images.
A burning thirst and a swollen bladder pulled me out of it. Another dousing with cold water chased away the sleep fuzz. My body ached and there were itching red rashes on both arms-poison oak, probably-but I didn’t feel quite so beat. My watch told me how long I’d been down and out: more than three hours. Almost one-thirty now.
The silence in the house seemed deafening.
I checked the voice mail on my cell, even though I was sure the ringtone would have wakened me if there’d been a call. Then I put on clean clothes-I couldn’t talk to people looking like a refugee from a hobo camp-and ran a comb through my hair and hurried out into the midday heat.
For more than four hours I drove around and around and around, showing Kerry’s photograph and asking my questions. Residents of a dozen or more houses on Ridge Hill Road and Skyview Drive. Campers and RVers at the campsite. Picnickers in the park down on the valley road. Shopkeepers and customers in the stores in Six Pines. Men and women stopped at random on the sidewalks.
Nobody had anything to tell me.
Sorry, can’t help you. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The only part of the valley I avoided was the logging road. If the search team had found anything, I’d have been notified right away. And the entire time, the phone was a silent weight in my shirt pocket.
The heat, the constant frustration finally took their toll. I drove back to the house, where I sat limp and listless on one of the chaise lounges in the porch shade, nursing a cold beer and fending off mosquitoes. Trying not to think too much, worry too much-like trying not to breathe.
Broxmeyer showed up at 6:55.
It was cooler then with a light breeze, the tops of the nearby pines gold-lit and the shadows among their trunks as black as ink. Fading sunlight threw glints like mica particles off the cruiser’s top as it turned in off Ridge Hill Road and climbed up into the parking area below. Going slow, which confirmed what the cell phone silence had already told me. The deputy’s grave expression and his first words when he joined me on the porch were an anticlimax.
“I wish I had good news,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t. The searchers didn’t find her.”
“Or any sign of her.”
“Not yet. I’m sorry.”
Sorry again. But sorry was a meaningless word. As Kerry had said to me once, quoting one of her agency’s clients, sorry don’t feed the bulldog.
I said, “What now?”
“The search will go on tomorrow morning.”
“In other wooded areas, you mean.”
“Everywhere within a three- to four-mile radius.”
“You’re not going to find her that way.”
Broxmeyer took off his cap, sleeved sweat from his forehead, and ran fingers through his lanky blond hair. Delaying his response so he could frame it in his mind first. “You still think she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Up there on the logging road.”
“That’s what I think. What do you think now?”
“The same as before. Possible, but unlikely.”
“So you don’t intend to investigate.”
He was uncomfortable now. I hadn’t invited him to sit down, and he didn’t take the liberty on his own; instead, he moved over to the railing, leaned a hip against it. “What would you have me do?” he asked. “Those tire impressions are too faint to make identifiable casts. There’s just no way to determine what kind of vehicle made them, let alone who it belongs to.”
“You could check on known sex offenders in the general area.”
“I could, and if I had reason to, I would. But there aren’t many, and as far as I know, none has a violent history.”
“As far as you know.”
“Look,” Broxmeyer said, “nobody guilty of the type of crime you’re suggesting is going to admit it. I’d have to have some kind of strong evidence to do anything more than ask a few polite questions. You were a cop once, you know how the system works.”
Or doesn’t work. “It isn’t the questions you ask,” I said, “it’s the kind of answers you get. Most felons aren’t very smart-they make little slips, show their guilt in other ways.”
His mouth tightened a little; he didn’t like being lectured. “Let’s say your idea has some validity. The person or persons responsible don’t necessarily have to be sex offenders, or have a record of any kind. Could be anyone who lives in the valley or is here on a visit, somebody who acted on a crazy impulse. How do you propose I go about finding a needle in a haystack?”
“By doing what I did this afternoon. Legwork. Look for somebody who saw something, knows something, and move on from there.”
“But you didn’t find anybody, did you?”
“No, but I’m only one man.”
“That’s right,” Broxmeyer said, “and I’m only one deputy. We’re short-staffed in Six Pines and the rest of the sheriff’s department… damn budget cuts. Fourth of July weekend coming up and that means drunks, fights, idiots misusing fireworks-extra work for everybody. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t spare the time or the manpower to mount an investigation based on a distraught husband’s unsubstantiated theory about his missing wife.”
“And you don’t want to.”
“I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.” He pushed off the railing, slapped his hat back on and straightened the brim. “All I can do is what I said I would… keep a team of volunteers out searching for as long as it takes to find your wife. You’ll just have to rely on us, be patient. Okay?”
I kept silent.
He said “Okay” to himself this time, then moved on down the steps and got into his cruiser and drove off with a little more speed than he’d used arriving.
Rely on us, be patient. Bullshit. The danger to Kerry was real, her life in jeopardy, and urgent action was necessary.
I thought about calling the FBI. Yeah, sure-another exercise in futility. I had no contacts in the Bureau, and contrary to a television show like Without a Trace, the FBI has no task force that deals with missing persons cases unless there is substantial evidence that a kidnapping has taken place and federal laws violated. The chances that I could convince an agent to come up from Sacramento were slim and none; with the threats of homegrown, as well as foreign, terrorism and the social and political unrest that seemed to be amping up, manpower in the Bureau was stretched thin, and low-priority cases received short shrift as a result. What I’d get was a polite listen on the phone and the same kind of brush-off I’d gotten from Broxmeyer.
Forget the FBI for now, forget the county law. But the conversation with the deputy had convinced me that I could not go on depending on hope, strangers, myself alone. I needed help, which meant it had to come from a known quarter I could rely on. And I needed it fast.
12
KERRY
Sometime during the morning or afternoon, she managed to free her hands.
She no longer had any sense of time. At intervals it seemed compressed, sluggish, and then it would expand in jumps like a defective clock. The light that filtered in through chinks in the wall boarding, at the edges of the shutter over the single window, was no help: there wasn’t enough of it to do more than put a faint sheen on the murkiness. Objects in the shed, the low ceiling, were shrouded in shadow. The gathering heat was the only indicator that the day was moving forward at all. Smotheringly hot in this prison, but it didn’t bring an ooze of sweat
