Nora sat on the hood of her car, puffing at a cigarette. It tasted ashen and burnt to her lips, but the buzz it brought was a needed comfort after such a disastrous afternoon. Her emotions had looped and hurtled through a rollercoaster worse than any she could remember, from the dread of discovering usable forensics that she feared might implicate her son, to the elation of her sting operation somehow working, to the frustration of the perps somehow vanishing when surrounded by police on all sides… not to mention, the sudden appearance of the Kessler boy, and the solid alibis he presented for himself and most of the rest of the gang. Nora had done her due diligence, of course, and called to follow up on as many as she could… the Perpetumart call checked out, clearing Wade Kerrigan and Shaun Valdez. Logan himself said he'd been journaling at the coffee shop a couple blocks away, and the owner confirmed it, though the timeline was a little fuzzy—Logan did leave in time to reach the scene of the crime, but Nora didn't count him among the suspects because he'd arrived outside the police line far too quickly to be one of the fleeing suspects. Ron DeLange was allegedly at his grandmother's house, though calls to Martha's home hadn't been answered. At least, when Nora called Ron's mother, Clara, she confirmed that he'd gone over to visit his grandmother, and that the boy had now come back home. The only loose end was her own son, Parker. Logan had said he went to the station looking for Nora… nobody there had seen him.
She remembered seeing a National Geographic magazine in a doctor's office. Framed in that bold, yellow rectangle had been a polar bear, stranded on a floating chunk of ice in a deep, blue sea. The article attached to the picture had been explaining that an unusually warm summer had left the bear, and others like it, stranded as the ice melted away. She imagined what it might be like to turn around and watch the ice crack and crumble into the churning waters, the small island of solidity crumbling away smaller and smaller as panic rose greater and greater. Right now, sitting on the white rectangle that was the hood of her car, Nora felt a sense of kinship to that bear. She felt like the ground was crumbling out around her, leaving her trapped and isolated. The past few days had been riddled with crimes and events that simply didn't make sense. Impossible timelines, invisible attackers, her son at the center of some ineffable web, and now a gang of suspects that had somehow disappeared from a closed trap like Houdini himself had been under one of the masks.
"What the Christ is going on around here?" she asked to nobody in particular. An officer to her right grunted in sympathetic bafflement. Both watched as Jackson Trent senior and Michelle Trent walked out of the vet's office, the former leaning on the latter for support. The two approached Nora.
"Almost had the sons of bitches, we did," Jackson said.
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"Have you notified their parents? Put out an arrest warrant?" Michelle asked.
"For the boys?" Nora asked.
Both of the Trents nodded in unison.
"No, we haven't, because they've just about all got alibis that check out," she said.
"Bullshit," Jackson replied.
"Just about all?"
"Two of them were verified by your own boss, sir," she said to Jackson. "One was visiting grandma like a good grandson should. Hell, the only one I don't have an alibi on is my own son, since he wasn't where the Kessler boy said he was—"
"We saw him in the morning," Jackson blurted. "Riding his bike, heading towards the wood."
"Oh?" Nora asked, feeling more cracks in the ice.
"Oh yeah," Michelle replied. "We were driving to the station this morning, before all that business at our house."
"When you came to pitch the sting op?" Nora asked.
"Yuh-huh," Jackson replied.
"Was Parker riding in the same direction as you guys, or heading elsewhere?"
"Different direction," Michelle answered.
Nora felt a fresh, spindly crack prod its way across the ice. Parker was the boy who bought the hoodie connected to the General Store robbery. Parker was the only boy whose alibi seemed to fail around this new incident. Parker, who showed up the night of the warehouse blaze. Parker, a good friend of the missing boy. Parker, who'd lied to her face. It all pointed inexorably back to him.
Nora swallowed.
"Look, one of the others here will have to give you a ride home. I gotta follow up on something… We'll speak soon." She excused herself and started up the car, snubbing her cigarette in the door's ash tray. As she reversed out, she made eye contact with the judging stares of both Trent parents, that grieving desperation still lingering just beneath the surface. And then she was alone, driving home.
As she pulled into her own driveway, she remembered that the Kessler boy had mentioned the gang meeting up at the DeLange home. If she worked quick enough here, she might be able to intercept them… she simply had to know first.
She practically kicked the door to Parker's room down as she stumbled in, forensics kit in-hand. She then began to apply the delicate dust to hard objects most likely to have been touched: the back of his desk chair, several books removed form the shelf, a baseball she'd watched him toss idly while lying in bed. Most had loose fingerprints, but Nora wasn't interested in those. The book held a partial palm print, but the thing was warped and badly-preserved. Finally, on the back of the chair, she found a solid-enough print. She looked at its pattern, scrutinizing it closely. She then pulled out the photo of the black paint smudge from forensics. As she glanced back and forth between the two, she heard the crackling of ice giving way to immense weight. She felt the cold sting of icy water surround her and wash her deep into its numbing grasp. She dropped the photo and sank to the bed, mind racing.
And then she burst to her feet, already back in-motion. She had to reach the DeLange home before he—and the rest of his gang—left.
She'd have to arrest him, simple as that.