The Disappearance

by J. F. Freedman

  She picks up his line. “Nicole is suspicious. It’s been building. Maybe she’s seen them together before, whatever. She follows him to the Lancasters’ house, sees them together, sees him leave alone—”

  “—waits for her to come back to her room, waylays her, kills her, takes the body!” he finishes. “And Joe and Nicole live happily ever after.”

  “Except, a year later he lowers the boom on Nicole, telling her she isn’t part of his plans anymore, he’s moving to the big time and leaving her in the dust in little Santa Barbara. Nicole flips,” Riva picks up, getting more and more excited as the scenario unfolds. “It’s so logical. She seeds the evidence, makes the call to the police, and it’s done.”

  He’s rocked by this. Thinking a moment, he says, “Slow down. Let’s look at this.” He starts considering all the pieces in the puzzle. “There’s lots of holes in this, Riva. How would Nicole have gotten hold of the key ring? And what about the shoes? Where did the prints come from? And my Triumph was trashed while I was in her office, so she couldn’t have done that.”

  Riva nods. “I agree there are holes, big ones, of course there are. But maybe there are explanations for them, acceptable explanations. For instance, maybe Nicole took them from his house and wore them, to frame him.”

  “Hmm,” he grunts from his chest. “That’s a big stretch, Riva. That presupposes she knew she was going to do something bad, before she even saw them together.”

  “Unless she had seen them together before, which she probably did, and thought that was where he was going after he dropped her off.” Despite his shaking his head, she presses on. “And what if Emma had the keys on her? Maybe she was afraid she’d get locked out accidentally and wouldn’t be able to get back in. So she had them on her, and Nicole scooped them up when she, you know, did it.”

  “That’s a big maybe, too,” he says.

  “But it’s possible,” she presses.

  “Yeah. It’s possible.”

  “Your ride could’ve been somebody else altogether, somebody angry at you. Lots of people were, and they are now. All the incidents don’t all have to fit together completely.”

  “No, they don’t,” he agrees. He’s thinking, he’s thinking—there’s something else. “What about my shooting? Are you saying that’s separate and apart, too?”

  She smiles. Then she gets up out of her chair and sits in his lap. “Do you know how handsome you are when you’re excited?” she teases him.

  “I must be handsome as hell now, ’cause you’ve got me real excited,” he says. “Come on, give, Tweety-bird. You’ve got that canary sitting in your mouth.”

  “Here’s the kicker,” she says. “What got me started down this path in the first place. Nicole Rogers was born in Idaho.”

  He looks up at her, sitting on him, his hand on her swelling belly, feeling it. Soon there will be life he can feel, kicking, movement. “So she was born in Idaho. We all have to be born somewhere.”

  “She was born on a ranch. Her father’s a big-time rancher and oilman.”

  “So she was born rich. What does that have to do with the price of tamales in Tijuana?”

  “She was shooting rifles, pistols, and shotguns from the time she was six.”

  “She was?” All of a sudden it’s hard to speak, his voice feels caught in his throat.

  Riva nods emphatically. “Yes, she was. And she got so good at it, by the time she was in high school she was a national champion. She almost qualified for the ’eighty-eight Olympics.”

  His heart is beating fast. “This is unbelievable.”

  She climbs off him. “I know,” she says softly. She looks at him. “What are you going to do?”

  He thinks for a moment. “I don’t know.”

  “Should we go to the sheriff with this?”

  “I don’t know,” he says again. “I’m on his shit list right now. And they’ve got their man, don’t you understand? They don’t want a fresh suspect. They want to try this case and get their conviction. If there’s fallout later, they’ll worry about it then.”

  “So you’re not going to do anything?” she asks in a halting voice.

  “I can’t. I’m in the middle of a trial,” he reminds her. “I don’t have time for anything else.”

  “You have to do something,” she says firmly.

  “Listen to me. I can’t.”

  “Then I will.”

  “You will what?” He’s out of his chair, hovering over her. “What will you do, Riva?”

  “I don’t know, but—”

  “You’re not going to do anything. Do you hear me? You’re a pregnant woman. You’re carrying our child. You are going to take it easy and cheer me on in court and that is what you are going to do. You are not going to do anything that could get you into trouble. There’s been enough of that already. Too much.”

  She takes one of his hands in both of hers. Her hands feel good—they’re warm, soft. “I’m going to take care of you, okay? That’s why I came down in the first place, Luke. To take care of you. Let me. I’m not going to get myself into any trouble. So don’t worry.”

  Ramon Huerta, the parking attendant who told Luke (and subsequently, to their horror, the D.A.’s office) about Doug Lancaster’s disappearance on the night Emma vanished, is sprawled languidly in the witness chair. He’s dressed half cholo, half throwback zoot suiter—hair slicked back and heavily pomaded, white T-shirt, black pants belted halfway up to his armpits, black suit jacket.

  This sonofabitch is stoned, Luke thinks with a mixed feeling of anger and awe at the jerk’s audacity. He regards his witness with a wary eye. Rising to begin his direct questioning, Luke notices that Doug Lancaster is absent today. His guess is that Doug is going to be absent most of the time from here on in.

  He guides Huerta through his story. Doug Lancaster left his hotel at one and seemed to be upset. Came back at nine, upset then too.

  “I want to introduce this piece of evidence, Your Honor,” Luke says, holding a plastic bag that has a parking claim-ticket inside it. “This is a parking-lot ticket from Shutters on the Beach, the hotel in Santa Monica where the witness worked.”

  “So ordered.”

  Luke walks the ticket over to Huerta, takes it out of its protective plastic, shows it to the witness. “Do you recognize this?”

  Huerta gives it a cursory glance. “Yeah.”

  “What do these numbers mean?” He points to some numbers on the back that have been imprinted by an automatic toll machine.

  “When you took the car out, when you brought it back.”

  “What do these numbers tell you?”

  Huerta scans them. “The car went out at one-sixteen a.m., was returned nine-oh-nine a.m.”

  “And this?”

  “The day.”

  “The exact same day Emma Lancaster was taken from her house,” Luke says. “May I, Your Honor?” he asks, motioning in the direction of the jury.

  Ewing nods his approval.

  Luke crosses to the jury box, hands the ticket to juror number one. “This was Doug Lancaster’s parking ticket at the Shutters hotel on the night in question,” he informs them. “The hotel has vouched for it being genuine, and the prosecution has stipulated it.” He looks over at Logan, who nods grimly. “That means they accept its authenticity. Please pass it amongst yourselves and look at it carefully.”

  The ticket makes the rounds of the jury box. Some of the jurors write down the details, the same jurors who have been taking other notes. It comes back to Luke, who places it in the plastic bag and walks it over to the clerk.

  As the ticket is tagged, numbered, and placed on the evidence table, Luke takes his place at the podium again. “You were personally present when Mr. Lancaster took his car out at one in the morning, is that correct?” he asks his witness. “He came for it himself and drove it away himself, nobody else did, is that also true?”

  “I got it for him myself. And he was the driver.”

  “And you were perso
nally present when he returned it at nine in the morning, is that also correct?”

  “Yes.” Huerta’s eyes are drooping; he looks so comfortable now he could fall asleep, right here in the courtroom. That wouldn’t be good for the cause. Time to wrap this up.

  “He drove it himself, no one else did it?”

  “No. It was him. He was by himself both times,” Huerta volunteers. “Nobody was with him. Both times.”

  “No further questions of this witness, Your Honor.”

  Ray Logan’s method of dealing with this bad-news witness is to impugn his character. He gets Huerta to admit that he was fired for improper advances towards a guest, a charge Huerta vigorously challenges—not the charge itself, that’s irrefutable, but the reason for it. He was a victim of the bosses. They’re always ragging on men like him.

  He comes across as a petty opportunist and pathetic whiner and malcontent, Luke knows. But his basic story holds up, bolstered by the claim ticket. Thank God they’d found that, that the hotel had kept it. Doug Lancaster, contrary to his sworn statement to the police—that he’d been in bed, in his hotel, all night long—had demonstrably been MIA for eight hours that night: the eight hours that are the most critical to this case.

  Doug Lancaster has been caught flat-footed in a lie. The question the jury has to be thinking is, why did he lie?

  Luke’s still down on the case, and especially his client, but he feels a little better than he did on the day the prosecution rested theirs.

  Like Doug Lancaster, Riva hasn’t been in the courtroom. She has her own agenda—to find out, if she can, whether Nicole Rogers was, or could have been, the real killer.

  Luke’s a lawyer. He can’t skirt the law. But she can. She gets in touch with one of her ex’s ne’er-do-well acquaintances up north and puts her problem to him. He can fix her up easy, he says. Modern technology, even an area of it that in today’s world of supercomputer capability is pretty low-grade, unglamorous, can work wonders, large and small. So by the end of the day, an illegal but highly effective Lo-Jack will have been secured to Nicole’s Nissan Pathfinder. Wherever she goes, Riva will know and will be able to track her whereabouts.

  This could include the plateau on the opposite side of the ravine from their house, which she is driving up to this morning. The light she saw that night, driving back from getting her groceries, it was surely nothing. But under the circumstances, why not check it out, eliminate one variable from the mix? Particularly after her near-fatal collision with what could have been Nicole’s vehicle.

  Her foray doesn’t put her mind at ease. To the contrary: there’s nothing there, no human habitation. The area is an overgrown bluff of scrub oak and underbrush that needs to be cut back before fire season starts. The nearest house is a good two hundred yards away. Too far away.

  Awkwardly squatting in the rutted dirt—being pregnant makes every physical movement a chore—she finds some tire impressions. That could be important. She needs to see the impressions the police took of the tire tracks they’d found up at Hollister Ranch, when someone had tried to kill Luke. If by some incredible stroke of luck they match, then it’s a whole new ballgame.

  She doesn’t want the police to know about any of this, not yet. Nor does she want Luke to know. He’d be worried, for her, and for himself too. He’s under enough stress already. He doesn’t need any more problems.

  That near miss. That was meant for Luke. The other driver thought it was Luke in the old truck. It was meant either to scare him, like the shooting in the water, or to kill him. Either way, someone out there wants him out of the picture, and will do whatever’s necessary to make that happen.

  She promised Luke she was going to take care of him. To him that means being in the courtroom, silently cheering him on, standing behind him, being home with him for dinner. To her it means more. It could mean helping him solve his case. Or—more important, much more important—it could mean saving his life.

  Hillary Lange, the other girl in the bedroom that night—the one who slept through the whole thing and who, a few months ago, dropped the dime on Riva that Emma had an affair with a man she baby-sat for—sits in the witness box. She’s definitely jail bait, to Luke’s eye. He recalls reading an article in the New York Times about how girls in modern industrial nations are reaching puberty earlier than ever, due to improved diet, lack of hard physical labor, other modern reasons. This girl sitting here, fifteen years old, is a good example. If you didn’t know she was fifteen, you could easily peg her age at eighteen or nineteen. And get in a world of trouble as a result.

  Like Huerta, his previous witness, Luke knows, she’s unhappy to be here. Riva long ago promised her that she wouldn’t be involved, that the information she passed along—about Emma being sexually involved with some man—was a secret between the two of them. Now here she sits, for the whole world to see.

  She tried to resist the subpoena. Her parents had thrown a major fit over it, not just about her having to testify—though they didn’t like that, not one bit—but even more about her betraying Emma, laundering dirty clothes in public, and by implication making not only Doug and Glenna Lancaster look like unconcerned, thoughtless parents, but them as well, and all of their friends who have teenage kids in similar situations.

  “Did Emma tell you she’d had an affair with an adult man?” he asks her. “A sexual affair?” He has Riva’s notes in front of him; the prosecution, as is their due, has a copy too. There are no secrets here for Hillary to protect, even though she wants to.

  “Yes,” she simpers.

  “Did she tell you who he was?”

  “The guy she baby-sat for.” She has a bit of a Barbara Walters lisp in her voice.

  He can see tomorrow’s headline already. So pathetic, so tawdry, the whole blooming thing.

  “Not a name?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “No. She’d never say a name.”

  “But for sure she was the man’s baby-sitter. For his children,” he presses.

  “Yes. She hated his kid. She only kept doing it because …”

  Luke doesn’t press her. He stands calmly at the lectern, waiting for her to finish.

  After several moments of no answer forthcoming, Judge Ewing leans down towards her. “Because what?” he gently prompts her.

  She scrunches her face up in a torturous mask. “Because they were … getting it on.” At least she’d remembered to say that, instead of “screwing” or “fucking.”

  “It wasn’t Mr. Allison.” He points to Joe. “She never said it was Mr. Allison.”

  She shakes her head. “It was the man who she baby-sat for.” Looking over at Allison, she says, “He doesn’t have any kids. She wasn’t talking about him.”

  Luke wants to bring in one more witness before the close of day, one who will add yet another element of doubt as to who out there might have wanted Emma Lancaster dead, and had the motive, means, and opportunity to kill her.

  David Essham owns Tri-County Gun and Supply, in Paso Robles. “Yes, I sold a rifle to a Nicole Rogers,” he says in response to Luke’s question. “A Browning 270.” He has the sales slip in his hand, refers to it.

  Luke, the gun-shop owner, Ray Logan, and Judge Ewing are meeting in the judge’s chambers to decide if Essham is going to be allowed to take the stand. Logan is vehemently opposed, thus this conference.

  “That’s an accurate, high-powered rifle, isn’t it?” Luke asks. “It could stop a man at two or three hundred yards?”

  “Easy. Piece of cake for a good marksman.”

  “Do you know if she is a good marksman?” he asks.

  Essham grins. “A regular Calamity Jane. I went out to the range with her—she wanted to test it, to make sure it was what she wanted. That woman could shoot a petal off a rose at a hundred yards.”

  Logan is shaking his head, but Ewing’s paying attention. “When did you sell the Browning to Nicole Rogers?” he asks.

  Essham recites the date, reading from his sales book. �
�That’s interesting,” Luke says, from the corner of his eye watching the D.A. steaming. “One week later, somebody tried to kill me using a rifle of that exact caliber,” he reminds Judge Ewing. “And that rifle has never been recovered.”

  Logan’s had it. “Your Honor,” he protests strenuously, “this is clearly inadmissible. Defense counsel is trying to throw up as many smokescreens as he can to obfuscate the facts in this case. Nicole Rogers is not a defendant in this case, or an accessory. You have to put an end to these extraneous fishing expeditions.”

  Ewing doesn’t immediately respond to Logan’s plea. “Please step out of the room,” he says to Essham.

  When the gun dealer is gone, Ewing turns to Luke. “The D.A.’s right. This trial is about the guilt or innocence of your client, Joe Allison, not whether anyone in the county could have done it instead. I’ve given you plenty of leeway in your pursuit of Doug Lancaster’s possible involvement, and I’ll continue to”—he looks over at Logan to make sure Logan hears this—“but not others. The appropriate place for this information is with the sheriff’s office, which could, and should, pursue this lead as regards your own shooting.”

  Essham won’t be allowed to testify. It was a long shot, trying to get him in, but it was worth the try. At least both the judge and the district attorney know about it, and the information has to cause them both doubt, more doubt than they already have. But he wishes the jury could have it too.

  The sheriff will have to deal with this information; he can’t avoid it. What worries Luke, particularly in the short term, is that Nicole Rogers really could be the sniper, and what does that mean for his future safety? Nicole wouldn’t try to take him out merely because she’s angry at Joe; that’s overkill. Either she thinks (or knows) Joe is guilty and doesn’t want to see him walk, or she herself, as he postulated, is deeply involved. Maybe fatally, all the way to the bone.

  Even without the gun-store owner’s testimony, it’s another solid day for the defense. The newspapers and television broadcasts say so. Earlier, in his cross-examination of Hillary Lange, Logan barely tried to discredit or break her down; there was no point. That Emma had slept with someone else didn’t mean she didn’t sleep with Joe Allison as well. In a sense, it buttresses his case, or so he claims when he addresses the press at the end of the day, in what is by now a daily ritual. She was sexually precocious, and Joe Allison had taken advantage of that.