“You’ve still got nothing?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“What’s it been, ten months?”
“Almost eleven.”
“That’s got to be killing you.”
“It is,” he said. “But only because everybody, including the FBI and the Charlotte guys, thinks it should be solved by now.” He dropped the pen into his pocket. “I don’t get it,” he said. “Two guys spend all day driving around Charlotte in an armored car, taking pickups, making deliveries. The last drop of the day, one guy gets out, the other doesn’t, and then he drives off and disappears-dumps the truck right on the Gastonia side of the bridge.” He held a finger to his head like it was a gun. “Thanks, asshole.”
“But that can’t be the only reason the Feds are all over you,” I said.
“It’s not,” he said. “Some of the money’s been passed here in town. Here and up at the casino in Cherokee, but you can’t see anything on the security cameras. The FBI brought in NASA, and they still can’t see anything. It’s not like we know who we’re looking for anyway. The driver definitely had help, but he’s probably long gone by now, if he’s even still alive.”
“Nobody’s passing big bills?”
“No,” he said. “They knew what they were doing, and they’re way ahead of us. It’s kicking our ass.”
I nodded toward the house. “That’s why you should let me lend you a hand on this case. I could take this one off your hands-one less on the books. Just help me out with what you can.”
“I don’t think so, Brady.”
“Come on, Sandy,” I said. “I help you; you help me. That’s how we work it.”
“When, Brady?” he asked. “When do you help me? When do we ‘work it’ like that? You’ve never worked anything for me.” He jingled his keys in his pocket and turned and looked at the house, and then he looked down at his feet. “I’m sorry. It’s just these Feds,” he said. “They’ve got everybody paranoid. They come rolling into town, kicking down doors, asking all kinds of questions, getting up in your face to make sure you don’t touch anything. A few days later, they’re like, ‘Why hasn’t anybody done anything? Who’s in charge here?’ I’m telling you, man, it should make you happy you’re out.” He caught himself as soon as he’d said it. “I didn’t mean-”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
He sighed. “All right. Look, I should be able to send you a few things today. I shouldn’t be doing it, but today’s probably not the best day to start following the rules, right?”
CHAPTER 9
I spent the rest of the morning back at the office, filling out invoices on new systems and answering phone calls about installation appointments, but the whole time I kept picturing the black fingerprint dust on the window ledge and thinking about what kind of promises or threats somebody would have to make to get Easter Quillby to open that window and crawl out into the night.
If twenty years as a cop taught me anything it’s that when folks disappear it usually means, one, they’re dead, or two, they don’t want to be found. Most of the time, when kids go missing, it’s the first, especially after they’ve been gone for forty-eight hours. After that, the chances of ever finding them, much less finding them alive, grow slimmer and slimmer with each day.
But Easter and Ruby’s case seemed like one of the easier ones: two little girls with a dead mother and a deadbeat father, who suddenly reappears out of nowhere, go missing from a foster home. I was about 99 percent sure the girls were with their father, and I was about 99 percent sure that after two days the amount of trouble he’d gotten himself into would start to sink in, and he’d end up trying to bring them back like nothing had happened.
While I worked, my eyes kept drifting to the framed picture of my daughter, Jessica, and me that sat on the corner of my desk. She was eleven in the photograph, about the same age as Easter Quillby. Somebody’d taken the picture on a Saturday morning one fall when her Indian Princess tribe had spent the weekend at Camp Thunderbird out on Lake Wylie, which meant that a handful of little girls had spent the weekend together in one cabin, cutting out vests from huge rolls of felt and earning colored feathers for arts and crafts and horseback riding while their fathers stood around trying to find things to talk about besides their kids and their wives.
In the photo, Jessica sat on one of the camp’s horses, and I stood beside her, my hand reaching up and holding the saddle horn like I was guiding her, even though a camp hand was holding the reins off-camera, clearly aware that I didn’t know what in the hell I was doing. I’m just standing there, squinting into the sun, smiling for the camera. The night before one of the dads and I had left the camp after the girls had all gone to sleep, the rest of the guys staying behind to sit around and play cards. We’d driven over to a convenience store across the street from the camp and bought a case of beer. Then we went back and sat in the amphitheater by the lake, chugging beers and tossing the empties into the dark near the edge of the water. Jessica was just a little girl in the picture, and now she was sixteen, beginning her junior year of high school, starting to think about college.
She lived with my ex-wife, Tina, and her husband, Dean, in an old, wooded neighborhood where most of the houses were protected by alarm systems I’d either installed or serviced, but I’d never stepped a foot inside Dean’s house, but that’s not to say he was a bad guy. He was a blue-collar, hardworking family man who’d made his money after opening a construction firm with his brother. Hell, he could’ve even been me, but he wasn’t. He and my ex-wife had been married for five years, and Jessica had been living in that house almost half as long as she’d lived in mine.
Back before the accident, we used to have lunch on Sundays after church at the Cracker Barrel, and then we’d ride through the rich neighborhoods, talking about which house we’d buy once we had the money, even though we knew we never would. I don’t know if he lived there then or not, but I know we probably drove past Dean’s house a million times.
I haven’t gone to church in years, and now I never drive past houses like Dean’s unless I have to.
When I came back from lunch, papers were waiting for me in the fax machine’s tray. I sat down at my desk and leafed through the pages: a police report with handwriting so sloppy I couldn’t hardly read it.
In the report, Miss Crawford said she’d gone in to check on Easter and Ruby that morning because they were late for breakfast; she’d found two empty beds and no girls. Then she saw the open window and called the police. She said both girls had on nightgowns when they went to bed, but she couldn’t remember the colors. A pair of sneakers belonging to each of them was missing, but nothing else had been taken. She mentioned their father, Wade Chesterfield, showing up at school and later at the home, describing him as tall and thin, maybe six feet and 175 pounds, with strawberry-blond hair just like Easter’s.
But I was surprised by what I found on the last page of the report. I laid the rest of the pages down by the fax machine and stood up and walked out to the reception area, where the sunlight came in through the glass door and front windows. I held the paper under the light to get a good look at it. It was a front and back photocopy of Wade Chesterfield’s baseball card with the Gastonia Rangers.
The card looked like something the Rangers might’ve created for a promotional night at the beginning of a season when hopes were still high. It might’ve even been a vanity card that Chesterfield had designed, ordered, and paid for himself. The photo was him in his pitcher’s windup: a lefty. The Gastonia Rangers, who’d left town and moved to Hickory at the end of the ’92 season, were a farm team for the Texas Rangers, and their uniforms were almost identical. Chesterfield was wearing the white home jersey, and even though the photocopy was black and white, his hat was probably blue and the cursive Rangers on his shirt was blue with red trimming. The other side of the card listed Chesterfield’s stats and his description. He was six-one and, at the time, weighed in at only 162 pounds. It was all there; the only thing I couldn’t tell from Wade Chesterfield’s card was what he looked like: somebody’d come along and scratched out his face with an ink pen.