The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 16

“Hang on,” Shoffler says, “we’re just breaking up the huddle here.” I hear voices, the chime of elevators, Shoffler exchanging parting comments with someone. Then he’s back. “So what’s up?”

“The Sandling twins.”

If I didn’t know the detective so well, maybe I wouldn’t notice, but I catch the hesitation and the sudden holdback in his voice. “So – what about them?”

“The more I read the more it sounds like Kevin and Sean. The parallels are compelling. And I can’t understand why you and Judy Jones dismissed the case as irrelevant. Pretty much blew it off.”

Once again, there’s that hitch in his voice, a guarded quality. “We checked into it, Alex. We did. Look – that kidnapping took place a whole continent away. You got the ages of the boys and the fact they’re twins. That’s it.”

“That’s it?”

“Apart from that, there didn’t seem to be a connection.” Shoffler clears his throat. “The mother, you know – she wasn’t exactly a pillar of the community.”

“Look, Ray – I’ve read everything I can find about the case. And far as I can tell, Emma Sandling may not have been Mother Teresa but there’s no evidence she had anything to do with kidnapping her children.”

“That’s your opinion. Maybe there’s stuff you don’t know about.”

“Must be. Because as far as I can tell there wasn’t exactly a full court press to hunt down the kidnapper once the kids popped up in Eureka.”

“You’re wrong,” Shoffler says. “There was an investigation. A thorough one, too. But the mother wasn’t exactly helpful.”

“You mean-”

“I mean Emma Sandling was not cooperative. She said it was to protect the boys, but not everybody bought that. Look – the kids are safe and sound; it’s a happy ending. For a few days, that was big news, a miracle. But after? There’s no perpetrator, no charges, no story, no trial. All you got is the boys themselves and a police investigation that goes nowhere. Why? Because for whatever reason – whether she’s involved somehow or she genuinely wants to protect her kids – Mommy won’t talk and she won’t let her kids talk.”

“She could have made a buck or two out of the media, that’s for sure.”

“True, and that could mean she’s on the level. Or maybe it’s just damage control. The more the thing gets looked at, the more her part in it is exposed to the light of day.”

“If there was a part.”

“Okay, if there was a part. But the consensus out there was that she had a hand in it, that it was some kind of shakedown that got screwed up. After which, Mother Sandling made herself scarce.”

“I don’t think so.”

Shoffler says nothing for a moment. Then he says: “Why not?”

“Because the more I look at it, the more I get this creepy feeling that whoever took the Sandling kids is the same guy who took mine. They got away, so he took my kids to replace them.”

“Hunh.” A pause. “A ‘creepy feeling’?”

“It’s the same pattern. Come on, Shoff.”

“There’s gotta be a boatload of twins on the West Coast. Why would this guy come all the way across the country?”

“I don’t know, but the point is I’m looking at this Sandling thing and it sounds so much like my boys. I figure I’ll take a closer look. But I can’t, because for one thing, Emma Sandling? She’s gone; she might as well have fallen off the face of the earth.”

“You tried to find her, hunh?”

“I did. And finding people is one of my job skills. If you’re a reporter, you’ve gotta have sources and you have to find them whether they want to be found or not. But I can’t find Emma Sandling.”

“Hunh.”

“And while I’m trying to track her down, I’m also talking to the cops out there in Oregon. Well, no, that’s not accurate. I’m talking at the cops out there in Oregon.”

“I don’t-”

“I call both jurisdictions – Corvallis, where the boys went missing, and Eureka, where they stumbled out of that trailer. Eureka – they tell what they can, which is not much. But Corvallis? I get nothing, Ray. A stone wall. The cops flat out won’t talk to me. They give me some bullshit about ‘privacy issues.’”

“So this is why you called me.” He lets out a sigh.

“Yeah. I thought you might be able to talk to them out there. Let them know I’m not gonna be a problem.”

There’s a long moment before he answers. “I’m sorry, Alex. I can’t help you. I wish I could, but my hands are tied.”

“Your hands are tied? We’re talking about my sons. Ray, you can’t-”

But the detective is no longer on the line.

Two hours later, I’m outside Shoffler’s place in Greenbelt, Maryland, waiting for him to show up. The house isn’t what I expected – although I’m not sure what that was. I knew Shoffler worked seventy-hour weeks, that he’d burned through two marriages. I guess I expected a crash pad but the tidy rancher in front of me is neat and homey, with a picket fence and well-kept flowerbeds. There’s even a grapevine wreath on the door.

At first, I sit on the porch, but at dusk a cloud of biting gnats drives me back to my car. I wait, listening to the O’s game on the radio and periodically cranking up the air when it gets too hot.

I’m jolted out of my doze by a deep metallic concussion that seems to take place inside my skull. The sound is actually a rap on my car door, a fact that I realize when I open my eyes to see Shoffler looming next to my window.

He’s not happy to see me. He stands in a predatory, almost threatening stance, half in shadow, illuminated by the sickly green of the streetlight. He looks terrible, irritated but so exhausted that my eyes flick to the dashboard clock to see what time it is: 3:32 A.M.

A film of moisture coats my skin. My mouth is cotton, my lips dry and cracked. My shirt is glued to the leather seat and makes a little sucking noise as I sit up and reach for the door handle. But Shoffler pushes his big hand against the Jeep’s door and scowls at me.

“Go home, Alex.”

“No.”

“Just go home.”

“I need to talk to you.”

He pivots on his heel and moves toward the front door; he’s inside before I can get out of the car. I ring his doorbell, which actually goes ding-dong, at least a dozen times. I can’t believe it. I’ve been sitting in the driveway for six hours. Back in the car, my impulse is to lean on the horn, cause a ruckus, force Shoffler to deal with me. But remembering the look on his face, I decide against it.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Shoffler in the past few weeks, and every minute of it I’ve been attuned to him with the rapt attention of a lover, always on the lookout for telltale signs: Has he heard something? Does he have news? I’ve become adept at reading the clues of body language – vocal inflection, gestures, and facial expressions.

I also know that cops and military types put a lot of stock in respect. If I lean on the horn and get in Shoffler’s face in that public way, I won’t get anywhere. He might even have me arrested. I move my car two blocks away and set the alarm on my cell phone to wake me at six. The detective won’t catch me dozing again.

When he comes out the door at 7:44, he looks surprisingly jaunty for a man who got – at most – four hours of sleep. And then he sees me, as I step out from behind his Crown Vic.

His shoulders drop. He wags his head. “Jesus, Alex.”

I just stand there. The Crown Vic’s door locks snap open.

“Get in,” he says.

“What?”

“Get in.”

It’s already hot outside, the sun a white blur behind the dull haze of sky. The interior of the car is stifling. It stinks, too, of old take-out food and stale cigarette smoke spiked with pine air freshener. I’ve spent enough time with Shoffler now to know this about him: he drinks coffee all day long, he chain smokes when he can, and he eats most of his meals in the car.

He backs out of the driveway, lowers all the windows. I think at first that we’re heading out for coffee, Dunkin’ Donuts or the 7-Eleven, but before long we’re on Route 50, rolling along in a rush of white noise. The detective remains silent next to me. After a few minutes, he fools with the controls and all the windows slide closed, with the exception of his. He punches up the air, and lights a cigarette, inhaling with a long greedy pull. It’s out of habit – not out of deference to me – that he exhales out the window. He’s pissed and the irritation comes off him like a force field.

“Where are we going?”

“I got a meeting,” he says, “on the Hill.”

“But-”

“You wanna talk? This is the time I got. You want to get back to your car sometime before midnight? That’s your problem.”

“Okay.”

I have to resist the reflex to apologize, or at least say something that might lower the tension in the car. It’s better this way, with both of us pissed off. This way there won’t be any bullshit.

We’re on 95 now. Shoffler plunges in and out of dense traffic, his driving style fearless and so aggressive I have to work not to push my feet against the floor. He smokes his cigarette all the way down to the filter, stabs it out in the crowded ashtray, then flips the lid closed.

It’s not actually out, and within a minute a thin fringe of smoke – and the acrid smell of burning filters – seeps out from the seam of the ashtray. After a couple of minutes he opens the ashtray again and dribbles some cold coffee into the smoldering mess. There’s a sizzle as the liquid hits the filters, followed by a new and terrible smell. “Aromatherapy,” Shoffler says. He shoves the ashtray shut and taps his fingers against the exterior of the car. “Look,” he says after a while, “I’m not really pissed at you.”

“You’re not?”

“You know why? Because you’re right.”

He yanks the big car into a momentary gap in the left lane, earning a long complaining beep. He sticks his hand out the window, middle finger raised. “My daughter tells me I lack maturity – that’s how she puts it. I tell her this is maturity for me: I give these jokers the finger now instead of pulling ’ em over.” He rolls his shoulders, pats his breast pocket looking for a cigarette, knocks one out, lights it. “So – Mother Sandling.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s like the Sniper case. Everybody’s saying the sniper is a white loner – white, white, white. White guy in a white van. Now, you may not know this, but as the thing is going down, some of the guys in the District – I’m talking about African American police officers – they don’t think so. They’ve got the idea – from eyewitness testimony, from voice tape – that this guy’s a brother. They also think he’s driving a converted cop car, a blue Crown Vic or a Chevy Caprice – what they call a hooptie. Some of the yo’s are partial to recycled police cars – whether out of a sense of irony or just because these babies do go. But the point is, do the rest of us hear any of this? Why is it that no one, in any of the briefings, says one word about a black guy in a blue sedan who calls himself we?”

I shake my head.

Shoffler stabs his cigarette into the mess of crumpled butts. “Is it because Montgomery County happens to be involved in a lawsuit about racial profiling?”

“You’re kidding.”

Shoffler wags his head. “Now, in the Sandling case – we got a lawsuit there, too, more than one. Jones and I – we did see the parallels, you know. Jones gets on the horn to Corvallis. And what happened? Were they helpful, did they extend every courtesy? No. They more or less told us to get lost.”

“She’s the FBI and they blow her off?”

“They’re polite, they want to accommodate us, but yes they blow her off. Like a fucking hurricane.”

“Why.”

“Li-ti-ga-tion. Here’s the deal: Emma Sandling has some issues with the way her boys’ case was handled. She’s suing the police out there – about the length of time she was detained, about the conduct of the investigation, about the follow-up, about every damn thing. There are suits about misconduct and another one over lifestyle profiling.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re saying that the equal protection clause in the Constitution should cover class and lifestyle issues, the same way it covers race, religion, gender, and ethnicity.”

“It’s a constitutional issue?”

“Yeah. Think-a-that, hunh? Now, the cops out there – they don’t trust Sandling. They still think it’s about covering her ass; they still think she was involved. So why – ask yourself – would Sandling be anxious to talk to anybody connected to law enforcement? The cops thought she did it. Her kids were taken away from her – and it took her months to get them back. The only reason she succeeded was because a sympathetic judge figured that leaving the boys in the library and living in a tent was not really neglect. Given welfare reform and the unemployment rate and the lack of child-care alternatives for Sandling, what’s she supposed to do? Anyway, when Jones called, trying to get Sandling’s phone number, she got nowhere.”

“Sandling wouldn’t talk.”

“Right. Sandling won’t talk, the cops won’t talk, the lawyers won’t talk. We asked.”

“Did she know about Kevin and Sean?”

Shoffler swings his big head in my direction and just looks at me. “What do you think? You think she coulda missed that story? Maybe if she lived on Mars. No, the thing is your boys’ kidnapping brought the whole thing back. It terrified her.”

“How do you know?”

“We had a conference call: me, Jones, Sandling, and her lawyers. The lawyers are a big help, as you can imagine – keep telling her she doesn’t have to talk to us, doesn’t have to answer this question or that. But we really whacked away at this woman; I mean, we laid on the guilt as thick as we could. Here were two boys in peril, her boys might have information helpful in the investigation, how could she as a mother… blah, blah, blah.”

“And?”

“Nothing. We did not get to first base. Wherever she’s living now, no one knows who she is. And she wants to keep it that way… which is understandable. She’s worried about some kind of leak, that her boys’ case will end up all over the news again, they’ll be outed in their new place. Maybe the perp will come back for another round – to which Jones says, ‘not if we catch him.’ But Sandling is not interested; she won’t say boo. The lawyer follows up by warning us not to mention the Sandling case to the media.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He called Jones’s supervisor at the Bureau and my chief in Arundel… just to reinforce the warning.”

I just sit there, in a funk of anger and impotence. I’m pissed at Sandling, her lawyers, the cops, everybody. And what’s worse, I’m sick at heart. I take a few deep breaths, fighting off a sort of interior collapse.

“You okay?” Shoffler says.

I shrug.

“I can do two things for you,” Shoffler says. “First – and I doubt this will do you a hell of a lot of good – I can get you a copy of the sketch. The one they did working with the Sandling kids. Jones got that out of them. I wasn’t supposed to make a copy, but I did. Anyway, it was published in the papers at the time. Anyone asks, that’s where you got it.”

“Does it look like The Piper?”

He shrugs, holds up one hand. “Who knows? Not really. More facial hair than our guy. Kind of fogs up the features.” He sighs. “Second thing – and you could get this on your own, so I’m just saving you some time here – Sandling’s maiden name is Whalen.”

“You think that’s the name she’s using?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Shoffler says, flashing me a grin. “I was constrained from pursuing the matter.”

He drops me off near the White House. “Take the MARC Train from Union Station,” he advises. “New Carrollton stop. A cab’ll take you the rest of the way. Cost you ten bucks, max.”

When I open the door the next morning to go out for the paper, there’s a manilla interoffice envelope inside the screen door. I’m not expecting much, but I’m still disappointed when I see the sketch.

The face is expressionless, as real faces never are. The lack of expression somehow robs the features of coherence and makes the image ambiguous. Even mug shots have some animation – that supplied by life itself, I guess. I take the sketch to my study and line it up with the sketches Marijke made, one from my glimpse of The Piper, the others produced by sessions with other eyewitnesses. There’s something about the eyes, maybe, that looks the same from sketch to sketch. Apart from that, it’s different men with facial hair. The faces gaze down on me, inscrutable, almost mocking: you don’t know who I am.

Mary McCafferty taps one pink fingernail on her desk and looks at me with her large brown eyes. “Finding her shouldn’t be a problem,” she says. “She may not have had an address, living in a park – but she had a car, which means a driver’s license, insurance. She apparently had a library card, and I’ll bet she had a doctor for those kids. There will be school records, maybe traffic and parking tickets, grocery shopper cards. Believe me, unless you really work at it, you’re in a thousand databases these days. And what are the chances she severed every connection to her past?” McCafferty shakes her head.

“Really.”

“She may be using a different name – but you say it’s her maiden name, so chances are she kept her social, and then… well, then it’s a piece of cake. I might have something by tomorrow. E-mail okay? Or should I fax you?”

“E-mail’s fine.”

“We’re all set,” she says, getting to her feet. She hesitates, shakes her head. “But mine’s the easy part. You still have to get her to talk to you.”

“I know.”

“My guess is this woman’s pretty quick to call the cavalry,” she says. “Don’t get arrested.”