The Rivers Run Dry

by Sibella Giorello

  At the parking lot by the nowhere stairs, I jumped inside the Barney Mobile, slamming the door and rolling up the windows. Rain beat like fists against the car’s roof, producing a noise so loud that I didn’t hear my cell phone ringing, only felt the buzzing sensation against my hip.

  Shaking water from my fingers, I flipped open the phone. The ID was blocked. “Raleigh Harmon,” I said.

  “Harmon!” barked Allen McLeod. “Where are you? I’ve been calling for an hour.”

  I hit the volume button, barely able to hear him over the pounding rain. “My phone was on, sir.”

  “Get to the VanAlstyne estate. Now. This thing’s taken a bad turn.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “They just got a ransom note,” he said. “The SAC wants to know why we didn’t believe them in the first place.”

  I backed out of the parking lot, throwing the wipers to full speed. “I’m on my way, sir.”

  “Another thing, the note came with a finger.”

  The circular driveway in front of the VanAlstyne estate held the sheen of heavy rain come and gone and now a mist rose from the pavement, shrouding the wheels of seven unmarked sedans, three Issaquah black-and-whites, and one state police cruiser. There was also a white panel van—Bureau surveillance.

  At the gate, two deputies from Issaquah checked my ID. I walked toward the front door, where the lake beyond steamed like dry ice. The officer at the front door had his thumbs hooked through his gun belt. I flashed my ID, heading inside.

  “What happened to you?” he said.

  I turned. It was Lowell, the state trooper I’d met in the parking lot with Courtney VanAlstyne’s vehicle. I told myself to keep walking, don’t engage, but in the foyer the grit on my boots ground against the polished marble floor. I stepped to the side, kneeling to untie my boots. My socks were soaked.

  “What did you do,” Lowell said, “take a shower with your clothes on?”

  I rolled up my socks, placing them inside the boots, then set them to the side of the foyer.

  “They let you walk around like that?” he persisted.

  “Lowell,” I said, standing up, “I’ve never worn a uniform and I don’t ever plan to.”

  He cocked his jaw to one side.

  I walked across the foyer, feeling cold marble against my bare feet, then came to the next room. The plush carpeting was soft as fur and the VanAlstynes were sitting on separate moss-green couches, facing each other over a coffee table. The table had scrolled wooden inlays that swept toward claw-footed legs. It was easier to look at the table. The pain on their faces was unbearable.

  Mr. VanAlstyne’s cool blue eyes gaped with fear, giving him the appearance of a man on the verge of sociopathic rage. His wife’s face was even more distorted. Her glistening white teeth suddenly looked gray, anemic, her lips so pale they were indistinguishable from the skin on her face.

  “I . . . I . . . ” she was stammering.

  At her side, Lucia Lutini cradled one of the woman’s skeletal hands. When Lucia met my eyes, I saw the depth in her brown irises, extending to the pit of hell and back.

  I walked to the next hallway, where three SWAT agents conferred with Basker. I didn’t see Jack but McLeod stood off to one side, in an alcove with an antique oak secretary offering photo-graphs framed in polished silver. Detective Markel stood next to him.

  “Harmon, what the—” McLeod said.

  “I didn’t have time to change, sir.”

  “Your feet are wet.”

  “Yes, sir. You said to come right over.”

  “Well don’t drip on their carpet. They’ve got enough problems.”

  I turned to Detective Markel. “I took Suggs’s shoes to the mineralogy lab in Spokane. The state geologist linked the soil to the Clay Pit mine, up on Cougar Mountain. I searched for a direct trail to his house. I didn’t find it. But I found a mine shaft.”

  “I wish it worked,” Markel said. “But we’ve got a problem. Suggs was in custody when they got this note. If he’s behind it, he’s got an accomplice.”

  I looked at McLeod. “What did you say about a finger?”

  “We sent it to the state lab, downtown. They’re running the tests.”

  “What did the note say?”

  The detective flipped open his small notebook. “‘We have your daughter. Orders will be issued. Obey the orders, she comes home.’”

  “We?”

  He nodded, then glanced over my shoulder.

  Mrs. VanAlstyne was still seated on the couch but she was looking up at a thin woman who stood in front of her. The woman wore latex gloves and held a long cotton swab between her right thumb and index finger. Lucia wrapped one arm around Mrs. VanAlstyne’s narrow shoulders and like a small bird in need of food, Mrs. VanAlstyne opened her mouth. The woman placed the swab inside, scraping the cotton against the inside of her cheek. She dropped the swab in a plastic bag, sealing the top.

  She turned to the husband.

  Mr. VanAlstyne watched the lab technician with a bleak realization. His fury was gone, and when he opened his mouth, it was a quick mechanical movement, something from a marionette.

  “Harmon, go home and change clothes,” McLeod said. “We’re setting up surveillance here on the phone and the house. Lutini’s going to stay with the family. I need somebody to keep up with the lab evidence. If that DNA comes in positive for the finger, your first call is me. Got it?”

  I made my way back toward the front door, picked up my boots and saw the lug soles had deposited wet clumps of clay on the marble. With nothing else available, I wiped the floor with my wet socks. But there was no getting rid of that clay, not without heavy mopping. It left a thin layer of pale dust.

  Lowell watched from the door. “How’re they doing?”

  I stood, cradling the boots. “Devastated. How else?”

  He nodded. Outside a man was approaching the house carrying a large black briefcase. More surveillance, my guess. Lowell checked the man’s Bureau credentials, taking an extra-long time to examine the small card. He looked puffed up suddenly, as though he expected to follow this low level federal employee inside, into the action. But all he could do was force the man to acknowledge his presence, to treat him as a peer in law enforcement.

  “You done?” the man with the briefcase said.

  “You’re clear.” Lowell handed back the ID. “Let me know if you need any help.”

  The man gave a tight smile and walked into the house.

  I sat on the wide slate steps outside, slipping my bare feet into my boots. They felt cold.

  “Amazing,” Lowell said behind me.

  I didn’t turn around. “What’s that?”

  “It looks like this picture-perfect life. All the money, the big house, nice cars. And then, poof. There’s this flash and you can see how they don’t have everything after all.”

  I stood up and walked away.

  There was nothing to say.

  chapter twenty-one

  Except for the cats, who ignored me, my aunt’s house was empty. I quickly showered, changed, scrawled another note for the fridge, and rummaged for food again. My stomach was so empty it had ceased growling.

  But the cupboards were bare—not even a bag of flaxseed—and when I opened the pantry door, the painted white shelves held nothing but ragged scratches from where the canned goods should have been. In the crisper drawer of the refrigerator, I found a bag of brown rice cakes two weeks past their expiration date. I ate them in the car. They tasted like dehydrated tree bark.

  Just south of downtown Seattle, I turned on a narrow road near Boeing Field and parked outside a squat building with reflective window panes. The building was sandwiched between a hangar containing airplane propellers and a commercial laundry operation where white steam curled from aluminum stacks, melting into the gray clouds overhead.

  While the Spokane branch of the state crime lab concentrated on evidence produced by its rural setting—minerals, flora, fauna—the Seattle br
anch was buried by urban decay. I walked through the materials analysis lab with my temporary ID from the front desk and saw evidence of the city’s most obvious enemies: drugs, DNA, drugs, firearms, drugs. And finally, forgeries.

  The Department of Questioned Documents was on the second floor, its south-facing windows framing a view of the laundry operation next door. The room had a hushed quiet, the kind of absorbed silence that penetrated reference libraries, and it prompted me to whisper my introduction to the examiner, a woman named Mary Worobec. She was petite with skin the color of sunbathed sandstone, and when she turned her head, her blonde hair swung like a hammock. The ransom note was resting on the light table in front of her, near a microscope and several magnifying glasses. She wore latex gloves.

  “Short and sour,” she said in a loud voice, pointing to the ransom note.

  The words were written in black ink on white paper. Ordinary notebook paper, with two inches of white space at the top and thin horizontal blue lines running across the page. The handwriting was block style, all capitals.

  “WE HAVE YOUR DAUGHTER. ORDERS WILL BE ISSUED. OBEY THE ORDERS, SHE COMES HOME.”

  “What do you make of ‘we’?” I asked.

  Mary Worobec shrugged. “In twenty-seven years, half the ransom notes I’ve examined say ‘we.’ Then it turns out it’s one guy trying to throw us. Or he has delusions. Either way, I don’t put that much stock in ‘we.’”

  On the wall above her every letter of the Arabic alphabet, all the calligraphic bends and curls, was laid out on a poster, along with the Hebrew alphabet, similarly inscrutable. Then Turkish. Chinese, French, Japanese . . .

  “How long has she been missing?” she asked.

  “The last time anybody saw her was ten days ago.”

  She nodded, grim. “My immediate take is you’re looking for a man.”

  “Why?”

  “First these simple declarative sentences. Any time you have an abduction or a kidnapping, it’s an emotional situation. Women tend to go on and on when they get worked up. They advise, hector, nag, so forth. And women tend to make it personal. But look at these sentences, see how they line up? Verb-noun, verb-noun, verb-noun. And then, there’s the block lettering.”

  “What’s special about that?”

  She lifted a jeweler’s loupe from around her long neck, pressing it against her right eye before leaning toward the document. “The terminations of these letters are solid. No trailing off. It’s aggressive, forceful handwriting. I can smell the testosterone from here.”

  “Maybe it’s a woman being careful.”

  “Always possible,” she agreed. “But the way people construct their sentences reveals how they think, what pattern their thoughts follow. Psychotics ramble because their thoughts are confused and disorganized. But this note shows the exact opposite, some-body with extremely linear thought patterns. Obsessive. Always in control. I’d hazard another guess.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s enjoying the suffering he’s inflicted on her. And on the family.”

  “A sadist?”

  “Yes. He believes she deserves this,” she said. “Look at the words again. ‘Orders’ . . . ‘issued’ . . . ‘obey.’ It has the ring of armed services, maybe something in his background. He might have been discharged for some kind of insubordination. I realize I’m hazarding speculation here, but I heard a fingertip came in with this.”

  I nodded.

  “Solid speculations won’t hurt, if this is as urgent as it sounds. Just realize what it is.”

  “I’ll make a note. Go on.”

  “He’s dangerous. Very dangerous. And part of what makes him so dangerous is that he presents himself to the world as perfect. That’s what this precise handwriting is about. It’s presentation; everything is in order. But when you look at the content, what he’s saying . . . it’s chilling, cold.”

  She was staring at the note, tapping her finger against her cheek.

  “What else?”

  “He works in a position of authority.”

  “Management?”

  “Management is a possibility. He needs rules, wants the rules obeyed. But then he breaks those same rules—because they don’t apply to him, because he’s above rules. That’s his secret life.” She shivered. “I wouldn’t want to be at this guy’s mercy.”

  My mind was trying to recall if I’d seen any handwriting from Suggs. And then, almost unbidden, I wondered about Jack, realizing everything he’d given me had been typed on the computer, then printed out.

  I left my card, asking her to call me as soon as she finished checking the note for fingerprints and DNA. Then I walked down the sterilized white hallway to Trace Evidence, located on the other side of the building, where the windows faced the mammoth concrete belt of Interstate 5. Afternoon traffic was already backed up to Boeing Field and along the windowsill were sample plants: marijuana, peyote, poppies.

  At one of the long black counters, a middle-aged man stared at a series of photographs wtih the fractured dimensions of crime scene pictures. He glanced at my ID, then looked back at the photographs. The most prominent picture showed the interior of a black minivan, the middle seat ripped out, replaced by a hot plate and scorched pans.

  “The latest trend,” he said. “Meth lab on wheels. Free delivery, just like pizza. All we need is somebody rear-ending that thing. The explosion will blow the car off the road.” He stuck out his hand. “Tom O’Brien.”

  I asked about the FBI evidence that came in today, and Tom O’Brien said he’d personally scraped the soil from under the fingernail about an hour ago. He sent the soil by courier to Spokane, to Peter Rosser.

  “He’s the best with soils,” he added. “I have photos of every-thing though.”

  He pivoted a half turn, lifting a stack of four-by-six color shots. At first glance, the object beside the ruler looked like something coughed up by the sea. Then I realized it was skin, black around the exposed edges. But the nail bothered me most. Its elliptical shape testified to months of expensive manicures, but in the magnified shots from the digital microscope, the new nicks and tears were evident and the nail bed was filled with compacted soil.

  “Could be the tip of a right pinky,” Tom O’Brien said, as I stared at the photos. “You can see how the nail’s torn—abrasion tears, like the finger scraped against something hard.”

  “Was a fingerprint available?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Whoever cut it off was careful. We didn’t even get a good partial print. We’re using DNA for identification. You want to talk to the lab?”

  He went to make copies of the fingertip photos, saying he’d leave them at the front desk, and I walked across the lab to the DNA section, one square room with an entire wall consumed by a white dry-erase board. On that, a running count of the state’s DNA backlog, all 53,721 cases.

  Two young women, each wearing white lab coats, stared into microscopes. On the floor between them a note was taped to a small refrigerator, reading, Food Only!

  On television, the kind of shows that Felicia Kunkel adored, lab techs were often seen collecting evidence. But in real life, lab techs never participated in an investigation, and when it came to DNA, their sole purpose was to find the fourteen different gene locations and determine whether those alleles, as they were called, matched any other person’s DNA. Provided it wasn’t presented to the O. J. Simpson jury, DNA was straightforward science.

  “I have three sets of DNA,” explained the first woman, a compact Asian girl whose black hair was cinched into a tight bun on top of her head. She began to explain how the DNA examination worked when I interrupted.

  “I’m familiar with the process. I just need the conclusion.”

  “Okay, great,” she said. “You can break it to them.”

  “Break what, to whom?”

  “Maybe they already know. One of them should.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The DNA from the fingertip?”


  “Yes.”

  “It matches the mother’s DNA.”

  “Okay.”

  “But it doesn’t match the father.”

  I took a moment. “You’re saying—”

  “I’m saying he is not the biological father. Not one of his alleles lined up with the girl’s DNA. Hey, maybe it’s an adoption. Sometimes people don’t want to talk about that, you know.”

  When David Harmon married my mother, he adopted me and my sister, Helen. I was five and Helen was eight, and if people haven’t experienced adoptive love, there was little use trying to explain it to them. Description wouldn’t help them recognize the territory, since most people couldn’t comprehend the depths and heights and wide-open wilderness that appeared whenever a heart transcended desire for its own kind.

  Adoptive love was not natural; it was not manufactured within our DNA. No evidence of its existence showed up in our blood types or facial features or the quaint familial traits that ran through generations, the genetic tendencies toward duty or distraction or drink. In scientific terms, adoption meant people were unrelated. Period.

  But in the aftermath of my father’s death, I came to realize, once again, that science never fully explained the world’s greatest mysteries. Science was a high calling. It was a noble and wonder-filled endeavor. But science had yet to provide satisfactory answers for our most beautiful unknowns—all the things that transcended understanding, the miracles that pervaded individual lives and stretched back to a majesty spoken into existence, to a sacrifice that continued to resonate within our souls thousands of years later. A sacrifice based on adoption: he chose us, he loved us, then he died for the worst within us.

  That afternoon, as I pulled into the VanAlstyne estate, my heart was keeping a rhythm that matched the thoughts jumping around my brain. Maybe Martin VanAlstyne knew Courtney was not his birth child; maybe he felt honored to be her adoptive father. But then, why the charade of taking DNA samples? And what about the white mask of dread I’d seen on Mrs. VanAlstyne’s face? Lucia believed she was hiding something. Perhaps this was it.