Fair Game

Who was Terry Baker?
Googling brought up a discouraging zilch. There were plenty of Terry Bakers out there, but not Terry Baker of PSU. Not on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter. This was a kid who understood the meaning of privacy.
Or paranoia.
Elliot gave up that approach and turned to Tucker’s notes, browsing quickly. Brief but comprehensive, that was Tucker’s strong suit. Not a guy for nuance, but he rarely—if ever—overlooked the essentials. Sort of illuminating, really. He and Tucker had only infrequently worked the same cases. They had not been partners. Neither of them would have wanted that. Elliot had specialized in investigating civil rights violations including hate crimes. Tucker had worked major thefts and violent crimes. On the occasions that they had been teamed, Elliot had admired Tucker’s no bullshit approach. It wasn’t subtle, but it was effective. It was less civilized than his own style, but it worked. Maybe if Tucker had been watching his back that day—
But no. That kind of thinking was unproductive. Tucker had not been there—and he sure as hell hadn’t been there after the fact. From the point that Elliot had been officially out of action, Tucker had zero interest in him anymore. Fair enough, because it was the same way Elliot felt.
Right?
Tucker was angry because he didn’t like the idea of being maneuvered. Or maybe he was one of those people who got mad when they felt guilty?
Elliot stared down at Tucker’s Bureau card with the official blue and gold FBI logo. Same phone number. Funny all the things he’d forgotten, but he hadn’t forgotten Tucker’s extension or cell phone number. Or home phone.
He put the card aside and returned to Tucker’s notes, but it was a struggle to concentrate. He kept remembering the weird, unlikely pleasure of being rolled onto his face and fucked to within an inch of his sanity by someone bigger and stronger and possibly even hornier than himself. The seduction of giving up control for that brief period, of letting go and accepting delivery of almost bewildering sexual satisfaction…It was a long time—seventeen months—since he’d let himself think about that.
Sort of like Pandora’s Box. All those painfully vivid images flying out: how merely that fierce, smoldering look of Tucker’s across a crowded room—a briefing room—could heat Elliot’s blood and stiffen his cock so fast it hurt; the taste of Tucker’s tongue pushing into his mouth; and the embarrassing noises of Elliot’s own shocked delight as Tucker’s thick cock shoved into his body and made them—for that brief space—one.
Pandora’s Box, all right, but at the bottom there was nothing resembling Hope.
Valiantly, Elliot tried to stuff the memories back in the casket and fasten on the job at hand. One thing for sure: Tucker would not be sitting around tonight remembering old times.
He could hear the harsh hwronk-hwronking of the geese down in the cove—a lonely sound—as he reread Tucker’s report on Terry Baker’s actions on the night of his disappearance. Nothing flagged. If the kid had voluntarily walked away from his life, logically he shouldn’t have spent the evening studying in the library for exams he would never take or papers he would never write. He should have been busy packing. And he should have taken his car. Granted, people did occasionally walk away from their lives with only the clothes on their back, but it usually followed some kind of severe emotional shock. There were warning signals, even if they only became clear after the fact. If Terry Baker had suffered some brutal epiphany, no one seemed to be aware of it.
Barring a psychotic break, it took a certain kind of personality to drop out of sight like that, knowing what the people in your life were going to suffer. At the least it required a lack of imagination—and empathy.
The same arguments held for suicide, although to a lesser extent. Besides, it was hard to picture someone planning to off himself by spending the night reading Renaissance philosophy in the school library. And, if it had been suicide, where was the body? Not many people tried to hide the fact that they’d killed themselves. Elliot couldn’t think of a single instance in his years at the Bureau.
But if Baker hadn’t voluntarily walked and he hadn’t killed himself…what had happened to him? Tucker was right about the unlikelihood of being snatched off a college campus.
As often as not, the key to any violent crime lay within the character of the victim. So who was Terry Baker?
Before he’d left the Baker house, Elliot had asked Pauline to let him take a look at Terry’s bedroom, but the bedroom had been turned into a guest room after Terry’s departure for college. Anything Terry had needed, he’d taken with him. The souvenirs and mementos of his childhood had either been tossed or packed away. In Elliot’s personal and professional experience, that was unusual. His own parents had kept his bedroom ready and waiting for him right up through graduate school. His years in law enforcement had more often than not confirmed his own experience.
But if you knew how to read between the lines, you could glean quite a bit from the bare facts. Going by GPA and an impressive course load, Elliot deduced the kid was a high achiever who was charting his future based on what his parents—his father in particular—planned for him. But Baker had also taken classes in architecture every semester since starting PSU. Not your normal pre-law elective. Architectonics and Architectural Theory were not your normal electives, period. On top of that, Architecture was a competitive major. Not easy to get into these classes. Either Baker had been exceptionally gifted or someone had pulled strings on his behalf. Maybe both.
Another telling thing was the lack of interviews with close friends. Baker didn’t seem to have any. Certainly no one close enough to know he’d been seeing someone. But if he’d had the guts to tell his parents, knowing his father’s feelings on his being gay, the relationship had meant something to him. Not necessarily love. The boyfriend, Jim Feder, might have served to establish precedent. It was hard to say without talking to one of the two men involved.
Elliot set the files on the nightstand and snapped out the yellow ginger jar lamp. The sharp silhouette of the pine trees fell across the floor boards. Through the bank of windows he saw the new moon, large and luminous, like the old man in the moon peering into his window. An old man with a face like green cheese. So close he could almost make out every pockmark crater and scar.
Sliding down into the flannel sheets and down-filled pillows, Elliot closed his eyes. He’d skipped his nightly stretches and his knee was aching, but it was a distant echo of pain, nothing unusual. Something he was learning to live with. He could hear the sigh of the pines outside, hear the gentle creak of the cabin. It reminded him of something…something pleasant. The lap of water against the side of a boat…the occasional plop of a fish…warm arms around him as the ocean rocked them to sleep…
 Chapter Five 
“Good morning, Professor Mills!”
At the chirpy greeting, Elliot glanced up from Steven Hyslop’s Eyewitness to the Civil War. Mrachek, Leslie hovered in his office doorway.
“Morning, Leslie.” He set the book and his lecture notes aside, nodded in invitation and she left the safety of the doorway in one long, leggy step and dropped gracefully into the chair in front of his desk. She pulled a notebook from her backpack and offered him a couple of neatly typed pages.
“My essay on John Ford’s West.” She smiled hopefully into his eyes.
That’s right. He was supposed to take an unofficial look at her work before she committed to handing it in for a grade. Elliot glanced at the neat sheets in the clear plastic binder. John Ford’s West, read the title. His gaze dropped to the first paragraph.