Nathan’s Run

Chapter 23

Jed had assumed that Ricky lived alone. There was no record of a wife, and none of the JDC staff had mentioned anything about a significant other. He was certain the question had been asked; it was standard procedure. When he requested the key to look around the apartment, though, the manager told him that Ricky’s girlfriend was still there and could let him in. Her name was Misty.

The Brookfield Garden Apartments were built in the early sixties to meet the county’s growing need for affordable housing, mostly for young military families. Somewhere along the line, the owners of the complex had landed subsidized housing contracts from both the state and federal governments, and now it was on the police dispatcher’s Trouble List: two cops minimum for any disturbance call.

Physically, there wasn’t much difference between these garden-style apartments and the garden-style apartments in Fairfield that continued to attract the young professional crowd. Except, of course, that these grounds were littered with trash, the chains on the swing sets were rusted, and the in-ground swimming pool hadn’t seen water in a decade.

Misty. Now there’s a name, Jed thought as he ambled up the stairs to the second floor. In his mind, he’d pegged Ricky’s girlfriend as a big-boobed bimbette, with frosted hair and a Texas accent. Probably worked as an exotic dancer. As he rapped on the hollow door, he held his badge up next to his chin, where it would be visible through the peephole. He kept his right hand free, just in case, pressing his elbow against his side to double-check on the Glock. In this complex, you could never be too careful.

He was about to knock a second time when he heard the knob turn and the door was pulled open, releasing a pulse of refrigerated air into the thick heat of the day.

Jed’s assumptions couldn’t have been further off the mark. The woman he faced looked no more exotic than a grieving housewife. She was young, maybe twenty-five, neatly dressed in a cheap shorts set. She wore her shoulder-length brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail, which she had clipped up to the back of her head. From a distance, she would have been attractive, but up close, her only visible feature was a deep red scar that traversed the bridge of her nose and continued under her left eye, nearly to her ear. The lines of the wound were too deliberate to be anything but an intentional act of violence. Jed fought the urge to look away, concentrating intently on her eyes. She had been crying.

“Are you Misty?” Jed asked.

“Mitsy,” the woman corrected, shifting her eyes from Jed’s face to his badge and then back again. “About time you got here.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I said it’s about time you got here. I had to hear about Ricky on television. Y’all could’ve at least shown the courtesy of telling me in person.” Her voice sounded strained. She stepped back and to the side, inviting Jed to enter.

As he crossed the threshold, Jed broke eye contact and fumbled for his notebook. “Well, fact is, ma’am, we didn’t know that Mr. Harris had a… well, significant other.”

Mitsy kind of snorted and shook her head as she retreated deeper into the apartment. “Jesus. You guys are something else. Significant other. You make it sound so romantic?’ She disappeared around the corner into the kitchen.

“I need you to stay out here, please,” Jed called. He fought the urge to draw down.

Mitsy came back around the corner with a half-empty Budweiser longneck. “Relax, officer, I don’t own a gun.” She slumped heavily into the sofa, sending a puff of cushion stuffing into the air, and gestured to a sagging La-Z-Boy. “Take a load off,” she said.

“No thanks, I’d rather stand,” Jed replied. The apartment was decorated in early yard sale, but it was clean enough, and Jed saw none of the accumulated dust and food trash he had come to associate with Brookfield Gardens. “Are you here alone?”

Mitsy nodded pensively. “I am now,” she said, all but finishing her beer in one extended guzzle. A scattered pile of empties lay on the floor near the shipping crate that served as an end table. “So, are you gonna catch that little son of a bitch or not?”

“And who would that be, ma’am?”

Mitsy looked at Jed, then shook her head in disgust. “Who would that be, ma’am,” she mocked. “Who the hell do you think? How many little son of a bitches are you looking for?”

“Look, Ms., uh…”

“Cahill. Mitsy Cahill.”

“Ms. Cahill, look. I know this isn’t pleasant, but do you think… “

“Sit down, goddammit!” Mitsy shouted, her eyes wet. “Just sit down and talk to me, will you?” Tears splashed down her cheeks as she blinked, and she wiped them with her fingertips in a futile effort to preserve her makeup. She took a deep breath and composed herself, then softened her expression as she again motioned to the chair. “Please,” she said, much more quietly. “It’s been a very lonely, very difficult day. I’m thrilled to have the company. Please.”

Jed shifted his stance uncomfortably, checked his watch, then sat down in the worn-out La-Z-Boy. It was like sitting on the edge of a well.

“So,” Mitsy declared, using the word as a sentence, an icebreaker. She forced a smile. “Nobody knows about Ricky and me, huh? I guess that means he didn’t talk about me very much to his friends.” The thought seemed to sadden her.

Jed shook his head. “No, ma’am, I guess not. At least not to the people we spoke with.”

She sighed and dabbed her eyes again. “He thought I was too ugly to show off to his friends. He never said it in so many words, but I always knew he was thinking it.”

Jed suddenly felt obligated to contradict her, to say she wasn’t ugly at all, but he sensed that Mitsy would know better. He just let the words hang in the air for a while as she seemed to travel in her mind to a faraway place. After ten seconds or so, he couldn’t take it anymore.

“Were you and Mr. Harris married?” he asked.

The question seemed to bring her back into the world. She shook her head and looked down. “No,” she said softly. “We talked about it a few times, but the time was never right. First we were waiting for him to have a better job, then after I got laid off, we were waiting for me just to have a job. When I finally found work, we needed to save some money. Recently, it’s been Ricky’s drinking. I was waiting for him to stop. All in all, we’ve been talking for nearly three years now. Never meant to be, I guess.”

Mitsy paused for a moment, looking like she might crumble. Then she smiled again—a tired, humorless smile that seemed to be an extension of her tears. “Like my sister told me, Ricky’s a man, and he was willing to take me in. With my face…” Her voice trailed off. “All things considered, he was a good man.”

Of the two of them there in the room, Jed wasn’t at all sure who was less convinced by her conclusion. “Did Ricky have anything to do with..” He aborted the question. There was no way to phrase it that would not seem brutish.

Mitsy let him off the hook. “My face? Oh, heavens, no. This was a gift from a boyfriend I dumped back in high school. Said he’d make me so ugly nobody else would ever want me.” She shrugged, as though she had told the story enough that it didn’t bother her anymore. “It worked, too. Until Ricky. And now I find out that he thought… Well, it’s been a very, very long day.”

Jed cleared his throat. “Well, Ms. Cahill…”

“Please,” she interrupted. “Call me Mitsy.”

Jed smiled. “Okay, Mitsy. I don’t mean to pry at such a difficult time, but I do need to ask you a few questions.”

“About Ricky?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“He’s not just an innocent victim, is he?”

The directness of the question caught Jed off guard, yanking his eyes from his notebook. “Actually, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

The room fell silent as Mitsy struggled with her thoughts. “He hated that place,” she said finally. “He hated everything about it.” “The JDC?”

“Ricky called it the jungle. He always talked about quitting, but he never did. Just when he’d reach the breaking point, they’d come through with another cost of living increase, and he’d decide to stay. It was awful.” She stopped talking, as though she had run out of steam.

“Did Ricky ever mention Nathan Bailey to you?” Jed asked.

Tears flooded Mitsy’s eyes again as she leaned forward in her seat. “You know, I’ve asked myself that question a thousand times today. I heard about what that boy said on the radio, and I’ve driven myself crazy trying to remember the name, but it’s just not there. I’m sorry?’

“You know, then, that Nathan said some uncomplimentary things about Mr. Harris. What do you think about that?”

Mitsy stewed for a long time before answering. She clearly had something to say, but she seemed unwilling to say it out loud. Jed just sat patiently, giving her all the time she needed.

When she finally spoke, she addressed Jed’s shoes. “I wish I could tell you that killing one of those little bastards would be totally out of character for Ricky, but I can’t. He hated them all so much. They’d never show him the respect he deserved. If somebody pushed him hard enough, well, anything could happen?’ She faded away again, then stood up abruptly, startling Jed. “I need another beer. Do you want one?”

“No, thanks,” he lied. Actually, he’d have sold his arm for anything cold to drink.

Mitsy wasn’t gone thirty seconds before she returned to her seat on the sofa. She stripped the cap from the bottle with an effortless twist and tossed it into the pile at her feet. She stared at the bottle for a moment as though reading the label, but she never took a sip. Her mind had traveled off again. As Jed watched silently, her mouth took an angry set, and she squeezed the bottle with both hands. It trembled in her grasp.

When she made eye contact again, she was angry. “I think he was planning something for a long time,” she said. Her tone was one of discovery, her words carefully measured. “I never put it together until right now.”

“I don’t understand?’

“Of course you don’t. You couldn’t possibly. Beginning a couple of weeks ago, I noticed things missing from the house Ricky’s things. When I’d do laundry, there’d be a few less underwear to fold. He’d take clothes out of the house, saying he was taking them to the laundry, but then he’d never bring them back. When I’d offer to pick them up at the cleaners, he’d say no. It was kind of like he was moving out of the apartment a little at a time. At first, I figured it was another woman, but then he always came home at night and he was always at the JDC when I called him. Finally, I just stopped worrying about it.”

“Didn’t you ever say anything?”

Mitsy smiled. “Over the years, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the mystery is less painful than the answer. No, I never said anything. And neither did he, but he started drinking again. Over the past few weeks, it got really bad. He was coming home drunk. I’d like to think he was doing his boozing after work with some of his supervisor buddies, but I’m not sure. I think he was getting drunk on the job. That’s what worried me most. I just didn’t want to go down that road again.”

Jed was confused. As he scowled, his eyebrows nearly touched. “So you think that his drinking had something to do with a plan to kill Nathan Bailey?”

Mitsy scowled back at him. “No. Well, maybe. I don’t know. He stopped talking to me is the thing. No conversation at all. Nothing. Looking back, putting it all together with the disappearing clothes and the plane ticket, I guess now I think he was trying to deal with something…”

“Whoa, whoa,” Jed cut her off, making a waving motion with his hand. “What plane ticket?”

“Well, that’s the biggest mystery of all. About a week ago, I found a plane ticket hidden in one of his shoes in the closet. One-way to Argentina, paid for in cash. Nine hundred dollars! I can’t imagine where he came up with that kind of money. He must have been saving up, the son of a bitch. Here we go, month-to-month, barely able to pay the light bill, and he’s saving for a trip! I never said anything about that either, because I kept telling myself that maybe he was planning some kind of surprise getaway for the two of us.”

“Was there a second ticket for you, as well?”

Mitsy answered by looking away again.

“Where’s the ticket now?” Jed pressed.

“No clue. The shoes and the ticket both joined the list of missing stuff.”

Jed leaned back in the hollow chair and crossed his legs. His knees were nearly level with his shoulders. “Argentina,” he thought aloud. “When was he supposed to leave?”

Mitsy shrugged. Her day was getting longer by the minute. “Best I could tell, it was an open ticket, no date on it. I didn’t even know he had a passport.”

“Do you remember the airline?”

She shook her head. “Not really,” she said, her voice thickening. She finally took a pull on the beer. “It was an airline I’ve never heard of—something Spanish, I think.”

Jed took a full minute to jot notes into his little book. The whole time, Mitsy faded further and further away. When he finally looked up, it was as though she had left completely. She just stared out the sliding glass doors into the blistering afternoon sky. Her eyes were so intense that Jed found himself looking to see what was so interesting.

A feeling of desperate frustration gripped his belly. Here he had all this new information, yet he didn’t know what to do with it. Clearly, Ricky Harris was not the model employee that Johnstone had portrayed him to be, but so what? What did the Bailey kid have to do with any of this?

“So, Mitsy?” Jed spoke softly as he interrupted her thoughts. Her gaze returned to him and she smiled her humorless grin. “I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”

“I just need to clarify one last point, and then I’m done. You said you realize now that Ricky had been planning something for a long time. What, exactly, do you think he was planning?”

She shook her head and shifted her eyes back to the sky. “Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it was to kill that boy. Maybe it was to do something else. Whatever it was, I guess it was bad enough to make him leave the country. And me.” In the end, her voice was only a whisper.

The Reischmann proposal had been flawless. Todd Briscow was 99 percent certain that they’d be awarded the contract within the month. He and his sales manager had spent the afternoon at the golf course, celebrating their impending victory. After the eighth hole, though, the heat had become too much, and they took their celebration into the clubhouse, where his boss was buying. As he navigated the winding turns approaching his home, Todd wondered if maybe he hadn’t had a few too many. It wasn’t that he felt drunk; he just had to work harder than usual to keep the Chevy between the lines on the pavement.

Todd hadn’t so much as thought about the boy he’d seen until he heard the news on the radio on his way home from the party. Could it be that the kid they were looking for was the same one he had seen? The age was about right, and that would explain what he was doing wandering around so early in the morning, but Todd had trouble believing that the kid he had seen was a murderer. When he spoke to his wife from his car phone about his suspicions, she told him that the police had left a picture of the boy at the house. Once he saw the picture, he’d know for sure.

After pulling the car into the garage, he took a few minutes to set up the sprinkler in the front yard before going inside. It was getting dark, and he was convinced that the secret to their green lawn was nightly waterings. Patty handed him the flier with Nathan’s picture on it before he had a chance to put down his briefcase.

“Is this him?” she asked anxiously. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen his picture on the news. It’s all they talk about.”

Like I have the time to watch the news, Todd didn’t say. The flier displayed two pictures of Nathan Bailey. One looked like a school picture, a smile and combed hair. The other one looked like it had been lifted off a videotape. Feature for feature, there was little resemblance between the boys in the pictures, and nothing in either reminded him of the kid from this morning. Until he noticed the eyes in the grainy picture. Those eyes bore the same deer-in-the-headlights look as the kid he had seen. And the hair was the same.

“This is him,” Todd said. “We’ve got to call the police.”

“Are you sure?” Patty pressed. Todd couldn’t tell from her tone what she wanted the answer to be.

“No, I’m not positive,” he answered honestly. “But I think we ought to call.”