The Murder Artist Read online

  “Afraid we can’t put Amber in play,” Shoffler says. “Not yet, anyway. An Amber requires specific, time-sensitive information: a description of the perpetrator, a vehicle make and model, a license plate.” His hands float up into the air and settle back down on his thighs. “Something. Amber – it’s strictly for abductions. At the moment, far as we know, your boys are lost.”

  “Right.”

  “We’re not sitting on our hands, Mr. Callahan. Soon as Gary called me – before I even got here – and I realized these boys had already been missing almost two hours, I went ahead and issued B.O.L.’s to the surrounding jurisdictions.”

  “B.O.L.’s?”

  “Be On the Lookout.”

  I nod but say nothing.

  “Okay,” Shoffler says, smacking his lips together, “so start with where you were when you last saw your boys, and then let’s go from the top through the day, what you did this morning, how you got here, when you got here, and everything you did within the fairgrounds proper. Let’s get this down while it’s fresh in your mind.”

  “We were at the joust,” I say. “The boys went up to cheer for the Green Knight…”

  Once I’ve recounted this part, we start at the beginning. I attempt to reconstruct the day. The red diode glows, I talk, Shoffler listens.

  The fair is for the most part deserted now, the booths shuttered and padlocked. Shoffler and I head toward the jousting arena. The detective stops everyone we meet, noting name and position at the fair in his careful handwriting, telling them they’ll have to check out with Jack at headquarters before they leave the grounds. He asks each of them if they remember seeing a set of twins. No? What about me? No.

  We’ve been through about a dozen such encounters when Shoffler stops walking, cocks his head, and looks at me. “Hunh,” he says with a look on his face that I can’t read.

  “What?”

  Shoffler shakes his head. “I’m just surprised nobody remembers them, that’s all. I mean – identical twins.”

  The remark skitters past me like a mouse in the walls.

  At the arena, Shoffler follows me as I walk through the hay bales.

  “About here,” I tell him, coming to a stop. “We were sitting just about here.”

  “And you were here the last time you saw them?”

  “More or less.”

  “And where were they?”

  I gesture toward the ringside, where “the Green Machine” once stood cheering. I describe – for what must be the fourth or fifth time now, exactly what happened. Shoffler pages back through his notebook and checks something. “So the last time you saw them, they were down there, cheering for the Green Knight.”

  I close my eyes, concentrate. “No,” I say. “That’s not right.”

  “No?”

  “Last time I saw them was right before the final joust. They were in a crowd of other kids, petting a dog.”

  “A dog? What kind of dog?”

  “Skinny dog – what do they call it? Like a greyhound, but smaller.”

  “Whippet?” Shoffler asks.

  “Right. It had a thing around its neck – you know, a collar. A ruffled white collar.”

  “You mean – like out of Shakespeare? A… what do they call that? A ruff?”

  “That’s right. A ruff. In fact” – the image jumps into my mind – “the guy was wearing one too.”

  “What guy?”

  “There was a tall guy with the dog.”

  “And they were both in ruffs. In costume.”

  “Right.”

  “Huh,” Shoffler says. “So you took your eyes off the kids to watch the joust and then the next time you looked, they’re gone.”

  “Right,” I say, with a trapdoor feeling in my chest, as if I’m on a plane that’s suddenly dropped twenty thousand feet. “They were gone.”

  As we approach the ring, I see that someone’s inside the arena: a skinny guy in a faded red Adidas T-shirt. He’s raking up horse manure.

  He answers Shoffler’s questions politely. “Allen Babcock,” he says in a British accent. “A, double L, E, N. I’m the head groom, take care of the horses and all that.” He gestures to the manure. “Take my turn doing the scut work, too. Mind if I ask what’s this about?”

  “We’ve got a couple of young boys missing. Twins.”

  Babcock’s eyes dart over to me. “Your lads, then?”

  I nod. “Six-year-old boys. Blond hair. You see them?”

  Babcock shakes his head. “Sorry. No one’s about now, and if you mean earlier – I’m not out front much. A few fans find their way back to the entrance chutes, but not many. No twins. Not today. I’d remember.”

  “Entrance chutes? So where exactly are you during these events?” Shoffler asks.

  “Have a look?”

  We follow Babcock through the arena and out a gate at the opposite side to what amounts to a staging area. Two metal chutes, consisting of lengths of tubular metal fence chained together, lead to two wooden corrals. “In one chute,” Babcock says, “out the other. The horses can be a bit headstrong – they don’t like all that fancy tack they have to wear for competition. So I’m back here, helping with the horseflesh, and getting the knights on and off their mounts – a right trick with all that armor.”

  “What happens afterwards? You trailer the horses away until the next day or the next weekend?”

  “No, no. We stay right out back here.”

  “Where’s that?” Shoffler asks.

  We follow Babcock toward a six-foot-high perimeter fence. “This fence enclose the entire fairgrounds?” Shoffler asks.

  “Right,” the groom says, unlocking a padlock and pulling open the gate.

  As soon as we walk through the gate into the area outside the fence, into the wide-open world, I feel panicked. There’s a whole wide world out here. If Kevin and Sean are not inside the fairgrounds, they could be anywhere.

  “Horses and tack in there,” Babock says, nodding toward a white clapboard barn. “Humanfolk in the caravan.” He gestures toward a large Winnebago. “The knights – well, they’re actors really, aren’t they? As well as riders. They live in the compound with the others. It’s just me and Jimmy here where we can look after the animals.”

  Beyond the barn, a field enclosed with white four-board fencing leads back toward the dense woodland. The cicadas roar.

  A huge black horse stands next to the barn, tied on either side to a framework. A short, dark-complected man holds one of the beast’s massive hooves and pries out dirt with a metal pick. Babcock introduces the man as Jimmy Gutierrez. After a few words with him, Shoffler writes down his name and telephone number in his notebook.

  “Mind if we take a look in the barn… and in your Winnebago?” Shoffler asks.

  “Bit untidy in the caravan,” Babcock says. “But go ahead.”

  We’re through the perimeter fence and on our way back into the jousting arena when I see it, near one of the metal chutes: a small white Nike shoe with a blue swoosh on it.

  The sight of it stops me cold. Shoffler and Babcock are through the gate and into the arena before the detective notices I’m no longer with them.

  “Mr. Callahan?”

  I beckon, unable to speak. I stare at the shoe. It’s just sitting there, in the dirt, perfectly upright, as if someone just stepped out of it – although, I see that the laces are still tied.

  “That looks just like one of Kevin’s shoes,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Right there. That shoe.” I point to it, a small white shoe with a smear of mud on its laces. “My son Kevin has shoes like that.”

  The sight of the shoe there in the dirt, its laces still tied, reminds me of all the times – the surprisingly numerous times – when I’ve caught sight of shoes separated from their owners. Tied together and dangling over a wire. Stranded solo on a roadside shoulder. Dumped in a trash bin. There’s something about abandoned shoes – even shoes outside hotel rooms, even tagged shoes in a shoe repa
ir shop – that’s always struck me as sad, even ominous.

  And this shoe – is it Kevin’s? – seems to me a terrible sign, proof of haste and violence. I lean forward, as if to pick it up, but Shoffler stops me, extending a stiff arm across my chest.

  “Wait a minute,” the detective says, his voice suddenly sharp. “Don’t touch it.”

  Ten minutes later, Christiansen arrives and the shoe ends up with its own little fence of traffic cones and yellow police tape. Christiansen will stay to await the arrival of the evidence technician. The word evidence worries me almost as much as the shoe itself. Allen Babcock claims he never noticed “the trainer” (as he calls it). Jimmy Gutierrez never saw it, either.

  “How do you know it belongs to Kevin?” Shoffler asks, as we walk back toward the entrance gate. “I thought they’re identical twins?”

  “They don’t dress the same,” I tell him.

  “Right,” Shoffler says. “I forgot.”

  “Now, let’s take it from the top, from when you got here,” Shoffler says. “What time was that, by the way? What’d the clerk look like?”

  I pull my wallet out of my back pocket. “I should have the receipt.” Pulling out the wallet makes me remember how I thought I’d lost it earlier in the day. Something about that incident worries me, but I let it go when I find the receipt.

  “Two-eighteen,” I tell Shoffler, reading the time stamp.

  The detective has his notebook out again. “And the person who sold it to you?” he says, without looking up.

  The question bothers me. My kids are missing and it’s like the detective is checking on me. I answer the question. “Thirtysomething, eyebrows plucked almost to oblivion.” The woman’s voice comes back to me: “One lord, two squires, is it? On Her Majesty’s royal Visa.”

  Two squires…

  Shoffler eyes the wallet. “You happen to have a photograph of your boys in there?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  Shoffler taps a finger against one eyebrow. “I might send one of the detectives back to the station with a photo. Put us a step ahead. We can prepare to distribute to the surrounding jurisdictions. And to the media.”

  I knew that the police would want a picture of the boys, but somehow the official request depresses me. “This is almost a year old,” I tell Shoffler, sliding the studio snapshot out of its transparent plastic compartment. I look at it for a moment, before handing it over.

  In the photo, my sons are wearing matching blue-striped

  T-shirts, which is unusual for them. Liz must have talked them into it, because they balk at wearing identical clothing and have only a few such outfits, gifts from Liz’s mom. Liz and I always let the boys pick out what they want to wear (within reason), and they almost never choose clothes that would make them seem interchangeable. Except when they want to mess with people and play what they call “the twin game.” They can’t fool their parents – but anybody else is easy game.

  Despite the matching clothes, there’s no question who’s who in the photograph. Placed in front of a camera, Sean does not comprehend smile – or any of the expressions photographers use in its place. No matter how many times Liz explains to Sean that the way he contorts his face is not a smile, no matter how many times he’s shown the evidence, it doesn’t matter. Every posed photograph of him taken from the age of three – and counting – features Sean’s idea of a smile. This exaggerated and mirthless grimace, lips stretched away from each other as far as possible in every direction – is something like what an orangutan does, drawing its lips apart to bare its teeth.

  The photograph is almost too much. It feels as if my chest is full of broken glass. I hand it to Shoffler with a strange reluctance, as if by turning it over to the detective, I’m somehow relinquishing possession of my sons.

  “I thought you said they don’t dress identical,” Shoffler says.

  “They don’t,” I tell him. “Most of the time.”

  “Huh.”

  Half an hour later, after a tour through the fairgrounds – refining my account of the day – Shoffler’s satisfied. He switches off the tape recorder and sticks it in a pocket. He pulls out his cell phone, takes a few steps away, and turns from me. I can still hear what he says. He’s summoning everybody to headquarters.

  I’m in a fog, shuttling back and forth between disbelief and panic. One moment, I can’t believe this is happening. Then I know it’s happening – Sean and Kevin are missing, they’re missing – by the cold fist squeezing my heart.

  “I think while we’ve still got some light,” Shoffler is saying into his phone, “we’d better expand the search into the woods.”

  CHAPTER 5

  I don’t notice exactly when the rose-and-peach sunset drains away beneath the horizon, but suddenly it’s night. A crescent moon, startling in its clarity, hangs kitty-corner in the inky, star-strewn sky. I pull my cell phone out and call voice mail at home – for about the tenth time.

  Nothing’s changed, no messages.

  Shoffler wouldn’t let me go out with the initial search teams. Everyone offers the same advice: the best thing I can do is wait. It’s my sons who are missing, yet I’m supposed to sit and watch, a spectator at my own disaster.

  And yet it’s oddly familiar, this sense of being in the audience while the well-oiled machinery of catastrophe rolls into action. Between the news and TV crime shows, disaster flicks and reality TV, we’re prepped for every kind of nightmare. No matter what it is, it’s already happened in some form to someone else – filmed in gritty detail and with a musical score to punch it up. I should know.

  From my bench, I can hear Shoffler from inside headquarters, voice at volume: “Start at the intersection of 301 and Shade Valley Road. Then the bird should deploy at point 19, first sweep the fairground…”

  At first the words make no sense. And then bird and deploy and sweep drop into the proper linguistic slots in my brain and I understand the detective is talking about a search helicopter.

  Christiansen says: “If the kids’re in the woods, you won’t see them from a copter.”

  When yet another squad car arrives with a trunkful of powerful flashlights and four more uniformed men from Carroll County (with more on the way), Shoffler organizes new teams.

  Food has appeared from somewhere. Papa John’s Pizzas, Gatorade, cans of Pepsi, big aluminum thermos dispensers of coffee, inverted towers of white foam cups. Someone’s pinned a topographical map to the wall and marked it into a grid. The first search party departs in a welter of raspy walkie-talkie communication, and then the second. When the third, consisting of four men and two women, assembles to watch Shoffler delineate their area on the topo map, I find myself on my feet.

  “I’m going.”

  Shoffler hesitates. “If we find them,” he starts, “it’s possible…”

  His voice trails away, but I can read his mind: It’s possible they won’t be alive. I nod to show I understand.

  Shoffler opens his mouth, as if he’s about to launch into his tired spiel about the best way to help being to stay put. But then he changes his mind, nods his assent. “What the hell,” he says.

  We walk through a densely wooded area in a ragged line, each person separated from the next by the prescribed double arm’s length distance of six feet, a span that shrinks and expands wildly depending on the terrain and its obstacles. Flashlights burrow into the darkness, probing and tunneling in well-defined cylinders of light until the beams fray off at the outer reaches of their scope and then dissolve into incandescent mist. The beams of the flashlights pry into hidden corners of the dense underbrush, illuminating tangles of multiflora roses, the crevices of big moss-covered rocks, the rough bark of tree trunks, leaves and branches, patches of glittery streams, the bright startled eyes of animals. Beams skid wildly through the sky as the searchers clamber over rocks and fallen logs. Every once in a while, the jaunty tune of a cell phone makes its anomalous intrusion and someone conducts an awkward conversation with spouse or friend.<
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  The search party, a segmented monster, makes a huge amount of noise as it crashes along, each man or woman yelling, “Sean! Kevin!” Above, the helicopter contributes even more noise, the thudding of its rotors as it makes methodical sweeps over the fairgrounds throwing up such a din that we can hardly shout over it at times. The voices calling for Sean and Kevin sound thin and puny, hopeless cries into the wilderness.

  We trudge and grope and clamber our way through terrain that’s not only rugged and full of unexpected and hidden ravines, but choked with brambles and vines, this underbrush often head high. It’s very tough going, as Shoffler warned us all, and it takes its toll. Every few minutes, there’s a yelp of pain, a curse. Within ten minutes, my legs and arms are torn up from the thorns, and my face is bleeding.

  An occasional raspy bulletin from Shoffler crackles out from the leader’s walkie-talkie. We halt until it’s clear that the communication is routine and involves no news of the boys. Each time this happens, my heart bangs against my rib cage and there’s an electric surge of adrenaline. I’m suspended, teetering between hope and dread.

  The search group also pauses when the helicopter hovers, as it does every few minutes, hesitating in one of its sweeps to cast a brilliant cone of light beneath it, so powerful it turns night into day. Then someone says, “Let’s go,” and we continue, clawing through the dense foliage, shouting until we’re hoarse.

  I sink into a kind of trance, focused only as far as the end of my beam of light, which I swing from side to side, methodical as an automaton, making certain to cover every inch of my patch of terrain. Many times, the light falls on a branch or a clump of leaves and tricks me into the momentary belief that I’ve seen a pant leg, an arm, a shoe, the curve of a head.

  They’re so small, really. When I check on them, asleep in their beds, when they’re quiet and inert, I’m shocked sometimes by how small they are – considering the space they take up in my life. If they were covered with leaves, even some halfhearted effort to hide them… It would be so easy to miss them.