God, he had loved Maria.
He’d been so happy back then, living in that dilapidated house on Drexel Avenue, but the demons had called to him and Maria couldn’t understand it. When you stepped back and thought about it, the whole thing made no sense. You could be addicted to booze or drugs or gambling. You could lose your house, your health, your money. You could be belligerent and even abusive-but if the cause was, say, booze or pills or the ponies, the world understood your pain. Your true love stayed with you and got you help. But if your demon was sex, if you needed what Del needed, what every normal friggin’ man in the history of mankind eventually gave in to, if you do something that was built into man’s DNA, something that really harmed nobody in the way drinking or pills did, except through jealousy-then no one understands and you lose everything.
It was her fault, really. Maria’s. Raising that kid with no father figure in the house. Not being able to forgive or to understand what a man was like. He had loved her. How did she not get that?
“Good evening, Mr. Flynn.”
The voice chilled the room. Del Flynn slowly turned around. When Ken and Barbie smiled at him, the temperature dropped another ten degrees.
“Did you find my son?”
“Not yet, Mr. Flynn.”
They both just stood there, looking as though they’d just finished a song on the old Lawrence Welk Show or… what was that dumb holiday show his parents used to watch every year? The King family. What the hell ever happened to them? And why did seeing these two always make him think of the weirdest crap?
“So what do you want?”
“We have a dilemma, Mr. Flynn,” Ken said.
“A moral dilemma,” Barbie added.
Del knew people. You don’t live around here and work with restaurants and trucking and not meet people. One of his best friends growing up was Rolly Lember, who was now head of organized crime in the Camden area. Del had gone to him for help with finding his son. He knew that he was making a deal with the devil. He didn’t much care. Lember had told him that he’d have his people on the lookout, but Del would be better off hiring two expert freelancers-the best in the business. He warned him not to be too shocked by their appearances. Del also reached out to Goldberg, a cop well-known for providing inside information for a fee.
No, he was not about to leave this to the cops alone.
Del knew that earlier in the day Ken and Barbie had traced down a stripper Carlton had been banging. Her name was Tonya or Tawny or something like that. Earlier, the police had questioned the girl, but she gave them almost nothing. Ken and Barbie had been able to extract more information.
“Are you familiar with a town called Kasselton?” Ken asked.
Del thought about that. “It’s up north, right?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever been there.”
“How about anybody with the last name Pierce? David or Megan Pierce?”
“No. Do they have something to do with my son?”
Ken and Barbie updated Del on their day. They didn’t go into details about how they went about gathering information, and Del didn’t ask. He just listened, feeling his heart break and harden at the same time.
Mostly harden.
“Do you think there’ll be some blowback?” Del asked.
Ken looked at Barbie, then to Del. “From Tawny? No. From Harry Sutton? Yes. But they won’t be able to trace it back to us.”
“Or you,” Barbie added.
Again Del didn’t ask for details. “So now what?”
“We normally follow the evidence,” Barbie said, in a voice that sounded almost rehearsed, as if she were suddenly playing someone much older. “In this case, that would mean questioning Mr. and Mrs. Pierce.”
Del said nothing.
“And,” Ken said, “that would mean leaving Atlantic City for Kasselton, thereby widening the circle.”
“And adding to the collateral damage,” Barbie added.
Del kept his eyes on the window. “So you’re here to get my approval?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think the Pierces know something?”
“I think the wife does, yes,” Ken said. “We know that Detective Broome met with her today. She chose to have a lawyer with her-that lawyer being Harry Sutton.”
“That means she had something to hide,” Barbie added.
Del thought about that, about his visit to the precinct. “Whatever this Megan Pierce told him-Broome acted on it. He had the crime techs at a park tonight. They found blood.”
Silence.
“Do the Pierces have children?” Del asked.
“Two.”
“Try to keep them out of it.”
It was, Del knew from personal experience, the most merciful thing he could do.
Megan ’s drive home took two hours.
Dave had recently put satellite radio in the car, so she tried to listen to Howard Stern for a while. One time, when she and Dave were alone in the car and listening, Howard had chatted up a stripper named Triple Es, and Megan nearly jumped out of her skin because she immediately recognized the voice as belonging to Susan Schwartz, a girl who worked La Creme back in the day. They had even been roommates for a time.
Oddly enough, Megan found Howard Stern to be his least interesting when the show was its most provocative. While far from a prude, Megan had found the more graphic bits-the dirty sex, the bodily functions, the freaks-tame but got totally immersed when Howard conducted celebrity interviews or commented on the news with Robin. Megan was always surprised at how often she agreed with him, how much sense he made-Howard could be a wonderful distraction/companion on long, lonely car rides-but tonight, after a few futile minutes, she flicked off the radio and let herself be alone with her thoughts.
What now?
It was nearly one A.M. when she reached her driveway. The house was entirely dark, except for the lamp on a timer in the living room. She hadn’t called Dave to say she was coming home. She wasn’t sure why. She just didn’t know what to say to him, how she would answer his obvious questions. She had hoped the two hours in the car would clarify that for her. But it hadn’t. She had considered everything from a total fabrication (“A friend-I can’t tell you who-had a personal problem”) to total truth (“You better sit down for this one”) to something in the middle (“I went to Atlantic City, but it’s no big deal”).
So as Megan parked in her driveway, as she dropped her keys in her purse and opened the car door and closed it quietly, because it was so late and she didn’t want to wake anyone, she still had no idea what she would say to the man she’d been married to for the past sixteen years.
The house was quiet-almost too quiet, as they say-as if the shiny new brick and stonework were somehow holding its collective breath. The stillness surprised her. Despite the late hour Megan figured that Dave would be up, waiting for her to return, maybe sitting in the dark, maybe pacing. But there was no sign of any life at all. She tiptoed up the stairs and turned right. Jordan’s door was open. She could hear him breathing. Like most eleven-year-olds, when Jordan finally fell asleep, he fell hard and deep and it would take an act of God to wake him up.
Jordan always kept his door open and still, at the age of eleven, used a night-light. Megan could see the mounted shark above his head. For some strange reason, Jordan loved fishing more than anything. Neither she nor Dave had ever fished-or remotely enjoyed fishing-but Dave’s brother-in-law had taken Jordan when he was four, and the kid just got the bug. For a little while, that brother-in-law took Dave on his local fishing excursions, but when he divorced Dave’s sister, that ended. So now at least twice a year, Dave arranged a boys’ fishing weekend (some might coin this “sexist,” since the females weren’t invited, but Megan and Kaylie preferred the word “grateful”), everything from fly-fishing in Wyoming to bass fishing in Alabama and last year, shark fishing off the coast of northern Georgia. That was where Jordon got that particular trophy mount.