Following Christopher Creed (14 page)

The chief was pacing and talking and pacing and talking with the officer I'd met last night, "Tiny" Hughes, behind a big picture window. There was an elderly secretary named Millie at a desk. I could hear seemingly meaningless words floating out from him and Officer Hughes: "Fax us the..." and "Why would Danny have..."

I figured we might wait quite a while. RayAnn had her laptop with her.

"Look up bipolar disorder," I said.

She rolled her eyes, keeping me in check by saying, "He's
not Charlie
"

I said nothing, which probably got her feeling some level of sympathy. RayAnn had had Abnormal Psych last semester too, but in a different section.

"As I never was forced to study-for-the-test/forget-after-the-test, I don't forget things after the test," she said, alluding to the three weeks we'd spent on this fairly common disorder. "What did you forget that you'd like me to remind you of?"

"How bad a case Justin has?" I suggested.

"Well. We know that manic doesn't mean happy. It means hyperalert to certain situations and sensations. It can mean that people's minds race, which his does. It can mean that people will believe they'll be millionaires next week, or that they're vital to the operations of the universe. He doesn't have that last thing, thank God. Believing you're the God of the Underworld is where it gets serious."

"And he didn't claim to have heard voices," I said. "That's
really
serious."

"Yeah, let's hope he didn't hallucinate," she said, obviously thinking, as I was, of his mystery statement before dropping off to sleep last night: "Quantum thought works ... and
I don't
believe in ghosts..."

She dropped her fist onto my leg, punching lightly with affection.

"I'd say he's not too bad. He's probably like millions of people out there: if he stays on his medication and away from controlled substances, you'll never know he has it," she said, then added with more concern, "unless it's his mania that's making him interested in quantum thought. There's a thin line between believing your good energy is powerful enough to bring you good things, and having a mental illness that has you convinced you're drawing your brother back."

"I know," I said.

"Aren't you anxious to see those e-mails? See if there's anything to them?"

"I ... have a horrible feeling that they're a scam," I said. "Though the timing—a couple weeks after he'd been trying quantum thought—is very strange."

Chief Rye's voice carried out of the office, saying, "Sorry, I don't have anything for you yet. Call back at..." It became inaudible, but he soon walked into the lobby.

We stood up. Chief Rye did a double take.

"Oh. My college students. I forgot about you. Um..." He beckoned to us, and we followed him into a detention room, where Lanz had to sniff the chairs loudly. Probably twenty years of sweat residue was on them. "I just told the
Press of Atlantic City
I have nothing, but they have a daily deadline. There's nothing I have that they can print for tomorrow, but I can tell you the half of what I've got."

We sat down at this long table, and he sat beside us, fingering some papers.

"Did you find Danny Burden?" I asked, flipping on my tape recorder, and I could hear RayAnn click a pen.

"I hope not," he said. "His mother, honest to gosh, thought those kids were in Las Vegas, same as Darla's mother. Mrs. Burden
knows
Danny was in Las Vegas, because he called her from there twice, and she still has the number in the caller ID. It belongs to a small hotel, not on the Strip, and the owner has no record of a Danny Burden. So we traced the call time and location from the hotel—he apparently didn't own a cell phone—and he'd been registered under the name Danny Richardson."

"But ... you're saying Darla wasn't with him?" I asked.

"We think not. The desk clerk at the hotel said he never saw any sign of a girl. It was only Danny."

Interesting. "What do you think happened?"

Rye's jaw bobbed up and down. "Actually, the Pinelands is not our jurisdiction. We're only investigating this because the body was found in our parts. I don't know these Conovertown folks well. But I was cruising around out there, knocking on doors this morning, and if you could have heard the neighbors ... you would think I was asking questions for the whereabouts of the Apostle Paul. Danny Burden never did anything in his life, never even had a speeding ticket. People always told him not to get too close to Darla, she was poison; she was too off-the-wall wild and could ruin him. He, according to everyone, is a godsend. He's got a handicapped older brother, a guy named Wiley, and Danny worked two jobs while going to school last year to afford his brother's therapy. Wiley was born with cerebral palsy. He's never had much therapy, much chance to improve, because anything new was experimental and the state wouldn't pay."

I agreed that Danny Burden didn't sound like a killer. RayAnn jumped in.

"So, what was Danny doing in Las Vegas without Darla?"

"One obvious theory is running from the law."

"But you don't think he did it," I said.

"I'm not a court of law"' He held his hands up defensively. "All I'm saying is that nobody in those parts can believe it. They say Darla was wild and out of control even before she was depressed; Darla could have killed herself ... except that, obviously, she didn't dig her own grave and jump into it."

I remembered Justin saying she'd committed suicide. I couldn't begin to guess what would have made him say that, and I wasn't about to bring up his name now.

"Did the Las Vegas hotel have any clue where Danny went after he left? Forwarding number? Anything like that?" I asked.

"No. In fact, he never checked out, so they still have a backpack and a gym bag that were his. Or, at least, the maids turned them in after the third morning it looked like he hadn't slept in the bed. They're looking to see if they threw them out."

"He took off without his bags?" I asked, confused.

"Or something may have happened to him. I called the city morgue out there, and they've got a fairly young John Doe who either fell or was pushed off a balcony of one of the bigger casinos. It's an unsolved, but it could be him. I'm waiting to hear from them, too."

I could see why the
Press
would only be frustrated with this much. There was nothing reportable in it. Everything was pending.

"Do you have a cause of death on Darla yet?" RayAnn asked.

"There are two holes, one in either side of her skull—the small one being the point of entry, and the larger one, on the other side, the exit wound. Blowing out your brains takes on meaning with certain firearms. The Burdens owned one. Danny's mother wanted to hand it right over to the police. It hadn't been touched in years, she said. But when she went to get it, it was missing."

"What kind was it?" I asked. "Would the bullets be a match?"

"All we know until we have a ballistics tester down here is that it
could
have been the gun. The Burden gun is size-appropriate for both the entry and exit wounds. Excuse me."

He left the room, and RayAnn muttered that Tiny was holding the telephone up from behind the glass window.

"What do you think?" she asked.

From my dealings with the campus and city police, I was comfortable here, plugging Chief Rye. Crimes are public knowledge, falling under the public's right to know. Cops are not in the business of keeping too many things from the media. Generally, the relationship is friendly, unless a reporter oversteps. It's hard to overstep if you're too confused to put the facts together.

I just laughed.

"We're so out of our league," she said. "I feel lost."

"I have to call Claudia today. Maybe I should do it right now. Maybe she'd have input."

RayAnn got out some notes from last night, helping me remember that I was supposed to ask if the body had been burned or dropped in an acid to help the decomposition process. I called Claudia and had to listen to her whistle Dixie for a couple minutes about having to cover the spring formal.

"So, it wasn't the missing kid," she finally said.

"No. It's a local girl."

"Damn. You don't have a story."

She could be shortsighted at times. "Claud, I got more story than I know what to do with. Trust me."

"You're always saying to trust you," she groaned.

"Have I generally been right?"

"Look. If you're going to write a think piece on what happens when a weird kid disappears from a small town, then go interview the town. Don't waste too much time on the forensics of the dead girl. That's not in your cookie jar."

"Right," I agreed.

"And you need to think of a hook for our readership. We're a college five hundred miles away. How does he relate to our student body?"

Because there's somebody like him on every floor of every dorm.

I said, "I would call your contact at the AP wire service, tell him it will be in Thursday's paper at the latest. Give him a heads-up."

"You really think you can write this so well that the wire service will buy it?"

It was a leap, but as usual, I said, "Don't worry about it."

"Yeah, trust me, he says." She sounded annoyed.

"Justin Creed showed up at our door at four a.m."

"The brother of your one and only?"

"You got it. He'd been missing for two weeks. But when we showed up, he decided to come back."

I almost had her, but Claudia is hard to impress.

"And what do you mean,
our
door? Jesus, Mike."

Claudia thought RayAnn and I were bosom buddies. No one knew about
us
at school, save Stedman. Technically we
were
only bosom buddies, if you discounted the fact that I'd kissed her a hundred times.

"We're saving money," I chided. "She sleeps in Randolph sweat apparel."

"You keep your hands off her. Isn't she a minor, something like that? Some homeschooled brainiac ... I haven't talked to her much yet. I don't warm up to children well."

I sighed. "I know what I'm doing—"

"You'd better hope so. If you get locked up on a statutory rape charge, I'm not bailing you out."

"So send me some money for an extra room. I could use it. I'm paying for this myself, you know."

"Like you'll ever let me forget it. How much?"

I told her the amount for an extra room, figuring I could use the money for something else. So long as I didn't "statutorily rape" RayAnn, we were in no trouble at all.

"I'll do a PayPal." She sighed. "I'll create a travel budget and look ever so important. And be back here by tomorrow night, right? I need you. We've got a case of plagiarism in the EE Department involving twelve students. One of them hacked into the professor's files and the others were silent takers."

My neck snapped. EE is electrical engineering. That was a huge story for a campus. But I'm used to remaining calm in the face of some fierce energy.

"I'll be there," I said, though if I couldn't meet Torey Adams and Bo Richardson before this funeral, I was staying. Somehow.

"So, where's Chris Creed?" she asked, finally. "According to his brother?"

"Justin says he's coming here, might already be here," I said.

"But you don't believe that."

"Why shouldn't I?" I asked, but my sarcasm bled through.

"It's too convenient. You're not that lucky."

Chief Rye was motioning to us through the picture window, according to RayAnn.

"I am beyond lucky in all ways, and you know it," I said, standing up.

"And that's why I love you and need you." She blew a kiss through the phone.

I blew one back before clicking us off. Maybe that's why Claudia could imagine me in the same sentence with statutory rape. She was a sexual harassment charge waiting to happen if she ever got around some disgruntled prude. Claudia was beautiful, if you're into tall, lanky, and full of oneself. But she told vulgar jokes like a guy, liked to stun starting reporters with her unflowery speech, and blew kisses to those of us she was grateful for and admired. She liked ruffling people, but she hadn't managed to ruffle me. I was experienced with women so domineering that she only made me laugh.

Lanz stopped me before I walked straight into Chief Rye, who was coming out of the window room with papers in his hand.

"Well, apparently the motel where Danny was staying did not destroy his belongings. The manager found the bags, searched them, and found what sounds like a suicide note. While I was getting the fax, the morgue called with a list of distinguishable body markings on the DOA. There's a birthmark on the ankle shaped like a missile and a tattoo on the left arm of a sinking schooner. When we talked to Mrs. Burden this morning, she mentioned a birthmark on his ankle and a tattoo of a sinking ship."

"So, it's him."

"We'll know for sure by around four o'clock, but I'd say it's all formality."

I felt RayAnn reach past me, and papers rumpled. I assumed she had the fax in her hand. Or maybe he refused to give it to her, because suddenly Chief Rye began to read.

"
Dear Mom, Dad, and Wiley:

"
I've rewritten this letter thirty times. I'm trying to figure out how to say everything. I can't, so I'll just throw down thoughts and leave you to believe that everything I am saying is true.

"
Something is going to come up if it hasn't already. It will look like I committed a murder, Darla's, and you all know how I loved her and wanted to make our baby a decent life. I was prepared to, and when Darla lost the baby, I was sad that I would not have a baby. I knew it would be hard, but I was looking forward to the baby.

"
I guess Darla was too, because while she never said that, she was very upset when the miscarriage happened. She cried for a month, and it was because I kept saying I would not marry her without the baby. I wanted to go to community college and get my degree first.
"

RayAnn and I had turned to look at the fax, too, and Chief Rye just dropped it into our hands. "I've read it twice. There are too many flaws in what he's saying. Something's wrong with the big picture, even if he's telling the truth, but have at it."