Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

TWENTY-TWO

WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG at seven thirty in the morning, I rolled over and grabbed it, rubbing my eyes and hoping it was Torkleson or Cody with news. After waking to find Melissa watching me the night before, I hadn’t slept for hours and had just fallen asleep.

“Is everything ready for tomorrow?” Judge John Moreland asked.

I didn’t respond.

Moreland said, “I know this has got to be tough. Please don’t make it any tougher on either one of us than it needs to be.”

I said, “I’m on to you.”

There was a beat of silence. He said, “What?”

“You heard me. You’ll be in prison, where you can never touch a little girl again. And you know what happens to your kind in prison.”

When he spoke again he sounded angry and impatient. “I have no earthly idea what you’re talking about.” I had hoped he would act guilty and reveal himself. He was a good actor.

“Really?” I said.

“You’ve gone off the deep end. I hate to say it, but getting the baby out of that… environment can’t be soon enough.”

“You’ll be wearing a jumpsuit and shoes without laces, and you’ll spend all your time looking over your shoulder for the next attack,” I said.

A heavy sigh. “I’ve done everything I can to be compassionate,” Moreland said. “I never needed to give you the time, but I did. I’ve offered to help you and your wife with another placement, but you’ve spurned that offer. All I get from you is threats and paranoid rants. You accuse my son of murder and me of something I can’t even say out loud. I would have hoped this entire painful thing could have been accomplished with some kind of maturity for the sake of the child, but I see that’s just not the case.”

Man, he almost convinced me with that one. He was damned good, I’ll give him that.

“I’m on to you,” I said again.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake…”

I punched off and looked up to see Melissa in the doorway, holding Angelina in her arms.

“Was that him?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What did he want?”

“He wanted to make sure we were ready.”

“Kind of him,” she said, with a kind of hopeless sarcasm. She closed her eyes. I stood up in case I needed to steady her. Angelina reached out for me, cried, “Da!”

I COULDN’T EVEN EAT the toast I’d made and stuck to cup after cup of coffee. With the mug in hand, I wandered through the rooms in our house as if seeing them for the first time in a while. White winter light filtered through the blinds and curtains. It was a different quality of light than fall or summer, a more dispassionate hue. It was obviously cold outside because the heater clicked on and forced warm air through the registers with regularity. I thought, Maybe this happens all the time, and I’ve just never noticed it before. I tried to remember the last time I’d checked our furnace in the basement and couldn’t recall when I’d done it.

Sanders and Morales were in their usual places. Wisps of exhaust from their running engines dissipated into the air.

I’d not told Melissa of my suspicion regarding Judge Moreland or my conversation with Detective Torkleson. Maybe I should have, but I was banking on the fact that Torkleson would call confirming the judge’s links to the ring, and it would all be over.

MELISSA DECIDED the house was missing something and decided to bake bread. Soon, the smells of baking bread filled the place, taking the edge off the day. Good call, I thought.

In Angelina’s room, there were boxes stacked up in the corner and marked SUMMER CLOTHES, WINTER CLOTHES, and TOYS AND GIFTS.

It was really happening.

For the fourth time that day, I pulled out my cell phone and speed-dialed Cody’s number and heard, “The number you are calling is out of the ser vice area at this time. Please leave a message…”

THERE WERE SEVERAL more phone calls throughout the day, none of them Torkleson or Cody. Melissa’s mom and dad called from different places and she talked to each of them longer than I could remember her ever doing. Her face flushed as she talked to her father, and I could tell she was getting angry.

“We had a lawyer,” she said, heatedly. “It’s not like we didn’t have a lawyer, Dad. It’s that there wasn’t anything he could do.”

She scowled as he went on, and when she saw me watching, she rolled her eyes.

“Gee, Dad,” she said, “it’s really great you are suddenly so concerned and seem to have all of the answers. But where were you three weeks ago when we could have used some of your wisdom?”

My parents called shortly after, before Melissa had cooled off. She talked to them and told them the situation hadn’t changed. After a while, she handed the phone to me.

My dad said, “Your mom is too busted up to talk anymore, sorry.”

“I understand.”

“I guess this is the kind of thing that can happen when we turn everything over to the government and to the lawyers,” he said. “When a whole society abrogates personal responsibility, these kinds of situations come up.” I’d heard his theory many times before that everything was better back in the pioneer days, when people dealt with each other fair and square, their word backed up personally by their reputations or their guns-without the involvement of third parties like lawyers or politicians.

“Dad, I can’t sit on the front porch with a shotgun on my lap and keep them away.”

“I know you can’t,” he said. “And it’s a damned shame.”

I thought of my grandfather’s Colt.45 upstairs in the closet, and said, “Yes, it is.”

Dad said, “I was joking to your mother that we ought to send somebody like Jeter Hoyt down there to straighten things out. That’d give those big-city types a dose of frontier justice, wouldn’t it?”

I smiled bitterly to myself. Frontier justice hadn’t matched up real well with Sur-13.

“Too bad we can’t do that,” he said.

I PACED. I called Cody’s cell phone again and again, getting angrier with him each time. Same with Torkleson, who wouldn’t answer his cell, either. I called the detective division, and the receptionist said Torkleson was out and she didn’t know when he’d be back. She asked if there was anyone else who could help me, and I said no, I needed to talk to Torkleson.

I stayed away from both Melissa and Angelina because I didn’t want my building anger and fear to affect them. I went upstairs and checked the loads in the.45, and went downstairs and looked at my furnace and wondered how in the hell it worked.

For once, what my father said made some sense. Why couldn’t I sit outside on my porch with a shotgun across my knees and keep the world away from my family?

I couldn’t stay home, but I couldn’t leave Melissa and Angelina, either, so I threw on my parka and went outside. As I approached Sanders, he slid his window down and held out his hand, palm out.

“That’s far enough, Jack.”

“Why?”

“The sheriff didn’t like our Thanksgiving dinner together. He told both of us to stop fraternizing with you and your family. You know what’s happening tomorrow.”

“And what would that be?” I said, angry.

“Jack, just stay back.”

I turned around and stomped back to the house. As I did I whipped out my cell phone and called Cody.

Out of ser vice range.

I called detective division again, and the receptionist said she’d put my message on his desk on top of the pile of my other messages.

DURING ANGELINA’S AFTERNOON NAP, I went into the kitchen as Melissa pulled more loaves of bread from the oven and put them on the counter to cool. I couldn’t even count the number of loaves she’d baked during the day-maybe twenty-five, maybe more. The kitchen was overwhelmed with the smell of yeast and flour and golden crust. There was more dough on the table, and it was obvious she was going to keep baking bread until she ran out of ingredients. I took a cursory look around the hiding places in the kitchen and didn’t see the bottle.

“You don’t have to keep looking,” she said. “I’m not drinking.”

“JACK, IT’S DETECTIVE TORKLESON,” Melissa said, shaking me awake. I’d fallen asleep in my chair in the living room out of exhaustion, and it took me a second to register what she’d said. When it did, my heart revved like a racecar motor, and I grabbed the phone and bounded up the stairs into our bedroom and shut the door.

He said, “I’ve been up all night since we talked. I hijacked our best tech gal and made her stay up all night with me in the basement of the building with her computers. We’ve been going over all of the evidence Scotland Yard and Interpol sent over…”

I tried to swallow, but my mouth was dry. “Jack, we can’t make any links at all between either Harris and Moreland or Coates and Moreland. We’ve got nothing to connect them.”

I nearly blacked out and had to reach for the headboard to steady my legs.

“Can you keep looking?” I said. My voice was weak. I’d staked everything on this. “Maybe Garrett has a secret computer? Maybe they know how to mask their telephone numbers and IP addresses somehow? Hell, I don’t know. All I know is that there has to be a connection.”

Torkleson sighed. “Jack, I’m not saying there isn’t a remote possibility. I’m not saying that. But the electronic trail between Coates and Harris is like a freeway. There’s nothing like that with the judge-not even an old cow trail, if you know what I’m saying. There are some IP addresses my tech gal can’t isolate, but nothing substantial, and nothing we could go to the DA with. It’s a dry hole, Jack.”

“It’s got to be there,” I said.

“Look, we’ve done all we could. It’s an interesting theory you had that plays into your situation, but nothing we can pursue in any way, shape, or form. Maybe somewhere down the line Harris will say the judge is a known associate, or give up his name for leniency. There’s always that.”

“It will be too late,” I said.

“I know,” Torkleson said.

I found myself looking out the window at Sanders’s cruiser. It was dusk and getting colder. Exhaust puffed from his tailpipe.

I said, “When you lose all hope, what have you got left?”

“I can’t answer that, Jack.”

“Neither can I,” I said, before thanking him and hanging up.

“HAVE WE DONE IT all wrong, honey?” I asked later that afternoon, as the sun dropped behind the mountains.

She stopped and looked at me, her eyes blinking oddly. “What do you mean?”

I shook my head. “Maybe we played it all wrong, because look where we are. Tomorrow they’re coming to take her. Maybe we should have hired a new lawyer, tried to take the judge to court to stall this at least. I know everyone said we’d lose in the end, but at least we’d have had more time. Instead, we tried to get Garrett to sign the papers, and he never signed them.” I didn’t even want to mention all that had happened, all that had gone wrong.

I said, “We could have done that or we could have hit the road right away and decided to go out with guns blazing. Maybe we could have created a media spectacle, gotten the press and the public on our side. Maybe that would have scared the judge and Garrett away.”

She took in a deep breath. “I’ve thought of those things. Believe me, Jack, I’ve never once stopped thinking of what we could do. Neither would have worked. I think you know that.”

I wasn’t so sure. “At least we could have tried.”

“We did try,” she said, her eyes tearing up. “We tried with the help of our best friends, and we did everything we could do. And I want you to stop speculating right now. All I’ve got in the world is the knowledge that we did all we could.”

I sat down heavily at the table. She came over and put her hands on my shoulders, leaving flour handprints.

“And we still don’t know why they really want her,” I said.

But I had an inkling, a thought so dark I still couldn’t share it, despite what Torkleson had said. And when I looked up at my wife, I could see by the emptiness in her eyes and expression that it had crossed her mind as well.