by Kate Merrill
TWENTY-FOUR
Both made mistakes…
Matthew followed Diana along a mulched path through the forest. She was carrying the red and white checked tablecloth Juanita had supplied down at the house, while he carried the fast food chicken they bought on the drive to the Porter farm. Soon Bobby and Juanita would join them for the picnic, and Matthew hoped everyone’s mood would improve in the meantime.
He noticed the defeated slope of Diana’s shoulders. That special jauntiness was missing from her stride. Maybe Bobby’s notion to get together wasn’t such a hot idea after all? But Bobby was worried about Juanita, and Matthew wanted to cheer Diana up, so the men came up with this idea as a potential distraction from the gloom that had descended upon them all.
Matthew had taped last night’s TV news broadcast and watched it time and again. Juanita and Bobby did a great job, but something about the description of the suspects bothered him. The news anchor offered Diana’s account of the girl with a limp and the big blond guy driving, and that image triggered a memory in Matthew’s brain. It was as elusive as a birdsong. He couldn’t pin it down, so he might as well let it go.
“I hope Bobby and Juanita are hungry,” he called to Diana’s back. “We bought enough chicken to feed our troops in Iraq. Bobby said the two of them haven’t been eating lately.”
“I’m not surprised,” Diana mumbled.
What could Matthew say? Diana had agreed to this outing, but by the dismal look on her face when he picked her up her condo, you’d think he was dragging her to her own execution. She still blamed herself for Juan’s abduction. Apparently both Diana’s mother and her partner, Liz, also believed Diana should have watched the boys more closely. That was nonsense, of course, and Matthew would happily strangle both women for adding to Diana’s misplaced guilt, but again, what could he do about it?
Diana has also missed two real estate classes, and Matthew knew how important the classes were to her future career. It seemed like she was retreating from life, and he would not let that happen.
“Hey, did you see all those guys guarding the gate as we entered the park? Maybe they’re hungry?” He joked.
“Those were FBI men,” Diana grumbled. “After the TV broadcast, folks will recognize Bobby and Juanita. The kidnappers might find out where they live and try to hurt them.”
“Relax, Diana, the bad guys won’t come anywhere near this place. But well-intentioned citizens might make a nuisance of themselves tying to help. With a little luck, the FBI men will turn them away. Bobby and Juanita don’t need a gang of do-gooder curiosity seekers pounding down the door.”
“Maybe they don’t need the two of us, either.”
Maybe she was right. Only last week Bobby had been outside laughing and laboring with the workmen creating Porter Park. He’d been nagging the men about their laziness, barking orders and cracking jokes. Tonight they had found the couple locked in the dark silence of their house.
“I think Bobby and Juanita just want to be alone.” Diana spread the tablecloth across a brand new picnic table. The table was located on a grassy hilltop overlooking the lake.
Sure they wanted to be alone, Matthew reflected bitterly. Just like he wanted to be alone when Lynn died. When he lost his wife, Matthew built walls around himself. They were so high that even his daughter, Ginny, could not climb over.
I know how they feel,” he said. “But sometimes it’s not good to be alone.” He looked on as Diana slid onto a wooden bench, then stared unseeing at the sun hovering low above the water. “You have children, don’t you, Diana?”
They hadn’t really discussed the subject, and that was Matthew’s fault. Some selfish part of him didn’t want to know the intimate details of Diana’s life with another man, so the past hung between them. She pinned him with troubled blue eyes, and he realized the topic was difficult for her, too.
“My son, Robbie, is the oldest. He’s in college, and his father wants him to go on to law school at Penn. Mandy, my baby, lives in Florida…” Diana’s words trailed off.
So, she had two grown children. The fact hit hard, causing a churning sensation in the pit of his stomach. “Didn’t Mandy go to college?” was all he could think to say.
Diana sighed. “When I divorced my husband, both children were devastated. I think Robbie understood, but Mandy was always Daddy’s girl. She couldn’t come to terms with it, and she ended up rebelling against both of us. She refused to go to college, although she’d always dreamed about attending art school, and then she ran off to Florida when my ex remarried. He didn’t even try to stop her, and she won’t return my phone calls…even now.”
Matthew was stunned. He ached to hold her, but he couldn’t seem to reach out. “What about your son? Are the two of you close?”
Diana shrugged. “We used to be, but Robbie doesn’t share his feelings anymore. Robert, my ex, expects him to excel in law school and then enter the family firm when he passes the Bar Exam. Thing is, Robbie always wanted to be a teacher, not a lawyer, but he doesn’t have the guts to stand up to his dad---not yet.”
Matthew’s emotions raged in unexpected directions. “This business of being a parent…it’s tough, isn’t it?”
Diana’s eyebrows arched in surprise. “Are you a father, Matthew?”
This moment of truth had come, so Matthew met it head on. “I have one daughter. Ginny is maybe a little older than your Robbie, but I haven’t seen her in almost five years.”
“My God, where is she?”
Matthew averted his face. He couldn’t bear to see his own failure reflected in Diana’s eyes. “She was in Texas last I heard. She called to say she’d eloped with some guy who worked on an oilrig in the Gulf. That was three years ago.”
Diana blinked. “Maybe you’re a grandfather, Matthew?”
He hung his head. “Who knows?” What could he say in his own defense? “It was my fault, Diana, I drove her away. We didn’t fight---nothing like that---but I wasn’t there for her, you know? I disappeared when my wife died.”
“Haven’t you tried to find her?”
How could he begin to explain? He had traveled throughout Texas, with no success. He had hired a string of investigators, who also failed. The last private detective had followed the case for six months, then come up empty. He had spoken the words Matthew now repeated to Diana:
“Ginny doesn’t want to be found.”
Diana reached across the table and took his hand. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was strong. “We both made mistakes,” she said softly.
The scent of pine needles mingled with the humid fishy smell rising off the lake. Footsteps broke the silence as Bobby trudged up the hill with Juanita clinging to his arm. This was supposed to be a picnic, but they were walking like mourners on their way to a funeral. They, too, had lost a child, but for them, perhaps, it was not too late. Diana’s fingernails bit into Matthew’s hand as she realized the tragic parallel of their situations. Matthew prayed silently to any force willing to listen: Let there be an end to it, and bring Juan home safely.
TWENTY-FIVE
Death on the line…
Bobby Porter slumped on the bench, his elbows propped on the picnic table as he stared at the chicken bones piling up on Juanita’s plate. At least she was eating, so the company had done her good. Bobby never knew what to expect when trouble came Juanita’s way. Where most folks got all quiet and depressed, Juanita usually carried on like a cat in heat. In the past three days, she’d washed every dish in the house when they weren’t even dirty and twice changed the sheets when they weren’t even slept in. Bobby knew enough to stand clear until she ran down, but he didn’t see that happening anytime soon.
The cops and the Feds have nothing,” Juanita said as she pushed her plate away in disgust.
They were talking about the rental car lead, but Bobby trusted cops about as far as he could throw them, yet Juanita had taken a fancy to the black FBI guy. She actually believed Bo might help them, and she prayed to the Lord night and day. But Bobby’s faith was shaken. Hadn’t this same Lord sent Juan to them in the first place? The Lord suckered Bobby into believing the boy was a gift that would bring them together as a family. Then that same Lord took the child away.
The Lord helps those that help themselves, so Bobby had located his daddy’s shotgun tucked away at the back of a closet. It hadn’t been fired since Jed killed some geese a few years back, so Bobby snuck it into the barn and cleaned it real good. He oiled it and filled it with shot, and he knew damn well the old man’s antique Winchester was a better weapon against the kidnappers than any cop’s snarl of red tape.
“What about the reward?” Diana’s voice interrupted Bobby’s lust for revenge. “You mentioned it on TV, so the kidnappers must be curious.”
Juanita wiped chicken grease from her mouth with a crumpled napkin. “Me and Bobby came up with ten thousand. It’s not a fortune, but it’s all we’ve got.”
Bobby looked at his old pal, Trout. “I reckon that’s not enough to make ’em take notice.”
“As I recall, you didn’t say how much you had available on TV,” Trout pointed out. “Maybe they think you have a whole lot more?”
“So why don’t they call?” Juanita asked. The Feds had given her a cell phone and told her to carry it everywhere. She shook the phone angrily at the air.
Trout turned to Bobby. “Where’d you get ten thousand dollars?”
Not that it was any of his damn business, but hell, Trout was like family. “I sold my landscaping equipment, truck and all,” Bobby lied. In truth, most of the ransom money had come from his dead daddy’s cookie jar. Bobby had stolen it a lifetime ago.
Bobby gazed out at the lake. The spot where he’d found his daddy floating drowned at the dock was gone now, replaced by a fiberglass pier for the new park. Bobby once took Juan down to where the old fish-cleaning table sat under the willow tree. Together they had scaled and gutted Juan’s bass, just like father and son. He never told Juan how Bobby’s own daddy used to cut off the fish heads and nail them to the tree trunk, how season after season, the sight of those wide, beady eyes rotting from their sockets and the grinning, toothless jaws, used to scare the shit out of Bobby. How they haunted his dreams even now.
When Juanita’s cell phone rang, Bobby near jumped out of his skin. She lifted it to her ear, her eyes frozen with terror, but all Bobby saw was those fish heads, so he knew that Death was on the line.
“It’s for you, Bobby,” Juanita choked. “It’s the FBI, with one of the kidnapper’s wanting to talk. It’s for real. He won’t talk to anyone but you.”
The three faces at the table gaped at him, then shimmered away like the lake had swallowed them up. Bobby steadied his wrist to keep his hand from shaking, and once the phone was in his hand, he turned his back on them all.
He listened, and it was the Devil, sure enough. The man sounded exactly like Jed come back from the dead. The voice was rough and country like his daddy’s, and when Bobby told him about the reward they’d got together so far, the man got mad as hellfire.
“But it’s all we got,” Bobby whimpered. “’How can we be sure you really got our boy?”
The kidnapper swore Juan was alive, but he wouldn’t let Bobby talk to him. He said he could prove he had Juan and described the tiny scar above Juan’s left eyebrow. Bobby saw it sharp as a knife to his heart. Every night when he tucked Juan into bed, he touched that little scar. “How much money do you want?”
The man claimed Juan was worth at least a tenth what he asked for the rich kid, which was five times what Bobby was offering. The Devil wanted fifty thousand by Saturday, so Bobby knew the game was up. He felt like a helpless child again, back in his parents’ kitchen. As the Devil spoke, Bobby saw Jed beating on his mama, while little Bobby clamped onto his daddy’s leg with his teeth. That night Jed dragged him into the yard and hit his head with a shovel. And Bobby had crawled off to the neighbor’s barn like a dying dog.
Next the Devil quoted from the Bible:
Give me John the Baptist’s head on a platter. And the king was sorry, but he commanded it be given…
Bobby’s stomach lurched.
“You listening?” The Devil laughed. “Unless you come up with the money, the kid’s head will arrive special-delivered in a whiskey box. I’ll send it right to your door.”
TWENTY-SIX
We call him the preacher…
Bo didn’t hear the soft footsteps in the hall, so when the door at his back flew open and hit the wall, he automatically ducked behind his desk and went for the gun in his drawer.
“Hey, don’t shoot!” Carla giggled nervously as she slipped into his office. She held up two white paper bags as protection. “I come bearing gifts…”
Bo sheepishly replaced his weapon and shut the drawer. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you coming. My nerves are shot.”
“Yeah, so they say…” She smiled and lowered the bags to his desk.
“Who says?” The rich odor of Chinese food filled his nostrils.
“Grim Reaper says you’re climbing the walls. Chill, man. Don’t let this Juan McCord thing get you all bent out of shape.”
Bo leaned back and massaged the tension between his eyes. His boss was trying to deal him out, and it just wasn’t fair. “I don’t get it. I’mthe one who knows the family, I’m the one connecting all the dots.”
“Maybe that’s why Grim thinks you should step back and let the crisis agents step in? Maybe he doesn’t want to risk you on the front lines?”
“Yeah, or maybe he’s so busy chasing the rat, he don’t see the wolf nipping at his ass?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Carla flopped into the chair opposite, pushed off her shoes, and lifted two shapely feet onto his lap.
Bo laughed. All the other agents left long ago to get a jump on the weekend, but Carla stayed behind. He captured her brown toes with his dark hand and squeezed them one by one. “Is this a mercy mission, Carla?”
“I saw the light under your door and figured you needed feeding. I am in charge of Public Relations, you know.”
“What kind of relations we talkin’ here?”
Carla pulled her feet off his lap and scooted her chair back a few pa
ces. “Strictly business, Beaufort. Employee morale is part of the job.” She lifted a chilled bottle of rice wine from her oversized bag along with two paper cups from the drinking fountain.
“I like the way you do business, ma’am. Does this mean we’re off duty?”
Carla pleaded the First as she heaped General Tso’s chicken onto paper plates at the uncluttered end of his desk. “They say Henry Morse drew a blank on the driver’s license. Too bad.”
“The license was fraudulent,” Bo grumbled. “This unknown subject knows how to work the system.”
“You think the UNSUB’s a pro?”
“Apparently he searched the local County Recorder’s office and found a death certificate for a male child born the same year he was. He ordered a copy of the dead child’s birth certificate, likely by mail, and then assumed his identity. He used the birth certificate to obtain a legal driver’s license, then he was home free.”
They ate in silence and drank more wine. The food was Bo’s favorite, yet he couldn’t appreciate the flavor, and nothing sat easy in his empty stomach.
“If the kidnapper isn’t Horace Wadell, then who the hell is he?” Carla wondered aloud.
“I’d bet the farm he has a prison record, but all we have is his photo on the driver’s license.” Bo couldn’t get the image out of his mind. The creep had a scar, ponytail, and evil eyes, just like the rental agent had described. Should Bo ask one of the Bureau artists to render a portrait of a classic psychopath, this guy’s face would emerge.
“What about fingerprints?” Carla asked.
“No such luck. The rental car was leased out after the crime. When they pulled it back in, all the trace evidence had been smudged beyond recognition.”
“Tough break.”
“Our profilers peg this as an impulse crime, but creating a fake license requires weeks of planning. I think the kidnapper has a whole portfolio of bogus identities he uses at will. It’s a way of life for some cons. Maybe Juan’s abduction was supposed to be his big payoff after a life of petty crime?”
Carla put down her fork and gazed at him through solemn eyes. “I didn’t hear the tape of the kidnapper’s phone message, but I know you’ve listened countless times. Word is, the abductor is one sick dude.”
Bo didn’t want to talk about it. Reviewing the kidnapper’s first call to Bobby had brought Bo’s bloody nightmare back with a vengeance. The grisly, insane talk of sending the boy’s severed head in a box sounded all too real, and when the asshole started quoting the Bible, Bo’s gut told him the man really was capable of such an atrocity. “We call him the preacher.”