My left shoulder was ruined, my arm useless. I climbed one handed, keeping my vision focused on the dim point of light at the top of the shaft, watching it grow bigger and brighter until I was near the surface and someone reached down to lift me up, eclipsing the light.
“Lend you a hand?” Ammara Iverson asked.
Chapter Seventy-two
On the way to the hospital to have my shoulder repaired, Ammara told me that the Wyandotte County Surveyor, the District Attorney, and their husbands were having dinner together when she caught up to them. The surveyor started to give a history of the county’s mines when the D.A. remembered a case involving the Argentine Mine, explaining that it became a thirty-four-acre underground cave when the mine closed. When a killer was rumored to have dumped his murder victim in the lake, the surveyor led an expedition into the mine through the shaft in Matney Park to search for the body. Detective Martin Grisnik was the lead investigator on the case. The surveyor and the D.A. were there when Ammara helped me to my feet.
I missed my appointment on Monday with the neurologist since I was recovering from surgery to repair the wreck I’d made of my shoulder. Joy postponed the hearing finalizing our divorce. She brought Ruby with her when she visited after I came home from the hospital. The dog raced through the dining room and into the kitchen before jumping onto my easy chair, marking her territory with a wagging tail.
“I don’t think there’s a future for us,” Joy said. “But I’m not in such a hurry for the future, either.”
“Maybe it would be better for the dogs if we waited,” I said.
She shrugged, giving me a sad smile. “Not too long. Just until we’re sure about Wendy.”
Despite a massive search of the Missouri River from Kansas City to St. Louis, Wendy’s body was never found. The FBI, the police, and scores of volunteers searched the woods in Matney Park and behind the rail yard but there was no trace of her. Joy even hired a psychic, who claimed he saw Wendy’s aura in a dozen different places, none of which yielded her body.
I wasn’t surprised. At least five times a day and more during the night, I saw Colby’s face when he said that she was dead. His micro expression with its asymmetrical, lopsided grin was enough to convince me he hadn’t killed her, that he’d lied to protect her from Grisnik, a last grasp at redemption.
Kate said it was possible, but it was also possible that I was finding hope wherever I could. Either way, I said, I’m not giving up on Wendy. We talked about it over dinner, this time at the rotating rooftop restaurant at the Hyatt Hotel, the 360-degree view of Kansas City a more romantic backdrop than the view at IHOP.
Kate was slowly recovering her capacity to read micro expressions. A lot depended, she said, on letting it happen rather than forcing it.
“It’s the same with you and me,” she said. “We have to let it happen.”
“You won’t mind if I give it a kick in the ass every now and then.”
“Can’t see how that would hurt,” Kate said, taking my hand in hers.
Tanja Andrija won the confessional race, offering up her brother and her New York connections that had supplied her with drugs for her retail outlets in return for a new life for her and her parents in the witness protection program. I sat in the back of the courtroom the day she entered her plea. The judge, a white-haired gentleman old enough to know better, did everything but ask for her new phone number. Tanja was a woman of considerable talent.
I eventually made it to the neurologist, who said that he’d never seen a case like mine in forty years of practice, as if I should be pleased to have broken his streak. He declined a diagnosis, sending me to a specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona. The doctor, a lanky, quiet, and compassionate man, stuck electrodes to my skin and monitored my involuntary movements, telling me with more certainty than hope that I had tics, a childhood disorder that disappeared in adolescence and almost never appeared for the first time in adults although, in my case, it had.
It was, he said, one of the nervous system’s unexplained defects, for which there was no known cause or cure. Though he assured me it would neither threaten nor shorten my life, he also conceded it was unlikely to disappear.
When the medications he prescribed didn’t work and made me goofy, he told me I had to retire or face worsening symptoms. Take it easy, he said. Do less and take more time doing it.
It sounded like death in slow motion. If living meant shaking, I chose shaking. The Bureau chose retirement and declared me disabled in record time.
Troy kept the case open, pursuing the possibility that Wendy was not only alive but was also the sole survivor of the drug ring. The offshore accounts they had used had been emptied, the money never recovered. Troy suspected that Wendy had made off with the money and was living the high life while her parents mourned her presumed death, a possibility I publicly rejected and privately prayed for.
I didn’t want her to be a criminal. I just wanted her to be alive and safe. If she had been involved, she’d be reluctant to contact us. I understood that, trading the nightmares about what had happened to her for the hope she was okay.
Ammara told me all about Troy’s theory over coffee, apologizing and saying that she’d asked to be transferred to another squad, adding that Joy and I were being watched in case we received a phone call or e-mail from Wendy or in case the balance in our bank accounts suddenly ballooned.
It was shameful, insulting, and inevitable, but I couldn’t criticize Troy. Even now, I couldn’t separate the truth from the lies. Each version was layered with shades of guilt, from Colby’s confession exonerating Wendy, to his implied indictment of her on the playground, to Grisnik’s insistence that she was the biggest thief among the thieves. The version that was missing was her own. Until I knew that, I wouldn’t pass judgment.
Either she was dead, her body lost, or she was alive and had left us behind. Whichever was the case, I had failed her.
Three months later I was having coffee at Beanology, one of my favorite haunts not far from my house, laptop on my lap, surfing the web. It was one of those rare winter days when the temperature soared for no apparent reason into the upper sixties. I was sitting on the outdoor patio, the sun at a blinding, sharp angle, Ruby curled on the chair next to me.
A message popped up in my inbox telling me that someone had sent me an electronic greeting card. I clicked on the link and an image materialized on the screen. It was a monkey with an ear-to-ear grin. The caption read
It was my birthday. I’d forgotten, but Wendy hadn’t.
