Normally, I would have just knocked on his door or camped out near his house, waiting for him to emerge to go shopping or mail a letter or take a walk. But given the now seemingly slight possibility that he was connected to Nick Parrish, there was not a chance in hell that I was going to be allowed to come within a hundred yards of him without an escort.
Which led to Ethan’s Plan B.
The dogs were relaxed but in ready-to-work mode, friendly to approaching strangers but focused on Ben and Ethan, waiting for commands. The two young neighborhood boys asked for and received permission to pet the dogs. They were peppering Ben and Ethan with questions (What are the dogs’ names? Are they boys or girls? How old are they? Why are they wearing clothes?), all of which I recorded. After all, I might end up with nothing but the story we said we were there for.
Fortunately, when it came to that other story, my three human companions let me ask the questions of the small crowd gathering on Douglas Street.
I told them Ethan and I were from the radio station, and the older couples mentioned that they remembered me from the newspaper. We spent a little time mourning the passing of the Express and giving them information on the news programs on KCLP, of which they had been unaware. I told them that I was doing a piece about how search dogs worked but that I hadn’t chosen their street at random.
“In connection with another story I’m working on, we’re all a little concerned about Kai Loudon,” I began. “He lives on this street, right?”
The house-two doors down from where we were-was eagerly pointed out by the kids. The story of the accident on the stairs was soon told by the adults. “Violet was so mean to that kid, I’m amazed Kai takes such good care of her,” one of the women said. “I think I would have suffocated her years ago.”
Her husband chided her, but the other couple agreed with her.
“No,” the man insisted, “she’s not so bad. Loudon was the problem.”
“Kai’s father?” I asked.
“No, stepfather.” The man blushed. “I don’t think the father has ever been in the picture, if you know what I mean. Loudon was a-” He glanced at the boys, who were eagerly taking this all in. “Loudon was worthless. I think he would have been happy if Violet had pawned the kid off on relatives. Instead, Loudon ended up leaving them. Kai was eleven or twelve, I think.” He glanced at the boys, then said, “Kai seemed to have fewer ‘accidents’ after Loudon left, if you know what I mean.”
I would definitely have to talk to this guy when there weren’t any kids around to make him censor himself. “Has anyone seen Kai lately?” I asked.
The adults exchanged glances, then admitted they hadn’t seen him for quite some time. “But that’s not unusual,” one of the men said. “He keeps odd hours, doesn’t come out of the house much. The Loudons never have been neighborly.”
“He doesn’t come to the door right away if you knock,” the mother of the boys said. “But I’m sure if you keep trying, you’ll find him there. He can’t go far with her to care for.”
“No, Mom,” the older of the boys said. I judged him to be about ten. “He’s not there anymore.”
“Michael!” she said, reddening.
He folded his arms and jutted his chin out, and I could see he was nearly ready to bend double with the effort of not smarting off to her.
“Michael, what makes you say that?” I asked, crouching down to eye level.
“He moved out. I saw him.”
“Liar,” his younger brother accused.
This led to a brief chase and might have resulted in mayhem, but their mother grabbed hold of Michael before he could punish his accuser, who was ordered to return home immediately. He wisely, if reluctantly, obeyed.
She turned to Michael, still in hand. “And as for you-”
“I’m telling the truth!” he protested.
“I believe you,” I said, for which I received a grateful look. His mother sighed and let go of him.
“When did he move out?” I asked.
“Last year,” he said. “In the middle of the night!”
“Now, Michael, that’s not true,” his mother said. “I know I saw him in June or sometime around then.” She frowned in concentration. “Goodness, it has been a while-not long before vacation?”
“That’s what I mean!” he said in exasperation. “Last year. When I was in fourth grade. This year I’m in fifth.”
“When do you get your vacation break?” I asked. Las Piernas was on a year-round schedule.
His mother pulled out a PDA and looked at the calendar on it. “They had six weeks off starting June thirtieth.”
Ben, Ethan, and I exchanged a glance. That would have been a week after Lisa King’s body was found.
“Has anyone else seen Kai since then?” I asked. The others thought this over, then shook their heads.
“Well, Michael, so you were up in the middle of the night-”
“Barney was sick,” he explained, his face suddenly awash in sadness. He looked longingly at Altair and Bingle.
“Barney? Your brother?”
That brought a small smile. “No, my dog. He died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s really hard.”
He shrugged and kept petting Bingle.
“So you were taking care of Barney,” I said gently.
“Yeah. I had to let him out in the backyard. He needed to barf. Then he wanted to stay outside for a while, so I kept him company. Then he heard something-you know, his ears went up. He went to the gate to watch something. So I followed him and saw that he was watching Kai move.”
He said that a truck and a van were in the driveway. Kai and another man finished packing up the truck, then the other man helped Kai load Violet (“her!” spoken with the air of delight felt by a boy who has seen something rare and freakish) into the van Kai usually drove. The older neighbors confirmed that once in a while they had seen Kai use a kind of gurney to load Violet into the van for doctor’s appointments.
“Big, white, windowless cargo van,” one of the men said. “Econoline, I think.”
“What did the moving truck look like?” I asked Michael.
He frowned and said, “Like a U-Haul, but it wasn’t. It was all white.”
Michael’s failure to mention this to his parents was easily explained-Barney had ended up going to the vet the next morning, so his companion’s illness had been foremost in the boy’s mind at that point.
It was also clear that the other neighbors hadn’t missed Kai and Violet Loudon. They hadn’t cared much for them, or about them. Welcome to suburbia.
I studied the exterior of the house from where we were standing. “Its windows are a little dirty, but the yard is cared for,” I said.
“Gardener comes by to work on the front yard on Fridays,” one of the women offered.
“Just the front yard?”
“Yes. I don’t believe there is a lawn in the back.”
“Anyone else use that same gardener?”
Another exchange of looks, shaking of heads. None of them recalled seeing any markings on the gardener’s pickup truck indicating who he was or how he could be reached. So unless we came back and waited around on Friday, we weren’t going to get any information out of him.
We thanked the neighbors and asked them not to follow us as we walked down the block with the dogs and crossed over to the Loudons’ yard. Ben and Ethan were just starting to give working commands to the dogs when the breeze shifted, and both dogs alerted.
Their body language suddenly changed. Their ears pitched forward, they went up on their toes, looking back at their handlers as if to ask, “Don’t you smell that?” Their excitement was controlled but evident.
Ben and Ethan let them off leash. They ran toward the backyard gate, sniffing there and along the fence, then running back to their handlers. Bingle and Altair also took interest in a small basement window. It was blacked out, as if painted on the other side, so there was no seeing what was drawing their attention.