The Searcher(85)
“Start right there,” Cal says, nodding to the front door. “Then sweep it round the room, nice and slow.”
After a moment, Trey does as he’s told without comment. He moves the flashlight evenly while Cal videos the room, then holds it steady for photos of the cooler, the sideboard, the stove, the propane tanks, the water bottles. Then Cal takes videos of the back rooms, without the flashlight. The unboarded back windows were a good call. If you’re going to do what Brendan Reddy was going to do in here, you want plenty of ventilation.
The place smells of nothing but damp, rain and spruce. Brendan never got started. He had most everything in place, maybe everything, and then something went wrong.
When they finish up the photos, Cal takes the flashlight back and walks the front room, keeping the beam on the floor. “What you looking for?” Trey asks, hovering.
“Anything I can find,” Cal says. “Nothing there, though.” He’s looking for bloodstains. He can’t see any, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there—the floor’s been cleaned not too long ago, although there’s no way to know whether it was before Brendan went or after. Luminol would still show blood, but he hasn’t got Luminol. “Take a good look round. Anything different from when you were here last?”
Trey scans every room, taking his time. Finally he shakes his head.
“OK,” Cal says. He puts his phone away. “Let’s go take a look around outside.”
Trey nods, hands Cal the flashlight and heads for the door. Cal has no idea what he’s making of all this. He can’t tell whether this is just because the kid is the way he is, or whether Trey is deliberately keeping his thoughts to himself.
They walk the overgrown area that used to be the yard, but there’s no convenient stash and no sign of digging. All they find is a midden from the house’s inhabited days: a little heap of broken crockery and glass bottles, half buried under years’ worth of silted-up dirt and weeds.
Trey finds a stick and beats down nettles. “Knock it off,” Cal says.
“How come?”
“I’d rather not tell the world that someone’s been here.”
Trey glances at him, but says nothing. He throws the stick onto the midden.
Up here has a silence that separates it from the lowlands. Down below, there’s always a lavish mix of birds fussing and flirting, sheep and cattle conversing, farmers shouting, but up here the air is empty; nothing but the wind and one small cold call like pebbles being tapped together, over and over again.
They work their way up the sides of the dip, poking into clumps of long grass, going systematically back and forth to make sure they miss nothing. They find a rusted garden hoe with half a handle, and a snarl of barbed wire, also rusty. When they reach the top they crunch through the spruce grove, kicking at piles of fallen needles and squinting up into the branches for caches. A couple of old nests make them look twice.
Cal knew from the start it was hopeless. There’s too much space up here for one man and a kid ever to cover. What he needs is a CSI team swarming all over the house, and a K-9 unit combing the mountainside. He feels like the world’s biggest fool, out here in a foreign country playing cop with no badge and no gun, and a thirteen-year-old kid and Officer Dennis for backup. He tries to imagine what Donna would say, but the truth is, Donna wouldn’t say anything at all; she would give him a stare where sheer incredulity beat out a number of other things for top spot, and then throw up her hands and walk away. Even Donna’s extravagant supply of words and noises didn’t contain anything to cover this.
“Well,” he says, in the end. “I guess we’ve seen about all there is to see around here.” It’s time to go. The light is starting to shift, the spruce shadows stretching down the side of the dip towards the house.
Trey looks up at him sharply, inquiring. Cal ignores that and heads deeper into the trees. He’s glad to get away from this place.
After a minute or two, he realizes he’s walking fast enough that the kid is trotting to keep up. “So,” he says, slowing down. “What do you make of that?”
Trey shrugs. He jumps to snap a branch off one of the spruces.
Cal feels a powerful need to have some idea of what’s going on in the kid’s head. “You know Brendan,” he says. “I don’t. That house give you any idea what he might’ve been planning?”
Trey whips the branch against a trunk as they pass. The hiss and smack are compressed by the trees all around. Nothing flaps or scuttles in response.
“When I went there,” he says, “after Bren went. I thought maybe he was living there. ’Cause I saw how he’d fixed it up, the roof and all, and the cooker and the cooler. Those didn’t use to be there before. I thought maybe he’d got sick of us and moved in there. I waited all night for him to come back. I was gonna ask could I come too.” He whips the branch against another trunk, harder this time, but the sound still flattens to insignificance. “I only copped on in the morning: I was fucking thick. There’s no mattress or sleeping bag or nothing. He wasn’t living there.”
This is the longest speech Cal has ever heard the kid make. He’s not surprised Trey didn’t mention the cottage earlier, not after that long night and that stinging slap of disappointment. “Doesn’t look like it,” he says.
After a shorter silence, Trey says, glancing up at him sideways, “All that stuff in the sideboard.”