ChapterTwenty-Three
I gather my thoughts and make a plan. I won’t tell anyone that Wade was in my house. That he left me this gift. The fact that he came here means my plan is working. I have chosen the right road to walk down, and it’s a road I have to walk alone.
I think about what this means, this picture of a young man. It has to do with Clay Lucas. More specifically, it has to do with the gun he nearly used to kill Wade, the gun that got him killed in the end.
The search for the original owner had led to dead ends. Guns are everywhere, and saying that is not a political position or opinion. It’s an objective fact. They’re purchased at stores and gun shows, resold on the internet and on the street, places like the one we have here under the bridge. They’re stolen off delivery trucks and from manufacturing sites and from people’s homes. They’re smuggled in from other countries. They’re even printed now.
This was just one gun. All identifying markings had been removed. The ammunition was indistinguishable. So it came down to assumptions about where Clay Lucas might have gone, might have been, people he might have seen, and who might have given him a gun or sold him a gun or been so careless with a gun that he was able to take it in the middle of a dark night while he wrestled with his demons and the chemical disorder that afflicted his brain.
I’ve seen the reports. The interviews with our detectives in vice and with the feds who came to dip their toe in our little pond until the media trucks drove away. They had done their own investigation and come upempty-handed. Yes, Clay Lucas had been spotted under the bridge, taking refuge with others who had nowhere else to go. The ones who were helpful had nothing to hide, and so they admitted to seeing him sometime before the robbery. They could not be more specific, except to say it wasn’t that day or the day before. Time slipped away easily, marked by the weather. Hot or cold. Rain or snow.
They were less forthcoming about anyone who might have given him access to a gun. This was a community that functioned on symbiotic relationships. The homeless provided cover for the dealers. The dealers brought relief to the homeless—food, blankets, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs. Some were clean but down on their luck. Others had lost their battle with addiction. Others still, like Clay Lucas, were mentally ill.
Attempts to study them end in frustration. Diagnosis isn’t aten-minuteprocess. It requires cooperation and submission and trust. The dealers don’t want social workers and shrinks hanging around, and the homeless gain nothing by attracting them. They gain nothing and lose everything by biting the hands that feed and protect them. And would bite them back without a second thought.
There is a balance that cannot be disrupted by outsidedo-gooders. A social order, a culture built on rules and loyalty and punishment for disobedience.
Then there is the missing woman—Laurel Hayes. We don’t know what to think. What to make of her disappearance. We consider the possibility she lied to her parents and her coworkers at Clear Horizons. Maybe she did see Clay Lucas after he stopped attending the day care. Maybe she gave him shelter or money after he ran away from home. Maybe she was somehow involved in helping him get his hands on that gun. Someone did.
There it is again—the wordmaybeclinging to every theory, every thought. I force myself to swallow the anger it provokes.
This picture I hold in my hand is the result of a different kind of investigation. It’s the handiwork of the man I inadvertently trained and who knew about the people under the bridge from our conversation. He didn’t think forward the way others had, starting with the fact that Clay had a gun and that he had been spotted under the bridge. He thought backward and asked the question I should have known to ask had I not been preoccupied with the pain of my numbness and my guilt and shame from killing a young man.
The day Clay beat his mother and escaped her care, he ran away. There was a short effort to find him, and it produced those few witnesses who’d spotted him under the bridge. He became another runaway in the wind. Another victim of a mental disease who had left treatment and disappeared. Finding the missing is how I’ve spent the majority of eight years. There’s a reason for the dusty files that remain unsolved.
I can hear the question in my head as I move through my house, get dressed, lock up as if nothing has happened. As if Wade did not walk through my front door and hide and watch me in the shower and then leave this present at my feet.
Why did Clay Lucas go to the bridge to begin with?
He was too young to know about that place. He’d been sheltered in hospitals and at home for most of his life. He’d never run away or been out of the watchful eye of a caregiver since his diagnosis when he was just sixteen years old.
How did he know to go there? Miles from his home on the other side of town. No transportation. No phone. No money. And yet that was where he ended up.
I stop moving after I’ve gotten dressed. I stand in my bedroom and try to navigate through spinning thoughts and frayed nerves and a churning gut. There is a physical disruption inside me. A sickness that pervades every cell. Every function. Whatever decision I make now must be held to a higher scrutiny. Impulses cannot be trusted. They tell me to scream and cry and drive in circles until I find Wade and take him down. I fantasize about throwing him to the ground and cuffing him and reading him his rights and putting him in my car and delivering him to my partner, who then drags him to an interview room where he is interrogated and then, finally, thrown in a cell. Impulses tell me to fight, but they don’t know how, and so I weave these absurdities.
I don’t know if what I am about to do is right or wrong. But I think about it from every angle and run down every possible outcome and finally make the decision.
The Lucases live seven miles from my house. I tell everyone I need to—the rookies in the gray SUV, who missed Wade walking through my front door, and Rowan, who is already buried in paperwork—that I’m going to a doctor’s appointment. No one wants to pry, and I think that maybe I can use this a few more times before it becomes suspicious.
I take the back roads and pull into their driveway twenty minutes after leaving my own.
They know I’m coming because I’ve looked up their number in our system and called ahead. I told them who I am. I told them I am coming alone. I gave them this time to prepare.
Aaron had been in touch with them several times and said they didn’t blame me. He said they wanted me to know that. But time has now passed and whatever caused them to feel that way has likely shifted. Just after the shooting, their son was a villain and I was a hero. Scrutiny had fallen upon their family. Judgment for not supervising such a sick man.
In the end, though, we have the attention span of small children. The scrutiny has since faded, along with the spotlight. Just like a political scandal or a celebrity divorce or a storm system moving toward the coast of Florida, a category five, no wait, now a four, and then never mind, it turned out to sea. The media attention surrounding the shooting was long gone. Not even the plea to the public to help find Wade had renewed the interest. Once a story was gone and people had digested it, folded it into their knowledge of the world, they had little interest in going back.
So I brace myself for the likelihood that this has happened to them. The scrutiny has faded, and their feelings about me have shifted to what my feelings would be if they had killed one of my girls. Hatred.
The house is aone-storyranch. A weathered For Sale sign is posted on the front lawn. Two cars are parked in the driveway. One is a small SUV. The other a utility van with the logo for Lucas Electric on the side. Flowers hang from a pot on the front porch, along with two wooden chairs and a round table in between. The setting is out of place, likely staged by the realtor. I can’t picture Clay’s parents casually enjoying nights spent on the porch, waving at neighbors as they walk dogs and supervise kids on bikes. I can’t imagine what they live with. What they now hold inside.
I pull into the driveway and don’t hesitate. I brace myself for whatever I’m about to find.
Bruce Lucas isfifty-seven. His hair is silver, and he appears gaunt and thin but somehow not broken. Sandra Lucas isfifty-three, and she has the look I know too well. The grief has been ravenous.
They greet me at the door. As I walk inside, I glance behind me from force of habit, to where Rowan usually is when I’m in the company of the survivors. This time, he’s not there, of course, and the reflex reminds me that I’m not operating at full capacity. I’m compromised by exhaustion, and the shock of having Wade inside my house. In my bedroom.
The Lucases are polite and cautious. They lead me to a cozy living room with gray sofas and a chrome coffee table. The floor is covered in carpet that shows signs of wear from a busy family. Photos hang from the walls and sit on the TV stand. My eyes catch a glimpse of Clay as a little boy. I would know those eyes anywhere. They haunt me.
