“A comb?”
“You know what I mean. When temperatures rise, people get burned. I mean, they get shot and shit. Happens all the time.” Charlie flung an arm around my shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. I know you only did it because you love him.”
The TV was showing the Bruins pre-game. They’d dug themselves a hole too deep to crawl out of. It was a lost season.
“What did you mean when you said I wasn’t entirely wrong?” Charlie asked, fisting nuts.
“When I drove with Chris up the mountain-that’s where I told Jenny to have the cops meet us; I knew he’d be too paranoid to go back to my place-he gave me something.”
I pulled the disc from the back of my pants.
“Anything on there linking Adam and Michael to some top-secret government conspiracy?” Charlie mocked.
“Chris says there’s pictures.”
“Pictures?”
“Of kids. And an old man, doing bad things to them.”
“Kiddie porn?”
“Chris says it’s Gerry Lombardi.”
Charlie did a double take. “Mr. Lombardi?”
“That’s what Chris said. He was convinced. Said that’s why he broke into his house and the job site. He was trying to find more computers. Get more evidence. Chris says that’s the real reason they’re after him, and that Adam and Michael know all about it. Since their big plans would be derailed if this went public, they’re trying to kill him. Of course, my brother also thinks the fluoride in the drinking water is trying to kill him.”
“You didn’t turn the disc over to Pat and Turley when they picked him up?”
“Nope. But Adam and Bowman drove out to the lake looking for it. Adam kept trying to get me to go off with him. But when they were taking Chris into custody, I switched the discs, in case my brother was right.”
“If you didn’t already believe he was, you wouldn’t have switched the discs.”
Charlie had a point. It had happened so fast I didn’t have time to think; I acted on instinct. I grabbed my CD collection and made the exchange.
“What’s going to happen when Adam-”
“Pops in Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s Live in New York City? I don’t know.”
Charlie pulled out his wallet. “You take a look at that disc yet?”
“You know I don’t have a computer.”
“But I do.” He slapped a pair of tens on the bar, draining the rest of his pint.
“Where’s Fisher?” I asked.
“At his mother’s.”
“Tell him to meet us at your place. I’d like to get his take before I move on this.”
“What’s your plan if it is Mr. Lombardi?”
Good question.
I didn’t have a clue.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Waiting for Fisher to show, Charlie booted up his old computer in the back of the house, and I emptied the old brown rucksack onto the living room floor. My brother’s world unfurled before me. I stared at a mess of clutter and crazy person junk, like when Ally Sheedy dumps her bag-lady purse in The Breakfast Club, a movie my brother and I watched so many times when we were kids, we could quote it, line for line, until the part where everybody starts crying a lot and it stops being funny.
His driver’s license was in there, expired, of course, picture taken back when he was still handsome, his shaggy brown hair carefully parted at the side. Drug paraphernalia, neatly rubber-banded together in a small, rectangular Tupperware container, which Pat had been kind enough to overlook. Through the plastic lid, I could see a charred spoon, needle, torn cigarette filter, aluminum foil, lighter. There were scraps of paper with numbers scratched in ballpoint, and business cards for free food items if ten holes were punched. None of these cards had anywhere near ten holes punched. Pair of socks. Plus the smeared undies.
I heard the front door push open. “Yo, where’s the party?”
“Back here,” Charlie shouted.
I got to my feet and joined Fisher in the tiny office. Charlie clearly didn’t need an office. I remembered when he put it together after his mom died. It was the only room he redecorated. It had been her sewing den. Back then, Charlie had a hundred business ideas he wanted to put in motion. All-terrain vehicle rentals. Mini-golf/bar. Now, a small computer sat on a Furio wood desk next to an empty wire basket. Dust covered the keys. A blue screen fizzled.
“Sorry,” Charlie said. “Desktop’s a piece of shit.”
“What’s the deal?” asked Fisher.
“I need a new computer. This one takes forever to load.”
“I mean the disc,” Fisher said, looking at me. “Your brother thinks Mr. Lombardi’s diddling kiddies? That is seriously fucked up.”
“Here we go,” said Charlie, clicking on a tiny desktop folder, which opened into several larger desktop folders, each labeled by long, alphanumeric sequences. Charlie selected the first one.
We waited. Nothing.
“Is it blank?”
“Hold on,” said Charlie. “Just takes a min-”
“Whoa!” said Fisher.
I could’ve gone my whole life without having those images stuck in my head, and now that they were, I’d never be able to get them out. What kind of a sick fuck does that to a child?
The pictures were amateurish and grainy, but it was clear as day what was happening, the unholy tangle of flesh. You couldn’t see faces too well, most photos were cropped above the neck. But that didn’t diminish the horror. They were all young boys-chubby, skinny, somewhere in between-put in positions little boys should never be put in, doing things little boys should never be doing. No two boys ever appeared together. You could tell the man in the photos was old by the withering, wrinkled skin, the age spots, and sagging body parts. His face was carefully edited out. The photos must’ve been taken with a timer. Unless there was someone else in the room, which added a whole new dimension I didn’t dare fathom. The background in each was gray, dark, completely nondescript, and, therefore, unidentifiable, your average basement. No furniture, not even a bed, just cold concrete with the occasional wood beam, a cheap carpet laid on the floor, like one you’d throw down for a dog.
“Try another folder,” I said.
There were seven folders in all, each with about half a dozen pictures, different kid, same location, same elderly man with bad posture making a guest appearance. The age would be about right. Without seeing a face, though, the perp’s identity was impossible to nail down.
As much as none of us wanted to, we clicked on every image, thoroughly examining them, moving from victim to victim, and feeling horrified all over again. All I could think of was Aiden, who was only a few years younger than these boys, and all the fathers who had no idea what was being done to their sons. As a parent, you strive to protect your kid, keep him from harm’s way. It’s instinctual, primal. If Chris was right and this was Lombardi, he’d used his charity as a cover to earn the trust of desperate parents, only to pick off their children when they were most vulnerable-which made him the worst kind of monster.
“There’s nothing we can use here,” Fisher said.
Sadly, I feared he was right.
Until we clicked on the last folder. A partial view of a face. Slightly out of focus, but maybe…
“Is it him?” Charlie asked.
We all leaned in and stared hard.
“That’s Gerry Lombardi,” Fisher said.
“I don’t know,” said Charlie.
“Try the next one,” I said.
Another partial view of the man’s face. Perhaps a bit more… We clicked through the rest. Nothing. Except the shame of frightened little boys.
“Go back,” Fisher said. “That one there.” He pointed at the screen. “That’s Gerry Lombardi.”
“It sure does look like him,” Charlie said.
I stared at the old man in the picture. I had Charlie zoom in, blow up, but the more we tried to manipulate the photos, the blurrier they became, until they morphed into shapeless, unrecognizable blobs. There could be no definitive answer. My best tool was my gut.