“Is it the cop part?” Miriam asked. “Is that what’s so unbelievable?”
To their credit, the four detectives, current and former, did not protest too quickly or readily, did not swear to the heavens that they had found it easy to consider one of their own as a killer and sexual predator. Infante, the handsome one who had picked her up at the airport, spoke first.
“The cop part makes a lot of sense in some ways. That’s how you would lure two girls away-show each one a badge, say you have her sister, that she’s in trouble. Any kid would follow a cop.”
“Maybe not Dave Bethany’s children in 1975-Dave was given to calling police officers pigs, before we found ourselves in their debt, before Chet became a trusted friend.” That was a conscious gift to Chet on her part, a way to make up for the sharpness in her voice earlier. “But okay, I see your point.”
“It’s just this particular cop, it doesn’t really track,” Infante continued. “He was in the theft division, a good guy, well liked. None of us knew him, but the guys who did are stunned by the idea that he could be involved in this. Plus, he’s not even sentient, so he’s an awfully convenient target.”
“Dunham,” Miriam said. “Dunham. Stan, you said?”
“Yes, and the son’s name was Tony. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“Dunham rings a bell. We knew someone named Dunham.”
“Not anyone you ever told me about,” Chet began, his voice defensive. She put her hand on his forearm, wanting to comfort him, but also keen that he stop talking, so she could follow this train of thought.
“Dunham. Dunham. Dunned by Dunham.” Miriam had a vision of herself at the old kitchen table in the house on Algonquin Lane. It was a rickety thing, a not-quite antique, passed down from Bop-Bop’s apartment when she left Baltimore. Foisted on them, Miriam would have said, more stuff for the house with too much stuff. There had been days when she felt she couldn’t walk across a room without bumping into a table or a footstool or some other object that Dave had dragged in. Dave had painted the table with taxicab-yellow lacquer and let the girls affix flower decals to it, which had looked good for all of two weeks, and then the decals had started to peel, leaving behind a sticky residue and pulling up bits of the paint. The green of the checkbook clashed horribly. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she was anxious when she paid their bills each month, watching them go a little further into the hole, playing the game of which creditor to appease this month, which one to let go a little longer. They had argued about expenses, but they could never agree on what was truly expendable. “Ghee costs nothing,” Dave would say if Miriam suggested that the Fivefold Path was a practice the household could no longer afford. “Why can’t you run her to and from school?” She would counter, “I have a job now, a job this family needs. I can’t drop everything to chauffeur Sunny back and forth.”
You could do the mornings… But who would do the afternoons?…The guy is screwing us anyway, reversing the route in the afternoon… We have to find some way to cut our budget.
It was an argument they had almost every month that year, and Miriam had prevailed every month, once again making out the check to Mercer Transportation, up in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania. She hadn’t even known where Glen Rock was. But when the checks came back, they were endorsed by-
“Stan Dunham owned the private bus company, Mercer, that we used to get Sunny to and from junior high every day.”
“Mercer owned the property,” the girl all but yelped. “It was an LLC, the previous owner before the development went in. I thought Dunham sold it to Mercer, but he must have simply transferred the deed to his own LLC. Shit, I can’t believe I missed that.”
“But we looked at the driver,” Chet said. “It was one of the first people we checked out, and he had a solid alibi for the day the girls went missing. Stan wasn’t the driver. You never told me about Stan.”
Miriam understood his frustration, for she felt it, too. No one had been sacred in their search for the girls, no one had been presumed innocent. They had turned their life upside down and inside out, looking for names and connections. Relatives, neighbors, teachers had been considered, whether they knew it or not. Employees at Security Square had been checked for minor sex charges, then brought in to talk to police, as if trafficking with a prostitute necessarily led to kidnapping two adolescent girls. Her coworkers, Dave’s associates. They had even tracked down the man who drove the Number 15 bus route that day, the man Miriam always thought of as the one who had driven her daughters to their deaths, as sure as Charon ferried the dead across the river Styx. Suspicion was infinite, but energy and time proved finite. Dave’s great, frantic fear, the anxiety that made life with him unbearable, was that they had not done everything they could, that there was always something else they should be doing, checking, examining.
And, sure enough, Dave had been right. Dunned by Dunham, he had sung. Are we being dunned by Dunham again? He had been polite, but stern, and they had quickly learned not to put him in their monthly roulette of bills that may or may not be paid. They could not afford to offend him, lest he drop Sunny from the route. But Dunham was nothing more than a signature, very black and emphatic, on the back of a check that returned each month from a bank in Pennsylvania.
CHAPTER 38
Lenhardt was still trying to figure out the tip for brunch by the time Infante called the duty judge to alert him that they would need a search warrant for Stan Dunham’s room in Sykesville. They met the judge outside the Cross Keys Inn, where he was having Sunday brunch, and in less than an hour Infante and Willoughby were on their way to the nursing home. Kevin had not wanted the old cop to come along, yet he couldn’t help but indulge him. Something had been missed, a detail overlooked, all those years ago. No one’s fault-once the driver was eliminated, why would anyone think of some faceless guy up in Pennsylvania, cashing checks? Still, he could tell that Willoughby was beating himself up.
“You know how we found the Penelope Jackson connection?” Infante asked. Willoughby was looking out the window, studying a golf course on the north side of the freeway.
“Some sort of computer search, I gather.”
“Yeah, by Nancy. The first day I did the typical stuff-NCIC, all those databases. But I didn’t think to check the fucking newspapers, on the off chance that Penelope Jackson had made news in a way that didn’t generate a warrant. If Nancy hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have made the connection between Tony and Stan Dunham. Even knowing what we did, we missed the timeline. Dunham’s lawyer told me he sold the property a few years ago, but I didn’t pin him down on the date. I assumed he was talking about the sale to Mercer, but he was talking about Mercer’s sale to the developer.”
“Thank you, Kevin,” Willoughby said in a brittle voice, as if Infante had offered him an Altoid or something else utterly trivial. “But you’re talking about an oversight you made in the first twenty-four hours of investigating a hit-and-run and a suspicious woman. I had fourteen years to work the Bethany case, and if the information about Dunham is correct, it means I never made a single significant discovery in the disappearance of the Bethany girls. Think about that. All that work, all that time, and I didn’t actually learn anything. Pathetic.”