Wardwell nodded.
She slid the news clipping toward him.
He blinked slowly. ‘Why are you showing me this?’ His tone was tired, resigned.
‘What do you know about Jennifer Mayer and Ruth Sleight?’
‘Same as everyone else,’ he said. ‘The same as everyone else.’
Ren waited.
‘Oh, come on,’ said Malcolm. ‘I turned on my TV set every night for three weeks and saw those beauti— those …’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t even call them two beautiful little girls without everyone looking crooked at me. All I know is that they may have been abducted and that they came home. And that they were OK.’
‘Do you believe that they were OK?’ said Ren.
‘No, I don’t. Sadly, I don’t.’
‘Since I last spoke with you,’ said Ren, ‘I’ve discovered your name was on a list that Jean Transom had in connection with the case.’
‘What?’
Ren nodded.
He paused. ‘Can you show me the photo of Jean Transom again?’
‘Yes.’ Ren handed it to him.
‘Like I said, she was in my store,’ said Malcolm, ‘I do not recall ever seeing her before that. The facts, as far as I’m concerned, is that once – once – I was arrested because of … the … child porn charges. Not for laying a finger on an actual child. Not for harming a hair on a child’s head …’ Tears welled in his eyes. He swiped them away. ‘That arrest was one year before these girls disappeared. And yes, I was brought in after those girls disappeared – by Frisco PD, as I am sure you know. But not by the FBI and not by Jean Transom. Yes, I watched the progress of that case on television, but it was from a rented house my wife and I were staying at in Florida. All of this I proved, and the record is there.’
I have those records, but I wanted to see your face.
Wardwell shifted forward in his chair.
‘Have you no trust in what the officers working the case believed?’ said Malcolm.
‘I’m not here to talk about the officers who ran the case, Mr Wardwell.’
He shook his head. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘Moving on,’ said Ren. ‘I’d like to talk to you about the charity work you do for –’
‘It’s not really charity –’
‘Well, it is,’ said Ren. ‘You give stuff away for free to needy people.’
‘Right, but I’m not a formal charity.’
‘I know that. I just want to hear how it all works.’
‘OK. Well, my son Jason and I get some things together, head up the mountains and bring clothes or food, warm drinks, whatever, to the old guys living up in the cabins or tents around there.’
‘When do you do this?’ said Ren.
‘Maybe once or twice a month. My wife makes the food, so it could be she’s made a big batch of chili and has some to spare. Or it could be that it’s the end of sale season at the store, so we have some clothes to give away. Or there’s a major dip in temperature and we’re worried some of those old guys are going to freeze to death up there.’
‘There’s no regular delivery route …’
‘No. We don’t even deliver to the same people every time.’
‘Is it always you and your son?’
‘Yes. But we sometimes take some of the kids who work in the stores. Especially the ones I think need to learn to not always just be thinking of themselves.’
Ren pushed a piece of paper and a pen toward him. ‘Can you write down the nights you were delivering in January – with whom, to whom and where.’
Wardwell paused. ‘That’s impossible to do accurately. I can’t remember.’
‘Try.’
He wrote with thin, light strokes, pausing before he committed each date to paper.
‘I’m not going to get all of this right,’ he said.
‘We’ll Xerox you a copy and you can get back to me when you get home and check your diary,’ said Ren. ‘If you have anything else to add, call me.’
Ren took the page from him when he was finished.
‘OK,’ she said, scanning the list. ‘Where were you Monday night, January fifteenth?’
‘At home. My wife can confirm that.’
‘OK,’ said Ren. ‘We’ll check that.’ She paused. ‘OK, let’s go back to the child porn …’
Wardwell looked away. He started tapping with two fingers of his right hand just above his collar bone. His lips started to move, barely. Ren guessed he was repeating something, but so subtly it was impossible to know what. She stared as his lips kept moving. For almost a minute he said nothing. Then he focused on her as if he’d talked himself into looking her in the eye.
‘I do not see what this has to do with anything,’ he said. ‘A grown woman was found dead, a –’
‘I know,’ said Ren, ‘but you understand you have a record, and therefore you are going to be of interest when a crime is committed in your neck of the woods.’ She paused. ‘OK, what I have here is that the porn consisted of illustrated magazines, like fifties pin-up pictures where the women are in corsets and suspender belts in the kitchen, smiling gaily. Except these were illustrations of children in regular clothes, doing regular things, like walking to the store. They were cute drawings. But with coded captions: “Little John fights with other boys. He is going to get in so much trouble.”’ She shook her head. ‘There was a phone number on the back for you to call,’ said Ren. ‘You’d give the illustration number and you’d get a video in the mail that corresponded to it. So if someone found the magazine, it’d look innocent.
‘Officers searched your house and not only did you have the magazines, you had the videos – They were labeled Caribou Hunt nineteen-seventy-whatever – you’d get a half-hour of hunting, then it would cut to what you were really hunting for …’
‘It was thirty years ago,’ said Wardwell. ‘Yes, I had those magazines, I admitted it almost immediately –’
‘Almost. Meaning, when the police arrived at your door, raided your home, found them –’
‘I admitted it, yes. I couldn’t have admitted it any sooner, could I?’
‘No. I guess a pedophile doesn’t really go around admitting to much, does he? A pedophile only gets the title pedophile when he’s caught, right? Y’all don’t call each other up, saying, “Hey, pedophile, me and some of the other pedophiles are getting together tonight for a little bowling …”’
‘Stop. Please,’ said Wardwell.
‘Aw,’ said Ren. She glanced at Gressett; can you believe this guy? and turned back to Wardwell. ‘I’ve been here before. You will explain to me how it’s normal, you love these kids, they love you, the Romans were at it left and right, society will swing back that way. And I could, for the sake of this interrogation process, pretend that I don’t think that that’s entirely unreasonable, that maybe you could actually have a point. But I’m really not in the humor. I don’t know, but I’m kind of a fan of kids having