Chapter 11
“What the hell, sir?” Maggie asked Gonzales.
That cracked me up: What the hell, sir. It was pure Maggie.
“Don’t look at me, Gunn. The guy just showed up. Wanted to help us find Tyler Matthews. Let Calvano do his job. He might stumble across something.”
I winced and wondered if people had ever said that about me. Probably. Stumbling was what I’d done best.
The guy who had showed up to help was in a wheelchair and compensated with ramrod posture, as if he wanted to prove he was in control. Calvano was sitting with him in the interrogation room. They were sharing coffee and cigarettes like a couple of old ladies in Boca Raton. The guy was somewhere in that gray area between fifty and sixty years of age. He had reddish brown hair swept back on top and cut short on the sides, and his face was pockmarked from long-ago acne.
“Who is this guy anyway?” Maggie asked. She and Gonzales were huddled together in the observation room close to the one-way glass, whispering so the others in the room could not hear. But I had a prime spot to overhear all.
“Colonel William Vitek, US Marines. Retired.”
“He get the injury in battle?” she asked.
“Car accident,” an old-school beat cop named Morty said from behind them. He had stopped by to see what the excitement was all about. “His wife and son died in the accident. He’s only been in town about six months. Inherited a house he’s looking to sell. Big war hero. At least that’s what people in the neighborhood say.”
That’s how Morty’s sentences often ended. He had walked his beat for decades and knew his neighborhood like a younger cop never would.
Maggie flashed Morty a smile. He was her father’s oldest friend. Morty called her “Rosie” and had since she was a little girl. He was also the only one on this planet who could get away with calling her that.
He’d been allowed to join them in observing the session because Morty was a lot more than just an old beat cop. Between him and Peggy Calhoun, they pretty much remembered every case from the past thirty years. They were the department’s memory, and Gonzales knew how valuable that was. He pretty much let Morty stick his nose in wherever he liked, provided it was on his own time. Morty was tall with bright white hair and the kind of rounded potbelly that comes with age.
“What are you doing here?” Maggie asked her old friend.
“Just thought I’d see Calvano work his magic,” Morty said cheerfully, letting a hint of brogue creep into his voice, even though he was about as Irish as Mohammad Albaca, who ran the coffee concession in the lobby.
Maggie looked at him skeptically.
“I worked on a case sixteen years ago,” Morty confessed. “A missing boy. Bobby D’Amato. He was taken from a rest area north of town. I responded to the initial call. They were only about ten miles from home, but the kid had to take a pee and the mother made the father stop to let him. They were still arguing about it when the kid ran inside to the bathroom by himself. He never came back out, not that they could see.”
“I remember that,” Gonzales said. “Never found the boy, right?”
Morty shook his head. “We figured the perp grabbed him, hit the highway, and was gone. The mother still lives in town. The father moved away for a better job and fresh start. But we never found the kid’s body. Nothing.”
“And you think the two abductions are connected?” Gonzales asked.
Morty shook his head again. “No, but I thought maybe . . .” He shrugged.
“You thought this guy might know something that would help with the old case? Or give you a fresh idea about what might have happened?” Maggie guessed. Her voice was kind. Like Morty, she never let go of an old case. They haunted her until solved.
“Especially this guy.” Morty nodded toward the man in the wheelchair. “Colonel Vitek is some big-deal defender of kids. Tracks all the online predators. Works for law enforcement departments up and down the coast.”
“Not ours,” Gonzales said firmly.
“Works for them?” Maggie asked, one eye on the interrogation room where Calvano and Vitek were trading stories about how stupid criminals are. Ironic, I thought, as I was sure somewhere criminals were sitting around and trading stories about how stupid Calvano was.
“Unofficial arrangements,” Morty explained. “With departments too small to have their own Internet divisions. What he does is manage a group of volunteers who pretend to be underage kids. They visit the right chat rooms, they wait to be approached, they make it plain they’re underage, and, eventually, someone always asks to meet in person. The volunteers agree and suggest an actual location, usually the town they’re pretending to be from, and that’s when Vitek notifies local law enforcement. The local cops wait for the pervert when he shows up, video games and candy in hand, and they’ve got their man.”
“You sound like you admire this guy,” Maggie said. She stared at Colonel Vitek, and I could tell she was thinking, I’m not going to canonize him yet.
Morty had no problem with Vitek’s methods. “If he gets even one creep off the streets, I’m all for it,” he admitted.
Maggie disguised her distaste. Anything that even approached entrapment was just lazy police work, in her opinion, even if it was for a good cause. “Is he any good at what he does?” she asked, staring at Vitek though the one-way glass.
“People say he is,” Morty said. “I wouldn’t know. But maybe he knows something that might help with the Bobby D’Amato case. You never know.”
I felt a flash of love and regret toward Morty. He was old, he was fighting off time and disease, but he had promised the parents of that missing boy that he’d never give up and, sixteen years later, he was still keeping his word. I wished I’d been half the cop he was, and I was ashamed that I had made fun of him when I was alive for never wanting to be anything but a beat cop.
Gonzales tapped impatiently on the window, signaling for Calvano to knock off the bullshitting and continue the interview. The feds were arriving that night, and he wanted something to show them.
Colonel Vitek heard the tap and nodded toward his unknown watchers. He knew he was being filmed—hence the ramrod posture, I decided. He enjoyed being the center of attention.
I wasn’t sure I liked him. For one thing, he had fleshy lips that he curled around his cigarette like he was sucking on a pacifier. For another, his energy was muddy and hard to read. I tried to enter the part of his thoughts that stored memory. This was where I usually had the most success in reading people. Memories could tell a lot about someone—what they chose to hold on to, what they had tried to let go, who they cared about, and what they feared.
The colonel had very unpleasant memories.
Not battles, like I had expected, or headlights bearing down on him before a crash, but memories of a different kind of war.
Most unpleasant indeed. No wonder he had devoted his life to catching child abusers. He was waging a personal war of revenge.
“Okay,” Calvano was saying to the colonel in a buddy-to-buddy tone. “Let’s get back to it.” Calvano smiled like he was Vitek’s best friend. Like a lot of guys who never got near a barracks, Calvano thought military men were the epitome of manhood. I was pretty sure I was about to witness a display of thorough ass-kissing—quite a contrast from the way he’d acted toward that poor slob Robert Michael Martin earlier in the day.
“You say your group has chapters all over the eastern US?” Calvano asked.
“That’s right,” the colonel explained. “We started out in New Jersey and we’ve spread from there. As you can see”—he patted the armrest of his wheelchair—“I’m limited in what I can do. But I manage volunteers from my home easily enough, and most of what we do is online. I was based in Philly, but I have some personal business here to take care of. It was easy enough to move headquarters here for a few months.”
“So you just cut your volunteers loose and let them do their thing?” Calvano asked. God, he was an idiot.
“No, sir.” The colonel shook his head vigorously. “They undergo extensive training. We don’t want to be accused of entrapment.” I could tell his unctuous smile had pissed off Maggie as much as it pissed off me. She did not like the colonel.
Interesting. I didn’t like him, either. But Maggie? Maggie really didn’t like him. Maybe because the colonel was a man who had to be in charge, and men like that are rarely big fans of strong women. She’d put up with more than a few Colonel Viteks in her battle to become a detective. I could understand her distaste. He was a reminder that the number of men in the world waiting to put her in her place was pretty much endless.
“What kind of training?” Calvano asked, with the eagerness of a groupie.
“After training, they do practice sessions,” the colonel explained. “While we conduct a background check to make sure we don’t invite a fox into the henhouse.”
“And Robert Michael Martin passed the background test?”
The colonel’s smile faltered slightly. “Martin passed our standard background check, yes.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if he had an official record, it didn’t show up. The guy is clean.” The colonel paused. “So far as I know, that is. So far as official records show.”
Maggie winced. He had just damned Martin with faint praise.
“Did you ever notice anything unusual about Martin?” Calvano asked. Subtle, buddy. How about a flashing neon sign above your head that says, “Accuse him! Accuse him!” just in case the colonel missed the message?
“He is very zealous,” the colonel admitted. He leaned toward Calvano and lowered his voice. “I get a lot of damaged people as volunteers. And I understand why. They come to me for a chance to fight back at what happened to them or someone they loved. They need to get some power out of the dynamic. I don’t ask people why they want to volunteer. I don’t have to. Robert is one of those. He has a personal stake in stopping child abuse.”
“So the guy is a little off?” Calvano asked.
Even Gonzales flinched at that one.
“Maybe a little,” the colonel conceded. “He volunteers all the time, and I prefer that my volunteers lead more balanced lives. If he isn’t online, he’s checking out the parks, keeping an eye on the homes of registered offenders. He’s very thorough.”
“He ever bring anyone in?” Calvano asked.
“Not yet,” the colonel admitted. “Sometimes . . .” He shrugged.
“What?” Calvano asked. “Give me some background here.”
But the colonel just smiled like he had said enough. “I have had a lot of very, very dedicated volunteers,” was all he offered Calvano. “And there have been a few bad apples in the mix. People whose motives aren’t so pure. I can never see them coming until we’re in the middle, though.”
“What do you mean?” Calvano said.
“I’m always keeping an eye out for the shady ones. And there’s always this moment where I start to get a feeling about someone and this voice inside of me says, Something’s off. I’ve learned to listen to that voice. When someone gets on my radar like that, I have special software I use to track them online without their knowing and read the transcripts of any chats they engage in. And I’ve caught a few, a very few, about to go over to the dark side.”
“And Martin is one of them?” Calvano asked, excited.
But the colonel shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. But . . .” He shrugged. “My radar started to go off about him. He just seemed a little too excited about the possibility of something actually happening. Know what I mean?”
Calvano nodded. “He told you about the man he supposedly saw in the park?”
The colonel nodded. “He left a few messages. Yesterday. Again this morning.”
“But you didn’t talk to him?”
“I have over fifty volunteers to oversee. I can’t talk to everyone right away. Not unless it’s a real emergency.”
“And you figured he was just blowing smoke?”
“I figured he was a troubled young man,” the colonel said.
Maggie had heard enough. She turned to Gonzales and preempted any attempt at straying from their plan. “All the more reason to give Martin a polygraph,” she said. “He’ll be back here in an hour.”
“Relax, Gunn,” Gonzales said. “We’re sticking with our deal.” He turned his back to Calvano and the colonel. “I think I’ve seen enough.”
Gonzales was restless, a little peeved, but I could not tell what the cause was. Was it just the tawdriness of the situation, the scummy nature of a world where even fifty volunteers had a hard time keeping the wolves from the lambs? Or, like Maggie, did he not like the slightly holier-than-thou attitude the colonel emitted? It was hard to tell.
There was a knock at the door of the observation room and Freddy, the desk sergeant, stuck his head inside. His face was grave.
“What’s up, Freddy?” Maggie asked.
“There’s a lady downstairs I think you better see . . .” His voice faltered. “She heard about the boy who went missing this morning.”
“Who the hell is it?” Gonzales asked. The last thing he needed was another complication.
“It’s Rosemary D’Amato, the mother of the boy who was abducted north of town sixteen years ago,” Morty explained. “She comes in every time there’s a child abduction or, really, any case that she thinks might tell her what happened to her son. She shows up here two, three times a year and has for the last sixteen years.”
Gonzales looked a little stunned at this.
“I’ll go talk to her,” Maggie volunteered.
“I’ll go with you,” Morty offered. “I’ve talked to her before.”
“Go,” Gonzales agreed, looking at his watch. “Sixteen years of waiting for us to do our jobs? God, just go to her.”
I had a feeling the feds couldn’t get here fast enough for Gonzales. He wanted to be rid of this case.