Nightcrawlers: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Mystery)

by Bill Pronzini

  The power tool stopped whining, and this time it didn’t start up again. She stood panting, dripping sweat, straining to hear. Other, fainter sounds came to her—rhythmic thuds, hammer blows. Building something out there, all right. And it didn’t matter what, as long as he kept on doing it long enough for her to get that second screw out.

  Only he didn’t.

  Sudden silence.

  Tamara played statue. The stillness stayed heavy and unbroken except for bird sounds in the trees. She’d been making a lot of noise . . . had he heard her? On his way over here to check?

  Her strength ebbed again; she was aware of throbbing pain in her arms and upper back when she lowered the frying pan. On her way to the kitchen, the wooziness came back. She had to lean against the wall to steady herself before she was able to draw an edge of the curtain aside.

  He wasn’t out there. The barn door was shut. Still inside?

  She waited, watching and listening.

  Emptiness. Quiet as dust.

  She stayed there a long time—what seemed like a long time anyway. Nothing changed outside. She told herself to go back to work on that screen. But she didn’t know where he was and sounds carried in this kind of heavy late-afternoon hush and she was afraid to risk it.

  Come on, asshole, make some more noise out there!

  The hush went on unbroken.

  She stood at the window for a time, frustration like acid in her mouth and throat. Went to check on the kid again, then made herself sit down and rest, then looked out the window some more. Daylight began to fade out of the sky, shadows built and lengthened among the trees and across the weedy front yard. The barn door stayed shut.

  What the hell was he doing in there now?

  Nightfall.

  Thick-dark and moonless, the kind of country night where you couldn’t distinguish one shape from another more than a few feet away. There were stars, millions of them, no light pollution up here, but they seemed dull and remote, didn’t give off much light. Crickets set up a racket in the tall grass, thrumming like a pulse. Up in the tree above the trailer, something that sounded like an owl let loose with a deep-throated cry—a mournful sound that raised up gooseflesh on her arms.

  But at least Lemoyne didn’t come crawling out with the rest of the night creatures. Whatever he was up to in the barn, he wasn’t doing it in the dark. Tamara could see streaks and spots of light around the edges of the door, through chinks in the front wall.

  She kept the lights on in the trailer. Good thing he’d turned the electricity on earlier; be twice as bad waiting here in the dark. She heated the rest of the soup, made herself eat some, woke Lauren up, and fed her a few spoonfuls. Girl could barely swallow. Didn’t cry or complain, just lay there with her big eyes staring dully—half comatose from the fever. The day’s trapped heat was easing now; a faint breeze blowing in through the open bedroom window had some chill in it. Tamara slid the one half all the way shut. Risk of the kid getting pneumonia was high enough as it was.

  An idea came to her. She’d used up all the towels, but the bed in the small bedroom had two cased pillows; she took off the cases, slipped the frying pan inside one and doubled it into the other. Then she shut off the bedside lamp, and in the faint light from the living room, went to work on the screen again. The pillowcases muffled the noise a little, but not much—not enough when she started animaling the pan under the frame. The sounds then seemed as loud as hammer blows in her ears.

  She went quickly to check outside. Empty darkness except for the scraps of light from inside the barn.

  Back to the screen. Slow, now, slow. Steady rocking pressure, hold the noise down to a minimum. That’s it. That’s it.

  Time telescoped, expanded, telescoped again. Pain, stiffness, fatigue forced her to stop and rest at four- and five-minute intervals. And every time she heard a noise outside, any noise, her heart skipped a beat and she stopped again, to listen for Lemoyne.

  But he didn’t come.

  As if he’d completely lost interest in them, forgotten they were in here. Not that she believed that for a second. No hope in that notion. He’d come for them sooner or later. And when he did they better not be here.

  Slow-rocking that pan back and forth, back and forth.

  And still no Lemoyne.

  And still that screw wouldn’t come out, that fucking stubborn little hunk of metal standing between them and freedom would not come out . . .

  24

  We searched the house top to bottom, a fast, professional toss. And we did it with the lights on. The only person they were liable to attract at this late hour was Robert Lemoyne, and I wanted him to walk in on us. Real bad, I wanted it.

  KIDNAPPED CHILD

  Had to be a young child, a little girl judging from the scatter of toys in that basement room. How young? Five, six, seven? Not as old as Emily, but it could’ve been Emily—any kid was vulnerable these days. Thinking that made me all the more furious.

  All right. Three possibilities in this case. Lemoyne had a daughter and the second of his ex-wives had custody; it could be one of those things. But the basement room, the padlocks on the door and the closet door, argued against a family snatch. If the victim was the child of somebody he knew, it was likely a onetime thing. If the victim was unknown to him, it was likely a worst-case scenario. Serial pedophile. Maybe a serial killer. One of those subhuman monsters who preyed on children for their own sick gratification and then broke them and threw them away.

  In any case, Tamara had stumbled into it. Saw something that made her suspicious enough to run the background check, and then last night made some kind of blunder that landed her in his hands. Her and the kid, locked up in the basement room, and the only thing she could do was leave a desperate message on the closet wall. And today—

  TAKING US TO TRAILER IN THE WOODS

  Where? Could be anyplace. Northern California, southern California, Oregon, Nevada . . . any damn place in the country. There were no unpaid bills to give us a clue, and no receipts; either Lemoyne got rid of them or stored them somewhere—not in the garage because Runyon found a key and went out there to check. No other clues around, either. And no sign of Tamara’s credit cards or driver’s license; he’d probably tossed them into a trash bin after abandoning the Toyota. There wasn’t any child porn or sick souvenirs or anything along those lines—not that that meant much one way or another. Just those crayoned words on the closet wall. And they still weren’t enough to bring in the cops yet.

  In the living room, while Runyon continued to poke around, I called Mick Savage on my cell phone. “New developments,” I told him. “Better you don’t know the details. How deep have you gotten into Robert Lemoyne’s background?”

  “Pretty deep, but there’s nothing so far.”

  “He own a second home anywhere?”

  “No way,” Mick said. “He doesn’t even own the one in San Leandro. Long-term lease.”

  “What about ties or access to rural property of some kind? A hunting or fishing club he belongs to, for instance.”

  “Uh-uh. He’s not a joiner, isn’t even registered to vote.”

  “His ex-wife, the second one, the mother of his daughter . . . what’s her name?”

  “Mia Canfield.”

  “Didn’t you tell me she’s from someplace rural?”

  “More or less. Little town called Rough and Ready, near Grass Valley.”

  “And Lemoyne lived there with her while they were married?”

  “Right, he did.”

  “See if you can find out if she’s still in Rough and Ready. If not, where she’s living now. In any case, on what kind of property and if it’s a house or a trailer.”

  “You mean a mobile home?”

  “Trailer,” I said. “Trailer in the woods.”

  “I’m on it,” Mick said. “Call you back as soon as I have something.”

  Runyon had been listening. He said as I pocketed the cell phone, “Stay here or wait outside?”

 
“In here. Lights off.”

  We went around the place throwing switches, returned to the living room by flashlight. I checked the street outside. Quiet, sleeping. All the houses I could see were dark now. We settled down to wait on opposite ends of an old couch with squeaky springs.

  Sitting there, I had a flashback to the time, years ago, when I was a kidnap victim—taken at gunpoint by a man I’d sent to prison, driven to a remote mountain cabin, chained to a wall, and left there to die. Three months I’d spent alone and shackled in that cabin, during which time I’d nearly lost both my sanity and my humanity. Time had built a wall around that period of suffering, brick by brick, and the wall had gotten thick enough so I seldom thought or dreamed about those lost months anymore. But Tamara’s abduction had breached the wall, allowed the images and emotions to leak through.

  Here one day, gone the next—suddenly, without warning. Family, lovers, friends, business associates left wondering, desperate for news and dreading what the news might be. So much of that kind of lunacy these days, the high-profile cases like Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson, all the low-profile tragedies that never came to the attention of the media or were ignored because they weren’t sensational enough. Some disappearances never explained, others resolved after months or years and too often with grisly results. Even the high-profile cases quickly shunted aside in favor of the next one to come along; human beings forgotten except by their families and the compilers of statistics. That was what would’ve happened in my case, if I hadn’t managed to escape from that cabin and track down the man who put me there; and at that, the media splash following my return had lasted only a short while and now the incident was remembered by only the few who had been directly affected. It hurt like hell, remembering and thinking of Tamara going through the same kind of thing I’d endured, of her becoming just one more statistic—missing and never found, victim of foul play . . .

  Runyon was saying something. “What was that, Jake?”

  “Thinking out loud. If Mick can’t find a lead, then what?”

  “No choice. We’ll have to take it to the law.”

  “Could mean trouble for us. Tamara’s message might not be enough to justify criminal trespass.”

  “I know it. Too many missing persons and child abductions these days, and in this goddamn litigious society everybody’s afraid of a lawsuit. The law can’t push as hard as it used to, or afford to give as much latitude to get the job done. They . . . ah, Christ.”

  Runyon said nothing, but it was plain he felt the same.

  “If they do try to bust our chops,” I said, “I’ll take full responsibility. Right now I don’t give a damn about my license, but there’s no reason you should have yours suspended.”

  “The hell with that. Joint decision, joint responsibility.”

  “Mick better come up with something, and fast. I want it to keep being up to us, Jake. Until we know one way or the other about Tamara and the child.”

  “So do I.”

  One way or the other. Alive or already dead.

  When the cell phone went off, I was in that shutdown, half-dozing state you can sometimes drift into in a situation like this, brought on by a combination of inertia and an overload of tension. The noise sat me bolt upright on the couch, fuzzy-headed for a couple of seconds until I realized what it was. I muttered a profanity and dragged the thing out of my pocket.

  “Got something,” Mick said. “Mia Canfield Lemoyne owns rural property in Rough and Ready, inherited it from her father. Looks like that’s where she and Lemoyne lived when they were married.”

  “Still living there now?”

  “I can’t find any record of her whereabouts after she divorced him three years ago. Probably means she moved out of state with the daughter. If he’s paying alimony or child support it’s not through his checking account, so I couldn’t trace her that way.”

  “But she does still own the property.”

  “That’s the interesting part. It’s still in her name, and the taxes are current. But her listed mailing address on the tax rolls is eleven-oh-nine Willard, San Leandro.”

  “. . . So Lemoyne is paying the taxes?”

  “Looks that way. Part of their divorce settlement, maybe. The records on that are sealed.”

  “Important thing is that he probably still has access to the property. What’s the address?”

  “That’s the bad news,” Mick said. “All I’ve been able to get off the Net is a parcel number.”

  “What do you mean, parcel number?”

  “That’s the way it’s listed on the tax rolls. Parcel 1899-A6. It’s in an unincorporated section near Rough and Ready, and Nevada County’s small—they don’t have data available online on property that hasn’t changed hands within the past couple of decades. Mia Canfield’s dad died in ‘sixty-five, when she was seven years old. She was raised by an uncle.”

  “Then how the hell do we find out where it is?”

  “I should’ve been able to get it from Dataquick or one of the other real estate databases, but there’s no listing anywhere. Same reason, probably—small county, same owner for nearly forty years. Either that or a glitch. The Internet’s not perfect, though if I have anything to say about it, someday it will be.”

  “There must be some way to get the address. What about when she and Lemoyne lived there—utilities, banks, credit card companies would have records of it, wouldn’t they?”

  “I checked,” Mick said. “Their mailing address the whole time was a P.O. box in Rough and Ready.”

  “Dammit.”

  “There’s a chance the P.O. would have a record of it. I could hack into their files, but that’s a federal offense. Even in a case like this . . . it’d jeopardize the agency and Sharon would kill me if she found out.”

  “Forget it. I wouldn’t let you take that kind of risk. Isn’t there any other way we can get the information tonight?”

  “Not without official help, through channels.”

  “Take too long,” I said. “So the only option is to wait until morning, get it from the county recorder’s office.”

  “Afraid so. The county seat is Nevada City, county offices open for business at nine o’clock. I checked that, too.”

  I held my watch up so I could read the radium dial in the darkness. Ten past one. Almost eight hours. An interminable length of time. “What’s that parcel number again?”

  Mick repeated it, and I followed suit to fix it in my memory. He said then, “Luck, huh?” and I said, “And a prayer,” and we rang off.

  Runyon, listening, had gotten the gist of the conversation. “How far away is Nevada City?” he asked.

  “Maybe three hours from here.”

  “Wait a while longer or head out now?”

  “I’m ready to move, but once we get up there the waiting’ll be worse with nothing to do. Might as well stay put for the time being. There’s still a slim chance Lemoyne will show.”

  Slim and none. It was almost four when we left the house—right out through the goddamn front door—and there hadn’t been a smell of Lemoyne the whole time.

  There was no gain in taking two cars, as Runyon pointed out. He wanted to drive and I let him do it; he had better nerves and not as much personal or emotional stake in this. We left my car in the Safeway parking lot on San Pablo, in a slot next to the red Toyota. It seemed like the best place, and there was a kind of protective symbolism in it too. A feeling that if we took care of her car, we could take care of her. Another thin little hope to hang on to.

  It was still dark when we picked up Highway 80 and headed east, but the first faint light of dawn had begun to creep into the sky by the time we cleared the Carquinez Bridge. Runyon drove the speed limit: there was no hurry yet. I sat staring out at the highway, watching the light traffic and the landmarks and yet seeing it all as if through a filter.

  Lemoyne had had Tamara and the child at least thirty-six hours now. Thirty-six hours, and another four or five before we got to Parc
el Number 1899-A6 in Rough and Ready. And maybe they’d be there and maybe they wouldn’t. And if they were there, maybe they’d be alive and maybe they wouldn’t.

  Long haul for Runyon and me, but it was nothing compared to the nightmare the two of them had been riding.

  25

  ROBERT LEMOYNE

  It was already dawn when he woke up.

  At first he didn’t know where he was. He sat up, rubbed his eyes. His head felt as if it were stuffed full of cotton, but he didn’t have a headache this morning—no pain at all. Then he saw the slatted bars of daylight coming in through gaps in the walls and realized he was in the barn. On the old army cot in the storeroom. Another night on the cot in the barn.

  He stood up, stretched, and went outside through the rear door. Cold. Always cold up here in the mornings. Got down into the twenties sometimes in the winter, when the snow level dropped below three thousand feet. He remembered two or three times they’d been snowed in, once for three days. Never go through that again if he could help it.

  Blackberry vines were heavily tangled back there—he’d have to get the weed-whacker out, not that it stopped those suckers from growing wild. Nothing stopped them. He walked over there and took a leak on the vines. That wouldn’t stop them either.

  By the time he finished he was shivering. Should’ve put his jacket on. He started back into the barn, changed his mind, and went around to the side where he could see the trailer. Mia was up. The kitchen lights were burning; he could see them faintly behind the drawn curtains. She’d have the base heater on, but not a fire started in the wood stove; she didn’t like to build fires. Lazy. Be getting breakfast ready, and it wouldn’t be much because she was lazy about that too. Eggs, toast, cereal. Hungry. He hadn’t eaten in a while.

  He took a few steps that way and then stopped. What if she was in one of her bitch moods again this morning? She’d been in one last night . . . must’ve been or he wouldn’t have slept in the barn. Yelling at him, calling him all kinds of names, scaring Angie. If he went over there now, she might start yelling again and he couldn’t take any more of that. It’d wake up Angie, scare her all over again. She was only six years old, she didn’t understand grown-ups fighting and yelling all the time.