The migraine began to recede.
[64]
D.C. pulled the Lumina into the parking lot of the Davol Research Institute and found an empty space not far from the front entrance. The Institute was set back several hundred feet from the street, secluded behind a wall of dogwood, European white birch, and sumac. D.C. climbed out, stretched, and wondered if the morning overcast was going to burn off before the afternoon rolled around.
The building was a lone wolf, located on the outskirts of town, not far from the airport. It had been built in the early '80s and remodeled once in 1994. Three stories high, steel beams, dark-gray reflective glass, it was modern and brooding and a marked contrast to its natural surroundings. The area had once been mostly farm land, but gradually it had begun to give way to commercial zoning as the airport expanded and brought more people into the region. Half a mile down the road, the American Fixture Company had built their headquarters in 1988. They remained to this day the nearest neighbor.
Inside, the lobby was open and breezy, with a marble tile floor. There were two elevators off to the left, and a grand stairway under a chandelier on the right. D.C. walked past the receptionist's desk without stopping. She looked up and smiled. “Good morning, sir.”
“Morning, Jenny.”
He took the stairs two at a time, adding a little pull to the effort by way of the mahogany banister. At the top landing, he turned left and made his way down a short corridor to the conference room at the end. Mitch was already there, waiting.
D.C. closed the door and leaned against it, his hands behind his back for support. “Is he back in the fold?”
“As of last night.”
“Good. And his mother?”
“We set her loose.”
“Any problems?”
Mitch, who had been leaning back in his chair, with one leg crossed over the other, sat forward. “Nothing we didn't handle.”
“Nothing like what?”
“There was an accident. The boy grabbed hold of the steering wheel. The car flipped. Anderson didn't make it. Zimmerman and Wright were banged up pretty good, but they're gonna be all right.”
“And the boy?”
“He broke his arm.”
“Christ. I told you we needed to keep a low profile on this thing.”
“Hey, I had the clean up crew there in fifteen minutes.” Mitch climbed out of his chair, and paced back and forth in front of the line of windows on the north side. You could see the faint background of the distant mountains behind him. “They got in and out in no time. Except for a handful of bystanders, it never happened. No one else knows about it.”
“Was the Knight woman injured?”
“She had some cuts and bruises, mostly around her eyes and scalp.” He paused and made a sour face. “We had to sedate her. I told you that would be a possibility, remember?”
“Yeah, don't worry about it. As long as there's no chance of her tracing anything back to us.”
“No, we're clean on this one.”
“What about the others?”
“They're already out of the area.”
“And Anderson?”
“Clean up took care of him.”
D.C. nodded. “I want you to stick around for awhile.” He pulled a white business envelope out of his jacket and tossed it across the table. “A little something for your troubles.”
Mitch picked it up. He tapped the edge a couple of times, nodding and looking undecided. Then he opened the envelope and fanned through the bills. “How long?”
“Until things settle down. That a problem?”
“Not for me.”
“I want you to keep an eye on the woman.”
“Mrs. Knight?”
“Yeah.” D.C. stared absently out the window. He should have been feeling a sense of relief, but he wasn't. Instead, it was more a sense of having awakened a sleeping beast. Things were going to be tricky for awhile. “And be careful about it, all right? The only thing more dangerous than getting between a grizzly and its cub is getting between a mother and her child. She's not going to let go of this for awhile, not without a fight. Remember that. Never underestimate an angry mother.”
Mitch nodded, noncommittally. “Anything else?”
“Just keep an eye on her.”
“You got it.”
[65]
Walt answered the door, and was both surprised and relieved by what he found.
It was around one in the afternoon, and he had spent most of last night and all of this morning puttering around the apartment, trying to keep himself busy while he waited for Teri to call. Waiting wasn't a far cry from dying, he had decided. They could both be agonizing, and they both involved a painful degree of uncertainty. It was the uncertainty that annoyed him the most.
Sleep had come a little after two last night, while he watched the end of a movie called Don't Talk to Strangers. He didn't remember how the movie had ended. In fact, he didn't remember much about it at all. There had been other things occupying his thoughts. More specifically, he had been worried about Teri and the boy.
Something had happened.
Something terrible.
He awakened several hours after nodding off, the television still flickering its images across the living room walls. An infomercial, something having to do with a super absorbent mop, was at the midpoint and an 800 number was on the screen, with a dollar amount in smaller type in the upper right-hand corner. Walt came awake, one eye open, then rolled over and drifted off again. It had been like that all night.
Teri still hadn't called by the time he finally crawled out of bed, a little after ten this morning. He had decided to give her until two. Then he was going to take to the streets looking for her. Waiting was a death of its own, and he had struggled with it all night. That was long enough. He needed to do something, anything, to make the waiting less painful.
Though that was all mute now.
Teri was standing in the doorway.
She wasn't alone. She was in the company of two police officers, neither of whom Walt recognized. It had been nearly three years now since he had last worked for the department. Situations changed. No doubt some officers had retired and headed for the countryside. And others had surely come on as new recruits. Nothing in life was ever static. So it wasn't surprising that he didn't recognize these two.
“Mr. Travis?”
“Teri? Are you all right?”
“They've got him,” she said, her voice caught between something of a whisper and something hollow. A white bandage slanted across her forehead, dotted by a red spot where blood had soaked through. Both cheeks were spattered with cuts and scratches. Thick, dark circles underlined her eyes, giving her what Walt's aunt had once referred to as “raccoon eyes.”
“They've got Gabe.”
She pulled away from the female office, and fell into Walt's arms. No tears. Just a need to be held by someone she trusted.
“It's all right,” he said. “We'll get him back.”
He helped her into the living room, onto the couch, and brought a pillow out of the bedroom for her. He did this while trying to calm the ugly self-accusations tearing at his insides. If only he hadn't been late yesterday. If only he had left a few minutes earlier, just a few minutes, just to be on the safe side.
Teri closed her eyes.
Walt went back to the officers, who were waiting patiently in the doorway.
“Is she going to be all right?” the woman asked.
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Has this ever happened before, sir?”
“No, of course not.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Why?”
“No reason, sir.” But of course, you didn't ask questions like that for no reason. “It's just that we found her this morning, walking along Locust Street, looking pretty banged up. We thought she might have been assaulted or something, but she kept insisting that her son had been kidnapped.”
“Yes, last night, apparently. I w
as supposed to meet them at the plaza near City Hall, but I got there late, and they were already gone.”
“And by them you mean?”
“Teri and her son.”
“Gabriel Knight?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever met her son, Mr. Travis?”
“Yes, of course.”
The woman glanced down at her notebook again. “Gabriel Knight? Is that right?”
“Yes,” Walt said, instantly wishing he could catch it and reel it back in. Apparently, they had believed Teri when she had told them Gabe had been kidnapped. They had believed her, and they had followed up, and they had come across some interesting background information.
“Are you aware that she reported him missing almost ten years ago?”
Yes, of course, Walt thought. But he only thought it. He didn't say it. Because if he had said it, it would only have served up more questions. And then questions on top of questions. And eventually it would have all lead back to how he had worked for the department, and how he had worked on the Gabriel Knight case. And how, my dear man, did he intend to explain all that?
“No, I wasn't aware of that.”
“I think you might consider getting your friend some counseling, Mr. Travis.”
“Yes. I'm sorry. I'll mention it to her.”
“You do that.”
The officer presented him with a business card and suggested he call if he needed anything else. Walt accepted it without comment. He turned it over several times in his hands, glancing only cursorily at the name—Officer Debra J. Pettitt—before thanking her for her trouble and tucking it into his pocket. Neither of them carried any false illusions. The card would be lucky to make it past the first trash can.
By the time Walt made it back to the living room, Teri had already drifted off to sleep. He brought a blanket out from the linen closet, unfolded it, and covered her. Then he plopped down in the chair across the room and watched her. He watched every breath go in, every breath come out, and he promised himself he would never let another bad thing happen to her.
[66]
Paranoia was new to Michael Knight.
That thought came to him in crystal-clear clarity as he walked off the plane and crossed the tarmac to the airport terminal. Just inside the doorway, a small crowd of people had gathered, waiting to greet arriving friends and relatives. He looked at each of them, directly, in the eyes, wondering if maybe this one might be waiting for him, if maybe that one might have a gun.
Paranoia was not comforting. It did not make for polite conversation with strangers. But ever since he jumped the backyard fence back in Tennessee and headed down a side-street in as stealthily a manner as he could muster, the paranoia had been following him relentlessly just the same. Somewhere behind him, sitting in a van, people had been watching the house.
Were they still watching? Michael wondered now, as he passed through the crowd and searched for an Avis or a Hertz or a Budget Rent-A-Car. Were they still watching the house or were they now watching him?
He had spent that first night in a hotel, trying to decide if Teri was drawing him into one of her “tricks of the mind” as he had come to thing of them, or if through some incomprehensible quirk of events, Gabe really was back, alive and well, and not a day older. It had been another shade of the paranoia, he supposed now, looking back on it. In the end, paranoia or no, Michael had decided to do something he hadn't done in years. He had decided to trust his instincts. After all, what did he have to lose? Even if it was all an elaborate fantasy playing out in Teri's head, at least he could put his mind at ease. Maybe, at the same time, he could even aid Teri in finding the help she needed. He owed her that much.
The next day, he called into the office sick. Janyce, his secretary, had gone over the week's appointments with him and they had shifted things around to the point where he felt he could probably steal a week without any major projects suffering.
“I hope you're feeling better soon,” Janyce had said in the wrap-up.
“Me, too,” Michael responded.
“If anything should come up--?”
“You can reach me here at home,” Michael said, surprised at how quickly the lie had come to mind, how easily it had tumbled out of his lips.
He hadn't had the same success in getting a flight out of town, though. That had been anything but easy. The attendants of the only major carrier had been on strike for nearly two weeks, and the day before, the mechanics union had joined them. Everything at the airport had ground to a standstill. It had taken him another day to arrange for a commuter flight to take him to Chicago. From there, he caught a flight to San Francisco and from San Francisco – where he had wasted another four hours – he finally caught a second commuter flight, this one into Northern California.
And here, at long last, he was.
[67]
Gabe woke up disoriented and feeling lousy. He had drifted in and out of wakefulness for hours, only dimly aware of his surroundings or the new cast on his arm. What had happened yesterday seemed faraway and dream-like. He remembered the accident, however. And he remembered seeing his mother in the back window of the other car. The expression on her face had been something like that of a woman being burned at the stake. It had been that horrible. He didn't think he would ever forget that image of her.
He sat up and saw that he was alone. Someone had dimmed the lights, and a dull hazy cast hovered over the room like a late morning fog. He had been placed in what appeared to be the middle bed in a line of maybe ten or twelve that stretched from one end of the cavernous room to the other. More important, though, he remembered this place. He had been here before. This was where he had found himself after the bike accident, the one that hadn't been an accident at all, according to his mother.
Gabe fell back against the pillow, suddenly aware of the plaster cast wrapped around the lower part of his right arm, between the wrist and the elbow. It smelled chalky, a little musty, not unlike the plaster leaf molds he had sometimes made at summer camp. There wasn't a mark on the cast, not a smudge of dirt, a slight indentation.
In the second grade, he had bent a finger back while playing wall ball and everyone had thought it was broken because it had swelled up so badly. Then the x-rays had come back and the doctor said it was just a strain and not to worry. But this was the first time Gabe had actually broken a bone.
He pulled the covers back and climbed out of bed. Someone had taken his clothes while he had been sleeping. He was dressed in his under shorts now, and a hospital gown. Cool air slipped through the long slit in the back and whirled around his legs like cotton candy spinning around the inside of a glass box. He reached back and tried to gather in the flaps as he followed a pattern of diamonds, black on white, across the floor to the only door exiting the room.
The door was painted a dull navy gray. It was made of metal, and there was a small observation window just above adult eye level. On his tiptoes, it was still too high to see through.
Gabe gave the handle a jiggle. It was sloppy loose, with enough play to make him think it might fall off in his hands. But the door didn't open. Apparently, it was locked from the other side. They had kept it locked the last time he had been here, too. Except when Miss Churchill was in the room.
“Hello?”
No response.
“Anybody out there?”
Another jiggle of the handle, and a lonely echo came back from the other side, like a ghost trying to tap out a message in Morse Code.
“Hello? Anybody?”
Gabe leaned against the door a moment, frustration building, and when he pushed away, he slammed the heel of his foot into the metal surface. It made a hollow, reverberating sound. He kicked it again, again with the flat of his foot, again with no response from the other side.
After a while longer, he retreated back to his bed.
He sat there, brooding, and staring endlessly at the door.
Sooner or later it had to open.
[68]
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“He keeps that up and next thing you know they're gonna have to put a cast on his foot,” the man said lightheartedly. He was sitting in a small room, with a bank of video monitors across the wall in front of him. The lights were out. The screens cast a dull, gray mood into the room. Work shifts usually ran a maximum of four hours, anything longer and the cast of the screens had a tendency to wear heavily on the eyes. When the eyes got tired, the mind got tired, and that was when you missed things.
“They oughta cast his whole damn body,” his partner said, placing an eight of hearts on a nine of spades and turning up his next card. It was a king, and there was nowhere to play it, so he buried it in the middle of the deck and turned up the next card. This one was a little better. A seven of spades.
“How do they do that?”
“What?”
“Cast your whole body? I mean, what do you do if you have to take a leak?”
“Catheter,” his partner said, without looking up. He cleared a column and went searching through the deck for a king to drop there.
“Ugh!”
“You said it, man.”
On the monitors, the boy plopped back into bed, looking restless and unhappy. He was fully awake now, and unless they gave him something to help him sleep again, he was going to be pacing like a caged animal the rest of the day.
“I think we're going to have to order up some nourishment for the little guy.”
“You better clear it first.”
Off to the left, the only door leading into the small room swung open and D.C. poked his head in. He was a man who liked to keep an eye on things, a coach who would much rather play the game himself if he were still as sharp as he had been when he was younger. Not to imply that he was old. That would be misleading. He was in his late thirties by appearances, his hair dark brown, his eyes intolerant, his face a mask that gave away nothing. Beneath the facade, he was a much older man, intelligent and no-nonsense, often cynical.
“How's the kid doing?”
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