by Scott Frost
“Do you think we got lucky,” I said to Harrison, “or do you think Gabriel wanted us to see his face?”
Harrison looked at the empty doorway where Philippe had just exited.
“I’ve been thinking about that. . . . The best I’ve come up with is that Gabriel couldn’t have known that I would be one of the people to walk through that door. If I didn’t, or someone like me, that bomb blows out the corner of that apartment building. And you’re dead.”
“Why did we have that minute to disarm it then?”
He turned to me. “A timed device multiplies the terror.”
The words hung in the air demanding attention.
“Multiplies the terror?” I thought about it for a moment. “You’re talking about suspense, aren’t you?”
He nodded. “Yeah, like a Hitchcock movie.”
“It’s not just about the victim, it’s about the people you frighten?”
“It makes more sense than us seeing his face.”
I started to step into my office.
“Lieutenant.”
I stopped and turned back to him.
“Whichever it is, this is the first bomber I’ve ever been frightened of.”
I looked into Harrison’s eyes for a moment. They appeared older; there was a weariness I hadn’t noticed before. They were the eyes of a man who had buried a young wife, who knew the results of terror. I stepped quickly into my office. I wondered if he would have shared that bit of information with me if I had been a male officer. And in truth I could have used a bit more locker room bravado than honest emotional intimacy.
I closed the door behind me, locked it, then walked over to my desk and looked down at my phone. My mother had already found out about the pageant fiasco on TV. And now it would only be a matter of hours before the news media had the story of Lacy’s disappearance, and I couldn’t let her hear about it that way.
I looked around at the walls of my office. They were lined with commendations, awards, service medals, plaques, photographs, every kind of knickknack that records a successful career. And now I would have to admit the truth to the one person who had always been able to inspire doubt in me. I hadn’t been able to protect my daughter. I felt like such a terrible failure.
I reached out to pick up the handset. As my fingers touched it I was sixteen again, geeky, never right, never perfect, never quite good enough. I was no longer any of the things my career suggested I was. The evidence on the walls of my office belonged to a stranger.
My mother’s phone rang three times. On the fourth ring I ever so subtly began to move the handset away from my ear, as if there was an involuntary reflex to hang up before she answered. The line clicked as we were connected.
“Hello.”
“It’s Alex, Mom.”
“Alex, I have been calling. What time is it?”
I had forgotten about time. I checked my watch. It was already after midnight.
“It’s late, Mom.”
“Why didn’t you get back to me? What is going on with my—”
“Mom.”
“I don’t understand why one phone call—”
“Something has happened. I need you to be quiet and listen.”
“I’m always here to listen, you know that. Not that you call. . . . Oh, God, is she pregnant?”
“Stop. Just stop and listen.”
There was silence on the other end. I could hear her take a wounded breath. “Fine.”
I started to speak, but before I could form a word my eyes filled with tears.
“Alex?”
She always had that ability to sense my emotional balance. Normally she used it like a shark sensing blood in the water to undermine me. But not this time. Her voice was different—softer, tender. It touched a place in my memory where all there was was love between us. A six-year-old daughter and a proud mother. Soul mates. What had happened to that? Was it my father leaving her when I was seven? Was it her quest to make sure I was never going to be as vulnerable as she had been to the musings of a man that made her push and push until we were strangers to each other?
Tears fell from my face and soaked into the pages of a report on my desk. I wiped them away and closed my eyes.
“Lacy’s been kidnapped.”
There was a short gasp as if all the air had just been forced out of her lungs. “I . . . I don’t understand. What do you mean—”
“She’s been kidnapped. It’s exactly what it sounds like.”
“But . . . you’re not joking.”
“No.”
“You’re not rich. Wealthy people are kidnapped. This doesn’t make sense. You must have made a mistake. I don’t believe—”
“Listen,” I yelled into the phone before her emotions got out of hand.
“Don’t talk to me like that.”
“Just listen.”
I heard her take a deep breath, then I continued.
“This is different. There’s more that I can’t go into, but I don’t think it’s about the money.”
“What then? Why?” Her voice was rising as the shock began to settle in. “Oh, God.”
“Mother, you need to call a friend, have them come over, don’t be alone right now.”
“I’ll come out there.”
She was in a retirement community in Arizona called Sun Estates.
“No, there’s nothing for you to do here, and I’ll be too busy. You’d just be alone.”
“You don’t—”
“Mother, I have to think of Lacy and nothing else. Your being here won’t help her. I’m going to find her, I promise you. She’s going to be all right.”
“This can’t be . . . It just . . .”
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone, then a barely audible whisper.
“Oh, Alex . . .” Her voice trailed away in heartbreak. Then she whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
It was the voice I remembered from my childhood, as gentle as a song. As she hung up the phone I could hear her holding back sobs.
A PACIFIC BREEZE had blown in, clearing the sky and dropping the temperature into the mid-forties. As Harrison drove us up the gradual slope into the foothills, I rolled down the window. Even this far inland, there was the subtle briny scent of the Pacific in the breeze. Taking in the air, I looked up into the dark sky—the stars sparkled in the blackness like luminescence in a tide pool. And somewhere underneath it all was my daughter.
“They’ll be camping out tonight,” I said.
Harrison looked across the seat not understanding.
“The parade. Families will be wrapping themselves in blankets and sleeping bags and camping out all along Colorado. I know of families that have been doing it every year since I was a kid. It’s a family tradition like Fourth of July fireworks. And that’s just the people on the actual parade route.”
A shudder went through me. I could still feel the rush of air and then the deafening concussion of the explosion in the bungalow.
“Worldwide, they estimate that two hundred million people will be watching on TV.”
I could tell from the look on his face that the number was news to Harrison.
“Two hundred million,” he said in surprise. “I had no idea.”
“Next to the Super Bowl, it’s one of the most-watched television events of the year.”
I looked at the dark road ahead for a minute.
“What was it that Philippe said Gabriel told him?” I said.
Harrison thought for a moment. “Everyone will know who I am, and everyone will fear me,” he whispered.
That was it. Everyone will fear me. A dream come true.
“There’re kids out there waiting for a parade. . . . Gabriel’s going to kill children, and two hundred million people will be watching.”
The lines around Harrison’s eyes tightened.
“The more innocent the victim, the more effective the terror. That’s the idea, right?” I said.
Harrison stole a quick glance at
me, then looked straight ahead.
“We have his face; he won’t get close.”
“Does he have to? Has anything he’s done up to this point struck you as the work of someone who plans on martyring himself?”
Harrison thought for a moment and then shook his head uneasily. “No.”
“And that makes him even more dangerous, doesn’t it?”
Harrison didn’t have to answer. The truth settled over his face like a mask. Things just kept getting worse.
We turned onto Mariposa and headed down my block past houses I had been driving by for twenty years. There were ivy-covered hills sloping up to perfect lawns. There were plastic reindeer on roofs and white Christmas lights made to look like icicles hanging from gutters. The Kellys lived there, the Geotzes there. Lacy had taken her first steps on this block. In that house, she kissed her first boy. In that one, my husband had had the affair with a dentist’s wife. Everything about it was familiar, except now it had the appearance of a studio backlot where only make-believe happens. The houses were facades, the happy, safe lives merely scripted. If a Santa Ana came blowing down out of the desert, I was sure it would all be swept away.
I noticed an unmarked car parked on the street outside my house. Harrison pulled up the incline of the drive and stopped. He opened the door and began to get out, then noticed I wasn’t moving.
I didn’t want to walk into that house knowing she wouldn’t be inside. I didn’t want to step into her room and go through her things as if she were just another victim whose secrets were now public property.
Harrison slipped back into the seat and looked straight ahead, his eyes seeing far beyond the garage door toward some distant point in time.
“My wife was missing for six days before she was found.”
He turned to me as if looking away from the past. “You have to fight doubt as if it has a face.”
He held my eyes for a moment, then looked straight ahead and took a deep breath.
“What face did you give it?”
The corners of his mouth turned up slightly in a smile, then he looked down at his hands as if something had just slipped through them. He shook his head.
“I never managed to.”
HARRISON HESITATED at the door to Lacy’s room as I stepped inside. As if by instinct, I picked up a T-shirt lying on the floor, folded it, then laid it on her bed. Mustn’t let a visitor see how messy your daughter’s room is.
“Does she have a diary?” Harrison asked, still standing in the doorway.
“Journal,” I said, remembering how Lacy had corrected me years before with the same question. “A diary is something nineteenth-century women used to remember who they had tea with. A journal is for writing, a record of your life.”
I glanced at Harrison, who was puzzled by the words.
“Teenagers are very specific about some things.”
I looked around the room. I wanted to touch every object, as if they would bring her closer to me. I wanted to hug her worn-out stuffed bear, as if it could whisper to me where she was.
“The journal wasn’t in her backpack, so it should be here,” I said.
Harrison was still standing in the doorway, hesitant to violate my daughter’s space and turn her bedroom into an evidence search.
“You want to do this alone?” he asked.
I looked around the room. Memories began rushing out of the pale yellow paint of the walls like oncoming traffic. A seven-year-old with a missing tooth came flying by. A five-year-old with a fever dream. A sleepover. Laughter. Loud, bad boy-toy music. The faint whiff of cigarette smoke filtering out from under the door.
I gripped the painted iron of her bedpost as if to pull myself back to the present. I then looked over to Harrison.
“Being alone is the last thing I want right now.”
“Okay.”
He stepped across the threshold and looked around. I could feel something change in the room. Lacy had just slipped a little further away.
“How about her desk?” he said.
I nodded and walked over to it but didn’t reach for any of the drawers. I just stared at it, unable to lift my hand.
“I think I’d like you to do this,” I said.
“Sure,” Harrison said. He stepped up beside me and began opening drawers.
I looked away. I didn’t want to be a part of this. I thought I could, but I couldn’t. I had to hold my daughter closer than this. I wanted her secrets to remain hers now more than ever.
“Anything that seems out of place, whatever, take it out,” I said.
I turned and walked over to the window, listening to the sound of drawers sliding open and papers being searched. The window looked out onto the backyard, which consisted of a square patch of grass and a border of bougainvillea along a split-rail fence line. Lacy had always said it would be a perfect yard for a dog, a golden retriever. But we never got one. I always came up with a reason why we shouldn’t.
“You ever have a dog?” I asked Harrison.
The rustling in the desk stopped. “Sure, growing up. We always had dogs. . . . I think this is it.”
I turned around and Harrison was holding Lacy’s journal. A blue, leather-bound volume with a sunflower painted on the cover.
“Yeah, that’s it. I’ve seen her carry it.”
He held it out to me. “You want to—”
“No, you do it. Work back from the last entry. A number, name . . . you know what to look for.”
He stepped back to the desk, sat down, and opened the journal to the last entry. “Dated yesterday.”
He began reading backward, turning pages quickly. As he read more passages a faint smile became visible on his lips.
“What is it?”
“It’s about the pageant.” He looked over at me. “I wish I had been there,” he said.
“I wish I hadn’t been.”
I heard myself say the words and swore my own mother had just said them. God, why did I say that? Have I learned nothing?
“No, that’s not true, it was great,” I said. “To have done what she did in front of all those people, knowing the trouble she would be in and what people would think of her. I’ll never be that brave, ever.”
Harrison glanced back at the journal and nodded.
“You have a very cool daughter, Lieutenant.”
He looked at me, but I couldn’t hold his eyes. My heart was in my throat. My voice broke when I tried to speak. All I could manage was a weak “Yeah.”
Harrison returned to the journal, carefully dissecting each word for any hidden meaning or misdirection. The room felt unnaturally silent. I desperately wanted to hear some very bad music, or the ringing of her phone—any noise to mask the emptiness. My breathing began to increase, though I couldn’t seem to take in enough air. Where was my daughter, where?
“I think I’ll step outside,” I said, starting for the door.
“Does the name or letter D mean anything?”
I stopped. Harrison was holding out the journal toward me. “There’s a phone number next to it.”
I reached out and took her journal in my hands. For a moment I just looked at the writing on the pages. The graceful loops and turns of ink looked like extensions of her long, thin fingers. I had always marveled at it. Where did she get this natural grace? Certainly not from me. Was it possible that along with red hair and certain genetic maladies, grace skipped a generation or two?
The letter D and the number were centered on a page between two widely spaced paragraphs.
“It doesn’t reference the paragraph before or the one after.”
“What do you think D stands for?”
“The obvious choice would be Daniel.”
“Finley.”
“Yeah . . . but that’s not his phone number. I remember it from the report.”
I picked up Lacy’s phone and called the number. Each ring felt like a jolt of electricity traveling through the line to my hand. I gave it ten rings and put it down.
“Let’s get an address on the number.”
Harrison jotted it down and then left me alone in the bedroom.
I resisted looking in the journal for a moment but was gradually drawn into it. How could I not be? I wanted to put my arms around it and hold my daughter’s thoughts as if I were embracing her. I began skimming pages looking for another reference to D, but found nothing. I tried not to read specific passages, but it was like trying not to love something you gave life to. Every other entry was a question. Why am I . . . Why do I feel . . . What did I do . . . Why is ____ such a shit. Being seventeen was like riding an insane carnival ride with no direction and no foreseeable end. God, I’d forgotten.
As I skimmed, my eyes settled on a passage and refused to move on. I tried not to read it, but it was already done. Shit. I read it softly out loud.
“What do I have to do to make Mom proud of me? What do I fucking have to do?”
There it was.
The journal sank to my lap. I stared into the pale yellow of the walls and silently repeated the words.
“What do I fucking have to do?”
Somewhere over the foothills the thump, thump of a department helicopter broke the silence. Out the window I saw the beam of its night sun arc across the darkness toward the ground. The helicopter turned to the west and moved away, the thumping of its rotors fading away, only to be replaced by the rhythmic beating of my heart in the empty room. I was holding the journal so tightly the knuckles of my fingers were turning white. Tears began to flood my eyes. What had I done?
Harrison knocked on the door and stepped in. I closed the journal and slipped it carefully back into its drawer exactly as we had found it. I didn’t want her to know we had violated it. It would be the last lie between us.
“Tell me something good,” I said, wiping away the tears.
“The number’s in Azusa. From the address, I’d say it’s a residence.”
I started for the door, but Harrison didn’t move. His eyes were seeing beyond the walls of Lacy’s room and held a look of apprehension or disbelief. The beeper on my belt went off. Harrison appeared to be expecting it.
“What is it?” I asked.
