by Lee Doty
With as much ill-grace as his body could convey, Miller led them into his living room.
“That’s how an investigation works, Mr. Miller,” Coigne said, using the voice of reason. “We won’t take much of your time. Actually, it’s Isabella’s time we need. She here?”
“Oh for crying out loud. I’ll see if she’s awake.” He left them, his shoulders slumped as though his burdens surpassed human endurance.
Despite his belligerence, Miller seemed to have less confidence than he did on their previous visit. Norma wondered why. She whispered to Coigne, “7:30 and no sign of the missus, and only one car in the driveway.”
Coigne nodded. When Miller returned with his daughter, alert and fully dressed, Coigne smiled at her and said to Miller, “We were hoping to speak with Mrs. Miller, too. Would you mind getting her while we speak to Isabella?”
“She’s not here,” Isabella said.
At the same time her father said, “She’s asleep.”
Coigne looked from daughter to father.
“Oh that’s right,” Miller amended. “She’s out. You know, ladies’ night out.” Miller shot his daughter a look that brooked no correction. “Anyway, we can tell you all there is to know.”
“That’s all right,” Coigne said. He pulled the shark figure from his pocket and held it in his palm.
Norma watched Isabella closely. She could swear the girl had a reaction.
“That means nothing to me. Whose is it?” Miller asked.
“It belongs to Laney Sager’s mother. We think Laney and her mother may be together, and Laney intentionally left it behind when she moved from one location to another. We hope she did that to give us some direction where to look for her. Maybe it brings something to mind in someone Laney’s age. Isabella?”
“Look, Lieutenant Coigne. Kidnapping, murder, these are things we know nothing about. Do we look like people at home with the underworld?” Miller gestured toward his furnishings, drapes, pictures, all proof positive they were above the criminal classes. While Miller continued listing all the murky things the Millers didn’t know about, Norma continued to study Isabella. Far from the spunky, smart girl who had greeted them on their last visit, Isabella remained silent during her father’s blustering. Norma wondered if “Mom” had had enough of her blowhard husband and left Isabella to deal with him.
Coigne turned to the girl. “Any ideas?”
She picked up the shark and quickly gave it back. She shook her head.
“Okay.” Coigne smiled and stood. Norma wanted to press harder, but followed Coigne’s lead to the front door. Miller had gotten Coigne out the door and had almost nudged Norma through when she said in a stage whisper to Isabella, “Would you mind showing me to the ladies’ room?”
Five minutes later, Norma opened the passenger door to Coigne’s cruiser. “Well, if a grunt means farewell, Mr. Miller said, ‘Farewell.’ Oh, and by the way, Coigne, do one of those three-point turns you’re so proud of and head us to the high school, whose sports teams are known as the —guess what?”
“Red Raiders.”
“No. Red River’s team was the Red Raiders. But when the school merged with Cockle Cove, whose team was the Blue Fins, they became a regional school with an entirely new team name. “
“The Sharks?”
“Ding-ding-ding. $200.00.”
“So why couldn’t the girl just say so?”
“All she said by way of explanation was, her father doesn’t want the family to get mixed up in anything. I think he’s mixed up, period. Also, Isabella confirmed Mom’s ‘away.’”
“Norma?”
“What?”
“Good idea, getting her to show you to the bathroom.”
“Good idea questioning her in the first place. Now stop driving like your grandmother and get us to the high school.”
32
“You can’t mean Gin’s involved.”
Trooper Katepoo had phoned Anne Sager with the news that her daughter was most likely being held with Laney by Rahul Singh. He needed her to confirm that Gin owned a silver shark charm for a necklace or bracelet, but at the same time informed her the forensics left little doubt that Laney and her mother were together at the East Nauset Fish Pier the night before.
Despite an initial shock, Anne experienced the first bit of hope that her granddaughter might yet be saved. Gin was inept and selfish, but surely if she was with Laney she would do everything she could to protect her. Wouldn’t she?
The more she thought about it, the less Anne felt surprised Gin was involved in Laney’s disappearance. Her generalized suspicions were aroused the moment her daughter showed up hanging on the arm of cover boy, Ken Crawford. Her daughter expected her to believe that she had cleaned herself up because she’d found someone to love and was experiencing a belated convulsion of maternal longing. Gin supposedly saw Laney now as a “vital part” of her life, rather than an annoying drag on her chaotic existence. Once Gin saw that Anne wasn’t going to roll over and let her have Laney, she must have found another way to get whatever it was she was after. That she’d put her daughter in harm’s way wouldn’t matter to Gin.
During their phone call, Trooper Katepoo said that Gin might be as much a victim as Laney, but Anne resigned herself to the more likely truth. Failing to get Laney legally, Gin was working with this gangster Rahul Singh to get what she was after.
She needed time to think and ended her call with the young trooper abruptly. She’d been homebound since Laney’s disappearance except for her meeting at Coigne’s office, and felt like she was losing her mind. If only Norma and Coigne would find Laney soon.
She headed for the beach, letting the local police officer stationed in her driveway know how to reach her.
Normally stamped with cheerful sailboats this time of year, the horizon was an uncompromised black line. An elderly couple gathered their beach blankets and umbrellas and made for home. The beach was empty.
Anne dropped her sandals and waded along the shoreline, her eyes trained on the foam. That’s what had carried in Buddy Todd’s body, a loser if there ever was one, a father who’d never paid one visit in all the years Laney had been in her custody. Anne supposed he’d been too busy touring rehab and penal facilities. He’d even been hospitalized from an overdose, according to Gin. How had Laney sprung from such rotten roots? Clearly, the girl hadn’t inherited her intelligence from her father, although Gin was no genius either.
Anne stopped skipping rocks. For a long time she stared into the distance and finally sank to her knees. Her crazed howl blew clear across the Sound.
33
Isabella Miller was adept at slipping out of her house unnoticed. She’d escaped on many occasions, not for the usual mischief, but to hide out until the stinging barbs hurled between her parents had stopped. On her bike, she made it to the high school in twenty minutes. The sun wouldn’t rise for hours. She hid her bike in back, double-checked her backpack for her cell phone and candy bars, and crept toward the front of the school. Coach Cummings would open the school and until then she’d stay hidden.
Laney’s mom whimpered. With each curve along Route 28 her head lolled from side to side. She was almost unconscious. Even the car’s rumbling over deep potholes didn’t completely rouse her. Laney patted her mom’s knee and tried to muffle her occasional moans with shushing sounds. Seated in the front passenger seat, Mr. Singh kept his gun aimed at her mom.
They would reach the high school soon and Laney still had only the vaguest of plans. She needed a way to ditch Mr. Singh and Varn and hide until either the men gave up and went away or help came, but she couldn’t figure out how to protect her mom in the meantime.
The high school had seemed like a good place to lead her captors for the search of the letter for two reasons. For one, her mother’s necklace brought to mind her school mascot and there was a slight chance someone looking for her might make the same connection. It was also all she had at hand to leave behind. For another, during orient
ation for entering the new high school after the merger, her class had trained to find good hiding places throughout the school in case of an active shooter.
Since she needed at least one good hideout for each class she might attend, she knew of many possibilities. There were the obvious places, inside a locker or a janitor’s closet. She’d also tried out the movable aisles in the library. They were heavy to move on their tracks and there were many of them. Some of the bookshelves were empty and she’d succeeded in climbing on board and fitting her body snugly onto a shelf. But her idea for this emergency situation was to head for her hiding place in the gym.
She’d found it last winter when Aunt Norma took her to a basketball game. During halftime, she’d watched two workmen simply disappear. One minute they were crossing the gym floor close to the bleachers, and the next, they were gone. It was only at the end of the game when she was leaving that she heard a hissing noise like wood sliding on a metal track. The workmen reappeared. They’d re-entered the gym from behind a door that blended so well into the wall as to be practically invisible. Laney later figured out that the workmen used the hidden doorway to get behind the bleachers and service them.
Varn pulled the car into a secluded woods near the high school. “So how we gonna get inside without setting off alarms? The school must have security like a bank, Mr. Singh.”
“You can’t get inside now,” Laney said. “You’ll have to wait until it opens in the morning. The schedules are different in the summer.”
Varn turned to Laney. “I didn’t ask you, so shut up. We walk in and what, Mr. Singh? We see someone, we start shooting?”
“Not quite, Mr. Varn. Miss Laney and I will walk in when the school opens. That means we’re going to sit in these woods quite some time. When we enter, I will explain that I’m with the FBI. I’ll show them identification and say I’m helping Miss Laney retrieve important information from her locker and other locations, all relating to her recent frightening disappearance. Fortunately, I will not be concerned about cameras because I have a suitable disguise.” Mr. Singh pulled from his jacket pocket a pair of dark sunglasses and an ear bud. He turned up his collar. “Miss Laney will of course back me up.” Mr. Singh waited long enough for her to imagine the consequences if she did not, then he spelled it out for Varn. “If I do not return within, say, fifteen minutes, you are to leave, and when you get far enough away, deal with Gin. And I mean deal with her.”
“Okay. You’re the boss. But I don’t like counting on the girl like this.”
“What you like, Mr. Varn, is not relevant. Ever.”
“Okay. Okay.”
Laney was about to object to Mr. Singh’s plan. She needed to keep her mom with her, but now saw Singh would never agree to let her accompany them into the school. He could hardly explain the limp woman to whomever they might run into and besides, he needed her mom held hostage so Laney would play along with his charade. She’d have to find a way to get help once inside the school, and hope it arrived in time to rescue her mom. She said, “We can get in as soon as Coach Cummings arrives. He’s the athletic director and assistant principal. He’s always the first one here and he unlocks the front door.”
“That’s more like it, Miss Laney. A little cooperation will help you and your mother.” Singh turned the gun ever so slightly toward the girl. “But how do you know Coach Cummings’ schedule and whether he follows it during the summer?”
Laney didn’t need to prepare for Mr. Singh’s question, only to tell the truth. “I’m lousy in gym, with pull-ups and rope climbing, things like that. I don’t want to embarrass myself again next fall, so I’ve been coming in early for practice, before the day-camp programs and summer school start.”
“You can’t believe that, Boss.”
She had to make Mr. Singh believe her. She would have to tell him the whole story about how her private athletic training came to be. “Coach Cummings is this odd-looking guy with these super wide hips and a pasty, pock-marked face and a lisp. Maybe that’s why he did what he did for me that time he had us do pull-ups and push-ups. I was the only kid who couldn’t do one. Not even one. No one said anything out loud, not at first, but I could hear the girls giggling behind my back. One girl even grunted as if she was trying to do a pull up, but it sounded like she was using the bathroom. Instead of drawing attention to me by yelling at the grunting girl, which is what I was afraid he’d do, Coach Cummings grabbed a basketball and did something amazing. He spun it on his finger for a long time, until everyone was looking at him, not at me. Then he put on this big globetrotter act, dribbling under his legs, passing to himself behind his back, all the while dancing around the gym floor, which astounded everyone because they used to imitate the way he teeter-tottered when he walked. They were as awful to him as they were to me. This time, though, everyone applauded like crazy. They’d forgotten about me. After class, he told me to come by the high school gym when school ended and he’d help me out. I’ve been practicing here most mornings ever since.”
In the silence that followed, she wondered whether she’d even be in school next fall, much less build up her arm strength.
“That’s a heartwarming story.”
That was all Mr. Singh said, but he must have believed her. Later on, when she pointed to Coach Cummings’ car and a man wearing a school T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers got out, Mr. Singh had them wait ten minutes before he and Laney shot across the athletic fields and entered the school.
34
Coigne could only describe his state of mind as goofball crazy. He’d once read about a guy whose beloved father was being eulogized at his memorial service and all the son could think of was outrageous raunchy sex. Back then, Coigne couldn’t understand such a guy. Now he worried he was wired the same way. How could he be fantasizing about Norma, a more maddening, defiant creature he’d never known, at a time like this? He should be paying attention to his driving if he was going to careen around corners like a drag racer. He should be calling for backup, and devising a strategy for rescuing the girl, if indeed she was at the high school. He had to wrestle his Norma fixation to the ground and get his mind back on the job.
They drove along Main past the library, an imposing, block-long stretch of white clapboard buildings, and swerved right onto Maple, then left on School. Coigne recalled the new $80 million school building had been controversial. Cockle Cove had overwhelmingly supported forming a regional school with Red River, but Red River rejected the merger a number of times, fearing the increased size of classes would cause SAT scores and college admission rates to suffer. Coigne hadn’t paid much attention to size at the time, but now he had to. They were going to be searching for Laney inside the Titanic.
“Slow down, Coigne.” They were about a hundred yards from the school. “I said, ‘Slow down!’” Norma grabbed the steering wheel. “We just passed a parked car in the woods. Keep going, but slowly. Don’t stop.”
“Relax. I saw it. I’m going to overshoot the school so we get beyond the line of vision of anyone in that car. Then I’ll turn into the school parking lot.”
“Just do it.”
Anyone could see how anxious Norma was. Coigne kept his voice calm. “We’re going to have to wait until dawn. It’s—”
“What? We can’t wait.”
“I was saying it’s only a few hours away. We need light, Norma, or someone could get hurt. Even Laney, if she’s here. When I get out, I’ll circle behind the school on foot. The woods surround it and will give me enough cover. If there’s anything going on, I’ll call and let you know as soon as I can. I’ll get backup and we’ll take it from there. Norma, listen.” He stopped talking until he had her full attention, her eyes on his. “You are to remain in the cruiser. This is an order. Do you hear me?”
“Fine.”
“I’m serious, Norma. Promise.”
“Promise.”
Coigne pulled into the lot. They spoke every few moments about nothing in particular. Their eyes closed from time to time
.
“Jesus, Norma, wait!”
The car door hung open. Norma had run toward the woods. Coigne swore out loud and fumbled for his cell. He made her out through the thick foliage, running along the phone perimeter of the school property. As he took off after her he gave instructions to Trooper Katepoo. She was already too far away for him to catch her. He could only pray she knew enough to stop and listen, a skill she’d never previously demonstrated.
He was glad it wasn’t quite dawn, too early for morning joggers. The school would take about five minutes to circle, adding in extra time to get through the thicker scrub pines, and another minute to reach the hidden car.
He stopped when he spotted it. Norma had also slowed to a halt. He couldn’t risk calling to her. The car’s window might be open and any occupant would hear him. She started her approach like she was ducking a helicopter propeller. When she rose to peer inside the car, Coigne saw a flash of movement in the back seat. Gin Sager. Gun in the front seat! He flew at Norma and knocked her down. The car windows rolled down. He pulled Norma toward the rear of the car and shouted, “You are surrounded by state troopers. Throw your weapons outside the car.” Silence. “You have no option but to—”
Commotion in the car. Coigne stood up to see Gin claw the driver’s face.
“Shit!” from the driver.
Someone fired his gun. Norma rolled under the car. Gin fell back. More gunfire.
35
Laney was ashamed when she realized she was putting Coach Cummings in danger, but it was too late to turn back. With a silent prayer and firm push, she opened the front door to the school. The air was still and the entrance hall, silent. Laney figured Coach Cummings had already gone to his office off the gym.
Mr. Singh nudged Laney along and they arrived at the gym entrance. The lights were off. Laney peered through the morning haze to spot the “invisible door” near the bleachers. Just as she was about to enter the gym, Mr. Singh grabbed her wrist and squeezed so hard she couldn’t move. They waited. She thought she heard a phone ring and Coach Cummings say hello, but she wasn’t sure. More waiting. Her mind filled the void with echoes of sneakers squealing around the basketball hoops, referees blowing whistles, and crowds blasting out the command, “Shoot! Shoot!”
