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Chapter 17

166 Chapter 17 After Jack and Beckley left the minister’s house, they stopped in at the station and then patrolled the area around the church and Reverend Edwards’s neighborhood, driving slowly up and down the streets. Jack was so tired he hardly saw anything. On Saturday when Beckley had picked him up at the hospital, he’d been relieved to see his partner, and Beckley had been solicitous , helping Jack to his front door. But now, tension crawled between them. “You should have radioed in the report before agreeing to take them with us to the station,” Jack said, referring to the minister and his wife. “I can’t see why the department would say no to that.” “There might have been another call they needed us to answer. Point is, ask before you make a decision like that.” Beckley drove, focusing on the road. “And next time spend more time investigating.” “That’s what you were doing. I handled the interview.” “You need to do both. Use your eyes and ears. I was listening even when I was upstairs searching the bedrooms. I heard everything the minister told you.” 167 Pain medication churned in Jack’s stomach. If he’d answered the officer who had trained him with a defensive remark, he’d have risked being written up. He wouldn’t have argued with his training officer the way Beckley had, and his resentment piled on top of other resentments—his injury, his mother’s death, the elusiveness of George Fowler. “What about that car over there?” Beckley asked pointing out an older station wagon parked away from the houses next to a field. “What about it?” “It wasn’t there earlier, and it’s a weird place to leave a car.” Jack shrugged. “Probably somebody walking a dog.” A few seconds later, as Jack had expected, they passed a man standing at the roadside holding a dog leash. Jack knew where George Fowler had gone. His instinct unwound like a ball of string inside him. He could grab hold of the end of the string, and at the center of the ball, George would be waiting. As they turned onto a deserted street, he told Beckley. “We won’t find George Fowler anywhere near town. He’s out at Crowfoot Lake, that’s the only thing that makes sense. His parents’ house is there, and he knows the area. It’s remote, and several of those summer cottages are abandoned. Twenty years ago, people built those places when the lake was first made and they thought it would be something. But it turned out there were too many trees, too much shade. The public beach out there shut down ten years ago. I know that place. There’s an abandoned cottage out there, off Buehler Road with white sand on the lakefront. I could find that cottage he talked about in the dark.” “They put a roadblock up on the highway immediately after the minister called,” Beckley told him. “They would have caught him if he tried to drive out there.” “How fast was immediate?” Jack asked, pissed that Beckley would challenge him. 168 “It was quick. I know that area also. There’s acre upon acre of pine trees. You go up there in the dark, and it’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack.” “If he’s there, it has to be done.” Jack fumed and for a few minutes neither spoke. Then Beckley said, “He wouldn’t talk about a place if he’d been staying there. Besides we were given these streets around the church to patrol.” “I’m not disputing that.” They had reached the church parking lot. They got out of the patrol car and walked around the churchyard not speaking. Stumbling in the dark with flashlights, they searched for places around the building next to the church where someone breaking and entering might have left clues. They traced a path back into the trees toward the minister’s neighborhood. Jack shone his flashlight on some impressions in the dirt, but there was nothing definitive about them. When they reached the road at the end of the path, there were no tire tracks. Nothing had been dropped, not even a coin or a slip of paper. “I’m tired of wasting time,” Jack said when they stood in the church parking lot again. “We haven...