Steel Breeze (2 page)

Backtracking
to the ramp would eat up valuable time, so he grabbed hold of the fire pole and
jumped to the ground. He was starting to pant as he circled the castle, sweat
prickling under his arms, his spine hunched as he peered through the cracks. Calling
Lucas’s name from up top would have been an announcement to all of the other
parents that, yes, he, the guy with the laptop, had lost his son, but down here
on the ground with the kids, he started doing just that. The sound of his own
scared, shaky voice made him more afraid than he already was.

There
was no reply.

He
knelt on the damp woodchips and poked his head into one of the openings the
kids used to enter the castle. The white soles of a girl’s sneakers blocked his
view, and he heard giggling. He yelled into the tunnel, “Lucas!” The girl
startled, then scampered around to face him. Was she Asian? Maybe. Whatever.

“Is
there a little boy in there wearing a green sweatshirt?”

She
shook her head.

Desmond
backed out, stood up, and broke into a jog around the perimeter, dodging
children, parents, and trees. He called his son’s name in increasingly harried
tones and felt the fear rising toward the pitch at which something fundamental
would change. It was rapidly turning into the kind of mounting dread that he
knew should be reserved for nightmares.

A
woman wearing a faded Red Sox baseball cap and carrying a rake in her hand
appeared around a corner and stopped in her tracks when she saw him. He felt
sweat running from his hairline to the corner of his left eye and rubbed it
away. Residual sunscreen stung his eye from fingertips that had touched his
son’s face less than twenty minutes ago.

“Did
you lose a kid?”  

Desmond
nodded and drew a ragged breath. He held the palm of his hand parallel to the
ground at waist height, Lucas’s height. He said, “Boy. Green sweatshirt, brown
pants, brown hair.” He felt the bulk of the laptop bag against his hip and
wished he could have ditched it somewhere, but the work it held was
irreplaceable.

The
woman looked at the bag, looked at his eyes. Her features softened as she read
the panic in them. “Jeez, that’s practically camouflage in a place like this,”
she said, nodding at the stand of pine trees that sheltered the playground, and
the increasingly dense woods beyond, which led by neglected trails to the
reservoir. The trails on this side of the water were probably only used by the
rare hiker who knew how they all connected and by teenagers who wanted privacy
for petty indiscretions. Looking at the gray tangle of deadfall, he felt his
heart sink. Would Lucas go in there without him? It wouldn’t have been easy for
him to reach the woods from the sandbox without walking all the way around the
three-foot-high wooden corral fence to where it ended at the baseball field on
the right and the woods on the left. But, Desmond remembered, he
had
picked
Lucas up and set him down on the other side of that little fence on more than
one occasion when the boy had needed to pee, and had accompanied him to the privacy
of the litter‐strewn trailhead. What if Lucas had felt the need and had gone to
the same place on his own without announcing it?

Desmond
trotted to the edge of the woods, scanning them for the half-concealed trail. It
was back in the direction of the sandbox, but for a child who had to walk all
the way around the fence rather than going over it, there were other paths he
would come to first. And they might all look the same to him.

“Lucas!”
he called.

No
reply came from the woods. He walked up the first trail he came to, listening
to the wind in the trees, the noise of the playground fading with every step. His
stomach revolted against the idea that he was moving away from the playground,
away from the zone in which he and Lucas had last been together.

The
paths here at the edge of the woods were chaotic and neglected, blocked by
fallen trees and choked with brambles. Heavy rain in the preceding weeks had
left the ground swollen, spongy, and muddy. In places, the water had pooled
into miniature ponds the length of a man, impossible to cross without boots or
a willingness to get soaked. Desmond knew that these would have stopped Lucas
from going forward in several places, and he was able to rule out certain
paths. He saw no children’s sneaker prints, but the grass was so thick and the
mud so wet that he couldn’t be sure the ground would have held an impression. The
water was too shallow for drowning, he thought. Or at least, too shallow to
conceal a body. He’d heard that a child could drown in mere inches of water. He
couldn’t believe he was having to consider such things and tried to remind
himself that he was wired with an active imagination, a predisposition for
chasing remote possibilities to vivid and devastating, yet unlikely
conclusions.

As
he neared the place where he had taken Lucas before, he came to a wooden plank
that had been dragged across the path to make a bridge over one of the larger
puddles. The wood was mud stained with child-sized sneaker treads. He couldn’t
be sure, but they could have been Lucas’s. He ran across the board and searched
the ground on the far side for more prints but found none.

His
mind reeling, he turned, and
there
: a patch of dark blue about thirty
feet up the trail, not the color of sky but a shade of fabric. Walking toward
it, he could make out voices, low and conversational, one higher in pitch—
Lucas’s
voice.

“Lucas!”
he shouted and broke into a run.

As
he approached the clearing, the blue swatch turned out to be a hoodie
sweatshirt, actually more a shade of indigo, over black jeans, hood up. The
person wearing it was shorter than Desmond, maybe five foot six or thereabout, back
turned to him. The figure’s hands were tucked into the pockets of the hoodie—a
non-threatening pose, and yet something about the posture was iron straight,
rooted to the ground and coiled to spring.

Lucas
stood beside the stranger, their bodies not touching, looking at something on
the ground. At the sound of his name, he turned toward Desmond, and his face
lit up with a smile. “Daddy!” he cried. “Look, Daddy, a duckie!”

Desmond
followed his son’s pointing finger to a black puddle and saw a mallard bobbing
on the glassy water. When he looked at Lucas again, the figure in the hoodie
was gone.

How
the hell was that even possible? The guy had been
right there
a second
ago. Desmond swept Lucas up in his arms and held him tight to his heaving
chest, spinning slowly on his heels and searching the woods.
There
—a flash
of indigo between the trees, deeper in the forest, already twenty yards
distant. With as much alpha dog as he could inject into his voice, Desmond
hollered, “Hey! Wait! Come back here.” But the figure only ran faster and
vanished behind the branches.

Desmond
set Lucas on the ground, squatted to his level, and examined him. Aside from
the shy, concerned look that Desmond recognized as the face Lucas wore when
trying to read if he was angry, he saw no signs of harm or distress. “Are you
okay?” Desmond asked.

Lucas
bobbed his head. “Did you see the duckie?”

“Yeah,
buddy. But who was that man, and why did you go with him?”

Lucas
shrugged.

“Did
he tell you his name?”

“No,
Daddy.”

“Lucas,
why did you go with someone you don’t know?”

“I
went to get acorns for my dump, and he asked me if I wanted to see a duckie.”

“Listen
to me. That’s not okay. You can’t just leave the playground and go with someone
you don’t know. Remember?”

“But
you said it’s okay to talk to grownups at the playground. Right, Daddy? You
said it’s okay.”

It
was true that every time some friendly mother tried to strike up a conversation
with Lucas in a place like this, every time Lucas was being shy and silent, Desmond
told him that it was okay to say hello, to answer a question about his name or
age. And fuck if it didn’t defy logic to tell a kid that it was okay to talk to
strangers sometimes, but not others.

“That’s
only if I’m with you. No talking to strangers when I’m not with you, and
definitely no following them. Understand?”

Lucas
turned his eyes down toward the mud at his feet.

“Do
you understand?”

Lucas
nodded. When he looked up, he found his delight again, and brightening, he
said, “Do you see the duckie?”

“Yeah,
buddy, I see it. Come on. Let’s go home.”

They
were approaching the parking lot hand in hand, passing the bench where the old
Asian man still sat alone, passing the deserted sandbox, when Lucas broke free
of Desmond’s grasp and veered off to the side. Desmond turned to yell that they
were going home now, that they were finished playing and he was losing his
patience, when he saw what had caused the diversion. “Don’t forget dump,
Daddy!” Lucas yelled, and Desmond could practically see the exclamation point
in the air. For a four-year-old boy, if a thing is worth saying, it’s worth
exclaiming, and if a place is worth going to, it’s worth running to.

Lucas
climbed over the sandbox wall, picked up the plastic truck, and threw it out of
the box, freeing his hands for the climb back out. When the truck hit the
ground, it rolled and something fell out of the dumper bucket. Desmond let out
a short yelp at the sight—a naked Barbie doll, scratched and dirty from long
neglect… headless.

Desmond
felt his muscles go limp. He dropped his laptop bag to the ground beside the
plastic abomination. He spun around looking for the indigo hoodie, but there
was no sign of Lucas’s trail guide unless he had ditched the sweatshirt. Black
jeans on a fit young man? Couldn’t find that either. Lucas picked up the truck,
but ignored the broken doll. He looked up at his father with concern.

“Let’s
go,” Desmond said. “Let’s get out of here.” He picked up the laptop and got a
good look at the doll. For a second he considered taking it with him. It could
be evidence. But evidence of what? There had been no crime committed here, and
the doll didn’t look as if it had been purchased and damaged for the express
purpose of fucking with him. Parents donated old toys to the sandbox all the
time, and kids surely lost things here as well. The doll looked dirty enough,
old enough, to have been buried under the sand for at least a year, unearthed today
by chance.

He
resisted the urge to reach out and pick the thing up, and he tried to tell
himself that this was rationality winning out, that he was avoiding the doll
for Lucas’s benefit, to sidestep the questions that his interest in it would
raise. But he knew the real reason he didn’t pick it up was the sickening fear
that it triggered in the bottom of his belly.

Chapter 2

It was the
dishes that haunted him in the months following Sandy’s death. Dirty dishes. What
a stupid thing to be arguing about before going to bed in cold silence. What a
small thing to get defensive about. He should have just owned it and said okay.
But no, he’d had to go and get all self-righteous about how he couldn’t believe
she was giving him shit for leaving dirty dishes in his study when the only
reason he was eating in there in the first place was to grade papers while
she
was watching TV, even though he was the one who still had to read bedtime
stories to Lucas at the end of a long day and couldn’t she just do the damned
dishes herself? It was a shitty final exchange to have had with the woman he
loved just hours before finding her decapitated in the back yard.

The
day after the scare at the playground Desmond woke before Lucas and, plodding
groggy-eyed into the living room, caught sight of the little plate of crumbs
left over from Lucas’s grilled cheese dinner. How had he missed that? Well, he
had
been a bit distracted while they’d watched the
Dumbo
DVD for the
umpteenth time. Lucas had a thing for his mother’s Disney collection, and a few
favorite titles were kept in steady rotation.
Dumbo
was the current
favorite, even though Lucas always wanted to skip the thunderstorm scene
because it scared him.

“Stay
with me, Daddy. Watch this with me,” Lucas would implore, and Desmond would focus
his eyes on the big-eared elephant while letting his mind play with the novel
in progress—a notepad tucked into the couch cushion. But last night his mind
hadn’t been on the book, it had been on the man in the indigo hoodie and the
headless Barbie.

He
heard the coffee maker go into its gurgle-and-sputter stage and decided not to
wait for it to beep. He pulled the pot out and poured his first cup while the
machine dripped all over itself. Time to get some work done before Lucas woke
up. Time to shift his mind to that other world, that imaginary world where his wife
had a different name and could still be saved from the monster.

He
had lost his teaching job a few months after Sandy’s death for experimenting
with the efficacy of alcohol as a pain-numbing, memory-erasing agent. He knew
now that the firing had pained Principal Rosenbaum. The man had barely been
able to do it, but Desmond had given him no other choice. The kids came first. Now,
almost a year later, the drinking was behind him. But he hadn’t done the
program, and maybe that was a little dangerous. He hadn’t found God instead of
the program, either. In fact, that was his whole problem with the program: you
had to surrender to a higher power. And Desmond still spent many a sleepless
night ruminating on just what kind of power a higher power might have if He
didn’t use it to prevent a loving mother from getting cut down by a crazy man.

The
drinking had stopped because of Lucas. Desmond couldn’t bear the thought of
losing him to Sandy’s parents. Phil and Karen Parsons had made no secret of the
fact that they thought Desmond was a sorry piece of shit for getting himself
fired with a young child to raise. And he didn’t disagree with them on that
score; he just wasn’t going to lose Lucas over it. So he’d cleaned up his act
and started writing again, and the book, when it emerged, did the rest. It took
care of him better than the booze ever could. He knew he would have to find
work again soon—royalties from his last book were down to a trickle now, and
the advance for the current one would only carry them so far—but for now,
writing was keeping him sane, and keeping them both fed.

Without
a second income, they’d had to move to an apartment near the beach, and that
wasn’t so nice, but it wasn’t exactly squalid either. Desmond knew he couldn’t
have lived in the old house anymore anyway. Too many memories. The apartment
felt a little bit like a vacation, and the book felt even more like one, but he
knew damned well that he wasn’t on vacation from supporting Lucas, and that
meant making the word quota every morning. Two-thousand words per day allayed
his fears of failing as a provider.

On
the morning after the playground incident he didn’t get any words down. He sat
at his desk and flipped open his laptop with the
Orpheus
file still
running. Words were waiting for him on the page, but they were not his own. Three
lines of unfamiliar text blazed up at him, separated by a line break from the
unfinished sentence he’d started writing at the playground.

Floating
on dark water

The
solitary drake dives

And
seizes the worm

Desmond
stared at the words. Whatever meaning they held eluded him. But the
meaning
of the little poem didn’t matter, not yet anyway. What mattered was that it
could be there at all, on his screen, in his home. And when the force of
that
meaning struck him, he stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over behind him
and staggering back from the laptop as if he had opened it to discover a giant
spider on the keyboard.

He
looked around the room. The apartment was a split-level and his desk was in a
corner of the living room on the ground floor. There were two windows, both
facing the sand-drifted street in front of the building. He went to the windows
and checked the latches. Both were still locked from the inside. The front door
was also still locked, the chain still fastened.

He
walked fast and light-footed to the kitchenette. There was a small window over
the sink—too small for entry—and a couple of steps that led down to a little
laundry alcove through which the back alley was accessible via the only other
door to the outside.

It
was unlocked.

Desmond
ran up the stairs to Lucas’s bedroom.

Lucas
was tangled in the blankets, still sleeping. Desmond stood in the doorway
catching his breath, waiting for his heart to slow down. He rested his elbow
against the doorframe and whimpered into his forearm. Stepping lightly again,
as if he hadn’t just made all the noise of a wild boar crashing through the
brush, he moved to the closet door where a poster announcing A DAY WITH THOMAS
THE TRAIN covered a door that had been coated with white paint so many times
that it could no longer be fully closed. He took a deep breath and threw the
door open with a long step backward, half expecting a blade to arc out at him
from the darkness, but the closet held only Lucas’s clothes and puzzles.

Lucas
stirred in the bed. He looked like a different boy when he was sleeping, his
face somehow older. Desmond thought about the backdoor downstairs in the
laundry alcove. Had he left it unlocked last night? He didn’t think so, but
could he rule that out with one-hundred-percent certainty? Yes, he thought he
could. The locks on this place were kind of a joke, but he knew he used them
vigilantly. He might have been a bit of a space case about that sort of thing
before Sandy’s death, wandering around half in a creative trance while taking
out the trash at the old house, forgetting to lock a door, but not anymore. Not
after the murder.
Right, Des?

He
went back downstairs to the laundry room and opened the door to the alley. The
frame showed no signs of tampering, and it dawned on him that he shouldn’t be
touching the knob, that it should be dusted for fingerprints. There didn’t
appear to be any damage to the keyhole either, but he’d never examined it up
close before, so he couldn’t say if all of the scratches around the slot had
been there already.

Fingerprinting.
If he called Fournier about this they would probably want to check his laptop
for prints too. And that would mean letting them look at the file. Desmond
didn’t care for that idea at all. He needed to think this through before he
made any calls.

Desmond
returned to his desk and glared at the text on the screen, stroking his beard. He
had hovered over the machine from this standing position untold times over the
years, pondering plot problems. Well, here was a good one. The lid on the
computer hadn’t been opened since yesterday on the park bench when he’d noticed
that Lucas was missing. The unfinished sentence above the haiku was the one
he’d been working on then. It
was
a haiku, wasn’t it? He counted the
syllables—eighteen. As a high school teacher, he had taught his students the
seventeen-syllable (five-seven-five) form, but he also knew that that was just
an English convention for a Japanese technique that didn’t exactly correlate. Still,
this was a haiku. Someone had invaded his personal computer, possibly even his
home, and had left him a message somehow related to Sandy’s murder.

He
thought back to the playground. He’d kept the laptop with him the entire time. There
had been no opportunity for someone to type the lines there. And after the
playground, when Lucas was hungry and they stopped for pizza, the computer had
been locked in the car the entire time. Upon returning home, he had set it down
on the desk.

He
read the poem again, and this time, knowing that Lucas was safe in his bed
upstairs, he could focus on the words. He was pretty sure he knew what was
being described, at least on the surface level, and he felt a deep unease
crawling into his gut. Not wanting to touch the keyboard, he went to the coat
rack by the front door and dug his smartphone out of his jacket pocket. He
pulled up Google and typed: drake.

There
were four meanings: The Elizabethan explorer, Francis Drake; some singer he was
unfamiliar with; the term for a male duck; and a more obscure use—a name
sometimes used to refer to a dragon. He vaguely recalled some reference Tolkien
had made to “the fire drake.”

A
duck. A solitary duck, just like the one they had seen yesterday.

A
dragon, like you might find decorating a kimono, or a samurai sword.

Desmond
closed the browser window on his phone and typed in a number from memory.

Half
an hour later Desmond sat at his kitchen table across from Detective Chuck
Fournier. The laptop sat between them, along with two cups of coffee and an
open metal case that housed a horsehair brush, a jar of dusting powder, clear
tape, and blank cards. Fournier had checked both the computer and the door for
prints. He had found only Desmond’s on the computer and the outer doorknob, but
had picked up another set from one of the windowpanes inside the door. It
seemed likely that these would belong to the previous tenant or the landlord. If
someone had indeed broken into the apartment to type the enigmatic haiku, then
the intruder had worn gloves while handling the laptop and likely would have
had them on the whole time. Fournier said he would run the prints through AFIS
anyway.

Desmond
rested his wrist on the table, his fingers curled loosely around the handle of
his coffee mug, inches from the laptop. He tried to read Fournier’s face—bushy
moustache and eyebrows, flinty hazel eyes that belonged in a poker game. Desmond
considered himself a pretty good observer of human behavior and facial expressions,
but all he could read on Chuck Fournier was the plain fact that the detective
was also reading him and making no bones about it. But that was nothing new. Fournier
had been appraising Desmond with that same cold, calculating eye ever since
Sandy had first introduced the two men.

Fournier
swiped the heel of his hand across his nose to relieve an itch he couldn’t
scratch while handling the prints. He sniffed, and then speaking in a low voice—possibly
because Lucas was still sleeping upstairs or possibly because Chuck Fournier
always spoke in a low tone—said, “You wanted me here in an ‘unofficial
capacity,’ you said. Like how they talk on TV. Why?”

“I
wanted your opinion on this before I take any action…as a friend of the
family.”

“A
friend with a fingerprint kit and a database. Look, Desmond, you can’t have it
both ways. And I don’t really buy this line about my opinion. You’re a guy
claiming a break-in, right? So you think this a crime scene.”

Desmond
flinched at the use of that word from a year ago to describe the apartment. “I
don’t know. All I know is that the back door is unlocked, and I locked it last
night. And I sure didn’t type those lines.”

“Do
you know how it looks: you asking to meet with the lead investigator on your
wife’s murder case alone? You asking to see her ex-boyfriend alone for that
matter?”

Desmond
straightened his posture. “Chuck, I know you cared for Sandy, so I assume you
care about her son. Lucas was too young to understand most of what was said
back when there were cops all over us, but that would be different now, and my
job is to protect him.”

Fournier
placed his fingertips on the laptop and watched Desmond uncurl his own from his
mug handle. “I think what you’re trying to protect is your privacy. What are
you afraid of, Des?”

“I
don’t want Lucas finding out that I think someone broke into our apartment,
okay? I don’t want to scare him.”

“And
you’re afraid of me reading what else is on this computer. Right?”

“It’s
my work. I need that to make a living.”

“And
you believe someone tampered with it just to fuck with you?”