by Saul Black
A wood pigeon exploded from the branches above her and went rattling away.
“I know where you are,” he called, in the tone of a kid playing hide-and-seek. “I know where you are.”
Cassie could hear the new calm purpose in him as he waded through the undergrowth. He hadn’t seen her, but he was coming the right way. He was coming straight toward her. The choice: stay where she was and pray that he missed her, or run again while he was still far enough away.
Run, Cass. You can run. It’s all still there in your legs.
She wasn’t aware of making the choice. Just found herself moving, her legs propelling her downhill, bearing right to where the trees looked closer packed. She’d gone no more than thirty paces before the ground got suddenly steep. She couldn’t slow herself. Her own momentum had become her enemy. She flung out a hand to grab at the trunk of a tree, but she was moving too fast. Her weight carried her, stumbling and flailing, through a deeper bank of ferns, and she saw the drop-off too late. An outcrop of mossy rock with a fall of maybe fifteen feet. The whole hillside, she realized, was a series of giant steps. There was the sound of running water somewhere far below. She crashed onto her side, but she was still slithering toward the drop-off. She grabbed at the ferns, felt them slip through her wet grasp. A moment of seeing, like a pretty snapshot above her, lime-green leaves against the blue sky.
Then something hit her hard in the small of her back and pitched her, winded, over the edge.
30
Valerie watched her sister help the old blind man, who was neither old nor blind, into her car, pull out of the lot, and drive away.
Rite Aid and Met Foods had external cameras that covered half the lot, and since she knew the time Cassie had left the drop-in it took her less than an hour to find what she needed. Another hour for McLuhan’s FBI elves to catch the last sight of the blue Mazda on street surveillance, turning east off Mission Boulevard at 2:49 P.M. And that was all there was. In the hours that had elapsed since then they could be more than two hundred miles away.
What’s she going to look like the next time you see her—if there is a next time?
Valerie was a numb blaze. The central certainty said she was doing everything she could do and that it wasn’t enough and that Cassie would suffer and die if she wasn’t dead already and if she was that would be just another thing that happened in the world because at the back of it all was nothing, or if not nothing, then a God with a smile like the Katherine Glass smile—which might as well be nothing. This certainty was a quiet, looped statement in Valerie’s head or soul, a nucleus of cold understanding. But around it the human habits swarmed. There had to be something else she could do. There wasn’t. There had to be. There wasn’t. The desperation just expanded, indefinitely, demanding that she find a way—any way—to translate the screaming need for action into action itself. Do something. Do something.
She’d seen it countless times in the families of the missing. How much could you pace the floor, wring your hands, stare at the phone, stay awake, drive around searching until your eyes started playing tricks on you? How long could you exist at the extreme edge of yourself, in the torment of knowing that every passing moment might be a moment of agony for the person you loved? It was worse than sitting by a hospital bed watching someone being taken from you by sickness. At least in that case you were with them, you were there, to bear witness if nothing else. At least in that case the sufferer wasn’t alone, and the proof that you could do no more than you were doing was in front of your own eyes, beyond argument or doubt. This was worse. The not knowing was worse. The not knowing gave your imagination and guilt infinite material to work with. There was, literally, no end to the horrors you could conjure.
There was no “John Hendricks” on Faber Street. Of course, although McLuhan insisted on checking out the two dozen listed individuals of that name in San Francisco who at least fit the age range. (Half of them were over sixty-five.) Valerie had brought Bree in to work with a police artist on a representation of “John Hendricks” (Valerie’s own memory of the guy was vague, beyond the beard and glasses and cap) and the resulting image had gone out to agencies and press.
She didn’t sleep and she didn’t eat and she didn’t go home. For the twenty-four hours that followed Cassie’s disappearance neither (with the exception of Sadie Hurst, whose husband was off work with a broken leg) did anyone else. There was nothing to do but keep going over the material and willing it to lead them somewhere new. She was aware of her colleagues not saying anything to her. They knew that anything they said would be the wrong thing. You didn’t try to offer comfort because some things defied comfort. Instead the station’s volume went down around her. Death was with her, wherever she went. The living knew their weakness in the face of it.
Nick stayed close to her, took a laptop and set it up next to her desk and began working his way through the case files. No one said anything about that, either. Deerholt stuck his head around the door, noted it, withdrew. There were the protocols and there were the brutal exceptions. Valerie’s mother stayed at Cassie’s house with Owen and the kids.
The kids.
Owen had told them Cassie was visiting with Aunt Valerie. Something had come up, he told them—a grown-up thing—and their mom had gone to help her sister. What grown-up thing? Jack had wanted to know. Something you wouldn’t understand, you’re too young. It’s no big deal. It’ll just be for a day or two. Vincent, six, had swallowed it, but Jack, eight, was sharper. When is she coming back? Is she sleeping there? Owen had watched his son refiguring the presence of the uniformed officers. The dots weren’t connected yet but there was a lot of thinking going on behind the dark eyes. How long before they’d have to tell the kids the truth? Two days? Three? A week? Valerie’s mother was a liability. She was holding it together for the sake of her grandchildren but she could go at any moment. On the other hand, taking care of the kids gave her something to do. She’d already laundered and ironed every item of clothing and linen in the place. Cooked and filled the freezer. And what was the alternative? Home alone, but for one of the officers? It was too much to ask.
By a supreme effort of will Valerie had stopped calling Agent Arden to check on Katherine’s progress with the ciphers. Arden had sounded ragged on the last call. Valerie knew she hadn’t asked McLuhan for another agent to share the babysitting. According to her, Katherine hadn’t slept, either. We could be sisters, you and I. Arden knew now who the live case was, but the information was kept from Katherine. Don’t give her that. The meal she could make of it. Valerie could imagine her face, the smile. But the facts wouldn’t go away: Katherine had been close with Raylene Ashe. Like it or not, they had to use her. In the absence of anything else, they had to. You’ve done your time with that witch, Cassie had said. No, Cass, I haven’t.
Nick’s phone rang. He looked at the screen. Ignored it.
“Who?” Valerie said.
“Nothing. Eugene.”
Very faintly, a charge of despair detonated in Valerie. Not because of Eugene, personally, but because in this moment Nick’s squash partner was the representative of the rest of the world going about its business, carrying on in either ignorance of or indifference to the fact that what had happened to Cassie had happened. Was happening right now. As if the theater lamp’s heat was on her, she thought of Katherine saying: The poem’s about suffering, and the universe’s indifference to it. The Fall of Icarus. The plowman going on with his work as the hero plunged, unnoticed, into the sea. Wherever Cassie was and whatever she was going through, elsewhere people were hailing cabs or weighing up dinner options or swapping inanities or watching TV.
She was aware, in the wake of the little exchange, of Nick forcing himself not to touch her. They had a gesture between them, had had it for as long as they’d been intimate: the hand in a grip on the hair at the back of the head, a squeeze, a gentle shake. It meant, I’m here. It meant, however rough your day’s been, however tired and fucked-off and worn-out you feel,
you’re not alone. You’re not alone. It was instead of words. The body was honorably dumb that way. It stepped in when words weren’t enough.
But there were times when nothing was enough. There were times when you were alone, no matter who was with you or what they did. Right now even Nick’s desire to comfort her felt like an obscenity, an endorsement of her own helplessness. Which was precisely why he stopped himself, she knew. Knowing it ought to have helped. But it didn’t.
Valerie got to her feet. She couldn’t bear it, the stillness, the waiting, the nothing to be done. In spite of knowing the futility of getting in her car and driving back out to Union City, she couldn’t stop herself. The hours of blocked action simply pushed her out of her chair, as if her body were no longer hers to control. She saw Nick was about to say: Where are you going?
Her phone rang. It was McLuhan.
“We found Cassie’s car,” he said.
31
When Cassie came to, she thought it had been a dream. She thought she had passed out tied to the iron pipe and her broken brain had concocted a fantasy of escape.
Because she still was tied to the iron pipe.
But something was different.
Her shirt was fastened. Her bra still hung loose inside it. There was duct tape over her mouth.
And it was dark outside.
Not a dream.
Oh God.
She looked down. Duct tape at her ankles. Her sneakers and socks were gone. She looked up: the same tape at her wrists. No possibility for movement there either.
She’d had all the time in the world, as she’d fallen, to register what was below her: knolly turf, more boney roots, and two flat, lichened slabs of black rock, one with a pale-green fern pressed against it like a brilliant fossil. She’d had all the time in the world to make the relevant calculations: that no amount of midair twisting was going to avoid the rock; that she would dash her brains out and that would be the end; that that would be a better end, that she could cheat him of what he’d thought he’d have from her; that she had people in her life—Valerie, whose strength and courage astonished her—who would make sure he didn’t get away with it, that it would give their love a new purpose, though it would deform them; that as he had threatened, she would never see her family again.
Yet here she was, with the all-but-lost future receding beyond her reach. Her head had a weight of wrongness in it, as if someone had forced a lump of iron under her skull. Every time she blinked, blackness loomed, an almost eclipse.
Concussion.
Sickness came up in her. She fought it. Vomit with your mouth blocked like this and you choke to death, like all those rock stars. Concentrate. For now just concentrate on not throwing up.
What for?
Why not choke to death?
Better than the alternative. Death—any death, now—was better than the alternative.
But she couldn’t. Life persisted, tormented her with the possibility—however remote—that she could survive this. As long as you were alive anything was possible. The memory of having moved freely through space was too close, the goodness of it, the promise. The drug of hope still had a hold. Hope or desperation. There was nothing between them now. It was impossible to tell them apart. Whichever it was, it kept her breathing, thinking, wanting.
“That was amazing,” his voice said. “That you got out like that.”
She turned her head to see him standing in the doorway of the other room, looking at her. He was holding a plastic bottle of Evian with a drinking straw in it. His hair was damp. She could smell the sweat cooling on him. “You’ve got your sister’s determination. What fabulous genes.”
She screamed behind the tape.
He didn’t move.
The loss of her shoes was a distinct subtraction. Ludicrous that she could feel it, but she could.
He turned and disappeared into the other room. Came back a few seconds later with the knife. Her heart quickened. He stood in front of her and set the water bottle down on the stool. Then he pressed the blade’s tip against her abdomen, through her shirt. With his other hand he reached up and carefully peeled the tape from her mouth, left it attached, hanging from her cheek. He lowered the knife.
“Scream,” he said.
She didn’t move or make a sound.
He withdrew the knife and stepped away from her. “Seriously,” he said. “I won’t do anything to you. If you want to scream, go ahead. It’ll help things, in the long run.”
She thought she wasn’t going to. She was half aware of beginning to work out whether she should do as he said, but the scream ambushed her anyway. Everything she’d been through rose up and roared out of her open mouth. It was, for the two seconds it lasted, a relief. It gave her, for these two seconds, pure blankness.
But of course the two seconds passed. Of course they returned her to herself. Her head fell forward on her chest. She was, at a stroke, completely exhausted. There was an aching emptiness inside her where the ability to cry had been. It saddened her, that the part of herself that could cry had gone, had been burned away, though at the same time she knew she had no more use for it. Her being was jettisoning the things it no longer needed, since the trip to death was one-way, since there was no point keeping provisions for the return journey.
“There’s no one to hear,” he said. “No one for miles. No one heard you scream in the woods, and no one heard you scream just now. I want you to know that.”
“Why the tape then?” she said.
The first words she’d spoken since he’d gagged her and bundled her into the trunk, a lifetime ago. Her mouth was dry and alien. How long since she’d had water? The acute dehydration was new: she had literally never been this thirsty before. It was a deep, rhythmic thud in her cells.
He came back to her, picked up the Evian, and lifted it to the level of her mouth. “You must be very thirsty,” he said. “Here. Have some.”
No matter what, there was no not drinking. If he’d laced it with arsenic, fine. She took the straw between her lips.
“They always say in movies when someone comes out of the desert: ‘Just a little, not too fast,’ but I never bought that. What earthly difference is it going to make?”
It was irrelevant to her. She drank until the bottle was empty. Her body, regardless of her soul, sang its relief. She wanted more. Didn’t dare ask.
“To answer your question, the tape is because I decide when you talk and when you don’t,” he said.
“How long have I been here?” she said. Keep him talking. The longer he talks the longer he doesn’t do something else.
“Since this afternoon,” he said. Then chuckled. “You should’ve seen your face.”
This afternoon? How many hours? She had a clear image of Owen on the phone to Valerie. Listen, something’s wrong.… The kids in their rooms not knowing yet, not knowing that they would never see their mother again, their lives still the lives that were swirled through by superheroes and Little League and candy bars and school, their lives that still took her touch for granted. The word “mom” still waiting to have its meaning changed.
“My sister is going to kill you,” Cassie said.
He smiled and rested his hand on her hip, gave it a little shake. “I don’t doubt she’s going to try,” he said. “But in the meantime…”
He pulled a syringe out of his pocket.
32
Cassie’s Mazda was in the grounds of a decommissioned electrical substation three miles outside of Daly City. The driver’s window had been smashed and the panel around the ignition switch removed. By the time Valerie got there the Bureau’s emergency response team had just finished their sweep of the building. A plump, yellowish moon was low in the sky. There was a motorcycle cop waiting for her by the car. A tall, well-built guy with sandy hair almost exactly the color of his deep tan. He had the kind of Clooney jaw some people liked but that always made Valerie think of Buzz Lightyear. TORVAL, his badge said.
“Did you touch an
ything?” she asked as soon as she was out of her own car. The five FBI vests were regrouping outside the substation’s entrance. Two local officers were with them.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I mean, I stepped up close just to make sure there was no one in it. I picked up the APB this morning.”
“Did they check the trunk?”
“The trunk?”
Valerie fetched gloves from her car and pulled them on. The trunk was locked. You needed the key fob even if the doors were open.
“Hand me your flashlight.”
She got in the back of the Mazda and found the mechanism for dropping the rear seats. She wasn’t expecting to find her sister—dead or alive—but she found herself moving like a frantic automaton.
The trunk was empty.
Her mind raced. Cassie’s car. Okay. Broken into? What the fuck?
“Whoever it was,” Torval said, “they couldn’t get it started. From what I can see it’s a wiring problem in the ignition. Wear and tear, you get that, even with these Japanese babies. I mean unless the battery’s dead. They knew enough to take the panel off, not enough to fix it.”
Valerie got out. “How’d you find it?” she asked.
“Precinct got an anonymous call on your suspect,” Torval said. “I was the nearest officer.”
“Which version of the suspect? We’ve got three out at the moment.”
“The most recent,” Torval said. “Apparently he was parked at the substation entrance talking on a cell phone.”
“Move away,” Valerie said. “There’s more than one set of tracks here.”
She hadn’t been careful. In her haste to look in the trunk she hadn’t examined the ground. Now she moved the flashlight around the Mazda’s perimeter.