The Never Game

by Jeffery Deaver

  The kidnapper might have stashed Sophie here and, somehow, she’d managed to free herself from the duct tape—which he’d surely used—and found something inside to break through the wall with. She’d probably tried to get out of the building and hadn’t found a door that wasn’t screwed shut.

  He was debating his next steps when he heard a faint click to his right, followed by what might have been a low muttering sound, as if someone were angry he’d accidentally given himself away. It came from the end of a nearby corridor, between long metal walls lined with pipes and conduit. A sign read DON’T “BUCK” THE RULES: HARD HAT OR FINE. YOU CHOOSE!

  At the end of the corridor were racks holding fifty-five-gallon oil drums and piles of lumber.

  The muttering sound once more.

  Sophie or X?

  Then, his eyes growing yet more sensitive to the dimness, he could make out, at the end of the corridor, a shadow on the factory floor. It was moving slightly, cast by someone standing just out of sight, to the left at the T intersection of aisles.

  Shaw couldn’t pass up the advantage. He’d ease slowly to the corner and step around fast. If the shadow belonged to X he’d secure the gun hand and take him down. He knew a number of ways to get someone onto the floor such that they weren’t inclined to get up anytime soon.

  He moved closer. Twenty feet. Ten. Five.

  The shadow shifted slightly, rocking back and forth.

  Another step.

  And Shaw walked right into the trap.

  A tripwire. He went down fast and hard, getting his hands up just in time. The agonizing pushup saved his jaw from fracture. He rose, crouching, found himself looking at a sweatshirt hanging on a hook. To it was tied a piece of fishing line.

  Which meant . . .

  Before he could rise fully, an oil drum rolled from the rack and slammed into his shoulders. It was empty but the impact toppled him. He heard a voice, Sophie’s, screaming, “You son of a bitch! You killed him!”

  The young woman was advancing on him, hair disheveled, eyes wide, her T-shirt stained. In her hand was what seemed to be a shiv, a homemade glass knife, the handle a strip of cloth wrapped around it.

  Shaw muscled the drum off—it bounced loudly on the concrete. With that sound and the scream, X would know more or less where they were.

  “Sophie!” Shaw whispered, climbing to his feet. “It’s okay! Don’t say anything.”

  Her courage broke and she turned and fled.

  “Wait,” he called in a whisper.

  She vanished into another room and swung a solid-metal door shut behind her. Shaw followed, thirty feet away. He stuck to her path, where there’d be no more traps. He pushed open the door and found himself in a boiler or smelting room. Coal bins lined the walls, some still half filled. There was dust, ash and soot everywhere.

  And light at the far end of a long row of furnaces.

  Shaw followed her footsteps, toward the cool illumination, whose source filtered down from a hundred feet above him; Shaw stood at the base of the smokestack. With less concern about the environment in the factory’s working days, the furnaces would have spewed fumes into the air throughout the south Bay Area. In the middle of the base was a pit, fifteen feet across, filled with a gray-brown muck, presumably ancient ash and coal dust mixed with rainwater.

  Shaw was looking for Sophie’s footprints.

  Which had simply vanished.

  And then he saw why. Mounted into the inside of the smokestack’s wall were rectangular rungs, like large staples, protruding about eight inches from the brick: a ladder for daredevil workers climbing to the top to replace aircraft warning lightbulbs, he guessed.

  She was thirty feet up and climbing. A fall from there would kill or paralyze her.

  “Sophie, I’m a friend of your father’s. I’ve been looking for you.” Shaw saw a glint and jumped back fast as something she’d flung fell toward him.

  It was what he’d guessed—the shiv—and it just missed him, shattering at his feet. He glanced toward the entrance to the furnace room. No sign of the kidnapper. Yet.

  Her voice was unsteady and she was crying. “You killed him! I saw you!”

  “I was there. But the shot came from whoever kidnapped you.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “We have to be quiet! He could still be here.” Shaw was speaking in a harsh whisper. He remembered her father’s nickname for her. “Fee! Please.”

  She stopped.

  Shaw added, “Luka. Luka’s your poodle. A white standard.”

  “How do you know . . . ?” Her voice fading.

  “You named yourself Fee when you were a baby. Your father offered a reward to find you. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “He did?”

  “I went to your house. Alta Vista Drive. Luka sat next to me on the couch with the gold slipcover. The ugly gold slipcover. In front of the coffee table with the broken leg.”

  “What color is Luka’s collar?”

  “Blue with white rhinestones,” Shaw said, then added, “Or maybe diamonds.”

  Her face went still. Then a faint smile. “He offered a reward?”

  “Come on down, Fee. We’ve got to hide.”

  She debated for a moment.

  Sophie began the climb to the floor. Shaw saw that her legs were trembling. Heights could do that to you.

  More rungs. When she was about fifteen feet above the brick floor, Sophie released the grip with her right hand and wiped her palm on her thigh, drying the sweat.

  Before she could take the rung again, though, her left hand slipped off the one she was gripping. Screaming, she made a desperate lunge for the rung but missed. She pitched backward, headfirst, tumbling exactly toward the spot on the brick where the glass knife had shattered into razor-sharp splinters.

  17.

  Unlike at San Miguel Park, the law had arrived fast and en masse. Ten official cars, a carnival of flashing lights.

  The medical examiner technician had just finished with Kyle Butler; that team had been the first to get to work. This always seemed odd to Shaw. You’d think corpses could wait—once you’d confirmed they were indeed corpses, of course—while evidence might dry up or blow away or change in composition. But they were the experts.

  The heart and brain of the investigation seemed to be the Task Force, specifically Dan Wiley. The imposing man was conferring with others, some local, some Santa Clara County, and a few plainclothes who, Shaw overheard, were from the Bureau of Investigation—California, not federal. Shaw was mildly surprised the FBI was not present. As he’d reminded Wiley, kidnapping is a federal crime as well as state.

  Shaw was standing near the loading dock, where he’d been directed to wait by Wiley. He had told the detective about Kyle Butler’s words and suggested that X—though using the preferred police term unsub, for “unknown subject”—had fled south on Tamyen Road.

  “At Highway 42 and Tamyen, there might be CCTVs. I don’t know the make or color of the car. He’ll be driving carefully. Stopping for red lights, not speeding.”

  Wiley had grunted and wandered off to deliver this information to minions—or not.

  He was now barking to a young woman officer, her hair in a constricted blond bun, “I said to search it. I meant to search it. Why would I not mean for you to search it?”

  The woman reluctantly deflated her defiant gaze. She walked away to search it, whatever it was.

  Shaw glanced at the pair of ambulances, forty feet in front of him. One of the boxy vehicles held the deceased Kyle Butler, the other Sophie Mulliner, whose condition he didn’t yet know. He’d managed to avert her landing on the glass-strewn floor by leveraging her into the ash pit—disgusting but softer than brick. He’d felt a bone pop with this maneuver—hers, not his—and she’d veered into the unpleasant soup. He pulled her out immediately as she moane
d in pain and retched. The cleanest water he could find was standing rainwater, more or less clear, and he scooped up handfuls, draining it into her mouth and telling her, like a dentist, to rinse and spit. The chemicals in the pit could not be good. The fracture was bad, both radius and ulna, though not a through-the-skin fracture.

  Shaw had not heard her account of the kidnapping; their time together in the smokestack had been devoted to first aid. He now saw the medical technician who’d been attending to Sophie walk away, speaking on his cell phone.

  Shaw pushed off the loading dock wall and started toward the ambulance to speak to the young woman.

  Wiley saw him. “Don’t wander too far, Chief. We need to talk.”

  Shaw ignored him and continued toward the ambulances. To his right, on the far side of the chain-link, he could see a gaggle of news vans and maybe thirty reporters and camera operators. Some spectators.

  He found Sophie, sitting up, groggy, eyes glazed. Her right arm, the broken one, was in a temporary cast. She’d be on the way to the hospital soon. Shaw was familiar with breaks; surgery would be involved. The medics had apparently used an emergency wash to clean off what chemicals they could.

  She blinked in Shaw’s direction. “Is he really . . .” Her voice was harsh and she coughed. “Kyle?”

  “He’s gone. I’m sorry.”

  She lowered her head and cried, covering her eyes. Catching her breath, she asked, “Did they . . . Have they found him?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus.” She tugged a tissue from a box and used that to wipe her eyes and nose.

  “Why Kyle?”

  “He saw the kidnapper’s car. He could identify it.”

  “Did he come with you?”

  “No. I told him to go to your house, to see your father. But he was worried about you. He wanted to help me search.”

  More sobbing. “He just . . . He was so sweet. Oh, his mom. Somebody’ll have to tell her. And his brother.” Eyes easing into and out of focus. “How did you . . . How did you find me?”

  “Checked places near San Miguel Park you might’ve been.”

  “That’s where this is?” She looked up at the towering building.

  “Did you get a look at him, recognize him?” Shaw asked.

  “No. He had a mask on, like a ski mask, and sunglasses.”

  “Gray? The mask?”

  “I think. Yes.”

  The stocking cap.

  Shaw’s phone hummed. He looked at the screen. He hit ANSWER and handed the unit to her.

  “Your father.”

  “Daddy! . . . No, I’m okay. My arm. I broke my arm . . . Kyle’s gone. Daddy, he killed Kyle. He shot him . . . I don’t know . . . That man . . . Mr. . . .”

  She looked his way.

  “Shaw.”

  “Mr. Shaw. Daddy, he found me. He saved me . . . Okay . . . Where are you? . . . I love you too. Call Mom. Can you call her? . . . Love you.”

  She disconnected and handed the phone back. “He’s on his way.”

  Her eyes looked past Shaw to the building where she’d been held captive. She whispered, “He just left me there.” Her voice revealed bewilderment. “I woke up in this dark room. Alone. That was almost scarier than if he’d tried to rape me. I would’ve fought him. I would’ve fucking killed him. But he just left me there. Two days. I had to drink rainwater. Disgusting.”

  “You found that glass and cut your way out with it?”

  “There was a bottle inside. I broke it and made a knife.”

  Another voice, from behind him: “Mr. Shaw?”

  He turned to the blond officer who’d been dressed down by the detective earlier.

  “Detective Wiley asked me to bring you to see him.”

  Sophie reached out with her good arm and gripped Shaw’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered. And her eyes began to well with tears.

  The officer said, “Please, Mr. Shaw. Detective Wiley said now.”

  18.

  Shaw followed the officer to where Wiley stood, by the loading dock, lording over the crime scene, snapping at yet another young deputy.

  Shaw wished Detective Standish had drawn the case. However obnoxious, he couldn’t be as insufferable as his partner.

  As they approached, Wiley gave a nod and said to the officer who’d brought Shaw to him, “Kathy, dear, do me a solid. I sent Suzie out front. See if she’s got anything for me. Hop hop.”

  “Suzie? Oh, you mean Deputy Harrison.”

  Wiley was oblivious to the snap of the correction whip. He simply added, ominously, “And don’t talk to a single reporter. Am I clear on that?”

  The blond officer’s face grew dark as she too reined in her anger. She disappeared down the broad driveway between the manufacturing building and the warehouses.

  The detective turned to him now and patted one of the stairs on the loading dock. “Take a pew, Chief.”

  Remaining standing, Shaw crossed his arms—Wiley lifted an eyebrow, as if to say, Whatever—and Shaw asked, “Did they find any CCTV at that intersection, Tamyen and Forty-two?”

  “It’s being looked into.” Wiley pulled out a pen and pad. “Now, whole ball of wax. Tell me from when you left my office.”

  “I went back to the Quick Byte. Somebody’d taken the Missing poster Sophie’s father’d put up.”

  “Why’d they do that?”

  “And replaced it with this.” He patted his pocket.

  “Whatcha got there, Chief? Tobacco chaw? A fidget stick?”

  “You have a latex glove?”

  Wiley hesitated, as Shaw knew he would. But—also as Shaw anticipated—handed him one. Shaw pulled it on and fished in his pocket. He extracted the sheet of paper from the Quick Byte. The eerie stenciled image of the man’s face. He displayed it.

  “So?” Wiley asked.

  “This image?”

  “I see it.” A frown.

  “In the room where he put Sophie? The same thing—or close to it—was graffitied on the wall.”

  Wiley pulled on his own gloves. He took the sheet and gestured a crime scene tech over. He gave her the paper and asked her to run an analysis. “And check in the databases if it means anything.”

  “Sure, Detective.”

  Bullying and talent, Shaw reminded himself, are not mutually exclusive.

  “You were in the café. And after that?”

  “I went back to San Miguel Park. I thought you were going to send a team there.”

  Wiley set the pad and pen down on the chest-high loading dock. For a moment Shaw actually believed Wiley was planning to deck him. The detective removed a metal container, like a pill bottle, from his front slacks pocket. He unscrewed the top and extracted a toothpick. Shaw smelled mint.

  “Better if you stay on message here, Chief.” He pointed the toothpick at Shaw and then slipped it between his teeth. He wore a thick, engraved wedding ring. He reversed the ritual of the container and picked up his writing implement once more.

  Shaw continued with his chronology: Kyle approaching him and the car on the ridge.

  “Was it you?” Shaw asked. “In the car?”

  Wiley blinked. “Why’d I do that?”

  “Was it?”

  No answer. “You see that vehicle?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Lot of invisible cars around here,” Wiley muttered. “Go on.”

  Shaw explained his conclusion that Sophie had been raped and killed and the body disposed of. He went looking for the most logical places where that might have been and ended up here. “I told Kyle to go to Sophie’s house. He didn’t.”

  “Why do you think the kidnapper didn’t come after you?”

  “Thought I was armed, I’m guessing. Detective, all the doors on the ground level were screwed shut, except one. Why would he leav
e it open?”

  “The whole point, Chief. He came back to rape her.”

  “Then why not put a lock on that too, like he did the gate?”

  “This’s one sick pup, Chief. Can’t hardly expect people like that to behave like you and me, can we now?” The toothpick moved from one side of his mouth to the other, via tongue only. It was a clever trick. “I suppose you’ll be getting that reward.”

  “That’s between me and Mr. Mulliner, a business arrangement.”

  “Arrangement,” the officer said. His voice was as impressive as his bulk. Shaw could smell a fragrance and thought it was probably from the ample hairspray with which he froze his black-and-white mane in place.

  “At least tell me how you heard about it, Chief.”

  “My name’s Colter.”

  “Aw, that’s just an endearment. Everybody uses endearments. Bet you do too.”

  Shaw said nothing.

  The toothpick wiggled. “This reward. How’d you hear about it?”

  “I’m not inclined to talk about my business anymore,” Shaw said. Then added, “You might want to get security video from the Quick Byte and go through the past month. You could find a clearer image of the perp—if he was staking it out.”

  Wiley jotted something, though whether it was Shaw’s suggestion or something else, Shaw had no idea.

  The young woman officer Wiley’d sent to search for “it” returned.

  Wiley raised a bushy eyebrow. “What’d you find, sweetheart?”

  She held up an evidence bag. Inside was the Walgreens plastic bag containing the rock stained with what Shaw now knew was Sophie’s blood.

  “It was in his car, Detective.”

  Wiley clicked his tongue. “Hmm, stealing material evidence from a scene? That’s obstruction of justice. Do the honors, sweetheart. Read him his rights. So, turn around, Mr. Shaw, and put your hands behind your back.”

  Shaw courteously complied, reflecting: at least Wiley’d dropped the “Chief.”

  19.

  In the sprawling cabin on the Compound, where the Shaws lived, several rooms, large rooms, were devoted to books. The collection came from the days when Ashton and Mary Dove were academics—he taught history, the humanities and political science. She was a professor in the medical school and was also a PI—principal investigator, overseeing how corporate and government money was spent at universities. Then there was Ashton’s flint-hard devotion to survivalism, which meant yet more books—hard copies, of course.