The Closer He Gets

“Those were his words? Not yours?” Zach asked carefully, hoping his incredulity wasn’t leaking into his tone.

“His,” the retired sergeant said. “Bothered me, but people say things like that all the time. ‘What a handsome boy!’ ‘Oh, your daughter is so pretty!’ You’re reading something into it that isn’t there.”

“You so sure about that?”

Again there was a momentary silence. “He had two daughters, one a couple years older than your sister, one a little younger,” Nolte said. “Best I could do was talk to the older daughter’s teachers and have the school counselor sit down with her. There was no suggestion she’d been molested.”

In other words, he’d done his job. Above and beyond, even.

“And you took his word for it that he hadn’t slipped out of his house that night?”

“No, I managed to run into his wife real casually and say, ‘Hey, I thought I saw Duane driving home, middle of the night. Hope there wasn’t an emergency.’ That kind of thing. She looked completely puzzled and said Duane wasn’t a night owl. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d been up past eleven. I couldn’t find any hint he’d had an inappropriate interest in little girls. What else could I do?”

“Probably nothing.” Those prickles hadn’t subsided, though. “I might get a little further now, though, in case he was later accused of anything.”

“Guess that’s true. Twenty-five years ago we couldn’t find out everything we ever wanted to know about someone on his Facebook page.”

Zach smiled. “I’m willing to bet people were just as dumb.”

“Took different forms.”

Turned out Nolte remembered the other name, too. Sam Doyle. Sam was a plumber. Zach recalled a plumbing disaster, a pipe broken in the wall behind the shower. The wall had had to be torn out and Dad had replaced the saturated plywood on the bathroom floor and the vinyl. Zach was even able, kind of vaguely, to picture the plumber who had responded. He’d been a young guy, with hair long enough he kept having to push it out of his eyes. Zach had wondered why he didn’t cut it. No guarantee he was this Sam Doyle, but what were the odds?

He’d certainly been younger than Zach’s mother, who at the time was... Zach had to count back. Thirty-five, he decided. But then, as he’d noticed since, Mom liked men of all ages.

Nolte didn’t remember, as well, what Sam Doyle had said, except that he’d been outraged at any suggestion he’d be sexually interested in a girl, far less willing to kill her.

“He’d had girlfriends,” the sergeant said. Something in his tone told Zach he was shrugging. “Seemed normal. You know? Again, no hint he could be a pedophile.”

“What about neighbors? Older teenage boys who’d have seen Sheila playing outside?”

Nolte and his partner had knocked on doors, asked around, but hadn’t come up with anyone of interest.

“Have you asked to see a copy of the police report?” he said a little testily. “All of this would be in it.”

“I haven’t yet, but Bran did and got the runaround. He wondered if it might have gone missing.”

“Huh. If you like, I’ll ask for a copy.”

“I’d like.” Zach set aside his notepad. “Thank you, Sergeant.” He gave him his phone number and mailing address, and said if he thought of anything else to please call.

After setting the phone aside, Zach did some concentrated thinking. He needed to tackle this as he would any other investigation. One advantage of having been there was that he remembered a couple of his mother’s good friends. Neighbors, too. He’d track down as many people who’d been close to the family as he could. There might have been a pedophile living a block away. The intervening years made investigating a challenge in one way, but in another way they gave him an advantage. He could find out where life had taken all those people. Who had been arrested, convicted, fired from jobs.

His mother could have had other lovers, but the few times he’d tried to talk to her about it, she wouldn’t admit to any. Instead she’d wept, as if he was committing the worst kind of betrayal.