Fear the Dark

by Kay Hooper

  “I’ll tell him to hurry,” Sarah said calmly.

  Jonah eyed her. “Left him in bed sleeping, did you?”

  “Not that it’s any of your business—Chief—but, yes, I did. It’s his day off too.”

  Jonah didn’t forbid his people to get involved romantically; he was a realist. And he preferred openness to sneaking around. Not that Sarah or Tim, both sensible professionals, had made it obvious, but Jonah knew, and he figured if he knew then everyone else did too.

  “Well, tell him I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. We need to get this car into the police garage, pronto.”

  “Copy. Want to call Sully and get his dogs out here?”

  “I doubt there’ll be time before we get a downpour. We’ll just have to wait and hope we get a lead. Maybe the dogs will come in useful then.”

  “What’ll you tell their parents?”

  “Damned if I know. Lie through my teeth, probably. Or just say what little we’re reasonably sure of. Say the kids were clearly eloping, must have had car trouble—and we’re investigating the rest.”

  “And how are we investigating the rest?”

  “Get the good camera out of the back of my Jeep and start taking pictures. The car, the way it was left, that bank. The footprints. You know the drill, Sarah.”

  “Copy that. I take it you’d rather no one else saw the scene as we found it.”

  “I’d rather, yeah. Call Tim, and wait till he gets here. He won’t have to be told, but remind him nobody but the three of us will know about how the car was left and the footprints until I say different. Once you have the pictures and he has the car, both of you get back to the station. I’d also rather nobody too nosy just wandered out here to see what was going on.”

  “Mildred Bates has been watching.”

  “Yeah, I can feel her eyes boring into my back. But she can’t see over the edge of the bank even with binoculars, she’s virtually immobile with that cast since she wrenched her knee, and I don’t expect even her to come out here, especially once the car is moved. With a little luck, once the car is moved she won’t wonder if there’s anything else to see out here.”

  “Like the footprints?”

  “Exactly.”

  A rumble of thunder made them both look up at dark clouds rolling in.

  “Shit,” Jonah said. “Weather’s coming in faster than the forecast. Get those pictures, Sarah. Close the car doors. And when Tim heads back to the station with the car, you follow. If there’s a little more luck for me today, the rain will wash away those footprints before anybody else sees them, and nobody will realize something very weird happened here.”

  “Hope you got a lot of luck stored up,” Sarah said as she headed for the back of Jonah’s Jeep. “I’ve got an awful hunch we’re going to need every bit of it.”

  Since it wasn’t raining yet, Jonah walked farther up the road a stretch, just to see if anything else looked odd, but found nothing. And no sign that a car had pulled off the road. In this area, the weeds pretty much ran right up to the road, trimmed back later in the year; in May even the hardiest of weed was hardly more than a foot tall.

  Giving that up, Jonah returned to the abandoned car. Thunder rumbled again. “Hurry,” he called out to Sarah, who was near the bottom of the bank, placing a ruler beside each footprint before she photographed it.

  “Yeah.” She didn’t look up. “Meet you back at the station.”

  Jonah wanted more hot coffee, lots of it, and he wanted breakfast. He had a feeling he’d need to be fortified. He got in his Jeep and headed for town, pretending not to see Mildred Bates beckoning imperiously to him. Sarah must have used her cell while he’d been checking out the road to call Tim, and lit a fire under him to get here in a hurry, because Jonah passed the police tow truck, lifting a hand to Tim as they came abreast but not slowing.

  The small downtown diner, simply named the Diner, hadn’t been open long this morning; Jonah was the first one to take a seat on a stool at the counter, and the booths were all empty. The coffee was just beginning to percolate.

  He wished it would hurry.

  He didn’t waste time calling out his usual breakfast order, hearing an acknowledgment yelled from the back. A glance at his watch told him he still had time before the usual breakfast crowd arrived. The waitresses hadn’t even arrived yet. But then he noticed something odd.

  “Hey, Clyde? Is your clock right?”

  The owner/operator, who usually cooked and was fixing Jonah’s eggs and bacon in the kitchen, popped his head into the opening where the waitresses picked up orders. “What? Loud back here, Jonah.”

  Loud because he played country music on an old CD player. He favored Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.

  “Your clock.” Jonah raised his voice and nodded toward the clock that hung in a place of prominence on the wall behind the cash register. Clyde had gotten it on his honeymoon, apparently having stopped at some point at one of those touristy places along the side of the road that sold novelty items.

  The big clock boasted an eagle, its gradually unfolding left and right wings showing the time. Most thought but never said that it was a peculiar-looking bird, especially at certain times when the wings were sort of cockeyed.

  Clyde was very proud of it.

  “My clock? What about it?”

  “Time right?”

  “Yeah, I set it when I came in this morning. Used my cell phone.” He vanished back into the kitchen before Jonah’s bacon burned and before Waylon could get to the chorus.

  Jonah looked at the big watch on his wrist for a moment. It had stopped. It never stopped, warning him when new batteries were needed, and he’d just put in fresh ones barely two weeks ago. It was more of a sportsman’s watch, with more than one dial so he knew his current elevation, and the time in another country if he wished, and he could also use the device as a stopwatch.

  Not digital.

  Staring at the still face and keeping the time on Clyde’s clock in mind, then as far as he could remember the time it showed would have been just about when he’d reached the abandoned car and the mysteries surrounding it. It was also showing zero elevation when the town was several thousand feet above sea level.

  He stared at it for a moment, then fished for his cell phone and checked the time. It appeared to be still working normally, showing the correct date. But . . .

  The time on the cell was off by more than half an hour. Pretty close to the amount of time he’d spent out at Simon Church’s abandoned car.

  “Well, shit,” he said under his breath.

  —

  “WHERE COULD THEY have gone?” Monica Church twisted a handkerchief in her hands anxiously. Long married to a man who, if he had deep feelings about anything, never showed them, she tended to be emotional enough for both of them. She also tended to dress in simple, elegant outfits that usually stood out in Serenity, which was more of a jeans-and-sweatshirt sort of town.

  The pretty spring dress she wore now, colorful and a bit filmy, would have looked more in place in a larger town and warmer weather. But neither ever seemed to dictate Monica’s choices. Gossip said she had found a man who showed her more attention than her husband, but if said lover had been identified, Jonah hadn’t heard about it.

  “Told you they were going to elope,” Ed Church said, taciturn as always, and casual as always in jeans and a black T-shirt. “Been obvious for weeks. No sense in trying to stop them.”

  “But something did stop them.” Monica’s reddened eyes turned to Jonah’s face. “Mildred Bates called me and told me she saw the police tow truck taking Simon’s car toward town.”

  Of course she did.

  “Where is my son, Chief?”

  Jonah sighed as he leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his cluttered blotter. He was expecting the second set of parents any minute now. “I’ll tell you
what I can, but let’s wait for Stuart and Sue Grimes; they called they were on their way.”

  Five loudly silent minutes later, the other set of parents burst in. Sue Grimes was every bit as emotional as Monica, but not crying and not neat; she was wearing pale slacks and a bright pink blouse that was buttoned wrong and almost matched her almost neon lipstick. Which had clearly been applied in haste. One eyebrow was darker than the other as well, and her blond hair didn’t look as if it had seen a comb since at least the night before.

  Jonah wasn’t tempted to laugh. Much.

  Stuart Grimes wasn’t as taciturn as Ed Church, nor could he claim the other man’s lazy stillness. Stuart waved his arms a lot. And his voice was loud most of the time.

  Jonah took in those details automatically, saving what amusement or annoyance he found in them for later.

  “Where are they, Jonah?” Stuart Grimes demanded. “Where are the kids? Why was Simon’s car towed back to town, and why is it in the police garage now?”

  Jonah was accustomed to the fact that many people in town called him casually by his first name, just as many used his title. It didn’t really matter to him.

  “If you’ll just sit down, Stuart, you and Sue, I’ll tell you as much as I know.” Which was a lie but a necessary one. The only saving grace he personally found in the situation was that these two couples were friends all the way back to high school, and it was unlikely that either set of parents would blame the other set’s kid for . . . whatever.

  Small comfort.

  He decided to start with blunt information, not because he was a cruel man, but because he knew the bottom line would have to be reached, and he preferred to reach it sooner than later.

  “The kids are missing,” he told their parents, keeping his voice matter-of-fact. “We have no evidence that anything happened to them, no signs of a struggle, nothing else to indicate they were taken away by force.”

  Monica let out a sob into her handkerchief.

  “And Simon’s Jeep?” his father asked. “It was in perfect working order.”

  Jonah nodded. “As far as we can tell, that’s entirely true. There was gas in the tank, the tires were fine, it cranked easily when we tried it. Still, I have my best people going over it inch by inch to see if there’s something not so obvious that might have stopped it.”

  With ominous timing, a loud boom of thunder rattled the windows, and it really let go outside, raining heavily.

  Jonah hoped Sarah had been able to get all the pictures she could, because there sure as hell wouldn’t be anything remotely resembling evidence at the scene when the storm passed.

  “Were they eloping?” Sue Grimes demanded, showing less emotion except for the fierceness in her eyes and voice.

  Jonah answered honestly. “Looks like it. The back of the Jeep was packed full of everything from clothes and a golf bag to a big screen and a goldfish bowl.” He felt compelled to add, “I had one of my people get the fishbowl out and bring it up to this floor, to the lounge.”

  He didn’t add that the solitary fish had seemed much more relaxed with more water in his bowl—and a bowl that was not in motion. He made a note to ask his people to look for fish food in the car.

  In his usual lazy voice, Ed Church said, “We got the car was pulled off the main road, doors open, engine off. Robbery?”

  Jonah wondered if Mildred Bates had a zoom-lens camera. Maybe they should have asked her for photos.

  Maybe they would, before this was over with.

  Shaking his head, Jonah said, “I don’t see how. Too many valuables left in the car.” He looked at Sue Grimes. “Amy’s purse was in the front seat, undisturbed. There’s several thousand dollars in her billfold. I had it and everything in the purse printed just to be sure; lotta smudges on the money, but otherwise no prints except Amy’s.”

  Every student entering high school in Serenity got an ID with photo and fingerprints as a matter of both school and town policy.

  He added, “Jean’s holding it for you at the front desk; you can pick it up when you leave. I doubt it has any value as evidence.”

  Stuart Grimes said, “Where are the kids? It’s not like there’s a romantic trail off the side of the road to tempt them to stop. Where did they go?”

  Jonah kept his voice even. “I don’t know, Stuart. At this point, all I can tell you is what I have told you. The car was pulled off the road, doors left standing open, personal items and other valuables left in the car. Key in the ignition but engine off. And the kids gone.”

  “You didn’t find a fucking clue? Not a footprint or anything to tell you what happened to the kids?” Stuart all but shouted.

  “I didn’t find anything that told me what happened,” Jonah replied, honestly. “Maybe friends came by and picked them up, for whatever reason. Maybe they set out walking—for whatever reason—and stuck to the pavement so they didn’t leave prints.” He finished with that lie without a blink. “Look, when it comes to missing people, it’s still early yet. We have to start calling their friends—we’ll need your info and probably your help for that—and see if any of them have information worth sharing.”

  Or are willing to talk.

  “And then?” Stuart demanded.

  “Let’s cross that bridge when we get there. The most likely explanation is that one of their friends knows where they are, and that they’re somewhere waiting out the rain. So we start calling their friends.”

  “And then?” Stuart demanded again.

  Jonah had never responded well to bullies, but his job had taught him to at least be calm. “Stuart, as I said, we’ll take this a step at a time, following the procedures for missing persons. While this storm is pounding us and most of the other kids are either at home or with friends, we have an excellent opportunity to make phone calls. I assume you’re all willing to help?”

  “Of course.” It was snapped almost in unison by everyone but Monica, who merely sobbed again.

  “Okay, you all know the conference room is next door. There are several phones as well as legal pads and pens. Coffee too. I called before I got here and had two of the high school yearbooks left in there. Stuart is a senior and Amy a junior, so you can divide up the list like that if you want; even if you don’t know names, look for faces you’ve seen with your kids more than others. However you choose is fine with me. Just please write down who you call and what they said. Jean’s getting a list from the school with phone numbers, home and cell.”

  And it was a good thing Jean and Jack Rollins, the school principal, were . . . very good friends. He’d been willing to leave his coffee and his snug, dry house and slosh out to the high school for numbers he’d fax back to the police station.

  There were, Jonah had thought many times, benefits to living in such a small town that virtually everyone knew everyone else. The downside, of course, was that nearly everyone knew everyone else’s business. So if they didn’t already, the whole town would soon know of an elopement that apparently didn’t go as planned.

  Jonah personally got the parents settled in the conference room and then returned to his office. All his instincts told him he wouldn’t get much use from whatever the parents found—except to spread the news faster—but they needed to be busy, procedure needed to be followed, and he needed them out of his hair while he tried to think.

  Sarah tapped on his door and came in. She didn’t look the least bit wet, so either they had beaten the storm back, or water just slicked off her like a duck. It was something he had thought before.

  She held a thumb drive in her hand. “You need to look at this.”

  “Ah, shit,” he groaned. “Don’t tell me this whole thing is even stranger than I think it is.”

  Without another word, she went around his desk to the credenza behind it, plugged the thumb drive into his computer, and called up the pictures on the drive.

  �
�Take a look for yourself. I got every shot before the rain started.”

  Jonah swiveled his chair around and stared at the large screen of his computer. He stared for a long time, his gaze moving from photograph to photograph, each one clear, correctly lit, expertly focused. Very professional, obviously taken by an expert.

  Except . . .

  “Did you close the car doors?”

  “Not until after I took those pictures,” Sarah said calmly.

  In each shot of the car, the doors were closed.

  “And the footprints?”

  “They were just as you saw them, same as I did, when I took the shots. The camera is working fine; I checked it as soon as I saw these. What the hell, Jonah?”

  He really didn’t know. Because there were no footprints in any of the shots. None. And he could tell from the wide shots Sarah had included that she had taken the pictures where they had both seen muddy footprints of two people.

  Footprints totally gone. Gone as though they had never been there.

  TWO

  May 12

  Judge Phillip Carson had called Serenity home for most of his life, minus the years away at college and law school and a five-year stint at a big legal firm in Atlanta.

  He’d hated Atlanta. Hadn’t thought much of the firm either.

  Coming home to Serenity had suited him perfectly. Even a small mountain town of hardly more than five thousand people could always use another lawyer—and had definitely needed a judge. Since the county in which Serenity resided could claim only two other towns, both also small and with small populations, it had been more or less tacked in a judicial sense onto the larger circuit that was literally on the other side of the mountain. And that one contained several large towns, which made for a busy judge.

  So it hadn’t been very difficult for Judge Carson to convince the powers that be that it would just be a good idea all around for this smaller county to become a single district, and for the judicial circuit to have its own judge residing in Serenity. Unless something really unusual came up, he only had to leave Serenity to hold court in one of the other small towns maybe once or twice a month.