by Todd Borg
All three siblings were taken to the hospital for treatment.
The search revealed that none of the rooms, up or down, showed any signs of any other human presence aside from the three siblings. There was no indication of any contact with the Granite Mountain Boys, no evidence of any connection to a kidnapping. There were no boards across the upstairs window.
An interview with two neighbors confirmed that the two kids were good kids, employed full time as chefs at Perry’s Perfect Pizza shop, well-behaved, and never had visitors other than their sister. Their boss was reached by phone and said the two brothers were the best employees he’d ever had. The boys had short haircuts, yet sufficiently long to conceal the tattoos they’d gotten when they were younger, and they both stated their intention to one day have the tattoos removed.
On careful count, the tree out the back turned out to have one trunk followed by two branches, followed by four branches, then seven, then fourteen, then nineteen before branching into uncountable twigs. It was a reasonable deviation from the natural Fibonacci sequence, but nothing like the exact sequence, and nothing like the tree in Silence’s drawing.
THIRTY
It was 10:00 p.m. when Mallory sent me home from his office. Street would be leaving the theater and heading back to her hotel. I’d had my cell off during the afternoon raid and during the evening’s frantic efforts at sorting out what happened and who was responsible and what could be done about it. Street would be worried, but I had to think a moment before I called her.
I paused in Mallory’s office doorway before I left. “It was a big mistake,” I said, “and it was all my fault. I’m really sorry.”
Mallory stared at me, his lips pressed tightly together. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
I drove home, my stomach writhing. The highway was empty and desolate. Heavy gray clouds, weakly lit with lunar light, flew across the sky, gathered together in a huge dark cluster and blotted out the moon completely.
I tried to tell myself that it hadn’t been that bad. There were no severe injuries and no weapons had been discharged. But what mattered was that I created the problem and Mallory was enduring the judgment for it.
In every respect Mallory was in a worse position than I was. He’d been the official in charge. The warrant had come at his request. The police involved in the raid had assembled at his orders. The young men who lived in the house knew that their castle had been breached by Mallory and his men. The landlord who would have to coordinate repairs to the broken doors would have Mallory’s name on his lips and in his thoughts as he considered his expenses. And the lawyers who earn a living turning mistakes and bad judgement into large monetary rewards would be talking about Mallory at every step of legal planning.
And Mallory did it all for me.
I let Spot out, picked up the new portable, found the right button to get a dial tone, and called Street’s cell.
She must have looked at the readout before she answered. “First, tell me you are okay,” she said. “I’m worried sick.” Her words were caring, but her tone was flat.
“I’m okay. And I’m very sorry I didn’t come today. I’ve made a bad mistake.”
“The raid was on the news. But they kept talking about it as Mallory’s raid.”
“That makes it worse. He took me at my word, and my word was wrong.”
Street paused. “I suppose the powers that be will say that even though you suggested the raid, Mallory should have exercised better judgement and held off until he had more evidence.”
“Yes, that’s what they will say. He is no doubt kicking himself as we speak. He listened to me, former big-city homicide inspector, thinking I knew what I was talking about. It’s hard to get someone into more trouble than what I’ve created for him.”
Street said, “The news reported some injuries?”
“A bruise, a broken wrist, a bloody nose. The girl’s shirt was torn.”
Street didn’t say anything. I took it as her recognition of the seriousness of the situation.
I continued, “There will be people calling for Mallory’s resignation. There could be lawsuits. But let’s change the subject to my other screw-up. How did your talk go?”
“It went well.” Street’s voice had the flat sound that revealed her disappointment and anger.
“I apologize for missing it. I’ll try again to make it to your next talk,” I said, realizing afterward how lame it sounded.
“I’m sure you will,” she said. Her delivery was monotone, but I’d put her in a difficult situation where anything she said would either sound hollow or falsely cheerful or resentful of my actions, which, regardless of how well-intentioned, still rankled.
“How was the play?” I said.
“I didn’t go,” she said. “I was worried about you and sad and disappointed that you didn’t come. Lonely, too.”
I winced. “Dare I ask if your dinner was okay?”
“I didn’t eat. I had no appetite.”
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. “You flew down. So now you’re trapped in San Francisco without a way home. And you’re starving. Is there a way I can make this better?”
“You could drive down tomorrow and get me.”
I apologized again and told her I’d be there in the afternoon.
After I got off the phone with Street I called Glenda Gorman at her home.
“Hi Glennie. It’s Owen,” I said when she answered. I was pacing about my cabin.
“I heard about the raid,” she said. “I was driving up from some errands in Sac, but Nathan over in sports keeps his scanner on. He kept calling to fill me in. Can you comment?”
“Yes. It was my fault. I’m hoping you can get that in the first sentence or two of Monday’s paper. Mallory took a big risk listening to me and it blew up in his face. Maybe I can redirect some of the community’s anger toward me.”
“Can you tell me how it evolved? If I can get the right flavor in my story, readers might understand why it happened.”
“Let’s hope.” I went over it from the beginning.
“How did you initially come to think that the girl was being held in that house?” Glennie asked when I was done.
This was the most difficult question of all. I stalled.
If I answered it truthfully and told her about the drawing Silence had sent, then her kidnappers would find out. They might punish her severely for sneaking a drawing of the house out to the outside world. Also, the kidnappers would immediately move her. That would destroy our only chance of finding her.
Instead of leaving her alive, they might decide to kill her.
On the other hand, if I lied and gave Glennie a false story about how we found the house, then she would be obligated to reveal the lie once she discovered the truth. That would almost certainly happen at some point, and when it came out it would make the situation even more difficult for Mallory.
And if I simply withheld the information from Glennie, she would be extra eager to learn about it.
“Owen?” she said, still waiting. “Are you still there? I was wondering why you thought the girl was held in that house?”
“Glennie, this is a hard one. So I’m going to give you my best explanation and hope you can go with it for now. Suffice to say that we had a reason we were looking at that house. But if that reason is made public it could cause the kidnappers to panic and kill Silence Ramirez. And it will certainly cause them to move her from her current location. We don’t want that to happen because it would eliminate our only current chance of finding her.”
“Which implies,” Glennie muttered, “that the reason you were looking at the house comes from a tip. The tipster thinks he knows where Silence is he and told you. Am I right? You can tell me off the record.”
“Yes. We got a tip we believe is credible. We don’t want the kidnappers to know that anyone is passing us information.”
I thought about another way she could help with her story. I said, “On the record, there w
ere two motorcycles at the house. They were the same as others that belong to possible suspects. Further,” I said, hesitating, choosing my words carefully, “a witness saw the girl in a window of the house, a house that was known to only have two men as occupants. The girl’s description matched that of Silence Ramirez. Of course, the girl turned out to be the sister of the tenants.”
“Your mistake was in erring toward any possibility of saving the kidnapped girl’s life,” Glennie said. “Better than if it were the other way around.”
“True,” I said. “But I should have handled it much differently.”
“I’ll tell it straight. The readers will see the sense of the action.”
“One more favor?” I said.
“What?”
“Some words of praise for the kids who got roughed up? Something about how well they handled the stress of the raid?”
“You mean,” Glennie mumbled, “something about how character is revealed by how someone reacts under adverse circumstances?”
“Yeah, something like that. I’ll owe you.”
“When this is all over,” Glennie said, “will you give me a full interview? The inside story?”
“Yes.”
The line went quiet and I had the sense that Glennie was taking notes.
“And how is Street?” Glennie said after a minute.
I hesitated, thinking about Street alone in a hotel room. “She’s well,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”
“You two are still close,” Glennie said.
“Yes,” I said. “Very.”
“That’s this reporter’s bad dream, you know. I want conflict. I need conflict.”
“Yes, Glennie,” I said.
After Glennie and I said goodbye, I got a beer out of the fridge, made a small fire and sat in front of it. I dangled one hand down from the rocker and stroked Spot as he tried to become one with the floorboards in front of the woodstove.
In a ruthless reporter’s hands, the story could be presented in a way that would invite lawsuits and destroy careers and ruin reputations. But I hoped that Glennie would take it a different direction and attempt to heal the wounds. Monday morning would tell.
THIRTY-ONE
I found myself looking at the clock all night long, aware that the moon coming in the window was getting fuller each night. I finally got up at 5:00 a.m. I let Spot out to prowl the dark for night creatures while I drank my coffee standing at the window that overlooks the view of Tahoe below.
The lake often has an eerie flat blackness at night, interrupted by the occasional boat light and, this particular morning, the three-quarter moon, which was about to set behind Rubicon Peak on the western shore. The moon was reflected in a long silver swath that split the dark water into halves. My mood was as dark as the water but with no bright spots to distract me.
I felt a powerful frustration at a situation that had no potential for improvement save the passage of time. I wanted to call Mallory and somehow make it better, but it was a magic-wand fantasy. He was going to be squeezed by his colleagues as well as by the community, and nothing I could say would reduce his misery or his resentment toward me.
Although Mallory and I don’t socialize as friends, we went back to when I was on the San Francisco PD. He was a sergeant working on an attempted murder of a fellow South Lake Tahoe PD officer. A witness had written down the suspect’s plate as the suspect fled. At the time, I was working on an assault case wrapped in a drug smuggling operation, and my suspect turned out to be the owner of the car. So Mallory and I spent some hours sharing information and doing a little strategizing at the same time. The suspect was eventually caught and convicted.
When Mallory was next in San Francisco, he and I got together for a celebratory beer at an Irish pub in the North Beach neighborhood. We found common ground in our family backgrounds filled with Irish and Scottish law officers, our antipathy toward politicians, and our growing cynicism about the trend toward incarcerating minor drug offenders with hard-core violent criminals, thus filling up prisons at great cost to the state while immersing pot-smokers in the world of serious crime.
The next time I was up skiing in Tahoe, I talked Mallory into joining me on the slopes, and we maintained a solid, mutually respectful relationship ever since.
Mallory was gracious about my decision to move to Tahoe and go private, a decision that some other law enforcement personnel see in a pejorative light. If Mallory thought that private cops were quitters who were more interested in money than in keeping our communities safe, he kept it to himself.
When it got light, I took Spot out for the trek down the mountain to the highway and back up, only this time I didn’t jog. I was too weary, psychologically as well as physically.
Although it was Sunday, I tried Mallory’s office number at 8:00 a.m., thinking I could at least leave a message on his voicemail.
But he answered. “Mallory,” he barked.
“Checking in,” I said. “Anything I can do to help? Personally or officially?”
“Naw. The review process is already underway. Ain’t much I can do to prevent them from burning my ass with a branding iron. I’ll explain to them what happened, best as I’m able. After that, if they call you in, you can explain best as you’re able.”
“Will do,” I said.
“Someone’s calling now. Gotta go.” He hung up.
The phone rang.
“It’s me,” Marlette said when I answered. “Silence sent another letter. This one shows the kidnappers.”
THIRTY-TWO
Marlette and Henrietta and I met at Marlette’s house.
“It was delivered the same way?” I said as Marlette handed me the drawing.
Henrietta nodded. “Slipped under the high school door sometime in the night. The weekend janitor had heard about the first drawing, so he knew what this was. He called me as soon as he found it. Then I called Commander Mallory, but apparently he’s unavailable ever since, well, you know. The police department sent down an officer to meet me at the school.” Henrietta pointed at the drawing. “This is a copy, just like before. I made two of them so you can keep one. I gave the officer the original.”
Marlette spoke up. “Open it. She drew the kidnappers.”
I unfolded the paper. Like the first letter, this drawing had lots of detail in the room and out the window. But the main difference was the two men in the room. They stood at the window, their backs to Silence as she drew, or more likely, as she looked at them with her photographic memory. They were looking out the window, one of them pointing at something.
Stomach acid rose in my throat as I realized that one was large and the other was a giant who had to bend over and lower his head just to see out the window.
Marky and Tiptoe.
“Turn it over, Owen,” Marlette said. “Look at the back side. She put on a stamp.”
I looked at the other side and saw that in addition to a drawing of the high school and the house where the address and return address normally would be, there was a drawing of a stamp in the upper right corner. It was as remarkable as the other drawings. Miniature in size, and to perfect scale, the flag and the Statue of Liberty were rendered in amazingly fine detail. The waves in the flag made it look like actual fabric.
I turned it again to check that the rendering showed the same room as before, although the perspective was shifted a bit to the left. The window with the view of tree and fence outside was now on the right edge of the drawing, while more of the room showed on the left.
“Did this one have the same folds?” I asked.
“Yes,” Marlette said. “It was folded in thirds so it could make a letter, and it had more of those faint fold lines like it was once folded into a paper airplane and then straightened out.”
“Either of you see anything else unusual in this drawing?”
Henrietta shook her head. “We were talking about that before you got here. Obviously, Silence wanted to show us the men. But was there some additional in
formation in this letter that wasn’t in the first?” Henrietta waited a second as if Marlette or I might comment. Then she said, “I know what the doctors would say. They’d think that the drawing is just another rendering of her environment. But I think there’s something else here.”
“You mean, a message of sorts?” I said.
“Yes. I don’t know what it would be. I keep looking at this to find some meaning. But I haven’t seen it yet.”
“What about a hidden image within the drawing?”
“You mean, like in a Bev Doolittle painting where you can see Indian faces in the rocks? No, I don’t think so. I’m talking about some detail that is easy for all of us to see when we look at the drawing, but has a significance that is obvious to Silence and not to the rest of us.”
“Like the tree branch pattern that demonstrates Fibonacci numbers,” I said.
“Right.”
We all stared a minute longer at the drawing.
“Let me know if anything comes to you,” I said. “I have to drive into San Francisco to pick up Street. I’ll be in touch.”
We said goodbye, and I walked out to the Jeep.
Spot was standing on the rear seat, bending his legs so his back would fit up against the ceiling. He had his head lowered to stick out the window. I heard him wagging as I approached, his hard tail banging between the front and rear seat backs.
“You think I’m bringing food or something?” I said.
He wagged harder. Probably could tell we were going to get Street.