Captors

by Farris, John

  Her voice was part whisper, part croak as he continued to bear down on her expressionlessly. "Get away!" she said. "Get—" Her eyelids fluttered; a different sort of surprise altered her face like a slap. The bushy-haired man stopped. She whirled and saw Gaffney watching from the telephone booth by the road, the receiver in his hand half lowered. For several seconds they were all suspended. She heard quite clearly the ragged woodcutting hum of the powerboat, a child whining to its mother, the bell of a cash register inside the luncheonette. Then she threw her hands to her face and sagged against the side of the car.

  Gaffney got to her quickly. "Carol—"

  "Let me alone. Don't touch me! Who do you think you are? Just a cop after all, and you're all alike! Brutal, sadistic—"

  "Carol, we hoped it would do some good. Help bring it all back, jog your memory—"

  She lowered her hands, glared at him with a barbarous anguish. Most of the people queued up in front of the luncheonette had become very interested because of the explicit tension in the air and her undisguised wrath. The fake bushy-haired man. was walking leisurely back to the Volkswagen van. Gaffney looked calmly and sympathetically at her, which was more than she could stand. "Get me out of here," she pleaded, sliding down into the car seat. She reached for her sunglasses and the dropped lipstick.

  They were on the Palisades Parkway, northbound, before either of them said anything. The dwarf clouds of morning had become thunderheads towering above Bear Mountain.

  After glancing at her a couple of times Gaffney ventured, "Still sore at me?"

  "I've already drafted three nasty letters to John Edgar."

  "He knew about it. We all knew it would be rough on you. There was a good chance the results would be worth the trouble."

  "Oh, God," she said bleakly, then gave up a ghostly smile. "Who was he? He looked—damned real to me."

  "One of Claude Demkus's cops. Active with the Chappaqua little theater."

  "Jolly. I feel all clenched up inside. I may have to have all my babies by Caesarean."

  "Look, I'm still good for coffee. We'll skip the meeting with the artist. You've had enough police work for one day."

  They stopped at a new place outside Peekskill, took a back booth in the nearly empty restaurant. She dabbed at the lipstick mark on her dress with a napkin and cold water, decided to leave it alone. She looked wan and troubled, eyes darkened to bittersweet chocolate. The air-conditioning was too cold for her. She was filled with yawns and nettlesome fears that occasionally prompted a small sad wince. He felt as badly as if he'd abused his own daughter. But he had to push her just a little farther.

  He took the brown envelope from his inside coat pocket, extracted the wire photo, wordlessly placed it in front of her. He was watching her closely. He saw nothing significant—a tightening around the eyes, a thinning of the lips, quickly a stillness that was almost masklike. For ten seconds she stared at the photograph, then glanced up at Gaffney with a sigh he felt rather than heard.

  "Who is she?"

  "I was hoping you'd know."

  She tried again, tapping her forehead lightly with a fist. She shook her head curtly. "I don't."

  "You've never seen her?"

  He took the photo back, looked briefly at it himself. A nice cheeky girl with a good-size grin and long tresses, lower jaw and double chin no photographer could minimize.

  "Her name is—or was—Barbara Hosker, called Babs. We're interested in her because she worked as a research chemist in a lab which makes a hypnotic drug which your kidnappers gave you. Babs left the drug company a month ago to marry the fellow she'd been living with in Palo Alto, an artist and sculptor named Jim Hendersholt."

  "So?" she said.

  "The drug has been manufactured in very small quantities so far. Only a few people have had access to it. Apparently it has odd side effects nobody is very sure of, so they're testing it slowly and carefully."

  "You think that girl might have stolen some of it?"

  "She could have. But we have no proof."

  "Where is she now?"

  "We'd like to know. She and her husband supposedly are in Mexico. None of their friends knew exactly where. They've had postcards from various places. Mexican authorities are trying to locate them for us. I have a hunch they might not be found right away." He took a second photo from the envelope and gave it to her. This one was of a bony-faced man of thirty or so, with very little hair, a great black moustache, simmering intelligent eyes.

  "That's Jim Hendersholt," Gaffney said. "Babs's husband. Shave off the Pancho Villa moustache, clap on a fright wig and dark glasses, he looks like our prime suspect."

  "In a way," she said indifferently. "But so did that cop back there. A lot of men in that disguise would look the same." She handed over the photo and sipped at her coffee. "That girl has such a sweet face. Maybe this doesn't mean anything, but she certainly doesn't look like a kidnapper. No more than my brother Kevin."

  "She could be an accomplice."

  "I wish I could say I knew her. I don't think I was ever in Palo Alto. Oh, once on a frat weekend when I was a sophomore. I had a lousy time." She stared through the tinted window at an expanse of asphalt, scrubby evergreens. "They went to so much trouble," she whispered. "Was it worth it? What did they gain?" She looked inquiringly at Gaffney. "How many of you are working on this now?"

  "About a hundred agents on different shifts. It's our baby now under the federal kidnap statute. Of course we get a great deal of assistance from local authorities. Since it happened on his beat, Chief Demkus is still very much interested in the case. He was personally offended."

  "That many men. Then you certainly ought to find whoever it is you're looking for." She shrugged. "But I can't bring myself to care. They hurt me, I guess, and caused my family a lot of grief. But I don't know them and I don't hate them. It just doesn't matter." She scrawled through spilled coffee with a fingertip. "You said the drug had odd side effects. Do you know what they might be?"

  "I don't have any information. I could find out."

  "I guess it isn't so important," she said, smiling, and touched the back of his hand with her fist: a chummy intimate gesture. "I mean, I haven't noticed anything different about me."

  The peregrine waiting on in the high gray sky was only a dot, like a pencil mark on smooth slate, and she kept losing the bird altogether. She shaded her eyes against the mild afternoon glare, maintaining her own watch with a dry mouth, a tense avid expectancy.

  The General took a live, unfettered pigeon from his falconer's bag and held it in his two hands for a few moments. Then, with a cry, he threw it into the air. The pigeon wobbled momentarily on its wings, circled higher. Almost instantly the peregrine broke her own circle, rolled over, swooped, fell. By the time she hit the frantically evasive pigeon with a closed fist she had traveled close to a thousand feet in eight seconds.

  Stunned, the pigeon fell like a loose bundle of feathers tied together with a string. The peregrine, now in an upward trajectory with opened wings, gradually slowed. Then she spiraled downward to her prey. She picked up the pigeon with one foot and severed its neck vertebra with her beak, killing it. The peregrine relaxed her feathers and looked around, eyed them sharply as if expecting approval, then proceeded to plume and eat. The General took the falcon on his fist to finish its meal. "Beautiful, isn't she, Carol?"

  Her hands fell to her sides, fingers uncurling. Her palms were wet. She approached the General slowly. The falcon paid little attention.

  The falcon was a golden bird, in her prime, lean from the period of training but well-adjusted to captivity. The General called her Rosalind.

  "Next week," he said, "with Riggs's help, I'll teach her to hawk game from a point." Rosalind lifted a foot momentarily and the bells there tinkled. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? Time to fly again. Just don't fly too far; I'd hate to lose you."

  "How long will it take?" she asked the General as they walked back through the field.

  He stroked Rosa
lind's feathers affectionately. "A day or two. She learns very fast. Hold her for me, Carol?" She raised her right arm and Rosalind, who had talons that could pierce bone, balanced herself delicately on the offered wrist, stared at her new companion with a full yellow eye, then folded her wings.

  The General lit a cigarette. "The only thing to worry about is that she might ride the wind too far for me to recover her. No matter how well-trained she is I can't be sure what'll happen when she's flying free." He smiled. "Even if I lose her one way or another it's been worth it. This is the most effective and humane killing instrument a hunter has at his disposal. If she misses her target she misses clean. When she hits, which is most of the time, she kills."

  The General owned thirty acres, not including the pond. Except for Sam and Felice he had no near neighbors. There were woods on three sides of his property, which was the nucleus of what had been, in the nineteenth century, a farm of over six hundred acres. A couple of the original farm buildings remained, a small tack barn and an equipment shed. There was also a brick tenant's house, in need of a new roof and long disused. The main barn had been hit by lightning years ago and destroyed, although some of the foundation could still be seen, overlapped by the summer tide of the fields.

  His house was pure Victorian, a small brick castle of four stories. It had murky windows as big as doors, doors half the size of railroad flatcars, a main staircase with room on each landing for a baby grand piano. There were twenty-six rooms. More than half were not furnished and never would be. The General lived in a spacious apartment on the third floor: bedroom, sitting room, office, eight closets—one of which was stacked full of wood for his fireplaces—two baths, a small kitchen in which he did no more than heat coffee. From his windows he had a fine, if somewhat distorted, view in three directions. Thirty years ago the house had been misguidedly whitewashed: most of the white had been weathered off but enough persisted to give the house a scabrous, ramshackle slightly unsteady look, perched as it was on a knoll.

  Between the house and the tack barn stood a trellised grape arbor which the General no longer had the time or energy to tend. Many of the vines still stubbornly bore inferior fruit from worn-out soil; others, thick as cables, lay tight and twisted within the old trellis, matted solidly enough in places to keep out all but a torrential rain. There was a dusty crooked path through the thirty yards of arbor which the General habitually followed from house to barn.

  The tack barn had been modified and soundproofed for use as an armory, where he test-fired new and used military weapons and bench-loaded his sporting guns. The adjacent equipment shed he had turned into a hawk house.

  He took Rosalind from the girl's wrist, placed her on a hawk block outside the door where he'd been weathering her for the past month. He attached the jesses, leather straps for her legs. The jesses were fastened through a double-eye swivel; a leather leash five or six feet long ran through the other eye, an arrangement which gave her freedom to leave the block, walk around in the yard, bathe in the concrete trough nearby.

  While the General attended to his falcon she entered the hawk house.

  The floor inside was earth, hard-packed, swept clean. There were two sharply intersecting planes of light from the windows at different heights. Ventilation was good but still the air had a taint, a feathery effluence like that from a still-warm nest taken from the hollow of a tree.

  On a rail covered with an old tarp, another falcon, this one a male and smaller, raised up with a spreading of wings and hissed at her. She paused, watching, then approached slowly. The tiercel's feathers stood out. He hissed again, angry and afraid.

  The General came up behind her, put a hand on her shoulder. "You're staring at him, Carol. He thinks you mean to hurt him."

  "He looks half starved."

  "He is. He won't eat from my fist. I don't think I'll be able to train him. Sometimes you can't overcome what's wild in them."

  "Could I feed him something?"

  "You can give him a mouse from the cage on the table."

  They were barn mice, gray-brown, summer-plump. She opened the top of the cage. The mice were huddled in opposite corners, trembling, intent on her.

  She swallowed, reached quickly in, grasped one behind the head, lifted it out. The mouse squeaked helplessly, terrified. She carried it back to the tiercel, stopped several feet in front of him. He rose on his perch again, wings opening, watching the struggle of the mouse in her hand. She stroked its backbone with a finger, eyes dark and thoughtful.

  Then with a flip of her wrist she tossed the mouse to the tiercel, who caught the mouse neatly with one foot, killed it with a quick jab of its beak, ate it in two gulps, all but bloodlessly.

  She wiped her hands on her jeans, staring. A shudder passed through her. Her eyes looked sleepy, her mouth slack. The pulse in her throat beat strongly.

  "Carol?" the General said.

  He had to say her name twice before she heard him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Tuesday, July 2

  In the night they heard her sobbing.

  Nothing wild or frightening to mingle with nightmares but despairing, compulsive sobs, then irregular periods of silence.

  Felice was up, heart thudding, hands numb, when Sam came in by way of the bathroom and turned on a lamp for her. "I'll go," he said.

  It was quiet now. "What do you suppose—?"

  "I don't know. She's been like that for a while." He tried a reassuring smile which didn't stick. "Why don't you get back into bed?"

  "Leave the light," she asked him. The room was chilly. After he'd gone she put a pillow at her back and smoked a cigarette. A minute or more passed; she heard Carol stirring in her room, as if to answer Sam's tap at the door. The floor overhead creaked loudly three or four times. Then she couldn't hear anything. Felice put her cigarette out but continued to sit up worriedly, until her heartbeat quieted and she began a nodding doze.

  A short abrupt cry half awakened her again. It wasn't repeated. There hadn't been anything about it to alarm her, no particular inflection. She gazed solemnly at the face of the clock by the bed—it was five after three—then turned over, burrowed deep under the covers and slept.

  When she awoke again it was with a feeling of guilt, muted dismay. She lay there unmoving, alert, listening; the sky was the color and texture of crushed ice but the windows had gold in them and the trees were filled with tuneful birds: wood thrushes, robins, an imperative cardinal whistling like a traffic cop.

  She threw the covers aside, got up, found a heavy robe and put it on with uncoordinated haste, anxiety coming and going in her body like the throb of a sore tooth.

  She went into Sam's room. He wasn't there. His bed was cold.

  Upstairs the door to Carol's bedroom was closed. Felice opened it as quietly as possible. The drapes were half drawn across south-facing windows. There was a good deal of clutter—she was still unpacking trunks, boxing things for storage. A high-intensity lamp on the desk focused its forgotten light on the pale oak floor. The air in the room was slightly soured from too many cigarettes.

  She was asleep on her side, covered to her knees, one hand outthrust and clutching a pillow as if she were holding some dream beast away from her throat; the other hand was curled protectively between her breasts. She wore cotton pajamas with a couple of buttons missing. She breathed through her mouth, breath catching in places as if she was on the verge of waking up.

  Felice smiled with a sharp sense of relief and had to check a motherly impulse to straighten the blanket, give Carol a little more protection against the morning chill. She left the door slightly ajar and went downstairs. There was a light on in the library, and voices. She thought she heard the General speaking. It was early, even for her insomniac father, and she shook her head in exasperation.

  But Sam was alone. He was standing near his desk, his back to her. The General's voice continued, raspy, disembodied.

  "Hello," she said. Sam gave her a wild startled look, then clutched at
his chest and pantomimed heart failure.

  "I'm sorry," she said meekly. "What's going on?"

  "Oh—" He reached low behind the desk, turned off the tape recorder in a bottom drawer, closed the drawer and locked it. "I was listening to some tapes of a bull session I had with the General. I need a quote for the new commentary piece I've been kicking around."

  "Horrible example?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  "Lord, when are you two going to grow up and stop—" She gave up when Sam grinned at her. "I looked in on Carol just now," she told him.

  He shook his head tiredly. "She had a rough night. I only came down about an hour ago. Is she sleeping?"

  "Not too well. Sam, what was wrong?"

  "I think it all finally caught up with her. The drugs they gave her have been hard on her nerves. And she'd had mild hallucinations—" Felice looked dismayed. "I'm sure it's nothing to worry about, but we'd better check with the doctor; he might want to change sedatives." Sam took a cigarette from a box, scowled at it, decided against smoking. "One other thing, Gaffney's been pressing her too hard. Under the circumstances I think she's been more than cooperative. I intend to ask him to lay off, at least for a few days until she settles down. His turn to cooperate."

  "I agree. Did you make coffee?"

  "Instant gunk. Terrible. What time is it, Felice?"

  "About six."

  "Too late to think about going back to bed. I could get an early train into the city, be home by midafternoon. How about dinner out tonight, the two of us?"

  "What about Carol?"

  "It was mostly her idea," he said, slightly sheepish. "But give me credit for knowing a good idea when I hear one." He put an arm around her waist and kissed her; it was meant to be casual but there was too much tension in him. She had the notion that if she accidentally tapped him with an elbow he might shatter. He yawned hard enough to crack his jaws, smiled. The arm around her waist felt good to her. Felice snuggled a little closer, rested her head against Sam's shoulder for a few moments. Together they walked back to the kitchen. She let Riggs off the porch.