Changed his life, changed mine.”
“Martha!”
Damn Broxmeyer. He could have told us about the broken back and the wheelchair, kept us from wasting our time coming here.
“Well?” she said to me. The nonsmile flickered again; her voice was wise and weary. “You still want to ask him about that missing woman?”
Runyon said no, sorry to have bothered her, and we got into the car and left her standing there with her crippled husband still querulously calling her name.
Tamara called again as we were making our way through thickening traffic in downtown Six Pines. Wanting to know if there was any news, if either of the two names she’d given me earlier might be the person responsible for Kerry’s disappearance. I told her Donald Fechaya was out, and why, and that we were on our way to Rock Creek to check on Jason Hooper.
She said then, “Well, there wasn’t much I could find out about the Monday night explosion up there. Official verdict is accidental, not a whisper it could be anything else.”
“Anything on the Verrikers?” I asked.
“Not much there, either, and I went down as deep as I could. Ned Verriker, age forty-two. Married to Alice Verriker in 1996, no children. Employed as a clerk and forklift driver at Builders Supply Company, Six Pines, the past nineteen years. No criminal record. Two DUIs, most recent four years ago.”
“Injury accidents involved in either of the DUIs?”
“No.”
“Financial troubles, unpaid personal loan, anything like that?”
“Not that I could find. No outstanding debts other than the usual mortgage and car loan. No recorded problems with coworkers or anybody else. Seems to be a pretty average citizen otherwise. Belongs to the Methodist Church, Elks, Six Pines Rotary Club-”
“Never mind all that. Mrs. Verriker?”
“Her slate’s even cleaner. No criminal or arrest record of any kind. Only blot, if you want to call it that, an illegitimate daughter when she was eighteen.”
“Ned Verriker the father?”
“No. Name on the birth certificate is Randolph Stevens.”
“What’d you find out about him?”
“Enlisted in the army the same year the kid was born. Killed in action in Afghanistan in 2002.”
“And the baby? You said the Verrikers are childless.”
“Given up for adoption at birth.”
And adoption records are sealed. The daughter would be sixteen now. Any chance she could hold a festering grudge against her birth mother for giving her up? Or that a member of her adoptive family did for some reason?
Tamara said, “It’ll take some time, but I might be able to hack up the info if you think it’s worth the risk.”
It wasn’t. What kind of grudge, real or presumed, could prod the daughter or anybody connected to her into turning the Verriker home into a time bomb? The possibility of a tie between the explosion and Kerry’s disappearance was enough of a reach as it was.
“No, forget it. It won’t help us find Kerry.” In time, I thought, but didn’t add. In time.
Jason Hooper was another bust. Forty-mile round-trip over twisty mountain roads to Rock Creek, a wide spot surrounded by wilderness-two and a half hours wasted.
We found Hooper working at his Roadside Garage and Towing Service. He was sullen and belligerent at first, but Runyon and I convinced him to cooperate. We didn’t exactly muscle or threaten him, but we made it plain through choice of words, gestures, and body language that we were willing to do whatever was necessary to get straight answers.
He didn’t know nothing about no missing woman, he said. He’d served his time on “that phony rape charge,” he’d never been in trouble over a woman since, he didn’t want no trouble now. Hell, no, he hadn’t been down in Six Pines Monday afternoon. Hadn’t been there in years, didn’t know nobody lived in Green Valley, why the hell would he go there? He’d been right here working on Monday, same as always. Rush repair job on a Dodge Caravan, his brother-in-law’d come over to help with the job, go ask him and he’d tell us. Had a couple of towing calls, one around three to haul a tourist family’s wagon out of a ditch, the other about five when Ed Larsen’s pickup quit on him on the Hamblin Grade. Check his logbook, the calls and the times were written down in black and white. We checked. He was telling the truth.
Whoever had Kerry, it wasn’t Jason Hooper.
Midafternoon by the time we got back to Six Pines. The town seemed even more crowded now, people gathering and preparing for the holiday weekend. At the high school football field, members of a marching band were practicing for Friday’s parade. The crashing cymbals and bombastic brass notes of a Souza march grated in my ears, set my teeth on edge.
The frustration and the heat had taken their toll. I’d drifted into a half doze for part of the long ride back, but it had done more harm than good. I’d had one of the fever dreams, almost but not quite a flashback, that had plagued me after the time at Deer Run. Only in this one, it had been Kerry who was chained to the cabin wall, and I was outside looking in and couldn’t get to her, and she couldn’t see me because the wall was made of thick, one- way glass. I jerked out of the dream with such sudden violence that Runyon almost swerved off the road.
Now, I felt drugged-the sunlight too bright even with sunglasses on, the shadows too dark, buildings and cars and strangers’ faces fuzzy at the edges. My thoughts fuzzy at the edges, too, so that I had to make a little effort to keep them focused. But I didn’t say anything to Runyon about it. Now that he was here, I could afford to keep pushing myself. If my body rebelled at some point, I knew he’d go on doing everything he could, that he wouldn’t give up. Where Kerry was concerned, he and Tamara were the only people on this earth I had that kind of faith in.
We hunted around for a place that had a Wi-Fi hookup. You can find one just about anywhere these days, and Six Pines was no exception. A pizzeria just off Main Street had a sign in front that advertised it for free. We went in there and slaked our thirst with Cokes while Runyon accessed his e-mail and we waded through the pages of info Tamara had forwarded, looking for another possible lead.
There wasn’t one. None of the other registered sex offenders on her county list lived in Green Valley-the closest was in a small town near Placerville, thirty miles away. The perps in the two statutory rape cases had been nineteen and twenty, the girls fifteen and sixteen, the sex consensual and violence-free. All the other sexual violations had involved the molestation of minors, the oldest child a boy aged ten, or public decency laws. The victims of the two unsolved rapes had both been young women in their early twenties, a waitress assaulted on her way home from work, and a hitchhiker picked up and attacked by two men she’d ID’d as Latinos. One of the female missing persons cases concerned a fifteen-year-old runaway from Six Pines, but that had been seven years ago and the girl had been found six months later living in the Haight in San Francisco.
So what now?
Neither of us addressed the question until we were back in Runyon’s Ford. I said then, “Somebody has to’ve seen the vehicle, whatever it was, going in or out of that logging road. You can’t drive the valley roads without passing another car somewhere along the line.”
“You pretty much covered all the locals in the vicinity. Maybe a tourist roaming around? We could try canvassing the motels, the B and Bs, that campground out in the valley.”
“Long shot. I worked the campground yesterday… nothing. But okay. I don’t see any other option.”
Runyon reached for the ignition key, but he didn’t start the engine. He said, “One just occurred to me. There’s one person out on those hillside roads every weekday-the man or woman who delivers the mail.”
“Right, good thought.”
“If his route puts him in the area afternoons.”
“We’ll find out.”
