Gonzalez had glued Boyd’s feet to the floor with construction adhesive.
“Jesus, man, I gotta open a window,” Gonzalez said. “You really stink up a party.”
“Please,” Boyd pleaded, his head slumping forward. “I don’t know what you think I did. I don’t know why you’re doing this to me…”
As Gonzalez opened casement windows, Newkirk looked everywhere but at Tom Boyd. He would never need to look again, he thought. The image was seared into him.
There was a workbench attached to the basement wall. On the bench were a video camera bag, Boyd’s shoes, a half-empty box of department Flex-cuffs, and an open toolbox. Newkirk could see the glue gun Gonzalez had used to attach Boyd’s feet to the floor.
“We’re going to start where we left off early this morning,” Gonzalez said, taking a stool from the workbench and moving it near Boyd. He perched on the stool so he was above the man. “You know those kids pretty well. I want to know where they would go if they were trying to hide. Where would they run?”
A sob came from inside the cloth sack. “I told you I don’t know… I don’t know. If I knew, I’d tell you. I thought they’d run to their mother’s house, I told you that. I don’t know of any relatives around, I don’t know their friends. I never fucking paid any attention to them, you know?”
Gonzalez turned and looked at Singer, then shrugged.
Singer nodded. Newkirk wondered what the exchange signified.
He had seen worse. There was a house in Santa Monica the police had used for a while. They called it “Justice Ranch.” Newkirk had been there on several occasions. Justice Ranch was a last resort, used to elicit information from scumbags when every legal avenue had been used or blocked. It wasn’t a place to get confessions that could be used in court, because neither the cops nor the victims wanted to go to court. It was a house of torture, the place where Gonzalez often performed the “guilty smile.” Newkirk became acquainted with both when a judge released a child rapist on a procedural technicality three days before another missing boy was reported. The rapist was picked up in an unmarked car and taken to the Justice Ranch. Gonzo had been there waiting for him. He called himself the Head Wrangler, but instead of tack he had a toolbox. No one ever heard from the rapist again. Then the Feds came in and shut it down.
But that was different, Newkirk thought. He had always been confident that the suspects taken into that house were guilty, even if the cops couldn’t get enough proof for a conviction in court. And if the suspects weren’t guilty of that particular crime, they were guilty of others. No doubt about it. But this was a whole other deal. Tom Boyd was just a local yahoo. It made him sick.
“Look, I’ll be straight with you,” Gonzalez said, leaving his stool for the workbench. “I kind of believe you don’t know where those kids went. I kind of believe it. But I’m not a hundred percent. I need to be a hundred percent to reach my comfort level.”
Newkirk tried not to listen to Boyd, who was begging. Crying and begging at the same time. Saying all the same things, over and over. Offering to do anything, pay anything.
“Anything?” Gonzalez asked, pausing. “Would you bite your own penis off, for example?”
Newkirk winced.
Boyd croaked, “Just about anything.”
“Ah, that’s different. I said I needed a hundred percent. You’re not giving me that.”
Boyd moaned and thrashed his head back and forth. “What do you want? What is it you fucking want?”
Gonzalez walked across the concrete and rattled through the tool box. He removed a pair of needle-nosed pliers. “I need one hundred percent compliance.”
“To do what?”
Gonzalez glanced over at Singer, and Singer raised his eyebrows, as if saying, This is going to be easy.
“I want you to confess.”
“WHAT?”
“I want you to confess that you took those kids and killed them because you were pissed off at their mother, and your brain was fucked up with steroids at the time.”
Boyd moaned again, and the moan turned into a sob.
“You can say it was an accident,” Gonzalez said, raising his whitey-white voice. “That you didn’t intend to hurt them at all. You sort of blacked out, and when you came to they were dead.”
“I can’t…”
“Oh yes, you can, Mr. UPS man.”
“You’ll kill me after I say it.”
“No,” Gonzalez said, shaking his head. “That’s not going to happen if you confess, but it sure as hell will if you don’t. If you cooperate with me, Mr. UPS man, I’ll put you in the back of a car and you’ll be driven to Las Vegas, where you can start a whole new life. That’s the place to start over, Las Vegas, where dreams can come true. I’m not going to give you money, or a new name, nothing. You’re on your own. A guy like you, with all those muscles, should be able to find a job pretty easy. They like muscle down there. Big muscles and little lizard brains look good on a résumé in Vegas. And you can’t ever come back here, you understand?”
Boyd was silent.
Even though Newkirk knew Gonzalez was lying, it had been a convincing performance. Newkirk again looked away, afraid he would get sick.
“I can’t confess to that,” Boyd said.
Gonzalez sighed theatrically. Then he snapped the pliers together in the air a few times, clack-clack-clack, and bent down to Tom Boyd’s naked feet, saying, “How many toenails does a guy really need?”
Newkirk didn’t care if Singer saw him close his eyes and cover his ears with his hands to drown out the scream.
JIM HEARNE sat straight up in bed, his eyes wide open, his breath shallow. He could feel his heart racing in his chest, something that always scared him. His father had died at age thirty-eight from a heart attack that came out of nowhere.
He felt Laura’s cool hand on his bare stomach. “Jim, what’s wrong? Are you all right?”
“In a minute…” he said, gasping.
He breathed deeply, tried to will his heart to slow down. He’d tried not to dwell on the Taylors, Jess, and Villatoro. After the reception, he’d kept himself busy, mindlessly chain-sawing dead limbs from the orchard, stacking them in a pile higher than his head, burning them as the sun faded. Being physically tired had been good, because he was ready to go straight to bed after two more quick cocktails.
But in the night it had all come back.
Should he just call Villatoro? Come clean? Risk his career?
Or should he call Singer and tell him, if nothing else, to close his accounts and move his business to another bank? Try to wash his hands of everything now?
The timing would be poor, he conceded. Singer was suddenly a local hero, leading the inept sheriff’s office in the search to find the Taylor children. Singer could make trouble for him, too, if he chose to. And what did that matter, if Singer did move his accounts? The board of directors would note the loss and ask questions. And moving them wouldn’t negate the fact that he’d established them in the first place, which was the problem, wasn’t it?
What did I set in motion?
DAY THREE. Sunday
Sunday, 2:18 A.M.
IF ANYTHING, the second night was even harder than the first for Monica Taylor. The sedatives helped, reducing the peaks of her emotions, smoothing things out a little, but beneath the blanket the pills pulled over her there was still the relentless fact that her children were missing.
She lay fully clothed on the bed in her darkened bedroom, trying not to roll her head over and look at the time on the digital clock radio. She needed sleep. Her muscles and joints ached for it. But it was more soothing to stare into the darkness with her eyes open than to close them and enter drug-induced, horrific nightmares involving Annie and William and every possible scenario of what could have happened to them.