The Angel of Knowlton Park (44 page)

He tried to give her an easy out. "I know that Iris has a boyfriend, a boy she likes. I think she's gone to meet him. Is that right?"

He watched understanding, agreement, and caution follow one another across Kelly's face. Her hands rose, fell, then rose again. She signed briefly, and they fell back into her lap.

Missy Steinberg said, "She doesn't know what to do."

She knew what to do, that was why she'd asked Missy to call. She was just stuck in adolescent coyness, in the small teenage friendship circle of "maybe she won't like me" that kept her from seeing the larger life and death issues. He choked down impatience, trying gentleness one more time. "Did Iris go to meet her boyfriend? Do you have any idea where they went?"

Missy signed the question. The girl shrugged, lowered her eyes, then shrugged again, keeping her eyes on the floor.

He saw Iris's eyes, open and soulless like her brother's. Saw flies circle and land. Felt a clench of dread in his gut. Like sand through an hourglass, the last of his patience ran out. He didn't have time to tenderly nudge a frightened teenager toward cooperation. He stamped the floor hard with his foot. Kelly's head came up abruptly, Missy turned, and both women stared at him reproachfully.

"We don't have time to play "should I, shouldn't I?" games," he said. "Iris Martin's gone to meet the boy she thinks is her boyfriend. He's not. He means to do her harm. There's still a chance I can prevent that if I can find her. If Kelly knows anything that could help me find Iris, I need to hear it now. Otherwise, I've got to get back out there and keep looking."

Missy Steinberg shot him a murderous look, but she was a professional. The same standards that made her translate fairly and accurately for Kelly required her to do the same for him. He watched Kelly's face as she followed the moving hands. Saw understanding followed by what looked like more stubborn reluctance. He opened the envelope he'd brought and pulled out the pictures. Without asking permission, he reached past Missy and laid them out on the desk. "Is one of these boys Iris's boyfriend?"

Missy frowned at the pictures. "Detective," she said, "I really don't think—"

"Don't think," he said. "Interpret. I know they're vulgar. They were taken by men who collect child pornography. I think Iris Martin went to meet one of these boys. Now please. Kelly's trying to tell me something," he said. "I'd like to know what it is."

Kelly, who'd been trying to get her interpreter's attention, stamped her own foot and began to sign vigorously, her gestures, which had previously been subdued, suddenly vigorous and elaborate. Missy watched attentively. "Yes. Yes. I think I recognize one of them. I only saw him once, the time he brought her little brother out to visit." She stabbed one of the pictures. The same one Neddy Mallet had picked.

"Thank you," he said. "Thank you, Kelly." He picked up the picture of Matt McBride. "Do you have any idea where he and Iris might have gone?"

For a minute, her hands hesitated, her chin set stubbornly, dark eyes resentful, but the moment passed. "Iris said her brother had a place. That they were going there."

"Any idea where the place is?" She shook her head. "Did she leave anything? An address? Phone number?"

"No," she said. "I'm sorry." Her troubled eyes searched his face, looking for something. Reassurance, maybe. "Is Iris...? Do you really think she's in danger?"

"I do."

"I could look in her room," Kelly offered. "See if she left any notes or anything."

It was exactly what he wanted her to do, but if he asked her to search, and then the search led to something, and then the something got challenged at trial? He couldn't take the chance. The memory of Kristin Marks and the chain of evidence errors still haunted him. "I can't ask you to do that."

Missy Steinberg followed him out the car, her feet clobbering the wooden floor, smashing down angrily on the gravel. "You're a real bastard, you know that?" she said.

"Because I'd rather find Iris Martin alive than dead?" He unlocked the door and jerked it open, his elbow just missing her face, she was standing so close.

Her focus had been on Kelly. Only then did it dawn on her what had just occurred. "You don't really think..."

"Of course I do. You think I was mean to that poor child because I enjoy it?"

Her eyes were wide with shock and concern. "Is there anything we can do?"

He hesitated. "I couldn't... can't ask you to search her room... but if you decided to, or Kelly took it upon herself to do it... and you found anything... I wouldn't mind hearing about it." He hoisted himself onto the seat and shut the door, taking off in a shower of gravel, leaving her staring after him. One more example of how he was a mean, selfish bastard with no social skills, unsuited to be a policeman. So dedicated to being hateful he'd rise from a sickbed just for the pleasure of sticking it to some poor deaf kid.

He drove home oppressed by the feeling that bad things were happening, things he was powerless to stop. A cop doesn't like feeling powerless. He got out of the car, fists clenched, breathing the way he would late at night, going through an open door into a dark building, not knowing what lay on the other side. That was how the whole day had felt—like going into a dark place, not knowing what was there. Except he did know what was there, didn't he? Iris Martin and Matty McBride. Ricky Martin. Perhaps others he hadn't yet identified. He just didn't know where to find them.

It was past time for Kyle and Perry. He sat and waited. Paced and waited. Stalking back and forth, tormenting his knee as he contemplated the exquisite torture Paul Cote had devised—to take his best detective, on the cusp of solving a case, and lock him out of the investigation, knowing that he wouldn't be able to leave it alone. Knowing that, at least in the privacy of his mind, Burgess would be putting the pieces together, unable to do anything with them. It was like locking a man up in solitary with half the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Doing something impulsive and stupid now would be to let Cote win. What he feared was that doing nothing would let the killer win.

Where the hell were they? He couldn't sit here forever waiting, worrying about what was happening to Iris Martin. He called dispatch and asked if they knew where Kyle and Perry were. The dispatcher was a friend, otherwise he would have gotten nothing. "Call came in maybe forty minutes ago. A woman, looking for you, asking for help. Her speech wasn't very intelligible. We got a partial location. They took off."

"You get a name?"

"Rice, maybe? Rice Marn?"

Iris Martin. The knife in his stomach twisted. "Location?"

"Back Cove. She said more but we couldn't make it out."

"Hope they took an army," Burgess said. "Thanks for the information."

His pizza was indefinitely postponed. The Back Cove was a huge bay, as big as half the old city, circled by residential neighborhoods, Payson Park, Back Cove Park, a ribbon of green parkland along the water, and running paths. McBride and Iris could be anywhere. Or gone from there entirely. It could be a trick. He could have made Iris call to lure them over there while he took her somewhere else. He could have told her she was one place when she was actually someplace else. Iris probably wasn't that familiar with Portland.

"Did she sound frightened?"

"She sure did. We couldn't understand much of what she said, but "Help" came through loud and clear."

He put down the phone with a heavy heart. He could see her face too well, imagine her fear too vividly. Iris was smart and resilient, but being a deaf person in a hearing world put her at an awful disadvantage. Even if she could find someone to ask for help, she might not be understood. It would be easy for McBride to convince people to dismiss her pleas for help. People were all too ready to dismiss anyone who was difficult to understand, or who made them feel embarrassed and Iris, knowing that, would be sensitive to the rejection and the judgments. It would only increase her fear and desperation knowing that even if she did reach out for help, she might not be understood.

He still had his radio. He tried to reach Kyle, got no response, and tried Perry. Stan's voice came on, brief and breathless. "Stan. It's Joe. You find her? Did you find Iris Martin?"

"Iris Martin. Of course. I should have known. What's going on, Joe?"

"Not on the radio," he said. "Call me."

"Oh, right," Perry said. "I'll just ask one of these seagulls if they've got a phone."

He was breaking up badly. "I'm losing you," Burgess said. "And I can't go get a new battery. Where are you?"

"Payson Park. Wait," Stan said. "We're getting nowhere here. We don't know what we're doing or what we're looking for. It sounds like you do. Let me grab Terry and we'll come over. You can order the pizza."

"Only if you stop by the station and pick up the crime scene videos."

"Oh, right. Pizza and a movie. I should have thought of that."

"Large roni with green pepper and black olives?"

Through a cloud of static, Perry said, "I love it when someone remembers. And Terry wants—"

"Hamburg with mushrooms and onions. And don't forget that printout."

"Will you marry us, Joe?"

"Screw you," he said. He ordered pizza and sat down to wait. He couldn't sit still. He limped downstairs and got the briefcase of stuff from his car, the stuff he'd taken off his desk yesterday to avoid Charlene Farrell's prying eyes and never gotten back. He sat at the table like a man playing solitaire and began laying out the crime scene photographs.

The pizza man came up the stairs followed by Kyle and Perry, looking a little unnerved to find himself followed by two men with guns on their belts. Burgess paid the man and put the pictures away. He'd used a fan to suck cool air out of the bedroom and the kitchen was comfortable. Sweaty and limp from the heat, they fell on their food with silent efficiency.

Perry finished first. He pushed back his chair, walked to the sink, and shoved his bald head under the faucet. He let the cold water run over him until Kyle said, "My turn," and nudged him aside. Despite the exhausted slowness of their horseplay, the pungent scent of sweat, and their grim faces, they were like kids playing in the sprinkler. A second later, Kyle scooped a handful of water and threw it at Burgess, yelling "Gotcha" as the water hit him full in the face. He pictured Cote's prune-faced disapproval as the three of them romped around the kitchen, soaking the walls and counters and each other.

It ended as quickly as it had started. He handed out bath towels, updated them on Iris Martin, and they sat down to talk strategy.

Chapter 34

"I've got a K-Mart clerk, out by the highway, thinks she remembers a teenage boy buying a blue blanket and some kid's underpants last week," Perry said. "It stuck in her mind because it was odd stuff for him to be buying. And because she tried to flirt with him and he was kind of nasty. They're getting us surveillance tape. And Devlin says he's got a match between a print on the boy's body and one of the sets of prints on that K-Mart bag. Too bad they're not in the system."

"They finally got around to doing those storm drains," Kyle said. "We got the knife. T-handled thrust knife. No prints." He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "What you got, Joe?"

So the system was working. Piece by painstaking piece. He told them about getting the pictures from Andrea Dwyer. About his talk with Kelly Stanley, her ID of Matt McBride's picture. About Ned Mallett also picking out the picture. He spread out the pictures.

Perry stabbed McBride. "Told you I didn't like that kid."

Kyle bent to look, pointed to another picture. "That's Ricky Martin," he said, fishing out a mug shot and laying it beside the other pictures. Ricky was clearly the beauty of the family, handsome in a deadly, sleepy-eyed way. Lots of prison muscle.

"So we've got to find them," Perry said.

"How?" Burgess asked. "You bring me those printouts? The video?"

"Yeah. But how does that help?"

Burgess's body felt like the football after the game. "I'm looking for a car. A blue car. There's nothing registered to Matt McBride. But what about his father? Or Ricky Martin? I'm looking for Martin or McBride there in the crowd. And maybe the car parked somewhere nearby? Looking for a break. Kelly Stanley said McBride was going to take Iris to Ricky's place. Since we don't know where that is, we're down to footwork. Get out there, flash pictures around, see if anyone recognizes Martin or McBride. Get cops checking all the rooming houses, shelters, and squats."