Page 48 of Backtrack

“Here it is.” Johnson nodded at a solid wooden door to his left.

Cutter knocked twice and then pulled it open without an invitation.

A hushed chatter, like the buzz of nervous insects, rolled out on a blue wall of cigarette smoke. Office chairs creaked and clattered as five teachers pushed away from a long conference table to turn and see who dared invade their private sanctum.

Cutter tipped his hat at the nearest teacher, a young man with a wide clip-on necktie and a Bobby Sherman haircut.

“Sheriff’s Office,” he said. “Wayne Cutter and this is—”

“LJ?” Clip-on Tie said.

Johnson gave a shy nod. “Mr. Stockwell.”

“Lord have mercy, it is you,” a woman in cat-eyed glasses looked up from a crossword puzzle at the far end of the room. The conference table was piled with gradebooks, well-worn copies of theReader’s Digest, and two glass ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts. As faras Cutter could tell, the woman with the crossword was the only one without a cigarette in her hand.

Johnson snatched off his hat at the sight of her and held it to his chest. He shot Cutter a side-eye, as if to say,This is the one I was telling you about.

“Mrs. Blake,” he stammered.

“A deputy sheriff!” Charlotte Blake had the timeless look of a seasoned high school teacher. Thirty or fifty—it was impossible to tell. She pointed her pencil at Johnson and gave a little nod. “I always knew you’d amount to something good, Lafayette.”

Johnson’s face flushed. This was obviously not what he’d expected. Cutter stepped in before the kid got all weepy.

“We were told we could find Mrs. Shoemake here.”

A tallish woman in a beige polyester pantsuit spoke up from the other side of the long table. Cutter guessed she was forty-five, maybe a little older, but that could have been the stress of her job. A More cigarette bobbed in her mouth as she talked, the lipstick stain barely visible against the brown paper. “I’m Nancy Shoemake.”

During surprise contact with law enforcement, even the most civil folks often jokingly raised their hands in surrender or acted as if they were about to be handcuffed. At the very least, the peanut gallery would titter and giggle with whispers ofOh, what did you do now, Nancy?orTake her away, Sheriff.” These teachers were a sober lot, beaten down from a long day after a long year of more long days—and now robbed of their summer to be back in school. The entire room fell quiet enough that Cutter imagined he could hear them blink.

He gave a nod to Johnson, who opened the case file and spun the folder around so Shoemake could study the sketch of Man Cub.

She hardly looked at it before she pushed it away. “He’s not a student at WHS.”

“Worth a try,” Johnson said,

“Oh, I know exactly who it is.” Shoemake parked the dark brown cigarette in the corner of her mouth and then snatched the folder back from Johnson as if she’d had second thoughts. She opened it back to the sketch. “I’m new to Weatherford High, but I started as a counselor at the middle school in ’68. This has to be RichardPink.” She took a drag of her cigarette before folding her arms tight across her chest and blowing a jet of smoke through pursed lips toward the ceiling. “He goes by Ricky Lee. Repeated the eighth grade—part of it, at least. Never made it to high school.”

Johnson glanced at Cutter, then back to the counselor. “I didn’t know dropping out of middle school was an option.”

“Richard Pink didn’t drop out of anything,” Shoemake said. “We kicked him out. He was expelled. Last year, as a matter of fact.” She pulled back her hair and pointed to a four-inch scar that ran from her forehead down to her ear. Her tone switched from detached to disgusted. “I committed the unpardonable sin of asking the boy to tuck in his shirttail. For that he grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall and beat the hell out of me. I’m damned lucky there was no axe or he would have hacked me to pieces. I have never seen eyes packed so full of hate.” She stubbed out her cigarette, grinding it hard, like she planned to drive it through the ashtray. “Juvenile courts are a joke. That boy put me in the hospital, and the judge just turned him loose with a slap on the wrist.” She shook another cigarette out of her pack and lit it while she spoke, looking down the paper barrel at Cutter as if he were part of the problem. “He was free before I was out of the hospital! Ricky Pink hits like a grown man, but he was only fourteen.”

Johnson said, “That means he’s only fifteen now?”

“Correct,” Shoemake said. “But I’m warning you, do not underestimate that boy just because he’s young.”

“This is extremely helpful,” Cutter said. “Would you be able to get us his contact information?”

Shoemake leaned back in her chair and folded her arms again, cigarette between two fingers. Smoke streamed straight up her shoulder beside her face. “Let me tell you something. Every one of us here do this job because we believe in the children. We have faith in them. But once in a great while, we come across one who you swear was just born bad. That’s Ricky Lee Pink.” She shuddered, then leaned forward and snatched up the phone receiver. Cutter, always tracking, studied the overflowing glass ashtray and tried to match the color and brand of lipstick-smudged butts with the teachers seated around the table. Either a lot of them smoked Mores or Nancy Shoemake was ahead by at least six cigarettes.

Mumbling into the phone, the counselor made a motion like she needed something to write with. Johnson slid a pen and sheet of paper from his clipboard across the table, tentatively, as if feeding a caged lion. Shoemake snatched it up, then nodded into the phone, pen poised over the paper ready to write.

“Yes,” she said into the receiver. “They’re at the school now … You bet. I’ll tell them.” She hung up and then dropped the pen on the paper, sliding it back across the table to Johnson.

“That was Carol, the attendance secretary at the middle school,” Shoemake said. “I wrote down her name and number. According to her, Ricky’s parents moved away a couple of years ago, somewhere near Texarkana, she thinks. It’s likely they hoped to get their younger kids away from his bad influence. They left him in the care of another relative, an aunt, but Carol can’t remember her name. She’s going to try and find it for you, but it might take a while. Schools create an unholy amount of paperwork. They put all of last year’s files in storage. I’m afraid the principal has the key, and he’s in Wichita Falls at an administrators’ conference. He’ll be back late tonight and at school tomorrow morning.” Shoemake stabbed the table with her index finger, seized with a sudden memory. “Ricky did list a person named Vincent Millner as an emergency contact.” Cutter gave a slow nod. Shoemake, evidently accustomed to reading faces as a guidance counselor, sighed. “I’m guessing Mr. Millner was the one who was killed by police?”

“He was,” Cutter said. Millner’s name would be in the paper soon enough. No point in keeping it to himself.

“I don’t know if this will help,” Shoemake said, “but Carol remembers a guy picking up Ricky Lee from school about a month before my incident. He told her he was Ricky’s uncle.”