David Wiltse - The Edge of Sleep

Once inside. Tee drew himself erect and stopped staggering. He leaned against the door and sighed heavily with relief. It was not good, he thought, to know your friends too well. An awful lot of secrets were best kept that way.

Becker called Hemmings on his direct line, avoiding the switchboard and the resultant entry of the call in the log.

“You know officially I’m no longer on the case,” Becker said.

“Back on medical extension, I understand,” Hemmings said cautiously. “Sorry to hear about that.”

“Thank you.” Becker wondered how much of the sarcasm he heard in Hemmings’s voice was his own imagination. Just how crazy did the agents think he was? Drooling, unable to tie his own shoelaces? Living on medication? Or just taking advantage of a good opportunity to get out while clinging to the pension rights. Or did they think about him at all?

“Just wanted to make sure you know my status,” Becker continued. “I don’t want you to end up with your ass in a ditch.”

“I appreciate the thought. What can I do for you?” Hemmings asked.

“I was curious, Hairy. About the Reynolds case, and the others

…”

“Can’t get it out of your mind, right?”

“Right, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t apologize. We’re all obsessive/compulsive or we wouldn’t be with the Bureau. What about it?”

“What have you turned up on the search for a nurse’s uniform?”

“Well,” Hemmings said, and Becker could detect in the single word the enthusiasm rising. A technician happy to complain about his problems. “I’m working only with a map and the yellow pages, you know. I started with the Amell Wicker case because I figured since the Reynolds snatch is only three weeks old, any uniform might not even have come to the attention of the cleaners as unclaimed yet. The Wicker case is two years old. They would have noticed an unclaimed uniform by now if they are ever going to. So I started there and I’m working my way forward in time. I began with a ten-mile radius around the point of seizure, which was the Upper Saddle River mall, and called every cleaner listed in the yellow pages in the towns within that circle. That’s a little better than 314 square miles, you understand. A lot of cleaners. When that didn’t produce anything, I increased the radius to twenty miles and started over. I don’t know how quick your math is, Becker, but that increases the area to cover by another 942 square miles. You go to a thirty-mile radius and that’s another 1,884 square miles and so forth out to the fifty-mile radius we figure is the maximum. That’s a lot of phone calls.”

“Good thing you got a WATS line,” Becker said. Then, in response to the silence, he added. “Must be a bitch.” Hemmings was not noted for his sense of humor.

“It’s time-consuming, what with one thing and another.”

“Have you turned up anything yet?”

“One unclaimed uniform at a Royal Cleaners in Ramsey belonging to one Mrs. Howard Elston, R.N. Unfortunately, Mrs. Elston died three weeks before the Wicker snatch, so I don’t think she’s the one we’re after.”

“Are you still at it?”

“I haven’t been told to stop.” Hemmings said. “Yet.”

“You know, it might be instructive to check the local hospitals and doctors’ offices to see if any nurse turned up missing all of a sudden.”

The phone was silent again. Becker thought at first that he had proposed a job of work huge enough to daunt even Hemmings.

“I think not,” Hemmings said at last.

“Too much?”

“Wrong direction,” Hemmings said. “I believe you are backing the wrong horse.”

“Why?”

“I take it you haven’t heard?”

“Hairy, I’m off the case. I haven’t heard anything. What is it?”

“They found the Reynolds boy.”

“Shit! God damn it!.. Where?”

“Off Route 84 in Connecticut between Bickford and Sandy Hook.”

“Same m.o.?”

“No autopsy yet, they just found him this morning, but I gather it’s the same. Beatings, trash bag, naked, so forth. But with a difference this time.”

“What?”

“A print.”

Becker caught his breath. “You said he was naked.”

“Indeed. But there was a half dollar in the bag this time. It had a hole in it, somebody was apparently wearing it as a medal. And on the half dollar, so I am told, were a thumbprint and an index finger as clean and neat as you could ask for.”

“Not the boy’s, tell me it’s not the boy’s prints.”

“I will do that. It is not the boy’s.”

“Have they traced it yet?”

“Oh, indeed. It popped up as fast as you please. There’s an outstanding warrant on the man in Pennsylvania.”

“Who is it?”

Hemmings paused.

“Don’t tell me if you don’t feel comfortable doing so,” Becker said. “Don’t jeopardize your job.”

“You’re on medical extension,” Hemmings said. “That’s right.”

“But still in the Bureau.”

“Don’t tell me if you’re afraid to.”

“Be good enough not to use reverse psychology on me, Becker. I may be in research, but I’m not a cretin.”

“Sorry, Hairy. But don’t make me beg, for Christ’s sake.”

“His name is Taylor Ashford, Jr. The warrant is for unlawful flight from the Pennsylvania State Correctional Facility, where he was undergoing psychiatric treatment.”

“A mental case.”

“I think you could say that.”

“What was he in for?”

“Apart from being crazy?”

“That’s not a crime in itself. Do you know what he was in for?”

“You can’t help yourself, can you, Becker? You know I pride myself on knowing things, so now you’re challenging me to prove it.”

“I asked you outright first.”

“So you did. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity of murdering his father, his mother, and his two siblings and was committed to an indefinite term in the bug house.”

It was Becker’s turn to be silent.

“So you see, it’s likely that I’ll be taken off the uniform chase as soon as Deputy Assistant Director Crist has the time to remember me at all.”

Jack was already all the way down the hill and standing in line for the mess hall when he remembered he had promised to give the girl from the Algonquin cabin his copy of Old Yeller. He left the queue for dinner and started back up toward his cabin, running at first until he hit the steeper grade, then settling into a fast walk. Dinner was one of his favorite times at camp. The counselors told stories and sang songs and put on skits and there was a feeling of camaraderie all around, even when the counselors urged them to shout out the superiority of their own cabin over all the others. Jack didn’t want to miss any of it, but he had promised he would let the girl from the Algonquin cabin borrow his copy of the book. He wasn’t sure why he felt so obliged to fulfill his promise to a girl, except that she had said she would really like to read it. It seemed an easy enough way to make her happy-except for the climb up the hill.

The path was wide enough for a truck to get up and down with the food supplies, but somehow when Jack walked it alone it seemed to narrow into nothing more than a rutted slice through the woods. When his whole cabin teemed down it together in the morning it was like a boulevard, pulsing with people and sounding with shouts and laughter. At those times he didn’t feel any more in the woods than he would on a playground with too many trees. Traversing the path alone, however, made Jack aware of the primitive nature of the surrounding forest. There probably weren’t any dangerous wild animals lurking among the trees: they had been told that often enough. There probably weren’t bad men with axes and knives, either. One of the counselors had assured them that bad men were restricted to the big cities and would be totally out of their element in the forest. Jack believed all of this because he had it directly from authority, and yet-there had been plenty of bad men in Sherwood Forest, just for an example. And madmen who lived in the woods and preyed on children, not witches exactly, but… Jack was vague on the details, but his sense of anxiety was real enough. And there were all those ghost stories the older kids liked to tell at night. But here he was, making his way to the cabin alone and the pride he felt in his courage more than outweighed his fears.