dinner sometime, he says, make a real evening of it. “I’d like that,” she says.
Later, the kids asleep, Jay and Lon stay up talking over a few beers.
Gingerly, he asks about Amy.
“She says she’s confused.”
“There someone else?”
“Her ex-husband.”
“Ouch.”
She shrugs. “She comes around still,” she says. “I don’t know.”
“She the reason you never left town after you lost the job?”
“I have yet to admit that to myself, Mr. Porter.”
“Enough said, Ms. Phillips.”
He backs off, and they finish the last of the beer in silence.
It’s nearly eleven o’clock by the time he walks her to her car, the dusty white VW Golf. Without a word said, he slips her two hundred-dollar bills, money he pulled from his wallet when she wasn’t looking. She tucks it into the pocket of her jeans, somehow knowing an elaborate or lavish thank-you would embarrass them both. “You look good, Jay,” she says. “You and the kids.”
“We’ll be all right,” he says.
“Yes, you will.”
He’s still a little undone over this Lori thing, not sure how or when to break it to her mother, still wondering if it’s the right thing to do. He’s about to ask Lonnie to throw some light his way, give him some idea of how to handle this, when he spots a black Nissan Z parked across Glenmeadow, idling at the curb. Heart thumping, he starts for the car, walking across the street at an angle. “Jay,” he hears Lon call behind him. As he nears the driver’s side of the Nissan, he can smell marijuana burning inside, a coil of smoke winding in a stream through a crack in the driver’s-side window. Inside the car, the smoke is so thick that Jay can’t see a soul. He raps on the driver’s-side window as the engine revs. The driver, whoever it is, peels away from the curb, tearing down sleepy Glenmeadow, tires squealing. Jay watches it go, catching the same four characters on the Texas plates that Rolly reported earlier, 5KL 6, plus the last two, a 7 and a 2. It’s Jon K. Lee’s stolen car, the one that was outside Jay’s office the night of the breakin. “What in the world was that?” Lonnie says.
“Trouble,” he says.
CHAPTER 7