4
ANSON
Father had taught me how to enter a room, how to secure a room. Always low. Always fast. Get through the door, round the corner, get down before anyone on the other side has a chance to react.
Vincent did none of those things.
With the revolver held high, he kicked the door hard enough to shatter part of the wood frame.
The whole porch shook with it. Then he stood in the opening for a good twenty seconds, surveying the interior.
Had anyone been on the other side with a weapon of their own, he’d surely have died at that moment, but nobody fired, and nobody shouted.
There was nothing. Not a sound as Vincent went inside.
I followed cautiously behind him with Paul at the rear. The stillness of the interior slapped us both. Even the dust felt like it was no longer moving. Like it hung in the air, frozen, suspended, an image of an interior rather than a living, breathing space.
Only hours earlier, the room had been alive—the girls, the Kid, Finicky, both detectives, and Van Man, the tension thick enough to have weight, and now it was a tomb. There was no other way to describe it. Like lying in a casket and opening your eyes an hour after they’d piled the dirt up top.
All the furniture had been covered in sheets.
No doubt this was the work of the men in those white suits.
Vincent went to the couch and tore away its covering, revealing the spot where Welderman had bled out.
They’d made some attempt to remove the stain, but it hadn’t come out; they’d only made it worse.
It was as if they’d taken a wet sponge to it and only spread it out, then given up and covered it.
Vincent only gave the dark blood a moment’s glance before bounding up the steps to the second floor while shouting Kristina’s name.
Paul and I looked at each other, knowing nobody would answer. We listened to Vincent’s heavy footsteps as he went room by room above. We listened as those footsteps slowed, as that same realization finally took hold in him, too. We were too late.
I quickly checked the parlor and found more of the same: white sheets covering the chairs, table, and the large china cabinet against the wall.
In the kitchen, the refrigerator door was open, the plug had been pulled from the wall, and everything had been removed from the inside.
All the food had been removed from the pantry, too.
None of this made sense to me. They hadn’t cleaned the house in the sense Paul had said—they may have wiped away prints, but aside from that, nothing had been done to conceal evidence.
Instead, the farmhouse looked like someone had closed it off.
Prepared it to sit empty for some time. The kind of thing you do when you go on an extended trip.
It’s like they weren’t concerned with whatever evidence they might have left behind.
When I went back to the living room, Vincent was coming down the stairs.
“All our clothes are gone; the girls’ stuff, too.
Every dresser and closet is empty. Toothbrushes and all our personal things from the bathrooms—they took it all.
” He gestured up at the pictures on the walls.
“But they left all of these. I don’t get it. ”
The photographs were of all the kids who had been trafficked through the farmhouse. More than I dared to count. Our pictures were up there too, along with many others, dating back years.
I looked back at the bloodstain on the couch. “They emptied the refrigerator, too. They’re more worried about food going bad than they are about getting caught. This all goes way beyond a few local cops.”
“Oh, shit.”
This came from Paul. He’d pulled the sheet from one of the armchairs—the yellow wingback Tegan liked to lounge in.
She’d sometimes sit there for hours with a book or just listen to music, positioned sideways, her slender legs dangling over the side.
The center cushion and the backrest were stained with blood.
Like the couch, someone had tried to scrub it out and only made it worse.
Paul looked like he might get sick. He had a thing for Tegan.
“We don’t know it’s her blood,” I told him.
“We don’t know it’s not.”
Vincent rounded the chair and sat on the arm of the couch.
He scratched his chin with the barrel of the .
38. I could only imagine what Father would say if he saw someone do that.
Father was a cautious man. Vincent must have realized the danger because he lowered the gun to his lap.
“What was it Welderman had said? When he told Finicky nobody could leave the house?”
“‘I want your keys. Nobody is leaving this place until Guyon,’” I told him. “‘Understand? Not you, not them, not anyone.’”
I didn’t realize I had also imitated Welderman’s voice until I looked up, and both Paul and Vincent were staring at me.
Father and I often did memory exercises.
We’d sometimes visit open houses, and when we got back home, he’d quiz me on what was in a particular room at a certain house.
We only had one television in the house, and one of his other favorite games was to watch three minutes of a show, then switch the channel, watch three minutes of another, and so on.
After thirty minutes, he’d ask me to recite snippets of dialogue from one he’d pick at random.
I could also do entire movies. Dirty Harry was one of my favorites. I could rattle off—
“Anson,” Vincent cut in. “Can you stay out of your own head long enough to have a conversation?”
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.” Self-conscious now.
“What’s Guyon?” Paul asked. “Any idea?”
None of us answered. Nobody knew.
Favoring my injured leg, I went over to the rolltop desk against the far wall and removed the sheet.
I was hoping to find a calendar; instead, I found more blood.
There were streaks of it on the wood, all over some utility bills that had been left behind.
Someone had done a number on the chair, too.
It was splintered in pieces, the remains shoved under the kneehole.
“Jesus.” Paul had gone as white as the sheet in my hand. “They’re dead. They’re all dead. They’re not in that van, they’re—”
“They’re not dead,” Vincent said emphatically. “The girls are worth too much money to them. They won’t hurt them.”
“Unless they had to,” Paul replied softly.
“It could be the Kid.” I didn’t want to say it, but somebody needed to. “He was in bad shape. Maybe they decided—”
“It’s not the girls,” Vincent cut me off. “And it’s not from the Kid.”
Saying it doesn’t make it so, my mind muttered, but I wasn’t about to tell Vincent that. “It could be Finicky,” I suggested instead.
Vincent nodded at that, like I’d fed him something he’d been craving. “Yeah, Finicky. She was a liability.”
“Yeah, Finicky,” Paul repeated, although he didn’t sound as convinced.
“Guyon,” Vincent said again.
Paul turned away from all the blood and looked out the window. “What was the date on the calendar? That date you said was circled everywhere?”
“August 29,” I told him. “Finicky had it marked on the calendar in the kitchen. It was circled at Dr. Oglesby’s office, too.”
“That’s only four days,” Paul muttered.
“You think your shrink is in on all this?”
“I think they’re all in on it. Everyone we’ve dealt with since we got placed here.”
“So what’s Guyon?” Paul asked. “A place? A person?”
A heavy silence came after that. None of us had any idea.
It was Vincent who spoke next. “The cop that got shot in the alley back in Charleston. He was trying to catch Weasel with Van Man, right?”
Paul nodded. He’d been the only one who saw. “He came in from one end of the alley and Van Man came in from the other. They tried to box Weasel in. I don’t know who fired first, but he got hit, same as Weasel.”
“Did it kill him?”
Paul pursed his lips as he thought about that. “I don’t know. Not for sure. I only got a glimpse before I ran.”
I knew what Vincent was thinking. “They would have taken him to Roper Hospital. That’s closest.”
Vincent nodded. “Sam fucking Porter. Got to be.”
Turning back to the desk, I opened the phone book and found the number for Roper. I was surprised to find the old desk phone still had dial tone. I would have cut the line. I keyed in the number and it began to ring.
Vincent frowned. “What are you doing?”
I held up a finger and silenced him.
Crackle of static on the line.
“Roper Francis, how may I direct your call?”
I cleared my throat and did my best impersonation. “This is Detective Welderman, Charleston PD. I need Officer Sam Porter’s room. Now. Police emergency.”
“P-O-R-T-E-R?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s fucking weird,” Paul whispered.
“He’s in 412. One moment while I transfer you.”
The line rang twice before a woman picked up. “Hello?”
I hung up.
Paul and Vincent were staring at me.
“Room 412,” I told them.
The look in Vincent’s eyes shifted and went cold as his gaze dropped back to the .38 in his hand. “You wanted to get cleaned up. We get cleaned up. Then we’re taking a ride to the hospital.”
Paul shuffled his feet. “Am I the only one who’s hungry?”
Neither of us answered him. Vincent was lost in his own thoughts, and I was watching Vincent.
The anger brewed within him like a growing storm.
Churning clouds, thick and black. He wasn’t holding the gun; he was squeezing it.
Every inch of him was tense. The muscles in his arms were tight.
I wanted to understand that feeling, but I knew I never would.
Anger and hate were as distant to me as love and happiness.
Yes, I loved Libby. I loved her in my own way, but was that the way other people loved?
The way normal people experience that particular emotion?
I knew it wasn’t, just as I knew what I felt inside for Sam Porter and the other dirty cops involved in all this was not the same as what Vincent and Paul felt.
It didn’t fuel me. It didn’t drive me. I saw Sam Porter as the next logical step in finding the girls, but Vincent looked like he might tear the man apart limb by limb in the moments before remembering he was supposed to ask him a question.
I wanted to feel that. Just once.
When I found Libby, I’d want her to know I felt it.
From a cup of pens and pencils on the desk, I found a metal letter opener and carved three words into the wooden desktop.
Maybe it was time I followed Vincent’s lead.
Maybe if I did, I could feel what he felt.
Just once.
As two of the showers upstairs came to life, I brushed away the wood shavings and stared at my handiwork.
“Father, forgive me.”
Forgive us all for what we are about to do.