by C. J. Box
“Yes.”
“You fucking better. You know what happened to Rodale when he forgot the deal we all made.”
Newkirk nodded.
“You in?” Singer asked. Everything rode on the answer.
“I’m in.”
Then he remembered the business card in his back pocket.
“ARCADIA POLICE DEPARTMENT,” Singer said, fingering the card. “Eduardo Villatoro, Detective. Then he handwrote ‘Retired’ under it. From our old stomping grounds.”
Gonzalez asked, “You know him?”
“I know him,” Singer said. “Actually, I know of him, because I always avoided meeting with him in person. He’s that pain-in-the-ass local who kept coming around asking questions. He couldn’t recognize a stone wall if he drove into it. Either that, or he didn’t care.”
Newkirk said, “This could be bad.”
Singer shook his head, dismissing the notion.
“What if he’s here because of, you know?”
“Then we’ll handle him,” Singer said calmly.
“Eduardo Villatoro!” Gonzalez said in heavily accented English, rolling his tongue around the name, just like Villatoro had done.
“He’s an ex–small-town cop,” Singer said, handing the card back to Newkirk.
Gonzalez said, “Maybe he wants to retire here. He’s probably worn-out from a lot of big cases in his career like getting kittens out of trees and shit like that. It means zilch. Let’s not get paranoid. We’ve got a couple of young’uns to locate first.”
Something banged the door, and the three ex-cops exchanged glances. Singer signaled for Newkirk to check out the sound.
Newkirk approached the door silently, then quickly grabbed the doorknob and threw it back.
A janitor stood in the hallway, pulling a mop back from where he had hit the bottom of the door. There were rainbow-colored arcs of soapy mop water on the linoleum floor. Newkirk saw the man jump when he opened the door, and take an involuntary step back. The janitor looked to be in his midthirties, a trustee judging by his orange jail-bird jumpsuit. Stringy brown hair coursed to his thin shoulders. Unfocused—and alarmed—eyes moved from Newkirk to Singer to Gonzalez.
“What do you want?” Gonzalez asked from behind the table. He had folded his arms across his chest in front of him so they looked even bigger than they were.
“Nothin’,” the janitor said. “Jes’ cleanin’.”
“You hear anything?” Singer asked conversationally. “What’s your name, anyway?”
“J.J.”
“What about the first part of my question?”
J.J. looked to Newkirk for help, found none, then lowered his head so his hair obscured his face.
“I’m jes’ cleanin’. I didn’t hear nothin’. I didn’t even know there was anybody in here.”
“Not that there was anything to hear,” Singer said. “We’re assisting with the investigation into those two missing kids.”
The janitor nodded, which consisted of his hair bobbing up and down.
“Take it easy, J.J.,” Singer said. Newkirk closed the door.
“You boys are paranoid, all right,” Gonzalez said, showing his white teeth. “We got it under control as best we can. And we’ve got that sheriff dicked.”
NEWKIRK NEVER TIRED of driving his car up the long, paved, heavily wooded road to his home and seeing it emerge through the trees. It was a mansion, his mansion, even though it was neocolonial and looked out of place among the huge log structures that were being built throughout the county. The only thing he liked better than seeing it in the daylight was seeing it lit up at night. It had been three and a half years since the house was complete, and he still couldn’t believe he lived there.
Three cars were in the circular driveway: his wife’s Land Rover, his sons’ Taurus, and the old pickup he used for cargo. The Taurus was parked in the place Newkirk reserved for himself, so he entered his home peeved. Sometimes, he thought his family didn’t appreciate what they had now, that it had all come so easily. They had no idea what kind of sacrifices he’d made to create this new life, what he’d done so his boys could grow up as Tom Sawyer instead of 50 Cent. Singer and the others, they just wanted to get out for themselves from careers that had become disgusting and intolerable. Newkirk got out for his family, to save them. He wished they knew that, wished they appreciated what they had now.
The boys and his daughter were at the kitchen table, already eating dinner. His wife, Maggie, looked up and glared at him. Newkirk noted the empty place setting that had been for him.
It was only then that he remembered Maggie telling him to be home early to have a family dinner with his kids since getting everyone together was so rare these days, with spring baseball practice and ten-year-old Lindsey’s soccer and all.
“Ah, jeez …” Newkirk moaned. “I totally forgot.”
The boys looked at their food. They knew their mother was angry, and they didn’t want to get into the middle of the fight.
“I guess you did,” Maggie said. She was slight, pale, with red hair and green eyes that could flash like jewelry when she was angry, like now.
“I was at the sheriff’s office …”
“And you were going to call,” she finished for him.
He eased the door closed behind him. It was quiet in the house. Most of all, he felt bad for his kids. His sons could take it, he thought, they were in their teens and totally absorbed in sports, girls, iPods. Lindsey, though, she could break his heart. Lindsey worshipped her dad. She’d known only the Good Dad, the one in Idaho. She never knew what he used to be like, what he used to bring home.
Maggie pushed her chair back and approached him.
“Do you realize how hard it is to plan anything?” she asked. He looked at her. She was livid. “The one night I ask you to be home at a certain time, you can’t bring yourself to do it. The one night!”
Newkirk stepped back, then leveled his eyes on her.
“Look, I’m sorry I forgot. But there are some kids missing, and I volunteered to help find them. I’ve been down at the sheriff’s office with Lieutenant Singer, and Sergeant Gonzalez …”
She rolled her eyes when she heard the names.
“What?”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Jim, I thought that was the life we left. You promised me. You promised me.”
He wanted to say, Don’t you care about those kids? but couldn’t bring himself to say it. Not with what he knew.
“So are you home now?” she asked.
He paused. “No, I’m here long enough to get a change of clothes. I’m likely to be down there all night.”
Maggie’s face tightened, and her eyes widened, making her head resemble a skull. She turned on her heel and walked straight to the bathroom off the living room. The slam of the door echoed throughout the house.
Newkirk stood there, his face red. Jason, his youngest son, shot a glance at him.
“There’s some steak left if you want it.”
Newkirk instead turned to Josh, the seventeen-year-old. “When you’re through with dinner, I want you to move your car. You’re in my place.”
Josh sighed. “Okay.”
“I’ll see you kids tomorrow,” Newkirk said, going up the stairs to his bedroom for his clothes. “Tell your mother I had to go.”
Saturday, 6:20 P.M.
JESS RAWLINS cleaned the wound again in the sink and looked clinically at the hole in his hand. It was good that it bled so freely, he knew, because punctures like that should bleed out and wash away potential infection with it. He flexed his hand, cringed at how much it hurt, and stuck it back under the cold running water.
Annie and William Taylor sat at the dining room table, watching him, looking guilty. They looked smaller at the table than they had in the barn. Annie’s feet—one with a shoe and the other dirty and bare—hardly touched the floor. William swung his legs, filled with nervous energy. William looked at him furtively, Jess noticed, not full on, like Annie. He
was probably afraid he would be in trouble for the wound, Jess thought. Some kids had strange reactions to the revelation that they were capable of physically hurting adults.
“Let me get this bandaged, and I’ll get some food going,” Jess said. “Then we’ll call the sheriff and let him know I found his strays.”
“Sorry about your hand,” Annie said.
“I’ll live. You are pretty good with a hay hook. Ever consider stacking hay?”
“No. Besides, William did it.”
Jess looked at William, who reacted with a mixture of fear and pride.
“You know,” Jess said, “I almost got into it with a couple of college boys this afternoon who could’ve probably put me in a world of pain, but they didn’t. It took a ten-year-old boy to do real damage.”
William beamed now, until Annie shot him a glance. “You should apologize.”
“I said I was sorry,” he said. To Jess, he said, “My dad was an outlaw. Maybe that’s why I did it.”
Jess thought that over, said, “I’m not sure you want to be too proud of that.”
William looked hurt, and Annie looked vindicated.
“But you swing a mean hay hook,” Jess said quickly. William smiled. Annie didn’t.
William asked, “What are you cooking?”
“Breakfast. Pancakes, steak, and eggs. Is that okay with you two?”
“It’s almost dark out,” Annie said. “Why are you going to cook breakfast at night?”
He looked at her. Her eyes were fixed on him. He thought he noted a kernel of hardness in them beyond her years, like she’d seen a lot in her brief life and was used to being disappointed. Jess felt a pang. There was something about her, all right. He recalled how he felt when he saw her photo on the poster the first time, and the anger that rushed through him when he heard the college kids making their stupid jokes. He felt some kind of affinity for her right off. He didn’t want to disappoint her.
“Because,” Jess said, “I know how to cook breakfast for kids. I used to do it. I haven’t cooked for more than one for a while now, and I’m out of practice. That’s why.”
“Where are your kids?” William asked.
“Only one son,” Jess said. “Gone. Grown up.” He winced as he rubbed the wound with salve, applied a square of thick gauze to the entrance and exit, and wrapped white medical tape around his hand to hold the bandages in place. When he had a good, tight wrap, he reached up and tore the tape off with his teeth. He could hear Annie admonish William in a whisper, saying the rancher was pretty old, so of course his son was gone. He was “probably really old, like forty,” she hissed.
“Okay, I’m calling now. Yup,” Jess said, gingerly taking the handset from the wall with his bandaged hand, “you kids created quite an uproar in town. They’ve got posters up, and even some volunteers, ex-policemen, are looking for you. Your mother must be worried sick about you.”
Annie and William exchanged looks.
He didn’t know whether to dial 911 or the regular sheriff’s department number. He decided on the latter, and thumbed through the directory for the county listings. It struck Jess, once again, that all of his friends were dead or gone. The realization had come to him suddenly a few months before, and it reared again now, filling him with unwanted nostalgia and simple dread. The county had changed while he hadn’t. There had been a time when there were a dozen good men and women—neighbors—he could trust to give him counsel on this situation. Not anymore. They were all dead, or bought out and in Arizona.
As he punched the numbers, he saw Annie, who had left the table, reach up with a dirty hand and pull the phone cradle down, ending the dial tone.
He looked at her, puzzled.
“Mister,” she said, “is Mr. Swann with them? The police, I mean?”
“I don’t know him,” Jess said. “Could be.”
“Tell him, Annie,” William urged from the table.
“Tell me what?”
She said, “You don’t know what we saw. We saw some men kill another man. Down by the river. We saw their faces, and they saw ours.”
Jess looked at her, hard.
While she talked—the words rushed out, and William interjected things to abet her story—she never took her hand down from the cradle of the telephone. Jess still held the handset, but listened. A cold-blooded murder, followed by a chase, a close call with a Mr. Swann, the biggest pigs she had ever seen, fleeing through the dark, wet forest to the barn.
Jess had his doubts. “But, Annie,” he said gently, “I haven’t heard anything about a man being shot to death. That sort of thing doesn’t happen here, and if it did, I’d have heard about it.”
Annie shook her head from side to side, pleading, “That’s what we saw. Me and William. We saw them shoot that man over and over again, then they saw us and chased us. They shot at us!”
“But how do you know Mr. Swann wanted to hurt you, too?”
“I heard him talking on the telephone,” she said. “I told you that.”
“But you don’t know who he was talking to,” Jess said. “You might have thought he was saying one thing when he really was talking about something else. Why would those men want to hurt you?”
As he said it, he thought again of that kernel of hardness, how it had already made her wary and distrustful. It was sad. Kids experienced so much, so early, these days….
“What if you call the sheriff and those men come after us again? They know we can recognize them,” she said, her eyes misting. “What will you do if that happens?”
He started to say he would talk directly to the sheriff, explain the situation and the reason for her fears, get things sorted out. But her face showed such raw desperation, such fear, that he couldn’t make himself say it. She was so sure of what she’d seen, and what had happened. But a murder in Pend Oreille County would be big news. Fiona Pritzle would have tracked Jess down like a dog just to be the first one to break the news, and she hadn’t. Search teams had been all over the banks of the river looking for Annie and William, and they would have found a body in a public campground. Somebody surely would have reported a missing man. It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t sure what to do. Maybe feed the kids, clean them up, wait until they fell asleep—they were no doubt exhausted—and call?
But wasn’t that what Swann had done to them, if Annie’s story was true? Hadn’t Swann betrayed them in that way? He didn’t want to give them a reason to run again, to further frighten them. People could be trusted, he wanted to show them. This was a good place after all.
“Your story is pretty believable,” he said, finally. “But you can’t just live here. You need to get home and see your mom. You might even need to have a doctor look at you both, to make sure you’re all right.”
“We’re fine,” Annie said. “We’ll live in the barn in that cave if we have to.”
“It’s a fort,” William corrected.
“You’re not living in the barn,” Jess said, furrowing his brow.
A minute passed. Annie kept her hand on the cradle.
“How about I call your mother?” Jess said. “I’ll let her know you’re okay. That way she won’t be suffering any longer, and I’m sure she’ll know what to do.”
Jess could see Annie trying to think it through. He could see she wanted to say yes, but something pulled at her as well.
“We’re mad at her,” Annie said.
“You may be,” Jess said, “but I’m sure she loves you and she misses you. You know how moms are.”
Annie wanted to argue, Jess could tell. But she didn’t. She let her fingers slide off the cradle, and Jess heard the dial tone.
“What’s your phone number?”
THE CORDLESS PHONE burred in Monica Taylor’s hand, and she looked at it as if it were a snake. Swann entered from the kitchen at the sound. He had said he would have to screen any calls. The local telephone exchange was monitoring the line, he said, and would be able to track the Pen register and trace the source, if neces
sary.
Every time the telephone rang, panic rose from her belly and momentarily paralyzed her. It could be good news about her children, and she desperately wanted that. But it could be the worst possible news of all.
“Monica,” Swann asked, “are you going to give me that?”
It rang.
“Why do you have to answer my calls?”
“We’ve been over that. In case it’s kidnappers …or a crank call. Sickos like to prey on people in your situation, especially when it gets on the local news.”
It rang again.
Swann approached her and held out his hand. Reluctantly, she handed him the phone.
“Monica Taylor’s,” he said.
She watched his face for some kind of inkling, some kind of reaction. She could tell from the low range of the voice on the other end that it was a man.
“Yes, she’s here,” Swann said. “Who is calling?”
Swann waited a moment. Monica couldn’t hear the caller.
“Hello?” Swann said.
The caller spoke, and she recognized it as a question by the way his voice rose at the end.
“This is Sergeant Oscar Swann, LAPD, retired. I’m assisting Ms. Taylor. Again, who is calling?”
A hum of a voice. Swann nodded, said “yes” a few times. Then: “I’m afraid I can’t help you with that. I have no authority there. I’d suggest you call the sheriff.”
Swann punched the telephone off.
“Nothing?” Monica asked, already knowing the answer by his demeanor.
Swann shook his head and put the phone down on the table. “Some rancher. I didn’t get his name. First, he wanted you, to tell you he hopes your kids get found real soon. But what he was really calling about, he said, was that one of the volunteer search crews knocked down part of his fence and some cows got out. He’s wondering who will pay for the damage, and you heard what I advised him.”
“Mmmmm.”
“Jesus,” Swann said. “You’d think with all that’s going on that he’d wait a little bit before bitching about a fence.”
