Twisted Fate(44)

We didn’t have enough men on staff to babysit rich boy while we tried to take down the scumbag that kidnapped Brian Phillips. The fact that he’d bought the movie and that he was on the registry was enough for a search warrant. Talking to Graham would have to wait. Rockland was a small force and we had no excuse to hold a kid who had just brought us this information voluntarily.

“Go!” I shouted. “Get moving.” I grabbed my jacket and headed out to the lot with the unmarked cars. “Graham, you go home and stay home. We’ll contact you later to ask you some questions.”

He looked astonished. “Did you find him? You found him already?” He laughed a little to himself.

I ushered him out the door. And ducked into the car. “We don’t know if we’ve found him or not. We’ll call you,” I said. We sped out and left him standing there.

I was, of course, terrified that we would be too late. It had been two days and the name we had was of a man who had already served time for taking a little girl down in Portland on a ten-day drive. Usually people like this feel they got nothing to lose if they’re going to do it again.

The house was way out by Chickawaukie Pond, near Achorn Cemetery, and I had to stop myself from thinking the worst. From thinking that little boy was already in the pond or dumped in Glen Cove.

We surrounded the house with the full force and backup from Waldoboro. I could feel him standing on the other side of the door when we rang the bell. I could feel him waiting, thinking we’d go away if he waited. He was trapped.

We pounded again and he opened the door. The place was neat and orderly—too orderly, like a hotel room.

I said, “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Brian Phillips, the boy who disappeared in Rockland last week. We understand you bought a movie that was made of him.”

His eyes darted just briefly toward a door off the kitchen when I said Brian’s name, and I motioned to Evans to check it out.

He took two uniforms with him, tramping down a flight of stairs while I questioned the scumbag about where he’d been the last four days. And soon I heard them calling up to us, telling us to call in an ambulance. Then they came rushing upstairs, Evans carrying Brian. He was unconscious and his hands and feet were tied.

I had the uniforms handcuff the scumbag and take him out to the car. I wanted to kick the living shit out of him right there but I knew he’d be getting plenty of that in prison.

Evans sat in a chair at the kitchen table and I cut away the ropes that tied Brian. From the way he was breathing, I was certain that he had been drugged. His pulse was slow and steady, and apart from some bruises and chapped lips, he looked okay. He must have been terrified and dehydrated, and clearly other things had happened to him or were about to happen to him before we arrived.

It was one of the quickest recoveries of an abducted child in the history of the state. We called Brian’s mother right there from the house and told her that her boy was found and seemed fine but needed to go to the hospital. And I’ll never forget the way she exhaled and started crying and laughing on the phone. As if she’d been holding her breath for days.

Evans held the boy close to his chest and we all felt like we had won the lottery.

On the way back to the car one of the uniforms said, “If that kid Graham hadn’t come in we might not have found him.”

I shook my head. “If that kid Graham wasn’t out making his movies, Brian would have been home with his mom and baby sister this whole time.”

But what he said was true. It took guts for a teenager with his history to come in and turn that information over to us. And thank God he did.

At least one tragedy was averted that year. At least one.





So Graham was officially a hero. Story in the paper and the whole thing.

“Art Dullard might have been too stupid to even know that what he did was connected to Brian’s kidnapping,” Declan said on the way to school. “If you hadn’t made us go over there and convince him, God knows what would have happened.”

“Yeah, well, it was Becky who said we should get him to help, and he did.”

“I don’t understand,” Declan said. “He was dead set against anyone finding out, and then he went there himself.”

I shrugged. But I knew exactly why he turned over the movies to the cops. Ally had convinced him in her gentle way. He wanted her to think of him as a hero and she could be very convincing sometimes. I don’t think he would have done it if he wasn’t afraid we’d do it ourselves and if he didn’t have Ally persuading him. It was a one-two punch from the Tate sisters.

“He still doesn’t think he did anything wrong,” I said. “You can tell he just doesn’t understand these things.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But you can also tell he’s kind of our friend now too. We didn’t rat him out that night. We went to bed and in the morning he did it himself. We ate pad thai at his house and talked to him like he was our friend. I think he’s our friend, Tate.”

I sighed. The mystery of Graham wasn’t that he had stupidly sold information to pedophiles. There was something more going on. Maybe I could sense these things because my own life was not exactly what it seemed all the time. Maybe I knew because he seemed like two different people to Ally and me when we talked to him.

But no matter how you cut it I knew. And it didn’t help things that people now thought he was a hero. Or the newspaper did at any rate. The creep who took Brian had I guess manipulated Graham too somehow. I don’t think he’d have given that information to someone doing bad things. But then again maybe he would. When we asked him about it the night we watched the movies, he didn’t seem to care why these people were paying so much for the movies. According to the newspaper, he didn’t tell the cops the same story he told us. Just that the guy had bought him a camera—not paid him money. Unless there were more people who bought the movies that we didn’t know about.