by Dean Koontz
53
Muffled by glass: “Hello there, Mr. Rafferty.” Mitch stared at the detective too long before putting down the car window. His surprise would have been expected; however, he must have looked shocked, fearful.
Warm wind tossed Taggart’s sports coat and flapped the collar of his yellow-and-tan Hawaiian shirt as he leaned close to the window. “Do you have time for me?”
“Well, I do have a doctor’s appointment,” Mitch said.
“Good. I won’t keep you too long. Should we talk in the garage, out of this wind?”
John Knox’s body lay exposed in the back of the station wagon. The homicide detective might be drawn to it by a keen nose for the earliest odors of decomposition, or by admiration for the beautiful old Buick.
“Sit with me in the car,” Mitch said, and he put up the window as he finished backing out of the garage.
He remoted the big door and parked parallel to it, out of the center of the alley, as it rolled down.
Getting into the passenger’s seat, Taggart said, “Have you called an exterminator about those termites?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t put it off too long.”
“I won’t.”
Mitch sat facing forward, staring at the alley, determined to glance at Taggart only from time to time, because he remembered the penetrating power of the cop’s stare.
“If it’s pesticides you’re worried about, they don’t have to use them anymore.”
“I know. They can freeze the creepers in the walls.”
“Better yet, they’ve got this highly condensed orange extract that kills them on contact. All natural, and the house smells great.”
“Oranges. I’ll have to look into that.”
“I guess you’ve been too busy to think about termites.”
An innocent man might wonder what this was about and might be impatient to get on with his day, so Mitch risked asking, “Why are you here, Lieutenant?”
“I came to see your brother, but he didn’t answer the door.”
“He’s away until tomorrow.”
“Where’s he gone?”
“Vegas.”
“Do you know his hotel?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Didn’t you hear the doorbell?” Taggart asked.
“I must have left before it rang. I had a few things to do in the garage.”
“Looking after the place for your brother while he’s away?”
“That’s right. Why do you want to talk to him?”
The detective drew up one leg and turned sideways in his seat, facing Mitch directly, as though to compel more eye contact. “Your brother’s phone numbers were in Jason Osteen’s address book.”
Glad to have something truthful to say, Mitch reported: “They met when Jason and I were roommates.”
“You didn’t stay in touch with Jason, but your brother did?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. They got along well.”
During the night and the morning, all the loose leaves and the litter and the dust had been blown to the sea. Now the wind carried no debris to suggest its form. As invisible as shock waves, massive slabs of crystalline air slammed along the alleyway, rocking the Honda.
Taggart said, “Jason was hooked up with this girl named Leelee Morheim. You know her?”
“No.”
“Leelee says Jason hated your brother. Says your brother cheated Jason in some deal.”
“What deal?”
“Leelee doesn’t know. But one thing’s pretty clear about Jason—he didn’t do honest work.”
That statement required Mitch to meet the detective’s eyes and to frown with convincing puzzlement. “Are you saying Anson was involved in something illegal?”
“Do you think that’s possible?”
“He’s got a Ph.D. in linguistics, and he’s a computer geek.”
“I knew a professor of physics who murdered his wife, and a minister who murdered a child.”
Considering recent events, Mitch no longer believed that the detective might be one of the kidnappers.
If you had spilled your guts to him, Mitch, Holly would be dead now.
Neither did he any longer worry that the kidnappers were keeping him under surveillance or were monitoring his conversations. The Honda might be fitted out with a transponder that allowed it to be tracked easily, but that was of no concern anymore, either.
If Anson was right, Jimmy Null—he of the gentle voice, with concern that Mitch should remain hopeful—had killed his partners. He was the whole show now. Here in the final hours of the operation, Null would be focused not on Mitch but on preparations to trade his hostage for the ransom.
This did not mean that Mitch could turn to Taggart for help. John Knox, laid out in the Woody Wagon as if it were a hearse, thrice dead of a broken neck and a crushed esophagus and a gunshot wound, would require some explaining. No homicide detective would be quickly convinced that Knox had perished in an accidental fall.
Daniel and Kathy would be no more easily explained than Knox.
When Anson was discovered in such miserable condition in the laundry room, he would appear to be a victim, not a victimizer. Given his talent for deception, he would play innocent with conviction, to the confusion of the authorities.
Only two and a half hours remained before the hostage swap. Mitch had little confidence that the police, as bureaucratic as any arm of the government, would be able to process what had happened thus far and do the right thing for Holly.
Besides, John Knox had died in one local jurisdiction, Daniel and Kathy in another, and Jason Osteen in a third. Those were three separate sets of bureaucracies.
Because this was a kidnapping, the FBI would most likely also have to be involved.
The moment Mitch revealed what had happened and asked for help, his freedom of movement would be curtailed. The responsibility for Holly’s survival would devolve from him to strangers.
Dread filled him at the thought of having to sit helplessly as the minutes ticked away and the authorities, even if well meaning, tried to get their minds around the current situation and the events that had led to it.
Taggart said, “How is Mrs. Rafferty?”
Mitch felt known to the bone, as if the detective had already untied many of the knots in the case and used that rope to snare him.
Reacting to Mitch’s nonplussed expression, Taggart said, “Did she get some relief from her migraine?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Mitch almost could not conceal his relief that the source of Taggart’s interest in Holly was the mythical migraine. “She’s feeling better.”
“Not entirely well, though? Aspirin really isn’t the ideal treatment for a migraine.”
Mitch sensed that a trap had been laid before him, but he could not tell its nature—bear, snare, or deadfall—and he didn’t know how to avoid it. “Well, aspirin is what she’s comfortable with.”
“But now she’s missed a second day of work,” Taggart said.
The detective could have learned Holly’s place of employment from Iggy Barnes. His knowledge didn’t surprise Mitch, but that he had followed up on the migraine-headache story was alarming.
“Nancy Farasand says it’s unusual for Mrs. Rafferty to take a sick day.”
Nancy Farasand was another secretary at the Realtor’s office where Holly was employed. Mitch himself had spoken to her the previous afternoon.
“Do you know Ms. Farasand, Mitch?”
“Yes.”
“She strikes me as a very efficient person. She likes your wife very much, thinks very highly of her.”
“Holly likes Nancy, too.”
“And Ms. Farasand says it’s not at all like your wife to fail to report in when she’s going to miss work.”
This morning Mitch should have called in sick for Holly. He had forgotten.
He’d also forgotten to phone Iggy to cancel the day’s schedule.
Having triumphed over two professional killers, he ha
d been tripped up by inattention to a mundane task or two.
“Yesterday,” Detective Taggart said, “you told me that when you saw Jason Osteen shot, you were on the phone with your wife.”
The car had gotten stuffy. Mitch wanted to open the window to the wind.
Lieutenant Taggart was approximately Mitch’s size, but now he seemed to be larger than Anson. Mitch felt crowded, in a corner.
“Is that still what you remember, Mitch, that you were on the phone with your wife?”
In fact, he had been on the phone with the kidnapper. What had seemed a safe and easy lie at the time might now be a noose into which he was being invited to place his neck, but he could see no way to abandon this falsehood without having a better one to use in its place.
“Yeah. I was on the phone with Holly.”
“You said she called to tell you that she was leaving work early because of a migraine.”
“That’s right.”
“So you were on the phone with her when Osteen was shot.”
“Yes.”
“That was at eleven forty-three A.M. You said it was eleven forty-three.”
“I checked my watch right after the shot.”
“But Nancy Farasand tells me that Mrs. Rafferty called in sick early yesterday, that she wasn’t in the office at all.”
Mitch did not reply. He could feel the hammer coming down.
“And Ms. Farasand says that you called her between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty yesterday afternoon.”
The interior of the Honda felt like a tighter space than the trunk of the Chrysler Windsor.
Taggart said, “You were still at the crime scene at that time, waiting for me to ask a series of follow-up questions. Your helper, Mr. Barnes, continued planting flowers. Do you remember?”
When the detective waited, Mitch said, “Do I remember what?”
“Being at the crime scene,” Taggart said drily.
“Sure. Of course.”
“Ms. Farasand says that when you called her between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty, you asked to speak to your wife.”
“She’s very efficient.”
“What I can’t understand,” Taggart said, “is why you would call the Realtor’s office and ask to speak to your wife as much as forty-five minutes after, according to your own testimony, your wife had already called you to say that she was leaving there with a terrible migraine.”
Great clear turbulent tides of air drowned the alleyway.
As Mitch lowered his gaze to the dashboard clock, a helpless sinking of the heart overcame him.
“Mitch?”
“Yeah.”
“Look at me.”
Reluctantly, he met the detective’s gaze.
Those hawkshaw eyes didn’t pierce Mitch now, didn’t drill at him as they had before. Instead, worse, they were sympathetic and invited confidence, encouraged trust.
Taggart said, “Mitch…where is your wife?”
54
Mitch remembered the alley as it had been the previous evening, flooded with the crimson light of sunset, and the ginger cat stalking shadow to shadow behind radium-green eyes, and how the cat had seemed to morph into a bird.
He had allowed himself hope then. The hope had been Anson, and the hope had been a lie.
Now the sky was hard and wind-polished and a frigid blue, as if it were a dome of ice that borrowed its color by reflection from the ocean not far to the west of here.
The ginger cat was gone, and the bird, and nothing living moved. The sharp light was a flensing knife that stripped the shadows to the lean.
“Where is your wife?” Taggart asked again.
The money was in the car trunk. The time and place of the swap were set. The clock was ticking down to the moment. He had come so far, endured so much, gotten so close.
He had discovered Evil with an uppercase E, but he had also come to see something better in the world than he had seen before, something pure and true. He perceived mysterious meaning where he had previously seen only the green machine.
If things happened for a purpose, then perhaps there was a purpose he must not ignore in this encounter with the persistent detective.
For richer or poorer. In sickness and in health. To love, honor, and cherish. Until death us do part.
The vows were his. He had made them. Nobody else had made them to Holly. Only he had made them to her. He was the husband.
No one else would be so quick to kill for her, to die for her. To cherish means to hold dear and to treat as dear. To cherish means to do all you can for the welfare and the happiness of the one you cherish, to support and to comfort and to protect her.
Perhaps the purpose of bringing him together here with Taggart was to warn him that he had reached the limits of his ability to protect Holly without backup, to encourage him to realize that he could not go any further alone.
“Mitch, where is your wife?”
“What do you think of me?”
“In what sense?” Taggart asked.
“In every sense. What’s your take on me?”
“People seem to think you’re a stand-up guy.”
“I asked what you think.”
“I haven’t known you until this. But inside you’re all steel springs and ticking clocks.”
“I wasn’t always.”
“No one could be. You’d blow up in a week. And you’ve changed.”
“You’ve only known me one day.”
“And you’ve changed.”
“I’m not a bad man. I guess all bad men say that.”
“Not so directly.”
In the sky, perhaps high enough to be above the wind, miles too high to cast a shadow on the alley, a sun-silvered jet caught his eye as it sailed north. The world seemed shrunken now to this car, to this moment of peril, but the world was not shrunken, and the possible routes between any place and any other place were nearly infinite.
“Before I tell you where Holly is, I want a promise.”
“I’m just a cop. I can’t make plea bargains.”
“So you think I’ve hurt her.”
“No. I’m just being level with you.”
“The thing is…we don’t have much time. The promise I want is, when you hear the essence of it, you’ll act fast, and not waste time picking at details.”
“The devil’s in the details, Mitch.”
“When you hear this, you’ll know where the devil is. But with so little time, I don’t want to screw with police bureaucracies.”
“I’m one cop. All I can promise is—I’ll do my best for you.”
Mitch took a deep breath. He blew it out. He said, “Holly has been kidnapped. She’s being held for ransom.”
Taggart stared at him. “Am I missing something?”
“They want two million dollars or they’ll kill her.”
“You’re a gardener.”
“Don’t I know.”
“Where would you get two million bucks?”
“They said I’d find a way. Then they shot Jason Osteen to impress on me how serious they are. I thought he was just a guy walking a dog, thought they shot some passerby to make a point.”
The detective’s eyes were too sharp to read. His gaze filleted.
“Jason thought they were going to shoot the dog. So they scared obedience into me and at the same time cut the eventual split from five ways to four.”
“Go on,” Taggart said.
“Once I got home and saw the scene they staged for me there, once they had me in knots, they sent me to my brother for the money.”
“For real? He’s got that much?”
“Anson once pulled some criminal operation with Jason Osteen, John Knox, Jimmy Null, and two others whose names I’ve never heard.”
“What was the operation?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t part of it. I didn’t know Anson was into this crap. And even if I did know what the operation was, it’s one of the details you don’t need now.”
&n
bsp; “All right.”
“The essence is…Anson cheated them on the split, and they only found out what the real take was a lot later.”
“Why snatch your wife?” Taggart asked. “Why not go after him?”
“He’s untouchable. He’s too valuable to some very important and very hard people. So they went after him through his little brother. Me. They figured he wouldn’t want to see me lose my wife.”
Mitch thought he had made a flat statement, but Taggart saw the hidden hills in it. “He wouldn’t give you the money.”
“Worse. He turned me over to some people.”
“Some people?”
“To be killed.”
“Your brother did?”
“My brother.”
“Why didn’t they kill you?”