by P J Parrish
“They called once,” Wainwright said. “They might call again.”
Susan didn’t reply, slipping away down the hall. Louis pushed off the sofa and followed her. She was standing at the open door to Ben’s room, watching the techs. He could almost read her mind, understand what she was thinking. Ben was gone, vanished, and now here were these strangers, tapping her phone, moving around her son’s room, leaving black smudges on the windowsills, the furniture, and everything Ben might have handled. It was like being touched by something ugly and dark, and he knew that no matter what the outcome of this, those marks would never really go away.
“Susan.”
She turned but didn’t even look at him. She went across the hall and into her own room. She crawled onto the bed, burying her face in the pillow. Louis came in to sit on the edge of the bed. He touched her hair.
“Susan.”
It took a moment, but she finally turned to look up at him. Her eyes were dry, empty.
“He’s just a little kid,” she said.
“I know.”
“He’s just this little skinny kid.” There was a catch in her voice.
“He’s smart, Susan.”
She shook her head slowly. “No, no, you don’t get it. They pick on him. At school, they tease him. He isn’t...”
She put her face into the pillow.
“Susan, listen to me. Ben knows how to use his brain. He’s smart in a way most kids his age aren’t.”
She didn’t move.
Louis hesitated, then got up and left the room. He went into Ben’s room. The techs were gone. Louis went to the closet and rummaged through some boxes and clothes in the corner. He found what he was looking for and came back to Susan.
“Susan, look at this.”
She turned to face him, frowning when she saw the title on the book Louis was holding -- In the Presence of Evil: Mass Murderers and Serial Killers.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, sitting up.
“In Ben’s closet.”
She took it from Louis and opened it.
“He showed it to me once,” Louis said. “When I first met you, that night you were working on the Cade case and you asked me to babysit? He showed me this.”
Susan was quiet, turning the pages, looking at the lurid pictures. Finally she closed the book and looked up at Louis.
“Ben is okay,” Louis said.
Susan’s eyes filled with tears as she clutched the book.
Finally, the tears fell silently down her drawn face. He thought for a moment she was going to lie back and bury herself in the pillow, but she didn’t. She leaned into him, her forehead on his shoulder.
“Louis.”
Susan’s head came up and Louis turned to see Wainwright in the bedroom doorway.
“Sorry,” Wainwright said. “But we might have their car.”
“What car?” Susan asked.
Wainwright hesitated, like he didn’t have the time or inclination to explain to her.
“What car?” she repeated.
“It looks like they picked up the pizza guy here on Sereno Key,” Wainwright said. “Then they drove his car to the old folks’ house. But they had to get over to this island somehow. We figured they left a vehicle over here somewhere, so I had the guys look. We think we got it at a Circle K near the causeway.”
Louis started to get up, but suddenly he could feel Susan’s hand, heavy on his arm. He knew he should stay. He knew he needed to be here and sit with her until she fell asleep or cried herself out.
She took her hand from his arm and placed it on his shoulder, giving him a gentle push.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll be all right.”
The car sat in the shadows behind the Circle K, its dark blue finish glistening in the weak glow of an old floodlight. It was a Cadillac El Dorado from the early seventies, long and sleek, with a faded black vinyl top. The thin strip of decorative chrome was gone, and the hood ornament had been snapped off.
Louis walked to the driver’s side and hit the interior with a flashlight. A second light came from Wainwright on the passenger side.
The car was empty. Louis tried the door and it opened with a groan. The dashboard and seats were cracked, brittle from decades of baking under the Florida sun. The floor-boards were covered in dried mud and newspapers.
Louis leaned over the seat and swept his light slowly over the back. He was looking for something that told him Ben had been in this car. It wouldn’t have been hard to scratch some letters in the old vinyl or to leave a button, or something that would give them a lead. But he saw nothing.
“Louis, is there a trunk switch?”
Louis brought the light back to the front steering wheel. “I don’t see one.”
Louis withdrew from the car and flicked off the flashlight, sticking it under his arm as he walked back to the trunk. He stuck his hands in his pockets and waited while Wainwright dispatched an officer to get a crowbar.
“They tell me the car is registered to a Byron J. Ellis, of Fort Myers,” Wainwright said, coming over to Louis.
“What’s his history?”
“Sixteen years for manslaughter up at Raiford, and a couple of GTA’s. He’s been out about eighteen months, last known address was Fort Myers.”
“No Miami connection?”
“Not that we can see off his sheet.”
“Susan ever deal with him?”
“No. He was convicted down in Collier County.”
The officer appeared with the crowbar and Louis and Wainwright stepped aside.
“How far away was the pizza guy’s last delivery?”
“Couple of blocks from the old folks’ place.”
A sharp wind suddenly blew through, shaking loose the raindrops from a palm tree. A drop hit Louis on the back of his neck and trickled under his collar, sending a current of shivers down his back.
“Got it, Chief.”
They turned back to the car and it occurred to Louis that this was yet another place he had to look, another corner, another room, another trunk. Each time something inside him pulled tight, like a steel brace that would somehow keep him upright if he saw what he most feared to see. He had to force himself to walk over to the open trunk this time.
Wainwright turned and looked back at him, his face a pale mask in the dim light.
“It’s empty, Louis.”
Louis felt the relief pass through him like the damp wind, and he quickened his step, flicking on his flashlight. The light danced over the inside, but there was nothing to see except junk. Louis’s flashlight beam paused at the inside of the rear bumper, where the taillight wires came through to the trunk. The tiny wires had been pulled out of their holes, leaving the right tail light unworkable. The wires of the Toyota’s trunk had been pulled out, too.
“Chief, look.”
Wainwright’s beam stayed on the wires for a moment then disappeared. “You think the kid did that?”
Louis looked at the other taillight. The wires were intact. He stood upright, running an arm across his face.
“The wires on the pizza guy’s car were pulled out. Too big a coincidence. I think Ben did it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Remember a couple years back, that guy who was held in a trunk and used the wires to get the attention of the cops? It was all over the news.”
“Yeah, I remember. But you’re not going to convince me an eleven-year-old boy would. And even if he had seen it on TV, he’d never think to try it.”
“Ben would.”
Wainwright turned away, gave some instructions to his men, and looked back at Louis.
“I know that Mrs. Outlaw has to have her hope, Louis. People in her situation don’t have anything else. But you should know better. You know what kind of people we’re dealing with here.”
Louis didn’t want to hear this. Wainwright put a hand on his shoulder, but Louis shrugged it off, turning toward Wainwright’s cruiser. He climbed back inside. Wainwri
ght got in and they drove back to Susan’s in silence.
Louis stopped inside the front door to pick up the over-night bag he had brought from his cottage. Two new cops were there and they didn’t even look up at him. Jewell, still at his post at the door, gave Louis a slight nod as Louis went down the hall.
In the bathroom, he changed into worn sweats and a pair of old socks. Going to Susan’s room, he paused at the door. Susan was curled on the bed and looked to be asleep, but she was still wearing her clothes.
He went in, leaving the door ajar so he could hear anything outside. He turned off the light. Slowly, carefully, he eased down onto the bed next to Susan, sitting up against the headboard.
The bedroom was dark but in the slender shaft of light coming in from the hallway, he could see the open door of Ben’s room across the hallway.
Susan stirred and turned toward him. He sat still, not moving. The rain had started up again, coming now with a hard cold wind that seeped in through the panes of the jalousie windows. Susan shivered next to him but didn’t wake up.
Louis got up and went to the window, giving the crank a hard twist. No use. The glass slats of the old window were as tight as they would get.
He crawled back under the comforter, easing close to Susan. For several minutes, he just sat there, trying to get warm. But he couldn’t. And he finally knew that the cold came not from the outside but from somewhere deep inside.
There was something oddly, terribly, familiar about it. It had been a different dark bedroom, a different cold wind, a different place. But the feeling was the same, the feeling that he was alone and no one was coming to help him. He was eight again, alone in a bed in the dark in a strange house listening to the Michigan winter wind outside the window. He couldn’t even remember which foster home it had been, or even the face of the man who was supposed to have been taking care of him.
He had lain in bed, shivering and crying, waiting for someone to come and turn on the light, to bring him another blanket. No one had come.
Louis pulled the comforter up over his chest.
Ah, Ben, be brave. Be brave and believe.
It was another hour before he finally fell asleep.
CHAPTER 18
Sunday, January 17
Benjamin sat on the bed, legs crossed, his back against the wall. They were in a motel room, somewhere far away from Sereno Key. They had come here last night, late, and they had hustled him inside under a blanket. He knew they were afraid someone would see him.
When they had gotten inside, he had curled up into a ball against the wall in the corner of the second bed, fighting tears, not wanting to let these guys hear him cry again. If he cried, the blond man would get mad again. He couldn’t stand crying, he said.
Ben had expected the blond man to eventually throw him off the bed, taking it for himself. But he hadn’t. Ben had awoken in the same spot, the thin bedspread thrown over him, a pillow squeezed against his chest.
The blond man, the one called Adam, was standing at the window. He was still wearing that same red T-shirt he had on yesterday, and those gloves he never took off, even when he ate. His skin was white, too white for someone in Florida, but he had muscles. The other guy, Byron, was in the bathroom. He was older than Adam and Ben wondered if he was the blond guy’s father because he bossed the blond guy around a lot, but still talked nice to him like a father would.
But they didn’t look too much alike. Byron was darker. He had tattoos all over him and they were ugly, except for the bird on his back. It looked like the eagle on the dollar bill.
Byron had just gotten out of bed and was in the bathroom now. Ben could hear him making gross noises behind the thin wall.
Ben tried to figure how long he’d been with the men. Friday night he barely remembered. It had all started in the park when he saw them shoot at Daddy and then suddenly they had him, dragging him away from Daddy’s car and putting him in the trunk of another car. That’s when he had pulled out the taillight wires, but it hadn’t done any good. No cops pulled them over.
Then he had fallen asleep, and wasn’t sure how long it was before he heard the car tires going over the metal things on the Sereno Key causeway. He knew it was the only causeway with metal things and he thought he was going home, but he wasn’t.
Instead he had been taken from that trunk to another trunk that smelled like pizza. He had pulled the taillight wires out there, too. But again, no one seemed to notice.
He had stayed in that trunk until the man named Byron let him out and walked him through the blue and white kitchen that he knew belonged to Mr. and Mrs. McAllister, the old people who lived down the street.
He had seen blood on the McAllisters’ white floor and he had almost stepped in it and then Byron had put a hand to his eyes like Ma did when people on TV got shot up or were getting naked and Byron had said “Don’t look at that stuff, kid.”
But he had looked. Even though he didn’t want to.
The blood...he didn’t want to step in that. But he knew now he should have. That way he would’ve left a footprint and maybe his Daddy would have found it and known he was there.
He had to let them know he was still alive. If he didn’t, they would stop looking for him. And he didn’t want them to stop looking.
The bathroom door opened and Byron came out. He wasn’t wearing a shirt and his skin was wet. Byron opened a box of donuts sitting on the other bed and looked inside.
Adam turned from the window. “You decide what we’re going to do now?”
Byron picked a donut from the box. “I’m thinking on it.”
Ben inched forward on the bed. He really wanted a donut but he was scared to ask. He was so hungry.
“Sir?” Ben said softly.
Byron looked at Ben over his shoulder.
“Can I have a donut, please?” Ben asked.
“Finally hungry enough to talk, huh?” Byron said. He tossed him the box.
Ben picked out a glazed donut. It was getting hard but he ate it anyway, his eyes watching Adam as he moved to the center of the small room and sat down on the edge of the bed. Adam was watching TV now, too, his hand resting on the tip of the knife in his belt. The knife Ben figured he had killed the McAllisters with. The knife that had caused all the blood on the kitchen floor.
It didn’t look like any knife he had ever seen, a short blade with a place to put your fingers, like brass knuckles. Adam liked to bring the knife out sometimes and feel it. Sometimes he cleaned his fingernails with it but it didn’t look like it did much good.
“You done thinking yet?” Adam asked.
“Yeah,” Byron said. “I got a new plan. This is what we do. We call them back and get Outlaw on the phone. We tell him this is a regular kidnapping and we want the hundred grand in exchange for the kid. Then we split for good.”
“For good? You mean never come back?”
“I’m tired, Adam. I’m tired of all this shit and I just want some peace.”
“In Aruba?”
“Hundred grand would go a long way in Aruba.”
Ben watched as Adam got up and walked a small circle in front of the TV before he turned back. “I don’t want to stay in Aruba the rest of my life, Byron. And I don’t want to be a wanted man for the rest of my life either. I’d like to come back here one day. I have family here.”
“That old man doesn’t give a shit about you.”
“Uncle Leo’s been good to me.”
“Good? What kind of asshole tells you if you don’t straighten up he’ll leave you out where the boars can eat you?”
Byron walked to Adam and put a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “After this is over, we won’t need him anymore. You won’t need him anymore. Trust me. It will be all right.”
“But what if Outlaw doesn’t come? Don’t they usually send some cop to deliver ransoms?”
“We tell him he has to come. We make him drive all the way out here somewhere so the cops can’t follow him without being seen by us. When he hands ov
er the money we shoot him.”
Ben looked up at the two men. Tears welled up in his eyes.
Kill his daddy?
He felt his body go tight and his chest suddenly seemed filled with something hard and sharp. He wiped the tears away with both arms, smearing the glaze from the donut across his cheek. His eyes caught a glimpse of the knife.
Don’t cry. Don’t cry.
“What do we do with the kid?” Adam asked.
“We take him with us and leave him out wherever we do the drop.”
“Leave him alive? What if they find him? He’ll tell them everything. He’ll tell them who we are. We have to kill him, Byron.”
“I’ve told you this before, Adam, guys that hurt kids are scum, and we’re better than that. There are some things you don’t kill.”
Ben pressed himself against the wall. He didn’t know what was happening. They were going to kill his daddy and then just leave him somewhere? He’d seen what it looked like out here on the way to the motel. There was nothing but swamp and he had seen a sign about boar hunting and he didn’t want to be out there by himself. What if no one ever found him? What if they didn’t even try?
Ben’s eyes dropped to his hands. The black and gold cigar ring was still on his finger and he started spinning it.
He pulled the paper ring off his finger, suddenly knowing what he would do. He’d leave the ring as a clue, just like he did the car wires. If they found the ring here, then they would keep looking. They wouldn’t let him die out there with the boars.
Ben slipped the paper cigar ring under the pillow, drawing his hand back out slowly. He laid his head quietly down on the pillow, his eyes on the flying bird tattooed on Byron’s back.
He wished he could fly like the bird. He wished he could fly home.
CHAPTER 19
Somewhere in his brain Louis heard the door open, the gentle click of a lock, and the wheeze of the screen. Voices drifted in with the cold air and he turned slowly onto his back.
A slow ache made its way through his lower back, then moved to his shoulders. He lay still, for a moment staying in that warm, mindless place between sleep and consciousness, not wanting to move or think. Then suddenly his mind jumped back.