by Thomas Perry
Sharon went with him. She had not thought about the two trucks parked in the driveway. There were a van and a pickup with a shell over the bed. He said, “We’ll put all four of them in the van on the floor. I have the keys. Let’s start with the one from the kitchen.”
They rolled him onto an old section of carpet and dragged him, then lifted him through the side door of the van. She was surprised that she was able to lift his feet if Michael lifted the top of him into the van, then climbed in and pulled. They repeated the process with the two on the porch. Then they got into the van’s seats and drove out to the last street and put that man into the van with the others. Michael took some time finding the four wallets and then searching the van for useful things. Next he drove back to the house.
“You drive the pickup. Follow me closely.”
Michael drove out onto the interstate, kept going about twenty miles, and then turned onto a smaller, narrower road, and a smaller dirt road after that. When they reached the end of the road, he drove to the edge of a hillside to a narrow canyon, got into the driver’s seat of the pickup, and pushed the van off into the canyon so it rolled downhill into the darkness. She could hear it moving through heavy brush, and then the sound stopped. There was no crash.
Michael drove the pickup home. He opened the garage. He made her get into the car and follow him while he drove the pickup twenty miles in the other direction on the interstate. He found a deeper arroyo, farther from the highway, and pushed the pickup into it.
During the trip back to the house, neither of them spoke. They locked the doors, and he nailed a piece of plywood over the broken window. They lay down and Michael slept. Sharon lay there beside him, her eyes open in the night.
Jerry Escobar was nearly ten miles away from the house by then. He had hidden in the weeds only fifty feet away while that guy had gone chasing after Juan Cabrera. He had heard the pow-pow-pow of the pistol killing Jody Kelleher inside the kitchen, and heard the roar of the shotgun at the front door.
After the massacre Jerry had alternately run and walked through ten miles of chaparral, but it wasn’t over yet. He had come out to this deserted housing development tonight with his friends trying to make a quick buck salvaging stuff from abandoned houses. He and the others had not been armed and had not expected any kind of trouble. They had pulled up in their two trucks, had gone to find the easiest way into the house, and the guy opened fire.
Inside the house, where he and Jody Kelleher had gone in through the window, the woman had opened up with a pistol. It was insane. If they’d known anyone was there, they wouldn’t have gone in.
Jerry was jogging along the shoulder of the road, heading for the next town, or the next rest area. He couldn’t remember which was going to come first. He had to get there before the sun came up and he died in the heat.
He had left his cell phone at home because the police could use the record of the towers that had recognized his phone to prove he’d been out here. As soon as he got to a pay phone he would call his cousin to come pick him up and drive him back to Bakersfield. He would remember this night for the rest of his life. And the girl. Especially the girl.
He had first seen her in the muzzle flashes from her pistol. A girl so young and pretty, with blond hair and milky skin, like an angel, and she was killing Jody Kelleher. Then, when she was standing in front of the van with the headlights lighting her up as if it were day, he had gotten a long look at her. He would remember her until his memory shut down and he died.
31
Till’s ads ran on cable television. They were played as public-service announcements on network affiliate stations. There were articles on Web sites that tracked kidnap victims and fugitives. Every police department or sheriff’s department in the country had a collection of photographs of Sharon Long and a “Wanted” bulletin.
Each day Till kept sending Sharon’s picture to more and more sites, more and more organizations. He had been searching for the Boyfriend for several months, and he was determined not to let this advantage slip away. Till believed that if he didn’t succeed within a few days, Sharon would be dead, as the other girls were. She would have a nine-millimeter round through the back of her head.
It was only a few days later that Till noticed the other ads. They offered a reward if a witness would call a telephone number with information leading to the capture of the man who had kidnapped Sharon Long. The number didn’t belong to a regular police agency, but it wasn’t a hoax. When he tried the number from a pay phone, there was a cheerful, efficient young woman on the other end. He wasn’t sure whether he imagined a slight Spanish accent or just suspected that the Mexican federal police would not have entirely pulled out after losing two cops and a prosecutor.
He called Detective Mullaney in Boston, but Mullaney had no idea who was behind the ads. Till tried calling other police departments—Carbondale, Springfield, Phoenix, Los Angeles—but they didn’t know who it was either.
Till called the number that Catherine Hamilton’s parents had given him, waited through seven rings, and then heard the phone lifted. “Yes?” It was Mrs. Hamilton’s voice.
“Hello, Mrs. Hamilton. This is Jack Till.”
“We’ve been hoping to hear from you, Mr. Till. I understand the authorities believe the man who killed Catherine is the one with the girl in Illinois.”
“He is.”
“No maybe, no uncertainty?”
“It’s him,” said Till.
“Are they going to catch him?”
“If we leave them alone, probably not. I think he’s taken the girl—her name is Sharon—far from Illinois, and police efforts that require departments all over the country to cooperate don’t usually work very well. I’ve been trying to keep the pressure on, putting this new girl’s pictures online and getting the cable TV networks to put them on the air. And now somebody else is doing the same thing, and offering a small reward for information leading to his capture.”
“Is there anything else we can do?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking. If we could offer a reward too, it might be enough to get people to start looking for Sharon.”
“We’ve already given you a hundred thousand dollars to pay for your expenses and services. We don’t regret it, but we’re not wealthy people.”
“If you can’t afford a reward, then don’t worry. I’ll try some other ways. I can even ask people to contribute to a reward fund.”
“Give me a moment to talk to my husband.” Till heard the phone being muffled, and very faint voices beyond that. Then the hand was removed from the receiver. “How about fifty thousand dollars?”
“That’s plenty,” said Till. “If you’re sure you can do it, then today I’ll start offering fifty thousand for information leading to this guy’s arrest and conviction.”
“I’m sure. If you’d like us to put it into an escrow account, we can do that.”
“That’s not necessary,” Till said. “And thanks. I think this might do it.”
Jerry Escobar was in Bakersfield again, lying on his single bed with the air conditioner mounted in his window blowing cold air across his body. The other night, while he was running for his life through the dark, empty desert to escape that crazy man and his crazy girlfriend, he had thought he would never make it to safety again. When his cousin Miguel had arrived at the rest stop to take him home, Jerry had been as tired and worn down as he had ever been. He had thought he might still die of heatstroke.
Jerry was a strong man. He had worked with a crew of gardeners from the age of eleven, and when he’d turned sixteen he’d started as a mason’s helper on a construction crew. He’d loaded bricks by hand into a wheelbarrow, then pushed the wheelbarrow on top of a track of narrow boards across uneven ground to the wall his boss was working on. He would mix the mortar for his boss and keep the bricks and mortar coming all morning and all af
ternoon when the days were so hot that people hid indoors. He had lost that job when the housing market went away.
He had worked as a plumber’s assistant after that. There was no plumbing for new houses, but there were always tree roots in the ground to crush sewer pipes. He was the one to stand above the broken pipe and begin digging, sometimes going down five feet, sometimes more, up to his ankles in sewage. He had lost that job too.
His friend Jody Kelleher had talked him into salvaging metal from empty houses. Jody had said, “It’s not even stealing from anybody. Who even owns them?” Construction projects that had been started wouldn’t ever be finished. Houses that had been built far out from the city would never be sold. By the time anybody got interested in them again the banks would have to bulldoze them and start over. Nobody would notice that plumbing fixtures and pipes and wiring had been taken out of them until then—and who would know or care what was taken and didn’t have to be bulldozed? Had the bankrupt contractor even installed them? It wouldn’t matter. There would be sand blowing through open windows by then.
So Jerry had begun to go with the others, even though he knew stripping the houses was stealing. They always had to go out into the dry, hot country northeast of Los Angeles, but the air got cooler at night, so the work was tolerable.
He had made a little money, enough to rent this apartment in an old motel. He’d even had the money to take Gloria out on real dates a few times. Then those two people had started shooting.
Afterward, Jerry had slept for twelve hours. Whenever he woke up, he would go pee and drink a full glass of water before he fell asleep again. And every time, he would lie there for a couple of minutes until he remembered the horror in the night—the blond girl’s face, looking scared while she pulled the trigger again and again. After a while he would retreat back to sleep.
Jerry was a coward who had not done anything to fight back or save his four friends. He was an ingrate. Even as Kelleher was dying, the shots piercing his body, Jerry was hating him for persuading him to go steal things from houses. Jerry was a fool for going along, and a weakling for hiding in the spare, dry bushes while that maniac soldier or whatever he was killed his friend Juan in the field practically with his bare hands. He felt such disgust at himself that he never wanted to get up.
The next evening Miguel called, then brought him some food. At first the sight of it made him sick, but after a few minutes he realized that what was bothering his stomach was hunger. There were a couple of big sandwiches from Subway and a six-pack of beer.
He and Miguel sat in the small room and ate. On the way home twenty-four hours before, he had told Miguel what had happened in the desert, so tonight he didn’t talk about it. Jerry really felt bad about it. He had no idea what he would say to the families of the four guys on the crew.
Miguel kept looking at Jerry, and finally picked up the remote control and turned on the television set. Jerry felt a second of irritation, but then it went away. He wasn’t going to be able to afford his cable bill next time, so he might as well watch while he could.
Miguel clicked through a few channels. There were old kids’ shows that he and Miguel and the other kids in the family had watched years ago. They all looked faded and cheesy now. There were a couple of old movies—one a western, with guys shooting at each other in the middle of a desert as they’d shot at him; and another, a black-and-white detective thing where everybody was wearing a hat and a suit that didn’t fit him. There were bad new bands, a couple of good old ones, a couple of women on the shopping channel selling lotion that looked enough like sperm to make him feel creepy to watch them rubbing it on. There was a commercial for a body shop.
Then the man came on. He was tall, kind of lanky, with hands that seemed all knuckle. His hair was light brown, almost blond. His eyes seemed sinister to Jerry because they were a flat gray, and the pupils were tiny black dots in the center because of the bright lights. “My name is Jack Till, head of Till Investigations. Please look closely at the pictures of this young woman. Her name is Sharon Long. She was abducted from Springfield, Illinois, on July twelfth.” The screen showed slides of the girl, who was very blond and friendly-looking—smiling, laughing in practically every picture. “She was last seen in the company of her abductor, a man in his twenties. He has dark wavy hair, and is unusually good-looking. If you have seen Sharon Long, please call the number on your screen immediately. Do not speak to either of them or try to approach them. The man is an armed and extremely dangerous homicide suspect. Call the number on your screen. There is a reward of fifty thousand dollars for information leading to his apprehension and her safe return to her family.”
Jerry sprang to his feet, pointed at the television screen, and shouted, “That’s her!”
32
“Homicide, Detective Anthony.”
“It’s Jack Till,” he said. He moved his chair closer to his desk and sat up straighter. “Remember me? I’m the private investigator working on the Catherine Hamilton murder. I called because I got the tip I’ve been waiting for.”
“Are you sure it’s the tip?” she asked. “What is it?”
“A copper thief on a crew stripping foreclosed houses in the desert northeast of LA stumbled on them two nights ago in one of the houses. His name’s Jerry Escobar. He says Sharon Long was there alive, but the boyfriend killed his four friends and drove the bodies off somewhere to dump them, and ditched the two trucks they were going to use to haul off the pipes and wires and things.”
“You’re planning to take the word of a copper thief?”
“He’s positive about the girl. And his four friends really seem to be missing. I called their houses.”
“Suddenly a scavenger, who probably has never seen five hundred dollars all in one place, sees you’re offering fifty thousand for information leading to the arrest of a kidnapper from Illinois. The thief is stuck here in Southern California. But that doesn’t stop him from making a bid for the reward. He sees this Midwestern kidnapper right here, with his living victim.”
“This is the same man who killed Catherine Hamilton here, and a few others in other places. I believe that Jerry Escobar is telling the truth.”
He heard her sigh. “All right. Bring Jerry in, and we’ll talk to him. Can you get him here tomorrow afternoon at, say, two o’clock?”
“Tomorrow?”
“If you can’t round him up by then, the next day is fine.”
Till said, “Look, Detective Anthony. I was a homicide detective for twenty-three years. I broke a lot of cases, got a lot of convictions. I’m not a naive person or somebody who doesn’t know what it sounds like to be lied to. This suspect is a heavily armed, experienced killer who has a twenty-year-old girl as a hostage. You don’t think it’s worth going out there right now?”
“I understand your impatience. But please let’s not insult each other. Even if this man exists, and is out in the Southern California desert, and is actually the kidnapper from Illinois, we still have lots of groundwork to do. Is the abandoned house in Los Angeles County? Or is it in Kern County? Or some other county? We’d need the cooperation of the local police, probably the state police, or even the FBI. We’ll need to make a plan and execute it so that if he is there, no law enforcement officers get shot. All this takes time and effort.”
“It’s four in the afternoon. We’ve got nearly five hours before dark.”
“I repeat my offer. Bring Jerry in to see us tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll see. Nothing is going to happen tonight.” She paused. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m on my way into a meeting.”
She hung up.
Till sat at his desk for a full minute before he moved. He wasn’t sure why he was doing this, but he had an instinctive urge to do something that made sense. He dialed the number of the flower shop where Holly worked. The phone rang a couple of times, and then, “Flower Basket, good afternoon.
”
“Hi, Jeanne,” he said. “This is Jack Till.”
“I recognized your voice, Jack. I’ll get Holly.”
“Wait. If you have a second I’d like to talk to you first.”
“Sure. What’s on your mind?”
“I wondered if you had an evening free this week. I’d like to take you to dinner.”
“Well . . . okay. I’m free tomorrow night. Or Thursday. Does either of them work for you?”
“Tomorrow night sounds best,” he said. “I was thinking of Banque in West Hollywood.”
“Wonderful. I read about the place all the time, but I’ve never been there.”
“Great. Can I pick you up at seven-thirty?”
“That’s fine. It gives me time to get the shop closed up.” She hesitated and then said, “Jack, I just wondered. Is this about Holly?”
“Only to the extent that she keeps telling me that you and I should go out.”
“Good,” she said. “Oh, I didn’t mean I don’t want to talk about her. It’s just that—”
“I know,” he said. “I’m glad you asked. It’s not about Holly; it’s about you.”
“Then I’ll see you tomorrow night. You know where I live, right?”
“Yes.”
“Did you want to talk to Holly too?”
“I’d better,” he said.
There were some unidentifiable sounds, and then Holly’s voice. “Hi, Dad. I hear you finally got around to asking for a date.”
“She already told you?”
“Well, we had discussed it before. You know, how if it doesn’t work out, we’ll still be just as close friends. Or if it works out too well.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Was that all you wanted?”
“Not exactly. I wanted to call because I’m going out on a case tonight. You won’t be able to reach me for a few hours. I’ll be back in the morning sometime, probably. If I’m gone longer, you have a key to my apartment.”
