A moment, then, in dramatic pause before he introduced each of the Ashford Day Committee members, the principals of the two high schools, and a dozen others who had worked to bring the town together for its birthday.
Norman and Joyce stood together, and Don winced when his father turned to the crowd and waved.
Then the mayor paused again, spoke again in a voice so soft no one dared sneeze for missing a word. He alluded to the Howler, and introduced Don.
Don didn’t move though the applause was loud.
“Go on,” Joyce urged him with a hugging grip on his arm.
He couldn’t. The cameras were watching, and the mayor was beaming, and the police chief in his dress uniform had climbed to the bandstand with a package in his hand.
“Go, Donald,” Norman hissed, poking his ribs harshly.
He couldn’t.
Where are you?
Tracey leaned forward and pulled a strand of his hair. “Go for it, Vet,” she said into his ear.
He grinned, shook his hair loose and stood. Hand smoothed his jacket, his throat went dry, and the walk across the infield through the flare of the spotlights was long and slow and filled with the sound of his soles striking the ground.
Hollow. Booming. Iron striking iron.
The applause started again when he positioned himself between the police chief and the mayor, and he smiled shyly, unable to see anything beyond the wall of white light.
The mayor said something — Don heard Amanda’s name and heard the silence that followed — and said something else before shaking his hand vigorously; and suddenly there were people right in front of him, kneeling, crouching, cameras working, flashbulbs exploding, mouths working as they ordered this pose and that, bumping into one another, crowding together, a hydra with white fire-eyes that made his own water.
The police chief said something, and handed him the package. His medal, and a certificate, and the grateful thanks of a town he had saved from further grief.
The applause punched his ears, the mayor slapped his back, and the chief pumped his hand without once seeing his face.
Then he was standing in front of the mike, and it was quiet. Only the whirr of a camera forwarding its film, only the scuffle of feet on the grass and the creak of a few chairs.
It was quiet, and it took him a moment to realize they wanted him to speak. Say a word. Tell them all how a kid had beaten a murderer to death.
A voice broke through the white wall from somewhere in the dark: “Hey, Duck, tell them the giant crow did it!”
He looked up sharply, searching for the voice and the derisive laughter that followed.
“I …”
He wasn’t close enough to the mike, and only the mayor heard him start; but the laughter was still there, and spreading through the crowd, feeding on his nervousness, sympathetic at his plight and trying to tell him there was only good cheer out there and the gratitude hadn’t died.
But they laughed, a few of them, and Don held the velvet-covered box close to his chest.
The mayor patted the back of his head and pushed him closer; the bandmaster cleared his throat. The laughter settled, and died, and there was quiet again.
Except for the wind that waited in the trees.
He looked down and saw his parents — Joyce was brushing a tear from her eye, and Norman was scowling; behind them, he could see Tracey holding tightly to her father’s arm as if holding him in his seat.
“Thank you,” he said at last and clearly, and stepped off the platform before anyone could stop him.
The applause was swift and short, and by the time he reached his seat, the bandmaster was already rapping his baton.
The police station was deserted except for the desk sergeant and dispatcher and, in a second floor office that faced the main street, Thomas Verona. His shift was over at twelve, but he felt as if he’d already strung three of them together— his eyes were bleary, his hands unsteady, and whenever he tried to concentrate on anything for more than a few moments at a time, the world began a slow spinning that forced him to shut his eyes tightly before he lost his balance.
Three fingers massaged one cheek as he stared out the window. There were few pedestrians, and the cars that stopped at the light on the corner were more than likely from adjoining towns, passing through, going home. He shifted his ministrations to the other cheek and imagined he could hear the concert in the park. Susan was there, sitting with the Quinteros, and he wished he could have joined them. But he couldn’t. It was Luis’s night, not his — Luis had found the boy and had taken care of him until the ambulance had arrived, Luis, who also managed to clear up the accident between a bus and car that had jumped a boulevard island.
Luis Quintero deserved what attention he could get; he, on the other hand, was needed to fill in when one of his colleagues was taken ill.
Still, it would have been nice, sitting beside Susan and holding her hand. A hell of a lot better than sitting in here.
“Shit,” he muttered, and turned away from the window, laid his palms on the cluttered desk, and stared at the file folder spread open before him. Test results on Falwick’s injuries. Test results on Amanda Adler and the Howler’s other victims. Test results on the blood found on Boyd’s clothes and hands. A preliminary autopsy report made just around noon, precedence over others because of the case’s notoriety. He poked at them with a finger and frowned. By necessity, most of what he looked at was initial findings only, though certainly conclusive enough for him to shut the folder, file it away, and move on to the next thing.
But he couldn’t.
He kept seeing the slender figure of that boy lying in the hospital bed, seeing the fear in his eyes, in the way he spoke without really answering questions. It wasn’t right. He would have surmised through visual evidence that Boyd was hiding something, covering up for a gang that had almost torn the retired sergeant to shreds — and he had, until the first results came in and he saw he was wrong, another theory shot to hell like hundreds before it and the ancestor of hundreds more.
One kid. One victim.
Footsteps in the hall and he looked up in time to see a white-jacketed man stride past his open doorway.
“Hey, Ice!”
The footsteps hesitated and returned. A short man with wispy hair atop a constantly wistful face leaned against the doorframe and grinned. “Such devotion, I can’t stand it,” he said.
Verona lifted his middle finger, smiled over it, then used it to stab at a sheet of green paper. “This thing here.”
Ice Ronson stretched without leaving his place. “Right, Tom. It’s a piece of paper.”
“The Boyd thing.”
“Okay. It’s a piece of paper about the Boyd thing.” He snatched a stick of gum from his breast pocket and folded it into his mouth. Blew a bubble he sucked back before it broke. “So?”
“So who did most of the work? I don’t recognize the signature here.” He turned the sheet around and waited until Ronson crossed the room to stare. “Christ, you guys can’t even write your own names except on checks.”
“Hey, man, it’s tough down there in the trenches,” Ronson said, taking a pair of wire-rimmed glasses from the same pocket as his gum. “We deal in volatile chemicals, delicate measurements, knowing all the time a man’s life may hang in the — shit, this is impossible! Why the hell don’t you get a decent lamp, huh? A man could go blind.” He held the paper up toward the fluorescent light in the ceiling. “Oh, yeah, it’s Adam. He did this stuff.”