Ridley Pearson - In Harm's Way

“… there? Sheriff?”

“Sorry about that,” Walt said. “Dropped the phone.”

“I don’t know what else I can tell you.”

“You’ll be at this number?”

“I will.”

“You’ve been very helpful.”

“You don’t sound too pleased.”

“I’ll be in touch.” Walt ended the call and holstered the BlackBerry.

The photo mounted to the hospital wall was itself again, showing the cheerful Hispanic girl. But the other child’s face-the one in Fiona’s photo-lingered beneath the surface, poisoning him.

At eight p.m., Walt was watching the Disney Channel with his daughters, the smell of burgers and home fries lingering in the air. Nikki lay on the floor playing Animal Crossing on her DS while simultaneously watching the show, something Walt disapproved of but tonight wasn’t going to make a big deal about. But it reminded him that as he made the transition back, away from depending so much on Lisa, that he had a responsibility to be consistent. The girls had learned to slip through the cracks, sometimes more like fissures, that existed between his way of parenting, Lisa’s discipline, and their mother’s basic fear of how to handle them. The girls had brokered these differences to their benefit, playing one against the other, citing established rules from another camp that likely didn’t exist, and effectively playing Walt’s guilt against him. There were at least two downsides to this: first, they got away with everything; second, they learned how to manipulate rather than face the music. He could cut them a certain amount of slack for the difficulty of their situation-the Taffy Twins, pulled and stretched in several directions at once-but for their sakes, it was time to lay down the law and see to it that, as much as humanly possible, Gail kept with the same program.

“Nikki, the TV or the DS, but not both,” he said.

“Mom lets me.”

“You want me to call her? If she says otherwise, it’ll cost you the DS for the week.”

She flipped the machine shut, stuck her lower lip out as she did so, and huffed as she pushed it aside.

“This show is boring,” Nikki said.

“No it isn’t,” Emily complained. “I like it.”

“Why don’t you read, Nikki? After this show, we’re going to read together. The three of us.”

“Oh, Dad…” Emily complained. To her sister she said, “See what you did?”

“Did not.”

“Did too!”

“Girls!” Walt said, raising his voice. “This show, then reading.” He looked over at them thinking that these two children defined him more than his job, more than any of his accomplishments. At school events he introduced himself with “I’m Nikki and Emily’s father.” He thought that summed it up.

His computer chirped from the living room.

“Skype,” the girls both said, nearly in unison.

“I’ll get it,” Walt announced. “But when this show’s over,” he said, already moving toward the dining table, “don’t start another one.”

“Yeah, yeah…” Nikki said, sounding entirely insincere.

He was going to have to work on that attitude of hers as well. “Have you got a pen?” Boldt asked once Walt had logged on.

“I do.”

“There can’t be a paper trail right now, although that’s being worked on.”

“Did you get my e-mail with Wynn’s shoe information?”

“I did. Thanks for that. More to come. Stay tuned.”

“Ready when you are.”

“These are the e-mail addresses on the list server: all people who requested to be notified of Gale’s parole. Some, I’m told, had restraining orders in place. Others were his victims. He had a pile of assault charges by the time they put him away. There are twenty-two on here. I’ll read them slowly. Here goes.”

Boldt, head down in the video, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, out of scale on his huge head and looking toylike, read the e-mail addresses carefully, calling out capitalization, underscores, and “dots,” working patiently through the list.

Walt read each back. Some were easy to identify the sender by the name, others wouldn’t be difficult to follow up on because of the host server-the name of a football team or a recognizable company. Five were generic and therefore obscure.

“They’re going to be tricky,” Walt said.

“I could ask Buddy Cornell to chase down the real names. There’s probably an e-mail trail in their system from these people, and I imagine at least some sign their names when sending a message. All he’s got to do is chase down those e-mails and read them. As long as we keep this by phone, and off any kind of paper trail, I think Buddy will help us.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Let me check it out for you.”

“I can Google the e-mail addresses as well. Sometimes that works. And I can cold-call the hosts. We’ve had to do that before and some of them are pretty cooperative.”

“And we have CIs here,” Boldt said, meaning criminal informants, “that are magicians when it comes to this stuff.”

“Anagrams,” Nikki’s girlish voice said from over Walt’s shoulder.

“Hello, young lady,” Boldt said from the screen.

Walt didn’t have to look over his shoulder because the camera view that showed his face in a small window also showed Nikki standing to his left.

“My friends’ parents…” she said, “they make anagrams out of my friends’ names so you can’t tell who they are. ’Cause of all the creepy stuff you talk about at school, Dad. Maybe they’re anagrams.”

Boldt bit back a smile on the screen.

“Worth a try,” he said.

“Looks like my daughters are going to help me,” Walt said.

“Can’t argue with that. I’ll give Buddy a call as backup.”

“Much appreciated.”

“And thanks again for the shoe stats. I think we may be able to pull this off by tomorrow sometime, if you’re available.”

“I’m here,” Walt confirmed.

They ended the call. Walt wrapped his arm around Nikki. “Okay, girl… looks like you just earned yourself a job. Double your allowance if you unscramble these names.”

“What about me?” Emily complained.

“You take half the names. Nikki takes half. Nikki goes first. You both get the extra allowance, and reading time is delayed by half an hour.”

“Hooray!” Nikki shouted, too close to her father’s ear.

The girls took to the work enthusiastically, thrilled to be needed, he realized. It alerted him to a glaring omission in his fathering: he took care of his girls, but he rarely asked them to take care of him. As the computer printer whined from the other room, Walt realized it wasn’t just the girls. He felt uncomfortable when others offered him their help-he looked at generosity as a debt, rather than as a gift. Even in the workplace, he had trouble delegating, pleased to have a deputy sheriff to handle that for him. He was sitting there contemplating the mistakes he’d made with Gail and was still making with the girls when Nikki delivered several pages of printout to him.

“We crossed out the ones that didn’t make any sense,” Emily explained.

“And we put arrows by the ones that sounded like names,” Nikki said.

He looked at his watch: they’d been at it for just over an hour, content to eat up reading time. He’d been occupied with Larry King and stewing over his personality shortcomings.

He praised their effort, placed the pages down onto the coffee table, and headed into their room; the three of them spent forty-five minutes reading about five kids inside Disney World after dark. The girls went to bed reluctantly, which was typical for any night, especially in summer when the sun didn’t set until nine-thirty and the sky glowed faintly well past ten p.m.