Van Endel made his way back to the trailer quickly. CPS, an ambulance, and two other marked vehicles had been added to the scene since he’d left. He needed to go talk to the other kids now, find Luke, and figure out what they knew.
He found Mike leaning against the car where he’d been before, but the man and woman were gone from the back of the Caprice. “I had them move them,” Mike said when he saw Van Endel looking. “Find your missing kid?”
“Nope,” said Van Endel. “You want to do me a solid?”
“Of course, Detective. How can I help?”
“Get this scene buttoned down, call in more help if you need it. I’ll help pick up the mess back at the station. That OK with you?”
“Of course,” said Mike. “Still looking for your missing boy?”
“It seems that I am.”
52
Tim was helping his dad with the patio. Neither had spoken of the night before. Tim’s mom and Becca had gone to Kalamazoo for some reason that Tim didn’t care about, most likely shopping. As far as he could tell, his additional troublemaking had gotten his sister off the hook almost completely. Somehow, that knowledge was worse than actually being in trouble in the first place, though Tim didn’t quite understand how it could be.
Tim was working as a tamper, pounding down the gravel as his dad walked around measuring everything. Lost in this work, his mind focused solely on the compression of pea gravel, Tim didn’t see that they had a visitor until his dad said, “Can I help you?” Tim let his arms relax as the tamper slid to the ground and he turned. It was no regular visitor, it was that detective who had decided they were lying, Van Endel.
“You can, assuming I can talk to Tim,” said Van Endel, walking up to Tim’s dad and shaking hands with him. “I’m not sure if you recall, but we talked briefly at the station downtown. My name is Detective Van Endel. If I remember right, you’re Stan Benchley, is that correct?”
“It is,” said Stan. “What did he do now—knock off a convenience store? I don’t think anything would surprise me at this point. Lay it on me.”
The detective looked surprised at Stan’s words and tone, and then seemed as if he might be biting back a smile. “Actually,” he said, “I’m here to apologize to your boy. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that your son and his friends have been telling the truth all along, and I need to hear what else he has to say. Would you mind if we went inside?”
Tim’s dad had been wrong, as it turned out: the detective had been able to surprise him. In fact, Stan looked as though he’d had the wind knocked out of him.
The three of them sat at the dining room table. Van Endel went over their rights, especially Stan’s. Stan said it was perfectly fine for them to talk.
“I would have preferred we do this at the station,” Van Endel said, “but time is fleeting, and as I’ve squandered a few days, I’d like to hear exactly what’s going on.” Van Endel reached in one of his pockets and set a .22 casing on the table. “And please, Tim. Tell me everything.”
Staring at the bullet for a few minutes, Tim knew there was no point in lying, not now. Van Endel would know if he did, and this was his chance to come clean, finally, on everything that had transpired over the last few days.
“When we saw that man and Molly, we were playing sniper with a rifle that Scott borrowed from his stepda—”
“Tim!” his dad exclaimed loudly. “What in the hell—”
For the second time that day, Van Endel came to Tim’s rescue. “Mr. Benchley, please,” he said. “Let me ask your son these questions. You can figure out an appropriate punishment later, but right now Tim needs to help me.” Stan sat back in his chair, red in the face, and Van Endel continued. “All right, Tim. Go ahead. You were playing sniper with a rifle. I assume a .22, is that correct?”
“Yes,” said Tim. “A .22 that came apart with just a few twists. It was pretty cool. Anyways, we were trying to hit this target, and our air rifles weren’t even coming close, so Scott borrowed the rifle. We were each going to get one shot, and that was going to be it. Then we saw the guy with Molly. And…”
“And what, Tim?”
Tim swallowed, or tried to. But there was nothing there to swallow. “We shot him.”
Both Van Endel and Tim’s dad rocked back against the backs of their chairs. Van Endel’s eyebrows had shot up, and Stan’s mouth hung open in horror.
“Say again?” Van Endel said softly. “Who shot him?”
“Luke did,” said Tim, feeling like the worst traitor in the world for telling the cop exactly what they’d told each other they’d never share with anyone. “He shot him in the right leg.”
“Jesus wept,” said Stan.
It came out like a river after that, Tim telling Van Endel and Stan every little detail. The midnight meetings, the detective work. It was only when he got to the part about Becca that Tim said, “Dad, I need you to leave the room for a few minutes, OK?”
“No,” said Stan flatly. “If there’s something that you did that’s so awful that you don’t want me to hear it, then I feel like I need to more than ever.”
Tim understood his dad probably felt like the floor had been yanked out from underneath him, and just wanted to reestablish some parental authority. But it was not to be. “Dad, it’s about Becca and Molly,” he said. “I’ll tell you later, but not now.”
There was a long, silent moment between them, and then his dad sighed and stood. Tim could tell he wanted to say something, but that he didn’t know quite what. Finally Stan settled on “Just yell if you need me,” his voice dull and hollow, before retreating down the hallway.
“They weren’t at the drive-in,” said Tim.
“I know,” said Van Endel. “Downtown, right?”
“Yeah,” said Tim, shocked. “But how did you know?”
“I didn’t for sure, not until right now. What I don’t know is what they were up to.”
“They were playing a game, I think,” said Tim, and then he told Van Endel exactly what Becca and her friends had been up to, as best he understood it, anyway. He told him about the outfits, the luring of men to the hotel to be robbed, and about Molly getting in a car and disappearing. Tim stared at the table during the telling, his face blazing the entire time, as though somehow it was his fault that everything had happened. When he was finished, though, he felt as though an enormous weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. Then he fell silent, exhausted, and almost unable to believe that he was being trusted by an adult again.
“So what happened after that?” Van Endel asked. “You knew Molly had been taken, you knew how it had been done, and you knew that the man who had done it lived nearby.” Van Endel sighed. “You also knew that you couldn’t go to the police or to your parents. So you started sneaking out at night.”
“Scott and I did. Luke was already out there, living in the fort. He just left his mom a note and took off.”
Tim saw a dark shadow pass over the detective’s face and then disappear. “So you started gathering clues. What’d you come up with?”
“Well, I already told you. You know, what Becca told me—oh, yeah, and the guy who picked up Molly drove a green car. I should’ve told you that first!”
“How sure was she about that?”
“Pretty sure, I guess,” said Tim. “She seemed pretty sure of it, or at least was sure of what she’d been told.” Tim was scared to tell the next part but kept going anyway. “Scott’s job was to borrow another gun from his stepdad, a pistol this time. Luke went around looking for houses that seemed suspicious, and it turned out that one that he thought looked creepy was owned by a friend of Scott’s stepdad, and the guy, his name is Hooper, drives a green car.”