He made a fast tour through the other rooms, lingering only in the bedroom and then for just a minute or so, all without touching anything. Back in the living room, he said, “Sorry about this. But I guess you understand my reasons.”
“I’d’ve done the same in your place.”
“Situations like this…”
“Just find her, okay? That’s all that matters.”
“Do our best. Might take most of the day to cover all the timber up along the ridge. You’ll be here?”
“I don’t know where I’ll be. You’ve got my number.”
“You look pretty worn out. Better get some rest.”
“Sure. Rest.”
Broxmeyer seemed to want to say something else, chewed his lip instead, and finally turned on his heel and left me alone. I stayed put until I heard the sound of his cruiser heading down the driveway. Then I went into the kitchen, slaked my thirst with a couple of glasses of ice water from the fridge. From there into the bathroom, where I washed my hands and splashed cold water on my face. The image that stared back at me from the mirror was that of a lookalike stranger: drawn, hollow-eyed, tattooed with an assortment of nicks and scratches. A face to scare little children with.
Children. Emily.
Thank God she wasn’t here to go through what I was going through. What would I say to her if Kerry wasn’t found or wasn’t found alive? So much tragedy in her young life already. Birth father and mother both victims of violent deaths. And the time in Daly City, shortly after she’d come to live with us, when a jammed pistol was all that had saved me from a violent end … she’d been there that night, and the narrow escape had freaked her out for weeks afterward. No telling how devastating an effect losing her adoptive mother would have on her.
Yes, and there was Cybil, too. Pushing ninety, fragile health, the two of them so reliant on each other. Lose her daughter, her only child, and the shock was liable to end her life—
For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Cut out that kind of thinking!
I went back into the bedroom. The burbling ringtone on my phone brought me up short, started my heart racing. But it was only the real estate agent, Sam Budlong. He’d just heard the news, he was so sorry, was there anything he could do? I asked him if he knew of anybody who had reason to be hanging out afternoons on the old logging road off Skyview Drive; there was a little silence before he said no in a puzzled voice, but he didn’t ask why I wanted to know. Instead, he said he hoped my wife would be found safe, and paused, and added another hope—that this unfortunate incident wouldn’t change our feelings about buying a second home in Green Valley. I hung up on him. Bastard. That had been the real reason for his call, not to offer aid or express sympathy.
What I wanted to do then was to get in the car and start another canvass of area residents, this time to ask the same question I’d asked Budlong, and one more: Had anybody seen a vehicle in the vicinity of the logging road yesterday afternoon? The search party was not going to find Kerry anywhere in the woods up there. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself they would, I couldn’t make myself believe it. What I’d felt on that road was neither an irrational fear nor a figment of an overwrought imagination.
But weariness held me in the house. I was in no shape to go anywhere without some rest first.
Dark in the bedroom with the curtains closed over the windows. I stripped off torn and dirty and sweat-soiled clothing, stretched out with an arm draped over my eyes. I felt so damn alone. And plagued, too, by a feeling that Kerry and I must be the victims of some monstrous, long-term cosmic conspiracy. Paranoid reaction, but justified. How else to explain that both of us now, husband and wife, had been subjected to separate kinds of kidnap horror in the same general part of the state? Crazy coincidence? What were the odds?
Eventually, the warmth and the darkness dragged me into the kind of sleep that lies just below the surface of awareness. Kerry’s face haunted a ragged series of druglike dreams, so vivid that I once jerked awake, thinking for a few heart-pounding seconds that she’d come back, she was in the room with me. I tried to keep awake, but my eyes wouldn’t stay open. And I drifted back into the half-world of peripheral consciousness and streaming dream images.
A burning thirst and a swollen bladder pulled me out of it. Another dousing with cold water chased away the sleep fuzz. My body ached and there were itching red rashes on both arms—poison oak, probably—but I didn’t feel quite so beat. My watch told me how long I’d been down and out: more than three hours. Almost one-thirty now.
The silence in the house seemed deafening.
I checked the voice mail on my cell, even though I was sure the ringtone would have wakened me if there’d been a call. Then I put on clean clothes—I couldn’t talk to people looking like a refugee from a hobo camp—and ran a comb through my hair and hurried out into the midday heat.
* * *
For more than four hours I drove around and around and around, showing Kerry’s photograph and asking my questions. Residents of a dozen or more houses on Ridge Hill Road and Skyview Drive. Campers and RVers at the campsite. Picnickers in the park down on the valley road. Shopkeepers and customers in the stores in Six Pines. Men and women stopped at random on the sidewalks.
Nobody had anything to tell me.
Sorry, can’t help you. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The only part of the valley I avoided was the logging road. If the search team had found anything, I’d have been notified right away. And the entire time, the phone was a silent weight in my shirt pocket.
The heat, the constant frustration finally took their toll. I drove back to the house, where I sat limp and listless on one of the chaise lounges in the porch shade, nursing a cold beer and fending off mosquitoes. Trying not to think too much, worry too much—like trying not to breathe.
Broxmeyer showed up at 6:55.
It was cooler then with a light breeze, the tops of the nearby pines gold-lit and the shadows among their trunks as black as ink. Fading sunlight threw glints like mica particles off the cruiser’s top as it turned in off Ridge Hill Road and climbed up into the parking area below. Going slow, which confirmed what the cell phone silence had already told me. The deputy’s grave expression and his first words when he joined me on the porch were an anticlimax.
“I wish I had good news,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t. The searchers didn’t find her.”
“Or any sign of her.”
“Not yet. I’m sorry.”
Sorry again. But sorry was a meaningless word. As Kerry had said to me once, quoting one of her agency’s clients, sorry don’t feed the bulldog.
I said, “What now?”
“The search will go on tomorrow morning.”
“In other wooded areas, you mean.”
“Everywhere within a three- to four-mile radius.”
“You’re not going to find her that way.”
Broxmeyer took off his cap, sleeved sweat from his forehead, and ran fingers through his lanky blond hair. Delaying his response so he could frame it in his mind first. “You still think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Up there on the logging road.”
“That’s what I think. What do you think now?”
“The same as before. Possible, but unlikely.”
“So you don’t intend to investigate.”
He was uncomfortable now. I hadn’t invited him to sit down, and he didn’t take the liberty on his own; instead, he moved over to the railing, leaned a hip against it. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Those tire impressions are too faint to make identifiable casts. There’s just no way to determine what kind of vehicle made them, let alone who it belongs to.”
“You could check on known sex offenders in the general area.”
“I could, and if I had reason to, I would. But there aren’t many, and as far as I know, none has a violent history.”
“As far as you know.”
“Look,” Broxmeyer said, “nobody guil
ty of the type of crime you’re suggesting is going to admit it. I’d have to have some kind of strong evidence to do anything more than ask a few polite questions. You were a cop once, you know how the system works.”
Or doesn’t work. “It isn’t the questions you ask,” I said, “it’s the kind of answers you get. Most felons aren’t very smart—they make little slips, show their guilt in other ways.”
His mouth tightened a little; he didn’t like being lectured. “Let’s say your idea has some validity. The person or persons responsible don’t necessarily have to be sex offenders, or have a record of any kind. Could be anyone who lives in the valley or is here on a visit, somebody who acted on a crazy impulse. How do you propose I go about finding a needle in a haystack?”
“By doing what I did this afternoon. Legwork. Look for somebody who saw something, knows something, and move on from there.”
“But you didn’t find anybody, did you?”
“No, but I’m only one man.”
“That’s right,” Broxmeyer said, “and I’m only one deputy. We’re short-staffed in Six Pines and the rest of the sheriff’s department … damn budget cuts. Fourth of July weekend coming up and that means drunks, fights, idiots misusing fireworks—extra work for everybody. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t spare the time or the manpower to mount an investigation based on a distraught husband’s unsubstantiated theory about his missing wife.”
“And you don’t want to.”
“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.” He pushed off the railing, slapped his hat back on and straightened the brim. “All I can do is what I said I would … keep a team of volunteers out searching for as long as it takes to find your wife. You’ll just have to rely on us, be patient. Okay?”
I kept silent.
He said “Okay” to himself this time, then moved on down the steps and got into his cruiser and drove off with a little more speed than he’d used arriving.
Rely on us, be patient. Bullshit. The danger to Kerry was real, her life in jeopardy, and urgent action was necessary.
I thought about calling the FBI. Yeah, sure—another exercise in futility. I had no contacts in the Bureau, and contrary to a television show like Without a Trace, the FBI has no task force that deals with missing persons cases unless there is substantial evidence that a kidnapping has taken place and federal laws violated. The chances that I could convince an agent to come up from Sacramento were slim and none; with the threats of homegrown, as well as foreign, terrorism and the social and political unrest that seemed to be amping up, manpower in the Bureau was stretched thin, and low-priority cases received short shrift as a result. What I’d get was a polite listen on the phone and the same kind of brush-off I’d gotten from Broxmeyer.
Forget the FBI for now, forget the county law. But the conversation with the deputy had convinced me that I could not go on depending on hope, strangers, myself alone. I needed help, which meant it had to come from a known quarter I could rely on. And I needed it fast.
12
KERRY
Sometime during the morning or afternoon, she managed to free her hands.
She no longer had any sense of time. At intervals it seemed compressed, sluggish, and then it would expand in jumps like a defective clock. The light that filtered in through chinks in the wall boarding, at the edges of the shutter over the single window, was no help: there wasn’t enough of it to do more than put a faint sheen on the murkiness. Objects in the shed, the low ceiling, were shrouded in shadow. The gathering heat was the only indicator that the day was moving forward at all. Smotheringly hot in this prison, but it didn’t bring an ooze of sweat from her pores the way it had yesterday. So dried out now, she could no longer produce enough saliva to ease the burning in her mouth and throat. Her thirst was almost unbearable.
But none of that kept her from sawing at the duct tape binding her wrists. She’d squirmed her body painfully from one end of the long bench to the other, in the hope that the other support leg would have a rougher edge. If it did, she couldn’t tell; she had almost no feeling left in her hands or arms. The sensors in her back told her when she had herself positioned, then she’d begun the long, arduous process. Rock forward and back, slowly, scraping the tape against the wood until she could no longer stand the strain; rest for a while and then start in again.
The task seemed impossible. More than once, she came close to abandoning it. But what else could she do, trapped in here, helpless? Wait passively for her captor to return and try to talk him out of killing her? No. She wasn’t made that way. All her life she’d been a doer, a fighter: never give in, never give up. The more difficult the task, the more determined she became. That wasn’t going to change now. Her outrage was greater than her frustration; so was her will to survive.
Now and then she prayed. She’d never been particularly religious, but she did believe in God; and if others believed in the power of prayer, then maybe there was something to it. She’d led a reasonably moral life, a more Christian life than so many of the self-important, hate-preaching hypocrites on the Far Right; maybe God, if He was merciful after all, would take pity on her.
The rest of the time she focused her mind on freeing herself. Her thoughts had grown sluggish anyway, and thinking only led to anxiety, a return of fear, and the crimping edges of panic.
The heavy rasp of her breathing kept her from hearing the duct tape finally rip and split. She didn’t realize she was free, or almost free, until she leaned forward to rest again, flexing her back muscles forward to ease the strain, and her arms bowed outward slightly and she had just enough feeling left in her wrists for an awareness of the tape’s pull on her skin.
A kind of dull elation moved through her. She didn’t have enough strength to tear loose the rest of the tape, and her fingers were useless. All she could do was keep flexing her back muscles, try to work enough feeling down through her arms so she could widen the spread of hands and wrists. It took a long time … bunches of minutes broken up by rest periods, an hour or more for all she knew. Slowly, slowly, the tape pulled and scraped, and there was another ripping sound and a faint stinging sensation on the back of her left hand. And both hands dropped apart and she was free.
Kerry wiggled away from the support, then over onto her side, and then her stomach with arms now splayed out on either side of her body. Still no feeling in either of them or in her hands except a residue of the stinging. She lay there breathing in the stifling air, willing her blood to circulate. More passing minutes strung together like links in an extended chain. Then the pain came, tiny prickles of it at first, gradually increasing until it began to radiate up and down both arms and in her fingers.
The pain brought on an impulse to weep, but her tear ducts were as dry as her mouth and throat. She rolled over onto her back, attempted to lift her arms. Not enough strength yet. She lay still, looking up at the shadowed ceiling where a huge cobweb hung from one of the beams, working now to flex her fingers. One twitched and moved and ached, then another and another, until she could feel them all, clumsy things as useless as sausages.
When the tingling and throbbing began to modulate from sharp pain to dull ache, she was able to raise her arms off the canvas and onto her bare thighs. She struggled into a sitting position, sat staring at her hands. God. They looked, as well as felt, swollen. Torn strips of duct tape still clung to both; blood streaks dried and fresh marked cuts, scrapes, welts all along her wrists and forearms. Again she felt the impulse to cry, but it lasted no more than a few seconds.
She made an effort to strip off the tape binding her ankles. No good. Fingers still too sore, too tender to grasp and pull. She lay flat again to ease the cramped hurt in her back. Flexed the fingers, chafed her wrists as circulation gradually improved—
Thrumming noise from outside: the link on the pit bull’s lead sliding along the ground cable as the animal broke into a sudden run away from the shed. A couple of seconds later, the dog began a furious barking.
&n
bsp; Balfour, coming back?
Oh, God, no! Not yet, not while her hands were still useless, her feet still bound.
She sat up again, managed to catch hold of a corner of the canvas, hang on and pull it up over her legs. Lost the grip, regained it, dragged the canvas to her waist.
The dog’s barking tapered off into sporadic yips and whines. Kerry sat motionless, straining to hear. The animal wasn’t running anymore, either.
She clutched at the heavy canvas, her weight on one hip and her eyes on the door. If Balfour had returned, she’d hear him in time to roll herself into the canvas before he unlocked the door and came inside. And then pray he wouldn’t uncover her the way he had this morning.
Quiet outside now. She held her breath.
Silence.
Not Balfour, not yet. Something had spooked the dog, that was all—a wild animal or stray cat, a phantom sound or movement. It didn’t take much to set off a beast like that.
Kerry twisted free of the canvas. The tingling in her fingers was pins and needles now, a good sign. They still felt big and clumsy when she set to picking at the tape around her ankles; it took patience, concentration to scratch an edge loose, pinch it between thumb and forefinger. She didn’t have enough strength yet to tear it, but she found she could unwind it in little jerks—an agonizingly slow process that left her weak and a little dizzy when she finally stripped the last of it off.
Her hands were better by then; she sat rubbing the numbness out of her ankles, her swollen feet. Another long, slow process before returning circulation brought shoots of pain, then the tingling and the pins-and-needles prickling.
She had no idea how long she worked before she was ready to try standing. Stop time, lost time. Awareness of nothing but the task of restoring her body to a functional state, and the occasional sound from outside that froze her until she was sure it had no meaning.
Hellbox (Nameless Detective) Page 9