The Reckoning (3 page)

Nick Kavanaugh was a detective with the Belfair and Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division. Early thirties, maybe six feet, he was heavy-shouldered, flat-bellied, hard-boned, and quick, with gray eyes and close-cropped black hair going silver at the sides. He was wearing a navy blue suit, Italian cut, a white shirt, no tie. He had a blue steel Colt Python in a Bianchi holster on his right side. Nick was leaning, hip cocked and arms folded, on the edge of a beaten-down plywood desk in Lacy Steinert's office at the Probe—what Tin Town people called the Belfair and Cullen Counties Parole and Probation Service.

Lacy Steinert, a sport model with her motor running, had a secret thing for Nick but so far hadn't gotten a chance to show it to him, Nick being married and all that happy-sappy domestic horseshit. So the meet was all business and the business was a seventeen-year-old part-time car thief named Jordan Dutrow.

Nick was pretty sure that late last night Jordan Dutrow had dropped in on a couple by the name of Thorsson, who had a nice rancher in Long Reach, one of Niceville's more upscale neighborhoods.

While in attendance there, Nick believed that Jordan had officially graduated from the occasional impulsive car theft to Home Invasion, Unlawful Confinement, Aggravated Rape, two counts of Felony Homicide, and Grand Theft Auto. Jordan Dutrow was one of Lacy's juvenile clients, out on probation after getting popped in possession—while blind drunk—of a stolen Jaguar. Nick was reasonably sure that Lacy Steinert might have an idea where Jordan Dutrow could be on this rainy Friday night in Tin Town.

Lacy folded her arms, shook her head. “I'm gonna need some assurances from you.”

“Like what?”

“Like if I help you find him you're not gonna just go Nickolate the kid like you did Junior Wanless and Cory Frampton.”

“Wanless resisted, and Frampton stuck his nose in.”

“Which is now way off to one side and looks like an aubergine.”

“Aubergine?”

“Big ugly purple thing. Also known as an eggplant.”

Nick had to smile.

“How about you stop calling these mutts kids, Lacy? Jordan Dutrow is one of the best middle linebackers Frederick Douglass Tech ever had. He's six-three, built like a Brahma bull, and if he had stayed out of trouble, he might have gone to Ole Miss or LSU on a football scholarship.”

“He's still a juvie. And gentlemen never say the words
Ole Miss
around an LSU alumna.”

“He's a client of yours. Which is why I'm here tugging on your sleeve at this unholy hour.”

Lacy gave him a sideways look.

“You pretty sure he's the one who did the Thorssons?”

“I am.”

“What have you got?”

“Thursday, around midnight, killer came up from a ravine over the fence, left prints on the wet grass—big running shoes, deep imprint, so a large guy. Entered through a breezeway door that had a faulty lock. Not obvious from the outside. Footprints show he went straight to it. Thorssons were at the back of the house, in the master. We figure he went right there, because the lawn had been cut and he got grass clippings on his shoes and they got tracked down the hall, all the way to the bedroom.”

“Familiar with the house?”

“Looks like. The Thorssons had the house up for sale, and there was an Internet listing for it, had one of those digital photo tours of the house. It was all there, including the floor plan. People never think about that.”

“How does that bring us to Jordan? Anybody could have seen that tour video.”

“Video didn't feature the faulty breezeway lock. That was insider stuff.”

“And…”

“Thorssons had a cleaning service—”

“Oh, jeez—”

“Yep.”

“Jordan's aunt, LaReena Dawntay,” said Lacy after a moment. “Crack addict. She's in Lady Grace, terminal cancer. She's one of mine. I see the daughter in the hallways sometimes. In a maid's uniform.”

“Sweep No More. Her name is Cheryl Reid. She does the Thorsson house every second Thursday.”

Lacy went quiet.

Rain hissed on the window glass and drummed on the roof. She could hear Nick's heart, or thought she could, or maybe it was her own. She really believed she had reached Jordan Dutrow.

“DNA or prints?”

“He wore gloves but no condom. Or it broke.”

“So DNA?”

“Yes. At the lab now. Jordan was booked into Cullen County Detention for the Jaguar thing. They took a routine swab as part of the Intake.”

“He's a juvenile. A school kid. They can't do that to a minor.”

“But they did.”

“Wouldn't be admissible.”

“No, but it would sure as hell nail him,” said Nick, with an edge.

Lacy cocked her head.

“You're pretty hot about this. What did he do? I mean, inside the home?”

Nick told her, sparing her nothing.

There was a long stunned silence between them.

“Christ,” Lacy said once she had found her voice. “He's only
seventeen
.”

“So was Caligula.”

Lacy worked it through, went a bit green around her edges. “Dear God. That would have taken a while.”

“Most of the night, if the ME is right about the time of death, which he puts at around two in the morning. The wife went first, finally; then he did the husband. No point keeping him around after that, we figure.”

She looked at Nick for a while, processing it.

“Nick, that is
not
anything Jordan would do. The things you say he did, Jordan wouldn't even
think
of that. He'd have to be some kind of…monster. A demon. There would have been warning signs. I saw him on Monday afternoon. He had lost weight, said he was having headaches, but he was going to school every day, making every football practice. Played last Sunday, first string against Sacred Heart, made MVP in that game. Nick, really, we had a decent talk. There was…nothing like this. Nothing. In his childhood—”

“Lot of sadistic crap plays at your local multiplex. Video games are full of it.”

“I've never bought the idea that slasher movies or violent video games make killers. Otherwise we'd have millions of kids butchering their families.”

Nick shrugged.

“All I want is this one kid, Lacy.”

Lacy went quiet.

Nick left it with her. He trusted her.

“Does he have anything to run on? Usually he's lucky to have five bucks in his pocket.”

“Cleaned out the wall safe in the den—no idea what was there, but it's gone. Firearms says Todd Thorsson had a concealed carry permit for a Kimber .45. It's gone too.”

“How'd he get away?”

“He stole the family ride. A red Mercedes SLS AMG.”

“Good lord. That's a quarter-million-dollar car. He would have stood out like a…”

“Like a dumbass thug in a stolen red Benz.”

“Any sign of it?”

“None at all. Disappeared off the face of the earth. He may have handed it off to some gangbangers. Beau Norlett is looking at security cameras along Bluebonnet as far north as South Gwinnett. So far nothing. It'll show. There's only two of them in this part of the state.”

“How is Beau?”

“He's mending. Hates the desk, but he's lucky to be alive. So, any ideas?”

More silence, the rain drumming on the roof. Then Lacy said, “From what I know—or thought I knew—about Jordan, he'd go to family.”

“We've tried them all. And the beat guys have been showing his photo to all the hotel and motel clerks in town. Nobody's seen him. Which is why I'm here. You're his PO. You know the kid. You have to run him down. Got any suggestions, places where he'd go to coop up?”

Lacy thought about it.

“You know the Works Department toolshed under the Armory Bridge?”

“Yes. West end of the bridge, right next to the Tin Town Flats.”

“Yeah. For a while there, Jordan had keys to it, from a summer job last year. One time he missed a meeting, and I found him there. Had a cookstove and a cooler and a cot. Very snug.”

“What made you look there?”

Lacy tapped her nose.

“A tip.”

“From who?”

“His mother. Celeste. She's a good lady, tries her best with him. Never quits.”

Lacy stopped there, gave Nick a look over her half-glasses.

“Look, Nick—”

“You want to come with me?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Nick…come on.”

Silence.

“We find him there, you stay out of the way?”

“Promise.”

“I've heard that before.”

“This time I mean it.”

Nick took a breath, let it out.

“Where's your piece?”

Lacy pulled open her desk drawer, lifted out a clip-on holster with a big fat Glock in it.

Nick sighed.

“Okay. Strap it on. Let's go.”

Barbetta aimed his Maglite at the parkette. The saw-grass leaves were churning in the wind, wet and slick. They looked like knives. He stepped through the gate and moved into the shadows under the palms. About ten yards in, he found a manhole cover, which usually covered an old storm drain, flipped open and lying on the saw grass. Barbetta had been in this parkette a dozen times and never seen it open.

The manhole cover had writing on it—
CITY OF NICEVILLE WATER AND POWER
—and it dated from before the First World War. He always figured the storm drain had been welded shut, but now the cover lay on a stand of saw grass, flattening it down, and the opening to the drain was a wet black hole.

Something else. There was steam rising up from the surface of the manhole cover. He reached out, touched a finger to it, and jerked it back. The metal was as hot as a cookstove.

What the hell?

He stood over the opening, put his flash beam down the shaft. It went down a long way, farther than his flash could reach. There was a rusted iron ladder riveted into the concrete wall of the shaft, the steps receding into the deep, into the darkness at the bottom of the shaft.

Barbetta knelt down by the opening, avoiding contact with the rim, feeling the heat rising up from the shaft. He lowered the Maglite beam farther into the hole, trying to see how far down the bottom was, thinking,
There has to be a bottom, right?

Well there was
something
down there. It looked like smoke, black smoke, a cloud of it, and inside the smoke there were golden sparks, glittering like cat's eyes. And there was a smell, a roasting meat smell, raw and acrid. Maybe some kind of animal? Raccoon or a possum.

Or rats.

Barbetta hated rats.

Could it be a fire down there?

The rain was running down the back of his neck and pattering on his flak vest.

There was no way anything could be burning at the bottom of a hundred-year-old storm drain on a night as rainy as this.

How about a power line shorting out?

Maybe the heat—the steam or something—had built up in the shaft until it popped the cover and now the rain was shorting out some old power line down at the bottom of the shaft?

Go down and check it?

Not on your life, my friend. I've seen that movie.

Barbetta sat back on his heels, wiped the rain off his face, pulled out his radio.

“Central.”

“Nine Zulu.”

“I'm at this parkette by Brodie's. I'm looking at what I think is some kind of electrical fire down at the bottom of this old drain shaft. I can see sparks and the shaft is real hot. I think we need to get some fire guys down here, and maybe some folks from Utilities.”

“Roger, Frank. Lights and sirens?”

Barbetta considered the hole, watched the steam—the smoke, whatever—rising up. Under the pattering of the rain on the saw-grass blades he could hear a faint sound, rising and falling. It was some animal crying out, faint but full of pain and fear.

What in hell…?

“Yeah. Lights and sirens.”

Nick and Lacy were in his navy blue Crown Vic rolling through heavy traffic about a quarter mile north of the on-ramp to the Armory Bridge when the cruiser got lit up with flashing red and blue lights, and then they heard the brass-throated bellow of the fire truck that was now filling up their rearview mirror.

Nick jerked the cruiser over to the right to let the truck pass, which it did, moving fast, weaving through the slowing cars. It disappeared into the mists and fogs of Tin Town, followed closely by a white panel van with
Niceville Utilities
painted on the side.

A minute later and Nick took a gap in the traffic to cut left across Riverside, killed the car's headlights, and pulled up to the gate in the chain-link fence that sealed off the Works area under the ancient iron bridge. The gate had a padlock on it, still in place.

The Works shack was a World War Two–era Quonset hut, a huge half cylinder of corrugated steel tucked in under the bridge pillars. It was streaked with rust and grime that had fallen through from the bridge deck. It looked squalid and beaten-down and depressed. Nick could see why. He would be too.

“Okay,” she said. “We think he has a Kimber, right?”

Nick nodded, smiled across at her in the dark of the cruiser. “You want to call for backup?”

Lacy shook her head, smiled back at him. “You'll be okay, Nick. I'm right behind you.”

“Yeah. How far behind?”

“Far enough not to get your icky bits all over me when he shoots you. Got Kevlar?”

“In the back,” said Nick, killing the dome light. They climbed out of the cruiser into the rain, strapped on the Kevlar, and walked carefully through the pitted gravel to the gate.

They both had their weapons out, Nick's Colt Python and Lacy's Glock 17. Their shadows rippled ahead of them under the single sodium yard light. The bridge deck was streaming water down and thundering with the traffic twenty feet above them. Nick checked the padlock. It was in place, but it wasn't closed. He slipped it off the chain and pushed the gate open.

“This hut have another exit?”

Lacy shook her head.

“Nope,” she said, in a hoarse whisper. “Just this one. Shed's used for gear storage, pumps, road salt, all that maintenance shit. Stacked up all over. Right inside this door there's a narrow aisle between rows of storage racks. They fill the hut and go all the way to the roof. At the end of the aisle is the room where he was cooping. Straight shot, and if he's in there, he's basically in a box. How do you want to do this?”

Nick was looking at the curved steel walls of the hut, thinking about that Kimber .45, about the power of that huge round.

“Nothing too complicated,” he said, leveling his Colt at the door. “If he's in there, we light him up with the flash, and then it's up to him. If he goes for anything, make sure it's a gun and not a ham sandwich.”

Lacy nodded. This wasn't her first dance.

The window in the door was a heavy pane of rippled glass reinforced with chicken wire. The glass was filthy, and no light was showing through it. Lacy took a breath and set herself to kick the door in. Nick stopped her.

“Try the handle,” he said.

She did.

It turned and the door came open about an inch. Under the roar from the bridge and the pattering rain they could hear the rhythmic chug of some kind of machine.

“Sump pump,” said Lacy. “The roof leaks.”

A pause, a gut check, Nick nodded at Lacy, and in they went. Lacy kicked the door right beside the handle, a solid cop kick with all her muscle behind it. The metal door slammed against a post on the right—a huge clanging racket.

Nick was past her and in, gun up, flashlight on—Lacy checked their six and all the peripherals while Nick aimed straight ahead. The beam tunneled down a lane of storage racks and hit a rumpled cot about forty feet away, a pile of clothing on it, what looked like beer or soda cans littering the floor. An empty cot.

Lacy covered him as Nick edged sideways down one side of the aisle, gunning each rack as he passed it, and then right back to the ten ring, keeping his Colt fixed on the pile of clothing and bedding. Lacy held back, waiting for somebody to pop out from a hiding spot.

Nick got to the cot, booted it over, kicked the pile of clothing. Cans rolled and clattered away. Lacy came down the aisle, checking her six, but they both had that
nobody home
feeling all cops develop. Nick turned to her.

“Get the lights, okay?”

Lacy went back, pulled a cord, and a hard blue light filled the interior. The place smelled of grease and gasoline and rust. And something human. Sweat. Fear. Blood. Water was dripping down from a crack in the rounded metal roof onto a stack of Day-Glo orange plastic cones. The concrete floor was slick and streaked with mold.

She did a quick check of the rest of the hut, lane by lane. Found a bucket in the corner that had been used as a latrine, and recently.

She got back to Nick. He was down in a squat, using the muzzle of his Colt to poke through the tangle of bedding, pizza boxes, crushed cans of Miller Lite and Red Bull. Lacy looked at the pile of clothing, the boxes, and the cans. Little slivers of material, brownish-green, lay scattered around on the floor.

Nick picked one up, held it out to Lacy. “Grass clippings.”

“Nick, we don't know this is Jordan. Could be a squatter, some homeless guy?”

Her voice trailed off as her eye fell on a scrap of material. “Can you hand me that black thingy there?”

Nick fished a shirt out of the pile with the Colt barrel. A football shirt. Frederick Douglass Panthers. Number 47.

“Jordan's number.”

She turned the collar back, held it out for Nick to read the sewn-in label.

J. Dutrow #
47

“His mother sewed that on so he wouldn't lose it,” she said, her hope for the kid fading fast, getting replaced by a slow-burning anger.

Nick used the muzzle of the Colt to flip the mattress over. The cot was an old US Army issue, olive drab canvas, stained and threadbare, wooden bones showing through the cloth. There was a tattered spiral notebook shoved in under the mattress, the kind they hand out in high school. The cover was plain light brown, covered in illegible scrawls made with various colored pens and pencils—gang tags, cartoon figures, bits of rap lyrics, but the line for the owner's name was still visible, there in big blocky print:

Jordan Kyle Dutrow Room 11C

Nick holstered the Colt, reached into his suit jacket, pulled out a pair of latex gloves, worked them on, flipped the notebook open.

The date was a few weeks back, the start of the fall school year at Frederick Douglass Polytechnic. The first few pages looked like school notes, laborious lists of assignments, test dates, class times, football practices, a list of scheduled games for the fall season.

Jordan had started out writing things down carefully, complete sentences, staying mostly inside the lines, his printing childish and heavy—the pages were grooved with the weight of his pencil—but each page was full of information: class notes, test results, references to various school trips, hopeful beginning-of-the-school-year stuff. Lacy's name showed up a few times, along with the time and date of his appointments to see her at the Probe—a brief comment on the margin:

Do her do her do her in a heartbeat!!!

“Got a fan there,” said Nick. Lacy just shook her head.

Nick went on, Lacy reading over his shoulder. In September Jordan's class had visited Charleston, another weekend trip to New Orleans. Another day trip three weeks back, the entire class went underground to learn all about the power and water systems beneath Niceville—
nasty
seemed to be Jordan's take on that;
nasty echoes nasty smells nasty whispers
—and there had been an overnight bus trip to Pensacola ten days ago to see the Naval Aviation Museum. Jordan had taped in the bus ticket and some color pages ripped out of the museum brochure; a note beside it read:

recruiter see him maybe be a flier a fighter jock

The pages ran on until about halfway through the book, and then, at what looked to be about midweek, any sign of order and attention began to disintegrate. His writing ran all over the place, a gouging scribble carved into the pages, harsh scrawls and indecipherable images, snatches of song lyrics, a lot of rap imagery—

so high nigga I could talk to rain—don't they know my nigga—gutter fuckin kidnap kids—no-torious biggie small—throw them in the river—skull fuck skull fuck skull fucked—

Lacy shook her head.

“Jesus, Nick, what's going on with this kid?”

“Looks like his rivets are popping. When was the last time you saw him?”

“Monday afternoon. He was late for the meeting. Said he had a migraine. I made some notes, asked about school, football, checked his attendance. Coaches were happy with him—like I said, he was MVP last Sunday against Sacred Heart—and his teachers were medium okay with his academic performance.”

Nick flipped the pages. There was more and worse as the pages went on, until the middle of the book, where there wasn't one legible word, just page after page of dense manic scrawls, swirls and loops and jagged thunderbolts—the paper ripped and shredded.

There was a small gap where pages had been torn out, just ripped apart and pulled loose, and then a final page where one phrase had been written over and over again, in a mad overwritten tangle so dense the page was nearly solid black.

They stared at that last page for a full minute.

“Man,” said Lacy, “Looks like an artist's impression of a brain aneurysm.”

“It does,” said Nick. “Game changer.”

“Unless he's playing us.”

“You really think he is?”

A pause.

“No. No way, Nick. He's not that clever. This shit is real.”

“We'll need this,” said Nick, folding the notebook in half, slipping it into his jacket pocket. He stood up, sighed, brushed the dirt off his cuffs.

“We'll put a surveillance car here, see if he comes back.”

“What now?” said Lacy.

“Now we go—”

His pager buzzed at him. He pulled it off his belt, looked down at it.

TIG911

Tig was Lieutenant Tyree Sutter, CO of the Belfair and Cullen County Criminal Investigation Division. Nick's boss.

911 meant
Call me now!

Nick did. He listened for a few moments, said, “Okay, we're moving,” and clicked the phone off.

Lacy saw the look on his face.

“What?”

“Jordan Dutrow. They've got him.”

“Where?”

“Niceville PD has him. Other end of the Mile.”

“Where they taking him?”

“They're not. Tig didn't say why.”

“But, he's
alive
, right?”

“That's what they're saying. You coming?”

“Yes,” she said. “I'm coming.”