The Program

by Stephen White

  “No. She never called back.”

  “So you think that means she’s okay?”

  “That’s what I usually try to tell myself.”

  Lauren rearranged the pillows she used to support her abdomen and her legs. “It could mean the opposite.”

  With a little mirth injected into his tone, he said, “It would be awkward for me to get through life thinking that way. I try to interpret not hearing from patients as a sign that they’re doing well. The alternative is unnerving.”

  She said, “Oh.” The single syllable expanded like a gas, filling the entire room. He had no choice but to inhale her doubt.

  He asked, “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe this isn’t a usual patient.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  She asked, “Do you ever get feelings?”

  “Like intuition? Those kinds of feelings?”

  “I guess.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Me, too,” Lauren said.

  The phone rang.

  Alan answered, listened for a moment, covered the receiver with his open palm and said, “It’s for you, sweets; it’s police dispatch. You’re on call tonight? I didn’t know.”

  First she nodded, then she shook her head. As she reached across him to grab the phone, she explained, “I’m backup.”

  Into the phone she said, “This is Lauren Crowder.” For about a minute she listened without asking a single question. Finally she said, “Of course, I’ll hold while you patch me through.”

  A MINUTE OR so later she threw back the duvet that covered her visibly pregnant body and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She forced a smile onto her face as she handed Alan the phone so he could hang it back up.

  “I’m either too old or too pregnant for this,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Apparent homicide at a little motel at the west end of Arapahoe. The Foot of the Mountain. Do you know it? I’m wanted at the scene.”

  “Yeah, I do know it. It’s charming, but I don’t think that’s the point. Why don’t you get somebody else to do it? Who’s your backup tonight? Call them. I’m sure they’ll understand.”

  “I told you already, I am the backup. Fred’s catching tonight, but his wife’s out of town and his kid’s real sick. I think she has the croup. It’s a small crime scene; my part shouldn’t take that long.”

  “It’s a homicide, right? You’ll be gone until the middle of the night, and you know it.” He paused before he added, “You won’t catch the case, will you? You’re about to go on maternity leave.”

  “No, I’m just covering for Fred. There’s no way that they would assign me a homicide this late in my pregnancy.”

  “Was that Sam on the phone? Is this going to be his?”

  Their friend, Sam Purdy, was one of the felony-team detectives eligible to catch homicides. She nodded. “That was Sammy. I’ll say hi for you.”

  Five minutes later she was dressed and out the door.

  4

  Alan was still awake when Lauren crawled back into bed at a quarter to three. All she had to say about the murder at the motel was that no witnesses had come forward, and that it didn’t look like it was going to be an easy case unless the victim’s husband or boyfriend did it.

  He asked if she was going to catch the case.

  Lauren said, “I already told you no.” Her tone clearly indicated she didn’t want to discuss the motel murder anymore.

  Alan rubbed her lower back for a few minutes as she struggled to find a comfortable way to rest her big belly on a pillow. After a minute or two, she stuffed another one between her thighs.

  From the rhythm of her breathing he could tell that she found sleep long before he did.

  The alarm stunned them awake after only a few hours.

  5

  Ron Kriciak pulled his pickup truck down Peyton’s street at seven-twenty on Wednesday morning and slowed to a stop a couple of doors away from her town house.

  He was uncomfortable with the level of monitoring he was doing with Peyton. In most circumstances Ron was a proponent of allowing the witnesses he was watching to make it or break it on their own. He didn’t like sitting on his witnesses like a damn chicken on an egg, but the message he was getting from Fenster Kastle was clear: If Peyton sneezed, Kastle wanted Ron close enough to hand her a tissue.

  Since Peyton hadn’t answered her phone when Ron had called at eight forty-five the night before, he figured he’d better stop by, check on her, make sure that everything was okay.

  Five seconds after he eased the truck to a stop, it was clear to him that everything wasn’t okay.

  The front window of the town house was broken out.

  Ron stopped the truck and felt for the weapon in his shoulder holster before he killed the engine. He pulled latex gloves from under the seat. Despite an acute sense of alarm, he managed to approach the house with practiced nonchalance. On the porch, he dialed Peyton’s number on his cell phone with one hand while he tried the doorbell with the other. The doorbell rang loudly through the missing window. But no one came to the door. After the phone pealed three times, Ron held the cell phone away from his ear and listened to the ringing that was coming from inside the house. When the answering machine kicked in, he reached into his jacket pocket and yanked out the latex gloves, pausing to snap them onto his hands. He tried the front door knob. It was locked. Ron couldn’t decide if the locked door was a good sign or a bad one. In the end he figured it didn’t really matter. He pulled his gun from its holster, checked the slide, reached through the broken window, and let himself into the house.

  OTHER THAN THE broken glass on the floor below the window, Ron saw no immediate signs of damage. In his peripheral vision he noticed that some flowers and water had been dumped on the living room carpet. He wondered about it but couldn’t generate any hypotheses to match that evidence.

  He sniffed the air but his nose found no clues.

  With a fingertip he caressed the safety on his handgun to convince himself it was off before he moved past the dining room toward the kitchen and family room.

  Trouble.

  The pantry door was open and groceries were spilled all over the floor. Spatters, smears, and streaks of blood led from the pantry toward a door on the far side of the kitchen. Ron guessed the door led to the garage.

  A crystal vase lay on its side in the kitchen sink. Ron remembered the flowers and water that he’d seen on the floor in the living room. He had A and he had B. But he still wasn’t sure what they added up to. He didn’t have C.

  On the coffee table in the family room lay an open copy of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. The center of the book had been hollowed out with a razor. The cache was now empty.

  Ron debated following the blood. He didn’t; instead, he backtracked and climbed the stairs, hoping he would find Peyton and the kid. Fearing he would find Peyton and the kid.

  Walking into the master bedroom he said, “Shit.”

  Used duct tape was strewn about the room. Two distinct bundles of sticky gray bands lay in the middle of the carpet and one smaller piece of less than six inches in length rested closer to the window. The mattress, box spring, pillows, and bedding were tossed haphazardly all over the floor. A metal bed frame and oak headboard sat naked across the room.

  Ron surmised a struggle had taken place in the room and guessed that the duct tape had been used to restrain someone.

  Peyton?

  As good a guess as any.

  The master bath was, to Ron’s eye, unremarkable.

  In his cursory examination he didn’t notice that it contained neither a hairbrush nor a toothbrush.

  Down the hall he found that the girl’s room was messy but intact. The bed had been slept in.

  Ron retraced his steps, descended the stairs, and once again pondered all the pieces of the puzzle. He couldn’t get them to configure into a recognizable form.

  He decided that it was time
to follow the blood and check the garage.

  He crossed the kitchen, opened the door to the garage, and flicked on the overhead light. Peyton’s car was in the center of the space, which was designed to hold two cars. Ron being Ron, he noted that the sedan needed to be washed. But he was surprised that the vehicle was there at all. By then he’d expected to find it gone along with Peyton.

  He blinked twice as though clearing his vision would make the vehicle disappear. Even after he blinked though, the sedan was still there. And it was still dirty.

  Ron stepped down a single concrete step into the garage. Without opening the doors he peeked into the car. The interior was empty.

  He moved around to the driver’s side, opened the door, leaned inside, and popped the trunk latch before he stepped to the back of the car.

  As he raised the lid he said, “I don’t believe this.”

  He used his gloved fingers to check the man in the trunk for a pulse before he flipped open his cell phone and hit the speed dial for Fenster Kastle’s number in Washington, D.C.

  FENSTER WASN’T AT his desk. It took someone over a minute to locate him.

  “It’s Ron Kriciak and this isn’t a secure phone, Fenster.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m at her house. It’s not even eight o’clock in the morning here and it appears that she’s gone absent. Circumstances unknown. One of ours—repeat—one of ours—is unconscious in the trunk of her car. Apparent head injury. Hell, definite head injury. House shows signs of break-in and struggle.”

  “Which one of ours?”

  “You want a name?”

  “No, I want hobbies and make of car. Then I’ll try and guess the guy’s identity. Lordy.”

  “He’s a local guy named Ficklin. You know him?”

  “First name?”

  “Ernest. Ernie.”

  “Should he know where she is? Is he on this client and somehow I don’t know about it?”

  “No way,” admitted Ron.

  Kastle exhaled loudly. “Get him some medical help and do it quietly. Once he’s in the hospital, get a guard on him and isolate him like he’s POTUS and the rest of the world has malaria. You understand what I’m saying? The second he’s alert and talking, I want to know. Don’t even think about talking to him before I do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Back to our friend. Is she on the run or has she been abducted?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Then guess.”

  “There’s duct tape in her bedroom. It looks like it was used as a restraint. I’d guess abducted.”

  The line went quiet long enough for Ron to become nervous all over again.

  “I want to know what happened in that house, and I want to know where she went, with whom, and when. Any resources you need locally, we’ll arrange. Are the local authorities involved?”

  “It does not appear so.”

  “Good. Keep it that way.”

  “Sir.”

  “I want updates on a secure line on the half-hour starting at eight-thirty your time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  6

  Dr. Alan Gregory was about a dozen or so blocks away from Peyton’s cottage in Chautauqua. He was in his Walnut Street office, only a few minutes into his second psychotherapy appointment of the day. Over his patient’s left shoulder he noticed a little light flash red on his office wall, indicating that his next patient had arrived. The red light distracted him briefly because it appeared to indicate that his next patient—a woman who had never been on time for anything in her life—had actually arrived forty minutes early for her appointment.

  His current patient was relatively new to his practice—this was only her third visit to his office. She was a thirty-four-year-old single woman named Kelli Wynton who was suffering during a relatively chronic phase of what he liked to call Self/Savvy-itis. He suspected that as a younger woman Ms. Wynton may also have endured the common, milder form of the disease—Cosmo-itis—and may indeed have been one of those troubled adolescents who suffered from the earliest known form of the illness—Seventeen-itis.

  Ms. Wynton’s conception of her mental well-being was largely shaped by her reading of her own inadequacies based on articles and surveys in the latest issues of the popular women’s magazines. That limited perspective left her totally immune to recognition of the impact of issues that may actually have been germane to her mental health.

  While Dr. Gregory was distracted by the little red light beaming on the wall, Ms. Wynton was talking about the methods she was employing to get men to call her back after the first date. The methods apparently weren’t working with anything approaching a satisfying degree of certainty.

  The therapist’s eyes left Kelli’s as the red light flashed off, then on again. He hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  The patient had just begun explaining with apparent pride that she got a lot of first dates. Two, most weeks. Sometimes three.

  A minute into her protracted conclusion that the frequency of first dates must mean she was an attractive person, the light flashed off again, then immediately on once more. Dr. Gregory heard a distant thumping bass begin powering its way through the well-soundproofed walls of the office suite. His patient didn’t seem to take any notice of the percussion.

  Dr. Gregory listened to the muffled sound of his partner, Diane, calling out from the hallway outside his office, “Excuse me, you can’t go back there. No! Don’t go in there; he’s in session.”

  Seconds later the door flew open and Ron Kriciak walked in. He was wearing a paisley tie on a chambray work-shirt and some green cotton pants that had never seen an iron. He held his arms away from his sides and puffed out his chest like a chimpanzee. “I need to talk to you,” he said, nodding to Alan Gregory. His voice was accusatory—the tone a parent might employ when bursting into a teenager’s room just after receiving a phone call from the principal.

  Trying to remain calm, Alan stood and replied, “This is not okay, Ron. I’m with someone right now. If you need to talk with me, you can call and make an appointment like everyone else.” To his patient, Alan said, “I’m sorry for the interruption. I’ll handle this as quickly as I can.”

  “I called. I got your damn recording. This cannot wait for you to return my call ‘as soon as possible.’ It’s an actual emergency. A real live life-and-death emergency,” Ron said.

  “Then go have a seat in the waiting room. Give me a few minutes to wrap this—”

  Ron said, “No.” He turned to the patient and a badge materialized in his hand. “Ma’am? I’m a U.S. marshal and this is official government business. Would you please step out of the office for a moment and wait down the hall in the waiting room for your doctor? I appreciate your cooperation. He’ll be with you as soon as he is done cooperating with me.”

  Alan faced Ron and said, “No. You go wait in the waiting room. She and I will find a quick place to stop and I’ll be right with you.”

  Kelli Wynton stood and moved toward the doorway. “No, no, no. I think I’ll just go,” she said. “Really, it’s not a problem for me.” She almost sprinted out the door in the direction of the waiting room. She hadn’t bothered to collect her purse or the top to her pale blue sweater set.

  Alan saw Diane loitering in the hall outside the office, her cordless phone in one hand, the other poised above the alarm-system panic button that was mounted on the wall. He raised a palm, encouraging her to hold off.

  “Ron,” he said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing busting in here like this?”

  “She’s gone. Peyton has disappeared. We can’t find her.”

  Alan immediately thought about her phone call the night before and her sense that someone from the Marshals Service was following her. He tried to comprehend the gravity of what Ron was telling him. He turned to the open doorway first and said, “I think it’s okay, Diane. Thanks for your help.” She frowned at what she perceived to be her partner’s total lack of judgment and moved out of
his sight down the hall. Alan didn’t hear her office door close and assumed that Diane was loitering in the hall within listening range.

  Alan faced Ron and asked, “I don’t get it. What do you mean that Peyton’s disappeared?”

  “I went by her house this morning. She wasn’t there. Her house is a shambles. Broken glass, tossed furniture. That’s the kind of disappeared that I mean.”

  “Jesus,” Alan said.

  “So do you know where she is?” Ron demanded.

  Alan shook his head, then explained what the gesture actually meant. He said, “Ron, you’ve been dealing with Teri Grady for a while on other cases. I’m sure you know that I couldn’t tell you even if I did.” He hoped Ron was able to translate those words into, “No, I don’t know where she is.”

  Ron folded his arms and tilted his head to one side. “You are going to tell me what you know.”

  Alan thought Ron looked like a bouncer. “First, how about you tell me what you know. And don’t threaten me, Ron. I don’t react well to it.”

  “Don’t be cute, Doctor. She may be in serious danger.”

  “I’m hearing that from you loud and clear. Please understand that. But if she is, I know nothing about it.” He wondered if that was exactly true. Peyton had told him the night before that she was concerned that someone was following her around with a camera. It had been his impression at the time that Peyton thought it was someone from WITSEC.

  Ron asked, “Do you know any reason that she might have run?”

  “Run? What makes you think she ran? I thought you were worried that she might have been abducted or killed. You said her house was busted up.”

  “If she’s been abducted, then she’s already dead. If she ran, I still might be able to save her sorry ass.”

  Alan moved across the office and shut the door. He pointed to the couch and said, “Have a seat.”

  Ron sat on the middle of the sofa and spread his legs so that there were about thirty inches between his knees. He leaned forward and rested his weight on his elbows, and the paisley tie he was wearing hung down between his legs like an extra-long floating punctuation mark.