Boy Crucified (6 page)

He hung up before I could answer.

I looked at my e-mail. Jensen had contacted the Illinois State Police, who had visited the Whiteheads that morning. They had no idea where their son was, hadn’t heard from him “in years.” The son had left no forwarding address, and the parents had no way to contact him.

I picked up the phone and dialed the parents’ number.

A woman answered.

“Mrs. Whitehead?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“May I speak to your husband?”

“Who’s calling?”

“Lt. Thomas Noel. Kansas City Police Department. Is your husband home?”

“He’s at work. I could give you the number.”

I took down the number. “Since you’re on the phone, Mrs. Whitehead, I suppose I ought to tell you that your son Earl is a suspect in a murder investigation. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?”

“I told the officers this morning,” she replied.

“You told them what, exactly?”

“I don’t know where that boy is,” she said.

“He hasn’t called you recently?”

“He hasn’t called in years. We don’t know where he is. We told them that.”

“Mrs. Whitehead, are you aware that it’s a crime to interfere with police work?”

“My husband’s a police officer,” she said, rather snippily. “You don’t need to tell me which end is up.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because if I find out that you’re covering up for your son, you’ll probably wish I hadn’t.”

There was silence.

“You sure you don’t know where you son is, ma’am?”

“I already told you I don’t,” she said.

“Well, I’ve got a dead body up here, ma’am. A boy. So if Earl shows up or contacts you, I want you to think about that.”

I hung up, feeling agitated and angry, and immediately punched in the number for her husband.

“Is this Frank Whitehead?”

“Yup, it sure is,” a male voice answered in a heavy drawl.

“This is Lt. Thomas Noel, Kansas City Police Department. I work with the homicide division. We’re investigating the murder of a boy, and I’ve got your son’s fingerprints all over the place. Do you know where your son is?”

There was silence on the other end. Then: “I done told them this morning. Don’t know where Earl’s got off to. Ain’t seen him in a coon’s age.”

“I’ve just read through your son’s file, sir. He was charged with molesting his nephew. That would have been your grandson, wouldn’t it?”

There was silence.

“There’s a note here that you, sir, vouched for your son before the court, which was probably why he got off on probation. I suppose I’m wondering how you could have vouched for him, and now you don’t seem to know where he is.”

“He done run off,” Whitehead said angrily.

“Is that right?” I asked. “I guess when you vouch for someone, it doesn’t mean much.”

“Now there ain’t no call for that.”

“Well, sir, I’m going to send your son’s file back over to
y’all
over there in Quincy, Illinois, and maybe you ought to read it again, and think about what he did to your grandson, and what he’s probably done to some other boy who’s dead now. And if you hear from Earl, I’d appreciate a phone call. That’s if you can be bothered.”

I was going to hang up on him—I was really in a mood and I had my reasons—but he said, “Now wait just a minute. What’d you say your name was?”

“Lt. Thomas Noel,” I replied.

“Like
The First Noel
?”

I rolled my eyes at the telephone.

“Well, Lieutenant,” he went on, “let me tell you something. Earl was a bit strange, and I’ll be the first to admit it. I tried to protect him. Of course I did, he’s my only son. But I’m well aware of what he did to my grandson, and although it ain’t in that police report, my wife and I have done everything we could to help our grandson and make it up to him. Earl’s got a screw loose. We know that. And if I had any idea in hell where he was, I would have told them this morning, and I would be telling you right now. But we don’t know. The boy don’t call. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of him for about eight years now. But what I’m meaning to tell you is that I think he joined some religious group down there in Missouri.”

When he said “Missouri,” it came out as “Mizzoorah.”

“Do you know the name of that group?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” the man said.

“Do you know anything about this group, how I might track it down?”

“Well, now, Earl sent us some literature once, a few months after he disappeared. It was about how the Holy Father was a heretic and weren’t the Pope no more and stuff like that. Me and my wife don’t go for that. We like the Latin Mass, but we don’t go for calling the Holy Father a heretic.”

“The Latin Mass?” I hadn’t heard anyone talk about the Latin Mass in years.

“Are you Catholic?” he asked.

“Sort of,” I said. An ex-priest was about as Catholic as you could get these days.

“Well, my wife and I, we’re traditional Catholics. We attend the Latin Mass.”

That was certainly fascinating.

“I need to know the name of the group that your son joined. Do you have any way of knowing that?”

“Well, Lieutenant, I couldn’t tell you. My wife is looking through her old letters and trying to find that literature Earl sent us, but she might have thrown it out. It’s been a long time, you know.”

Shit.

“Sir, if there’s any way at all you could find out—did he call you? Do you have copies of your old phone bills? Any way at all to trace his whereabouts?”

“I just can’t help you,” he said.

“Can’t or won’t?” I asked.

“I can’t, Lieutenant. I don’t know where he is. Now if he’s done something to hurt somebody, you can be sure that we’ll cooperate and do whatever we can to help you. I stuck my neck out for that boy once, and he done made a fool of me, and you can be sure it won’t happen twice. You have any kids, Lieutenant?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, sometimes you’ll do anything for your kids, even if it’s not right. But after everything Troy’s been through these past eight years—Troy’s my grandson—well, I guess I just didn’t understand what my son had been doing to him. Troy tried to kill himself, two years ago. Slashed his wrists. I think he meant it, too, because his mother had gone out for the evening but had forgotten her purse, and so she went back home to get it and found him in the bathtub. ’Course, if she hadn’t gone back, he would have bled to death. It wasn’t like he was timing it so she could find him and rescue him. You’re a police officer, you probably know about that.”

I did.

“Anyway,” he said, “if I knew where Earl was, I would tell you. I’d like to think that you believe me when I say that. We’s good people, and I just don’t know what went wrong with Earl, but he’s done embarrassed this family half to death.”

I could only imagine how he must feel, how embarrassing it must be to have a son who was arrested for sexually abusing a child, and who was now wanted in connection with a murder investigation.

“Let me give you my number,” I said, trying to sound more conciliatory, “and if you or your wife think of anything, or if you come across any old letters, anything at all that might help me track down your son, please call me. I don’t care what time of the day or night, just call me straightaway.”

I gave him my cell phone number and rang off.

V

I
LOOKED
at my watch. It was 9:45 a.m., and Lt. Harris was no doubt preparing himself to bask in glory.

I picked up the phone and called Harlock.

“I think we should run Earl Whitehead’s picture,” I said. “Harris could hand it out during his press conference. We could say he’s a suspect. Right now, he’s the only one we’ve got. If we get lucky, someone may recognize him. Parents haven’t got a clue as to his whereabouts.”

He considered this in silence. Finally, he said, “Do it,” and hung up.

I took Whitehead’s picture from the file and hurried off, Daniel on my heels. Harris was in his office, standing in front of a mirror, checking his teeth.

“You can’t just barge in here,” he said, giving me an embarrassed look after I had done just that.

“Why don’t we run Whitehead’s picture?” I suggested. “Position him as a suspect, because that’s what he is.”

He frowned. “I have to think about this.” He went back to prepping himself.

“I could just leak it,” I said, annoyed.

“I could have your ass.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“Fine. Leave it on my desk.”

“By the way, this is my new partner.”

“So I gathered.”

“Daniel Qo, meet the ever-charming Mac Harris.”

VI

“S
T
. F
RANCIS
OF
A
SSISI
—what does it mean?” I asked Daniel. “Is the killer trying to tell us something?”

Daniel squinted up at me, leaned back in his chair, and gave this some thought. I already had my own ideas, but I was curious to see if he had any.

“Something about saints, holy rollers?” he suggested.

I shrugged. That was not quite right.

“Maybe the victim’s name has a ‘St.’ in it, like Susan St. James, or something?”

“That’s closer,” I said. “But what else?”

He continued to ponder but was stumped.

“First thing we’re going to do,” I said, “is fire up the missing persons database.”

I nodded at his computer. I did not have to tell him how this was accomplished; he already knew. He was apparently somewhat of a computer whiz. That would make my life easier.

“What’s the password to get in?” he asked, looking up to me.

“Use your own,” I said. Each detective was given his own system log on name and password, enabling them to access any of the databases we had available.

He typed in his name and password, and the introductory search screen came up.

“Now what?” he asked.

“Do a search,” I said. “Let’s look for someone named Francis. That’s the most obvious thing.”

He typed “Francis” into the list of keywords to search for and did not need me to tell him to restrict his search to males ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen in the state of Missouri. He then clicked on the “search” button and we waited for the system to start displaying results, of which there were exactly two, neither of which bore any resemblance to our victim.

“Now what?” he asked, looking up to me again.

“Why are we doing this anyway?” I countered.

“You think the kid might have been a runaway.”

“Yes, but why?”

He considered this but didn’t know.

“Did you read the reports?” I asked.

He nodded.

“And?” I prompted.

“Shit, man, I don’t know. You tell me.”

“First off, the kid is skinny, almost malnourished. That suggests he might have been living on the street and not doing a very good job of it. His teeth were also a bit of a mess, as though he hadn’t been getting proper dental care. That’s another sign of someone on the street. That’s why we look at missing persons first.”

“Oh.”

“So, try the same search, but with all the states included, not just Missouri.”

He did that, turning up a slew of hits, but not the one we were looking for.

“Why don’t I look for kids in Missouri and Kansas who have gone missing in the past four, five days?” he suggested.

I nodded.

He performed the search, and again we waited, then flipped through page after page of information, doing the same search for all the local states, but with no success.

“We may have to do this the hard way,” I said. “Maybe do a search for all missing white males ranging in age from fourteen to eighteen, and then look through them one by one, including all of them in the database going back however many years. If a report was filed five years ago, for example, we’d have to have the art department do an age progression, see if we can get a match.”

“That could take a long time,” he said, frowning.

“It very often does,” I replied. “There is one other shortcut.”

“What?”

“Francis is often shortened to Frank. Why don’t you see if you can pull up any Franks in the database who are the right age and race?”

He pecked away at his keyboard, then sat back, waiting for the results to start coming in.

“If no one has filed a missing persons report on this kid, then we’re wasting our time,” he pointed out.

“I know that,” I said. “But most white kids who go missing are reported, though most of them are runaways who don’t want to be found.”

“Why just white kids?”

“Because a lot of minorities don’t report a missing kid to the police, maybe because they’re afraid of the police, or afraid their immigration status will be affected, or something. Some of them don’t even know they should report a missing child, that the police will do everything they can to find that child. Sometimes it’s just a language barrier thing—the parents don’t speak English, are too intimidated to go to the police station. But most white kids, and black kids, too, for that matter, get reported.”

The results started appearing, and Daniel flipped through the screens. A few minutes later, fifteen-year-old “Frankie Peters” was staring back at us, and something about him looked very familiar.

“When was this filed?” I asked.

Daniel flipped through more screens. “Kid was reported missing two years ago, last May. From Liberty, Missouri.”

“Can you scroll to the bottom of the file, see who was the last person to access this record?”

The last person to look at the file was a patrol officer named William Dunning, at the Liberty County police station, who had left a note to say that the parents had called this past Friday to report they’d had a phone call from their missing boy, but that the call had been abruptly disconnected.

“Can you print this off?” I asked.

VII

M
ARY
B
ETH
paged me two hours later.