The Watcher in the Wall (24 page)

“I get it,” Stevens said, thinking the guy sounded like he fit Gruber’s profile. Thinking it was too late to drop in on the check-cashing joint Earl Ashley had used, thinking it would be a hell of a break if this arson made the case.

“Guess we might as well check it out,” Stevens told the desk sergeant. “Got an address?”

•   •   •

The fire was dying out when they pulled up to the scene, the whole block smoke and ash and wet, fire trucks parked at odd angles, firefighters dragging hoses, dousing the ruins. Neighbors milling about, mingling with uniformed police officers, news crews. Windermere parked the rental car, and she and Stevens waded into the mix.

The blaze was pretty well put out at this point. A few flames licked up from the remains here and there, but Stevens figured the show was just about over. The house wasn’t much to look at, what was left of it, mostly billowing smoke and charred aluminum siding, structural beams bent in crazy contortions.

Not that it had been a prize before the fire: a single story, probably, a handful of rooms. Old as Hades, too, judging by the rest of the block. As Stevens and Windermere walked closer, they could hear switch engines moving freight cars back and forth, the almost constant sounding of horns. “Sure sounds like the right place,” Windermere said. She walked to a group of bystanders, flashed her badge. “Federal agents,” she said. “Anyone want to tell me who lived in that place?”

•   •   •

The crowd drew back a little, muttered to themselves, looked past her shoulders, avoided eye contact. Stevens joined Windermere, pulled out a printout of Randall Gruber’s last known photograph, and another
copy where they’d run an aging simulation, fifteen-year-old Randall Gruber plus twenty years.

“Anyone recognize this man?” he asked, holding the photos aloft. “Anyone ever seen him before?”

More muttering. Stevens was about to give up, stow the pictures, find more gawkers to bug. Then someone pushed forward from the back of the crowd. A teenager, a boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen.

“That’s Earl,” he told Stevens. “That’s who lived there.”

Stevens and Windermere swapped glances. Stevens held out the photographs again. “Earl Ashley?” he said. “This guy?”

The boy took the pictures. Studied them. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just know that’s Earl’s place. I’m not supposed to go near there.”

Windermere stepped forward. “Why not?”

The boy hesitated, conscious of the sudden attention. He backed away a little. “He’s just weird, is all,” he said. “Like, sometimes he’ll come around me and my friends, try to talk to us. My dad says Earl’s a creep. I’m not supposed to go over there.”

Windermere looked at Stevens. “I guess that’s our guy. But where the hell is he?”

Gone,
Stevens thought.
Burned his house down and vanished.
But before he could get the words out, he heard voices behind him, urgent, excited, a murmur from the crowd. Turned back to the blaze just in time to see a group of firefighters emerge, animated, radios crackling.

Windermere hurried over, flagged down a fireman with a radio, Stevens right behind her. “What’s going on here?” she asked the man.

The firefighter lifted his visor. Took off a glove and wiped sweat from his eyes. “We just found the body,” he said. “Guess this poor dope didn’t make it out after all.”

He walked on. Stevens watched him go, his mind reeling, knowing he should be happy—hell, jubilant—knowing, if it was Gruber in there, that they’d caught a hell of a break.

But he didn’t feel jubilant. He looked at the house, the cluster of firefighters again, knew there was more to the story. Knew, deep down, that what he was hoping for was a damn sight too neat, was bound to be too good to be true.

<
92
>

It was
a long-ass bus ride.

Madison boarded the 7:15 to Orlando with negative time to spare. Convinced the ticket agent to hold the bus while she counted out the fare from Paul’s savings and the fifty bucks she’d received for her phone. Boarded at seventeen minutes past the hour, the whole bus glaring at her, nobody moving their freaking backpacks and carry-ons to give her a seat. She wound up in the last row, the three-seater, wedged between two overweight sisters and the lavatory. Good times.

Paul had made a valiant attempt at a good-bye. Followed her as she hurried through the terminal to her bus, called out her name just as she handed her ticket to the driver. She turned around, impatient, feeling the driver and everyone in the bus staring at her.

Paul looked away, like he could feel the attention, too. “I guess I’ll probably never see you again,” he said.

“Probably not,” Madison said. “But who knows? I’ll get ahold of you somehow. I’ll get your money back.”

“Never mind that,” Paul said. “Just be safe, okay?”

“Yeah,” Madison said. “Okay.”

“This guy, if he’s creepy or whatever, don’t be afraid to turn around and come home. You’re not alone, you know?”

“I know.” Madison shifted her weight, gave the driver an apologetic smile. “I really have to go, though.”

“Take my number.” Paul reached in his pocket, pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Thrust it in her hand. “If anything happens, you can call me. Anything at all, okay?”

Madison unfolded the paper. He’d written his phone number on a baggage tag. His name. She folded it, put it in her purse. “I gotta go,” she said.

“Yeah. I know.”

She leaned forward and hugged him. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “Thanks again.”

Paul hugged her back. Hugged her like he would keep on hugging her forever if she didn’t make a move, so she did. She released him, stepped back, turned and climbed on the bus. Navigated down the aisle to the triple seat at the back, wedged herself in. When the bus pulled out, Paul was still standing there, watching it go.

•   •   •

The bus made it to Orlando at a quarter past nine. Madison peeled herself out of the seat, followed the rest of the passengers into the station, bought a prepackaged ham sandwich and a Diet Coke for seven
dollars from the concession stand inside. Ate it while she waited in line for her next bus, the overnight to Nashville.

This time, at least, she got a window seat. The guy next to her was a Japanese tourist, a young guy, spent the first three hours reading his guidebook and leaning over her to snap blurry pictures of the darkness with a futuristic digital camera. He didn’t try to talk to her, anyway, or even really look at her. He minded his own business, and she minded hers.

She was stultifyingly bored. Her old phone, the iPhone she’d hocked at the bus station in Tampa, held all of her music. Plus, it had Internet access, something her burner sorely lacked. She hadn’t even had time to buy a magazine in Orlando, though she couldn’t have afforded one anyway. She had about eighteen dollars left to get her to Louisville. She would have to budget wisely.

So she sat in her window seat and watched the cars pass by, headlights on the highway. Thought about Brandon and how cool it would be to actually meet him, to hug him and kiss him and just, like, talk to him, person to person, face-to-face. She wondered if he would want to hook up the first night, felt a flutter in her stomach as she considered the idea. Hooking up with boys was not usually something on her radar; then again, neither was running away.

Madison wondered if her mother was freaking out yet. If she’d even noticed her daughter was missing. Of course she had—Brandon’s parents had phoned the police. Probably all of Tampa was looking for her. She wondered if they would check the Greyhound terminal, if they would follow her to Louisville. She hoped not.

Somewhere around midnight, the bus pulled into a truck stop and Madison climbed down to the parking lot, stretched her legs, bought a
candy bar inside the gas station and bummed a cigarette from a woman smoking by the bus door. Madison didn’t smoke, but it seemed like the glamorous, nihilistic runaway thing to do. It made her feel cooler, anyway, standing under those harsh white gas station lights. It made her feel less alone.

The woman with the cigarettes had a book she was done with, some kind of romance novel, the kind Madison’s mom liked to read.

“It’s not bad,” the woman told Madison. “Not enough sexy bits for me, but you take what you can get, hey?”

“Exactly,” Madison said, and she took the novel gratefully, spent the next couple hours choking down the first ten chapters, some ditzy chambermaid and a handsome, rich lord. She fell asleep with the book in her lap, the Japanese guy snoring delicately beside her; slept a long, fitful night punctuated by gas stations and small towns, and a disorienting arrival in Atlanta around six in the morning.

•   •   •

She slept until the bus reached Chattanooga, Tennessee. Spent another three dollars on a stale gas station pastry, which brought her down to fourteen dollars and some change to get her to Louisville and Brandon.

By midday, the bus pulled into Nashville, and the tourist beside her was leaning over again, snapping pictures of the skyline and the Cumberland River as if he were afraid it was all going to disappear. She climbed off the bus and went straight to the bathroom, tried her best to do her hair in the scratched mirror above the sink, wished she’d brought her makeup, a toothbrush, clean underwear.

She was afraid. She’d pinned her hopes on this guy, and she would like to show up in clean clothes, a pretty dress maybe, her hair washed
and brushed, her breath fresh, the rest of her not smelling like she’d spent a day on the road. Maybe Brandon would see her,
smell
her, and decide he was better off dead after all. Maybe he’d do it even if she was clean and pretty. Maybe he’d constructed a fantasy Madison that the real her could never equal.

Or maybe Paul was right and Brandon was nothing but a filthy sex pervert, and not really a cute boy at all.

Maybe, maybe, maybe
. They were announcing her next bus, a four-hour haul that would take her to Louisville. Madison brushed her fingers through her hair one last time, splashed cold water on her face. Hurried out of the restroom and across to her bus, her stomach in knots, excited but worried, as she thought about what lay ahead.

<
93
>

The Erie County
Medical Examiner’s Office was located in a sprawling hospital complex in northeast Buffalo. Stevens and Windermere showed their badges at the door first thing the next morning, were buzzed in to a long, sterile hallway, low ceilings and plain walls. Their footsteps resonated, every other noise muted, the whole facility as solemn as the business conducted within.

The ME was a small, slender woman named Yoshida. She met them in the hallway, shook both their hands, a firm grip. Ushered them into an autopsy room with three examination tables and one body, badly burned.

“As you can see, the identification has not been straightforward,” Yoshida told them, leading them to the center table. “The victim’s skin is damaged well beyond the fingerprinting stage, so we’re moving on to dental records and DNA, but both options take time.”

Windermere studied the body, the extent of the damage. Knew any normal human being would be sickened by what she saw; hell, even Stevens was hanging back a step or two. Windermere wasn’t sickened. She’d seen death before. And she needed to know if this corpse was Randall Gruber.

“We don’t have time to wait on lab results,” she told Yoshida. “I need to know if this here is my guy, today if possible. So what can you tell us?”

Yoshida frowned. “Very well,” she said. “The first thing I noticed, beyond the obvious external burn damage, is that this man very probably did not die in the fire.”

Windermere followed her eyes. “Well, he obviously died,” she said. “You’re saying he was dead before the fire started?”

Yoshida circled around the table so that she was facing Stevens and Windermere, gestured to the incisions she’d made on the victim’s torso. “I’ve begun an internal examination,” she said. “As you can see, the viscera are remarkably well preserved. The lungs, for instance, and the airways, are largely free of soot. This is abnormal with victims of fires, as you might imagine.”

“He would have been breathing smoke,” Stevens said. “If he was still alive.”

“Exactly,” Yoshida said. “That in itself is enough to raise questions, but there’s something else, too.”

She moved down to the victim’s torso. “Abdominal lacerations,” she
said. “Deep cuts, and many of them, to the stomach, kidneys, and intestines, and even through the rib cage to the lungs and heart.”

“Stab wounds,” Windermere said. “This bastard got his with a knife.”

“That would be my suspicion,” Yoshida said. “Those wounds are consistent with serious violence.”

Windermere looked down at the body. Figured she didn’t necessarily feel bad for the guy. If it was Gruber—and who else would it be—he had the knife coming, and she could live with that kind of justice.

But who had stabbed him? And where had they gone?

Then Stevens spoke up. He was studying a chart at the end of the table, far away from the Y-incision and the victim’s internal organs.

“This paperwork here,” he asked Yoshida. “This is for the same guy?”

Yoshida followed his eyes. “Yes, that’s correct,” she said. “It’s a slow day around here.”

Stevens peered closer, squinted at the paperwork. “Says here you pin this guy at six foot, one sixty,” he said. “Age, early twenties.”

“Or younger,” Yoshida said. “It’s hard to be sure—”

Windermere hurried over. “Impossible,” she said. “That doesn’t make sense. Our man is thirty-five, easy.”

“This man here isn’t over thirty,” Yoshida replied. “He’s not even twenty-five. His bones haven’t finished growing yet. Moreover, the vertebrae at the base of the spine haven’t fully fused together. These are skeletal processes that take place in a young adult, not a grown man.”

Windermere didn’t reply. Didn’t know what to say. Felt sick suddenly, and it wasn’t because of the dead body beside her.

“How sure are you on the age thing?” Stevens asked Yoshida. “What’s your margin for error?”