Then I called Lyle. I called him more times that night than I ever had before. He never answered. And I called Sophie, but the phone went straight to voicemail, my voicemail—Camille Waresch. Leave a message—over and over again.
I didn’t call Darren or any of his buddies at the Sheriff’s Office. Not about this. Not about exactly what he had warned me about, exactly what he had told me to not bring on myself. Besides, I wasn’t even sure I could trust him. He had withheld information from me, lots of it, and all the evidence I had given him—Patrick’s USB drive, the stuff at that trailer out in the middle of nowhere—had gone missing. Where did he stand anyway? Whose side was he fucking on?
When I had run out of ideas, when there was nothing left except blinding rage and fear, I got in the Bronco and tore down the highway.
Ed Beale answered the door in a threadbare yellowed undershirt and a pair of old shorts. Behind him, the blue glow of a television danced, a sitcom droned, a fan buzzed. He was surprised to see anyone on his doorstep at that time of night, even more surprised it was me. But he was shocked when I asked to speak with Todd.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Camille,” he said and shook his head. “We all been through a lot and—”
“It isn’t about Patrick, Ed,” I said. “It’s about Sophie. My daughter.”
Ed frowned. “Todd don’t know Sophie.”
“He does. He tutored her in Spanish last year.”
“Who is it, Ed?” Christine—her voice tired, drained—said from further inside the house.
“You know Camille Waresch’s girl, Sophie?” Ed shouted over his shoulder, but he kept his eyes on me.
“Sure. Patrick—” she said, then faltered. Somewhere beyond the living room, something splashed, a faucet was turned on, then off. “Patrick knew her,” Christine said faintly.
“See?” Ed said. “She was Patrick’s friend.”
“Look, I know he’s here,” I said impatiently. I pointed out past the bushes at the little blue sedan parked beside the driveway. “His car is right there.”
Ed stared at me for a few long seconds, sizing me up, I guess. I’d never given him any cause for alarm, but having a child taken changes you, makes you more wary, more scared. More protective of what you’ve got left.
But he turned his head again and shouted over his shoulder: “Todd! Come out here a minute.”
The sitcom went to commercial. The faucet turned on again, turned off.
“Todd!” Ed shouted again, louder.
When Todd replied, it was somewhere deep within the house. “What is it? I’ve got an exam tomorrow.”
“Come out here a minute, I said. You got a visitor.”
“Alright, alright. I’m coming.”
A minute, maybe more, passed before I heard footsteps. Ed heard them too; he left the door open, stepped away, went back to the living room and turned down the volume on the TV. Todd appeared in the doorway.
“Ms. Waresch, hi,” he said, his voice all light and cheerful, like the perfect kid on a sitcom. Or a psychopath in a horror film. Even his eyes were smiling. “How are you?”
I narrowed my eyes. “Fine.”
“What can I do for you, Ms. Waresch?”
I stepped away from the stoop, hoping he would follow me outside. He didn’t.
I mirrored his smile, clenched my fist. “Have you seen Sophie lately, Todd?” I said.
He thought for a moment, his nose screwed up like a baby that smelled its own fart. “Don’t think so, Ms. Waresch. I don’t think I’ve seen her at school at all this term.” He laughed lightly, then smiled. “Not that we’ve been back more than a couple of days!”
“And an exam so soon?” I said icily.
His smile widened. “AP U.S. History.”
“Your brother ever take that class?” I said viciously.
Anger—no, disgust—flashed across his face, was replaced by a plastic imitation of grief. “I don’t want to talk about Patrick.”
That was the end of the line.
“Listen, boy,” I said, my voice low, a maternal growl. “Where have they got her? Where is my daughter?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I haven’t seen Sophie all summer.”
“Where are your little friends hiding out?”
“I don’t know what you mean. My friends all live at home,” he said, then paused. “With their parents.”
“Don’t fuck with me, kid.” I shifted my weight. “Tell me where King and Nick are.”
“Who?” he simpered.
I stepped closer, got right up in his face. “If they’ve done anything to her, I swear I’ll—”
“You’ve made a mistake,” he said slowly, clearly, and not for my benefit.
Then my gun was in his face, millimeters from his mouth. I could feel the trigger pressed into the pad of my index finger, feel the blood pounding in my temples. In his face, deep in his eyes, the devil was back.
“Tell me,” I breathed.
He smirked. My index finger twitched. A grin spread across his face, daring me to do it, to shoot him on the front doorstep of his parents’ home.
Footsteps.
“Todd, get back to your studying.” Christine’s voice from beyond the door, in the hall. “I’ll talk to Camille.”
Todd flashed one last smile. “Nice to see you, Ms. Waresch.”
By the time Christine appeared in the doorway, the Beretta was tucked into my holster, but I was still shaking with anger.
“Camille?” Christine said, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What’s going on with Sophie? She all right?”
“Ask your son,” I shouted, leaning against the doorframe with one hand, one foot on the stoop, the other on the dirt, caught between going after him, beating the information out of him, and … and nothing.
I stepped back from the door, focused on Christine—Christine in white shorts and a water-splashed blue tank top with ruffles at the hem.
“And while you’re at it,” I said, more quietly, but no less angrily, “ask him what he told Patrick’s other friends.”
Christine shook her head. Strands of her graying bangs stuck to her sweaty, creased brow. “I don’t understand. What friends?”
I looked her in the eye. “Ask him who killed your boy, Christine.”
Her face blanched, the dish towel hung limply in her hand. Then I heard her say, her voice small and tight, “Why?”
But I didn’t answer. I was already gone.
23
“Open the door, Lyle!” I shouted, beating the door with my fists.
When he answered—his eyes bloodshot, his hair tangled—I pushed him aside, back against a wall. I wanted to take him by the throat, to shake him like a rag doll, but I kept my fists low and bared my teeth instead.
“Where is she?”
He fumbled for the door handle, eyes screwed tightly against the morning light. “Jesus, would you close the door?”
Instead, I slammed it into his shoulder, into the wall. Plaster showered onto the frayed brown carpeting.
“What the hell are you doing?” he yelled, clutching his shoulder. “I’ve got a deposit on this place.”
I grabbed the torn collar of his T-shirt, clutched it in my fist, and leaned into him. “Where is my daughter, Lyle?”
“How the hell should I know? I took her to the airport. You said she was in Michigan.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I heard you last night. I heard your ridiculous fucking laugh on her phone.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“It wasn’t me. I was down at the casino last night, all night. Go ask. George Entenman was at the bar.”
“It was you!” I shouted.
“Hey!” he shouted back at me. He was wide awake now. “Maybe she made some friends out there. Maybe she was out with some friends.”
I could have told him everything. I could have told him I knew damn well she had never shown up in Michigan. I could have told him I knew about
his buddies, about Captain Jimmy King and Nick, who was really Victor Calzón from California. And Todd. That I knew Sophie was in deep.
“I don’t care how you’re involved in this, Lyle,” I growled. “I don’t give a fuck what your angle is. Just tell me where she is.”
He shook his head, his eyes disbelieving and passive, like this was all some big joke. “You’re insane, Sis,” he said. “You’ve gone fucking insane.”
Maybe I had, maybe I hadn’t. But he knew—I knew he knew—and I wasn’t going to stop until he told me.
“Whoa,” he said, his eyes suddenly wide and fearful. He raised his arms up the wall like a stinking crucifixion. “Okay, I get it. I get you. Just take that piece out of my ribs and I’ll tell you. Okay?”
I moved the M9 an inch, but I kept my grip on Lyle’s shoulder, pinned to the wall.
“You know that guy, Nick?” he said quietly.
I nodded, didn’t add that I knew more about him than that.
“There’s this place up in the mountains.”
“She’s there?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He shrugged and I thought about how easy it would be to break his clavicle. “But they’re close, you know?”
“As close as he was to Patrick?”
“No,” he said awkwardly, then blushed even more awkwardly. “I mean, they’re really close.”
“He’s fucking my daughter?”
Lyle shrugged.
“And what about Jimmy King?” I said.
Uncertainty distorted Lyle’s face, like an abused puppy that’s been offered a bone.
“Is he up in the mountains too?” I said.
Lyle shrugged again but couldn’t talk fast enough when I pressed the muzzle of my gun under his rib cage. “Yeah, it’s King’s place. There are parties sometimes.”
“Like the one last night?” I purred.
And for a moment, it seemed he would trip up. But, then: “I was at the casino.”
“You said.”
“I don’t know nothing about a party last night.”
“Or whether my daughter was there?”
He shook his head. I relaxed my grip, let him breathe. His eyes were flat and pale, empty, but knowing, like a feral dog’s. He breathed raggedly at first, but after a while he was calm again, pliant.
“How well did King know Patrick, Lyle?”
He blinked quickly, narrowed his eyes, then tried to hide the wariness there. He turned his head, rubbed the stubble on his jaw with his knuckles. “Pretty good, I guess.”
“Did he work for him?”
“Sometimes,” Lyle said, like everyone knew. Like it was no big deal.
“What did he do?”
Lyle shrugged.
“I know Patrick pissed him off,” I said.
A chunk of Lyle’s hair, greasy, dirty blond, fell from where it was tucked behind his ear. He reached up, brushed it back again, but then he turned his head, stared blindly into the brown living room.
“And I know someone else told King something that pissed him off even more,” I added, careful not to say too much. Lyle raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t look back at me.
“Did he do it, Lyle?”
He looked at me then, but his face was a mask: carefully blank, and beneath it, something more. Always something more.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“Did he kill him, Lyle? Did King kill Patrick?”
“Why would he do that?” Lyle’s voice was leaden, a little leaden smile on his lips.
“What is he going to do to Sophie?” I said, my voice thick in my throat.
“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s a big girl.”
“She’s fifteen,” I snarled.
Lyle shrugged.
My elbow hit him first, under the chin, snapped his mouth closed. The butt of the M9 followed, caught him beside his left eye on the way down the wall, sent him sprawling.
I wanted to scream at him that I knew what King was doing, that I knew what he, Lyle, was doing. I wanted to tell him that I knew he knew. And I wanted to ask, to know, how he could stand by with Sophie, his precious little niece, in the crosshairs.
Instead, I pinned him, ground his fresh wound into the dirty carpet and bruised his tender neck with the muzzle of my gun.
“Where are they?”
* * *
Lyle gave me directions, landmarks, claimed he didn’t know the address. It didn’t matter; I already knew where he was sending me. And by the time I got there, I had sunk down into that blackness you get in the field—if you’re lucky, that is. It blocks out everything else. Morality. Justice. Mercy. In the blackness, there is only the mission. Out there, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, wherever, sinking down into that blackness is how you survive. That day, that night, it was the only reason anyone survived.
* * *
09:03 PDT.
I Ditched the Bronco in a stand of trees half a mile away from the property line. My brown jeans faded into the shadows. My long-sleeve green camo faded into the branches. The CamelBak I had strapped on had enough water for twenty-four hours; same for the pouch of energy bars. Would it take that long? I had no idea. I had no idea what was waiting for me, whether I had finally gotten close enough to kill, whether there would be a patrol or a guard or just rabid Captain Jimmy, waiting for me with a shotgun. Maybe it was a trap; maybe it was my day of reckoning. I didn’t care. There was only the mission. There was only Sophie.
I hiked in along the boundary lines, staying as close to due south and as far from any buildings as I could. The big Okanogan complex fire was still a couple of years off, and the trees in the foothills were still green, lush, the ground still thick with long, thin pine needles dried to a rusty orange. And it was quiet, so quiet. Just the whispering of the breeze in the branches overhead, the screams of hawks riding the thermals, the manic chittering of chipmunks in the undergrowth. The steady swish-swish-swish of fabric as I climbed higher and higher.
10:12 PDT.
I had been hiking for an hour when I finally heard footsteps up the hill. I retraced my steps, took cover. The patrol was young, green: wearing a brown T-shirt and BDUs that had never been stained with anyone’s blood or sweat or piss, an AR-15 resting on his shoulder like he was in the goddamn color guard. Swaggering, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. Playing soldier.
And while I watched, hunkered down in prone, my M9 at the ready, I wondered why Jimmy King would bother to set a patrol who didn’t even swing his head in my direction as he passed. But that’s the reflex, the Army reflex. You set a watch, you set a patrol. You protect what you got, even if your protection is just a dirtbag kid. So why do you need a patrol, Captain Jimmy? What do you have back in those woods that you need a brat with a gun in the middle of nowhere? How much you got in that shed, Captain Jimmy?
I picked up the pace.
11:19 PDT.
I carried on through the trees, headed southwest. The GPS I had taken from the county office indicated there was about a mile left until I reached the vicinity of the barn and the shed I had seen the previous day. The barn was on the county map, two houses about a half mile away were, too, but the shed wasn’t. With a patrol out that far, who knew what else I would find on the way.
I picked my way slowly up the hill, stopping frequently to listen. The second and third patrols I saw weren’t much better than the first. Seemed King kept the good ones, the ones with a clue, for the gates. Or maybe I’d find my trigger-happy friend from the other night lurking closer to the lab. Either way, I had decided to go in under cover of darkness—this was the time to assess the field, to listen, to find out what I was up against. And so far, I was smiling.
12:27 PDT.
I located the barn and the shed. The black Dodge was still there, but where the Suburban had been the day before, there was only an oil stain on the packed dirt floor. The metal shed was still closed tight, not even a break in the siding as far as I could tell,
and nothing except two empty wooden pallets to see outside. But chemicals hung thickly in the still air, and over the whirring of the powerful fans up by the shed’s roofline was the faint, very faint, bass thump of a stereo inside. Jimmy King was making a new batch, a potent one by the smell of it.
13:21 PDT.
I located the two houses that showed up on the property records. One was older, wooden, and spare. It sat in a brown, weedy garden beside the gravel drive that came up from the road and then snaked back into the woods to the barn and the metal shed. Across a wide clearing, dug into the side of the hill, was a newer building, its long wall of windows facing the valley to the east. Each house had a wooden porch that could have whined under Sophie’s bare feet the night before. Each had a screen door. Both looked deserted.
Uphill from the clearing, I squatted in the underbrush, slowly sweeping my binoculars across every square foot of visible space and growing more and more anxious, doubting more and more that I was in the right place, that the compound was where my daughter was being held or holing up or whatever the hell she was doing. Where were the vehicles for the guys out on patrol? Where were the empty booze bottles, the sticky plastic cups, the other trash from the party Sophie had been at the night before? I pulled out the map I had printed from the county records and checked the layout again. There were no other roads, no other buildings recorded, no other areas that would support a building either. Immediately to the east was a cliff just waiting to sheer off in the next landslide. To the west, another steep slope rose into the mountains. To the south and down the hill was a thick stand of woods and the county road I had turned off of the Tuesday before. And to the north was territory I had already covered.
I circled the clearing, scoping for any sign of life, any flicker of movement at a window or on the gravel drive, anything that indicated these buildings were inhabited, any sign of Sophie. At the bottom of the clearing, too near the gravel drive for comfort, I saw it: the door of a small red shed pushed ajar by a black plastic garbage bag that had fallen off a much larger pile. Garbage. Evidence of the party? It wasn’t like I had a better option. The entrance was exposed, but if I was fast …
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