Devoted in Death (In Death #41)(44)

She gestured him toward her office. He stopped again inside it, studied her board as she shrugged out of her coat.

“You know there’s more. Half again more maybe.”

“It hasn’t been updated since I left yesterday. I’m late getting in because we have another missing person.”

“Jayla Campbell. I was reading the bulletin,” he said when she narrowed her eyes, “when you came in. The timing’s right, I see you know that, too. They’ve got her. They’d’ve started right in on her last night, too. Excited to have another. They’d’ve already started hurting her.”

“There’s no official victim in Silby’s Pond. I’d remember.”

“No, ma’am. Sir. Lieutenant. Sorry.” He scrubbed at his eyes a moment. “I was saying how I figured you’d be willing to talk with me, so I drove up to Branson, as it’d be the best place to get a shuttle through to New York. I got the last one heading out, figured I’d hit lucky. Until they dumped us in Cleveland ’cause of the weather. So I rented a truck, and drove the rest.”

“From Cleveland, in this weather.”

“The only way to catch them is to catch up to them. I haven’t managed that yet.”

“Have a seat. You want coffee?”

“All I can get. Black would be just fine, thanks.”

She got two from the AutoChef.

“Who do you think they killed in your town?”

“Melvin Little. He’s what you might call a fixture around those parts. He served in the Urban Wars, and he never could get through that, if you know what I mean. He came home, to his parents, a younger brother and a sweetheart. What my own daddy tells me, is Little Mel – as he was called, being small in stature – used about any substance he could get his hands on to muffle the nightmares, the voices, the memories. I know this doesn’t matter, but I want you to know him.”

“You’re getting your fifteen,” she told him.

Nodding, Banner took a hit of caffeine. His eyes went wide and glassy. “Sweet Baby Jesus, what is this? Is this New York coffee?”

“Not exactly. It’s real coffee. I’ve got a connection.”

“Real coffee.” He said it like a prayer, with awe and reverence.

Remembering her first taste of Roarke’s coffee, she smiled. “Need a minute?”

“It could take days.” He smiled back, and she saw, beneath the fatigue, a great deal of charm. “Wait till I tell the boys back home.” Then he sighed. “Little Mel, he couldn’t adjust back. They tried what they try, but he was just one of the lost. There were too many, I guess. He didn’t like being indoors much, so he took to sleeping out in the hills, in the woods. You have what you call here sidewalk sleepers.”

“Yeah.”

“And they, some of them, they make a kind of home for themselves out of what they scavenge. He did that. His family took him food and supplies, but after some time, it was clear enough he wasn’t coming back. Most times he was drunk or high. He never hurt anybody but himself.”

She could see Melvin Little – Banner painted him well. And she sensed more. “What was he to you?”

“His sweetheart? That’s my grandmother. She loved him, loved the boy he’d been, but she couldn’t reach the man who’d come back. She married my grandfather, but she still went out to see Little Mel from time to time, take him food and fresh clothes. I got in the habit of going out to check on him every week or two.”

“So you looked out for him.”

“We did what we could. It’s true he might go rifling through a car or a cabin or shed now and then if it wasn’t locked up, take what caught his eye. More often in the last couple of years. Not when anyone was in them, you understand, and he never did a break-in. If it was locked, he left it be. Otherwise, he’d just go on in, poke around, take something to add to what he called his collection. Might be a fork or a doorknob, a broken clock.”

“You considered him harmless.”

“He was harmless.” Banner took a moment, another hit of coffee. “We had a boy go missing once. The family had gone camping, and the boy wandered off. We were putting the search team together when Little Mel comes walking into the campsite with the boy riding on his shoulders. The boy said how he’d been chasing a rabbit, and he got lost, and was crying and hurt his foot. And Little Mel came along, gave him a candy bar, wrapped up his foot in a handkerchief that was, truth be told, none too clean, and said how he’d give him a ride back to his mama. And he did. He never hurt anybody.”

“What happened to him?”

“I knew when I went out to check on him something was wrong. Not that he wasn’t there, but his things, they were jumbled up.” Banner paused, shaking his head. “He took pride in his collection, and there was an organization to it. And that day, there wasn’t.”

He looked up again, into Eve’s eyes. “You know how you get that pull in your belly?”

“I do.”

“I had that. I went looking for him, at his usual places. Where he liked to fish, where he’d take what he called his preambles. I didn’t find him until the next day. I went back the next morning, took his nephew’s son who’s a friend of mine so we could cover more ground. I found him in a gully, all broken up. You’d have thought how maybe he’d slipped off the track above, taken a long, bad fall. But he was a damn mountain goat, I swear. He’d been dead three days.”