The Disappearance

by J. F. Freedman

  “You never heard any of that?” the cop asks.

  “No.”

  “But you were friends. Not only with the parents, but with the girl too.”

  “Well, sure,” Joe admits readily, “Emma and I were friends, despite the difference in our ages. She was very mature for her age.”

  Jackson sits back. “I’m about done here,” the cop says. “A couple more questions is all. Not about your deal,” he adds, “that was an accident. We’re not going to bust you on that. We don’t want you going down to L.A. starting your new job with a cloud over your head.”

  Joe sags with relief. That’s what he’s been waiting and hoping to hear. “Thank you,” he says to the cop. He’s revised his attitude about the officer—he isn’t a bad guy, he had a job to do.

  “That kidnapping still bugs me.” Jackson leans forward again. “I was one of the detectives working on it, and us not solving it, it just … it sticks right here,” he says, pointing to his Adam’s apple.

  “I can understand that.”

  “You were around the house all the time, weren’t you,” Jackson says suddenly by way of left field.

  “A fair amount.”

  “You were probably there the day she was snatched.”

  “Not that day, no. I hadn’t been there for about a week, as I recall. All the rain, there wasn’t much going on in the way of parties and whatever.”

  Jackson files that away in his mental computer. “Did we ever interview you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Regarding your whereabouts and so forth.”

  “Yes.” They hadn’t pressed him—he obviously wasn’t a suspect.

  “Did the officer who questioned you ever ask your opinion of who might have done it?”

  “Of course.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That it had to have been some sick bastard.”

  “That was before or after her body was recovered?”

  Joe thinks a moment. It’s been over a year ago now, and everything then was crazy, no one was thinking straight; he certainly wasn’t. “Before, I guess. Although it could’ve been after,” he says with confusion.

  “I could check that out,” the cop says. “Not that I have any cause to,” he adds quickly. “Now that it’s over, and there’s been a year to cogitate on it, who do you think did it? I don’t mean a specific person,” he clarifies, “there’s no way you could know that. I mean what kind of person. Crazy or sane? A stranger … or someone she knew?” He’s staring into Joe’s eyes, pupil to pupil, as he’s asking these questions.

  “I don’t know.” Joe stifles a yawn. Jesus, he’s exhausted. He doesn’t have his watch, they took it off him along with the rest of his stuff, but he guesses it must be three or four in the morning. “Look. I’ve answered all your questions, like I said I would. Now I’d like you to let me go, like you said you would.” He stands up. “A deal’s a deal. I’ve kept up my end, I’d like you to keep up yours.”

  Williams and Logan, watching this over the closed-circuit, wince. “He’s right,” the D.A. says. “Legally, we can’t hold him any longer.”

  “I’d better pull my boy at Allison’s place,” Williams concedes. “I don’t want him there when he shows up.” He picks up the telephone to dial Detective Sterling’s pager number.

  Before he finishes, Sterling comes flying through the door.

  There’s a knock on the door to the interrogation room. Jackson opens it. Sterling is on the other side. He says something into Jackson’s ear.

  Jackson exits the room without a word of explanation to Joe, firmly closing the door behind him. The lock clicks; it sounds like a gunshot to Allison’s ears. He’s starting to get freaked. What kind of number are these guys running on him? Why have they left him alone?

  Jackson joins the others in the viewing room. He sees a paper bag on a table in the corner of the room. Sheriff Williams strides over to it and dumps out the contents: a pair of running shoes. He picks the left shoe up. “Check this out.”

  The shoe has a cut-mark in the bottom of the sole, as if sliced with a knife or the edge of a shovel: a solid match to the cut-mark on the shoe print left in the ground outside Emma’s bedroom, and at the trail where her body was found.

  Jackson high-fives Sterling. “Great work!”

  They’ve also found some condoms, the same type as the ones discovered in the Lancaster gazebo the first night they searched the place. Williams, who knows something important that none of the others knows, treads lightly with them.

  “This is a popular brand,” he says cautiously. “In and of themselves they don’t mean anything.”

  “Unless …” Sterling doesn’t finish his sentence.

  “Don’t go barking up a tree you don’t know where the branches are,” Williams says sternly, cutting off any further discussion. “We have everything we need without any wild conjecturing.”

  He’s going to call Doug Lancaster right away. And Glenna too. An end, finally, to this senseless, horrendous tragedy.

  TWO

  AFTER YOU GO A couple of hours north of San Francisco on Highway 101, past Ukiah twenty miles or so, you hang a left onto California 20, an old winding road that leads through dense woodland, most of it in Jackson State Forest. Ten miles before you get to Bartstown on the coast, you take a right, going north again now on County Road 97, a narrow two-lane lush with greenery on both sides, stands of pine and cedar and giant redwood, wildflowers and wild vines bursting into color at this time of year, early spring, after it has been raining all winter and the ground is bursting with life.

  The road forks and you bear left onto Parris Road, which is almost never traveled unless you live on it, which hardly anyone does. It winds up and around the low green felt-covered mountains, moving into higher ground, switchbacking in ever narrowing circuitous loops and curves. The road is poorly maintained, potholed in many places; you have to be careful driving it or you could be plunging several hundred feet down a chasm. Even the few locals who regularly use this road drive it respectfully. Still, there are one or two fatalities on it every year, marijuana farmers hauling their product who fail to negotiate an unmarked curve on a moonless night.

  After surviving this road you turn off, a hard right, onto an even thinner one which is little more than badly laid asphalt-gravel mix on hard-packed clay. In the winter it can be impassable for weeks at a time. You take this road three miles, to the ninth driveway off to the left.

  “Ah!” the old man says to himself, “he really lives to hell and gone.” If he’d known the drive up from Oakland, where he rented his Dodge Stratus, was going to be so treacherous, he never would have come. You’d think the man he was coming to see would have warned him, knowing his age. Picked him up in Ukiah. Some gesture of civility.

  At the entrance to the driveway there is a thick rust-speckled chain that hooks into two iron poles set on either side of the narrow road, next to a weather-beaten tin sign on a wooden post on which is hand-painted in big block white paint letters the warning PRIVATE PROPERTY. KEEP OUT. THIS MEANS YOU—I SHIT YOU NOT. Under which, in a smaller, different hand, someone has spray-painted “He really means it!” The sign is riddled with bullet holes.

  The chain is down now, lying slack across the entrance road.

  The old man phoned two days before and informed the dweller of this hostile property that he was coming. Otherwise, he is sure, the chain would be firmly in place, barring access to any and all that might be tempted to violate its borders.

  Judge Ferdinand De La Guerra, now retired, sits in his idling car for a few minutes, looking up the hard-packed dirt-gravel that leads to the house. Was this a smart idea? At the time he decided to come, it had seemed like a pretty good idea; of course, the fact that there were hardly any other options available, none that he could think of, anyway, rendered the decision moot, pretty much.

  The judge emeritus is a sixth-generation Santa Barbaran, a direct descendant of one of the original land-grant f
amilies. There are buildings and streets all over the county named after the De La Guerras. Until a couple of decades ago, men like him ran the show. They decided how much new business would be allowed to come into town, who ran for mayor and city council, how the pie was going to be cut up. That isn’t true anymore; democratization with its sloppy, anarchic style has taken over, which is okay, a democracy has to be democratic, he knows that and believes it, even if it means not as much gets done, and what is accomplished costs a lot more.

  The problem is, getting democratic doesn’t mean more people share the control. It only means that different people have it now—the ones who are willing to put in the time, serve on the committees, hold the lesser offices, and so on. His people used to do that, too, but in their spare time; they had businesses to run. Now being a politician is a full-time occupation.

  The other people who are in control now, besides the new breed of politicians, both on the right and on the left, are those with money, many of whom haven’t lived in Santa Barbara for very long. Doug Lancaster is one of them. Not only is he rich as hell, he has the power of the media, because he owns a big piece of it. And he and his former wife certainly put in the time, there’s no disputing that. The symphony, Music Academy, art museum, history museum, you name it, they get involved. Good people doing good things who wield considerable power. Which is the reason the old man has flown and then driven up here today.

  He looks at his watch. Almost five-thirty. He drives up the narrow, rutted, winding road, profuse with wild plant life. Finally, after about five minutes, he comes to a clearing in which Luke’s house sits amidst blankets of native grasses and wildflowers. Built of redwood, with a goodly amount of glass wrapping around, the house sits low to the ground, spreading and enveloping its piece of the property, rather than imposing a will. It reminds the old judge, in its own way, of the adobes of the Southwest that seem to grow up from the earth, rather than having been arbitrarily placed on it.

  The dogs—of course there would be dogs, three of them—come running out at the sound of the approaching car. They don’t look particularly fierce, but you never can tell. Around here, people establish elaborate lines of defense, dogs being some of the first soldiers you encounter. Then electric fences, elaborate camouflage, and finally guns.

  Luke knows the old judge is coming. So these should not be attack dogs. Still, the old man sits in the car waiting for the owner of the dogs to show.

  Instead of the man he has come all this way to see, a woman appears. Medium height, slender, nicely built. Striking features, long dark hair in a thick braid down her back. She’s wearing loose-fitting Levi’s, a Bridges To Babylon 1997–98 tour T-shirt, and shower flops. She peers towards the car, waving a tentative welcoming hand.

  “You have to be Judge De La Guerra.” Her voice is low, rich, tinged with a trace of south of the border.

  “Yes,” he calls back in answer.

  Two fingers to her mouth, she whistles loudly through her teeth, and the dogs sit down on their haunches, red tongues lolling out.

  “They’re harmless,” she says. “Strictly for show.”

  The old man gets out of the car, stretches. His body doesn’t like car trips like this one anymore; he stiffens up easily. He reaches his hand out as the woman approaches.

  “Riva Montoya,” she introduces herself.

  “Ferdinand De La Guerra.”

  “What do they call you?”

  He smiles: She’s direct. He likes that. “Fred. Judge. The old coot.”

  “Welcome to our casa, Fred. Come on inside.” She heads off towards the house. Hastily he grabs his overnight satchel and briefcase from the backseat and follows her. She’s a lovely sight to follow, the judge thinks. The guy could always pick them. Especially Polly, until that went south.

  “You want a beer, glass of wine, something stronger?” Riva asks.

  “I’d better put some food in my stomach before I have anything like that to drink,” he says. “I passed on lunch. I wanted to make sure I gave myself enough time to get here before dark, in case I got lost.”

  “Well, then, you’ve come to the right place,” she says heartily, leading him into the kitchen through the back door. Different pots and pans are bubbling on the stove, and inside it as well—a collage of enticing aromas.

  “I’ll be right with you,” Riva tells him. “Look around the house, make yourself at home. Luke had a crisis to tend to; he ought to be back any decade now.”

  The house is built in a modified hunting-lodge style: a long main room with the kitchen at one end, then dining area, living room, partially separated den at the far end. A hallway leads back off the living room section to the bedrooms.

  The interior walls have been adobe-plastered. More than a dozen paintings, mostly California landscapes, hang on the walls, and there are bookshelves all over the place, books falling out of them onto the floor, bookmarked, old, dog-eared. Off to one side there’s a huge stereo system; several speakers are set high on the walls around the cavernous room. A big-screen TV is visible in the study.

  “We’ve got the mother of all satellite dishes,” Riva calls out from the kitchen as he stands in the center of the living room taking it in, “so if you’ve got to satisfy your CNN or World News Tonight jones, you’re covered.”

  “Thanks,” he replies absentmindedly. What a place! The ultimate backwoods house.

  Riva comes into the room carrying large wooden bowls filled with guacamole and salsa and a basket of chips that smell homemade. “Dig into this,” she says graciously, “and let me know when you want something liquid. I make a killer margarita, if I do say so myself.” She moves towards the front doorway, balancing the food on her arms and hands. “But you know what?” she says, leading him outside, “it tastes even better when you’re sitting on our front porch.”

  She’s right—the vista is absolutely breathtaking. From his aerie De La Guerra looks out over thousands of acres of virgin forest, mostly redwood and huge ponderosa pine, rolling down the sides of the low mountains until fifteen miles in the distance the village of Bartstown sits tucked up against the Pacific. The ocean, an almost infinite variety of greens and aquamarines and blues and whitecaps, extends 180 degrees south to north, stretching out to a hundred-mile-deep horizon. At this time of day the low light of the westering sun, some of it clear, some refracted through the cloud cover, is changing in color as it starts its final descent, transmuting from pale yellow to blood orange, casting shifting patterns of light and darkness on the water. Even from here he can see the high waves foaming up on the rocky beach.

  Sitting in a battered Adirondack chair, De La Guerra scoops up a hearty dollop of Riva’s guacamole on a chip, dips it into the salsa, and wolfs it down. Man, spicy! But delicious. “Whew!” His tongue starts dancing around in his mouth. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was. Judicious with the salsa after that first fiery bite, he scarfs several more of the avocado-laden morsels, hunkering over the bowl so as not to drip any onto his trousers.

  The edge off his hunger, the bowl of guacamole perched in his lap, the old man stretches out and contemplates the extraordinary scene. Why would anyone want to leave this? he thinks to himself. Not a comforting thought—he doesn’t want to go home empty-handed.

  “Why’re you here?” she asks him suddenly.

  “Yeah,” comes a man’s low drawl out of nowhere. “You planning on hanging with us for a couple weeks?”

  Startled, De La Guerra almost drops the bowl. Luke Garrison has materialized on the porch, from where, the judge knows not. He squints as he looks up at the man beside him, the sun coming over his shoulder, backlighting him. “Don’t you know better than to sneak up on an old man with a heart condition?”

  “Come on, you’ll outlive us all, Freddie,” Luke drawls, looking down at his former mentor. “You look pretty damn good for an old fart. Downright healthy.”

  “I’m doing all right,” the judge agrees, at ease now that his appetite’s been appeased and his h
ost has shown up.

  Luke Garrison. He hasn’t seen him for almost three years, since Luke left Santa Barbara. If he hadn’t known who this man standing next to him was, he wouldn’t have recognized him on the street. Always clean shaven, Luke sports a beard now, a bad-boy goatee. His hair, as straight and straggly as Neil Young’s, is hanging loose considerably past his collar, and, the judge notes with shock, an honest-to-God ruby stud is prominent in his left ear. He’s wearing an unraveling-at-the-cuffs black cotton sweater over a plain pocket T-shirt, greasy jeans, scuffed work boots. Even his voice is different—low, slow, guttural, like John Wayne with a hangover.

  “Well,” De La Guerra says, “are you sure you’re Luke Garrison? You don’t look like any Luke Garrison I know.”

  “You start a new life, you make changes. Inside as well as what you’re seeing.”

  Riva comes onto the porch carrying a tray with a pitcher of margaritas and three salted glasses. “Is it cocktail hour yet?” she inquires rhetorically, setting the tray down on a side table next to De La Guerra’s chair.

  “Officially,” Luke says, smiling at her. “And I for one can use this.”

  He pours three glasses full to the top and hands one to her, one to his guest. “To my number-one mentor, supporter, and ball-buster,” he toasts, lifting his own glass in tribute. “It’s good to see your old bones again. I think.” He clinks glasses with the old man, knocks his drink half down in one long swallow.

  His guest sips his drink. It’s good: a De La Guerra from Santa Barbara knows how a margarita’s supposed to taste, this one is the real thing. “It’s good to see you too, even if you have reinvented yourself.”

  “Dinner’s in half an hour,” Riva informs them. “I trust you’re not one of those squeamish wimps who won’t eat my homemade rabbit stew.”

  “With relish.” He smiles at her. Neat lady, this one. True to form for Luke Garrison, for whom looks were always only the surface of the package.