Words of Conviction

by Linda J White

  Kenzie moved the interview a different direction, intending to come back to Zoe from a different angle. Waller explained some of his methodology to Kenzie, sending cold chills down her spine.“I like to shave their heads, you know? Makes ’em crazy. And then . . .” He laughed hoarsely and began rattling his chains again. Then, suddenly, his right arm flew back, and a look of startled surprise filled Waller’s face.

  Grinning, he held up his hand. He’d slipped the cuff.

  Crow cursed. He moved toward the door of the interview room.

  “Hold it!” Scott commanded, reaching out and grabbing Crow’s arm. “Wait. Get the chief.” Crow stared at him like he was crazy.

  Adrenaline poured through Kenzie when she saw Waller’s freed hand and the maniacal look on his face. He stared at Kenzie, and smiled, and his smile became a leer.

  Kenzie looked into his eyes and realized how empty they looked, like a shark’s eyes—devoid of expression, vacant. It was like looking straight into the Abyss. A loud buzzing began in her ears. Her throat tightened. Somehow, she knew from his expression exactly what he was thinking. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and fear, cold as steel, gripped her.

  Her mind raced. Could Waller sense fear?

  Just then, the chief and two detectives walked into the interview room. “All right, Waller, let’s stop playing games,” the chief said.

  “Are you all right?” Scott asked Kenzie as she emerged.

  “Fine, except for my heart, which stopped beating a couple of minutes ago.” She shook her head. “If I believed in demons, I’d say I was just in a room with one.” Kenzie shivered involuntarily.

  “I thought Crow would jump right through the window. He had to go outside to cool off.” Scott ran his hand through his hair. “What did you think?”

  “Waller’s all over the map. Some of the methodology fits but none of the linguistics does. He’s very bright, despite the way he talks, but Scott, he’s weird.”

  The police chief appeared down the hall and called Scott. Kenzie stood still, trying to recover. Crow suddenly appeared beside her. “What did you think?” she asked him.

  He didn’t answer her at first. She could see the tendons in his neck were as tight as bowstrings. He glanced around as if making sure they were alone. He took a deep breath. “There are witches among the Diné,” he said quietly, “evil people with empty eyes. People who my grandfather would say have given themselves over. I’ve seen the same thing myself. This man,” he said, nodding toward where Waller had been sitting, “is evil.”

  Kenzie shivered again.

  Ten minutes later, Scott, Kenzie, Crow, and the chief met to discuss their progress. “Honestly,” Kenzie said, “I don’t think Waller is the man who took Zoe.”

  “What makes you say that?” the chief asked.

  Kenzie explained her psycholinguistic analysis of the ransom note, and how the language and the profile it suggested didn’t fit Waller. Midway through her explanation, she saw the chief’s eyes glaze over—he wasn’t buying it.

  She turned to Scott. “I want to pursue the other lead.” By that, she meant Grayson Chambers, but she didn’t want to reveal his name.

  Scott understood. “Have you called Alicia? Has there been any other Internet activity?”

  Kenzie grimaced. “No. I checked with her a few minutes ago.”

  “So it all stopped right about the time the police picked up Waller.”

  She had to admit that it had.

  “And he’s pretty facile with computers. More facile than his occupation might suggest,” Scott added.

  “He’s got three computers, loaded with porn, plus an iPod, wireless network, the whole bit,” the chief said.

  Crow had been standing with his back to the group, staring out of the window. He turned around. “I think you should let her go back,” he said to Scott. “I’ll stay with you. Let her go.”

  Scott looked at him curiously. “What are you thinking?”

  “She knows what she’s talking about. Waller’s not the guy. Let her go. You and I can stay and break him down.”

  Kenzie studied Crow. He looked tense. Was he buying the profile she’d created or simply protecting her?

  “I don’t know how much more support we can give you,” the chief said, looking at his watch. “Overtime is killing us.”

  “If we need another agent, we can bring one in,” Crow retorted.

  Scott’s cell phone rang. He looked at the number and said, “Hold on.” Standing up and moving to the edge of the room, he spoke quickly, quietly, and then clicked the phone off with authority. He looked straight at Kenzie. “Grable’s complaining to the director. He doesn’t believe the other lead is valid.”

  Kenzie sighed with exasperation. “It’s ridiculous to allow him to affect the course of an investigation, even if he is a senator.”

  Scott frowned.

  An officer opened the door of the room, came in, and spoke quietly to the chief, who then turned to the group and said, “Waller wants to show Kenzie something near his house.”

  “Waller wants a field trip,” Crow said.

  Scott took a deep breath. “He’s not going to call the shots. Let’s you and I go, Crow, and Kenzie, you go on back. Pursue whatever you want to pursue. Finding Zoe is more important than placating Grable. And if this turns out to be a dead end, we won’t have invested all our resources here.”

  All the way back to Grable’s house, Kenzie rolled over the evidence for her premise in her mind. Chambers had motive: To avenge what was in his mind poor treatment by the senator. He had means: He’d been in the third-floor bedroom, knew Zoe, and knew how to observe the goings-on in the house. And he had opportunity: Surely, he would know about Mrs. Grable’s mah-jongg night.

  But where was Grayson Chambers now? Kenzie had to answer that question. More specifically, where was he the night Zoe was abducted? But a deeper, unstated question knotted her stomach: Would her understanding of psycholinguistics and her application of it in this case be accurate? Or would her work just give the naysayers, from her boss on down, more evidence it was voodoo science?

  Grable had said Chambers taught at some college in California. So, Kenzie started with Pepperdine University in Malibu, and worked her way up the coast to U.C.-Santa Barbara, checking faculty lists on websites and making phone calls. No one had heard of a Grayson Chambers. She thought perhaps he may have published an academic paper, so she searched for one but found nothing. She got other agents working on accessing California driver’s license records and other public information—even newspaper archives. Then she went back and called colleges north of Santa Barbara and inland toward the San Joaquin Valley.

  Still empty-handed, she called the senator’s secretary. “Did he have his doctorate?” she asked Louise.

  “I don’t think so,” she responded. “Just a masters. As far as I know.” She chuckled. “I’m sure I would have heard about every step of his progress if he’d been working on a doctorate.”

  Masters only. If that were the case, he’d probably be teaching at a community college, Kenzie reasoned. So she began calling all she could find in California, starting with the area north of L.A. “There are an awful lot of community colleges in California,” she muttered as call after call produced nothing. One hour went by, then two.

  Frustrated, Kenzie turned another direction. She Googled KickerG, Chambers’s online screen name. And she got two hundred thirty-seven hits.

  “Awesome,” she said.

  “What did you find?” Alicia asked. They were in the Grables’ dining room. Alicia was monitoring the High Stakes message board, while Kenzie searched for information on Chambers.

  “ ‘KickerG’ is the screen name Grayson Chambers used for political blogs,” she explained, keeping her voice low. No sense running the risk of having Grable hear her suspicions about Chambers. He and his wife were upstairs, but Kenzie wasn’t taking any chances. “I’ve got two hundred thirty-seven hits on that name on Google.”
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  “All right!”

  “I want to read through these as fast as I can,” Kenzie said. “I want to see if I can find any correlations, any patterns.” She wiped her hands on the tactical pants she’d changed back into. “Will you back me up on this? Google KickerG, and make a file of everything he’s posted.”

  “Will do.”

  “And then e-mail it to me and print it. Be sure you have URLs, times . . . everything we’d need to get back to each posting.”

  “Grayson, I have to go to the store! Look at this refrigerator! It’s empty!” Sandy motioned toward the open door.

  She stood toe-to-toe with him and he didn’t like that. He didn’t like being challenged, especially by a woman. This wasn’t her plan. It wasn’t her house. And it certainly wasn’t her money soon to be sitting in an offshore bank.

  Grayson hit the door so that it slammed shut. Eyes glaring, he snapped at her. “You will do as I say, or I swear . . .”

  “But Gray, we need the food! Just let me go. I’ll be real quick. Then you can have the car and go anywhere you want. C’mon,” her voice softened. “Gray, honey. If you leave now, me and Zoe, we’re gonna get hungry.”

  He backed down. He sure didn’t want her doing something stupid, like ordering out for pizza. Over at the kitchen table, Zoe sat on a chair. She seemed to be studying them, her hand to her chin. Good grief. She looked like her old man.

  Grayson turned back to Sandy. “All right. Go. You have one hour.”

  “I’ll need money.”

  He swore and pulled two fifty-dollar bills out of his wallet and handed them to her. “Take her with you,” he said, nodding toward Zoe.

  Sandy remained very quiet.

  “What?” he prompted.

  “Last time? When we went to the mall? I had a hard time with her. She kept telling everybody her name: Zoe.”

  “What? What?” Rage poured through him. His blood pounded in his head and his anger felt like a white heat in his body. He pointed his finger in Sandy’s face. “Can’t you control her? What’s the matter with you?” He stood very close to her, close enough to see the fear in her eyes and something in him liked that. “If you blow this, I’ll . . . I’ll . . .” And then he did something he’d never done in his whole life. His hand flung out, and he slapped her, slapped her hard across the face.

  “Oh!” she said, reacting to the blow. When she looked back up at him, she had tears in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she whimpered. A red handprint marked her cheek.

  “You go,” he hissed, “and get back here pronto. You understand? ASAP.” He threw his car keys down on the floor. Sandy picked them up, and scurried out of the door.

  An odd mixture of anger and satisfaction filled Grayson. He’d stayed in control of the situation. He’d kept that woman in her place. He’d made his point. He turned and looked at Zoe. The little girl stared at him, those blue eyes, so like the senator’s, fixed on his face.

  And suddenly, he felt helpless again. He raced to the door and yelled out, “What does she like to do?” His question unanswered, he came back inside. “Hey, want to watch some TV?” he asked Zoe.

  “No.”

  “Want to play with your toys?”

  “No.”

  “Want to read a book?”

  “No.”

  The kid was a brat. “What do you want to do?”

  “See my daddy.”

  “You will. In a while.”

  “You stole-ed me,” she said, “and I hate you.”

  He flew into a rage. “What are you talking about?”

  “My daddy’s gonna get you.”

  “He told me to take care of you!”

  “No. You stole-ed me.”

  Grayson looked around for a distraction. He threw some paper at her. “Here. Draw.” And he left the room.

  When he peeked in a few minutes later, the little girl had her head down, focused on the paper, drawing. Great. Now he could do what he wanted.

  He went out to the living room, booted up his laptop, and started working on blog entries. He couldn’t access the Internet, but he could write offline and copy and paste it later. Most people on the Hill still weren’t getting it. They just didn’t understand politics! Amazing that the most powerful country in the world had such an incompetent legislature. They just weren’t grasping the issues correctly. He had his arguments ready. He rubbed his hands together like a baseball player about to grip the bat. He still had game. And he would let people on the Hill know it.

  Grayson got lost in his work. When he looked up fifteen or twenty minutes later, Zoe had left the kitchen and was tiptoeing through the living room. When she saw him, she shrank back against the wall. “I got to go to the bathroom,” she said.

  “Well, go on!” he responded. What was he, her nanny? She disappeared down the hall.

  Much later, he realized he hadn’t seen her come out. Much, much later he realized it probably wasn’t a good idea to leave her alone. Much, much, much later he got up to find her.

  24

  Grayson glanced in the kitchen. Where had Zoe gone? Her chair stood empty, her crayons scattered on the table. “Zoe?” he called. He walked to the bathroom, in the small hallway leading from the living room to the two bedrooms, and looked in. No Zoe. He even checked behind the shower curtain. And her bedroom was empty, though her toys lay scattered on the floor, like she’d been in there playing.

  Grayson’s heart began really pounding now, and he cursed out loud. He went into the room where he and Sandy were sleeping. Nothing. But then a tiny voice caught his ear.

  “My name is . . .”

  He dove across the bed. Zoe crouched in the corner, his cell phone at her ear. He grabbed it from her hand, clicked it off, and threw it across the room. She screamed. He grabbed her arm and hauled her onto the bed. Zoe kicked and tried to bite him. Her voice pierced his ears! He hit her hard, harder than he should have, across the face. Then he pushed her down with both hands, bouncing her into the mattress. “Don’t . . . you . . . ever . . .” he yelled, “. . . do that again!”

  She writhed and tried to push him away. Grayson hit her again. “Shut up. Shut up!” he yelled. Glancing around the room, he grabbed the sashes off the curtains, and flipping her over, he forced her hands behind her back and tied them. Then he tied her ankles together. And when the little girl screamed, he spanked her.

  The 911 dispatcher rewound the recording of the last call. The childish voice said, My name is Zo . . . He glanced at his coworker. “We got another kid, playing with a phone.”

  His coworker frowned, and shook his head. “Call them back to confirm. Don’t these kids have parents?”

  Grayson had just gotten Zoe quiet when his cell phone rang. He picked it up, expecting it to be Sandy. But the caller ID said “Emergency Dispatch.”

  What did they want? “Hello?” Grayson said, moving quickly away from Zoe. He forced himself to sound relaxed. “Oh, no trouble, officer.” He managed a chuckle. “My daughter. She just learned about 911 and . . . yes, sir. My name?” His heart raced. “Everett. Bob Everett. Yeah. Everything’s fine here. We just need to teach her when to call.”

  Grayson hung up the phone and cursed. That kid! What if the dispatcher didn’t buy his reassurance? How do they track cell phones? How close could they get if they wanted to investigate further?

  If he could get on the Internet, he could find out. But he couldn’t. No Wi-fi! Hands shaking, he jerked the battery out of the phone. Walking quickly to the kitchen, he took a meat hammer out of a drawer and began pounding and pounding until the phone was a mess of plastic and metal and tiny pieces. Then, for good measure, he scooped it all into a zippered plastic bag, added a can of soup for weight, took it outside, and heaved it into the pond behind his mother’s house. When he heard the splash as the bag hit the water, he felt instant regret. What if he hadn’t destroyed the tracking part?

  By the time Sandy got back half an hour later, Zoe lay asleep in her bed, clutching a stuffed
animal, her thumb in her mouth. “How’d you do that?” she asked Grayson.

  “You just have to know how to handle them,” he said. Sandy would never know about the restraints, or how Zoe sobbed until she fell asleep and he was able to remove them.

  Sandy hesitated, like she wanted to ask him more, but then changed her mind. “You want lunch before you go?”

  “Nah. Got to run. I’ll be back later,” and he gave her a peck on the cheek like nothing had happened, grabbed his laptop, and left. “Watch your cell phone!” he yelled as he opened his car door. “Don’t let her get to it.”

  First job: Get a replacement phone. One of those disposable ones.

  “Here’s the interesting thing,” Kenzie said to Alicia, who was looking over Kenzie’s shoulder. “KickerG’s last posts on these political blogs roughly coincided with the times our suspect was posting on the High Stakes board.”

  “Could be coincidental.”

  “What are you doing?” The senator stood in the doorway, demanding an answer.

  Kenzie looked at him. Grable looked tired, and she wondered if he’d slept at all over the last two days. Grief and anxiety had aged him almost overnight. The suave, handsome senator had disappeared. In his place was a graying older man, drowning in a sea of fear. Instantly, she decided to be up front. “Scott and Crow are in Alexandria, investigating that man the police arrested. I interviewed him, Senator, and I don’t think he had anything to do with Zoe’s disappearance.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  She moved toward him. “I’m pursuing the Internet leads. More specifically, I’m still looking at Grayson Chambers.” Kenzie brushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. “I know you’re having a hard time imagining him as a kidnapper. But you will not direct the course of this investigation.” She looked straight at him, staring at him as a mosaic of emotions crossed Grable’s face. Anger. Fear. Concern. Then finally, resignation. She softened her voice, “As soon as I can clear him, I’ll get off that line of investigation. But until I know for sure he’s innocent, I’m going to pursue it. Because I really want to find your daughter. And I know you do, too.”