He turned the cell phone over in his hands, saw nothing unusual. Some hiker would have discovered it eventually, when the woodpile was getting low. Or maybe before that. The cell phone could have been found already, saving so much time, if only someone had been in the cabin when Cody had made one of his calls. He took a guess at her PIN, entering B-U-D; and got into her voicemail on the first try. He checked the messages.
Beep. “Hello, Clea, it’s Dad. The answer to your question is that the contents of your trust fund will be transferred to you in three stages, starting at age twenty-one. Why do you ask? Give me a call.”
Beep.
“Hey, it’s Alex. Drop by after riding—my mom sent a care package. I think I can promise jujubes galore.”
Beep.
“Pick up, goddamn it. We need to talk.” That was Townes.
Beep.
“It’s me. I—are you all right? You’re in the paper but I just can’t believe…Call if you—when you get this. I hope everything’s…”
Beep.
“Clea, I’m on my way.”
Beep.
Beep.
“I’m here. Let me help.”
Beep. No more messages. Cody listened to them all three times. He had the phone, the first real evidence, but somehow Clea seemed farther away than before. He walked around the warming hut, checking places already checked, trying to piece together some kind of story, a story that would explain how Clea’s cell phone ended up down at the bottom of that woodpile. A crazy notion entered his mind: If he could find the answer to that question, he would also learn everything that had happened before and after, the whole chain of events. But, standing by a frost-covered window, staring at nothing, Cody got nowhere. Did he have to be so slow?
Cody gazed down at the phone; he liked the feel of it in his hand. About to listen to the messages yet once more, he was struck by another idea: photos. Clea wasn’t one of those kids who snapped cell-phone photos of every little life moment, but he had a memory of her taking at least one, a picture of Junior at someone’s party.
Cody went to Clea’s menu, clicked on pictures. There were nine. The very first one was that party, a party that had taken place, Cody now remembered, at Dickie van Slyke’s on a night his parents were out. Junior had a big grin on his face and a keg of beer on each shoulder.
Picture number 2: Bud, looking vacant.
Number 3: Clea offering Bud a sugar cube. She was laughing, looked totally happy. Cody remembered taking that one himself, but couldn’t remember what he’d said to make her laugh.
Number 4: The stone gates in front of the main road leading onto the campus—Dover Academy, 1886. Sky blue, trees green, a few kids wearing shorts in the background; had Clea snapped this one the day she arrived?
Number 5: Alex, Larissa, and Townes, arms around each other and smiling; something, maybe a bit of popcorn, was caught in Alex’s braces; everyone looked happy.
Number 6: Townes on his horse.
Number 7: Townes and Clea on Townes’s horse, Clea behind him, arms around his waist, both of them smiling.
Number 8: Townes sitting at a bar, watching a football game on a big-screen TV. He had a cocktail glass in his hand and an intense expression on his face, maybe even anxious.
Number 9: An extreme close-up of a wrist—a man’s wrist—and the base of the palm of his hand. The angle was weird, as if the picture had been taken from a strange sideways position. One other thing: There seemed to be a tattoo on the inside of the man’s wrist. Cody was squinting at the screen, trying to identify the tattoo, when the battery died. Kind of amazing it had lasted this long, but Clea’s phone was top of the line, with a power-saver mode feature, and also had been lying under the woodpile, closed and unused; and maybe luck was involved, too. Cody hoped so: He knew from football what luck could do—although Coach Huff hated luck, good and bad and allowed no mention of it. Cody flipped open his own cell phone, took Sergeant Orton’s card from his pocket, and called the number written on it.
“What’s that look like to you, Vin?” said Sergeant Orton.
They sat in a trailer behind the North Dover police station—Cody, the sergeant, and Vin, the tech guy. Vin peered at the screen on Clea’s cell phone, now charged and running again. “Tattoo, sarge. Tattoo of some kind.”
The sergeant gave Vin an impatient glance that Vin missed but Cody caught. “Any possibility of blowing it up on a big screen?”
“Nice idea,” said Vin, and less than a minute later he had the wrist photo displayed on a big screen. “Looks like a fish,” Vin said.
“Maybe one of those dolphins,” said the sergeant.
“It’s a shark,” Cody said.
The two men had another look. “Yeah,” said Vin. “A shark, but kinda crude.”
“Prison work,” Sergeant Orton said. “See how that’s his left wrist? Most likely did it to himself.” They gazed at the shark tattoo. “Vin,” said the sergeant. “Send an e-mail to all staff, anybody come across some ex-con with a shark tattoo.”
Vin turned to a keyboard, muttered along as he typed, “Any-body come a-cross some ex…” His voice trailed off.
“So it’s a kidnapping?” Cody said.
“Can’t say,” said the sergeant. “All we got for sure is the phone in that hut, and this picture.”
“The last picture,” Cody said. Sergeant Orton had no reply. Cody stared at the screen, memorizing every detail of that wrist—strong and thick, with a bulging vein—and of the shark tattoo.
A uniformed cop entered, handed the sergeant a sheet of paper. “Transcripts, sarge,” he said.
The sergeant ran his eyes over the page, then turned to Cody. “Hungry?” he said.
“Not really.”
“I am,” said the sergeant. “You can watch me eat.” He rose. “And when you’re done, Vin, start checking inmate descriptions in the databases of all the state prisons for, I don’t know, past five years.”
“For an itty-bitty tattoo like that?” said Vin. “I’ve seen them screw up on missing limbs.”
The uniformed cop laughed. “Missing out on missing limbs,” he said. “That’s a good one.” Sergeant Orton gave him a look and his mouth closed. Vin’s fingers moved to the keyboard.
Sergeant Orton, wearing street clothes—he looked smaller out of uniform—drove Cody in an unmarked car to a doughnut shop just over the town line and went inside. He came back with coffee and a bag of pastries—cheese Danishes, crullers, bear claws. Cody bit into a Danish, found he was hungry after all.
“Try those bear claws,” said Sergeant Orton, mouth full.
Cody tried a bear claw: delicious.
“Best bear claws in the state,” said Sergeant Orton. He sipped his coffee, wiped his mustache on his sleeve. “Any bear claws where you come from?”
“No,” Cody said. “But I had one in San Diego.”
“When was this?”
“Long time ago.”
“Your family travel much?”
“No.”
“Got any brothers or sisters?”
“No.”
The sergeant reached into the bag for a cruller. “So it’s just the two of you? You and your pop?”
Cody nodded.
“What happened to your mom?”
Cody stopped eating. “She died.”
“How?”
“Cancer.” The bear claw was getting sticky in his hands but he didn’t want it anymore. “Shouldn’t we be doing something right now?”
“Like what?”
“Looking for Clea,” Cody said. “With this new evidence.”
“Crime scene’s out at the warming hut as we speak,” the sergeant said. “And we’re working on the tattoo, as you know. Not much you and I can do.” He paused—was he giving Cody a chance to talk about his family? Cody thought so. He said nothing. “Suppose we could go over the transcript,” Sergeant Orton said at last. He took the paper from his pocket, put on his glasses, cleared his throat. “‘Contents of your trust fund
.’ Any idea what kind of money we’re talking about?”
“I don’t know about any trust fund.” Cody didn’t even know exactly what a trust fund was.
“She never mentioned it?”
“No. Clea’s a normal kid.”
“What do you mean?”
Cody shrugged.
Sergeant Orton turned to him, his voice sharpening. “I need you to do better than that.”
A little jet of anger spurted inside Cody and he almost said Tough shit. He decided at that moment, once and for all, that Sergeant Orton was nothing but a user, never to be trusted. But was there any way of getting Clea back without his help? Cody forced himself to find words, the right ones.
“You wouldn’t know she’s rich,” he said. “Not from her herself.”
“But from her house, her parents, things like that?”
“Yeah.”
“Fran is actually the stepmom?”
“Yeah.”
“Where’s the mom?”
“She died a few years ago.”
“How?”
“A skiing accident,” Cody said. “In Switzerland, I think.”
“Interesting,” said the sergeant.
“Huh?”
“The similarity and all—what with your own mom.”
Cody set his coffee cup on the floor; he wanted his hands free. “So?”
“Just filling in the blanks.”
Cody sat back, folded his arms across his chest. His mom’s death was nobody’s blank. The sergeant went back to the transcript. After a while Cody picked up his cup, drained what was left.
“I put in a call to Mr. Weston, of course—about this trust fund,” Sergeant Orton said. “He’s still in a coma.” The sergeant tapped the transcript sheet with his finger. “The question is—why was she asking about it in the first place?”
Cody shrugged.
“She into drugs?”
“I already answered that.”
“Does she owe anyone money?”
“Why would she borrow? She always has enough.”
The sergeant folded the transcript, stuck it back in his pocket. “How’d you feel about that?”
“About what?”
“Her always having enough and you not.”
“I always had enough too,” Cody said.
The sergeant turned to him, seemed about to say something, but then his police radio crackled. He took it off his belt, pressed a button. “Yup.”
“Sarge?”
“Yup.”
“Got a preliminary out of ballistics. We’re lookin’ at a thirty-eight.”
“Start checking permits.”
“Already on it.”
Sergeant Orton clicked off, turned to Cody. “One little thing. These—don’t want to call them breaks in the case, let’s just say developments—”
“The phone and the ballistics?”
The sergeant nodded. “We keep that news to ourselves for now.”
“Meaning you think whoever we’re looking for is close by?”
Sergeant Orton closed his eyes in a strange kind of way, longer than a blink; almost like a little kid who didn’t want to see what was happening, if that made sense, and how could it? “Didn’t say that,” said the sergeant.
Back in the barn, Cody found Ike on his hands and knees in Bud’s stall, scrubbing the floor with a stiff brush. “Otherwise,” he said, looking up, “they’ll pick up the smell of blood, spook ’em forever.”
“The other horses?”
“Who else? Can you smell blood? Gotta take care of the horses.”
Cody glanced at the horses. They didn’t seem spooked, anxious, or even attentive; all of them just standing in their stalls, doing nothing except twitching their tails or shifting around. Cody walked over to Townes’s horse.
“This one Midnight?”
Ike rose, picked up his bucket. “Yeah. Champion of the barn.”
Midnight was big and black, with a shining coat and a glossy mane. “How much would a horse like this cost?”
Ike came over, stood beside Cody. “More’n you or me can afford, tell you that.”
“Just out of curiosity.”
“Ten grand. Maybe thirty.”
Cody took a quick sideways look at Ike, trying to see if Ike was ragging on him or something. No sign of that; maybe Ike had even less feel for math than he did. But at that moment Ike surprised him. “We could look up the exact figure, we had a mind to.”
“Yeah?”
“Just so happens Midnight got sold not so long ago.”
“Townes doesn’t own him anymore?”
“What I just tol’ you,” Ike said. “Don’t believe me, I can prove it—show you the books.”
“I believe you,” Cody said. “But I’d like to see the books.”
“Curiosity killed the fuckin’ cat—you don’t know that one?”
“I never believed it.”
Ike gazed at him. “Maybe you’re right.” He checked his watch. “Slow day, what with the snow. We can spare a minute or two.”
They went into the office, a small space off the tack room. Ike sat behind the desk, took a big leather-bound book from a drawer, licked his finger, paged through. “Here we go,” he said, turning the book so Cody could see.
He studied a page labeled INVENTORY, all the writing in blue ink, small and neat. There were two columns, on the left the names of the horses, with a brief description—Bud, for example: “chestnut gelding, age 9”; on the right, names of the owners: “Mr. Win Weston, Little Bend, CO.” The horses were listed in alphabetical order. Cody ran his eyes down to Midnight. “Black stallion, age 13.” And in the right-hand column, “Townes DeWitt, Dover Academy.” Under that, another notation, dated three weeks before: “Papers transferred to LB Corp., North Dover.”
“It doesn’t say the price.”
Ike turned the book, moved his finger on the line, followed it with his eyes, lips moving. “No, it don’t. But ten grand at least, take my word for it.”
“What’s LB Corp.?”
Ike shrugged. “Some business deal.” Ike closed the book and put it away.
LB Corp. Cody had a flash of inspiration, maybe the first of his life, a three-part inspiration, kind of complicated, but it made sense. One: LB stood for Little Bend. Two: Something had gotten Clea interested in her trust fund. Three: LB Corp. had to be some—what was the expression? holding company?—belonging to the Westons, set up in North Dover for some reason, the important point being that Clea, or Mr. Weston, or both of them, now owned Midnight. But why?
TWENTY-ONE
NO RANSOM DEMAND, but all of a sudden money was in the picture. Why had Clea been asking about her trust fund? Did it have something to do with buying Midnight? How could her interest in the trust fund relate to any kind of ransom? That would put things in the wrong order: The kidnapping had to come first.
Cody sat in the office at the barn, trying to organize everything he knew on a sheet of paper. He was alone; Ike had driven off to the feed store, would be gone for a stretch, as he’d put it. For the first time in his life, Cody made lists, drew connecting arrows between this and that. He got nowhere. He couldn’t escape the feeling that no more facts were needed, just more brainpower. After a while he crumpled up the sheet of paper, tossed it in the wastebasket.
Cody walked into the main part of the barn, past Bud’s empty stall, stopped in front of Midnight. Midnight, so tall, gazed down at him, nostrils widening. Cody reached out to pat his face. Midnight turned his head, shied away.
Cody returned to the office, took out the ledger, checked that inventory page again. Midnight: Formerly owned by Townes DeWitt, now owned by LB Corp. Why would Clea want to buy Midnight? She already—at least back then, three weeks ago—had a horse, a horse she loved. Cody gazed at the inventory page for a long time before it occurred to him to flip the Midnight question around: Why would Townes want to sell him?
On a blank sheet of paper, Cody wrote:
Reason
s for selling M:
1. T was buying a new horse.
2. Wanted C to have M.
3. Got tired of M.
4. Needed the $.
Any more? Not that Cody could think of, and even this brief list seemed padded. Townes needing money, for example, the kind of money Midnight was worth, up to $30,000, according to Ike: What sense did that make? He almost stroked it off the list, but while his pen hovered over the page, he realized that checking out number one wouldn’t be hard. A bunch of phone numbers, including Ike’s cell, were written on a chalkboard over the desk.
“Ike? It’s Cody.”
“Somethin’ wrong?”
“No.”
“Then what’re you callin’ me on my cell for? It’s roamin’.”
“Just a quick question—has Townes bought a new horse, or is he planning to?”
“Think you’re talkin’ to a mind reader? Who knows who’s plannin’ what?”
“Did he buy a new horse, then?”
“Why’d anybody want to do that?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Season’s over till spring—you’d just be payin’ stable fees for no reason. And this is costin’ me.” Click.
Cody crossed number one off his list. 2. Wanted C to have M.
Cody went through the desk drawers, found a Dover Academy student directory. No Alexes listed, but there were three Alexandras, one of them from Boston: Alexandra O’Rourke. Cody dialed her number. She answered on the first ring.
“Cody?” she said. “I was just going to call you. Is it true—someone poisoned Clea’s horse?”
“Shot him.”
“To death?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh my God—why would anyone want to do that?”
“I don’t know,” Cody said.
“This is horrible.”
“Yeah. Maybe you could help me out with something—did Clea ever say anything about Midnight?”
“Townes’s horse?”
“Yeah.”
“Not much—just that he’s a great horse, that kind of thing—why? Jesus, did he get shot, too?” Alex’s voice rose a little; Cody heard real fear.
Reality Check Page 16