“Elder,” Stacy snapped, “after you answer this officer’s questions, you have an assignment. You’re going to go sit in your room and you’re going to ponder this: ‘Christ didn’t die for people who already loved him. He died for sinners—people whose lives were bound up and directed by sinful desires that went contrary to God’s will. It was the sick he came to cure, not the healthy.’” Then he tapped the pile of papers on his desk. “And you’re going to write a confessional on what that means to your mission and the work God has given you to do and how you’re going to use today as a lesson for dealing with people not in the Church when you’re out there in the world spreading the Gospel according to Jesus Christ.”
“Yes, President Stacy.” I wouldn’t swear Stacy’s speech cowed Trey, but the boy acted contrite enough.
“And if this officer comes back and tells me you’ve given him any lip, been disrespectful of his office or himself, and have not cooperated fully with his investigation, don’t doubt that I will deal with you accordingly. I’m certain the last thing you want is to be sent home.”
That equaled probably the worst punishment that a missionary could suffer. Everyone you knew would know you got kicked off your mission. The embarrassment and shame of that would follow a man for the rest of his life. My missionary companion hated his mission so much he couldn’t sleep and lost twenty pounds, but he kept on with it—and I gave him as much support as I could—because he wasn’t about to shame his family by going home early.
The only worse punishment in the Church was excommunication…like had happened to me.
President Stacy kept drumming his fingers on the papers. “Adjust your attitude, Elder, if you understand what’s good for you.” Then he took a deep breath and smiled—at me. “Elder Taylor will take you to one of the unused classrooms. You can interview Elder Hall there.” He reached out and offered his hand. It took me a second to fire up my brain and take his shake. “If there’s any problems you can grab any of the Elders and send for me.”
“I hope I won’t need to.”
“I hope you won’t either.” That might have been said to me, but President Stacy was looking right at Trey Hall when he said it.
We followed Elder Taylor through a few turns until he came to one of the rooms. After a quick check to make sure it was unoccupied, he let us inside. I thanked him and moved on in. The claustrophobic classrooms still seemed as sterile and lifeless as when I’d done my training. White brick walls and tiny little windows up near the top kept distractions to a minimum. A dozen plastic chairs with the little writing surface desks bolted to them crowded the space. This particular room boasted a little folding table under the window. My guess is they’d had a cultural immersion session earlier—food and such that the missionaries would soon be exposed to. Paper plates and cups in the trash kinda clued me in on that.
Trey came in behind me and found himself a chair. I let him stew for a bit in his own hate and shame of being called out on it by his Mission President. I’d rather have gotten the interview off to a friendly start, but if someone’s gonna start out ornery on you, you might as well make ‘em suffer in it. When I’d pretty much read every prayerful quote and proselytizing exhortation on the walls I moved over and shut the door. Then I settled myself against the table, my butt resting against the lip of it.
“You remember when Lane and Chris disappeared.” Figured with his attitude, I’d just drop right into the subject. Dancing and finessing weren’t going to get me nowhere with this cocky little mule.
“Yeah.” He glared at me, his hands crossed over his chest and his face as closed off as his body language. “I think either the Sheriff or the State Police talked to me.”
“I know. I’ve read the interview.” I shifted my butt on the edge of the desk. “You’ve been here a couple of weeks now? You probably haven’t heard.” The only news you were allowed as a missionary were your letters from family. They were told to keep things bright and bubbly so as to not distract the Elders from doing God’s work. “We found Lane’s body.”
Trey went just a little gray. “You did?”
Dropping the bombshell had the effect I wanted. “Yeah, up near Dixie National, between Widtsoe and Antimony.” I noted that he didn’t ask at all about the other boy. ‘Course, from what I’d read, him and Lane had been thick as thieves while the other boys sort of spun in their orbit.
The news of Lane’s death seemed to knock him and knock him hard, ‘cause it took a while before he even managed an, “Oh.” I couldn’t quite peg whether it came from learning his best friend had died or something else. He rubbed his face with both hands and took a moment to get himself kinda under control. “I mean, shit.” Even still his voice broke and his hands shook. “I ah, figured something might have happened, you know, ‘cause it’d been a month and nobody heard, but I hoped he’d just run away.” Swallowing, Lane looked up toward the thin strip of light from the window. “You know, him and Chris.”
“Any reason to think they would?” I let a heavy pause sorta float between us, give Trey’s mind time to fiddle with the implications. “Run away, I mean.”
“We’d all talked about ditching the sticks and going someplace big.” He scratched his cheek like he was thinking on something. “Lane could have made it anywhere and I just sorta figured that Chris might have gone along for the ride.”
When I’d been a kid, I could’ve pegged within ten miles of where someone grew up by how they talked. Now, with satellite and cable most all kids this boy’s age sounded like the came off some sitcom. Sometimes that made it hard for me to get a bead on who was leading me on or not. Just meant I had to really keep an eye on how Trey reacted and moved.
At least the news of his friend’s death had knocked some of the fight out of Trey. “You remember the last time you saw either boy?” That should make the interview go a bit smoother.
“Yeah, the day after Thanksgiving.” That squared with what was in the reports I’d read.
My plan, such as I’d thought it up on my drive down, was to take him back over what he’d already told us and then see if I could tease any new information out of his brain. “Big storm that weekend, wasn’t there?”
“Sunday,” he nodded, “I think.”
“Okay, so it’s pretty obvious I’ve come here to talk to you about your friend Lane and also about Chris.” Before I got too far, I figured I ought to remind him he wasn’t under arrest or nothing, that he could stop talking and walk out at any time. “We’re concerned about what might have happened to Lane just before he went missing and leading up to where we found him on the mountain. I also am really needing to find Chris now. See what he knows. So, I had better caution you, you’re not obliged to say anything, I can’t force you to be here. You understand that, right?” ‘Course I didn’t put that imposition on him, but the Mission President sure had. Still, it weren’t me being coercive.
Trey chewed on his thumbnail and mumbled, “Yeah, I understand.” Most all of the boy’s nails were bitten down to the quick.
I eased back into the interview. “What can you tell me about that last time you saw Lane?”
“Nothing big.” He shrugged. “We all got together and hung out. You know, me, Lane, Chris, Cooper and Alex.” He rattled off the boys’ names like I might not know them. “Cooper’s folks went down into Cedar City to do shopping for Christmas and so we hung out at his place and watched TV mostly.” So far he hadn’t veered much from the version I already had. “That morning. Later we went up into the forest to collect wood. Cooper’s dad has a permit to get it off the national forest.”
I shifted some, trying not to make him nervous. “So you were up in Dixie National that Friday?”
“Yeah, around,” Trey hedged. Wasn’t sure whether it was typical teenage indifference or actual misdirection. “We got to driving around up there because, you know, we were bored.” None of the other nervous ticks were there, though. “And we’d stopped by Lane’s and threw his two-stroke Suzuki in the back next to my own little Honda 200R. Spent most of the afternoon racing the dirt bikes out on the forestry roads.”
“Anything strike you about that day?” So far nothing strayed, too much, from what version I already had.
“Lane was acting a little funny.” One thing Trey wouldn’t do was look at me direct. I couldn’t read too much into that, since he didn’t take too kindly to my type. “I don’t know how to explain it. It didn’t seem like anything much at all that day.” I tucked his attitude into my back pocket to mull over later.
The questions I’d keep on with. “How so?”
“Moody. All angry and stuff over little things.”
“Anything else you can think of?”
“Not really. Pretty much Lane was Lane.”
I prodded. “What about Chris?” Lane being dead and Chris being missing added up to nothing good.
“Chris was Chris.” Trey huffed. “Being a butt head.”
“How so?”
“Just things.” Screwing up his face like he was thinking, Trey added, “Not wanting to do shit. You know. Being a bummer.”
I prodded again. “About what?” I didn’t remember reading this in the file.
This time Trey took a little longer to think. “Well, like Lane wanted to build a ramp, see if we couldn’t jump one bike with another.”
Didn’t seem like much, but I’d known people who’d killed over stupider things. “They fight about it?” And that risk taking behavior, outta Lane, sometimes that led up to taking yourself out.
“No,” Trey shook his head, “just shit.”
We knew Lane died, but not how. We also knew Chris weren’t nowhere around. Didn’t mean either was necessarily connected. “Anything going on with either of them at home?” Could have just been two boys who lit out on different paths.
“Lane’s folks were splitting up and Chris was repeating his senior year.” Again, that weren’t news.
“Think Lane was real upset about it?”
“I know he was.” Trey confirmed. “He told me he was. He couldn’t believe that his dad was moving to Salt Lake and leaving him and his sisters behind.”
“Didn’t like his mom?” That the original interviewer hadn’t asked. Maybe he didn’t feel the need to because he already knew or maybe he didn’t feel an itch to ask.
“She was his mom.” Like that should be obvious, Trey scowled. “They got into it all the time. Mostly he was pissed that his dad would go to the city and not take him. He really hated Escalante.”
“Were either of them involved in anything, not quite on the up and up, that might get them messing with the wrong sort of folks.” Trey’s eyes got wide and then narrowed, like he tried to figure what I was poking at. ‘Course most folks don’t like those sorts of questions no matter who they are and I came into this whole interview with a bucket load of negative points. “Look, you don’t like me. We both know that.” However, I figured I might just be able to tweak some of that negative into a positive. “And, after your little speech in front of President Stacy, I don’t much like you.” I grinned at that—all tight and kinda feral, like I wouldn’t be at all sorry to bite his head clean off. “However, understand something, I ain’t in the church no more. I know you talked to Deputy Woods last time, and he’s a fine officer, but he’s also in my Ward…the Ward I used to be in.” Corrected that, intentionally, reminding him that I’d been excommunicated. “So whatever you all were doing, if you tell it to me, that’s between you and God. It ain’t going to get back to the Stake President or your Bishop.”
I rocked back, crossed my arms over my chest and stared so hard I could almost feel him twitch. “So, I’m gonna ask it again, any of y’all into anything that might get you messed up with the wrong sort of folks?”
Trey dropped his gaze down to study the toes of his shoes. Real low, like he worried someone outside might hear, he mumbled, “We’d smoke some dope sometimes. Lane usually got it for us.”
“Local?” Because there was so much land and so little law, we had more than our fair share of big pot farms up in the mountains—large busts were measured in tens of thousands of plants—most all of them operated by Mexican drug cartels.
“Maybe.” Back to picking at his cuticles, Trey thought for a moment. “I don’t know.”
“You ever pick it up for you and your friends?” Trey swallowed and actually started chewing on the nails on one hand. Figured I could throw him a line. “I ain’t going to haul you off for having bought dope a couple months back.”
Trey’s knee started jerking, not fast but enough to be noticeable when you’re looking for tells. I just waited for him to get to it…no sense in me pushing more than I had, at least yet. Trey sucked in a huge lungful of air. Instead of looking at me he seemed to read the scriptures on the wall. “A couple of times, but Lane knew bigger guys than I did.” Almost like he was apologizing, he rushed out, “I didn’t want to say anything when Lane went missing, you know ‘cause of his folks…and mine, but when we all split up that afternoon, he said he was going to try and score some.”
I almost growled out, “From who?”
“I don’t know.” When I glared, Trey added, “I really don’t know who he bought from.” All that earlier hate and defiance seemed to fade out of him. It left his face a wounded mask of doubt and worry.
I didn’t ease up on my harsh tone. “Any names?” Even though I still didn’t know how Lane died, I wanted some names in case it turned out to be something more than an accident. They might just, possibly, be the last folks to see Lane alive.
“John maybe one of them, but I couldn’t be sure.” Still worrying his nails with his teeth, Trey mumbled, “Lane said he owed that guy some money.”
“How much?”
He kinda collapsed into the hard plastic chair. “Shit, I don’t know.” That came out all whiny, like he was sick of me poking and maybe felt a little like he should have come clean before.
“Lane ever say he was worried about this guy?”
“Lane?” Trey snorted and it wasn’t an amused sound. “Lane never worried about anything even when he should have.”
Well, that gave me something interesting to grind over about Lane, but I had another boy from that pack missing. “Chris gonna go with him, to make the buy?”
“Chris was Lane’s ride.” We were back to things that I’d read in the reports. “He might have dropped Lane off at home or gone with him, I don’t know. They didn’t say.”