by Kay Hooper
“But no judge.”
“No. It’s a grassy path most of the way down from the road to the water, you know that, and we haven’t had any rain since that gully washer the day the kids disappeared. No sign of footprints, his or anybody else’s, except for one clear print just where he put the string with his catch in the water.”
“String tied to the stake?”
“Yeah. As always. Nobody ever bothers that, not even the kids. Nobody else was out there, or had been, far as I could tell. Haven’t seen another soul since I got back here. I took a chance and made the hike back to the judge’s place, and everything looked normal. Key was in the normal place, so I went inside and took a quick look. Normal. Absolutely normal.”
Jonah knew she was repeating the word deliberately. And they both knew why. The pit in his stomach was making him feel queasy, and not only because he considered Phillip Carson a good friend.
“One thing,” Sarah added. “His cell was on his kitchen counter. Whether he forgot it or—”
“Probably just left it there. Whenever he doesn’t expect to be called, or doesn’t want to be, he just leaves the cell at home.”
“Thought so. But we still need to take a look at his records and see when the phone was last used. I suppose the warrant he signed is good for his phone records too?”
Jonah honestly had no idea, but he knew the judge in the neighboring district, and made a mental note to call him and find out what they needed to observe the legalities.
“Okay, I’ll take care of that a bit later. You talk to Clyde?”
“Asked him to keep his questions to himself, that you’d come talk to him later. We both know nobody else is likely to miss the judge unless we start shouting about it, at least for a day or two. Might not be such a bad idea for us to have that day or two without . . .”
“Without panicking the town?”
“Something like that. Missing kids with a clear intention of eloping is one thing; the judge is a fixture here. He goes missing, nobody is going to believe he just ran off.”
“Probably right.” Jonah fumbled for his alarm clock and squinted at the time. “It’s after ten.”
“Well, there really wasn’t much for you to do here anyway. I figured you needed the rest, and I could take care of the preliminary look-see. Even went ahead and got pictures, for all the good it’ll do us.”
“I appreciate it.” He swung his legs off the bed, absently noting that they were still wrapped, mummylike, in the covers. “What time did Clyde call?”
“Right at seven. Called me on my cell, not the station. Said the judge was always there when he opened up at six.”
“Figure thirty minutes to walk from the stream to the Diner. He never uses lures in that stream; how fresh was that bait?”
“It’s a worm, Jonah. All I can tell you is that it wasn’t moving and hadn’t dried out. He had a little can of live worms beside the tackle box.” She paused, then added, “He had one of those little fisherman’s battery lanterns beside his chair. The kind that’s fairly powerful even though it’s small enough to fit inside a tackle box. It was still on.”
“So it was still dark when he . . . left.”
“That would be my guess.” She drew a breath. “The only thing the disappearances really have in common. Every victim was taken in the dark.”
THREE
Jonah ran his fingers through his hair, trying to think. “Shit,” he said again. “Did you say you were still there?”
“Judge’s fishing spot, yeah. I knew you wouldn’t want crime scene tape around the area, but I also figured you’d want to see it the same way I did. Only a few cars have gone by this morning on the way to church. Nobody’s appeared to notice anything strange about me being here, and I’m leaning against the car all nice and natural. Just looking at the view. I’ll stick around here. You can get to the Diner before church lets out. Have breakfast and talk to Clyde.”
“Anything else?” he asked politely.
“Yeah. Bring me a coffee, will you?”
“See you in a few.” He didn’t wait for a response but cradled the receiver and fought free of the remaining covers so he could get out of bed. He had been told he was an extremely restless sleeper but had no idea why, since he could never remember his dreams.
In less than half an hour, he was showered, shaved, dressed, and out the door. Like the judge and even though both were bachelors, Jonah owned a house not far from the downtown area, with a small front yard, a garage, and a fenced backyard where the latest thing in barbecue grills lived on a spacious patio.
Though Jonah had never asked, he figured the judge owned a house rather than a condo for the same reason he did: a dislike of neighbors being too close.
They each knew more than they really wanted to about their neighbors through their respective jobs. There was no sense finding out more details they didn’t need to know.
The Diner held only a scattering of customers, since church hadn’t yet let out, so Jonah was able to claim his usual stool at the counter. Am I becoming predictable? And is that a bad thing?
“The usual, Chief?” a fresh-faced waitress named LaRae Owens asked cheerfully as she poured coffee for him.
Definitely predictable.
“Yeah, thanks, LaRae.”
She nodded, smiled, and went off to serve somebody else, calling out Jonah’s order as she passed the serving window to the kitchen, a bit quieter than usual because it was Sunday. And because Waylon and Johnny weren’t singing back in the kitchen.
Jonah sipped his coffee and looked at nothing, his mind racing. Phillip Carson wasn’t the sort for a joke, not like this, not when he knew how worried Jonah was about the kids disappearing. How worried the town was. So he hadn’t vanished just to have fun. He didn’t have family to speak of, at least not in Serenity, and if he’d been called away for a family emergency or because of his duties as a judge, Sarah would have known about it because the station was always notified of any change to his schedule.
If he had vanished as the kids had vanished, then victimology was not going to help find either the judge or the kids. Two teenagers attempting an elopement, and then a highly respected judge in his late forties who liked to fish at night? What did they have in common? Why would both be targets to be . . . taken?
They all lived in Serenity. They were all white, which was the majority demographic for the town, so possibly not something important to victimology. They had all been taken, apparently, sometime before the sun rose.
Jonah didn’t know that the latter mattered; if he’d wanted to abduct someone, he probably would have chosen the darkness as a cover himself. And so late, between midnight and dawn, there was certainly less chance of being seen or heard, especially in a little town not exactly famous for its nightlife.
But . . . the unsettlingly weird aspects were true of all three disappearances. It was as if those three people had simply vanished in an instant. No signs of struggle. In the case of the kids, there had been footprints that had seemed decidedly strange when Jonah had seen them with his own eyes; the fact that the camera had not shown them at all just added to the eeriness of his memory of them.
The fact that both his watch and his cell had apparently been affected at the site where the kids had vanished, just as Sarah’s and Tim’s had been affected, was decidedly weird.
Jonah mentally kicked himself for not having asked Sarah if the same . . . situation . . . existed at the judge’s fishing site. Though he’d find out soon enough, he supposed.
He hadn’t realized he’d been lost in thought so long until a steaming plate of eggs, hash browns, and bacon slid in front of him, along with a smaller plate of toast.
“What the hell’s going on, Jonah?”
It was Clyde, and he kept his voice low.
Jonah glanced back over his shoulder toward the kitchen.
&
nbsp; “Alec’s minding the griddle. Kid’s a fair cook—and nobody can screw up breakfast anyhow. Where’s the judge?”
“I have no idea,” Jonah replied honestly, keeping his own voice low, his tone determinedly casual.
“So he’s just gone? Gone like those kids last weekend?”
“That’s how it looks. I’m going to meet Sarah at the stream as soon as I finish up here so we can put our heads together and try to figure it out. Wanted to ask you if he’d said anything to you recently. If he’d noticed anything odd, strange phone calls, a car he didn’t recognize parked near his house or office, anybody following him.”
Clyde leaned an elbow on the counter, looking very casual until Jonah met his very level, steely gaze—and reminded himself that even though he was only a few years older than himself, Clyde had served in Iraq back in the beginning.
“Not a word. Nothing out of the ordinary. And you do know, I hope, that he didn’t talk to me about those kids going missing, not the way he must have talked to you, about details I imagine you’ve mostly kept to yourself.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“I know how to keep my trap shut too, Jonah. Do me a favor and keep me in the loop about the judge as much as you can, okay? We’ve known each other a long time.”
Jonah nodded.
“Appreciate it. Now eat your breakfast. You don’t look much better than you did last night.”
Without bothering to comment, Jonah merely dug into his meal, knowing he needed to eat even though he had absolutely no appetite. He was aware of Clyde returning to the back and his griddle, joking normally with the two waitresses working this morning and talking to Alec. And then he cranked up Waylon and Johnny—though a few notches lower than normal in deference to its being Sunday.
At least, Jonah figured that was it.
He finished his meal, also aware that more people were coming in for breakfast or brunch or lunch as the area churches were letting out. He ordered two coffees to go, paid his bill and left a generous tip, then managed to leave the Diner without anyone saying anything to him except good morning.
He had learned long ago that a preoccupied expression on a cop’s face was enough to keep all but the most determined busybody from asking questions he didn’t want to answer. He had perfected that preoccupied expression, though it certainly wasn’t faked now.
He drove his Jeep roughly half a mile to the narrow side road that ran along the stream for a stretch, parking behind Sarah’s cruiser. She was leaning against the front fender, hands in the pockets of her jacket, looking down toward the stream with a frown.
“Anything new?” he asked as he joined her and handed over her coffee.
“No,” she said, gloomy. She took a sip of the hot coffee. “I just keep asking myself why the judge. Why those kids. What the hell’s going on, Jonah?”
“I wish I knew. They’re all white, they all live in Serenity, and they all disappeared sometime between midnight and six, as far as we can tell. All disappeared during the night. Those are the only commonalities I can think of.”
“Shit.”
He hesitated, then said, “Your watch—”
“Not wearing one.” She didn’t look at him. “But as near as I can figure, my cell lost the time I was here earlier, and the time I was down there using the camera. Seems to be working fine, it’s just . . . about forty-five minutes off what it should be.”
Jonah hesitated, then looked at his watch. He’d bought a new one rather than having the other one repaired. He was inordinately relieved when it was clearly working just fine. And then Sarah had to offer an explanation.
“I’ve been thinking, and I think there’s some kind of perimeter. Because standing here, my cell hasn’t lost any time. But it did lose the time I spent down there around his chair. Not sure exactly where the demarcation line is, assuming I’m right. Maybe your watch can tell us when you head down there.”
Jonah wasn’t exactly in a hurry to test her theory.
“You really didn’t notice anything at all odd down at the stream? Other than whatever happened to your cell?” He could see from their position the judge’s low beach chair and other things a few yards from the stream.
“Nothing. Looks like he just got up and left, peacefully. Leaned his pole against his chair, left his catch in the water, his tackle box and bait can closed. And just . . . left. How long do you think we can keep this quiet?”
“If we have to start asking questions, which we do? The whole town’ll know by suppertime.”
“And then?” Sarah sounded like she dreaded the answer.
“And then,” Jonah said, “this place is going to go from uneasy to downright scared. It won’t be pretty.” He straightened away from her cruiser. “Before that starts, I want to get a look for myself. And then I want to get Sully’s dogs out here, checking both sides of the stream at least half a mile in each direction.”
He didn’t want to even mention the idea that had occurred to him on the way here. That maybe the judge wasn’t missing. That maybe they’d find him quickly enough. In the water.
Then Sarah said, “He wouldn’t have waded out into the stream to fish, and I can’t think of another reason he’d have willingly gone into the water. I looked as closely as I could and didn’t see any sign of blood on any of the rocks, like if he’d lost his balance and fell.”
“Still,” Jonah said.
“Yeah. Still. With all the big boulders downstream, and the trees felled by last winter’s storms, if he did fall in, his—he’d likely be caught somewhere along the way.”
Jonah could hear in Sarah’s voice that part of her would prefer to find the judge—in whatever condition—than have another inexplicably missing person.
He didn’t blame her. He felt the same.
“Okay,” he said finally. “We can be sure of a few things. The judge didn’t leave a car parked by the side of the road. He wouldn’t have left all his equipment and his catch behind, and he wouldn’t have done that and accepted a ride from anyone.”
“Maybe he got hurt,” Sarah suggested. “He got a hook through one finger last summer, remember.”
“Yeah. But if something like that had happened, he would have made sure to let you or me know about it. That’s something I’m absolutely sure of. The only way he left here hurt and without letting us know would be if he was hurt . . . bad. Unconscious.”
“And a Good Samaritan helped him but didn’t report it?” Her voice was steady. “Doesn’t sound likely.”
“No,” Jonah said grimly. “It doesn’t sound at all likely.”
As he took a step toward the stream, Sarah said, “You gonna test my theory?”
Jonah didn’t want to, but he didn’t admit that out loud. He just held his wrist up and pushed the cuff of his sweatshirt back so he could see the new watch, efficiently ticking away, then walked slowly down the path toward the judge’s abandoned things.
When he was approximately six yards away from the little fishing site, his watch just . . . stopped.
May 30
Lucas Jordan scrolled through the last page of the report on his tablet and looked across the big desk at his boss with lifted brows. “And the police chief is only now calling us in?”
“It’s happened in pretty short order,” Bishop, Unit Chief of the Special Crimes Unit, said, calm as always. “A little more than three weeks, and the first disappearance had all the earmarks of an elopement, possibly set up in such a way as to throw off pursuit. No solid evidence there had been an abduction. The second, almost exactly a week later, the district judge—who likes to fish at night and knew all the details of the earlier disappearances. But an adult, and there was absolutely no sign of a forced abduction. Wherever he went, it could have been willingly.”
Samantha Jordan, who hadn’t even opened the tablet in her lap, looked at Bishop from her curiously
dark eyes, unblinking. “The chief doesn’t think he did that, obviously.”
“No. But he could find no evidence to the contrary, just like with the teenagers. Then, three days later, on a Tuesday night just after ten P.M., a young woman named Luna Lang vanished. She left her husband at home with their sleeping infant daughter, to walk to the opposite side of their apartment complex, through an enclosed courtyard, to borrow a couple of jars of baby food from a friend and neighbor. She never got there. And, again, there was absolutely no sign of an abduction.”
“Any of these places have security cameras?” Luke asked.
Bishop half nodded. “At the apartment complex. Grainy images the FBI lab is trying to enhance, but it looks like Mrs. Lang was visible, walking briskly, then passed into what’s apparently a security blind spot. She never reappeared on the security cameras.”
“How big was the blind spot?” Samantha asked.
“According to the chief, no more than fifteen feet.”
Samantha blinked. “Damn.”
“Whatever happened, happened fast,” Bishop agreed. “And also according to the chief, in that blind spot were no windows or doors, or even shrubbery. No place for an assailant to hide.”
“An enclosed courtyard.”
Bishop nodded. “Pretty sturdy, tall iron fencing at the walkway out of the courtyard, with a gate requiring a keycard and a code. All entrances and exits are recorded on the main security computer. Now.” He paused, then added, “This complex advertised itself as safe for young families just because of the general layout; it was designed with a few tricks to deter burglars or anyone else thinking about breaking in. From very thorny and well-lit shrubbery preventing any access to first-floor windows to first-rate door and window locks with individual security for each unit, plus excellent lighting all around the perimeter and inside the courtyard. Each apartment door is well lit all night, as are the open walkways on each of the four floors within the courtyard. No shadowy spots. And there’s a two-man security team at night, one to watch the monitors and the other to patrol.”