Lucas pulled into the gravel patch that served as a driveway, and as he got out of the car, saw the curtains twitch. Until that moment, it hadn't really occurred to him that Charlie Pope might be inside. Could Charlie be stupid enough to hide out at his mother's? And here was Lucas going to the front door, no protective vest, his pistol tucked in a spot that might be a half second too slow, his mind working on other errands.
He slowed, scratched his face, miming a man who'd forgotten something, went back to the truck, pulled his gun out, and tucked it into his side pants pocket. The front sight had been smoothed to prevent hang-ups, and he kept the hammer and trigger assembly hanging out so his hand would fall on them.
Which wouldn't do him a lot of good, he thought, as he started back up the sidewalk, if Charlie was waiting behind the door with a shotgun stoked with double-ought buckshot… He saw the curtain twitch again and thought, Why would he waituntil I got to the door?
GOOD THOUGHT. But nothing happened on the way up, and at the door he stepped to one side and rang the bell. A few seconds passed, and he rang it again; then the door jerked open an inch or two, and a woman asked, "Whattaya want?"
He felt like a Fuller Brush salesman, but put on his official cop voice: "Mrs. Marcia Pope?" "Yeah?"
"I'm Lucas Davenport with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension." He held up his ID with his left hand. "We're looking for your son, Charlie. Is he here?"
"No, he's not here. I haven't seen him in more'n a month. I don't know where he is. I've already talked to the Austin police."
All he could see was one eye, a hank of steel gray hair, and the end of a short, pointed nose. "I need to interview you. Open up."
"You got a warrant?" The door opened two more inches, the better to argue.
"No, but I could get one. Then we'd come back, put handcuffs on you so all the neighbors could enjoy themselves, and take you to police headquarters to talk."
Silence, three seconds, five seconds. "You're not going to take me if I talk to you now?"
"Not if you tell me the truth," Lucas said. "Charlie's not here?"
The door opened wide enough that he could see her. She was a small, hatchet-faced woman wearing black slacks and a blue blouse that looked like a uniform from a chain restaurant. "I ain't seen that boy since the Fourth of July. He came down on the bus to see the fireworks. He always loved them."
Lucas nodded: "Can I come in?"
"The house is a mess," she said reluctantly. "I've been working all the time…"
But she backed up and he stepped inside.
SHE HAD A TV, a beat-up couch, a green La-Z-Boy, and a couple of end tables in the living room. Everything was stacked with magazines and tabloid newspapers; even more paper was stacked against the walls; decades of Us and People. The room smelled of fried meat and Heinz 57 Sauce.
Pope seemed to be looking for a place for Lucas to sit, but he said, "Never mind, I'm okay…" He eased toward the kitchen: more magazines, but no sound, or feel, or anything that indicated another person around. They stood facing each other and Lucas pushed her for names of friends, anything that might point to where Pope had gone.
"He had to have friends from high school…"
"He wasn't in high school that long. There was one boy, in grade school, but he drownded."
In the end, it seemed that she'd hardly known her child. When he was twelve, she said, he started skipping school. She didn't know where he spent his days; he simply went somewhere and hid. The school authorities hunted him down at the end of every summer, but as soon as his enrollment was counted for the state aid, they let him go. He was a pain in the ass, and always had been.
The high point of his teen years had come when he'd crashed his bike, hitting his head on at curb.
"They thought he was gonna die, but he didn't; goddamn brains almost squirted out his ear," his mother said.
In eleventh grade, Charlie Pope stopped pretending. He quit school, got a job at a McDonald's, was fired. "Never washed his hands after the bathroom, they said." He did some more time at a Burger King, was fired again, and then did whatever kind of pickup work he could get, lived however he could, Marcia said.
"His old man took off thirty years ago. Nobody knows where he is or what he's doing. He was a worthless piece of shit anyhow, but I didn't know that when I took up with him," Marcia said. "I was just a girl."
"So there's nobody-nobody ever talked to Charlie."
She looked away from him for a moment, her forehead wrinkling. Then, "You know, there was them brothers from over by Hill. He was talking about them on the Fourth, maybe they'd have a summer job for him. He didn't like hauling garbage… What was their name? I can't think…"
"What about them?"
"They're farmers. They got these big gardens, Charlie says. They live in the country somewhere by Hill, they sell tomatoes and corn and cukes and stuff down on the highway somewhere," she said. "One of them vegetable stands. They use to hire Charlie to work in the gardens… you know, pickin' shit and pulling weeds and they had one of those machines, like a lawnmower, but it plows…"
"A tiller?"
"That's it. They taught him how to run it and he'd help with the gardens. He did that for a couple of summers. He liked it."
A little tingle: "This was where? By Hill? That's a town?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah. Hill."
"You don't know their names?"
"No… I mean I used to. I seen one of the boys, once, he had one of those things on his face and neck, a raspberry thing, I think they call them? Or a strawberry thing? One of those like birthmarks, great big one on the side of his face…"
"A port- wine mark?"
She snapped her fingers: "That's it. A port-wine stain. Right on the side of his face."
He pushed her, but that was all she had. He left a card with her and said, "I need to tell you two things," he said. He crowded her a little, let her feel the authority. "If Charlie gets in touch, you call us. He's dangerous, and he's dangerous to you. He's completely run off the rails this time. You understand?"
"Yup. I'll call you, don't you worry." But her eyes slid away from his.
He got right back in her face. "You better, or you'll go inside with him, Mrs. Pope. You wouldn't like the women's prison. We're talking the worst kind of murder, now and if you help him, you'll be an accomplice. So you call."
"I will." She looked at the card this time.
"Second, you don't talk to anybody about what you told me," Lucas said. "I need to go look up these garden guys, and we don't want anybody to know we're coming. So you just keep your mouth shut, okay?"
"Okay."
"I'm not fooling, Mrs. Pope. You mess with us on this, we'll put your ass in jail."
LUCAS FOUND HILL in his Minnesota atlas; more a crossroads than a town. The map showed two streets where a creek crossed a county road; the place might have a bar, maybe a gas pump. Still in Mower County, northwest of Austin. The sheriff had been at the meeting that morning…
LUCAS HEADED EAST out of town, on his cell phone as he drove. The sheriff was still in his car somewhere, and the Mower County dispatcher wouldn't give Lucas his phone number. "Then give him mine, call him and tell him to call me back," Lucas said.
Larry Ball got back five minutes later. Lucas could hear noise in the background, music and voices. The Rochester Mall?
"I just talked to Marcia Pope," Lucas told him. "There are a couple of guys just outside of Austin who hired Charlie Pope to work their gardens. They're truck gardeners, out by a place called Hill. You know a couple of brothers, one's got a port-wine mark on his face?"