Nothing budged. Most of the wall panels were padded and fabric-covered. Whatever was beneath them felt rock solid.
Where is the remote? What good are all these electronics without a remote control?
I was about to conclude that someone had pilfered the thing during one of the showings of Doyle’s house when I guessed that the storage cabinet I’d been searching for might be secreted behind the Spielberg movie screen. I returned to the front of the room. Careful to use only my fingernails, I pulled on one side of the mahogany molding.
It didn’t budge.
I moved to the other side of the screen and did the same.
That side didn’t move either.
I tried the hidden latch trick and used my elbow to put pressure on the right vertical section of the frame.
The mahogany slid backward half a centimeter and clicked.
Bingo.
I released the pressure and the screen swung forward from a recessed hinge on the opposite side of the frame.
My mouth dropped open.
Well, I thought, this part of the book isn’t fiction.
I pulled myself into the opening behind the screen, used my fingernail to flick on a light switch, and stared, trying to drink in every detail before I was banished from the house, because I knew that it was almost certain that I was about to be banished from the house.
I spent about a minute sitting there-examining, figuring, memorizing-before I hopped back down into the theater, flicked off the light switch, swung the screen back into place, and found Sam in the kitchen. He was engaged in a dialogue with a woman dressed in street clothes. I figured she was a detective or a crime-scene tech. I manufactured some fresh surprise for my voice as I interrupted them. “Excuse me. Something to show you in the theater downstairs, Detective Purdy.”
The woman with Sam gave me a who-the-hell-are-you look. Sam glared at me, too, and seemed prepared to launch into some low-velocity attack on my character either because I’d interrupted something important or because I’d ignored his instructions to stay put downstairs.
Or both. Most likely, both.
“Now,” I said. “It’s important.”
“Give me a minute,” Sam said. He said it not to me, but to the woman in the street clothes.
52
Earlier that evening, back in my office, I had lifted a dozen or so sheets from the top of the stack inside the blue Kinko’s box and placed them in my lap. I’d turned the pages one by one, lingering for a long moment over the handwritten sheet that Bob Brandt had written warning me not to read any further.
Ultimately, I turned that one, too. Considering the transgression I’d committed by arranging the fake-psychotherapy session with Bill Miller that afternoon, breaking my promise to Bob Brandt not to read his manuscript until he gave me permission seemed, by comparison, like a paltry professional sin. Right or wrong, I’d already rationalized that Bob’s apparent disappearance was a sufficiently emergent circumstance to void the previous arrangement, anyway.
I was beginning to feel so adept at rationalization that I was considering running for Congress.
The next sheet in the box was the first page of actual text of Bob’s book, written in that tiny font he preferred.
No one had considered the possibility of a tunnel.
Talk about starting your joke with the punch line.
A tunnel? “No one had considered the possibility of a tunnel.”
Holy moly.
53
Doyle’s excavation was a work of thoughtful engineering.
The length of the subterranean construction wasn’t exactly mind-boggling; the distance between the south side of Doyle’s basement and the north side of the Miller home was only about fifteen feet. And this wasn’t a highway tunnel; the diameter of the mostly round bore ranged from a maximum of about thirty inches a few feet from where it began behind the Spielberg movie screen to as narrow as twenty-four inches or so near the Millers’ house. Parallel tracks of angle iron were embedded in the flat floor of the tunnel all the way from one end to the other. A long string of outdoor holiday lights-white only-were stretched along the entire distance to provide illumination.
The slope of the tunnel-it ran downhill at a steeper angle than I would have expected-was curious to me, but my initial impression was that the slope was deliberate. It appeared that the floor of the tunnel dropped about six or seven feet over its short length. A husky winch was bolted to the outside of Doyle’s foundation wall and a sturdy stretch of conduit connected it to the house’s electrical system. The stout cable from the winch was hooked to one end of an ingenious contraption that was constructed of four sets of skateboard wheels topped with two narrow, interconnected sections of thick plywood, loosely hinged in the middle. The wheels of the makeshift sled fit perfectly into the angle iron tracks that had been set in the tunnel floor.
A flimsy remote-control unit jerry-rigged from a garage-door opener would have allowed Doyle to operate the winch from any location in the tunnel. By climbing prone onto the sled, hanging on, and pressing the remote-control button, Doyle could either slowly extend or retract the cable on the winch, which would either lower the sled farther into the tunnel toward the Millers’ house or pull it back up the slope toward his own house.
Simple. Elegant.
Building the tunnel would have been tedious, no doubt. But if Doyle had managed only six inches of fresh digging a day, he could have completed the excavation in a little over a month. A foot a day and he’d have been done in a fortnight. The dirt that he’d removed from the tunnel was undoubtedly part of the weaving contours and berms of Doyle’s personal backyard water park.
And the snow thing?
Mystery solved.
54
“You should close that door,” I said, after Sam had followed me back downstairs into Doyle’s theater.
He hesitated, his bushy brows burdened more with aggravation than curiosity. But he complied. The chatter from the rest of the house disappeared as the door settled against soundproofing gaskets in the jamb.
I stepped across the room. Without fanfare I raised my elbow and pressed on the edge of the movie screen. The frame swung open on its long hinge, revealing Doyle’s portal.
Sam stepped closer and leaned inside. He said, “Holy shit.”
“Yeah.”
Sam did what I had done, although he pulled on fresh latex first. He lifted himself up into the opening behind the movie screen, flicked on the light switch, and stared. I watched his eyes move from the dirt cave, to the angle iron tracks, to the string of holiday lights, to the winch, to the sled.
I couldn’t be sure, of course, but I thought that he was adding things up the same way I had. He didn’t say a word at first; he just shook his head slowly. Admiration? Frustration? Amazement? I couldn’t tell.
After a couple of minutes silently going over the specific elements and the implications of Doyle’s tunnel, he hopped back down from the opening and stood next to me. “This is what you were looking for?” Sam’s voice was only a few decibels above a whisper.
“A tunnel, yeah.”
“But you thought it was in the crawl space?”
“That was my guess. I figured that was most likely. I thought we’d find the opening underneath the plastic in there.”
“You going to tell me how you knew?” he asked.
“No.”
“How did you find it?”
“Boredom. Luck.”
“Tell me how you knew about it.”
“I probably shouldn’t have disclosed the tunnel to you, Sam. I absolutely can’t rationalize disclosing how I know about it.”
For the time being he appeared to accept that. He put his hand on my shoulder, the act of a friend, and said, “Come on. We need to clear out. It’s hurry-up-and-wait time.”
“Why?” I didn’t want to leave; if he’d let me, I was planning to stay and watch the photographers and crime-scene techs do their thing on whatever they discovered in D
oyle’s tunnel.
“This isn’t exactly covered by the search-warrant request we made. I have to amend it and go back to Judge Heller.” He paused, filling his ample cheeks with air and exhaling loudly before he spoke again. “And now I’m going to need a fresh warrant for the Millers’ house to see how this thing looks from the other end.”
He sounded weary. “I thought you’d be excited about this,” I said.
“You’re thinking Mallory, right?” He looked back up at the opening in the theater wall. “This is how she got out of her house that night? This is the answer to the snow puzzle?”
“Sure. You have to admit that it adds a whole new dimension.”
“I’ve told you before: The fact that the kid didn’t leave any footprints in the snow the night she disappeared doesn’t mean anything. What’s important about this tunnel isn’t that now we know how Mallory got out of the Miller house. That’s not why the tunnel’s here. What’s important about this tunnel is that now we know how Doyle got into the Miller house.
“What we still don’t know is why. Why did the guy living next door want this kind of access?”
Sam had a point. “He certainly went to a lot of trouble, didn’t he?”
“This is the sort of thing bank robbers used to dig to get into a vault full of cash. But if Doyle Chandler wanted to bust into the Millers’ house to steal, why do all this? People bust into houses all the time. And they get away with it, neighbors even. They pick locks, break windows. But this tunnel wasn’t built for some one-time burglary. This was built for long-term access. Bill Miller never reported a burglary at that house. If Doyle wasn’t stealing from them, why did he want in so badly?”
“Mallory?” I said in reply to Sam’s question.
“Yeah, maybe it’s that simple, maybe he was a perv. Time will tell.”
“What if your underlying assumption is wrong, Sam? What if she didn’t run? What if Doyle took Mallory out through the tunnel? What if that’s why he wanted access to the Millers’ house?”
Sam closed his eyes and his body stilled as though he were narcoleptic and he’d suddenly started sleeping standing up. For a moment even the act of breathing wasn’t apparent. Finally, he opened his eyes and said, “Again, why? There are easier ways, and there’s a lot we don’t know.”
“Like?”
“Like… where does this thing come out in the Millers’ house? Why didn’t we spot it last month? That house got more attention than the new girl at a titty bar.”
“You weren’t looking for a tunnel. I wouldn’t have found this if I didn’t suspect it was here.” I actually didn’t feel like admitting to Sam that what I’d been looking for when I stumbled on the tunnel was Doyle’s fancy remote control. “Who would have guessed that somebody had dug a tunnel into his neighbor’s house? Who does things like that?”
Sam eyed me suspiciously. “You didn’t go down there, did you? To the other end? Tell me you didn’t mess with this evidence.”
“I went no farther in than you did.”
I waited in the vacant living room while Sam went through the house ordering all the search personnel to pack up their equipment and immediately leave Doyle Chandler’s home. While he was upstairs I ambled over to the southern window in the living room and checked to see if I could spot the familiar silhouette in the front upstairs window of the Millers’ house. I couldn’t.
Sam was the last to clear out.
“Not a word,” he said to me as we approached the front door.
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t want Bill Miller to know we’re heading over there. All I’ve told the team is that I’m modifying the affidavit. They don’t know about the tunnel yet.”
I made a zip-it motion over my lips.
Sam clarified. “Not even Lauren.”
“She’s probably asleep. I’ll tell her in the morning.”
“That’s fine. You can tell her in the morning. But you can’t tell your source. Your patient, whatever.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“Because I know you aren’t clairvoyant, I also know that somebody told you about the existence of this tunnel. It wasn’t Doyle Chandler since I don’t think he’s done much chatting to anybody over the last few days. So it was someone else. Maybe the Camaro guy, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. Keep the discovery of the tunnel to yourself.”
“I understand.”
“Wait.” He glared at me. “You weren’t seeing the kid for therapy, were you?”
“Mallory? No.”
The glare degraded into a face that was merely suspicious. “Was Diane?”
I shook my head. I was glad I wasn’t hooked up to a polygraph.
“No bullshit?”
“No bullshit.”
“And your guy’s still missing, right?”
“Who?”
“The Camaro guy? You haven’t talked to him.”
For the moment, I’d almost forgotten about Bob’s plight. “Yes, he’s still missing, and no, I haven’t talked to him.”
Sam kept his eyes on mine for a few seconds after I answered his question. He was trying, I thought, to decide whether or not he believed me.
“There’s something else to wonder about, too,” he said.
“What?”
“Say the Camaro guy knew about the tunnel. What’s his part in all this? You’re afraid he’s a victim. Not me. I’m seeing his name on our list of suspects. Everything’s in play again, Alan. Everything from Christmas Day on.” He opened his eyes wide in amazement. “And I’m right in the f-ing middle of it.”
It was at that moment that I stopped waiting for Sam to thank me for my help in discovering the tunnel. It was apparent he wasn’t too happy about being right in the f-ing middle of whatever the tunnel represented.
“Sam, Mallory could be alone somewhere. If you guys have been wrong all along-if she didn’t run, if she was abducted by Doyle… well, Doyle’s dead. She could be locked in some crappy cabin up in the mountains all by herself. She may not have food or water. It’s freezing outside. She may need help.”
“I know all that.”
“Did you guys find out where Doyle’s been living since he moved out of here?”
Sam just shook his head. “We have a cell number, that’s all. He was pretty intent on keeping his profile low.”
“Why?” I asked.
“We don’t know.”
“You don’t know or you won’t tell me?”
“We don’t know,” Sam admitted.
“Did you find his car?”
“Truck, but no.”
Finally, he opened the front door and allowed me to walk out in front of him. “Go home. We can do this,” he said.
I thought he was trying to convince himself, but I kept that thought to myself.
55
I took advantage of the cover provided by the cluster of crime-scene techs still huddled outside the front door of Doyle’s house and immediately cut across the neighbor’s front lawn toward my car. I was hoping that Bill Miller hadn’t spotted me either arriving or leaving, but I didn’t turn around to check for his silhouette at the window.
The night had turned cold, bitter cold, so cold that the snow on the ground squeaked beneath my feet with each step. I raised the collar on my jacket and stuffed my hands as deeply into my pockets as I could. A breeze was blowing down from the north and I lowered my face to retard the harsh chill of the Canadian air. Each fresh gust cut at my skin like a shard of glass.
“I thought that was you over there.”
Someone was leaning against the hood of my Audi wagon, bundled in a ski parka, a wool cap pulled all the way down past the ears. It took me a moment to process the available data-first, that the person was a man, and second, that the man was probably Bill Miller.
“Good evening,” I said. I thought I’d managed a pretty fair attempt at disguising my fluster.
“We need to talk,” he said.
Politely, I said, “Well, we hav
e a time set up, I think. I don’t have my calendar with me.” I didn’t really expect my parry to work, but mounting it seemed like a necessity.
It didn’t work.
“No, now. You’re back in my neighborhood. And you’re here with a whole shitload of police. That means we talk tonight. Is that too much to ask?”
Shitload? That wasn’t a Bill Miller word.
I was starting to shiver from the cold. I was dressed to travel short distances between warm houses and cars with seat heaters. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough to linger on a Boulder sidewalk in January in the face of a north wind.
“It’s not appropriate for me to see you here, Bill. This isn’t the place for a professional meeting.”
“You want to come over to my house?”
The tone of the question was appropriately sarcastic. When I didn’t reply, he added, “Or I could follow you over to your office. That would be fine with me, too.”
My fingers clumsy, I fumbled for the tiny button on the key that would unlock the doors on the Audi. “Let’s get out of the cold. At least tell me what’s on your mind.”
Bill’s ski parka was noisy. The nylon or Gore-Tex or whatever the sleek fabric was rustled and crackled as he settled into the front seat of my car. I waited patiently for the crinkling to diminish, and I used the time to put the key in the ignition, start the engine, and flick on the seat heaters. Truth be told, the seat heaters were half the reason I’d bought the Audi. I never knew it before I tried seat heaters for the first time, but it turned out that if my butt was warm, I was warm.
What an epiphany.
I tried to guess what was coming next from Bill Miller. On that front, I was drawing a blank.
Bill pulled his cap back so that it sat high on the crown of his head like a kid’s beanie. He stared at me. In another circumstance I would have found the portrait humorous, and might have laughed. Not that day, though. Not those circumstances.
Missing Persons Page 30
