Cruel Comfort (Evan Buckley Thrillers Book 1) (5 page)

There wasn’t any more sleep for him
that night so he was up early the next day. He started researching the case,
but soon realized he wasn't going to find out much more than Tom Jacobson had
told him the night before. The newspaper archives told a familiar story with
the media's rapidly dwindling interest mirroring the lack of any palpable
progress by the police. The only piece of information of any use that he could
find was the name of the chief of police ten years ago; Matt Faulkner.

He knew he was given to seeing the
faults in anything the police did, but he couldn't help but feel that they'd
been far too quick to pin the blame for the boy's disappearance on the father,
once he too disappeared. He made up his mind to go to see Faulkner, and try to
get more information out of him before doing any more digging himself. If
Faulkner talked to him he could save himself a lot of unnecessary legwork. He
would have liked to talk to Linda Clayton first - if he could talk to her there
was a better chance that Faulkner would talk to him - but she hadn't made any
attempts to contact him.

It didn't even cross his mind that
he wasn't actually working for her. Somehow it had turned into a personal
crusade.

            He decided his best bet was to drive out and try to
talk to Matt Faulkner immediately. Faulkner had retired some years ago and was
now living in a trailer park on the outskirts of town. Evan didn't bother ringing
ahead as he wasn't sure Faulkner would agree to talk to him, particularly since
the case wasn't what you’d call his finest hour.

The man who was locking up the
trailer door as Evan walked up certainly didn't look like Evan expected him to.
The trailer park wasn't the greatest place he'd ever been, but if he thought
Faulkner was going to be sitting around his trailer all day in a wife beater
and grubby old pants, drinking beer and smoking, he couldn't have been further
from the truth.

Faulkner was mid sixties with short,
steel gray hair and a flat, square face. He was tall and slim and looked like
an advert for healthy living. He looked like he was on his way to the gym.

'I'm on my way to the gym,' he said
when he saw Evan approaching. 'I don't want to buy whatever it is you're
selling.'

'I'm not selling anything, Mr
Faulkner. I'd like to ask you a few questions.'

'Sorry, I don’t do surveys. I'm in a
bit of a hurry actually. Can you come back another time? Maybe four or five
years.'

'It's about one of your past cases.'

Faulkner clearly wasn't expecting
that reply. He looked at Evan suspiciously. 'What, you want to write my
memoirs?' he snorted.

'No, it's just one case I'm
interested in.'

Faulkner's eyes narrowed. Evan had
the impression he knew which one it was going to be. 'And which one might that
be?'

'Daniel Clayton.'

Evan couldn't be sure but he thought
Faulkner stiffened when he heard the name.

'As I said, I'm in a hurry.' He
started walking towards his car.

'Linda Clayton hired me to look into
the case,' Evan blurted out. He didn't know what made him say it, but it got
Faulkner's attention. He stopped and looked at Evan, raising his eyebrows.

'You sure about that?'

'Of course I'm sure. Why else would
I be here?'

'You tell me, son. It's just that as
far as I know, Linda Clayton gave up on that boy years ago. Gone soft in the
head too, if you ask me.'

'Losing a son and a husband in the
space of a few weeks can do that to a person.'

Faulkner nodded. He had a tight
expression on his face. He seemed to be assessing Evan, weighing him up. Maybe
he was embarrassed by what he'd just said about Linda Clayton.

'Okay, I'll give you five minutes,
for all the good it'll do you.'

He walked back to the trailer and
unlocked the door. 'Come on in. I don't want to talk about it out here.'

Evan was surprised for the second
time that morning as he entered the immaculately kept trailer. Obviously it
showed on his face too.

'What did you expect?' Faulkner
said, 'Empty beer cans and overflowing ashtrays all over the place? Isn't that
how trailer trash live?'

'Do you live here alone?' Evan
asked, inadvertently digging himself into the hole even further.

'Yeah, but the maid comes in every
morning and tidies up after me.'

Evan could feel a flush creeping up
his face. His ears felt impossibly hot. He wasn't sure what to say.

'Don't worry about it, son,'
Faulkner said. 'Let's just hope for Mrs Clayton's sake - and your career's -
that you don't bring your ill-informed preconceptions to the rest of your
life.'

He gestured for Evan to sit. 'Want a
beer?' he said with a laugh.

Evan laughed too. 'Why not? I'm Evan
Buckley by the way.'

Faulkner handed him a cold beer.
'Pleased to meet you Mr. Buckley - here's hoping you get further than the rest
of us did. What do you want to know?'

'Well, all of it really. If you
could talk me through it from the beginning.'

Faulkner raised his eyebrows. 'Is
that all? Okay, here we go. One day, about ten years ago, on his way home from
school, Daniel Clayton disappeared off the face of the earth. He left the
classroom same as usual and started to walk home. He never took the school bus
- his mother thought the exercise was good for him. Plus he wasn't a very
popular kid and the other kids picked on him a lot. He never made it home and
he's never been seen since.'

Faulkner leaned back in his chair
and rubbed the back of his neck, but didn't say anything more. He took a sip of
his beer.

'That's it?' Evan couldn't decide
whether Faulkner was being deliberately obstructive or he just wanted to make
Evan work for it.

'That's all the facts. The school
bus driver said that he normally saw Daniel walk past the bus on his way home,
but not that day. So, if you believe the bus driver, Daniel disappeared
somewhere on the campus. That's if the bus driver wasn't picking his nose at
the time and missed the boy as he passed. Or that he hung around and left the
campus a bit later than normal. Or that any one of a million other things
happened.'

'So what did you concentrate on? You
must have had some suspicions.'

'You need to realize there were two
very distinct time periods here - before the father disappeared and after.
After he disappeared, we pretty much came to the conclusion that he was
responsible for the boy disappearing, and he decided to disappear himself
before we could prove anything against him.'

'I thought you said the boy never
made it home.'

'Sorry, you're right.' He took
another pull on his beer and looked at Evan over the top of the bottle. 'I
should have said the boy wasn't home when the mother got home from work. So he
could have come home like normal and something happened to him there. The
father was out of work at the time, so he could have been home when the kid got
back.'

'What do you mean, could have?'

'He said he was in a bar and didn't
get home until after the mother. But nobody could remember seeing him in the
bar he claimed to be in. And this is still a small town where a lot people know
each other. Especially people who go to the same bar all the time.'

'So, on that basis, you assumed it
was him. He’s either in the bar drinking or he’s killing his son. No other
options.'

Faulkner ignored the comment. 'It
wasn’t just that, but then he disappeared himself. Given the complete lack of
any other evidence pointing elsewhere, we reckoned it was the most likely
explanation.'

The more he talked to Faulkner, the
more it seemed to Evan that they hadn’t looked very hard for an alternative
explanation.

'Convenient.'

Faulkner glared at him. 'Convenient
my ass. Suddenly we've got two missing bodies and a new prime suspect who happens
to be one of those missing bodies. We'd have preferred it if it was the local
pervert.'

'That can't have gone down very well
with Linda Clayton.'

'You can say that again. I think
it's fair to say she was adamant there was no way on God's green earth that her
dear husband could have been involved in their son's disappearance. It rather
soured relationships between us.'

'I can see that it would. No doubt
made worse by the fact that you promptly gave up on any other avenues you might
have been pursuing.'

'You've got a nerve. If you put on a
wig and a dress, I'd swear you were her come to give me a hard time.'

Evan held up his hands. 'Sorry, I
didn't mean it to sound like I'm judging you.'

Faulkner didn't look particularly
appeased and went and got another beer. Evan declined the offer.

'This is more like it, eh? Living up
to stereotypes.' Faulkner said, taking a pull. 'Sorry, sad old cop drinking
beer in his trailer, haunted by unsolved cases. But as I remember the story,
the next thing you know, the sad old cop gets the bit between his teeth again
and gets back out there and solves it.' He shook his head. 'I'm sorry, but it's
not going to happen this time, son.'

'What about before the father
disappeared?' Evan asked. Just because Faulkner had made up his mind, it didn't
mean he had to agree with him. Linda Clayton didn't.

'What about it? A load of dead ends
and time wasters. A whole bunch of people saw a "suspicious-looking"
pickup truck' - he did the quotes thing with his fingers - 'some other people
saw a suspicious-looking camper van and half the town saw a suspicious-looking
dark sedan cruising around that afternoon.’ He gave a short, humorless laugh. ‘They're
always
dark
sedans. Like a white sedan is always driven by the good
guys. And what the hell is a suspicious-looking vehicle for Christ's sake? One
with some legs sticking out the window? I think at least one “witness” even saw
Elvis that afternoon!'

Evan laughed. 'I suppose it brings
all the cranks out of the woodwork.'

'You have no idea, and it’s not just
the cranks. People have an argument with their neighbor and call us up and say
they saw body parts in their trash just to get them back.' It appeared Evan had
set Faulkner off on a favorite diatribe. 'Some of the guys in the bar who
didn't remember seeing Robbie Clayton were helpful enough to remember seeing
all manner of other people. Suspicious-looking people of course. People with
shifty eyes, that sort of thing. The barroom wisdom was really running high
that day. In fact I think that's where Elvis was spotted, having a beer with
Hank Williams.'

Evan smiled and waited for him to go
on but he seemed to have run out of steam. 'And...' he prompted.

'And nothing. Absolutely zip. Nada.'

'Who else did you look at? What
about the bus driver?'

Faulkner gave him a long-suffering
look. A
God-give-me-strength
look. He shook his head wearily

'If you find me a ten year old phone
directory, I guarantee we talked to most of the people in it. Even though...'
Evan started to interrupt but Faulkner held up a hand to stop him. '
Even
though
we didn't have the benefit of you guiding us along, showing us how
to do our jobs. Oh, and the benefit of ten years worth of hindsight, of
course.'

Evan ignored Faulkner's sarcasm. He
was surprised Faulkner didn't ask him to leave. It probably wouldn't be long,
so he needed to keep pressing him.

'You must have had a prime suspect.'

'We did. Based on Carl Hendricks'
statement...'

'Who's Carl Hendricks?'

'The bus driver. Based on his
statement which we believed to be accurate, it appeared that Daniel disappeared
on the campus.'

Evan was struck by the inconsistency
of what Faulkner was saying. He was about to say something but Faulkner held up
his hand to stop him.

'Don't worry, it hasn't escaped me
that if we believed the father was responsible, then Hendricks' statement must
be inaccurate. He really was picking his nose and didn't see the boy walk past.
But at the time - and remember, no hindsight allowed' - he wagged his finger in
mock admonishment - 'we had no reason to think it wasn't true. So we
concentrated on looking inside the campus. The most likely candidate seemed to
be his teacher, Ray Clements. Like I said before, Daniel wasn't the most
popular kid in his class, but he got on well with Clements. It turns out the
kid would hang around sometimes and Clements would give him a ride home. He'd
drop him off a couple of blocks away so his mother wouldn't find out.  Which
also meant nobody else really knew it was going on.'

'Did he have an alibi?'

'Nothing we were able to check. He
said he went for a drive that afternoon because it was such a beautiful day. He
showed us a receipt for gas, but there's nothing to say you can't fill up with
a kid hogtied in the trunk.'

'But nothing came of it?'