The only answer, then, was not to get caught.
He stopped his tour of the channels to watch a couple of minutes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, until he remembered how it ended, and he started flashing through the channels once again.
It had been a long time since Michaels had heard Hackner so agitated. “Calm down, Jed. He was just telling you his opinion. You want the guy to lie?” Jed’s conversation with Johnstone had put a burr six inches up his butt, and he was taking it out on his lieutenant over the phone.
“Opinion my ass, Warren! This guy is a menace to the very kids he’s supposed to be protecting. He couldn’t care less about anybody in there!”
If it had been anyone else taking up his time with such irrelevant bullshit, Michaels would have lost his temper long ago. But it was Jed, and Jed didn’t go off the deep end very often. Must have struck a nerve, Michaels told himself. Something in Jed’s past maybe, when he was a kid. Maybe an old man who hit first and asked questions later. Or a buddy who’d gotten the shaft. Who knew the baggage people carried around with them? Michaels decided to cut his sergeant some slack.
“Okay, Jed, accepting the fact that he’s a menace, what would you have me do about it?”
“Get his fat ass fired!”
“I can’t do that. He doesn’t work for me.”
“Jesus Christ, Warren, don’t you see…”
“Jed… Jed…,” Michaels tried to interrupt. “Goddammit, Jed, shut up!” That did it. “Listen, I understand that Johnstone’s a hateful son of a bitch, and I’ll stipulate that he’s a menace to the people under his control. But the fact of the matter is, we’re already up to our ass in alligators over the kid’s escape, we’ve turned up exactly zero worthwhile leads, and I simply don’t have the time to worry about the staffing of the Juvenile Detention Center right now. And, I might add, neither do you.”
When Hackner didn’t respond, Michaels knew that he’d made his point. “Now, then,” he continued, “do we have any evidence at all to corroborate the Bailey kid’s self-defense story?”
Jed sighed. “I just got finished telling you—”
“Yeah, I know, that Johnstone’s a bad guy,” Michaels finished for him. “What about Ricky Harris, what did Johnstone say about him?”
Hackner clearly didn’t want to answer. “He said he was a model employee.” Jed’s reply was little more than a mumble.
“And his personnel jacket?”
“Same thing.”
“Face it, Jed,” Michaels concluded. “We’re still looking for a murderer. I want to give the kid the benefit of the doubt just as much as you do, but they taught us both in cop school to let the evidence guide our conclusions, not the other way around. And frankly, right now, the evidence against Nathan Bailey is pretty damning.”
Jed wouldn’t let it go. “I’m telling you, Warren, there’s something else here—something we’re missing. We don’t have any evidence as to motive. All we’ve got is a dead body and a very plausible story from the boy. You believe him as much as I do. You said so yourself this morning.”
This really wasn’t going anywhere. “Tell you what, Jed, let’s split this case into two parts. The first part: we’ve got to bring the kid into custody. His motivation for killing Harris doesn’t affect that. Once we’ve got him back, we’ll have all the time in the world to prepare the case against him. That’s the time to hang Johnstone out in the breeze—and Harris, too—if that’s what’s appropriate. Fair enough?”
Hackner was quiet again, as though he wasn’t sure whether he had won or lost. “I guess it’ll have to do. But I’m going to dig deeper into this guy Ricky.”
Warren smiled. Jed was too hardheaded to answer with a simple okay. “Now that that’s out of the way, we’ve had the uncle’s place under surveillance, I trust?”
Jed was all business again. “Yep. Not a sign of either one of them.”
“Think maybe they skipped town together?”
“I guess that’s possible, but considering their history, I don’t think it’s likely. The uncle’s the whole reason he ran away, remember?”
Michaels thought it was a long shot as well, but he had to pursue it as an option. One of the most basic principles of investigative police work was to eliminate the obvious before searching for the obscure. And as unlikely as it might have been for Nathan to return to the uncle he purported to hate, it was a place that he knew, and where he had roots. It would have been irresponsible not to surveil the house. “So, where else might he have gone?”
Jed answered succinctly, “I can’t think of a single place where he might not have gone.”
Michaels conceded that the question was ridiculous. If the uncle were deleted from the equation, Nathan had no one left in his life. And sad as that was, it left him with limitless options. Owing allegiance to no one, without so much as an obligation to phone anyone to say he was all right, the entire world belonged to this fugitive from justice; his options were limited only by the breadth of his imagination and his cunning. If he were an adult, these conditions would add up to the most difficult type of search. Since he was just a kid—hell, Michaels didn’t know what that meant. Certainly there were options available to adults that were not available to children, but on the other hand, children sort of blended into a crowd, and to a large degree, they all looked alike. Not feature for feature, of course, but human nature was such that people didn’t notice children’s features. Police were fortunate if people even remembered the presence of children in a crowd, let alone any specifics. Consequently, a child on the run could have options that would never be available to an adult.
The bottom line was this: They had no way of quickly focusing their search.
Dr. Baker’s day had begun nearly eight hours ago with a SIDS baby who had arrived by ambulance, unnecessarily, as it turned out. The baby had likely been dead for hours, already showing signs of lividity and rigor mortis when he was transferred from the ambulance cot onto the gurney in the ER. Even the medics had known that there was no hope, but they weren’t paid to deliver that kind of news to frightened, desperate young parents. As medical director, that was Baker’s job.
Life and death were his business, and this was neither the first nor the last time that he would hold the hands of sobbing adults, as he sewed his own emotions together with a thin suture of professional aloofness. Still, it was a shitty way to start a day.
As of twenty minutes ago, however, the world had been brought back into balance as he delivered a very fortunate young man into this world via emergency cesarean section. Not one to show emotion on the job, he was self-conscious of the tears in his eyes as he handed the wailing infant over to his grateful mother. Somehow, it was easier to let the emotions go on the good news than on the bad. For Tad Baker, it was what had kept him coming to work every day for the past eight years.
Between the day’s two momentous events was an endless stream of broken bones and sliced flesh, all of which had to be handled in due course, prioritized in order of the injuries’ threat to the longterm health of their owners. As he slipped a set of x-rays into the clips on the viewer, he frowned, instantly regretting the decision of the triage nurse to put this case at the end of the line. Ordinarily, broken fingers were, on the ER’s scale, a low-priority injury, but this guy was the exception. The ghostly white hand on the screen before him was more than just broken; it had been mangled. The pain must have been excruciating, Tad thought. How odd that he would have sat so patiently in the waiting room for—he referred to the admissions chart—four hours! Cringing at the potential liability an event like this posed to his hospital, he made a mental note to follow through on it later. It was, after all, not the sort of note one would want to have in writing, in case Mr.—he referred to the chart again—Bailey turned out to be the litigious sort.