NOS4A2(106)

Vic found the ham, coleslaw, and a bag of Doritos and began to make up the plates.

“There’s a secret to cop sandwiches,” said a woman who had come in behind her.

Vic took one look and knew this was The Guy she had been waiting for, even if The Guy wasn’t a guy. This woman had frizzy brown hair and a little snub nose. She was plain at first glance, devastatingly pretty on the second. She wore a tweed coat with corduroy patches on the elbows and blue jeans and could’ve passed for a grad student at a liberal-arts college, if not for the nine-millimeter strapped under her left arm.

“What’s the secret?” Vic asked.

“Show you,” she said, and eased herself in, took the spoon, and dumped coleslaw into one of the sandwiches, on top of the ham. She built a roof of Doritos over the coleslaw, squirted Dijon mustard on the chips, buttered a slice of bread, and squished it all together. “The butter is the important part.”

“Works like glue, right?”

“Yes. And cops are, by nature, cholesterol magnets.”

“I thought the FBI only came in on kidnappings in cases where the kid has been hauled across state lines,” Vic said.

The frizzy-haired woman frowned, then glanced down at the laminated card clipped to the breast of her jacket, the one that said over an unsmiling photograph of her face:

FBI

PSYCH EVAL

Tabitha K. Hutter

“Technically, we’re not in it yet,” Hutter said. “But you’re forty minutes from three state borders and less than two hours from Canada. Your assailants have had your son for almost—”

“My assailants?” Vic said. She felt a flush of heat in her cheeks. “Why do people keep talking about my assailants, like we don’t know anything about them? It’s starting to piss me off. Charlie Manx is the man. Charlie Manx and someone else are driving around with my kid.”

“Charles Manx is dead, Ms. McQueen. He’s been dead since May.”

“Got a body?”

That gave Hutter pause. She pursed her lips, said, “He has a death certificate. There were photos of him in the morgue. He was autopsied. His chest was split open. The coroner took his heart out and weighed it. Those are convincing reasons to believe he didn’t attack you.”

“And I’ve got half a dozen reasons to believe he did,” Vic said. “They’re all up and down my back. You want me to take my shirt off and show you the bruises? Every other cop in this joint has had a good look.”

Hutter stared at her without reply. Her gaze held the simple curiosity of a small child. It rattled Vic, to be observed so intently. So few adults gave themselves permission to stare that way.

At last Hutter shifted her eyes, turned her gaze toward the kitchen table. “Will you sit with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, she picked up a leather satchel she’d brought with her and settled at the kitchen table. She peered up expectantly, waiting for Vic to sit with her.

Vic looked to Chitra, as if for advice, remembering how the woman had, for a moment, comforted her and whispered to her like her mother. But the policewoman was finishing the sandwiches and bustling them out.

Vic sat.

Hutter removed an iPad from her briefcase, and the screen glowed. More than ever, she looked like a grad student, one preparing a dissertation on the Bront? sisters, perhaps. She passed her finger over the glass, swiping through some sort of digital file, then looked up.

“At his last medical exam, Charlie Manx was listed at approximately eighty-five years old.”

“You think he’s too old to have done what he did?” Vic asked.

“I think he’s too dead. But tell me what happened, and I’ll try to get my head around it.”

Vic did not complain that she had already told the story three times, start to finish. The other times didn’t count, because this was the first cop who mattered. If any cop mattered. Vic was not sure one did. Charlie Manx had been claiming lives for a long time and had never been caught, passed through the nets that law enforcement threw at him like silver smoke. How many children had climbed into his car and never been seen again?

Hundreds, came the answer, a whisper of a thought.

Vic told her story—the parts of it she felt she could tell. She left out Maggie Leigh. She did not mention she had ridden her motorcycle onto an impossible covered bridge of the imagination, shortly before Manx tried to run her down. She did not discuss the psychotropic medication she did not take anymore.

When Vic got to the part about Manx hitting her with the hammer, Hutter frowned. She asked Vic to describe the hammer in detail, tapping the keyboard on her iPad’s screen. She stopped Vic again when Vic told her about how she had gotten up off the ground and gone after Manx with the tappet key.

“Tapper what?”

“Tappet key,” Vic said. “Triumph made them special just for their bikes. It’s a spanner. Kind of wrench. I was working on the motorcycle and had it in my pocket.”

“Where is it now?”

“I don’t know. I had it in my hand when I had to run. I was probably still holding it when I went in the lake.”

“This is when the other man started shooting at you. Tell me about that.”

She told.

“He shot Manx in the face?” Hutter said.

“It wasn’t like that. He clipped him in the ear.”