Chapter 21
I spent the rest of the night outside the Hayes
house, watching to see if he would go out in search of someone to
take his frustrations out on. The next morning, I went in search of
Danny, knowing that Alan Hayes would not hesitate to start using
him. I had no success. He did not show up for work and I could not
find him at any of the usual bars. I backtracked through my memory
for every sorry dive we had ever sought refuge in and checked them
out. No dice. And though he had been estranged from his family for
years, I even stopped by the house where Danny’s ex-wife and his
son still lived. The yard was in disarray and the house looked
neglected. I knew Barbara was working two jobs to keep her and
Danny Jr. afloat. I guess some things just had to slide.
It made me sad to see the deterioration of the
yard, a once-tidy lawn where we had sat on summer nights, grilling
steaks and raising beers to the future, boasting about our latest
successes in solving a case. Danny’s life had slid into the bottle
right before his divorce and drowned in it soon after. But I could
not pinpoint exactly where it had all gone wrong for me, when my
life had taken the last, irrevocable wrong turn. Somehow, when I
was not looking, it just had. Perhaps that was just the way it was,
that no one ever recognized a moment for what it was—and perhaps it
was kinder that we were allowed to hold on to our illusions for
just a little bit longer after the point of no return.
I know it had happened to Danny, too, that his life
had slipped away from him when he wasn’t looking and that he drank
to stave off the realization that it was now too late to get it
back—and that nothing would turn out as he had planned. But now? It
was one thing to give up on your own life. It was another to
destroy the lives of others because you were angry about your own.
Oh, it was far worse. Nothing good would come of this.
Nothing.
I watched the empty house for a few hours,
remembering what had been. A woodpecker lived high in a tree next
door and kept flying down to test the tin pipe that dangled from
the overflowing gutters to the ground. With a rat-tat-tat ,
he’d probe the metal, fly off indignantly, only to return and try
again. I could not decide whether I admired his perseverance or
thought he was the stupidest damn bird I had ever seen.
Eventually, I gave up and wandered over to the
apartment complex where Danny had rented a unit after his wife
kicked him out. Though no one was home, baby paraphernalia and
college books were scattered over every available surface of the
four-room apartment, telling me that Danny had moved on and other
tenants taken his place. I examined a terry-cloth duckling that a
chubby fist had flung to the floor. The orange bill was frayed from
where it had been gnawed on by tiny baby teeth. It pierced my
heart. One of my sons had a duckling just like it when he was a
baby. I remembered using it to scrub him in the tub at night. Yet I
could not remember which son it had been. How was it possible to
forget such an important thing as that?
Enough of the past. I had to keep my mind on the
present. I had to keep my mind on the case. Maggie was in
danger.
Why would Danny be so willing to hurt Maggie? Why
would he be so willing to work with Alan Hayes? Surely it wasn’t
because of her rejection of his clumsy advances. The way Danny
drank, the terrible care he took of his body—I don’t think he had
actually felt desire for anything but another shot of whiskey in
years. And though his pride may have taken a hit, he lacked the
energy to follow through on defending its honor. I was certain of
that.
And did he really care about the Hayes case and
being proved wrong? I was certain he had not cared about it even
back when it was new. Why would he care about it now? What did he
hope to gain? The past? Oh, Danny—to think you could return to the
past and reclaim it in some way. Only someone who had given up on
the present would ever think in such terms.
I thought back to the days when we had first
investigated the murder of Alissa Hayes. Neither Danny nor I had
been in good shape; we were both beginning our final slides into
the bottle. Danny was still reeling from the breakup of his family,
though it had happened a good five years before. And I’d had my own
excuse for drinking then, as well, though I could hardly remember
the details. It was a promotion of some sort that I had coveted in
the more sober recesses of my heart and not gotten. Of course,
looking back, I was barely holding on to my present job at the
time. There was no way anyone would ever have seriously considered
me for more. But we have such power to delude ourselves and I had
been deep into delusions back then.
With neither one of us sober or focused enough to
work the Hayes case properly, we had simply followed the path of
least resistance, one that had ended in an innocent man sitting in
a jail cell. Yet, that was neither the first nor would it be the
last case of injustice caused by incompetence, or even by our
incompetence. It wasn’t like Danny had intentionally steered us
wrong or had anything to do with Alissa’s death.
So why would he want to stop Maggie from doing her
job?
I had no way to find Danny to ask him, no way to
move forward in figuring out what it all meant. And so I returned
to Maggie for the afternoon. She would have someone to watch over
her.
Maggie was working furiously on a warrant
application, entering paragraph after paragraph into the computer.
A cold cup of coffee and forgotten salad sat unnoticed beside her
as the hours passed. Occasionally, she would pick up the phone and
speak to Peggy upstairs in the lab, double-checking the spelling of
some of the more technical terms before entering them into her
report.
By three o’clock she was ready to submit the report
to Gonzales. She walked it upstairs herself. Seeing her approach,
he waved her inside. I followed like an invisible puppy, watching
the two of them intently, wondering if Danny’s suspicions had been
right, fearing they had something going on.
But Gonzales did not give her a second glance when
he took the papers from her. There was nothing between them but
professional respect. I was ashamed to have thought like Danny,
even if for only a second.
Gonzales read through the application and the file
beneath it quickly, frowning the entire time. When he was done, he
stared at Maggie intently.
“What?” she asked defensively, her fatigue starting
to show.
“Where’s Bonaventura?” he asked. “He’s AWOL and I’m
pissed off about it. When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Last night,” she said, still protecting Danny. She
would not tell Gonzales about how Danny had barged in on her visit
to the Hayes house. She would not betray the brotherhood, even if
the brothers did not consider her fully one of their own. “We went
out to dinner,” she explained. “I thought I might be able to get
something out of him about the case.”
Gonzales looked skeptical.
“I know,” Maggie added. “It was stupid. He had
nothing to give me. I’m not sure he even remembers the case. And he
was plowed.”
“Did he try to put the moves on you?” Gonzales
asked abruptly.
Maggie looked shocked.
“I’m asking for a reason, Gunn,” he reassured her.
“I’ve had complaints about him from other women in the
department.”
She shrugged it off. “It’s not anything I can’t
handle.”
Gonzales shook his head, disgusted. “He’s a human
train wreck and he’s not going to stop until he’s taken others down
with him. But if I can him now, I lose the respect of one hundred
and forty fellow officers.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
“So what did he have to say about the case?”
Gonzales asked. “Did he happen to explain how they ended up putting
the wrong man in jail?”
Maggie suppressed a smile at his sarcasm “No, sir.
Basically, he tried to put the blame all on Fahey.”
“He would,” Gonzales said. “But don’t believe it.
Fahey let the bottle get the best of him his last couple of years,
but inside he still had something left. Did you know that he gave
me a run for my money in the academy? He could have been a great
cop. He could have been sitting here where I am if things had been
just a little bit different.”
I felt a jolt of adrenaline, as I always did when I
heard someone mention my name. It always made me realize anew that
I had once been among them, living as one of them. It seemed a
thousand lifetimes ago.
Gonzales tapped the file with a fingertip. “You’ve
left some things out of this. Most requests like this summarize the
first investigation more . . . critically, shall we say? They
usually provide more evidence of sloppiness.”
Maggie shrugged. “Just trying to save you some
trouble slogging through it all, sir.”
“How bad was it?” he asked. “Just tell me.”
“They were . . .” She hesitated and I loved her for
it. “They were sloppy, sir.”
“How sloppy?”
“Very sloppy.”
“Who’s fault was it? Fahey or Bonaventura?”
“Sir, you’re asking me to judge a dead man.”
“Just tell me.”
“You’re right about Fahey. He was better on his
end, but maybe moved too quickly with his suspicions. Bonaventura
was supposed to take the family, but by the time he got around to
it, the boyfriend was already in custody and both of them stopped
looking into any other alternatives at all.”
“And you really think the girl’s father has
something to do with this?”
“Sir, it’s not Bobby Daniels. He’s been in prison
and the murders are identical. Alan Hayes is a common link between
the two girls—I checked and he lied about not knowing Vicky Meeks.
She monitored a class he taught last summer. Plus he is frequently
around the kind of lapidary dust we found on both victims, he knows
the areas well where both bodies were found, and besides all of
that, something is very wrong in the Hayes house. You know that I
can’t put a hunch in the report, but if you even walked in the
front door, you’d know there was something wrong in that family. I
promise you. At the very least, we need to look into it.”
“Anything in his past?” Gonzales asked.
“Nothing provable yet. But girls went missing from
the three colleges where he taught before coming here. At the same
time he was living in each area.”
“Statistically speaking?”
“Statistically speaking, at a rate well above what
you would expect in a college town. And I’m still waiting on some
jurisdictions to get back to me.”
“His employers?”
“It’s hard to get anything out of them. They’re
afraid of lawsuits. But he’s bounced around a lot, been denied
tenure twice, and left one college before the issue even came up.
That’s a bit odd. I’m hoping someone outside human resources will
crack and give me something off the record. I’m still working on
it. I have a contact inside one chancellor’s office. If she gives
the go-ahead, I’ll hear something next week. All I can get from
them so far is that it was a student complaint about unprofessional
conduct that led to his leaving.”
“Okay then,” Gonzales conceded, having the sense to
trust a good cop when he met one. “You’ve given me enough to push
the search warrant through. O’Malley will approve it. It’s yours.”
He looked up at her more kindly. “How’s your father doing?”
So he knew her personally after all.
“Better, sir. He gets out every now and then.
That’s progress.”
“I was sorry to hear about your mother. That’s a
tough way to go.”
Maggie looked away. “It was kind of you to come to
the service.”
“Least I could do.” Gonzales sounded almost human.
It was a side of him I had not seen in two decades. “My dress blues
ought to be good for something.”
“It helped my father,” she said. “You being
there.”
But Gonzales had used up his humanity allotment for
the day and, to my relief, there was not even a smile exchanged
between the two of them when they were done. He simply signed the
request for a warrant, handed the file back to Maggie, and picked
up the phone to call the judge.
By five o’clock, Maggie had her search
warrant.