“How soon?”
“Maybe two weeks.”
Mitch grunted. “Like I said, I’m sure Mrs. Knight won’t mind waiting.”
“Then for Christ’s sake just get rid of her!” Childs said, surprising everyone in the room, including himself. For a moment, his entire body shook. He looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It’s just that…”
“We can’t kill off everyone,” Mitch said.
“I said I didn’t mean it.” He leaned against the desk for support, doing his best to deal with the mix of frustration and guilt roiling up inside him like an angry thunderhead. This had never been the way he had envisioned it. Never. “Amanda Tarkett was more than enough killing for all of us.”
“She was an accident, you son of a bitch.”
“Gentlemen, please,” D.C. said. “Let’s try to stay on subject, all right? We’ve already got plenty on our plate here. No need to toss in the playground insults.”
The pencil Childs had been holding suddenly snapped in half. He stared at the two uneven pieces, the cylinder of graphite exposed beneath jagged yellow edges, then tossed them at the wastepaper basket next to his desk. One piece bounced off the rim and fell silently to the carpet. The other hit home, making a hollow, clanging sound.
“Done?” D.C. asked.
“I hate this,” Childs said.
“I know you do.”
“It’s a fucking nightmare.”
“So let’s see if we can find a way out of it. All right?”
Childs nodded, wearing the lost and lonely face of a man who wasn’t sure of anything anymore.
[122]
Teri went into Walt’s bedroom after the manila envelope that had arrived in the mail yesterday. It was sitting where she had left it on the bureau, under the dictionary. She pulled it out, thought about the name at the bottom of the letter – Richard Boyle, and thought how much the bastard must have been enjoying himself. Well, he wasn’t enjoying himself now, was he? She took a deep breath and held it. For a moment, her encounter with Boyle came back to her again, vivid, so fresh that she could smell the alcohol in the air. She had managed to keep it down for two days now, and she had promised herself not to let it up again until long after Gabe was back home and safe.
Teri eased the breath out, and forced her attention back to Walt.
Following the visit to the cemetery, the trip back to the apartment had fallen under the cast of a thick, self-conscious silence. She had witnessed a private moment in the life of a private man, and she had wanted him to know that she understood how difficult his childhood had been. But the moment had never seemed quite appropriate and as soon as they had arrived home, Walt had gone to bed, saying he felt as if he might be coming down with something. He slept through the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening.
Teri found it a little more difficult to sleep. She busied herself with a casserole for dinner—the recipe had been on the back of an elbow macaroni package—and tried not to give too much thought to what had happened. But she had been doing quite a bit of that lately and it was getting more difficult all the time.
Now, standing at the bureau, she wondered for the hundredth time if showing Walt the manila envelope would make matters better or worse. The contents included Xerox copies of old newspaper articles taken from several local newspapers. The articles spanned a period of almost twelve years through the late Fifties and early Sixties. Altogether, they went into a detailed account of Walt’s childhood – his parents’ divorce, how his father had kidnapped him, the towns where they had been spotted, the names they had used, the changes they had made in their appearances. The articles ran all the way through the death of Walt’s mother in 1965, and after that they came to an abrupt end.
What a nightmare, Teri thought.
How could a father do such a thing to his son?
There was one additional item in the envelope, this from only a few years ago. It was a Xerox copy of the minutes of a Board of Supervisor’s meeting dated March 13, 1991. Under the subheading Personnel Matters was a short one-sentence statement highlighted in yellow. It read: With the recommendation of the Police Commission, the employment of Detective Walter L. Travis shall be terminated with full disability pay as of the last day of the last pay period of this month.
He hadn’t quit the department.
They had asked him to leave.
[123]
“No,” Walt said, standing at the living room window, looking out across the valley. A thin band of twilight colors edged the distant mountain tops. A few more minutes and nightfall would own the sky. “I didn’t quit. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, but it’s not the kind of thing a person likes to slip into the conversation.”
Teri listened, suddenly hating herself for having put him in this position.
“And yes, I had some psychological problems.”
“I don’t care about that. I just want you to know that I understand.”
“Really? Then you’re doing better than I am, because I don’t think I understand.”
“It must have been hell – what you’re father did to you.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“The past haunts us all,” Teri said.
He turned away from the last sliver of sunset, his face expressionless. “I suppose you would know that better than most, after everything you’ve been through.”
“I was just worried about you,” she said.
“No need. I’m all right.”
“Guess I should have known that.”
Walt’s face was drawn, though he managed to find room for a slightly self-conscious smile. It wasn’t the tragic smile Teri had half-expected to see. Instead, it was a break in the ice that had seemed to form between them earlier in the day.
“Yes, you should have,” he said.
Teri managed a smile of her own. “Friends?”
“Friends.”
[124]
“What we need to do is get the two kids moved out of here as soon as possible. If the Knight woman starts nosing around—and I think we all know she’s going to do just that—then we damn well better not have her kid in the basement, yelling for his mommy.”
“We can move them into a motel in the morning,” Mitch said.
“And then move them out to Houston from there,” Childs suggested.
D.C. studied the doc, looking for anything that might indicate what was really going on inside the man’s head. He had watched Childs swing from one mood to another like a chimpanzee trying to find a vine that might support him. The man had finally gotten himself under control again, but as far as D.C. was concerned he was running out of vines.
“How long will it take?”
“To get them to Houston?”
“Yes,” he said sharply. “To get them to… Houston.”
“The same day, if there’s a flight going out.”
“Tomorrow?”
Childs nodded.
“Then why don’t we do that.”
“What about the others?” Mitch asked.
“Well, since we can’t move them all—”
“How about a little sleight of hand,” Childs said. “We could leave them right where they are. No one’s likely to stumble across them in the basement, anyway. But if we fix up the first floor… maybe move some equipment down, bring in some monkeys and rats, pay a few indigents to let us draw blood, that kind of thing… maybe that’s all we would need to put her off for another week or so.”
“Might work,” D.C. said. He pulled a single cigarette out of a pocket and as he sat there thinking, he fingered the cigarette across the back of his hand and back. Between the Knight woman and the kids waking up—not to mention the pressure from Webster—he had already decided that things had gotten too far out of hand. The question was: what should he do about it?