All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 98

98

They drove out across Route 9.

At a gas station miles from anywhere Saint took down a statement from the old guy who worked the pumps and then watched security tape so grainy she could not make out much beyond a blur pulling a gun and making off with just under a hundred bucks.

Nix stared at vacant lots and half-built homes. “They say we’re out of recession. Couple million jobs lost. The way I see it they still haven’t been found again. All that talk back then about oil and Bretton Woods.”

In a diner of red booths, the leather split and the padding bulging out, a fan spun, a milkshake machine rattled, and truckers drank endless refills and stared at day-old newspapers like they were always a step behind.

“You did good,” Nix said.

Saint wore the navy uniform, the shirt the smallest they carried but still, the sleeves ended halfway between wrist and elbow. “Taking a statement isn’t catching a—”

“Fundamentals,” he said, and bit into a grilled cheese. “Ain’t a better

meal on this earth.”

She sipped on her soda.

Nix dabbed at his moustache with a napkin. “How’s your

grandmother?”

“Same.”

“There isn’t any shame in wearing a badge.”

“I know that.”

Nix stirred another sugar into his coffee. “You heard from the kid?”

“No.”

“He’s out there looking?”

Patch had bought their rental house as the decade eased to a close, giving his mother the kind of security she had chased for much of her lifetime. Saint did not ask where the money had come from.

After prom she had watched him climb from the 42 bus at the end of each day, overalls tied at the waist, his long hair pulled back with a bandana, his jaw strong. Sometimes she caught the girls watching him and whispering and giggling in that way they did. And for a while she saw Misty, if possible even more beautiful as she stood apart from her group and sometimes stole looks at the boy who had once saved her life and broken her heart. After graduation Saint heard Misty took a year out to travel, to put some distance between herself and Monta Clare and the memories it stirred. Her grandmother told her first love was the most terminal of ailments.

“I filed another request for visitation with Tooms,” Saint said.

“He won’t see anyone.”

“But you go there each and every weekend.”

Nix shrugged. “I just need to see him. I need to look into his eyes.”

“Maybe we’ll never know why.”

That fall Martin James Tooms pleaded not guilty to the murder of Callie Montrose, bringing to a close a year of trial prep, during which the DA leaned and Tooms’s savings eroded. He lost the farm, but through it all kept the kind of undignified silence that led Saint to pray for his demise each Sunday.

Saint had sat beside Nix and the DA when they ran through detail in its minutiae, and they promised to keep the Macauley boy from showing at the prison gates armed with a dagger and a promise to gut the man if he didn’t tell him where the girl was. A promise they failed to keep on so many occasions the Ellis County cops had no choice but to arrest Patch, keep him overnight, and set him free beneath the flotilla of sunrise.

Patch wrote close to sixty letters to Marty Tooms; Saint read each before delivering them. Sometimes he rambled for pages about his life and where people said he was headed. Other times he begged, pleaded, offered

to go see Judge Heinemann and ask for his captor’s salvation ahead of sentencing. And on dark days he cussed the man out, speculated on what kind of hell was waiting for him, on how he could have worked with Eli Aaron to bring such horror.

They worked on an impact statement. Saint wrote while Patch spoke of the kind of empty horror that kept him awake each night, wondering about Grace, hoping to God she was not real. She did not bend his words or salt the wounds; for three pages she simply detailed what had happened to him: his life before, his life now, and what might still come. A lifetime of therapy, of sleeping on the floor in the darkness. Of chasing a shadow of a girl who, if she was out there, was likely dead or wishing she was.

Tooms did not speak, even to his lawyers, who moved to have him declared insane for that very reason. The judge noted his level of forethought and promptly threw it out.

The case strengthened when hair samples taken from the remains of Eli Aaron’s house matched those of Marty Tooms. Saint and the DA connected dots that weren’t all that hard to join together. And then came the blood.

Eight samples were taken from the mattress in the underground store of the Tooms house.

All eight were matched to Callie Montrose.

Saint had looked to her left as Nix shook his head in despair, then closed his eyes to it all.

Behind them, in the gallery, Callie Montrose’s father screamed and cursed and kicked as he was dragged from the room by the same cops he used to work beside.

The only emotion Tooms showed was when they asked for the location of Callie’s body, so that her father might at least have the scarce comfort of laying her to proper rest.

Tooms remained silent through his tears.

Records were pulled, and it was put to the jury that Marty Tooms had written out prescriptions for himself for a large amount of painkillers and sleeping pills, and supplied them to Eli Aaron, who would use them to

subdue his targets. Saint had watched those twelve men and women dab tears from their eyes.

The night before sentencing Patch followed Judge Heinemann back to his colonial in Elion County. The judge called the cops. While he waited to be hauled away Patch sat outside, leaning back against the door and speaking of Grace, of the kind of girl she was, of the life she should have been living. He did not know if the judge or his two daughters heard him, only that the next day Marty Tooms was sentenced to death. A punishment that rippled through the state as Heinemann had always leaned liberal. Saint watched as the reporters speculated that it was a ploy, that the sentence would be reduced to life if Tooms gave up the location of Callie Montrose, and the rumored missing girl. Saint marveled at Patch, who kept true to his word.

He would burn everything and everyone in his path.

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