Sam looked at me, aghast. “I would never do that.”
“Well, someone did. Did you get anything else?”
Sam shook his head. “Not much. Same stuff we’ve been hearing, sweet kid, liked everyone, blah blah blah.”
I stopped him. “No, not blah blah blah. This is good, and important, and we can’t forget it, no matter what else we discover. Consistency tells us a lot, Sam. People are creatures of habit. Everything we know about Nicky thus far tells us he was a good kid, sweet, gentle-natured. Everything we know about Reed thus far also tells us he was a good kid. And what does that tell us?”
Sam shook his head and shrugged. “Well, we’d expect that, right? Since it was the same guy?”
“It tells us that even though Nicky went to drastic, extreme measures to change his appearance-the tattoos, the piercings, the hair dye-he didn’t, or couldn’t, change his personality. On the outside, Nicky became Reed. On the inside, Nicky stayed Nicky.”
I stood and walked to the back of the station, where a whiteboard stretched the length of the wall. I erased a few scribbles and a tiny unflattering cartoon of what looked like Chief Chavez and a pack of ponies and rummaged around the markers until I found one that wasn’t dried out.
I drew a long horizontal line and then added a tick mark along it.
“Three years ago, in the summer of 2012, Nicholas Bellington left home for a camping trip and he never came back. He was presumed to have died when he what-fell? Tripped? Was pushed? Jumped?-over Bride’s Veil. His body was never found.”
Sam nodded. He grabbed a marker and some distance from my first mark, added another tick. “Two days ago, Nicholas Bellington, living under the alias Reed Tolliver, turns up in his hometown murdered. This is all we can say for certain, right?”
“Right.” I drummed my marker against the wall, thinking. “I think we need to consider the possibility that Reed wasn’t the target.”
“You mean Nicky was the target. Someone discovered who Reed really was and that’s why he was killed; not for something Reed did but for something Nicky did.”
Pleased, I nodded at Sam. “You’re sixteen. You survive a fall that would have killed anyone else, and then you run. But you don’t run to your parents, your school, or your church. Instead, you run as far away as you can and then you change. You change your name, your hair. You destroy your face with tattoos and piercings to the point that if your own mother saw you on the street, she’d walk right by you. Why?”
The room was silent save for the rhythmic whoosh of the ceiling fan. It paced our thoughts like a giant metronome. Whoosh, whoosh. Whoosh, whoosh.
“You’re scared. You do all that because you are scared to death,” a voice whispered into my ear. I jumped and turned around. Finn Nowlin had crept into the room in that silent way of his and he stood, looking at us. Then with a wolfish grin he reached around me and slapped up the window shade on my left. Sunlight streamed into the room and I thought about Finn’s words.
I knew there were shades of fear, the same as there are shades of like, and love, and anger, and desire. I was grateful in that moment to have never known the level of fear that Nicky must have felt, to do the things he did.
Chapter Sixteen
The phone rang for a long time at the Bellingtons’. I was about to hang up when Ellen Bellington answered. She sounded harried, impatient to get off the phone.
“Of course we didn’t keep his things. We boxed them up and gave it all away, after the police came and poked their damn fingers through it, touching every little item they could,” Ellen replied in response to my question.
“What about his schoolwork, his papers? Did he have a journal, maybe a diary?”
She laughed, that harsh bark so at odds with her beauty. I was starting to believe that laugh was more representative of her true self, the ugly side she kept hidden.
“What do you think? He was sixteen.”
“Mrs. Bellington, we need to discover why Nicky disappeared three years ago. If we can figure out what he was doing at the time-”
“Nicky wasn’t doing anything, Gemma,” she interrupted.
I heard a low voice in the background and then a muffled sound, as if she’d covered the phone with her hand.
“I have to go. Frank, my father-in-law, he’s not well, I have to go to him,” she said. “Check with that basketball coach. Maybe he can tell you more. He was real fond of Nicky, too fond for my liking.”
Ellen hung up the phone with a force too strong to be an accident, and I rubbed my ringing ear.
Although school had not yet resumed, Cedar Valley High School ran summer classes through the end of August. I checked my watch; it was nearing four o’clock. I took a chance and called, and waited while an administrative assistant put me on hold and tracked down the basketball coach.
I paced the office and listened with one ear as Finn regaled Sam with war stories. He was beginning the one about Christmas Eve of ’09, and the drunken department store elf, when the hold music stopped and a male voice came on.
“This is Darren Chase.”
His voice was low and sounded like he’d spent some serious time down in the bayou; I heard in the ebb and flow of his words days spent on shrimping boats, in swampy wetlands, watching shell-pink and blood-orange sunsets over the Gulf.
I introduced myself and asked if I could see him regarding a student he had coached a few years back.
He said, “Well, sure, of course,” then added, “Which student?”
Damn. I forgot the Bellingtons still had not held their press conference.
“Mr. Chase, I’d rather not get into too many details over the phone. Can I buy you a coffee at Rick’s?” I said. “I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Make it thirty, and a beer, my treat,” he said with a laugh. “Or is it doughnuts that you cops prefer?”
“Very funny, Mr. Chase. I’ll see you at four thirty then.”
I asked Sam to join me. Chief Chavez hadn’t officially made us partners on the case but what the hell, the kid was eager to learn and it never hurt to have a second set of eyes and ears. I didn’t want to put the mileage on my car, so I checked at reception and gave Sam a high five when the receptionist tossed me the keys to Olga.
Olga was a piece-of-shit Oldsmobile, a relic from the ’80s, but she was the hottest ticket around, on account of her working air conditioner and AM/FM stereo. We clamored into it and cranked the AC and headed over to Rick’s Café, a small restaurant that sat in the shadows of the ski lifts, at the base of a black-diamond run called Maverick’s Goose.
“I was thinking about what you said the other day, you know, dreaming about those kids, the McKenzie boys,” said Sam. He fiddled with the AC vents, opening and closing them like a kid himself. “Do you think we’ll ever know who killed them?”
I shrugged. “I hope so, but who knows? You have to understand, back in ’85, and then in 2011, when I found the skull, thousands of dollars were poured into the case. Hell, tens of thousands, and not just money, but time, effort, and energy. Finding those bodies opened old, deep wounds in Cedar Valley. There were people in town that would have preferred the bodies never be found. I guess they thought it was just easier to keep thinking maybe the kids had run away.”
“But if the Woodsman is still alive… well, that would be something, right? If there was some way to find him…”
I had to appreciate his enthusiasm.
“Of course. But we went over it, again and again. I haven’t given up, but I can’t let the past prevent me from giving all to the present. Take Nicky Bellington-we have an opportunity to find his killer and solve this case, here and now.”