“Can you try?” I asked.
Torkleson looked over his shoulder to assure himself we hadn’t been overheard by his colleagues. “I’ll try,” he said softly.
“Thank you,” I said, wanting to kiss him.
“But I don’t think it will pan out,” he said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “If there are electronic trails from Coates and Harris to Moreland or his son, I think we’d already know it. This case has been in the works for a hell of a long time.”
“I understand,” I said. “But won’t it be easier if you’re specifically looking at a particular target-Moreland’s or Garrett’s computers or phones-than cross-referencing a whole city?”
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
By then Angelina had lost all patience and worked her arms free and was swinging at me, her little fists thumping against my topcoat lapels. “Down! Down!”
“Angelina, no.” The tone of my voice silenced her. She began to cry, and I was sorry I had snapped at her.
THAT NIGHT I ROLLED over in bed and opened my eyes and caught Melissa sitting there in the dark staring at me, a drink in her hand. No doubt wondering why she’d married a man who couldn’t keep her family together.
Saturday, November 24
TWENTY-TWO
WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at seven thirty in the morning, I rolled over and grabbed it, rubbing my eyes and hoping it was Torkleson or Cody with news. After waking to find Melissa watching me the night before, I hadn’t slept for hours and had just fallen asleep.
“Is everything ready for tomorrow?” Judge John Moreland asked.
I didn’t respond.
Moreland said, “I know this has got to be tough. Please don’t make it any tougher on either one of us than it needs to be.”
I said, “I’m on to you.”
There was a beat of silence. He said, “What?”
“You heard me. You’ll be in prison, where you can never touch a little girl again. And you know what happens to your kind in prison.”
When he spoke again he sounded angry and impatient. “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.” I had hoped he would act guilty and reveal himself. He was a good actor.
“Really?” I said.
“You’ve gone off the deep end. I hate to say it, but getting the baby out of that… environment can’t be soon enough.”
“You’ll be wearing a jumpsuit and shoes without laces, and you’ll spend all your time looking over your shoulder for the next attack,” I said.
A heavy sigh. “I’ve done everything I can to be compassionate,” Moreland said. “I never needed to give you the time, but I did. I’ve offered to help you and your wife with another placement, but you’ve spurned that offer. All I get from you is threats and paranoid rants. You accuse my son of murder and me of something I can’t even say out loud. I would have hoped this entire painful thing could have been accomplished with some kind of maturity for the sake of the child, but I see that’s just not the case.”
Man, he almost convinced me with that one. He was damned good, I’ll give him that.
“I’m on to you,” I said again.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake…”
I punched off and looked up to see Melissa in the doorway, holding Angelina in her arms.
“Was that him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to make sure we were ready.”
“Kind of him,” she said, with a kind of hopeless sarcasm. She closed her eyes. I stood up in case I needed to steady her. Angelina reached out for me, cried, “Da!”
I COULDN’T EVEN EAT the toast I’d made and stuck to cup after cup of coffee. With the mug in hand, I wandered through the rooms in our house as if seeing them for the first time in a while. White winter light filtered through the blinds and curtains. It was a different quality of light than fall or summer, a more dispassionate hue. It was obviously cold outside because the heater clicked on and forced warm air through the registers with regularity. I thought, Maybe this happens all the time, and I’ve just never noticed it before. I tried to remember the last time I’d checked our furnace in the basement and couldn’t recall when I’d done it.
Sanders and Morales were in their usual places. Wisps of exhaust from their running engines dissipated into the air.
I’d not told Melissa of my suspicion regarding Judge Moreland or my conversation with Detective Torkleson. Maybe I should have, but I was banking on the fact that Torkleson would call confirming the judge’s links to the ring, and it would all be over.
MELISSA DECIDED the house was missing something and decided to bake bread. Soon, the smells of baking bread filled the place, taking the edge off the day. Good call, I thought.
In Angelina’s room, there were boxes stacked up in the corner and marked SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, and TOYS AND GIFTS.
It was really happening.
For the fourth time that day, I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Cody’s number and heard, “The number you are calling is out of the ser vice area at this time. Please leave a message…”
THERE WERE SEVERAL more phone calls throughout the day, none of them Torkleson or Cody. Melissa’s mom and dad called from different places and she talked to each of them longer than I could remember her ever doing. Her face flushed as she talked to her father, and I could tell she was getting angry.
“We had a lawyer,” she said, heatedly. “It’s not like we didn’t have a lawyer, Dad. It’s that there wasn’t anything he could do.”
She scowled as he went on, and when she saw me watching, she rolled her eyes.
“Gee, Dad,” she said, “it’s really great you are suddenly so concerned and seem to have all of the answers. But where were you three weeks ago when we could have used some of your wisdom?”
My parents called shortly after, before Melissa had cooled off. She talked to them and told them the situation hadn’t changed. After a while, she handed the phone to me.
My dad said, “Your mom is too busted up to talk anymore, sorry.”
“I understand.”
“I guess this is the kind of thing that can happen when we turn everything over to the government and to the lawyers,” he said. “When a whole society abrogates personal responsibility, these kinds of situations come up.” I’d heard his theory many times before that everything was better back in the pioneer days, when people dealt with each other fair and square, their word backed up personally by their reputations or their guns-without the involvement of third parties like lawyers or politicians.
“Dad, I can’t sit on the front porch with a shotgun on my lap and keep them away.”
“I know you can’t,” he said. “And it’s a damned shame.”
I thought of my grandfather’s Colt.45 upstairs in the closet, and said, “Yes, it is.”
Dad said, “I was joking to your mother that we ought to send somebody like Jeter Hoyt down there to straighten things out. That’d give those big-city types a dose of frontier justice, wouldn’t it?”
I smiled bitterly to myself. Frontier justice hadn’t matched up real well with Sur-13.
“Too bad we can’t do that,” he said.
I PACED. I called Cody’s cell phone again and again, getting angrier with him each time. Same with Torkleson, who wouldn’t answer his cell, either. I called the detective division, and the receptionist said Torkleson was out and she didn’t know when he’d be back. She asked if there was anyone else who could help me, and I said no, I needed to talk to Torkleson.
I stayed away from both Melissa and Angelina because I didn’t want my building anger and fear to affect them. I went upstairs and checked the loads in the.45, and went downstairs and looked at my furnace and wondered how in the hell it worked.