“Hang on,” Kiger said. “I got Tracktron on the line with somebody Downtown. They’re running it now.”
The crosswalk cleared, but the light stayed red. “A silver Legend,” Christensen said, feeling helpless.
“Color don’t matter,” Kiger said. “Sit tight.”
“Easy for you—”
“Gimme that again, Jerry,” Kiger said, his voice softer. Talking into another phone. “Got it. That the best you can do?” After a pause. “Will do.” To Christensen, he said, “Schenley Park. Looks like down around Panther Hollow, least that’s their best guess. You know any reason that car might be down there this time a day?”
Schenley Park. Maybe a mile. “I’m right there!” Christensen shouted as the light turned green. He felt his body kick into overdrive. There was no reason why Brenna’s car would be in that isolated ravine in the middle of Oakland’s sprawling public park, at least no reason that made sense outside this nightmare.
He looked left, hoping to make an impossible turn across six lanes. If he did, he could be at the park entrance in less than a minute. He held his ground as the other cars moved forward. Three, four, five passed. From the car directly behind, an agitated blast. Six. In his rearview mirror, empty lanes. He gunned the Explorer and lurched halfway across, nearly into incoming traffic. Tires screeched. Another blast.
“The hell you doing?” Kiger asked.
“I’m right near Schenley, on Bigelow!” Christensen shouted, edging the SUV’s nose into the onrushing flow. A burst of code and descriptors from Kiger’s scanner somewhere in the background. Christensen recognized only the words “silver Acura.”
“Just went out on the radio,” Kiger said. “We’ve got patrols in the area. Meet ’em, y’hear? Don’t you go down in there without—”
“There’s a maintenance yard or something there,” Christensen said. “Off Schenley Drive, behind Phipps. Tell them to turn at the Columbus statue and just follow it back, maybe a hundred yards. A service road goes down from there, right under the bridge. I run on it in the summer.”
“You wait for our car,” Kiger ordered. The lazy drawl was completely gone. “They’ll meet you there.”
Christensen sped past the Cathedral of Learning and turned left through a red light at Forbes, sending an on-rushing minivan into a panic skid. A quick right put him into the Carnegie Library parking lot, hurtling the wrong way down a one-way aisle. He forked left onto the Schenley Bridge. The car shuddered as it hit a pothole, then bounced across the center line as its speed climbed. The Columbus statue was straight ahead, and just before it he veered onto a narrow blacktop road that disappeared into the trees.
“I’m serious, goddamn it.” Kiger shouting now. “You wait. You don’t know what you might walk into down there.”
Christensen surveyed the maintenance-yard parking lot ahead. The only car there was a dark-blue Chevy. “There’s a car, looks like maybe a city car, but there’s nobody in it. I don’t think it’s one of yours. How long’s it gonna be?”
“Soon’s we get a response I’ll tell ya.”
“Bullshit,” Christensen shouted back. “How long?”
Kiger hesitated, said something to Jerry on the other line. “We’re trying to divert somebody.”
Christensen cut the engine and opened the door. With the phone still in his hand, he stepped onto the gravel lot outside a building labeled “Schenley Park 4th Division/Pittsburgh Department of Public Works.” The road beyond the building was rutted and muddy, but as far down as he could see it was scored by a car’s recent tracks. Overhead, the decrepit span of the Panther Hollow Bridge blocked the sun.
“I’m leaving my car at the maintenance building and going in on foot,” he said.
“Do not leave your car,” Kiger said.
“There’s nobody here!”
“Wait, goddamn it!”
Christensen thought of Brenna, of the hulking Harnett, of the possibility that the two of them were somewhere down in that dim and foreboding hole. “I can’t,” he said.
As soon as he hung up, he hit the speed-dial combination for Brenna’s car phone. Just as when he’d tried it from home, it rang and rang. He had no choice. Searching the Explorer’s interior for something, anything, he could use as a weapon, he pulled the driver’s seat forward and found his ancient ice scraper, with its cheery red brush bristles at one end of the long wooden handle and a molded plastic scraper at the other. It would have to do.
Chapter 35
Dark. Brenna closed her eyes and opened them again. Still dark. Breathtaking pain radiated like powerful fingers from the back of her neck to the front of her skull, crushing logical thought. She thought, Dark’s good. Light might kill me. In her haze, she imagined light like a knife, stabbing through her eyes into the pulsing pain center of her brain. In that vaporous, incoherent moment, she thought, The dark is keeping me alive.
She tried to move her head. Her body tensed instantly, and she drew one quick breath, sharp and desperate. Now the rest of her throbbed like a nerve rubbed raw. She heard herself moan. And something else, distant but familiar, soft but painful beyond question—the shriek of her car phone. She knew its call like the cry of her own child. Again and again, somewhere … else. Each ring jolted her, but she dared not move again.
She closed her eyes; the effort to keep them open was exhausting her. She imagined someone bringing a hammer down on a spot just behind each eye, crushing the stalk, reducing the optic nerve to a mushy pulp but leaving the eyeball intact. Yes. That’s exactly how it felt.
The phone stopped ringing, but the earth suddenly moved. A gentle roll to one side, a jostle, followed by another sound, a muted pulse. It sounded almost like a muffled gunshot, but she knew it wasn’t. The sound was too familiar—a car door’s electric locks. Nothing else sounded exactly like that.
“Mmmmph,” she said, and the effort to speak registered on the back of her eyelids. A thousand pinpricks of pain unfolded like a constellation, and she felt herself start to black out. Air. She needed air. She tried to open her mouth and felt the skin across her face pull tight. Something was wrong. No air came. She felt for a moment as if she were drowning, then realized she was breathing only through her nose. She probed with her tongue, but it stopped at her lips. She pressed it hard against whatever was stretched across her mouth, trying to push through, but felt it flatten against that unexpected wall. The effort pulled again at the skin on her face.
Duct tape, she thought.
For the first time, an adrenaline chill mixed with the pain. The sensation triggered something, an image that suddenly flashed in the darkness like lightning. Eyes. Vicious eyes. Staring down at her through the red-rimmed holes of a ski mask. Behind them, in the dusky moment, she recognized the track lights in her law-office ceiling. And she felt hands, powerful hands. She felt their size and strength as she surged against them, fighting, scratching, struggling against a flurry of fingers that smelled like latex and chlorine.
Then darkness. And pain. She was back in the here and now, wherever and whenever that might be.
It would be torture, but she had to explore. She curled the toes on her right foot. This time the pain reassured her; at least her primary systems were working. She tried to lift the foot, and the effort sent a searing wave up her spine and down her left arm. She braced herself for another go and tried again, extending her knee only a few inches before the foot found a wall. She pressed hard and felt pressure against the top of her head. Those were the limits of her world at the moment, a dark space maybe five feet across. She struggled against the clutching fear of confinement.
Another sound, muted again but familiar. A car door latch sprung open, maybe two in quick succession, followed by the same rocking sensation she felt before. She wondered, the trunk of a car? She tried t
o reach a finger forward, only to realize her arms were pinned behind her.
The right one was numb, asleep beneath the weight of her body. She wiggled the fingers on her left hand, felt in her grasp the deadened fingers of her right. She curled her left index finger down toward her wrist and felt duct tape again.
In the darkness, as slowly as she could, she felt behind her for other clues. Her left hand hit a rigid hump. She let her fingers explore its dimensions and play across its surface, and suddenly she knew where she was. Her hand had found the CD changer mounted in the Legend’s trunk. She was curled semiconscious into the trunk of her own car, her hands bound behind her, her mouth taped shut.
This struck her, at first, as preposterous.
Then, as her mind cleared, as terrifying.
She’d gone to her law office to work, to stay overnight and work on … DellaVecchio. She’d crashed, late, on the fold-out couch and then … Oh shit, the hearing. Jesus. What time is it? What day?
She heard the Legend’s rear door open just behind her head. The car bumped and swayed as someone crawled into and out of the passenger compartment, then stopped moving as whoever it was stepped outside again. She heard the chinking clank of metal on metal and the clack-clack of wood hitting wood, as if someone were wrestling something awkward from the backseat.
Nothing made sense. She pulled a long breath through her nose, hoping the air would clear the fog in her head.
Outside the car, she could hear footsteps, the sound of one person, maybe two, moving heavily over damp earth. Sometimes, she heard the crackle of dried leaves. Which made no sense at all. Damp ground and dry leaves? Where could that be? A forest? She was weighing that possibility when the footsteps moved away from the car, receding into some indefinable distance. When they were gone, she tuned into the other sounds coming from outside the trunk.
What she didn’t hear bothered her most. Where was the traffic noise? She had no idea what time of day it was, but even if it was the middle of the night she couldn’t imagine a place in the city without the hum of cars and trucks. She listened more carefully. Birds? And now something else, in the distance, from the same direction she’d heard the footsteps disappear: Ch-shik.
And again: Ch-shik.
No matter how hard she tried to make sense of what was happening, coherent thoughts wouldn’t come. She was aware only of a developing rhythm.
Ch-shik.
Ch-shik.
Ch-shik.
She counted maybe four seconds between each sound, her sense of dread rising as the cadence revealed itself. Even now, disoriented by pain and darkness and claustrophobic fear, she understood one thing clearly—the sound a shovel makes as it slices into soft earth.
Chapter 36
Christensen raged into the cool embrace of Panther Hollow. The trees were bare in early spring, but the branches overhead formed a thick canopy of ash, maple, and hickory. Golden shafts of morning sun showered from above, spotlighting small sections of the surrounding forest and the rutted road that was taking him down into the deep ravine.
He passed under the decrepit span of the Panther Hollow Bridge, then followed the road left, running full tilt with his ice scraper down the service road’s first significant dip. Through the trees to his right, way down on the hollow’s floor, he could see a fountain dancing at the center of a small pond. The branches of a weeping willow hung well out over the water. A little more than a year earlier, on a bench beneath that tree, Brenna had first suggested that they move in together. “Merge the households,” she’d said, leaving him to calculate, or miscalculate, her precise levels of love and commitment.
He couldn’t think about that now.
The road narrowed and got steeper. He should have shortened his stride for control, but his steps got longer as he sprinted down the damp, treacherous slope. The road leveled off, and just ahead was a small stone bridge across a rushing creek. Christensen read its chiseled cornerstone as he flashed past: “WPA 1939.” Just beyond it, the road forked. One part dipped even deeper into the forest, to the right. The other narrowed further still as it rose to the left, back up to street level. Tire tracks scored the soft mud of both forks.
He stopped, panting, his breath rising in wispy vapor around his face. Damn. He crossed the bridge again, back to the last clear imprint of the tracks he’d been following from the maintenance yard. He knelt down and memorized the tread pattern, which was clearly from a snow tire. Brenna’s Legend had snow tires. That much he knew.
He checked the freshest tracks on the left fork. They were wider and deeper, with knobby tread along the edges. A maintenance truck, maybe? They clearly didn’t match, and none of the older, drier sets did either. He moved across the fork, knelt down, and found the snow tire tracks immediately. They bore right, deeper into the chasm.
Christensen felt as if he were running toward the dark bottom of the ocean. This far down in Panther Hollow, the shafts of sunlight became pinpoints. The gold was fading to the color of lead, and he was surrounded by the damp smell of forest decay. His ankle gave way as he stepped on a rock the size of a golf ball. Momentum carried him forward, arms tracing a desperate pattern in the air. He lurched for several strides with his chest parallel to the ground, but he didn’t go down. He skipped for a few steps to test the ankle, then continued his headlong descent, the pain dulled by panic.
The road dwindled to a path. He was deep in the hollow, alone with an ice scraper, looking for a nightmare. The snow tire tracks turned left up ahead into what looked like a small clearing. The heavy chain across the clearing’s entrance was down in the mud. It disappeared completely in two places where the car had driven over it. Christensen stopped to catch his breath, and that’s when he heard a noise, dull and indistinct, coming from the clearing. Then he saw it. In the dim light, on the other side of a stand of maples, a swatch of silvery steel.
He stepped off the road and crouched behind a boulder, wondering whether he’d already been seen. Or heard. For the next thirty seconds, he focused on his breathing, willing it back to a resting rate. You don’t know what you might walk into down there. Stealth couldn’t hurt. Neither could self-control.
The Legend, if that’s what it was, was maybe twenty-five yards away. Following the tracks would take him right to it, but he’d be completely exposed as he approached. Not an option. He might be able to make a wide circle to the right, move between trees and rocks, stay hidden until he was close enough to get a better look. The ground was a minefield of leaves, twigs, and fallen branches, but it was his best shot. He moved off, stepping cautiously, keenly aware of every rustle and snap.
A minute later he was fifteen yards closer, standing behind a sturdy oak, staring at the back end of Brenna’s empty car. One of the rear doors was open. The courtesy light along the door’s lower panel glowed—an eerie still-life suggesting something out of order.
Then, the car moved. Or did it? Christensen blinked. A subtle shift of weight maybe, but it caused the rear shocks to sigh. He leaned around the tree, waiting to see if the car moved again, when a man stepped into full view from the woods just beyond the car.
His ski mask registered first, a black full-face cover with red trim around the holes for his eyes, nose, and mouth. Christensen thought of terrorists, of Klansmen, of cowards of all stripe who carried out their work from behind a mask. Then he noticed the shovel, spade-end up, which the man used like a walking stick as he hurried toward the car. Despite the cold, his gray sweatshirt was damp at the underarms, and there was an oval of sweat at the center of his broad chest. Fresh mud spattered the legs of his sweatpants. Christensen had no easy way to gauge scale, but the man looked well over six feet tall.
The masked man took off his leather work gloves and laid them on the car’s hood, revealing hands that to Christensen seemed oversized and unnaturally whit
e. He looked closer as the man let the shovel fall to the ground. He was wearing surgical gloves underneath the work gloves. Christensen noticed his massive forearms, and in that moment he was sure he was looking at David Harnett.
Circling to the driver’s side, Harnett put his knee on the backseat and leaned into the open rear door. The Legend sagged. When he backed out again, he had a handful of black steel.
The gun was unimpressive—like the pictures in posters that urged a ban on Saturday night specials—but a gun nonetheless. Christensen tightened his grip on the long handle of his ice scraper. Where the hell was Brenna? The question consumed him right up until Harnett slid a key into the trunk lock.
Then he knew.
Chapter 37
Light poured in, obliterating the darkness. Brenna felt it like an explosion as the trunk lock popped and the rear deck rose. In a sudden rush of fresh air, she recoiled deeper into the tiny space. Her body jerked and shuddered.
She’d known it was coming. The digging had stopped, and she’d heard footsteps circling the car again. As soon as the key slid into the lock, she’d braced for pain. It was worse than she’d imagined, an agony that turned her rigid, knotted her fingers and made her whimper like a child. She hated herself for that.
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