“The more you love something, the more angry you’ll be when that thing is threatened or attacked. If you love children, you’ll be incensed at pedophiles; if you love your wife, you’ll get angry when someone insults her; if you love endangered species, you’ll be furious when they’re hunted to the point of extinction; if you love unborn children, you’ll be outraged about abortion. Anger always, and only, runs as deep as love.”
I’d never thought of it like that. “Your dad was a smart man.”
“Yes, he was.”
A thought: To find out what you truly love the most, look for what makes you the most angry.
Anger is the cousin of love…
I said, “You know how psychologists will tell you that no one can make you angry, that you only choose to become angry?”
“Sure.”
“I can’t remember a time ever in my life when I’ve chosen to be angry. And I’ve never met anyone who’s said to me, ‘This guy cut me off on the interstate and I decided to get angry.’”
“Anger’s a response”-Radar was right with me-“not a choice.”
“Right. Nobody ever chooses to become angry, we can only choose not to respond with anger. If we want to.”
“Okay.” He could tell there was more. “And?”
“And I’m not going to do that with Griffin.”
“You’re going to remain angry.”
“Yeah, and respond that way.”
“So am I.”
“I guess we’ll see where that leads.”
He was quiet. “Yes, we will.”
The trip went by fast and before I knew it I was pulling up to the side of the road in front of Timothy Griffin’s dilapidated house on the outskirts of Fort Atkinson.
59
Two cars from the Fort Atkinson Police Department were already at the house when we arrived.
A sergeant whose name tag read J. CARVER met us at the porch.
“Do you have him?” I asked.
He shook his head. “House was empty when we got here, but since we had the search warrant…well…” He pointed to the door. “We accessed the property.”
There was a shattered lock on the door and I liked this guy already.
“What else?”
“We found a false cabinet under the basement stairs. There’s a box. A bunch of toys and some children’s clothing.”
“Show me.”
While we were descending the steps, I could feel my heart twisting in my chest. Radar and I pulled on latex gloves.
“They haven’t disturbed anything,” I asked Carver, “have they? The other officers?”
“No. I made sure they didn’t touch anything until you got here.” Carver seemed like a pro and I was glad he was the one calling the shots for his team.
We reached the basement and he led us around the back of the stairs to the place where the officers had dismantled the cabinet. The basement itself was cluttered with unfinished woodworking projects, stacks of cardboard boxes, a shotgun on the workbench where Griffin may have been working on it, an old, warped pool table.
The square cardboard box they’d found was about half a meter tall, deep, and wide. It held a clutch of toys, some children’s clothes beneath them, and, apparently, something bulky that I couldn’t make out beneath the toys and clothing.
The toys in the box that caught my attention right off the bat were a plastic horse about the right size for a Barbie doll to ride on and a stuffed goat. As well as two small plastic pushcarts.
Beside them, tucked into the side of the box, was a carefully folded-up page torn from a coloring book with a sketchily colored-in bull.
Fire rose inside me.
I wondered if Griffin had colored in the picture himself or if an abducted child had done so.
Despite myself, I felt something inside of me slipping, something that’d been rooted firmly for a long time in what I believed about right and wrong, about justice and mercy: I wanted Timothy Griffin out of the way for good and I wanted to be the one to take him out. And if things played out like that, I knew that afterward I wouldn’t regret it at all.
But honestly, thinking those things frightened me.
Keep the demons at bay.
Keep them at bay.
Yeah, well maybe not this time.
As I removed the toys and then the children’s clothes-outfits that looked like they would’ve fit someone Jenna’s size-I saw what was bunched up beneath them.
A jacket.
Even though the arms of the coat weren’t visible, I said quietly, “There’s a small rip on the left sleeve, about halfway down.”
Radar was on one knee beside me, looking into the box as well. “How do you know that?”
“Because it used to be mine.”
60
I took the jacket out of the box.
The rip was right where I remembered it.
In a voice that I couldn’t help from being hushed, I explained to Radar and the other officers how I’d left this jacket in the tree house to cover Mindy Wells’s naked corpse. “I don’t know what happened to it after the investigation. I never saw it again.”
How did Griffin get this? From the evidence room? But he was never a cop…
I laid the jacket down softly, gentleness at this moment seemed to be a way of honoring the memory of Mindy Wells, then I stood and faced the four officers who’d been here when Radar and I arrived. “We need to find Griffin and Mallory. Now. Do any of you have any idea where they might be?”
They all shook their heads.
“He wasn’t here when he fled,” I said. “Yet somehow he knew we were coming to his house.”
“Why do you say that?” Carver asked.
Radar answered for me, pointing at the box. “If he was taking off for good, he wouldn’t have left that behind, especially if he knew you were coming with a search warrant.”
So, where was he?
The obvious: he and Mallory were just out running errands.
Maybe.
But we couldn’t afford to assume that right now.
“Did you put out an APB on his car yet?” I asked Carver.
“Yeah. So far no word.”
The only people who knew we were going to be here were Ralph, Radar, me, the judge whom Ralph contacted…
And the Fort Atkinson police.
Did someone warn Griffin that the police were on their way?
I asked Carver, “Who received the fax of the search warrant?”
“I did.”
“Who else besides the people in this room knew about it? Knew you were coming here?”
He gestured toward the three other men. “I grabbed these guys while we were at the station, but when we got here we radioed dispatch our location. So it could have been anyone.”
“No, not if you radioed in your position after you arrived. Griffin was already gone when you got here.”
There was always the possibility that Griffin had been at a neighbor’s house or something, saw the squads arrive, and just didn’t come home.
No, his car is missing from the driveway.
Okay. How to do this and not end up accusing one of them of warning Griffin…
“Do any of you know Griffin?”
All four men shook their heads.
I glanced at Radar, who was eyeing them, one after another. “Officer Webb,” he said to a stout young officer with short bristly hair and pale blue eyes. “You knew him, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“But you’ve seen him, right? It’s a small town. You see people around.”
“I don’t know, I-”
He looked rattled and Radar didn’t let up. “Officer Webb, did you call him? Tell him you were on the way over here?”
“No, of course not!” But he didn’t look Radar in the eye, and when he said the words he was tapping the forefinger and thumb of his right hand rapidly together.
I was about to push the issue, but Radar spoke up first. “You know something and you’re holding out. Right now you need to tell us what it is. We have-”
Surprisingly, that’s all it took. Webb held up a hand in quick surrender. “Listen, listen, all I did was call my sister. That’s it. That’s all. I just told her Griffin might be involved in something.”