“Right. Hunting accident?”
“It’s not hunting season.”
“So I’m a poacher.”
“How about just saying you were cleaning your rifle and it went off?”
“Lame. Besides, they’d want to see the rifle, check its registration.”
“Unknown assailant shot you while you were hiking in the woods?”
“Where in the woods? The National Seashore isn’t open to visitors this early in the day, and on private property I’d be trespassing.” He paused. “Hey, fuzzy thinking on my part—the chopper pilot used to be an EMT, and we keep a first aid kit on board.”
I hesitated. “You trust him to deal with a gunshot wound?”
“He has before. Besides, it’s only a flesh wound.”
“But there could be complications—”
“I’ll see the doctor that RI uses for situations like this when I get back to the city. He won’t ask questions or report it.”
“Okay. It’s a ways to the chopper, but you can lean on Craig while I watch Samson. You want to rest first?”
“I just want to get the hell out of here.”
“You in much pain?”
“Bearable, now that you’re with me.”
CRAIG MORLAND
Bob Samson wasn’t admitting anything, even with Craig’s weapon under his nose. He looked sullen and spat on the ground a couple of times. Craig was out of patience with him.
He said, “One more time—where are Piper Quinn and Adah Joslyn? I’ll use this gun, goddamn you.”
Silence.
“Either you or TRIAD snatched them from Quinn’s building on Tenth Avenue.”
“I don’t know no TRIAD.”
“J. T. Verke, then.”
“Who?”
“Rogue ex-CIA. A very dangerous man to deal with, Samson.”
“I didn’t deal with nobody.”
“Your uncle and his partners did—look what happened to them.”
Silence.
“They can find you, Samson. There’re hundreds of ways they can take you out.”
Samson was sweating now. He looked down, shuffled his feet.
“Even if you never get on a plane again, there’re always car bombs. Incendiary devices under your house. A drive-by shooting. Poison in your In-N-Out burger.”
Samson’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
“I imagine you’d be eligible for the witness protection program if you come clean on this.”
“Oh sure—live in some shithole as somebody else. You don’t get it—Morell Associates is mine, now that my uncle’s toast. I got my life right here.”
“Not if the office blows up when you unlock the door some morning.”
“Ah, shit.” He scuffled on the ground some more. “I never did that much, and I never snatched nobody. All’s I did was find a place to stash ’em and take ’em food.”
“What place? Where?”
Silence.
Craig slapped his cheek with the gun barrel. “Where?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Bullshit.”
“They’ve been moved. I’m out of it now. End of story.”
“Who took them? TRIAD?” Craig moved as if to slap him again, and Samson flinched.
“Yeah. They hired my uncle’s firm to clean up this building on Tenth Avenue.”
“Why’d they take the women?”
“Trying to use the Quinn broad to lure some guy who has information they want. The other was snooping around, saw one of the TRIAD agents, so they took her too.”
“Who’s this guy they’re after?”
“Marine intelligence. Went AWOL in Iraq under somebody else’s name.”
Piper Quinn’s husband.
Keeping his voice steady, Craig asked, “You say your uncle’s firm did the cleanup on Tenth Avenue?”
“Yeah.”
“And where did you hold the women?”
“This place my uncle’s company runs security on. Verke told him where.”
“What place?”
“Doesn’t matter. They’re gone now.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know!”
Craig heard sounds in the trees nearby, then Shar’s voice called, “Hey, Craig, look who I found.” A moment later she came into view, Hy hobbling beside her with their arms around each other. Hy looked pale, and Shar didn’t look much better. All this physical exertion couldn’t be good for her.
“Ripinsky—you all right, man?”
“I’ll live—no thanks to this asshole.”
Shar said to Craig, “You help Hy to the chopper—the pilot used to be an EMT. I’ll watch Samson. He tell you anything?”
“Some. Not enough.”
“Adah? Piper?”
“Lying bastard claims he doesn’t know where they are.”
Craig took over support of Hy, while Shar held her weapon on Samson. The four of them made their way through the woods to the clearing. At the chopper, Shar and Hy and the pilot conferred for a moment. When she came back to where Craig stood with Samson, Craig related the rest of what Samson had told him.
“Okay,” she said, facing Samson. “This place Morell Associates runs security on—where is it?”
“Like I told this guy, it don’t matter. They’ve been moved.”
“Where to?”
“Nobody told me.”
“TRIAD—how did they contact you?”
“This J. T. Verke came into the office, flashing a lot of cash.”
“And you did what?”
“Standard cleanup on the apartment building.”
“How many tenants were living there?”
“Just the woman. Verke was sort of camping out there.”
“Again, where did you hold Adah and Piper?”
Headshake.
“Fast-forward a little. Who was the woman who visited you here last night?”
“Some skank I met in this pickup joint in San Rafael.”
“Her name?”
“Who knows? That kind of place, you don’t bother with names.”
“The place’s name?”
“I don’t remember.”
“When did you meet her? Last night?”
“No. Three, four nights ago. Last night she just showed up here. That didn’t sit well with me, but I let her stay awhile.”
“Ms. McCone,” the pilot called out from the chopper. “I need to speak with you for a minute.”
Concern registered on Shar’s face. She turned and hurried over there. Craig watched her go.
In that instant of inattention, Samson lunged at him and sent him reeling. Before Craig could regain his equilibrium, Samson head-butted him in the stomach and knocked him sprawling backward on his ass. As he struggled up, gasping for breath, he saw Samson crashing away into the woods.
A handgun cracked from the direction of the chopper. Shar had seen what happened, fired a warning shot. No way she’d shoot to kill their only witness.
But Samson didn’t stop. A couple of seconds later he vanished among the trees.
Shar started running after him. Craig sucked in air, cursing himself, and joined the pursuit.
Their convergent paths brought them together at the edge of the woods. Craig could hear Samson stumbling through the undergrowth somewhere ahead of them, the snapping sound of a branch breaking off.
“Bastard! I only took my eyes off him for a second.”
“Don’t worry, he can’t get far with his hands tied.”
They plunged ahead, following the noises as best they could. But they still couldn’t spot Samson in the murky darkness.
“Dammit.” Craig panted. “He knows these woods a lot better than we do. If he finds a place to hole up…”
“He won’t. We’ll get him.”
More thrashing, snapping sounds, coming from off to their left now. They veered that way. The soft earth was slippery here; Shar, in the lead, nearly lost her footing and had to grab at a fir bole to keep he
rself from falling. Her breathing was heavy and irregular. Craig moved to steady her, but she shook him off.
She’s going to do herself damage. Maybe have a relapse—or die.
Ahead, the trees thinned and the terrain rose above a clearing that looked like a small amphitheater. Samson was at the far end, struggling to climb to higher ground beyond. Craig yelled at him to stop, but it was a waste of breath. Samson lurched sideways and kept going.
They were halfway across the clearing when Samson reached the top of the rise. For an instant he was backlit by a shaft of sunlight; then he staggered forward and disappeared on the other side.
Craig pushed around Shar and increased his stride, urgency making him careless of his footing now. Shar was trailing him on the rising ground when they heard a sudden yell, then a thudding noise that cut off the outcry.
“Christ,” Craig said, “what was that?”
“Sounded like he ran into something.”
Craig pounded up to where they could see what lay behind the rise, Shar climbing more slowly. The terrain sloped downward again, sharply, the ground covered with ferns, vines, and a tangled deadfall.
At the base of a thick-trunked pine near the deadfall, Samson lay in a twisted heap, unmoving.
Craig ran ahead, knelt beside him with a sick, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Samson must have tried to avoid the deadfall, tripped, lost his balance, and careened sideways. With his hands tied behind him, he’d had no way to stop himself and he’d hit the tree head-on. There was no need to feel for a pulse.
Shar came up beside him. “Dead?”
“Broken neck, goddammit. Snapped like a twig.”
And there goes my last link to Adah.
ADAH JOSLYN
She was starving, her body racked by alternating cold and hot spells. Getting sick. Going to die alone on this filthy quilt, and maybe nobody she loved would ever know what happened to her.
Many cases like that when she was on Missing Persons, before she transferred to Homicide. If they didn’t turn up within the first twenty-four hours, forty-eight tops, you could pretty much consider them gone.
Children missing, wives missing, husbands missing, friends missing. Media exposure. Nutcases coming out of whatever strange universe they dwelled in to give false confessions and false leads. A sighting here, another there—most unverifiable. Relatives begging for new developments, their voices made more dull and hopeless by the passage of time.
The ones that really bothered her were the kids; husbands and wives and friends had a tendency to disappear voluntarily. But the kids—innocent, easily duped by strangers, snatched, abused, tortured, killed. They’d haunted her on the job. Haunted her still. Every so often, even after she was promoted to Homicide, she’d pull up their files, hoping some detail from the past would connect with the present.
Adah remembered working San Francisco sightings on the Jaycee Lee Dugard case; it was an exception. An eleven-year-old girl had gone missing from her neighborhood in South Lake Tahoe eighteen years ago. She was found last summer—a grown woman living in a shed in the yard of the house belonging to the couple who had taken her. Of course, she’d lost her childhood, had two children of her own fathered by the kidnapper. Lots of problems with adjustment there, but still she’d come home.
All too often they didn’t come back. Then there was the horrible, grief-filled closure: a body that had been found under a freeway overpass twenty years before identified by the newish science of DNA; a sudden confession from a murderer brought in on minor charges; a father of one of the missing cracking under pressures related to his present-day life and admitting to a crime against his own flesh and blood.
Such closures were bad, but not knowing was a hundred times worse. The harshest pain was of those who waited throughout their lifetimes, who died without ever knowing what had happened to the lost. Mothers and fathers living out their old age in silence and resignation. Husbands or wives putting everything on hold in the hopes their spouse would return. Friends searching every crowd for the missing one’s face. Uncertainty, frustration, constant anxiety—and every phone call or knock at the door threatening to smash their worlds forever.
Adah didn’t want that to happen to Craig, to her parents and friends.
Dammit, she wouldn’t let it happen! She wouldn’t.
CRAIG MORLAND
They stood looking down at what was left of Bob Samson. Craig felt a despairing emptiness.
Worse than when he and his colleagues had found the body of the kidnapped seven-year-old son of a diplomat in a junkyard in Maryland. Worse than when a fellow field agent’s head had exploded in a hail of bullets from the semi-automatic of a bank robber in rural West Virginia. Worse, even, than when his younger sister had drowned in the Atlantic off the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
The first two tragedies had been horrible, but they went with the job’s territory. His sister—eighteen years younger than he, a change-of-life baby. Kristina was her name. She’d been only thirteen. Blonde curls, blue eyes, big smile, long, long legs. He’d loved her, but he’d hardly known her, having been mostly gone from home since her birth. That distance had allowed him to be strong for his grieving parents.
Who would be strong for him, now that he’d lost Adah?
Shar, apparently. She took his arm as the chopper lifted off, taking Hy back to the city. Squeezed it tightly, then laced her fingers through his.
“We are not giving up yet,” she said.
The hell with not giving up. It was over. For a savage moment he wanted to smack Shar, ream her out for ever bringing Piper Quinn into their lives.
Shar’s eyes met his, something dangerous and ugly glittering deep within them. She understood and shared what he was feeling.
She said, “The chopper pilot’ll come back after we search Samson’s cabin. In the meantime, will you please climb down there and remove the headband from that son of a bitch’s wrists. If he’s found, it’ll look like an accidental death. If not, let the buzzards and coyotes have his remains—as he was willing to let them have Hy’s.”
SHARON McCONE
Craig and I began a careful search of Samson’s cabin, looking for anything that would tell us where he’d taken Adah. In the kitchen I found Hy’s BlackBerry, wallet, and keys. I pocketed them and continued searching, trying to concentrate on every object I looked at or handled, but my body ached badly and my thoughts kept straying to the possibilities.
Bob Samson had told Craig that TRIAD was holding Piper as a lure for her supposedly dead husband, Ryan Middleton. Quasi-government agency. If they wanted to reel him in, Piper would have to be at a location Middleton knew of and would gravitate to.
But wouldn’t he suspect a trap? Maybe, but the lure of Piper might be stronger.
Why? She’d served divorce papers on him. He’d apparently faked his own death and escaped Iraq with classified information.
A smoke screen? Some political ploy they’d gone in on together?
No. Piper wasn’t a political animal. She’d told me she hadn’t even voted in the last election.
Well, a monetary scam, then.
Wrong again. Piper didn’t need money, had never shown the slightest inclination toward acquiring material possessions. Just the reverse—she was generous to a fault.
So she probably wasn’t aware Middleton had survived the suicide bomb blast. Why should she be? His remains—or those of a man identified by his dog tags—had been sent back and interred in Colma. His personal effects had been returned to her. She’d been recovering from a crippling accident, which had left her life forever changed. The part of it that had belonged to Ryan Middleton was as dead as he supposedly was.
But not for Middleton.
My head ached and my eyes felt like I’d been in a sandstorm. My husband had insisted on forgoing a trip to an emergency service and returning home after only the minimal first aid given him by the chopper pilot. I wasn’t sure that I hadn’t damaged my health with all that runn
ing in the woods. I’d watched a man die and—in spite of my bravado about letting the coyotes take care of his body—any death felt like a part of myself slipping away. And now I feared I’d never see Adah again.
I sat down on the lumpy, stained couch in the front room.
No tears, McCone. Be strong for Craig. Wasn’t he strong for you when you were locked-in and helpless? Wasn’t Adah? And everybody else?
Craig called to me from outside, where he’d gone to search Adah’s Prius.
I dragged myself up from the couch and out the front door. He stood by the car, several keys attached to a blue plastic tag dangling from his hand.
“They were in the ashtray,” he said.
TED SMALLEY
He’d finally driven back to the pier when he’d seen the RI chopper hover over and descend toward the property above Inverness. Now he was waiting to hear from Shar or Craig or Hy. He was jumpy from too much coffee and had been plaguing Neal, who had returned from his book-buying trip to the Pacific Northwest, with half-hour updates.
Down the catwalk, Mick was at his keyboard, probably also wired on too much coffee. Thelia was at hers, still trying for a hit on Adah’s or Piper’s credit cards. Patrick was busily plugging information into his damned flow charts.
Why didn’t Patrick get a life? Ted wondered. He buried himself in those useless diagrams, except for when he was worrying about his kids. He’d recently told Ted that the boys weren’t doing well in their Catholic school, and it must be the nuns’ fault. The nuns weren’t strict enough, Patrick claimed, not like they were in the scary old days of his youth when they’d loomed over you like big black birds ready to pick the flesh from your bones if you broke any of their thousands of rules.
Back in his youth, Ted thought. Yeah—all of twenty years ago.
Besides, one of those kids needed excess flesh removed.
Bad, Ted. Very bad.
He knew he was taking out his concern about Adah and Shar and Hy on the Neilan household. And he shouldn’t be: Patrick was a good guy, and the kids would eventually turn out okay, as they tended to do when there was a concerned parent around.
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