Vicious

“Nancy?”

“Yeah, Nancy Abbe, our operator at the police station,” he explained. “She said you’d called and left a message for the sheriff. He’s off duty now. So—I’m just following it up. If you’d like, I can put out a statewide APB to be on the lookout for your fiance’s vehicle.” He glanced at his notepad. “Black 2005 BMW with Washington plates, KKC405. Is that correct?”

Susan nodded eagerly.

“While I’m at it, I’ll notify my buddies in blue at Mount Vernon, Anacortes, Bellingham, and Everett. I’ll get word to the ferry terminals, too.”

“That would be terrific,” Susan said with a dazed, grateful smile.

“Okay then,” the deputy said. “I’m on it.” He headed back to his patrol car.

Susan opened the back door of her Toyota, then unfastened Mattie from his car seat. He was still crying—but more softly now, as if he might fall asleep soon. Susan grabbed his Woody doll, then shut the car door with her hip. She carried Mattie to the police car, where Deputy Corey—she’d forgotten his last name—was sitting in the front, talking on the police radio to the woman she’d spoken with earlier. Susan recognized her voice—even through all the radio static and Mattie’s whining. The deputy was instructing Nancy to phone and fax all the surrounding police stations and the ferry terminals to keep a lookout for Allen’s car. In the middle of it, he stopped and looked up at Susan. “Hold on a sec, Nancy,” he said into the radio mike. Then he nodded at Mattie. “Ms. Blanchette, if you’d like to take our buddy there inside the house, that’s cool. Maybe you can give that nap a second try. I’ll check in with you once I’m finished up here.”

“Of course, I’m sorry,” she said. Then she headed toward the house’s front door. She could hear the deputy talking into his police radio.

“We’re looking for Meeker, Allen, male, thirty-nine, black-grey hair….”

She began to feel a little bit better, enough so she could talk calmly to Mattie once she’d laid him down on the sunroom sofa. She put his Woody doll in his hand, then took off her windbreaker and covered him with it. “You know, we’re going back home tomorrow,” she said. “Won’t that be nice, sweetie? Just you and me, and we’ll take it easy. Maybe we’ll order a pizza and watch TV. What do you think? Just a boring night at home, doesn’t that sound pretty wonderful right about now?”

“’Kay,” he murmured, nodding tiredly. “Can we watch Shrek when we go home?”

“Of course,” she said, smoothing back his light brown hair. “Anything you want, sweetie.” She watched his long-lashed eyelids flutter and then close.

While he dozed off, Susan glanced over toward the sliding glass door—at The Seaworthy moored to the old dock outside. She thought about the e-mail warning her—or more specifically, warning Allen—not to involve the police. The person who had sent that e-mail had said he wasn’t far away. Well, if he was watching the house, he knew the police were here now. He probably figured she was telling the police everything anyway. She wasn’t putting that girl in any more danger by letting this deputy know what was going on.

Just then, the deputy lumbered up the steps to the back porch. As Susan tiptoed over to the glass door, slid it open, and stepped outside, he took off his police cap.

“Well, we’re getting the word out there,” he said. “Someone’s bound to spot his car soon.”

“Thank you very much,” Susan whispered. “Listen—ah, Corey, have you had any other missing persons cases today?”

Frowning, he shook his head.

“There’s this teenager named Moira, and I think she’s in trouble….” Susan glanced back at Mattie on the sofa. Shedidn’t want to be gone too long—and have him wake up to find himself alone again. “Could I—very quickly show you something on the boat?”

At a brisk clip, they started down the back lawn together. Susan told the deputy about the pink brassiere she’d found and the cryptic e-mails. Listening intently, he kept scratching his blond head. He stepped aboard the boat first and then reached out his hand to help her onto the deck. Susan had been in such a rush earlier she’d left the cabin open and the power on. She took one last look back at the house before she went below.

In the boat’s cabin, she pointed out the bra with the torn strap on the galley table. The deputy advised her not to touch it again. “This is way out of my league, and Stuart’s, too,” he murmured, bent over the table with his hands behind him as he closely studied the bra. “We’ll have to get the state police on this pronto. Let’s leave this right where it is….”

Susan sat down at the navigation station. The computer screen had turned black except for the floating Windows logo. She clicked the mouse, and a porn site came up on the screen: BOOBS BONANZA— XXX-RATED! flashed across sexually explicit photos of nude, large-busted women in various provocative positions.

“Now, that’s some evidence I don’t mind reviewing,” the deputy remarked.

Susan tried to clear it, but the pornographic images remained on the screen. She couldn’t even go back to the menu screen. “What is this?” she muttered, frustrated. “This wasn’t here before….”

Corey was looking over her shoulder. “You said you downloaded a picture of the girl? I bet you anything the guy sent you a virus. Mind if I get in there?”

Susan surrendered the chair, then anxiously glanced out the window at the house again. The deputy managed to clear the screen, but he was having difficulty bringing up anything else. “If you can bear with me for just a few minutes,” he murmured, “let me try a few things, here. There’s still a chance we can get something off the hard drive….”

“I’m sorry, but I really don’t want to leave my son alone in the house,” Susan said. “I need to be close by in case he wakes up.”

Eyes on the screen, the deputy nodded. “Go, go,” he urged her. “I’ll meet you on the back porch. I won’t be more than two minutes here. If this is a dead end, I don’t want to waste any more time on it—especially if this girl’s in any kind of real danger.”

Susan nodded and then headed up on deck. She jumped back onto the dock and scurried up the lawn toward the house. At the porch steps, she slowed down and crept up to the sliding glass door. Mattie was on the sofa, fast asleep. She caught her breath, then turned and glanced back at The Seaworthy. The boat’s outside and interior lights glowed against the darkening sky.

After a few minutes, the boat’s lights went out, and the deputy climbed up from the cabin. Susan watched his silhouette as he stepped onto the dock and hurried up the sloped lawn toward her. As his face emerged from the shadows, she could see he was frowning. “No luck,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “But maybe if we got some computer geek to tinker with it, we’d recover those e-mails.” He gave her the keys to the boat and then glanced toward the glass door. “Is he still sleeping?”

Susan nodded. “Thank God.”

“Any clue at all who might have sent those e-mails?” he asked. “Anything more you could tell me about the girl would be a helluva lot of help.”

“Her name’s Moira, and she’s here for the weekend with Jordan Prewitt and another friend. They’re staying at this house on—ah—”

“Cedar Crest Way?” the deputy finished for her.

Susan nodded again. “I stopped by there about two hours ago, hoping they might know where Allen was. Jordan was the last one to see him.” She sighed. “Anyway, Moira wasn’t there when I dropped by. They didn’t invite me in or anything. They were acting sort of peculiar. I can’t put my finger on it exactly. They were just acting kind of funny….”

“Well, Jordan Prewitt’s a pretty strange kid,” the deputy said. “Then again, I can’t blame him. He’s been through a lot.”

“I know,” Susan murmured. “I talked at length about him with our neighbor, Tom Collins, this afternoon. He told me about Jordan’s mother—and what happened at this house with Mama’s Boy ten years ago.”

The deputy nodded glumly. “Huh, that Collins guy is a pretty weird character himself.”

Susan didn’t like hearing that. “What do you mean?” she asked warily.

He shrugged. “The guy’s a real hermit, all holed up in that house every other weekend. No friends or visitors. I don’t think anyone besides him has ever been inside that house since his father moved away. God knows what