“Hang on,” she mumbled, seemingly unacquainted with the buzzer that needed to be depressed in order to let them inside the office. She pressed it and Weyler pushed the door but it wouldn’t budge. The woman, clearly overwhelmed by the technical revamp, depressed the button again—this time with more impatience. Weyler pushed harder and the door released. The woman pried her chubby frame out of her new chair with the tags still on it and led them through the maze of dust-laden boxes, freshly constructed desks and computer tables, as she yelled across to a worker to “rewire the buzzer for the front door…
again
!”
Turning one corner, she pointed toward a windowed office cloaked in half-drawn, yellowed Venetian blinds. “He’s in there,” she said, out of breath from the thirty-foot promenade.
Weyler rapped his knuckles against the closed door and opened it. “Hello, old friend!” he said in a genuine cadence.
The sweet smell of cigar smoke bit into Jane’s nostrils. A large man with a gut that hung well below his belt buckle swung his scuffed cowboy boots off the desk and put down his cigar. “Well, Christ Almighty, am I happy to see you!” Bo enthusiastically shook Weyler’s hand and patted him hard on his back. “Goddamnit, Beanie, you couldn’t have gotten here a minute too soon!”
“Bo, I’d like you to meet, Sergeant Detective Jane Perry.”
Bo’s gratitude quickly shifted to distaste. “No, no,
no
, 10-74!” he said waving his chubby hand in the air. “I asked for
you
, Morgan!
Only you
. Get her the hell
outta
here!”
CHAPTER 5
“God, I forgot how much I love that small town charm!” Jane sardonically responded after Bo’s less than enthusiastic greeting.
Bo’s face was turning five shades of red as he painfully spun toward Weyler and guided him around in a confidential pose. The juxtaposition of the two—with Weyler’s tall, lanky frame and Bo’s squatty, porcine physique—reminded Jane of Mutt and Jeff. “Beanie, I told you I wanted this under the radar. I ain’t fiddle fuckin’ around! What in the hell were you thinking?” Lowry’s voice sounded like he ate gravel and ground glass for breakfast and chased it with a cup of hot, spent ammo.
Weyler put his arm around Bo’s shoulder and spoke in a soothing manner. “You’re out of here in less than two weeks, Bo. We need all the help we can get and Jane is one of my best.”
“We don’t want TV cameras and publicity here!” Bo retorted in a gruff stage whisper. “And
she
…” Bo jabbed his thumb behind him toward Jane, “tends to attract that nonsense!
And,
I heard she’s a loose cannon! Jesus, Beanie, I need someone with a slower heartbeat than her.”
Jane hated the media coverage she’d drawn in the past two years more than anyone. But she also hated being referred to as “her” and talked about as if she wasn’t standing in the same room. And why in the hell was Bo calling Weyler,
Beanie?
“Well, fuck me!” Jane said under her breath, with indignation. “I don’t need this shit.” She turned toward the door.
“Jane!” Weyler snapped. “Close the door and sit down.” He turned to Bo. “She’s staying. I’m staying. And we’re going to figure out this damn case. So, let’s all take a deep breath and try to work together.”
Jane closed the door and meandered to an empty chair in front of Bo’s desk. Weyler slid into the seat next to her as Bo readjusted the sinking waist on his trousers, zipped up his standard issue police chief’s jacket and walked with an unsteady gait
to his beaten-down office chair. He plopped down hard into the seat, wincing almost imperceptibly. The cluttered room was hot and stuffy. Jane removed her jacket and scanned the disorganized office. Sure, there was the building remodel but she figured that Bo’s office space had probably always looked like the aftereffects of a tornado. His desk was littered with paperwork, a cluster of old coffee cups, opened and unopened files, pens, and dried rinds of oranges that were beginning to petrify. There were also three mismatched lamps, all with a thick coat of dust on their shades, and a myriad of sandwich wrappers and Styrofoam containers that held some kind of food that was eaten during the Clinton administration. A wooden sign—at one time displayed on the wall—now lay across a stack of papers. It read:
IT IS WHAT IT IS.
Two file cabinets stood to Jane’s left, both topped with another pile of papers and files bursting with even more documents. A calendar was taped to one of the file cabinets. Large black
Xs
filled the dates that had already passed. The square eleven days from that date was circled in a thick red pen. Behind Bo’s desk was a large window that overlooked Main Street. In front of the window stood a strange assortment of file boxes, each a different color and each marked with either a
!, ?,
a thumbs up and a thumbs down drawing. The patchwork chaos made no sense to Jane. For her, sitting in this office was like inhabiting the center of Bo Lowry’s brain—an unbalanced place, indeed.
“Looks like you have your hands full with the remodel,” Weyler offered in an attempt to inject a neutral statement.
“Yeah, we’re charging feet first into the Twentieth Century,” Bo snorted, obviously not happy with the whole upheaval.
“Don’t you mean Twenty-first?” Jane asked.
“I got bad knees. I can only handle one jump of a century at a time,” he snarled, his liver still spitting bile knowing that he had to deal with Sergeant Detective Jane Perry. He took a puff of his cigar. “It’s what the new police chief asked for. He’s one of
them young,
techno
boys. It’s costing the town a bundle but they don’t care. Throw enough money around and you know what it buys.”
Jane wanted to say, “Whores, silence and beauracracy” but decided against it.
“Too much goddamn technology for my blood! They try to tell me it’s all 10-8,” Bo grumbled, using old cop talk for a good piece of equipment
,
“But it’s all over my bald head.” He tapped his pudgy fingers nervously on his cluttered desk. “Everybody
texts
and
emails
these days! Whatever happened to callin’ somebody up and actually
talkin’
to them?” Quickly, he sat up in his swivel chair, waving his hand toward the activity on the other side of his half-opened Venetian blinds. “That’s not my style, Morgan. See what I’m sayin’? They start usin’ all these fancy
techno
words and I can’t figure heads or tails what they’re talkin’ about. Makes what’s left of my hair hurt.” Jane sensed an uneasy edge to Bo’s voice. Fear crept in at the corners of his tenor.
“You still have seven or eight good years in you, Bo,” Weyler offered. “You’re not that close to Social Security.”
“Hell, Beanie, I could have a massive stroke, completely paralyzed, livin’ in a wheelchair, drool drip pin’ down my chin and unable to speak my own name and these fine people would still keep me around!”
“Then stick around for another few seasons,” Weyler stressed.
“10-74, my friend,” he said, using the 10-code for the word, “No.” “
It’s time
. I see the writin’ on the wall. I’m old hat.” Bo ran his fingers across his sparse comb over. “Eleven days and I’m outta here. Day after Easter. Jesus resurrected and so will I! I can’t wait to retire. I’m gonna sleep for weeks. I love to sleep. The only drawback is, you can’t enjoy it fully since you’re unconscious.” Jane wasn’t sure if Bo was nuts or just pleasantly eccentric. He turned away, letting out a stiff breath. “You know, Vi’s cuttin’ out too. She’s sixty-five. Takin’ the dole and ditchin’ this place.”
Weyler turned to Jane. “Vi has been with Bo since his first day in Midas. She’s his right arm…”
“Right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, ears, eyes and lungs,” Bo quickly interjected, his breathing sounding shallow to Jane. “I couldn’t see my way clear without her!” His voice was desperate, like a man clutching onto a sinking life rope.
“What are you going to do?” Weyler asked.
“Florida coast,” Bo touched the edge of a bright yellow folder on his desk. “Warm, you know? Lookin’ forward to it.” Jane watched as he pulled a page over the yellow folder, covering it completely. It was a gestural extension of shame—a literal
covering up
of what he was saying. Bo’s mind seemed to drift momentarily.
“I didn’t think you liked the humidity
or
the ocean.”
Bo looked up at Weyler, lost in a private moment. “Yeah, well, we all gotta make the hard choices in life, Beanie.” Jane noted that Bo continued to call Weyler “Beanie.” Obviously, it was a term of endearment but what did it signify? Weyler might have been considered a beanpole in stature in his youth when Bo and he were FNGs…”fucking new guys.” Jane noted a moment of sadness coming from Bo, only to be quickly buried and replaced with a
back to business
approach. “I got a shit pot of crap to go over with you.” He spoke only to Weyler, making a point to ignore Jane with his body language. He proceeded to unearth sundry pieces of paper—all protected in clear, plastic evidence bags—and a book, also placed inside a clear bag. “The day after little Juice Box’s disappearance, his folks found this in their mailbox.” Bo handed Weyler a book, clearly leaving Jane out of the discussion.
“Little Juice Box?” Jane questioned in a confused manner.
Bo wedged the cigar into the corner of his mouth. “Juice Box Jake Van Gorden,” Bo replied, never looking at Jane. “I look at him and I think of a juice box. Small kids drink them. Jake is small for his age. He’s like one hundred and twenty pounds and a song. It follows. You got a problem with that?” Bo snuck a
chary eye toward Jane.
Jane wasn’t sure if the song was a
short
song, but she wasn’t about to ask Bo to decipher his odd verbiage. “No problem, Bo. It’s perfectly normal.” Her tone was laced with sarcasm.
Bo looked at Weyler. “You put up with this shit from her?”
Weyler would have none of it. “Getting back to the clues?”
“Inside that book was a
sympathy
card,” Bo handed the card to Weyler, “sealed and addressed only to BAWY.” Jane reached for it but he laid the white envelope encased in a plastic evidence bag on the desk in front of Weyler.
“Been dusted for prints, I assume?” Jane asked, irritated.
“Yes,” Bo replied in an over-the-top manner, “and we found nothin’ so he wore gloves when he touched it. Same thing with the book.”
“Find any DNA on the envelope flap?” Jane wasn’t about to back down.
Bo let out an exasperated sigh. “10-74. It’s a peel ’n’ stick flap.”
“Whoever did this knew his DNA could be found on the flap from his saliva and thought ahead of time to buy self-sealing envelopes,” Jane rejoined.
Weyler considered it. “You only do that if your DNA’s in the system. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter.”
“So, somebody with prior convictions, somebody smart and someone who likes to plan things out.”
“Why don’t you get a pad and write all these ideas down,” Bo said in nasty tone, “so we can make a long list and then we can solve this before lunch.”
That was it for Jane. Between jonesing for a cigarette and dealing with Bo’s dismissive manner, she’d reached her maximum capacity for arrogance. “Listen, I don’t want to be here anymore than you want me here!”
Bo jerked the cigar out of his mouth. “
That
is the exact attitude I saw comin’ down the pike!” He yelled, pointing over Jane’s shoulder. “There’s the door, little lady!”
“
Enough
!” Weyler insisted.
“Boss, I can’t work with this!” Jane’s voice sounded almost too desperate.
Weyler realized he had to take a stand. “Bo, here’s the deal: either you back off Sergeant Perry and try to maintain civility or we walk. What’s it going to be?”
The blood drained from Bo’s face. He suddenly looked like a big kid being disciplined by the principal. Taking a nervous puff on his cigar, he moved uncomfortably in his chair and gestured with his chin to the book and card in Weyler’s hand. “So, see, that’s the first clue,” Bo said, reluctantly acquiescing.
Weyler handed Jane the envelope. The letters on the front, BAWY were written in a hesitant hand. “This looks like the way a kid writes who is just learning to hold a pen,” she mused.
“Could be right handed and he purposely used his left to disguise his handwriting,” Weyler offered.
“Yeah. What is a BAWY?”
“Maybe an acronym?” Weyler considered. Now it was Bo who was left out of the discussion.
“If it is, I’ve never heard it.” Jane tried to sound it out. “Be Aware…” She shook her head. “It’s anybody’s guess.”
Weyler slid the card out from the plastic bag and opened it. “’So sorry for your loss.
JACKson
sends his regards.’” Weyler compared the shaky printing from the outside of the envelope to the inside of the card and was confident the same hand wrote both. “The boy’s name is Jake. Why is he referring to him as Jackson and emphasizing the
Jack
?”
Bo nervously shuffled through the papers on his desk. “Let me see here.” Spotting a bright green sheet of paper, he grabbed it and handed it to Weyler. “I had Mr. Van Gorden write down the boy’s full name. That’s what they gave me.”
Jane took a gander at the page. It read:
JACKSON JAKOB VAN GORDEN
. Her thoughts immediately turned to the misspelling of
Jacob
she’d given Betty earlier that morning. “Does he call himself Jackson?”
“10-74,” Bo said gruffly. “Parents told me that was his given name but he hated it and went by the shortened version of his middle name.”
“What’s the book?” Jane asked.
Weyler handed it to her. “
You Can’t Go Home Again
by Thomas Wolfe.”
“See,
You can’t go home again
pretty much tells me what the kidnapper is planning for Jake,” Bo surmised.
Jane was beginning to feel into the person who had kidnapped the boy. Her prior assessment of someone who was exceptionally smart and a planner was becoming more evident now. Wolfe’s book wasn’t exactly fluffy pulp fiction. Written in the 1930s, Jane remembered reading it in a college lit course. The main character in the book, George Webber, is a writer who pens a successful novel about his family and hometown. However, when he returns to that town, he is shocked by the rebuke and outright hatred that his family and friends feel toward him for exposing their lives to strangers. The story then shifts to Webber’s life as he leaves his hometown and ventures around the world in search of his true identity. In the end, Webber returns to the United States and rediscovers his reality with both sadness and love. It’s about a man coming to terms with himself, his family and his purpose. And in Jane’s mind, it had to have a hidden meaning that the kidnapper was eager to convey in a veiled, intellectual manner. She slid it out from the plastic bag and thumbed through the pages, finding page 243 freshly dog-eared. “Did the book come like this?” she asked, showing the page to Weyler.