Adamson gave a small noncommittal shrug and an even more noncommittal reply.
‘Drifted around.’
‘In the minivan?’
‘Yeah. I was sleeping in it.’
Evan leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. It all made sense—if you believed a word of it. Adamson gave Hendricks the perfect alibi, then took off in the vehicle that had been used to abduct Daniel. If the van had been spotted and they ever caught up with it, the suspicion would be that Adamson made a run for it and dumped Daniel somewhere along the way. He was glad he didn’t have any friends like Hendricks.
‘You look as if you almost believe me,’ Adamson said.
‘That’s because it sounds almost true.’
Adamson didn’t bite, didn’t ask him what part he didn’t believe. He leaned forward over the table.
‘You’ve met him,’ he said.
Evan nodded.
‘Did he strike you as a stupid man?’
‘No.’
‘If I’d snatched the kid, you think he’d just come out and say, hey, I’ve got a spare cell in my secret basement, you wanna use it? I’ll do you a good deal.’
He had a point. Hendricks had gone to a lot of trouble to change his name, to hide his past. It wasn’t likely he’d let Adamson jeopardize all that.
‘Tell me about the father.’
‘That’s easy. I wasn’t even living there by then.’
‘This is when you were drifting around,’ Evan said, making quotes in the air with his fingers.
‘That’s right.’
‘Can you prove it?’
Adamson was quiet for a few seconds as he thought about it.
‘Maybe. Not off the top of my head, though. I’d need the exact dates.’
It was either a very convincing bluff or he genuinely believed he’d be able to prove his innocence. There were only two things nagging at the back of Evan’s mind. Floyd Gray’s repeated caveat when he told Evan Adamson’s story was one.
Adamson was full of shit. I don’t know I ever believed a word came out his mouth.
There was nothing he could do to prove that either way. The other thing was the Zippo lighter. He pulled it out of his pocket and shoved it down the table. Adamson caught it as it flew off the end. Evan watched his face the whole time, saw a small but definite jolt of surprise-cum-recognition. He didn’t say anything.
‘Where’d you get this?’ Adamson said.
‘You admit it’s yours, then?’
Adamson didn’t answer. Evan saw his mind churning through the implications. This time he didn’t wait for him to say something, didn’t give him a chance to come up with a carefully filtered reply.
‘I found it in the basement chamber that you were never in.’
Adamson dropped his eyes. He went to put the lighter in his pocket.
‘I want that back,’ Evan said.
Adamson ignored him, dropped it in his pocket.
Evan stood up.
‘Okay, see you in court. By the way, I’ll have to say where I found the lighter—’
The words were out before he could stop them. He’d have taken them back if he could. He felt a cold chill on the back of his neck as he suddenly realized what he’d said could be construed as the offer of a deal:
Give it back and I won’t say where I found it.
The Zippo was out of Adamson’s pocket and sliding down the table towards Evan in a flash. Evan avoided Adamson’s eyes. He didn’t want him to see that any thought of a deal had crossed his mind, because it sure as hell had been taken that way by Adamson.
‘How did it get in the basement if you never went down there?’ Evan said, keeping his eyes on the lighter in his hand.
‘There’s only your word that’s where it was.’
Evan nodded, couldn’t dispute that.
‘True. But when I say that’s where I found it and you say oh no you didn’t, who do you think the jury will believe?’
Adamson studied the table top a while longer, searching for answers in the scarred surface.
‘I went down there one time,’ he said eventually, his words coming slowly as if he was reliving the experience in real-time. ‘You’re right, I was intrigued—not suspicious—why Hendricks kept everything locked. One day right before he threw me out he left the keys behind when he went out . . .’ He stopped, as if something that had puzzled him for the last ten years or more finally fell into place. He nodded to himself and carried on. ‘That’s why he kicked me out. He knew. Anyway, I found the keys on the floor. I knew I didn’t have long. I went down into the basement. There was something wrong with the lights. I don’t know, maybe he deliberately pulled the breaker in the electrical panel. I had to use that lighter to see. When I got into the room at the end of the tunnel I saw two doors. One of them was locked. None of the keys on the ring fitted it.’
Evan was back there with him, creeping around in the dark, the threat of Carl Hendricks returning at any moment hanging over him.
‘That must have been the room the boy was in. There was no sound coming from behind the door. Not even when I tried the lock.’
It was easy to imagine why not. Fear. Mind-numbing, tongue-paralyzing fear as Daniel thought his tormentor had returned to put him through hell and back once more.
‘The other door was unlocked. The room was completely empty. I walked all around it using the lighter to see if there was anything. There was nothing. Then I heard Hendricks come back. You’ve been down there, you know how you can hear when a car drives over the top. I panicked and dropped the lighter. It went out when it hit the floor. I couldn’t find it. I was groping around in the pitch black, wasting too much time. There was a faint glow coming from the stairs leading down into the main basement under the house. I ran. I made it back up the stairs into the house as he came through the back door. I didn’t have time to lock the door. He caught me standing by the basement door looking guilty as sin with the keys stuffed in my pocket. Later, I dropped them under the coat rack as if they’d fallen out of his pocket.’
Adamson was sweating by the time he finished his story, little rivulets running through his hair, down the side of his face. Evan let out a long breath he hadn’t been aware he was holding.
‘But he knew,’ Adamson said. ‘Next day he made up that story about me stealing money and I was out on my ear.’
The story made sense. But, then, all good lies do. It touched on facts and emotions that Evan could relate to. Adamson was right, he’d been in that basement, he knew what it was like to be creeping around in the dark with the fear of being caught hovering over you and the sense of a nameless dread infusing the very atmosphere of that godforsaken basement.
It still didn’t make it true.
And it didn’t answer the one question that made it virtually impossible for Evan to control his hand, to stop himself hurling the Zippo in Adamson’s face and screaming at him:
Yes, but where did you get this in the first place.
Adamson knew it too, sensed that Evan’s obsessive interest in the Zippo wasn’t just to catch him in a lie, to prove he’d been in the basement.
He didn’t know what it was, but some base instinct, an animal cunning, told him he had a hold over Evan. A hold that he could use to his advantage. Evan saw the change in his eyes, sensed how the balance had shifted.
He couldn’t stop himself, despite all that. He was who he was and there was no use fighting it. He didn’t throw the lighter in Adamson’s face, but he did place it carefully in the middle of the table. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, tried to look like he could take the answer to his next question or he could leave it, didn’t amount to a hill of beans either way.
If he thought he was fooling Adamson, he was only fooling himself.
‘Where did you get the lighter?’
That was when Adamson knew. He might be going to prison for the rest of his natural life, but he had Buckley by the balls. He stood up and looked at the tech, n
odded towards the door. Then he looked directly at Evan, a hint of a smile on his lips.
‘I’m tired now,’ he said, yawning so loud it sounded like somebody was vacuuming his mouth. ‘And I’ve got a lot to think about. We’ll talk again when I’ve decided what I want you to do. You can keep the lighter.’
Chapter 10
EVAN’S HEART SANK as he saw Levi waiting for him outside his office when he got back from visiting Adamson. His mind was still reeling as he tried to figure out exactly when and how he’d lost control of the situation, ended up on the back foot. Levi was the last thing he needed.
Levi looked as if he’d slept in his clothes after they’d been run through a car engine. The whole of the left side of his face was swollen. A trickle of dried blood ran down his jaw from his ear. A Band-Aid was taped to the top of it. Despite his war wounds, he was giving off a low-level buzz of excitement.
The strange phone call Evan received the previous night came back to him, the one that sounded like a fight was going on at the other end. Clearly, it had been. And by some miracle, Levi had come out on top.
‘You looking for this?’ Evan said once they were inside, pulling the photo of Levi’s wife out of his pocket.
Levi waved it away with a dismissive, bigger-fish-to-fry flick of the hand. Evan put it front and center on the desk so Levi didn’t miss it when he left.
‘I want to hire you again.’
Evan leaned forward, elbows on the table, palms pressed together so he at least looked like he was pleased to hear it.
‘What made you change your mind?’
‘Two of the guys who gave me that’—he tapped the photograph on the desk between them—‘abducted me.’ Then he told him all about the van with the handcuffs and the toolbox and what they were planning on doing to him.
‘Fingernails?’ Evan said when he’d finished.
Levi swallowed nervously. He ran his hand through his hair, a sheen of sweat on his top lip. As he lifted his arm, Evan caught the stale odor of unwashed body with the remains of something else behind it.
‘Yes. Fingernails. The big guy said the other one, the scary one, collected them, said he pulled them all out even if you told him—’
‘What did you do after you got away?’ Evan said, cutting him off.
‘Drove for a couple miles, then parked and searched the van. I was hoping my laptop might be there, but it wasn’t, just this battered old toolbox.’ Subconsciously he covered the fingers of his right hand with his left palm, protecting them, as he carried on. He shook his head, a gesture of regret, of wishing he’d had the sense to know better. ‘I couldn’t stop myself from looking. Jesus. I wish I hadn’t. There was a pair of blood-stained pliers, little bits of . . . I don’t know how I wasn’t sick. I can’t stop thinking how they were going to pull out my fingernails and I wouldn’t be able to tell them anything to make them stop. I had nightmares about it last night. The one called Tomás kept pulling them out over and over and over again. By the time he’d ripped out the last one, the others had all grown back and he started over—’
‘Where did you sleep?’
The abrupt question jerked Levi back from whatever dark place in his mind he’d been transported to. He cocked his head, his brow furrowing, as if he didn’t understand the question. Evan repeated it for him.
‘In the van,’ he said, wrinkling his nose, then sniffing at his clothes. ‘Ugh. You wouldn’t believe what it smells like. Smell that.’
‘No thanks,’ Evan said, pulling back from the outstretched arm. He knew exactly what it smelled like from where he was. Human fear and degradation.
‘Do you believe me now?’
‘About your wife not being dead, you mean? I don’t know.’
Levi came out of his chair like somebody had lit a fire under it, planted his hands flat on the desk.
‘Jesus Christ! What will it take? You don’t threaten to pull out somebody’s fingernails unless you’re pretty sure they know something. They think she’s alive and they think I know where she is.’
‘If that’s true it means she faked her own death. Why—’
‘It must be to do with why these guys are looking for her.’
‘And something else,’ Evan said, feeling as if he was standing in front of the mirror, giving himself a talking-to. Something in his tone made Levi stop and listen instead of talking over him. ‘It means she doesn’t want to be found. Not by anyone . . .’
He didn’t need to finish the sentence.
Not even you.
‘Are you ready for that?’ Evan carried on, the feeling of talking to himself intensifying, of talking to a brick wall.
Levi shook his head helplessly. He didn’t know or he didn’t want to know, it didn’t make a lot of difference.
‘I don’t have a lot of choice, do I? I didn’t start this. It’s not up to me when it stops either. Those guys aren’t going to give up. Are you going to do this or not?’
Evan didn’t have a lot of choice either. It didn’t happen often, but this was one of those situations where he realized he was strangely superstitious, that he didn’t want to tempt fate. If he didn’t do this for Levi, with his hangdog face that needed a good slap, fate would make damn sure he never found the answers he was looking for, answers about Sarah’s disappearance.
‘Okay. Start at the beginning. I want to know what happened when she supposedly died.’
‘I told you all that yesterday.’
‘I need more details. Have you got the death certificate? Autopsy report?’
Levi dropped heavily into his chair. His shoulders slumped.
‘It was all on my laptop. I scanned them in case I lost the hard copies.’
‘So, where are they? The hard copies.’
‘I think I lost them.’
For a moment Evan thought he was joking. The look on Levi’s face told him otherwise.
‘You think you lost them?’
‘I looked for them the other day, after the two guys left. I couldn’t find them. Maybe I threw them out by mistake.’
Despite Evan doing his best to keep his face neutral, there was something in it that Levi didn’t like.
‘You think I’ve made it all up about Lauren dying, don’t you? That she’s alive because she never died in the first place.’
Evan guessed he was a hair’s breadth away from getting fired a second time. That would be a new record, an achievement he wouldn’t look forward to telling Guillory about. He picked up the photograph still sitting on the desk between them, changed the subject.
‘Why would anybody be looking for her? Especially the sort of people who are prepared to pull out fingernails to get what they want.’
Levi shook his head.
‘No idea.’
‘Did she owe money? Gamble?’
‘No. And no. She hated gambling, said it was for losers. And, no, she didn’t have a drug problem either.’ He glared at Evan as if he’d just insulted his sister. ‘She hated drugs more than she hated gambling.’
‘What does she like to do?’ Evan said, deciding against asking him if she got drunk on a regular basis.
Levi’s face softened, thinking about better times.
‘To fly. Her old man always promised to teach her to fly before . . . anyway, that was what she lived for.’
Evan didn’t push him on what he’d been about to say. It would come out if it was important. Levi’s gaze was off in the distance somewhere, his eyes out of focus. A wistful smile curled the corners of his mouth. Evan smiled with him although he couldn’t think why. It seemed to him he’d have more chance finding that other, more famous, female pilot—Amelia Earhart—than Levi’s clean-living wife.
Chapter 11
‘HOW’D IT GO with Adamson?’ Kate Guillory said when Evan called her immediately after Levi left. He’d forgotten about it.
‘So-so. Hendricks told him I was the one put him in the coma. But I reckon I convinced him Hendricks is his problem, not me.’
&nbs
p; Something that sounded a lot like hmmm came down the line.
‘What do you mean hmmm?’
‘Just because you didn’t put him in the hospital, doesn’t mean you’re not his number one problem now. The statement you gave us is all we have connecting him to what happened in that house. That and the lighter you found. The fact that Hendricks almost killed him and would have bricked him up in that chamber with you works in his favor too, makes him look like a victim, not a perp. None of it made a lot of difference while he was in a coma that nobody expected him to come out of—’
‘But now he’s awake—’
The words hung in the air between them, the implication clear. Guillory put it into words.
‘My guess is they’ll cut him loose in the next day or two. I’d watch my back if I were you. He might decide to eliminate his problem at the source.’
Evan pictured Adamson shuffling into the room on his sticks, standing there helplessly as the nurse retrieved one of them for him when he dropped it, his body stooped, muscles wasted. It didn’t bring him much comfort. It doesn’t take a lot of strength to pull a trigger, after all. Or ask a friend to.
‘You offering to act as police protection?’
‘No—but Ryder’s free.’
‘I think I’ll take my chances, thanks.’
She laughed, but it rang false. He heard something behind it, knew she was uncomfortable with his refusal to take his safety seriously.
‘What did he say about the lighter?’ she said, deciding to not waste any more breath.
‘We’ll talk again when I’ve decided what I want you to do.’
‘What?’
‘It’s obvious isn’t it? He’ll tell me what I want to know if I do something for him in exchange. Trouble is, he didn’t say what. Yet.’
He felt the disappointment coming down the line, pictured the slow head shake, the pity in her eyes.
‘Jesus, Evan, don’t you ever learn? You never heard the phrase twisting in the wind? He’s going to jerk you around like everybody else does. Sometimes I think they’re all in it together. You’re the only one who can’t, or won’t, see it.’
He didn’t want to get into this argument with her again. They’d had it so many times before, he’d lost count. Seemed to him he always lost it, too.
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