Angie shook her head. “With all due respect, Dr. Dawe, it sounds more like justice.”
He gave her a bitter nod, then wiped the tears from his face. He stood.
We looked up at him. Eventually, we stood, too.
He walked us back to the foyer, and as we had the first time I’d been here, we stopped by the shrine they’d erected to their daughter. This time, however, Christopher Dawe acknowledged it. He squared his shoulders to it and placed his hands in his pockets and glanced at the photographs one by one, his head moving in shifts so slight they were nearly imperceptible.
I studied the ones in which Wesley appeared, and I realized that except for the height and the blond hair, he didn’t look much like the man I’d come to believe was him. The young Wesley in these photos had small eyes, weak lips, a tremulous sag to his entire face, as if it were sinking under the combined weight of genius and psychosis.
“A couple of mornings before she died,” Christopher Dawe said, “Naomi came in the kitchen and asked me what doctors did. I said we healed sick people. She asked why people got sick. Was God punishing them for being bad? I said no. She said, ‘Then why?’” He looked over his shoulder at us, gave us a faint smile. “I didn’t have an answer. I stalled. I smiled like an idiot and still had the dumb smile on my face when her mother called her and she ran out of the room.” He turned his head back to the pictures of the small, dark-haired girl. “I wonder if that’s what she thought as her lungs filled with water-that she’d done something bad, and God was punishing her.”
He sucked a breath loudly through his nostrils and his shoulders tensed for a moment.
“He seldom calls anymore. He usually writes. When he does call, he whispers. Maybe it’s not my son.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“I won’t pay him another dime. I’ve told him. I’ve told him he has nothing left to threaten me with.”
“How’d he react?”
“He hung up.” Dr. Dawe turned away from the photos. “I suspect he’ll come after Carrie soon.”
“And then what will you do?”
He shrugged. “Bear up. Find out how strong we really are. You see, even if we pay him, he’ll destroy us anyway. I think he’s drunk with it, this power he seems to have. I think he’d do it whether it brought him financial gain or not. This man-whoever he is, my son, my son’s friend, my son’s captor, whoever -he sees this as his life’s work, I think.” He gave us a dead, hopeless smile. “And he really loves his job.”
27
Information about Wesley, or the man who called himself Wesley, had the character of Wesley himself: It appeared in scant flashes, bright and fast, and then disappeared. For three days we worked out of the belfry office and my apartment trying to glean, from notes, photos, and rough transcripts of the interviews we’d conducted, any tangible proof of who this guy was. Using contacts at the Registry of Motor Vehicles, BPD, and even agents I’d once worked with from both the FBI and the Justice Department, we ran the photos of Wesley through computers that interfaced with every known justice agency, including Interpol, and got zip.
“Whoever this guy is,” Neal Ryerson at Justice told me, “he keeps the lowest profile since D. B. Cooper.”
Through Ryerson we also acquired a list of the owners of every 1968 Shelby Mustang GT-500 convertible still in existence in the U.S. Three were registered to owners in Massachusetts. One was a woman, two men. Posing as a writer from a car magazine, Angie visited all three at their homes. None was Wesley.
Hell, Wesley wasn’t even Wesley.
I considered what Stevie Zambuca had said about Wesley being vouched for by someone in Kansas City, but based on our list, no one in the entire city of K.C. owned a ’68 Shelby.
“What’s the oddest thing?” Angie asked on Friday morning, panning her hand over the mountain of paper on my dining room table. “About all of this? What jumps out?”
“Oh, I dunno,” I said. “Everything?”
Angie grimaced, sipped from her Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cup. She picked up the list the Dawes had compiled for us, as best they could remember, of addresses where they’d sent the bimonthly cash deposits.
“This bugs me,” she said.
“Okay.” I nodded. It bugged me, too.
“Instead of trying to find Wesley, maybe we should see where the money takes us.”
“Fine. But I bet they’re bullshit drops. I bet they’re big homes where he knew no one was home and the postman would have to leave the packages on the porch, and once he’d left, Wesley just swooped in and picked them up.”
“Possibly,” she said. “But if just one of them is the address of someone who knows Wesley, or whoever the hell this guy is?”
“Then it’s worth the effort. You’re right.”
She placed the list down directly in front of her. “Most of these are local. We got Brookline once, Newton twice, Norwell once, Swampscott, Manchester-by-the-Sea…”
The phone rang and I picked it up. “Hello.”
“Patrick,” Vanessa Moore said.
“Vanessa, what’s up?”
Angie looked up from the list, rolled her eyes.
“I think you were right,” Vanessa said.
“About what?”
“That guy on the patio.”
“What about him?”
“I think he’s trying to hurt me.”
Her nose was broken and a sallow brown bruise fringed the orbital bone of her left eye while a streak of hard black ran underneath it. Her hair was unkempt, the ends split and frizzy, and her good eye had a bag underneath it as dark as the bruise. Her normally ivory skin was gray and faded. She was chain-smoking, even though she’d once told me she’d quit five years ago and never missed it.
“What’s this,” she said, “Friday?”
“Yeah.”
“One week,” she said. “My life has fallen apart in one week.”
“What happened to your face, Vanessa?”
She turned it up to me as we walked. “Pretty, huh?” She shook her head and the tangled hair fell in her face. “I never saw him. The guy who did it. Never saw him.” She yanked the leash in her hand. “Come on, Clarence. Keep up.”
We were in Cambridge, along the Charles. Twice a week, Vanessa taught a law class at Radcliffe. I’d been dating her when she was offered the job, and was initially surprised she’d accepted it. The stipend Radcliffe paid wouldn’t cover her annual dry cleaning bill, and it wasn’t like she needed more work. She’d jumped at it, though. Even with all her other work, the part-time teaching offer had validated something in her she couldn’t completely articulate, and besides, she got to take Clarence into the classroom with her and have it chalked up as the eccentricity of a brilliant mind.