Two things had justified the cautious and high-tech approach they were taking: Kimbal had a well-documented tendency toward violence, and the girl’s stepfather was a cop. There was no way they could use the standard approach, which would have been to take a couple of sheriff’s deputies and bring the girl back. The core eight people had spent the last two days discussing evidence and options, and by now they were thoroughly fed up with one another.
“Look,” Al was saying tiredly, “even you guys aren’t allowed just to take the guy out without even giving him a warning.”
“We’re not suggesting that,” began the FBI man at the head of the table.
“Sounds to me like you are. You just said you couldn’t go in at night because of his dogs and because he and Jules are always in the cabin together, but during the day you can’t get in fast enough to separate them without alerting him. Short of cold-blooded murder with a sniper scope, what’re you going to do, disguise yourselves as rocks?”
Several angry voices spoke up at once, and Kate half-listened to the argument, her eyes drawn to the enlarged photos of the small cabin where Jules had been taken by her father.
It was literally out in the middle of nowhere, in an expanse of knee-high scrub and rock, five miles from the nearest neighbor. For a paranoid ex-con with survivalist leanings out to save his only daughter from the wicked world, it was perfect: He could see the enemy coming, miles away.
Other photos tacked up on the carpeted walls showed fuzzy images of Marsh Kimbal, lanky and black-haired. In several of them, Jules followed behind, but the pictures, taken over a considerable distance with lenses like telescopes, were too hazy to give a hint of the girl’s expression. To Kate, though, the girl’s body language told of her confusion and doubt.
The argument was coming around again, and it was time for Kate to say her bit. She stirred, waited for an opening, and spoke up.
“I still think you’re wrong. I know kidnap victims always fall in love with their captors, but I don’t believe Jules would fall for his crap, not in the long run. I mean, look, the man’s a fascist.”
“He’s a survivalist,” corrected the male psychiatrist, and Kate went on hurriedly before he could present a lecture on political niceties.
“Same thing,” she said. “He’s a sexist and a swine, and Jules would never go for it. You won’t have any trouble separating her from him.”
“She’s only a child,” he insisted.
“She’s got more brains than any three adults, present company not excluded.”
“She may be bright,” commented the woman expert, “but that doesn’t mean she is not gullible.”
“Okay,” Kate conceded. “Granted, intelligent people can be really stupid. But not Jules, not in this case. I know that if I go in there all by myself, let her see me, just ease in and out again, she’ll read it as a warning, so that when you come in with force, she won’t panic. She’ll be ready to come to us. On the other hand, if you just descend on her with guns blazing, then she probably would hang on to Kimbal, because she wouldn’t know what the hell was going on. An adult wouldn’t, either.”
At this point in the argument’s cycle, the head man normally either redirected the flow or called for a break, but this time, before he could do more than place his hands on the table preparatory to shifting his chair back, the woman expert sat forward and placed her gold pen onto the glossy wood with an authoritative click.
“Inspector Martinelli may be right,” she stated. The room went still in surprise. “If she did succeed in going in, making contact with the child, possibly even conveying a message, and coming away, then we would be in much the stronger position: Jules would be forewarned, and we would have had a direct look into Kimbal’s defenses. If she failed, one of three things would have happened: She would be driven off, taken hostage herself, or shot outright. In the first case, we would not be much worse off than we are now, nor in the second, which would also give us the thin advantage of having a trained adult present to oppose Kimbal. As to the third possibility, I don’t know that there is much to say, other than noting that Inspector Martinelli is clearly aware of the risks involved, has had a good deal of field experience with decoy situations, and does not appear to me suicidal.”
Well, thought Kate, feeling her mouth go dry, it’s always good to have a clear mind to tell us how matters lie. She glanced at Hawkin, but he was not looking at her.
“I still think I should be the one to go,” he was saying.
Both psychiatrists began immediately to shake their heads. Even the man agreed that, with this particular hostage taker, any casual intruder would have to appear blatantly harmless. Were they in a city, an aged drunk might do, but not miles from the closest bar. The analysts knew enough about Marsh Kimbal to feel certain that he would take an adult male intruder as a threat. He might believe that a woman was harmless, though, and that she was stupid enough to get lost among the dirt roads of eastern Oregon.
For once, Kate agreed with the experts.
And for once, to everyone’s astonishment, the disparate law-enforcement personnel assembled in the room seemed on the verge of agreement, as well. So tired of waiting that they were willing to go along with any proposal actually involving forward motion, they found themselves, with varying degrees of reluctance, agreeing to Kate’s proposal.
The rest of the morning was spent laying out plans and fallbacks, and then Kate was excused so that she could put on her fancy-dress costume.
Kate sat, clenching and loosing her hands on the wheel of the little Japanese car, staring through the streaked windshield and over the carefully dirtied hood at the bare road that stretched out into the distance.
Beside her, Al Hawkin rubbed his hand over his mouth, grimacing at the scratchy sound, and broke the silence.
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“Al, the sooner you get out of the car, the sooner I can get on with this.”
“I could go.”
“Al,” she said warningly.
“All right.” He made no move toward the door handle. “Are you scared?”
“Of course I’m scared. I’m always scared when I dress up as a decoy. It’s gotten so I start to sweat whenever I pick up a tube of lipstick.”
He smiled dutifully at the feeble joke. “Christ, I hate sending you out there without a backup.”
“You’re not sending me out anywhere,” she said, bristling slightly. He turned to look at her for the first time since they’d left town an hour before.
“I wonder if Jules will actually recognize you.”
“My new look,” she said. “I thought the lace on the collar was a really nice touch.” With her tired blond curls, light pink lipstick, trim brown penny loafers, and tan polyester trousers—she’d drawn the line at the flowered skirt that had been offered—she looked like a conservative young woman, the sort who could easily get lost out here in the middle of nowhere.
“In my youth, they used to call that a Peter Pan collar.”
“Did they? Funny. Jules told me once she hated Peter Pan—the idea of lost boys made her furious. This was when we were looking for Dio,” she explained.
“Yes? Well, I’m sorry Lee can’t see you.”
“Jon would love it even more. Get out of here, Al. I need to go.”
“Watch your back, Martinelli,” he said, and surprised them both by reaching out an arm to embrace her shoulders briefly. In a moment, he was standing on the roadside, watching her drive away, before he turned and got into the back of the governmental car that followed her for a while before turning off to join the rest of the watchers on the low hillock three miles south of the cabin where Jules Cameron was being kept by the man who would be her father.
Kate decided that sweaty hands and heart palpitations were not unsuited to the role she was supposed to be playing, so she might as well not try to hide them. She pulled up in a tentative manner in the dirt space in front of the cabin and sat for a moment, studying the two s
leek Doberman pinschers who stood inside their high-wire cage that adjoined the house. They were studying her in turn through the wide spaces of the wire, their heads down, their jaws shut in concentration, their eyes hungry, as she opened her door and cautiously got out of the car. Nothing moved, including the dogs, although she knew that Kimbal and Jules had been inside as recently as when she’d dropped Al, or the FBI men following her would have let her know. Besides, his pickup truck was still there, parked under the bare tree that in the summer would shade a part of the dog run.
She walked around the back of the car, keeping it between her and the dogs, and walked up the two worn wooden steps to knock at the screen door. She stepped back down onto the packed earth, turned her back on the door, and waited.
Tense as she was, she didn’t hear the inner door open until the man spoke.
“Yeah?”
Kate spun around, laughing nervously at the shadowy figure behind the screen. His right hand was on the door, his left hand resting on the jamb at shoulder level. She squinted up at him.
“You startled me,” she said, with just the slightest drawl in her voice, and tittered again.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Well, I’m lost, I think. At least none of the roads much resemble the directions I was given, and haven’t for some time now. I wonder if you might tell me where I am.”
She felt his eyes on her, and wondered where Jules was. “Where d’you want to be?” he asked.
“A place called Two-Bar Road? Here, let me get my map. I’ll show you.” She went to the car, aware of his suspicious gaze burning her, a gaze echoed by the two animals off to her right. She opened the passenger door, took out a crumpled and completely unfolded Oregon road map, and carried it back to the house.
He had not moved. He did not move when she stood on the lower step and fumbled with the awkward sheet, balling it up rather than folding it to the place.
“See, I was here, and—here’s the place. It’s just a driveway, but they call it Two-Bar Road. It’s there where the circle is—see? D’you mind if I open the door so you can see it? That’s better. So, can you tell me where I am now?”
No sign of Jules, not even in the slice of tidy room she could see when he allowed the door to open just enough to bring his right shoulder out and point to a place on the map with his index finger while his left hand stayed glued to the inside doorjamb—with a gun, she speculated, nestled up against the wood trim and held tightly in place? Kate fancied she could smell gun oil.
“You’re right here,” he said, his finger in the blank space forty miles from the imaginary Two-Bar Road.
“Am I really? Oh no. And it’ll be dark by the time I get there. How on earth did I get way over here? Oh well. Let me just make sure I have it right. I don’t suppose you have a pen? No, don’t bother,” she drawled, although he had made no move toward stepping inside his house. “I’m sure I have one in the car.” She went back to the passenger side of the car, rummaged about in the fake leather handbag, and came back with a cheap ballpoint pen. One of the dogs was smelling the air for her scent, its muzzle protruding from the cage up to its eyebrows. “Those are certainly powerful-looking dogs you’ve got there,” she said to their owner. No response, and Kate was torn between the building fury that nothing whatsoever was happening and the need to maintain her line of helpless chatter.
“Let me just mark this down here. Now where was it?” Where the fuck is Jules, you bastard? she thought. “Okay, I’ve got it. So I go back to here and then turn left; that should get me there.” God, this is her father; she’s got his hands, and they have the same eyebrows. “I don’t suppose I could use your telephone, just to call and let them know I’m coming?” She knew that he had no telephone, but it was, after all, the sort of thing a lost woman would ask.
“I don’t have a phone.”
“You don’t? Well, I guess it’s quite a ways from nowhere. Yours was the first place I saw for miles.” Surely she’s heard me, Kate thought in desperation. She has to be here, and the cabin is too small for her to be out of earshot. I’m going to have to leave; he’s not going to let me in. She wavered, then decided to try just one last nudge. “Just one more thing, then, and I’ll let you get on with your evening. I wonder if I could be really intrusive and ask if I could use your bathroom? If I have to go another hour on these roads, I’ll just burst.” At least I know you have indoor plumbing, you bastard. I don’t have to worry about being pointed to an outhouse.
He studied her, looked over her shoulder at the beat-up car, and then took his right hand off the door and stepped to his left. Taking a deep breath, and mightily tempted to elbow him in the gut as she went past, regulations be damned, she went up the two steps and walked past him into the house, into a room with a threadbare braided rug on the worn linoleum floor, mismatched sofa and chairs in front of an oil-drum woodstove, and the arsenal of a survivalist on racks on the walls. She had just time to notice an open book, a spiral notepad, and a pen on the Formica kitchen table when her body froze at the sound of a shotgun shell being jacked into place.
“Turn around,” he said. She did so, slowly.
“What are you doing?” she demanded in outrage and fear, neither of which were feigned, not with the barrels of a shotgun two feet from her chest.
“A woman like you would rather pee her pants than come into a lonesome house with a strange man. Who sent you?” Shit, it wasn’t just Jani who gave Jules her brains, thought Kate wildly.
“Marsh?” a tentative voice said from behind Kate.
Kate jerked, and then with her hands well out from her sides, she swiveled her head to look at the inner door.
Jules was wearing grubby, overly large jeans and a plaid shirt that had to belong to Kimbal. On her feet were the boots they had bought in Berkeley, one of them with string in place of the original laces. Her haircut had grown out and had a hacked-off appearance. A wide bruise darkened her left cheekbone, and her eyes looked at Kate without recognition.
“Go back to your room, Julie.”
“But Marsh, I just wondered—”
“Julie,” he said in a voice like a quiet whip crack, “I said go.”
The child looked out from under her lank bangs at her father, and at Kate, then stepped back into the room and shut the door quietly. Kate turned her head back to the man with the shotgun.
“Is that what you wanted to see?” he demanded. “That’s my daughter. She’s mine, and if that bitch of a mother of hers sent you to fetch her back, that’s just hard luck for you. Out.”
For a moment, Kate felt weak with relief: He was going to let her drive away, thinking her an informal envoy, and no great damage would have been done. However, halfway to the car he said, “Stop right there. Hold out your left hand.”
She knew the sound of the rattling metal even before the handcuffs hit her wrist. The sharp jab of the shotgun barrel against her spine kept her from moving, but she broke out in a sweat, oozing fear, and it was all she could do to keep a whimper from finding its way up her throat.
“Other one,” he ordered, and when she did not move, he barked, “I’ll shoot you down right here if I have to.”
He won’t, she tried to tell herself. There’s no reason for him to do more than drive me off his land in some humiliating manner. Besides, I do have backup; a dozen men are watching through their scopes from that small hill off in the distance. Just keep him calm, and delay. If Jules has the sense to go out the back window, they’ll see her and move up quickly. Just take it slowly….
She bent forward so he could have her right hand, and felt the metal cuff slip around it. Kimbal took the gun out of her spine. “I used these on Julie when she tried to run away, back in the beginning. I knew they’d come in handy again.”
“What are you going to do with me?”
“Me? I’m not going to do a thing. However, those dogs of mine, they know it’s about time they were let out, and they’re not going to be too happy about you t
respassing.”
Kate heard another jingle, and she looked back, to see him thumbing through a key ring. He selected what looked like the key to a padlock and began to move toward the cage and the quivering dogs.
“Marsh,” came the voice again.
“Julie, go back in the house,” he said without looking up.
“Marsh!”
“Julie,” he began in a growl, and then stopped. “Baby, we won’t need that. This lady’s leaving on her own.” Kate turned and saw Jules in the doorway. She had a revolver in her hand that looked as if it belonged in a Western, but it was clean and looked well cared for, as had all the rifles on the wall. She had it in her right hand, pointing at the ground.
“You can’t hurt her, Marsh.”
“Julie, this is Daddy’s business. Take the gun and put it away before you hurt yourself.” He sounded as if he were talking to a six-year-old, but then Jules was acting strangely young, as well.
But determined. “Let her go, Marsh. Don’t let the dogs out.”
Both adults stood still, squinting into the late sun at the thin young girl in ill-fitting clothes, hanging on to a gun that probably weighed more than her arm did. Kate stared not at the gun, but at the tear that was trickling down the young face.
With Child Page 26
