But wouldn’t it be better to know the worst, know it and be able to decide what to do?
Looking around the office, eying the open bedroom door, he said, “Our lovely afternoon.”
“We’ll still have it, Henry,” she promised him. “We’ll follow her, we’ll find out what she’s up to, and then we’ll come right back here. Henry...”
He looked at her. “Yes?”
He loved that lascivious smile she sometimes showed; not often enough. “It’ll be better than ever,” she whispered.
On the way back to the Infiniti, he thought, I’ll have to phone Muriel, I’m going to be later than I thought. I’ll have to phone her, I’ll have to tell her... whatever I tell her.
6
When CID Detective Jason Rembek, a big shambling balding man with thick eyeglasses sliding down his lumpy nose, reached his cubicle at Headquarters at 8:34 Saturday morning — according to the digital clock on his desk, which was never wrong — the overnights were stacked waiting for him, escape-related materials on top, lesser cases underneath, just as he’d instructed.
The flight of the three hardcases from Stoneveldt Thursday afternoon had kept him on the hop all day yesterday. He hoped things would be quieter today. He had other Opens on his desk, not just these three punks taking a little vacation.
Detective Rembek had been on the state force fourteen years, with very little experience of prison breaks. None, from Stoneveldt; that trio had made the record books. Nevertheless, it was his own experience and the experience of others he’d talked to or read about, that the boys in prison were mostly there in the first place because they didn’t know how to handle life on the outside, not even when they weren’t on the run. Very very rare was the guy who disappeared forever, or showed up thirty years later a solid citizen, mayor of some small town in Canada.
Mostly, the escapees ran until they got tired and then just stood there until they were rounded up. Sometimes they’d steal a car or rob a convenience store, but there was no plan in their lives, no long-term goal. Three, four days, they’d start to get hungry, they’d start to miss that regular life they had in the cells, and they’d call it quits. Detective Rembek believed it was true almost without exception that once an escapee had thought about escape, he was finished thinking.
Were these three going to fit the pattern? Why not? On Rembek’s desk were photos and bios of the three, and there was little in them to make him believe they were going to beat the odds. The two local boys, anyway. Given their histories, their family ties, their dependency on this small area of the world, it was only a matter of time before they’d show up somewhere they’d been before, that they just couldn’t stay away from. A relative, a girlfriend, a bar, a fellow heister. And then the net would scoop them up, put them back where they belonged.
The out-of-towner was the wild card; Ronald Kasper, or whatever his name was. No one had ever escaped from Stoneveldt, but these three had, and neither Marcantoni nor Williams seemed to Rembek the kind of guy to break that cherry. So was Kasper the one who’d made it happen? Was he the one they had to find, the one they had to outthink and outguess, if they were going to collect all three?
Rembek studied the few pictures he had of Kasper. A hard face, bony, like outcroppings of stone. Hard eyes; if they were the windows of the soul, the shades were drawn.
Rembek didn’t pick up any of the pictures, but leaned closer and closer over them, his nose almost touching the surface of the desk. Had this bird gone through plastic surgery some time in the past? Did he have other histories, beyond the broken burglary at the warehouse and the escape from Stoneveldt? Rembek craved the opportunity to interrogate that face, see what was behind those eyes.
Well. There were other ways to come at them. The three escapees now on his desk had three contact points, being the people who had visited them during their time inside; one each. Ronald Kasper had been visited several times by his brother-in-law, named Ed Mackey. Thomas Marcantoni had been visited twice by his brother, Angelo. And Brandon Williams had been visited three times by his youngest sister, Maryenne.
The first of these was the most interesting. After Kasper broke out, police naturally went to the motel where Mackey was living, only to learn he’d checked out that morning, no forwarding address, no useful ID. Detective Rembek doubted very much it was a coincidence that Mackey checked out of his motel in the morning on the same day that Kasper checked out of prison in the afternoon.
The top report on Detective Rembek’s desk told him that no progress had been made in either finding Mackey or learning who he actually was. The next two folders were mostly the results of the wiretaps on Angelo Marcantoni and Maryenne Williams, wiretaps that had been granted by the judge at nine P.M. on Thursday, less than four hours after the escape, and had been in operation ever since. No police officer actually sat next to the recording machine twenty-four hours a day; it was a voice-activated tape, picked up at eight every morning, and four in the afternoon, and midnight.
Angelo Marcantoni, according to the transcript, did very little on the telephone, and then it seemed to be mostly about bowling; if that were a code, as far as Detective Rembek was concerned, Marcantoni was welcome to it. In any event, he appeared to be the law-abiding brother, married, three children, with absolutely no criminal record of any kind and an unblemished work record with a supermarket chain. Detective Rembek thought it unlikely he would risk all that to help a brother who’d been in increasingly serious trouble since he was ten.
As for Maryenne Williams, she appeared to be a young mother who spent all her waking hours on the phone with other young mothers, discussing their babies, discussing their babies’ (mostly absent) fathers, and discussing boys they thought of as “cute” as though they didn’t have trouble enough already. That’s what the MW transcripts had been up till now, and that’s what they looked like for last night, too, boring and tedious to read but necessary.
And then:
11:19 P.M.
MW: Hello?
C: Hi, it’s me.
MW: (audible gasp) Are you okay?
Detective Rembek sat straighter, holding in both hands the paper he was reading.
C: Yeah, I’m fine.
MW: What are you gonna do?
C: I think I gotta go away.
MW: Oh, yeah, you do. You need money?
C: I’m gonna get money in a couple days, I’m okay. I got a good place to stay, and next week I’ll take off.
MW: Listen, uh—
Almost said his name there, Detective Rembek thought.
MW: —you remember Goody?
C: Yeah, that one.
MW: Well, he come around, he said, any way he can help, buy you tickets or stuff, whatever, you should call him, because it wouldn’t be good for me to do anything.
C: No, no, you shouldn’t do anything. I’m just calling — I wanted to tell you I’m okay, and I’ll be going away, next week.
MW: That’s the best thing. If you need help—
C: Goody.
I wish I could hear how he said that name, Detective Rembek thought. Does he think Goody will help him, or does he think Goody isn’t any use? He won’t tell his sister, because she thinks this Goody is all right.
MW: I’m glad you called.
C: Well, yeah, I had to. Listen, kiss Vernon for me.
MW: I will, (crying) Bye, now.
C: Bye, now.
The call had been traced, after the event, to a pay-phone on Russell Street, a nondescript working-class neighborhood. Two police officers were at this moment searching the area, with no realistic expectation of finding anything.