Russell, Ron and Taylor stayed at Carson's apartment to search it yet again. They'd found a T-shirt stained in blood, but no traces of the knife or the gun.
Brock decided it was useless to go back to the field office and wait there for the court order to arrest Tommy Ledger. Hank volunteered to go to his workplace, where he'd been earlier to arrest Carson. So Brock led the others to Ledger's home address, to keep an eye on the place.
On their way out of the precinct, Brock saw Hank climb into Gillian's car. She was behind the wheel, back to her jeans and flannel, and he couldn't keep his eyes from following her as she drove away. He got into the SUV a little puzzled. She was willingly missing Ledger's arrest?
You kicked her out of the case, remember, Brockner? And after the last couple of days, would you blame her if she doesn't want you around? He started the engine with a sigh. How would he even begin to make it up to her?
Soon Hank reported that Ledger had abandoned his workplace after Carson's arrest, and nobody had the slightest idea where he might be. Which set Tanya on one of her manhunts through street cameras.
Brock and the others had only been ten minutes around Ledge's house when a uniform brought the court order. So they led the locals to the front door.
He wasn't home. On the bright side, his stinky drunk father tried to stop them from entering the house, so Brock arrested him for obstruction of justice.
Ledger's shocked, beaten mother cringed in a corner as they spread all over the house. Aldana approached her, warm and soothing, and got her to stutter a few words.
When Brock came back from the second floor, Aldana shook her head. "She says Tommy hardly comes home these days."
That was enough for him. Ledger's protector had been taken away from him and his home was hell on earth. There was only one place he had left to try to hide away. So he called Russell. They needed to leave Carson's apartment just as they'd found it and send all the police away.
"You and Bellison circle your way back and wait for us. Ledger will show up as soon as he feels sure the police is gone," he said.
Aldana asked Banks to leave a couple of female officers there and send an ambulance. At the others' questioning frowns, she explained, "I wanna stay with her. I think I can get her to talk some more."
Brock narrowed his eyes. "What is it you want to know, Miles?"
She arched her eyebrows. "Tommy is their only son, right? Then why do they have three single bedrooms upstairs?"
That was Gillian's right-hand talking, so he decided to trust her instinct. Maybe there was something more about the Ledger family they needed to know.
Tanya and Kurt found Ledger on a feed from a street camera near his workplace, and followed him from there. They lost him at the corner of Blue Hill Avenue and River, but that was just a few streets away from Carson's apartment, so it was more than enough to confirm Brock's theory.
Russell, Ron and Taylor kept an eye on Carson's building until the others arrived. Hank and Gillian joined them there. All of them stayed scattered around in a three-street ratio. Banks kept a SWAT team and his uniforms half a mile away.
It was a long wait, because Ledger was too scared to show up in broad daylight. But all of them were used to long watches. They took turns to fetch a bite, and chattered over the radio as they used to.
Brock wasn't the least bit interested in listening to their banter, but he kept his earphone on, alone in the SUV. It kept him distracted from his thoughts, which seemed to roam out of control since that moment with Gillian outside the interrogation room. And he also wanted to hear if she said something, and what. But either she didn't have her mike on, or she was oddly silent, because he didn't hear a single word from her.
As the afternoon came slowly to an end, Aldana called them from Ledger's house. She'd been right staying back, and now she gave them the one missing piece of the puzzle.
"When the Ledgers got married, they planned to have many children, so they bought a house for a large family," she said, as she walked out of the house for a while, to speak out of Mrs. Ledger's earshot. "But after Tommy was born, Mr. Ledger got used to be too drunk to keep a steady job, or function as a husband. So there were no more children, and they were soon out of savings. Then Mrs. Ledger came up with the idea of giving some use to those spare rooms they had. She did some rehab on them and offered them for rent. She had her first tenant back in 2001, and soon the three rooms were taken. Tenants may come and go, but some of them stayed longer that the others. One of them was this cute, shy young man who took a room in late 2004. She can't remember his name, but she does remember that he grew very fond of Tommy, who was in high school back then."
"Are you talking about the Libra?" asked Hank.
"Yep. I asked Tanya to send me a picture of him to show to Mrs. Ledger. You should've seen her smile at seeing his face again. Because he was so quiet and neat, you know? And he was so nice to Tommy. He'd hardly trade a word with her or the other tenants. But he would spend hours with her son. He called Tommy 'my one true friend.' And that meant the world for the boy, 'cause he'd never had a real friend before. He had so many problems at school and never made any friend. And his father was always so hard on them. But Tommy loved this man. He'd wait for the man to share a while even when the man came back home late at night. The boy was brokenhearted when the man had to leave, in 2006."
"You mean the Libra told the boy who he was?" asked Fred.
"No," Aldana replied. "Mrs. Ledger said he left a few things behind when moved out, and Tommy kept those objects like presents. She thinks there was a notebook among those things."
"A journal?" ventured Ron.
"It'd make sense," Russell said. "What d'you think, Brock?"
"Yes, it would make sense. Maybe he sympathized with the abused boy, and that made their bond strong enough for him to leave him an account of what he couldn't share with him aloud," said Brock.
"And a way to deal with the abuse," said Russell, thoughtfully.
"So years later, when Carson takes him under his wing in jail, Tommy tells him about his bestie," said Banks.
"And his crazy ideas about who his lost friend really was," said Hank.
"And Carson thinks this story could be a great way to make his grand entrance back to society," said Fred.
"A way to act out on his sadism and get away with it," said Russell.
"Can I barf now?" grunted Ron.
Brock nodded to himself. The puzzle was finally complete. Now he only needed to bring it to an end. Then he could try to find a way to make amends with Gillian.