Torn (12 page)

The man who eventually persuaded me out, and then covered me with a blanket until the EMTs could take charge, was Troy Hayden, one of the local cops. What made me relent—I was gripping a steel support beam with both hands and refusing to let go—was his promise that they’d find Noah for me. That he hadn’t been able to keep that promise could be why he’s always so kind and polite
when I come storming into the station with some new theory about that day.

It was Troy who first suggested checking out private investigators, so it makes sense that he’s willing to cooperate with Randall Shane.

“Hi, how are ya,” he says, giving the big man a formal handshake and showing us both into his small, windowless office. What used to be Leo Gannett’s office. Troy is now acting chief, and everybody expects that he’ll eventually be appointed chief.

“Doin’ okay,” says Shane. “I understand from Mrs. Corbin that you’ve been very helpful and generous with your time.”

“Least we can do,” Troy says. Compared to the late Leo Gannett, who was pretty imposing, he’s a slender little guy, only a few inches taller than me. His lack of height has never seemed to bother him, maybe because he’s a miniature hunk and has never lacked for female attention. Think Kurt Russell circa
Escape From New York
and without the eye patch. Helen calls him ‘Troy The Beautiful Boy,’ but she means it in the nicest possible way.

Shane hands him a business card. “I put my credentials on there strictly for disclosure. We both know being a former FBI Special Agent doesn’t give me any special privileges. I’m not a licensed private investigator. I’m acting in a civilian capacity as a consultant to Mrs. Corbin in the matter regarding her son, just to be clear.”

Troy grins, which makes him look about fifteen. “You’re famous, dude. At least on the Internet. When Haley told me, first thing I did was run a Google search on you.”

“Don’t believe everything you read on the Net.”

“You saying you don’t actually walk on water?”

Shane smiles. “Ever seen Wile E. Coyote attempt to walk on water? That’s me.”

“Nah, nah,” says Troy with a dismissive wave. “Bet you can do it when you need to. I read all about that deal in the Everglades, where you found the girl in the swamp? Everybody else gave up, but not you.”

“Not her mother, either,” Shane says, with a glance to me. “She never gave up.”

“Anyhow, I’m real pleased you’re looking into Haley’s case. Fresh eyes.”

“Thanks. Please understand this is preliminary. I’m still looking into the possibility that Noah Corbin survived, and have reached no final conclusion. Not yet.”

“Yeah,” says Troy, shooting me a look. Wanting to know how I’ll react. Understandable. He’s seen me at my worst.

Both men seem concerned that I’ll freak out if they say the wrong thing. What they don’t seem to understand is that once you’ve been to the worst place, once you’ve confronted the unthinkable, talking about it doesn’t make it worse. If I freak out—and I might, you never know—it will be on my own time, for my own reasons, and not because someone mentions the possibility of Noah being dead. I live with that possibility every moment, awake or asleep.

“I’m hoping you’ll tell me everything you know about the perpetrator,” Shane is saying, leaning forward. “Past history, habits, rumors, whatever. Your personal impression.”

“That’s easy. He impressed me as a weasel.”

“Mrs. Corbin says he had a long history with your department.”

“Mostly with Leo, yeah,” Troy says. “I didn’t grow up
around here, so I didn’t know Roland when he was a kid, or when he first got in trouble. But Leo always said he was a sad case. Mother a tweaker—excuse me—a methamphetamine addict, father in prison. To be truthful I never saw the sad part of Roland. What I saw was a mean-spirited, self-centered creep who for some reason thought he should be treated like a celebrity. Famous-in-his-own-mind kind of guy. For what reason I could never figure out.”

“He’d been picked up numerous times?”

“Yeah. Charged twice, convicted once for possession of less than a gram. Meth, just like Mom and Dad.”

“Incarcerated?”

“Naw. Slap on the wrist. Probation, I think.”

“He was a dealer?”

Troy makes a face. “In his dreams, maybe. Following in the footsteps of dear old Dad. But no, we never saw indicators of dealing. Leo used to stake out Roland’s trailer now and then, but there was never enough traffic to indicate dealing. Nobody trusted the guy enough to front him.”

“Was he cooking?”

“Roland? Cooking up meth? No way. He didn’t have the means or the skill.”

“But he had the means to obtain a significant quantity of C-4 and construct a bomb?” Shane points out.

Troy sighs, studies the ceiling. “I know, I know. It doesn’t fit. Roland going nuts with a gun, shooting Leo, I get that. Didn’t see it coming, but it fits. The bomb, the smoke machine, that’s what puzzles me, Mr. Shane. That’s why I thought it was a good idea, bringing a guy like you in to have a look around. Like I say, fresh eyes.”

“I assume the plainclothes have been thorough? In your estimation?”

“The state police detectives? Oh yeah. Real pros. Departments this small, we don’t have the facilities or the experience to investigate major crimes. The trooper investigators handle it, that’s in their charter. And I got no real complaints on that score. They were all over it. But once they got the DNA match it was case closed, on to the next. Who really cares what motivated Roland Penny? He did it and he acted alone, that was their conclusion.”

“But not yours?”

He glances at me before responding to Shane. “I haven’t come to a conclusion,” he says uneasily. “Maybe Noah was killed in the explosion, maybe he wasn’t. I’m keeping that possibility open in my mind. But for sure something is off about Roland Penny being the big bad master bomb maker.”

“You think he may have had an accomplice?”

“It’s a possibility. Yeah.”

“Any likely candidates?”

“No leads toward one. And I can’t think of one. And I’ve tried, believe me.”

Shane takes a break, goes back over his notes. To fill the void, Troy attempts to reassure me with a smile. He’s been so nice, so cooperative, I can’t hold it against him that he thinks my son is dead. He says otherwise, about keeping an open mind, but I can tell. A mother can always tell.

“Any thought on where Roland got three grand to put down on a new car?”

Troy sits up straighter, keenly interested in this particular subject. “It wasn’t dealing, I’d stake my life on that. Even if he was dealing, which I highly doubt, he’d have
been small-time. A hundred bucks here or there, five at the most. This guy lived hand to mouth. No way he’d get his hands on three grand all at once, let alone the rest of the fifty or sixty grand.”

“So you checked it out?”

Troy shrugs. “I was curious. Figured no harm, no foul, follow the money like they say.”

“Even though the troopers were investigating. Had come to their own conclusions.”

“Yeah. Happened on my watch, right? Even with the Staties in charge, I still got an interest. So I drove over to the dealership, checked it out. Strange thing, the salesman who took the down payment couldn’t identify Roland.”

“A bad memory? Too many customers? I’m not really surprised.”

“Yeah, but he did remember the guy who put the money on that particular vehicle. Because the salesman has been trying to unload it for months, it gets about what, two miles a gallon? It’s just he doesn’t remember Roland, he remembers a guy with a dark mustache, had an accent.”

“Yeah?” says Shane, perking up. “He say what kind of accent?”

“That’s where he gets vague. Maybe Russian, maybe Greek. Could have been Polish. He really had no idea.”

“His impression was a mustache and a foreign accent. Maybe.”

“Yeah, which is why it’s not really helpful. All he really knows, he’s positive it wasn’t Roland. A dude that scruffy and slimy would have made an impression. He said the guy with the accent was handsome, like a movie star or something. And Roland was no movie star, believe me.”

Shane makes more notes, writing firmly in a legible hand.

“I assume the troopers searched his domicile?”

“That dump of a trailer?” Troy scoffs, his nose wrinkling in disgust. “Yeah, they tore it apart, looking for more explosives. It was clean. No trace of C-4 or detonators or any sort of bomb-making equipment. They went over the place with a chemical sniffer. All they got was the fumes off Roland’s dirty socks. The detectives told me wherever he put the bomb together, it wasn’t there.”

“Anything on his computer?”

“You mean, did he download an instructional manual, something to show him how to wire up the C-4? Maybe, but not on his home computer because he didn’t have a home computer. I dunno, he could have used a library computer, or gone to an Internet café in Penfield or Rochester or somewhere. Nobody knows, and at this point nobody really cares. Other than, you know, us,” he says, catching my eye again.

“So there was no computer in Roland’s trailer?”

“Nope. And no phone lines, either. He had a cell, not a landline. No cable hookup, no satellite. So no Internet connection, even if he did have a laptop stashed somewhere. Which I find highly doubtful.”

“Why is that?” Shane asks.

“Because Roland wasn’t a laptop kind of guy. He just wasn’t.”

When we get up to leave, Troy waits until Shane clears the door and then gives me a thumbs-up and a nod of approval. He thinks I made the right choice, bringing in the big guy. In contrast to Tommy Petruchio, who scorns the notion of outside investigators.

One out of two. I’ll take those odds.

11. The Door Swings Open

Up to now, the only laws I’ve ever broken have to do with traffic. Speeding and a few parking tickets. I never even shoplifted when that was a ‘thing’ with my old Jersey girl posse. It wasn’t a moral reservation at the time—can you have moral reservations about The Gap?—more a fear that I’d get caught, be publicly embarrassed.

So I’m surprised at my own reaction when Shane proposes breaking the law. No hesitation, I’m all for it.

“Okay, but I don’t want you in the vicinity,” Shane cautions. “Even if you don’t actually enter the premises you could still be held as an accessory.”

“For checking that nasty old trailer? You said it doesn’t have a proper lock on the door, so it’s not exactly breaking and entering. Just entering.”

“Entering a private domicile without invitation is, at the very least, trespassing,” Shane reminds me.

“Is trespassing a serious crime?”

“Depends on the circumstances. It can very serious if there’s an intent to burglarize.”

“Are we going to burglarize?”

“Depends on what we find.”

“Good,” I say. “Let’s do it.”

“Really, Mrs. Corbin, it’s best if you leave this to me. You can bail me out if I get caught.”

He makes getting bailed sound so routine that I have to ask, “Have you ever been arrested?”

“I’ve never been charged or convicted,” he says, somehow making it sound dignified.

“So you
have
been arrested.”

He shrugs. “More like taken into custody. Hazard of the job. Pushing to locate a missing kid, sometimes you go over the legal line. It happens.”

Eventually we agree that I’ll drop him off and drive away and he’ll call me on the cell when he wants to be picked up. Which sounds very sane and reasonable until I pull into the rutted, unpaved driveway to turn around and catch a glimpse of Roland Penny’s broken-down old trailer glinting in the setting sun.

I can’t resist. Throwing the big Town Car into Park, I grab my purse, get out. “Screw it,” I tell a startled Shane. “If they want to arrest a grieving mother for checking out the rat hole of the man who blew up her son’s school, let them.”

“Mrs. Corbin, really, I think it would be better—”

“Are you coming?” I ask, striding off through the ankle-deep snow.

“Okay then,” says Shane, shortening his gait to keep pace with me. “When did it snow? Last night?”

“Early this morning.”

“No footprints,” he points out. “So nobody has been poking around here recently.”

The rock the creep lived under isn’t exactly a classic Airstream. It’s a battered old construction trailer left over from some long-ago project, plunked down on a parcel of land once exploited for gravel pits. A power line was brought in years ago, but not much else. According to Troy, Roland was paying a hundred a month to an absentee owner, and from the look of things he wasn’t getting any bargain. One of the aluminum side panels has been kicked in, revealing a thin stuffing of dirty, waterlogged insula
tion, and some plastic water pipes that must by now be frozen solid. There’s only one small window, the cracked glass held together with a strip of duct tape. The door hangs on broken hinges, propped closed with a cinder block.

We saw this much from the paved road. It looks even less appealing close-up. Shane removes the cinder block. The door swings open, screeching back at the cold wind that’s just now stirring.