Embrace the Wolf Page 3

  We shook hands and I shrugged. I’d seen a lot of dead ends in my day. Most weren’t as polite as this. The information would have been helpful, but not crucial. Mrs. Saunders said that the police sergeant Peter DeVito probably knew her husband best.

  The police station wasn’t too far so I figured I’d head straight up there. If DeVito was in, maybe he and I could talk over lunch. Maybe we couldn’t talk at all. I never know with cops how they’ll react to me. Lots of them see me as a nuisance, an intrusion, a troublemaker. Sometimes I am. Hopefully they deserve the trouble I’m making. Some of them know their limitations: budgets that you can’t budge, caseloads that become overloads, docket backups, and unspeedy trials. Sometimes they welcome what I can do that they can’t and they’re helpful. Cops like that aren’t the rule in my experience. They are a pleasant surprise. I hoped Sergeant Peter DeVito would be one.

  I jogged up the station house steps, let a lady cop through the door, and went inside. The cop on desk duty asked me what I wanted. I showed him my license and said I wanted Sergeant DeVito. If his face was any indicator, he was passing a kidney stone. I told him it was about the Saunders case. He made a quick recovery and got on the intercom.

  “Hey Pete, there’s a P.I. here about the Saunders case.”

  “On my way down.”

  Pete DeVito slogged grimly down the stairs fighting the tide of his own reluctance. He was in his fifties with a steel gray flattop, a rebuilt nose, and no laugh lines at all. His gait had the awkward roll of a weight lifter. He had the size too. We shook hands.

  “Pete DeVito.”

  “Leo Haggerty.”

  “Unless you’ve got two kids to turn in out in your car, I’m not sure we’ve got anything to talk about.”

  “I wish I did. But it’s about Herb Saunders. He’s disappeared. Left a crazy note for his wife. She says he hasn’t been like this in years. She also says you know him as well as anyone. I was hoping you’d give me some clues as to where to look for him.”

  DeVito shrugged and looked at the clock, “All right. Hey Nick. I’m goin’ to lunch with this guy. Be back in an hour. Okay?”

  “Yeah, Sarge.”

  DeVito went back up and came down with his jacket on. His holster now discreetly covered, he could walk among the civilians. We went out, and DeVito looked up and down Wisconsin Avenue trying to pick up the scent of food in the air and decide where to eat.

  “There’s a Chinese place down the road. They’ve got a back room. We can talk.”

  We went to his car and down to the restaurant. The place was packed. DeVito slid around the line and went to the hostess. A little head nodding and badge showing and the owner appeared. More head nodding, a little arm waving, a lot of smiling all around. DeVito waved me up front. We went around the corner to a cordoned off banquet room, marked This Section Closed. The sign was turned around and we were seated.

  DeVito leaned back in his chair and took the menus from the waitress. I looked at it and ordered, as did he. She slipped silently away.

  “All right. Herb Saunders has disappeared. As of when?”

  “Yesterday.”

  “You said he wrote a letter to Maggie?”

  “Yeah. Here it is.”

  He looked at it and handed it back to me. “Vintage Herb. He ain’t been like that for years. Not since he used to get the crackpot calls and letters. He’d get so psyched up over a ‘lead’ he’d be wired, wouldn’t sleep. He’d pace up and down. Show up at the station all hours. Then he’d crash. Drink himself blind to come down. That’s when he’d be trouble.

  “How so?”

  “Oh, he’d get in fights. He’d decide to search a place. Like at 3 A.M. with a crowbar for a key. Sometimes I thought he had a death wish. Just looking for someone to put his lights out. Problem was he’s a tough cookie, and with a little sour mash propellant in him he was hard to bring down. I went out and brought him in a few times. Sat up all night with him, talking, pouring coffee into him. Getting him through the night into the next day.”

  “How long have you been on this case?”

  “Since day one. I took some time off for a while. Thought maybe a fresh perspective would turn something up. It didn’t. So I asked to be put back on it. Not too long ago, actually.” The waitress returned with our food. DeVito dug right in and after a couple of wolfish swallows, stopped and wiped his mouth.

  “Listen, when you came in talking about the Saunders case I got short not ’cause I don’t care. Believe me I care, but I’ve got no patience left. Too many kooka-rookas have tried to get their kicks on this case and I’m getting too old to still be nice about it. You can help, great; you’re a wacko then piss off. Mind you, I follow up everything. Everything. I just ain’t polite any more.”

  “You have any theories about it?”

  “Theories, yeah. You got only a couple of ways to go on a case like this.” He counted on his fingers, “Runaway, murder, or abduction. Never been a shred of evidence of a runaway situation. No reason to suspect a simple homicide. Why? What reason? Who would want to simply kill them? The family was solid, no underworld connections, no drugs, no gambling. No need to teach them a lesson. That leaves abduction. Why? Money? No ransom was ever demanded, no political extortion. They weren’t a prominent family. No, that just leaves us with the perverts. My theory is somebody stole those kids to abuse them and then killed them when he was done, and they’ve been dead a long time.”

  “Sometimes they don’t. They show up years later.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. Usually that’s real little kids stolen by crazy women who want babies. So they take care of the kid and don’t hurt it. Problem is we’ve never had a woman associated with this case. Porterfield saw a man in that car.”

  “What about that California case. The kidnapper was a man?”

  “Yeah, but this is different.”

  “How so?”

  DeVito put his face in his palm and looked away and then back at me. Hard. “Okay, I don’t know why but I’ll show you something when we get back to the station. The only lead we ever had.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Maybe you can do something with this. Find a new angle. Lord knows I don’t know any more about this case than I did the day it happened.” The exhaustion of four years of keeping the sails of hope up in the dead calm of this mystery showed on DeVito’s face. He shook his head, “It’s a killer you know.”

  I nodded.

  “You know what a ‘cannibal case’ is?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well this is one of them. It eats up everyone it touches. Me, Porterfield, the Saunders, all the families, my men. I had to take a leave of absence after about a year on the case. My wife was ready to leave me. I had a burn in my gut. You’d a thought I was gargling with Drano. I had a hotline rigged into the house. I was up and out all the time, any day of the week for a year following leads. I wanted to find those kids so bad. Just give’em back to their folks and make all that hurt go away. Jesus, we never made one bit of progress on this. Son of a bitch was a genius or just lucky. I always thought it was a drifter. Somebody just passing through. A one-man plague stalking this country. ‘The kid killer.’ Someday we’ll arrest some 60-year-old vagrant, and in the drunk tank he’ll start to talk and it’ll all unravel. It’ll dwarf anything we ever imagined.”

  DeVito ate some more and began to talk again. He’d probably never been asked how he felt about the case, the helpless helper, and he had a lot to empty himself of. I sipped some tea.

  “That’s what this case did to me. Made me believe in magic. You know early on I did community work. Lots of ‘safety tips.’ Do this and you’ll be okay. Don’t do this, it’s dangerous. Shit. Brave talk. The only ones safe are the dead! Really tossed me over. I got paranoid. I’d look at my kids. They were older, but just as vulnerable. Nothing I could do. Couldn’t save them from this thing out there. I couldn’t find these kids. Man, I really knew where Saunders was coming from.”

  “You e
ver suspect him?”

  “Oh hell, yes. Early on. Had to. Case like this odds are it’s not a parent, but that don’t make it impossible. Oh, we kept him under surveillance for quite a while. Lie detector. The whole shebang. That’s how I got called to pick him up from the bars. No, he was clean all the way. Really killed me to have done that after a while. The guy really loved his kids you know. He’d never have touched them. That I know. That’s a fact that’s true. Maybe the only thing I know about this case. But I do know that Herb Saunders lived for those kids. Now he’s dying for them. I think about the helplessness. You love them so much. They’re so much a part of you. I think that’s what love is. You let someone get as important to you as yourself. You hurt their hurt. You know those kids are in pain and frightened as long as they’re away from you. Every moment you know that pain is there. Until it’s over one way or another you know it’s pain they feel and you feel it. You want to stop it. You’d do anything to stop it. And you sit there, helpless to end the pain. It’ll make you crazy. Herb couldn’t stand that. I think the drinking, the fights were ways to stop the pain, the helplessness.”

  “You ever suspect Porterfield?”

  DeVito chuckled sadly. “Oh yeah. I suspect everyone. Put a tail on myself for a while. You know, a schizo, a split personality. Had to ask myself why I was so obsessed by this case. It’s my nightmare. It’s everybody’s nightmare. Somebody just tears a hunk out of you and you can’t give it up for dead. What if they come back someday? The guilt would kill you. What if. Those two words’ll make you crazy. What if. What if. You step right through a doorway and what is, is gone. There’s no time. Limbo, man. I’d rather go to hell. It’s the waiting that does you in. You can’t go on. You can’t go back. You’re frozen there. Your guts being torn out forever.”

  I thought of the eagles eating at Prometheus. It took Hercules to rescue him. Half man, half god. It would take more than me or DeVito had to put an end to this.

  “I think that’s what happened to Herb. He ‘what iffed’ himself right around the bend. Seems like it’s a one way street to me and Herb didn’t know how to go in reverse. He never did.”

  I tried to redirect DeVito. “What about Porterfield?”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry. I get lost in this sometimes. Porterfield. Yeah, we checked him out. A cop gets a kid’s trust pretty easily. Good access there. He gave us our only lead. Could have been a throwaway, a fake to misdirect us. It never panned out. Maybe there was no man. But we found the car. Maybe Porterfield planted it. We watched him for a long time. He never did anything suspicious. His fuck-up cost him his career. Probably more. He was disciplined by a review board. They didn’t need to. The man would have killed himself if he thought it would get the kids back. Wanted to be transferred to the investigating team. Rode around the clock for days looking for the car. Just like all of us, it ate him up. He took an early retirement. He was a good man who made a mistake. Everything else about him got lost or forgotten. He was the man who let them slip through his fingers and that’s it. One hell of an epitaph, I’ll tell you. People may forgive you, but life’s a pretty ruthless proposition.” DeVito wiped his mouth and signaled for the check. We split it and left a healthy tip—perhaps some kind of offering to a god of mercy indeterminate. DeVito looked at me with baffled sadness. A fisherman who’d tried to throw a net over tomorrow and came up empty. We left together.

  Chapter 6

  At the station DeVito went back to the records room. He came back with a sealed parcel. “Let’s go down to the viewing room. It’s in the basement.”

  I trotted after him.

  DeVito opened the pouch and took out a video cassette. He turned on a TV monitor and made some adjustments to the attached recorder. He looked back at me. “This is the only lead we’ve ever had on this case. We found the car Porterfield saw two days later. We went over that thing like it was a flying saucer. Nothing. I mean nothing.… But this tape. Had to have been left there on purpose. This bastard was too careful. It was either a message to us or so unrelated that he didn’t care. I tend to believe the latter because we never got anywhere with this. We talked to every tape maker, distributor, sales outlet in the whole metropolitan area. I talked to an expert on the West Coast. The only thing we know is it’s local and amateur. We looked up the people in this in every mug book in the area. I was on 14th Street for days talking to everybody down there. Christ, I even got picked up in a sweep. Nothing.”

  DeVito turned off the lights, came back, and sat next to me. “Hold on to your seat. I’m going to show you an act that’s got so many Xs, nobody’s old enough to see it.” He aimed the remote control at the set like a sword, and it lit up.

  There was a man standing in the center of the screen. He had a black hood over his face and nothing else on. In his left hand was a leash. At the end of it on all fours was a nude woman with very close-cropped blond hair. She looked straight into the camera with a face that looked older than time. The man jerked on the leash and barked, “come.” He began to walk across the barren room with the woman crawling on all fours. The leash snapped again. “Sit.” The woman gasped and dropped her ass to the ground. The man undid the choke collar and strode away from her. He turned crisply and clapped his hands. “Come.” The woman moved quickly across the floor to him, her ass wagging from side to side. My lunch was starting to clot. The trainer snarled, “down.” She dropped on her elbows and knees and slowly rolled her head and eyes up at him. “Roll over, bitch.” She rolled over and assumed the canine submissive position: hind legs apart, forelegs folded up, throat bared. He knelt next to her and stroked and probed her everywhere, cooing “good girl, good girl.” He stood again and went off screen and returned with a chair. He sat and commanded, “up.” The woman got on her knees and worked her way between his legs. He stroked her under the chin and behind the ears. He said, “suck” and she did. Her machine mouth drove on as relentless as progress. I’d had enough. DeVito turned it off, hit the lights, looked at me, and shook his head. “You see why I’m not optimistic? That’s one hateful bastard if that’s him.” He put the cassette back in its pouch and sealed it again. I wished the images would recede as quickly as that. We shook hands, and he wished me good luck. I told him I’d keep him posted. We trudged up from the basement. On the way to my car I knew what I had to do. The thought left me more than a little cold. Time to talk to Lester Kroll, king of the trolls.

  Chapter 7

  Father Augustus Shannon thought, One more to go, then I can relax. Not the best attitude I know, but my back has been killing me. Maybe I need orthopedic shoes. Maybe one leg’s longer than the other. Who knows. Just get me through this day. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and rubbed his eyes. He squinted when he put them back on and waited to hear the door close on the other side. The penitent began, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was … too long ago, Father.” Father Shannon remembered that the last person was a stranger, a face new to the flock. He’d been here long enough to know most of his parish by voice. The silence went on for a while. Father Augustus said, “Yes, my son?”

  “That’s a good point, Father. Am I your son? I mean, do you think there’s a place in your heaven for me, Father? I’ve gone quite aways astray.”

  “God’s love is infinite as is his forgiveness. Repent your ways and all things are possible.” Father Shannon had often heard this defiance and doubt in his adolescent congregation members.

  “That’s an interesting concept. Let me tell you my story first. I’ve refined myself quite a bit over the years. It’s nice to be able to sit here in the dark, though I wish it were cooler, and tell someone about myself. Unburden myself, as it were. I mean that’s what confession is, isn’t it? Oh, by the way, before we begin. What I say here is confidential, isn’t it? I mean absolutely confidential. You Catholics are ones for absolutes?”

  “What you say here is absolutely confidential without exception, provided it is a confession of sin in hopes of reconciliation with your Go
d.” Father Shannon was used to the need for certainty among penitents that this was an inviolate secrecy. It was essential to the task of seeking God’s forgiveness that they be free to pursue it without fear of the censure of their fellow men. “You said ‘you Catholics.’ Are you not a Catholic, my son?”

  “Oh, I’m not sure what I am these days.” The man laughed. “First off, it’s been quite a while, as I said. Seven years to be precise. Frankly, I didn’t recognize you.” The man laughed again.

  “You wouldn’t. I was assigned to this parish after Father Simons retired last year.”

  “Well, that changes things a bit.” There was a pause, then, “This will do though. Let me tell you a story about myself. It’s quite illuminating, really opened up my eyes to reality. Taught me a lot of lessons about myself that I’ve been pursuing ever since. When I was a younger man I sought the company of prostitutes. Unusual ones, for I sought unusual pleasures. The details are unnecessary, but I was pursuing my pleasure with one, a woman I had used quite often. I was lost in myself enacting our favorite game as I always did, when she started to laugh. She had looked up at us in the mirror and was laughing at me. I suddenly realized she had been laughing at me all the time. I stopped playing with her and began to beat her. I smashed her face. That mocking mouth I emptied of teeth. I hauled her around by her hair, slamming her head into the wall. Pretty soon there was blood everywhere. I took her head in my hands and looked into her face. She looked like a slam-dunked jelly donut. And what do you suppose I learned in that moment, Father? Let me tell you. I saw that there was no one there to laugh at me. There was no place for her to hide. I had reeled her entire being up from the depths like one of those grotesque lantern fish, so poorly adapted to the surface that they just lay there stunned. So did she. All of her was on the surface. Those bulging eyes looking at me for mercy, for an end to it all. I had turned her inside out like a pocket and emptied her of everything, every wish, every dream, every secret. Her life was reduced to one simple sentence: Don’t hurt me. That was all there was. A simple purity to our relationship. I could inflict pain or not. She would suffer or not. There was nothing else. There’s nothing like pain to bring people together. I’d never felt closer to anyone in my whole life. I wanted to thank her for having let me learn that beautiful lesson from her. So I let her live. I fixed her first. I really don’t know if she lived through that night or not. Capricious mercy pleased me also. I had found the key to grasping the mystery of other people. They’re so slippery and elusive. Don’t you find that, Father? It’s so hard to get the true measure of a person, to know, really know, if their heart is pure. Father? Oh Father, please don’t go mute on me. We’ve only just begun. You wouldn’t want me to leave angry would you?”