One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  Maybe Bishop had found a way to scrub himself from the Internet, but if he had a missing brother, the mother’s his picture would be in the database.

  The homepage was a sea of faces and sad facts. Missing from . . . Missing since . . .

  “What years?” James asked, opening a search field.

  Kick realized she had no idea. The images were in generic locations: the beach, a park. The boys wore commonplace, conventional clothes. “They were color photographs,” Kick said, struggling to remember. “But could have been anytime in the last twenty years.” She did the math and reconsidered. “Or forty.”

  “So between 1970 and now,” James said. He brought up the results, and sighed. “That’s 2,700 kids. Almost three hundred missing in Oregon alone.”

  “Can you sort them? Like by gender and hair color?”

  “Not on this website,” James said. “You know who can do that?” He looked at her pointedly. “The police.”

  “Can’t you use your algorithm?” Kick asked.

  “No,” James said. “I could write another one. Just give me ten hours and a truck of Mountain Dew.”

  Kick massaged her throbbing temples. “So we’ll skim through them,” she said, trying to sound more upbeat than she felt.

  There were 295 pages to look at, with nine faces per page. At first it went quickly. Kick moved her eyes from face to face, looking for a match to the image in her mind. Most of the pictures were school photographs. Some were snapshots. The babies looked up from high chairs or the lap of an adult. Some were forensic sketches. Those kids had been found, or at least their bodies had. It was their identities that were missing. Thirty pages in, the faces all started to look the same: babies, teenagers, girls, boys, black, white. “Stop,” Kick said, rubbing her eyes. She was so tired, she was starting to see double. She reached, absentmindedly, for James’s wire talisman. “Where did you find this thing, anyway?”

  James plucked it from her hand. “I’ll do it,” he said, setting the little wire man back down in his place by the monitor. “I’ll sort them.”

  “How?”

  James reached for his Cthulhu mug. “With my brain.” He took a sip from the mug, clicked on his mouse, dragged a copy of one of the photographs to his other monitor, and dropped it in an open document. “Go walk the dog,” he said.

  When Kick and Monster got back from the walk, James was still at it. Kick, woozy and sore, curled up with Monster on the couch and fell asleep.

  The mechanical spitting sound of the printer woke her up. Monster was snoring softly with his tongue out, one ear twitching as he dreamed.

  “How long was I out?” Kick asked, sitting up.

  “Two hours,” James said. “Look at this.” He scooted back his chair so she could see the computer station. Kick blinked and her head swam a little. All three monitors were tiled with the faces of dark-haired missing boys. “I pulled all the boys who fit your description, between the ages of six and ten,” James said. “There are 190. Do you see the boy from Bishop’s photographs?”

  “Give me a second,” Kick said, reaching for the ibuprofen again. She swallowed a pill as she scrutinized the faces on the screen, which seemed especially bright. Kick was struck by how different they all looked. Maybe it was their set of basic similarities that made their uniqueness stand out. Most Kick could dismiss right away. The neck was too long, the head the wrong shape, eyes too far apart, chin too pointed. But some of the faces made her pause. She had to look harder for differences. “No,” she said. “I don’t see him.” She pointed at one of the boys, a thin-armed, floppy-haired boy with a forced class-picture grimace. “But he’s close,” she said. She cocked her head, and studied another of the boys, also slight and dark, with pale skin and a hesitant expression. “And he kind of looks like him,” she said.

  James had the self-satisfied smile he got when he’d figured something out. “Check the printer,” he said.

  Kick reached across the desk and lifted a stack of paper from the printer tray. As she flipped through the still-warm pages, she recognized the two boys she’d pointed out, as well as others from James’s screens. Removed from the context of the others, the differences between these boys evaporated. None of these boys matched the boys in Bishop’s photographs, but they were indisputably similar. They could have all been brothers.

  “I found ten of them,” James said, talking fast. “Look at the most recent, on the bottom.”

  Sometimes James could see patterns that no one else could. Sometimes he could see patterns that weren’t even there. Kick rifled through the printouts to the last page.

  Her skin goose pimpled. The boy she was looking at was eight years old. Caucasian. Dark hair. Light eyes. But this wasn’t the boy from Bishop’s wall. This was a picture of Adam Rice.

  Kick carried the stack of images to the middle of the room, got down on her knees, and started spreading them in a circle on the floor around her. “Print Adam Rice’s investigation report,” she said. “Print everything we have: media reports, anything.” She studied the boys’ faces. She didn’t know what it meant or what she was looking for. What stood out, again, were the pieces that didn’t fit. Mia Turner. Josie Reed. If Adam Rice’s abduction had something to do with all these other boys, what did they have to do with them?

  “Synchronicity,” Kick said.

  “Events that reveal an underlying pattern,” James said. “How long did you see the Jungian?”

  “Just once,” Kick said. “But she talked a lot about synchronicity. She kept trying to get me to see the meaningful coincidences in my life.” Kick stood, eyes roving the circle of images she’d made on the floor. “My dad bought me a puppy,” she said. “I let the puppy get out.” She glanced at Monster, still snoring on the couch. “I went after the puppy, and Mel was there, and he used the lost puppy to get me into his car. All those years later, when I couldn’t remember anything from before, I remembered Monster; I remembered enough that Frank was able to figure out who I was and get me home. Is it a meaningful coincidence that Monster was at the center of my abduction and my rescue? Is it a meaningful coincidence that my dad left us just months after I was reunited with the puppy he bought me? Or that I couldn’t remember my name but I remembered my dog’s?”

  “We see what we want to see,” James said. “It’s called cognitive bias. Synchronicity has potential in fractal geometry; otherwise, it’s bunk.”

  “But what if I’m right?” Kick asked. She hadn’t gotten caught up in a missing-child case in over a year. Maybe there was a reason that Adam Rice had broken her streak. She gazed down at the lost boys. “Maybe I’m supposed to save them.”

  “That’s what’s called an error of inductive inference,” James said.

  Kick wasn’t so sure. “I’ve spent the last ten years training myself to be stronger, and smarter—offensively and defensively,” she said. “Two kids are abducted a few hours away. John Bishop shows up. He has photographs in his house that send us down a rabbit hole, and we end up back at square one: Adam Rice. And nine other boys who fit the same profile.”

  James scratched his head. “We’re looking at ten boys with recognizably similar features and comportment, abducted over a fifteen-year period, from locations all over the map.”

  He was doing the math, she could tell, backtracking.

  “I would probably come up with ten other groupings from a sample size this large,” he said. “It’s compelling, but it doesn’t tell us anything. We didn’t find the boy from Bishop’s photographs, did we?”

  “He’s dead,” Kick said. It seemed like the obvious answer. If she was right, and Bishop’s brother had been abducted, then the only reason he would have been taken off the missing-child list was if he had been found. Dead. Or alive. Call it flawed inductive inference, but Bishop had lost someone. Kick had seen Bishop’s dead stare. Her mind went back to Adam Rice looking out the window in that s
atellite photo. It had been Adam Rice, hadn’t it?

  “You’re doing it again,” James said. “You’re obsessing.”

  “Give me some paper,” Kick said, standing up.

  James hesitated, then pulled a quarter-inch stack of copy paper off the feed tray of the printer and wheeled backward in his task chair to hand it to her. “There’s not enough data to draw any conclusion.”

  “I’m going to need more paper than that,” Kick said.

  Two hours later Kick had plastered James’s apartment with notes. She’d made bulleted lists, circled words, drawn arrows, underlined, and used all caps—everything she knew about Bishop, about the missing kids, everything he’d told her, everything they’d found out. Some items she’d written in pencil, some in ink, some in purple marker. It was all color coded, though when James had tried to puzzle out her methodology, Kick wasn’t able to put it into words. She’d torn the copy paper into jagged pieces in order to make it stretch. They were laid out piecemeal on the floor, were taped on the wall, and covered the sofa cushions. Kick stood up and inspected the images of the boys that she’d arranged over James’s travel posters. See Italy! a poster of the Leaning Tower of Pisa commanded, over which Kick had taped a photograph of Adam Rice.

  “And you think I’m messy,” James said.

  “This isn’t a mess,” Kick said. “I know where everything is.”

  “Remind me to talk to you about chaos theory sometime,” James said.

  Monster lifted his head, yawned, then did a sort of pratfall off the couch onto some notes that Kick had fanned out on the rug. Dog hair floated in the air. Monster circled the notes once, flopped down on them, and closed his eyes. Kick rocked back on her heels. It had all been for nothing. She had thought that getting everything out of her head would help. But sitting in the center of the paper blizzard she’d created, nothing connected. There was no synchronicity.

  “I’m going to bed,” Kick said. It was almost ten p.m.

  “You can sleep on the couch,” James said. Change Your Thoughts and You Change Your World, advised the poster above his desk. This from a guy who thought the Jungians were full of shit.

  Kick rubbed the back of her neck. Her head was throbbing. “No, thank you,” she said. She went over and kissed James on the cheek. His skin always tasted a little sour. It was probably from all the medications he took.

  “Don’t have sex with him,” James said.

  Kick wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “Excuse me?”

  “People like us, it just fucks things up. You know the rule.”

  Kick did know the rule. She had been the one to come up with it after a particularly traumatic teenage encounter with a boy who burst into tears from the pressure he felt to provide “a positive heteronormative sexual experience.” His mother was her shrink.

  The rule was: Don’t have sex with anyone who knows anything about you. (Also, don’t have sex with your shrink’s children—but that was more of a personal guideline, and Kick had expanded it to include all shrinks’ children.) “I don’t even like him,” Kick said. He was a smug, horny liar with a stupid-looking house and a wife, and she was beginning to suspect that he’d let her Glock get blown up on purpose.

  There was that self-satisfied smile again. James swiveled back to his computer. “But you knew who I meant,” he said.

  “You’re my favorite relative,” Kick said.

  “Well, obviously,” James said.

  13

  WHEN KICK OPENED HER eyes the next morning, the first thing she saw was the map. For a second she thought it looked blurry, but when she blinked it came into focus, every state boundary and pushpin. She made herself get up. Her head still hurt but was better, she thought, than the night before. She reached for the ibuprofen at her bedside. Monster burrowed out from under the covers and rolled over on his back next to her, and she gave him his morning tummy rub. He stayed in bed when she got up, eyes half open, watching her. She was sore and stiff, and she stretched before she made her way to her dresser. After she changed into her running clothes, she went to her closet and found her sneakers on the closet floor, next to the boxes of letters. Kick touched the lump on her forehead and turned back to the map. Adam Rice, in duplicate, stared back at her from the wall. Kick went to her laptop and turned it on.

  The news sites were ablaze with stories of Mia Turner’s miraculous recovery. Kick scanned them, but there hadn’t been any developments of interest since she’d read all the latest last night. Instead, despite herself, she clicked on another story: “Mel Riley: On Death’s Door.”

  Kick read it, then snapped her laptop closed.

  She had to force Monster out of bed. The arthritis in his back had made dismounting to the floor a huge production, involving Kick hoisting him in her arms and him going stiff, then panicking, and finally both of them making groaning noises as he was lowered to the floor. Once he was off the bed, Kick brushed the dog hair off her running pants and Monster blinked his milky eyes and panted happily at her, his tail thumping against the floor.

  “I’m not facing her without you,” Kick said.

  Monster followed her to the bathroom. While braiding her hair in the mirror, she noticed that her forehead looked almost normal, which she found vaguely disappointing, especially since she still had the headache.

  “Are you ready for our marathon?” Kick asked him, sliding his red harness over his snout.

  There had been a time when even the sight of that harness would send Monster bounding about like a hyperactive lamb. They would run ten miles together, and even then Monster only stopped because she did. Now they walked a block to the park and Monster sat tied to the leg of a park bench while Kick exercised.

  Today they had the park to themselves. It wasn’t much of a park, just a plot of grass with a children’s playground set, a water fountain, and five public trash bins all marked with differing categories of recyclables. There was no fencing, so the dog people went elsewhere, up Mount Tabor, or to the trails of Forest Park, or to the local dog parks. Fences didn’t much matter with Monster. Kick always kept him on his leash outside anyway. Sometimes her whistle didn’t work out in the world, and he was so frail she worried about him getting hurt.

  Tae kwon do required focus, strength, and endurance, but mostly it required the ability to deal with looking like an ass in public. It was the opposite of disappearing. Kick could have practiced at home or at the dojo, but going to the park got Monster outside, and there was something about looking like an ass in public that Kick found a little appealing. She had been stared at so much by strangers since her rescue, she liked thinking that some of them were staring now because she looked ridiculous and not for all the other reasons.

  She stripped down to her tank top, dropped to the grass, and did leg lifts until her thighs trembled while Monster fixed his glazed eyes at her with his head cocked. Then she got up, brushed the grass off her pants, and did a hundred lunges, followed by fifty step-ups on the bench, with a pat for Monster each time. Squat thrust, single leg squat. They were not pretty, and they were not exercises for the socially insecure. But they were all a necessary foundation so that if Bishop ever showed up again, Kick could use an eagle strike to shatter his pointy jawbone.

  Kick focused on that as she lowered herself into horse stance, widening her knees, bending them, and holding it. She bent her elbows, held her hands in loose fists, palms up, on either side of her waist, and visualized directing a tiger claw strike at Bishop’s trachea. Sweat began to bead on her neck. Her thighs burned. Kick let her eyes close. I shall be a champion of freedom and justice, she repeated in her mind. I shall build a more peaceful world.

  “In tae kwon do, they say that the elbow is the strongest part of the body,” a woman’s voice said.

  Kick snapped her eyes open but otherwise remained motionless, squatting over the grass like she was peeing in the woods.

&nb
sp; Striding toward her, wearing three-hundred-dollar sneakers and all-white exercise clothes, was her mother. “Since when do you know anything about tae kwon do?” Kick asked her, making herself sink lower into the stance even as she could feel her face turn scarlet from the effort.

  “They offer it at the MAC club,” her mother said breezily. She unzipped the white jacket she was wearing. “After Zumba.” She tossed the jacket over the back of the bench, revealing a white halter top that was no bigger than a jogging bra.

  Kick was determined not to give up on her stance even as her mother stood there with her hand on her hip like she was waiting for a hug.

  To anyone watching, they would have looked like friends meeting up to exercise together. Paula Lannigan worked hard to maintain her figure and she spent a fortune on laser treatments and blowouts and eyelash grower and injectables. She said it was for her TV appearances as a spokesperson for the Missing Person Alliance. If a kid went missing, CNN didn’t want to have someone ugly on to talk about it, apparently.

  “What happened to your head?” Paula asked finally.

  “I hit it on something,” Kick grunted, inching her feet farther apart. The wider the stance, the stronger the base. “Did you bring it?”

  Paula pointedly ignored the question, spun back toward the bench, bent down, and took Monster’s face in her hands. “There’s my boy,” she said in a gooey voice.

  Monster snuffled and licked at her, and Kick couldn’t help but think: Traitor. She resumed her mantra: I shall be a champion of freedom and justice. I shall build a more peaceful world. Her pelvis and hamstrings felt like they had gone to war.

  Paula sat down on the bench. “You made me look like a fool last night,” she said with a glare at Kick. “I left a fund-raising dinner and drove three hours to take care of you after I got the call you’d been hurt. I showed up with the press. The police wouldn’t even confirm you had been there.”

  That was just like Kick’s mother, to make it all about her. Sweat trickled down Kick’s face. “I’m feeling much better, thank you,” she said. She could barely get the words out. Monster had rolled over on his back and was letting Paula stroke his belly with the toe of her sneaker.