by Lisa Gardner
“Another stupid map,” Kincaid filled in. He repeated, “Son of a bitch.”
The noise was too loud outside. Kimberly ducked inside the Wal-Mart, still deserted with all the employees and customers segregated out front. She discovered Shelly in the book department, cell phone glued to her ear as she ranted at someone over the air waves. Kincaid was speaking again. Kimberly headed for the peace and solitude of feminine hygiene.
“If Shelly thinks she knows where she’s going, then she should go. You can join her in the car, we’ll get some other officers bringing up the rear. You still have the GPS?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we can track you. So, thirty-five-minute drive, say another ten minutes to locate the precise spot … You’d better get going.”
“We can’t.”
“You can’t?”
Kimberly sighed heavily. “Don’t either of you get it yet? Detective Grove’s gone—we don’t have the twenty thousand dollars anymore.”
“Son of a bitch!” Kincaid swore.
Her father said nothing at all.
Wednesday, 11:45 a.m. PST
For the second time in one day, Lieutenant Mosley was flabbergasted. In his day, when a trooper picked up a “person of interest,” the man was brought straight to the nearest field office. He was set up in an interrogation room. He was offered a beverage of choice. Then the interrogation room door was shut, and the man was given plenty of time in a small, barren space sitting on a hard metal chair with a rapidly filling bladder to think about things. It’s not like everyone suddenly cracked under the pressure. But it certainly softened most of them up.
For starters, Adam Danicic was not shut in the interrogation room. He was not sitting on a hard metal chair. He was not, from what Mosley could tell, suffering from any lack of creature comforts.
In fact, the Daily Sun reporter was currently at the sergeant’s desk, stretched back in the sergeant’s leather office chair and chattering away on the sergeant’s phone.
Mosley walked in, took one look at what was happening, then headed straight for the state trooper who’d brought Danicic in.
The officer immediately snapped to attention. “It’s not how it looks!” he burst out when Mosley stopped in front of him.
“And how does it look?”
“I mean, I had no choice!”
“Because you’re not wearing a pair of handcuffs or a gun?”
“He said he would only come with us if he could make some calls. And then once we got here, he said if we didn’t give him a phone, he would use his cell phone, and of course, we wouldn’t want him tying up his cell phone.”
“Because the kidnapper wouldn’t be able to get through.”
“Exactly, sir!”
“Tell me, Officer, do you really think a reporter would jeopardize his chance of speaking directly to the man who has abducted two people?”
The officer’s eyes darted from side to side, which Mosley took as a no.
“Do you really think he would do anything to risk his airtime on the nightly news, or the number of copy inches he can command on the front page?”
“I was told we needed him to cooperate. And I wasn’t given anything to charge him with.”
“Then you find something, Officer. Obstruction of justice. Expired license. Broken taillight. You were at the man’s home, standing in front of his car, for God’s sake. You can always find one little infraction. Even the Pope has committed some sort of misdemeanor in his life.”
The officer didn’t answer anymore, which was answer enough.
Lieutenant Mosley returned to the front of the small field office, where Danicic was still jabbering away on the phone. Mosley hit the line-one button with his index finger and the phone went dead.
“Hey, that was my lawyer!”
“You feel you need a lawyer?” Mosley asked levelly.
“In the entertainment industry, you bet. I’ve already gotten called by Larry King, not to mention the Today show. But then you also have to figure in the possible book deals. I mean, I tell everything up front, who’s gonna be left to buy the hardcover? I need a strategy.”
“Sit up,” Mosley snapped. “Feet off the desk. Show some respect.”
Danicic arched a brow but did as he was told. He uncrossed his ankles. Straightened in the chair. Dusted off his gray jacket, which up close was not as nice a fabric, nor as tailored a cut, as it had looked on TV. His shirt was too big around the neck. His tie a bit too harsh a shade of pink.
The cameras had given him a certain level of mystique. Now he looked exactly like who he was, a small-town reporter trying desperately to make it in the big leagues.
“You ever meet Rainie Conner in person?” Mosley asked.
“No.”
“Dougie Jones?”
“Am I a suspect? Because if you’re thinking of me as a suspect, then I am calling my lawyer.”
“I’m trying to think of you as a person. Trust me, every minute it’s becoming more difficult.”
Danicic scowled, but looked away.
“Those are real people somewhere out there,” Mosley said. “A woman and a child fighting for their lives. Have you ever been to a crime scene, Danicic? And I don’t mean standing behind a string of yellow tape. I mean up close, personal, where you can see it’s not some Hollywood special effects. Ever sat through an autopsy? Ever read a medical examiner’s report? Do you really know what a bullet, what a knife, can do to the human body? Get up,” Mosley said abruptly. “I have something to show you.”
Mosley jerked Danicic to his feet. The reporter was too stunned to react. Mosley marched him to the back, sat him in the interrogation room, which was a former janitor’s closet and still looked it.
Back in the front office, Mosley pilfered the first gray filing cabinet he came to. He took only cases marked closed and adjudicated. If the past two years had taught him anything, it was that you could never be too careful with the press.
He stormed into the interrogation room and started slapping the photos down onto the table. “Teenager, hanged. Woman, gutted. Man, hit by a freight train. Body, sex undeterminable, dragged from a river. Hands, covered in marijuana leaves. Eighteen-month-old boy, drowned. Still thinking of book deals, Mr. Danicic? Because there are plenty more where these came from.”
Danicic picked up each photo. Studied them. Carefully placed them back down.
He looked up at Mosley. He shrugged.
“The world is filled with bad things, yada yada yada. I’m not an idiot, Lieutenant. I’m not even that different from you. Your job is to give these people justice. My job is to tell their story. Today, we have a story. You can’t stop me from telling it.”
“And if it puts the victims further at risk?”
“Further at risk?” Danicic snorted. “Tell me how. You people are the ones playing games. I’m at least making an attempt at salvaging a very precarious relationship. Face it, the kidnapper doesn’t trust you. And if he gets too nervous, Rainie and Dougie are dead. I’m offering a viable alternative. Kidnapper calls me, everybody wins. And yeah, so maybe that means I get a book deal. As long as they’re found alive, I don’t think Rainie or Dougie will mind.”
“You are messing with the lines of communication in a time-sensitive case. He calls you, we have to wait to get the news. We don’t have time to wait. Sometimes, law enforcement is war. And in war, you need a single line of communication.”
“On the other hand, every time the kidnapper contacts me, he has to surface. More times he surfaces, better chance you have at catching him.”
“More manpower it takes to cover all angles,” Mosley countered.
“Then it’s a good thing you have so many jurisdictions involved.” Danicic leaned forward. “Lorraine Conner is a former FBI profiler’s wife. You want quid pro quo? You tell me, is the FBI involved? Is this now officially an FBI case? And I still want to know about the other guy I saw on the fairgrounds, the one wearing the windbreaker from the Georgia Bureau of
Investigation. Seems to me, there’s a lot going on here you still aren’t telling the public. Think how that’s gonna play when two people turn up dead.”
“When? That doesn’t sound like positive thinking.”
“Current investigative efforts have done nothing to convince me otherwise.” Danicic pushed back the chair, stood up. “You arresting me?”
“Not yet.”
Danicic arched a brow. “That doesn’t sound like positive thinking,” he deadpanned. “I’m outta here.”
The reporter took a step forward. Mosley grabbed his arm. The look Danicic gave him was harder than Mosley had expected. More calculating. Apparently, once enough was at stake, even a fairly inexperienced journalist learned fast.
“If we find out that you received information and didn’t share it with us, that would make you a coconspirator,” Mosley said softly. “Which would make you party to the crime. Which would mean you cannot profit from anything related to the crime—no book deals, no paid appearances, nothing. Think about that.”
“You know,” Danicic said impatiently, “not all journalists are the bad guys. Or—let me guess—you voted for Nixon.”
“He’s using you, Danicic. Why send a letter to the editor, why leave a ransom note on the windshield of your car? You want to be an objective reporter, then start asking yourself the hard questions. This subject is driven by his lust for celebrity. You can quote me on that. Except we can’t make him infamous; only the media can. You can quote me on that, too. The more coverage you give him, the more you’re rewarding his efforts. And the more you make him like it …”
Danicic jerked his arm free, just as the police radio crackled to life on the sergeant’s desk. The trooper picked it up, but in the small space, Danicic was still standing close enough to hear.
Mosley watched the reporter’s face, waiting for some kind of reaction. If the guy was an actor, then he was good.
“Ah jeez,” Danicic murmured, shoulders coming down, hand raking through his short-cropped hair.
Dispatch was calling for more officers; investigators had found a grave.
39
Wednesday, 11:52 a.m. PST
For Quincy, time stopped at precisely eleven fifty-two a.m. Wednesday morning. Up until that point, he thought he’d been doing fairly well. Poring over his notes in order to see what they might have missed. Working with Kincaid to analyze the whiteboard listing investigative tasks: They didn’t have Detective Grove’s official report of Rainie’s last twenty-four hours. They needed to press Sheriff Atkins for a completed assessment of local offenders. Then there was still the matter of following up with Laura Carpenter, of tracking down Andrew Bensen. In the past thirty-six hours, many things had gotten started, but too few had been finished. It happened in an investigation moving in this many directions at this kind of speed.
Candi offered her assistance. Apparently, anything was better than sitting around a conference table, twiddling her thumbs. Kincaid sent her off to Laura Carpenter’s house. A trained hostage negotiator shouldn’t have any problem interviewing a battered wife, and that would earn them at least one check mark on the whiteboard.
Quincy agreed to take over the search for Andrew Bensen, Army’s efforts be damned. With the clock still ticking, they didn’t have time to wait for official reports. Quincy booted up his laptop and started working his cell phone. Calling Bensen’s grandmother. Getting the name of the man’s former high school classmates, drinking buddies. What were his hobbies, interests? Did he take any prescription medication? Had he come to Bakersville often? How well might he know the area? Had anyone ever heard him express any particular anger over his father’s death, or any interest in contacting Lorraine Conner?
“Well, at least Lucas wasn’t shacking up with some whore, raising her bastards all these years,” Eleanor Bensen said with a snort, when Quincy asked what she’d thought upon hearing the news that her son Lucas had been shot.
And Andrew?
“Never told him. Boy hadn’t asked about his father in fifteen years. Why start now?”
“Did he learn the news from anyone else?”
“How the hell should I know? I’ll tell you one thing, though. That boy’s a moody S.O.B. Thinks the world owes him something just because he grew up without parents. What does he think I am, chopped liver?”
Quincy was still mulling over that particularly cheerful conversation when Kimberly called about the note taped to the bottom of the Wal-Mart pay phone.
And once more, Quincy and Kincaid shifted gears. No need to worry about coordinating complicated ransom drops. Now it was purely a matter of X marks the spot. Deposit the hidden treasure. Worry about what the subject would do to fuck with them next.
They needed another seven thou. Kincaid ordered Shelly and Kimberly to hit the road. Quincy whipped out the yellow pages. A branch of his bank was located in Garibaldi, on Kimberly and Shelly’s way north. He tried demanding money by phone. The bank manager hung up on him. Kincaid called back, rattled off enough legalese to make a lawyer proud, and secured the promise of seven thousand in cash to be handed over to a law enforcement officer in approximately eight minutes.
They were still feeling pleased with themselves, jazzed in the sort of way people who never dealt in matters of life and death would ever understand, when the other call came in.
And Quincy’s world stopped. Kincaid talked, but his words had no meaning. Quincy stared at the whiteboard, but couldn’t read the writing.
A local farm, owned by a suspected drug dealer. A county investigator, executing a search by poking through a pile of manure. The discovery of a woman’s pale white hand.
The ME was on her way. The DA was formally requesting a primary examiner from the Portland lab. All activity at the farm had ceased. Nobody wanted to make a mistake. They had one body. Now the question was: Did they have three?
“I’ll call Kimberly,” Kincaid said.
“No.”
“They might as well come back. Shelly was the one who arranged for the search. She’s going to want to be involved in what they found.”
“Not until we know for certain.”
Kincaid didn’t say anything.
“It might not be Rainie; we don’t want to blow the drop.”
Kincaid didn’t say anything.
Quincy finally turned around. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “I’m the one who’s supposed to die first.”
Kincaid had to go. Quincy sat alone in the conference room, staring at the whiteboard and thinking, for once in his life, of nothing at all.
Wednesday, 11:56 a.m. PST
Candi’s first impression of the Carpenters’ house was there was no way she would ever live here. Not that she’d grown up on Park Avenue, but her Grandma Rosa had prided herself on her home. Every morning she swept the front steps. Afternoons found her polishing her furniture with lemon-scented Pledge. Heaven help you if you came into her kitchen with mud on your shoes. Candi and her cousins would be handed a rag and sentenced to spend the next hour scrubbing floors on their hands and knees.
Rosa’s Portland bungalow may have contained seven kids under the age of ten, but for as long as Candi could remember, that little house had glowed. Starched lace curtains on the windows. Strands of green ivy cascading from the window seat, the mantel, even curling around the cross of crucifixion. All the neighborhood kids preferred coming over to Rosa’s house to play. They would drink Kool-Aid in a lemon-scented kitchen, then play in the tiny backyard, overgrown with Rosa’s carefully cultivated wisteria vines.
The Carpenters’ house, on the other hand. Dark, Candi thought. Too many tall trees towering over a tiny house. The giant firs blocked the sun, sucked the moisture from the grass, and left only the moss alive on the dilapidated roof. Definitely no wild cascades of purple flowers here.
Candi parked on the muddy drive. She followed an uneven brick path, picking her way carefully over the heaving stones, interspersed with giant clumps of crabgrass. The fro
nt of the house was painted mud brown, with the door to match. She knocked, waited, but no one answered.
Candi thought she heard the sound of voices, however. She cocked her ears, then realized it was the radio, coming from around back. She followed the noise.
She found Laura Carpenter standing on a cement patio that was pretty much in the same state as the brick walk, inhaling a cigarette. Minute she saw Candi, Laura dropped the Marlboro to the ground and stepped on it. The woman shifted her balance forward, as if trying to cover the motion as a random step.
Candi thought she’d seen twelve-year-olds better at disguising their habit.
She held out her hand. “Candi Rodriguez, Oregon State Police.”
Laura Carpenter didn’t scowl, but she didn’t exactly roll out the welcome mat either. She ignored Candi’s extended arm, shrugging instead.
“So what d’you want to search now?” the woman asked. She had her arms crossed over her chest. Baggy purple sweatshirt. Stringy brown hair. Hollow brown eyes. She spoke with a voice of practiced indifference.
“Actually, I was wondering if Stanley was home.”
“Nope.”
“Is he running some errands?”
Laura jerked her head toward the encroaching woods. “He’s out there. Still looking for the boy. Stanley,” she added derisively, “thinks he’s Knute Rockne. Quitters never win. Winners never quit. Just because a bunch of police officers have declared the boy kidnapped doesn’t mean Stanley’s gonna hang up his hat. Not Stanley.”
Laura’s hands were trembling. Candi decided to make it easy on both of them. She made a show of patting down her jacket. “Ah shit, I must’ve left them in the car.”
Laura looked at her.
“My cigarettes,” Candi explained. “Don’t suppose you happen to have one …”
The woman finally smiled. She wasn’t fooled, just grateful. “Don’t suppose I do.” She whipped out the red -and-white pack. Banged one out for herself, then handed the pack to Candi. There was a book of matches by the grill. They both lit up, Laura exhaling smoothly, Candi managing not to cough. It’d been years since her last cigarette. Ah man, though, it did taste nice.
