Michael Koryta - The Prophet

But he was thinking— seventeen, seventeen, seven-fucking-teen— and the liquor was stirring in his belly like acid.

She’d looked it, too. He couldn’t pretend otherwise, couldn’t even grasp at the pathetic shield of claiming she’d been one of those girls who looked older than her age. If anything, she maybe looked a little younger. Would’ve been carded for cigarettes by any gas station clerk. Went out of her way to tell him she was a senior at Baldwin-Wallace, and while his eyes had said No, his brain had said Who gives a shit and her money had said Just do the job, Adam.

“You didn’t think,” Salter asked, “that she might be lying to you?”

“Everyone lies to me, Salter. All the time. Did I think she might be lying? Sure. But caring about why she was lying, that’s just… look, she said what she wanted me to do and she had a reason for it and she had the letters.”

“And the cash,” Salter said.

Adam felt like breaking the smug prick’s nose, Salter sitting there with his bristling military crew cut and hooded eyes and his badge, looking at Adam as if he were one of the dancers back at Haslem’s, empty of dignity and hungry for a dollar.

“You don’t need a paycheck?” Adam said. “You don’t need to keep the mortgage paid?”

Salter’s gaze didn’t waver. “I’m not interested in the idea that you wanted work. I’m interested in the idea that she paid cash.”

Right. Because cash suggested her age, at least to Salter, who expected an adult would have written a check or asked if Adam accepted credit cards.

“In my business,” Adam said, “cash transactions aren’t unusual.”

This was true. A lot of people came to him with higher IQs than credit scores, and that wasn’t to say they were bright.

“I see.” Salter made a notation on his pad, and then said, “Let’s talk about the letters she had. You read them?”

“Yeah.” Seventeen. A child. A corpse.

“Did you make copies?”

“No. She’d already done that. What she had, they were copies. I never saw the originals. And I saw only one of the letters. But there were others.”

“What did that letter say?”

“It was from her dad. He was—he’d been—in prison. Got out and then I guess he didn’t write anymore for a while. She was upset about that. Then he started back up, but he wouldn’t say where he was, wouldn’t give a return address or anything. So it was just, you know, a one-way street. She wanted to be able to respond. Asked me to find him. An address, I mean.”

“You’re qualified for this sort of work?”

“I’m a licensed PI, you know that.”

Salter didn’t respond.

“It’s what I do,” Adam said. “Same thing I do every day. People skip out on bond, and I go find them. I bring them back. You know this.”

“Nobody had skipped out on a bond here.”

“Skill set,” Adam said. “Same skill set.”

“I see. So you used that skill set, and you found an address?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you remember it?”

“No.”

“But you have records?”

“Yeah. Yes.”

“She didn’t give you a physical address? Just the phone number?”

“Just the phone number. She said she was a student at—”

“Baldwin-Wallace,” Salter said. “Yes. She say how she picked you for the job?”

“She said she had a referral.” Adam wished he’d stopped for a mint or some gum. He was breathing beer out with every word, and it made them seem flimsy, pathetic.

“We understand this part,” Salter said. “Her boyfriend told us. The referral, if we can call it that, came from him. He plays football for your brother.”

“Plays?” Adam said. “Like, right now? On this team?”

“Like right now,” Salter said, nodding. “Colin Mears? I gather he and his family are pretty close to your brother. There was some conversation about you, and I guess Colin understood you to be a detective.”

Adam let that glide by. Understood you to be, not understands that you are. Who cared? Who cared what Salter thought? What mattered here was a girl with glitter nail polish. What mattered was finding the sick son of a bitch who’d killed her, finding him and ending him. Because if you didn’t… if he just stayed out there…

“It’s a shame she lied to you,” Salter said, “and a shame you didn’t ask for any sort of identification. Because if you’d been operating with her real name, you’d have found her father easily. At Mansfield Correctional.”

Adam stared at him. “He never left?”

“Never left. He’s been there seven years. We’ve got people interviewing him right now. He says he wrote his last letter in August. So whoever kept writing? Whoever it is you found for her? We need to find him. Fast.”

“Makes no sense,” Adam said.

“What?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Salter. I saw the letter, okay? The guy who wrote it was trying not to see her.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. I read the damn—”

“You’ve told me that. But it seems like he was tossing a lot of breadcrumbs out for someone who didn’t want anyone following the trail. Telling her he was in town, then giving her his landlord’s name? This to a girl who was actively seeking contact with him? That doesn’t strike you as contradictory?”

These were fair points, but still Adam shook his head.

“He knew where to find her, clearly. So what’s the point in that kind of a game?”

“I’m not sure,” Salter said. “But games aren’t uncommon with stalking. Not at all.”

“It’s so patient, though,” Adam said. “Waiting to see if she’d respond? If she’d look for him? It’s too damn patient.”

“Maybe he wasn’t so patient. Maybe when she showed up at his door, it rushed him.”

Adam remembered the numbers then. They floated toward him on a black breeze: 7330. On Shadow Wood Lane, yes. That was the address, that was the door at which she’d arrived.

That was where he’d sent her.

6

WHEN BETH CAME DOWNSTAIRS to greet Kent, it was past two in the morning but she didn’t show any surprise. During the season, hours like this were no cause for alarm for a coach’s wife, and in the years before they’d had children, hours like this had been Beth’s norm. She’d been an ER nurse and intended to return to it once Lisa and Andrew were old enough. The night shift had never ebbed away from her; Kent sometimes found her making coffee at four in the morning simply because she knew better than to fight for a return to sleep.

Tonight, though, she’d been asleep. He could tell that from her foggy smile and the way her long blond hair was fuzzed out from the pillow. “Still perfect,” she said. “Nice work, babe.”

He’d opened the refrigerator to get a bottle of water and in the shaft of white light she saw something that made her say, “Hon?” in a concerned voice.

He took the water out and let the door swing shut and they were standing in darkness when he told her that Rachel Bond was dead.

“Someone killed that poor girl? Murdered her?” she said, her reflex response to bad news, stating the facts and considering them, the practiced reaction of someone who had been required to show poise in the face of crisis. Tonight it chafed. Scream, he wanted to say, cry, shout, break down, because no quality was so annoying in someone else as the very one you didn’t like in yourself. He’d spent the whole night trying to offer calm and strength and to repress emotion. He was tired of that.

Beth crossed the kitchen and took him in her arms then and the irritable edge that sorrow and fatigue had given him melted into her warmth. He held her while he told her about the police station, all that had been said, Stan Salter and Colin Mears and the news about Adam.