The Night Swim(25)

“In these cases, you really want to speak to the last person to have seen the missing person. In this instance, it was a kid called Harris Wilson. My first stop was his house.”



* * *



Harris’s dad, Bill Wilson, was in the driveway polishing his car when Detective Cooper arrived. The detective was dressed in canvas shorts and a T-shirt. He’d been on his way to his boat when he’d received the call about Kelly Moore and didn’t have time to go home and get changed.

“Harris around?” he called out to Bill as he walked down the driveway.

“Who’s asking?” asked Bill.

Detective Cooper flashed his police badge. “I’m looking for a girl who went missing last night. Harris’s friends say he might have seen her before she disappeared.”

“Harris is asleep,” Bill said, furiously polishing the hood of his car.

“Can you wake him up?” Detective Cooper asked. “It’s kind of important.”

“With pleasure. ’Bout time he woke up.” Bill tossed the rag onto the car hood as he led the way into the house.

He left Detective Cooper sitting at the pine kitchen table, flipping through the sports section of the newspaper while he went upstairs to wake his son. A few minutes later, Harris shuffled into the kitchen in bare feet. His hair was a mess. His clothes were creased, like he’d literally thrown them on. He couldn’t meet Detective Cooper’s eyes at all as he pulled out a chair and sat alongside his dad at the kitchen table. Detective Cooper took one look at him and tossed the newspaper aside.

He had dealt with scores of missing-persons cases during his years on the force. The scenario was almost always the same: A teenager runs away and the parents immediately expect a missing-persons file to be opened and no stone to be left unturned in the search for their kid. The kid inevitably turns up hours or days later. It’s discovered he, or she, was staying with friends after a fight at home. Sometimes the pattern repeated itself when the kid ran off again after another argument.

He’d assumed this would be one of those cases. That is, until he set eyes on Harris. His eyes were bloodshot and he was showing an inordinate amount of interest in the floor. More troubling, Harris reeked of alcohol and weed. Detective Cooper smelled it even before Harris reached the kitchen table.

Rightly or wrongly, in the unofficial barometer of guilt by which detectives measured potential suspects Harris was in the red zone.

Harris took a green apple from the fruit bowl on the table. He looked for a moment as if he was about to take a bite, then changed his mind and threw it from one hand to the other like he was preparing to pitch a ball. It didn’t look good. A girl was missing and he was messing around, fidgeting and looking like he wished he were anywhere else.

Harris’s father gently kicked Harris in the calf to get him to cut it out. Harris looked at his dad and shrugged. He must have known that he stank of marijuana and cheap liquor. Not exactly the way to impress a cop who’d heard that he was the last person to see a missing girl before she disappeared.

Harris tossed the apple around again and then took a bite with a pronounced crunch. Detective Cooper watched him closely, pushing back his chair so he could get a better view of the teenage boy sitting across the table from him.

One thing was certain in his mind: Harris Wilson had gone from a possible witness to a key suspect before he had answered a single question.

“Thanks for talking to me, Harris,” Detective Cooper said, deliberately sounding casual. “I only have a few questions. It won’t take long.” The teen shrugged as if it made no difference to him.

“Are you aware that Kelly Moore is missing?”

“My dad told me. When he woke me up. That’s the first I heard of it,” he said, his eyes downcast. He shifted the apple from one hand to the other. “What do you mean by ‘missing’?” He looked up. Detective Cooper noticed an uncertain catch in his voice. Harris was afraid of something.

“Missing as in nobody knows where she is,” said Detective Cooper, watching him closely. “Some people say they saw you leaving a party with her. Did you leave a party with Kelly last night?”

“Kind of.” Harris squirmed at the question.

“What do you mean by ‘kind of’?”

“Kelly left the party after Lexi locked her out of the house. I saw her walking off down the street in the dark. A lot of us did. I followed her from the house.”

“You followed her?”

Bill Wilson sat up so abruptly that his chair squeaked. He seemed to register for the first time that Detective Cooper’s sudden interest in his son was not as innocent as he had presumed.

“I didn’t think it was right that she was walking alone at night. Lexi was being an outright bitch to her. So I went after Kelly and walked back to town with her. I was leaving anyway. The party was lame.”

Harris told Detective Cooper how they went to the playground and sat on the swings for a while until he left Kelly there to go to his house to get something. He was gone for only a few minutes.

“What exactly did you get from your room that was so important that you had to leave a teenage girl alone at a park in the middle of the night?”

Harris examined his nails with the utmost fascination before raising his head. “I got something to smoke,” he said eventually.