The Triple Threat Collection

by Lis Wiehl

  Her arm began to ache. Allison let it relax a few inches. “And what if this baby isn’t born healthy? And I keep putting off telling Marshall, even though I don’t know why, and what am I going to do for child care, and how will I manage to breastfeed and work? And what if my work just gets too dangerous?”

  In the midst of pouring out her fears and requests, Allison remembered the other half of the verse. Thanksgiving. It took real effort to get the words out. “But thank you, Lord, for this pregnancy, for this baby growing inside me.” As she heard herself murmuring the words, she felt a thrill of wonder and awe. She was pregnant, after all this time.

  As of today, she was five weeks along. Allison clung to that number now, even though only last week it had seemed silly when she had learned that they counted from the first day of your last menstrual cycle. She hadn’t had any morning sickness, hadn’t been especially tired, hadn’t had to go to the bathroom more often. The only things that were different were her heightened sense of smell and her sore breasts. Whenever she was alone in her office or in a restroom stall, she would roughly run one hand across them, making sure they were still tender. She had read someplace that if you were going to miscarry, then your breasts would stop hurting first, before the blood began.

  Allison realized she had fallen silent, and that both hands were back in her lap. She had given the burden back to God.

  Behind the closed bedroom door, the bed creaked, and she heard Marshall roll over and put his feet on the floor. Taking a deep breath, Allison thought of her prayers.

  As soon as the door opened, she said, “Marshall. I have something for you.” Ignoring the cat’s cry of protest, she pushed him off her lap and stood up.

  “What?” He pushed his black hair out of his half-closed eyes. Marshall wasn’t a morning person.

  “I got you an early Christmas present.”

  Allison handed him the small package she had wrapped this morning. It felt too light to contain all their dreams.

  Marshall shot her a puzzled look. They weren’t the kind of people who stretched out Christmas celebrations. They didn’t even have a tree up yet.

  He hefted it experimentally and then tore open the wrapper. Inside was the white plastic pregnancy test. The crossed pink lines were still visible in the window.

  Slowly, Marshall’s mouth opened. No words came out. Her heart beating in her ears, Allison watched as comprehension spread up his features. His eyes widened. His eyebrows lifted. Finally, he turned toward her. He had to clear his throat before he could get the words out. “You’re—you’re pregnant?”

  Allison nodded.

  He caught her wrist and pulled her to him, wrapping his arms around her. His body was still warm from the bedclothes. With his mouth pressed against her hair, Marshall murmured, “We’ve been waiting for so long. I can’t believe it.”

  She could feel his heartbeat underneath her ear. Finally, finally, Allison began to feel herself relax. No matter how hard things were, Marshall would always hold her up. He offered her a safe place where she could take off her armor and show the vulnerable woman underneath.

  “I love you,” she murmured.

  Instead of answering, Marshall kissed the top of her head, a million tiny kisses. His fingers lightly grazed her belly.

  “I can’t wait,” he said, and his voice wavered between laughter and tears.

  Allison grinned up at him.

  LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL

  December 17

  Even four blocks away from the school, Allison could hear the singing. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tune was old and familiar: “Amazing Grace.” She wrapped her coat more tightly around her.

  When she had heard on the radio about the vigil for Katie Converse, Allison had decided to attend. Every time she saw Katie’s photo on the news or in the paper, she was reminded of her sister. It wasn’t just the superficial resemblance, the unfinished look of the snub nose and the big eyes. Before their father died, Lindsay had been filled with the same enthusiasm, the same hope that maybe she could be the one to change the world. After he was gone, she started to hang out with a different crowd. Allison felt she should have done something to save her, but she had ignored the danger signs. By attending the vigil, Allison felt like she was doing something, no matter how small, to help Katie.

  Obviously, she wasn’t the only one who felt some kind of connection to the missing girl. The school parking lot was completely full, forcing her to park four blocks away. As Allison hurried to the school, she tried to put some distance between herself and the shabbily dressed man who had parked directly behind her. He wore a navy blue ski jacket, the hood cinched tight against the cold so that she couldn’t even see his face. There was something about him that made her uneasy, but she told herself that a vigil would attract all kinds.

  After she had walked a block, she turned to look over her shoulder. The man was matching her step for step, no closer, but not any farther away. She thought of the note she had found on her car. Walking faster, she snaked her hand inside her coat and touched her cell phone, clipped to her belt. She was relieved when she joined the crowd—she guessed there were more than three hundred—congregated in front of Lincoln High.

  Allison had come straight from work, so she didn’t have a candle. But as soon as she came up to the edge of the crowd, a girl with black-rimmed eyes handed her a candle and a large button with Katie’s picture on it. After Allison pinned the button to her coat, an older man standing next to her lit her candle with his own while she shielded the flame.

  The crowd had stopped singing, and it was eerily quiet, except for some muffled sobbing. It was like they were all waiting for something to happen. Waiting for Katie to come home. Or, failing that, waiting for news. For answers, for a sign, for their hopes to be fulfilled—or their nightmares to come true.

  Allison spotted Cassidy at the edge of the crowd in a bright circle of TV lights. She was interviewing a man whom Allison recognized from the newspaper as Katie’s father. She edged closer so that she could hear.

  Wayne Converse was in the middle of an appeal. “Katie, honey, if you can hear this, we love you. Please call us.” His glasses reflected the light. “And if you are someone who has Katie against her will, please let her go. Please.” His voice broke. “If anyone has any information that can help us, that can lead Katie to us or us to Katie, please call the FBI or any police agency. Our family is absolutely devastated.”

  As he spoke, Cassidy nodded solemnly. Afterward the camera turned its eye to her while she wrapped up the segment, leaving Katie’s stricken father literally in the dark. Then a dapper man whom Allison recognized as Senator Fairview put his arm around Katie’s father and drew him away, murmuring softly. They were joined by a tall, slender woman whom Allison guessed must be Katie’s mom.

  On an easel near the school’s front doors, a huge blown-up photo of Katie watched the crowd. She was grinning, her eyes as blue as the bright sky behind her. The photo had been blown up so large that every one of her freckles was clear. Allison joined the others gathered before the make-shift shrine erected in front of the photo. More than a dozen votive candles flickered inside glass enclosures. Heaped around them were stuffed animals, snapshots of Katie, a drawing of a dove held in place by a pebble, a ceramic kneeling angel, and a dozen bouquets of flowers, still wrapped in plastic.

  On each side of Allison, girls stood in clumps, their arms around each other, their faces shiny with tears as they contemplated the potential loss of their friend. Their tears, Allison thought, came as much from disbelief as they did from pain. And maybe there was a measure of fear, too, fear that whoever had snatched Katie could come for them next.

  Allison closed her eyes and prayed wordlessly.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw a woman slowly walking along the edge of the crowd, filming people’s faces with a digital video camera small enough to fit into her palm. Scanning the rest of the gathering, Allison picked out two men dressed in plainclothes, film
ing the faces that glowed in the light of candles. A uniformed police officer approached one, indicating a part of the crowd with a jerk of his chin. The cameraman turned. Allison tried to figure out who they were looking at, but she couldn’t tell. She suddenly remembered the man in the navy blue parka, but when she looked around the crowd, she couldn’t see him anymore.

  She did spot Nicole, who acknowledged her with a nod and then went back to watching the crowd, her expression fierce and alert. Nicole was here for professional reasons, while Allison’s were more complicated, personal as well as professional. She thought about the fragility of life, about Katie and Lindsay and the new life inside her.

  The crowd began to sing “How Great Thou Art.” In the flickering, golden light of the candles, their faces looked serene and ghostly. Their voices raised gooseflesh on Allison’s arms, despite her warm coat. Without a piano or even a pitch pipe, they were perfectly in tune. Without a director, they still found the same rhythm, still started and stopped each line at the same time.

  In their unrehearsed and implausible perfection, Allison felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.

  But when she looked out at the blackness that surrounded them, she felt something else. Evil. Waiting.

  NORTHWEST PORTLAND

  December 18

  As she drove to the Converses’ house,Nic felt exhausted. She had stayed at the vigil until every last person had gone, paying particularly close attention to those who lingered, those who wept until they could barely stand—and those who caught a glimpse of one of the cameras filming the crowd and quickly turned their backs.

  And she knew this was only the beginning. Today was a Saturday, but for the time being, weekends were only a theory. You worked this kind of case until it was finished, and until then there weren’t any days off. This could eat her life up—bones and all—before it was over. She had already made arrangements for Makayla to temporarily stay with her own parents. She hadn’t seen her daughter since the day before yesterday. Nic was giving up time with her own precious child to help another family find theirs.

  At least she had been in the FBI long enough that she was no longer considered a rookie. When you were the newest agent, you got handed a stack of cases no one else wanted to work, took the territory no one else wanted to drive, and drove it using the oldest car in the fleet. When every-one else went to lunch, you stayed behind to answer the phones. When they executed a search warrant, you were assigned the spot the bad guy was least likely to exit through.

  Being asked to be a liaison to the Converses was a sign that someone in the Bureau wanted her to go further up the ladder. The thing was—Nic wasn’t sure she wanted to go. Not when Makayla was so young and she saw her so little as it was. The next step would be being named a field supervisor, but the Bureau had recently gotten serious about its five and out policy. Supervisors at a field office could only be there for five years before they were required to take an assignment at headquarters. If they didn’t, they had to step back down in rank or quit. There was no way Nic would take Makayla to DC. She couldn’t afford private schools, not on what the FBI paid, and she would never put her daughter in public school there.

  As a black woman in the Bureau, Nic was in a double minority. They liked to trot her out as an example, but everything she did was also scrutinized. Nic’s achievements didn’t seem to add up as fast as a guy’s. At the same time, she sometimes thought that if she made a mistake, it would be broadcast on a loudspeaker all over the office.

  Sometimes it felt like she had to be twice as good as a man to even compete—like Ginger Rogers, who had done everything Fred Astaire had, only backward and in high heels. Take the 2.5-minute shooting drills. Agents had to shoot while lying prone, from behind barricades, on their knees, reloading, switching hands, moving ever closer to the target. They were expected to get a score of 80, which meant they had to put 80 percent of their bullets in the kill zone.

  Nicole’s last score had been a 97.

  She pulled up to the Converses’ house. Now there were four camera crews out front. She parked in the narrow driveway behind Valerie’s red Volvo station wagon—she didn’t see Wayne’s blue BMW sedan—and ignored the shouted questions as she went up the walk.

  Nic was here to interview Whitney before Valerie drove her to school. At first she had thought it was strange that the Converses wanted Whitney to continue attending her middle school, even if they were now driving her instead of having her take the bus. In the last day, though, Nic had begun to see the wisdom of it. If she stayed home, Whitney would be reminded of her sister’s absence every second. She would probably over-hear speculation that would crush whatever innocent conceptions she still harbored about the world and the way it worked. These hours spent at school might be her last chance to still be a child.

  Valerie answered Nic’s knock. Each day, her face looked more haggard. “Wayne’s out with the searchers,” she said. “He can’t take sitting at home.” She called upstairs. “Whitney! The lady from the FBI is here to talk to you.”

  Whitney bounced down the stairs. She was in that awkward stage of adolescence, springy and skinny, her limbs like rubber bands. Her hair was as dark as her sister’s was blonde. Wasn’t there a fairy tale about two sisters, one dark and one fair? Snow White and Rose Red, maybe that was it.

  Valerie led them into the living room and then left.

  Whitney kicked off her flats and curled her legs under her. She was dressed like all girls were these days—skinny jeans, a turquoise camisole long enough to show underneath a striped T-shirt, and a dark green hoodie. It was pretty much what Makayla wore, only because this girl was four years older, she had more of a figure. She looked at Nic with curious dark eyes.

  “So tell me about Katie,” Nic said gently.

  “She’s three years older than me. We haven’t gone to the same school for a long time. But she’s really smart. Every teacher that had her thinks I’m going to be as smart as her. But I’m not.”

  “It sounds like she casts a long shadow.”

  Whitney stared at Nic, a little puzzled, and then her brow smoothed out. “You mean is it hard being Katie Converse’s little sister? It’s not. She’s nice to me. She gave me this manicure.” Whitney spread out her pink-tipped fingers, but half of them had been nibbled on. She flushed and slipped her hands under her thighs. “She helps me with my homework, and sometimes she lets me borrow her shoes. We wear the same size.”

  Nic thought of the dozens of boxes in Katie’s room.

  “Do you think your sister could have run away?”

  Whitney’s face scrunched up. “Where would she go? Sometimes we see kids on the streets downtown, but Katie would never live like that. You’d get really dirty. She likes to be clean. Besides, she really wanted to go back to the program. She said that she could go to bed whatever time she wanted, and eat whatever she wanted.” She glanced at the doorway and lowered her voice. “See, our mom’s kind of strict.”

  “Did you talk to her that morning?”

  Whitney bit her lip. “She was still asleep when I went to school. I didn’t see her at all.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. She exhaled shakily. “That’s what I don’t understand. Why did she have to take Jalapeño for a walk?”

  “What do you mean? Because you had already walked him that morning?”

  “No. I mean, yeah, I did walk him that morning. But Jalapeño’s my dog, not Katie’s. I’m the one who takes him for walks. She doesn’t even like him that much.”

  Nic felt a bolt of electricity race down her spine. The Converses had mentioned earlier that the dog was Whitney’s, she was sure they had, but the meaning of it hadn’t hit her until now.

  The day Katie disappeared, she hadn’t been walking the dog to give it some exercise.

  She had been walking the dog to give herself an excuse.

  But an excuse to do what?

  CHANNEL FOUR

  December 18

  Cassidy sat in the basement of the TV station, loggin
g the tape she and Andy Oken the cameraman had shot this morning.

  After the rally last night, they had rushed to the car to get the tape back for the eleven o’clock news. Except there had been a teensy problem. Cassidy’s car was gone.

  “I told you not to park here, Cassidy,” said Andy, a weathered man who was really a little too old to be toting around such heavy equipment. He gave her a smug look. “But you said no one would notice. You said they would be too busy trying to find a bad guy to give a rat’s—”

  Cassidy cut off his rant with one of her own. “It wasn’t really that close to the fire hydrant. And it’s not like this is the time of year they have to worry about fires anyway.”

  “Well, we’re in deep doo-doo. There’s no way we’ll get the tape back to the station in time.”

  Cassidy didn’t waste her breath answering. Instead, she ran out into the middle of the street and forced a huge car, so old it had fins, to lurch to a stop. The driver leaned out to yell at her in a foreign language. But through a series of hand gestures in which she repeatedly pointed at the Channel Four logo on the camera and then at her watch, Cassidy managed to impress upon the guy, a fiftyish Russian immigrant—at least she thought he was Russian—that she and Andy needed to get back to the station and that it was an emergency.

  “TV?” the driver asked with a grin, pointing at both Cassidy and Andy.

  “TV,” agreed Cassidy, pointing at just herself.

  After several wrong turns, a hair-raising few minutes going the wrong way on I-405, and an illegal U-turn, he had gotten them back to Channel Four. With five minutes to spare.

  This morning they had been out again, first to retrieve Cassidy’s car from the impound lot, then to interview a few of the Boy Scouts who were now canvassing the area near Katie’s house. They had also shot B-roll—footage without a narration sound track that would run while viewers listened to Cassidy or one of her interview subjects. The B-roll added dimension. While Cassidy talked about the Boy Scouts, the B-roll would show them knocking on doors and handing out fliers.