Clean Slate

Chapter 43

Mac never saw Abigail at DPP that afternoon. But then he was not there for long himself; he got caught up on some offender employer visits, did a bit of trace work on a seven-dayed clown that, he concluded, had skipped, and paid unannounced visits on three home-confined offenders on tethers. Though he enjoyed the routine of the work – the predictability of it was a comfort to him just then – he also had trouble staying focused. The Eddie Fant / Earl Bucaro "case," if that was the term for it, loomed in his head. To borrow Clare Epple's term, it seemed to him a "cluster," consisting of a corpse at one end, and the perpetrator at the other, and a maze of blind alleys and dead ends in between. Now the perp had turned, and though Mac tried not to feel scared by Bucaro's implied threats, he did feel disconcerted that the bland tanned man had concerned himself with the addresses of his wife, parents, sister.

As for Libby, by day's end Mac had not heard back from her. And about that he was torn also. Even after four intense days he still wanted her, but another side of him, the more adult one with the longer view, knew that the thing could just flame out all at once. He and Libby were like touching a match to napalm -- and he uneasily thought he should ramp it back before it sizzled everything in sight. But then his brain replayed scenes from their couple-time in the dark, the twilight, flickering candlelight, and the glow of the rising sun, and he realized that what he wanted most today was just one thing: more. . . .

Just as he was about to try her again, on his walk back down the crowded street for the Stadium, she called him. "Sorry for not calling sooner," she said.

"No problem. You okay?" Mac asked, drawing up at a red light.

"It's just been a madhouse!" she rushed. "I was late for work this morning from that long drive in from your place. And of course all hell had broken loose. I had to shoot all the way out to Cripplegate for a story."

"That's where you are?"

"No, I'm on my way home now, just now crossing back over the loop highway."

"Long haul. Lot of windshield time."

"So I think I need a rain check on tonight."

"Okay, that's fine," Mac answered, disappointed with the sexual intermission but – guiltily now – grateful for an evening at home at Wild Rose.

"I'm tuckered out," Libby fussed, "I've got chores to do at the house. And I'm not feeling good. I've had these aches in my chest --"

"Just take care of yourself," Mac said, crossing the street.

"And I have to finish up my story and file by eight. Christ! While I'm thinking about it, did you get anywhere with Cheppy?"

"Never even got near that," Mac confessed. "Put calls in to Privette and Miller, couldn't hook up with either."

"I see."

"I did, however, have lunch with Suzanne."

"You found another victim?"

"Uh, no, Suzanne's my wife."

"Oh."

"Did not go well."

"Uh-huh."

"No rapprochement on the horizon, it would seem."

"The notion never even crossed my mind."

"So," Mac said uncomfortably, "you have a nice evening, take good care."

"I shall. And tomorrow night, my friend," came her voice, "I'm making you an incredible gourmet meal at my place."

"Lovely."

"No more for us the cold pizza between boinks. I need to fatten you up so you can service me properly."

"Is that a complaint you're filing?"

"With this dazed glazed smile I still wear? Ha!"

---

Friday was always the quietest day at Department of Probation and Parole. Most judges heard motions on that day, and many motions required the presence of probation/parole officers, so the halls and cubicles and offices of the department were generally placid. Mac, having for once no business at the Court House, was plowing into reports and file updates. He was just finishing a call with Flip – the card session planned for Mac's the next day had to be moved up a week – when Abigail breezed in. As always, she carried her inbox mail and a pair of go-coffees into Mac's office. "Morning," she said, handing Mac a coffee.

"Thanks. How's things?" Mac asked absently, squinting at his computer screen.

"Things are things," she said, seating herself on his guest chair. She wore a simple sky blue belted dress, open at the neck, that looked very cool and trim on her long slim form. Her chocolate brown hair was bunned back, as it almost always was these days, and whatever makeup she was wearing did little to hide the hollows around her eyes and in her cheeks. It had been so long since he'd seen her smile, he'd almost forgotten she had dimples. She yanked the open-tab of an oblong cardboard Fed-Ex envelope, popped it open, extracted a single sheet of paper, and squinted at it, brow furrowed.

After a moment she said, "Well!"

"What?" Mac asked.

She shook the sheet like an unclean thing. "It's from Garry."

"He sent you a Fed-Ex?"

"To say. . he's. . .breaking up with me."

Mac snapped a look at her. She was staring, cornflower blue eyes wide, mouth half open, as if thinking and wondering: what's the catch? As for Mac, he felt a jolt of what he had to admit was savage pleasure. I fixed something, he thought. "Wait a minute. Fed-Ex?"

Abigail laughed, and the changes it made in her – color to her cheeks, light in her eyes, a loosening of posture that had been so long wound up – and yes, there they were, those dimples – caused Mac's savage pleasure to be replaced with an even nicer feeling: contentment at having helped, in his own small way, this kindly, damaged woman. "I haven't heard from him in a couple of days," she said, with a tone of wonderment. "I figured he was out of town. Wow!"

"He give a reason?" Mac asked, opening his coffee.

She flapped the note. "Oh, it's because I've changed," she said, in sing-song tone. "I'm not the same woman he fell in love with. He still loves me, he's just not in love with me. It's not my fault, it's his."

"Welcome to Dumpsville, Population: you."

"Yeah yeah, woe is me," she said, sounding a little giddy.

"Take it easy, sweetheart. You can get past this." They smiled at each other. Mac asked, "So, what about Sheffield now?"

"You know what? I think I'll just stay here."

"Good." He watched her, almost thought better of it, but then, toasting her with his go-coffee, said: "I like you."

"Well, I like you, too." Looking away quickly – Mac thought he saw tears in her eyes – Abigail got to her feet. "Been meaning to ask you," she said. "I've been going through the emails and spreadsheets on that CD you gave me. When I have time."

"Okay. Anything interesting?"

"Oh, there's some names I recognize. And those emails -- some of them are pretty raunchy." With long fingers, Abigail fumbled her coffee open. "Lots of stuff about Brody's sex parties -- for money -- she advertises on the internet."

"How nice."

She looked uncomfortable. "It's sickening. I mean, I'm no prude. But. . . Anyway, I'll keep reading if you want me to. I just – I'm not sure what it is you want me to look for."

"Remember that name I wrote down the other day?" She nodded. "Seen him mentioned in there?" She shook her head. "Well, that's what you're looking for. And I'd appreciate it if you'd keep on."

"Why?"

"It could be there's more of this stuff out on the street," Mac said. "We don't know how much of it Eddie stole, or where it might have gone."

"Right."

"If that person I mentioned, if he's in there, I need to know that," Mac said, "so I can alert him."

"You don't really think he trafficked with Brody?"

"A month ago I'd have said no. Now I don't know what to think," Mac said grimly. "But I do know this. If he was involved with her, and if there's a chance that word of that could get out, I want to at least warn him." She looked uncertain, and Mac understood; she certainly did not know him very well yet and was within her rights to be suspicious. "I owe him," he explained. "He's been a friend to me, almost like a quasi-dad, practically since I started work at the Court House."

"I get you."

"We've hung out," Mac went on. "We both study the war. We did --"

"Which war?"

"What do you mean ‘which war.' War Between the States. Hello."

"Well, 'scuse me all to hell!"

"We did battlefields together," Mac went on, smiling. "Swapped books. Attended lectures at the U. You should see his collection of mementoes. He married us, Suzanne and me, back in the day. And Ruth, his wife, she's always been kind to me. So if trouble's headed down the hill at him, I want to give him advance warning. I owe him that much."

"So," she said uncomfortably, "what do we do, if we find evidence that implicates him in some sort of --"

"Hey, this isn't about sparing him consequences. If he was tied in with Brody, and/or broke the law in some way, he'll have to take his lumps, just like everybody else who comes through here. And speaking of Brody."

"Yes?"

"If you find anything on that disk that could help us locate her, let me know that, too."

"You want to see her?"

"Maybe," Mac said.

"You're not getting enough sex with the red head?" Mac just looked at her. Abigail winced. "Okay, I apologize, bad joke." She absently fidgeted with the mail. "You know," she plunged, "it's the rapes I'm all tied up in knots about. Bucaro, and those poor women. We've got to do something about that."

"We will,"Mac answered. "When we get our break."

She sighed, turned, went into her office. "Cheppy!" Mac heard her say. "I'm missing something there! I just know it!"

---

Getting to Wild Rose was not that difficult. Earl knew how to read a map. But finding McGladrey's place, well – that was something else again. Many of the roads in this rural region south of the river were little more than rutted gravel two-tracks, winding erratically through woods and across vast open fields of corn and wheat and wriggling among abrupt hills that shot toward the skies with their dense clusters of trees and rock outcroppings. Road signs were infrequent and often unhelpful. Earl had to stop once for directions to Old Kennesaw Road -- which, as it turned out, he'd already been on without knowing it; and a second time, when the road inexplicably forked, to get the coordinates of the McGladrey farm.

Finally arriving at mid afternoon, Earl was careful to park his borrowed county-pound Chevrolet Celebrity at the west end, on the gravel shoulder, between two enormous trees near what looked like a relatively new steel sided pole barn. To the east, beyond an expanse of treed lawn, stood the austere white clapboard Victorian farm house. Further to the east, among another cluster of trees, stood an old weathered wood hay barn with a brown tile silo. There were, as Earl expected, no vehicles about, no signs of life. He decided to approach the house from the rear, hoping that his parked car would seem only to be that of a surveyor or something. He'd hardly seen a soul since his three (or was it four?) passes through the sad hamlet of Lock Two, and figured that, on this Friday afternoon, he'd have plenty of time to toss McGladrey's house undisturbed and unobserved.

He threaded his way along a narrow path past a big mossy pile of field stones and then around along the back of the pole barn, headed for the house. The grass was soft under his running shoes, and the afternoon sun burned relentlessly in the vast blue sky. The meadow to his left waved in a sea of wheat, and birds sang high up in the limbs of the maples and oaks that dotted the property. For Earl this was a trip back in time, in some ways. Of course the Twenty Towns region, from whence he sprang (a fact he had kept carefully concealed for thirty years), was different in many ways. That was a mountainous coal mining region with but tiny truck farms notched out of hollows in the blue smoky mountains. It was peopled by glint-eyed hard-handed folk, terminally hostile toward all outsiders, including even the law, fiercely loyal to their own clans. Unlike this bunch of rubes down here, passive peaceful shit-kickers being increasingly infected by the incursion of soft city slickers like Mac McGladrey, deciding to live way the hell out here for God knew what reason.

To Earl, it mattered not. What he did care about, and he thought about this as he approached the house, was getting dirt on the son of a bitch – any kind would do – something to push in his face and motivate him to change his ways. Everybody had secrets. Earl was sure that McGladrey had his share, and in his search of the PPO's house Earl meant to find all of them.

Along the back of the farm house ran a great expanse of flat wood deck, with the requisite cushioned deck chairs and a sizeable propane gas grill. Double doors allowed entrance to the house at the right, and Earl decided to make those his first target. Emerging from a clump of trees, Earl was making for the deck when he saw something to his right, toward the front of the house. A white Ford F-350 pickup sat on the dirt driveway now. A woman stood next to the open driver's side door. And trotting toward Earl, in a gait not entirely friendly, was a large beefy black-and-brown dog.

Earl stopped. With as much amiability as he was able to muster, he said, "Easy, pup. Easy, boy."

The dog, a mixed Shepherd, kept coming, large head angled, white teeth showing, brown eyes unimpressed. As if in response, it growled. The woman called, "Cookie! Hold it, girl." The dog stopped ten feet from Earl, but stood braced in a crouch, its head lowered, eyes in a merciless stare on him.

Earl glanced toward the woman, who was approaching him now. Beyond her, in the pickup cab, he could see a couple of young kids hanging out the windows, watching, as if spectators at a sporting event. The woman was in her mid thirties, spare and strong, with cropped black hair and a squarish honest face. She wore jeans and a denim work shirt with its sleeves rolled up. Under her right arm, tucked casual and broken so the barrels pointed down, was a shotgun.