“What about the alibi?” She turned to Ken.
“I called the conference organizer,” Ken said. “The woman I spoke to claimed he was there for the whole thing—from Monday to Wednesday. He gave a talk on Monday. She saw the presentation.”
“That was the night before it happened, though.”
“Yes, but the hotel confirmed that he checked out on Wednesday.”
“Did he check out in person?”
Ken stared at Ali. “I didn’t ask.”
“He could have left the key cards in the room. Could have left the night after the talk or even early the next day and still have made it to the park by midmorning. The hotel would still have him down for checking out when he said he would.”
“Did anyone see him around after the talk, at some of the other seminars?”
Ken shook his head. “Not specifically, no.”
“Ken,” Ali said. “Get back on the phone now and call both the conference organizer and the hotel. Find out if anyone actually saw him after Monday evening. Get the names of other conference attendees who might have seen him and verify if he was there or not.”
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“He went to meet his daughter for lunch,” Herman said. “I told him to stay close by, but with the evacuations . . .” Herman’s voice faded, which I took as a bad sign.
“You don’t know?” Ali looked at him with surprise.
“He had an alibi, and his daughter wanted to take him for lunch, but she wanted to get back home to check on Kyle first, so they drove separately. He was going to come right back, but with the evacuations, I figured he got caught in traffic.”
We all turned to Ken after he hung up with the Hampton Inn in Great Falls. “They emailed the receipt to him, which probably means he did not check out in person.”
Ali looked from Ken to me to Herman. “If he was in the old man’s photo, he obviously knew old Tuckman, but he denied it when I asked. His alibi could be sketchy. He had to know about the car keys in the barn. Walt said they’ve done it that way since he was a boy. Herman, try to get ahold of the guy and let’s send someone to his house immediately.”
“We’ll go,” I offered.
“That works, but be careful. It’s east of Martin City,” she pointed northeast toward the park. “Off the South Fork Road East and from what I understand, they’re not letting anyone through. I’ll radio IC to let them know you’re headed that way. Let me know if he’s not there, and do the best you can to have a look around. If we can’t locate him, put out an APB immediately. We need to find this guy. And someone get ahold of Wendy, ASAP.”
• • •
Combs was not answering his phone, but Wendy did immediately. She said she’d gone back to her house because she wanted to check on Kyle. He’d gone home to sleep after being released after the night of interrogations. She wanted to make sure he didn’t leave again to go meet his friends after he woke. Then, apparently, Wendy and her father had lunch in a café in Hungry Horse and afterward, he said he was heading back to the church. She seemed genuinely concerned that he might have gone to his house deeper in the woods instead and not made it back—that perhaps the spreading fires played some role in preventing him from getting back to the church from his house.
Ken and I hopped in the car to head to Combs’s house, but before we pulled out, I quickly searched the number for the county dump and dialed it, hoping it would still be open. It wasn’t, and I figured it closed at five. “Damn,” I swore.
“What?” Ken asked.
“I wanted to get hold of someone at the dump. I can’t reach Gretchen, and I’d like to check on why she went there. I have a feeling it has something to do with our case.”
“I know the director of public works,” Ken said. “Dan Hittle. He’s a friend of my wife’s.”
“You have his number?”
“Yeah, it’s on my phone.” Ken pulled up his contacts and read it to me.
Thankful for small-town connections, I called the man, told him who I was, and asked if he could find out for me who had been working the entrance station and if I could get his or her number. He told me he’d look into it and get back to me. When I said it was urgent, he said he’d hurry.
I started the car and we headed in the opposite direction of the line of white and red flashing lights muted by the impenetrable smoke. When we turned from Highway 2 into Martin City and continued to South Fork Road East, it became hard to see and disorientating, almost worse than the day of the dig, the day Jeremy went missing. Flurries of ash clogged the air, and even inside the car we could feel the smoke crawling into our lungs. I tried to drive as fast as possible and was thankful that we were on a paved county road, at least for a few miles. Eventually it turned to gravel, but we didn’t have to go far before we made it to Combs’s property. I slowed way down in his driveway. We could barely see his house through the smoke until we parked just yards away from the garage doors.
“This property butts up against National Forest land,” Ken said.
“Yeah, I know.” Tall pines that we could barely make out pressed in on us from behind the house. I thought of all the many places deep in the woods that Jeremy could be if he was still alive, and how susceptible those areas would be to the fire when it swept through. The day he was taken, the smoke was already bad. The abductor likely knew there might be evacuations of the canyon at some point. Had that not been a concern because he or she didn’t intend to keep Jeremy around that long? Or because the person planned to keep Jeremy somewhere else, perhaps in the valley outside the ravaged canyon? Or had the abductor simply not cared one way or another?
“Not that many houses out this way,” Ken said. “You notice how far back the last one was?”
“About three-quarters of a mile down the road.”
“Yep,” Ken said.
“Thanks for making me feel even more uneasy,” I joked.
“You’re welcome.” Ken smiled.
“But you’re right to bring it up. Doesn’t hurt to take note, play it safe,” I said. “No car in the drive. He’s probably not here, unless it’s in the garage. First let’s see if there’s a window around the side, then I’ll ring the bell.” I opened the car door. “You cover me?”
“Sure thing.”
We hopped out and took a look around the side of the garage. We found a side door near the back, but no window. We walked around to the front again. It was a clean, well-maintained place with a nice tan-and-white paint job. An immaculate lawn only slightly browned from the heat and lack of rain spread out in front of the house. Combs either spent a lot of time watering it or he had an irrigation system in place. Pretty flower gardens lined the beds below the windows and on the sides of the front porch. Small rectangular windows embedded in thick cement squatted at the base of the house, indicating a basement—not unusual for Montana homes, but it made me uneasy.
I rang the bell and stood to the side of the door while Ken took his post behind me. If this was our guy, we didn’t need him coming at us both with a weapon. But no one came. I rang it again and waited. Nothing. I rapped on the door loudly, calling out, “Mr. Combs, if you’re in there, we need to speak to you,” but all was silent except the strong stirring of the wind in the trees and the sound of airplane and helicopter engines carrying water and fire retardant in the not-too-far distance.
“I don’t think he’s here.” I backed away from the door and went over to the window beside it. I could make out a tidy living room with plain furnishings. Books lined the walls on shelves on both sides of a fireplace. Neatly stacked magazines lay on the coffee table before a beige couch. Through an opening near the side of the room, I could make out the kitchen—some dated appliances and oak-colored kitchen cabinets. “Looks empty,” I said to Ken.
We walked over and opened the toolshed. An old lawn mower sat in the center and shovels, spades
, rakes and other tall implements leaned against the wall. Several bags of mulch and soil slumped in one of the corners. On the other side, shelves stretched across the wall held smaller gardening tools, bottles of fertilizer, and several pairs of thick gardening gloves. Next to the gardening gloves was a box of nitrile gloves—the kind we used in the lab. That alone wasn’t so interesting. Many people used them for cleaning, to handle toxic solutions. But in light of the other things we’d learned about Combs, along with that fact that the truck was wiped clean, my skin prickled.
“Let’s radio in to see if Combs has been located yet and if they want us to enter.” I looked into the murkiness, trying to make out the forest. “If there’s any chance at all that the boy’s in the house, he shouldn’t be left behind—trapped out here in the possible path of the fires. In fact, we shouldn’t be out here much longer either. I’d say we have exigent circumstances for a warrantless search.”
27
* * *
Gretchen
JEREMY CONTINUED SCRAPING the floor while I inspected the cage. I had been trying to figure a way out, but it was one of those heavy-duty, small-linked industrial wire-mesh cages with sharp ridges on every loophole. There were a series of them, and they all had sliding doors. He could have put me in any one of them, but this was the only one with a dead bolt, which I assumed he had brought himself. He wasn’t expecting a second victim, although now—I had begun to realize—I wasn’t simply a victim. I was either a lamb or the devil. In my mind, neither one could be good.
Panic had shot through me in waves for the first hour after I came to, and I told myself to calm down. This man was Wendy’s father, a pastor. . . . How could he have taken Jeremy? How could he not be reasoned with? The thoughts whirled in my head over and over. I tried to make sense of it all, but there was none to be made. Combs had spoken nonsense. Abraham? Isaac?
I didn’t know a lot about the Bible, but you didn’t need to be an expert to know the story of Abraham and Isaac—how God had asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac to prove his love for God, and how an angel sent a lamb to be sacrificed instead at the last minute. If any of the other boys I’d researched were related to this, I wondered about the possibility of him waiting for the sacrificial lambs to materialize to replace the other boys, and they never came, until now. Until me.
A chill went down my spine. I forced myself to take a deep breath. Crazy. Crazy talk. Crazy thinking. What was I to say to him? I told myself that I should be careful not to push any buttons. I needed to get us out of this place.
The smell of smoke had gotten more intense and the temperature hotter. Jeremy and I were both sweating, and I wondered how Combs could continue to pray in this condition, but I realized that the fervor the fire seemed to stir was exactly what he might have expected. I heard the drone of airplanes above and the sweet sound of sirens in the distance, and for a second, my hopes soared that someone was coming to rescue us. But as the plane engines and the sirens faded, I realized the sirens were for the fires. When I’d driven out earlier, I had heard the fire crews had contained the Ole Fire, but Sheep Fire had grown stronger in its march to the northwest with the increased wind, and the one on Desert Mountain close to West Glacier had grown larger. I’d also heard a new one had erupted on Columbia Mountain just east of Columbia Falls at the northern end of the Swan Mountain Range. They had labeled it the Columbia Fire. I knew this would be the one closest to us. There had been talk of a mass evacuation of West Glacier and the entire canyon as well as the North Fork area because of the Trail Creek Fire. I wondered if they had started the process.
I paced while Jeremy colored on the floor, but when he finally stood up and stretched, I stopped and turned to him. “Jeremy,” I said.
“Yes?” he answered, and I felt relieved for a response at all. It seemed like a small victory under the circumstances.
“Have you had anything to eat or drink?”
He nodded. “He brought me some things.”
“Enough?”
Jeremy looked in the direction where Combs still prayed. Even though we couldn’t see him, we could hear his muttering, low-pitched and surreal. I could see that he wasn’t sure whether to turn on this strange man who had been his only link to survival. I could also see he had glanced up at me occasionally, trying to decide whether he could trust me.
In the course of only four days, Jeremy had come to see Combs as his caretaker on some level. On another level, he was wiser than that and old enough to understand his situation.
“Jeremy,” I said again. He looked at me, his eyes large. “I’d really like to get us out of here. Is there anything you can tell me that would help me help us to do that? Anything at all? Like, do you know if he has a gun?”
Jeremy shook his head. “I haven’t seen one.”
“Okay, how about food? How often does he usually bring you food and water, and how does he give it to you?”
Jeremy began to explain the routine—that Combs brought him food and water usually only once a day, sometime in the morning. He told me that he usually brought it in a bag, with cups and plastic utensils.
“Has he fed you today?”
“No, he didn’t come today. I don’t know why.” Jeremy slumped back down on his sleeping bag. He cheeks were hollowed and he had dark circles under his eyes.
I went and sat next to him. I knew why. Combs had been hung up at his church and couldn’t get here. I wondered if he’d leave to go get Jeremy dinner, or if it didn’t matter to him at this point. I glanced at the candle burning. There was only about two inches of it left. “Jeremy,” I whispered. “I know this man. I work with his daughter. I had no idea he was like this, but I’m hoping, since I know him, that I can talk some sense into him.”
Jeremy looked at me and frowned, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “You won’t be able to do that. He’s”—he shook his head more frantically—“he’s not . . . he’s not right. He . . .” His voice faded.
“He what?” I said softly.
“In the parking lot when we got here, I tried to get out of the truck, but he grabbed me, tied me up. He held a knife to my neck. . . .” Jeremy’s face started to crinkle and tears pooled in his brown eyes. “He said he’d hurt me and my family if I screamed, but then he kept saying how sorry he was for what he had to do. And he keeps telling me I’m special. He calls me Isaac, and says that he needs to prepare me for the big day. I’m too afraid to ask him what that means.”
“You poor thing.” My throat felt very dry. This boy had been separated from his family for four days now, unable to leave this cage, alone for hours at a time, perhaps every night, all night in this frightening place. I couldn’t imagine how hungry and terrified he’d been, how forsaken he felt. Once the seed of abandonment sprouted inside you, its ugly flowers bloomed through your entire being. “You’ve been in here the whole time?”
He nodded, and my words made something he’d been bottling up erupt. He dropped his face into his hands and began to sob. A pained choke burst forth from him. I put my hand on his back, but before I knew it, Combs was at the cage, yelling at us.
“What have you done to him? What have you done? Don’t touch him. Get away from him.” He had a black stick like a battering ram and pounded the side of the cage with it. The loud clanking of the metal rattled throughout the vast, darkening building.
I stood up quickly and moved away from Jeremy. I could see him try to swallow his cries, his face contorted with sorrow and fear. I backed closer to the vat, my hurt arm throbbing and my head spinning. I still hadn’t recovered from being hit earlier, and I felt as if I might faint.
Combs glared at me, his eyes narrowing. He pointed the black stick at me. His other hand clenched tightly into a fist. “You will not hurt him. You will not hurt Isaac. He is our son. He belongs to God. Do you understand? Are you not the lamb I thought you might be?”
I stared at him, speechles
s, unable to think of anything to say. I felt like I might crumble to the floor, so I reached out and steadied myself against the vat. He continued to glare icily at me, trying to read me with a confused, angry expression. I felt as if time had slowed and I were in a movie or a dream. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of his veined temple and his sinewy neck glistened. Finally he dropped his arm with the cudgel by his side and marched away.
My chest heaved. Jeremy had moved to the corner and was crouching again, his head resting on folded arms. I went over to him and slowly knelt too. After a moment, after my heart rate began to slow again, I reached out and touched his upper arm. His skin was clammy and cold. The reality that this innocent boy had no one but me to help him froze me with fear. I wondered how many times Combs had lost his temper with him over the recent days.
I glanced at the candle, slowly burning down. I didn’t understand how I’d gotten to this place. My motto had always been “Do no harm,” to work humbly toward the greater good, but always behind the scenes, in a laboratory or behind a white Nomex suit, and steadily, in small increments, make a difference.
Whatever I needed to do to get us out of here now would not be behind the scenes, nor would it be incremental. I had to think of something big, and I had to think of it quickly. Terror swept through me like freezing water—primitive and visceral. It felt capable of knocking me down, stealing my breath and drowning me like a wooden boat sunken in the cold, frothing sea.
I swallowed my fright. “It’s going to be okay,” I said to Jeremy. “I’m not sure how, but I’m going to get you out of here.”
28
* * *
Monty
ONCE WE GOT the go-ahead from Ali, we found an unlocked door at the back of the house and entered through it to the kitchen. I told Ken I’d take the basement and asked him to search all the rooms upstairs.
We both put on gloves, and I went down a narrow stairwell off another kitchen door and hit the light switch at the base. A bare bulb dangled from the ceiling’s center and illuminated typical storage items: boxes, plastic bins, an old file cabinet, a folding card table and chairs. A used washing machine and dryer stood on the opposite side of the room. I opened the top drawer of the file cabinet and quickly fingered through the files. Years’ worth of bank statements and utility and mortgage bills clogged the manila folders. I searched for bills that might indicate whether Combs had another property besides the house, but didn’t see any. The other drawers were filled with similar statements, articles on pastoral duties, and other generic forms.
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