The Devil's Highway (2 page)

“Will you find our son, Mr. Longville?”

“I’ll do my best.” I took a breath and let it out slowly. It had been a short night, and it was going to be a long day. “I’ll need to talk to these young men, these friends of Brad’s.”

“I thought as much. The police have taken statements from both of them, and I have their contact information here for you.” She went to an end table and brought back another piece of paper for me. There were two names on it, and numbers and addresses. Mrs. Caldwell was a very thorough lady; I had to give her that. I supposed that I would be just as thorough, if I were in her place.

They walked me to the door and said their goodbyes. Mr. Caldwell turned and went back into the small parlor and sat down heavily. Mrs. Caldwell lingered there, her hand grasping my arm. I waited to hear what was on her mind.

“Promise me that you’ll find him, Mr. Longville. Swear to me you won’t stop until you do. Brad’s father is not well, or I’d go look for my son myself.” She spoke in a fevered whisper, an urgency in her every word.

I looked past her at the thin man on the couch.

“My husband has cancer, Mr. Longville. It’s progressing rapidly. Promise me.”

Her eyes were blue and burned like the eyes of some Old Testament prophet. She had me pinned and I couldn’t move. “I promise,” I told her, because those were the only words that would quench the blue fire and let me go. But they cost me, because with those words I had put my feet on a road that wound through the heart of a lost country toward dangers that I dared not even dream.

I walked out of the house and into the shadow of that spreading chestnut tree, where little Brad had undoubtedly played, and dreamed his secret dreams, in days lost and gone. It was sunny there, and peaceful. A nice place to be young. I’d grown up in the North Side Birmingham Projects, so I had no idea why someone might leave all of privilege and wealth behind. But that was okay, I didn’t have to understand. I just had to find Brad Caldwell, and bring him back there. I got in my car and headed off down the road. Little did I know, I’d be a long time coming home.

Chapter 3

Andy Blades was a busy young man. He’d graduated with Brad from Emory University, somewhere in the middle of his class, no scholar, maybe, but still a very bright guy. He’d gotten a degree in computer science and programming languages. Immediately after he’d come home from his week-long fling in Florida, he’d sobered up and punched in at his new place of employment as an entry-level programmer for a large firm that wrote financial software for hospitals. He was also engaged to be married in six weeks, so his life was pretty geared up at the moment.
 

He was in sitting the back of a large corporate suite, in his cramped cubicle, talking on his cell phone with his wife-to-be and trying to eat a deli sub while scanning a page of code for some nagging error. I had fought my way across Atlanta during morning rush hour to get here, after I’d called ahead and he’d eagerly agreed to meet with me. He struck me as very concerned about Brad, and eager to help find him in any way that he could.

“Sorry that I’m so rushed, Mr. Longville. The firm put me on a software development team that’s working on a pretty crunched schedule. I’m the new guy, and I really want to show these senior programmers what I can do, so the guys on the team told me to do all the customer simulation, you know, grunt work. I jumped right in, checking for all the bugs and what not. I’m trying to get some of that done while I grab a bite to eat, but my fiancé keeps calling me with wedding stuff.”

“I understand, Andy,” I said as I took in his cubicle. Pictures of a pretty redhead, the fiancé, it was a fair assumption, dominated the walls. There were pictures of the two of them ice skating, hiking, smiling in a restaurant next to other friends.

“I just wanted to go over the facts about the day you left Brad Caldwell in Florida,” I said.

He stopped eating his sandwich, and looked at me. “I know, it all sounds pretty stupid. And maybe it was, but you don’t know Brad. He’s pretty much the alpha male in the picture when it’s me, him and Ray hanging out, and it’s just the three of us most of the time. We were roommates and friends all through college. Bros, you know? Anyway, here’s what happened.”

He put a fingertip on his desktop, like he was going to draw a picture there.
 

“On the way home from partying down in Florida, Brad told Ray and me that he had hit it off with a girl he met one night down in Panama City, and she lived in the Jacksonville area. Supposedly he met the girl one night after Ray and I passed out from some pretty heavy drinking, and he’d decided to go for a walk to clear his head.

This could have been one of several nights. Ray and I partied pretty hard down there, and on a couple of nights, Brad had only a beer or two and that was it. Sort of odd, because Brad can really put it away when he’s in party mode, you know? Anyway, He told us that he and this mystery girl had really hit it off, and they’d talked about it and agreed that he would meet her in Jacksonville.”

“Did this girl have a name?” I tried again, just in case he might have remembered something since he spoke with Brad’s parents.

“I’m sure she did, but Brad wouldn’t tell us.”

“You don’t find that odd?” I asked.

“Once he got me to agree to drop him off, he was pretty tight-lipped.”

“So just how was Brad supposed to get home after you guys left him down in Florida by himself?”

“He said that he was going to take a bus or a plane back. He had plenty of money to do whatever he wanted.”
 

Yes, he did; forty-five thousand dollars, I thought. All of it still sitting untouched in his bank account, however.

“Had he ever done anything like that before? On impulse?”

“Impulse? It isn’t what you’re thinking, Mr. Longville. I mean, it
wasn’t
‘on impulse.’ It might seem that way, but Brad always plans things out, way in advance. It seems like he’s doing something impulsive, but the truth is he planned it months ago, and he’s just telling
you
about it at the last minute, because that’s when you need to know. Brad plans everything out in the minutest detail. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

“I’d say that having your buddies drop you off in the middle of a strange city to meet some girl whom you’ve only known a few days is pretty impulsive.”

“Yeah, you would, but the fact is, like I said, you don’t know Brad.” He paused for a second and took his cell phone out again, and checked the number of the incoming call. “Hang on a second, I’ve got to take this call.” He flipped open his phone and listened for a moment.

“Yeah. Oh, that’s fine. Tell your mom I think that’ll be great. Bride’s Maids? I don’t
care
what color they are, honey. I’ll be happy with whatever you choose. Yeah, Okay, that’s fine, I’m really swamped right now, we’ll talk it over tonight at your folk’s place, okay? All right. Gotta go. Love you, too.”

He looked at me sheepishly. “Sorry.”

“It’s perfectly all right.”

“Ok, see, the thing about Brad is, it may seem like he just met that girl, but I
know
him. He probably met her on the Internet months ago and planned to meet her in Florida, he just never told anyone. That’s the kind of thing he does. He probably planned the whole thing back then, he just told us when he
needed
to. It all seems spur of the moment, but Brad always knows his next move, you see?”

Andy paused, then shook his head. “I’ll tell you, sometimes I think Brad has his whole life already planned out, to the last detail, and he’s laughing at the rest of us, because we live day by day with no idea what’s coming next.”
 

With that, I thanked the young man for his time. I was planning to see another of Brad’s friends, Ray Polley, the third man who had gone along on Brad’s ill-fated Florida trip. Andy gave me directions to Ray’s apartment.

About twenty minutes later I had found the place. Over a month had passed since graduation, but Ray Polley wasn’t working. He was in his apartment near the Emory Campus, and he was having a beer when I arrived. It obviously wasn’t his first. When I knocked on the door, I received a slurred invitation to come on in. Ray was on the couch, watching TV with indifference. A battalion of brown beer bottles stood in close ranks on the coffee table before him, awaiting the order to stand down.

Ray had already been at ease a while. He looked at me with a fuzzy expression and raised his beer bottle in salute.
 

“Whassup, bro?”
 

“I’m here to ask you a few questions about your friend Brad Caldwell.”

“Have you heard something about him?” he asked. His eyes were a little glassy, but he was still fairly cognizant. Judging from the proliferation of alcohol-related posters, mirrors, and beer lights that adorned his apartment, Ray had probably done his fair share of drinking in the past few years, so it would take more than a few beers to get him soaring. The beer he was working on was just breakfast for your experienced drunk. Trust me, I know; I used to be one.

My pilgrimage from the life of police officer to that of my current line of work is a dirty little story that I seldom tell. Put it this way: Once I had let someone down when they were counting on me, and a good officer lost her life. Some people blamed me, others didn’t. None blamed me so much as I blamed myself. I took to the bottle, and spent a couple of years in its blinding embrace.
 

In the end I had left the force. Sometimes I missed my old life, with its myriad intricacies, and its sense of brotherhood. The feeling of belonging to the right side had also been important to me, in a world grown so ambivalent. I missed all of those things, usually when I wasn’t up to my neck in my own troubles, and could afford to wax romantic.

I took a seat across from Ray. “I haven’t heard anything. I’m here to find some things out.”

“Ah. Okay,” he said, sluggishly.

“Can you tell me what happened the day you left Brad in Jacksonville?”

He looked at me with two bleary eyes and smiled his weak, disarming smile. “Sure, bro. We left him in a parking lot.”

“I mean before that. Did he give you any details about the girl he was going to see?”

“What girl?”

I thought that maybe Ray was drunker than I had initially suspected. “Brad told you and Andy that he was going to meet a girl there–”

“I know that, man. But there wasn’t any girl.”

“What? That’s not what I was given to understand.”

“Probably so, but get this. That story that Brad told Andy? I think it’s a load of crap, man. Brad told Andy that he was doing this—running away with a girl, because he knew that Andy would sympathize, and give him less trouble. See, I know Brad. Brad’s a step ahead of most people. Andy’s getting married, so Brad told him a story he’d go for. He had to, otherwise, Andy would have fought him tooth and nail, and probably never left him there in Jacksonville.”

I revised once again my opinion of Ray’s relative sobriety. “If that’s what you thought, why didn’t you tell anyone?”

Andy lifted his beer and saluted me again, half-heartedly.

“Oh, I told them, man. I told them. But, look at Andy, and then look at me. Andy’s a success, a go-getter. You think anybody paid
me
any attention?”

I sat back and thought about that. So now there were two versions of the same event, and if Ray was right, there was a third version—the
real
story with all of its unknown details. That version was known only to young Brad Caldwell, wherever in the world he was at that moment.

Chapter 4

I left Birmingham early the next morning. I made it to Jacksonville, Florida by early afternoon. It was a fine day for a drive. The panorama of the South changing from verdant wooded hills to flat vast fields watched over by circling hawks and vigilant crows, and finally to swampland and coastline, home to great blue cranes and wheeling seabirds.

I pulled into Jacksonville, Florida, off Highway 10. On the car stereo, a man who called himself Keb’ Mo was singing
I’m so Lonesome I Could Cry.
The music filled the parking lot parking lot of the Jacksonville Value Center, which consisted of a giant square of yellow-ruled, black pavement; a supermarket; a drug store; a Chinese restaurant; a nail shop; and several other businesses connected together into a giant L shape, sharing a generic brick façade.
 

The strip mall took up two adjoining sides of the square. Truant shopping buggies were scattered around the parking lot, while clusters of their more responsible cousins had been collected around two designated cart recollection areas. There was an airport somewhere close by; low-flying planes passed overhead, filling the parking lot with the jet noise.

Here was the place that Brad Caldwell had last been seen alive by his friends. According to Andy Blades and Ray Polley, they had dropped him off in front of the Saving King supermarket, the strip mall’s dominant business. He’d told them that was where he and his nameless girlfriend had agreed to meet.
 

The supermarket’s security video, which the police had already been over very thoroughly, and I seen myself, had shown everything, just as Brad’s two friends had reported. They had dropped him off, and he had come inside. He had waited approximately forty-five seconds, and then he had exited the store again, turned to the right, and disappeared from history.