'Few days. She was with her mom and dad.'
A scraggly-haired woman in a rumpled pink housecoat stepped partway out of the back door of the house on the left. 'Mick, you get back in here! If you're too sick to be in school you ain't gonna be out runnin' around!'
I smiled at her, but she didn't smile back, and I didn't like the way her hand clutched her housecoat between her breasts.
'I gotta go,' Mick said.
'I would if I were you,' I told him. I knocked on the back door again, loudly this time, to appear above- board.
That's when I saw the bullet hole.
It was from a large-caliber bullet and it was just below the doorknob, where it wasn't too noticeable. And it was neat, as if the bullet had gone through the wood from the outside.
I looked the door over and saw another neat round hole, up near the top, alongside the door frame. The bullet had made a thin groove in the frame, as if it had been fired at an angle. Stepping back on the porch, I looked over the rear of the house as if figuring a siding estimate. There was another neat bullet hole in the bottom-left corner of the window beside the back porch.
My throat went dry. I was afraid now of what might be inside the house. Squatting on the back porch, I tried to see through the lower of the two bullet holes in the door, but all I could make out was what looked like the bottom of a picture frame against the pale green of the opposite wall.
I straightened and drew a deep breath that made me light-headed for a second. Maybe the bullet holes meant nothing; maybe they'd been there for years.
Feeling a bit steadier, I went to the window and tried to peer in between the drawn curtains. They overlapped too much and it was impossible. I saw something else, though. Directly opposite the neat hole in the window pane was a neat hole in the curtain.
My breath caught in the dryness of my throat and lumped there, and my stomach felt as if it had been stabbed with a tuning fork. There was no walking away now. It was time to have Mick's mother call the law.
They got there in five minutes and I showed them my identification and they weren't impressed. A tall man with dark hair combed like Hitler's introduced himself as Lieutenant Frank Dockard, the stocky uniformed policeman with him as Sergeant Avery. By their manner I saw within a few minutes that Avery was the silent servant and that Dockard fashioned himself the brains.
Mick and his mother watched soberly from their front porch as I told my story, and Dockard made notes in a leather-covered note pad with the diligence of a monk copying an ancient manuscript. When I was finished, he snapped the note pad shut and gave no indication of what he thought, and the professionally placid, thick features of Sergeant Avery were unchanged.
After a while Dockard rubbed a long forefinger behind his right ear, as if checking for an injury. 'Let's take a look at these bullet holes,' he said, and led the way toward the back of the house.
The three of us stood on the back porch while Mick and his mother looked silently on from next door. Dockard grunted when he saw the holes in the door, stepped down off the porch and grunted again when he saw the bullet hole in the window and the corresponding hole in the curtain.
'Phoned Mr. Carlon,' Dockard said as Avery inserted a pencil into the bullet holes to check the angles of the shots. 'He said he hasn't heard from his daughter in months but knew she wasn't in Layton.'
'If he hasn't heard from her in months,' I said, 'how can he know where she is?'
'He can know where she isn't.'
I decided not to rise to that bait. I got a roll of antacid tablets from my pocket and popped one of the white disks into my mouth.
'What's that for?' Dockard asked.
'Nervous stomach.'
He looked me over appraisingly with small brown eyes. 'Can't blame you for that.'
I could feel the veiled suspicion, the catlike waiting to pounce on my first wrong move, my first indication of whatever they thought I was trying to pull off.
'Look,' I said to Dockard, 'I'm only doing my job. We're in the same business… You ought to understand that.'
'I don't understand what a Carlon and her daughter would be doing living in a little dump like this, especially here in Layton. And I don't know if I like your line of business, either. It's legalized kidnapping.'
'So is what Joan Clark did. The father has as much right to the child as she does. Besides, after I make the snatch I always let the child decide.'
'Decide what?'
'Whether to go or stay.'
'And what do they do?'
'After we talk it out they usually pick the parent who cared enough about them to hire me.'
'And if they don't?'
'I leave them and refund my client's fee. It's in the fine print of my contract.'
'That's stupid business.'
'It doesn't happen very often. I'm a persuasive talker'
Avery was finished fooling around with the bullet holes.
'Why don't we go in?' I asked, but I was afraid to go in and Dockard could see that.
'Better the front way,' he said, and we walked around the house. We must have been driving Mick and his mother crazy.
The front door was locked, and at a nod from Dockard, Avery leaned his bulk against it and the latch splintered from the wood frame. My heart tried to scramble up my throat as we went in.
The inside of the tiny house was uncomfortably hot, stuffy, with the thick stillness of a place that has been closed tight for a long time. We were in the living room-red shag carpet, worn sofa, recliner chair, incongruously expensive stereo set up along one wall. The lamp on the table by the front window was still glowing.
None of us said anything. The kitchen was right off the living room; I could see a corner of the green refrigerator. As we walked toward the doorway, a peculiar odor, as of something putrescent, struck me, and my legs began to tremble. The kitchen doorway seemed farther away.
There was no one in the kitchen. One of the chrome-legged chairs was on its side near the stove. On the table a horde of gnats swarmed about the rotting remains of a carryout chicken dinner in a red and white cardboard bucket.
The wood on the inside of the door had splintered away from the bullet holes. The two bullets fired through the door had lodged in the wall above the sink; the shot fired through the window had left a bullet somewhere inside a cupboard containing a jumble of aluminum pots and pans. Silent Sergeant Avery pointed a square-tipped finger at something lying on the white porcelain surface of the ledge of the sink. It was a woman's ring, a ruby surrounded by a circle of diamonds in a gold setting. A jeweler's appraisal wasn't needed to see that its value reached the thousands.
'Keeh-rist!' Dockard said with appropriate respect for wealth. He bent closely over the ring but didn't touch it.
5
We drove toward the Layton police headquarters. I sat in the front seat of the plain tan sedan, next to the driver, Avery. Dockard sat in back, directly behind me; he was silent, but I could almost hear his brain whirring. Dale Carlon drove ahead of us in his sleek Mercedes, as if forging the way.
The headquarters building was a low, beige-brick structure with several tall antennas jutting from its flat roof. It was set on a wide green lawn, neatly landscaped with low-lying shrubbery, and I could see several parked patrol cars on a blacktopped lot behind the building. Avery held the door open for us and we entered, walked past a grandmotherly receptionist-switchboard operator and down a sterile-tiled hall to an unmarked door. A scrub-faced, somber patrolman went in with Carlon and Dockard. Avery stayed behind, held open the unmarked door for me with
