Dewitt shook his head. “We can get Dr. Howard to examine the kid if it comes to that. In the meantime, get his mother in here and take an official statement. If the kid did kill somebody, I don’t want him getting off on a technicality.”
****
They took another statement from Jeffy once his mother arrived. Grace watched closely while Taliafero conducted the interview. Taliafero asked Jeffy the same questions in different ways, urged him to repeat certain details, made him describe the three hundred-dollar card and retrace his steps from school to home every afternoon. But despite all that, Grace detected no inconsistencies in the boy’s story.
She watched the mother, too. Mrs. Hanson, a thin woman in a faded dress, who had perpetually-tired eyes, listened to the story with a little frown on her face, showing surprise only once. Not when Taliafero mentioned“possible harm to Timmy Johnson”—that had only made her frown deepen. But when Jeffy gave his black hole explanation, her eyes widened, her breath caught and her body language screamed anxiety in a way that no detective could have missed.
Dewitt noticed it too, and rapped on the door to bring Taliafero out. Closing the door, he turned to them and folded his arms. “So?”
Taliafero shook his head. “I can’t crack the kid, but the mom sure is interesting.”
Dewitt sighed and nodded. “And here I was ready to call this a case of too much high fructose corn syrup.”
“Shouldn’t we send a forensics team over to the Johnsons’?” Grace asked. “Hard to indict anybody for murder if there’s no evidence that a murder actually occurred.”
“I don’t want to send a team yet. I’m with Tally on this maybe turning out to be a prank. But you two go check it out. Holler if you see any black holes.”
****
Mr. Johnson wasn’t home. Mrs. Johnson let them in. She was a pretty woman, but there was a dull sort of glaze to her eyes that Grace had seen before. Denial, probably, or shock. That desperate creeping fear that only the parents of a missing child could ever know.
“It’s about time,” she said when Grace and Taliafero entered the house. Despite the words, her voice was without heat. Without any emotion, in fact, spilling out of her in a soft, droning babble. “I called in the missing persons’ report this morning. You want a description of what he was wearing? I’ve been trying to find a good photograph—”
Grace cleared her throat uneasily. “We’re not exactly here about the missing persons’ report, Mrs. Johnson.” She glanced around the foyer of the place—a four-bedroom duplex in a nice brownstone, worth a lot these days but probably not when they’d bought it. There was something strange about the place, she noticed at once. Something off-kilter. But she couldn’t put her finger on the source of that feeling.
Mrs. Johnson walked past them toward the living room. A half-burnt cigarette smoldered in an ashtray on the table; she picked it up and waved them toward the couch. “Talk to me about what?” Her eyes lit in sudden hungry anxiety. “You found Timmy?”
“No, Mrs. Johnson. I’m sorry.” Taliafero looked uncomfortable. “Do you know a friend of Timmy’s named Jeffrey Hanson?”
The Johnson woman seemed to wilt; her dull glaze returned. “Jeffy? Sure I know him. Weird kid, but nice enough. What’s this about?”
“Why do you say he’s weird, Mrs. Johnson?”
“He just… is.” She made a vague gesture with the cigarette; smoke swirled in loops around her. “Quiet. Polite.” Her lips quirked in a faint, fleeting smile. “Well, maybe I’m just used to Timmy. But I’ve heard weird things about his mom.” She shook her head. “Anyway, what does he have to do with my son?”
Taliafero cleared his throat. “This afternoon, ma’am, Jeffy came into the precinct and asked to be arrested. He said, and I quote—” He flipped through his notepad. “’I think I killed Timmy Johnson. It was an accident, but I think maybe I should go to jail.’”
The Johnson woman’s face went slack for an instant. “Timmy’s dead?”
Quickly, Grace spoke up. “We’re not certain, Mrs. Johnson. Jeffy says it happened here, in Timmy’s bedroom, but obviously you would have been the first to know if that was true. And Jeffy appears to be… confused… about the details of the crime. So we can’t jump to any conclusions about Timmy yet.”
The shock began to clear from Mrs. Johnson’s face. She swallowed, took a breath, noticed that her cigarette was about to drop some ashes, and absently stubbed it out. “When… when will you know more?”
“Well, first we’d like to examine the crime sc—the place where it supposedly happened,” Grace said. “May we?”
The woman nodded and waved them toward the stairwell. “Up on the left.” She fell silent then, lost in the daze of her own terrible thoughts. Grace and Taliafero glanced at each other, then made an awkward exit to go check out the scene.
But when they opened the door to the Johnson boy’s room, they both stopped in shock.
Parts of the room were still normal. A bookcase set into one wall held all of the usual accoutrements of the small-boy lifestyle: large binders labeled“MONSTER KING” in a blocky hand, an open box of Legos, a row of books arranged with a mother’s neatness. On a nearby wall were posters, one of the Yankees’ Derek Jeter and another of some spiky-haired anime character. Below the posters was a bed, more or less in order. They could see that at one point it had been neatly-made, but now the sheets hung half on the floor and the bed itself had been partially pulled away from the wall. It dipped at a precarious angle toward the yawning, splintered pit in the middle of the hardwood floor.
“What the…?” Taliafero murmured aloud. Grace stepped into the bedroom, moving gingerly even though the outermost edges of the floor seemed stable. The pit started a foot or two into the room. From there the floor had been demolished in a rough circle, bits of plaster and wood sloping dangerously toward a hole maybe five inches across at the center. They could glimpse the room below—the kitchen—through the opening.
Grace had a sudden vision of a whirlpool made of wood and lathing rather than water, twisting with hellish speed as it descended into… what?
A black hole, like the kid said.
She pushed that thought aside.
“Looks like somebody dropped God’s bowling ball in here,” Taliafero muttered.
“We thought he’d run away,” said Mrs. Johnson. Grace spun around. She’d been too stunned by the hole to hear the woman coming up the steps behind them.
“That’s why we waited ’til today to file the report,” Mrs. Johnson said in her heatless, spiritless voice. “We thought he’d gotten into something—fireworks maybe—and run away because he thought we’d be angry. But I don’t care about the floor.” She rubbed her eyes; Grace’s heart ached for her. “If you find him, tell him that. The floor doesn’t matter, I just want him home.”
Grace pointed at the floor. “Mrs. Johnson… do you have any idea what could have caused that?”
The woman looked up, her eyes haunted and very, very lost.
“No,” said Mrs. Johnson,“but there’s one in the kitchen, too.”
****
They searched the basement as carefully as they could in the area under the kitchen hole. But there was nothing—no blood, no fireworks residue that they could see, no signs of a struggle. The basement had been set up as Mr. Johnson’s den, with an old couch and TV and ugly carpeting. The couch was out of position just as the Johnson kid’s bed had been, and the TV stand lay on its side, the TV a shattered wreck beside it. Aside from that, the room was clean. There was no sign of whatever had punched its way down through two floors.