3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  She frowned. “It does sound hard to believe.”

  “Thanks so very much.”

  Her eyes slid toward his face. “Like Garner, I was trained to follow the forensic evidence. The difference between us, however, is that I won’t simply dismiss your theory. It’s just that I never had an intuition of how to unravel a case. I don’t think real life works like that.”

  Jack felt sorry for her. It was a peculiarly familiar feeling, and then, with a start, he realized it was how he had felt toward Sharon most of the time they were married.

  “One thing I will guarantee you,” Nina said, breaking in on his thoughts, “that kind of argument won’t fly with Garner.”

  That was when Jack handed her the metal vial. “I found it hidden in the bottom of Alli’s box spring. There’s cocaine inside.”

  Nina laughed. “So you found it.”

  “What?”

  “Hugh owes me twenty bucks.” She pocketed the vial. “He said you wouldn’t find it.”

  Jack felt like an idiot. “It was a test.”

  Nina nodded. “He’s got it in for you.” Abruptly detaching herself from the wall, she threw down her cigarette butt. “Forget that sonovabitch.” She moved off to the west, Jack keeping pace beside her.

  “Back there,” he said slowly, “when you read sections of that report …”

  “I knew you were having trouble.”

  “But how?”

  “You’ll see soon enough.”

  They went along, paralleling the dorm. Just beyond it was a utility shed. At first it appeared that they were going to skirt the shed. Then, with a look over her shoulder, Nina opened the door.

  “Inside,” she said. “Quickly.”

  The moment Jack stepped through the narrow doorway, Nina closed the door behind them. The interior contained a plain wood table, several utilitarian chairs, a brass floor lamp. It was as sparsely furnished as a police interrogation cubicle. The small square window afforded a view down over the end of the rolling lawn to a tree-line beyond which was the wall that bordered the property.

  Two people occupied the room. A cone of light from the floorlamp illuminated the sides of their faces. Jack recognized them: Edward Carson and his wife, Lyn. The soon-to-be First Lady, dressed in a dark, rather severely cut tweed suit, a ruffled white silk blouse held closed at the neck with a cameo the color of ripe apricots, stood at the window, arms wrapped tightly around herself, staring blindly at clouds shredded by the wind. Fear and anxiety drew her features inward as if every atom of her being were psychically engaged in protecting her missing daughter.

  Jack glanced at Nina. She had learned about his secret from Edward Carson.

  Though the president-elect looked similarly haggard, the moment Jack and Nina entered, his sense of moment forced his political facade back on. Back straight, shoulders squared, he smiled his professional smile, the sides of his mouth crinkling along with the corners of his eyes. Those eyes, so much a part of his extraordinary telegenic image, possessed, in person, a glint of steel that did not come through on the TV screen. Or, mused Jack, maybe he was in war mode, all the knives at his disposal being out.

  He was sitting at the table, a Bible open to the New Testament. His forefinger hooked at a section of the text, he began to recite from Matthew chapter seven. “‘For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?’”

  Edward Carson stood up, came around the side of the table. “Jack.” He pumped Jack’s hand. “Good of you to come. I have best wishes and Godspeed for you from Reverend Taske.” He kept a firm grip on Jack’s hand. “We’ve all come a long way, haven’t we?”

  “Yes, sir, we have, indeed.”

  “Jack, I never got a chance to thank you properly for your help when we needed to evacuate my office during the anthrax attack in 2001.”

  “I was just doing my job, sir.”

  Carson’s eyes rested on him warmly. “You and I know that isn’t true. Don’t be modest, Jack. Those were dark days, indeed, marked by an unknown American terrorist who we never found. Frankly, I don’t know how we would have gotten through it without the ATF’s help.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Now the president-elect’s other hand closed over Jack’s and the familiar voice lowered a notch. “You’ll bring her back to us, Jack, won’t you?”

  The president-elect stared into Jack’s eyes with the intensity of a convert. Despite his big-city upbringing, there was something of the rural preacher in him, a magnetic flux that made you want to reach out and touch him, a call to arms that made your pulse race, rushed at you like a freight train. Above all, you longed to believe what he told you—like a father communicating with his son, or at any rate what in Jack’s mind was how a father ought to communicate with his son. But that was all idealistic claptrap, a pasteboard cutout, a larger-than-life image from the silver screen, where happy endings were manufactured for captive audiences. Unlike reality, which had never been happy for Jack and, he suspected, never would be.

  “I’ll do my best,” Jack said. “I’m honored you asked for me, sir.”

  “In all honesty, who better, Jack?”

  “I appreciate that. Sir, in my opinion the first order of business is to create a plausible cover story.” Jack’s gaze swung to the woman by the window, who was holding herself together by a supreme force of will. He recalled Sharon in a similar pose, as Emma’s coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. He’d heard a whispering then, just as he’d heard in the main building. Sharon said it was the wind in the treetops. He’d believed her, then.

  He inclined his head slightly. “Mrs. Carson.”

  Hearing her name, she started, summoned back into this time, this place. She seemed thin, as if she’d lost her taste for food. For a moment she stared bleakly into Jack’s face; then she came away from the window, stood in front of him.

  “Ma’am, do your parents still have that olive farm in Umbria?”

  “Why, yes, they do.”

  He looked at Edward Carson. “It seems to me that would be a good place for Alli to be ‘spending the holidays,’ don’t you think?”

  “Why, yes, I do.” The president-elect put his cell phone to his ear. “I’ll have my press secretary get right on it.”

  Lyn Carson moved toward Jack. “Now I know what you must have gone through, Mr. McClure. Your daughter …” She faltered, tears gleaming at the corners of her eyes. She bit her lip, seemed to be mentally counting to ten. When she had herself under control, she said, “You must miss Emma terribly.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do.”

  Finished with his call, the president-elect signaled to his wife and she stepped away, turned her back on them to once again contemplate the world outside, forever changed.

  “Jack, I have something to tell you. You’ve been briefed, no doubt, given the theories, the evidence, et cetera.”

  “About E-Two. Yes, sir.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think there’s a hidden agenda. E-Two may be a prime suspect, but I don’t think it should be the only suspect.”

  Lyn Carson turned back into the room. Her lips were half-parted, as if she was about to add something, but at a curt shake of her husband’s head, she kept her own counsel.

  When he spoke again, it was in the same tone, Jack imagined, with which he held sway over backroom caucuses—hushed and conspiratorial. “What’s important, Jack, is that you not leap to judgment like these political hacks. I want you to follow your own instinct, develop your own leads. That’s why I expended a great deal of political capital to have you reassigned.”

  Lyn Carson held out her hand. It was very light, very cold, no more than the hollow-boned wing of a bird, but through it pulsed the iron determination of a parent. The terrible agony in her eyes he recognized as his own.

  “I’m so awfully sorry.”

  Her words had a double meaning, and he
knew it. She was talking about both Emma and Alli.

  “Bring our daughter back to us.”

  “I’ll return her to you.” When he squeezed her hand, the bones felt as if they truly were hollow. “I promise.”

  Tears overflowed from Lyn Carson’s eyes, fell one by one at her feet.

  8

  “You shouldn’t have promised,” Nina said. “You can’t guarantee you’ll find Alli, let alone bring her back.”

  Jack found it interesting and enlightening that Nina Miller had been privy to his conversation with the Carsons. Garner’s deliberate exclusion was an all-too-graphic example of the schism within the task force, behind which, of course, was the disagreement between the fundamentalist wing of the Republican Party currently in power and the moderate wing about to take that power away from them. It was no surprise that a political agenda governed the task force. This was precisely what Bennett had warned him about, and he knew there was no good news to be had here.

  “What I can guarantee is hope,” Jack said shortly. “Hope is her food and drink. Only hope will keep her going through the darkest hours.”

  “Hope dangles people from a slender thread,” Nina said. “It’s patently unfair.”

  They had been striding down the hallway. Now Jack stopped, turned to her. “Do you know anything about darkest hours?”

  Nina stood staring at him. She didn’t answer, because apparently she had nothing to say.

  “I’ve had my darkest hours,” Jack continued. “And now the Carsons are having theirs.”

  He stood very still, but there was so much energy coming off him that Nina, as if slapped in the face, took an involuntary step back.

  His eyes glittered. “I will bring Alli back, Nina. You can make book on it.”

  Jack led her to the right, skirting the shed. There was a swath of lawn, rather narrow by the standards of the rest of the property, beyond which lay a thick stand of fluffy pines and large, gnarled, very old oaks. By the time they reached the trees, Jack had determined that Nina had low-slung hips and a walk that, defying the odds, was distinctly sensual.

  “I want you to know …” Nina stumbled over a stone as well as her words.

  “What?”

  “I’ve … had my darkest hours, too.”

  Jack, navigating through the rooty trees, said nothing.

  “When I was a kid.” Nina picked her way under tree branches, over exposed roots, the knuckles of angry fists. “My older brother … he molested me….”

  Jack stopped, turned back to regard her. He was startled at her admission, which couldn’t have been easy to make. But then again, it was often easier to confess to a stranger than to someone you knew.

  “And when I fought back, he beat me. He said I needed to be punished.”

  Jack felt a ping, like the ricochet of a steel ball bounding from bumper to bumper in his own shameful pinball machine. “You know that’s not true.”

  Nina’s face was pinched, as if she wanted to make the past disappear. “He’s married, got two kids. Now he’s got a whole new family to dominate. How I hate him. I can’t stop.” She made a little sound in the back of her throat that was either a laugh or a sob. “My parents loved God, they believed in his loving kindness. How wrong were they?”

  “When we were growing up,” Jack said, “parents were unconscious when it came to their effect on their kids.”

  Nina paused for a moment, considering. “Even if you’re right, it doesn’t make what they did better, does it?”

  They resumed their trek through the stand of weeping hemlocks and pin oaks. He heard the rustle of the wind through brittle branches, the hiss of faraway traffic, the call of a winter bird. The melancholy sounds of winter.

  At length, Nina said, “Where are we going?”

  “There’s a secret path.” Jack pointed ahead. “Well, it isn’t a secret to the juniors and seniors, but to the adults …”

  They had reached the far side of the tree-line. He took three or four steps to his left, moved some brush away, revealing a narrow, well-trod earthen path through brambly underbrush and the occasional evil-looking hemlock.

  “Except you.”

  He nodded. “Except me.”

  Nina followed him along the twisting path, at times half bent over in order to avoid shaggy low-hanging branches. Their shoes made dry, crunching sounds, as if they were walking over mounds of dead beetles. The wind, late for an appointment, hurried through the hemlocks. Grim bull briars and brambles pulled at them.

  “With all the manicured lawn, why hasn’t the school pulled this stuff out?”

  “Natural barbed wire,” Jack said.

  “What do the kids do in here?” With a hard tug, Nina pulled her coat free of a tenacious bramble. “Drugs and sex, I expect.”

  “I have no doubt that drugs and sex are on the students’ minds,” Jack said, “but so is escape.”

  Nina frowned. “Why escape from the lap of luxury?”

  “Well, that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?”

  “Who told you about it? Emma?”

  Jack’s laugh held a bitter edge. “Emma never told me anything.” Like so much in life, this was a matter of trust. Edward Carson certainly trusted Nina, and she had bravely trusted him with her secret, and that had touched him in a way she could never imagine. “It was Alli. She was worried about Emma.”

  “Worried? About what?”

  “She never said. I got the impression there was only so much she was prepared to tell me. But she did say that several times when Emma thought she was asleep, she crept out of the room. Alli said the one time she followed her, she saw her vanish down this path.”

  “Did she go after Emma?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “I take it you don’t have a teenager. I went after Emma myself.”

  “And what happened?”

  They had reached the high brick wall that surrounded the property. It was guarded on this side by a double hedge: low, sheared boxwood in front of tall privet. Jack was already behind the boxwood, had found the slight gap in the stately privet. Pushing aside the sturdy branches, he vanished into the thicket.

  When Nina tried to follow him, she found the privet was so thick, she was forced to leave her coat behind, press herself bodily into what she was sure had a moment before been a gap. Shouldering her way through, she found herself on the other side, almost flush up against the brick wall. Jack was on his haunches, hands pulling at the bricks. To Nina’s astonishment, they came away easily until he had a pile of approximately twenty, which left a hole in the wall large enough for a human being of small to normal size to wriggle through.

  “I followed her through here.”

  Crouching down, Nina saw a wedge of lawn, the bole of a tree, and beyond, a field at the end of which were stands of oaks, birches, and mountain laurels.

  “I saw her meet someone; I couldn’t tell who, it was just a shadow standing beneath that tree,” Jack said. “Either she heard a noise or some instinct caused her to look back. She saw me, she came after me, pushed me back to this side, snarling like an animal.” Jack sat back on his haunches, his eyes far away. “We had a real knock-down, drag-out shouting match. She accused me of spying on her, which was, of course, the truth. I told her I wouldn’t have had to spy on her if she wasn’t sneaking around in the dead of night. That was a mistake. She blew up, said what she did was no business of mine, said she hated my guts, said some things I don’t think she really meant, at least I hope not.”

  Nina was kind enough not to look at him directly. “You never found out?”

  Jack dived through the hole in the wall.

  On hands and knees they picked their way through. There was about the hole the stink of the grave, a sickly-sweet scent that reminded Jack of the time when he was a kid and the neighbor’s black cat got stuck inside the wall of his room and died there, giving off the stench of slow decay. The neighbor, an old woman married to
a male harem of feral cats, wanted the black one back, to bury it properly beneath her fig tree, but Jack’s father refused. “It’s good for the boy to smell death, to understand it, to know it’s real,” he explained to her papery face and sour breath. “He needs to know that his life isn’t infinite, that death will come for him, like it does for everyone, one day.”

  In starless night, he lay in rageful silence, listening to the sound of his own ragged heart as he breathed in the stench that penetrated to the pit of his stomach until, unable to keep to inaction, he ran across the hall, there to violently lose his supper in the low porcelain bowl. In the adjacent room, his parents made love aggressively, raucous as sailors on shore leave, with no thought that they were not alone.

  Jack and Nina stood close together on the other side. Jack wondered whether Nina was thinking the same thing he was: Is this how Alli’s abductors smuggled her out of the school? Over Nina’s right shoulder, the hills rolled on, leading eventually to the Georgetown Pike.

  Saigon Road, the site of Emma’s crash, lay just five miles west down the Pike. He felt a stirring, as if a cold wind were blowing on the back of his neck. A prickling of his scalp. Was Emma here in some form or other? Was such a thing possible? In the course of his work, he’d come across a psychic who believed that spirits of the dead who had unfinished business couldn’t cross over into the light or the dark until that business was finished. These thoughts sent his mind racing back to when Emma was alive.

  At Sharon’s fierce insistence, Emma had applied to Langley Fields. Jack saw no need for his daughter to be sequestered in what seemed like a four-year straitjacket, but Sharon had prevailed. The education was exceptional, she argued, and Emma would be exposed to a wide variety of students from all over the world. All Jack saw was the pretension of the consumerati: Mercedes, Bentleys, and tricked-out Hummers disgorging siliconed mothers, cell phones blaring Britney Spears, yapping dogs the size of New York City rats, the flash of platinum Amex cards held aloft. He had been obliged to take out a second mortgage on their house in order to pay the exorbitant tuition. He fervently wished he’d fought harder, insisted that she attend Georgetown or even George Washington, the other colleges to which she’d wanted to go, but Sharon had dug in her heels, wouldn’t listen to either him or Emma. She wanted her daughter to have the kind of education she herself had always dreamed of getting, but never had.