City of the Sun

NINE

Behr began early, lowering himself into the blizzardlike maze of details. The Gabriels ’ bank accounts came up modest and tidy, as he expected they would. He went in and talked to the teacher, Ms. Preston, combed through newspaper archives for reported stories on the case, and then went to interview the soccer coach. Behr sat in his car a distance away and staked out a practice, checking to see if anyone was hanging around near the kids doing the same. He sat for an hour and a half, as the team moved up and down the field, bunching around the ball occasionally, causing the coach to blow his whistle and wave his arms, which returned them to better spacing. Behr raised his miniature Zeiss 12 Ч 25 and glassed the streets bordering the field; he saw he was the only one in the watcher category. Parents began showing up, and the kids ran, muddy-cleated, to waiting cars. Behr opened his door, swung his feet out, and started toward the field. The coach oversaw the last of his players leaving and was picking up the orange cones that marked the field when Behr got to him.

Coach Finnegan wore plastic-framed glasses, a fleece top, and a flexible knee brace on his right leg beneath baggy Umbro shorts. The guy had coached the Wayne Hornets for six years after moving there from Colorado Springs. Unlike the teacher, Andrea Preston, who was a pillar of the community, Finnegan, according to Behr ’ s background check, was divorced, delinquent on six alimony payments, and had once pleaded no contest to a bad check charge. Fines had been paid.

“Must be cold,” Behr said, pointing at the coach ’ s red legs.

“I always wear ’ em,” Finnegan said of his shorts, “even at the end of the year.”

“You ’ re Finnegan?” Behr asked as a formality.

“Uhm-hm. You?”

“I ’ m here about Jamie Gabriel.”

“He used to play for me.” The coach nodded. “Sad thing that happened. He was a striker.” The man ’ s face didn ’ t give anything away. “Any news?” he asked as an afterthought.

“I work for the family,” Behr told him by way of a nonanswer. He wasn ’ t going to tell this guy shit. For many cops and investigators the major obstacle to detecting deception and finding the truth was their own natural tendency to believe people. Behr had no such problem: he ’ d seen too much ugliness. He couldn ’ t help his prejudice, either. He reserved a little dose of suspicion for men who worked with children. Female teachers had his baseline trust. Male college professors made sense to him. But adult men who worked with young boys chafed just slightly at the part of him that doubted humanity. He knew this was stupid, and he ’ d seen countless female criminals prove it so. Behr appraised the soccer coach. Could his emotional or psychological issues have led him to do the unspeakable? The guy seemed like a regular ex-jock; he was probably beyond reproach.

“Ever seen anyone hanging around the field who shouldn ’ t be?”

“You mean when Jamie — ”

“Anytime. Before or since.”

“Haven ’ t. I ’ d question anyone like that,” the coach said, a real solid citizen.

“Ever have a player mention an adult was bothering him?”

“Only their relatives. Usual stuff. ‘ My father won ’ t let me play because of grades. ’ ‘ My mother ’ s boyfriend ’ s an asshole. ’ ”

“Gotcha.”

Finnegan toed down a hunk of loose turf. Behr looked over both ends of the field.

“How does transportation work?”

“Parents do drop-offs and pickups. Team van for road games or parents can drive if they want. Anybody who ’ s not a parent who ’ s picking up a player has to be prearranged with me by phone. More than a few times I ’ ve had to refuse an aunt or uncle and drive a kid all the way home because the mother or father forgot to call.” The coach offered this with a half-smile. He was looking for hosannas for his commitment to youth safety. Behr hated like hell to disappoint him.

He looked down at his notebook, closed it. “Well, that ’ ll do her. Call me if anything occurs.” He handed the coach a card and cut across the field toward his car.

Behr drove the paper route before six, as was Jamie ’ s custom, rolling slowly down Richards through the neighborhood. He went down Cypress, around Grace, Sixteenth Street, Perry, and then Tibbs. He passed a jogger as he turned onto Tibbs, a large guy in nylon shorts, high athletic socks, and a thick terry-cloth headband, huffing about a twelve-minute mile. Behr checked his notes as he made the next turn, onto Mooresville, then followed it to Lynhurst. The route was an ambitious one mileage-wise. The kid had carried plenty of papers a good distance.

As he left Lynhurst, Behr passed an old Civic hatchback coming from the other direction. A Hispanic man was driving while another, the size of a jockey, was crouching in the back and hurling papers toward houses. The kid ’ s replacements, Behr thought, as he drove on to the end of the route. The neighborhood yielded nothing; the houses were blank facades. Behr sat in his idling car and ate a ham sandwich, looking down the street he had just driven. He let his mind wander. Someone leaving for work, so early and as such not thinking about traffic, backs out of the driveway and, boom, hits a kid on a bike. No one else is awake at that time, the boy ’ s down, not moving, so the driver scoops up the kid and the bike and drives out of town to dump him.

Behr shook his head. Chances were that Jamie never even rode his route that day. Any number of things could have distracted him from his usual routine, which would mean that the cops had been looking in the completely wrong place, and he was, too.

Behr flipped through the file he was building on the case. He got to one of the articles he ’ d printed from the newspaper ’ s online archive. It was from page two, under the fold, three days after the boy had disappeared. There was no picture. Goddamn toddler goes missing for half an hour they ’ re running front-page photos and features on the television news. A kid gets old enough to have his own ideas, it raises too much doubt about what could have happened, renders it unnewsworthy. Behr finished the sandwich, crumpled up the wax paper it had been wrapped in, and drove back to the head of the route to start in on the canvass.

The number of people at home on door-to-door canvasses always surprised Behr. Not just housewives, old people, and invalids, but young, working-age men and women — they were usually at home. At first he figured they should all be at work, but much of the time they were not: They worked the late shift, or the early shift, or they had a day off or were between jobs. Eighty percent of the bells he rang in some neighborhoods got answered. Then there was Mount Auburn. These were working people. Even at a quarter to nine in the morning, almost no one was at home, and that meant no information for him. He checked the police report and saw that the cops had swept three times — pre-work, midday, and evening — and still owed on completion. Behr got a couple of cleaning ladies, none of whom had worked there at the time of the event, and two home owners with fuzzy recollections of the date, it being so far back.

He went off from Richards, retracing the streets he had driven. He collected contacts and had brief interviews with the few people who answered their doors, but he had no real luck until he reached 3 Tibbs, the second house on the block. The home, according to his street listing, belonged to a Mrs. Esther Conyard. The house was ill kept compared with those surrounding it, and as soon as Behr saw her through the Plexiglas outer door, he knew why. She was old, nearing ninety, and not a spry ninety at that. She wore a heavy knit sweater over a housecoat over a robe, the type of elderly woman who felt a draft when it was eighty-five and humid. She was past going outside at all, much less doing house upkeep.

“Are you Mrs. Conyard?” Behr asked when she arrived at the door.

“I am. But I ’ m not buying anything. See, I ’ m on a fixed income,” she told him.

“I ’ m not selling, ma ’ am,” Behr began. “I ’ m investigating a boy who went missing around here last year.” He appraised her to see if this rang any bells, but she remained blank. He continued. “Maybe you heard something about it? He was a paperboy…?” This seemed to register, and she made a show of nodding, but Behr could tell she was acting. Still, the woman was homebound and he knew many senior citizens kept odd hours. Either they couldn ’ t sleep and stayed up late or they couldn ’ t sleep late and woke up early. And for a woman like this, myopic though she might have been, what else did she have to do but look out her windows? “I was wondering if I could come in and talk about the case?”

Behr watched her fear of strangers wrestle with her desire for company. “I don ’ t know if I should.”

He flashed his license, which he kept in a billfold with his old three-quarter shield. Then he took out the school picture of Jamie. “This is him. Maybe you saw him riding his bike?” She looked at the picture of the kid, with his cute little cowlick, and that did it. She swung the door open.

“I ’ m afraid I don ’ t know anything about the case,” she said, her voice tremulous with the effort of walking down the hall. “But I ’ ll answer any questions I can.” She led him into the living room and a stabbing prickle went down Behr ’ s spine at what he saw there — stacks and stacks of newspapers. The room was filled with them, the Star, years ’ worth of them, unread. Many yellowing. Mrs. Conyard saw Behr looking. “I always mean to read the paper at night, but I end up watching television…” Behr nodded to keep her going. “I like solving the puzzles on Wheel and I end up putting it off to another day.” With the amount of unread papers she had in there, Behr wouldn ’ t have been surprised if she believed Carter was still in office.

“You know, Mrs. Conyard, I wonder if I could look through your papers, see if you got yours that day?”

“Sure, sure, go ahead,” she told him. Behr was already kneeling and poring over the stacks for the dates close to the day of the disappearance. “I keep meaning to get rid of the old ones… Maybe they ’ ll be good for something.”

There was a loose sort of left-to-right organization to the papers. Within ten minutes Behr had found October of the correct year and saw what didn ’ t completely surprise him. She had all the papers leading up to the day, but no paper from the day Jamie went missing. There was no paper for two days after that, either. Mrs. Conyard remembered the interruption in service. It was disconcerting to her. Then the delivery service resumed, on the third day. “A little brown man. In a car. That ’ s the way they do it now,” she told him.

“That ’ s progress,” Behr said, looking not at her but through the nearby stacks of papers to make sure that none were misfiled. None were. Her order was fairly meticulous.

“You know what?” Mrs. Conyard told him, memory ’ s light breaking across her face. “Now I do remember the police stopping by and asking questions.” Behr nodded his support for her recollection, which unfortunately contained no other hard information. She hadn ’ t seen any suspicious cars or people then or since. “It ’ s a very safe neighborhood. That ’ s why I ’ ve stayed all these years since my husband died.”

She moved across the room to a portrait of her late husband that rested on the television. “This is Mr. Conyard…my John…” She held it out for Behr ’ s inspection. He looked it over and planned his exit.

Behr spent the next several hours in his car, parked on Tibbs, on the cell phone with the circulation department of the Star. It took a good while before he got the right person, a Susan Durant, who had been there many years and had a handle on things, and a memory to boot. She recalled them losing their delivery boy. It was a sad day at the paper even though no one remembered ever having met him. And there was a near mutiny in Circ. when the story only got under-the-fold coverage. She checked the logs and saw that the resident at 5 Tibbs had complained and been credited for no delivery on October 24. Several others from later in the route had made the same call. Susan also confirmed that there was no delivery in place for the next two days. All the customers on the route were credited for those days as well.

“Nope, there weren ’ t any complaints from anyone on the route prior to 5 Tibbs,” Susan Durant said from her downtown office, causing Behr to get that prickle down his spine again, as if he felt he was drawing a bead on where something might have happened to Jamie.

“I owe you an Italian dinner, Susan,” Behr offered for her time and effort on the phone.

“Oh, I don ’ t do carbs, Frank,” Susan said with regret, then added encouragingly, “but we could make it a rib-eye.”

“A steak it is, Susan.” He promised to call her when things wound down on the case.

Behr turned off his phone and settled in to wait for a Mr. Louis Cranepool, resident of 1 Tibbs Avenue, to return from work. As he waited, Behr ran scenarios in his head. In the case of a missing kid, the parents always got a hard, and often the first, look from police. Behr was sure that within the police file — the official one, not the copy — there was a report showing that the Gabriels had been thoroughly investigated, maybe even polygraphed. There were circumstances in which Behr would ’ ve begun by looking more deeply into the mother and father as well. Veracity of grief was no indicator of innocence in crimes within a family. But having sat with them, Behr recognized the completely blinding condition of not knowing what had happened to their son from which the couple suffered. This was much harder to fake. He felt the burled walnut of his custom steering wheel flex under his palms. He looked down and noticed his hands were white-knuckled across it. He relaxed his hands and tried to keep them from becoming fists as he considered what Cranepool ’ s involvement could be.