Heartstopper (33 page)

“We’re just trying to help,” Gordon Lipsman said.

“What’s that old show-business expression?” John asked pointedly. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you?”

Gordon Lipsman blanched. He looked toward his brown, tasseled loafers.

“Look, there’s not much anyone can do tonight,” John
continued. He didn’t want trouble. Not from the town drunk, a couple of teenage toughs, and a wimpy, high school drama teacher. Where was his backup anyway? He’d called for another car on the drive over. What was taking so long? “Go home, people. Get a good night’s sleep. If you feel you have to do something, you can check out the mall on your way home.”

“My wife isn’t at the goddamn mall. I’m telling you—”

“And I’m telling
you:
You’re under arrest. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back,” John instructed, unhooking his handcuffs from his belt to show he meant business. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to this, but clearly some show of force had become necessary. “Come on, Cal. Don’t make this any harder than it needs to be.”

“Fuck you,” Cal said, even as he turned around and extended his arms behind his back.

Thank God, John thought as he slipped the cuffs around Cal’s thick wrists. He made a mental note of the scratches on Cal’s hands, wondering if they’d come from tearing up Kerri’s place or something more sinister.

“Is that really necessary, Sheriff?” Gordon Lipsman asked, his eyes still on his shoes.

“Go home,” John said again, waiting until they’d left the house before ushering Cal outside. A police cruiser pulled up as the last of their cars departed. About fucking time, John thought, leading Cal to the curb. What he said was “Read Mr. Hamilton his rights and take him to the station. The charge is assault.”

“You’re not coming?” Cal asked John as the second officer pushed him into the backseat of the cruiser.

“I think we could all use some time to cool off and calm down,” John said. “I’ll see you in the morning. Maybe by then, Mrs. Hamilton will be back to bail you out.”

“And if she isn’t?”

“We’ll file a missing persons report and start looking.”

“I bet you wouldn’t be so relaxed if it was
your
wife who was missing,” Cal said from the backseat of the cruiser, and John might have smiled had Cal not added ominously, “Or your daughter.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just thinking out loud.” Cal Hamilton sank back in his seat, stared out the front window, refused to acknowledge the sheriff further.

“Lock him up,” John directed the other officer with a loud knock on the hood of the car with the palm of his hand.

“You have the right to remain silent,” he heard the deputy say as he threw the car into gear.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Cal said dismissively as they pulled away from the curb.

For several minutes John stood staring at the pavement, debating whether he should go down to the station and question Cal further. But he doubted he’d learn anything more of value tonight, and he knew he should probably go home, try to get a good night’s sleep. If Fiona Hamilton was, in fact, missing, then he had an exhausting day ahead of him. It wouldn’t take long before the press got wind of her disappearance, and pretty soon he’d be up to his eyeballs in reporters from neighboring counties, and the mayor would be on his back again, deriding his instincts, his dedication, his ability. John had been in law enforcement almost twenty years, and twits like Sean Wilson were still questioning his worth. Maybe because he routinely questioned it himself, John realized, understanding that if a serial killer was indeed in their midst and he apprehended him, then he’d no longer be regarded as an overweight, over-the-hill sheriff of a backwater, little southern town. Was that really how others saw him? he wondered. And did he have the strength to alter that perception?

A woman’s voice sliced through the night air. “Sheriff?”

He turned toward the sound. “Mrs. Crosbie.”

“Please call me Sandy.”

He tried to smile. “What can I do for you, Sandy?”

“Is everything all right?”

“For now. I may need to speak to you again tomorrow.”

“Of course. Anything I can do to help. Sheriff,” she began again before he could turn away.

“Yes?”

“That phone call I had before …”

“Yes?”

“It was from Rita Hensen.”

The school nurse, John thought, picturing the tiny woman. It had been John who’d unwound the cord from around her husband’s neck three years ago, and the sight of his lifeless body hanging from the shower rod was something he doubted he’d ever be able to completely erase from his memory. “Is there a problem?”

“Well, I’m not sure whether I should be telling you this …”

“Telling me what?”

“I don’t want to get Brian into trouble. He’s a very sweet boy, very sensitive, and I’m sure he hasn’t done anything wrong, but with everything that’s been happening …”

“Mrs. Crosbie … Sandy,” John corrected. “What is it you’re trying to tell me?”

“Rita just called. She’s very upset.”

“Has Brian done something?” This was like pulling teeth, John thought. Except more painful.

“That’s just it. She’s not sure. He won’t talk to her.”

“So what makes her think anything’s wrong?”

Again Sandy hesitated. Then the words tumbled out in a rush, as if spilled from a glass. “Well, he’s been very uncommunicative ever since Liana’s vigil. Clearly something has been bothering him, but he wouldn’t discuss it. At first Rita thought the whole thing had just churned up
memories of his father’s death. He hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s up at all hours. Sometimes he leaves the house in the middle of the night.”

“What happened tonight?” John asked, knowing there was a more specific reason for Rita’s call.

“Brian went out earlier without telling her where he was going. He was gone for well over an hour, and when he came back, he headed straight for the bathroom. Rita heard the water running for the longest time, and when he finally came out, she saw that he’d rinsed out his shirt, and …”

“And?”

“And she thought that was very curious because he never does stuff like that, and that’s when she saw a few red drops on the floor and realized it was blood.”

“She’s sure it was blood?”

“That’s what I said. She said she’s a nurse, she knows what blood looks like. She also said there were bruises on Brian’s hands and scratches on his face.”

“He could have tripped. He could have gotten into a fight. He could have walked into a door,” John ventured, thinking of Joey Balfour. What a night this was turning out to be. “There are any number of reasonable explanations. We shouldn’t go jumping to conclusions.” But even as he spoke the words, John was wondering if it was possible that Brian Hensen was somehow involved in Fiona Hamilton’s disappearance, that he’d somehow managed to lure her from her home, that he might actually have killed her, that this shy, sensitive seventeen-year-old boy whose father had committed suicide three years earlier could also have murdered Liana Martin and Candy Abbot. Was it possible?

“That’s what I tried to tell her,” Sandy said.

“What?”

“What you said—that there were any number of explanations, that she shouldn’t go jumping to conclusions.”

“What was Brian’s explanation?”

“There wasn’t one. When Rita questioned him about it, he called her a bunch of names and stormed out of the house.”

“Does she have any idea where he went?”

Sandy shook her head. “He took the car. She’s beside herself because she thinks he might have been drinking.”

“Shit,” John said. How many times had he said that tonight?

“I didn’t know whether to tell you.”

“You did the right thing.”

“I don’t want to get Brian into trouble.”

“Sounds like he’s already in trouble.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find him,” John said simply.

“And then what?”

John shook his head. He hated conversations that ended with
And then what?

H
e spent the better part of the next hour driving through the carelessly laid-out grid that was Torrance. Whoever had designed this place should be shot, John thought, knowing no formal planning had been involved in the town’s creation, that Torrance had more or less designed itself, beginning as a few widely scattered homesteads and expanding as its population increased. It followed no particular course, spilling like loose flesh from the top of a girdle into whatever empty spaces it could find.

John executed another perfect three-point turn at the end of yet another dead-end road, shaking his head in bemused wonderment at his ineptitude. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know his way around. He did. But it was late, he was getting tired, there were no streetlights, and the starless sky was the kind of dark your eyes never got used to. How was he supposed to find anyone?

It was ironic, he thought, that he’d begun the evening searching for one man and was ending it looking for another. On one end of the search was Cal Hamilton, a brute and a bully, all balls and no brain. On the other was Brian Hensen, smart, shy, and sensitive. Could one be more different from the other? And was there a link between the two? Was it possible that Brian Hensen was in any way connected to Fiona Hamilton’s disappearance,
and by extension to Liana Martin’s death? God, he hoped not. Surely that family had suffered enough already.

Once again his thoughts returned to that afternoon three years ago when he’d answered the phone to hear the flat tones of a fourteen-year-old boy summoning him to a modest house on Cherry Drive. “Sheriff Weber,” the voice had said without inflection, “this is Brian Hensen. Could you come over, please. My father is dead. I can’t cut him down.”

The senior Brian Hensen’s face was remarkably similar in shape and bone structure to that of his son, although Brian’s face was delicate where his father’s had been coarse, his hair lighter, his skin fairer, his eyes a paler shade of blue. Neither could be considered handsome—their noses too broad, their chins too weak—but they were perfectly respectable faces nonetheless. There was just something missing, a focus perhaps, and in its place lingered a sense of distraction that had been passed from father to son.

The senior Brian Hensen had suffered from depression all his life, succumbing to its ravages three years earlier, as one succumbs to any terminal illness. Some people had turned up their noses, called him a coward, said he chose the easy way out. But mental illness had robbed Brian Hensen of choices. Would people be so judgmental about someone who died of pneumonia, John wondered, or gave in to the constant and debilitating pain of cancer? Pain was pain, he thought, his eyes searching the deserted roadside for any sign of Brian’s black Civic.

He’d been worried about Brian ever since he’d found him clinging to his father’s lifeless body, his skinny arms wrapped around the man’s muscular thighs, trying to hold his legs up, to take some of the weight off his broken neck. “I couldn’t cut him down,” the boy kept repeating, a pair of useless scissors discarded on the white tiles nearby.

Indeed, it had been difficult for even John and his deputy to cut through the twisted sheet the senior Hensen
had used as a noose, even more difficult to remove that noose from around the bruised folds of his flesh. His skin had taken on a bluish hue, and purple lined his lips.

And if
he
could still see Brian Hensen’s body hanging lifeless from his shower rod, he who was used to the sights and smells of death, what must it be like for a sensitive young boy on the verge of manhood, unformed and unsure, still trying to figure out who he was and what he wanted from life? Did he want life at all? Or had he inherited his father’s suicide gene along with all the others? John knew that depression often ran in families, like long legs and brown eyes, and that suicide could be as contagious as chicken pox. He’d worried about Brian taking his own life. He hadn’t even considered the possibility he might take someone else’s.

John turned right, the headlights of his cruiser catching something suspect beneath a large banyan tree off the side of the road. He immediately pulled the car to a stop, grabbed his flashlight from the glove compartment, and jumped out of the vehicle. The night was growing cooler, although the air was still heavy with humidity. Even still, the sweet odor of marijuana took no time reaching his nostrils. He inhaled, experienced a vicarious thrill. It had been twenty years since he’d last enjoyed a toke. The memory warmed and comforted him as he advanced, his hands relaxed at his sides. There’d be no need for guns here, he thought as he approached the young man sitting beneath the tree in the high grass. In his experience, smokers of marijuana were far more mellow and much less likely to resort to violence than their drunken counterparts. “Victor,” he said, staring down at the young man whose ghostly white face required no extra lighting.

“Sheriff,” Victor acknowledged without any effort to disguise what he was doing. He took another drag off his hand-rolled cigarette and stared into the night.

“What are you doing here, Victor? Aside from the obvious.”

Victor’s head shook slowly from side to side. “The obvious is all I’m doing,” he replied after a pause.

“You know it’s against the law,” John said, feeling like a total hypocrite. What he really wanted to do was pull up a patch of earth and join him.

“I’m not hurting anyone.”

“Except yourself.”

Victor laughed. “Come on, Sheriff. You really believe that?”

“It’s against the law.”

“You gonna arrest me?”

John focused his flashlight on the surrounding area before circling it back to the road. “Where’s your car?”

“Didn’t bring it.”

“You walked here from home?”

“It’s not that far.”

“A couple of miles.”

“Cardio,” Victor said with a sly smile. “It’s good for you.”

“Not if you get eaten by an alligator, it’s not.” Again John circled the surrounding area with his flashlight.

“Don’t worry, Sheriff. I’ll protect you.”

“I appreciate that.”

Victor took another drag off his joint. John debated telling him to put it out, but the cigarette had already burned all the way down to Victor’s fingers and all that remained was one last drag, which Victor took, stretching it out as long as he could and holding it in his lungs until he was forced to exhale. “Good stuff,” he croaked.