John sank behind the wheel of his police unit and fought the urge to drop his forehead against the steering wheel, or perhaps just open the door and lose his coffee cake. Several uniformed officers stood talking outside their squad cars in the parking lot across the street. He didn't need an audience.
Get it together, man, he told himself. You're a detective, for Chrissakes. But still, he'd felt more comfortable at Vistas on the James with Tyler Greenhouse pointing a gun at him than he felt right now. Whatever he said to Ma about this was likely to go worse than their prior conversation. And it was awful to know that his mother felt this horrible about herself.
He started the car and decided to drive to the beach. Only six blocks from home, and practically right next door to the fire company he had volunteered for when he was a teenager and wanted to be a fireman, it had provided a place for him to slip away and walk when things with Ma boiled over. He could walk around there and think it over, then go home once he'd figured out what to say.
As he drove down East Pembroke, the sun faded to a weak white glare behind gathering gray clouds, and a few drops of rain pattered his windshield. God damn it. Can't a person even walk on the beach today?
He decided to go anyway. Since they'd torn the old amusement park down, the pavilion provided a place to stand, at least, if the weather was too bad to walk.
Buckroe Beach had a long and varied history dating back to 1619. From the end of the new fishing pier, John liked to think you could see the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, if the skies were clear enough. Unless the air held not even a touch of humidity, that wasn't possible in the daytime, but you could see Thimble Shoals Lighthouse and the ten-story Nansemond On The Bay condominiums in Norfolk across the water.
John remembered coming to Sunday school at the sprawling old church across the street and marveling at the amusement park when it was here. The little amusement park lighthouse still stood in sharp relief before the water, but the antique hand-painted carousel played its cheerful tunes downtown now, and the bright white rails of the roller coaster no longer brushed the sky. Instead, John parked in front of a huge manicured lawn crisscrossed with orderly sidewalks—the very lot that had started all his mother's problems with the paper.
The temperature must have dropped twenty degrees in the past fifteen minutes. The wind tore at his shirt. The fresh smell of salt water tingled his nose; beyond the little retaining wall, the bay rushed and foamed. It was too early in spring for the beach crowd, but several people cast lines off the fishing pier, huddling in slickers against the wind and approaching rain.
A fine mist dampened his shirt. John walked around to the back of the pavilion—really just a raised concrete platform with a tall roof. The front of it stood some three feet off the ground, but the back melted into a gentle uphill slope.
Under the shelter, a young black kid in cutoffs and a yellow jacket sat listening to an iPod. Several yards away, a black girl and a tall, plump, tow-headed white girl in thin summer tank tops sat discussing the white girl's suspension from school.
"My problem is I can't control my temper," she said.
Buckroe Baptist's tall white steeple rose over sidewalks graduated with lampposts that looked like lanterns. Over its long rooftop the mist blew in waves, sideways, like smoke instead of rain. Directly in front of the pavilion, two enormous rosebushes thrust dozens of little blossoms like tiny pink fireworks into the surrounding gloom. A soaking wet Stars and Stripes slapped the flagpole between them.
Shouts of laughter rang out behind him. He turned to see a guy and a couple of shapely young girls in wetsuits paddling on boards in the rising surf. A black lab ran in the shallows from one surfer to the other, its whole body wriggling in a doggie joy-dance.
A black 1969 Mustang with blue and orange Boogie boards bungee-corded to the roof rolled up First Street past the giant rosebushes, slowing as the men inside caught sight of the girls. The driver, a young man with a mushroom cap of curly blond hair, parked on the street. He and three other lean young men in black and neon wetsuits piled out, took down their boards, and jogged for the beach. Weather like this saved surfers a long ride through the tunnel to Virginia Beach.
John stepped behind a concrete pillar as the surfers stampeded past. Mushroom Head's blond curls, darkening and flattening in the mist, made him think again of Cabbage Clay, whose mug shots boasted the same chin-length blond curls.
No way, John thought. Too easy. All the same, best to wander around the parking lot and check out license plates just in case.
In two minutes he stood in front of it: black 1969 Shelby Mustang GT 500 with Virginia plate number SO FINE, burned into his memory forever from the Pride case file. Clay's.
Now what?
Arresting Clay wasn't going to help him much. All he had to do was say, "Yeah, I was Pride's CI," and not talk.
He could tail the guy home.
If none of them had noticed his plain white detective's sedan, with its city license plates and supersize antenna, sprawled like a beached whale only yards away.
The boy with the iPod dangled his legs over the front of the pavilion, jumped down, and ambled off. The bay rolled and rumbled beyond the retaining wall.
John wandered back over to the pavilion and climbed up from the front. The two girls crowded closer to the center of the stage, away from the mist, and John caught, "My mom pushed me down the stairs." Shrieks and laughter from the surfers wove between the spray and the rushing sound of the water. The dog paddled under the pier.
The two girls clambered down off the pavilion and walked off, rubbing their hands up and down their bare forearms. The black Labrador swam too close to Clay as he pushed his Boogie board out into the choppy bay again, and Clay punched his board forward into the animal's rib cage. A startled yelp pierced the rumble and crash of the water.
From the left of the pier the guy with the dog yelled, "Why'd you hit my dog, asshole?" and crawl-stroked under the pier.
Clay yelled, "Keep it on a leash, asshole!" The first man swam faster, his arms chopping at the water.
John turned and slid down off the front of the pavilion to the ground. He had some nitrile gloves in the glove box of his vehicle; he retrieved a pair and jogged to the Mustang, careful not to actually think about what he was doing. For this kind of thing, one's mind had to be professionally blank.
Not that he had ever done it before. And if he got caught, he wouldn't ever be doing it again. Certainly not with a detective's badge on his belt.
He slipped the gloves on and looked around for a rock. A quick glance around at the empty park, and seconds later the driver's side window lay in pieces on Clay's front seat.
John rifled the glove box first. Yes, the car did still belong to Clay, although the registration wasn't any more help with a home address. The address on the registration was 1408 East Pembroke, which Solly had traced to a Mailboxes N' More months earlier. John glanced over his shoulder and checked the rest of the glove box: zilch. No guns, no drugs, nothing.
Clay kept a clean car, more or less, except for cigarette ashes, and a few crumpled fast food wrappers. Something gummy under the passenger's seat pulled at John's gloves. He tossed aside a moldy, half-eaten slice of pizza, and then shifted a leather jacket in the back seat. A crumpled and smudged mechanic's bill lay under it, and a couple of creased magazines.
An occasional shout rose above the little retaining wall; from here John couldn't hear much else. He glanced up, saw no one watching him, and hit the trunk button.
He jumped out and went through the trunk, trying not to look like he was hurrying. Spare tire, jack, tool box, road flares. Was this guy a dead end, or not? John had hoped for an easy answer.
He had the lie on his lips: I'm a police officer, I saw that someone broke your window. Another glance around showed that he didn't need it yet. His pulse hammering in his ears, he went back to the rear seat and checked the pockets of the leather jacket. A pack of cigarettes, one fancy lighter, and one cheap plastic one. Assorted change. He lifted the jacket high to look under it once more, as if that could make some magic piece of evidence appear. Zip.
He scanned the magazines. This guy was at Belle Isle on the night of July sixteenth wasn't likely to be written in any of them. But, on closer inspection, he did see the mailing address, under Clay's name. A new one: PO Box 33849, Hampton, VA 23669. At least that was something. John folded and pocketed the magazine, a battered copy of a popular firearms periodical.
He'd been at this close to ten minutes and he had to get out of here. Yet, the need for something more sucked at him.
He heard one of the wetsuited girls scream and looked up to see Clay and the dog owner throwing punches at each other. Clay's three buddies wavered on the sidelines, shouting encouragement and preparing to jump in, while one of the girls ran to her beach bag and drew out a cell phone.
John bent and slid his hand between all the seat backs and their lap cushions, looking for anything small that might have gotten stuck there.
In the front passenger's seat he hit something metal and came up with another cigarette lighter, a silver one with a "D" carved in elaborate script on the front. A chill shook him; he opened it and heard it make that familiar musical ping.
John turned the lighter over. "W.H. Pride" was engraved on the back.
He slid it back where he'd found it.
Hampton PD would come roaring down Pembroke any second. John closed the passenger door of the Mustang and strode back to his cruiser. He fired up the ignition, turned right, and took a circuitous route out to Mallory, out of sight of any Hampton patrol units that might happen to roll up. Mallory ran parallel to the beach and would take him the six blocks home.
***
"All I'm saying, Ma, is that kind of letter is inappropriate for a business transaction." His mother's eyes narrowed at him across the glass table with the kind of fury he used to see over the flyswatter or the belt. His stomach seized into a cramp.
He reached down and gripped his badge. Sometimes he needed a tangible reminder that he was grown up, and a cop. Ma wasn't dangerous like the perps he arrested every day, but after twenty-nine years of her, he still reacted as if she were.
Her face went red, twisting in an ugly sneer. Her upper lip curled. "Oh, so I'm 'inappropriate' now, after all I've done for you." Her head pecked back and forth with the words, like a chicken's. Childish, petulant, a little girl over dolls. "After all I've been through, Sandy thinks I'm doing pretty good!" Sandy was Ma's boss at the gym. She stood up and leaned over the table on her hands, barracuda teeth grinning right in his face. "As if you're so perfect! You could barely keep yourself on the team at Duke! You were the one calling me up crying because you almost flunked out and lost your scholarship. Grandma ponied up for all those extra tutors and you didn't make the NBA after all that, anyway!" This wasn't the first time John had heard this from her.
She sometimes took it back later. But it always left him wondering what she really thought of him.
"You didn't even finish your degree—got the whole family upset—and now you're just this lowly cop. And you had things a lot better than I did, Mister, so what's your excuse?" She swung her arm as if she were clearing the table. "So I don't even want to hear it!"
John just sat there. Unlike those other times, this time he couldn't afford to back down. Neither could she afford for him to, though she didn't seem to recognize that in the least.
She plunked back down in her chair, her eyes reddening. Tears spilled down her cheeks. "I don't care what some lieutenant says downtown. You try and do anything with your father creeping in your room at night, and your husband calling you a fat slob and beating you up. Dr. Stephens said I was doing real good not to be on drugs or alcohol!"
She sniffled, wiping tears. "Andy knew that. You know that. Everybody knows that." Reproaching eyes cut across at him over the table as she jerked her chin away. "I can't believe you're taking his side against me!"
John remembered sitting in this very spot at fifteen, reliving the horror of his mother's early life as it poured over his head and into his ears. It had been easier to forgive her for a lot of things after that. Then she dropped out of therapy, once because she couldn't afford it, and once for reasons unknown.
His reflection in the table glass looked younger, as if he really were still fifteen. What Ma said had always sounded right, and the way she saw things had always made sense. He ran his finger around the cold metal edges of his detective's badge. It had taken several years of dealing with all kinds of people on street patrol before the obvious truth had finally sunken in: Just because you had bad experiences didn't mean you had to respond to the world in the way that seemed so natural to people like Ma. People got raped, people got robbed, people got sexually abused, and most of them held down jobs, supported themselves, and didn't beat their kids. They didn't write letters like this to every boss, friend, or family member they had a disagreement with, and expect everyone to let it all slide. Inside Ma's world, things were different. Very, very different.
The job trained him to deal with people like this on a superficial level. The job got them inside his squad car, inside the jail, and inside the courtroom. It didn't teach him what to do when the person was his own mother.
His response here, whatever he thought of to say next—and he was thinking, and not coming up with much—would be adequate, for the job. It wouldn't be adequate as a son. John never knew what that response might sound like; the right words to get through to Ma never seemed to exist, and he felt permanently bad about that.
She sat there crying. Silence seemed like the best thing for the moment. He got up, went to the bathroom, and brought her back a box of tissues.
He sat down and pushed his hair off his damp forehead. "All I'm saying, Ma," he tried finally, "is if you do it again, he can file another complaint. And I don't know if I can help you the next time."
She tore a tissue from the box and blew her nose. "Writing a letter is not a crime!"
He didn't say anything.
"You agree with them! How can you agree with them? I don't know what I've done to make my own son hate me!" Her voice rose into an anguished moan.
"If I hated you, Ma, I wouldn't be interfering here. I'm keeping you out of jail and out of court, and that's the truth about all of this."
She only wept harder. She fell forward, folding her arms on the table, and hid her face. Her whole body convulsed. Her sobs rose into piercing, keening wails, the kind that had terrified John as a boy burrowed under the covers at the foot of his bed at night, listening to his parents argue. On the job, John had seen a lot of people cry, but no one else ever cried such wrenching sobs. To hear them was to know just how deeply one human being could suffer.
A six-year-old's desperation to do something to make it all better tugged at him. In the past he would have gotten up and given her a hug, apologized for whatever it was he had done, and held her until she felt better. But if he did that now, he might seem to be agreeing with her, and she had to cut this shit out this time. She absolutely had to.
He sat there in the gloom, not knowing what to do. A cardinal fluttered past the kitchen window to the bird feeder just outside. The feeder tipped and swung in the rain.
A treacherous thought crept into his brain: After throwing all that awful stuff from college at him like so many sharp knives, how could she expect him to want to comfort her? But it would have been wrong to leave, and she was crying so hard now she couldn't have heard anything he said, anyway—even if he had known what to say. So she cried on and on, and he sat.
It was like being trapped inside a lunatic asylum.
***
He walked into the post office later, on feet that didn't feel like his. The line of postal clerks and the few people standing there with their packages had a sort of glaze over them, as if he were looking through celluloid. A headache gripped his temples like a vise. He showed his badge and asked for the postmaster.
The postmaster gave him the name and address of the owner of post office box 33849. George E. Clay, 1408 East Pembroke Avenue. Clay's Mailboxes N' More address.
***
John had left Hampton for home and was fifteen minutes east of Richmond when his cell phone rang. He signaled and pulled off onto the shoulder of I-64. After the kind of day he'd had, there was no point in causing a cell phone-related crash.
He had a pretty good idea who it was. "Robin," he said into the phone, smiling.
"Yo, Robin!" Detective Rand Edward's cheerful voice boomed in his ear.
"Yeah, what's up?"
"Thought you'd like to know, Mr. Clay was involved in a little altercation at the beach a couple of hours ago."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Got another P.O. box mailing address on him, too, so that's something else to run down."
John winced. With any luck at all, nobody at the Buckroe post office would mention the fact that another cop was there earlier asking for the same information.
"And another little gift—his car got broken into during the altercation, so we got a chance to search that—you know, check for fingerprints, see if anything was stolen."
John smiled even more broadly. The Pride case was back out of cold storage! "Find anything interesting?" he said, trying to keep his voice neutral.
"Nah, not much," came the reply. "But at least we can get a place of residence now."
John started to say, "What?" and stopped himself just in time. Who the fuck did Hampton have searching these cars, anyway? He hoped it wasn't Edwards.
He briefly considered asking Edwards if they couldn't go over the car again, then thought better of it, because he'd already been to the post office. Shit. If he hadn't done that, he could specifically ask if the seats had been searched. But as it was ... better not to mention it. He thought that if Edwards found out he'd been to the P.O. with that very same address, before Hampton even had it—and then somehow knew to check the car seats—he might be cool with it, but he couldn't risk it.
Edwards said, "I'll let you know if we get a street address, and anything else that turns up."
"Thanks," said John. "Happy hunting."
John ended the call, and this time he did drop his forehead against the steering wheel and shake his head back and forth. He'd just been a heartbeat away from having a search warrant for Clay's house—wherever that was—from having the man behind bars, where he could be interrogated, where he couldn't disappear. John remembered Reg's story about Clay's trips and contacts in New York. Jesus fucking Christ, how could they miss that lighter? He needed, really needed, to punch someone at Hampton PD in the face. Even if it was Edwards.
That piece of evidence really was crucial. John and Peters had discussed a case of theirs with Pride outside of HQ the day before the murder—outside, because Pride had wanted a smoke. And he'd lit his cigar with that silver-pingy lighter.
The traffic on 64 flew past him as quickly as his own thoughts. This case was about to take a highly illegal turn.
And John's first step was to figure out where this cocksucker Clay lived.