by Tami Hoag
“Curt McCaskill, BCA.” Stifling a yawn, he held up an ID.
Paul leaned across the table and studied it, then gave the agent a suspicious look, as if he didn't quite trust the man to be who he said he was. McCaskill endured the examination with stoic patience. His bloodshot eyes were primarily blue, his hair a thick shock of ginger red. He wore a multicolored ski sweater that looked like a television test pattern.
“And you are . . . ?” the agent prompted.
“Paul Kirkwood. I live here. That's my table you're sitting at, my coffee you're drinking, my son your colleagues would be out looking for if they weren't too lazy to bother.”
McCaskill frowned as he came around the table and offered Paul his handshake. “Sorry about your son, Mr. Kirkwood. They've called the search for the night?”
Paul went to a cupboard, pulled down a mug, and filled it with coffee from the pot on the warmer. It was bitter and strong and swirled in his stomach like discarded crankcase drippings.
“Left my son out there to God knows what fate,” he mumbled.
“Sometimes it's better if they can regroup and start fresh,” McCaskill said.
Paul stared at the pattern in the vinyl floor. “And sometimes they're too late.”
In the silence, the refrigerator began to hum and the ice maker chattered.
Josh. Josh. Josh.
“Ah . . . I'm here to monitor the phones,” McCaskill explained, avoiding the topic of outcomes. “All calls will be taped, in the event the kidnapper makes a ransom demand. And we'll be able to trace them.”
Kirkwood didn't seem to have any interest in the technology. He went on staring at the floor for another minute, then brought his head up. He looked like a junkie in need of a fix. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face drawn, skin ashen. His hand was shaking as he set his cup down on the counter. Poor guy.
“Why don't you go take a hot shower, Mr. Kirkwood. Then get some rest. I'll call you and the missus if anything comes in.”
Without a word Paul turned and went into the family room, where a single ginger-jar lamp burned low. He started past the couch and jumped when Karen Wright sat up, blinking and disheveled. A bloodred afghan dropped into her lap as she braced her arm against the back of the couch and looked up at him. Her other hand automatically combed back through her fine ash-blond hair. It fell into place like a silk curtain, a classic bob cut that fell just short of her slender shoulders.
“Hi, Paul,” she murmured. “Natalie Bryant called me to come sit with Hannah. I'm so sorry about Josh.”
He stared at her, still trying to adjust to her sudden appearance in his living room. Nausea swirled through him like water sucking down a drain.
“All the neighborhood women are taking turns.”
“Oh. Fine,” he mumbled.
She frowned prettily, her lips a feminine bow set in a fine-featured oval face. From the corner of his eye he could see McCaskill sliding back down into his chair at the kitchen table, his attention already on his magazine.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “You should probably go lie down.”
“Yes,” Paul murmured. His heartbeat stuttered and pumped as his brain swam dizzily. Josh. Josh. Josh. “Yes, I'm going.”
He was turning as the words came out of his mouth, struggling to keep himself from running out of the room. He was sweating like a horse, even as chills raced through him. He peeled his sweater off over his head and dropped it on the floor in the hall. His fingers fumbled over the buttons of his Pendleton shirt. The shakes went through him like the tremors before an earthquake. His heart raced. His head pounded.
Josh. Josh. Josh.
The shirt was hanging from one arm as he stumbled into the bathroom. He fell to his knees in front of the toilet and retched, his whole body convulsing with the effort to vomit. On the third attempt the coffee came up, but there was nothing else in his stomach to be discarded. Clutching the bowl, he dropped his head on his forearm and closed his eyes. The image of his son pulsed behind his eyelids.
Josh. Josh. Josh.
“Oh, God, Josh,” he whimpered.
The tears came, scalding and scarce, squeezing out of him. When they were spent, he pushed himself up off the floor and finished undressing, folding his clothes neatly and dropping them into the hamper on top of half a dozen tangled wet towels. Shaking like a palsy victim, he climbed into the tub and turned the shower on full blast, letting the hot water pound the cold out of his bones. It pelted his skin like hailstones, washed away the sweat and tears and the faint tang of sex that clung to him.
After he had dried himself off and hung the towel on the bar, he slipped into the thick black terry robe that hung on the back of the door and went out into the hall. The door to Lily's room was ajar, letting a sliver of the hall light fall across the rose-pink carpet. Farther down the hall, the door to Josh's room stood open.
Everything about the room said boy. A friend of Hannah's had painted murals on each wall, each mural depicting a different sport. A poster of Twins outfielder Kirby Puckett held a place of honor on the baseball wall. A miniature desk sat between two windows, piled with books and toy action figures. Bunk beds were stacked along another wall.
Hannah sat on the bottom bed, her long legs curled beneath her, her arms wrapped tight around a fat stuffed dinosaur. She watched Paul as he turned on the small lamp on the bedside table. She wanted him to grin at her and hold his arms out as he told her they had found Josh safe and sound, but she knew that wouldn't happen. Paul looked old and drawn, a preview of how he would look in twenty years. With his wet hair slicked back, the bones of his face stood out prominently.
“They called off the ground search until morning.”
Hannah said nothing. She didn't have the energy or the heart to ask if they had found any clues. Paul would say if they had. He just looked at her. The silence spoke for itself.
“Have you slept?”
“No.”
She looked as if she hadn't slept in days, he thought. Her hair frizzed around her head; mascara and fatigue had left dark smudges beneath her eyes. She had changed out of her clothes into another of his bathrobes, a cheap, garish blue velour job his mother had given him for Christmas years before. Paul refused to wear it. He had worked hard to be able to afford better than the junk Kmart had to offer. But Hannah refused to throw it out. She kept it in her closet and wore it from time to time. To irk him, he thought, but tonight he ignored it.
She looked vulnerable. Vulnerable was a word Paul seldom used to describe his wife. Hannah was a nineties woman—intelligent, capable, strong, equal. She didn't need. She could have lived just as well without him as with him. She was exactly the kind of woman he had dreamed of marrying. A wife he could be proud of instead of embarrassed by. A woman who was someone other than her husband's shadow, slave, and doormat.
Be careful what you wish for, Paul . . . His mother's mousy voice whispered in the back of his mind. He shut it out as successfully as he had always managed to shut her out.
“I've just been sitting here,” Hannah murmured. “I wanted to feel close to him.”
Her chin quivered and she squeezed her eyes shut. Paul sat down on the edge of the bed, reached over, and touched her hand. Her fingers were as cold as ice. He covered them with his, thinking that it used to be easy to touch her. There had been a time when they couldn't get enough of each other. That seemed ages ago.
“About— When you told me—” He broke off and sighed, then tried again. “I'm sorry I jumped on you. I wanted to blame somebody.”
“I try,” she whispered almost to herself, tears squeezing out between her lashes. “I try so hard.”
To be a good wife. To be a good mother. To be a good doctor. To be a good person. To be everything to everyone. She tried so hard and thought she succeeded most of the time. But she must have done something wrong to be made to pay this way.
“Shh . . .” Paul pried the dinosaur from her grasp and pulled her into his arms, letting her cry on his sh
oulder, letting her lean on him. He rubbed her back through the cheap velour robe and felt needed. “Hush . . .”
He kissed her hair and breathed in its scent. He listened to her soft weeping, absorbed the feel of her clinging to him, and desire drifted through him like smoke. Hannah needed him now. Superwoman. Dr. Garrison. She didn't need his income or his friends or his social position. God, she didn't even need his name. He was chronically superfluous to her life. He was the shadow, the nobody. But she needed him now. She wrapped her arms around him and hung on tight.
“Let's go to bed,” he whispered.
Hannah let him help her up from Josh's bed and walk her down the hall to their own room. She made no protest as he slipped the robe from her shoulders and kissed the side of her neck. Breath shuddered out of her lungs as his hands cupped her breasts. She had felt so alone all night. Emotionally abandoned. Exiled. She needed so badly to feel loved, comforted, forgiven.
She turned her head and brushed her mouth across his, inviting his kiss, rising into his kiss, her breasts pressing into his chest, her back arching as his hand settled low along the valley of her spine. The need burned out the fear for a few moments. It suspended time and offered a refuge. Hannah took it gladly, greedily, desperately. She pulled Paul down to the bed with her, wanting his weight on top of her. She opened herself to him as he pressed his erection between her legs, needing to feel him inside her. She held him while he arched into her again and again, wanting nothing more than the contact, the illusion of intimacy. And when it was over, she closed her eyes and lay her head on his shoulder, wishing against the hollow ache in her chest that the sense of closeness could last. But it wouldn't. Not even on this night, when she longed so desperately for something to cling to.
What happened to us, Paul?
She didn't know how to ask. She still couldn't believe it was real, this distance and anger that hung between them. It seemed all a bad dream. They had been so happy. The perfect couple. The perfect family. The perfect life of Hannah Garrison. Now her marriage was falling apart like a cheap tapestry and her son had been stolen. Stolen . . . taken . . . abducted. God, what a nightmare.
Her eyes drifted shut on that terrible thought, the exhaustion winning out at last, and she slid from the nightmare into blessed blackness.
Paul knew the instant she fell asleep. The tension went out of the arm she had banded across his chest. Her breathing deepened. He lay there, staring up at the skylight, feeling caught in the middle of some surreal play. His son was gone. By this time tomorrow Josh Kirkwood would be a household word all over the state. Newspapers would splash his picture all over their front pages, along with the impassioned plea Paul had made in the parking lot of the ice arena at four A.M. Please bring my son back!
Josh. Josh. Josh.
His eyes burned as he stared up at the starless sky. And the play went on. Act Two. His wife lay naked in his arms hours after his mistress had done the same. Overhead, helicopter blades beat the night air.
5:43 A.M. 12°
Mitch climbed out of his truck, his gaze automatically scanning the alley behind his house for signs of reporters, skittish after the debacle in the ice arena parking lot. He wouldn't have put it past any of them to follow him. Get a shot of the failure of a police chief as he drags his sorry ass home. Lets child predators snatch kids off the streets of his town. No big surprise. Look what happened in Miami.
It settled on his aching shoulders like a cloak—the guilt, edged in anger, dyed black by his mood. He threw it off with a violent swing of his arm, snarling in self-contempt.
What a jerk you are, Holt. This isn't about you. It isn't about Miami. Hold the old rage inside where it belongs, and rage anew for Josh.
Easier said than done. The anger, the sense of impotence and loss and betrayal, were echoes from his past. And as much as every cop knew better than to personalize a case, he couldn't stop himself from feeling as if this crime had been perpetrated in part against him. This was his town, his haven, the safe little world he could control. These were his people, his responsibility. He represented safety to them, and they were his extended family.
Family. The word hung with him as he went up the path to the back door, the snow squeaking beneath his feet in the icy stillness of the early morning. He let himself into the house and toed off his heavy Sorel boots in the back hall.
In the kitchen Scotch, the old yellow Labrador who was his only roommate in Jessie's absence, cracked open one eye and looked at him without raising his head from his cushioned dog bed. At twelve, Scotch had officially retired from guard duty. He filled his time sleeping or wandering around the house, carrying in his mouth whatever object struck his fancy en route on his travels—a shoe, a glove, a throw pillow from the couch, a paperback book. One of Jessie's Minnie Mouse dolls was wedged between his head and his paws for a pillow.
Mitch let him keep it. The old scoundrel might have stolen it out of her bedroom, but it was just as likely Jessie had put him to bed with it. The Strausses lived across the alley, and every day after school Jessie came over with her grandfather to let Scotch outside and to play with him. She adored the old dog. Scotch patiently suffered through dress-up games and tea parties with her, faithful, gentle, returning the little girl's love unconditionally.
The images striking on tender feelings, Mitch padded into the kitchen in his stocking feet. The light above the sink cast the room in amber and shadow. His gaze wandered aimlessly. The house dated back to the thirties. A nice, solid story-and-a-half with hardwood floors and a fireplace in the living room and big maple and oak trees in the yard. A house with character that remained mostly repressed because of his lack of decorating skills.
That had been Allison's forte. She was a nest builder with an eye for style and a love of small detail. She would have converted this kitchen into a place of warmth and charm with framed prints and strings of peppers and old Mason jars filled with cinnamon-scented potpourri. Mitch had left the room exactly as it was when he moved in—the walls mostly bare, the curtain at the window above the sink an old rummage sale reject left by the last owners. The only things Mitch had added were drawings Jessie had done for him. Those he mounted on the refrigerator with magnets and stuck up on the wall with tape. Somehow, the bright, childish images in the otherwise vacant room served only to point out how bleak and empty the house was.
He felt hollow as he stared at the pictures. Alone. Lonely. God, sometimes the loneliness ached so badly he would have given anything to escape it—including his life. He would have died as penance, but then, living was a harsher punishment.
Crazy thoughts. Irrational thoughts, the department psychiatrist had told him. Logically, he knew it wasn't his fault. Logically, he knew he could not have prevented what happened. But logic had little to do with feeling.
Leaning back against the sink, he squeezed his eyes shut and saw his son. Kyle was six. Bright. Quiet. Wanted a two-wheeler for Christmas. Took his dad to school during job week and beamed while Mitch told the first grade about being a policeman.
“Policemen help people and protect them from the bad guys.”
He could hear the words, could look out on the small sea of little faces, his gaze homing in on Kyle's expression of shy pride. So small, so full of innocence and trust and all those things the world had ground out of his father.
“Policemen help people and protect them from the bad guys.”
A hoarse, tortured sound wrenched out of Mitch's throat. The feelings ripped loose, the bars of their cage weakened by fatigue and memory and fear. He clamped a hand over his mouth and tried to swallow them back. His whole body shook with the effort. He couldn't let them loose; he would drown in them. He had to be strong. He had to focus. He had a job to do. His daughter needed him. The excuses came one after another. Deny the feelings. Ignore them. Put them off. His town needed him. Josh Kirkwood needed him.
He forced his eyes to open. He stared out the kitchen window at the velvet gray of the day before dawn, and sti
ll in his memory he could see Kyle. His vision doubled, the image splitting, the face of the second body going out of focus and coming back as Josh.
God, please no. Don't do that to him. Don't do that to his parents.
Don't do that to me.
Shame washed through him like cold water.
Across the alley a light came on in the Strauss kitchen. Six A.M. Jurgen was up. He had been retired from the railroad for three years, but kept his schedule as regular as if he were still going down to the Great Northern switching yard every day. Up at six, start the coffee. Drive down to the Big Steer truck stop on the interstate to pick up the StarTribune because paperboys were unreliable. Home for coffee and a bowl of hot cereal while he read the paper. His quiet time before Joy emerged from their bed to begin the recitation of her daily litany—a deceptively soft, deceptively mild running commentary on all that was wrong with the world, the town, the neighbors, her home, her health, her son-in-law.
As badly as Mitch wanted to avoid his in-laws, the sudden need to see Jessie was stronger. To look at her and hold her and see that she was real and alive and warm and sweet and safe. He stepped back into his boots and trudged outside without bothering to lace them.
Jurgen came to the back door of the neat Cape Cod house in his daily uniform of jeans and a flannel shirt, neatly tucked in. He was a stocky man of medium height with piercing Paul-Newman-blue eyes and military-cropped gray hair.
“Mitch! I was just making the coffee. Come on in,” he said, his expression a mix of surprise and annoyance at having his regimen interrupted. “Any word on the Kirkwood boy? Cripes, that's a terrible business.”
“No,” Mitch replied softly. “Nothing yet.”
Jurgen swung the basket out on the coffeemaker and dumped in a scoop of Folger's. Too much, as usual. Joy would comment on it being too strong, as always, then drink it anyway so she could later complain about the heartburn it gave her.
