Red Web

by Ninie Hammon

  "Goody. So this wreck could have happened in Bangladesh."

  "Could have, I s'pose. But my best guess would be somewhere nearer than that."

  He cast a sideways glance at Dobbs before he continued.

  "Got to remember, my mama was paintin' portraits sixty years ago. And back in them days … let's just say the gene pool in West Virginia didn't have a whole lot of fish."

  Dobbs nodded. "Mountain people had a kind of look to them. I couldn't describe it, one of those things you know it when you see it."

  Bailey watched Dobbs reach into his pocket and draw out his watch. He flicked the catch with his thumb and glanced at the watch face. He didn't want to know what time it was, of course. If he had, he certainly wouldn't have looked at that pocket watch, which hadn't kept time since … maybe it never did. Taking it out and looking at it, that was just something Dobbs did.

  "The people in mama's paintings, they had the look of mountain folks."

  "There have been more fish added to the pool in the last half century, so you can't tell anymore just by looking that somebody's one of us. But if T.J.'s mama only painted local happenings, why would you be any different?"

  "I think there's somethin' … something about West Virginia or maybe about mountain people that's … part of the magic."

  "So … I painted that picture either because that child, that family were" — she smiled — "mountaineers, or the accident that killed them happened somewhere close around here — is that what you're saying?"

  "Sounds right to me," T.J. said.

  "I was here in Kavanaugh County in 1997 and if there had been a triple fatality that gruesome, I guarantee I'd remember it," Dobbs said. "The wreck might have been somewhere close around, but it wasn't right here. They were going camping … the parents didn't say anything about stopping for the night, did they?"

  "No."

  "Then I'm betting that wherever they were going, it wasn't more than a day's drive from here."

  T.J. nodded. "I say we start lookin' for a wreck that happened in an area — I'm just puttin' this out there — no more than a hundred miles from here. Anywhere within a hundred-mile radius."

  Bailey watched T.J. drop effortlessly into police-officer mode.

  "You check accident reports online, a three-fatality wreck in 1997. Wouldn't think there'd be a huge number in just one year. Check West Virginia, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania. I'll see what I can find out from obituaries online. Pro'ly won't be much. And Dobbs—"

  "I'll check local newspapers. If there was a fatal wreck in that county, they'd have the story. The West Virginia Press Association's website will have a list of the weeklies."

  Three hours, two delivery pizzas and another batch of chocolate chip cookies later they had all come up snake eyes. The only fatality statistics available were from the state highway departments, which listed the number of fatal accidents in each county — a grand total by year. Obituaries online were a complete dud. The names were listed in alphabetical order by year. In 1997, only two counties showed three obituaries with the same last name, but none of them were adults with one child, a girl about seven years old. And they were listed by county of residence, not where the people died.

  Dobbs had made out best. He'd contacted all twenty-three weekly newspapers in West Virginia, along with a dozen weekly newspapers in Ohio and Kentucky that lay near the West Virginia border. All of them had some record of past issues, but the form of those records varied widely. Most had digital records of the actual newspapers dating back five to ten years. Beyond that, though, the newspapers themselves were available only on microfiche — at the newspaper office. Dobbs had figured out quickly that the kind of records he needed weren't always available in such small operations, so he'd taken to asking to speak to "the oldest person in the building."

  "A three-fatality accident — that's a big deal in those counties. They'd remember."

  To Bailey's surprise, though not to T.J.'s and Dobbs's — he had found a "veteran" of at least twenty years in most of the newspapers he called. Unfortunately, the old-timers remembered the bad accidents where local people were killed. But three strangers … maybe, maybe not.

  There were only four newspapers where he couldn't find out anything at all. They were among the smallest of the newspapers, three of them in neighboring counties deep in the mountains. There'd been no old-timers on the premises he could talk to, and the only records of the newspapers from 1997 were bound volumes of the newspapers themselves, stored in the attic or basements of the newspaper buildings.

  "I think the newspapers are our best bet," Dobbs said. "I've eliminated all but these four. I vote we take a road trip. We could hit all four in one day — a long day." He cast a glance at Bailey, and merely said "mountain roads" by way of explanation. "It's a total shot in the dark. Anybody got a better idea?"

  Nobody did.

  They agreed to leave after breakfast the next morning.

  Bailey had hardly slept at all the night before so she hoped she wouldn't stare buggy-eyed into the darkness tonight, too. She tried really hard not to keep doing the mental math, but her eyes kept straying to the clock on the dresser as she got ready for bed.

  When she turned off the bedside lamp, the digital readout cried out in flashing red letters in the dark.

  Riley Campbell had been missing almost thirty-six hours.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Brice couldn't help being squeamish about Melody McCallum's classroom, didn't relish spending quality bonding time with Bambi, the saucer-sized tarantula. Though he'd arranged to meet Melody before the start of the school day, there were four children already in the room when he arrived — the "lucky" children whose job it was to feed grasshoppers to the spider.

  Melody stood by the window with a bright green parakeet perched on her finger.

  "Pretty boy," she said.

  "Pretty boy, pretty boy," the bird chirped in bird speak as it paced like a sentry up and down the length of her finger. "Hello. Goodbye. Pretty boy."

  When she spotted Brice, she put the parakeet back in its cage and met him at her desk.

  "The rest of the children won't be here for another fifteen minutes."

  Brice found himself leaning toward her when she spoke because her voice was so soft. He wondered if that was a calculated thing, to get the children to pay attention. She was wearing a different sweater today. No ladybugs on this one, just an apple that had a cute, grinning worm sticking his head out a hole.

  "Would you mind explaining to me how talking to the children about what they put on his desk will help you find Riley?"

  "Sometimes … no, maybe most times, you don't know what you know. Witnesses know things they never think to tell the police because it doesn't occur to them the information might be important, or because they only remember some detail when they're reminded of it."

  He hoped that would suffice. It didn't. She just stood there, watching him.

  "It's possible, probably not very likely — that one of these children saw something they didn't tell anyone about, not because they were trying to be secretive but because they just didn't think of it."

  She said nothing.

  "Yeah, it's a long shot, but we have to chase every rabbit down every hole."

  "But how will these things—?"

  "For the same reason you had the children bring them in — to put the children at ease. If I can get them to talk to me about something easy, that might serve as a springboard to some other unrelated thing."

  Lame. Though she didn't say so, it was clear she thought he was on a fool's errand. T.J. Hamilton would have pointed out "they picked the right man for the job."

  The room filled with children, not rowdy, cheerful children, though. Subdued. Quiet. As soon as the final bell rang outside in the hallway, Brice stepped to the front of the room. Before he had a chance to ask his first question, the children began to interrogate him.

  "Why can't you find Riley?" asked a bespectacled littl
e boy in the front seat on the first row. "The FBI knows everything. They find lost kids all the time. My mom said so. Why can't they find Riley?"

  "We're doing everything we can and you can help by answering a few questions."

  "I don't want to answer questions," said a sour-faced little girl seated beside the terrarium where Bambi was probably chowing down on a still-live grasshopper. "Why do we have to?"

  Brice wanted to respond, "Because I'm bigger than you are and I have a gun." Instead he said, "You want to help Riley come home, don't you?"

  She nodded.

  "Even if you don't understand why I'm asking these questions, you still need to answer them fully and truthfully. Deal?"

  The children murmured among themselves. A couple said, "Deal." Most just stared at him.

  He picked up a well-worn teddy bear off Riley's desk.

  "Whose is this?"

  A chubby little boy in the back row reluctantly raised his hand.

  "I don't sleep with it," he said, making it clear he wasn't anybody's wimp.

  "Why did you bring it?"

  "It belonged to my dad. But he didn't sleep with it either! I keep it on my bed to remind me of my dad — he's in Afghanistan. I throw it on the floor when I go to bed at night."

  Brice had the same basic exchange with every one of the students.

  The little girl who put the china doll on Riley's desk had gotten it for Christmas. Her grandmother made china dolls.

  The boy who'd provided the tractor wanted to be a farmer, like his uncle.

  The baseball glove belonged to a little boy who — duh — loved baseball.

  So it went with the matchbox car, the stuffed Ninja Turtle, the Han Solo light saber, the Hulk action figure doll and the rabbit's foot. Most of the items had been purchased for the children themselves, which ruled them out. Still, Brice took down the name of the child and notes on the item each had placed on Riley's desk.

  "When's Riley coming back?" a little boy asked as Brice opened the door to leave. "Me and him, we was gonna play Angry Birds tomorrow at my house. We play every Saturday." He sighed elaborately. "It's the only game my mom will let me play. Will he be back by then?"

  "I hope so."

  His cellphone rang as he was walking out of the building.

  "You want to tell me what you're doing at the school?" The condescension in the senior FBI agent's voice was thicker than clabbered milk. How'd Nakamura know where Brice was? Like the little girl said, the FBI knows everything.

  "I didn't agree to become lawn art in my own front yard. I'm concentrating on what I can do that you can't."

  "And that is?"

  "Get the locals to open up to me. You charge in here like" — he caught himself before he said a kamikaze pilot over Pearl Harbor — "Sherman marching through Atlanta and nobody's going to tell you anything. I'm working to get people — children, specifically — to relax and maybe they'll think of something they didn't know they knew."

  "And what did you find out?"

  "Nothing. Yet."

  The beat of silence that followed spoke volumes.

  "I'm giving a status briefing in fifteen minutes."

  That was it and then the line went dead.

  As he drove back to the courthouse, Brice called Bailey and found out that she, T.J. and Dobbs were on their way to Bartlesville.

  "There was nothing on Riley's desk that was an obvious link to a child killed in a car accident in 1997."

  He didn't like the sound of fatigue and hopelessness he heard in his own voice so he hung up without further comment. As soon as he stepped into the conference room/command center in the courthouse, his eyes were drawn to the clock. There seemed to be more than accusation in the clock face now. Now, he saw condemnation. Riley Campbell had last been seen in the hallway of Corruthers Elementary School Wednesday afternoon. Today was Friday. The percentage of kidnapped children found alive after forty-eight hours was … miniscule.

  It was clear Bailey didn't want him and Dobbs to see how disappointed she was that Brice had found out nothing from talking to the children in Riley's classroom. She'd a'made a lousy poker player.

  The first newspaper they tried was the Bartlesville Bee. The building was undergoing renovations. Only a small portion of the front office was visible, with the rest of the interior behind plastic sheeting to keep the clouds of drywall dust at bay.

  The microfiche reader was in the part of the building quarantined by dust and the receptionist couldn't be persuaded to let them brave the contamination at their own risks.

  T.J. tried to talk her into allowing them to take the files with them to the library —

  "No library in town," she said. "And the files are stored back there with the reader. I'm not going to go digging through that mess to find them. Come back in a couple of weeks. No, make that a month."

  It took more than an hour to get from Bartlesville to the next community with a weekly newspaper. T.J. thought about telling Bailey that the distance between the two communities "as the crow flies" probably wasn't twenty miles. But driving on the winding roads was already making her carsick and she didn't need the added stress.

  Simpsonville's newspaper was located in a small office in the town's only "strip mall" — a single long structure that contained the Dollar General Store and Beddingfield's Insurance Agency on the other end and a vacant space in between.

  "Prosperous little burg," Bailey commented when they got out of the car.

  "More prosperous than some," Dobbs said. "Looks like the electricity's still on."

  It took less than five minutes for them to discover their hour's drive had been wasted. The reason the newspaper was occupying space in the "new building" was because the old newspaper office had burned down a couple of years before. All the records had burned with it.

  "You could have told me that yesterday when I called," Dobbs told the bored twenty-something working the front desk.

  "You didn't ask."

  Half an hour later, the voice from Bailey's iPhone's Maps app instructed her to turn left on Yosemite Road.

  "How come you got a British accent on that thing?" T.J. asked, when the voice pronounced the street Yo-sem-ity. "Around here, they call it Yo-se-mite."

  "I just like the sound of it, so crisp and official. I always wanted to go to England."

  "It's one of those nice-place-to-visit-but-I-wouldn't-want-to-live-there destinations," Dobbs pointed out from the back seat as Bailey turned from Yosemite to Baldwin Street.

  "And you know that how?"

  "I lived there for a couple of weeks. Left as soon as I could. Got tired of hearing dumb-American as a hyphenated word."

  As T.J. recalled, Dobbs had closed a financial deal during that "couple of weeks" that had netted the man six figures.

  From the front passenger side of Bailey's little blue Honda Accord, T.J. looked out at the little town of Hemphill, which might have had a couple of thousand residents, making it the biggest town anywhere around. It actually looked prosperous, lawns well kept and trimmed, neat brick houses. There was the requisite Civil War Memorial in the town square, dedicated to the soldiers who'd fought on both sides of the conflict, which he thought was considerate of them. But this was, after all, West Virginia, a state hunked out of Virginia because the residents sided with the North rather than the Confederacy. Maybe more than any other border state, West Virginia had split — literally — down the middle on the slavery issue and maybe more than in any other border state, the conflict had torn families apart.

  Bailey pulled into a parking space opposite a row of buildings where the disembodied British voice had directed them. Across the street from the lot was the Crenshaw County Water District Office, the Hair Affair Beauty Parlor, the Hemphill Enterprise and the Hemphill City Police Department.

  There was a bell on the door when they entered and a young woman whose smile was so perfect it had to have cost her parents a fortune in orthodontist bills stepped up behind the counter.

  "Ma
y I help you with something?"

  "We called yesterday, asking about a story in one of your old newspapers."

  "Yes, you talked to me. You were looking for a traffic accident, right?" When Dobbs nodded, she gestured for them to follow her. She went through a half-swinging door in the middle of the counter and led them to the back of the building. "If a story's more than fifteen years old, we only have the summaries searchable online on the newspaper's website. We're gradually converting the old files, but anything dating back before 2000 is still in the bound volumes up here."

  Before them was an old wooden staircase. The door at the top opened to a cavernous storage space that spanned the width and breadth of the whole building below. It was filled with boxes, crates and old equipment, outdated machinery made useless by computerized technology. T.J. suspected the old printing press in the back corner was a genuine antique and would probably command a good price on eBay.

  In the back portion of the room were shelves filled with gigantic books. Each had bound between its covers actual newspapers, six months per volume.

  The receptionist walked along the shelves, searching the covers.

  "You don't know the exact date the accident happened, right, just the year?"

  Bailey nodded.

  "We're a weekly newspaper, twenty-six issues in each book."

  She walked past the books, reading the spines.

  "January to July, 1994, July to December 1994, January to July 1995 …"

  When she came to the volumes for 1997, she pulled one large book off the shelf and carried it to a long standing table in the middle of the room.

  Dobbs got the other volume for 1997.

  "It won't take you long to look through these, I wouldn't think. You won't have to search the whole newspaper. A multiple-fatality wreck in this county — the story would be on the front page."

  The woman looked around.

  "Sorry it's so dusty up here. You can haul the books downstairs where there's air conditioning if you get too hot, but it probably won't take you long to find what you're looking for." She turned to go, then turned back. "I hope you don't mind spiders. This place is full of them."