The Hiding Place

Chapter Fourteen

Stynes saw Reynolds in a corner booth of Judy’s Grill, a Dove Point diner and local landmark. For close to seventy years, city council members and county commissioners gathered in the booths, making deals and pulling strings over eggs and coffee. Stynes and Reynolds used to eat there at least once a week. They liked the food and the cheap prices. And they liked to make fun of the self-important politicians.

Reynolds drank from a tall glass of soda as Stynes approached. Stynes noticed that his former partner’s hair looked thinner, the skin of his scalp touched with pink from time in the garden. Reynolds chewed on an ice cube as Stynes sat down. He wore a few days’ worth of gray stubble.

“Nice to see you, handsome,” Reynolds said.

“Some of us still have to work,” Stynes said.

“I waited to order. You know I’m diabetic now. I have to eat regularly to keep my blood sugar right.”

“Is that why you’re drinking a Coke? Your blood sugar?”

“Fuck me,” Reynolds said. “It’s Diet Coke.”

Stynes ordered a patty melt, fries, and regular Coke. Reynolds winced as he listened to the order, then asked for a turkey club and a salad.

When the waitress was gone, Reynolds said, “How was Reverend Fred?”

“Full of God’s love. He has his dress over his head about an error his bookkeeper made.”

“Guy has a bookkeeper?” Reynolds asked. “Isn’t that place worth about fifty cents? It’s in East for Christ’s sake.”

“He’s trying to properly render unto Caesar, I guess.”

“He’s given sanctuary to more mutts,” Reynolds said. “Every guy we’ve ever arrested over in East has passed through Reverend Fred’s church at one time or another. Somebody ought to bring him in.”

“For what? Having a messiah complex?”

Reynolds rubbed his hand over his stubble. “And now he has Rogers there. Jesus.”

“I saw him.”

“Rogers?”

“In the flesh.”

“What the fuck kind of work is he doing?”

“He’s the right reverend’s administrative assistant and Bible study partner apparently. He was stuffing envelopes when I saw him. Looks like he’s aged forty years since he went away. I mean, the guy really looks like shit. He must have had hell’s own time inside.”

“Good. I hope someone tore him a new rectum.”

The waitress brought the food. Stynes salted his fries. He was blessed with good genes. No blood pressure or cholesterol problems. He’d never smoked. Reynolds had gone through hell quitting cigarettes fifteen years earlier, and he was still kicking at sixty-eight.

“Look at this shit,” Reynolds said, nodding toward his plate. “I might as well be a vegetarian.” He took an unenthusiastic bite of his salad. “What did Dante have to say for himself?”

“Not much. Says he’s a born-againer, found Jesus on the inside and did time for his wicked, wicked ways.”

“He confessed?”

“Not to the Manning murder,” Stynes said. “I think he’s just admitting he’s a perv, you know?”

“That’s headline news.” Reynolds grabbed the salt and sprinkled a liberal amount on his salad and sandwich. “Speaking of which, what gives with that article? This little bitch trying to stir the pot or what?”

“She’s trying to make her bones.”

“I bet the Reverend Fred ate it up with a knife and fork.”

“He did manage to bring it up,” Stynes said. “Acted like we’d railroaded Dante.”

“Pissant.”

They chewed their food in silence for a while. Silverware clinked against dishes, and a low murmur of lunchtime conversation filled the air. A busboy went by with a huge tub of dishes. Stynes watched him go through the swinging doors into the kitchen, then spoke up.

“You know,” he said, “do you ever think about that case? The Manning case?”

“From time to time,” Reynolds said. “I’ve got grandkids that age. If one of them disappeared that way-Jesus. I don’t know how the Mannings function day to day. I’d be ready to tear the world down.”

“Their life isn’t a bed of roses.”

“No shit.”

“Seriously, though, do you ever think about how we ended up getting Dante in the first place?”

Reynolds stopped chewing. He leveled his gaze at Stynes from across the table. “You mean by investigating?”

Stynes considered dropping it. Reynolds was retired and likely not to be a receptive audience. But if he didn’t ask the guy he respected most in the world, who was he going to ask?

“We had witnesses,” Stynes said. “The kids and the adults in the park. And we had his aunt, and the porn and the clippings about the case. Did we have enough? I mean…talking to Dante Rogers today, hearing what he had to say…And talking to the Mannings, too…There might be something there-”

“Okay.” Reynolds dropped his fork with a loud clatter. It dropped off the table and onto the floor. He made an exaggerated show of picking up his napkin and wiping it across his mouth. “I know what this is,” he said. “I’ve seen it before. You’ve got, what, two years to retire?”

“About that.”

“Okay, and you’re getting old, right? Pushing sixty? And you’re looking back over everything and you’re saying to yourself, ‘Well, what did I do right and what did I do wrong? And does any of it amount to two farts in a windstorm?’ Right?”

Stynes didn’t answer, but Reynolds’s insights struck a chord. Stynes knew he was reassessing, summing up, looking forward to life in retirement. And what waited for him there? Reds games on TV six months a year and Gunsmoke reruns in the winter.

“You know what you need to do? You need to get remarried. Look at you.” Reynolds signaled the waitress and received a new fork. He started eating again. “Look at you. Widowed. No kids. No dog or cat. And you’re looking down retirement like it’s the barrel of a gun. Get outside yourself a little bit. You’re still young. You can still get it up. Find a nice schoolteacher who’s about to retire. Ride off into the sunset together.”

He paused to chew. Stynes thought he was finished with his rant, but Reynolds leveled his butter knife, pointing it right at Stynes’s chest, and said, “This shit ain’t going to fly with me, okay? I’m not digging into the past and thinking about all the shitheads I put away. This Dante, he got what he deserved. Right? Don’t go there.”

Stynes worked on his fries. He nodded, absorbing Reynolds’s words, letting them rattle around in his brain. As expected, Reynolds didn’t want to hear it, and maybe his old partner was right. Why dig into the past just because Dante Rogers looked like a pathetic piece of shit at the Reverend Fred’s church?

“That’s the longest we put anyone away,” Stynes said. “I mean, outside of guys who pled or were obviously guilty.”

“You did good,” Reynolds said. “You were young, but you did good. You worked well with the Mannings and those little kids. It worked. I only wish the asshole had gone away longer. I wish we’d made it first degree. They were still frying bastards back then. He could have ridden the lightning. Zap. Then we’re not having this talk.”

“And you’d be missing me,” Stynes said.

“Bullshit.” Reynolds threw the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth and wiped his hands. “Listen to what I said. Retirement can be a bitch if you don’t have something to do.”

Stynes sipped his drink, drained it down so only ice was left in the glass. “Do you remember something about that case?” Stynes asked. “The testimony of those kids. When we talked to them at the park, they told us two things. Yes, they told us they saw Justin with Dante and all that. But they also told us that Justin had run off into the woods, alone, chasing a dog or something. But that night when we talked to them, neither one of them remembered that part of it. All they wanted to say was that they saw Justin with Dante. Nothing about the woods.”

“So? They’re kids. Remember Elizabeth Smart? Her kid sister sees the guy come into the room and take Elizabeth. Nine months later, she wakes up one day and says, ‘Hey, I know who it is.’ Nine months. They’re kids. Little kids. Who knows how their minds work? And other people-other adults-saw Dante at the park.”

The waitress brought the check, and Reynolds pointed to Stynes. “It’s his turn. I’m on a fixed income.”

Stynes brought out his wallet and put a twenty down with the check. The waitress collected it and brought him change. “Look,” he said. “There were a lot of adults in the park that day. We talked to all of them, but we pretty quickly started looking for a black guy and dropped any other thoughts because of what those kids said at night, how adamant they were that night. Adamant. Right?”

Reynolds didn’t respond, so Stynes counted out the tip and went on, his voice lowered.

“Who commits most crimes against children?” Stynes asked.

“More Trivial Pursuit?”

“You know as well as I do-sixty-eight percent of the time it’s a parent or family member, right? We may not have known that as much back then, but we sure as hell know it now.”

Reynolds made a circular motion with his hand. Go on.

“And who had access to those kids before we talked to them?”

“We talked to them right in the park and they mentioned Dante, right after it happened.”

“There was a lot of heat on us. Hell, there was heat on every cop in America back then. Crime was up all over. If something happened, everybody freaked out. They acted like the world was ending. Maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to what was said in the park because of the chaos that day. The body was found in the woods, and that’s the direction those kids pointed us to initially.”

“We searched there,” Reynolds said. “Hell, we searched those woods multiple times. We dragged that little pond, turned over every rock. We had to wait for Mother Nature to give that kid’s body back to us.”

“Didn’t you think there was something…off about Bill Manning? We talked about it at the time.”

“Yeah, his kid was missing. That’s enough to make anybody off.”

“Are you going to give me another lecture on how I don’t understand what he went through because I never had kids?”

Reynolds almost smiled. “I’ll let it go.”

“Seriously, there was something going on there, right?” Stynes asked.

Reynolds leaned back. “You mean because of what the Mannings said that day?”

“Yes,” Stynes said. “In the morning, right after Justin disappeared, Mrs. Manning, Virginia Manning, told us that her husband didn’t go to work at his usual time that day. She said that he stayed home, which was unusual. But that night, when we went back to the house to talk to them again, she had changed her tune. She said her husband did leave for work at the usual time, that everything was normal in the morning, and he didn’t come home until they found out that Justin was missing. She called him at work and told him.”

“I remember all this, Stynes.” Reynolds pointed to his head. “I’ve still got it together up here.”

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“When someone contradicts themselves, we see it as a red flag. We push harder.”

“It was a red flag,” Reynolds said. “We both saw it that way. We talked about it then, remember?”

“Yes. And you told me to let it go, to back off the Mannings.”

“Damn right.”

“You said they were scared and upset, and it wasn’t unusual for someone like Mrs. Manning to get her facts mixed up.”

“It’s called being compassionate,” Reynolds said. “Good cops do that. They know how to treat the victims of crimes.”

“But didn’t we turn away from them too quickly?” Stynes asked.

“Too quickly?” Reynolds asked.

“Yeah.”

“As I recall, you pulled Mrs. Manning aside for a little heart-to-heart the night her kid disappeared, didn’t you? You asked her all about this, right? As I recall, you did it without my permission. And what happened?”

“She stuck to the story,” Stynes said. “She said she mixed things up in the morning because she was upset.”

“There you go,” Reynolds said.

“But was it enough? Couldn’t we have pushed them just a little more?”

“Let me ask you something, since you’re so fond of these trivia questions. Who commits most of the violent crimes in Dove Point? And where do most of the violent crimes take place?”

Stynes paused, letting Reynolds’s words sink in. “Jesus, Terry. Are you for real?”

“I’m talking numbers, Stynesie.”

“You’re saying that blacks commit most of the violent crimes, and most of them take place over in East.”

“Amen, brother.”

“So that’s why we looked so hard at Dante Rogers and let the alibi from the Mannings go?”

“We had the witnesses against Dante,” Reynolds said. “Against the Mannings we had what? A woman’s hysterical story about her husband?”

“And the tendency of kids or anyone else to be killed by people they know.”

Reynolds shook his head. “I don’t see it, Stynesie. Take my advice-get a hobby. Become one of those Walmart greeters. Do something. But I have to get out of here-”

“What about Scott Ludwig?” he asked.

Reynolds tightened his jaw, as though biting back on something.

“Ludwig was there,” Stynes pressed. “He was doing that nature walk or whatever for a group of kids. But he left without talking to us. As soon as trouble went down, he was gone. And nobody saw him or could find him.”

“That’s not a crime.”

“It is damn weird if a crime has been committed, and he was at the scene. He’s always been an odd duck-”

“Also not a crime. Look at you.”

“We should have looked at Ludwig harder. We both know that.”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t? I guess Dante made a more vulnerable target, didn’t he? He wasn’t white and from a prominent family-”

“Hey,” Reynolds said. The word came out so loud it seemed to surprise even Reynolds. Other diners turned to look, and Reynolds ducked his head a little, gathered his cool. But he didn’t cool off. He pointed at Stynes and said, “Listen, you want to carry around some bullshit guilt and doubts, that’s fine with me. But you do it alone.” Reynolds looked around. The other diners were back to their own business-or at least pretending to be. He turned back to Stynes. “You can accuse me of a lot of things, but I wouldn’t dump a case because someone has money. You bring me one shred of proof, one piece of evidence that Ludwig or anybody else did anything to that Manning kid, and I’ll change my mind. Otherwise, put it in the win column and let Dante Rogers live out his crappy life over in East like the puke that he is.”

Stynes hated himself for feeling chastened, like a little kid scolded by his dad. Reynolds had that effect on him. Always.

But at some point, everybody leaves home…

“I’m going to talk to Ludwig, Terry,” Stynes said. “And Bill Manning. I have to.”

Disgust dripped off Reynolds’s face as he pushed himself up from the table and left Judy’s without saying good-bye.