Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 27

“Sure,” Lido said.

As Lido worked the computer like a mad scientist, the figure in the photo became larger and lost more definition. “All I can tell is he looks young,” Lido said.

“That’s lettering, there in the lower right,” Helen said. She pointed. “I think it’s a name.”

“I’ll zoom in on it,” Lido said, “but it’s gonna break up pretty soon.”

Helen reached into her purse and put on a pink pair of glasses. No one had seen her in glasses before.

She removed the glasses and stood up straight. “That’s okay, I got it.”

“The photographer’s name?” Lido asked.

“No, it’s not a photo credit. It’s the kid’s name in newspaper print: Jordan Kray.”

Lido pressed save and then ran printouts of what was on the monitor. Then he went to work with his computer, immersing himself again in his private digital world. Someday Lido might stay there, Quinn thought. Might even be trapped there in geek land, with all the other brilliant geeks who wear mismatched socks but can work complex equations in their heads.

“There’s no Jordan Kray that fits the characteristics we’re looking for,” Lido said, after a while.

“He doesn’t even have a Web page?” Fedderman asked. He had come in with Harold’s partner, Sal. They’d held their silence while Lido was working.

Fedderman’s wife, Penny, had been coaching him on the computer while trying to create a Web site. She had convinced him that everyone other than the Fedder-mans had a Web site, and that he was a natural. Already he had a tendency to store information on a cloud someplace that he could never access.

“The guy’s a troglodyte,” Fedderman said.

“Something like that,” Lido said.

They stared again at the blown-up digital image. Under Lido’s coaxing it was larger now, in sharper definition. The photo was obviously one of a young male teenager. Or maybe he wasn’t even in his teens.

“That’s a newspaper photo, so let’s find out which paper,” Quinn said.

“Small-town rag,” Fedderman said. “Maybe a giveaway. And not recent. You can tell by the print under the photo.”

“You mean the font,” Harold said knowledgeably. “That’s how they started calling front-page news in the early twenties. In newspaper slang, ‘big font’ meant big news. Since it was always on the first page, ‘font-page news’ gradually became front-page news.”

“Is any of that true, Harold?” Sal asked.

“Should be.”

“Get the enhanced sketch in circulation,” Quinn said, marveling as he often did that his bickering team of detectives could solve anything. What accounted for their success? Unconventional thinking, maybe. “Let’s follow it up with the photograph of the kid. Send both images out to the media, then hit the neighborhoods and shops where the victims lived or worked. Do it on foot, face-to-face, so you can see what reaction you get when they first lay eyes on the photo.”

“We need to find out more on that photo,” Sal said.

“More on the kid,” Harold said.

“It amounts to the same thing, Harold,” Sal rasped in his annoyed tone. Sometimes Harold could be intolerable.

“Don’t be negative,” Harold said.

There! Negative. Photography. Was Harold joking, or making fun of Sal? Or making Sal the joke? Or was Harold just plain dumb? Or so dumb he was smart?

“I’ll drive the unmarked,” Sal rasped, “and I’ll control the air conditioner. Think of me as the captain of the ship.”

Harold said, “Font news.”

28

Iowa, 1998

For the next several years, after his family’s destruction, Jordan stayed with the Millman family, who had a farm a mile west of the Krays’ house that had burned.

He went to school on the yellow bus as before, but the other kids tended not to talk to him. No one made fun of him; they simply didn’t seem to know quite what to make of him. A kid like Jordan, their classmate, an actual hero. Nobody knew how to approach or talk to him. A kid who in truth had been thought of as something of a dork had miraculously become “awesome.”

Jordan enjoyed his celebrity status—at least some of it. But after a while he became withdrawn and quiet. He would look around the bus sometimes at his schoolmates and wonder how something that had nothing directly to do with their lives could strike them as so great a tragedy that they seldom knew what to say to him. He thought it shouldn’t be such a problem. Even the nitwits they saw on TV news were always yammering about “getting on with” their lives.

The Millmans were a nice enough family. The father, Will, had died three years ago in an auto accident. His wife, only slightly injured, became “The Widow Julia.” Their son Bill, also injured, was a little younger than Jordan. He seemed to look up to Jordan, who, while older, was considerably smaller.

At times Bill would follow Jordan to the burned, partially collapsed hulk of what had been the Krays’ home. The burned smell was still strong, but Jordan was used to it and didn’t mind. He would stand at the edge of the ruin and point things out to Bill. Teacher-to-student mode: “See how the kitchen floor caved in first? That’s because the appliances were so heavy. And the fire almost melted part of the house’s main beam, running the length of the structure. That’s a steel I beam that held up the entire weight of the house,” Jordan told Bill, “but look how it’s bent. Like it’s squishy rubber instead of steel. See over there, where the electrical service was run in and mounted on that wall? That metal box hanging on the wall is full of circuit breakers.”

While Jordan talked, Bill listened carefully about electric current and circuit breakers. Then they covered the subject of smoke alarms. What kinds there were and how sometimes they worked but sometimes didn’t. Jordan explained about the sprinkler system, and how it was kept dry by air pressure unless one piece of metal melted faster than another, which completed a circuit and triggered an alarm and an indoor cloudburst.

Bill Millman thought that if someone walked in or listened to them, it would sound as if Jordan was trying to sell him the ruined house.

What Jordan never talked about was the short time he’d spent after entering the burning house. Before the propane explosion.

Jordan had learned a great deal observing the fire that morning, not the least of which was how a burned body looked. Kent, he thought.

Jordan only had to move a few feet to find what must be his mother’s body. Interesting how the blackened corpse might have worked when alive, the bone and muscle and tendon receiving instructions from the brain. Human bodies were simply large gadgets, Jordan realized. Parts working in conjunction with each other.

How fascinating.

Especially women’s parts.

The widow Julia liked to cook. Bill and Jordan liked to eat. Bill became tall and lean, an outfielder on the school baseball team. He was disciplined for using the janitor’s tools to peel a baseball like an onion, unwinding what was inside. He never told anyone that Jordan had ruined the baseball, curious about how and why it behaved as it did when it met the bat.

The two boys grew apart. Bill became immersed in baseball, and Jordan, more and move aloof, discovered reading. It was rumored that the Cincinnati Reds were going to send a scout to assess Bill’s talent. Bill shagged fly balls and spent extra hours in the batting cage, but the scout never showed up.

Toward the end of that season, a batted ball shattered Bill’s kneecap. He managed to adapt well to an artificial knee, but that was the end of baseball or any other active sport.

Bill did, however, learn to walk with the knee so well that unless you knew about the injury, you’d think it was just fine.

Then Bill got into the habit of spending time in the park, hitting fly balls to slightly younger, more nimble outfielders. Now and then Bill would even break into a run to field a ball that was thrown back in.