by Jan Burke
“Maybe my mom set it off by accident,” she said. “Don’t call the police.”
“I won’t, not if you don’t want me to. Did I hurt your arm?”
She shook her head. Her face creased with worry as she looked back at the house. “If my mom comes out of the house and she sees me out here talking to you, I’m going to be in so much trouble.”
“I know your mom. I think I might be able to talk to her about all this,” I said, hoping that wasn’t a huge lie.
“Is it true she used to be a newspaper reporter?”
“Yes. We worked together on the Express.”
“That seems… impossible. I mean, that she was a reporter. She’s a good teacher. I could see her being a teacher in a school.”
“Earlier you mentioned a couple of things I’d like to know more about. You mentioned someone named Mason?”
“I told you my brothers and sister are adopted, right?”
“Yes. Genie is nine, right?”
“Yes.”
Jenny Fletcher would be nine, if she still lived. Could it be the same girl? I realized that deep down I had believed she was dead. Maybe that was a result of having just read a lot of material on child abductions. Or reading about the violent circumstances under which she disappeared. No matter what Caleb’s faith in his brother might have been, I hadn’t thought it was likely that his sister survived.
Until now. What the hell was going on? I silently lectured myself about not jumping to conclusions based on next to no evidence, even as I felt hope begin to soar. “Could Mason be a much older brother?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. I just know that my sister, Genie, has rememberings of someone by that name.”
“Rememberings?”
She blushed. “I know that’s not a real word. But I couldn’t find a real word that worked. Do you know what I mean?”
“Boy, do I.”
“You’ve made up words?”
She was starting to relax some, to not look as if she might run off again. “I can’t use them in the newspaper,” I said, “but sometimes one made-up word seems better than two or three real ones.”
“Name one.”
A term Lydia and I used for the publisher of the Express came to mind. “Pagusting. That’s when something or someone is both pathetic and disgusting.”
She smiled. “It’s a good one, if you mean pathetic in a sardonic way.”
“Uh, yes. So tell me about rememberings.”
“They aren’t quite memories. They’re just… little pieces of memories. Feelings. Impressions. Sometimes… I think mine have been about my… about the man you wrote about.”
“Blake Ives? Like what?”
“He used to sing this song to me, when I was scared.” She hummed a few notes of a familiar tune.
I sang a line of the lyrics to go with it — “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.”
“Yes! That’s the one!” She frowned. “Was that in the article?”
“No, that’s a detail that didn’t appear in the story. But he told me about singing it to you when thunderstorms scared you.”
She gave a big sigh of relief. “Sometimes I thought I was crazy.”
“Do you want to meet him?”
“I think so….”
“Do you want me to go to your house with you and talk to your mom about it?” I had a great many things I wanted to discuss with Bonnie Creci.
She thought it over and said, “I guess it’s worth a try.”
She stood still, though. We were well down the block from her place.
Her brows drew together. “Maybe instead… do you have his phone number?”
“Yes,” I said.
We heard a car engine. A moment later the garage door began to rise.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “That was open when I left the house.”
A black Beemer quickly backed out and immediately headed down the street, away from us. The windows were tinted, and between that and the angle of the sun, I didn’t get a look at the driver. We were too far away to read the license plate.
“Know anyone who drives a car like that?” I asked.
“Uncle Dexter,” she said quietly.
“Could he be the one who set the alarm off?”
She nodded. Tears started rolling down her face.
The garage door closed again. The tears fell faster.
“Carrie?”
“I hate her. I hate her!” She started running toward the house again.
I followed, not trying to catch her this time. She sped up the front walk and into the house. I wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, or even what I could do, let alone what legalities might be involved. Could I legally take a minor back to the custodial parent? Should I just call the Orange County Sheriff’s Department or the Department of Child Protective Services and let them handle all the details? Call Blake Ives? Maybe Frank would know.
No matter what else happened, I didn’t want to lose track of Carla Ives. Blake Ives would be so happy and relieved to know she was alive and well, but he’d never forgive me if she disappeared again.
I also didn’t want her to have to face Bonnie alone.
I moved faster, running up the front walkway and pushing the unlatched door open.
I came to a halt in the entryway and let the door close behind me. There was blood on the beige marble of the foyer, and as I looked up the stairs, I could see blood and bits of scalp and hair marking the wall and railings. Someone had come downstairs the hard way. Who? And where was he or she now?
To my left, I heard a little sound of distress.
“Carrie?”
I turned to see her being held tightly by a man who had a gun lodged against the underside of her chin.
“Lock the door!” he shouted at me.
I did as he said.
“Drop your purse on the floor and kick it away!”
I obeyed again, doing my best to avoid the blood spatter. Praying none of Carrie’s blood or my own would be added to it.
“All right.” He drew a harsh breath. “You have a choice, Ms. Kelly. You can die knowing that you caused Blake Ives’s daughter to be delivered to him in a body bag, or you can do exactly as I say.”
CHAPTER 45
Tuesday, May 2
12:06 P.M.
ANTELOPE VALLEY
SOMETIMES a man with a gun gets to have things his way.
When we first got on the San Diego Freeway, I started saying that I thought this was a bad idea, that I would be missed.
“Just shut up and drive,” he said.
He had a gun and I didn’t, so I stopped talking about what a big mistake he was making. I held tightly to the steering wheel and tried to make myself think clearly, but strategies about survival weren’t coming to me as quickly as they might have if I had been given a little time to mull things over.
The man with a gun was in a big hurry.
He wasn’t sitting within reach, so even if I had summoned the nerve to try it, I couldn’t take the gun away from him. He was in the back of the van I was driving. The van was some sort of working van, although it looked as if it had been adapted so that it could be used for either passengers or cargo. The middle section of seats had been taken out, but a bench seat in the back was in place. That’s where he was.
I glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
He wasn’t a big man, or a young man. That didn’t matter. More important, and not so good for my own chances of a future, were the three A’s — he was anxious, angry, and armed. No, there was a fourth. He was an asshole.
The sweat that had stained his shirt at the armpits an hour ago now drenched the front as well, dampened his forehead, and plastered his hair to his head at the temples. The stench of his fear reached me, masking the scent of my own. Knowing he was afraid did not comfort me at all.
I could have taken chances with his aim, tried to escape, or driven the van in a way that would throw him off balance, then jumped out while
he stayed in it to crash. After all, his gun wasn’t pointed at me.
It was pointed at Carrie.
Although he had bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape, and placed a fat strip of it over her mouth as well, he seemed to think she would yet escape him, and never let her move more than a few inches away. Most of the time, he clutched one of her slender, pale arms in a bruising grip.
Her blue eyes were dilated almost to black with fear. Blue eyes that caught mine in the mirror, pleading.
I looked away, to the off-ramp just ahead. I couldn’t think clearly about much at that moment, but I knew that I couldn’t sacrifice her life in an attempt to save my own.
So I got off the freeway just like he told me to, driving this van, which would shield anyone’s view from what was going on in back. They could only see me, and no one seemed to notice I was terrified.
Terror never stays at the same level over time, though, and the initial adrenaline rush had passed off even before we were ordered into the van. But the cold knot of fear in the pit of my stomach seemed to have amazing staying power in this situation. After over ninety minutes of it, I was having a hard time not driving erratically, or in any manner that would displease him.
I did not want him to be any angrier, any more nervous than he already was.
Sometimes a man with a gun gets to have things his way. I didn’t even object when, on one of the slow stretches of Interstate 5, he began going through my purse, which he had picked up off the floor of the foyer. He pulled out my cell phone and pocketed it.
As time passed, I began to wonder what had happened to Bonnie. To wonder where Carrie’s “dad,” Roy Fletcher, and the other three children were right now, and how long it would be before they missed Carrie. To wonder how long it would be before I was missed by anyone.
I followed his curtly delivered directions, and now we were in the high desert area north of Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley. The valley lies on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains. He told me to exit the freeway in Palmdale and made a call on my cell phone.
“It’s me,” he said.
After a pause he said, “Palmdale, but—”
He sighed. “I know, I know. Yes, I know I’m late! Listen to me… Yes, there are…”
He glanced at me and lowered his voice. “Things are a bit complicated. Carrie wasn’t alone when I found her.”
I could hear someone cussing him out.
He hung up. He gave me another series of directions, so that we were headed east.
A few minutes later, my cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID display and pressed the button that answered the call, but didn’t speak.
He was getting cussed out again, but this time he said, “Shut up or I’ll hang up again and do as I damned well please.”
He looked more nervous than he had been five minutes earlier. He glanced constantly between Carrie and me. He still held the gun on her. I had formulated plans to throw his aim off if he actually looked as if he was going to lose it and squeeze the trigger. Unfortunately, almost all of them seemed just as likely to result in my own death, if not also causing her life to be lost in a crash.
“She was with that reporter. Yes, Irene Kelly. I-I-I didn’t know what to do…. Of course not. Not there… no. Oh really? Well, you weren’t there, Cleo, so I had to come up with something, right? So she’s driving. By the time I got everything arranged, we hit traffic.”
There was another silence.
“Well, thank you. Really? Well, I thought it was the smartest thing to do. I mean, under the circumstances… yes, yes. Exactly. All right.” He made a kissing sound into the phone and hung up.
His anxiousness seemed to evaporate. I wasn’t sure I liked him looking so smug, though.
We went through a town called Lake Los Angeles, the existence of which I would have doubted if I hadn’t seen it myself. We turned south, toward the mountains, without seeing either a lake or angels. I’m sure both were there somewhere.
We crossed the California Aqueduct and kept going south. He started watching ahead more often, calling out directions more quickly. We were soon in desolate territory, turning onto potholed roads that seemed to have been laid out for communities that never materialized, some developer’s mirage, now abandoned. We left those for an even more isolated dirt road.
We were in the foothills when the angels belatedly made their appearance. We passed a side road, and less than a minute later I saw the red light of a law enforcement vehicle — I couldn’t see any markings to make out the agency. I had to fight back tears of relief — we would be rescued! In the next moment I realized that things weren’t exactly resolved. How would the gunman react to the news I was about to give him? Not knowing what it might literally trigger, I braced myself and said, “We’re getting pulled over.”
His reaction seemed odd. He smiled, then quickly frowned and said, “Pull over and act natural. Don’t do anything to make him suspect what’s going on back here, or the girl dies.” He was talking like a TV gangster. He forced Carrie to lie down and covered her completely with a blanket.
“I’ll need my wallet,” I said.
He smiled again, found it, and tossed it to me.
Something wasn’t adding up. I kept the engine running. I had one weapon — the van. I didn’t see many possibilities to use it that would lend themselves to happy endings.
A single uniformed officer got out of a vehicle I couldn’t see. The officer had almost reached my now-lowered window before I realized she was female. The uniform looked damned familiar. Frank was already in Detectives before I married him, but I knew what a Las Piernas Police Department uniform looked like.
We were way the hell out of Las Piernas’s jurisdiction.
The style of this uniform was known as a Blauer, with the officer’s name embroidered over the pocket.
D. Fletcher.
The rest of the outfit wasn’t a convincing fake job. She was missing most of the fifty pounds of equipment a patrol officer carries. Her sidearm was holstered and she made no move to reach for it.
“License and registration.”
I played along, thinking that if I drove off, I might cause the man in the back of the van to shoot Carrie — or me. I needed a better opportunity. Or something that even vaguely resembled even half an opportunity. She moved to the front of the van and then around to the sliding side door. She knocked on it.
Now the gunman was frowning in earnest.
Still holding his gun, he moved awkwardly over to the door and opened it.
She had her own weapon out, a small handgun, and not the larger piece that was still holstered. The woman grabbed the wrist of his gun arm.
This, I thought, was as good a chance as I was likely to get.
The van was moving just as she pulled him out of it. I stepped on the gas, raising a huge cloud of dust. I heard a little popping noise and thought she was shooting at the tires.
In the side mirror, I saw the man drop in a heap.
The woman wasn’t looking at him.
She was staring after us.
CHAPTER 46
Tuesday, May 2
12:35 P.M.
ANTELOPE VALLEY
SHE might have been staring because she knew what I didn’t — that the dirt road ended a short distance ahead.
I braked and swerved to avoid going into a dry wash, yelled to Carrie to hang on or brace herself any way she could, and turned the van around. As I did, the side door slid on its tracks and shut again. At least Carrie wouldn’t roll out.
I had to disable the BMW. If the shooter got into her car, she’d easily outrun the van.
As I drove back toward her, she was smiling. She had unholstered the bigger gun. I think she expected me to simply surrender, because when I aimed the van at her, she looked surprised. Maybe it was wishful thinking on my part, but her hands seemed a little shaky. I crouched as low as I could behind the steering wheel, and I drove right at her. She raised the gun and fired. A spray of
glass pebbles came at me as some of her shots blew out the windshield, and I heard the ping and hammer of the bullets hitting metal as they did some damage to the van, but I kept going, hoping to God that nothing was going to ricochet into Carrie or me.
The shooter’s surprise turned to a look of white-faced fear. She did an awkward rolling dive away from the front of the BMW.
I couldn’t afford to hit the BMW in a way that would risk disabling the van, and I didn’t want to injure or kill Carrie by sending her flying around the back of the van in a big collision. So I braked and skidded to a sliding halt, adding to the cloud of debris that was coming into the van. I lined up the back end of the van with the left front side of the Beemer, then threw the van into reverse and gave it some gas.
It made a loud bang, and I pulled forward. The BMW’s front wheel tilted at a nasty angle and the tire was flat. I had certainly done more than fuck up the paint job on the rest of the front end. Good enough.
I drove away like a bat out of hell.
AS soon as I felt sure that I had put enough distance between the shooter and us that we were out of immediate danger, I pulled over and went back to Carrie. She had managed on her own to free the blanket from her face, and maneuvered herself against the backseat. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. Tears rolled down her face, over the tape across her mouth.
I glanced around. The floor of the van was littered with glass and the contents of my purse. My cell phone, alas, was out in the desert in a dead man’s pocket.
“I’m going to move you up by me so you don’t get cut by this glass, and then I’ll work on getting this tape off of you, okay?”
She nodded.
I pulled the blanket off, causing more beads of glass to fall. At least it had protected her from the initial shower of windshield fragments. I picked her up as carefully as I could, an awkward business in the confines of the van, but we made it to the front seats. I set her on her feet, brushed off the passenger seat, and helped her to sit down. I strapped the seat belt on her. “Just in case we have to take off in a hurry,” I said.