Lee Child - MatchUp

“I’m going to read you your rights,” Tarley said.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“Just listen,” she ordered. “Hear him out. This is all part of the deal.”

Weeks sullenly let Tarley go through his spiel. When the detective finished, the room was silent apart from the rush of air through the vents. She peered at Weeks for a long intense moment and remembered when her own son had been held for questioning. She felt some empathy for this kid, whatever he was wrapped up in.

“Tell me about Michael Drake, and what he’s doing up there in the woods.”

Weeks’s Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times. He brushed his long hair back from his eyes and shrugged. “He comes up and fishes.”

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about.”

A muscle worked in the boy’s jaw. He looked at Tarley and said, “My old man paid the money back. You heard that. Can I go now?”

Tarley said, “If you burglarize a place, you don’t get a free pass for giving the money back. And then there’s the murder.”

Weeks’s mouth dropped open. He blinked and stared at Regan again. “Who was murdered?”

“A completely innocent fisherman from North Dakota,” she said. “We believe whoever did it shot the wrong guy. The man they were trying to shoot saw a nearly naked girl in that RV at Drake’s, and whoever was behind it decided they had to get rid of him.”

Weeks stared at the table. “Oh, God. Shit.”

“What do you know, Phillip? Who are those people?”

He glanced wildly around the room, as if searching for a way out. “They’ll kill me, too. If I talk. They said it. That they’d kill me if they ever saw me talking to a cop.”

Tears welled in his eyes.

She said, “It’ll be hard for them to kill anyone, when they’re doing life without parole.”

“You can’t keep me safe.”

“I can.”

He looked to Tarley who nodded his assessment.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Okay.”

A moment of silence passed.

“What happened to them kids?” Weeks asked. “The girl that the guy saw. The one who was almost naked. What happened to her? Is she there? Is she okay? Are the other ones okay?” He was frantic now, both legs bouncing crazily under the table. “Carla and Al are mean people. Are the kids still up there?”

“I thought the woman’s name was Cheryl,” she said. “Or maybe Delores.”

“Not if they were in that RV. That was Carla and Al,” he said urgently.

All his arguments about not talking seemed to have vanished.

“Do Carla and Al have a last name?”

“I think Al’s is Dickens or, no, Dicker. That’s it. I don’t know Carla’s. I never heard. I don’t know much about them.” He squeezed his eyes closed in concentration. “Except maybe they’re from Nevada. I think I heard that once, but I’m not sure.”

“How often have you seen them at Drake’s?”

“A bunch. They come up four, maybe five times a year, in the RV.”

“And what do they do?”

He looked at Regan as if she were slow on the uptake. “They make movies, ya know, and take pictures either in the cabin, Drake’s house, or out in the woods around there.”

“You’ve seen them?”

He nodded.

“Children having sex?”

“Sometimes, the older ones with Al, mostly, and with each other,” Weeks said, his voice going low.

“Were you ever involved in that?”

Weeks looked away, scared, maybe, shamed for sure. Then he nodded. “Not for a long time. Not for a couple of years. I got too old. Are you going to put me in prison?”

Her heart bled for the kid, for what he’d been through. Who knew where his mother was, or if she was alive or dead. The old man abused and beat him, then used him for profit, forcing him to pose and have sex.

“No, Phillip. What we’d like to do is to get a complete story from you. Everything you know about Michael Drake and Carla and Al, and then, someday, we’ll want you to talk about it in a courtroom,” she said. “But you won’t be going to prison. You’re a victim here.”

But the people who did this?

Hell wasn’t bad enough for them.

Tarley got sandwiches, chips, and soft drinks, and though there was an out-of-sight recorder covering the interview room, he’d also brought out a small digital recorder that Weeks could see. They talked for an hour, leading the kid through a basic statement. As Regan had expected, Weeks had left his home before Flowers, Johnson, and Katy Waller had been to Weeks’s father’s trailer and to Drake’s log cabin, so Phillip knew nothing about the events that led to the shooting of Cain. His father knew about the child porn but had nothing to do with its production.

“He doesn’t know anything about cameras or lights or any of that shit,” he said demolishing a ham and cheese, then washing it all down with a huge swallow of Dr Pepper. “He just took care of the property when Drake wasn’t there.”

His father had guns, Weeks said. Both rifles and handguns, and he was a hunter.

“It’s not a big deal though. Everybody up there’s got guns. Everybody hunts. That’s why you’re up there,” he said, then finished the final half of his sandwich and tore open a small bag of Doritos.

“So Drake has guns?” she asked.

“I never seen one. Maybe he’s the one guy around Grizzly Falls who doesn’t hunt. He fishes, though. And he runs the cameras.”

“Is he sexually involved with the kids?”

“He doesn’t do the sex. He makes the movies and sells them.”

“Where does he get the kids?”

“Dunno.”

“You never spoke to any of ’em.”

“If I did, my dad would beat me. He’s got a special belt.”

She couldn’t wait to put Bart Weeks behind bars.

She asked a few more questions, but Phillip had told them everything he knew. When they were done, Tarley told Weeks that he’d be placed in a cell by himself, for his own protection. He’d be allowed to have most of his own belongings in the cell and would be fed separately.

“Almost like a motel,” the detective said. “Keeping you safe. You’re too valuable to be walking around where somebody might hurt you.”

After Weeks had been put away, Tarley walked Regan outside where night had fallen, the sky stretching dark above the illumination of the streetlights.

“I think you got ’em.”

God, she hoped.

She checked her watch. Just after ten p.m. Flowers and Johnson would probably be in the woods around Drake’s place. Given Phillip Weeks’s statement, and the probable imminent arrest of the RV couple, they had enough evidence to raid Drake’s place, could easily get a warrant, and probably didn’t need anything that Flowers and Johnson might turn up.

She called them from the front steps of the police station, but there was no answer. She left a message and went to look for a motel where she could wait for them to call back.

VIRGIL AND JOHNSON HAD WALKED up the road to Drake’s cabin, staying to the side, where they could step back into the brush if anyone came along. Nobody did, and when they crept up the road across from the cabin, they couldn’t see the BMW they’d noticed on their first visit, though the Jeep remained in the open garage.

Virgil whispered, “Garage first. See if the other car’s here.”

They made a long circle through the forest around Drake’s cabin, pausing every minute or so for one of them to tell the other to be more quiet. That was almost impossible. The brush was so dense that they were constantly tangled up in it. Virgil finally took out a flashlight and splashed its beam on the ground at his feet, tilted back enough that Johnson could see where to step. They emerged behind the garage, with the secondary cabin to their left. The garage had a back window and, through it, they could see that the second and third stalls were empty. Nothing inside but some lawn-care machinery and the Jeep.