Disturbance

TWENTY-THREE

When I walked down Douglas Street, it was in the middle of a sunny afternoon, and I was not alone. Rachel, Ben, and Ethan were with me, as were two of the dogs, Altair and Bingle. The only one officially on bodyguard duty was Rachel, and she was armed, although her martial arts skills made the need for a weapon unlikely.

Thanks to Rachel, my own skills were improving-not that I had advanced much beyond a basic level. Otherwise, I was armed with only the tools of my own trade. I had a notebook. (A paper notebook, not a computer. Old habits die hard.) A pen. And my recorder, ostensibly to record a story about search dogs.

If that had been what we were really up to, it would have been a perfect day for their work-cool, moist air, with a light breeze. Altair and Bingle were wearing their working vests, which attracted a kind of attention that four people walking a couple of dogs might not have otherwise. This was essentially what we were hoping for, and when two kids in the company of their mother and two elderly couples made their way over to admire the handsome canines, Ethan’s look was downright smug. The idea to use the dogs as busybody bait was his.

I probably should have objected more vehemently to his plan-for a number of reasons. Alas, Ethan knew more than a few of my weaknesses, and he appealed to my curiosity and-I’m ashamed to admit it-a desire to royally avenge myself on Vince.

Vince had not only gone public with his objections to my story via scathing interviews with other media but further showed his displeasure by stonewalling us at every turn on that or any other story that involved one of his investigations.

Although it was great publicity for the station and upped our listenership, I was angered on behalf of the Enwills-Vince made more than one public statement in which he said that “reporters at KCLP are being misled by someone police investigators do not believe is reliable.” Even that probably wouldn’t have been enough to make me go against my better judgment, but then Vince upped the ante by doing all he could to make Frank’s life miserable at work.

I heard about this not from Frank but from Rachel. Frank’s partner, Pete, never discreet about departmental gossip, ratted Vince out to his wife, who in turn let me know about it. Rachel and I were both furious. Frank told us to ignore it, that Vince was just trying to piss me off. Trouble was, his efforts worked. Really well.

Ethan decided that if Vince wanted to see what life was like without cooperation, he’d be happy to oblige.

So when the calls started coming in, Ethan declared we’d investigate on our own and strictly forbade passing any information on to the police. “This time, we won’t contact them until we are certain,” he said.

“Certain?” I said. “You planning on setting up a DNA lab in the back office?”

“Okay, until I feel confident.”

There wasn’t much to feel confident about at first. Dozens of names were mentioned in the calls that came in. Many were clearly hoax calls. Eventually-a word that covers a lot of footwork and Internet searches-we narrowed the possibilities. One of the most promising of those possibilities was a young man named Kai Loudon, who lived with his mother, somewhere on Douglas Street.

Loudon was mentioned by several callers, all former high school classmates. Most didn’t know him well. None of them thought he had dated Lisa King, saying that Kai didn’t date anyone after his junior year. The junior year was mentioned as a clear memory, because at the beginning of his senior year, he had left school and finished his diploma through online courses. Everyone knew that, because after the start of his senior year, Kai Loudon spent all his time taking care of his injured mom.

The story was a class legend, but I heard a firsthand account from a young man who had accompanied Kai home that day, and had been with him when he discovered his mom lying at the bottom of the basement stairs. At first they both thought she was dead, but even as Kai was dialing 911, his friend saw that she was breathing and had a pulse.

“But she was almost completely paralyzed,” he said. “She had both spine and head injuries. Kai had to do everything for her. Feed her, bathe her, comb her hair, give her medications-everything. Luckily, he had just turned eighteen that summer, so he was legally an adult and was able to deal with all of the legal aspect of things. He gave up his whole life to take care of her. I hope you aren’t implying he had anything to do with the death of that girl.”

The others told similar stories. When I asked them if they had seen Kai lately, they confessed guiltily that they had rarely been in contact with him after the accident. Once in a while they would see him in a grocery store or at the mall. The withdrawal had been his choice, which they saw as Kai spurning pity.

I began to doubt Josh’s identification. Weaknesses in eyewitness memories of events had been studied extensively, especially since the “false memory” studies of the mid-1970s. Given his head injury, any confusion he experienced about events of that day was not surprising. Was it possible that we had unwittingly set him up for a false memory? If he was searching for an answer, a face to fill in the blank in his memory of his attacker, perhaps the faces in the photos of Lisa King on the KCLP Web site had suggested one to him that wasn’t real.

Despite what Vince claimed in his interviews, though, we had never said that anyone in the Weissman Park photo killed Lisa King, or come close to making that accusation. I had been careful to make the story on Josh about his struggle after his injuries, and the request for information about the photo was not couched as an accusation-we all, Josh included, knew that he could be wrong. We asked for the public’s help to find people who might have known Lisa King, and fully acknowledged that identifying the people in the photo might lead nowhere in terms of the murder investigation.

If it was leading nowhere, so be it. But what ultimately bothered me was that it led a little too perfectly to nowhere.

Even for a guy who was caring for an invalid, Kai Loudon was more than reclusive. He seemed to have disappeared. If he had answered the phone when I called and said, “Leave me and my poor mother alone, I was in a photo with a girl who happened to be at that same concert, so what?” that might have been that. But he wasn’t answering his phone, and none of his “friends” had seen him for years. I was curious.

Normally, I would have just knocked on his door or camped out near his house, waiting for him to emerge to go shopping or mail a letter or take a walk. But given the now seemingly slight possibility that he was connected to Nick Parrish, there was not a chance in hell that I was going to be allowed to come within a hundred yards of him without an escort.

Which led to Ethan’s Plan B.

The dogs were relaxed but in ready-to-work mode, friendly to approaching strangers but focused on Ben and Ethan, waiting for commands. The two young neighborhood boys asked for and received permission to pet the dogs. They were peppering Ben and Ethan with questions (What are the dogs’ names? Are they boys or girls? How old are they? Why are they wearing clothes?), all of which I recorded. After all, I might end up with nothing but the story we said we were there for.

Fortunately, when it came to that other story, my three human companions let me ask the questions of the small crowd gathering on Douglas Street.

I told them Ethan and I were from the radio station, and the older couples mentioned that they remembered me from the newspaper. We spent a little time mourning the passing of the Express and giving them information on the news programs on KCLP, of which they had been unaware. I told them that I was doing a piece about how search dogs worked but that I hadn’t chosen their street at random.

“In connection with another story I’m working on, we’re all a little concerned about Kai Loudon,” I began. “He lives on this street, right?”

The house-two doors down from where we were-was eagerly pointed out by the kids. The story of the accident on the stairs was soon told by the adults. “Violet was so mean to that kid, I’m amazed Kai takes such good care of her,” one of the women said. “I think I would have suffocated her years ago.”

Her husband chided her, but the other couple agreed with her.

“No,” the man insisted, “she’s not so bad. Loudon was the problem.”

“Kai’s father?” I asked.

“No, stepfather.” The man blushed. “I don’t think the father has ever been in the picture, if you know what I mean. Loudon was a-” He glanced at the boys, who were eagerly taking this all in. “Loudon was worthless. I think he would have been happy if Violet had pawned the kid off on relatives. Instead, Loudon ended up leaving them. Kai was eleven or twelve, I think.” He glanced at the boys, then said, “Kai seemed to have fewer ‘accidents’ after Loudon left, if you know what I mean.”

I would definitely have to talk to this guy when there weren’t any kids around to make him censor himself. “Has anyone seen Kai lately?” I asked.

The adults exchanged glances, then admitted they hadn’t seen him for quite some time. “But that’s not unusual,” one of the men said. “He keeps odd hours, doesn’t come out of the house much. The Loudons never have been neighborly.”

“He doesn’t come to the door right away if you knock,” the mother of the boys said. “But I’m sure if you keep trying, you’ll find him there. He can’t go far with her to care for.”

“No, Mom,” the older of the boys said. I judged him to be about ten. “He’s not there anymore.”

“Michael!” she said, reddening.

He folded his arms and jutted his chin out, and I could see he was nearly ready to bend double with the effort of not smarting off to her.

“Michael, what makes you say that?” I asked, crouching down to eye level.

“He moved out. I saw him.”

“Liar,” his younger brother accused.

This led to a brief chase and might have resulted in mayhem, but their mother grabbed hold of Michael before he could punish his accuser, who was ordered to return home immediately. He wisely, if reluctantly, obeyed.

She turned to Michael, still in hand. “And as for you-”

“I’m telling the truth!” he protested.

“I believe you,” I said, for which I received a grateful look. His mother sighed and let go of him.

“When did he move out?” I asked.

“Last year,” he said. “In the middle of the night!”

“Now, Michael, that’s not true,” his mother said. “I know I saw him in June or sometime around then.” She frowned in concentration. “Goodness, it has been a while-not long before vacation?”

“That’s what I mean!” he said in exasperation. “Last year. When I was in fourth grade. This year I’m in fifth.”

“When do you get your vacation break?” I asked. Las Piernas was on a year-round schedule.

His mother pulled out a PDA and looked at the calendar on it. “They had six weeks off starting June thirtieth.”

Ben, Ethan, and I exchanged a glance. That would have been a week after Lisa King’s body was found.

“Has anyone else seen Kai since then?” I asked. The others thought this over, then shook their heads.

“Well, Michael, so you were up in the middle of the night-”

“Barney was sick,” he explained, his face suddenly awash in sadness. He looked longingly at Altair and Bingle.

“Barney? Your brother?”

That brought a small smile. “No, my dog. He died.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s really hard.”

He shrugged and kept petting Bingle.

“So you were taking care of Barney,” I said gently.

“Yeah. I had to let him out in the backyard. He needed to barf. Then he wanted to stay outside for a while, so I kept him company. Then he heard something-you know, his ears went up. He went to the gate to watch something. So I followed him and saw that he was watching Kai move.”

He said that a truck and a van were in the driveway. Kai and another man finished packing up the truck, then the other man helped Kai load Violet (“her!” spoken with the air of delight felt by a boy who has seen something rare and freakish) into the van Kai usually drove. The older neighbors confirmed that once in a while they had seen Kai use a kind of gurney to load Violet into the van for doctor’s appointments.

“Big, white, windowless cargo van,” one of the men said. “Econoline, I think.”

“What did the moving truck look like?” I asked Michael.

He frowned and said, “Like a U-Haul, but it wasn’t. It was all white.”

Michael’s failure to mention this to his parents was easily explained-Barney had ended up going to the vet the next morning, so his companion’s illness had been foremost in the boy’s mind at that point.

It was also clear that the other neighbors hadn’t missed Kai and Violet Loudon. They hadn’t cared much for them, or about them. Welcome to suburbia.

I studied the exterior of the house from where we were standing. “Its windows are a little dirty, but the yard is cared for,” I said.

“Gardener comes by to work on the front yard on Fridays,” one of the women offered.

“Just the front yard?”

“Yes. I don’t believe there is a lawn in the back.”

“Anyone else use that same gardener?”

Another exchange of looks, shaking of heads. None of them recalled seeing any markings on the gardener’s pickup truck indicating who he was or how he could be reached. So unless we came back and waited around on Friday, we weren’t going to get any information out of him.

We thanked the neighbors and asked them not to follow us as we walked down the block with the dogs and crossed over to the Loudons’ yard. Ben and Ethan were just starting to give working commands to the dogs when the breeze shifted, and both dogs alerted.

Their body language suddenly changed. Their ears pitched forward, they went up on their toes, looking back at their handlers as if to ask, “Don’t you smell that?” Their excitement was controlled but evident.

Ben and Ethan let them off leash. They ran toward the backyard gate, sniffing there and along the fence, then running back to their handlers. Bingle and Altair also took interest in a small basement window. It was blacked out, as if painted on the other side, so there was no seeing what was drawing their attention.

I began to feel uneasy, wondering if I really wanted to know what was so fascinating to a pair of human remains detection dogs. I told myself not to be so fainthearted, and also not to ignore the obvious approach. Rachel stayed by my side as I went to the front door and knocked, an idea she wasn’t too crazy about, especially because simultaneously the dogs became close to frantic with their desire to get into the backyard. But no one answered.

Ben called Bingle back and said, “Time to call the police. We don’t have a warrant, we don’t want to ruin a case.”

I looked over his shoulder and said, “That won’t be necessary,” just as a black-and-white pulled up to the curb. One of the neighbors must have called them.

Two hours later, there was a bigger crowd on the sidewalk opposite the Loudon house, the closest police would let anyone come. Frank and Pete had shown up, tipped off by the patrolman, who was a friend of Frank’s. Their presence and Reed’s usual calm demeanor probably kept Vince from going over the edge. Reed and Vince had a warrant.

Attitudes changed not long after they accessed the property.

When the gate to the yard was forced open, the reason for the dogs’ excitement wasn’t immediately plain. A large, slightly raised wooden deck covered almost all of the yard. But the dogs both gave hard alerts as they stood over sections of the deck, and it was soon discovered that many of the boards in these sections were loose. Once those boards were lifted, it was clear that the earth beneath the deck had been disturbed. There were four areas that had been recently dug up-body-sized holes. The soil, when stirred up a bit, had a sharp, unnerving scent that even humans could recognize. No corpses could be seen in the holes, but there were bits of hair, bone, and teeth in each. There was no mistaking that these had been graves and that someone had removed remains from them.

Ben and a team of his forensic anthropology graduate students were going to be busy doing recovery and identification work.

The house itself bore all the signs of a hasty departure. The basement was pristine and was almost bypassed, except that Bingle gave signals that made Ben say, “Not so fast.” Turned out there was an exception to all the cleanliness. Bingle’s interest led police to the discovery of a false wall, behind which was a hidden room. The thick walls and floor of the room bore stains that Kai Loudon had apparently found difficult to remove.

Or, as Ben suggested, Loudon might have felt a kind of attachment to them, considered them to be erotic artwork.

I tried not to let that thought disturb me.

I also tried to feel proud of our day’s work, rather than terrified that this monster had been in my own backyard.

I failed on both counts.