know that many people in the neighborhood yet. We haven’t lived here long enough.”
Greg nodded through his disappointment. He supposed there’d be no shortcuts on this one. “That’s all right, sir. Just thought I’d ask. Thanks for your help.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem.” He turned again for the door.
“Wait a minute!” Todd exclaimed before Greg could take a step. Todd had the look of a man who had just discovered something important. “The Grimeses up the street are on vacation,” he said. “I just remembered that the kid next door’s been picking up their newspapers all week.”
At Greg’s request, Todd walked the police officer up the street to the Grimes residence at 4120 Little Rocky Trail. To Greg, the house looked no different from the others in the neighborhood, except he remembered this as the one at which he had been compelled to look through the front window, having seen—no, sensed, really— motion through the sheer curtains.
In the daylight, it had looked just like all the other empty houses on the street, but now, at night, its darkened windows stood out like an ink stain on a white tablecloth. As he drew his weapon from his holster, Greg told Todd to wait by the curb. Todd did him one better, and volunteered to go back home.
At this point, procedure mandated that Greg call for backup. A lone-officer search of a structure for a confessed killer was insanity, and even to consider doing it violated every procedure he could think of. Crazier still was the prospect of bringing every cop in the free world to bear on a property that was merely empty. In the world of the police officer, it was far better to be dead than embarrassed. With no serious thought at all, he decided to perform this search on his own. In his worst moments of self-doubt, it had never even occurred to him that he couldn’t outshoot a kid. Now he was surprised that the thought gave him such comfort.
He started where he’d left off last time, shining his flashlight through the front window. In the dim, deflected glow of the light, nothing seemed out of place. Just a darkened living room, not entirely unlike his own. He walked down off the front porch into the side yard. Not sure what he was looking for, exactly, he noted that there were no footprints in the grass, and no broken glass. The air conditioning compressor was running, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, did it?
The backyard was more of the same. He’d read in the report from the Nicholsons’ house that Nathan had gained entry through the back door, but this house had no back door on ground level. Rather, it was a half-level up, where a deck might have been built, but wasn’t. A wooden railing in front of the door blocked any direct access anyway.
The only conceivable means of entry would be through the kitchen windows, which seemed intact, or through one of the tiny grass-level basement windows. As a random thought, he admired the housekeeping skills of the homeowner. At his own home, the basement panes were perpetually mud-spattered, but here, the Grimeses’ windows were spotless. One was so clean that it appeared not to be there at all.
The significance of the thought made Greg’s skin crawl. No matter how clean the glass, there should always be a reflection of a flashlight.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Greg mumbled aloud. He assumed a shooter’s position on his belly, playing his light around the inside of the basement, backed up by his service revolver, with his finger a half-pull on the trigger. Once he verified that nothing was either moving or alive, he lowered himself through the window, and inside the house.
The voice of his field training officer from long ago boomed in his mind to call for backup, but he ignored it. He could sense the nearness of his prey, and he was going to finish this one himself. It would be the perfect day: discovering the car, and capturing the kid. He just hoped to God there’d be no shooting. The paperwork on shooting an adult was ridiculous. Greg didn’t even want to think about what would be involved with shooting a kid.
Greg’s movements inside the house were spiderlike. His weapon was an extension of his right arm, held stiffly out at ninety degrees, with the base of the grip cradled in his left hand, which also held the mini Maglite, whose powerful light beam was aligned with the muzzle of his pistol, brightly illuminating his field of view. His back was rigidly straight, his knees were bent, and he advanced through the basement and up the stairs like a fencer, his feet never crossing. He was perfectly balanced for a fight.
The door at the top of the basement stairs was closed but not locked, posing only a moment’s delay in his search. If the kid were there, and if he were smart, he’d be waiting on the blind side of the door, and he’d take his shot at the first sign of movement. Aware of this, and being smarter than the average bad guy, Greg paused before proceeding, playing his flashlight around to provide the boy who wasn’t there with a false target. Then he charged forward and shoulder-rolled into the kitchen, recovering expertly to jerk his gun and light in a horizontal arc, covering all compass points. There were no visible targets to be shot.
It was only after a thorough search of the second floor of the house that Greg found a note on the kitchen table signed by Nathan Bailey. The good news was that this was the right house. The bad news was that they had missed the kid. The note apologized for breaking in, and assured the homeowners that he’d done the laundry for them. It went on to say how badly he felt that he had to steal their car, and that, oh, by the way, he now had a gun.
Greg lifted his portable radio and keyed the mike.
Chapter 25
In the dark, New York looked a whole lot like Pennsylvania. For the last five miles, a car had parked itself on Nathan’s back bumper and refused to back off. He’d tried slowing down to get the guy to pass him, and he’d tried speeding up in an effort to lose him, but nothing worked; the guy just stayed there, about three feet behind, his bright lights in the rear- and side-view mirrors burning circles into Nathan’s retinas. The other driver was playing some sort of game, racing up close, then falling back a ways. The game frightened him.
After seeing the parade of police cars entering the neighborhood, Nathan had made the decision to avoid the main highways, and to stick instead to the smaller roads. On the map, they looked like they all headed in the same direction. And once he had gotten the hang of the gearshift, he was as comfortable piloting the little Honda around the curves as he was the Beemer.
Like so many other decisions he’d made these past couple of days, this one seemed to have started out well, and then turned sour. He hadn’t realized how much of a sense of security there was in passing gas stations and other occupied places periodically. At 1:30 in the morning, there were no lights anywhere, and no other cars around, which to Nathan meant that there were no sources for assistance when this asshole in his mirror finally did whatever he was planning. One thing was certain, though. He had been smart to take the pistol with him.
Sheriff’s Deputy Chad Steadman’s orders were clear. He wasn’t to make the stop until backup units were in place. According to the last report from the Pennsylvania boys, Nathan Bailey was armed and dangerous, and driving the Honda that Chad had been following for the last twelve miles. In the wash of his high beams, the driver certainly looked short enough to be a kid. And the job the driver had done on the license plates wouldn’t fool anybody.
To kill the time as he waited for the other two on-duty Pitcairn County patrolmen to form up on him, he decided to play a little cat-and-mouse, falling back a few car lengths, and then roaring ahead till he nearly hit the Honda’s rear bumper. If the kid bolted, he’d have probable cause to pursue on his own. The games seemed to unnerve the kid a little, but other than some erratic swerving, he kept his cool. Steadman wasn’t sure how he felt about a kid keeping his cool under pressure. Wouldn’t that make him all the more difficult to manage after he was captured?
Steadman saw headlights cresting the hill behind him at the same instant his radio crackled to life. “Charlie Seven’s on location with Baker Fifteen,” the speaker barked.
“Charlie Seven,” acknowledged the dispatcher.
Steadman pulled the microphone out of its dash-mounted clamp and thumbed the transmit button. “Baker Fifteen, Charlie Seven,” he said, hailing Jerry Schmidtt, his newly arrived backup.
“Charlie Seven, bye.”
“Reliability is high that this is our kid,” Steadman explained in the practiced monotone of one who had
