by Kyle Mills
“Hey, he can’t do that!” Passal said as Michaels disappeared through the door.
Beamon sat down across the table from him. “He just did.”
While the trailer was just about what Beamon had imagined. Passal himself wasn’t. Despite his threadbare clothes and less than cosmopolitan surroundings, he was alert, and his hair was reasonably well kept—not the long scraggly locks or military cut that people who chose this type of life normally favored. The eyes that had a few minutes ago flashed with paranoia and fear had settled into the calm apprehension of a thinking man.
Beamon considered his plan of attack carefully. “I’d like to talk to you about your niece.”
“My what?”
“Your niece. Jennifer?”
Passal’s expression softened for a moment. “Haven’t thought about her in a long time. She was two last time I saw her. Couldn’t be much more than fourteen now.”
“Almost sixteen, actually.”
Passal nodded thoughtfully. “What’s the FBI want with a fifteen-year-old girl?”
“To find her. She was kidnapped a few days back. The couple who adopted her were both shot in the head. Hell of a mess.”
The muscles in the man’s jaw rippled subtly as his teeth clenched. “So you thought maybe the child molester did it. Fuck you.”
“Don’t know who did it, Dave. Thought you might be able to help me. Maybe your brother or your sister-in-law might have had some enemies. Any ideas?”
“They’re both dead,” Passal said. “Any enemies they had ought to be satisfied with that, don’t you think?”
“You tell me.”
Passal’s quiet apprehension seemed to be slowly evolving into full-fledged nervousness. “No. No enemies.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
“What can you tell me about your sister-in-law?”
“What do you mean?”
“It sounds kind of strange, but we’re having a hard time figuring out who she was. Looks like she might have changed her name a few times, moved around a bit. Would you know anything about that?”
“No.”
Beamon pulled a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and began slowly rolling a cigarette. “Maybe you remember where she was from? Did she ever mention any family?”
“No.”
Passal knew something, but his fixed stare and the set of his jaw told Beamon that he wasn’t going to succumb to any classroom interrogation techniques. Beamon considered taking him in, but decided that it would be pointless and possibly dangerous. If the man did have Jennifer stashed around here somewhere, she’d likely die without him tending her. Goddamn cold in Utah at night.
Beamon lit the cigarette and mulled over his options. They were all bad. All he could do was move as quickly as possible and hope that luck was with him. He stood abruptly, prompting Passal to scoot back in his chair.
“Okay, then, sorry to have bothered you. Is there any way we can reach you if we come up with something that might jog your memory?”
Passal looked down at the table. “You won’t.”
Beamon paused for a moment just outside the door. “Must get kind of lonely up here sometimes. Don’t know if I could do it.”
Passal turned a tired face toward him. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to find out. There’s an empty lot about a mile down the creek. I’ll save it for you.”
Beamon cocked his head and opened his mouth to speak, but then thought better of it. He’d get what Passal knew. He just needed a little leverage.
“Okay, Chet, we’re out of here,” Beamon called.
Michaels was walking with comic slowness through the sagebrush west of Passal’s trailer, his eyes locked on the ground.
“Anything?” Beamon asked as Michaels retraced his steps and came alongside him on the road.
“That shack over there is the only other building. There’s a snowmobile and a generator in it and that’s about it. I looked under the trailer—it’s up on a bunch of cinderblocks cemented together. Nothing but some old lumber. How ‘bout you?”
“He knows something, but he sure doesn’t want to tell me what it is.”
“So you think he’s involved?”
“Either that or he has an idea who is. I don’t know. This one’s throwing me.”
Beamon looked up at the stars coming to life in the darkening sky and pulled his parka close around his neck. “You hear the weather forecast for tonight?”
“Yeah. The wind’s supposed to die down. Other than that, clear and cold.”
“Good flying weather.”
“You’re going to fly back to Flagstaff?”
The sound of pounding drifted up behind them on the wind. Michaels jerked around, but Beamon just kept walking. Passal patching his broken window. “No, we’re going to stick around.”
“And watch Passal?”
“And improve our relationship with the sheriff.”
“But what if he’s got her? He might be planning on getting rid of her right now!”
“It’s possible,” Beamon said hesitantly, trying to fight back the memories of his most spectacular failure. “But if we bring in a bunch of people to watch him, he’d know it. Hell, we couldn’t even sneak up on him today.”
It had been years ago in the heat of a southern Texas summer. He had brought in no less than ten agents to watch and occasionally harass Bill Meyers, his primary suspect in the kidnapping of a ten-year-old girl from El Paso.
A few weeks later he’d found the girl tied up in a pit about a mile from Meyers’s house. The memory of how she looked, staring up at him, her skin turning black and her swollen tongue prying her mouth open, was still painfully vivid.
It seemed that Meyers had stopped bringing the girl food and water when Beamon’s men started watching him. According to the local coroner, the little girl’s death had been extremely unpleasant.
11
“OKAY, SO I’M STILL BEHIND THE TREE. I thought I caught the guy solid through his car window, but I’m not sure, right? And I’m not too happy about having to stick my head out ‘cause the tree next to me doesn’t have any bark left from this asshole’s machine gun.”
Beamon kicked an empty chair across the floor to demonstrate the tree’s relative position. “I had to do something, though, you know?”
The man was an artist, there was just no denying it. Sheriff John Parkinson and three of his deputies sat literally on the edges of the seats surrounding the torn-up old wood table, transfixed by Mark Beamon’s manic way of telling a story.
Chet Michaels leaned back, took another sip from the Budweiser he’d been nursing for the last hour, and watched his boss’s face intently. There was nothing in his expression or tone that would indicate that he was anything more than some good-old-boy cop from Texas. No trace of the reportedly off-the-scale IQ, the pressure of the press’s impossible expectations and constant scrutiny, the endless distractions that came hand-in-hand with running an office. The little girl who was most likely dead or dying somewhere.
But those things were there—he’d seen them. Sometimes when Beamon didn’t think anyone was looking, he’d suck the right side of his lower lip between his teeth and fix his eyes on the nearest wall. In those brief moments, he seemed like a completely different person.
Michaels took another tiny sip of his beer and continued to study Beamon’s performance. In the two days that they’d been in Kanab, local law enforcement’s attitude toward them had gone from mild suspicion to near-worship. He would never be able to pull that off. You just had to be born with that kind of charisma.
“I must have waited there for five minutes,” Beamon continued, barely pausing to breathe. “Listening for the guy to get out of the car. Nothing. Finally I take a quick look. Shit, you can’t even see into the goddamn car anymore ‘cause of the blood all over the windows. Looks like he exploded in there, you know?”
The glassy-eyed cops grinned in unison.
“So I go up to it
. No mistaking it, the guy’s dead. I open the door and he kind of flops down face first on the back seat. Anyway, I grab him by the hair—he’s got this really long hair—to pull the body out.” Beamon paused dramatically. “Pulled his head clean off. Shotgun blast had caught him right in the neck.”
The cops were silent for a moment and then burst out laughing. Sheriff Parkinson pounded drunkenly on the table with a closed fist.
“True story,” Beamon said, leaning back and polishing off his beer. “Puked all over my shoes. Had to write a full report to get the Bureau to buy me a new—”
The sound of his beeper going off stopped Beamon in mid-sentence. “Whoops, that’s us, John. I think our fax is coming through.”
Parkinson pointed to the empty beers in front of Beamon. “One more quick one for the road?”
“Thanks, but no,” Beamon said. “We’ve got to move.”
“You boys still coming by the house for dinner?”
Michaels grimaced. He’d hoped Parkinson’s invitation had been hypothetical.
“Hell yeah,” Beamon said. “It isn’t often I get a home-cooked meal. Six o’clock, right?”
“What is this?” Chet Michaels said, spreading the slick fax paper out on the bedspread in the hotel room he and Beamon had been sharing for the last two nights.
Beamon double-checked that his gun was loaded and began digging through his suitcase for a heavier sweater. “Think about it, Chet. Try to understand the psyche of your average backwoods paranoid.”
Michaels looked down again at what seemed to be a bad fax of a photograph that hadn’t turned out. He flipped it upside down. Still nothing. “I think it must have gotten screwed up in the fax, Mark. It’s just dark with a few light splotches.”
Beamon ignored him. “As I was saying, the psyche of the backwoods paranoid. When the Red hordes—or more likely the ATF—come over the hilts and surround ‘em, their trailer sure as hell isn’t going to save them. What do they do?”
“Head for the hills?”
“Hell, no. That’d be un-American. They go for their bomb shelters.”
Beamon slid an arm though the sleeve of the sweater he’d turned up and pointed to the photograph. “I got turned on to these things years ago when I was looking for another girl, a little younger than Jennifer. What you’re looking at is an aerial photo of Passal’s spread taken with heat-sensitive cameras. Tell me what you see.”
Michaels studied the fax for a few more moments, then pointed to a roughly rectangular off-white splotch centered on it. “That must be the trailer. You can see the stove here in the middle.”
“That’d be my take on it.”
“This little thing here must be that shack where the generator was running.”
“Uh-huh.”
Michael’s finger traced along the edge of the photo, stopping on another anomaly in the dark gray background of the photograph. “What’s that?”
“That’s where the ground isn’t being heated by the sun. It would seem to indicate that there’s something under there that’s not under the rest of the area.”
Michaels brought the fax up close to his face. “What do you think it is?” he said excitedly.
“I’m hoping for Jennifer Davis, but I doubt I’m that lucky.”
12
JENNIFER STIRRED, BUT DIDN’T OPEN HER eyes. She rolled to her back, kicked the sheets off, and breathed deeply. Bright light filtered through her eyelids, and for a moment she imagined that they had become transparent. Through them she could see the pine celling of her home and the enormous wrought-iron chandelier that hung above her bed.
This was it. It had to be. Today she would finally wake up from the nightmare. Today she’d be home. Jennifer took a final deep breath and opened her eyes.
The glare off the stark white ceiling blinded her, just as it had the last five times she had played out this elaborate ritual. She threw her forearm over her eyes, rolled on her side, and began to cry quietly.
Why was this happening? Had she done something wrong? Maybe she was sick—and this was a hospital. The horrible dreams were just part of the illness. High fever could cause those things—she’d seen it on TV. And that’s why she was alone. She was contagious. Quarantined.
She would think about that for a time, as she did every “morning” in the windowless room. When she had once again convinced herself of the plausibility of this explanation, she would rise and walk slowly to the doorless bathroom at the other side of the room, splash water on her face, and stare at the empty wall above the sink.
Finally, she would look down at herself. At the short white T-shirt and cotton panties that were the only clothes provided for her. At the unnaturally pale hue her skin had taken on.
She would let her fingers trace the outlines of the fading green-brown bruises that had adorned her body in various configurations since she had taken up mountain biking. Then she would return to the twin bed and sit with her back against the wall and stare at the empty room, eventually sinking to the mattress and into something that felt more like a trance than sleep. When she awoke, there would be a plate of food, a towel, and a clean T-shirt and pair of underpants by the door.
She had no idea how long she’d been alone in this room. The difference between day and night was just a flick of a light switch and there had been no sounds emanating from behind the heavy wooden door that led to … where?
Sometimes the feeling that she was caught in a cube in the middle of an empty desert plain overwhelmed her. She would become panicked that one day the person silently depositing her meals would lose interest and she would die alone and hungry, never knowing what had happened to her and to her family. Or worse, that the meals would continue to silently appear forever, leaving her to drown in loneliness and confusion.
At first the quiet clink of metal against metal didn’t sound real. Just another trick played by her mind. When it came again, though, she struggled back to a sitting position. The heavy knob on the door jiggled almost imperceptibly.
It was real.
She pressed her back against the wall and drew her knees to her chest, feeling the numbness and despair that had become oddly comforting in their familiarity wash away in a flood of adrenaline.
Could it be her father? Of course, it must be. He’d finally come for her. It had all been a fever-induced dream. And now she was better.
The door opened slowly as Jennifer slid to the edge of the bed and began to stand, wanting nothing more than to be folded in her dad’s arms and to be told that she was okay now and going home.
“Jennifer.”
She fell back onto the bed, legs pedaling desperately in the tangle of sheets until her back slammed against the wall. It was her. The woman who had made her father go crazy. The woman who had been sitting at the edge of her bed staring into the dark while she slept.
Jennifer kicked at the air weakly in an effort to keep the woman away, to no effect. She easily caught one of Jennifer’s ankles and threw her legs to the side.
“Be still,” the woman said, grabbing the back of her hair. Out of the corner of her eye, Jennifer saw a man with a thick black mustache pull the door closed, leaving them alone.
Jennifer could feel the woman’s eyes boring into her and tried to turn away, but the woman’s grip on her hair kept her head immobile. “No, you look at me, Jennifer. Look at me.”
Jennifer wanted to push her away, but she felt weak, confused. Like she was floating in a current that was impossible to fight.
“Do you know what’s happened?” the woman said.
Jennifer opened her mouth, but she hadn’t spoken in so long and she was so afraid, her throat felt paralyzed.
“Do you know what’s happened?”
“I don’t know,” Jennifer got out.
“Yes you do. Tell me.”
The images of her parents’ death that seemed to have finally begun to fade suddenly returned to her with devastating clarity. “My parents,” she stammered. “They’re … gone.�
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“That’s right, Jennifer. They’re dead. And you know how, don’t you. Tell me how.”
Jennifer threw her arms over her face and felt the tears begin to flow down her temples. “No,” she sobbed. “No, don’t make me.”
The woman pulled Jennifer’s arms away from her face and tightened her grip on her hair.
“How did it happen, Jennifer?”
“He killed her … then he killed himself. What did you do to them? What did you do to my parents?”
She felt the woman slide her hand under her T-shirt and gently caress the skin on her stomach from her navel to just beneath her breasts. Jennifer tried to move away, but the powerful hand tangled in her hair held her fast. “They weren’t your parents, dear. You know that. Don’t you?”
“They were,” Jennifer heard herself say. “They loved me just as much as if I was their real daughter.”
“That’s what you were supposed to think, Jennifer,” the woman said, shaking her head with something that looked like sadness. “It’s what I told them to make you believe.”
“You’re lying!”
The edges of the woman’s mouth curled up almost imperceptibly. “Then why didn’t your father use the gun I gave him to save you?”
Jennifer closed her eyes so tight she could see dull streaks of imaginary light streaking across the insides of her eyelids. “He would have … he wanted …” Her voice trailed off. Why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t he saved her?”
“He didn’t save you because you weren’t really his child. I gave you to them and told them to take care of you until it was time for you to come back to me. That’s all.”
The woman’s hand slid from underneath her shirt and into her hand. Jennifer heard her stand and felt a gentle pull. She allowed herself to be led into the bathroom.
