The Prophet

5

HASLEM’S HAD A single TV mounted in the corner above the bar, an ancient, heavy thing in an age of sleek flat screens. Nobody ever complained, because what people came there to watch wasn’t on television but cavorting across the stage and swinging around a stainless steel pole.

Adam Austin watched it for ten minutes, though. At 11:20 he asked the bartender, Davey, to tune it over to Cleveland’s ABC affiliate.

“Volume?” Davey asked.

“No.”

It was the sports segment of the local news, and all Adam wanted to see were the scores ticking by at the bottom of the screen. He wanted to know who was coming at his brother’s team from the other side of the bracket. The only team in the state that posed a real risk was probably Saint Anthony’s, a program that had dominated Kent’s squad consistently. They’d won, of course. By forty points. A confident thrashing. Chambers, on the other hand, had advanced with a win that felt more like a sigh of relief.

“Too close, Franchise,” Adam muttered as he thought about it, using a nickname that only one other person in the world had ever called his younger brother. “Way too close.”

Kent had probably spent the past week preaching them up instead of teaching them to hit. That was his way. But they’d gotten the job done, they were 11–0, and the state title was no longer a dream for this town, it was an expectation. How his brother would handle that remained to be seen. Perhaps some of the Psalms would be forfeited in favor of the lessons of Lombardi, and the teachings of Paul would come to mean one man and one man only: Paul Brown.

Behind Adam there were three girls working the stage and maybe two dozen rednecks shoving bills at them. Every now and then somebody who’d just sold a used jet ski or some such bullshit would get giddy over his fortune and flash a twenty, but mostly these girls were dancing for dollars quite literally. Adam kept his back to them. He was waiting for the appearance of one Jerry Norris, who hadn’t deemed Thursday’s court appearance worth his time. Jerry hadn’t shown yet, which suggested one of two things: he was too wasted to make it to the titty bar, or he had been tipped off to Adam’s presence by a friend.

Adam meant to leave at midnight, but Davey poured him a shot of Jim Beam on the house, and it was sacrilege to pass on free whiskey. By the time it was gone, he felt a little less tired and a Drive-By Truckers song was playing on the computerized bastard imposter of a jukebox and he thought he might as well have one more last beer.

He’d had three last beers before the phone call came. He felt no surprise; the calls that came for him often came at this time of night. It was late and he was tired, but this would be money calling, and when money called, it didn’t matter if it was late and you were tired. Hell, in his business, money rarely called at other hours. When it turned out to be Stan Salter, he was surprised but not stunned. He dealt with police too often for that.

“Which one of my favorites has done what?” he asked.

“It’s not that kind of situation,” Salter said. “We’re going to need to talk to you in person, Adam. You good to drive in, or should I send someone out to get you?”

“The hell you talking about?”

“Homicide,” Salter said. “When I say I need to talk to you, I mean now.”

This wouldn’t be the first time one of Adam’s charges had killed somebody—it would, in fact, be the third—but it was never a pleasant experience.

“Who did it?” he asked.

“Adam, it’s not that kind of case. We need to talk to you about the victim. I’ve been told you spoke with her recently.”

“Name?”

“I said we’re going to need to speak in person.”

“And we will. I can still hear the damn name.”

There was a hesitation, and then Salter said, “Rachel Bond.”

“Don’t know her,” Adam said. He wouldn’t have forgotten posting bond for someone named Bond. That shit would stick with you.

“We’re hearing otherwise.”

Rachel, he thought. Rachel. Was that the woman who came in all bruised up, asking to get her husband out?

“Blond chick, ’bout thirty?” he said. “Husband’s name is Roger?”

“No,” Salter said. “Brunette, and she wasn’t about thirty. She was exactly seventeen. Came to you to ask for help finding her father.”

“That’s not right. No. That girl… her name was April. She was a college student.”

But he was remembering the way he’d looked at her and thought that he was getting old fast, because college girls were beginning to look impossibly young.

“That may be what she said,” Salter told him, “but that’s not what she was. And she’s dead now, Adam, and we need to talk about it. We need to talk tonight. I’ll ask you again—can you make the drive or do I need to send someone?”

“I can make the drive,” Adam said, thinking that she’d brought the letters in one of those plastic-covered folders that students carried. Not college students. And the nail polish. Red with silver sparkles. She’d painted her nails for the Cardinals.

“Then get down here. I’ll be waiting on you.”

Salter hung up, and Adam set the phone onto the bar and stared into the mirror in front of him. With all those rows of bottles, all he could make out of the reflection were his eyes and receding hairline.

“Fuck me,” he whispered.

He didn’t remember the address, to the great frustration of the men in the room with too-bright lighting and the smell of new plastic, a digital recorder running on the table.

“It was out in the country,” he said. “On a lake. It was… Shadow Lane. No, Shadow Wood Lane. I don’t remember the number.”

“You’re sure of the road?”

“Shadow Wood. Yes.”

One of the detectives left then, and it was just Stan Salter and Adam.

“Do you think she was killed there?” Adam said.

“We’re going to find out. Did you see the place?”

“No.”

“Just gave her the address?”

Adam wasn’t sure if Salter’s tone was really loaded with contempt or if he was imagining it. He couldn’t have blamed the man either way. He was remembering that while the girl had teeth that were straight and white, she’d smiled in an odd, careful way, lips-only most of the time, as if she’d worn braces until recently and was still trained by muscle memory and teenage insecurity to hide those now-perfect teeth…

No, she didn’t. She didn’t have that smile at all. That was a different girl. You cannot think of them together, Adam, you cannot do that.

“Yes. I gave her the address in a phone message. Said she could let me know if it didn’t pan out, and then we’d try again. I never heard back. She told me her name was April Harper. She told me she was a college student.”

“You make no habit of checking identification?” Salter asked, and Adam had to make an effort to focus on the question. He kept losing himself to that nail polish, that plastic folder, that smell of coconut that told him she’d been to a tanning bed.

“On my clients?” he said. “No. Who does? I wasn’t letting her board a plane or even drink a beer, I was agreeing to do a job. Checking her age, that’s not my responsibility.”

But he was thinking—seventeen, seventeen, seven-fucking-teen— and the liquor was stirring in his belly like acid.

She’d looked it, too. He couldn’t pretend otherwise, couldn’t even grasp at the pathetic shield of claiming she’d been one of those girls who looked older than her age. If anything, she maybe looked a little younger. Would’ve been carded for cigarettes by any gas station clerk. Went out of her way to tell him she was a senior at Baldwin-Wallace, and while his eyes had said No, his brain had said Who gives a shit and her money had said Just do the job, Adam.

“You didn’t think,” Salter asked, “that she might be lying to you?”

“Everyone lies to me, Salter. All the time. Did I think she might be lying? Sure. But caring about why she was lying, that’s just… look, she said what she wanted me to do and she had a reason for it and she had the letters.”

“And the cash,” Salter said.

Adam felt like breaking the smug prick’s nose, Salter sitting there with his bristling military crew cut and hooded eyes and his badge, looking at Adam as if he were one of the dancers back at Haslem’s, empty of dignity and hungry for a dollar.

“You don’t need a paycheck?” Adam said. “You don’t need to keep the mortgage paid?”

Salter’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not interested in the idea that you wanted work. I’m interested in the idea that she paid cash.”

Right. Because cash suggested her age, at least to Salter, who expected an adult would have written a check or asked if Adam accepted credit cards.

“In my business,” Adam said, “cash transactions aren’t unusual.”

This was true. A lot of people came to him with higher IQs than credit scores, and that wasn’t to say they were bright.

“I see.” Salter made a notation on his pad, and then said, “Let’s talk about the letters she had. You read them?”

“Yeah.” Seventeen. A child. A corpse.

“Did you make copies?”

“No. She’d already done that. What she had, they were copies. I never saw the originals. And I saw only one of the letters. But there were others.”

“What did that letter say?”

“It was from her dad. He was—he’d been—in prison. Got out and then I guess he didn’t write anymore for a while. She was upset about that. Then he started back up, but he wouldn’t say where he was, wouldn’t give a return address or anything. So it was just, you know, a one-way street. She wanted to be able to respond. Asked me to find him. An address, I mean.”

“You’re qualified for this sort of work?”

“I’m a licensed PI, you know that.”

Salter didn’t respond.

“It’s what I do,” Adam said. “Same thing I do every day. People skip out on bond, and I go find them. I bring them back. You know this.”

“Nobody had skipped out on a bond here.”

“Skill set,” Adam said. “Same skill set.”

“I see. So you used that skill set, and you found an address?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you remember it?”

“No.”

“But you have records?”

“Yeah. Yes.”

“She didn’t give you a physical address? Just the phone number?”

“Just the phone number. She said she was a student at—”

“Baldwin-Wallace,” Salter said. “Yes. She say how she picked you for the job?”

“She said she had a referral.” Adam wished he’d stopped for a mint or some gum. He was breathing beer out with every word, and it made them seem flimsy, pathetic.

“We understand this part,” Salter said. “Her boyfriend told us. The referral, if we can call it that, came from him. He plays football for your brother.”

“Plays?” Adam said. “Like, right now? On this team?”

“Like right now,” Salter said, nodding. “Colin Mears? I gather he and his family are pretty close to your brother. There was some conversation about you, and I guess Colin understood you to be a detective.”

Adam let that glide by. Understood you to be, not understands that you are. Who cared? Who cared what Salter thought? What mattered here was a girl with glitter nail polish. What mattered was finding the sick son of a bitch who’d killed her, finding him and ending him. Because if you didn’t… if he just stayed out there…

“It’s a shame she lied to you,” Salter said, “and a shame you didn’t ask for any sort of identification. Because if you’d been operating with her real name, you’d have found her father easily. At Mansfield Correctional.”

Adam stared at him. “He never left?”

“Never left. He’s been there seven years. We’ve got people interviewing him right now. He says he wrote his last letter in August. So whoever kept writing? Whoever it is you found for her? We need to find him. Fast.”

“Makes no sense,” Adam said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Salter. I saw the letter, okay? The guy who wrote it was trying not to see her.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I read the damn—”

“You’ve told me that. But it seems like he was tossing a lot of breadcrumbs out for someone who didn’t want anyone following the trail. Telling her he was in town, then giving her his landlord’s name? This to a girl who was actively seeking contact with him? That doesn’t strike you as contradictory?”

These were fair points, but still Adam shook his head.

“He knew where to find her, clearly. So what’s the point in that kind of a game?”

“I’m not sure,” Salter said. “But games aren’t uncommon with stalking. Not at all.”

“It’s so patient, though,” Adam said. “Waiting to see if she’d respond? If she’d look for him? It’s too damn patient.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so patient. Maybe when she showed up at his door, it rushed him.”

Adam remembered the numbers then. They floated toward him on a black breeze: 7330. On Shadow Wood Lane, yes. That was the address, that was the door at which she’d arrived.

That was where he’d sent her.