Caught. Part 8

"Right, more of that AA nonsense. We really don't know about tomorrow, do we? So that's how you should make amends. Stop writing letters, stop talking about yourself in group, stop taking it a day at a time. Instead, do the one thing that will guarantee you'll never murder another child's father: Wait for that bus and step right in front of it. Other than that, leave me and my son the h.e.l.l alone. We will never forgive you. Not ever. And how selfish and monstrous of you to think we should so you, of all people, can heal."

With that, Wendy turned around, headed back to her car, and started it up.

She was done with Ariana Nasbro. Now it was time to see Dan Mercer.

CHAPTER 6.

MARCIA MCWAID SAT ON THE COUCH next to Ted. Across from them was Frank Tremont, an Ess.e.x County investigator there to deliver their weekly briefing on the case of her missing daughter. Marcia already knew what he would say.

Frank Tremont wore a suit of chipmunk brown and a threadbare tie that looked like it had spent the past four months crinkled in a tight ball. He was in his sixties, near retirement, and had that seen-it-all, world-weary aura that you find in anyone who has been at the same job too long. When Marcia had first asked around, she'd heard rumors that Frank might be past his prime, might be coasting through his last few months on the job.

But Marcia never saw any of that, and at least Tremont was still here, still visiting them, still in touch. There used to be others with him, federal agents and experts in missing persons and a.s.sorted members of law enforcement. Their numbers had dwindled over the last ninety-four days until it was just this lone, aging cop with the horrible suit.

In the early days, Marcia had tried to busy herself by offering the various officers coffee and cookies. There was no such pretense anymore. Frank Tremont sat across from them, these clearly suffering parents, in their lovely suburban home, and wondered, she knew, how to tell them, yet again, that there was nothing new to report on their missing daughter.

"I'm sorry," Frank Tremont said.

As expected. Almost on cue.

Marcia watched Ted lean back. He tilted his face up, his eyes blinking back tears. She knew that Ted was a good man, a wonderful man, a great husband and father and provider. But he was, she had learned, not a particularly strong man.

Marcia kept her eyes on Tremont. "So what next?" she asked.

"We keep on looking," he said.

"How?" Marcia asked. "I mean, what else can be done?"

Tremont opened his mouth, stopped, closed it. "I don't know, Marcia."

Ted McWaid let the tears flow. "I don't get it," he said, as he had many times before. "How can you guys not have anything?"

Tremont just waited.

"With all the technology, all the advancements and the Internet . . ."

Ted's voice trailed off. He shook his head. He didn't get it. Still. Marcia did. It didn't work that way. Before Haley, they'd been a typically naive American family whose knowledge of (and thus faith in) law enforcement was derived from a lifetime of watching TV shows in which all cases get solved. The well-groomed actors find a hair or a footprint or a skin flake, they put it under a microscope, and presto, the answer comes to light before the hour mark. But that wasn't reality. Reality, Marcia now knew, was better found on the news. The cops in Colorado, for example, still hadn't found the killer of that little beauty queen, JonBenet Ramsey. Marcia remembered the headlines when Elizabeth Smart, a pretty fourteen-year-old girl, had been abducted from her bedroom late one night. The media had been all over that kidnapping, the whole world transfixed, all eyes watching as the police and FBI agents and all those crime scene "experts" combed through Elizabeth's Salt Lake City home in search of the truth--and yet for more than nine months, no one thought to check out a crazy homeless man with a G.o.d complex who'd worked in the house, even though Elizabeth's sister had seen him that night? If you'd put that on CSI CSI or or Law & Order Law & Order the viewer would toss the remote across the room, claiming it was "unrealistic." But sugarcoat it as you might, that was the kind of thing that happened all the time. the viewer would toss the remote across the room, claiming it was "unrealistic." But sugarcoat it as you might, that was the kind of thing that happened all the time.

The reality, Marcia now knew, was that even idiots get away with major crimes.

The reality was, none of us are safe.

"Do you have anything new to tell me?" Tremont tried. "Anything at all?"

"We've told you everything," Ted said.

Tremont nodded, his expression extra hangdog today. "We've seen other cases like this, where a missing teenage girl just shows up. She needed to blow off steam or maybe had a secret boyfriend."

He had tried selling this before. Frank Tremont, like everyone else, including Ted and Marcia, wanted this to be a runaway.

"There was another teenage girl from Connecticut," Tremont continued. "Got caught up with the wrong guy and ran away. Three weeks later, she just came back home."

Ted nodded and turned to Marcia to have his hope bolstered. Marcia tried to muster a rosier facade, but there was simply no way. Teddy turned away as though scalded and excused himself.

It was odd, Marcia thought, that she of all people could see clearest. Of course, no parent wants to think that they are so clueless as to miss the signs of a teenager so desperately unhappy or unhinged that she'd run away for three months. The police had magnified every disappointment in her young life: Yes, Haley hadn't gotten into the University of Virginia, her first choice. Yes, she hadn't won the cla.s.s essay contest or made the AHLISA honors program. And yes, she may have broken up with a boy recently. But so what? Every teen had stuff like that.

Marcia knew the truth, had known it from that first day. To echo the words of Princ.i.p.al Zecher, something had happened to her daughter. Something bad.

Tremont sat there, not sure what to do.

"Frank?" Marcia said.

He looked at her.

"I want to show you something."

Marcia took out the Mickey Mouse photograph she'd found at her daughter's locker and handed it to him. Tremont took his time. He held the picture in his hand. The room was still. She could hear his wheezing breath.

"That picture was taken three weeks before Haley vanished."

Tremont studied the photograph as though it might hold a clue to Haley's disappearance. "I remember. Your family trip to Disney World."

"Look at her face, Frank."

He obeyed, his eyes resting there.

"Do you think that girl, with that smile, just decided to run away and not tell anyone? Do you really think that girl took off on her own and was savvy enough to never use her iPhone or ATM or credit cards?"

"No," Frank Tremont said, "I don't."

"Please keep looking, Frank."

"I will, Marcia. I promise."

WHEN PEOPLE THINK OF NEW JERSEY'S highways, they think of either the Garden State Parkway with its mix of shattered warehouses, unkempt graveyards, and worn two-family dwellings, or they think of the New Jersey Turnpike with its factories and smoke-stacks and mammoth industrial complexes that resemble the nightmarish future in Terminator Terminator movies. They don't think of Route 15 in Suss.e.x County, the farmland, the old lake communities, the antique barns, the 4-H Fairgrounds, the old minor league baseball stadium. movies. They don't think of Route 15 in Suss.e.x County, the farmland, the old lake communities, the antique barns, the 4-H Fairgrounds, the old minor league baseball stadium.

Following Dan Mercer's directions, Wendy took Route 15 until it became 206, turned right on a gravel road, drove past the U-Store-It units, and arrived at the trailer park in Wykertown. The park was silent and small and had the kind of ghostly look where you half expect to see a rusted child's swing swaying in the wind. The lots were divided up in a grid. Row D, Column 7 was in the far corner, not far from the chain-link fence.

She got out of the car and was amazed by the quiet. Not a sound. No tumbleweeds blew across the dirt, but maybe they should have. The whole park looked like one of those postapocalyptic towns--the bomb dropped and the residents had evaporated. There were clothes-lines, but nothing on them. Foldout chairs with torn seats littered the grounds. Charcoal barbecues and beach toys looked as though they'd been abandoned in mid-play.

Wendy checked her phone service. No bars. Terrific. She climbed the two cinder-block steps and stopped in front of the trailer door. Part of her--the rational part that knew that she was a mother, not a superhero--told her that she should back up and not be an idiot. She would have pondered that decision further, except suddenly the screen door opened and Dan Mercer was there.

When she saw his face, she took a step back.

"What happened to you?"

"Come on in," Dan Mercer mumbled through a swollen jaw. His nose was flattened. Bruises covered his face, but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst were the cl.u.s.ters of burn circles on his arm and face. One looked as though it had gone all the way through his cheek.

She pointed to one of the circles. "They do that with a cigarette?"

He managed a shrug. "I told them my trailer was a no-smoking zone. It made them angry."

"Who?"

"That was a joke. The no-smoking zone."

"Yeah, I got that. Who a.s.saulted you?"

Dan Mercer shook it off. "Why don't you come in?"

"Why don't we stay out here?"

"Gee, Wendy, don't you feel safe with me? As you so bluntly pointed out, you're hardly my type."

"Still," she said.

"I really don't relish going outside right now," he said.

"Oh, but I insist."

"Then good-bye. Sorry to make you drive all this way for nothing."

Dan let the door close as he disappeared inside. Wendy waited a second, trying to call his bluff. It didn't work. Forgetting the earlier warning bells--he didn't look as though he could do much damage in his current condition anyway--she opened the door and stepped inside. Dan was on the other side of the trailer.

"Your hair," she said.

"What about it?"

Dan's once wavy brown hair was now a horrible shade of yellow some might call blond.

"You dye it yourself?"

"No, I went to Dionne, my favorite colorist in the city."

She almost smiled at that. "Really blends you in."

"I know. I look like I just walked out of an eighties glam-rock video."

Dan moved farther away from the door, toward the back corner of the trailer, almost as if he wanted to hide the bruises. Wendy let go of the door. It slammed shut. The light was dim. Sun streaks slashed across the room. The floor near her was worn linoleum, but a poorly cut rug of orange s.h.a.g, like something the Brady Bunch would have considered too garish, covered the far quarter of the room.

Dan looked small in the corner, hunched over and broken. What was bizarre, what had angered her so, was that she had tried to do a story on Dan Mercer and his "good works" about a year before her sting showed his true predilections. Before that, Dan had seemed to be that rarest of beasts--the honest-to-G.o.d do-gooder, a man who truly wanted to make a difference and, most shockingly, a man who didn't couple that desire with self-aggrandizement.

She had--dare she admit this?--fallen for it. Dan was a handsome man with that unruly brown hair and dark blue eyes, and he had that ability to look at you as though you were the only person in the world. He had focus and charm and a self-deprecating sense of humor, and she could see how these miserable kids must have loved that.

But how had she, a pathologically skeptical reporter, not seen through him?

She had even--again, dare she admit it, even to herself?--hoped that he would ask her out. There had been that great, early attraction when he looked at her, that thunderbolt, and she'd felt sure that she'd sent a bit of a lightning storm his way too.

Beyond creepy to think about that now.

From his spot in the corner, Dan tried to stare at her with that same focus, but it wasn't happening. The seemingly beautiful clarity she'd been fooled by before had been shattered. What was left in its place was pitiful, and even now, even after all she knew, Wendy's instincts told her that he simply could not be the monster that he so obviously was.

But, alas, that was c.r.a.p. She'd been had by a con man--simple as that. His modesty had been a way to cover up his true self. Call it instinct or women's intuition or going with your gut--whenever Wendy had done that, she had been wrong.

"I didn't do it, Wendy."

More I I. Some day she was having.

"Yeah, you told me that on the phone," she said. "Care to elaborate?"

He looked lost, not sure how to continue. "Since my arrest, you've been investigating me, right?"

"So?"

"You talked to the kids I worked with at the community center, right? How many?"

"What's the difference?"

"How many, Wendy?"

She had a pretty good idea of where he was going with this. "Forty-seven," she said.

"How many of them claimed that I abused them?"

"Zero. Publicly. But there were some anonymous tips."

"Anonymous tips," Dan repeated. "You mean those anonymous blogs that could have been written by anyone, including you."

"Or a scared kid."

"You didn't even believe those blogs enough to air them."

"That's hardly evidence you're innocent, Dan."

"Funny."

"What?"