Leaving Time(27)

VIRGIL




Every cop has one that got away.

For some, it becomes the stuff of legend, the story they tell at every department Christmas bash and when they have a few too many beers with the guys. It’s the clue they didn’t see that was right in front of their eyes, the file they couldn’t bear to throw away, the case that was never closed. It’s the nightmare they still have every now and then, from which they wake up sweaty and startled.

For the rest of us, it’s the nightmare we’re still living.

It’s the face we see over our shoulder in the mirror. It’s the person on the other end of the phone, when we hear that mysterious dead air. It’s always having someone with us, even when we’re alone.

It’s knowing, every second of every day, that we failed.

Donny Boylan, the detective I was working with back then, told me once that his case was a domestic dispute call. He didn’t slap cuffs on the husband, because the guy was a reputable business owner everyone knew and liked. He figured a warning was enough. Three hours after Donny left the house, the guy’s wife was dead. Single gunshot wound to the head. Her name was Amanda, and she was six months pregnant at the time.

Donny used to call her his ghost, the case that haunted him for years. My ghost is named Alice Metcalf. She didn’t die, like Amanda, as far as I know. She just disappeared, along with the truth about what happened ten years ago.

Sometimes, when I wake up after a bender, I have to squint because I’m pretty sure Alice is on the other side of my desk, in the spot where clients sit when they are asking me to take pictures of their wives in the act of cheating, or track down a deadbeat dad. I work alone, unless you count Jack Daniel’s as an employee. My office is the size of a closet and smells of take-out Chinese and rug-cleaning fluid. I sleep on the couch here more often than I do at my apartment, but to my clients, I am Vic Stanhope, professional private investigator.

Until I wake up with my head throbbing and a tongue too thick for my mouth, an empty bottle next to me, and Alice staring me down. Like hell you are, she says to me.


“This,” Donny Boylan said to me, ten years ago, as he popped another antacid tablet into his mouth. “This couldn’t have happened two weeks from now?”

Donny was counting the days until his retirement. As I sat with him, he gave me a litany of all the things he did not need: paperwork from the chief, red lights, a rookie like me to train, the heat wave that was aggravating his eczema. He also did not need a call at 7:00 A.M. from the New England Elephant Sanctuary, reporting the death of one of their caregivers.

The victim was a forty-four-year-old long-term employee. “You have any idea what kind of shitstorm this is going to cause?” he asked. “You remember what it was like three years ago when the place opened?”

I did. I had just joined the force then. There were townspeople protesting the arrival of “bad” elephants—the ones who’d gotten kicked out of their zoos and circuses for acting out violently. Editorials every day chastised the planning board, which had allowed Thomas Metcalf to build his sanctuary, albeit with two concentric fences to keep the citizens safe from the animals.

Or vice versa.

Every day for the first three months of the sanctuary’s existence a few of us were sent over to keep the peace at the sanctuary gates, where the protests were centered. It turned out to be a nonissue. The animals adapted quietly and the townspeople got used to having a sanctuary nearby, and there were no complications. Until that 7:00 A.M. phone call, anyway.

We were waiting inside a small office. There were seven shelves, each filled with binders labeled with the names of the elephants—Maura, Wanda, Syrah, Lilly, Olive, Dionne, Hester. There was a mess of papers on the desk, a stack of ledgers, three half-finished cups of coffee, and a paperweight shaped like a human heart. There were invoices for medication, and squash, and apples. I whistled, looking at the sum total of a bill for hay. “Holy crap,” I said. “That could buy me a car.”

Donny wasn’t happy, but then, Donny was never happy. “What’s taking so goddamn long?” he asked. We had been waiting now for almost two hours, while the staff tried to corral the seven elephants into the barn. Until then, our major crimes unit could not collect evidence inside the enclosure.

“You ever seen someone who’s been trampled by an elephant?” I asked.

“You ever shut up?” Donny replied.

I was investigating a strange series of marks stretched along the wall, like hieroglyphs or something, when a man crashed into the office. He was skittish, nervous, his eyes frantic behind his glasses. “I can’t believe this happened,” he said. “This is a nightmare.”