“No, I just wondered—”
“Shut up.” As if someone had flipped a toggle in His head, His mood had switched, and He was done talking to me. He had used me and now He was finished with me. “I don’t know why the hell I’m bothering with you when I could be halfway there with number thirteen.” He nodded at Juliet.
He had not raised His voice, only changed His tone. Yet I felt Juliet’s whole body jerk upright, rigid.
Knife in hand, He stood up, shoving the table out of His way. Swaggering to the middle of the room, He loomed over us. “You, Candy, get your wrappers off,” He ordered, thumbing the edge of Pandora’s blade. “Start with that coat.”
NINE
After catching the scantiest of naps on a sofa outside the department building’s restrooms, Sissy was awakened by the arrival of the early shift.
Once on her feet, she shuffled to the front desk. “Boss here?” she asked the harried woman who worked Sunday mornings.
“Just came in. Been all night at the Phillips place.”
“Anything new on the missing girl?”
“Nope.” The woman was not friendly, not unfriendly. Like most of the department employees, she had worked there for over a decade, and would not begin to regard Sissy as significant until Sissy had lasted at least a year.
“How’s the chief holding up?”
Expressively the woman arched one eyebrow.
“That bad, huh?”
“No sleep, DA’s daughter’s missing? If Chief Angstrom was a terror threat, I’d color him red.”
“Hoo boy. Thanks.” Sissy walked off, no longer shuffling. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what she had to do anyway. After just a minute in the women’s room to wash her face with cold water and consult the mirror to straighten herself up, Sissy tapped on Chief Angstrom’s office door.
“Enter.” The roar from within sounded neither louder nor softer than usual.
Sissy entered. Stood in front of his desk. Said, “Sir,” instead of “Good morning, sir,” because she felt the latter might be inappropriate under the circumstances.
He peered up at her from his chair, and she was startled to notice that one of his heavy, scowling eyebrows was parting company slightly with his forehead. The boss wore false eyebrows? Eyebrow toupees?
“Well, what is it?” he barked.
Fake scary eyebrows. What a hoot. Sissy wondered if everyone in the department knew except her. With remarkable ease because she could not be intimidated while trying not to laugh, she said, “Sir, I have something new on the Dorrie White case.”
“If you mean the Juliet Phillips abduction case, you’ve wasted your time, not to speak of making improper use of department computers.” He aimed a scowl her way to impress upon her that of course he knew what she had done. “We don’t have jurisdiction at this point in time. It’s Appletree’s case now.”
“And the Dorrie White missing persons case?” Sissy volleyed without an eyeblink’s hesitation. The warning scowl, meaning Bud Angstrom Knows All, had failed to intimidate her when she was hoping that one of the beetling eyebrows might fall off.
But a snort of unfunny laughter from the boss stiffened her spine, reminding her she was still a rookie. “What missing persons case? You know they’ll find Dorrie White when they find Juliet Phillips.”
Very likely true, Sissy knew, although not in the way Angstrom meant it. In his mind he had already convicted Dorrie of abduction.
In her hand Sissy held a report on an alternate suspect: Blake Roman. Although there was not a word about handwriting in it, Sissy did not really want her boss to see it anymore. In her most sure-’nuff tone she said, “I guess I’ll just fax this to Appletree PD, then.”
But Angstrom was alerted at once. “Fax what?”
She did not allow herself to sigh in resignation to her fate. “Blake Roman,” she summarized her document, “wanted fugitive, raised in Appletree, a couple years older than Dorrie White. Went to school with her when she was Dorrie Birch. Served time for sexual assault, wanted for parole violation and for questioning in the abduction, rape, and murder of a teenage girl. I found pictures of the girl. She bears a marked resemblance to Juliet Phillips, who looks almost exactly like Mrs. White did when she was young.”
“From the photos of what she looks like now, that’s hard to believe,” said Angstrom acidly.
But at least he showed some interest. Good. A man capable of understanding and exploiting the psychological nuances of bristly eyebrows perhaps deserved more credit for smarts than she’d been giving him, Sissy reflected.
“Based on?” he asked.
“When I was at her house, I saw her wedding photos. Do I need to get a copy of one?”
“You need other things a lot worse. What else have you got?”
“Just to sum up, the love letters Dorrie White hid under her mattress were from someone named Blake,” she said. “Maybe it was Blake Roman. Maybe, like a lot of rapists, he was hung up on somebody he couldn’t have, and that somebody was Dorrie. Maybe he abducted Juliet because she looks like her biological mother.”
“And maybe instead of just plain balls you’ve got crystal balls,” Angstrom said. “All this based on his effing handwriting?”
“There’s not a word in the report about handwriting.”
“Huh,” he grunted, apparently involuntarily.
Sissy pressed her case. “Just the facts. Which fit.”
Angstrom chewed his lower lip and gave her the peer from under his eyebrows again.
“All I’m saying is heads up, this man exists,” Sissy told him.
“All right, if you found him in NCIC, he exists, and I suppose the Appletree PD ought to know. Did you send them copies of the White woman’s photos yet?”
“No, sir.” How could she, when she’d just learned of the jurisdictional change? Angstrom liked to take advantage of any excuse to bark.
“Well, get on it!”
“Yes, sir. Is that all, sir?”
“Damn right it is! Go the freak home and get some effing sleep!”
“Yes, sir. Good morning, sir.”
Sissy did not allow herself to smile until she had closed the chief’s office door behind her and headed toward the fax machine.
* * *
Sam exceeded the speed limit considerably on his drive to Appletree and pulled in around dawn on Sunday morning, twelve hours and a sleepless night since he’d come home to find Dorrie missing.
Maybe it was his lack of sleep, or his mood, or the gray light or the crepuscular time of day, but Appletree seemed ominous to him, like a movie set, like the sort of small town where bad things happen and are hushed up. He noticed there was hardly anybody on the street, as if people were either afraid to venture out or else waiting for their cues. Rolling at sixty miles per hour right through the middle of what seemed like a ghost town, Sam saw the blue sign he’d been told to watch for and pulled in at the Appletree Municipal Building/Fire Hall/Police Station.
Driving around back to park, under sulfurous security lights he saw a yellow rollback emergency road-service truck.
And on the truck, Dorrie’s Kia.
Abandoning his Silverado in mid–parking lot, Sam ran to the rollback and climbed onto the truck bed. “Dorrie?” he called as if she might be asleep in the car.
God, the front of the car was a mess. All rumpled up. Windshield smashed. Didn’t look like any normal kind of accident Sam had ever seen. An attack?
From below and behind him a deep voice demanded, “What the hell you think you’re doing?”
Sam turned, saw a muscular man in a police uniform, and counterdemanded, “Did you look in the back?”
“Get down off there before I—”
A second, softer, gravelly voice said, “Now hold on, Walker.”
“Yes!” Sam’s head ached from clenching his jaw, his eyes burned, his mind swam with fatigue, and all his manners seemed to have deserted him. “Did you look in the back! Somebody might have stuffed her into the back!”
“Yes, we looked. No, we didn’t find anything.” The old cop’s voice managed to be gritty and gentle at the same time.
“You’re tampering with evidence, Mr. White.” The burly cop spoke more quietly, but his resentment sounded barely restrained.
“We been over that car with a fine-tooth comb,” said the old cop. “Let him look. Mr. White, we found no bloodstains in the car and no damage in the occupancy area. The car has a messed-up axle, and you can see it’s got extensive damage to the hood and the windshield, but there’s no indication that anyone was hurt.”
“What the—” Sam stopped just in time. Good Lord, he’d be swearing next. Then he’d sound like a bum as well as looking like one. Tightening his control on his voice and himself, he tried again. “What is the air pump doing hanging on front?”
“Looks like somebody secured the hood with it. Funny way of going about it.”
Sam found himself breathing easier, beginning to feel intimations of hope. The old man had said no one was hurt. And yes, Sam began to believe, Dorrie had survived the accident, because Dorrie had tied that air pump there. It was just the sort of thing Dorrie would do.
“So the hood flew up and smashed the windshield and then she tied the hood down. . . .” Speaking somewhat more calmly, Sam moved around to the side and yanked open the passenger door to peer into the car. “No purse or anything.”
“We figure she walked away from the accident, whatever kind of accident it was, and she took it with her.”
“Then why wouldn’t she use her cell phone? She always carried it with her.”
“We don’t know.”
“Why would she tie the hood down, then walk away?”
“We don’t know that either.”
“You shouldn’t be messing around in there,” said the other cop in resigned, rote tones, “but since you already are, you notice anything else unusual?”
Sam looked. “Tools in the backseat. They should be stowed with the spare tire.”
“Any sign she had a passenger in the car?”
“No.” Sam couldn’t seem to get the edge out of his voice. Leaning into the car, he flipped open the glove box. Kia manual, insurance forms, registration, all the usual items were still there. Except one. “The flashlight’s missing.”
“Flashlight, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I guess it would be natural for her to take a flashlight with her in the nighttime. You come down off of there before the high pooh-bah of FBI arrives and I have to put handcuffs on you.”
Sam jumped down. As his feet hit the ground, he demanded, “What have you been doing to find her?”
The younger cop scowled. “Waiting for the FBI. The way I figure, they’ve got a lot more resources than we do. And when they find the Phillips girl, they’ll find your wife.” He yawned, showing some fillings in his molars.
Sam could not imagine how anyone could just assume Dorrie had taken off with the Phillips girl. And he especially could not imagine how anyone could yawn when Dorrie had not yet been found. Tightening his lips, he fought back several unwise comments, saying only, “So you don’t have any new information to go on? Anything at all?”
“Not that I know of. Bert? I thought I heard the fax machine printing out something.”
“Just the usual morning junk.”
“BOLOs from California?”
“As if anybody from California would ever show up here,” the older man explained to Sam. Then he turned back to his apparent boss. “Yep. That kind of thing.”
“I thought I heard the paper shredder going too.”
“Right.” The craggy old cop turned to Sam again and asked, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
The old guy’s voice was kind. Suddenly unable to speak, Sam nodded, telling himself he was accepting the coffee for the sake of caffeine, to stay awake.
“Cream and sugar?”
Nod. The bitter concoction had to be more bearable with cream and sugar.
“Inside,” said the surly younger police officer, leading the way.
Following him and the old cop into the station, Sam found his eyes stinging, going blind with tears. He blinked fiercely. No matter how tough things got, and no matter how exhausted he felt, he couldn’t let himself get emotional. He had to stay calm. He had to find Dorrie.
* * *
“I told you, get that coat off!”
Sitting rigid next to me on the sofa, Juliet did not obey. Maybe defiant. Maybe too terrified to move. He had His knife. He towered over us.
Loudly and firmly I intervened. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
This was absolutely true. I’d been saving up to have to go to the bathroom at some crucial point.
“So do I!” Juliet gasped. “I have to go to the bathroom too!”
His wooden face went balsa pale. The color of a skull. Death. He lifted the knife to lunge.
He was going to kill us.
Juliet screamed.
I shoved her toward the far end of the sofa as I leapt up to fling myself between Him and her. Or tried to leap. I staggered, lurched, wobbled to my feet. Damn lupus. Damn stiff legs and barely functional back. Hitching forward to stop Him, I realized I’d already succeeded, although not in the way I had intended. Frozen a couple of steps from the sofa with His knife in the air, He stood gawking at me.
When I was a little girl playing on my uncle’s farm, I had seen how the hen pheasant flounders and flutters, pretending her wing is broken, to lure danger away from her chicks. And even knowing this, whenever I had nearly stepped on a flapping hen in the weedy meadow, I had still chased after her.
Now I was the frantic, playacting hen luring the predator away from my chick. Pretending to ignore Him, limping heavily, I floundered to the door and tried the handle. It was locked, of course.
He demanded, “Stupid slut, what you think you’re doing?”
Somehow my voice still came out strong. “I need to go to the bathroom.”
“You saw where it is.” He motioned toward the fridge. “Help yourself.”
Unwisely I turned on Him. “I’ll empty it on your head first.”
And maybe following my lead, Juliet flared, “Throw some on precious Pandora too!”
We’d gone too far. Snake-quick, He coiled to strike her, knife hand raised. I couldn’t see His face, but I saw the look on hers as she closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see death coming. Before I had time to scream or hurl myself toward—
He said, “Candy need to go pee-pee?” Just like that, His tone had flipped to the sickeningly sweet extreme. He tossed His knife into the air and caught it by the handle almost playfully. “Tell you what, sugar Candy, I’ll let you and pukeface Marie both go potty in the ladies’ room down the hall if you give her ugly coat back to her.”
I limped over there, signaling Juliet with my eyes, Do it. She stood up, letting my thick quilted coat slip from her thin shoulders. I took it from her, holding it over one arm. In her skimpy top and jeans, she stood trembling like a deer.
“Now you’re sweet sweet Candy,” He pattered like a carnival barker. “See how nice I can be when you’re my good sugar Candy? Come on, babies, Pandora and I will take you to the potty.” Waving His knife like a signal flag, He directed us both toward the door.
I expected Him to step ahead of us and unlock it, His back to us. I hoped maybe I’d be able to throw myself on Him, knock Him down.
Instead, from behind us
He ordered, “Go.”
I said, “Unlock it.”
“Already did.”
I tried the handle. It turned. He had it rigged up somehow, like the ceiling light and like the seat belt in the van. Pulling on the door—it opened inward—I felt all too much the way I used to when my father hogged the TV remote: helpless and furious. Seething, I stepped out into a basement corridor, all too aware that our captor could flick off the light at any moment and trap us in total blackness. The only illumination came from the room we were leaving, and even with it, that passageway seemed dim as a tunnel. Especially with that awful dark paneling, that mottled brown indoor-outdoor carpeting . . . the same mud-toned carpeting I remembered from seventeen years before, although it lay in threadbare patches now.
I knew where this hallway went.
“Stop there,” ordered the voice from behind me. That strange, familiar voice. Daydream voice. Nightmare voice, now.
I halted outside a door that looked as elderly as the building, tall and solid, probably oak, with rectangular insets but no glass except—what was that glass door over the top of the door called? A transom. I suppose, back before there had been either air-conditioning or electric light, they’d needed it up there for ventilation and some illumination of the hallway. Now the transom’s wavy old glass showed only darkness.
Juliet stood close beside me, skinny arms wrapped across her chest, hugging herself.
“One at a time,” our escort directed. “Light switch is inside on the right. You’ll notice the lock is on this side.” He flourished His knife toward a substantial bolt on the outside of the doorframe.
Oh, no remote control device on this door? “Kind of low-tech,” I remarked.
And wished instantly that I hadn’t. The look He gave me froze my blood. “But very effective,” He retorted too softly. “Don’t try anything stupid or I’ll leave you in there to die and rot.” His stony eyes shifted in thought. “Might be the way to do it, Marie,” He added, almost friendly. “I don’t want any of your weird-ass freaking blood on me or Pandora.” He gestured with the knife. “You say you gotta go, all right, go.”
Dark Lie (9781101607084) Page 14
