Shadow Image

by Martin J. Smith

  She passed the stairs again, avoiding what she knew was at the top—Taylor’s room. It was too real. For now, she was clinging to abstractions, hoping the thin veneer of emotional distance would protect her from flat-out hysteria. Jim was right. She’d ignored the signs, let the defender’s zeal and political ambition blind her to the truth. How could she step into her son’s room, see his Batman sheets and his odd collections of boyhood, and at the same time know that he now was in the malevolent hands of people she’d trusted?

  And yet, here she was at the top of the stairs, drawn to the bedroom door like a moth to a flame. She felt the danger, knew it wasn’t smart, but she pushed it open anyway and stepped in, wishing suddenly she’d spent more time there.

  Even at seven, Taylor had arranged his new room with a decorator’s attention to detail. He was a neat child, frighteningly so, and nothing was out of place despite the usual morning rush to school. His maple bed was made, the Batman logo on the spread perfectly centered, the sheets turned neatly over the spread’s lip. The caped crusader glared from the case of a perfectly plumped pillow. The frothy pink bows and pink front wheels of his Barbie skates, inherited from Annie, peeked from beneath the bed frame. A withered lei she had brought back from Hawaii two years ago hung around one of the short posts of the headboard. Why hadn’t she taken Taylor with her?

  His brass piggy bank sat on one corner of his desk, no doubt full. Taylor was a conservative child, the antithesis of Jim’s Annie. Taylor had coveted the black lacquer pen and pencil set that once sat on her office desk, and she knew the moment she offered it that no Christmas gift she’d ever give him could delight him more. It was placed along the desk’s outer edge, the pen and pencil ready for plucking by some efficient junior executive. Other than that, the desk’s top surface was clear. It looked like the work space of an honors graduate from a time-management seminar. Sentimental items and other distractions—his geode collection, two model airplanes webbed with Testor’s glue, a plastic ant farm filled with industrious workers—were relegated to a shelf across the room. His father, the CPA, would be so proud.

  The bookshelf seemed messy, with the spines of varying sizes placed side by side. Tall books next to short books, fat books next to skinny books, paperbacks next to hardcovers, an apparent hodgepodge of volumes until she recognized her son’s personality at work. The books weren’t arranged by size, but alphabetically, starting with Aardvark’s Ark and ending with Where’s Waldo. She smiled.

  The walls were bare except for a single photograph taken during his first and only AYSO soccer game. He’d quit after the game, terrified by a coach’s gentle reprimand. He’d been picking dandelions on defense, his attention diverted as a swarm of players shuffled past him toward an unlikely goal. In the photo, though, he was all business, crouched and ready for action, his voluminous shorts hanging nearly to the tops of his brand-new spikes, which never quite fit. Geek-boy gets physical.

  And suddenly, she was crying, imagining her odd and irreplaceable baby in the hands of a stranger, possibly a killer. Brenna closed the door and leaned against it. She was alone. No one would know. But still she stifled a sob and went straight to the kids’ bathroom for a tissue. The face in the mirror startled her. She’d stayed in control, kept it together while Jim was there. But now her eyes were rimmed in red, her hair falling in reckless strands across her forehead. It was as if the past hour had aged her five years.

  Brenna wiped her eyes and tucked the stray hair behind her ears. She took a deep breath, then another, then headed back down the hall to their bedroom. She’d told Jim she’d wait by the phone, promised him, in fact. What she hadn’t counted on, though, was the oppressive silence of the house, the overwhelming sense of isolation and helplessness. Inaction contradicted everything she understood about the world. She needed to do something.

  She cleared her throat and tried to wring the anxiety from her voice, then jabbed the Record Greeting button on the answering machine.

  “You have reached the home of Brenna Kennedy and Jim Christensen,” she began. “We’re not home right now, but you can still reach us by dialing our mobile phones.” She enunciated her cell phone number and the number of Jim’s car phone, knowing he was probably out of range. “We very much want to talk to you. Please call.”

  She played back the greeting, distressed by the wavering fear in her voice, at the weak-kneed plea at the end. She recited the Pledge of Allegiance, modulating the tone, projecting control, then recorded the greeting again, skipping the “Please call” at the end. It sounded better, stronger, determined but fearless.

  Within minutes, she’d stepped out of her St. John suit and into her jeans and Reeboks. She pulled on one of Jim’s dark-blue Pitt sweatshirts and gathered her hair into a tight ponytail. After one last look down the hall toward Taylor’s room, she was back down the stairs and looking for her purse.

  She found it where she’d left it, on the front-hall table. Its weight didn’t surprise her because she knew the gun was inside. What surprised her was her resolve in picking it up and stepping without a second thought out the front door.

  Chapter 37

  Cook’s Corner Inn was the inevitable intersection of two of the nineties’ most onerous trends—a rural gourmet coffee bar frequented by wealthy, urban Harley riders. Christensen was surrounded by men and women his age and older who were sheathed in leather, grasping at lost youth, pretending to be rugged individualists, the type of people who could take a Tuesday afternoon off if they damn well pleased.

  None of them were Simon Bostwick.

  Christensen drained his third cappuccino. How long should he wait? He’d arrived fifteen minutes late because of the Squirrel Hill Tunnel traffic, but Bostwick would have waited. Wouldn’t he? After twenty minutes, he’d quizzed a few Cook’s Corner patrons about Bostwick. After thirty, he’d pretended to be an old friend and cadged some rough directions to Bostwick’s house from a waitress who Christensen was sure had slept with the former deputy coroner. He looked down at the crude map she’d scribbled on the back of a napkin, then at his watch. Nearly an hour late—an hour Christensen didn’t have to waste.

  He slipped a $20 bill under the sugar bowl and stood up, nearly colliding with the waitress, a vivacious, high-mileage brunette, but no less stunning because of the world-weary lines around her eyes. Maybe more so.

  “Where do you know Simon from again?”

  “Pittsburgh,” he said, flustered. “We’ve lost touch, though, since he moved up here.” Backing away, Christensen knocked a spoon off the table. It clattered to the floor. He bent down to pick it up, and when he stood up she was eyeing him like prey.

  “Be an odd time of day for him to be here,” she said. “He’s a partier. Mostly comes in for a java jolt after the bars, or first thing in the morning if he’s been out all night.”

  “Still a partier, eh?” he bluffed. “That’s Simon. Never on time, either.”

  The wall clock behind her read 7:04. Christensen wanted to find Bostwick’s house before dark. He laid the spoon on the table beside the twenty.

  “Lemme get you some change,” she said.

  Christensen shook his head. “It’s fine, thanks. If he comes in, tell him I’m headed to his place and I’ll wait for him there.”

  “Straight out Mountain Laurel Road, right at the ranger station,” she repeated. “If you pass a tricked-out Sportster on the road between here and there, it’s probably him.”

  Christensen backed toward the door. “Appreciate it.”

  Mountain Laurel Road ran in a straight line between Champion and the ski resort of Seven Springs, western Pennsylvania’s version of Aspen but with hills instead of mountains. It billed itself in recreational brochures as a “year-round resort community,” an effort, Christensen suspected, to attract the region’s upscale second-home investors without stres
sing too heavily winter’s often undependable snowfall. This time of year, its leafy trails and silent ski lifts were given over to mountain bikers. Every car Christensen passed had at least one bike on the roof rack.

  He checked the napkin, then hit the brakes hard as he passed a ranger station on the left. The Explorer’s speedometer plummeted from eighty-five to zero as it skidded to a stop. His heart was pounding, fueled by adrenaline and caffeine, as he jammed the transmission into reverse and backed up to the turn. In the dim, dusky light, he checked the napkin again. The waitress hadn’t given the road a name, and now he could see why. It was hardly a road at all, but a narrow, unpaved tunnel of parallel tire tracks disappearing into the woods. A decent rain would turn it into a bog, but at the moment it seemed dry and passable. Still, he was glad he had four-wheel drive. She’d said to follow it all the way to the end.

  Christensen turned on his headlights, trying to imagine Bostwick navigating the rutted road on a motorcycle. He passed an A-frame on his left, apparently unoccupied, and an identical one on the right. Every hundred yards or so, a For Sale sign designated another undeveloped lot. Maybe half a mile in, through a brace of birch trees just around a bend, he saw the pale glow of a window light. At the same moment, his headlights caught the rear reflectors of a car sitting squarely in the middle of the road, well away from what he now could see was another A-frame.

  He turned off his headlights and killed the Explorer’s engine with a vague something’s-wrong-with-this-picture feeling. From the waitress’s directions and the way it sat at the end of the road, he knew the far house was Bostwick’s. He assumed Bostwick had a car as well as the motorcycle, but what would it be doing there, so far from the house and blocking the road?

  Christensen stepped out, taking care to close the Explorer’s door quietly. He was maybe a quarter-mile from the house, but the forest was silent and unforgiving. Something about the skewed scene still bothered him. Stealth couldn’t hurt.

  The car itself was a puzzle, a standard black Thunderbird with its engine still ticking. Three antennas of varying styles and lengths rose like stiff whiskers from the roof. Through the tinted driver’s-side window, the car was alive with electronics—at least two telephones, a headset, a laptop computer, indecipherable black boxes. All along and underneath the dashboard, tiny red indicator lights blinked. Unfamiliar dials glowed pale green. It looked like a communications satellite on radial tires. Christensen wanted to lean closer, to press his face against the glass for a better look, but the car reeked of paranoia. Surely it was alarmed.

  He walked in the right tire track toward the house, slower now, listening. The cabin sat at the road’s dead end, sunk into a level spot of an otherwise hilly lot that reached up into thick woods. The lot had only two other structures, a separate garage to the left of the main house and a small, squat building no bigger than a child’s playhouse on the hillside behind it. Inside, Christensen guessed, a single lamp was on.

  Suddenly, the cabin’s angled ceiling flooded with light. Someone inside had turned on the track lights that studded the roof beams. From where he stood, still downhill looking up, all Christensen could see was the ceiling and what appeared to be the railing of a loft. The sudden light was followed almost immediately by a crash, as if someone inside had upended a heavy piece of furniture. Then the sound of breaking glass.

  He circled to the right, up a small hill that offered a view into the cabin’s wide-open front windows. The ground was dry, but the climb was steep. Stepping from rock to root, he moved as quickly as he could in his slippery leather-soled loafers. Hooking one arm around a tree to hold himself steady, he tried to see across maybe fifty yards and over the front porch railing into the cabin’s ground-floor living area. From there, though, the view was blocked by stacked firewood along the bottom of the windows. Christensen skidded down the loamy hillside and moved closer, climbing farther up another hill that was closer to the house and less steep.

  A man inside was moving. Christensen squinted, trying to make out details. He had no idea what Bostwick looked like, but his first impression was that the man was older than Bostwick, and overdressed. A dark suit hung neatly over his stocky frame, its fine lines holding even as the man heaved cushions from the living-room couch. He tossed them across the room, then pulled open the frame of a sofa bed, stripped its sheets, tipped the mattress off the frame, then upended the entire couch and let it fall upside down, shattering a glass coffee table. Christensen thought, unexpectedly, of his father, of the one time alcohol had loosed his rage as his family cowered in a corner of their normally quiet house.

  This was different. The man was too controlled. He pulled open the lap drawer of a desk, rifled the contents, then upended the drawer onto the floor. He repeated the procedure with each of the desk’s other drawers, chuckling and talking to himself or to someone elsewhere in the cabin as he did. A two-drawer file cabinet beside the desk was next. The man walked his fingers across the tabs of the top drawer, occasionally pulling a file, opening it, then letting the contents drop to the floor like falling leaves. He bent down, out of sight, and presumably did the same with the bottom drawer. When he stood up, he casually tipped the filing cabinet onto its side.

  Christensen looked away. He was breathing hard. The air tasted like chilled champagne, but that wasn’t why he felt suddenly dizzy. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, knowing instinctively he needed to think clearly.

  It wasn’t Bostwick. It couldn’t be. Raging alcoholics sometimes ransack their own homes, but never systematically and with the patience this man showed. No, the man in the suit was looking for something, Christensen decided, and suddenly he understood. The scene blinked into focus like a high-speed Polaroid: The car. The dark suit. The search. This was the man in the dark suit who had been talking to the kids outside Kids’ Korner four hours earlier. He worked for the Underhills. He was looking for the same thing Christensen was—the films from Chip Underhill’s autopsy.

  Who else could he be?

  Where the hell were the kids?

  A three-quarters moon was cresting the hill behind Bostwick’s house. Its pale glow lit the thin white trunks of the birch trees, which surrounded Christensen like anorexic ghosts. For the moment, he had the advantage of being able to see what was happening inside the cabin without anyone seeing out. He looked for somewhere closer to the windows where he might perch unseen for a while, wondered if he could climb high enough in the maple tree to the left of the cabin’s front porch to get a better view.

  He sidestepped down the hill and into the cabin’s carport, then hurried across to the base of the maple. Ten yards away, wooden steps led up to the front porch. They looked creaky and forbidding, too brightly lit by the lights from inside to give him the cover he needed. He tried the footing along the maple tree’s trunk, but his shoes slid off as if the soles were icy. He slipped them off and tried again, grabbing the maple’s lowest branch and swinging one leg up and over. Within minutes, he was where he needed to be, wedged in the crotch of two high branches, looking through a gap in the leaves into a part of the room he couldn’t see from the hillside.

  A second man was sitting on the floor, his hands behind his back, his flannel shirt open and askew. A web of blood covered the left side of his face, but he seemed conscious and alert. He answered whenever the other man spoke to him, but otherwise he watched the sacking in silence. At one point, he shifted positions and Christensen saw a glint of chrome at his wrists. If Christensen was right, Simon Bostwick was handcuffed to the railing at the bottom of the loft stairs.

  Christensen could hear the roar of blood in his ears, pumped by a heart in overdrive. The man in the suit was in the loft now. He hoisted a twin-bed mattress and leaned it against the angled ceiling. He did the same with another, then reached into his pants pocket. With a flick of his wrist, he snapped open a blade and traced an X across the face of one of the
upended mattresses. Peeling away the ticking, he peered into the opening like a surgeon, then stepped to the next mattress and opened it the same way. Finding nothing there, he heaved both over the loft rail. The mattresses landed with a crash on the accumulated plates scattered across Bostwick’s narrow plank dining table. The man disemboweled the box springs in the exact same way, but left them leaning against the loft ceiling when he was done. But as he walked back down the stairs, the open knife still in his hand, he seemed more agitated than before.

  Christensen felt a prickly wave of dread in the hair on his neck as the man dragged the point of the blade along the wall toward the bottom of the stairs. The whole scene had a dreamy feel to it. When the man stopped in front of Bostwick, Christensen resisted the urge to look away. He breathed again when the man folded the blade into the knife’s handle and put it back in his pocket.

  But just as quickly, the man, still talking, reached into his suit coat, stooped down, and pressed the barrel of a gun against the side of Bostwick’s head. Bostwick nodded, and the other man stood up. He circled slowly around and started up the loft steps again. About halfway up, he turned around and sat. Bostwick tried to turn, to keep the gun in sight, trying to see behind him. But his eyes were full of fear. The other man talked on, the conversation one-sided, and even without hearing the words, even from a distance, Christensen felt the man’s cruelty. Bostwick was helpless, aware of the threat behind him but unable to face it down. The man wasn’t just in danger; he was emasculated.

  “Just give him what he wants,” Christensen said out loud, resisting the urge to look away.

  He wished he had.

  With a muffled pop, Bostwick’s head snapped, thrust backward by a jet of gore from the exit wound. His face transformed in an instant, like that of a startled child. When Bostwick slumped forward again, a crimson geyser suddenly rose straight up from the entry wound at the back of his head. His body went limp.