The obvious was to me, well, obvious. “He lived next door. People prey on kids, Sam. He could’ve become obsessed with her.”
“A voyeur? That’s all you got?”
“I’m thinking worse.”
He scowled. “Why dig a tunnel?”
“To do his thing. Access.”
“Risky as shit. Three people live in that house. He’s bound to get caught wandering around in there trying to get at the girl. Doesn’t work. You live next door, there’re much easier ways to spy on a kid.”
“Maybe he went in at night when they were asleep.”
“There are pervs who like to watch girls sleep?” Sam asked.
After all his years as a cop, Sam’s residual naiveté still ambushed me sometimes.
“There are pervs who like just about everything.”
He held up his hand. “I don’t want to hear it.”
I thought about the theater in Doyle’s basement. All the top-end electronics. “Did Doyle wire their house? Hide video cameras in Mallory’s room? The bathroom? Anything like that?”
“We checked. Fixtures are all clean, attic’s clean. No holes drilled where they shouldn’t be drilled. There’s nothing there, not a single extra cable in the Millers’ house, not a single cable coming back through the tunnel to Doyle’s. No transmitters. If he put surveillance in, he took it back out when he moved away.”
I thought for a moment, forcing myself to go back to basics. Psychology basics. The best predictor of someone’s future behavior-maybe the only predictor-is his past behavior. I said, “Car thieves steal cars, right? Bank robbers rob banks?”
Sam looked at me as though he’d just realized I was mentally challenged. “Yeah, and psychologists ask stupid questions.”
“What do we really know about Doyle Chandler?”
“Not much,” Sam admitted. “Did I tell you he was shot?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“He was shot. Behind the ear, slight upward angle. Shooter wasn’t real close, no burns on his skin. Slug looks like a.38. Second and third shots to his back. But they were just insurance. He was already dead with the first slug.”
“Suspects?”
“Camaro Bob’s on the list.”
I didn’t want to hear that. I went back to Doyle. “You know one more thing about Doyle for sure, Sam: He steals identities,” I said.
“Yeah?”
He knew where I was going. I said, “You were wondering about the motive for the tunnel. There it is.”
“Doyle went into the Millers’ house to build a new identity?” Sam said.
I noted-with some relief-that his question was almost entirely devoid of skepticism.
“What better place? Say Doyle went in during the daytime when Bill was at work and the kids were at school. He’d have the run of the house. Personal records, financial records, work stuff that Bill left laying around. Computer files, his e-mails, maybe even passwords. Be like Wal-Mart for an identity thief. With a tunnel he could take all the time he needed to fill in every last blank.”
“ ‘Lying’ around. Bill would leave stuff ‘lying’ around. Not ‘laying’ around.”
I smiled. “Does the gratis English lesson mean you think I got the rest right?”
“Maybe,” Sam said. Even though he’d already caught his breath, he put his hands on his hips the way exhausted athletes do, stared at me, and momentarily left any parsimony behind. “We blew it the first time. Eight years ago? We did. I don’t care about the public face we tried to put on it, the damn truth is that we fucking blew it. Guess what? I don’t want to be the guy who blows it this time. If you have something that’ll help me find that girl, I need to hear it. Second chances don’t come around too often in life. I have one. We need to redeem ourselves.”
In the years since the other little girl’s death, I’d never heard Sam be so brutal in his appraisal of law enforcement’s role. “Okay, yeah,” I said.
“Yeah, you have something? Or, yeah, you understand?”
Did I have something? If I did, I wasn’t sure what it looked like. I said, “Yeah, I understand.”
He stepped toward the Cherokee. “I don’t need your understanding.”
64
I tried to stretch out my calves a little more as I pondered Sam’s challenge and watched him disappear down the dusty lane. I was just about to go back inside when the square front end of an approaching car came my way. It stopped a hundred yards or so down the road, in a little turnout on the soft shoulder.
The car was the GM sedan I’d seen earlier. The sun had crested the eastern horizon and was reflecting off the windshield. From my vantage point I could tell the car was pale yellow. The hood ornament clued me in that it was a Cadillac.
I stuck my hands in my armpits to warm my fingers, and I waited.
A man climbed out of the driver’s seat, stuffed his hands in his pockets, and began walking toward me.
Bob Brandt.
Even at a hundred yards I recognized the denim jacket. My thought? Thank God you’re alive.
“Somebody’s been in my house,” he said when he got within fifty feet. His voice was pressured. He didn’t say hello.
So what else is new?
“I know,” I said. I’d come to the conclusion that it was Doyle who had trashed Bob’s place, but I kept the guess to myself.
“Did you read my stuff?” he asked.
That’s why Bob was at my house: to chastise me for breaking his trust and spilling his secrets. That was fair-I had broken his trust and spilled his secrets. “Hi, Bob,” I said, reframing things, at least for a moment. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“Why?”
Bob’s “why” was a classic schizoid question, but perfectly sincere. His disorder left him with only the most rudimentary concept of “concern,” at least the person-to-person variety.
“I hadn’t heard from you, thought you might be in… danger.”
“Oh.” He played with the notion for a moment before he added, “I went somewhere. Do you know what’s going on? Who was in my place?”
“Are you okay?”
“Tired. Drove all night.”
“Are you here by yourself?”
He turned his head and looked back at the Cadillac, as though he needed to check to be sure. “Yes. What’s going on? Did you read my stuff? I told you not to. You must have seen my note.”
“Like I said, I got worried. Anyway, I think you wanted me to read it. Otherwise you wouldn’t have given it to me. We can talk about it.” It was shrink talk, but it also happened to be true.
“I was just getting started. It’s just a story.”
“The tunnel part is real.”
He swallowed, and his eyes started their disconcerting shimmying. He spit a solitary word: “So?”
Bob’s retort was schoolyard bravado, nothing more.
“How can I be of help right now?” I said, trying to sound therapeutic.
He seemed surprised by my offer. After a moment, he said, “That’s a good question.”
He stepped back, literally and-I feared-figuratively. Instinctively, I sought safer ground for him. “Is that your car?”
His eyes found the Caddy and lingered there. “It’s my mother’s.”
Your mother’s? Was Bob being sardonic? I couldn’t say. “You like it?”
He’d returned his attention my way, but was looking past me toward the distant turnpike. Finally, he said, “Lots of power. Good cruiser. Cushy. Only fourteen K on it.”
“Not as cherry as your Camaro,” I said.
“Close,” he said. “Pretty close.” He made an unfamiliar popping sound with his lips. “Maybe you can help somebody… I know.”
“A friend?” I asked. Please tell me Mallory’s okay.