“Emily,” he said.
“Hi, Ray. I knew if anybody looked hard enough for me, it would be you.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m okay. He just kept me handcuffed and asked me questions. I’m just really tired.”
“You’ll be able to rest. They’ll take you to the hospital and clean you up and make sure you’re all right.”
A big new silhouette appeared. “You’re safe now, Mrs. Kramer.” It was the voice of Detective Gruenthal. “Mr. Hall, I’d like you to ride with Officer Daniels here, and we’ll take Mrs. Kramer with us. We need to talk.”
Emily made a decision at that moment, and she was not even certain why. It was possible that it was simply the “You’re safe now,” which she had heard before and no longer believed. She would tell them all about the kidnapping and the man in the ski mask. But somehow the other part-the part she had figured out and kept from telling the man in the mask-didn’t belong to the police; at least not yet. It belonged to her.
34
The police kept Emily talking until seven in the morning. Ray Hall was sitting in the hallway when they released her, waiting to take her home. They drove through the heavy morning traffic to his house, and when they were inside, she said, “Ray, do you have Sam Bowen’s phone number?”
He looked at her for a moment, then went to the sideboard, opened a drawer, and pulled out an address book. He found the page and handed the open book to her.
“Thanks,” she said. She dialed the number and waited. “Hello, Sam? This is Emily Kramer. Oh, things haven’t been so hot around here since the funeral, but it’s a long story, and I don’t have the energy right now.”
She listened for a few seconds, staring at the floor and nodding her head, then said, “Why haven’t you opened it?” She listened for a few more seconds. “Well, open it now, and read it. I’ll be up there as soon as I can get a flight. I don’t know the schedule. I’ll call you from the airport.”
When she had hung up the phone, she said to Ray, “I know you won’t agree with what I’m doing. You’ll notice I haven’t asked you.”
“I assume what you were saying means Sam has the evidence. You haven’t told the police?”
“He has a package. I’m going up there, and we’ll see what’s in it.”
“That guy is still out there. He must have ditched the SUV within ten minutes after he left you, or they would have caught him. And he’s nuts. He could be right outside waiting for you.”
“If so, then the best way you can protect me is drive me to the airport and watch me leave.” She picked up the telephone again.
THE HOUSE WAS a two-bedroom cottage with brown clapboards outside Seattle overlooking Puget Sound. There was a wooden deck lodged in the space between two pine trees, and a hot tub. On a cool day, Sam Bowen could step from the tub into the warmth of his house in two steps.
Sam wore a pair of blue jeans and a green flannel shirt with buttoned flaps over the breast pockets. He sat on an Adirondack chair staring out at the water. An empty glass was on the table, and beside it was the stationery box with a maroon top and gold print.
“I never opened it until you called, Emily,” Sam said. “It arrived a couple of days ago, but the handwriting on the label was Phil’s. I figured it had to be just another one of those housekeeping things that Phil did sometimes. He would have something he didn’t want lying around the office, or maybe he even wanted to be able to tell somebody truthfully that he didn’t have it. He would stash it somewhere, sometimes with someone like me.”
Emily said, “Weren’t you even curious?”
“Shit, Em. I’m seventy-three years old. I was a cop for twenty years, and then a private investigator for about as long. I’m cured of that. I’m not interested in getting hit in the face or staying up late anymore, and there aren’t any secrets I haven’t heard.”
“But now you’ve read it, haven’t you?”
“Yes. It’s about a case we had.”
“What kind of case?”
“A bad one. It was one of those jobs that you hesitate to take, and you probably wouldn’t take at all, except that by the time you hear about it, the client is already sitting in your office. He’s so distraught that you can barely stand to look at him, and he’s there only because he’s already tried everything that had a reasonable chance of success.”
Emily said, “So it was a man who came to see you.”
“Not me, Phil. I wouldn’t have heard about it at all, except that Phil called me into his office to listen. He introduced me and said, `I want my associate Mr. Bowen to hear this.’ That was a bad omen. He never called anyone his associate unless that person was about to do something painful.”
“What did you say?”
“I sat down and shut up and listened. The man was rich. I could see it by looking at his shoes. They were Mephisto walking shoes, handmade. That was a telling thing, to me. What it said was that he had enough money to buy whatever he wanted, but that he wasn’t interested in impressing people. They don’t look like anything. He had a good haircut, a watch that looked expensive, but with a French name I hadn’t seen before. I could tell Phil had seen the same signs, and so I stopped thinking about what we were going to make, and listened to the story.”
“What was it?”
“Nothing special-a story we’ve all heard about a thousand times. Sometimes I think a third of my working life was spent with daughters looking for their fathers, and another third with fathers looking for their daughters.”
“That was the case?” Emily asked. “He was searching for his missing daughter?”
Sam nodded. “He had a lot of land in the San Joaquin Valley, and he lived in a big house on an enormous piece of land-the sort of place where if you want to gossip over the back fence, you have to drive there.”
“What was his name?”
“Theodore Forrest, the Something. Maybe the fourth or fifth.”
“And the daughter? What did he say about her?”
“Her name was Allison. He said that she had been a terrific kid at first, the sort of little girl who was always happy-maybe a little smart-ass, even-and who lit up a room as soon as she came into it. He brought a couple of old pictures of her at about age five and ten along with the others, and I could see what he meant. She was a really pretty kid, with a lot of intelligence behind the eyes.”
“You said `at first.’ What was the problem later?”
“He said that around age thirteen or so, troubles started. She had a kind of personality change. All of a sudden she wasn’t interested in the family anymore, just wanted to stay in her room. Her grades went all to hell. Her old friends seemed to move on, and they were replaced by a different kind of kid.”
“That doesn’t sound unusual. What kind of kid?”
“The kind that skips school, does drugs, and so on. This wasn’t exactly a new story to me, but it was to him, so we listened. He said the girls were the worst in his eyes. They were the kind that gave a father a lot to think about, for sure. He said that he’d heard stories about a couple of them. They were promiscuous in that scary selfdestructive way that girls are sometimes, kids who don’t seem to give a damn whether what they’re doing kills them or something else does. The more he tried to get rid of them, the more Allison liked them. She would sneak out to meet them. He moved her to a private school, and she would slip out at night to go out with them. Then she was gone.”
“How old was she at that point?”
“Sixteen. By then she was looking very grown up. When her father came to see us, we saw the pictures, and I remember thinking she would be hard to find because she could pass for twentytwo or so in the right clothes.”
Emily sensed something withheld. “Tell me more about the pictures.”
“There are a few in here.” Sam opened the box and pulled an envelope from a pharmacy’s photo lab out of a file. He set the envelope on the table in front of her, and she began to shuffle through the photographs.
One showed an athletic-looking man in his early forties in a fancy cabin or ranch house-possibly some kind of resort-sitting at a table with his arm around the girl. They were both grinning at the camera with similar expressions, and Emily looked closely at the two faces, trying to detect a family resemblance. There was nothing
