Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(20)
It was a black-and-white close-up of a man in his late fifties with a face that looked as if the skin had been pulled back hard against the bone, bunched up, and clipped by a metal clamp at the back of his skull. His pale eyes bulged from their sockets, and his tiny mouth all but disappeared under the shadow of his curved talon of a nose. His sunken cheeks were so puckered, he could have been sucking on a lemon. Ten or twelve strands of silver hair were finger-combed across the exposed flesh at the top of his pointy head.
“Ever seen him?” Broussard asked.
We shook our heads.
“Name’s Leon Trett. Convicted child molester. He’s taken three falls. The first got him sentenced to a psych ward, the last two to the pen. He finished his last bit about two and a half years ago, walked out of Bridgewater, and disappeared.”
Poole handed us a second photo, this one a full-length color shot of a gigantic woman with the shoulders of a bank vault and the wide girth and shaggy brown mane of a Saint Bernard standing upright.
“Good God,” Angie said.
“Roberta Trett,” Poole said. “The lovely missus of the aforementioned Leon. That picture was taken ten years ago, so she could have changed some, but I doubt she’s shrunk. Roberta has a renowned green thumb. She usually supports herself and her dear heart, Leon, as a florist. Two and a half years ago, she quit her job and moved out of her apartment in Roslindale, and no one has seen either of them since.”
“But…” Angie said.
Poole handed the third and final photograph across the table. It was a mug shot of a small toffee-skinned man with a lazy right eye and scrunched, confused features. He peered into the lens as if he were looking for it in a dark room, his face a knot of helpless anger and agitated bewilderment.
“Corwin Earle,” Poole said. “Also a convicted pedophile. Released one week ago from Bridgewater. Whereabouts unknown.”
“But he’s connected to the Tretts,” I said.
Broussard nodded. “Bunked with Leon in Bridgewater. After Leon rotated back to the world, Corwin Earle’s roommate was a Dorchester mugger named Bobby Minton, who in between stomping the shit out of Corwin for being a baby-raper was privy to the retard’s musings. Corwin, according to Bobby Minton, had a favorite fantasy: When he was released from prison, he was going to look up his old bunkmate Leon and his wonderful wife, Roberta, and they were going to live together as one big happy family. But Corwin wasn’t going to show up on the door without a gift. Bad form, I guess. And, according to Bobby Minton, the gift wasn’t going to be a bottle of Cutty for Leon and a dozen roses for Roberta. It was going to be a kid. Young, Bobby told us. Corwin and Leon like ’em young. No older than nine.”
“This Bobby Minton call you?” Angie said.
Poole nodded. “As soon as he heard about Amanda McCready’s disappearance. Mr. Minton, it seems, had consistently taunted Corwin Earle with vivid stories about what the good people of Dorchester do to baby-rapers. How Corwin wouldn’t be able to walk ten yards down Dorchester Avenue without getting his penis chopped off and stuffed in his mouth. Mr. Minton thinks Corwin Earle specifically chose Dorchester in which to pick up his homecoming present for the Tretts because he wanted to spit in Mr. Minton’s face.”
“And where’s Corwin Earle now?” I asked.
“Gone. Vanished. We’ve staked out his parents’ home in Marshfield, but so far, nothing. He left the pen in a taxi, took it to a strip club in Stoughton, and that’s the last anyone’s seen of him.”
“And this Bobby Minton’s phone call or whatever—that’s all you have to tie Earle and the Tretts to Amanda?”
“Pretty thin, huh?” Broussard said. “I told you we don’t have much. Chances are, Earle doesn’t have the balls for a straight kidnapping in an unknown neighborhood. Nothing in his sheet points toward it. The kids he molested were kids at a summer camp where he worked seven years ago. No violence, no forced captivity. He was probably just talking big for his cell mate.”
“What about the Tretts?” Angie said.
“Well, Roberta’s clean. The only felony she’s ever been convicted of was as an accessory-after-the-fact in a liquor store stickup in Lynn back in the late seventies. She did a year, completed her probation, and hasn’t spent so much as a night in county jail since.”
“But Leon?”
“Leon.” Broussard raised his eyebrows at Poole and whistled. “Leon’s bad, bad, bad. Convicted three times, accused twenty. Most cases were dropped when the victims refused to testify. And I don’t know if you know the logic regarding baby-rapers, but it’s the same for rats and roaches: You see one, there’s another hundred nearby. You catch a freak molesting a kid, you can bet there’s another thirty he’s never been bagged for if he’s halfway intelligent. So Leon, by our conservative estimates, has probably raped a good fifty kids. And he was living in Randolph and later in Holbrook when kids disappeared for good, so the feds and local cops have him at the head of their lists of suspects for those kids’ murders. Let you in on another aspect of Leon’s character—last time he was busted, Kingston P.D. found a shitload of automatic weapons buried near his house.”
“Did he take a fall for them?” Angie asked.
Broussard shook his head. “He was smart enough to bury them on his next-door neighbor’s property. Kingston P.D. knew the shit was his—his house was filled with NRA newsletters, gun manuals, The Turner Diaries, all the usual well-armed paranoid’s paraphernalia—but they couldn’t prove it. Very little sticks to Leon. He’s very careful, and he knows how to drop out of sight.”