Jay wrinkles his brow. “Are you sure?”
“Blue T-shirt, this girl,” she says, pointing to a copy of the missing girl’s graduation photo that’s poking out of her shirt pocket. “Three different people, Jay, on three different streets, said she left one of these leaflets on their doorsteps. This was last week sometime.” She pinches off the smoking tip of her cigarette, grinding out the red cherry in the damp grass, and pockets the butt.
“This isn’t Hathorne’s,” Jay says.
“I know. A friend of mine works opp for their team, guy who used to write for the Post too. He says the word internally is she wasn’t theirs.”
“What do you mean, ‘opp’?”
“Opposition research,” she says. “He wouldn’t breathe a word of the dirt they’ve dug up on little Miss Sandra Dee over there, but I sure as shit wish he’d root around in Parker’s closet. I happen to know she spends a lot of time in there.”
Lon smiles wide, waiting for him to take the bait.
Jay would just as soon have no idea how she knows that.
He looks at the flyer. “This means Alicia was either working for Acton–”
“Or Wolcott,” Lonnie says, finishing the thought.
“Easy enough to put Alicia in a blue T-shirt to make her look like a Hathorne worker, an insider with some concerns about the direction of the campaign.”
They both turn to catch a glimpse of Wolcott and her crew, Reese Parker and the other staffers following as the cameraman and the news reporter shadow the candidate. Wolcott is across Ledwicke, talking to her potential constituents, half of whom Jay is fairly certain didn’t vote for her in the general.
“You think it’s theirs? Parker and Wolcott’s?”
“If it is, then coming out here sure is damn good cover,” Jay says, shoving his hands into his pockets. Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux have been left standing in the parking lot of the Samuel P. Hathorne Community Center, aimlessly watching the activity all around them. Ruby Wainwright brings them coffee, offers Maxine a seat away from the crowd. “They’re wasting that girl’s time with a photo op,” Jay says, shaking his head at Wolcott’s performance for the camera, “when the real story of what she was doing in Pleasantville is right here,” he says, pointing to the flyer. They’re going about this all wrong. He remembers the white van, the fact that each girl was kept alive for days. “Wherever she is, she’s not here.”
“You want to roll to the Northeast?”
The cell phone in Jay’s pocket rings.
He pulls out the black Motorola and answers.
Rolly got an address for Hollis, he says, page 223 in the phone book.
“Easy as pie,” he says.
“Look like someone’s home?”
“No car, no movement outside.”
“Any sign of the girl?”
“No,” Rolly says. “You want me to start something, knock on his door?”
“Be careful with it, though. If he smells trouble, thinks you’re a cop sniffing around, he may spook, panic even, and we may never find the girl.”
“The day I pass for a cop, take me to a field and shoot me.”
Half Chickasaw, half Louisiana Creole, Rolly Snow is an ex-con who did time with one of Jay’s friends from his Movement days. Part of his gift as an investigator has always been the fact that he doesn’t look the part–with his long, braided hair, black as ink, and the initials of his name tattooed across his right hand. Jay can picture him behind the wheel of his El Camino Real, the pickup that comes out whenever a job requires it, when a Town Car would be as out of place as a hat on a horse’s head. He’s parked a few houses down, he says, with a clean view of Hollis’s front windows. “I’ll play it smooth,” he assures Jay.
Jay closes the flip phone, sliding it back into his pants pocket.
He glances again at the Robicheauxs, Maxine’s hips spilling off the sides of a cheap folding chair, a line of sweat running down her hairline, weaving through a mesh of pressed hair, the roots untended for the last five days. Five days. She keeps rubbing her hands along the front of her thighs and rocking back and forth in the chair, her body moving on memory, old muscles aching for the child she once rocked in her arms. She looks up, her gaze landing on Jay. From where he’s standing, he can feel the weight of the bags under her eyes, her face as wrecked as that of Tina Wells’s mother, the day she wept on the TV in Bernie’s room at St. Luke’s. He gives Maxine a polite nod. She gives him the same, rocking back and forth in the folding chair. Jay turns to Lonnie and says, “Let’s go.”