“So, Mitsy?” Jed spoke softly as he interrupted her thoughts. Her gaze returned to him and she smiled her humorless grin. “I’m sorry, were you talking to me?”
“I just need to clarify one last point, and then I’m done. You said you realize now that Ricky had been planning something for a long time. What, exactly, do you think he was planning?”
She shook her head and shifted her eyes back to the sky. “Honestly, I don’t know. Maybe it was to kill that boy. Maybe it was to do something else. Whatever it was, I guess it was bad enough to make him leave the country. And me.” In the end, her voice was only a whisper.
The Reischmann proposal had been flawless. Todd Briscow was 99 percent certain that they’d be awarded the contract within the month. He and his sales manager had spent the afternoon at the golf course, celebrating their impending victory. After the eighth hole, though, the heat had become too much, and they took their celebration into the clubhouse, where his boss was buying. As he navigated the winding turns approaching his home, Todd wondered if maybe he hadn’t had a few too many. It wasn’t that he felt drunk; he just had to work harder than usual to keep the Chevy between the lines on the pavement.
Todd hadn’t so much as thought about the boy he’d seen until he heard the news on the radio on his way home from the party. Could it be that the kid they were looking for was the same one he had seen? The age was about right, and that would explain what he was doing wandering around so early in the morning, but Todd had trouble believing that the kid he had seen was a murderer. When he spoke to his wife from his car phone about his suspicions, she told him that the police had left a picture of the boy at the house. Once he saw the picture, he’d know for sure.
After pulling the car into the garage, he took a few minutes to set up the sprinkler in the front yard before going inside. It was getting dark, and he was convinced that the secret to their green lawn was nightly waterings. Patty handed him the flier with Nathan’s picture on it before he had a chance to put down his briefcase.
“Is this him?” she asked anxiously. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen his picture on the news. It’s all they talk about.”
Like I have the time to watch the news, Todd didn’t say. The flier displayed two pictures of Nathan Bailey. One looked like a school picture, a smile and combed hair. The other one looked like it had been lifted off a videotape. Feature for feature, there was little resemblance between the boys in the pictures, and nothing in either reminded him of the kid from this morning. Until he noticed the eyes in the grainy picture. Those eyes bore the same deer-in-the-headlights look as the kid he had seen. And the hair was the same.
“This is him,” Todd said. “We’ve got to call the police.”
“Are you sure?” Patty pressed. Todd couldn’t tell from her tone what she wanted the answer to be.
“No, I’m not positive,” he answered honestly. “But I think we ought to call.”
Chapter 24
At last it was dark, and time for Nathan to continue his journey. Finding the keys this time had been a much more difficult task. It took him nearly an hour of frantic hunting before he finally found a single Honda key among a clutter of loose change in an ashtray stashed in the back of a dresser drawer.
In a flash of inspiration, Nathan had killed the last thirty minutes in the steamy garage, using electrical tape to change the ones on the Honda’s license plates to fours.
The Honda started up on the first turn of the key. He took care to make sure that the transmission was in neutral, but kicked out the clutch nonetheless. If there was one thing he’d learned in the past two days, it was that you couldn’t be too careful. With the engine running, he searched for the button to the garage door opener, but found none.
“Oh, man,” he grumped, turning the engine off. “Something’s got to go right tonight.” He groped under the seats and searched in the glove compartment for the opener, but found nothing. He’d have to use the button on the wall, an option he feared because it would bathe him in light while he was completely unshielded. His decision made, he walked to the door between the garage and the kitchen, but again found no button.
Could it be?
Sure enough, for the first time in his twelve years, Nathan Bailey had to manually lift a garage door. He was surprised by how little effort it took.
Once out of the garage, he set the parking brake, shifted back into neutral, and manually closed the overhead door again. Back in the driver’s seat, he fastened his seat belt, coasted down the slightly inclined driveway, shifted into first, and gently engaged the transmission. His acceleration wasn’t exactly smooth, but it wasn’t anything like he’d feared.
His heart jumped as he approached the end of Little Rocky Trail. Three police cruisers, traveling bumper- to-bumper with their blue lights flashing, slid the turn into the neighborhood, speeding off down the street he’d just traveled.
Nathan figured that the guy from that morning had finally made his phone call.
“Are you sure it’s him?” Greg pressed. His tone was urgent and abrupt, making Todd wonder if he had done something wrong.
“How sure do you want me to be?” Todd retorted, exasperation showing through in his own voice. “You left a picture of the kid at our door, and I’m telling you that the kid I saw for about five seconds fifteen hours ago looked like the picture.” Patty, Peter and the dog had all joined him at the kitchen table to witness the inquisition.
Greg took a deep breath and let it out. Clearly, his anxiety was showing, and he was telegraphing the wrong message to his witness. As the investigating officer for this portion of the Bailey case, he faced a difficult dilemma. If he reported to the state police that the Bailey kid had been sighted in Jenkins Township, the whole law enforcement world would descend upon them, perhaps to the exclusion of where the kid actually was: Just as surely as his discovery this afternoon could be a career-maker, a mistake could sentence him to life as a beat cop.
There had been hundreds of Nathan sightings over the past twenty-four hours, some as far away as California. None of them had panned out. Greg needed some additional proof before he cried wolf. There had to be a way to verify Mr. Briscow’s story.
“Tell me again what he was wearing when you saw him,” Greg said, straining inside to sound patient.
Patience, however—real or pretended—was not Todd’s long suit. “I already told you, Officer, that I don’t remember. He had shorts, I know that, and some kind of sports team shirt. I don’t recall which team.”
According to the reports from Virginia, Nathan Bailey had taken a Chicago Bulls shirt from the Nicholson house.
“And where was he headed when you last saw him?”
“When I first caught sight of him, he was coming toward our house, crossing the street.”
“From where?”
“Like he was coming from the Perlmans’ house.”
Not knowing who the Perlmans were or where they lived, that information was less than helpful. “Could he have been coming from St. Sebastian’s Church?” Greg asked.
Todd considered the question for a moment, calculating the map directions in his mind. At length, he nodded. “Yes. If he’d cut through the woods, that’s the general way he would have come from.”
Greg clapped his hands together. “I think that’s enough to call it an official Nathan sighting,” he said with a smile. Turning to the other police officers who had gathered in the front hallway, he said, “Sounds like the real thing, guys. Let’s go door-to-door and find him.”
It was always this way in police work. What you’re looking for always showed up in the place you’d already searched. Greg thanked the Briscows for their assistance and rose from the kitchen table to assist the others in the search. As he approached the front door, he realized that he hadn’t asked the most important question of all.
“Mr. Briscow?” he said, turning around to face the family again.
“Yes?”
“Do you know if any of your neighbors are on vacation this week?”
Todd winced as though he had a sudden toothache. “Jeeze, Officer, I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t
